It is hot in New York City again. The children are still off from school and we have returned from the Cape to those days at the end of the summer break when we’re done with camp and need to fill the days. Today I took them over to one of our favorite spots, the American Museum of Natural History. If you have seen the first Night at the Museum movie, you know it. We met a friend who is going through a rough time and she and I caught up while the kids checked out the exhibits.
We stood and stared at the new Richard Gilder Center for Science, Education, and Innovation ants exhibit for a long time. We watched the ants divide and conquer as they broke down the leaves, built their homes and otherwise worked together. It was mesmerizing, like watching a river flow over rocks or ocean waves ebb and flow, yet with an added sense of purpose. Maybe closer to people-watching at a busy New York City intersection. No idea why everyone is heading in their very purposeful stride, but sure that they have a destination.
Comparing the size of the ant to even their own piece of leaf is impressive enough. Look to the background of the photo. The full leaves seem insurmountable. How can those ants even start without feeling overwhelmed?
Then I knew what I was going to write about this week as I ease into job hunting.
Starting a new DAM project can feel like looking at the leaf and wondering where to even begin. There are so many questions to ask, so many opinions to gather, so many steps ahead. Breaking the project down into manageable chunks is the only way forward. If you look back at my early Give a DAM posts, you can see some early steps to get you started, from a content audit to naming.
And that’s fine, but you will not get much further without finding your other ants. As we watched the seemingly never-ending flow of leafcutters march back and forth across skyway tubes and fungus-farm tracks, it was also clear that many hands (mandibles?) make light work. When your project - any project, by the way, from launching a new site, moving cross-country, starting to write a book, organizing a closet - is at the point when the work just has to get done, once the decisions have been made and you’ve made your plan, spreading the labor across a team means that no one is burnt out, overburdened or, conversely, left out.
When it comes to a DAM project, we can use technology like platforms and AI to streamline the process, removing obstacles and offloading repetitive work. We might outdo the ants there, and yet I see wisdom in how each one of them contributes. It made me think of how on successful DAM projects, training multiple people across teams as power users was always brought better results than tasking a select few to manage. Spreading the “work” also spreads the rewards and connections to turn a DAM from a standalone tool into part of the full content, creative and brand infrastructure. Flowing from creation to distribution to incorporation into new campaigns to metadata-enriched assets, each person’s interactions with the DAM meant better results in the next round.
As I look at new opportunities, I hope to lead a team that can collaborate like this. I love to break down a big project into steps together. I am further down the career path and bring those skills along with me - which means I am looking at many types of roles. When I ask questions, the responses of those who are already within the company will inform the direction and give powerful insight on the project’s history and what pain points they are hoping to fix first. Instead of feeling overwhelmed, I will help them feel supported, included, and necessary to the project’s success. Like those ants, working individually it might seem like the goals will never be accomplished if each only carries a little piece of leaf. And maybe it will take time, but the ants’ “superorganism” is thriving during the process, not just the result: a goal we should try to bring out of the museum and into our work (and home) life too on our next big project.