My Biggest Technical Mistake as a Production Director
“Humility builds trust. Ego builds resentment”.
The title says it all. This isn’t easy to put out there, but I think it’s often more valuable to share our mistakes with others than to share our wins. It’s easy to share a win because we look good, but I can confidently say my most significant learnings have been from failure, and since this blog is about sharing my learnings, I need to talk about my greatest production failure.
The Tea
We were working on clearing a few multisite audio hurdles a few years ago. We aimed to expand our ability from sending 8 and 16 audio channels between campuses to 64 channels. This would allow us to send more worship tracks from our broadcast campus to the video campuses. It would also provide future broadcast expansion opportunities if we streamed our services from other campuses. We could send audio and video back to our main broadcast campus for mixing and streaming.
We found what I thought would be the perfect solution to implement: Dante Domain Manager. I don’t want to beat up on Audinate in this post. However, the solution was marketed in a way that didn’t seem too complicated, especially as a former IT guy and someone who is Dante level 3 certified. I read the documentation and sent it to our IT team, and we all agreed that we could do this. I purchased the license, our IT staff spun up a virtual server and configured our networks, and we started implementing it. We did the first campus, and it was seamless. It was a cool product and gave us so much flexibility in routing audio between buildings. It was great! We then moved to implementing it at our second campus, and again, it was great! It worked well, and I even sent 64 channels of audio from the first campus and played it through the PA at the second campus flawlessly, like a virtual soundcheck. I was in love!
The honeymoon lasted a few months, and then we started encountering strange problems. We’d fix it, and then something else would happen. We even hopped on support meetings with Audinate, and we still couldn’t get to the bottom of it. We encountered one problem after another—all leading to audio not passing through our PA systems—seemingly always on service days. One time, we made it through band rehearsal and service run-through, and 10 minutes before service, all audio stopped, causing us to hold doors while I scrambled and tried to get it back up and running in time for service. The final straw came on a Sunday morning when we had clocking issues at one campus while no audio passed at the other.
I decided to abandon Dante Domain Manager.
I had to admit, it just wasn’t the right solution for our church and our network. It required more time and energy than our IT staff or I could give to manage it as it needed to be managed. All the time and energy that other staff and I spent on this solution was reversed and abandoned. I felt defeated and incompetent. I felt bad that this decision I made caused so many problems for so many people.
There are a few lessons I took from this. The first is a gear lesson—unless you have complete control of your network and can ensure no other network traffic is on the Dante network, it is best to avoid Dante Domain Manager. The second is a leadership lesson—A friend of mine says, “Leadership is lonely.” I never fully understood that until I made a decision that didn’t work, and I had to walk it back humbly and apologetically. Our wrong decisions can damage trust. Our character is tested when we realize we’re in the wrong and are faced with a choice between humility and ego. We either double down, tell everyone else they’re wrong, and keep pushing until something breaks, or we humbly own that we’re wrong and take responsibility for the decision.
“Humility builds trust. Ego builds resentment”.
The decision to pull the plug on Dante Domain Manager was hard. My ego shouted at me, telling me I’d look foolish to my team, bosses, and even my wife when I told her. Were those fears worth losing trust over? No, which is why I chose humility. Fortunately for me, my humility was met with grace from my bosses, teammates, and staff, which is a testament to the healthy culture I work in. Even if I knew they wouldn’t have responded that way, we’re the ones who have to choose and carry out our character, regardless of how someone else may choose to respond.
I’m sure most people have found themselves in a similar situation where they have to choose between humility and ego. Remember, trust is slowly built and quickly lost. Showing humility will sting for a little bit, but your working relationships will be stronger in the long run.
