And not everything has to land!

April Fool’s Day came and went last week…

And with it – a short film courtesy of myself and Jack.

Based on viewership stats I’m going to assume you haven’t seen it, so let me tell you: this video sits somewhere between a product launch and a fever dream.

Think low-budget 70s television, complete with slightly off editing, deliberate slip-ups, and the general tone of Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace.

The product is called InvisiFog, and it’s quite the breakthrough in security technology.

Fog… that you can see straight through.

Splendid stuff, if you ask me.

Anyway – we thought it up, laughed, refined it, laughed, made it, put it out, and… well, it hasn’t exactly broken the internet.

But that’s quite alright! Not everything you make has to land to be worth doing. Sometimes just doing it and having a giggle is enough.

As far as I know there’s only one (!) day a year where you’re actively encouraged to be a bit of an idiot. To put something daft into the world and see what happens. And even then most people play it fairly safe. Seems wild really, doesn’t it?

I’ve always thought work should leave a little more room for silliness. Obviously not constant nonsense – we’re a small team and we’re not running a circus – but there’s got to be room for going off-script without everything grinding to a halt.

Now for the all-important caveats…

Yes we work in a serious industry. Yes what we do matters. People rely on it, and there’s a level of focus and responsibility that comes with that. Rightly so on all counts.

But that doesn’t mean everyone has to behave like a robot all the time.

I’ve written plenty in recent months about the challenges of leading a business –unpredictability, geopolitical strife, decision paralysis. All not-so-fun but very real stuff we navigate each week at Smoke Screen.

So it’s only fair we get a good dose of silliness too.

The two aren’t mutually exclusive. If anything, one makes the other more bearable.

This particular bout of immaturity has also reminded me… effort and outcome don’t always line up.

Jack put real work into the video – same with the Halloween ones he’s done before. Sometimes they fly, sometimes they don’t. You can spend weeks on something and it barely registers. Then something you threw together in half an hour gets all the attention. That’s just how it goes.

If you only ever do the things you know will land, you end up doing a very narrow set of things. And that gets rather dull rather quickly.

Maybe the moral of the story here is… don’t take it too personally.

The irony of writing about it here isn’t lost on me by the way. Feels like a cry for help, doesn’t it? Our InvisiFog video didn’t set the world alight and I just can’t get my head around it and I’d love nothing more in this entire world than for you to go and check it out right here right now…

Only joking. I don’t really mind whether you watch it or not.

But I do care about keeping up our silly streak from time to time. Not to reap rewards in any obvious way, but to remember as a team that having fun only improves the quality of the work we do every day.

The world feels pretty serious most of the time. But we’re still people behind all this, and we sure like having a laugh.