The line about asking individual knowledge workers to optimize their own work hits me hard. I'm the only programmer in the office I work at. My boss has started telling people that they should take an hour every week to stop and think about how a small process can be done better/faster. The problem is that the longest and most important part of what they do isn't some manual task, but a mental process (they are digital artists). I doubt most people are going to intuitively solve the complexity of their own brains through introspection (as some early psychologists thought we could do). It's easier for me to 'optimize' because I can manipulate how a physical computer operates. It's hard for anyone to manipulate how their intuitive functions work besides slowly gaining experience and mastery.
I don’t know what your digital artist coworkers produce, but unless it is pure l'art pour l'art they can think about ways how to streamline processes outside of their art. How do they receive their “brief”? How is the work batched? Does it ever happen that they are asked to produce something which then gets thrown away and wasted for reasons the company could better control? Are there any missunderstandings? If the artist see themselves as simple “brief -> bitmap” converters then this is of course beyond their pigeonhole, but if they are smart and creative people, as I belive they are, they might already have ideas how to improve things. And the boss basically encouraged that those with ideas come forward, so he might believe the same!
Also this “the only way to improve is slowly gaining experience and mastery” is not true. (I was paraphrasing your words) I watch many videos of great artist sharing tips. Again I don’t know what medium they work in, but in 3d work one can improve a lot by better organizing their asset library. In digital painting work I have seen people use posable human models to start sketching from. Ian Hubert shares great “lazy tutorials” on how he learned to cheat and animate complex looking things in super simple way. Just spending an hour a week reading up on tricks from others can improve ones “craft”.
And what is the worst? You goof around an hour and can’t think of anything. You tell the boss that when he asks, what is he going to do? Fire you for not trying hard enough? If he does, he wanted to fire you anyway and was just fishing for an excuse.
This makes a lot of sense. I guess I just wondered if people end up degrading the quality of their work to maximize speed instead of inspecting their process which is another part of the artistic flow. Everything you've said here is a good refutation of my original comment.
