Social Hallucinations

(Don't) Hold a meeting

It is a good post to start the Monday and hopefully change something this week. Stop meetings for meetings sake. Meetings have become the solution. We have problem on agenda let's meet.

Meetings can be good if only everyone is prepared and there is clear plan on how to follow up. So don't waste this week and all the upcoming weeks on fruitless meetings. Let's do something.

Via Johnnie Moore

 

What's your favorite working space?

Can you imagine this is the real working space!? Someone is really sitting there and working. Amazing and so calming.

What I love about it, is the lack of ditractions around and the omnipresent calmness. This is you and your thoughts. Wonderful. I wish I could spend there a few working days. I imagine that it is impossible to get stressed out in there :) Idyllic.

Here is my working space. I like being surrounded by things I like and things where I can bring inspiration. Quiet and safe. It means a lot to me where I work, though the best ideas come to me while I am walking.

What's your favorite working space?

The more focus on profit, the less good ideas

What motivates us...

I work for free

Dictractions foster creativity

It was good to read this article in Wired:'How Twitter and Facebook Make Us More Productive' that breaks the army of voices who present how distracting Facebook and Twitter can be and how much loss they generate for companies. This is just a one side of story as "social networks are particularly well suited to stoking the creative mind"

 
From my own experienced being focused for 8 hours on power points slides or excel sheets doesn't take me really productive. On the contrary it imprisons me in the fast tracks of routine thinking. There is nothing more inspiring than sharing thoughts with other people, finding impulses from completely different and not really connected with the problem you are working on sources. Our minds need to be kept fit and challenged to work properly.So stay connected and never stop exploring, sharing and learning. Play. Create. Share.

Photo by Adrian Wallet

The 6 types of ideas

via Tom Fisburne 

Do We Really Have to Meet?

Meetings are nice but are all they really necessary? It is very valid question on Monday morning and calender full of meetings. Sitting in meetings is often a nice time - waster, break from work where you sit and...nothing really happens except of talking. 

How to change the meeting culture and cut down the unproductive hours of just sitting and talking. Here are a few tips from Seth Godin

1. Understand that all problems are not the same. So why are your meetings? Does every issue deserve an hour? Why is there a default length?

Schedule meetings in increments of five minutes. Require that the meeting organizer have a truly great reason to need more than four increments of real-time face time.

Require preparation. Give people things to read or do before the meeting, and if they don't, kick them out.

Remove all the chairs from the conference room. I'm serious.

If someone is more than two minutes later than the last person to the meeting, they have to pay a fine of $10 to the coffee fund.

Bring an egg timer to the meeting. When it goes off, you're done. Not your fault, it's the timer's.

The organizer of the meeting is required to send a short email summary, with action items, to every attendee within ten minutes of the end of the meeting.

Create a public space (either a big piece of poster board or a simple online page) that allows attendees to rate meetings and their organizers on a scale of 1 to 5 in terms of usefulness. Just a simple box where everyone can write a number. Watch what happens.

If you're not adding value to a meeting, leave. You can always read the summary later.

It is a good way to start the new year at work, the year that is about doing the meaningful things. 

via Tom Fishburne

Rethink the way how you run your business

Traditional rewards aren't always as effective as we think. Incentives block creativity.

Time to build business based on the knowledge of human motivations, it is what can lead to creating the change and making a difference.

More hyphen - More perspective

What qualities make a good planner?

Passionate practitioner, who are interesting and are interested in the world around and put the madness in the method and treat their job as a hobby

via PSFK

The Near Future Agency

"(...) the future agency becomes virtual and led by superhero planners and creative thinkers. Behind the superheroes, it's all virtual. All shared."

(John Ebbert)

The media fragmentation, increasing number of channels and ways to communicate with people that live liquid lives is followed by the increasing number of agencies that offer their "expert" service to

Image by michael.heiss via Flickr

solve a piece of your communication problem and get a piece of marketing budget. Roles get blurry. Advertising agencies think media, media agencies think creativity, etc. More experts emerge. More silos get built. We can't face the near future with the silos organizations that are characterized with the lack of flexibility.

What we can do to survive? Implement flexibility, strong leadership and work the way that reflects how people live and think - seamless. Ordinary people don't think in communication channels, they seek for the ways to satisfy and fulfill their needs.

The seamless life of agency can be reflected in the way we organize ourselves into flexible and versatile teams and collaboration across different disciplines is the key. 

After all, we together in the business of helping our clients to connect with people.

More interesting related read: Markets are Networks

DONE is the Engine of MORE

"There are three states of being: not knowing, action and completion" This is how The Cult of Done Manifesto begins.

It is all about optimizing your actions to get things done, to move on. It is about effectiveness and creating things. 

Personally I enjoy the state of creating, wandering, asking questions and exploring, the tickling feeling of uncertainty but there is always the moment when the urge to move on and see the thoughts taking shape emerges. Then it is all about getting things done, cause it "is the engine of more". When you are done with one project, you can start another one and begin the new exploration. Besides if you want to know who you are, don't ask. Do something. Doing will define you.

There is Life After Advertising

Trailer for the new movie about advertising - Lemonade. More than 70,000 advertising professionals have lost their jobs in this Great Recession. Lemonade is about what happens when people who were once paid to be creative in advertising are forced to be creative with their own lives. It is uplifting and fantastic to see how they find their new call. It is also fascinating to hear how liberating for them was to lose the job and get time to eat, see family and "do things that matter".

What's Your Job

Weekend Quote

Ideas Generation / Brainstorming Sessions

This is the first guest post on my blog by great and very creative guy Michael Trenerry who have chosen Finland over Australia. You can read more about Michael and his company iKONIC here as well as follow him on Twitter and read his blog to get more of his wisdom. Enjoy!

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Over my time I have sat in many idea generation or brainstorming sessions both within media and advertising agencies, hotshops and on the client side or with the client. These sessions can be to generate ideas for an individual campaign, a long-term strategy, a product launch or they might very well be for your next new business pitch.

Amongst these sessions though, only very few have been in my opinion highly successful. The reason is quite simple. There has been a lacking brief, lack of structure, no leadership and no real collaboration.

The Brief
Mentioned in my earlier blog, the brief is vital. What exactly are we aiming to achieve from the session. What are our objectives & what do we already know. Sessions take time and that means money for you, so lets be sure that we have a good brief that outlays exactly what we intend to achieve during the session.

Structure and Process
I don’t want to take the fun out of these sessions because that is what they are all about but you do need some structure to tackle the brief. The structure does a few things. It ensures we maximise the time we spend in these sessions constructively. It ensures everybody gets to put ideas in. It ensures we cover all the points we need to and most of all it ensures that when we leave & finish the meeting, we leave with an action list of clear indicators & the key persons involved in ensuring those tasks are met.

A good session while structured doesn’t really feel structured. Like the term brainstorm, we start by dumping down lots of ideas. From these ideas we decide which are the most innovative and interesting and which best meet the objectives of the brief. When we have a few good ideas we can move forward – expand them, dig deeper, pull out insights, and create example case studies and so on until we feel we have our winning idea. The winning idea will often come in a second or third session after we have analyzed our key ideas in more detail.

Make sure in all cases before a meeting is over that everybody who has attended agrees with the idea & that everybody is cleary aware of what they are required to do to get to the next stage.

Session leader
In all cases, there should be a person in the session that is the session leader – the person who structures the workshop, understands the brief in minute detail, a person that listens to others, mediates and writes ideas down. This person should be skilled in running ideas/brainstorming sessions and a creative mind. The person should help the group move along in a clearly structured manner.

Without this person, we essentially normally end up having lots of ideas but no central focus – people walk away from the session with a smile but when they sit down, they don’t really know what next…

Collaboration
I have been involved with many new business pitches. The great ones show real collaboration, they show that the team worked brilliantly together and they all believe in the idea and their ability to deliver it. The successful sessions are fun, a birth of great ideas from everybody and in the end a united approach that shows very clear collaboration. The unsuccessful ones seem to have people working in modules – one digital guy creating digital ideas, one print person creating print ideas and one television person creating television ideas – no integration between the overall idea. The idea should show that all parties have worked together seemlessly on all aspects of the project.

I could continue to write more about good and bad sessions but to wrap it up, just remember what these sessions are for! Its business, we all have limited time and resources so plan & think strategically at all times BUT also remember to be super creative – don’t let the structure and process ruin the creativity required to build great ideas…