Creative Leadership Retreat: Paul Dichter

We spoke about this a little bit when you were on the show a few months back, but one idea that came to us, the class that Bill and I teach through Johnny and I was this idea of these thinking hats.

There's a book called Six Thinking Hats where he works with his team to try on different types of hats like there's the black hat one might go wrong here or the white hat the optimistic one it sounds like you don't exactly take that mode but there's some of you on the team that are maybe more of like the i want to push this idea forward some that are skeptics how does that play out on the team

Yeah, I remember we were talking about this.

Yeah, so the...

I feel like you do end up finding out what your strengths are and what you naturally want to do.

And I feel like in that room, I was just a generator of hundreds of terrible ideas.

But I've never stopped coming up with ideas.

And then there was someone else that I worked with for many years, and she... she uh she's not happy about this no she she would shoot everything down so i would come up with i i'd say what about this and she would say no and but it was a really good balance and if i said something and she nodded it was an amazing feeling and it's turned in it Yeah.

I think there's a lot of roles.

Some, some people are really good at seeing the big picture and some people are really good at,

at

the moment that's happening

on

screen, like the scene right now and what the person's trying to get from the other character.

I

want to open up the floor for questions here, but I've got one more here.

I'm curious about chemistry because, um, It's hard for us to know what the chemistry was like in the room, but I can tell you the end user experience of watching the show, it felt like there was a very cohesive creative experience behind the scenes.

Is that true? And what are the elements of the chemistry that you saw in that writer's room?

Yeah, it's definitely true.

I mean, it was as small a group as we could make it.

And for the last few seasons, everybody had worked together for a long time.

And we were really siloed from the real world impact of what the show was.

And we would just show up every day and try to figure out what the next thing that should happen in the story was.

And, yeah, I think that that creative being comfortable with each other let us put ourselves out there and be more vulnerable and... be wrong and have bad ideas all day and not feel self-conscious about it.

And it also let us not have the door open too wide to what the world or Reddit or, you know, the internet had to say about what we were doing.