In Fashion

The creative director at a fashion house is the most senior creative role, and frequently the most critical role in the company. Houses rise and fall most because of their creative directors. At Prada, the creative director is Miuccia Prada who is also co-CEO. She took over her grandfather’s company after being told that a woman could not run the business. When she took the reins, Prada was a $450,000 company; today it is worth several billion dollars. Tom Ford was creative director at Gucci and Yves Saint Laurent before opening his own house (he is also an Academy Award–nominated film director, writer, and producer).

The job of the creative director is not to design the clothes themselves. Their job is to create concepts. These concepts will apply to the collection or the label as a whole. Their work consists of the following:

• Understanding what the market needs, and what customers want that they might not even know they want

• Determining what designs should be made within the constraints and the possibilities

• Expressing an overarching concept that allows many different local designs to support the innovation necessary to stay relevant, but also the consistency necessary to produce and distribute the realizations of the designs

In this sense, they are a meta-modeler. They make a design wherein designs can be made.

In Film

In film, the creative director might be the director or the production designer. They must do all of the following:

• Manage teams.

• Lead by influence.

• Bargain.

• Stick to a budget.

• Understand how the music, the characters, the dialog, and the edits and pacing all work together to tell the story to reveal to viewers what they need to know when so that they both understand what’s happening and have enough mystery to figure out to keep watching.

• Design the props and settings and scenery and lights altogether to make a unifying concept.

• Express the unifying concept to the local designers responsible for each of those areas, such that they can in turn produce their own designs for their respective areas.

• Figure out with the team how to invent something familiar enough to be appealing to audiences and yet new enough to get them to buy a ticket.

The creative director is who gives a movie or a show its look and feel, its mood, its unification with the script, the actors, and the goals and constraints of the studio.

It is perhaps easy for the more scientifically minded of us to dismiss or deride artists as people who are disorganized or who do not understand the rigors of applied knowledge in business. Although software projects being late by months or a factor of two or three are the norm, when was the last time you heard of a play not opening on the advertised evening? Films do go over budget on occasion, but the director is responsible for assembling the creative team but also ensuring proper execution at every stage of preproduction, filming, and postproduction. In a sense, the making of a movie is similar to a software project. You have the script (the requirements), you storyboard in simple and cost-effective sketches before filming to allow everyone to envision how it will come together, and you manage all the people and places and things with a budget of a million dollars up to $200 million and more.

An important similarity here is that what the director must be good at is understanding the creative process of himself and the entire team, as well as practical matters of making an artistic product that must “work” within a business context.

In Video Games

The creative director is critical in the making of video games. This person, like Vitruvius’ architect of old, must be skilled in many disciplines including art, graphics, illustration and fine art, math, physics, computer science, management collaboration and leadership, and outstanding ability in reading and writing. Their precise skills depend in part on who the person is, and what their own background and proclivities entail.

In Advertising

The creative director in advertising guides the entire creative department in selection of visuals, music, and themes for an engagement. They lead directly and by influence. They will often work with key clients as a project manager and lay out the entire chronological order of how a campaign and all its constituent elements across many media outlets will be arranged. They are charged with working for maximum impact, cost management, and efficiency, and must meet deadlines.

They might also perform copy writing and art direction and have a degree in journalism, psychology, media communications, film making or language arts, or, more rarely, business.

In advertising, creative directors are not uncommonly promoted to chief creative officer, and chairman of a firm.

In Theater

In the theater, this role is called the artistic director. This is the person with overarching control over the artistic vision of the organization, as well as choices of the plays to be produced and directorial choices. Their job in practical terms is to plan the season of what will be produced. They frequently speak to the press and represent the theater and often will engage in fundraising and meeting with prominent donors. They are frequently former directors and often apply support in the form of counseling and recruiting.

In ballet, they hire choreographers, and ensure proper training of the dancers. They are almost without exception former dancers.

In Technology

If you thought your job in technology was to be the creative director, what would you do differently?

You would not police the developers. You would create a context in which they can design well themselves.

You would not be overinvolved in metaphors about skyscrapers—things made of concrete and steel and intended to last many decades of being battered by physical elements. You would see that software has a shorter shelf life, and that you are not the designer of a building, but the designer of designs: you would make a factory not of software, but a factory for designers of software.

You would not create mere taxonomies and classifications, and become devoted to making hair-splitting distinctions between the role of the solution architect versus the software architect and the application architect. Each company is too different for these to have any traction or much applicability outside their own walls, and the employees within the walls too transient for anyone to care. Rather, you would be in the business of creating value for customers, like the plucky and resilient creatives: by any means necessary.

You would see, and embrace the fact, with joy, that software is a creative process and that there is no shame in that. You would look beyond the factories of the asphalt jungle and cannery row for inspiration, and turn to architectonics of music, games, and film.

If we were to learn from our esteemed leaders in the artistic community of filmmakers, dancers, video game creators, theatrical artists, fashion designers, and advertisers, we would have turned the dial a bit in our focus.

In such a configuration, the architect creative director in technology would be a role that is responsible for understanding and finding ways of applying these things in practical ways to create value for customers:

• How will people work together? What is the set of expectations across disciplines? What organizations are necessary, what roles and functions are needed? What training? How can we help recruit the best talent to reach our aims? What sense of collective culture and individual craftsmanship will obtain the best results?

• What processes will be employed? Processes are a system and can be designed with the same level of rigor and imagination that we use to design software systems. A set of repeatable practices are necessary; how can they be optimized for efficiency, impact, and delight?

• What tools will the people employ to best realize these practices with the least friction and waste? What attributes should any system have to ensure that functional and nonfunctional requirements can be readily met?

• What must systems adhere to in compliance and regulation? What balance of budget and timeline and quality should they demonstrate?

• How does your corporate and departmental strategy inform the way systems will be made? What internal projects, such as the moving of a datacenter or a pending merger/acquisition, inform system design across teams?

• How can you help your organization grow, scale, differentiate, and compete across these areas?

• How will you manage projects and design the implementation of projects for maximum efficiency?

• How will you collaborate with internal stakeholders in marketing, communications, product management, development, infrastructure, procurement, finance, HR, management, strategy, and executive leadership to create a unified vision and the organization that can realize it in a coherent, compelling way?

• How can you represent your organization in the press, in interviews, in speaking engagements, and in public writing to advance your organization’s position as a thought leader? How can you attract and retain key customers and assist in marketing efforts?

This emergent role is a collaborator, a presenter, a leader across disciplines, who is able to assemble across disciplines and to synthesize across industries, including fields in philosophy, set theory, logic, history, cultural difference, religion, linguistics, math, physics, marketing, management, music, art, advertising, theater, systems engineering, writing, rhetoric, customer service, retailing, psychology, strategy, and computer science and its attendant history. This is not an entry-level role. You must first understand making, and have been a maker for a long time, of different kinds of systems, in different fields, with different organizations and among different cultures.

The creative director is in the business of making meta-models: the model of how models are made in your organization, taking all these disciplines into account to create that meta-model, the space in which other disciplines such as software developers can do their best work. This is the creative director. You are not creating the thing; you are creating the space in which everyone else can create their things.

Don’t see yourself as making the architecture and design for one building, one piece of software. Rather, move up the value chain, and make the design of how designs are made. Lift your visor to take as your domain not only a software system, and not only a collection of software systems, but the design of people, process, and technology at your organization. This is what is needed now. But we do not need this old architect metaphor anymore. Creativity by definition can never become a commodity.

What’s In a Name?

It is well understood that the architect’s role is not particularly well understood. Despite this, we presume to attempt to be “effective” at our pursuit of the work. In so doing, I have suggested modifications and updating of the way we approach our work, and the scope and activities of the work we do to help our organizations.

In this book, we have taken issue with even the moniker “architect” as being an inappropriate metaphor for the work we do, the tools we have at our disposal, and the material we have as our subject. But just fighting with a name and replacing it with a different one would serve little important purpose.

Perhaps, given all the existing conferences and HR job descriptions, we must remain satisfied with calling ourselves “enterprise architects”? But there may be hope (to paraphrase Churchill) to shape this title, and thereafter the title will shape our work. Recall that “Scrum Master,” a wildly outlandish title that comes from the game of rugby, didn’t exist 20 years ago, and soon came to be considered de rigeur in any software organization.

But there is a job to do. Considering the multivariate functions we perform and the new ways this book suggests to help us be more effective and, well...perhaps another title is more appropriate now. Maybe chief semanticist.

Other names come to mind. The title creative director makes a certain wonderful sense. Of course people might think you’re at a marketing agency or fashion house with that title. But then has there not been considerable clarification at cocktail parties as to whether you’re an architect of buildings or of software; have you not even made the distinction to say “real architect” when referring to those who make buildings? I want to say “concepter,” but it sounds a bit high-falutin’.

Or maybe executive producer. Consider for a moment the work of the theatrical producer, which has no obvious analog in business. This maps better to how we see the role. The Broadway producer has the following responsibilities:

• Assembling a compelling creative team

• Helping ensure that the right talent is available and managing the balance between star power and cost (note that in the theater, “talent” refers to the people onstage, whereas “creatives” refers specifically to the director, writer, and composer)

• Making the case to win the money from a variety of backers

• Finding the right space for the production

• Managing talent throughout the process

• Setting expectations for a wide variety of stakeholders, dealing with very concrete matters such as number of seats, marketing, and the contractural arragements for the size of the font for the star’s name in relation to the title

• Setting parameters and providing creative input as the show is being developed

• Helping negotiate and manage contracts and meet competing requirements

• Pulling together the many disparate elements to create a financial and critical success

• Doing anything necessary to ensure that the show will go on

Perhaps executive producer is at least as good a metaphor for helping us think anew, think differently about our work so that we can be more effective. They are there to help conceive the show when it’s just an inkling, and they see it all the way through writing, workshopping, rehearsals, and staging. They are the “quarterback” of the theatrical production. In successful projects, this is what this role is about: creating the concept, communicating it to others, ensuring that the implementation matches the concept, and ensuring its successful rollout. Then, someone else can take over.

As we further consider our better role, consider the following:

Perhaps we can do better by forgetting about the conceptual legacy of architecture. Or not forget it entirely, but take up what matters from the discipline, not get too caught up in the name, and step into our future.

Perhaps it is not so much a problem. Perhaps some titles no longer serve us. Do they hamper more radical thinking? There weren’t always architects in technology. It is not necessary. No one knew they were supposed to have Scrum Masters until a little more than a decade ago. Things evolve as they must. It’s time for something new.

Consider yourself, your own situation. How would your world change if you were the chief semanticist, the creative director, chief philosopher, or the executive producer of your organization? How dramatically would that change what we do, how we focus, how we advance our field? The signs, the language is real, and not only real, but signs in a semantic field are our only material and beget our systems and make us think and create differently.

The future of computing will not be programming. It will not involve human programmers writing code in syntax for static compilers.

The future of computing will be visual.

We have the nagging need to show up at our work tomorrow and do something we hope could be called valuable, perhaps even important, innovative, or beautiful. We hope to act beyond the haunting chains of our inherited language and thereby our inherited identity, to learn the lessons of our failures, to make something creative, something meaningful, something that’s useful and capable of creating wonder and perhaps even joy. Something new. Something better.

Are you ready?

What will it be?