Filed under: 10 Questions for Strategists, blast from the past, Experience, Get Friendly, Great Stuff, passion
2 of 10 QUESTIONS FOR STRATEGISTS
One of the key things you learn as you practice strategy is to size up the problem you’re addressing.
As you tackle business problems and marketing challenges and service design opportunities and consulting projects you start to understand the unique components that you need to address to get it done.
You start to build frameworks to organise the chaos. Matrices so that you can map out a messaging house. You build process to describe the journey you’ll take clients on. You work out what sells and how clients buy.
You craft your process into a practice. You make charts. Lots of charts that you can remix and reuse and refresh.
They say the only difference between a junior and a senior strategist is the amount of charts they have access to…
(Vegetarian warning….)
All tenure gives you is the experience to know what kind of beast you’re dealing with…and what you need to carve it up.
Charts are knives- they should cut through, they should help you break things down, and carve out the cuts in the carcass.
The more knives you have, the more tasks you can get done quickly.
You wouldn’t use the same knife to chop an onion that you would to fillet a fish.
So your charts need to be fit for purpose, many and various.
And above all- sharp.
Filed under: 10 Questions for Strategists, Experience, Great Stuff, passion
1 of 10 QUESTIONS FOR STRATEGISTS
I’ve been lucky enough to have a new audience for my nonsense in the Strategists Anonymous series of workshops put on by You’re Good, Get Better.
Standing up with the largest cup of coffee I can find the first question of the day is fired at me….
Q: So, what’s a strategist?
Being a strategist, I start contrary wise…
This is what I think we aren’t:
- We’re not ninjas
- We’re not wizards
- And we’re definitely not rockstars
So what are we?
- Curious
- Driven to hear the signal in the noise
- Keen to mix the elements we find and the ones that don’t exist yet into a cohesive score
Q: And what’s the process? How do you do that?
I love this story of Ray and Charles Eames:
Sell your expertise and you have a limited repertoire. Sell your ignorance and you have an unlimited repertoire. Sell ignorance and your desire to learn about a subject. The journey of not knowing to knowing is the work.
It’s from the documentary The Artist and the Painter, and it really is “an extraordinary and enjoyable history of how two people influenced so much of our thinking and surroundings today”. I couldn’t recommend it more highly..anyhoo
As strategists we’re incredibly fortunate to sell people our journey of not knowing to knowing. We get to take people on the ride with us. We get to keep what we learn and get better. And get paid for it. It’s a crazy good deal.
But it probably won’t shower you in glory.
I have 10 of these questions mapped out as a result of the crews who participated in the workshops. Thanks for the curiosity y’all- hope sharing these helps.
P.S. You’re unlikely to ever need more cowbell
In the 6th century, a list of the seven deadly sins was officially outlined by Pope Gregory the Great, who reduced the original list of eight written by a respected monk named Evagrius the Solitary. The list was changed only slightly again in the 17th century, with the final list, which we still refer to today, composed of lust, avarice, gluttony, sloth, anger, greed, and pride.–
The Atlantic notes that seven years ago in a soliloquy transcribed by The Wall Street Journal, Reid Hoffman suggested a comprehensive theory of social-network success.
“Social networks do best when they tap into one of the seven deadly sins,” the LinkedIn co-founder and venture capitalist said.
I do remember it all starting out quite differently. I was recently kicking through some of my archives and came across this piece from 2006: We are not alone
Mother Teresa spoke often about the effects of being lonely and the crushing poverty of spirit that is caused by feelings of being unwanted- so much much so that she called this ‘the leprosy of the West’. A recent international study claimed that more than a third of adults are lonely.
There’s alot of talk that screens are taking over face to face interaction, and that culture is suffering as a result. David Armano’s fantastic post We Are Not Alone. Life 2.0 puts forward the notion that the growing suite of web tools allows us, through creating and connecting, to find out that others like us exist.
There is a now a place where we can find that ‘we are not alone’ and more. Screen life, online life IS ‘real’ life. For many (and there are many- over 450,000 bloggers in Australia alone) our online time informs and inspires our terrestrial activities.
Examples of this range from the fabulous red paper clip story, to the spontaneous walkouts in high schools of over 40,000 students across California organised through individual myspace pages and to the popularity of acts like The Artic Monkeys and OKGo.
These stories, OUR stories, will only grow as we continue to contribute our time and energy to trying to connect with each other.
Myspace organised walkouts…wowsers…(the more things change the more they stay the same: https://www.schoolstrike4climate.com/ organises local walkouts through Facebook, a platform that wasn’t even available in Australia 13 years ago)
While I’m sure that humanity’s darker traits get more oxygen on social platforms that we’d like- there is light to be found. I wonder how useful it is to entirely demonise something that is only reflective of… well, us.
Twitter gets a very notices, a a wrath filled echo chamber and for very good reasons.
My parry and repost:
( Rob Campbell shared this with the line: “The most beautiful, loving – yet heart wrenchingly sad – story that you’ll read today. Especially the last 5 words.”)
Please explore this marvellous thread about sharing unsolicited poetry with crying strangers:
The kindness will just kill you.
Some of the things I love, love, love about what I get to do for a day job are the opportunities to examine workplace cultures and develop ways to influence them to exhibit resilient positive outcomes.
It’s not a simple process, it’s not even complicated. It’s complex and sometimes chaotic. Mostly though where I start is Disorder.
I recently got asked by my friend Matt Granfield to comment on what he put forward as an hypocritical action from a holding company about the contradictory behavior and promises of two of their brands, and did I see anything wrong with that.
I thought it was an interesting notion that we might hold advertising to greater standards of morals and ethics than we hold ourselves. I thought that it might be valid to ask if that was right.
In I tweet therefore I am, Peggy Orenstein shares her experiences:
Each Twitter…
View original post 437 more words
I like this question. Very much.
See the video here (I’ve put quotes in italics)
Word and pictures aren’t enough anymore…..we have to make something with a little more substance
Innovation comes from the making of new things (not just the ideation)
People still glorify campaigns- no P&L, no equity share for employees, no other ambition than to create a relationship with consumers- one of the reasons why these projects don’t hang around is when the campaign money runs out no one cares about them. They win their award …and then they’re off. But if you try to create a business model and design sustainability (self sustaining) into it-so when the money’s gone the project’s still there. It stops being a campaign and starts to be a product
It was when the panellists really turned away from campaigns and really talked about where products sit in the marketing mix that I think things got interesting:
You now have so many touchpoints- and so few companies have anything to say (or the time or the budget to create content for each of these)
-You need to go deeper into an organisation- and teach the receptionist how to deliver the brand
If products are an expression of utility, delight, innovation and bloody good design, I’d like to think the opportunities to ideate and create business cases to make a difference to everyone’s bottom line are endless for hungry agencies working with brands who are eager for growth ideas.
Filed under: Experience
This is a beautiful Twitter thread on leadership, found on the ever delightful swiss miss.
I like the tension and the glorious space for exploration in between notions of how how we turn up, and how we turn up for others.
I’m currently trying to create a deep rail to change the “Today I have to…” conversation to “Today I get to….” The greatest thing I get to do is see ideas born and made by flowering talents. I want to build my focus to “just be present and be a spotlight for others” and let them know it’s their time on the stage and that it’s their time to shine.
The thread examines how this crafts safety in a team. While the hothouse of an agency doesn’t fight death on the line (or it shouldn’t: “It’s PR not ER!) I can’t help but hope that the approach can afford more breathing space to let ideas live.
- Strategy: The Essential Reading Guide 2019
- Byron Sharp- How Brands Grow
- Mark Ritson
- Mark Pollard
- Julian Cole
- https://www.skillshare.com/classes/Communications-Planning-Crash-Course/527585589
- Subscribe to his fortnightly Planning Dirty newsletter where he shares tools, resources and brain bombs for your comms http://bit.ly/PlanningDirty
- APG Strategy Conference 2018 | On The Contrary
- https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLTy6ltcTOMUIlyPBby_SqU701NpHF_gHq
Events
- Creative Mornings- is definitely worth getting to….
- https://www.facebook.com/CreativeMorningsSydney/
- subscribe to their email here https://creativemornings.com/cities/syd
- https://www.sydneytalks.com.au/
- Ignite http://www.ignitesydney.com/
- https://sydney.edu.au/news-opinion/sydney-ideas.html
- https://www.pechakucha.org/cities/sydney
- loads of things at Giant Dwarf- The Moth, StoryClub, Erotic Fan Fiction…
- Have a look at the Skills Maturity Matrix and evaluate where you are: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/18vPo7S1KJqxBWaZYcLVa3f4Zwuc94zcp8_aKBviS3Y8/edit#gid=0 (this is by the awesome Clay Parker Jones and unpacked here https://www.cpj.fyi/the-undercurrent-skills-maturity-matrix/ )
- carve out 30 mins a day to explore information/ inspiration
- take at least 30 mins one a day a week to record and reflect the week’s journey- what have you learned?
- the hard part here is just to start
- my process was to just take the three most resonant things and do a bit of a compare and contrast….
- here’s my blog- and an example of a month worth of reflections- https://katiechatfield.wordpress.com/2006/10/ (just an example- you could explore https://katiechatfield.wordpress.com/category/great-stuff/ or https://katiechatfield.wordpress.com/category/experience/)
- Schedule a 30 min chat with someone who will challenge you once a month to explore what you’ve found and how it’s informed your thinking
have you copped this bloke on the telly?
interrupting me favourite show
talkin tax cut not favorin’ the many?
reminds me of someone I know
not that I’m against fiscal-ly fitness
don’t get me wrong on that score
I could watch all them rich blokes forever
explain no tax cuts to the poor
and I’m not against helping the many
cripes if they was to go on the blink
the rich’d have no earning interests
it certainly makes a bloke think
now it’s true throats get squeezed when they’re talking
not that they’ve done more so of late
and it’s true they’ve put aside Tone-on
but this close to voting it’s bait
so what if we can’t save the climate
so what if we can’t afford homes
I can remember what most of them look like
so there’ really no need have those
so when this bloke says Stong new economy
Economy he says on TV
I give him nod and change channels
Cause I know he’s not talking to me
Enrol to vote – Australian Electoral Commission
Filed under: Experience, Get Friendly, The Rules, Zeitgeist | Tags: generosity, psychology
Wonderful interview with the organizational psychologist Adam Grant, who many know from his New York Times columns, describes three human orientations, of which we are all capable: the givers, the takers, and the matchers. These also influence whether organizations are joyful or toxic for human beings. His studies are dispelling a conventional wisdom that selfish takers are the most likely to succeed professionally. And, he is wise about practicing generosity in organizational life — what he calls making “microloans of our knowledge, our skills, our connections to other people” — in a way that is transformative for others, ourselves, and our places of work.
50 minutes well spent
Found this useful frame work on the Katie Dreke’s fab tumblr obsessivecompulsive
- Start with conflict. Tolstoy once remarked, “All great literature is one of two stories; a man goes on a journey or a stranger comes to town”—and he knows a thing or two about narrative. Without a change in the status quo, there is no story, so make sure people understand the current situation and why it’s untenable.
- Explain your progress thus far. Your team may have been working on this problem for some time, but it will be new to your audience. Show the results from your customer research and competitive analysis; using quotes or images from real people for greater impact.
- Propose your grand ambition. Despite the challenges, reassure the audience that there’s reason to hope—and, in fact, a great opportunity for those willing to seize it. Lay out your team’s vision for the future, but then…
- Identify the barriers. Create drama by introducing new sources of conflict and explaining what’s stopping the organization from achieving its goals.
- Explain how to overcome those barriers. Make the audience the protagonists by explaining why their help is needed. If they feel like they are part of the solution, they will become powerful brand ambassadors for the new changes.
- Build excitement as you expose the creative solutions. Unveil your ideas and clearly illustrate how they will get you closer to the big vision.
- End smoothly with timing, costs, and next steps. Our last presentation tip now that the story is ending, is to take action. Translate the vision into tactical goals and clear responsibilities so that people can bring it to life.
Super. I’m a gonna use it now….
I was lucky enough to be in the audience at the Google Firestarters gig that Neil Perkin puts on all over the world. Great line up: Faris Yakob (founder Genius Steals), Angela Morris (Exec Planning Director, JWT Australia), Graeme Wood (Head of Strategy, M2M Australia) and a provocation about the intersection of data and creativity.
There was so much great stuff and interestingness. Effective too-it’s really got me thinking about where I think the sweet spots lie in the use of the digital discipline in the role of growing brands and business.
1. Start with conflict.
- Is digital storytelling content or experience?
- Where paid media is experiencing 84% avoidance and banners have a 0.06% CTR and 1 in 5 ad block it’s easy to say that the problem lies in the audience- that fantasitc ‘attention span of a goldfish’ 8 second span thing
- But we’re in a golden age of TV where long form content is king and people will watch an entire 13 hour series in one sitting
- Gamer’s sessions average over an hour
- Is it that audiences have less ability to focus, or that they’ve increased their ability to filter?
- Digital is a more effective cultural medium than an advertising context
- Our aim should be to get people off the couch
- The opportunity is to think broader than media property, bigger than passive content consumption and to start to play in culture.
2. Explain progress thus far.
- Cultural institutions seem to be leading the way in utilising digital to mean more and grow
- Museums and art galleries are exploring their reasons to be, to inspire and educate, and be Cathedrals of the Imagination
- Have a look at this great stuff: the work of the Culturelabel team, Seb Chan’s extraordinary Pen project for the Smithsonian, MONA, what’s going on at music festivals….
- Experiences are being designed to create new audiences, increase desire and attendance, increase dwell times, link the online data, content and curation with the physical world, build communities, and prompt repeat visitation
- This is happening as a result of working within the culture of audiences. Understanding their behaviour and seeking to provide experiences that add (not are ads)
3. Propose your grand ambition.
- Digital storytelling is creating a narrative in culture, driven by a protagonist on their own hero’s journey.
4. Identify the barriers.
- Paid Media magic beans= easier to buy than build
- I’ve got a hammer= the answer to everthing is paid media and all problems are solved with attention/engagement/ awareness
- Over kill and undercooked= using creativity to only make advertising is kind of like using Nuclear Power to heat water to make electricity
5. Explain how to over come the barriers
- Grown up business cases for innovation
- Define ambitious outcomes beyond traditional media metrics
- Involve decision makers beyond marketing
6. Build excitement as you expose the creative solutions.
- Working at the C level of an organisation and introducing all kinds of people to new ideas needs a skill set to manage complex stakeholder environments and the ability to both change people’s minds and help them build the skills to champion new ideas. Education is how you sell innovation
7. End smoothly with timing, costs, and next steps.
It was Ansel Adams birthday this week. As a lover of stillness, ligh† and high places his photographs are potentially responsible for introducing the urban dwellers of the 20th Century to the truly sublime potential of National Parks.
Or maybe just this one.
This is the track down to the Fairy Bower in the Nattai Gorge, well out of range of data or voice, but still has the ability to connect you to things a little more powerful than your news feed.
Anyhoo. Thanks Ansel.
I’ve been privileged to be part of the team working with the NSW government on the urban regeneration of the Bays Precinct area. This weekend, the 16th and 17th of May there will be a summit that we’ve designed with a purpose of generating public awareness and input on one of the world’s biggest urban transformation project of its kind.
Love you to come, bring the kids and your neighbours. Lovely coffee, lush juices and fresh goodness to eat, and just so many opportunities to hear and co create what the future of this waterway district at the edge of the CBD will be.
Registration
The program and content will be made up of a series of short talks, ‘discovery’ displays and consultation exercises designed to be staggered throughout the day, allowing people to come and go as they wish.
This is a free event taking place at Australian Technology Park:
http://www.thebayssydney.com.au/events/sydneysiders-summit-16-17-may-2015.aspx
Background
In November 2014, Jack Morton worked with the NSW Executive Committee to conceive and develop The Bays Precinct Sydney International Summit. It was a unique undertaking, which brought together a broad range of local and international urban transformation practitioners, academics and policymakers, as well as community and not-for-profit representatives. The purpose for the Summit was simple; to create an environment for leading people in their fields to think, hear, discuss, and learn about what is possible and how. With a focus on forging relationships that will enable ongoing collaboration for both this and future urban transformation work.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fipa7o8gnWY#t=309
I’m looking at pattens at the moment and how they are formed and what meaning can be ascribed to them.
I loved coming across kintsugi and the notion that repair can be a process of adding both strength and beauty. It’s interesting that cracks themselves are openings that form in materials to relieve stress…the pattern of cracks indicates whether the material is elastic or not. A true break means tha the materials have failed under the strain.
I think elasticity, being able to change and adapt, is fundamental. And change is never going to be a one off, so perhaps plasticity is a more useful term to explore.Kintsugi can repair breakages- but you need gold, literally gold, to get the best results out of the process.
What about a golden notion though- one that allows an object to change and grow an adpt and self organise
The Golden Ratio is a universal law “…in which is contained the ground-principle of all formative striving for beauty and completeness in the realms of both nature and art, and which permeates, as a paramount spiritual ideal, all structures, forms and proportions, whether cosmic or individual, organic or inorganic, acoustic or optical; which finds its fullest realization, however, in the human form.”
– Adolf Zeising, 1854
The Golden Ratio, is very important in nature. Converted to an angle (as a proportion of one – =360 degrees – full turn), it equals 137.507764 degrees. Turns out that plants often use this angle to arrange leaves around the stem. This just happens to minimise the shading of leaves lower down the stem by leaves higher up so each leaf gets as much sunlight as possible (more than with other arrangements anyway).
Visually, the series typically appears as a spiral.
From the point of view of physics, spirals are lowest-energy configurations which emerge spontaneously through self-organizing processes in dynamic systems. From a biological perspective, arranging leaves as far apart as possible in any given space is favoured by natural selection as it maximises access to resources, especially sunlight for photosynthesis.
I really like these notions that systems just known when to turn, how to share and maximise the distribution of resources and grow in a way that is both strong and astheically pleasing.
Be wonderful to create these kind of self organising principles- I wonder if the trick is to bring propotion and a sense of proportion into the environment so that it can be easly seen and acted on.
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack, a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in.Leonard Cohen, Anthem
Kintsugi or Kintsukuroi is the Japanese art of fixing broken pottery with lacquer dusted or mixed with powdered gold, silver, or platinum. As a philosophy it treats breakage and repair as part of the history of an object, rather than something to disguise.
Part of service design is describing and inspiring people about the real challenges of change, the need to to fix things, to look at something broken and believe that not only can it be brought back to life but be both more beautiful and more valuable while retaining history and integrity.
I find it useful it to explore Mr Cohen’s insight that cracks provide illumination and how it intersects with this ceramic practice of renewal.
Not only is there no attempt to hide the damage, but the repair is literally illuminated… a kind of physical expression of the spirit of mushin….Mushin is often literally translated as “no mind,” but carries connotations of fully existing within the moment, of non-attachment, of equanimity amid changing conditions. …The vicissitudes of existence over time, to which all humans are susceptible, could not be clearer than in the breaks, the knocks, and the shattering to which ceramic ware too is subject.
—Christy Bartlett, Flickwerk The Aesthetics of Mended Japanese Ceramics
Mostly what this notion can tell us is that it’s ok. It’s ok to break, to have cracks and weaknesses. It’s natural and part of life and growth and of interacting with people. Even more than that, when you pick up the pieces, you can transform into something stronger, more resilient, utterly unique and desirable.
I’m constantly thinking about the creative brief and how to get it righterer.
I’ve written about my approach here on the notion of collaboration and the blank page one page brief
To me the planner’s role in giving a creative brief to a team is to tell team a the story, set up the protagonist/ the consumer, outline their obstacle and the part you have for them- the hero.
Give your story a beginning a middle and end. Allow the team to collaborate with you as you tell the story.
and shared Jasmine Cheng’s delightful exploration here (and whoop! it’s had +125,000 views since it got published).
I need to change it up again as I’m doing far less campaigns and far more service design projects. Far. More.
Building the bridge between a brand’s promise and it’s practice is kinda awesome and shifts the game from defining what you want to say to designing what you want people to do. It’s real, it really changes things, it’s difficult but not hard. It makes sense to me, and that’s my challenge because I need it to make sense to other people.
And a creative brief just doesn’t quite cut it. There are many reasons why. The diagnosis and the remedy are still very close bedfellows but you’re writing a solution for a stage, with scripts and blocking for the actors. It needs to be rehearsed and built by collaboration. It must have the space to be fueled by improv and deliver a sense of ownership to each and every player. And it must fundamentally delight audiences.
I came across this exploration Birdman: Writing A Screenplay Is Like Writing a Poem
“you need to write.. so that…every moment is so perfectly placed, so carefully visualized and realized on the page that anyone who reads it will immediately know: “Yes, I know this can to work. I know this can work because I saw it and I felt it and I imagined it and I heard it play…in my head as if it were real. I know it work because I’ve already seen it happen in my mind.”
There’s some great thinking there about balancing out ego and the need to tell the truth, exploring how to externalize the internal obstacles that you see and creating that safety net (for both the budget and the creatives) where you’ve really worked as hard as you can to ‘fix it on the page’.
I loved this:
we do need to strike that balance between the part of ourselves that wants to say something authentic and the part that needs to succeed. We also need to strike that balance between writing (what’s in) our hearts and shaping into a form that other people can understand.
Both our form and our function can work together to accomplish that goal to tell a true story in a true way, in a way that other people can connect to. And in a way that can get people in seats to see the story you’re trying to tell.
More than anything this piece is a call to action to write and re-write. The coolest thing about service design projects is that you shift from a six week cycle to at least a six month cycle. You need to think and re think the task, the tools and how the teams collaborate. I’m thinking that is time for a shift from a brief to a script.
‘.
Filed under: Experience
Have been lucky enough to be at the Spikes Festival of Creativity in Singapore. I’ve been involved in the forum sessions about creative talent and I presented on this:
Does your business value creative thinking? Of course it does, and you are almost certainly one of the 91% that believes it impacts directly on your company’s success. But are you one of only 26% of employees who strongly believe their working culture encourages creative thought? And where does this leave the future success of our businesses?
While we all know it’s important, one of the fundamental challenges organisations have is in developing a culture of innovation and inspiration. Jack Morton conducted research among employees across the globe which suggests the lack of understanding and consequent support for creative thinking could be hampering effective creative output and the ability of business to attract and retain talent.
This Forum discusses to what degree business across the globe is actively encouraging a culture and environment conducive to creative thinking and consider the success stories of those organisations that hold the nurturing and promotion of creative thinking close to their hearts.
I think that the case for change for our industry and for Enterprise is quite well-known. We know why we need to change (disruption) and we know we need to change (creativity and innovation be that digital, integration or whatever) the challenge is away going to be how.
In Andrew Ho’s session he spoke about a better marriage of strategy and creative and how the tools, perspective and approaches of each discipline works better in combination rather than pass (or parse) the parcel, and a question ‘will we ever run out of insight?’ really stimulated some reflection on the experience of presenting and facilitating my own session.
The questions around how we deliver great ideas, how we can innovate our process, how we can support people through this journey are tough to answer.
And here’s the journey to my refection. Jack’s creativity research puts forward 6 recommendations to help build more creative cultures: collaboration, play, freedom to fail, space to think, ego support and idea collection. The best kind of cultures have all of these aspects and I wanted to create an experience of what those six principles in action might look like. I love the haikugami tool
- as of freedom to fail I show a haiku written about my own work culture and attempt to demonstrate how to fold a paper plane- giving permission to people to make their version as imperfect and human as they like
- I tell them a story of collaboration, how I’ve sought out their participation by putting a sheet under each of their seats. I tell them about the goal- let’s make a hundred co-created wishes for creative culture fly. I want their thoughts and expression, but I want us to share and build on our thoughts
- I ask for playfulness a thought articulated in only 5 or 7 syllables, and line by line I ask them to stand up and let their thoughts fly across the room, and to jump and catch someone else s thought as it flies past
- ego support is about making the rewards of creativity real, fun and transparent, hopefully a room full of heads down and the energy of sharing reflects this notion
- the conference and the session itself is place to think, a context that is designed to open up different parts of the brain
- and I collect ideas and celebrate participation at the end. The photo above is just some of what I was given back from the audience
What did I learn? What thing did I see, what human truth did I observe, from delivering this experience to room full of punters wanting creativity, believing in creativity and eve working in creative fields?
It’s really award and uncomfortable to move from a passive state to one of participation.
It’s hard to know what’s the right thing to say when you’re asked to express your feelings.
And that’s the point- creativity feels chaotic and a bit weird if you’re not used to it. It’s the reason why there’s such a gap between the desire for these kinds of cultures and them grit it takes to deliver them. But the results! I have a hundred poems: inspiring, playful and brave that tell the story of what can happen in a room when you start to do things differently.
Peak insight? I think I’ve only just started to learn about the power and potential of human creativity.
Have been part of the Sydney Social Media week advisory board ( top geezers) on crafting how we can explore our theme of The Future of Now: Always On Always Connected.
For me creativity, and the future are inextricably linked. We just won’t make it unless we fully harness the limitless resource of our creative potential.
“As deep knowledge becomes a common asset, creativity will be the differentiating factor. Creativity is not a ‘nice-to-have’ attribute anymore, it’s a prerequisite for performance, development and growth—supporting us in our ability to innovate and drive change faster and better.” –Ben de Vries, Head of Brand Management, Ericsson
But we also won’t make unless we share, we collaborate and we inspire each other with our different perspectives. I believe that social technology and behaviors may well be one of the engines that will provide the forward momentum to allow creativity to really be embraced.
The team I’m part of have been doing some global research on this (on Slideshare here) talking more than 7,000 people in 11 markets and we found that creative thought was defined as: solutions to problems that are unexpected in any field of work, not just within traditionally creative fields such as writing, design or the performing arts.
Some of the key outtakes of the research (Collaboration, Play, Freedom to fail, Ego support, Space to think, and Idea Collection) are helping me build my approach to the panel sessions I’m involved in, and these are the notions I’m looking at:
- How can we achieve more through collaboration and co-creation?
- How can we facilitate meaningful conversations, practices for devoting time to creative thinking and mindful contemplation?
- How can we balance and preserve humanness — meaning the ability to listen, empathize, engage, focus and be present in the moment — despite the constant disruption that technology enables?
Would love to know if you find the research useful. Am looking forward to my own Eureka moment. All anecdotes welcome!
Filed under: Digital Strategy, Experience, Get Friendly, Great Stuff, passion, Zeitgeist
It’s Festival time in Sydney. While I’m super excited about taking my inner child by the hand and having a bit of a frolic on Sacrilege, the true sized inflatable bouncy castle Stonehenge in Hyde Park’s Festival Village, I was interested to read this in The Australian
FESTIVAL organizers measure success in terms of ticket sales and economic impact, but a new cultural metric may be tweets and pictures on social media. Last year, an enormous yellow duck was a hit of the Sydney Festival, where 1.7 million people could not have missed seeing it at Darling Harbour. Some 14,000 images were posted on Instagram using festival hashtags.
Mmmm. ‘Cultural Metric’. Good notion. Loads of tension in it:
- What is culture?
- How might culture be measured?
- How do we value it?
The NSW Government is investing more than $5 million to ensure the success of the 2014 Festival,
“Last year the Sydney Festival attracted more than 500,000 people with more than 120,000 tickets sold to paid events, including more than 33,000 people who attended events in Western Sydney. In 2012, it injected almost $57 million into our economy“
From that perspective an arts investment looks like a pretty good return to the taxpayers hereabouts. I wonder how they’d value those tweets.
Early last year MoMA curator of Architecture and Design Paola Antonelli led a discussion about Culture and Metrics, (which I’ve entirely re cut below):
- why bother?
- the reality is that cultures come and go over time. If we don’t know what’s valuable about a particular culture, we run the risk of losing it forever.
- not all art is concerned with culture, and not all culture is arts-based
- it’s the best way to create a future that human beings want to inhabit.
- MoMA has been one of the most important cathedrals of the imagination in my life since childhood, and envisioning it as a driver of R&D across society at large is extremely exciting.
- measurement
- Kate Levin, the Commissioner of The Department of Cultural Affairs for New York City: measuring culture, is mostly about objectives and outcomes. She used The Gates as an example of a valuable, measurable project funded by the Department for Cultural Affairs. Four million visitors to this 16-day installation created $254 million in revenue for NYC.
- Measuring culture will require us to think of new ways to measure and share the story of a project’s insights and impact.
- culture and value
- “For me, The Gates was never about whether the saffron curtains and plastic frames were art. Some people argued that it was a hideous monstrosity while others loved it. Instead, I just felt lucky to be part of the flow of conversation and people as we passed together through The Gates on a beautiful blue and gold day. I felt lucky to be a New Yorker. And that’s the point of culture. It gives us a sense of place while at the same time evoking a deeply personal experience of the universal. “
- “For me, The Gates was never about whether the saffron curtains and plastic frames were art. Some people argued that it was a hideous monstrosity while others loved it. Instead, I just felt lucky to be part of the flow of conversation and people as we passed together through The Gates on a beautiful blue and gold day. I felt lucky to be a New Yorker. And that’s the point of culture. It gives us a sense of place while at the same time evoking a deeply personal experience of the universal. “
As Rita observed, and who was at the MoMA talk, it brings to life one of Andy Warhol’s statements:
- “Being good in business is the most fascinating kind of art.”
Creating a deeply personal experience of an enterprise, creating a real and vibrant culture, feels like a bit of an art, and has the same kind of challenge:
Answer: With great difficulty.
Then again…. people are the only metric that really counts.
It’s hard. Really hard. Most companies can’t do it. The ones that can, make a fortune. Life is unfair.
Trying out the lovely Haiku deck….
These are my notes from a breakfast meeting with the lovely Megan Brownlow from PwC.
She spoke about their interesting report: PwC’s NextGen: A global generational study, Millennial Workers Want Greater Flexibility, Work/Life Balance, Global Opportunities
This comprehensive and global generational study conducted by PwC, the University of Southern California and the London Business School looks into the aspirations, work styles and values of “Millennial”/”Generation Y” employees (those born between 1980 and 1995).
The study, which included more than 40,000 responses from Millennials and non-Millennials alike, captures the various forces at play that are influencing the experience of Millennials. These include: workplace culture, communication and work styles, compensation and career structure, career development and opportunities and work/life balance.
I followed with these notes on how the existing behaviors and first language of millennial employees can be harnessed to meet both their needs and that of their employers.
Life just bites you on the ass sometimes.
I’ve been trying to write this for ages: since receiving the phone call a couple of days before Christmas; since working on releasing the shock and pain and disbelief at the news; since writing that first condolence card; since the first time I could get together with my oldest friends face-to-face to share the wtf-ness; since standing blacked up and bare faced nursing a whiskey and hearing his Dad desperate for some insight, any scrap, at the wake, as to why.
Since, since, since.
I lived my 20’s in a little run down terrace in what is now SOGO, but was then the cheapest place we could find. It was dark, falling to pieces and smelled in the damp, but filled with what became a chosen family, and for me, a true home.
None of us had money, but we were all working doing stuff we loved- art, music, architecture, design. We all were good at creating something out of nothing: the kitchen transformed from a peeling crack lab into a place where mermaids played; a bare wall turned into an ever moving pop gallery of avant cards; a back yard that hosted now famous ‘drinks by the pool’ parties where the blow up wader was just an excuse for ridiculous cocktails and costumes.
There was dancing. Cooking. A million late night conversations. A million bottles of red wine. One very scrappy cat. Sometimes the dishes didn’t get done. People peeled out as they met their partners, or their career took them off to different horizons and eventually the place got sold and we moved on.
That was sometime ago. It lasted about 7 years and felt like forever.
I thought everyone had grown up since then. Not me, obviously, but other people had mortgages and businesses and children and partners. Eventually I only saw some in back yards, with tired eyes and gentle, humorous self deprecating stories of the domestic hurdy-gurdy their lives had become. Tucked in, I thought. Safe, I believed. Happy, I dreamed.
I can’t remember the last time I told my friend I loved him. That he was important to me. That knowing him has made my life better every day since I met him. That his take on silly and serious and determined and disciplined was a benchmark for me. That I respected his work, was totally crazy about his choice of partner and his children, in awe of his practice and held deep affection for the past we shared and held a desire to co-create memories for the rest of our lives.
Now I won’t get that chance. He is gone. He took himself off the merry-go-round. I don’t know why. No one seems to. I will never understand. I’m trying to come to terms with that. I’m not looking for a silver lining. It’s just crap.
Sometimes we let go of the gold in our lives, the people that we love, to pan for shiny trash. Sometimes the people that we think we know are very very good at hiding their pain. Sometimes the things we don’t say haunt us.
Since. Sometimes. Say it.
Get Shouty 