Total Teamwork - Imagination Ltd.

Total Teamwork: Imagination Ltd.

Home Base: London, England
Year Founded: 1978

The line would be 700 people long. And although they would be waiting to get into one of Britain's greatest attractions, most of the people in the line would be restless or tired, irritable or impatient. Everyone would know that the wait wouldn't last for more than 15 minutes. But knowing how long the wait will be often makes it that much more unbearable.

The final irony: The point of waiting in the 700-person line would be to have fun. Everyone would be waiting to take a seat at Skyscape, an attraction inside Britain's Millennium Dome, a sprawling, one-year exhibition that is part theme park, part architectural wonder, and part edutainment venue. Once inside Skyscape, visitors would watch a special 30-minute episode of a popular British comedy series, "Blackadder" -- a kind of "Seinfeld" meets "Monty Python."

That is the scene that the people at British Sky Television -- Skyscape's sponsor and a leader in multichannel entertainment in the UK -- foresaw playing out at the attraction, if they did nothing to avoid it. "We knew that the film would be terrific," says Andrea Sullivan, 37, the director of corporate affairs for Sky who is running the project. "But to be a truly entertaining experience, it had to be fun from the moment that visitors walked through the door."

The possibility of a long line was a problem. After all, comedy works better when people start out with a smile on their faces. As it happened, just when Sky was worrying about the line problem, company officials were talking to an unusual British outfit -- a 22-year-old design firm with the daring name Imagination Ltd. Sky needed someone to "manage the line," and, while not many companies would know where to begin with such a project (even Disney, master of crowds, does little more with its legendary lines than disguise their length), Imagination offered to tackle the job.

Imagination does all kinds of design work: graphic design, Web sites, product introductions, visitor centers -- even the dramatic lighting of the famous Lloyd's building in London. Its 1999 revenues of £101.5 million, or about $160 million (up 25% from 1998), make it larger than its top two competitors -- Enterprise IG, and Interbrand Newell and Sorrell -- combined. Recently, the firm has begun to invent a whole new discipline: creating "brand experiences" that transcend physical spaces and traditional marketing practices.

For Imagination, Sky's queue problem presented a chance to have some fun. "This work was quite mad, really," says Ralph Ardill, 35, Imagination's director of marketing and strategic planning. "We wanted to push the queue experience to a new place."

In typical Imagination fashion, the firm started with a team of in-house employees -- an architect, a lighting designer, a graphic designer, and a film director. Eventually, the core Imagination team brought a choreographer in to join the group. What could a film director possibly contribute to figuring out how to manage a line? And what might an architect and a choreographer talk to each other about?

At Imagination, those questions aren't dismissed as silly; they aren't even questions at all. When you're trying to "push the queue experience to a new place," having a film director, an architect, and a choreographer on your team might come in handy.

Imagination easily accomplishes something that most companies struggle with: It creates effective work teams, comprising people with a wide spectrum of talents who not only tackle projects together but also engage in real teamwork. At Imagination, employees know that the talent of the team is greater than the talent of its individual members. The members of each team learn from one another. They transcend the boundaries of their jobs, their functions, their training, and their tenure at the company.

Teamwork is how Imagination works. As the company creates interesting experiences for its customers -- and for its customers' customers -- it is also creating a space at its own headquarters in which "the team experience" flourishes.

These days, companies in all industries are infatuated with movie-production-style management -- assembling a loose-knit team of freelance talent for each project. Imagination has assembled a company of 350 people built on the opposite principle: Make sure that your in-house people have a wide range of skills, use those people to assemble diverse teams, and don't hesitate to let the Web-page designers give the architects advice.

"When you sit in on our creative meetings," says Ardill, "you don't know the writer from the multimedia person from the architect. Our approach involves relationships, camaraderie, working things through. It's much different from working with a series of hired guns. Teamwork is a harder way of doing the work. But when it clicks, the result is a seamless experience."