Filed under: 10 Questions for Strategists, Great Stuff, Innovation, The Rules
There’s no more common trope than marketers currently want to be ‘data driven story- tellers’.
Q: How does strategy help contribute to creative product?
While I think that there may as many definitions of strategy as there are strategists, it will aways help you if you can define where your skills and interests lie and how you can best help a team.
One of my favourite frames for understanding is to find where a strategist sits on the spectrum from Numbers to Narrative.
For many years the notion of ‘t-shaped talent’ which has broader skills and knowledge and learns by linking up different perspectives from different specialties, was a profile we all sought. You wanted to have a wide lens of expertise and a deep specialisation.
If you think in a linear fashion, you’d start at one end of the spectrum, where at one end you have data and at the other end the strategic narrative, to find where you might sit and then focus on developing your strength.
True Data Strategists that can identify both patterns in the noise and identify the human insight driving it are quite rare. I think we’re all discovering the growing and evolving value of data in crafting creative solutions. It won’t do you any harm to refine or build your ability to both build and read a spread sheet and design an information to be accessible and powerful.
Creative Strategists, or Comms Planners structure a messaging house to get stuff done. They carve up confusion and create clarity. They stand in the shoes of their audiences and babel- fish translate corporate propaganda so it has heart and meaning. They are word smiths, the architects of distributed sense and driven to find the compelling and the engaging and the cut through. Again- it’s super important to be able to have the skill to construct communication in a way that people want to listen, what to know what’s next and actually want to take action on what’s being said.
In between and aligned to these areas of expertise are the researchers, analysts, consultants, specialists, brand planners and the media planners and all the other job descriptions allocated to our roles.
In a t-shaped universe you only get one specialisation.
What may add depth to the metaphor is if you understand a spectrum as a wave and not a line:
Then you can explore the notion of how the disciplines might amplify each other, and how they generate more momentum when you put them together, how you can cover more ground if you have more than one….
My thoughts are that you don’t have to choose, that specialisation is for insects, that the better the base the stronger the building and so on.
But it is a good idea to know what skills you have, and where you have gaps and ensure you’re bringing rigour and research to whatever you do.
Just don’t forget that if you want people to do anything with what you find, you’ll need a good story.
PS:
A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.
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.
This essay proposes a map for four domains of creative exploration—Science, Engineering, Design and Art—in an attempt to represent the antidisciplinary hypothesis: that knowledge can no longer be ascribed to, or produced within, disciplinary boundaries, but is entirely entangled.
It’s deliberately hard work to read, but asks cracking questions:
- Can a scientist invent better solutions than an engineer?
- Is an artist’s mindset really all that different from a scientist’s?
- Are they simply two ways of operating in the world that are complementary and intertwined?
It’s chock full of dense high nutrition nuggets:
- an intriguing assertion by Savas Dimopoulos on the connection between Art and Science: “The things that are least important for our survival are the very things that make us human.” Both Art and Science can be understood as human needs to express the world around us. Both require suspension of disbelief, offering speculations about our physical and immaterial reality prior to proof.
- The role of Science is to explain and predict the world around us; it ‘converts’ information into knowledge. The role of Engineering is to apply scientific knowledge to the development of solutions for empirical problems; it ‘converts’ knowledge into utility. The role of Design is to produce embodiments of solutions that maximize function and augment human experience; it ‘converts’ utility into behavior. The role of Art is to question human behavior and create awareness of the world around us; it ‘converts’ behavior into new perceptions of information
- Science produces knowledge that is used by engineers. Engineering produces utility that is used by designers. Designers produce changes in behavior that are perceived by artists. Art produces new perceptions of the world, thereby granting access to new information in and about it, and inspiring new scientific inquiry.
I love how this map is used to both understand and address Knotty Problems.
MIT Media Lab Summit devoted a summit to Knotty Objects that gathered designers, scientists, engineers, makers, writers, curators, and scholars around the discussion of four complex and omnipresent objects, along with the rich stories they can tell. The objects–brick, bitcoin, steak, and phone–became lenses through which the transdisciplinary nature of contemporary design was examined.
A video archive of the entire summit is available here.
Happy chewing!
Filed under: Digital Strategy, Innovation, Service Design | Tags: Innovation
Lovely thinking about the role of research, the scaffolding of teams with structure and principles, the necessity of focussing on adding value and the whole shebang being an iterative process
Link here: https://www.slideshare.net/mobile/adamconnor/design-thinking-finding-problems-worth-solving-in-health
Lovely find @markpollard
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.
Well, good folk, there’s nothing on earth
Like a genuine,
Bona fide,
Billion dollar,
Ideas boom.
Innovation!
What’d I say?
Innovation!
What’s it called?
Innovation!
That’s right! Innovation!
[crowd chants `Innovation’ softly and rhythmically]
I hear those things can make us proud
Don’t you build it in the cloud?
What about us brain-dead slobs?
You’ll be given cushy jobs.
Were you sent here by the devil?
No, good sir, I’m on the level.
I swear it’s Australia’s only choice…
Throw up your hands and raise your voice!
All: Innovation!
What’s it called?
All: Innovation!
Once again…
All: Innovation!
But your pathway seems seems quite frail and broken…
Sorry, ma’am, the mob has spoken!
Innovation! Innovation! Innovation!
[big finish]
Innovation!
Homer:Inno… D’oh!
Get Shouty 