There’s a look, and I’m only in on it as an observer, but it fills my little heart up.
It’s risky advertising a single role and then defying your own rules and giving two people the job. Especially a job that involves a level of curation and in some ways ownership, lots of creative decision making and heaps of vision.
But that’s exactly what I did, and what you’ll come to know, if you hadn’t already clocked it. Is that nothing about this project has been usual!
I cannot tell you how much I laboured over the job description for this role, in fact I will tell you, but in a seperate blogspot. It’s verging on a dissertation honestly!
BUT something magical happened and I think, it’s in part to do with that level of interrogation and consideration.
I interviewed 8 people, and hand on heart I can tell you all of them were appointable. That is practically unheard of and I promise you it wasn’t because the interviews weren’t robust. Of those 8, I’d say 8 were incredible, 5 defied my expectations- and look, I have high expectations! But two, two of them were exceptional!
I made lists, spreadsheets, and debated the options at length. I just couldn’t decide, not because I’m indecisive, but because Abi and Bee were just something else. I knew then and I know it deeper in my bones now, over a year later.
I know it in many ways, but I know it most when I see them, in the flat. They have this deep understanding of eachother, and they have this look. Maybe it’s many looks and subtle shifts. But they often don’t need to say a single thing, they just say it with this look.
And everytime I catch it, it reminds me of that risk of hiring them both, it reminds me that projects like this are about far more than the sum of their parts. The shiny parts.
They’re about humans, being humans and building things together in deep collaboration. And sometimes at the heart of that collaboration is just a look.
– Z