Digital Digressions

Making is Connecting

A great talk by Prof. David Gauntlett at the annual LEGO Idea Conference that I wanted to share with you. More thoughts about the conference here.

Siftables - Realworld digital manipulation

This is so great - saw this at MIT a few years ago and so pleased to see how much further this concept has evolved since then. Imagine if all those complex tasks you perform today with a computer, keyboard and mouse - could be done with gestures, simply by moving blocks around? Sounds like child's play you say. Well, have a look at this, forget touch screens and go for blocks instead!

What makes collaboration successful?

Collaboration is becoming increasingly important for both innovation and business success. It is also a key enabler to protect companies in the eye of the storm. Collaboration relies on individuals being accountable to each other ethically. 4 key principles are at the heart of this: Appreciation, Trust, Commitment and Recognition. Read more>>

The History of the Internet

Contrary to popular belief Al Gore did not invent the Internet. Nor did it magically just appear one day in 1992.. in fact the history of the Internet goes back much further than that, and this neat little video tells the story of all the different elements that led to what we take for granted today, or are (in the case of some of the most prolific Twitter users) addicted to!

The death of traditional marketing

The world is changing at an unprecedented pace. Connectivity is changing how information is created and distributed and conversations between consumers build brands more than communication strategies do. It’s a cut throat world out there as this little video illustrates better than a 1000 worlds. So for those who still wonder why communities are so important and why companies need to learn to converse with their consumers rather than talk at them - look no further:

Did you know?

Right now I'm in the midst of a huge annual effort in the company to gather up insights, trends and inspiration to kick-off our annual innovation process - taking a starting point in a broad understanding of the world (both long-term and short-term) and making sure that insights are at the heart of how we innovate as a company.

When I say 'innovation' I literally mean 'the act of generating more value for the consumer, customer and the business by fulfilling a need or job to be done better than anyone else'. And to do that well, you of course need to understand what the needs and jobs to be done are out there - where can you be better, do more and be more relevant than you were even just a few months ago.

Of course it is a challenge to make sure you have as much relevant insight as hand as possible - but the second challenge is quite the opposite - the sheer quantity of information that is now available and the rate it also changes presents quite a task to ensure you don't drown people in information, but sift through it all - establish patterns and digest and present the insights in ways that make it workable for a wide range of people from different disciplines.(Remember: none of us are as smart as all of us, so the more people you can involve in the innovation effort the better chance you have of innovating both on small, medium and large scale and often you'll need all of those to be truly groundbreaking). So you need to create an inspiring and empowering experience, sparking ideas as opposed to anxiety (too much information, I can't handle it) or the opposite: boredom (I've heard it all before: what's new?).

One thing that I came across recently, is this 'Did you know' range of videos - which are very inspiring in how they contextualise the pace of change taking place right now. Below is the original video, which also talk about things we need to do as humanity to make sure we can keep abreast with the developments. I am told that the CEO of Coke recently used to get his team of senior leaders thinking about the pace of change. Below that is the other video, a 2008 update of some of the facts mentioned. So insights can be inspiring - in fact, when you really know what's going on - you realise we are all living on borrowed time and the more we understand that, the more likely we are to stay in business in the future too.

The LEGO Innovation Model

Innovation is one of those topics rife with debate and often what is innovation to one person is business-as- usual for the next. Communicating an innovation is often half the job of getting it on the shelf and innovators and designers alike, regardless of where they work, often have to be relentlesss lobbyists and use sophisticated tools of persuasion to further their concepts such as fancy presentations, multi-media, eye-popping visuals - you name it, these are the tools of the designer witch-craft. Needless to say, invariably the more skilled you are in all this, the more sought-after you are as a designer.

What we did at LEGO revamping our innovation process flew in the face of a lot of this. We recognised that some of this 'witch-craft' was getting in the way of making solid business decisions. Concepts were bought into, not because they had a solid business case behind them, but because people developed emotional attachments to them or saw it as their ticket to career advancement to push something through, regardless of the cost. To be fair, this happens all over the place, not just LEGO, but the difference is we chose to do something about it. Arguably some of this, along with the very hard work of the entire organisation in many different areas goes some way to explaining our remarkable turnaround from the doldrums in 2003 where our survival as a company was at stake. Last year, we posted our best results ever in the company's entire 75 year history. Perhaps just a little bit of that remarkable turnaround was down to this.

http://www.designcouncil.org.uk/en/About-Design/managingdesign/Design-at-LEGO/

The link above leads you to the full case study published at the Design Council site and it makes not only for some very good reading, but also is a timely reminder of the value a common tool can have in bringing different disciplines together working on innovation that combines design and business thinking instead of encouraging a war between the two. Having a shared language is tantamount to bringing people together and this model in particular has helped us have some hard-hitting, but objective debates about the merits of concepts and collectively understand how to improve them. Only by creating a shared foundation can you have any hope in trying to solve a problem together.

Train Yourself Smarter

Sounds like the ominous beginning to a self-help book, but there is more truth to the title that what you may think. There are plenty of studies out there that suggest the positive benefits of brain training, often suggesting that doing cross-words and memorising long lists is a good way to get yourself thinking smarter, faster. However, this is like saying that simply doing curls with a dumb-bell will make you an Olympic athlete. It's not purely the muscle fitness that matters, it's the whole package, so aerobic fitness, endurance, stamina you name it - all have a part to play in what finally comes together in an explosive meter sprint for the finish line. Same with your brain.

Or put more precisely, of course intellectual stimulus helps develop your brain, but so does physical training. In fact, research published from Harvard Business Review onwards, suggests that if we want to increase our mental capacity, we have to increase our physical fitness to match. This, because the brain like any other muscle in our body depends on blood flow to do its thing and the higher your metabolism and ability to sustain physical exercise at an beyond your aerobic threshold, the better 'oiled' is the machine to deliver continuously on what makes all of us smarter - learning.

It's hard to learn anything when you are tired, it's even harder when you are stressed and learning is what allows your brain to build more connections between neurons, which can potentially fire and give you ideas, helping you be more creative, think faster or even just make the right decision ahead of the wrong one. Worst of all, many of the high pressure jobs out there today requiring continuously operating at stress-levels, make learning all but impossible, so cycles of burn-out are not uncommon. We work hard, feel under pressure to do things better, smarter, faster so we get stressed, making it harder for us to learn how to do things differently, so we then get frustrated, which of course makes us even more stressed... you know the drill.

Interestingly, it is not all out of our hands however. There is a way of being methodical about it all and making it possible for you to prime yourself for some very steep learning curves, perhaps radical career changes even or new jobs in other companies where the mix of the familiar to the new is radically turned on its head and you have to spend most of your time learning, before you can become productive. This is crunch-time for many of us. Can we not just make the transition, learn what is necessary for us to deliver on the job, but also ensure we keep learning to make sure we stay ahead and begin not just doing the usual but increasingly the extra-ordinary?

Research suggests that balancing our increasingly busy work lives with some well-developed and above all challenging exercise can help us do just that.

From bikeradar A recent study from Illinois, USA gives further evidence that exercise can augment brain power.

Using 110 students researchers looked at a battery of fitness criteria (eg endurance run, push-ups, body mass index, etc) then selected the low and high scoring subjects to represent low and high fitness students [4].

All subjects were also assessed for IQ, visual cognitive speed by presenting randomly arranged pictures and activity. Additionally they were wired up to an electroencephalogram to measure brain activity across various regions of the skull. This allowed researchers to look at how fitness levels related to brain function. Their conclusion is very telling: “We found that aerobic fitness was positively associated with neuroelectric function and behavioural performance in preadolescent children engaged in a stimulus discrimination task”

Put more simply: fit children have better functioning brains. 

This research makes promotion of active pastimes and sports something we older humans should be engaged in for the well being of younger generations and it’s good for you at any stage of life too. Research on elderly subjects from 70 to 90 suggests that walking alone “is associated with a reduced risk of dementia” [5]. Across most age groups it appears that exercise of even a modest amount helps to keep the brain functioning better.

The bottom line is you don’t need to break 20 minutes for 10-miles or win a Grand Tour to gain positive mental health benefits from exercise. As Max Ehrmann wrote in his 1927 Desiderata: “Beyond a wholesome discipline, be gentle with yourself”.

And this is the point exactly, to improve fitness - not accelerate your burnout. I can personally attest to both greater learning capacity and ability to sustain higher workloads since I started a regime of road cycle training. I have gone from 30km nearly finishing me off to losing over 10kg and riding 140km the other weekend at a pace many of my fellow riders had to work hard to keep up with. This is progress for sure, but what it really has helped me do is be the reset-button to hard work, crazy travel, lots of pressure and make sure I stop, get out there, blast around the country-side getting rid of adrenaline and all those nasty stress hormones that make us sleep badly, gain weight and over time get depressed. Instead, by finding an outlet that works I am happier and have made greater leaps and bounds in terms of progress in everything I do, because as the quote goes in Starwars - it brings balance to the force.

LEGO Play - Constructing knowledge and transforming the world

Every now and so often I get these questions  like 'explain the meaning of life on one page', which get your head spinning and are entirely possible to answer, but never without spending a long time meditating on that answer first. For that particular question I have an answer, which you may or may not agree with, which is: Happiness, but I digress.. This particular question though was on the subject of explaining LEGO play, which although simple in some ways: you put a bunch of bricks together in any way you imagine - can actually be pretty complex if you delve into what is actually happening between the lines so to speak.

So if you ever wonder about that question, here's my take on an answer.. and discuss!

Most of us automatically associate childhood with play more than anything else. Children play as often as they can; play is fun. Play also contains in its very foundation all the most important elements that allow us to learn[1], to make sense of our experience and find our place and voice in the world.

 Give the mind a hand, and give the hand a system (or pattern, or language, or logic)

 LEGO play champions a “low floor, high ceiling and wide walls”[2] approach – meaning the threshold to begin play is low, but only the sky is the limit by virtue of literally endless combinations possible with LEGO bricks. The wide walls is about supporting a broad range of open-ended exploration and discovery, yet underpinning it is a shared build system creating an intuitive set of constraints challenging one to think up iterations to an originally conceived idea. It is the familiarity of this System in Play and its capacity to support infinite variation in expression that encourages exploration of the unknown and a mindset open to growth.

From the day we are born, we learn, thrive and grow in relation to others. Vygotsky in particular emphasizes the role of language and other artefacts in mediating human interaction. Children’s extraordinary talent as learners comes largely from their ability to set the stage allowing them to safely project themselves into the unknown through their imagination[3]. In expressing ideas or giving them form through building with LEGO, we make our ideas tangible and shareable with others which, in turn, helps shape and sharpen these ideas further and in that process we build our knowledge and our view of the world through our own personal experience.[4]

Creativity (as opposed to mere novelty) occurs when you think a thought that is outside the space of thought even conceivable to you[5].

Ultimately LEGO play is not just a matter of giving form to ideas, making them tangible and shareable. It is also a matter of bringing ideas and forms to life by making ourselves part of the play by acting out scenarios, events and stories. Treating our creations as if they were the ideas they stand for is what brings them closer to our mind’s reach and enables us to immerse ourselves with the situation at hand and allows us make a creative leap, in effect transforming our view of the world[6].

LEGO play welcomes young and old, experienced builders and novices, but above all it presents everyone with opportunities for creativity that are dynamic and malleable. The experience of flow[7] often associated with LEGO play is the balance between existing skills and the challenge at hand as well as between the anxiety and impatience in realising your idea.

Much like knowledge is an experience to be actively built, both individually and collectively[8], LEGO is a product that isn't finished when it leaves the factory; your imagination makes it complete. It is a creative material, a catalyst in enabling us to influence the world by building and experimenting, pushing our cognitive boundaries and advancing our collective thinking by growing us as individuals.

---

[1] Hans Henrik Knoop, The Danish University of Education

[2] Prof. Mitchel Resnick, MIT

[3] Prof. Edith Ackermann, MIT

[4] Prof. Seymour Papert, MIT

[5] Prof. Margaret Boden, University of Sussex

[6] Prof. Edith Ackermann, MIT

[7] Prof. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Claremont Graduate University

[8] Prof. Seymour Papert, MIT

Hello world... and a new book: Groundswell

No, contrary to popular belief i have not fallen off the edge of the planet (just yet) although my silence recently could have given you that impression. Things have just been bonkers, I have been travelling too much and at times been so tired I have had absolutely nothing to add, which knowing my ability to talk may actually come as a blessing to my colleagues..

Things are looking up though - for those of you who followed my efforts to use this blog to recruit someone to join me, the news is: it worked! Surprisingly social networks and namely Facebook came to my rescue in that a friend came across the blog post and thought of a friend who would be perfect for the job (and he is!) and told me to get in touch (via Facebook). Sounds serendipitous and it was - but it turned out to be the best bit of sideways recruitment I've ever done. Now we both owe him a beer so Alex, when you do stop twittering and feel the onset of a beer, let us know.

Apart from that many things are afoot, which I need to share with you in the coming weeks, but in the meantime I wanted to build on the topic of communities, social networking and the lot and introduce you to a new book, Groundswell where my colleague, Tormod Askildsen, head of community development at LEGO has been interviewed too. read a little here on the topic of AFOLs or Adult Fans of LEGO:

Groundswell on Social Media Today

Avoiding the 3 pitfalls of Innovation based on Insight

Don't get me wrong - I'm a fierce proponent of innovation based on insight. How else would you be able to frame your innovation and understand whether what you are proposing is even relevant, unless you understand the competitive landscape in which you operate? The purpose of this post is not to question whether you need insights or delve into how innovation works or how to fuel it, but instead, assuming you have a smooth running innovation machine - and you work from solid consumer insight - how come things can still go wrong?

Interestingly, cognitive science can help us here, specifically the work of Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, who three decades ago explored the benefits and risks of heuristics, or shortcuts in thinking. Heuristics help to explain the time we get it wrong even when having been presented with all the reasonable information and insight, which presumably should have led us to make the right conclusions rather than the wrong ones. There are three errors, which are common when this happens:

Anchoring error - This is when you seize on the first bit of information and basically make your mind up before you have heard the whole argument, even when some subsequent findings may be contradicting what you seized on initially.

Availability error - This is when some surprising findings emerge that remind you of a dramatic past case and you mistakenly apply mental models or conclusions from that case to new findings and rationalise them in the same way, again leading you to potentially make the wrong conclusion.

Attribution error - Despite getting a ton of insight, it can sometimes be very tempting to group these findings into stereotypes and grossly generalise, to see information as ways of confirming what you already know, rather than seeing the little inklings that your stereotypes aren't correct. Here again the information may be correct, but your use of it incorrect.

These mistakes are all very human and can easily happen, but research in other fields are showing just how dangerous these mistakes can be. In the engineering field these errors can lead to countless hours spent hunting for a technical problem in the wrong place, in the medical fields the very same mistakes can lead to gross misdiagnosis and potential patient deaths and of course in design, to redundant products and solutions. To err is human, but to err without learning from your mistakes is plain stupid.

Debunking Popular Myths about Creativity

Like innovation, there are plenty of misconceptions about creativity out there, which makes it all the more confusing when people are extolling the importance of creative skill in the 21st century. To continue my quest to unravel these complex topics this instalment is all about explaining what creativity is NOT.

• You have to be an artist to be creative There are many creative engineers, scientists, financiers etc. creativity is not a privilege reserved to poets and artists alone. Nor is it a characteristic of loners, misunderstood geniuses or crazy people. It is about invention and innovation, often by teams!
• Creativity is a talent that some have and others don’t Viewing creativity as a talent is one of the best excuses for doing nothing. True, some people have a natural curiosity; an active imagination; a relentless energy; and a desire to think differently. But these qualities can be learnt!
• Creative people are mostly rebels (won’t play the game, play mostly by their rules) As we begin to understand the ‘game’ of creativity, we know how minds form patterns [in which they then get caught] and what it takes for people to move across patterns to generate new ideas (serious play). You don’t need to be a rebel to enjoy the sense of freshness that arises from unlocking stifling thought-patterns.

• Creative people are ‘liberated’, free-spirited and child-like. The ‘liberation’ myth is based on the notion that freeing people up from their inhibitions, and encouraging them to be playful and child-like will unleash their creative fibre. Comparing adult creativity with the playfulness of children is difficult. Children are endowed with a creativity bourne out of innocence because their minds have not yet formed as many stifling patterns. The minds of adults, on the other hand, are filled with many useful patterns to be cracked and bridged for the purpose of innovation.
• Tools and techniques are confining This myth rests on the notion that systematic tool-use is contrary to the nature of creativity, which must be ‘free’. According to this view, materials should be malleable (like clay) and user-friendly (like clay). Contrary to belief, however, materials with an integrity (a ‘logic’ of their own) are often more useful in boosting a maker’s creativity - provided, of course, the maker is a fluent user of that tool!
• Creativity occurs as a single burst of genius Despite the plethora of myths pertaining to this, extensive research into both artists’ most famous works and numerous inventions attributed to a single stroke of genius have shown that instead, ideas emerge through a process of fabrication that evolves over time and through hard work

Instead creativity:

• requires both divergent and convergent thinking
• is not a matter of left brain vs. right brain alone
• involves both problem-solving and problem-setting
• balances tradition and innovation, continuity and change
• combines/blends individual and collective contributions
• involves making the familiar strange and the strange familiar

For those interested in finding out more, have look at  Explaining Creativity: The Science of Human Innovation by Keith Sawyer, which gathers all the most recent findings in the field of creativity research and also outlines how different disciplines view creativity.

Understanding Innovation

Innovation is one of those words that are very hip these days. Granted, even I have it in my title. Interestingly, it is also one of the most misunderstood words in business today, so perhaps it's worth spending a little time understanding exactly where it comes from.

If you look for the definition of creativity on Wikipedia, you'll find over 60 different versions - most will agree on the basic premises below and beyond that, the views are radically different depending on your scientific or cultural background. Summarising:

• At the simplest level, creativity is about bringing into being something that was not there before
• Creativity is a mental process involving the generation of ideas and concepts, or new associations between existing ideas or concepts
• Creativity occurs when a person thinks a thought that is outside the space of thoughts that is even conceivable to that person Margaret A. Boden

Now creativity is not innovation, although the two are frequently confused for one another. Innovation is actually made up of two halves:

• Imagination: No new ideas can be generated without a person’s abilities to ‘ think outside the box’ or envision alternative ways in her mind
• Creativity: No insights, however brilliant, will ever be realised unless they are projected out, i.e given material form

A person’s creative expression is the visible face of imagination at work.

Imagination and creativity are each faces of a coin called innovation

With this in mind, innovation becomes a process of fueling the imagination and using creativity to bring into existence the ideas at imagination gives rise to. The two go hand in hand and innovation becomes very hard if a) your imagination is stifled or b) you lack the creativity to bring to life the ideas that you've had.

Therefore fostering innovation is about a process to ensure that there is enough food and stimuli for individual and collective imaginations to engage and about creating avenues for creative expressions to materialise and be improved iteratively either by individuals or collectively. Some past blog posts to inspire you:

Avoiding Creative Apartheid 

Why Innovation cannot remain in the realm of the few

The 7 Must-Do's of Innovators

How to Encourage Innovation in Business

The Conditions for Thriving Innovation

That is not to say that these traits all need to exist in a single individual, instead they can collectively emerge in a community, in an organisation, a film crew, and so on. Successful organisations, communities or creative groups accommodate both the acquisition of stimuli to inspire the imagination of members as well as individuals with an ability to creatively realise those ideas. Collectively or individually, an essential part of innovation is the social dimension that fuels imagination and creativity as well as the process of iterative improvement. None of us are as smart as all of us.

Meet My Latest Addiction: The Yamaha Tenori-On

Ok ok so you figured I'd gone a bit quiet over Christmas - no surprise really as no doubt all of you have had Decembers similar to mine, trying to finish off everything in time for the holidays and still remain sane. Well Christmas did finally arrive and I went and got myself a long-awaited addition to my musical arsenal: the Yamaha Tenori-On, radically turning electronic music-making on its head through the innovative new user interface. I'll write more later, but here's a demo of how it works:

A couple of links: Global Yamaha site;
UK site for Tenori-On 

Avoiding Creative Apartheid

Right, here we are - new year, new challenges and not surprisingly: probably still a lot of the old challenges about too, hopefully with the wisdom (and increased girth) of some time off during Christmas, we will be able to approach those issues afresh.

So my first post of the year is dedicated to a topic capable of arising fury within me, over and over again - despite my (by now) many years within the field of design and most recently innovation. This topic, so aptly named Creative Apartheid by Gary Hamel, captures the problem very well:

Too many executives seem to believe that while few people in the company may be really clever and creative, most folks aren't. Gary Hamel

Just before Christmas in fact, did something happen that reminded me yet again of how widely spread this notion is and how it can easily become a self-fulfilling prophecy - i.e this way of thinking means that those esteemed to be 'creative' become intellectually lazy and stop making an effort to ensure that those not currently deemed to belong to the 'creative class' can make a useful contribution, thus proving that creative output invariably only comes from those already belonging to this group of esteemed individuals. Sound confusing? Let me explain by using an example of something that happened to me recently:

2 external consultants had been hired to revamp the value proposition of a service. Famed for their role in a number of award-winning commercials and one being a well-known author, this pair had the credentials of 'creative genius' written all over them, certainly within the advertising field. Personally I have nothing against the duo and find their work and ideas highly refreshing, but what happened next is what constitutes the problem.

To boost the creative work a series of brainstorms had been called, with a mixture of both individuals from the team involved in providing the service as well as a few select externals, including myself, whose insight and background was relevant to the task at hand. Coming in to the workshops I was taken aback by firstly, how linguistically focused many of the excercises were in the sense that not only did they focus on creating ideas, but also crafting these ideas into the most beautiful prose ever - all at the same time. Secondly, the sessions dived straight in, with no warm-up whatsoever to bring the team together and with a very ambitious agenda of work to achieve by the end of the day.

As you would expect, the sessions floundered and much less was accomplished in the time available than what the organisers hoped for. The two consultants, like everyone else, were completely drained by the days activities and proceeded to question why some of the individuals had been present at the meeting, when they clearnly weren't going to contribute anything. It appeared that lines had got crossed between the leaders of the group and the consultants as to what was the outcome of the session and who should be involved. Some of the comments from the consultants annoyed me hugely and I began to think in detail about what had happened and why I had adjusted to their working methods and some of the others hadn't.

1. Relaxing before innovating - check out some 'non-method' methods of how to get people to drop some of the familiar office-induced tensions and anxieties that are the enemy of any creative brainstorm Running Creative Brainstorms
2. Beware of imposing your own ideal way of working on others - advertising as an industry seems to be extremely word-heavy, rewarding to people with linguistic intelligence and capability, but those who lean more towards visual or spatial intelligence, or indeed are capable technological innovation sometimes struggle expressing their ideas purely in words. Be aware of your own comfort zone in terms of not just working style, but also jargon and lingo pertaining to your own professional field and how that can turn off people who aren't doing the same work as you. What are the things that all of you have in common? Concentrate on that to bring together a diverse team and build on everybody's strengths rather than exposing their weaknesses.
3. Don't divide people into the creative and non-creative, not even implicitly - a Freudian slip earlier in the day from one of the leaders made the rest of the day excruciating to say the least. When discussing how the groups should be split, rather than just talking names, the person emphasised the importance of having at least one 'creative' per group, this way of talking of course again deriving from the advertising industry's way of talking collectively about creatives when in fact meaning art directors and copy writers, yet to non-advertising folk this sounds like dividing people into creative and non-creative people. Again, when this is the perception, it is needless to ask why anyone would bother contributing.
4. Concentrate on one task at a time - Again, break things down into manageable-sized chunks - if you are a team with a track record of previously working together your chunks can be bigger, but your innovation may only be incremental as being familiar with each other means your thinking may already have got stuck in some grooves. To avoid this manifestation of group-think, you could adopt a role-play approach, where each of you champions the cause of a specific group relevant to the problem you are trying to solve, for instance consumers, marketers, designers, programmers etc. If you are a diverse team, the chunks need to be smaller, yet your innovation can potentially be bigger, because fresh pairs of eyes on old problems can help see things from new angles.
5. Plan accordingly - if it is a huge task you are embarking on, and you have a diverse team to help you with it, one brainstorm or workshop may not be enough, but you instead need to plan a sequence of them, progressively narrowing down the scope. Again, the earlier you start your planning the more options you have at your disposal.
6. The facilitator often does the most work, but invisibly so make sure you have one and that they understand what is expected of them and why the others are there - The best facilitators just make things happen and that's how it seems, but the reality is very much that of the swan in the lake, above the water graciously gliding past, making it seem effortless while feet paddle feverishly under water to keep the bird moving. That is the facilitator for you and with a diverse team the facilitator often has to be the one capturing comments, building on people's comments, coaxing input from the more quieter team members, keeping time, the lot. A task not to be underestimated and often the success of any brainstorm is down to how good the facilitation was.
7. If language is an issue, focus on expressing ideas, not composing the most lyrical prose - Capturing ideas and phrasing them for most conceptual impact are two different things and require two very different modes of thinking: ideas need your mind to be in open-mode, thinking freely, broadly and making lateral links as well as conceptual jumps. Finding the best adjectives to describe a product you already know what it is, requires your mind to be in closed mode - analysing, evaluating. Often people stuggle to leap from one mode to the next in the same session, so it's a good idea to split them apart, forcing everyone to be in the same mode all at the same time.
8. Allow contribution and input, even when the official session has ended - particularly if this is your own team you are drawing upon, it's no good if you normally tell them to zip it when they have a suggestion or idea for you and then you ask them when it suits you. Walk the talk and allow people to be part of the beginning as well as the end. Sometimes you can't make amendments anymore despite people coming up with an excellent idea, but grace them with an honest explanation of the situation and if possible, think up a way of using their idea somewhere where it still can make a difference. If you do that, you find people are more willing to help you too.
9. Having the idea is the easy bit, implementing it is often hard - that means making sure the ideas live on beyond the brainstorm and they will, if you have observed the rules above. People you have involved will have a vested interest in making sure the ideas survive and are acted upon, because they were part of creating them, but invariably it will take a lot of hard work, not just from you, but from everyone - so what better than having a team around willing to help!

So creative brainstorms can work - and pooling people's ideas, regardless of background and don't you believe anyone that tells you the opposite. In fact, if the brainstorm didn't come out as planned, rather than blame others, it's worth taking a long, hard look at yourself to see if you indeed committed some of the mistakes catalogued above. Fix the problem and try again. As Gary Hamel puts it:

When you look at companies like Toyota, you see their ability to mobilize the intelligence of the so-called ordinary workers. Going forward, no company will be able to afford to waste a single iota of human imagination and intellectual power.

What Makes a Good Toy?

All the recent attention focused on the toy industry courtesy of safety concerns seem to have not just caused any Chinese-manufactured toys to be viewed with suspicion and sent parents trawling through the Internet in search of advice on the matter, but also caused a wider shift in spending patterns link as parents increasingly worry about finding something for their little ones this Christmas, which won't get recalled in a few months time when someone licks it and finds it poisonous.

This in my mind doesn't just touch on ensuring even better quality control on toys, but brings in to sharp focus two potentially incompatible value-systems: on one hand - the desire for safety and quality; on the other hand - the (almost) accepted transitory nature of many products (temporary diversion rather than long-term joy) and the subsequent unwillingness of some to spend money on products where safety and quality are taken extremely seriously.

Certainly in the toy industry nobody likes to point fingers and it is a matter of ensuring that each manufacturer takes responsibility for this, however with a lot of the focus on price, China has in recent years been a very tempting solution for many trying to keep abreast with a larger consumer trend of continuously wanting everything faster and cheaper than before. Quality takes time, it costs too and that can be a problem if your company's business model can't support the investment in it.

Back to lamenting toys I was recently asked what in my opinion makes a good toy, so here's my personal list of criteria:

1. Age appropriate - small children in particular like to put everything in their mouth and are very  tactile in their play and exploration of the world - that means that the materials used and size are essential in making the toy safe. Older children have better fine motor skills and have stopped 'chewing' on everything to figure them out so can better handle small pieces.

2. Hands on - minds on: children's gross and fine motor skills along with coordination mature earlier than other parts of their brain so it is important that their toys stimulate movement and coordination, both on large and small scale. The ability of the toy to engage your mind and imagination is essential as children learn about both themselves and the outside world through their imagination.

3. Easy to learn but challenging to master - this gives the toy longevity and guarantees interest over time.

4. Many ideas and opportunities - it is important to be able to learn through the toys, but if they do not encourage experimentation and idea generation the learning will be short-lived

5. Fun alone and together - being alone and together is important for kids, both with their own peers but also with their parents, so toys that can handle both enable role-play and storytelling that kids both love to hear and to do for themselves, alone and together.

Now some toys tick all the boxes, others only some, but it's important to remember than there are many kinds of toys, each with their own strengths and a good mix is important too, but above all they must all encourage play, the more the better!

 

 

Earning the Affinity of Your Consumers

Some years ago I came across an excellent paper by Juan Pablo Valencia and Taryn Westberg at the London Business School, where extensive investigations were conducted into how experiences people have with brands influence their perception of it and how best to generate value from Brands through experiences.

Their paper (Experience and the Brand) discusses this in elaborate detail, which makes for some interesting reading in itself and one of their conclusions is to use a consumer affinity pyramid where you place your consumers based on the level of their affinity for your company. The people who love your brand are at the top and those who hate you are the very bottom. Interestingly people at different levels of the pyramid have specific consumption patterns, thus generating different revenue for the company. Moreover, as they move to higher segments the bring more value in the following ways:

• Higher consumption rate and repeat usage
• More willingness to pay price premiums
• Longer relationship with the brand (decreased churn)
• Word of mouth/brand ambassadorship
• Community Effects

There are alternative models to the one just described. For example, brand impact can be evaluated by calculating the advertising and PR expenditure that would be needed to get the same results in terms of changes in customer behaviour. The concept is simpler, but can only be used for comparative purposes. Alternatively, if customers can be tracked through CRM or other means, then the actual impact on sales can be measured. Sales impact can then be used to determine effectiveness with an ROI model.

So then we get to the interesting part. If this is indeed the case - the big question then becomes: how do you influence people's movement upwards in the pyramid? What creates higher levels of affinity in consumers? Is it a fancy marketing campaign? Is it friendly staff? Is it the ability to customise your own products? Well, as far as I can tell - it is not that simple. Despite the transformative power of experiences (as extolled in the paper), consumer affinity is made up of a range of factors, if one is to consider affinity from a long-term perspective, where it can truly have an impact on the company and its sustainability. Ultimately there is no gimmick solution to this problem, but in fact it is one that demands a profound re-evaluation of the company as a whole, what it is, what it stands for and how it treats its supporters: the consumers.

Broadly speaking we know that higher levels of affinity means people have a deeper emotional bond with a company. Experiences that are meaningful have a capacity to create an emotional bond by virtue of our participation in them, which moves us from objective observers into being active participants. If the experience we participate in is a positive one, or even transformative, our affinity will be higher than it would be if say, we just heard about it from someone else. That means we care more.

We care about the product and the company, we worry when things are not going well, we get more disappointed than average consumers if we are let down and we are also more willing to personally contribute to the company with content, ideas or even help our fellow consumers with advice and ideas. So with this in mind, the responsibility of companies is huge in making sure to respect and value every single last contact with its consumers and not consciously and repeatedly fail its most staunch supporters. That is a radically different approach than merely keeping a bunch of shareholders and investors happy. It's about ensuring every one is happy and consumers first and foremost. So can that even be possible I hear you asking?

Why not? The rate of change in technology, software, CRM and the growing number of online contacts a company receives, it should no longer be impossible to consolidate all these connections into user profiles that can be used, not for endless marketing campaigns and bombarding users with offers, but as a means of going back to basics: of listening and anticipating and respecting, being deserving of that emotional bond people have with you. And for that, you as a company have to behave more like a trusted reliable friend that some faceless bully in the playground that sometimes has a great offer to tempt you with and next minute leaves you in some quagmire of call-centre hell and bad service. The question is as a company: are you worthy of your consumers' affinity?

Visions of the Future: Understanding Trends

Back to that time of the year again, I'm busy collaborating with people across the company and externally to pull together insights and inspire a new bout of business development for next year. It's a fascinating subject, mapping the competitive landscape around any company, because some things you can control and knowing about them in advance will really help and other things, well, they just happen and sooner or later some of it or all of it will have an impact on you too, whether you like it or not.

For my own sanity's sake I keep following a 3-pronged approach when it comes to understanding trends, an approach I originally came across courtesy of Unilever and having chewed on it for quite some time, I've come to the conclusion that it is a very powerful way to understand the difference between cause and effect in the arena of trends.

The word 'Trends' in itself has become somewhat of an overused term and tons of institutions now deliver trend reports of various calibres, sometimes causing more confusion than clarity and this because everything is muddled together: Macroeconomic drivers meeting consumer anxieties in some niche expression through one single on-line service provider isn't exactly a trend, it is an expression, which may be the correct expression to capitalise on a nascent consumer trend, but it's longevity as a business is dependent on other factors in addition than the survival of the potential trend that spawned it. Thus it has to be evaluated as an expression, not as the mother trend - if that makes sense?

Back to the 3-pronged approach: Firstly we must seek to understand

1. Drivers
• External drivers - these are out of the control of individual consumers, but somewhere along the line they may have an impact on your life. Examples are the global economy, climate change, political risk and so on.
• Internal drivers - These are value, aspiration, needs and demands driven and influence the life of consumers.
2. Trends - trends are really about how consumers respond to the above drivers through their behaviour. It's not about whether black is in our out, it's more about understanding that fundamentally our needs don't change that quickly, but external and internal drivers will create new opportunities for those needs to be met, which conveniently leads us onto the third point:
3. Expressions - These are ways in which the trends are expressed in consumers' day to day lives, examples illustrating how businesses for instance are exploiting the trends today.

So bearing this distinction in mind, it is easier when you come across anything labelled a 'trend' to understand whether this is in fact an external or internal driver, a consumer response to the former in the form of behaviour or indeed an expression of the trend in the form of a business.

By keeping a keen eye out for the drivers, both internal and external over time it becomes possible to stay ahead of the curve so to speak, to anticipate trends and expressions, rather than merely notice more and more obscure new businesses cropping up. This is hard and of course it helps constantly being on the look-out for many different kinds of information, sources and so on, but also consciously engaging in monitoring something will gradually make you more sensitive to small changes and being able to identify the crucial indicators in a field that tell you when something is about to change.

Exoforce for Real: Fully Functioning Exoskeleton for Humans

Some years ago I worked on LEGO Exoforce and inspired by the exoskeleton that Sigourney Weaver uses in the Alien movie, in addition to the Manga inspirations of Gundam and NeonGenesis Evangelion, the exoskeleton robots operated by tiny mini-figures took form.

Little did I know that only a year or two later, the technology would be available not just to play with as an idea in a toy, but something for us to try out for real. This video demonstrates the exoskeleton and sadly, here it is shown as something for the military to use, whereas I could see tons and tons of uses for it to help people in their day-to-day activities. Imagine no longer needing a wheel chair, just step into your exo and off you go.. dancing, running, walking up the stairs, playing ball - you name it.

The Business Jargon Buster

Back from my lengthy travels this week I picked up the Economist's The World in 2008 again, a report I always look forward to reading as it is diverse in points of view and always packed with insight, in addition to being spiced up with the occasional slice of current affair humour thrown in for good measure.

Andrew Palmer's The Good Jargon guide is an excellent example of just such an article - close enough to remind all of us of the buzzwords we use, but witty enough to make us laugh at ourselves too. Some of my favourite witticisms from this articles is the references to globalisation. First everything was supposed to become the same (Coca-colonisation), then local differences made all the difference (localisation). Now some things are the same and others different (glocalisation) and because of Thomas Friedman's bestseller we are even debating 2D vs 3D - is the world flat or spiky? It will appear insightful in a business meeting to state that the world is round - but a 10-year old could have told you that.

Also the references to emerging markets by acronym means Brazil, Russia, India and China are a BRIC, China and India are Chindia and my favourite, Palmer is rooting for Spain and Latin America to be referred to collectively as SPLAT, I love it. Furthermore it's not about making heads or tails about stuff no more - instead it's the size of your tail that matters, apparently. The Long Tail is of course the theory of how niche audiences can be catered for through all of us being increasingly connected on-line and thus coupling supply and demand is easier than ever before. The thinking is that lots of niche products are more important than a few blockbusters, but then we have Fat and Heavy Tails where extreme events occur more frequently than theory predicts, but if you do away with tails altogether and go for a Black Swan, you are into territory that is wholly unexpected.

I also totally agree with the point of labelling anything 2.0 - yes we've heard about web 2.0, but do we really need books like The World is Flat 3.0, (making you think of infinite software upgrades where there's no discernible difference, but somehow you still have to pay for it) Lunch 2.0 (Silicon Valley canteens serving free lunches) or Government 2.0 (where citizens become more involved) - seems like we are creating a whole league of BS 2.0 too? Or what about Greenwash - the environmental version of whitewash, or forgetting marketing campaigns and going for 'poking' people instead. It's a ridiculous world out there and somehow we need to describe all these ideas, but it appears that there is an entire industry devoted to dreaming up silly names for things, massclusivity anyone?