Only Dead Fish

Google Firestarters 2, Visualised

The rather talented folk at Scriberia created an amazing visual record of our second Google Firestarters event on Design Thinking In Planning. It takes some serious skill to have captured Tom and John's rapid-fire, broad-ranging talks in such a detailed and illustrative way and they've done an amazing job. So as a follow up to the write up of the event it's worth taking a look, and you can view it in all it's glory here.

Creative Futures

I agree with the sentiment expressed in this post that it's a nonsense to suggest that The Wilderness Downtown shouldn't be eligible to compete for a lion at Cannes (it ended up taking home a Cyber Grand Prix). I put out a tweet saying as much, which prompted a reply from Nick pointing me at the remarkable Pinepoint, which in turn led me to the (growing) collection of interactive documentaries, video projects and animations (alongside a bunch of other cool stuff) from the National Film Board of Canada. It is, they say, "the result of artists and storytellers of all sorts utilizing new technology, to explore new forms of creation, for a new kind of Canada". And it's rather amazing.

It was notable how far removed many of the interactive brand experiences that populated this year's Cyber Lions Shortlist were from what you might think of as traditional ads. Perhaps, as Iain suggests, it does indeed feel as if the digital transformation of our industry is almost complete. Perhaps. Either way, both of these things are manifestly reflective of a technologically creative present and future that is full of possibility. And one that should be embraced.

VW Dark Side

Whichever side you're on there's a lot to admire about this campaign from Greenpeace. A smart subversion of the Star Wars theme that VW capitalised on with the well-known (and liked) ad The Force. This morning saw some high profile poster sites being hijacked, quite a few Stormtroopers involved (which created a bit of a stir on the silicon roundabout it seems) and a site launched where you can 'develop your skills as a jedi to help further the rebellion'. All of which is designed to highlight a report about VW's commitment (or lack thereof) to help reduce CO2 emissions.

The execution on the site is pretty slick, with a second short film ('The Rebels Strike Back'), a rebel manifesto, your own Jedi training page which you're encouraged to share to help progress in your training (see what I did there). But I think the thing I like most about it is that they have hijacked a theme in a powerful way, with a great combination of online and IRL, and a strong group call to action ('Together we can turn VW away from the dark side') that seems to be spreading quickly. Like Roo, I'm left wondering how and when VW will respond.

Images courtesy

Happy Birthday Fish Food

I've been compiling and sending out a weekly newsletter for exactly a year now. It's been quite an investment of time but it's been fun doing it, the list has grown quickly and best of all people seem to have got a lot from it - in fact quite a few have said nice things about it. I probably don't publicise it as much as I should, which is no doubt why many readers I mention it to don't know I do it. So this is to say that if you're interested you can see some previous examples here, and sign up to receive them here. It'd be lovely to have you as part of it.

#Firestarters 2: Design Thinking In Planning - The Event

 
Might Design Thinking, instrumental in bringing human-centred design principles to innovation processes, change the practice of planning? Is it relevant? These were the questions tackled in the latest Firestarters event - part of the series I'm curating for Google to facilitate different thinking and debate around some of the more interesting and challenging issues facing the practice of planning. So Wednesday evening saw some of the great and the good in UK planning gather at Google HQ to engage in some open space debate stimulated by a couple of truly thought provoking talks by Tom Hulme, Design Director at IDEO, and John Willshire, Chief Innovation Officer at PHD.

The intention with these events was always to link the discussions together rather than have a series of isolated debates, and so the topic of Design Thinking picked up nicely on some of the themes that came out from the talks by Mark Earls, and Stuart Eccles and the ensuing conversations at the first event on Agile Planning.

Tom's excellent talk focused on Design Thinking as an approach, or philosophy, rather than a defined process. Central to this was the idea of moving away from convergent thinking focused on making choices and instead towards creating as many choices as possible - an idea which IMO is a truly interesting one for planners (instead of a single response to a brief, a response which opens up lots of possibilties and options for clients) and one which was picked up in a conversation afterwards hosted by Michael.

Divergent thinking, said Tom, does not restrict creativity and can bring in a flow of new concepts to a business which can then be optimised in a continous and often concurrent cycle. He outlined 8 key principles around design thinking:

1. Challenge the question - easy to say, less easy to do. The 'Keep The Change' Bank Of America initiative that led over 12 million customers to save more than $3 billion was used as an example of an idea that arose from challenging the brief. For an interesting take on this, check out James' write up
2. Be user-centred - the importance of actual experience in developing understanding and empathy, and the hazards of introducing ideas out of context (in a focus group for example)
3. Look to the extremes - the behaviour of extreme users is often where the interesting insights and ideas lie
4. The collision of messaging and experiences - experiences themselves hold strong messages so it's not one or the other, it's both. Sneakerpedia is one example of this combined approach
5. Be holistic – the interdependencies within a business are important in delivering solutions that work, so they can't be ignored. The marketing model is no longer distinct from the business model. Tom's OpenIDEO for example, was a great way to bring the IDEO way to life, and tangibly demonstrate what they stand for. As part of this, he talked about the IDEO business visualisation model (I've included a short film below of him talking this through at a recent HackFwd talk) and the open document he's created as a resource for strart-ups and which has had hundreds of contributions
6. Value diversity - lovely example here of what Steve Jobs learned voluntarily joining a Caligraphy class at college (a story explained in his 2005 Stanford Commencement Address which I urge you to watch if you haven't)
7. Launch to learn – the act of building stuff helps us to understand the details of what doesn't work, Zynga's Ghetto Testing approach, and a provocative thought here about whether prototyping might become redundant because it's so cheap to launch, emphasising a point also made by Mark Earls about 'lighting lots of fires'.
8. Stay in beta - we all hear it said, how many really do it? Wonderful example here of the Clover Food Lab which goes out of it's way to make a feature of the fact that the whole business is a constant prototype.

And finally, a great snippet, picked up by Simon in his excellent write up: “Looking at why people really hate stuff is wonderful inspiration to come up with new ideas”. Here's the IDEO business model visualisation:

HackFwd: Visualize Your Business Model in 15 Minutes Flat from IDEO on Vimeo.

John's talk followed on nicely but took a different angle, focusing on how (to quote a Bad Religion song, which John managed to do liberally through the talk) "the process of belief is an elixir when you're weak", and how process can be a port in a storm of uncertainty. The potential of Design Thinking is certainly not as a new process to adopt. That, said John, is something we don't need. Process tends to average things out - whilst it can make bad work good, it can also make great work good. To illustrate this he used a great analogy (John is exceptionally good at his analogies) of how the audio range of popular music is often compressed to make it more immediately appealing for radio airplay for example (as per the visual below). And he referenced research on the effectiveness of campaigns from the IPA databank on those that used pre-testing as a process, and those that didn't (guess which were more effective).

Inflexible methodologies tend to bind us, not free us, and agencies can be uniquely good at packaging this up ("a process is something to sell in lieu of real work"). All of which leads to the point (explained eloquently in his analogy and post on Adam Smith And The State of Modern Marketing, which I encourage you to read) that often the approach and the sell is industrial, yet the actual work is increasingly agricultural. Phil has done a great write up of John's talk (with pictures!) over here.

In a lively open space session afterwards Francesco (who does super-smart stuff at the super-smart Face Group) hosted a conversation around designing for customer collaboration and real-time feedback. Some interesting points came out around a discussion about designing for openness and loss of control, how agencies often see this as an admission of inadequacy, and how agility can die at the hands of execution. Notably these points circulated around a number of needs: for 'soft' processes in order to deal with the stream of feedback and gather inputs from many different directions in real-time; to shorten the feedback loop to launch and iterate as soon as possible; to structure budgets in order to support iteration; for 'rough boundaries' in order to allow for flexibility; for strong strategic vision and a sense of shared experience to focus and signpost participation well; and to capture feedback in a structured fashion, to cluster and filter with experts in order to make the most of the richness of data.

Stuart hosted a group that built a lot of the themes from his talk at the first Firestarters event. There's much common ground between design thinking, agile principles, and the notion of the lean agency, particularly around the idea of designing consumer experiences through recombining, building and iterating in order to understand, and experimenting in small ways. Experimentation is the only route to innovation, and there is real financial support for innovation through things like the government R & D tax credits but incorpating feedback loops is challenging. One of my favourite soundbites of the evening was the "audacity of zero" - suggesting how easy it is to think you're doing a great job, and what a comfortable place it is, when you have no feedback.

And finally Martin hosted a lively and productive discussion around whether HOW you do what you do now as important (if not more) as WHAT you’re trying to do (nimbly expounded in this post he's authored). The discussion centred around how often it's about identifying short-term solutions, meaning that its easy to be drawn back into the comfortable, easy stuff that we know. Whereas perhaps the real question, and the right answer is more complex, involving bigger issues such as structure, people, reorganisation which is often longer-term and far from easy. The conversation also focused on how testing can act to reduce risk (so howabout a 30% plan instead of a fixed plan?) and a rebalancing between thinking and trying in favour of the latter. What would happen if a client asked for a how solution rather than a what solution? Might it help reframe the answer from brand advice to business advice?

If you're interested, Hugh Garry put together a good Storify of the event which is a great account of an excellent evening. My thanks go to Google for being brilliant hosts, and of-course to all who came and participated, particularly the presenters and conversation hosts. With two such events now under our belts, our next one in September and another one due at the end of the year, my sense is that we are (in our own way) building some kind of momentum. The challenge is, I think, to keep building on the ideas and discussions that have been shared so far, and somehow to make the ideas and output as tangible as possible. As James has eloquently said, it ain't what you find out, it's what you do with the knowledge. I have some ideas, but as usual contributions, feedback and thoughts around the thinking captured here (and the themes for the next one) are more than welcome. News on the next event up on here soon.

Predicting The Present

An interesting thought as part of the whole agile thing, is about how competitive advantage will increasingly come from not only being able to make an informed prognosis of the future, but an informed prediction of the present. Much market intelligence, and even important indicators such as retail sales data, are published weeks after the events on which they are reporting on have taken place. If we were able to benchmark current activity quicker, make accurate predictions about the present, and react to that intelligence in a more timely way, it could lead to a not insignificant advantage.

When the Bank Of England released its latest Quarterly Bulletin (PDF) last week for example, it included an article describing how it can use search data as an economic indicator, benchmarking areas such as housing, tax, benefits and unemployment. Monitoring current economic activity closely, it said, is an important aspect of policymaking, but official economic statistics are generally published with a lag. Accepting some limitations, search data is extremely useful: it’s very timely; it's a by-product of everyday activity as opposed to survey questions after the event; it provides continuous collection of data on an extremely broad number of areas; it has the potential to inform existing indicators as well as answering different sorts of questions; and it can be effective at helping analyse issues that arise unexpectedly.

In Bounce: How Champions Are Made, Matthew Syed makes the case that rather than some god-given talent, champions are created from a long-term commitment (around 10,000 hours worth to be precise) to focused and concentrated training. It is only this, that enables us to hone the specific qualities that distinguish greatness. One such quality, notable in sports, is the ability to perceive and anticipate outcomes faster than others. Many sports are characterised by what psychologists call "combinatorial explosion", meaning that as a game progresses the vast number of potential moves and outcomes open to players at every stage, and the subtle ways in which those actions are inter-related, results in a rapid escalation in the number of variables. So in team and ball sports like football and tennis for example, the myriad ways in which the team players might be positioned and move forwards, or the endless potential angles or speed at which the ball might come off a boot or a racket results in layers of combinations of possibilities of overwhelming complexity.

Exceptional players learn to group huge amounts of information into a higher order construct, enabling them to identify patterns and anticipate outcomes faster, in a process that psychologists call 'chunking'. So brilliant football players, for example, are able to anticipate in a split second where a player is heading into space and position a perfectly weighted and directed pass into their path. This decision-making happens so naturally, and so fast, that it is almost as if they are not making decisions at all, but acting on some sixth sense or God-given intuition (hence the 'Talent myth'). Yet the process of recognising the myriad subtle cues needed to predict what will happen next is not congenital. It can only come from thousands of hours of concentrated practice. It is, if you like, like a language that remains foreign to most of us, but one in which those who invest the time and effort become fluent. As Syed says: "Good decision making is about compressing the informational load by decoding the meaning of patterns derived from experience."

For businesses, the rapid digitisation of products and services creates a potential combinatorial explosion of data. Deriving meaning from such 'big data' will increasingly about chunking - recognising the patterns and understanding quickly what is important. Thankfully, the tools we have at our disposal are becoming ever more sophisticated, not least in the advancing field of social analytics. In 2008 Google launched Google Flu Trends, an application that used search data to provide timely estimates of flu activity across 28 countries. It was a great utility that revealed the real possibilities behind this idea - it can take weeks for traditional flu surveillance systems to report on their data, but flu trends updates every day, with good estimates of activity. Flu trends also revealed that whilst tools such as Google Insights for Search were good at allowing you to enter a search term, or even a category, and see the search trends, the potential behind reversing that process and inputting data from real world activity and seeing the search terms that match that trend was even greater. So now we have (just launched) Google Correlate which does just that.

I believe that this kind of intelligence, and these kinds of tools, will increasingly create the competitive advantage of the future. So I've written a piece on Canvas8 that delves a little deeper into some of these ideas - you can read it here.

Sunday Sermon

Ken Robinson on Passion from The School of Life on Vimeo.

I saw Sir Ken Robinson talk about this in person a couple of years ago and it was one of the best talks I've ever been to. Sir Ken believes that everyone is born with tremendous capacities, yet somehow we often lose touch with what we're capable of and spend much of our time far away from the place where our talent meets our personal passion: "For most of us the problem isn’t that we aim too high and fail - it’s just the opposite - we aim too low and succeed". Do yourself a favour today and take the time to watch it. Yes, it's 50 minutes. But it's 50 minutes well spent.

Part of the excellent series of Sunday Sermons from The School Of Life

The Perfect Community

I loved this short film that asked one simple question: "What Does 'Community' Mean To You?". As Maria points out there are some (perhaps expected) universal needs that seem to emerge including proximity and convenience, face to face interaction but the over-riding need seems to be for a sense of belonging.

Which leads me to this fascinating question posed by Robert Dunbar a couple of months ago. Dunbar's number of-course posits that the ideal number (or put another way the cognitive limit) for a human social network  (defined as those with whom one can maintain stable social relationships, or acquaintances that are both reciprocal and have a history) is 150.

So, goes the argument, this was the typical size of communities in hunter-gatherer times, of villages from the Domesday book right through 18th-century England, of parishes in modern day Hutterite and Amish fundamentalist Christian communities. Similarly, in the military the company (usually around 120-180 in size) is the core to the organisational structure. Some companies (like Gore-Tex) have even used the principle (before it was known as Dunbar's Number) to limit the size of working units and factories to ensure a work community where everyone knows everyone else and where everyone feels real responsibility toward a shared group vision.

Yet drammatically changed levels of economic and social mobility present a drammatically changed scenario from the traditional dense, geographically confined, small-scale communities of old. One in which the mutual obligation and close-knit relationships that characterise such societies have been replaced by fragmented and distributed social networks and sub groups - pockets of friends from where we grew up, went to college, the variety of jobs we've had, who are unlikely to know each other and geographically dispersed. This, says Dunbar, means that communities are no longer as self-policing as they once were. It's easier to offend or step out of line in one community and retreat to the relative safety of another. Quoted in the current issue of Wired:

"...the price we pay for having more personal freedom is that we lose social cohesion on the larger scale. We become less committed to our neighbours and each other. If we are to survive in the global village, we must somehow find a way to recreate that sense of community."

I can see his point, but find myself wondering about the real impact of technology in all this. Technology has facilitated diffused networks and communities often on a global scale, diminishing the exigency of proximity and making it easier than ever to maintain a group of friends, or multiple groups of friends, wherever they might be around the globe. Yet many seem to derive a sense of belonging and fulfillment from online communities (however dispersed they might be) that are fluid, often overlap and are seemingly capable of self-moderation. The formation of collaborative groups has become easier than ever. And technology is as effective at bringing people together in localised, neighbourhood communities as it is on a global scale.

So is technology contributing more toward social fragmentation or cohesion? Do our own limitations, and our increasing mobility facilitated by technology mean that it is diminishing our sense of community and belonging, or might it just be providing the very connections we need to help keep it alive?

Stubborn On Vision, Flexible On Details

"A big piece of the story we tell ourselves about who we are, is that we are willing to invent. We are willing to think long-term. We start with the customer and work backwards. And, very importantly, we are willing to be misunderstood for very long periods of time. I believe if you don’t have that set of things in your corporate culture, then you can’t do large-scale invention."

Jeff Bezos, Amazon, on the balance between iteration and intuition.

The Email Addiction

 
Chris Anderson (the founder of TED, not the Editor of US Wired) has launched an appeal to help create an Email charter in an effort to find a solution to email overload. His point is a simple one. We're drowning in the stuff and every year it gets a little worse. The problem is not with the technology but with the way in which we use it. Over-zealous use of copy-in and reply-all, open ended questions, cutting and pasting into emails, the context created by long email chains. All of which often means that the total time it takes to respond to an email is more than the time it took to create it.

It's possible to be disciplned in our own use of email of-course. To batch time in our working day, restrict the number of times we access it. We've all heard of this approach yet almost no-one follows it. Because as this experiment shows, it's far from easy. And as this fascinating Guardian piece from a couple of years ago pointed out, email is addictive in exactly the same way as slot machines are: a 'variable interval reinforcement schedule' which rewards actions only sometimes and not in a predictable way, and which has been established as the way to train in the strongest habits. So usually when we check email there's not much of interest but every now and then there's something really good, which is enough to make it difficult to resist checking it frequently.

This is a serious problem. Despite the emergence of some powerful alternatives, the amount of time we spend with email still increases and it is an ingrained habit that is being reinforced. Many people feel compelled to spend a significant part of their working day in their inbox. The hours that we work are longer than ever, the degree to which work encroaches on the rest of our lives greater than ever, and email is a prime culprit. We check it more often than we think and each time we do it takes a significant amount of time (an average of 64 seconds according to a study by Loughborough University) to recover our train of thought. We then feel compelled to deal with it immediately so that it does not become another thing on our to do list, meaning that productivity can be destroyed. In fact it's a prime candidate for what you might call Unproductivity.

This is a behavioural issue. It's notable that when companies (including Deloitte and Intel) have trialled no email days in an attempt to help deal with the overload problem, they have proved entirely  ineffective because they don't help people to change their behaviour whilst they are actually using email.

As Chris says, this is a 'tragedy of the commons', the commons in question being the world's pool of attention. If email makes it too easy to grab a small piece of that attention, then "the unintended consequence of all those little acts of grabbing is a giant rats nest of voracious demands on our time, energy and sanity". A commons problem requires a community to come together to agree new rules and avoid this "escalating spiral of obligation and stress", so hence the email charter.

We need to find a better way of working and Chris's idea, and his candidate rules, are not a bad place to start.