So now that I have my fancy role of "producer" (...grandmaster tactician fire elementalist wolf ninja pirate), I've been pressing on the rest of the team (mostly Farran) to have content meetings and to get more brainstorming going. I work best when people are talking a lot - it leaves little time for ideas to settle and be forgotten, and generally keeps things fresh. General discussions with ideas of where to go with our worlds brings about great realizations of "Oh! We totally need to do ____!" With these revelations, we branch off into other topics and eventually find ourselves back where we intended to go, often with great new concepts and ponderings. I consider these deviations a huge blessing, because keeping everything rigidly to-the-list in task management style is boring, and for someone with as small of an attention span as me, I get bored if I have to parse a list and lead a meeting that way.
But.. when I discover what I want to do next, I generally hone in on it, making a list of prerequisites that need to be completed before my main objective can be tackled. I was deadset on working on culture for a particular world we're developing, and I had a short list of must-dos that absolutely had to be hashed out before I could continue in earnest. This left me barking (ha) orders at Farran along the lines of "Have this meeting! Draw these things! Make these decisions! Barf out names! Wharrgarbl!" Admittedly, I get excited when creating content, but when it came down to it, I was putting a lot of strain on his creative mojo, because, quite simply, he doesn't work the same way as I do. Farran is far more seasoned in worldbuilding than I am, and because of that, he's got a very different way of approaching the content creation process. Whereas I like to focus on particular chunks at a time, he prefers to work on bits and pieces at a time, molding the world around these small decisions and artistic nuances, forming a more involved whole. This greatly differs from my view, and initially, it caused a bit of unnecessary friction between us - I actually had to end the meeting, step away, and ponder things for a day before I returned to the path I was on before.
Before continuing, I mulled over our philosophical differences - I certainly didn't want friction between us as friends, and certainly not as content creators. Asking Mr. Bond for his thoughts didn't seem fruitful (sorry MB!), but I realized that we needed to come up with a middle ground on how to approach the creative process if we were to both be happy with the work we're doing. As my own ponderings didn't get as far as I would have liked, I phoned Farran the next day and, before talking about any of the content I was steaming over the night before, I asked if we could talk about how we create content when working alone. After he shared a bit of insight on his process, I suddenly understood why he was so miffed about my requests, and in short order, I was agreeing with him. I told him about my limited experiences in the past, and we ended up quickly moving into talking about the stuff I was really concerned with - culture, not drawing concepts, not anything else. In the end, we came up with a great idea to present to Mr. Bond, and during our large group meeting that followed, did so to curious success.
In short, it's good to hash out differences in work styles before getting too far into projects with other team members. Not only will it save lots of time, but it'll keep friends friends, and I sure as hell don't want to lose either of these two.
