Media is an industry that is fundamental to a functioning society. Through the media, we find out what is happening. We used to get our information mostly through commercial media like newspapers, television, and radio, and we got our community and social information through word-of-mouth. Of course, digital and social media have changed the rules of the game. Now, information is readily available and accessible everywhere, online, and at any time. We often learn what’s going on with our close friends through social media, and we learn what’s happening on a global level through commercial media, or through a hybrid of commercial and social, like independent websites and blogs that are run as businesses.

Media professionals today have to have the skill to grow and change along with rapidly changing circumstances. They need to learn the innovation skills that entrepreneurs have had for some time, and they need to be able to handle the fear and repeated failure that is a natural part of both the innovation and learning process.

Fear and Fail is an organization that hosts regular meetups in three cities, including Stockholm. On August 18th, organizer Steve Ferris hosted a meetup that featured speakers from the media industry.

Fatina Lagerås is a CEO who spoke to us about the early stages of founding her production services company, SWIXER. When she began the company, she had no experience as a founder, only as an employee. Running a business is quite different from working in one, she discovered. She braved through the initial stages of the business, doing ten jobs at once, but she ran into problems when she tried to hide her worries and insecurity about what she was doing. Anxious to be a “duktig flicka,” a good girl who doesn’t make trouble for anyone, she tried to do everything herself, and didn’t delegate or ask for help enough.

At one point, Fatima left for New York, thinking that everything was running smoothly and nothing would go wrong. Of course, everything that could go wrong did go wrong. Her staff had to step up above and beyond their job descriptions to ensure that production didn’t stall. The lesson that Fatima learned was that she wasn’t able to fix everything herself all of the time. She accepted that she couldn’t be everywhere and do everything. Even when it meant making less profit, it was sometimes in the best interest of the overall health of the company to hire a professional who could make sure things ran the way she wanted them to.

The night’s second speaker, Petter Lindblad, is a film producer who runs the Swedish production company Snowcloud Films. Snowcloud specializes in projects for children and youth. Speaking to us, he explained the importance of team communication, relating a story of a project that hit a crisis at a critical milestone when a technical director failed to deliver what he had promised. The failure wasn’t the TD’s alone, Petter said, but a failure in communication. At the early stages of the project, when Petter first recruited the director, the expectations were not made clear. Petter let himself be reassured by the director when he should have asked more questions and checked in more often.

Now, Petter recruits differently. He finds good people and sparks their ambition by telling them what he wants them to become. He runs projects with much greater transparency, where all members of the team are expected to apprise each other of what they are working on, and how things are going, so that there are no surprises that result in disappointed and angry clients or a last minute scramble for an extra million in financing to finish the project.

People like a good bit of gossip, so of course the audience wanted to know more about the TD who dropped the ball. The specific mistake the TD made was to focus too much on making the image nice, without taking into consideration that the extra time and effort would have to go into every single image in the film. He didn’t create the workflow that was needed to apply the same post-processing technique to every shot in the film, so they simply couldn’t do the work.

Petter said that they never blamed him in front of the client — it was important to him that he and his company accept the blame for what went wrong. Petter had to find a million in new funding at the last minute to fix the mistake, but they managed it.

Impact Hub will continue to host the Fear and Fail events in the future. To see when the next one is scheduled, we recommend that you join the group on Meetup, or keep an eye on our Events page.

Author

Kirsten Zerbinis was following the new media story. Now she’s creating it as the Co-founder of a media technology startup.