This post is part of a series of essays bundled under “Travelling without moving”.

Intro of that series can be found here.

Petervan Pictures © 2021 – Travelling Without Moving

After the Foam-post of begin April 2021, we continue with “Inappropriateness”, an ambiguous feedback from a client on a rejected project.

In her post “The Change Refusal” https://weneedsocial.com/blog/2021/4/8/the-change-refusal, Céline Schillinger describes the weird situations where she submitted an idea, it was accepted, and then… was not given the permission, the support, or the means to carry it forward.

I had a similar experience not so long ago.

With a small team, we were contracted for a corporate experiment with Pirate-TV, a novel crossover video production.

Depending on whose point of view, it went well to not-so-well.

The production team was and still is super-proud of and committed to the deliverable. But at the very end of the project, the client believed our work was “inappropriate” and banned us from replay.

My good friend Peter Hinssen (Founding Partner of nexxworks) warned me early in the project “Boy, you are in for some fights if you want to pull this one off!”. I shrugged; I had crossed many other bridges over troubled water before.

The project started promising. The client accepted our proposal and briefing to do something radically different. Different in content, mixing, rhythm, visual collision and poetry, that sort of thing. Different, but relevant. Relevant to the ambiguity and uncertainty of the white-water world we are drowning in.

Not a Zoom style webinar with a speaker and a slide deck, or worse, a “fireside-chat” of two boring executives and a CNBC style of journalist, 2 meters apart from each other in white leather seats in front of a green screen that is then filled in with some fake backdrop to look cool.

So off we went. Everything went quite smooth. Too smooth in hindsight.

There was one hick-up in the process. A senior director who did not understand “why the heck we were doing this” almost stopped us. We scheduled a meeting to explain and understand her feedback. “All right, I get it now, make sure you integrate my feedback and questions, but without mentioning my name”, she said.

We incorporated the feedback and answered the questions. We delivered what we believed was a professional end-product, 100% in line with the brief.

But at the very last minute another senior person in the client’s organization intervened from the top, we got banned, and that was end of story.

The explanation? The work was considered “completely inappropriate”.

A request from our side to have a conversation was not honored.

Was it the format that felt too heretic to the executive leadership? Was it something else? We can only guess.

And what does that mean “inappropriate”?

As I was writing this post, I bumped into a presentation about contextual integrity. The talk was in the context of privacy, but I liked the breakdown to be very “appropriate” for my argument.

I believe the rejection had indeed to do with contextual integrities not being well aligned.

If inappropriateness is the opposite of appropriateness, then that would mean that inappropriateness is about not conforming, not meeting the expectations. That the result is illegitimate, not worth defending, morally not justifiable.

So, in other words, we did not conform. Thank God! What a compliment! The brief was to be radically different, no?

We requested if we could release the production under our own brand, “appropriately” edited not to reveal the name and the business of the client. But unfortunately, the client decided we were not allowed to re-use the raw footage. Hour and hours, days and days of brainstorming, recording, editing, soundscaping, video production down the drain.

No worries. We’ll be back.  We decided to re-do the whole bloody thing on our own budget, our own tastes, our own reclaimed freedom.

Since then, we have redacted the scripts for the new recordings, did extra research on the content material, and developed a virtual mosaic leaving the audience the choice where the enter the show, and how to complete the narrative journey. It will be the first episode of Pirate TV – Business Edition.

When will it be ready? Shall we say in a couple of weeks? Working with artists and original content authors, I have learned to be patient and more careful in setting expectations on the when and what of the final deliverable, although the pressure of a deadline sometimes – but only sometimes – helps to get to a high-quality experience.

Looking back at Celine’s themes for dealing with rejected work, I believe we went through the full loop. Asking to understand and reframe together with the first senior director, getting banned, avoided, and then picking up the pieces and creating the context for success in our upcoming re-do of the project on our own terms and conditions.

Courtesy Céline Schillinger

As creators, we must take risks, break sense, practice free play imagination.

Sometimes, we must be on the err side of things to know how it tastes.

In that sense, this experience was very rewarding.

Being banned even felt a bit heretic, and almost a badge of honour.

Next time in Travelling Without Moving, we’ll talk about “Studios”, as a proven way of failing and recovering together, a repurposing of the architecture studio practice of practices.

Hope you stay on board.

Warmest,