Event Questionnaire: Information, Respect, and Responsibility

What is our responsibility to one another as professionals, in terms of information? And what is the most respectful way to use the information we obtain?

Over the course of the last few weeks I have been thinking quite a bit about how we treat one another's businesses. For the last 18 months I have participated in a think tank called The Business of Being Creative Collective. Each week, we discuss a topic of relevance to our segment of the industry, and I cannot help but think that everything leads back to respect and responsibility. Our leader, Sean Low, has recently lead us through a discussion on information. How much do we know about the businesses we partner with? What information, specifically, do we have about the successes and opportunities of our partners, and how do we use that information to help our clients make educated buying decisions?

I suggested that we put the cerebral talk into real work practice, with my team as the test subject. We were in the midst of producing a wedding with an ultra-luxury budget (over $500,000) and every partner that we worked with was somewhat new to the other. In putting together the timeline, my main concern was ensuring that I was providing the right information, to the right people, in the right way.

Attached to the timeline was a document in which I asked everyone to participate in a pre- and post- wedding questionnaire. The goal was to try to ascertain who needed what information in order to operate at their highest level, and also to encourage each team to evaluate their unique contributions along with the ways in which they could have done better. After all, if knowledge is power, than the more I know about each company I bring onto the team pre-production, the better I will be at managing them and creating an environment that elicits the highest quality work.

The response to my request was mixed. Some people were excited by the opportunity and welcomed the chance to have a conversation about work flow and production in advance, as opposed to just reacting onsite to whatever production is happening. Others were concerned about the idea of displaying their weaknesses. They did not want to be perceived as "bad" or less valuable, and they did not want to be publically judged for their potential shortcomings.

My position was that this exercise would be a good thing for us all, and that we would be better partners and professionals in the long run. If our next wedding is our best wedding, and if we are committed to constantly evolving and elevating the industry, then it is our responsibility to be self evaluating, to be sharing constructive criticism of one another, and to working towards a more respectful and efficient production practice.

Ultimately, the truth is that we do judge one another. We just do it in the dark. We form opinions about who does what well, who we like working with, and who we would prefer not to engage with. We share these opinions quietly amongst the friends and colleagues that we trust, and we tell our clients some of what we know, because we don't always know the whole story about how another business is run. What a disservice this is to our clients, and to each other. The only way out is to bring it all into the light. To develop a compendium of information on ourselves and each other, and to share that knowledge openly with those who care to know the truth.

To date, I have not received any formal responses from the partners that were on the team, but I am hopeful and giving them time. Despite that, my own self evaluation was equal parts enlightening, disappointing, and exciting.

For example, I realized that I allowed the lighting team to make decisions in advance that I truly didn't agree with. In the end, we needed to revert back to my original plan in order to make this set up work properly. I was disappointed in myself; as the leader of the team and the chief planner and designer, I should have been confident in my own ability and knowledge from the very beginning. Instead, I allowed them to be the "experts" when I should have pushed harder to secure what I wanted from the very start.

That lack of confidence came from the fact that I did not know their ceiling grid as well as I would have liked. It was my first time working in the space, and regardless of all of the time I put into studying the grid, I need to become more knowledgeable and better versed in the technical side of things. To become better in this field, I have reached out to other professionals in an effort to be better at speaking their language.

And that is the exciting part. School was always a place that I loved, the pursuit of knowledge, the process of learning. After years in this industry and having been exposed to the best of the best in terms of creativity and art, it's easy to become jaded and start to feel like we know it all. To be a beginner all over again is invigorating. It reminds we that there is always more to learn, more to do, and an infinite number of ways to get better.

Footnote: If there is anything that I can hope to gain from this space (LinkedIn) it would be to continue to connect with and grow my community of like-minded professionals interested in advancing not just ourselves, but our industry at large. If you have thoughts or a similar story, I hope you share it here.