The Hollywood Model: Dynamically building teams for unique challenges
Oct 10, 2023
By: Dan McClure
(Originally published on the Outsight International blog)
How many organisations can produce the equivalent of a hit movie? While it’s easy to roll your eyes at some of Hollywood’s efforts, the reality is that this industry is capable of repeatedly undertaking new and original initiatives: leveraging a myriad of different skills in the service of a complex and rapidly shifting market. Their survival and success depends on the ability to repeatedly do creativity at scale.
Until recently, few other industries had to meet similar creative demands. Most organisations — whether they were commercial businesses, government agencies, or non-profits — could focus on mastering the things they already did. A leader’s goal was to make sure things were well run and competent. Any incremental improvements reinforced established capabilities.
Committing to a steady course like this requires a stable world. Unfortunately, disruptive change is sweeping through one industry after another. Even before the advent of the global pandemic, it was clear we had entered into a turbulent era where new ideas, bold action, and systemic change would be necessary to claim a relevant place on the world stage. The winds driving this change are powerful: new technologies of a fourth industrial revolution, trans-border problems like climate change, and massive societal shifts in education, economic capacity, and urbanisation.
This is a world where being good at bold imaginative change has become a necessary core competency. For that reason, it is well worth taking a closer look at what Hollywood did to prepare for a business based on creativity at scale.
THE HOLLYWOOD STUDIO SYSTEM
Organisations are built to address the type of challenge they face. When mid-twentieth century Hollywood had to produce primarily for middle America’s host of movie theaters, the studio system arose. Large integrated movie studio operations bought together, under contract, the many types of talent needed to imagine and create a movie. Actors, directors and a host of other professionals in the employ of the studio execs — establishing a model that could efficiently produce a steady stream of films for a single major distribution channel: local movie houses.
This is not so different from the approach most large commercial and public sector institutions take to professional staffing today. As projects come and go, the organisation’s portfolio of skilled individuals are moved within the organisation, perhaps augmented by consulting resources that expand or fine tune the skill set.
Assuming a stable world, organisations can align the skills they have on staff with their mix of needs.
The studios’ comfortable level of control was challenged in final decades of the century, when the movie industry faced an increasingly challenging creative environment. New competitors threatened their entertainment monopoly and audiences demanded a more sophisticated and varied fare. Movies yielded ground to TV, which gave way to cable, and has now fragmented into a host of streaming services and other specialised media platforms. The quantity and sophistication of content has rushed ahead too, with last decade seeing the number of scripted shows growing by over 150% ushering in an age of peak TV.
The industry had to produce more demanding creative work at an ever accelerating pace. The unique demands of ambitious projects made it increasingly difficult to effectively bring the talent needed for the varied efforts under one roof. While a big budget action film might be best served by one set of skills, these could quite different from those needed to successfully realise an intimate drama or scripted TV series on a streaming service.
As creative projects grew in ambition and became increasingly unique, the studio lost its role as the centralised home of talent. Thus, more projects were assembled from a pool of individuals and organisations that had specific skills and resources.
DYNAMIC COLLABORATIONS: BUILDING THE RIGHT TEAM
This shift from highly centralised team to custom-created networks of collaborators makes sense when program efforts must be both ambitious and original. Big ambitious challenges need a wide range of different skills, so there is creative power in a model where the right talent can be bought together for each unique project.
An organisation with its own ‘studio’-style teams inevitably find it difficult to overlay their fixed set of organisation skills on such shifting needs. Mismatches and gaps quickly emerge. In some cases, additional capacity will be needed, while in others, exceptional skills will go to waste. Gaps emerge in areas of expertise either because existing staff are insufficiently skilled or because the role is entirely new.
In this turbulent creative environment, the value of a stable, highly optimised, organisational skillsets is eroded. The new Hollywood Model recognised this, assembling a tailored team for a specific initiative and then allowing the various professionals to move to another project.
It should be noted that this ability to build dynamic teams is not about fighting for the top 1% of super skilled individuals. That’s a game that large well funded organisations will almost always win. Instead, highly effective teams are created by tailoring the right type of talent to the task. Someone who might be of marginal value on one project, could be a premier contributor on a different type of initiative. Leaders don’t need to fight for the widely recognized superstars, but rather can focus on finding the uniquely right contributor.
The ability to align complex projects with diverse talent also provides creative returns to the project contributors. Practitioners with a unique set of skills can cobble together a series of similar projects where their talents are fully appreciated. It also becomes possible for those with a more vagabondish soul to diversify their work, avoiding pigeonholes by embracing a number of different efforts.
FOSTERING DYNAMIC CREATIVE ECOSYSTEMS
As the demands for creativity at scale grow in the world, other sectors can and should look for opportunities to adopt a Hollywood Model of dynamic collaboration building. Of course, this shift comes with new demands. One of the crucial advantages of traditional self-contained organisations is that the infrastructure for managing and integrating teams is clearly defined. When Hollywood abandoned the studio system, a number of new supporting services needed to emerge to fill these ecosystem building needs.
This is not trivial work. Dynamically constructing a collaboration requires the ability to identify and validate talent, negotiate acceptable terms of engagement, and integrate day-to-day activities. Simply trawling the world talent pool for potential matches between a project and a professional creates excessive overheads for all involved.
An ecosystem of both formal and informal support for collaboration building is needed to make the model viable. Across different sectors, nimble supporting services are rising to the challenge. A wide range of approaches are emerging, ranging from bare-bones freelance marketplaces to far more sophisticated program facilitators that take an active role in execution of collaborative work.
Other aspects of the collaborative ecosystem evolve more organically. For example, a study of video game development, where the product is created by many different collaborators, found that within the shifting networks of contributors were informal clusters of professionals and teams that regularly worked together.
TIME TO EMBRACE OF THE HOLLYWOOD MODEL
As organisations find that their challenges are increasingly defined by disruptive change, rather than stable performance, the need to create at scale becomes more urgent. Leaders may be tempted to see this as an issue of imagination, driving them to promote ideas and innovations from within an organisation’s walls. Encouraging creative thinking certainly isn’t a bad course of action, but it fails to recognise the systemic barriers a self-contained organisation faces when it seeks to actually realise an ambitious new vision.
Reaching outward, creating a more flexible organisational structure by dynamically building the teams that tackle initiatives, opens the door to effective action on big ideas. Ideas can be more original (tapping the right unique skills) and bigger (assembling larger creative teams). This is done while still making it possible for each new initiative to pursue possibilities that are different from the program before.
This is the kind of creative capacity our era of disruptive change demands. Whether an organisation is working in business, government, or non-profit action, it’s time to take inspiration from the Hollywood Model, and break down walls in the name of creative prowess.
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