One amazing thing beats seven watered-down ones.

principle — attributed to David Stark

Stark's allocation principle is to find where you get the most bang for the buck and concentrate there. He would always rather do one amazing great thing than seven watered-down measly things. The principle generalizes from event design to almost every creative and budget decision. Splitting investment evenly across components is rarely the right move. Identifying the single component that carries disproportionate weight and overfunding it produces work that registers; spreading the same budget thinly produces work that does not. The discipline is editorial. Most teams under-edit; the strongest design directors over-edit and trust the remaining choices to carry the weight.

For designers, project leads, and clients allocating budget across event components. The principle is hardest to apply when stakeholders each want their own component funded.

focus, scope, design-discipline, budget-allocation