When I was a young junior designer I made a tiny but very expensive error on a £250k print run. A single spelling mistake — printed on an 8 carriage vinyl-wrapped London Underground train.
It was very clear I had well and truly messed up. But instead of passing blame, the team taught me to see it as an opportunity — how to avoid such mistakes in the future — and how to work together to solve them when they do.
Working onsite (before remote working was a thing) where everyone scrums in, instilled something in me that I’ve never lost.
Rolling my sleeves up and doing what’s necessary, without complaint, is something that’s saved my skin more times than I can count.
Rolling my sleeves up and doing what’s necessary — without complaint — is something that’s saved my skin more times than I can count. In the early days of Function & Form, my first web developer let me down on a critical project with weeks to the deadline. He wasn’t a team player and when things went wrong, he disappeared with the money.
Instead of giving up, I taught myself the skills I needed to rebuild the entire site from scratch in under four weeks.
The project went live.
My business lived on.
And I’ve only worked with people who share that value ever since.
Nobody has embodied this attitude better than the engineers who saved Apollo 13 in 1970.
When the spacecraft’s oxygen tank exploded, three astronauts were stranded 200,000 miles from Earth — without enough power or oxygen to get home.
Back in Houston, the flight team had 87 hours to find a solution. A room full of people who decided failure was not an option.
We came into the room as a team and we’ll go out as a team.Gene Kranz, Flight Director, Apollo 13
To get the crew home safely they needed to filter excess CO₂ — but the components on board simply didn’t fit. Working through the night, NASA engineers designed a makeshift adapter from plastic bags, cardboard and duct tape.
All three astronauts splashed down safely on April 17, 1970.
Most of our daily challenges are not life or death. But we can choose to care nonetheless. And we can choose to be a team, so that when a crisis hits we do what’s necessary, and go home proud to have achieved the impossible.
That’s what I was given in my first job. And it’s what I try to bring into everything I build at Function & Form. Finding people who share that same instinct — who muck in, who care, who take it personally when something isn’t right — that’s what makes work worth getting up for.
Not just a job. A sense of purpose.