The Weekly Arsenal

From the Arsenal: SOPs can reveal problems. Story Of The Day: Bob was walking me through a bunch of docs. There were A LOT of them.He had an SOP for every content process they did. To be honest there were so many I even lost track listening.Excel sheets, word docs, Canva slides...The list went on. After he went over them I asked:Does the team use these?Do you have one for this process? and he said:“Yes we have them, and it's shit… but it’s good.”At first it sounded contradictory.So I asked...

From the Arsenal: Transfer the part they can't Google. Story Of The Day: Bob cut a 90-minute call down to about 15. He had been using most of that time to walk people through the same information. The expectations.The process.All the yadayada people needed before getting started. So he recorded it. Now people could watch the presentation before the call. Bob only showed up for the questions. The obvious win was getting more than an hour back. But Bob had also separated two things most leaders...

From the Arsenal: Give your team the mirror before they need your eyes. Story Of The Day: Bob had a new toy. You could tell he was excited to show me.An actual thing the team could use. He had taken the frameworks,the checklists,the standards,(the stuff that usually lives in his head and his A-team's head...) and shoved it into one self-check tool over the weekend. Proprietary.Internal.Built for their way of reviewing work. The feedback was overwhelmingly positive. New hires liked it because...

From the Arsenal: The problems you're fixing today might be the problems you were praying for. Story Of The Day: "12 weeks ago, you would be dying to be in the situation you are in right now." I said it almost without thinking. Bob laughed."That's a great point." Then he paused."This is a problem that we now get to have." A few minutes earlier...he had been walking me through everything that felt broken. Too many systems.Too many moving pieces.Too many things to maintain. The team had synced...

From the Arsenal: Don't become your team's shortcut. Story Of The Day: Things were moving better. The process had more structure.The work was not getting stuck in the same places.And the leaders on the team were starting to step into more responsibility. But then one of those leaders asked a question. Something like:"How do I know when I should step in...versus when I should let them figure it out?" Good problem. Because when someone steps into leading,they start feeling pressure that used to...

From the Arsenal: You're superman when you should be Lex Luther. Story Of The Day: Bob was walking me through the whole video delivery chain. The whole thing. And without realizing it...every link still had a little string tied back to him. If the client wanted the whole thing,he thought about the whole thing. If the edit needed to happen,he thought about the edit. If the post needed graphics,he thought about the graphics. If the client needed files uploaded somewhere,he thought about the...

From the Arsenal: Most teams have a "what good actually looks like" problem. Story Of The Day: On a recent call, Bob was walking me through a revision problem. At one point, he described the cost of it:"It takes so much more work to write, to edit it and give feedback on something than to just do it." They built the framework.They had the checklist.They kept track of progress.They did multiple rounds of review. And still, the work still wasn't where they wanted it to be. More notes.More...

From the Arsenal: If you’re looking for someone exactly like you, you’re already stuck. Story Of The Day: Bob has been doing video for 35 years. The kind of experience where you can:forget a cable,lose a monitor feed,improvise a shot... and still come home with what you need. The kind of experience that’s built through thousands of projectsand thousands of decisions. Most think they’re trying to replace themselves to get out.They’re actually trying to transfer judgment. That’s why delegation...

From the Arsenal: “When there is more people and it doesn’t work, you feel like you’re doing something wrong.” Story Of The Day: I was listening to Bob walk through what was happening inside his team. At first, it sounded like quality-control. Bad edits.Weak drafts.Too much revision.Too many things getting kicked back. But Bob said it himself:“That’s not a content issue.” And he was right. One editor would wait hours before touching an assignment.Another would send over a setup that clearly...

From the Arsenal: Small teams are becoming dangerous. Story Of The Day: Since we are on the AI train this week, I thought I'd continue the subject. The interesting thing about AI for in-house video teams isn’t just automation. It’s compression. Smaller teams can suddenly punch above their weight class. Years ago, certain outputs required: more specialists,more technical execution,more layers,more labor. ow a lean team can suddenly operate like a much larger one. And as more execution becomes...

From the Arsenal: Humans hallucinate better than AI. Story Of The Day: While I was in Shanghai my cousin introduced me to two founders running a production company there. Bob comes from a heavy VFX and technical production background.Mary handles producing, client management, and pre-production. For the next two hours, almost the entire conversation revolved around AI. What tools they were using.What actually worked.What was overhyped.How much faster technical execution was becoming. Bob...