The organisational gap that's quietly costing creative companies their best work and their best people
A rolling wave in a workshop room in Kigali. A group of film professionals from four countries, strangers turned collaborators. And a realisation that changed the direction of my work: the most sophisticated organisational development methodology I'd ever encountered had nothing to do with the industries that need it most. Here's what creative and gaming companies are missing — and what it's quietly costing them.
The rolling wave…
Kigali. End of day four. A group of film professionals from Rwanda, Nigeria, Kenya, and Germany, tired, buzzing, ready to go home. This was the second time we had come together. They were part of the Moving Picture Incubator, working on solving real film distribution roadblocks — with the ambition of launching new businesses together.
I asked if anyone had a closing ritual. One participant smiled, slapped his thighs, and started a rolling wave — the kind you see in football stadiums. Within seconds the whole room was in it, laughing, alive.
I've worked with teams in 30 countries. That moment was priceless.
Not because it was fun — though it was. But because of what it meant: a group of people who had started out as individuals, each carrying their own project and their own agenda, had become something else over the course of this program. They had become something — distinct teams, but a real community. And they knew it.
Nobody had planned that wave. But everything we had done together made it possible.
… did not happen by accident.
That moment didn't happen by accident. It was the result of something that most creative and gaming companies never deliberately build: the intentional processes that facilitate work, decisions, and human connection — infrastructure that matches the ambition of the work itself.
The incubator organisers — my clients — put it this way: the film distribution professionals had entered as strangers and left as teams — some even founding businesses together. What made that possible wasn't chemistry or luck. It was structure. A deliberate, well-designed and facilitated process.
Most studios and creative companies are extraordinarily good at one thing — the work. The film, the game, the product. What they rarely have is an equally sophisticated understanding of the human system producing that work.