ID Strategy Conference 2006

Mok's Presentation Makes Rounds on Blogoshphere

Clement Mok's presentation has been getting some recent airplay from bloggers outside of the Strategy '06 event:

From Organic's 3 Minds

"Agency 2.0

Earlier this month, the IIT Institute of Design at Chicago hosted its second annual Strategy Conference, billed as a "business conference about design, rather than a design conference about business".  One question on everyone's mind was the future of the advertising agency.

Usually we hear from traditional agency heavyweights like Bob Jeffrey, CEO of JWT. But in this case, the lead voice was Clement Mok, now back at Sapient as Global Director of Design Planning."

From Experience Planner:
"I especially identified with Clemont Mok’s thoughts on this subject. Mr. Mok recently gave a presentation at Strategy Conference. You can download his presentation here [PPT 13 MB] and the accompanying podcast here [M4A 19.4 MB]."

Open Source Marketing + Design Thinking

Inspired by last week's event, I recently contributed the featured post on Marketing Prof's Daily Fix.  In it, I explore the relationship between design as it relates to the next generation of marketing.

Similar to business + design, there is a huge opportunity to get some dialogue going between traditional marketers and designers.  Some marketers still view design as "graphic design"—a perception that needs to evolve as what marketers really need more of is "creative problem solving + design thinking" 
Read on...

Roger's Ripple Effect II

This is why blogs are becoming so influential in how humans are evolving communications.  Talk about networks.  Roger made his presentation in Chicago and is already getting picked up in the blogoshpere.  In this case, Mark Vanderbeeken's Putting People First (a terrific innovation/design blog).  Mark blogs from Turin Italy—so the Ripple effect has already made it to Europe.

Related comments can also be found on Nussbaum On Design and Logic + Emotion. 
Don't be surprised if video of Roger's presentation shows up on You Tube.  ;)

Snake Oil + Creativity

Clement Mok was absolutely right when he talked about the Advertising business containing “snake oil salesmen”.  He was equally correct when he added that some of the most creative minds work in this industry.  I’m really glad that Clement dared to use the “A-word” at a conference that draws designers, design thinkers, businesspeople and creative problem solvers.  What Clement describes as “Advertising 2.0” is happening in real time—and has been for a while.  And it’s picking up steam in a big way. I like to refer to it as “Marketing 2.0” as that covers a little more broad ground.

Clement referenced two leading shops who are paving the way in this field.  R/GA and Crispin Porter.  They are leading the pack—but there are others right behind them waiting to pick up where traditional advertising has left off.  I’ll name some names: AKQA, Critical Mass, Organic, Avenue A/Razorfish and Digitas (Full disclosure—I work for Digitas).  These are all firms who understand that Marketing has gone from “push” to “pull”.  As Clement beautifully presented in visual format, the next generation of marketing depends heavily on integrated media placement and measurable results.

So—back to the world of IIT, and the intersection of business and design.  Why is this relevant?  The next generation of “marketing firms” are employing creative problem solvers not unlike what IIT produces.  The caveat is that we take these design thinkers and creative problem solvers—then pair them up with copywriters, planners and brand-focused individuals.  Marketing 2.0 is a big deal because it combines brand with experience—resulting in the hypothetical goal of heavily influencing the customer experience across a variety of touch points and channels.

I really enjoyed Clement’s presentation—and the fact that he chose to talk about the next step in advertising.  His deck was beautiful and simple—he brought the value of design to his presentation.  The only thing I thought it was missing was a few examples of what Marketing 2.0 can look like.  So, from my perspective—here are a handful.

Mini Cooper (design an build your Mini)
Nike ID (Customize footwear and clothing—be sure to click customize)
American Express (Consumer generated media)
Shop Composition (Rich shopping experience)
Nikewomen in the news (R/GA vs. 30 second spot)

As someone who sits somewhere between experience design and marketing, I'm glad Clement brought this topic to the IIT venue.

Podcasts are up!

Check the podcast section on the ID Strategy Conference Community site and you will find audio from most of yesterday's talks. Unfortunately a few of the problems with audio spilled over into our recordings as well. Because of this, part of Roger Martin's talk is missing. Look for more recordings and pdf's of available presentations as soon as we get more bandwidth.

Tell you friends and colleagues and happy listening.

Meme diversity

Chris Meyer dropped a buzzword yesterday that's sure to stick with us for a while. "Memes" are nuggets of culture that are fast replacing genes as the fundamental mutating element that moves our society forward. While genetically, we are as tall, strong and fast as we've ever been, our cultural evolution is what's really going to propel us into the next century.

It's like that image of man evolving, the one where he starts out as an ape and his posture gets better with each subsequent likeness until he is walking tall. Culturally, many of us are still that crawling primate. Maybe the ones on MySpace are starting to stand up.

But I think Chris made an interesting point about teams - that bringing in "meme diversity" can stimulate innovation. People from different backgrounds, with different degrees of cultural sensitivity, might be able to give the team fresh eyes and fresh thinking.

If the goal is to grow your cultural diversity, I wondered, how culturally diverse am I? How many memes can I name? What's going on in America, that everybody knows about?

So here's my best list in five minutes.

Red hot cheetos...the Academy Awards...Subservient Chicken...the Curiously Strong Mints...having an MBA...business travel...hitting a "home run"..."I wish I knew how to quit you"...childhood obesity...wardrobe malfunction.

Are these the memes Chris is talking about? Because after writing this list, I'm not so sure about the real impact here. Are these nuggets of culture or just buzzwords? Is there a difference? It seems like memes are often generated through top-down channels like media and entertainment, as opposed to bottom-up methods like two people having a conversation. So if movies and news are the main meme factories, how are they moving our society forward?

Perhaps my list is disastrously outdated and generic, and I need to go join MySpace. But hopefully meme diversity moves beyond good ad campaigns and starts to encompass more useful bodies of knowledge, things like Six Sigma and Accident Forgiveness and This American Life and the tipping point and game theory and geocaching and sidewalk art. So not the mainstream US culture, but the fringe culture. Those are the people that I want on my team, and those are the memes that will bring innovation.

Roger’s Ripple Effect

Similar to ericniu’s last post, our lunch roundtable veered in a similar direction.  The “communication gap” is something we all seem to be struggling with in real time.  I facilitated the session titled “Playing In, Around and Outside of Your Sandbox”—the premise being that firms are increasingly spreading their wings in related areas of expertise.  But what the table all seemed to agree on was that there is a need for “next generation” talent in order to do this.  We're all looking for people who can thrive in interdisciplinary situations and are self-motivated to innovate.

The communication issue is key.  And I agree with the notion of creating a safe environment to help facilitate this dialogue—we need to do more here.  Authentic collaboration is not neat and clean.  It’s messy business.  But with the right kind of environment and communication techniques, it can happen.  Innovation only comes from the collaboration of interdisciplinary teams, even if the spark starts with an individual.

Back to our roundtable, we had a mix of folks from such diverse firms as Marriot, Closerlook, Ecco Design, Pathfinder and Doblin—but what we all had in common was this issue.  How to get our teams to work this way—and what type of individual is needed at the ground level vs. the top tiers.

I see this in my practice as well (Experience Design for an interactive agency)—we have traditional copywriters, brand strategists, interaction designers, technologists, project managers and marketing people all mixing it up.  Talk about messy.  But on the rare occasion when we get to authentic collaboration—great things happen.  I put together a simple visual model to illustrate the pieces that come from this collaboration—“T-Shaped Creativity”.  T-Shaped Creativity is only possible when commincation is happening—the pieces that make up the "T" don't come from one person.

So a huge thanks to Roger for calling out the “elephant in the room”.  It’s not enough to cheer on innovation—we need to figure out how to create environments where it can actually happen.

Lunchtable Discussion: Educating Creativity

Facilitator: David Dunne
Etienne Fang
Elizabeth Pastor
Phil Repp
Andy Kim
Pi Wen Looi
Chris Meyer
Young Ae Hahn
Max Shangle
Melody Roberts
Myself

When I first sat down at this table, and even after listening to everyone introduce themselves and their motivations for sitting here as well, I thought the focus would be on design education as it's traditionally taught in school. For instance, how do you teach creativity in a business school context? David began by proposing 5 topics to focus on: climate, context, content, process and output.

Of its own volition, or perhaps in response to Roger Martin's earlier presentation, the conversation in fact morphed into a discussion on communication and how to educate clients, business people, and the general public on the value of design. And how to simply talk with each other to begin with. The issues that arise not just with incongruous language, but with varied experiences and backgrounds as well. We need to teach people how to make connections, how to talk to each other. Visualization is a great tool, and visual-centric and non-visual-centric people can all sit at the same table. Going back to Roger's talk, one of the tools he mentioned for crossing the divide was analogies. I think there's great value in illustrating your points using stories that everyone can understand.

The table also discussed differences in both worlds and the real value you get from multi-disciplinary teams. Melody mentioned how many innovations come not from the top-down, but from the bottom-up, from workers in the field who are in the prime position to generate insights. Throwing people with different backgrounds together creates tensions, but also enables powerful opportunities for insights (a more reproducable skill than creativity). Another concern with this sort of 'team creativity' is the difference between shared responsibility and design by committee. Rather than simply voting on features and a sort of 'my idea' vs. 'your idea', isn't it better to incite powerful brainstorms of 'our ideas' and choosing the best from that pool? A safe, open environment where people aren't afraid to put their ideas out (and potentially make fools of themselves) goes a long way to facilitate communication.

Scott Durschlag and Moto's 10 Big Consumer Trends

This afternoon Scott Durschlag shared some research Motorola has done over the last two years on global consumer trends. I believe he noted that 25 countries were part of the study. Being immersed in vast amounts of research on multiple sectors at the Institute of Design, I've seen all of these at one point or another but it was nice to see them so freely and concisely presented. The list, if I copied it down correctly, was as follows:

1. Inflationary time currency
2. New connectivity
3. Self-preservation society
4. Self-obsessed me culture
5. Gender expressionism
6. Age play
7 Experiential society
8. Transparent society
9. Search for authenticity
10. Information and knowledge management

Good stuff and certainly worth considering regardless of what you are working on. Thanks Scott for sharing...

Chris Meyer and the shared mind.

So far I've very much enjoyed what I've seen and heard here at strategy 06. I REALLY like that today's schedule is on the back of my nametag and that there's wireless internet access.

I was delighted to hear that there will soon be a combined MDes/MBA offered by ID and the Stuart School of Business.

I found Chris Meyer's Theory of Everything About Networks talk interesting because part of it dealt with agent-based modeling and that was, for me, follow-up to my first glimpse of that theory years ago at Doblin when Josh Epstein came to visit. I understand the gist of that application of networks and though I understand how it works about as well as I understand my microwave, I think it's going to to be increasingly important to designers as you create the future.

To find out that the word google actually has something to do with a parasite that attacks the brains of mice to make them attracted to cats -- that alone was worth the price of the conference.

Meyer's current focus is on human capital, and how networks can be used to help organizations and individuals identify and exploit common value. Or something like that. The notion that we are moving from an era in which organizational "capabilities vibrate but don't move" to one in which capabilities move and it's liquid and INNOVATION IS HAPPENING FASTER THAN EVER BEFORE is not new but it was cool to hear it put in those terms. And it really is happening all the time now; I've had experience trying to recruit those capabilities for firms and have friends who plug in and unplug in small consulting firms and I'm always wondering where they're actually working now.

I really liked comparison between Arthur C. Clarke (the next evolution of man is one shared mind) and the quote from Kevin Kelly, where he talks about the internet as a (shared) invisible mind. As a blogger I know this is true, and yet it's discovering the individual voices out there in the morass that make the shared mind so interesting to me.

What Roger Martin is Talking About is Discipline Lock

Roger's talk a bit earlier this morning prompted me to post some words I wrote a couple of weeks ago. I couldn't agree with him anymore that there are fundamentally different modes of work and value between businessmen and designers. In fact, I would argue that deep training in any field makes one think, act, and talk differently. These different mental models produce a discipline lock that is disastrous to teamwork. The words that follow pertain to this issue and were written a couple of weeks ago...

At the same time the complexity in our society requires ever more sophisticated interdisciplinary solutions to be relevant, disciplines themselves have grown ever deeper and more complex. This presents an interesting dilemma for all of us: we need to be more specialized to bring the best and latest knowledge to bear against complex problems but we have to be broad enough to communicate valuably with other members of our "team", whatever that may be. This is, bar none, the biggest barrier to creating innovation today and is what completely differentiates companies who succeed and fail. One dimensional thinking just simply will not cut it in the current context.

Thinking of work I've done in the past for a major internet portal, I can not begin to express the frustration I would have with designers that would couch presentations of their work with the disclaimer that, "The design of the page could be so much better without these ads on it." This portal, and consequently the designer's salary was funded almost exclusively by advertising. His values were so exclusively locked into his own discipline that he couldn't easily reframe the problem for what it was: to create the best experience of users of this particular page while supporting business goals. If he had, he may have considered new ways to reach the consumers he served but instead designed the page with the ads treated as an affront. The truth is that we all benefit from learning about offerings we want to buy and when presented well we will happily respond advertising.

That said, not everyone has the time or interest to be trained in all of the various disciplines one could bring to bear to some problem or opportunity. I am a bit of a unique (nut) case as I was trained in Anthropology and Psychology at the University of Chicago as an undergrad, worked as a designer but then more of a business lead for 9 years, and am now attending the Institute of Design's Masters program. I've had academic training or professional experience in social sciences, business and design so I have a particularly broad point of view. I don't necessarily advocate individuals spreading themselves this thin as I have, at various points, felt like I have lacked the deep part of the T of so-called "T-shaped" people. I see myself as a shorter but maybe a bit wider version of the T and believe that this allows me to really bridge real and perceived gaps on project and strategy teams with which I work.

I am building on my experience and doing additional research in this area. I have hope that we could develop a common shared practice and lexicon taught across disciplines which could assist development teams in bringing the collective wisdom of the group to bear to create the most relevant, most compelling, most sustainable offerings. It really doesn't matter how important our observations, insights, designs, interactions, patterns, architectures, engineering solutions or business models are if we can't adequately communicate their value to each other.

We have to be generous not only with our contributions but also our listening. People really do wish to contribute.

Interview discussions

I've created individual posts below for the six (and counting) on-line "perspectives" interviews with some of our speakers and conference Fellows. Please comment on these posts for specific discussion of the interviews.

Looking forward to seeing everyone in a couple of days!

Vince LaConte
IIT-ID communications director
[email protected]

perspectives: Roger Martin

The dean of the University of Toronto's business school explains why managers need to learn how to think like designers, and why all design is really decision design.

Read the interview: Designing Decisions

Welcome all to Chicago and Stratcon '06

I look forward to seeing (and writing about) you all soon. I promise to (try to) make all of my posts as respectable and journalistic as possible while still keeping you interested. Come find me to say hello and share a cocktail at the reception Wednesday evening.

Also, in case you didn't know, the Museum of Contemporary Art (site of Stratcon) currently has four fabulous exhibits installed that you really must take a moment to see. Most notably, a show on Warhol titled "Supernova" documents his work on Stars, Deaths and Disasters in the early 1960's. See more here at the MCA website: http://www.mcachicago.org/.

Cheers,

Zachary Jean Paradis
www.creativeslant.com

4:20 Bruce Nussbaum, Business Week

3:45 Measuring value: Mok, Redenbaugh, Davis, Alexis, Benjamin

2:30 Jeremy Alexis, ID & Cynthia Benjamin

2:00 Russell_Redenbaugh, Kairos Fund & Natalia Davis Kairos Fund

11:20 Clement Mok

11:10 Doug Look

9:40 Jeb Brugman, The Next Practice

9:00 Ben Tsiang, Sina

4:40 Design in the Business World , Bruce Nussbaum, Business Week, Conde Nast

4:00 Todd Tillemans, Unilever & Chris Conley, Gravity Tank

3:00 Carol Coletta