Holding a creative team together for ten years

How does a room of strong creative voices build one sprawling thing without coming apart? Paul spent a decade in the Stranger Things writers' room, joining as a writer's assistant in season one and rising to co-executive producer by the finale, writing three of the series' most memorable episodes along the way. That room had every pressure yours has: real disagreement, changes in leadership, continuity that had to survive a fanbase reading every frame, and a studio asking for more. Paul will walk through how the room actually worked.

Making an idea vivid enough that people join it

How do you get people to commit to something that doesn't exist yet? Lucy runs a practice that brings scientists, artists and designers together to prototype body futurism and post-nature futures. She led far-future research at Philips, advises brands and institutes, has worked in Hollywood writers' rooms including Blade Runner 2099, and co-directs a futures incubator at SCI-Arc. Getting a physicist, a fashion house and a film studio to pull in one direction requires a vision people can picture. Lucy will show how she builds one.

Monday evening: a screening of Lucy's film work.

Reading the organization as a system

Your idea didn't fail on merit. So what did it fail on? Sheryl built a practice on systems thinking and evidence-based design — robotic surgery, K–12 education redesign, work with the Gates Foundation, Microsoft, IHME and IKEA — and now designs for privacy at Google. Kevin has spent twenty-five years moving between engineering, business and design in equal measure, helping Nike, Google and PepsiCo find strategic innovation, and now leads ImagineCo's design studio. Together they'll take an organization apart: where the real leverage sits, which resistance comes from structure rather than personality, and how to lead people whose disciplines don't share your vocabulary.

A clear position does the recruiting

What happens when the right people come looking for you? Andy builds software that makes ordinary tasks joyful — a weather app, a calculator, a habit tracker — while most software is engineered to extract attention. He's an entrepreneur doing work that lights him up and building a business for people who feel the same way. That's a position, and positions attract people. The community around his work is itself a coalition, and it shapes what he makes next.

Building support outside your own walls

How do you build something around your values, not knowing how your community will respond? Molly built a beloved company in Seattle and used it to help change many state and local laws — like increasing the minimum wage, creating a sick leave law, a state paid family & medical leave program, and adding small business tax credits to the original Affordable Care Act — with authority over nobody who voted. She is openly political. That creates some controversy, yet also earns her the most loyal following in her market, and it's the reason the coalition existed at all. She'll go through how she did it: who she brought together, who surprised her, and what the consequences are of speaking your political truths when you are a business leader.

Creative work that stays meaningful

How do you bring real creative thinking to your work without losing the reason you're doing it? Designing Your Life grew into a global community organized around a shared method, which is to say a coalition. Bill has spent the years since studying what makes work worth doing, most recently in How to Live a Meaningful Life. He'll talk about craft and meaning together: what it takes to make something well when the tools are changing this fast and the pressure is to go faster instead.

Earning trust in real time

What does it take for a room of strangers to agree to believe you? Andrew studied design at Stanford and became a magician, building a role nobody offered him whose entire output is delight. There are two things in that worth an evening. First, the mechanic: a magic show is the fastest coalition there is, a performer and a room of strangers deciding together to believe something impossible, built in ninety seconds, cold, every night. Second, Andrew himself, who is a working example of what Bill Burnett describes in the afternoon.

He performs after dinner on Tuesday. We're not going to explain this one further.