Nice article that condenses Ed Catmull’s original. It sounds simple.

The company I’m working for is based on software development and is growing a games team. The interesting thing is that pairing of developers and an agile approach already exists. They seem reticent to create hierarchies and instead of appointing leads in the games team they want to keep a flat structure. I started researching how to carry out peer reviews for a creative team of games producers, designers and animators (the Flash developers should be included – but that’s another story).

I was taken back to when I set-up a company (Preloaded -digital media studio, 2000) my idea was that it should be a collective. With a small core of people 3-5 but drawing on much wider network of people with a variety of skills that we could draw on as and when projects required them. We started out this way, we hired desks in someone else’s offices – it was the only way we could pragmatically build the company. The collective network seemed to wither and fade as we became busier and fell into copying the same structure as everyone else.

It feels like a new opportunity for evaluating ways of working has been thrust upon me and I’m keen to see where we end-up.