(2) Building A New Agency OS - Google #Firestarters. (2) Google Firestarters Conference: An Emerging Agency OS. Playing to our strengths – thoughts on “agency” prompted by Google Firestarters #3 « Sawdust. Thanks to Neil Perkin for curating another highly topical, highly relevant, highly provocative Firestarters event on behalf of Google. And thanks to Mel Exon, Martin Bailie and James Caig for providing said provocation by way of three alternative views on The New Operating System For Agencies. This is not a summary of the evening. This is a personal reflection on some themes that resonated with me whilst they’re are still fresh in the mind. 1) Outcomes, being asked the right questions, and “agency”. Martin highlighted several differences in outlook between clients and agencies. One of these was that agencies focus on outputs, whereas clients are more concerned with outcomes. More specifically, clients in marketing departments brief agencies to deliver outputs.
However, if the client CEO or CFO rather than the marketing manager were to brief an agency on the issues keeping them awake at night they might pose different questions, questions that focus on commercial outcomes. 3) Apollo 13 So… (2) Google firestarters #3 future OS of agencies. #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. #Firestarters At Google.
As you may know, Google asked me to curate a series of events for them designed to facilitate different thinking and debate around some of the more interesting and challenging issues facing planners today. So the inaugral #Firestarters event on Thursday, on the subject of Agile Planning, saw a couple of fantastic talks by long-time ad provocateur Mark Earls, and Stuart Eccles - co-founder of smart digital agency MadeByMany. Mark gave a thought-provoking preview to his new book ('I'll Have What She's Having') due out later this year, building on the idea of how things don't spread unless people see other people doing it first, and how this means we need to shift focus towards the concept of lighting lots of fires and 'curating diffusion' (isn't that a lovely idea?)
, using data in smarter, more agile ways, identifying patterns, and how in this regard it is the space between people that is the truly interesting bit. (2) Thinking About Innovation.