But What Else Do You Do?

This essay was written for the Makers of Sport® newsletter in May 2016. Monday Musings and Weekend Reads were the written editions of the newsletter that accompanied the podcast; the archived email is on Mailchimp. The newsletter's links and announcements are trimmed here.

Over the last 8 or so years, I've become fascinated with the idea of a T-shaped person, an idea created by McKinsey & Co. when discussing consultants.

You might be a designer, a photographer, an animator, a writer, a programmer, a project manager or a businessperson. It's important to be deeply skilled in a particular discipline and be an expert in that skill; but, in order to truly be able to collaborate with others on a deeper level, it's vital to be able to empathize with other disciplines.

Experience design firm IDEO—who also coined the term "design thinking"—believes that in order to facilitate the best collaboration (which in turn inspires innovation), it is vital to hire T-shaped designers. These types of designers tend to be rapid learners and hence ideal consultants due to their ability to pick up on other disciplines, even working in and contributing to those disciplines fostering innovation.

T-shaped people are inherently curious folks who have a principle skill (i.e. graphic design), or the vertical stem of the T; yet are inquisitive enough to learn by experimenting with other areas and typically doing them well (i.e. strategy), or the horizontal cross-bar of the T. They typically don't thrive in bland offices, but rather need the freedom to explore out it in the world and work directly with experts in different disciplines. By doing this, they develop an emphatic mindset and because of their natural curiosity, pick up additional skill sets quickly.

In the world of sport, this may be an in-house graphic designer that can also write front-end code (HTML/CSS), take quality photography, use their art direction skills to produce video, and contribute to copywriting or the strategy of an organization. Through their inquisitive nature, they are able to explore insights from many different perspectives (typically outside of their realm) and recognize patterns which eventually evolve into groundbreaking ideas.

Edward Boches, Professor of Advertising at Boston University and former Partner & Chief Creative Officer at Mullen Lowe, recently wrote in Adweek that the new generation of advertising/design graduates are hybrid creatives. They have both the desire and skills to "play in multiple sandboxes without being confined to one". In fact, they don't want to be confined to one. And in order to retain and attract creative talent from the tech startups, it's important to facilitate opportunities where these types of T-shaped people can be unrestricted in staffing plans, titles and roles.

A favorite creative director of mine, Wieden + Kennedy's (Nike's agency of record) John Jay, believes that "the longer you work, the more people want to put you in a silo. Why? So that they can define who you are by their terms. Our job is to never let anyone define who we are by their terms" as he mentions in this Fast Company interview.

As a designer that writes, codes, podcasts, is entrepreneurial and passionate about history, I couldn't be more thrilled to hear that the industry is moving in this direction. I often have a hard time putting a title on what I do. I tend to say I'm a designer as that would be the stem of my T, but I feel like that is a bit of an undersell as I'm equally empathic of and possess the skills of copywriting, strategy, sales, audio production and more. These would be the horizontal of my T.

Are you a T-shaped person or an I-shaped person? Do you have other interests or skills that allow you to be empathetic of other disciplines and collaborate with others? If not, you should consider branching out if you're looking to expand on your opportunities and adapt to the future of the creative workforce.

A good place to start learning about T-shaped is to read any article Tim Brown, President of IDEO has written on the matter. Including his book, Change by Design and book written by the co-founders of IDEO, Creative Confidence.

As always, have a great week, y'all.

Cheers,

Adam