My brother-in-law is a screenwriter. One of the things he says he’s learned about Hollywood is “When there is a problem, it feels really good to be the one to ‘save’ the project. Everyone wants to be the person that saved it.”

Man, is that familiar or what! Something isn’t working. You think of a fix. You tell the team to make it so, and they do. Boom! Done. It’s so satisfying.

But… was that the best solution? Often, the answer is no. Great artists aren’t great in isolation — they have colleagues who influence them, who question their work, who challenge them to do better. Greatness is a group achievement.

Here are five guidelines to help your team solve your problem, whether it’s a flawed script or a flawed website design.

There’s an old cryptography joke: Random numbers are too important to be left to chance.

It is extremely difficult to create a truly random number, but on a practical level we can. A good enough random number is one which cannot be predicted by another tool with a rate of success more than chance. That’s a much lower bar to hit than the unachievable ideal of random…