Back in school, my arts teachers often said that the things I drew were on too small a scale. In hindsight I think I was probably too shy to commit to a larger drawing on a big piece of paper. Fiddling away on a tiny picture felt safer.
About a month ago I signed up for a course in clay sculpting, and the first assignment was to model a bit of popcorn, but on a hugely magnified scale (see the picture on the left for a work-in-progress shot). I couldn’t believe the fun I had and the insights I got into three dimensional sculpting, all of which would have been lost if I’d started on too small a scale.
The reason I’m writing about this here is that in my opinion this translates well into the content develper’s world. Please note that big doesn’t have to mean size or budget. Here I mean big in terms of ambition level and disruptiveness. These are some of the benefits from setting your project’s ambition scale big enough:
1.) You plan big enough. It is a simple truth, that if your ambition level is low, your project will only ever reach moderate success at best. Dream big, plan big and then go for an ambitious execution. Your chances of succeeding will be that much greater.
2.) You see the interrelationships more clearly. Just as with the different masses on a sculpture, by doing things big enough you realise how the different parts of your project fit or don’t fit together, what needs emphasizing more and what can be trimmed. If your development approach is too small, fewer of the problems inherent in creating any successful big property will become apparent.
3.) Others will notice what you did. If you create something big, you’ll make a splash that people will notice. You don’t have to launch your project from space, but doing something ambitiously disruptive is sure to get you noticed!
