Briefing for Participation. To Get To The Root Of A Hard Problem, Just Ask "Why" Five Times. In his book, The Lean Startup, Eric Ries puts forth a entrepreneur’s playbook inspired by the Japanese lean manufacturing model: Start small with a 'minimum viable product,' gauge customers’ reactions regularly and often, make improvements efficiently, and eventually scale up to a profitable business. The following is an excerpt from the book--Ed. To accelerate, lean startups need a process that provides a natural feedback loop. When you’re going too fast, you cause more problems. Adaptive processes force you to slow down and invest in preventing the kinds of problems that are currently wasting time. As those preventive efforts pay off, you naturally speed up again. Let’s return to the question of having a training program for new employees. The alternative is to use a system called the Five Whys to make incremental investments and evolve a startup’s processes gradually.
At the root of every seemingly technical problem is a human problem. 1. Make a Proportional Investment. [Eng] The use of consumer insight in Advertising: from classic Adve... Welcome to the age of micro-planning. Main Welcome to the age of micro-planning Downstream - where planning is heading. Image courtesy of SunnyUK I had the absolute privilege of judging the Account Planning Group Creative Strategy awards recently. This year’s shortlist has been public for a while. That said I think there was a clear difference in this year's papers and presentations. That said it seems a shame to me if planners are walking away from, or unable to deliver, ‘upstream’ brand planning. So why are we seeing a lot less brand planning and a lot more micro planning? Once upon a time in a land far, far away clients would issue pitch briefs with the commercial problem they were seeking to solve and ask a selection of agencies at the top of their game to answer that problem by any means they felt necessary to meet the objective.
However, this kind of pitch has become rarer and rarer. Micro-planning, downstream and real time planning have all been a welcome addition to the capabilities and remit of the strategist. Wait. Agile planning. The word traps planners plan themselves into | Life. Then strategy. Strategy | Comments | Last built on 5 October, 2011 On the way to work today, I listened to a couple from The Bronx compare weekends. The guy played Monday Morning Hero about how much dope he had smoked. The girl, frustrated in her search for a cheap two-bedroom apartment, found a backdoor into the topic.
“I remember this last place we lived in, we had no furniture except a television,” she said. Three things struck me. All morning I wondered about the telepathic powers of her uncle, a man she needed only to mention to get a laugh. You know the words I’m talking about: words made for diagrams, textbooks and teenage English essays – words made for undoing, not making. So, I have given up trying to catch contact. Here are the most common word traps that I have come across and stepped in. 1. God-complexes run rampant in advertising and marketing.
Most used in discussions that patronize women, ‘empowerment’ doesn’t really mean anything. 2. 3. Perhaps you learned Wallflower growing up. 4. Stop Fetishising The Insight. Why is a Good Insight Like a Refrigerator? Here is an Insight: "Product satisfaction arises less from inherent construction and performance than from consumers' internalised perceptions of personal utility. " You may have found it faintly familiar; and - when you finally worked out what it meant - more than faintly obvious. What you won't have found it to be is exhilarating, inspiring, memorable, actionable, evocative. You will not have been tempted to repeat it to colleagues or include it in your next internal newsletter. Certainly, it contains a truth - and an important truth at that; but it just sits there. Between 40 and 50 years ago, Professor Theodore Levitt famously told his Harvard Business School students: "People don't want quarter-inch drills. "Product satisfaction arises less from inherent construction and performance than from consumers' internalised perceptions of personal utility.
" His diligent students would have noted it down; but it would never have been quoted and it would have enlightened nobody. Bold hypothesis. Approaches to ideas and a proposed metaphor | to. wa. - walking on the insight road (and not halfway there). When you look at the big discourses in this industry – social media, design thinking, innovation, culture, storytelling, ‘digital’ – it is easy to see that there is a difference between how companies act and how proponents of certain perspectives want them to act.
Not the ‘advertising is in crisis’ talk itself is new. Quite the contrary, the advertising and marketing industry needs the supposed failure of old approaches for new ones to be able to sell. It’s a lot like another cultural industry: fashion. But then again, we have have made some advances in our understanding of people, culture and organizations. We now better than before that it’s very hard to predict which ideas and behaviors will spread in culture. It is still very hard to predict behavior, even with behavioral economics, big data and neuroscience, to name a few. Yes, we learned a great deal more about how things spread – hat tip to Mr. It’s not that there aren’t proposed solutions. . Share: No related posts.
“If you don’t understand people, you don’t. Sinsights. So I’m one of the judges at the AME festival and the category I’ve been given to look at is ‘best insight’. There are a lot of entries … covering a lot of categories … and I have to say the standard of them overall has been average. Sure, there are some fucking awesome ones, the sort of insight that not only pulls you in with its genius, but also makes you hugely jealous with it’s discovery … however there are some that are nothing short of a scandalous embarrassment. To be fair, some of the issues are because … 1/ Some entries come from agencies in countries where English is not the native language … so they can’t articulate themselves as they would like to and end up being at an immediate disadvantage. [The fact entries have to be submitted in English is an issue in itself. I appreciate it's the language of business but we are in Asia and it kind of reflects many of the issues I talked about here] Now I don’t know who is to blame for it.
Of course not all entries were bad. Blog: Don't leave the customer journey to the nerds. Why ‘how’ is as important as ‘what’ « LOVE+MONEY. Thanks to net_efekt/flickr As part of the google firestarters event, brilliantly hosted by Neil Perkin, I debated the failure of research companies in helping clients and agencies with the ‘how’: the act of making and perfecting ideas in market, with communities and within organisations.
Since that event Cog and Face Group have discussed their services, as well as Brainjuicer. This is great. Well done those pioneering companies. Every one should hire them! But the problem with the ‘how’ remains a big one for us on a number of fronts, not just insight and testing. And it’s getting bigger by the day. Once agencies relied on the power of the idea and communal faith (with a bit of testing) it would work now we must become engineers of its success. What do I mean? Because business never stops, neither should our marketing. Advertising in the future will be much more like PR, observed former Publicis COO Richard Pindner for the ever thought-provoking Ignition group Well not necessarily. Why? #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. Tom's excellent talk focused on Design Thinking as an approach, or philosophy, rather than a defined process. 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. Great Ideas Call for Calculated Boldness - Bill Taylor. By Bill Taylor | 11:00 AM February 23, 2011 Leaders everywhere are hungry for big ideas that change the game — products that wow, marketing that captures the imagination of customers. At the same time, leaders everywhere are wary of big ideas that bomb — innovations that fall flat, messages that miss the mark.
This is why so many leaders seem so conflicted and confused: Should they calculate the short-term pluses and minuses of every strategic choice they face, or should they aim for something bold? One answer is to get beyond this either/or choice and recognize the power of both/and thinking — that is, to embrace the power of calculated boldness. What’s calculated boldness? It’s a term I learned when I spent the morning at the Chicago offices of DraftFCB, the advertising agency whose clients include Dockers, Hilton, and Honda.
I visited Chicago to share ideas from my book, Practically Radical. The title of the book, Calculated Boldness, caught my eye, so I followed up to learn more. 1. 100+ Beautiful Slides from Cannes Lions 2011. 10 Common Mistakes Event Planners Make. May 27, 2011 | AUTHOR: Julius Solaris | POSTED IN: tips Technology and social media are changing the way we produce, plan and promote events. Here is a quick sum up of common errors made by you and I when planning an event. This post has been written by Julius Solaris for Event Manager Blog (?). I promise I will avoid any melodramatic view. I won’t say you will be out of business if you don’t follow my advice. However I’ve tried all the tips below and they worked for me. I have also reverse engineered some of the advice after analyzing the events I respect, no award-winning/we-are-so-great crap. 1.
Follow us on Twitter, Like us on Facebook, Join our Group on Linkedin, Read our Blog, Watch our Videos on Youtube. Hey, calm down! You do not need to be everywhere. A constantly updated and engaging Twitter account makes it for me. What social networks should I use for my attendees? Quality beats the heck out of quantity when it gets to social. 2. Nice brochure. Yes, you can! 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 9. 10. Birth of an insight. This is the second in a new cartoon series I developed with Motista to parody the state of traditional market research.
To celebrate the launch, Motista is giving away a signed print of this cartoon to everyone who shares a comment or suggests a cartoon idea at the Motista blog. I’ve certainly experienced the wonky evolution of consumer insights between what we hear in focus groups, what we say to ourselves, and what we ultimately create for the consumer. Motista co-founder Alan Zorfas riffs on this topic and the resulting “crisis of credibility” for marketers. It includes this nugget: “Insights are plentiful and cheap. Agile Planning (Redux) The smart guys at LHBS in Vienna asked me to give a talk on Agile Planning earlier this week as part of their series of "Uncomfortable Talks" designed to promote some good, challenging thinking on the practice of communications and planning. It was helpful in bringing together a bunch of disparate thoughts I've long had around this subject but if I'm honest, it was difficult to know where to stop - it's a subject that touches so much of what we do, so there's a lot more I could've talked about.
But I guess central to my theme here is that though there is much talk of the impact of digital, particularly around social media platforms, and the importance of failing fast and so on, my sense is that the kind of fundamental change that is required won't happen unless we actually change the way we do what we do and the culture that surrounds that. Agile Planning. Innovation Starts With Disruptive Hypotheses. Here's How To Create One | Co.Design. A disruptive hypothesis is an intentionally unreasonable statement that gets your thinking flowing in a different direction. It's kind of like the evolutionary biology theory of "punctuated equilibrium," which states that evolution proceeds slowly and every once in a while is interrupted by sudden change.
Disruptive hypotheses are designed to upset your comfortable business equilibrium and bring about an accelerated change in your own thinking. The ability to ask, "What if? " is an essential part of every executive's skill set. Contrast this with the more traditional definition of 'hypothesis,' which is a best-guess explanation that's based on a set of facts and can be tested by further investigation. With a disruptive hypothesis, however, you don't make a reasonable prediction (if I charge the battery, the phone will work). Instead, you make an unreasonable provocation (what if a cell phone didn't need a battery at all?). What Do You Want to Disrupt?
That's it. What Are the Clichés? There is not enough creativity in strategy. In the Superbrothers article Less talk more rock featured on Boing Boing, the authors, both spawning from the gaming industry, suggests that a project should skip the first strategic phase and go directly for the creative process. The argument goes that there is, amongst a range of things, a spark at the initial creation of an idea that often gets killed as the process gets bogged down for months in enervating strategy and research. - The article is highly recommended, find it here. Being a Planner it might sound counter intuitive but I found the argument not only valid, but exceptionally interesting to pursue. I am not convinced that the traditional strategic approach is the most effective approach.
And I am looking for alternatives. In their article the Superbrothers suggest that you don’t skip the strategy phase, but you come back to it… so there was hope.. but how would this work? The traditional strategic process is essentially geared to finding the same answers every time. Planning for Participation « Planning in High Heels. There are seven words that make my heart sink these days more than any others. No, they’re not “high heels are bad for you: fact”, or “there is no chocolate left for you”, but: “then people can upload their own versions”. Of course they can. But why on earth would they? The assumption-without careful consideration of motivation, incentive and user experience-that users are desperate to upload their own content is the new “let’s do a viral”.
Yes, some great pieces of film are much parodied, painstakingly re-edited and lovingly mocked-the Downfall parodies series, for example, is a gift that just keeps on giving. But these examples are few and far between, requiring a depth of involvement, from a committed and talented fanbase, that few brands can command. We used to believe that if we built it, they would come. There have been some excellent provocations recently about lazy (or over ambitious) participation. So, as ever when putting pen to…screen…I ask myself: what do I have to add? 1. 10 presentations to help you become a digital planning genius. Planning Taxonomy | Buy me, I’ll change your life.
5 new online media-planning rules.
How to do account planning – a simple approach | Life. Then strategy. What Planners Can Learn From Butchers. Who make better planners? Planners or creatives? - Rory Sutherland's Blog - Blogs - Brand Republic. The Account Planning Group. Influencers – Comment l’inspiration devient-elle contagieuse? | Sabine Dufaux. Snickers and the hunger for insights - Bhatnaturally.