Digital Digressions

The Saga Continues: British Airways On-line Booking Con

A while ago I almost got into the Guinness book of records for spending the longest time (28 Hours) in transit on a flight that normally takes less than 2 hours. This is a story with all the elements of pure chaos theory and how, if you are British Airways, you will not give a toss about how all those variables will conspire to turn every single passenger on your flight to an active detractor for your brand.

You will be amused to know that exactly a month later, on the day, I had the (mis)fortune of being on yet another BA flight, this time to Helsinki and guess what: this one was delayed also! Not by 28hours this time, only a paltry 3 hours, but given what we'd been through in the last month, it was 3 hours too many. I desperately wanted to believe my 28 hours experience was a one off, that would never happen again and that deep down BA are a decent company, who cares for its customers and staff, but I keep getting bitterly disappointed. All of this of course further brought to an edge by the fact that in recent weeks we have had plenty of chirpy (arrogant) BA senior executives on the news boasting how much profit they have made in 3 months alone. Marketwatch article 'By cutting costs' - they say, I would like to remove the spin from this statement and say the truth, which is more like 'by kicking customers in the head and grabbing their money'.

The on-line booking con
So surely it is not possible to add insult to injury anymore? Wrong. This morning I was truly bowled over by just how badly BA does treat you. Having to fly to Copenhagen in a month's time, I was on-line trying to book tickets today (foolishly my colleagues have already booked their flights, which meant I had to swallow my pride and go book my ticket with my by now 'favourite airline', BA) when I came across the real corker. Having found the flight, entered my details and credit card info and pressed Make a Reservation button, nothing happens for ages. OK. This is not a problem, it happens, even with the best of folks.

So I divert to doing something else and return to the screen after a while to find a window loaded with the following information:

Worried about being charged twice if I repeat the action, I instead pick up the phone and call the number on the screen. So while I'm in the phone abyss listening to music and told to '...if you wish to make or pay for a reservation press 1... if you..' I press 1 and hear some more music and then a quick recorded message that says;

'we would like to inform you that by booking over the phone you will incur a £15 pound surcharge per each passenger...'

Incredulous about what I've just heard (I wonder at this stage if I have misheard it) a person comes on-line asking the usual

• 'you are through to ... how can I help?'
• To which I reply 'I have just been on your website trying to make a booking and been told that your systems are not responding so I should contact you over the phone instead. Now I hear that by doing that and completing my booking I will have to pay an extra £15 despite your website being down and me not having any other choice in the matter..?'
• To which the lady politely replies (they still manage to be polite while they kick you in the head!) 'yes, we are experiencing some problems with our website this morning that they are working on and hope to have resolved as soon as possible.. so in the meantime, yes, if you make the booking over the phone you will incur a fee of £15 per passenger..'
• Still not believing my ears, I enquire about how long they think the site will be down and whether I could have the fee redeemed as it is not my choice to speak to a person, but in fact to make an on-line booking, which I can't, because of their website trouble..
• I'm told they don't know how long it will take and no, it is not possible to redeem the £15...

So let me just re-iterate: We are charged a compulsory luggage-handling fee (even if we are not travelling with luggage) by a company who is now famous for losing people's luggage and is setting up a sorting operation in Italy to try to deal with the luggage backlog BBC article and BBC Video, a fuel surcharge (that British Airways have recently been fined for fixing) and now another £15 for the fact that their website doesn't work?? Who are the suckers here?? It's unbelievable and moreover - how is it possible that they can just get away with this?

So I put the phone down and decided to wait until the website is supposedly fixed..

Designers as Facilitators of Collective Creativity

Back in the day when I went to design school, the greatest aspiration uniting all my fellow students was to become the next Philippe Starck. The idea of the lone genius, the one people always called upon to create beauty and join form with function, the duck that consistently always laid golden eggs for his clients - this was, and in some circles still is, the ideal for designers.

Creativity and why designers are not artists
What's the difference you may ask. A good question to ask as both rely heavily on their creative skill to create solutions. According to Arthur Koestler, the most-cited authority on creativity, every creative act involves bisociation, a process that brings together and combines previously unrelated ideas. He contrasts bisociation with association, saying that association refers to previously established connections among ideas but that isociation involves making entirely new connections among ideas. Koestler’s definition addresses all forms of creativity, whether in art, science or humor.

So designers, artists, scientists, you name it all rely on creativity for coming up with solutions, but the difference between designers and artists is ego. Designers (at least good ones anyway) divorce their egos from a project early on to immerse themselves in research, ethnographic studies, insights of various sorts to come up with solutions that best serve the needs identified by users. Artists on the other hand delve in much greater luxury, not necessarily materially speaking, but in terms of accountability. Their works of art are born out personal briefs, passions and ideas - not a common need or problem and are specifically bought, because of their personal interpretation of the reality we all live in. It is their synthesis of subjects in to visual, interactive or 3 dimensional form that evokes an emotional and intellectual reaction in an audience. You can argue here that the above is similarly the reason why we buy certain products, because the name of the designer has become synonymous with compelling design that we appreciate. That is entirely correct, in some areas the roles are particularly blurred as is the case with fashion design for instance, where the designers behave more like artists (some more than others), but who are still commonly referred to as designers.

The Advent of Collective Creativity
Fast-forward to 2007 and our CEO at LEGO, Jorgen Vig Knudstorp, speaking about collective creativity and its power to create stunning products and solutions; 'Why have 100 designers, when you can have a 100.000?', he poignantly asks. And I think: absolutely! Why not indeed - whereas I can in my mind's eye hear all those designers gasp quietly in the background, this is the sound of their dreams vanishing before them.

What does he mean? Knudstorp is referring to the power of collective creativity. Collective creativity occurs when bisociation is shared by two or more people. We are beginning to see that collective creativity can be very powerful and can lead to more culturally relevant results than individual creativity does. This is what happens with really good collaboration based on teamwork.

Liz Sanders from SonicRim articulates this very well her article on the subject. All people who touch and are touched by the “product” that is being designed should play a role in collective creativity. (By “product” I mean products, interfaces, spaces, etc.) These people fall into two main groups: “makers” and “users.” “Makers” include all the members of development teams from disciplines such as marketing, engineering and design. “Users” include people who shop for, buy and end up using the product.

Collective creativity is already being practiced in industry today by “makers.” In fact, most design firms sell their interdisciplinary product development experience. The biggest opportunity for improving the quality of products that we design today is to practice collective creativity with "users." Others agree. Design critic Rick Poynor has argued that "since design is something fundamental to being human, it can’t be left solely in the hands of designated practitioners."

Architect  Christopher Alexander writes “People need and have a right to determine and shape their own environment. . . . They are the only ones who know in a profound way what they need . . . .Good architecture can only come from wholehearted involvement of the users in the shaping of their buildings and streets.”   

Why is collective creativity important?
To quote Liz Sanders here: Collective creativity, when practiced with "users" in the design development process, can result in useful and relevant innovation. This is important because useful and relevant innovation can be commercially successful at the same time as it is culturally beneficial. The shift from individual to collective levels in thinking and doing is occurring today in many domains. We see this shift taking place especially today in the world of business. Design education needs to keep up with the shift to meet the challenges created by new levels of thought and action.

The changing role of the designer
The days of the super-star designer are numbered. The skills needed to facilitate collective creativity are very different from what the lone genius does in his corner. First there is humility and the profound appreciation of the role ordinary people should have in shaping and creating the project of their dreams. It is no longer the designer who tells the world what the solution should look like, it is the designer who uses his/her expertise in unlocking creativity to enable others, who perhaps habitually are less confident in the creative realm, to unlock their thoughts, ideas and creativity.

At LEGO work continues to expand the ability of ordinary people to create the product of their dreams. An approach pioneered by the Mindstorms NXT development process of involving the Mindstorms community in designing the hardware, software, the toy and pieces for the new robot, has rapidly continued into completely user-designed products sold through the company's LEGO Factory channel, where users can indeed create their very own LEGO model and buy exactly that model as well as be inspired by and buy the creations of others. This of course in parallel with existing product development of LEGO toys, still handled by designers themselves - but even here community interaction is becoming more and more commonplace as the insight and ideas coming from LEGO users are simply too valuable to ignore. Long gone are the days of the lone genius - instead here we are at the advent of collective creativity where the power of many creates far better products and experiences than any one of us could have dreamt up on our own.

The 5 Rules of Growth

What are the principles for creating growth? Or rather, what are the things you need to make sure your ideas for growth address in order for you to ensure they succeed?

Growth is a word that sooner or later begins buzzing around a company, because cost-cutting - although great for survival, won't get you anywhere in the long run. The world is constantly moving on around you and any company thinking they can sustain themselves in business by continuously doing the same thing, but at a cheaper price, will gradually watch their market wither away.

This is yet again one of those either-or arguments. The business world is rife with the proponents for one or the other and people seem to be reconciled to the fact that you can never have both, but much like my posting on Why the desire to simplify can inhibit innovation it is in fact exactly the opposite: to be able to grow you will need to figure out a way of achieving both: repositioning yourself in the marketplace to enable growth and doing this continuously at a more competitive price in order to stay there.

I would agree that there are people whose strengths lie in one of the two camps, you are either great at cost-cutting or at generating ideas for growth, but you seldom find people who are good at both. This, however, is not an absolute truth, but more a testament to the unwillingness of people to move out of their comfort zone. It's like saying: you are either a great pianist at birth or you will never become one. That's rubbish! Like any skill, sport or ability - you may have a set of 'tendencies', but it is your sheer hard work and determination that ensures those 'tendencies' destine you for greatness, not what you are born with. Same in business. So to be truly great in business, if your strength is to come up with brilliant ideas for growth - stretch yourself into thinking how you can deliver that growth idea through better use of supply chain, logistics, pricing, distribution, i.e how can you use what people do in cost-cutting exercises to generate entirely new business models that help you deliver that growth idea better than if you stuck with the existing set-up and simply did an iterative improvement?

OK - you see where I'm going with this? Before I stray too far, let's recap on those rules I mentioned earlier:

1. Sustainable?
No point going for a growth idea, which is not sustainable - i.e can you deliver this year after year, in a lean and efficient way without killing your staff, your company and moreover: do you know this idea is something people will ask for in 5 years time too? If not, then figure out now how you will evolve your growth idea over time to stay relevant. If you can't you know it's not sustainable.

2. Profitable?
Forgive me for stating the obvious here, but often people don't realise that new ideas for growth also sometimes call for new ways of measuring profit. Numbers can hide as much as they reveal sometimes. If you haven't accounted for all the things that eventually will cost you, you may not have an accurate picture of your profits. Many companies are in this dilemma now, because the rising focus on carbon footprints and greenhouse gases/global warming means that there are entire industries whose pricing policies do not reflect the toll they take on the environment. If we suddenly had a price assigned to products and services based on the carbon footprint they require in their manufacture for instance, many profits would instantly erode. Companies will need to start thinking about this very soon. You say: ah well, this will automatically favour the likes of Google whose business offering is entirely virtual and thus they have no pollution to worry about. Wrong! Google has to worry about this stuff too, because by nature of the size of their business they are now renting entire server farms to fuel their need to keep indexing the net and providing the service they do. Before we even get to whether those servers are using toxic components etc. these server farms use a lot of electricity, which has to come from somewhere - now Google's profits wouldn't perhaps be so mind-boggling anymore if the price of electricity suddenly began reflecting the toll it takes? Just a thought.

3. Capital Efficient?
Needless to say, there is no point having growth which is not.

4. Differentiated from Competition?
Me too ideas are often prompted by competition moving into an area and you feeling obliged to do the same. More choice in an area is not necessarily good if you cannot offer differentiation. In a worst-case scenario it means a price-war and less profits for all. Some deliberately go for this, but unless you are absolutely sure your business models allows for cheaper, faster, more cost-effective offers (because you are using a business model radically different from your competition in this area) there is no point to go for this. Falling prices in the long run mean a commoditisation of your product/service and distinctly less value attached to it by consumers, who generally become more vary paying for anything.

5. Innovative?
Everyone argues they have innovation, but innovation is a confusing word. It gets mistaken for creativity (the capacity to generate ideas) and simply going for iterative improvements. Adding another feature on a digital camera is not an innovation. The Ipod itself wasn't even an innovation, but orchestrating Itunes and a legal way for music downloads around an MP3 player was. It's about doing 'new'. Turning things on their head - ultimately it is about converting ideas into profitable growth. What does that mean? Well ideas are nothing unless people are willing to buy it and after having it bought it, coming back and buying more. Innovation is about taking that leap and creating something, which starts an external shift eventually snowballing into influencing previously unconnected industries.

Flight BA 349: A study in chaos theory and the importance of managing expectations

A technical problem compounded by lack of leadership among ground staff; a flight delayed 28 hours; a riot on-board - what does it all mean and how it could have been avoided?

Here's the story of how my weekend away turned into a nightmare.

As mentioned in the previous post - here was I really looking forward to a weekend away, in South of France of all places, but a safe bet this time of year in terms of sunshine, good food and in this case, also nice company - all factors conspired to create a most wonderful break and memorable party away from the rain and cold of Britain during Wimbledon and it would all have been perfect if it wasn't for the flight back. So what happened?

T - 2 1/2 hours:
We arrive at Nice airport, a smooth journey from Cannes - expect to check in; nobody at the desk so we check in using machines and sit ourselves down to wait.

T - 1 hour:
1 1/2 hours later BA staff appear at desk so we drop our bags off and head for the restaurant.

T - 1/2 hour:
We are called to gate; proceed to board and sit ourselves down onboard plane.

T + 1/2 hour:
We are still sat on-board and get informed by pilot that there is a technical problem with the hydraulics and we need to check this before departing.

T + 1 hour:
We are told a hydraulic pump has failed and it cannot be fixed. BA is trying to source one in France along with an engineer to come install it.

T + 1 1/2 hours:
We are told there is neither a pump nor an engineer to fit it in entire France; so both of these need to be flown down from Heathrow in the morning. We are advised to exit the plane (it is now 9 pm) and go find the BA desk in the terminal where the staff will advise us on hotel accommodation and give us drinks/food vouchers.

T + 2 hours:
We are waiting in front of BA desk along with 200 odd passengers; having to queue up individually to the desk to state our names and receive information about our accomodation. To ease congestion some are told to leave now and claim back their hotel expenses from BA customer relations. Some take this advice and leave; others stay. General pandemonium exists as people are conviced there is no space for them on flights scheduled for the next day so there is a scramble for getting wait-listed; buying places on other flights etc.

T + 3 hours:
It turns out the queue we have been standing in (there are 6) is for people trying to reschedule themselves onto flights tomorrow and not for accomodation at all, so we shift ourselves over to the queues for accomodation.

T + 4 hours:
We finally receive information about which hotel we need to go to. Turns out it is only 200 m from the airport and this could have been announced to us collectively 4 hours ago. We are told to make sure we are back at the check-in no later than 11 o'clock the following morning in order not to miss the flight, now rescheduled for 12.30. At this point it is finally explained to us that there will be an extra flight scheduled that day - our famous flight 349 will appear again, to take all original flight 349 passengers back. This eases some of the fears people had about getting back, yet some speculate whether this will really happen and how free BA are to schedule extra flights in excess of their allotted slots.

T + 4 1/2 hours:
We arrive at hotel, discover it is a 2 star hotel, the kitchen has closed and there is no minibar in the room. We dump our stuff and decide to go find food.

T + 5 hours:
We, along with 50 other people, decend upon the local Novotel whose kitchen is still open and virtually scramble to order the last food they have.

T + 6 hours:
Exhausted, but full we make our way back to the hotel and fall into bed.

The Web and the Illusion of Anonymity

I had a strange experience the other day. Someone I met for the first time told me they had 'Googled' me before our meeting and were intrigued to find all this stuff about me, including this blog. Now forgive me folks, but on one hand here I am, with a blog being seemingly progressive and 'out there', in with the times and all that and the fact is that most of my friends don't read my blog, at least not regularly anyway, because they prefer to talk to me in person about the topics I blog about and many more things, rather than read about them on my blog.

Can't blame them really, but this has also caused a certain disconnect for me, where usually I would meet people and it would be me making the first impression and eventually this person would discover I had a blog, which would be more of a curious 'aha' moment for them, rather than something they would use to form an opinion about me even before meeting me. However, this, as I mentioned, was all turned on its head just the other day. The insecure person in me immediately wondered 'what do they think... do they like what I write or do they think I'm a total nutcase??' Anonymity on the web at least (most of the time) means you will never get to meet the people in person who think your blog is a bunch of ramblings and that you are truly nuts.. but it may all change!

Fortunately this individual was very complementary, or perhaps just a supremely a nice person who couldn't bring themselves to tell me just how bad they thought my writing was, but fortunately at least saved me the embarrassment of telling it to my face. Of course you will all rush to tell me that I should have thought of that when starting a blog and to this I reply: I did! Initially I was very much in two minds about whether I should blog under my real name or anonymously, and initially I did blog completely anonymously as I was experimenting with content and style and so on.

Eventually I settled for the 'a little bit about everything' approach that you find on this blog - stuff I think about and find that writing it down into a post helps me structure my thoughts and move on and think about new stuff... clearing my mind if you like. So my blog has now become a bit of a scratch book of thoughts and sometimes pretty personal too - in the same breath I have abandoned anonymity and even sport a button to my Linked-in profile now for all those who wonder who I am and why I'm interested in all these diverse topics (hopefully my profile goes some way to explain this..here's me hoping anyway!)

The scary thing is though that the more I have become 'exposed' through this blog, the more people, prospective employers, clients, you name it all use Google to check up on people they are about to make contact to. On one hand we are seeing extremely personal confessions on blogs and various social networking sites and on the other hand we are seeing more and more people having to pay the price for that as it seems that there are still employers out there who are looking for people who are literally the 'blank' canvasses - with no clearly defined and perhaps 'jarring' personal identities to try to mold into an organisation where individualism is a fault, not an asset.

Some are talking about how young people in particular should be much more careful about what they do reveal on-line as that digital trail will follow them forever - there are even companies devoted to destroying information about you on the net these days - service comes at a pretty price though. The one place not even they can reach are the news archives of various papers - once you end up there you are on the net forever. So where does that leave us? It seems that the arena is wide open for the debate on a set of 'net ethics' of sorts - what is acceptable to take into account about a person in terms of background checks on the net, versus what is advisable for individuals to reveal on-line?

Ultimately some things are personal and although revealed on-line on say a social networking site, they should remain as such or be considered as such by a company seeking to employ that person. Also those who devote countless hours to blogging and so on are in fact industrious minds to whom a blog is one outlet, but give the person a challenge to chew on that same industrious mind can be put to service for the benefit of a company, as opposed to being seen as an overtly extrovert destroyer of 'the way we have always done things in this company'. What do you think?

What Marketeers Forget When Thinking of Web 2.0

Web 2.0 is on everyone's lips - it's attractive to users, because we become the authors, publishers, content creators and between us we can create infinitely more value for each other than a company can on its own. Context is the content. Marketeers are intrigued by this prospect too, because it means new, potentially more cost-effective ways to target their audiences, spreading word of mouth and if you are lucky, being able to measure the effect much more precisely than you ever could via say TV or print-advertising. There is a prospect of creating more bang for the buck and moreover, learning more about the likes and dislikes of your consumers.

In the wake of this growing phenomena, there is an exponential growth of seminars, lectures, conferences and events to explain what web 2.0 is, what you can do with it and how best to make use of it. Countless executives are invariably crammed into a room, where some net-savvy individual extols the virtues of blogging, viral marketing, you name it and the room is filled with various degrees of perplexed individuals who are beginning to realise that the entire paradigm they have structured their careers and lives around, is shifting into the unknown and many traditional practises will have to change if they are to survive.

Your Audience is Active - not passive
Traditional communications theory used to focus on measuring and analysing the effect of media on the people exposed to it. Audiences were considered passive and we all wanted to know what watching TV really does to you, does it make you buy more, more stupid, more obese etc? The truth is that audiences are active, they consume media based on its uses and gratifications gained. That goes for TV too these days - having a Tivo box makes the traditionally passive act of TV watching much more active as you can choose what you want to watch, when, skip the ads and teach the thing to tell you next time something is on that you might enjoy. This becomes even more acute when we move towards on-line media - users decide what they do, where they go, what they watch, who they talk to and so on. What others have said is easier for them to find out, and what is on their mind is easier to broadcast to everyone around them too.

If You Want to Talk, You Must Show You Care to Listen
Traditional marketing operating from a paradigm of passive consumers that need to be engaged, first be reminded of their inadequacies and then told how to overcome them still wants to approach Web 2.0 with the same attitude. It's still about trying to sell people some smokescreen and appeal to their fantasies and desires, but that will not work anymore, not in the traditional sense.

Imagine you are sitting at a table with a person you have never met. You begin a conversation, politely you try to find out who they are and so on. Imagine then if this person behaved as if you had just pushed the 'play' button, out comes some random message about who you should be, what you should do to be like that, what they are selling and how good it is. So you patiently wait till the end of this litany and ask again. You want to know about the person behind that statement. Are they nice, do they have integrity? Do they care about the same stuff you do? Again the same mantra. What that is, is a one-way broadcast, like radio and TV advertising, because the medium didn't allow talk-back - but nowhere is that approach becoming obsolete quicker than the web.

No longer is it about 'what do we want to communicate - it's about 'what do we want to facilitate!'
Web 2.0 is a dialogue, it's a start of a love-affair, it's a discussion that takes twists and turns depending on who is having the conversation and what the topic is. It's fun to talk to someone if they show they listen to what you have to say and respond accordingly. It's even better when they can put you in touch with other people just like you. It's extremely boring when you feel like you are talking to a wall. It's really that simple - but what it means is that smokescreens become harder to maintain. After all, not everyone is David Copperfield and besides, if everyone's rating everything and all views are public - you don't even want to be David Copperfield, you have to be you and be good, because what goes around comes around.

Build Good Karma
Buddhism is a very useful in this context and may even one day become the foundation of the new world-wide company ethic - but the basis is simple: refrain from bad behaviour, do good and remember that karma comes back to haunt you - good or bad. So can your company handle that level of openness, can you genuinely say that everyone in your company respects your consumers and tries their utmost to be fair, do the right thing and never lie? Marketing in this context becomes less about convincing people something is great, but more about setting the structure and motion in place for responding to what people want, encouraging them to work with you and always, always, always making sure you are honest, respectful and humble. In product design we  always used to joke that you are only as good as your last project. How true is that - in the world of web 2.0 you are only as good as the last consumer experience you delivered.

It takes a (global, connected) village to raise a child

No I'm not referring to Hillary Clinton's book, nor her speech on the topic of children - but I am borrowing the same (origin unknown) African proverb that claims it takes a village to raise a child. In fact, I'm building on it to refer to the Internet, the global connected village it has made the world, we are all connected, not necessarily by six degrees of separation from Kevin Bacon but in fact by 3rd degree via LinkedIn (or Myspace, Bebo, Facebook or whatever takes your fancy).

For me it has been a revelation that by humbly starting to publish this blog here in my corner of London, UK, there are people as far as Kiribati who magically stumble on this site and moreover, can be bothered to read what I have to say. Truly humbling. Big up to Kiribati I say! This global village of ours has also taught me some very valuable lessons, some of which I agonise over in a previous post about the pain of trying to come up with consistently good quality material. Not sure I succeed consistently, but mainly due to the kindness and patience of my readers, I still have an audience..

I recently came across a brilliant study from Forrester research by a guy called Jaap Favier, Dutch perhaps I endeavour to guess? Anyway he has managed to pull together some great insights about how group dynamics are driving social media on the net and how this connectivity means companies need to change in order to stay relevant for their consumers. Sounds complicated, but on a larger scale I feel companies need to learn what the village has raised me to believe over the years:

Content is king -> CONTACT is king
It's not about the stuff, it's about whether you care to listen what people have to say, whether you can help put them in touch with each other and provide them with ways they can not only help each other, but create things together with you. Are you a good citizen and do people even want to know you? If you are evil, chances are they don't. Often only when you go look for friends do you discover what people really think about you. Don't let it get that far.

The Medium is the Message -> The RESPONSE is the message
Can you get people to care enough to get involved, can they respond to you, to others, do things change based on their response? You get what you give, if you are rude and deceitful, chances are you also foster that behaviour in people around you.

We call the shots -> THEY call the shots
Don't think you know it all. Don't even attempt. There are people out there who know your company, product, service you name it better than you do. They do call the shots whether you like it or not. A smart thing would be to learn from what they have to say and be humble.

KEEP IT REAL
Only if you are honest, true to what you promise and deliver it as good as you say it is, people trust you. To be trusted you have to keep it real, always. No lies, no cheating, no screwing people over - they find out soon enough and others even sooner, so be good and the world is good to you back. Most of the time anyway!

It's funny - yesterday we had the last episode of the Apprentice, (for now) where our pet magnate Sir Alan Sugar got himself a fresh faced new apprentice, Simon, willing to work 'his cotton socks off' as he bluntly put it when asked why he should be hired. Sugar, true to his name, subsequently presented Simon with some unsightly pairs of cotton socks that he could 'work off' in due course. Although not the most experienced of contestants, Simon's happy-go-lucky attitude and kindness got him quite far and moreover made him a master at dealing with some of the more prickly contestants in the show.

The complete opposite was Katie, fired from the show last week. It seems that in her case, common decency took a left-turn and avoided her altogether. Certainly, courtesy of having a blog you learn first-hand how quickly the Internet bites back and let's you know faster, sooner, and more sharply how much you suck, even when your best-friends stay silent. It felt almost sadistic and certainly voyeuristic to sit there watching Katie spouting her horrific comments about her fellow contestants to the camera and then select comments being revealed to the fellow contestants by programme directors.. pausing to focus on the furious candidate, squirming in their seat, rolling their eyes. It just amazes me that no one from the real or virtual village has played their part, taking Katie to one side, giving her a really good hiding and reminding her just what it means to be a citizen in the global village. Sir Alan Sugar did it sort of, a little yesterday - but all she did was smile. Knowingly. Thinking she still calls the shots. Think again.

The Rise of Transparency Tyranny

Recently we at LEGO had our most visible example yet of a phenomenon increasingly affecting companies world-wide: the rise of the consumer activist. Above and Beyond: LEGO Shop gives consumers new hope. In our case we are lucky as this commentary turned out in our favour and helped highlight some of the practises we have prided ourselves in offering ever since we set up our consumer service centres, but more often than not consumers bite back and give not only companies a piece of their mind, but also their fellow consumers.

We are truly moving away from the days when it was possible to limit the damage of a single consumer disappointment to travel only as far as that individual could reach through letter, phone and discussion with friends and family. Still damaging to a brand, granted, but today, we are faced with a new situation, a new world order if you like where single consumer contacts and their outcome, positive or negative - have the power to influence thousands, if not millions as they can now be recorded (not only in words, but through camera phones, video, voice) in addition to traditional text - making the content much more evocative and that content be shared with millions, through a plethora of rating and social networking sites.

The only fly in the ointment right now is the absence of profiles - i.e having a service/product/experience rated by someone just like me (age, education, income, job, interests, lifestyle etc.), which would lend the ratings even more gravitas, but it is just a matter of time before a networking site like Myspace teams up with a rating service and makes this happen.

Enter the era of transparency tyranny. This movement is picking up, as people are moving from trusting companies to trusting their peers instead. Furthermore the Digital Natives (those who have grown up with the Internet always there) communicate 155% more than before (Forrester), which means this phenomenon will only grow.

So in my opinion there is nothing that warrants a higher priority in companies than focusing on delivering first-class services and experiences to consumers, measuring it through the Net Promoter Score (NPS). The NPS has to be consistently good across all touchpoints, because this - more than anything, will determine the future of your company. In our case - by the power of our strong heritage, we have a lot of expectations to live up to - people who have grown up with the brand and have come to expect a kind of quality, continuity and ethic to LEGO, which the other toymanufacturers struggle to achieve. All eyes are on us to continue to deliver that in the age of transparency tyranny!

Why the Desire to Simplify Can Inhibit Innovation

A friend recently postulated that having budget constraints can encourage better innovation than those with lots of money to burn as this provides a framework where automatically many things are out of bounds, because you can't afford them. He proceeded to point to many start-ups often don't have a lot of money, but make up for it in energy and determination and thus often end up coming up with solutions better, smarter and more relevant than their heavy-weight rivals. Stops you re-inventing the wheel I suppose.

Coming from a product design background I must agree that an essential component to innovation is first figuring out your constraints, the framework within which you intend to innovate. Before you know that, it is virtually impossible to determine, which of your million ideas is the best solution to a given problem.

Having smaller budgets certainly creates some immediate restraints on what the solution should be - i.e it can't cost more than X. That has a remarkable ability to focus a team. The trouble with this approach is often the desire to simplify too soon, which means that many important factors, which will in the end determine the success of the solution, are discarded too early from the process, and thus the solution ends up being more of the same, rather than truly groundbreaking.

One of my favourite quotes ever is that of F. Scott Fitzgerald, that for him 'the sign of a truly intelligent individual is one who has the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function'. Innovation is often just that, how to balance the constraints one has from an organisational, technical and financial point of view against the desires and demands of one's consumers. Often it is not a matter of either-or, but both, and the innovation is the process of coming up with just how that will be done.

Here the key is to be able to seek less obvious, but potentially relevant factors (that will give differentiation in the long run, although to start with will seem like they are adding more complexity to the topic), secondly it is the ability to consider multi-directional, non-linear relationships between these variables and seeing problems as a whole, examining how the parts fit together and how decisions affect one another, and then lastly: creatively resolve those conflicts between seemingly opposing ideas to generate innovative outcomes.

That sounds very complicated and at times, it is - and it is pivotal not to fear the complexity to start with and simplify too soon, thus ending up creating a solution which will only partially address the problem (and potentially give birth to an entirely new problem!), but to persist and strive to integrate, not divide. So constraints are good - but do you know all your constraints or have you simply settled for the most obvious ones?

The Elusive Concept of Premium

What does it mean to be a premium brand? What do premium products look like? What do companies need to do differently because they want to be premium?

These are all hard questions and ones we need to examine in detail, because they will determine the success or failure of establishing a company in the premium realm. For me, coming from a design background I see this as a multidimensional challenge, and one which we cannot successfully solve in each of our own specialisms, but something we can only reasonably tackle by thinking about how all elements in the products and services we offer come together, seamlessly, to create meaning and in that regard we need to be looking outside-in, rather than attempt it from our respective silos.

Owning a premium product used to signify status. Status these days is no longer just about hoarding as many luxury goods as possible and being able to pay vast prices for things in short supply. Kids are teaching us that status is to be had in many more ways than before, such as through experiences (it's not about what you own, it's the story you tell afterwards!), participation ("I was part of making this!" ex. LEGO Factory), skills (becoming really good at something and finding your own appreciative audience ex. blogs, flickr, youtube) and through networks (who connects to you and who you connect to, tribal-style ex. social network sites like Myspace).

So the notion of what it means to be a premium product or brand has changed too. To be premium is certainly to be able to deliver consistent, good quality in line with people's expectations, products that are easy and intuitive to use, but it's also about being treated with respect as a consumer. Moreover it is about being able to provide meaning to our consumers, co-creating value, connecting people in community, appealing to emotional, spiritual and social values, being tied to a person's self-image, highly personal and it's about empowering people to do things previously not possible.

As the bar for premium is raised ever higher by competing brands trying to innovate, by nigh-on complete price transparency and the growth of rating services for almost any and every kind of product or service - it becomes clear that to be premium is to be committed to a of motto 'Only the best is good enough'. Only now, our consumers know it and demand it, because as soon-to-be global consumers their frame of reference of what a good website does, will be the leader in the field, not necessarily another competitor in the same field as you, what quality means could be Apple, not your biggest rival, what good packaging/service/game is, yet another company we never previously considered our competitor and so on.

So being and staying premium is a hard task. It means that as a company, people need to come together to understand that consumers at different levels of affinity, want different things from you. For us the greatest challenge moving forwards will be reconciling the fact that it is not one or the other; addressing only the great masses or lead-users, but both together, at the right time in the right way. For that, we need to work as one company, organising ourselves around the needs of consumers, not our functional silos. And as employers, we need to attract and retain the very best of talent, because only then, by growing people and the roles we each play, can we consistenly deliver premium, year-after-year.

Why Innovation Cannot Remain in the Realm of the Few

Last week a long-standing dream of mine finally came true when I had a chance to visit the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston. Even back in the day of studying product design at Central Saint Martins I was always intrigued by the level of experimentation, technical prowess and simply outright genre-busting design and thinking that was going on at the MIT Media Lab and I always wished I could have studied there too. As some of you know, the LEGO Group is a Consortia Research Sponsor and thus chance and fortune collided and enabled me to take part in both the fascinating H20 or Human 2.0 event last Wednesday and the Sponsor day on the Thursday. Both events gave me a unique insight into what it means to be human in the 21st century and how innovation is fuelled on a large scale, seemingly infecting all that enter the Media Lab premises.

Seeing all this made me think of innovation yet again and how the Media Lab was different from many other places I have visited in its attitude and relation to innovation. What strikes you when entering the premises is that innovation is seen a bit like oxygen - it's there, people don't even question it, everybody breathes it and moreover, everybody CAN breathe it, because it is natural. Too often, whether you are in a company or even browsing a bookstore for that matter - innovation seems like the new buzz word, something of a dark art that most people are mystified by, only few people master and more over, a billion-dollar industry exists to tell us how we can become better at it. Of course you will be amused to know that innovation is also part of my job-title, but rather than make me feel special or privileged I feel a strong, sometimes even daunting, responsibility in trying to engender it in everyone around me, empowering people to come with solutions themselves, acting more like a facilitator than some lone genius in an ivory tower.

A book I'm currently reading, called The Upside by Adrian Slywotzky delves into depth explaining what companies do to minimise risk when innovating. He very convincingly points out that not only is it a matter of identifying an opportunity and ceasing it, but how in fact most innovations are likely to fail, even when they are 90% right for the purpose they were developed. Slywotzky goes through a series of examples, including the development of the Prius, the Ipod and others, highlighting just how many steps were required to create these successes and how innovation was present in each and every one of those steps - proving conclusively that innovation has to happen at every level in a company to make such successes as the Ipod to really take off. A product innovation alone wouldn't have gotten Apple to where they are today, but instead a deliberate strategic application of innovation at successive steps of the process, towards the end involving over 50 people, a large project by Apple's standards, but essential in making sure that all parts of the business were optimised to deliver what we now know to have become a legendary example of innovation: the Ipod.

Slywotsky in fact lists a number of principles in his book, which seem to crop up again and again as an approach that works, a formula that ensures that Innovation doesn't remain in the realm of the few, but instead permeates an entire company and ensures that even the tiniest chances of success are systematically increased over time, step by step, by consistently and continuously involving everyone and ensuring that innovation is something everyone contributes to and is part of, rather than a select few.

1. Work fast to pre-empt competition - crazy deadlines mean you get people's undivided attention rather than the phenomenon of mission creep - when deadlines get drawn out, because people get involved in other things in the meantime
2. Share information freely, openly, between all - set up an email sphere in line with what the fifteenth-century mystic Nicolas of Cusa described as 'something whose circumference is nowhere and whose centre is everywhere. Everyone on the mailing list stands equally close to the centre of the action and everyone is capable of being the centre at a particular moment in time - able to draw energy from everyone else in the group to solve today's most pressing problem
3. Encourage young, flexible minds who like to challenge the norm and think in new ways - sometimes this is the only way to stop things being done the way we always have done them. In fact, encourage people to think this way whether they are young or old!
4. Always take pride in asking the toughest questions -about customers, their needs and interests, and the ways the company's business processes can serve those customers better.
5. Plan for version 2.0 - i.e learn from your mistakes and put the learning back in the organisation!
6. Design your business model (distribution, communication etc.) as shrewdly as you design your product!

Now these are very generic bits of advice and the really interesting thing is reading all the case studies and seeing what combination of general advice (above) was mixed in with strategic measures to address the specific weaknesses of the company mentioned. It's always a mix of both - but interestingly, in each of the successes mentioned, it was the deliberate involvement of all parties to the solution, early on in the process that created the necessary momentum to deal with everything else. Thus innovation should be, much like it is at the MIT, like the oxygen in an organisation - we all need to breathe it and we all CAN and SHOULD, because only then can breakthroughs happen!

4 Things Managers Do To Demotivate People

Whether we like it or not, industrialisation, globalisation and business development in general has seen the birth of a new breed of professional, the manager. Unless you are blissfully caught up in a one-man enterprise of sorts and can call yourself your own manager, chances are that somewhere, sometime your life is influenced by one.

Note that managers are different from leaders and in my perception there seems to be far more managers around than leaders, to the point I'm willing to postulate that businesses these days are over-managed and under-led to the point that more and more people are disillusioned with their jobs, frustrated by the office politics and generally not enjoying their work as much as they could be. Why is it? Surely what managers do is good, necessary and important and without them we would be at a loss? Or is it that the nature of management and the behaviours associated with management is in fact responsible for causing more agony than necessary? Let's pick this apart a little:

Management Behaviour 1: Trying to Turn Everything into A Win-Win
In itself this is not a bad thing, to think that people are more likely to do something if they think they will get something out of it too, rather than lose out. Common sense actually, but it can create its own set of problems. By focusing on procedure of how a decision should be made (the process) as opposed to what decision needs to be taken, the managers conveniently distract people from thinking about what they might potentially lose out on if the decision that is taken is not to their advantage. Once people commit to the process of how the decision will be made, they will have to support the outcome as they were involved in formulating the decision-making rules. This will make them accept their losses, believing that next time they will win. Needless to say that over time this will simply end up demotivating people.

Management Behaviour 2: Being Vague is Easier than Being Crystal-Clear
Managers have a habit of communicating with their sub-ordinates indirectly, using vague language, 'signals' rather than clear 'messages'. A signal can be interpreted in any number of ways, while a message clearly states a position. A signal doesn't put your head on the line, because you can always later blame that your signals were 'misinterpreted' by your staff, whereas messages put your head firmly on the line, stating 'this is what I stand for'. From another angle it also means that with messages there is the direct consequence that some people may indeed not like what they hear, but in any case messages create emotional responses (good or bad) in people and makes managers eager to preserve the status quo (see below) anxious. With signals, the question of who wins and who loses often becomes obscure, but equally the person who communicates in signals as opposed to messages, is perceived as not having a clear position, but instead spineless and perhaps not capable of sticking up for his people, should the need arise. Again a massive demotivator.

Management Behaviour 3: Playing for Time
Sometimes it's better to sleep on things, rather than trying to make a decision then and there. Many managers have literally taken this to their heart, counting on the fact that if delaying major (difficult) decisions, compromises have time to emerge that take the sting out of win-lose situations and the original issue will be superseded by more pressing matters, again serving the purpose of diverting people's attention. Over time this has a tendency to create more and more confusion as some major decisions never get made, due to the endless playing for time and thus the risk of work being duplicated or even in some cases redundant, enters the picture. This of course another massive demotivator as nobody wants to be stuck working on something which will be deemed irrelevant 6 months down the line.

Management Behaviour 4: Preserving the Status-Quo
Last but not least managers often tend to see themselves as conservators or regulators of an existing order of things, the Status Quo, with which they personally identify and which provides them with rewards and a sense of who they are. The stronger the institutions and hierarchies that support a manager, the greater their self-worth, thus why change it? Thus to get things done AND preserve Status Quo it becomes a matter of tactics. Tactics of course involve both costs and benefits; they make organisations more bureaucratic and political on the expense of direct, hard work and close human bonds and relationships. This makes people feel like they are there not to do things in the best, most effective and rational way, but to prop up the ever-expanding system of individuals who reap greater benefits from the Status Quo than they do.

A great article written by Abraham Zaleznik for Harvard Business Review in 1992, titled Managers and Leaders - Are They Different? sheds a lot of light on this topic and at its time caused a furore in business schools up and down the country for suggesting that business leaders have much more in common with artists than they do with managers, but more on that soon!

The Rules of Creativity According to Kids

Recently I had the pleasure to meet Mitchel Resnick, a professor at the MIT, and listen to his presentation of the Lifelong Kindergarten project. Resnick is famous for his book Turtles Termites and Traffic Jams where he outlines how control emerges from apparently independent behaviour. Another book, by Kevin Kelly, called Out of Control also touches on the same topic and the central thesis in both works is the notion that you cannot know in advance every possible permutation of situations that can happen and subsequently devise centralised solutions for it, instead you can create adaptive intelligence by building seemingly simple layers of sensing and functionality on top of each other, enabling complex intelligence to emerge.

To put it more simply: How does a bird flock keep its movements so graceful and synchronized? Most people assume that the bird in front leads and the others follow. In fact, bird flocks don't have leaders: they are organized without an organizer, coordinated without a coordinator. And a surprising number of other systems, from termite colonies to traffic jams to economic systems, work the same decentralized way. Turtles, Termites, and Traffic Jams describes innovative new computational tools that can help people (even young children) explore the workings of such systems--and help them move beyond the centralized mindset.

His Lifelong Kindergarten project is a tribute to the value of the iterative (design) process - the power of such processes in enabling learning, creativity and innovation to take place. He explains this powerful notion in very simple terms, but they resonate across all spectrums, because of their inherent power to foster new thinking. Resnick argues that more of life should be like Kindergarten, not in the sense that it's all primary colours and very basic, but that we should strive to create more working environments, projects and creative spaces open to exploration, discovery and learning as opposed to those fixed mindset-inducing situations where people are measured as opposed to encouraged to grow, as I talk about in my previous post.

His take on the creative process is very simple, yet powerful:

1. Imagine - open your mind to possibilities, imagine, be creative - if you don't know how below are some great suggestions by kids who are part of the Computer Clubhouse project in how to come up with great ideas.
2. Create - Based on your ideas, create something!
3. Play with it, try it out, experiment with it, does it work like you intended, why? or why not?
4. Share it with others, find out what they think?
5. Reflect - what does it all mean, the experiences playing with it, sharing it, maybe something can be improved?
6. Imagine how it could be improved, what else could be done, start a new cycle of ideas.

This leads me to a great definition I came across recently - the difference between Creativity and Innovation:

• Creativity - the capacity to generate ideas

• Innovation - the capacity to generate ideas of value to others

This to me is pivotal and explains succinctly what makes great products, experiences, services and what are simply creative ways of approaching those subjects.

Now back to imagination - it can be daunting sometimes, but Resnick provides a great checklist, as developed by kids, on how to get you started:

1. Start Simple
2. Work on things you like
3. If you have no idea, fiddle around
4. Find a friend to work with, share ideas
5. It's OK to copy stuff (to give you ideas)
6. Build, take apart, rebuild
7. Lots of things can go wrong - stick with it.

Now that list of advice beautiful in its simplicity - no need to embellish it with fancy words and explanations, it is there, fair and square and totally valid whatever you are trying to get your head around!

Success is a Mindset

Why is it that some individuals become geniuses, others retire as millionaires, business empires get built seemingly from scratch and in other cases talented individuals never rise beyond mediocrity, regardless of their field or profession? Some attribute this to luck, others claim it is down to what talent we are born with or that we are either smart or not, but in all cases people are wrong. Success is not down to what you are born with, it's about what you make of the things you are born with. In other words, it's down to whether you have a fixed or a growth mindset.

A fascinating series of studies by Stanford Professor Carol S. Dweck have been collected in a newly released book titled Mindset - The New Psychology of Success   capturing the intricate, but crucial differences in how people with these mindsets look at the world and what effect that subsequently has on their lives, their chances to succeed and ultimately their happiness.

The Fixed Mindset
Believing that your qualities are carved in stone - the fixed mindset - creates an urgency to prove yourself over and over. So many people are stuck with this all-consuming goal of proving themselves - in the classroom, in their careers, and in their relationships: every situation calls for a confirmation of their intelligence, personality or character: Will I succeed or fail? Will I look smart or dumb? Will I be accepted or rejected? Will I feel like a winner or a loser? These aren't just things we pick up as we enter adulthood, but Dweck delicately points out that as a parent, you can have a profound impact on whether your child falls into the fixed or growth mindset, same in schools - in fact society at large seems to have conditioned us to think that talented people always get ahead and those smart enough don't have to work hard - they just do it. The truth is no one just does it - but how can learning even be fun when your whole being is at stake every time there is a test, a competition or a deadline?

The Growth Mindset
The people with a growth mindset have a far more open way of looking at the world and themselves in it - traits are not simply a hand you have been dealt and have to learn to live with, always trying to convince yourself and others that you have a royal flush when you are secretly worried it is a pair of tens. In the growth mindset, the hand you are dealt is just the starting point for development. It is based on the belief that your basic qualities are things you can cultivate through your efforts. Although people may differ in every which way - in their initial talents, and aptitudes, interests and temperaments - everyone can change and grow through application and experience.

Do people in this mindset believe that anyone can be anything, that anyone with proper motivation or education can become Einstein or Beethoven? No, but they believe that a person's true potential is unknown (and unknowable); that it is impossible to foresee what can be accomplished with years of passion, toil and training.

Did you know that Darwin and Tolstoy were considered ordinary children? That Ben Hogan, one of the greatest golfers of all time, was completely uncoordinated and graceless as a child? That the photographer Cindy Sherman, who has been on virtually every list of the most important artists of the twentieth century - failed her first photography course? That Geraldine Page, a great actress was advised to give it up for lack of talent?

You can see how the belief that cherished qualities can be developed creates a passion for learning. Why waste time proving over and over how great you are, when you could be getting better? Why hide deficiencies instead of overcoming them? Why look for friends or partners who will just shore up your self-esteem instead of ones who will also challenge you to grow? And why seek out the tried and true, instead of experiences that will stretch you? The passion for stretching yourself and sticking to it, even (or especially) when it is not going well, is the hallmark of the growth mindset. This is the mindset that allows people to thrive during some of the most challenging times in their lives.

Who has accurate views of their assets and limitations?
Interestingly, studies show that people are terrible at estimating their abilities. Professor Dweck and her students recently did a study to find out who most likely to have inflated views of their abilities and try for things they are not capable of? It turns out that those with the fixed mindset accounted for almost all the inaccuracy. The people with the growth mindset were amazingly accurate.

When you think about it, this makes sense. If, like those with the growth mindset, you believe you can develop yourself, then you are open to accurate information about your current abilities, even if it is unflattering. What's more, if you are oriented toward learning, you need accurate information about your current abilities in order to learn effectively. However, if everything is either good news or bad news about your precious traits - as it is with fixed-mindset people - distortion almost inevitably enters the picture. Some outcomes are magnified, others are explained away, and before you know it you don't know yourself at all. Howard Gardner, in his book Extraordinary Minds, concluded that exceptional individuals have 'a special talent for identifying their own strengths and weaknesses'. It's interesting that those with the growth mindset seem to have that talent.

The book
Rather than merely going over the differences between the two mindsets, Professor Dweck does an excellent job of also explaining the background to these mindsets, that we may in fact be riddled with both of them, but in different areas or parts of our lives. She further takes a very hands-on approach to explaining how to spot when you are in fixed mindset thinking and then how to move yourself in to the growth mindset thinking instead. The book is littered with case studies of people from all walks of life, explaining how people have conquered their fears of failure to become successful individuals. Despite Professor Dweck being an academic, the book is surprisingly straight-forward, even chatty in places, but ultimately a very approachable book and one of the most useful I have read in a long time. Not only do you learn to examine yourself and your own behaviour as a result of reading this, you also learn to be supportive to your friends, loved ones and partner, and moreover, how to turn your workplace into a positive environment where people thrive. I find my coaching skills have improved dramatically too - highly recommend reading this book!

Culture or Conditioning: How Many of Our Problems are Self-made?

Reading the excellent book by James Surowiecki on the Wisdom of Crowds (see side panel for link), one of his examples when talking about the power of convention: seating in public places, got me thinking about the role of convention and norm in determining the shape and feel of our lives, jobs and even destinies to some extent. Let me backtrack slightly: in this chapter Surowiecki talks about how powerful conventions are in making society run smoothly, they maintain order and stability in addition to reducing the amount of cognitive work you have to put in to get through the day. Quoting:

Conventions allow us to deal with certain situations without thinking much about them... and they allow groups of disparate, unconnected people to organise themselves with relative ease and an absence of conflict.

So let's think more deeply about this - how much of our lives is actually made up of conventions? How many things do we actually do and put up with, not because that's the most logical way to approach a situation or solve a problem, but because it has always been that way or we have always done it in a certain way? Let's take this example by Surowiecki:

Consider a practice that's so basic that we don't even think about it as a convetion: first-come, first-served seating in public places. Whether on the subway or on a bus or in a movie theathre, we assume that the appropriate way to distribute seats is according to when people arrive. A seat belongs, in some sense to the person occupying it. This is not necessarily the best way to distribute seats. It takes no account, for instance, of how much a person wants to sit down, It doesn't ensure that people who would like to sit together would be allowed to. And it makes no allowances - in its hard and fast form - for mitigating factors like age or illness (in practice of course people do make allowances for these factors, but only in some places. People will give up a seat on the subway to an elderly person, but they are unlikely to do the same with a choice seat in a movie theatre, or with a nice spot on the beach).. so why do we do it? To begin with, it's easy and it allows people to concentrate on some presumably more important things. The rule doesn't need coercion to work, either. And since people get on and off the train randomly, everyone has a good chance of finding a set as anyone else.

Still if sitting down matters to you, there is no law preventing you from trying to circumvent the convention by, for instance, asking someone to give up his seat. So in the 1980s, the social psychologist Stanley Milgram decided to find out what would happen if you did just that. Milgram suggested to a class of graduate students that they ride the subway and simply ask people, in a courteous but direct manner, if they could have their seats. The students laughed the suggestion away, saying things like "A person could get killed that way". But one student agreed to be the guinea pig. Remarkably, he found that half of the people he asked gave up their seats, even though he provided no reason for his request.

This was so surprising that a whole team of students fanned out on the subway and Milgram himself joined in. They all reported similar results: about half the time, just asking convinced people to give up their seat. But they also discovered something else: the hard part of the process wasn't convincing the people, it was mustering the courage to ask them in the first place. The graduate students said that when they were standing in front of a subject, "they felt anxious, tense and embarrassed". Much of the time they couldn't even bring themselves to ask the question and they just moved on. Milgram himself described the whole experience as "wrenching". The norm of first-come, first-served was so ingrained that violating it required real labour. The point of Milgram's experiment, in a sense, was that the most successful norms are not just externally established and maintained. The most successful norms are internalised.

This leads me to the title of this post - how many of our perceived problems exist because we have begun perceiving them as 'convention',  and trying to fight them literally fills us with anxiety, tension or embarrassment? This happened to me too, not that I realised it necessarily at the time. In my case our team had been together for a few years and we unwittingly became became victims of some presumptions by our boss at the time, he had made his mind up regarding each of our strengths and weaknesses and forever treated us according to these stereotypes and never would let us prove him wrong by doing something different. After a while you almost begin to believe it yourself, when you find that you are arguing a point to deaf ears. Although you persist, it is easy to gradually give up as the embarrassment of asking and labouring a point simply becomes too great and before you know it you have been conditioned to put up with it.

Someone a while ago illustrated this very well, when explaining how fleas are trained for the flea circus. This is a true story! To get fleas to jump a specific (premeditated height) what you do is you stick them in a tall tube, the height of which you would like to train your flea to jump and stick a lid on the tube. In the beginning the flea will jump as high as he likes, but hit his head/body in the lid of the tube. He will do this a few times until he learns (mainly from the pain!) that this is not a good move. Eventually he learns to jump just so high that he won't hit his head in the lid of the tube anymore. Take him out of the tube and he will still only jump as high as the height of the tube he was in.

How much are are we victims of the same thing? How much could we in fact change what happens to us by daring to pipe up, speak our minds or even just as a difficult question? True, this will demand more labour on our behalf, but may in fact lead us to happier lives, new opportunities and allowing us to grow beyond our perceived limitations.

What drives you: Extrinsic or Intrinsic motivation?

What drives us is not just a key to the sustainability of our happiness, it also defines us as people more than we think.

What is extrinsic and intrinsic motivation? Extrinsic motivation is all that external stuff that tells us we have made it. People's praise, a fat pay-check, a big watch, a nice car, a big house.. all those things have gained such importance in our lives these days, probably because of the advertising and marketing industry's triumph in convincing us we are all losers, unless we have these symbols of success. These symbols have become very much what people measure themselves up against, signs of achievement and in fact rabbits, that whippet-like youngsters mindlessly chase around a track for, not because they necessarily want it, but because a lack of self-reflection and awareness has made it possible for the world to substitute individual values with collective definitions of what one SHOULD do, have or seen to be doing.

Intrinsic motivation is the opposite. It is about finding satisfaction from inner values, learning, growth as an individual, helping others, the sense of doing something useful, taking on a social cause and so on. Being driven by intrinsic motivation is also an opportunity to be authentic - think of your life as a house. Can you knock down the walls between the rooms and be the same person in each of them - if you did, would you like being the same person in all the rooms. Would that person reflect what you are all about? If you said yes to all the questions above, chances are you are an intrinsically motivated person. You have a Strong sense of values and it is very important for you not to be in conflict with those values - any job that offered you tons of money to be in conflict with those values you would feel bad about accepting, because you would feel like you are going against yourself. Maybe these things are not as clear in your mind that you could rationally explain why you said no to a tempting offer, maybe you need to remind yourself in case you are feeling foolish when friends rolls their eyes and tell you they don't get your decision.

The extrinsic motivation is easy to get hooked on initially - the path of accumulating material wealth is clearly laid out. You know how to measure it and ironically, if you don't pursue it people wonder what is wrong with you. The only way to avoid getting caught up in materialism is to understand where your happiness and fulfilment comes from.

The thing is that even though we are not in touch with our values, our drive can ensure our success for a while, but we will be unable to sustain it. Why? Because however we want to look at it, extrinsic motivation, although strong, will never be as strong as intrinsic motivation. As we age, we will find that something is missing in our lives and that we are holding back from being the person we want to be. We need the courage and honesty with ourselves to open up and examine our lives and ask ourselves the hard questions. As we do so we become more humane and vulnerable, but also more authentic as people. It also becomes easier to cope with times when things don't go as planned, or the long-awaited promotion eludes us. We persist, because we are bigger than that.

Interestingly, it seems that at the heart of many successful companies lies the very notion of motivation too.  Built to Last  talks at length about what it is that makes companies great and it seems it is that inner sense of purpose, which is higher than merely the desire to be in profit. As the chairman of Hewlett Packard said on many occasions; "profit is what allows us to be here, but profit is not the reason for us to be here". Those are examples of intrinsically motivated companies and they seem to be able to stand the test of time much better than their more extrinsically motivated competitors.

I suppose serving the test of time is what all of us earn for ultimately - fashion, fads, hairstyles all change, our jobs change, even our lifestyles - but who we are, well, if that rests on a more solid foundation than simply with the size of our car and the trappings of our latest salary package, means we also have the fortitude to last through the hard times.

From Insights to Innovation

Just back from a conference in lovely Amsterdam on the subject of 'Converting Insights into Actionable Results', my mind buzzing with two days' worth of presentations from the likes of Coca-Cola, Volvo, Sony-Ericsson, Procter & Gamble etc. on how they use insights in their respective companies.

In some respects it really sounds like Insights is the new buzzword replacing the now so droll-sounding 'market research', but in many ways people still treat it the same. They agonise over it, mine it, look for it, pay people to come up with it, talk to consumers in hope of finding it - but it seems the true gems of insight are hard to come by. They are retrospectively self-evident, as Coca-Cola likes to put it, but that statement itself makes insights hard to spot, because the ones that are really going to make the difference aren't yet the ones that you have the luxury of hindsight to identify them with.

What also surprised me about this conference is that there is a lot of emphasis on using insights on what consumers want, need and complain about in the beginning of a process to inspire solutions, but very few, if any, have actually set up any process to detail how this feedback changes as a result of action. We use the Net Promoter Score at LEGO to drive the development of our consumer touch-points and to evaluate how successful initiatives are in improving these scores. That is a simple way of validating whether what you thought addressed a fundamental insight, actually does any such thing.

So what is the point about insights anyway? You can take a starting point in anything, to help guide a problem-solving process - but you could say there is value to be had in understanding how to better meet consumers' needs. That in itself may not actually be something you can find out by asking consumers themselves. It is down to you to collect information, process it, digest it, sleep on it, combine it with other things and collectively emerge smarter by having a more compete understanding of the multi-faceted picture, which is the reality for us all these days.

The danger with what people perceive as insights (consumer research) is that they are confused with people's opinion on things. Opinions can change very quickly and aren't really fundamentally useful for anything long-term, as they hold truth only for short periods of time. This means that although you can have a quite healthy turnover and a bunch of seemingly happy customers, they may only stay with you until there is a better alternative around the corner. Their opinions are thus next to useless in telling you what you should be developing next.

A more useful area for insights is understanding people's lifestyles. These change too, but not too often, maybe 5 times in our entire lifetime - when we we are children, teens, life after university and before children, life with children, life after children have flown the nest - the lifestyles at these different life stages are quite different and they tend to last for a few years at least, before there is a significant change. The downside is that the change can be quite radical and both opinions and preferences held whilst in the previous life-stage, may change radically as a result of moving into a new lifestyle.

The most interesting area for insights are people's values. These change hardly at all. Children up to the age of 12 tend to mirror their parents' values almost exactly, whereas ages of 12-25 are characterised by the deliberate experimentation with and independent (from parents) search for your own values. After your 25th birthday you are very unlikely to change your fundamental values on things, and thus - gaining insights of these will be much more useful long-term than anything else. One could argue that this very fact is what creates mid-life crises in people as earlier years of life and career may be linked to highly extrinsic motivations (proving to the world you have made it), whereas lasting happiness in life comes from satisfying your intrinsic motivation. If you haven't discovered that, before settling on your values, you will feel a sense of conflict later on in life, but more about that in another post.

Transforming insights into innovation is another hurdle in its' own right - on one hand it is about finding those golden nuggets, then it's about defining and creating platforms where innovation can happen - areas where there is growth potential, where your company can bring something unique to the mix and which is in-line with where your company wants to go and its brand. After identifying these areas you almost have to start all over again - sifting through your existing body of research to work out what is relevant in the light of the platforms you have identified for innovation. Some will add more depth and relevance to what you have already identified, others will highlight areas where you need to find out more and lastly, any new concept based on these platforms may themselves end up generating more insights in the process of being developed and tested.

But in many cases we are not there yet - the community specialising in insights and research are often not the people charged with implementing activities based on the insights identified, change is hard to digest among these specialists and being put in charge of it is even harder for many. Thus we still end up in the same dilemma as before: we may know what is right, but are we capable of acting upon it?

How the Power of Imagination can Alter Your Brain

Many years ago as a kid I was confronted with a particularly grumpy old lady, whose grumpiness was not merely a set of behaviours, but had etched itself deep into to the lines of her face, her posture and general demeanour. Afterwards I told my mum '... that lady should think more happy thoughts!' and we laughed together about this. Little did I know how profound this statement was until now, almost 25 years later.

What caught my eye was an experiment explained in a recent issue of TIME magazine (February 12, 2007), devoted to exploring all sorts of topics pertaining to the brain and its' functionality. Let me quote:

It was a fairly modest experiment, as these things go, with volunteers trooping into the the lab at Harvard Medical School to learn and practise a little five-finger piano exercises. Neuroscientist Alvaro Pascual-Leone instructed the members of one group to play as fluidly as they could, trying to keep to the metronome's 60 beats per minute. Every day fro five days, the volunteers practised for two hours. Then they took a test.

At the end of each day's practise session, they sat beneath a coil of wire that sent a brief magnetic pulse into the motor cortex of their brain, located in a strip running from the crown of the head toward each ear. The so-called transcranial-magnetic-stimulation (TMS) test allows scientists to infer the functions of neurons just beneath the coil. In the piano players, the TMS mapped how much the motor cortex controlled the finger movements needed for the piano exercise. What the scientists found was that after a week of practise. the stretch of motor cortex devoted to these finger movements took over surrounding areas like dandelions on a suburban lawn.

The finding was in line with a growing number of discoveries at the time showing that greater use of a particular muscle causes the brain to devote more cortical real estate to it. But Pascual-Leone did not stop there. He extended the experiment by having another group of volunteers merely think about practising the piano exercise. They played the simple piece of music in their head, holding their hands still while imagining how they would move their fingers. Then they too sat beneath the TMS coil.

When the scientists compared the TMS data on the two groups - those who actually tickled the ivories and those who only imagined doing so - they glimpsed a revolutionary idea about the brain: the ability of mere thought to alter the physical structure and function of our gray matter. For what the TMS revealed was that the region of motor cortex that controls the piano-playing fingers also expanded in volunteers who imagined playing the music - just as it had in those who actually played it.

"Mental practise resulted in a similar reorganisation of the brain", Pascual-Leone later wrote. If his results hold for other forms of movement (and there is no reason to think they don't), then mentally practising a movement, a golf swing or a swim turn could lead to mastery with less physical practise. Even more profound, the discovery showed that mental training had the power to change the physical structure of the brain.

Where does this leave us? Well, it does highlight the profoundness of statements like Be mindful of your thought's, because according to this we, ourselves, are very much in charge and can influence how our brains will perform, by either allowing a set of thoughts to take place or consciously working to direct thinking and thus mental practise in another direction.

To bring back the grumpy lady from the beginning - it seems that many factors that contribute to this lady's grumpiness are things that are out of her control. Fair enough, but what is in her control is how she chooses to see those things. If she indeed allows herself to become grumpy, then next time something, however small, happens, she will get grumpy that much faster than before. Why? Because that connection in her mind is now stronger than the path where she tries to look on the bright side of the problem, for instance. By continuing to allow this to happen over time, over and over again, she would eventually become grumpy and indeed stay grumpy, all the time. Her health, demeanour, physique, all of it would be affected by the fact that in the beginning - a bout of intellectual laziness meant that she preferred to think the grumpy thought and remain in that frame of mind, rather than making a conscious effort to train her mind to think in a different way.

So is the truth then that we become our thoughts? To a large extent you could say yes, but that message contains hope, because being conscious and self-aware of one's own behaviour and thought patterns means one can also influence those. So we should indeed strive to become better by imagining ourselves not as we are, but as we would like to be and devote time to thinking about this and acting on it, rather than try to lull ourselves into some false belief that the world and our reality is what happens to us and we have no influence over it. Far from it. We may not have influence on the physical factors of this, but we certainly have a large influence over how our brains deal with and process that information and how we behave subsequently. And those behaviours may very well influence what happens afterwards, or as people like to joke 'if it didn't kill you, it'll make you stronger'.

Interview with the CEO of LEGO on Monocle.com

Further to my recent posts on LEGO and our highly inspirational CEO, Jorgen Vig Knudstorp - here's a chance to see the man in action in an interview by Tyler Brule, the editor-in-chief of recently launched Monocle magazine, aimed at business leaders world-wide. Jorgen talks about the turnaround of LEGO, about our open-source approach to business, about creativity, and even the future of Europe - highly enjoyable and interesting, so go have a peek!

Interview with Jorgen Vig Knudstorp, CEO of LEGO Group

Music Community 2.0 - Garageband.com

No, I don't mean Apple's lovely music-making software, but a community site called GarageBand, my latest addiction introduced to me by a friend only days ago. My music-making has seen a break recently, mainly because of other distractions, but also because when you are making your own tunes just for the fun of it, there's only so much you can shower your friends with and if they don't get what you are trying to do, your inspiration can take a dip. Not so say I only do tunes to get a pat on the back, it's more that when you are making music you really appreciate the feedback from fellow musicians.

That is also the beauty of this site - GarageBand excels where so many others have failed. It builds a community around independent music, people who haven't even got signed up yet, and the act of reviewing other people's songs before you even are allowed to upload songs yourself. Ahh, easy you say - but no, comments like 'this sucks' or ' your mother was a hamster' don't cut it on this site, as before your reviews go anywhere they have to be reviewed by other users who give you points on how well you articulate your points and how useful the review was to them.

True democracy - this helps not only the good stuff to trickle up to the top in the charts running on Garageband.com, but also all the bands to get useful feedback from their peers and not just some random comments or people trying to suck up to them. You have to complete 30 reviews, before you get to post your first song so this does take a bit of time to do, but again that is the beauty of it - good things come to those who wait. Too many sites instantly give away all their goodness to the extent that you lose interest in about a week, where other sites, like this one, grow on you.

So there you are, trying to be your most verbatim best, giving useful pointers and descriptions of stuff thrown at you (yes you can choose genres! I'm sure I wouldn't give very good ratings to the Country & Western lot, not because of malice - just because it isn't my thing) and having reviewed tracks in the Jazz, Electronic and Electronica genres I must say I'm particularly impressed with the quality of Jazz on Garageband.com.

A sad discovery, however, is that this site, a little weighted to the American audience, still doesn't have a genre called Drum&Bass, which does exist in America too, usually under the name 'Jungle' and a little too aggressive in my liking - but the really good stuff you'll find under the sub-genres of Jazz-step and Intelligent Drum & Bass - the output of which mainly comes from Europe. So once I'm as far as ready to upload my own tracks onto Garageband - I shall have to decide whether my Drum&Bass numbers should be classed as 'Electronic', 'Electronica', 'Dance', or 'Techno' to comply with Garageband's collection of genres.

Not sure what I'm on about? Go check out Beatport or TrackItDown for some great examples of what Drum & Bass can offer. Needless to say - this stuff is not mainstream in the sense that if you expect to hear it on Top 40 countdowns - forget it. That is also the beauty of Garageband.com - the real stuff, coming straight to you without some record company exec deciding what you should be listening to - for the people by the people, brought to you by web 2.0 put to the service of building a great community. Amen.