Introducing Ars Pandemonium!
Determinedly driving the screw with a hammer.
After 30 years as a creative professional — and more than 20 as a manager and leader of creative professionals — I sat down to reflect on a career’s worth of things I’d seen and heard, thought, said, experienced, regretted, and accomplished. Of opinions formed and changed. Of lessons learned, forgotten, and re-learned.
I intended to write mostly for myself, but a great thing about writing is that it’s awfully easy to share.
So here is Ars Pandemonium, an ongoing musing on the art and craft of managing the chaos of creative endeavor. There’s a lot of memoir, some strong opinions, maybe a little shoe-gazing and wool-gathering. Quite a bit of pointing out the blatantly obvious. Expect some medium-hot takes.
As I kick this off I have no idea how much, if any, of it will be interesting to how many, if any, readers. So let’s give it a shot! I look forward to all feedback.
Hopefully, as the channel populates with content, the project itself will become more clear to you, dear reader — and to me, too! But I thought I’d take a moment here and propose some general parameters within which I intend to work.
The Plural of “Anecdote” Is Not “Data”
Ars Pandemonium is not journalism. I am not a journalist. It is not academia, and neither am I an academic. Sometimes I cite sources, other times I might not. I might assemble elaborate straw-beings to argue against. I might invoke my paternal prerogative: “because I said so.”
Look, much of this writing is anecdotal. Stories are generally true, and as factual as I can reasonably make them, within certain constraints. That is to say, these are my observations, my interpretations — my memories. It is certainly the case that none of us has perfect recollection, and even more to the point that we have only our own perception to recollect anyway.
And notwithstanding all of that, some of it is pure opinion. And sometimes I’m just wrong!
Anyway, as I’ll get into in a minute, I try hard to anonymize the goings on, and in some cases that does require a bit of Vaseline on the lens, you know?
Acknowledgements
It is not lost on me that if I’m writing about my experiences as a manager and a leader it means I’m also writing about those that I have managed and led. My teams made me! But of course, those folks didn’t sign up to write — or indeed even be mentioned in — a Substack channel about those experiences. In the next section I’ll go over a bit of how I approached this problem, to the extent that it is a problem.
But I want to first give my absolute heartfelt thanks to everyone I’ve had the humbling privilege to lead. It’s been my honor, and truly I want all of them to know that I have learned far more than I have taught and gotten more than I ever gave.
If You See Yourself In My Writing
I’m not here to talk about individuals I’ve worked with, and certainly not to air dirty laundry. But I’ve worked with hundreds and hundreds of people over the years, and as I explore certain anecdotes looking for insight and learning, I’m sure to tell a story or two that might hit pretty close to home.
If you find yourself experiencing such a thing, I want to say two things to you: 1) don’t panic — nobody else is going to figure it out, and 2), it’s probably not you anyway — in just about every story I tell, I can generally think of at least two incidents that it is illustrating, and in some cases, many more.
At the same time, I hope everyone sees themselves to some degree in this writing. I have no idea whether the ideas that I’m putting forth here are “universal,” or “widely applicable,” or “vanishingly niche,” or just me shouting into the void. But what I would hope is that I’ve managed to collect some anecdotes and insights that will at least ring true.
Politics
Ars Pandemonium is not at all intended to be a political screed. It does, however, have to do with the interactions of people and institutions and organizations which…well, that’s the actual definition of “political.” And let’s be honest: I certainly have a position and a point of view!
The context of the work is fundamentally late-stage capitalism, business, and industry on the one hand, and on the other, it’s deeply interested in equity, inclusiveness, diversity and the fair value of creative labor. There’s probably something for everyone to disagree with! Ça va. If it annoys you, well, at least hopefully it made you think. If thinking annoys you, please go away.
Along those lines, I want to point out some conventions I attempt to follow and why. For example, I try to use non-gendered language whenever possible. English is incredibly elastic and evolves remarkably quickly. But only so quickly…and the elimination of gender can still lead to some awkward constructions. Totally worth it. English only evolves if we evolve it, so here’s my little push on that wheel.
In addition, I sometimes attempt to make explicit what is often very nuanced around really important issues of diversity and inclusion in the workplace. But of course, I’m a cis-gendered, heterosexual, university-educated, six foot tall, white man, and a lifelong learner on these subjects. I can’t expect I’ll get it all right. That doesn’t let me off the hook, and it’s not an excuse.
But look, there is no power dynamic here: no one has to read what I write. And I’m always open to feedback.
The Name
So, why “Ars Pandemonium?”
There is art and craft involved in the professionalizing of art and craft. I’m a strong believer in process management, but also in its healthy tension with wild experimentation, in the constant play between predictability and radical opportunism.
Good creatives tend to be clever, sensitive, ambitious, headstrong, moody, cynical, optimistic, and unpredictable, in various combinations and amounts. Put them together on a team and it can create explosive energy: sometimes explosive like a rocket engine, sometimes explosive like a grenade. Sometimes one, then the other. Hard to predict! There has to be a way to capture it without stifling it, to feed it but keep it directed.
When thinking about this as a management ethos, I rather grandiloquently called it The Pandemonium Principle.
I love the word pandemonium. It is a portmanteau of Greek terms coined in English by John Milton in Paradise Lost. Yes, there it had religious overtones (obviously), but if you’ve read Paradise Lost then you know there’s a lot of nuance about even that, too. And in modern idiomatic usage it has shed any notions of “demons” in a religious sense while still carrying the cognitive load of the more classical meaning of daemons.
The word is cleverer and more intentional than “chaos,” less overtly political than “anarchy,” and carries fewer pejorative connotations than “insanity” or “craziness.” It also has a lovely and fascinating usage history in the field of cognitive science. Plus, it just sounds cool.
And, being that I’m a pretentious dope, instead of “The Art and Craft of Pandemonium,” I figured let’s go full send and throw some Latin in there, too.
Ergo, “Ars Pandemonium.” Welcome aboard.
Also!
Check out the Ars Pandemonium Bookshelf. I read a lot of mainstream management and business literature, and sometimes I write up thoughts and musings about what I’ve read. Not reviews or recommendations, just some notes on my impressions. Take a look.
If you’d like more about my professional history you can find me on LinkedIn here, or check out my portfolio site (always under construction), Audible Images.