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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…

10 rules for surviving an unpredictable world

Cover via Amazon

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of The Black Swan, gives his 10 rules for surviving an unpredictable world with dignity:

1 Skepticism is effortful and costly. It is better to be skeptical about matters of large consequences, and be imperfect, foolish and human in the small and the aesthetic.

2 Go to parties. You can’t even start to know what you may find on the envelope of serendipity. If you suffer from agoraphobia, send colleagues.

3 It’s not a good idea to take a forecast from someone wearing a tie. If possible, tease people who take themselves and their knowledge too seriously.

4 Wear your best for your execution and stand dignified. Your last recourse against randomness is how you act — if you can’t control outcomes, you can control the elegance of your behavior. You will always have the last word.

5 Don’t disturb complicated systems that have been around for a very long time. We don’t understand their logic. Don’t pollute the planet. Leave it the way we found it, regardless of scientific ‘evidence’.

6 Learn to fail with pride — and do so fast and cleanly. Maximize trial and error — by mastering the error part.

7 Avoid losers. If you hear someone use the words ‘impossible’, ‘never’, ‘too difficult’ too often, drop him or her from your social network. Never take ‘no’ for an answer (conversely, take most ‘yeses’ as ‘most probably’).

8 Don’t read newspapers for the news (just for the gossip and, of course, profiles of authors). The best filter to know if the news matters is if you hear it in cafes, restaurants... or (again) parties.

9 Hard work will get you a professorship or a BMW. You need both work and luck for a Booker, a Nobel or a private jet.

10 Answer e-mails from junior people before more senior ones. Junior people have further to go and tend to remember who slighted them.

You can find the whole article here timesonline site.

It's good add on to my previous post on life being a succession of moments.

Manifesto for Growth

Written in 1998 by Bruce Mau - a designer and innovator. He listed those 43 simple points that can be applied as your way of working manifesto. Reading this is a good way for starting 2009.

1. Allow events to change you. You have to be willing to grow. Growth is different from something that happens to you. You produce it. You live it. The prerequisites for growth: the openness to experience events and the willingness to be changed by them.
2. Forget about good. Good is a known quantity. Good is what we all agree on. Growth is not necessarily good. Growth is an exploration of unlit recesses that may or may not yield to our research. As long as you stick to good you'll never have real growth.
3. Process is more important than outcome. When the outcome drives the process we will only ever go to where we've already been. If process drives outcome we may not know where we’re going, but we will know we want to be there.
4. Love your experiments (as you would an ugly child). Joy is the engine of growth. Exploit the liberty in casting your work as beautiful experiments, iterations, attempts, trials, and errors. Take the long view and allow yourself the fun of failure every day.
5. Go deep. The deeper you go the more likely you will discover something of value.
6. Capture accidents. The wrong answer is the right answer in search of a different question. Collect wrong answers as part of the process. Ask different questions.
7. Study. A studio is a place of study. Use the necessity of production as an excuse to study. Everyone will benefit.
8. Drift. Allow yourself to wander aimlessly. Explore adjacencies. Lack judgment. Postpone criticism.
9. Begin anywhere. John Cage tells us that not knowing where to begin is a common form of paralysis. His advice: begin anywhere.
10. Everyone is a leader. Growth happens. Whenever it does, allow it to emerge. Learn to follow when it makes sense. Let anyone lead.
11. Harvest ideas. Edit applications. Ideas need a dynamic, fluid, generous environment to sustain life. Applications, on the other hand, benefit from critical rigor. Produce a high ratio of ideas to applications.
12. Keep moving. The market and its operations have a tendency to reinforce success. Resist it. Allow failure and migration to be part of your practice.
13. Slow down. Desynchronize from standard time frames and surprising opportunities may present themselves.
14. Don’t be cool. Cool is conservative fear dressed in black. Free yourself from limits of this sort.
15. Ask stupid questions. Growth is fueled by desire and innocence. Assess the answer, not the question. Imagine learning throughout your life at the rate of an infant.
16. Collaborate. The space between people working together is filled with conflict, friction, strife, exhilaration, delight, and vast creative potential.
17. ____________________. Intentionally left blank. Allow space for the ideas you haven’t had yet, and for the ideas of others.
18. Stay up late. Strange things happen when you’ve gone too far, been up too long, worked too hard, and you're separated from the rest of the world.
19. Work the metaphor. Every object has the capacity to stand for something other than what is apparent. Work on what it stands for.
20. Be careful to take risks. Time is genetic. Today is the child of yesterday and the parent of tomorrow. The work you produce today will create your future.
21. Repeat yourself. If you like it, do it again. If you don’t like it, do it again.
22. Make your own tools. Hybridize your tools in order to build unique things. Even simple tools that are your own can yield entirely new avenues of exploration. Remember, tools amplify our capacities, so even a small tool can make a big difference.
23. Stand on someone’s shoulders. You can travel farther carried on the accomplishments of those who came before you. And the view is so much better.
24. Avoid software. The problem with software is that everyone has it.
25. Don’t clean your desk. You might find something in the morning that you can’t see tonight.
26. Don’t enter awards competitions. Just don’t. It’s not good for you.
27. Read only left-hand pages. Marshall McLuhan did this. By decreasing the amount of information, we leave room for what he called our "noodle."
28. Make new words. Expand the lexicon. The new conditions demand a new way of thinking. The thinking demands new forms of expression. The expression generates new conditions.
29. Think with your mind. Forget technology. Creativity is not device-dependent.
30. Organization = Liberty. Real innovation in design, or any other field, happens in context. That context is usually some form of cooperatively managed enterprise. Frank Gehry, for instance, is only able to realize Bilbao because his studio can deliver it on budget. The myth of a split between "creatives" and "suits" is what Leonard Cohen calls a 'charming artifact of the past.'
31. Don’t borrow money. Once again, Frank Gehry’s advice. By maintaining financial control, we maintain creative control. It’s not exactly rocket science, but it’s surprising how hard it is to maintain this discipline, and how many have failed.
32. Listen carefully. Every collaborator who enters our orbit brings with him or her a world more strange and complex than any we could ever hope to imagine. By listening to the details and the subtlety of their needs, desires, or ambitions, we fold their world onto our own. Neither party will ever be the same.
33. Take field trips. The bandwidth of the world is greater than that of your TV set, or the Internet, or even a totally immersive, interactive, dynamically rendered, object-oriented, real-time, computer graphic–simulated environment.
34. Make mistakes faster. This isn’t my idea -- I borrowed it. I think it belongs to Andy Grove.
35. Imitate. Don’t be shy about it. Try to get as close as you can. You'll never get all the way, and the separation might be truly remarkable. We have only to look to Richard Hamilton and his version of Marcel Duchamp’s large glass to see how rich, discredited, and underused imitation is as a technique.
36. Scat. When you forget the words, do what Ella did: make up something else ... but not words.
37. Break it, stretch it, bend it, crush it, crack it, fold it.
38. Explore the other edge. Great liberty exists when we avoid trying to run with the technological pack. We can’t find the leading edge because it’s trampled underfoot. Try using old-tech equipment made obsolete by an economic cycle but still rich with potential.
39. Coffee breaks, cab rides, green rooms. Real growth often happens outside of where we intend it to, in the interstitial spaces -- what Dr. Seuss calls "the waiting place." Hans Ulrich Obrist once organized a science and art conference with all of the infrastructure of a conference -- the parties, chats, lunches, airport arrivals — but with no actual conference. Apparently it was hugely successful and spawned many ongoing collaborations.
40. Avoid fields. Jump fences. Disciplinary boundaries and regulatory regimes are attempts to control the wilding of creative life. They are often understandable efforts to order what are manifold, complex, evolutionary processes. Our job is to jump the fences and cross the fields.
41. Laugh. People visiting the studio often comment on how much we laugh. Since I've become aware of this, I use it as a barometer of how comfortably we are expressing ourselves.
42. Remember. Growth is only possible as a product of history. Without memory, innovation is merely novelty. History gives growth a direction. But a memory is never perfect. Every memory is a degraded or composite image of a previous moment or event. That’s what makes us aware of its quality as a past and not a present. It means that every memory is new, a partial construct different from its source, and, as such, a potential for growth itself.
43. Power to the people. Play can only happen when people feel they have control over their lives. We can't be free agents if we’re not free.

Hat tip to John Moore

Life is too short...

Image by Midnight-digital via Flickr

“ Life’s too short to hate what you do all day.
Life’s way to short to make mediocre stuff.”
- Seth Godin, Tribes

Amazing View from my Office

Innovation Doesn't Happen During Office Hours

I had a fantastic afternoon yesterday with a bunch of people that mad my whole evening bubble with energy and good ideas. Thanks Stephanie & Carl, Karim and Joachim! If only all people were bold and open minded as you ... :-)

Many things have been said about the creativity and innovation. In Denmark, you even have a Innovation and Entrepreneurship Line at business school that will teach you how to be innovative...hmm. Can it?

Being innovative or creative is a mindset and it doesn't happen from 9.00 to 17.00, at least not for me and a few others. According to my experience and the piece of research I've found claims that if you want to get some ideas, you need to stay up.

'Early to bed, early to rise, makes you healthy, wealthy and wise', says proverb, which I've never believed in and reminds me rather about Max Weber's Protestant Ethic.

Being innovative is not just staying up late and night, it is also spending time with other people, being inspired by others who dare to color outside the lines. I am fascinated to observe the reinforcing effect such  meetings has on the participants. One word leads to an idea, the one idea leads to another, the ideas become to concept and then someone bold says, let's do it! And the snowball gets rolling on.
More brains are clever than the one. Maybe not strictly clever but the brains can influence each other and provoke the incredible streams of ideas. All you need to do is to stay open and listen to others and let your imagination rule. There will be time for rational selection of ideas afterward. The common sense so often destroys great ideas as it doesn't allow them to mature.

After my meeting yesterday I recalled the friends gatherings I was participating when I was in high school. We could sit hours and talk about the craziest stuff provoked by others. It was like chain reaction and the more insane ideas get the more we talked, the more we created. We weren't afraid to say something stupid. The latter fear embraces us totally when we become grown ups. Shame!

My key to creativity is to shake off the fear of saying something wrong, putting aside the common sense for a while and hang out with people who already did it, leaving the office and walking, and of course stay late up in the night.

How do you open the doors to being innovative?

Leading the Tribe

 ...is the new green. I am about to finish reading (listening) to Seth Godin's new book Tribes (you can downloaded it here for free or buy on iTunes for $ 0,99).

It is really interesting reading, so important for agencies that strive in finding their way of working in the new more connected reality.

The main outtake to me so far is that it takes changing mindset and attitude. The copy and paste into new template isn't the way for the winners. In order to become the part of the game in the connected world, we need to become heretics and lead the tribe, instead of managing and using old logics pimped with new hype words. It is about telling stories that unite the tribe, instead of giving orders.

Can't wait to get home and finish the book.

The Art of Briefing

Only God knows how many briefing templates, I’ve created during my career at agencies, hoping clients would fill it out. Nope. It didn’t happen.  I’ve asked, I’ve explained but it seemed like the word brief evoked some allergic reactions. I’ve begun to wonder whether it was my fault. Was I too pushy? Were my questions too stupid? Were my templates too bad? Clients kept on sending short mails with target group (people 25-45 years old) and budget and the list of wishes. So I called back and asked: What are the objectives? What do you want to achieve? Hmmm. Silence followed by some vague explanations. Then one day - Eureka! Finally I got it. After long consideration and many discussions with both clients and my colleagues, I have found out that people fear briefing as it implies responsibility.  Writing things down on paper means not only that you have to give a deep thought to your business, see the way you are going and define where you want to go, but it also makes you responsible for the results. Brief creates unwanted expectations, not to agency, but to the marketer. My experienced showed me that many tend to dislike it. They would rather keep their media down to 5 insertions in glossy magazines, rather then get into discussions and uncomfortable questions about the state of their business. And on the other hand, the intimidating briefing form I was trying to enforce wasn’t helping in any way.  The amount and the depth of information, the form and the boundaries the template implied, made it impossible to succeed.  It is impossible to hit the jackpot with briefing using the traditional methods cause briefing is a process and it requires a specific set of mind and approach.

Stay Curious
First of all it is an exploration. We are not supposed to jump right away to the answers we believe to be correct.  Briefing isn’t any linear process, we might get lost before we find out what the right path is.  The trick is to let it happen and stay curious.
Secondly, briefing should be focused on deep understanding and honesty – saying what you think and believe.  Honesty is the beautiful virtue and it can make magic at briefing meetings when both agency and client are inclined to say what they think and believe.  It takes everything to the next level, it allows not only being clear about tasks and expectations, but also ignites insights and ideas to be used later on.

Dialogue
So you may ask, how can one get a good brief? My answer is, you have to make one yourself. How? By talking with your clients, by having an interesting dialog session* that is a collaborative creation, an exploration of the issue and focuses on the clients and the task. Afterwards writing it all down and reviewing with the client before the final approval.
Dialog session usually starts with the definition of task. What do we expect to achieve? What are the objectives? The next step is the exploration of the task from a number of different perspectives: business, organization, competitors, trade, brand, consumers, society and communication. We just ask questions prepared before and the questions that emerged during the session. It is about listening and monitoring the flow of information. The point is to leave the meeting with a clear understanding of the job to be done, and why it needs to be done, as well as, how to measure the success (KPIs). Not just a piece of paper filled with marketing jargon.
Of course we need the piece of paper for the files and to be sure we have the common understanding of the goals and KPI’s. This time, it is not a template but the document crafted as a result of in-depth discussion about the client business, understanding obstacles and challenges, the consensus on the purpose for the communication and KPIs.
The simple change, turning briefing from questioning into conversation, make it more bearable, useful and insightful tool for creating ideas and making things happen.

Article written for TalentZoo

Quote for The Week...

...and the rest of your lives


"If one spent one's whole day working and sleeping there would be no time for observation, let alone thought."   (Thomas Pynchon)

In the Pursit of ...the media planner

I do a lot of conceptual work lately about innovation and creative work processes within the media agency. It brought to my mind the distinction Aristotle made, and which seem to be forgotten. He divided the world into parts: the first in which things can't be other than they are and another in which things can be other that they are - a simple but very strong distinction. The first part is typified by the physical world in which a rock is a rock and can't be anything else. In this world, Aristotle's Analytics lays out a fabulous toolbox - rigorous, objective, quantitative analysis which goal is to establish and document the reality of the situation. This world is the most known and most of marketing communication is created within the "unchangeable reality", where the being consistent matters.

The other world, where things can be other than they are, is the world of people, of organizations and of cultures. For example, a bad communication strategy can be something else - a great communication strategy - if someone figures out how to turn it around. In this area analytics are inappropriate tool. Instead, Aristotle described the thinking tools: conversation, invention, and intention. Here our efforts aren't focused on the description of what is real but rather on the creation of something that does not currently exist, that must be first imagined.

Media agency must operate within those distinctions. We need to deliver both hard and soft facts. We need to provide our clients the rigorous and quantitative analysis, we can't run away from numbers and we still need to be kind of accountants for our clients and describe the reality by using the hard facts, ROI, reach, awareness, etc. But we can't stuck in that role, we need to evolve into the new type of media planners, into communication guides who take the clients, consumers and brands on the fascinating journey to the modern and fragmented world of plenty.

If media agency wants to keep up with the changes, embrace the media proliferation and get in touch with its most important client -  human being - we have to understand and operate in the second of Aristotle worlds - the world where things can be changed via creativity and innovation. I know we people are not so fond of changes in general, we are afraid of losing control. For safety reasons we stick to routines. But if we, media planners want to stay in the game, we don't need to get the new fancy title. In order to stay in the game, we have to develop the new skills, be enthusiastic and curious. We must believe and dare to influence the world and make media plans and brands look different. It is worth it. It is a fantastic adventure.

Get Loose

Every day routines, work, duties, deadlines. Damn you get so serious. Serious title on your business card. So close to be convinced that you are grown up and life is nothing but serious.

Every time I feel that this kind of seriousness is about to hit me like the truck, I turn on this video. It brings me back down to the earth. After all, we are just kids who want to play and we are not so serious as we'd like to look like. It is so easy to be a grownup. Nurturing an inner child is an art. sometimes you just need to go on a silly walk to discover what's life is about.

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humor, Monty Python

Breaking the Rules

This is crazy video with crazy kitesurfing stunt. It made me think about the way we work avoiding to take risks and tend to stay on the safe side. But sometimes it is necessary to take the big jump to the other side, break the rules and routines. Try something new and feel the rush. Take a walk on the wild side.

creativity, kitesurfing

Death by Power Point

There is nothing worse for your business than bad presentation. There are estimated 30 million presentations each day and around 50% of them kill people. I wrote earlier about the scientific findings showing that power point isn't good for our brains, so I believe we should definitely do our best to improve those power point slides, that will probably never die themselves.

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