ensconced in a blunt, jet-lagged haze I wound my way through Manhattan’s Central Park to the Museum of Modern Art on 53^rd. , where  I queued for five hours to sit opposite performance artist Marina Abramović. And stare at her.

In total, 1500 New Yorkers have queued – most of them from 4am – for this peculiar experience.  Stacks of people cried, by the way. It was a big, beautiful experience to be in the room.

But this is the thing: in spite of all the mind-boggling options, Manhattanites mostly derive pleasure from brazenly not attending to them.

There are emu eggs out there to buy, but the best stories happen over a pastrami sandwich in a daggy diner. Or on the subway. Or on your stoop. In essence, there’s a focused appreciation for the minutiae of life, for the real moments that happen between people. Options are narrowed (mostly because you have to, to survive the onslaught of choice) and intimate neighbourhoods form (mostly because everyone lives on top of each other, not spread out over suburbs).This intimacy plays out in the press daily. Big news stories can be happening out there. But the most popular New York Times story of the day will be a 3000-word treatise on the dude who changes the light bulbs at Grand Central – what he eats for breakfast, how he spends weekends. In today’s paper there’s a feature story on two misfits who play ping-pong together. No exciting news angle. Just a quaint friendship dissected over 747 words.

But back to the queuing. Manhattanites are notorious for loving a queue. There are 18,696 eateries across the island, but locals queued for hours at the infamous Magnolia Bakery in West Village when it first opened. In the snow. For a damn cupcake. The queue for Shakespeare in the Park tickets each summer have become their own little subculture. People sit in a line all day, making friends and sharing their picnic with strangers, even though there are countless ways you can see live theatre in this city.

Sitting in the staring queue this week I realized this is how New York makes life better.  Why do New Yorkers queue when there are countless other options to be experienced? Because queuing is about being a part of a something. Which is a reminder to us all that beyond the frenzy and excitement of life, mostly we all yearn for realness and intimacy and simplicity.

We all yearn to belong. I tend to find this comforting and exhilarating all at once.

There’s a lot of talk about the kind of skill sets and team structures that are needed T Shaped and Sun Shaped People, and from BBH NY  Voltron:

‘T-shaped people’ – awesome in (at least) one area, plus highly collaborative and at least literate in many other things. So blending both the right skills and the right attitude.

In addition to sketching out why these hybrid people are so important in creating new forms of creative product, I briefly touch upon the importance of the agency implementing the right kind of ’operating system’ (the processes, values and culture within a company) if the fancy new ’software’ is going to run smoothly. If the operating system is outdated, even the most impressive software is redundant. I show, in one slide, an overview of how BBH in New York is approaching the re-engineering of it’s OS.

I can’t help but think that the name ‘t-shaped’ is not something that people might identify themselves with. It doesn’t feel inspirational or aspiration or like a personal goal. And it being a hard angled space it, to me feels like a term that fights against the flow, organic and fluid nature of innovation.

And it’s just another made up word. It needs to be explained. With out the supporting deck it’s obscure and it can’t defend itself with out a chart. Must try harder.

I wonder if we can come up with a naming convention that works a little harder for us- but makes our audience fell like they know what the hell we’re talking about.

Something like this:

“What you need to learn is that being creative is not enough in this business. You have to become technical. Creative people are born creative – you’re lucky. Technical people however can never be creative. Its something they’ll never get. You can’t buy it, find it, study it – you’re born with it. Too many creative people don’t want to learn how to be technical, so what happens? they become dependent on technical people. Become technical, you can learn that. If you’re creative and technical, you’re unstoppable.”

– Robert Rodriguez (via feltron :: roomthily :: ronenreblogs)

I really like that notion of unstoppable. I like that there’s a personal goal there: what you need to do to be unstoppable. I like the promise that this idea might give a team.

I can’t believe that I’m going to argue against the following:

Mr. Ping: The secret ingredient is… nothing!
Po: Huh?
Mr. Ping: You heard me. Nothing! There is no secret ingredient.
Po: Wait, wait… it’s just plain old noodle soup? You don’t add some kind of special sauce or something?
Mr. Ping: Don’t have to. To make something special you just have to believe it’s special.

Because deep down we also know that this just isn’t true:

There is no charge for awesomeness… or attractiveness

That’s where the big bucks are made my friend. Skadoosh.

Presented at the Retail Financial Lending Summit 14th May 2010

If everyone from supermarkets and search engines to phone companies and airlines offer banking services where does this leave banks?

• And what happens when we use less cash, if by 2018 less than half of all transactions will be paid that way?
• And this virtual currency thing- how does that change what a bank is- and what people might want from a bank?
• Australia’s big banks are failing to make the grade according to consumer ratings released by Mozo.com.au
• Yet innovation is coming from direct banks and credit unions.
• And players who have good retail understanding are encroaching on traditional territory.

Might focusing on your brand experience and your customers change the game?

• Zappos is powered by service
• The power of Repeat Customers & Word of Mouth
• Explicit core values that get translated into brand behaviors
• Recruitment is indoctrination into company culture- everyone gets a $2000 offer to leave. 1% take it.
• It sold for $1 billion

Why can’t complex organizations provide great brand experiences?

• Mike’s Hard Lemonade-Barry Schwartz call to defeat process over practical wisdom
• Best Buy’s Geek Squad turns the ordinary business of technology troubleshooting into a customer adventure
• Zip Car innovating the experience of car rental

What’s going on in the branch?

• That customers want to be served face-to-face. If banks are to move beyond acquisition – to retention and to wallet penetration – then they must reinvent the branch from a glorified transaction centre to a product sales and advisory service center.
  • Up to 90% of customer relationships are formed –  and lost – in branches.
  • Banks will not succeed at maintaining and growing customer relationships unless they provide customers with quality sales and service in branches.
• The conundrum of customer centricity, however, is that most customers don’t see banks as providers of advice-based services. This is not surprising given the extent to which branches have been deskilled over the last decade. The perception map shows that banks deliver only on broad knowledge and bright smiles—not what is needed to deepen client relationships.

The reinvented bank

• There has been a lot of excitement recently around the “Gap-ification” of branches—making them look more like retail stores than like stodgy old branches. But a mere face-lift is not enough.
• The Umpqua Bank retail design strategy translated the culture of a small community bank into an integrated brand experience and helped Umpqua grow from $120M to $8B.
  • “It’s all contrary to what you might find in a bank,” says Lani Hayward, executive vice-president for creative strategies at Umpqua. But deposits at the branches Umpqua has converted are up an average of 30% since the changeovers, and the average number of products sold to each household is double that at the traditional branches”
  • ING Direct is an online bank, but management realized the bank needed some physical presence to reassure the public the bank was more than a billboard. So execs devised the ING café, which look like Starbucks; people can go have coffee, smoothies, use a free-wireless connection, and learn about ING if they choose. But the eight “branches” have no transactional ability whatsoever; people still must sign up and do transactions online. For example, the ING café in Chicago had “Bike to Work Week Specials” in mid-June. “Every bicyclist that rides to the ING DIRECT Café during Bike to Work Week will be treated to a free bike valet, beverage and tune up. While you’re there, ask a Café Associate about other simple ways to save your money.”
  • WaMu rolled out its retail branch design with great fanfare in 2000, and used the new model as they moved into new markets such as Las Vegas and Atlanta. Later they remodeled existing branches to incorporate the new retail features. Before WaMu collapsed last September, they had spent roughly $1 billion on a branch-building binge.
• Some bankers are thinking along these lines, and they repeat a similar mantra: innovative branch design and technology must encourage engagement with employees, not to discourage human interaction. Executives at Barclays, Umpqua, Key Bank and TD Bank, to name a few, view the branch as the channel of choice to build customer relationships. “The biggest thing in banking is the relationship, and you can’t do that online,” says Lani Hayward, evp of creative strategies at Umpqua Bank. “You can make mistake after mistake after mistake, and the customer will stay with you if they believe you’ll take care of them.”

Aligning brand promises into brand behavior

• You can understand where you’re NOT delivering
• In order to work out where you can make improvements
• But you need to inspire your team’s BEHAVIOUR
• And understand that your team is made of different types of people
• Who have different engagement needs
• Warmth and Wisdom
• There are no miracles

Research compiled for this presentation can be found here: http://delicious.com/katiechatfield/banking

It’s Autumn and the golden light seems to have tinted everyone and everything. I still seem to be navel gazing around nostalgia – perhaps the weather is my excuse.

I’m intrigued by a string of sepia-toned, passage of time-y, wasn’t it better and isn’t life fleeting confections being used to hock pretty much any product or service you care to think about. I’m sure you can pull a few to mind but have a look at  John Lewis’ Never Knowingly Undersold and Sunbeam.

The Sunbeam TVC had this comment on Youtube:

SugarBeeDee Not another freaking whimsical, faux happy moment ad!
The summery pastely hipster thing has been whored to death and rather than make me feel all shinyfuckinghappy, I want to bash my head on a wall or kick the TV.
The song is so tacky too.
Argh, take it off and make something that doesn’t rot out teeth from our skulls, please!

If you do a shallow dive into the meaning of nostalgia you get this:

The term nostalgia describes a yearning for the past, often in idealized form.

Idealization is dangerous it seems powerful but really what it delivers is propoganda. You can’t own it. You can’t prove it and you can’t deliver it.

I can’t help but think that a lot of this ‘past that never happened’ stuff seems to create an emotional connection, with Mumbrella and others calling the John Lewis ad The Most Powerful of the Year. I wonder how useful this construct is in creating an imperative to take action. Is the argument of this notion not more than : We’ve been there in the past? Is there a strong enough ladder to the plea: You should be with us in the future?

Pretty bland stuff.

In “The Wheel” the writers of Mad Men use that emotional ladder to create a need for a new product  and tie it to a universal human need :

Don Draper: Nostalgia – it’s delicate, but potent. Teddy told me that in Greek, “nostalgia” literally means “the pain from an old wound.” It’s a twinge in your heart far more powerful than memory alone. This device isn’t a spaceship, it’s a time machine. It goes backwards, and forwards… it takes us to a place where we ache to go again. It’s not called the wheel, it’s called the carousel. It let’s us travel the way a child travels – around and around, and back home again, to a place where we know are loved.

Bud Caddell’s presentation There’s More Time Than The Present examins how we experience ‘time’ to help craft more effective opportunities for calls to action. I’m liking the tension in between nostalgia and ‘time machine’. And what I’m thinking about is don’t forget to find that pain. It’s where  the moment of truth lies. These moments are ‘around and around’, in the past and the future and they bind us together. So instead of using a mirror to reflect something that never happened it might be more useful to become that centre of gravity- a carousel that will give you an experience, show you the future and the past and deliver you home.

I’ve been quite challenged to draw an opinion about the question  In 2050 what will we be nostalgic about?

It’s hard to be a futurist. As Matt Linderman at 37signals noted in expert opinions

the problem with experts: They’re experts on the past. No one is an expert on the future.

We can only draw on our experiences, see the signals of now and attempt to extrapolate….

I am very glad that when I was in my teens and 20s most people didn’t have a camera on them at all times and that there was no place to publish and share those photos.

I was young, I loved music, I managed bands and worked for record labels and I made very very bad decisions. I was not terribly kind to myself or others.

Thankfully I don’t remember to much of any of it. I have very few reminders. It’s a blessing.

A song from that time, Deb Conway’s “She Prefers Fire” is introduced in concert with the comment ‘do you ever have the kind of days when you wish your house would burn down?

Everything that we have reminds us of what we have lost
Everything that we have echoes what we desire
Possessions, letters now just fuel for history

It’s important to not keep too much history fuel around. We all know that controlled burning can help prevent forest fires.

I can’t help but think that people going through that time of their life now and getting scars and breaking hearts and making infamous, funny prat falls can’t pick themselves up and burn the photos.

Or hide the blog posts, or box up the Facebook comments…

In 2050 being photographed and captured might well be ubiquitous.

Imagine all those bad hair days, terrible outfits, drunken behavior, spats with partners and nose picking moments being able to be tagged and shared and tracked back to you….

Or the happier moments that you’d prefer to keep in the past.

I think I’ll be nostalgic about being able to create my own ‘digital me’ and having some portion of control over it. And of having the luxury of being able to forget.

I love this. We don’t have the Tropicana Juice brand here in Australia and so all I can read is just the pure intention of creating an experience around the difference that starting your day with sunshine makes….

Nice one.

The contrast between that and this :

I can’t help but think that ‘designed to help’ is something that could be so much more powerful if were experienced, if it were actually delivered, rather than promised….

My notes:

The theme: One of the fundamental challenges organisations have is in developing a culture of innovation and inspiration- and building the teams and behaviours that will share and collaborate in order to achieve this. Where do you start? And how do you feed the fire?

Chart 13:

Change management is a scary word

It’s difficult, lengthy and expensive

Is technological change environmental change?

Chart 14:

(from Mumbrella’s coverage of the APG Battle of the Big Thinking Battle of Big Thinking part 1: Creating unique brands; Changing the world; Perth vs Sydney

Speaker: Peter Williams – CEO, Deloitte Digital

Topic: The formula for changing the world

Quote: “Any match in the box can start a fire.”

His argument:

That rather than chasing influencers, brands need to understand that when a population is ready to go through a phase transition anything can be a trigger if you understand it.

Using a home experiment involving a bottle of beer from the freezer, he showed how once one molecule of beer freezes (or changes phase), the transition moves to the next.

He also challenged the audience to clap in unison, and with no other obvious organisation, the room fell into rhythm within about a second.

He argued that formula for changing the world is simply having a self-influencing population that is ready to make that phase transition, and a trigger.

Chart 15:

Phase transition is more than synchronicity

You need to design the ‘what’s next’- because you’ll lose momentum and the potential for shift if you stop supplying new triggers and adapting the rules.

This formula’s potential describes the building blocks of change

It’s a process- an organic model that lives. It’s not set and forget.

It’s about creating an environment and prompts for adapting the simple rules and the trigger

Because phase transition is a chain reaction- you need to keep feeding the loop

Chart 16:

“Any match in the box can start a fire.”

“The ability to combine knowledge and information in a new way is important. Just because you have knowledge and information does not mean you are a creative person. But it is also impossible to be a creative person without knowledge and information.”

http://knowledge.smu.edu.sg/article.cfm?articleid=1267

Chart 20

This exercise was inspired by Helen Hasan’s presentation at the NSW KM Forum – February Triple Threat.

At it’s heart:

• You ask participants to find someone they don’t know and negotiate a game of PSR
• (this can usually be seamlessly achieved
• Then you ask that ‘team’ to find another pair and negotiate another game (with no further explanation)
• What was a simple and explicitly understood task becomes a lot more complex….and chaotic
• …. what will happen next?

Helen Hasan is Associate Professor in Information Systems at University of Wollongong.  She has been a member of the KM committee of Standards Australia since its beginning and is proud of her role in writing the Australian KM Standard released in 2005.  Her research areas relate to an innovative aspect of KM that she now refers to as ‘Sensible Organisation’. She has published widely in academia and she has applied her research findings in numerous consulting projects.

Photo credits:

• http://www.flickr.com/photos/96224913@N00/4498976198/in/pool-connectnow
• http://www.flickr.com/photos/96224913@N00/4498976260/in/pool-connectnow

Chart 23

http://threexthree.wordpress.com/

Chart 24

http://teamred1.tumblr.com/

Chart 26

The management team also used this structure to present quarterly back to the team

Chart 36

This diagram was created for my chapter of ‘Age of Conversation’

What it says is that you’re never more than 2 steps from disaster….

And with the tenure of marketers….why would they take that risk ?

Chart 39

Blog coverage: From State of Flux :

Can I explain what I do to my Mum?  Katie Chatfield highlighted that we are working in a field that is quite complex and that has a new language. Don’t use jargon and discourse people don’t get, people need to understand your ideas to take them up. Use language as a tool to transfer your idea to the next person, when your trying to translate an idea to someone, it needs to be a story they can tell to other people.

Chart 43

Blog coverage: State of Flux:

Jack’s Show and Tell
Katie Chatfield introduced us to her company’s concept – Jack’s Show and Tell. This is cool! Company gets together to “build a titanium culture” recognises and awards work that changes the game. Gives people a chance to learn to tell great stories. Once a month, brought to you by the strategy, creative and design team. It is show and tell for grown ups and not a lot has changed since Year 3 at school. Simple stories, powerful experiences, transferring knowledge and a chance to look at how someone looks at the world

Chart 47

Ralph was inspired by the ancient (and, sadly, lost) art of haikugami, where the traditions of haiku are melded with those of origami to create beautiful and functional poetry.

In this entertaining and interactive presentation, Ralph shows what’s possible with 500 people, 5 minutes, and lots of pieces of paper!

See his fab presentation and  some of the creations

Chart 49

Photo credits:

• http://www.flickr.com/photos/servantofchaos/4501397180/in/faves-51977763@N00/
• http://www.flickr.com/photos/servantofchaos/4500764251/in/pool-connectnow
• http://twitpic.com/1dqp70
• http://www.flickr.com/photos/96224913@N00/4498976552/in/pool-connectnow

Chart 50

Photo credits:

• http://www.flickr.com/photos/96224913@N00/4498977038/in/pool-connectnow
• http://www.flickr.com/photos/96224913@N00/4498976594/in/pool-connectnow

I took some video notes a while back to prepare for ConnectNow a conference that is happening in Sydney next week.

I want to explore some of the programs that I’ve designed and facilitated that help build face to face storytelling cultures and share some of the outtakes.

And I’d love to give people some experience of what it’s like to participate in a grown up show and tell.

Where I’ve got to in designing the experience is something along these lines:

• knowledge exchange- exploring the potential of 200 units  towards 40,000
• what can we learn from paper, scissors, rock
• simple rules + the notion of phase transition
• paper planes and storytelling

I’m hoping that people come prepared to play!

I love the brevity and the passion of video case studies. I love their structure: an insight, the experience and the results.

What I think is food for thought for all of us is the notion that the journey of our work is a story in itself.

And I love that ‘the idea is everything’- and yet almost all of the tippytop winning entries all have ‘live’ as a large component of the work.

Have a stroll through the video case studies below, be inspired,  and have a think about how we can all better tell the stories of what we do and what can be done:

• Cannes Lions 2009THE HOUSE OF IMAGINATION (Silver)
• WHOPPER SACRIFICE 2009
• (Case Study Tooheys Extra Dry 5 Seeds –
• (Case Study) ING DIRECT – Professional Fan
• Nike Plus – Titanium Lion – Cannes 2007
• Earth Hour – Titanium Lion – Cannes 2007·
• Titanium Grand Prix 2008 UniQlo Uniqlock
• Tap Project – Titanium Lion – Cannes 2007
• Lynx Jet wins at the Cannes Lions Festival 2006
• Cannes Lions 2009 – Titanium & Integrated Lions Grand Prix – Obama for America
• Cannes Lions 2009: THE GREAT SCHLEP (Titanium Lion)
• Cannes Lions 2009 OASIS DIG OUT YOUR SOUL
• Cannes Lions 2009TRILLION DOLLAR CAMPAIGN (Gold)

How to Pick the right Chart by Amit Agarwal on Flickr found on Swiss Miss

Useful, perhaps, for presenting information- but how are you presenting insight? How are you embedding knowledge? How are you facilitating the transference of ownership of your ideas to your audience?

Now compare that ‘thought starter’ to this:

I love this video of Oliver Jeffers’ process: ‘The pictures define the words and the words define the pictures’.

I wonder what would happen to our ability to educate and motivate one of our most important audiences, our clients, if we stopped thinking about ‘charts’ and ‘decks’ and even ‘presentations’.

What if we thought: ‘story books’?

The purpose of story books are multiple: curated moments between parent and child; almost unconscious educational experiences where children don’t even know that they’re learning to read; and potentially building the foundation of a lifetime relationship with the power of the imagination and the delight of the written word. They live beyond  the duration of the mechanics of reading aloud and they are designed to be retold. Powerful stories you can bring to life years afterwards, in their entirety, and without the book in front of you.

Now those are benchmarks!

What could you do with:

• Several cardboard boxes
• Beach balls
• An old bucket
• A 1950s-era Dansette record player that can play vinyl discs at both 78 and 33 rpm?

If you’re Robin Hemmings and Oliver Millingham you use them to  bring to life the ”46 or 47” real and imaginary people,  in the play One Small Step, who were  involved in the space race between the Soviet Union and the United States.

”They’re all essential components of our rockets. You see, we have to fly to the moon several times while we’re in Sydney.”

Last year was the 40th anniversary of the moon landing – a defining moment in human history: something which would have engrossed the greatest scientific minds of the past 2500 years, from Aristotle to Copernicus, Galileo to Newton. Yet, just four decades on, the world was more interested in the antics of Paris Hilton and the death of Michael Jackson than recalling that thrilling vision

Steve Meachem, in his review “How to get to the moon – with just a little excess baggage”

Nevertheless, audiences have been moved by One Small Step, which relives the era when rival empires set themselves a seemingly impossible challenge, then raced to meet it via names like Sputnik, Gemini and Apollo.

”The whole show is like one big dare,” Hulse says. ”If it was just about technology it wouldn’t make good theatre. But it isn’t. It’s about human endeavour.”

I saw the show and I loved it. I was lucky enough (or rather I know @IanLyons …) to be able to take the creative team I work with to the show and this was their response:

How frickin‘ awesome are cardboard boxes…

What really came across was ingenuity- the passion and the playfulness of the storytelling. Cardboard boxes became rockets and jet packs and all kinds of gadgetry. Small children clapped and big  kids cheered and everyone got swept away with the energy and the notions behind the adventure of having a really big vision and committing to a huge challenge.

The teams that participated in the space race didn’t have anything thing they needed on the shelf to get there. And yet NASA sent astronauts to the Moon using less computing power than you will find in a modern family car – we’re not even talking top of the range models here.

I can’t help but think that with advertising creative we can forget the vast color, depth and variety of the human imagination- and how much more fun (and effective) it can be to inspire an experience in someone’s head rather than giving it to them on a plate.

Maker-uppering works best when the storyteller and the storytell-ee are feeding off each other. When you play together. When its participatory.

In realising our messaging to the n-th degree we can paint all the details and don’t allow our audiences imaginations to become involved. I can’t help but think that we might pre-digest our creative a little too much to allow a role for our audiences. We all know that kids can like the box better than the present: a toy is what it is while a box can be anything you want it to be. I wonder if instead of briefing “out of the box thinking” we might have more fun and invite more participation with “what could we do with this box” thought starters.

UPDATE: must share this Calvin and Hobbes’s transmogrifier from Simon

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