At The Edges. Edges have always been interesting places. And I think they are becoming increasingly so. In The Power Of Pull, Hagel, Brown and Davison talk about innovation happening at the edges of organisations. About the value of individuals who are connected to the interesting ideas being shared and who bring new thinking into a company. At the #Firestarters 2 event at Google, Tom Hulme of IDEO talked about how great insight can come from looking to the extremes of how people use a product or a service. Image courtesy I think it's perfectly valid to focus on core customers and making your product or service as good as it possibly can be for them. But I also think that an endless cycle of driving efficiencies leaves little room for the kind of ideas that really challenge existing ways of doing things. Image courtesy. Porous Enterprise. We Need To Rethink How We View Creativity.
Image Courtesy In a world of new economics, perpetual change, and reduced latency, it goes without saying how important creativity is right now to every organisation on the planet. IBM's survey of 1,500 global CEO's identified creativity as the number one 'leadership competency' of the future. When we think of creativity at an individual level we think of moments of inspiration, big ideas, free-flowing associations, uninhibited thinking. Yet as soon as we think of creativity at an organisational level a strange thing happens. This is wrong for so many reasons, but worst of all has to be that it is such a motivation-sapping, energy-depleting, conviction-destroying reality. And I think this needs to stop. The desire for command and control completely underestimates the value of stepping back, getting out of the way, letting go. Pixar know a thing or two about creativity. I think we need to rethink how we view creativity.
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. But the problem with the ‘how’ remains a big one for us on a number of fronts, not just insight and testing. 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 Surely you need to get ‘what’ right first don’t you? Well not necessarily. Why? Well, not really. Google Firestarters : Intellect trumps intellectual property. « Sawdust. Scriberia sketch of John Willshire's Firestarters presentation Process increasingly gets in the way of problem solving. Thus spake John Willshire, Chief Innovation Officer at PHD, at last night’s excellent Firestarters event. The event was generously hosted by Google and masterfully curated by Neil Perkin. John will no doubt post his slides in due course, and I’ll link to them from here when he does, but several of his points really struck a chord. To paraphrase… 1) Process is a crutch Piss-poor photo-journalism Process is reassuring because it’s a thing you can see and buy. But whilst process might help to make bad ideas good, it also tends to make great ideas good too.
Process breeds homogeneous mediocrity. (Thus spake John Willshire). 2) Process is a broken crutch The dynamism and interconnectedness of today’s technology and communication channels means that a silo-based, division of labour approach to process doesn’t work any more. 3) Process is anti-collaborative and counter-productive. Google Firestarters #2 – Design Thinking « Curiously Persistent. The second Firestarters event, hosted by Google and curated by Neil Perkin, was an excellent evening – probably even better than the first evening. There were lots of interesting people to speak to and debate with in the break-out session and afterwards, while the Google catering is unrivalled. I’m amazed the staff aren’t twice the size they are, given the volume of cupcakes around. The primary reason for the quality of the event is the speakers. Both were very interesting. Tom Hulme (IDEO) Tom talked about design thinking as a set of beliefs.
Tom’s 8 steps for design thinking are Challenge the questionBe user-centred (and do so in context. Tom is a very charismatic speaker and came up with wonderful examples – from Sneakerpedia being an example of message and experience combining, to Steve Jobs’ calligraphy course as an example of diversity to his open document containing useful tips for start-ups. John V Willshire (PHD) sk Image credit: Design Thinking... What is That? Agile Planning.