Total Teamwork - Imagination Ltd.

Because a lot of the creative work gets done at Imagination's meetings, they do not result in eye rolling. In fact, so many ideas get floated and hashed out at weekly project sessions, that the paternity of any particular element or idea is often cloudy. After the meetings, designers scramble to their drafting tables or computer screens to bring the discussions to life.

Finally, at Imagination, the clients are often an ongoing influence on the team. Even though they can't be physically present at each meeting, they are consulted often enough to become a source of ideas and inspiration. The smiley-face logo, for instance, was pursued mainly because Sky pushed for it. Following Sky's lead, Imagination found the right way to design the logo.

Increasingly, Imagination takes projects well beyond the boundaries that other design firms or agencies might have taken them to. For Skyscape, Imagination didn't just contract to design the space; the firm also contracted to oversee it throughout the one-year life of the Dome. Imagination arranged a training program for the Dome's youthful "yellow coat" staff, beyond the standard Dome training, and Skyscape managers brief the "yellow coats" before every performance of Blackadder.

"We are in the experience business," says Ardill, "not the interior-design business. Sky is relying on someone else to construct and deliver something that it has no experience with itself. What if one of the monitors in the space fails? It's not enough to have the idea."

Talent and Respect

One day five years ago, Adrian Caddy sliced the spine off an issue of "GQ" magazine and started sorting the pages into categories. "We were working on a project -- I don't remember what -- and we had the adverts in one pile, and the editorial sections in another pile. We started thinking, What makes a magazine? What if 'GQ' weren't a magazine but a place? And then we thought, What if we could turn the magazine into something like Club GQ?" (Caddy and Ardill liked the idea so much that they wrangled time with Condé Nast's senior executive in the UK, Nicholas Coleridge, and formally pitched it to him.)

While the idea for Club GQ never took off, it represented the crystallization of a critical question for Imagination: What business was the firm really in? With its stable of designers, architects, lighting experts, theater people, writers, and film directors, Imagination wasn't an advertising agency, a design group, or a theatrical-production company. So what was it?

The idea for Club GQ came out of a small, experimental group that included Caddy and Ardill. The name of the group was Brand Development, and its initial mission was to find ways to deepen the brands of some of Imagination's biggest clients, such as Ford. But what Brand Development really did was to reinvent the Imagination brand: The company learned to marshal its creative resources to produce "brand experiences" -- a whole new kind of work created by a whole new way of working.

The Dome's Journey Zone and TalkZone are probably the most compelling examples of Imagination trying to create a complete experience. "Journey is, literally, a journey about journeys," says Caddy. The notion of "brand experience" is intentionally circular: The kind of work that Imagination does, and the way that the company does its work, converge and reinforce each other. In the course of creating multitextured experiences for its clients, Imagination has created multitextured teams for itself.

In that way, Imagination has solved the mystery at the heart of teamwork: The essence of teamwork is that people contribute selflessly. They rise above themselves, and they are committed to their goal and to one another. But why doesn't that happen all the time? "At many ad agencies," says Andrew Horberry, 37, account manager for the Journey Zone, "you are hired to fulfill a traditional kind of craft role. At Imagination, people still have roles. But rather than jealously guard those roles and say, 'You can't question me! I'm the subject-matter expert!,' they are willing to really listen."

At Imagination, the team approach works because it allows anyone to contribute to anything -- and all team members are expected to come up with ideas outside of their own areas. And it works because, ultimately, all members also know what their role on the team is. It's hard to imagine creating something from scratch with only a set of rules or policies to follow, but it is part of the unwritten psychology at Imagination. People make all kinds of suggestions, and people take all kinds of suggestions. But there is a self-regulating mechanism: Filmmakers can't impose their will on architects, and writers and graphic artists must ultimately come to agreement.