Films on the Fly‘s motivating principle is to foster new paradigm changes in entertainment and education whilst doing it in an economically responsible manner.

Paradigm Changes :

• Entertainment — Using Multipath interactive storytelling.
• Education – Using collaborative communities and self directed learning.
• Economics – Using the ‘For-Benefit’ and Money as Value concepts listed below.

Goals

Defining a companies aims and goals are never easy as the wrong goals can have disastrous effects.

“Badly designed goals may cause systematic problems for organisations due to narrow focus, unethical behavior, increased risk taking, decreased cooperation, and decreased intrinsic motivation. Use care when applying goals in your organisation.” — Dan Pink (in his book Drive)

The founders of Films on the Fly, Michael and Sunny want to make the world a better place, and are going to start by fostering a paradigm shift in entertainment, through the Multipath interactive storytelling concept.

We also believe that :

Engaging, interactive video can be used as a catalyst for social change.

What better way to change the world than by creating a web platform which can be such a catalyst.

Aims

Along with our goals are a number of aims.

Films on the Fly‘s main aims are :

• To foster and excel at Multipath storytelling and interactive video.
• To grow Australia into a world renowned hub for interactive and online video.
• To use our skills, power and wealth for the benefit of the local and broader society and environment.
• To use science and technology to increase our understanding of what we do and help devise ways to do it more efficiently and effectively.
• To foster an environment of innovation, collaboration and creativity, both inside and outside of the company.
• To, whenever possible, try and fix the root cause of problems, instead of just treating the symptoms.

Principles

Intrinsic Motivation

Films on the Fly‘s business culture is build around Intrinsic motivation. We work because we enjoy the job and have autonomy, mastery and purpose, rather than extrinsic motivation (working for money). For more information check out Dan Pink’s inspiring TED talk on the Surprising Science of Motivation. We also recommend you read Netflix’s presentation on their Corporate Culture.

For Benefit

In the spirit of social entrepreneurship Films on the Fly sees itself as a ‘for-benefit‘ company.

We balance the priority of profit making with the value of social and environmental benefit.

Similar to the idea of an L3C (low-profit limited liability) company, we favour long-term value and social impact over short-term economic gain. Whilst we certainly aren’t adverse to making money, we want to make sure that cutting corners now won’t cause catastrophic issues to humanity in the future.

Small examples are that we want to limit the difference between the lowest paid full time employee to the highest paid employee. That is to say that instead of the CEO making 100x the average salary he should only make up to 3x the average.

Money as Value

One way of putting these concepts into practice is to adjust the way we value things.

In the current monetary system products and services are generally valued according to the scarcity (supply/demand), and human labour required to create it, with a narrow focus on maximising profits. This worked fine before the industrial revolution when we did primarily mechanical based tasks and energy was mostly derived from slavery instead of oil and humans didn’t have the population nor power to dramatically alter the environment.

But with the issues and changes facing humanity we need to take a different approach.

When considering the costs of a product or service Films on the Fly likes to include the costs of human well-being and the environment into the equation. For example, whilst the monetary system may value the costs of outsourced child labour to be very cheap, but because of the damage to human well being (health, education and happiness) we see it as a being more expensive than a normally paid adult worker in Australia. Although it should be re-iterated that if possible, we prefer to replace monotonous, repetitive tasks with automated systems or to change the design so it does not require such a boring job in the first place. An example could be to turn the task into a game that is fun to play and also educational.

The cost of a coal fired power plant might be cheaper in the short term within the current monetary system, but in the long term the increased environmental destruction is simply not worth it when clean, renewable energy sources like solar and wind are not just available, but could power all of Australia’s energy needs, allowing us to get to zero carbon emissions within 10 years.

The interesting problem for our financing team will be trying to run an internal for-benefit (money as value) economic model within the current monetary system. It will take some time to find out the true costs of products and services and we will likely try out various algorithms and weightings, but we hope that other companies will follow our lead and choose the smarter long term choices, which ultimately lead to a greater future for all humanity.

In order to help make the world a better place and foster new paradigms we are going to need help. We are looking to work with like minded people who share our passion. If you want to help, or have any ideas regarding the concepts presented on this page then please comment below or email contact@filmsonthefly.com

Note : This page was initially created as a post on the 27th of April 2010 and was last updated on the 15th of June, 2011.