What you don’t decide to do is as important as what you do do.
Scott Belsky (Adobe’s Chief Product Officer and Executive Vice President, Creative Cloud plus co-founder of Behance) gives a stunningly insightful talk which I revisited recently. It challenges us all to think about how to design / assess businesses and / or understanding our own business potential based on using a differentiating what we decide to do / don’t do:
“Self-awareness is the only sustainable competitive advantage you can find.”
Am hoping Mr Belsky won’t mind that I took the model discussed and made it available for download below as a blank template (just right click and ‘save as’)—it certainly helped me in some of my thinking about new service offerings:
Watching a Shirky talk always means leaving with a huge amount of pearls, but check out the above plus the quote below and tell me it doesn’t resonate with any creative endeavours you have been involved with:
“…they don’t care that they saw it in practice because they already knew it couldn’t work in theory.”
If you work with a client or in a corporation / organisation which doesn’t get what you’re trying to do even though you have showed them the solution, forget changing minds, time to change the company you keep!
Then surround yourself with people who take care plus improve each others output.
For nearly a decade, a huge part of my life has been devoted to a pro-bono endeavour of producing the community TEDx events here in the capital.
The decision to cancel this years event really hurt—read the full announcement here—as the 2021 event was going to be my last and boy I was aiming to go out on a high (with a 2,000 person event plus some wicked delegate experience ideas to boot as well).
Then explore new paid opportunities which align to my skill set and serves my individual purpose regarding enabling people to find and have voice through delicious learning experiences.
Am looking to work with kind humans who reach beyond their grasp and have complex problems to solve—I like intersecting disciplines, leading on collaborations and crafting outcome-based connections through content creation.
Big words for basically saying making cool and complicated stuff with nice people!
Let me know if you are in need of a DK-shaped human to assist in any creative project directing / producing.
And I will continue to offer and deliver speaker coaching (one-to-ones and group masterclasses) for select clients as well as developing out the fourth Creative Leadership NZ 2021 conference for the end of the year.
As a creative producer, I craft delicious learning experiences…
…this cute line is my attempt to describe the intended impact beyond the generic title, and last week I truly got to manifest this goal.
Teulo has been a fantastic client: inviting me to MC their twice monthly global online talks (which garner on average about 350 souls), record and edit down their podcast series, as well as produce the above.
The brief was to develop an ‘in-studio’ recorded interview experience with a a specific topic-expert which would become the fifth module of a five part in-depth online series for architects and designers.
The process of developing the idea from brief to concept and then to product is a wonderful journey—with my propensity for details (have been told by more than a few how ‘particular’ I am), it amplifies the potential of achieving an output of the highest quality.
“Love how DK can hear my creative ideas and vision, then bring them to life. I have huge trust and respect for DK and really enjoy working with him, as he completely understands what I want to achieve with Teulo. Thank you!”
It all starts with client who trusts, then collaborators who embellish your plans with their own mastery (thanks FlashDog Studios and Mike Potton), on top of trusting in ones own ability to convert a shared vision into actuality knowing that iteration and deviation are oftentimes positives.
Am now hungry for more experiences and opportunities like this…
After 11 episodes with 22 impressive humans covering nearly 18 hours of conversations, has it been worth it?
The calibre of guests and their subsequent discussions has been impressive (see below). It’s been such a joy to bring together interesting souls who don’t know each other to explore connections and insights. It certainly celebrating the talent we have in the capital and have learned so much from the discussions.
As an a side, very aware of the positive relationships formed as well as the community being built up through the alums.
Creative Welly is an advertising / sponsor free project and the biggest cost is the time for all involved. It takes a whole day to set up then record two episodes. Then there’s the video editing, reviewing, blog post creation, audio production, uploading all content, distribution etc. I pay for the Vimeo Plus account and a few episodes in switched from the paid audio podcast hosting of Libsyn to the free Anchor platform.
In terms of how many views and / or listens, don’t know. Haven’t looked. This is the deficit in the plan as don’t have the time to promote and upload across multiple platforms, although, to be very honest, this is both not the reason to start this (but totally appreciate for many this is the validating factor).
From a production perspective, there is nothing like this out there. It’s exhilarating to see the result of my vision to craft something unique in the long-form video podcast format space come to fruition.
That being said, the focus next year will be:
hone the format: amplify the ‘courageous’ bit of the conversations;
promotional collateral: before posting live and during review create some shorter form content for cross-platform promotion (Linkedin / Twitter / blog content etc.);
2021 list: continue to curate and focus on revealing the wonderful talent the city (and those passing through) has to offer.
So if you’re not subscribed here’s a quick run down on who you’re missing out on:
A cacophony of thanks, not only to the guests for sharing their generous times, stories and insights, but also deep appreciation to Alex at Xequals for hosting us, plus Jono from Empire Films for producing the superb and unique final videos.
If you’re a viewer / listener please feel free to drop me a line or comment below with any ideas / suggestions for improvement I’m missing out on here, and please subscribe via Creative Welly if you haven’t already.
In June my friend Trent Yeo calls me with an audacious idea to go some way in addressing the tourism deficit of Queenstown. His pitch was simple: in March 2020 this year, if you had a job you suddenly became part of a global tribe called ‘remote and flexible workers’, lets build out a learning experience around this, attract different humans to the area to explore working from here in the future.
So after some early scoping, tweaks and iterations plus LOTS of conversations, RemoteTogetherNZ was born:
Join us for RemoteTogetherNZ, a festival of professional development, networking opportunities, and wellbeing activities which explore the themes of flexible and remote working in one of the most beautiful places in the world.
The remote world is here to stay and New Zealand has a great opportunity to be a global leader. We are in a privileged position to be able to reflect back on lockdown and despite the challenges it brought, it also revealed humanity, kindness and focus on what was important. If Aotearoa is to lead the world as a global citizen and a regionally progressive nation, then what are we doing with the largest single effort humans spend their waking hours doing – work?
We’re trying to do something which can’t and / or shouldn’t be possible: pull together a world-class, vibrant and compelling, two-week festival, in about 3 months, with over forty different learning opportunities exploring the following themes:
Have been working my fingers off curating the current offer and it’s been a wonderful journey of collaboration with such open and good humans:
Trent – the visionary, energetic catalyst for the whole endeavour.
Scott – on-the-ground logistics ace making sure what we plan is doable,
Jess – leading on MarComms and the weaver of complex narratives.
Cuillin – utility superstar, covering off so many other things the rest don’t have time to do.
So if you’re interested in these topics, work in an organisation or business which is still exploring how to react accordingly to this new epoch, someone in charge of redoing policies and strategies, a leader still getting to grips with this different approach to leading etc., register now and snap up the ‘cheap-as-chips-early-bird’ options!
