On Feedback

I enjoyed James Meek’s review of Peter Biskind’s latest book in the current edition of the LRB. In particular, this anecdote stood out to me:

When Alan Ball was co-writing Grace Under Fire for ABC, ‘people’s assistants were coming up and giving me notes, like “I don’t like the colour of the wall on the set.”’ When we moved to HBO to make Six Feet Under, the feedback on his pilot script was: ‘Could you make it just a little more fucked-up?’. Joe Soloway moved the other way, from Six Feet Under to ABC’s Grey’s Anatomy, and experienced the network cud-chewing system: ‘the writers would write an outline, then it would get re-written, then another outline, rewritten - a script could get writtten literally twenty times.

Meek highlights that each successive generation of TV is driven by the opportunities afforded by new technology. Implicit though are the cultural differences in the organisations too. As Phil put it so brilliantly to me recently, culture in a corporate setting is best described as what matters and how things get done’. In this telling, newer organisations are free-er, more creative and more willing to take risks. The incumbents become overly bureaucratic. Top heavy and scared of making mistakes, senior execs lean into re-arranging deck chairs rather than empowering their creative talent to do anything more significant or challenging.

As always, the question becomes - in a significantly developed organisation does the culture of a company encourage and reward creativity and innovation or stifle it? Is the purpose of process to minimise the risk of failure, or maximise the opportunity to produce something truly amazing?