Getting Wicked

Sara Ohrvall on twenty-first century entrepreneurs via Think Quarterly:

Today, it’s not only about what you do – it’s about why you do it. People no longer want to join just because you’re a start-up and you might become big; they want to start up because they believe in why they’re doing it and the end result.

The second issue of Google’s Think Quarterly offers a series of interviews with “Next Gen Innovators,” who represent the digitally-native group of entrepreneurs, artists, activists, businesspeople, that are already redefining culture as we know it. Questions of purpose, transparency, and social awareness inevitably permeated a conversation that was narrowly focused on innovation through digital technology.

The digital age is reshaping the very foundation upon which organizations are built. The what is now not as important as the why, and according to Bright Simons from Mpedigree, the notion of “the company as a fortress, where all information is kept away from prying eyes, is changing” thanks to cloud-computing and open architecture constructs. In his own words: “open ways of thinking about how we solve our problems – is being driven by a cloud-based mentality.”

In the meantime, Dennis Crowley co-founder and CEO of Foursquare, can teach a lesson or two to old-school managers. Collaborative and social technology is not only a product at Foursquare but also a philosophy, a way of conducting business and solving problems rooted in giving back:

Cycles of innovation are much faster and everyone merges off everyone else. When our company runs into a problem, we show everyone our solution. There’s a different mindset for a lot of people now that’s, like, ‘If you know something other people don’t, it’s your job to teach people and give back to the community.’

These are not just positive and isolated examples of young people that stumbled upon success. The ideas expressed in these five interviews are representative of a radical change in culture and one that can prove lethal to those who refuse to listen. Today’s economy runs on talent and those who can provide purpose, openness, transparency, and social awareness will be more likely to become magnets for the kind of talent that drives innovation and prosperity.

Will Sansom writes in the latest issue of Contagious Magazine about the potential rewards of brands embarking on projects together with their stakeholders. This approach stands in contrast to a more self-centered approach rooted purely in campaigns:

A project on the other hand, needs constant nurturing and encouraging. It relies on engagement, feedback and input. It is collaborative and communal, and requires constant monitoring. It is undoubtedly more challenging, but potentially much more rewarding.

The appeal of creating a project is clear; not only can it encourage deeper engagement and forge social connections, but it also gives brands the chance to nail their colours to a particular mast and show what they stand for by effecting change in the real world.

Projects are the reverse of campaigns, they come after the brand has committed to devoting resources to solving a common problem pulling people in. This approach is probably a direct consequence of the fact that marketing communications are adapting to what Douglas Rushkoff refers to as a “mediascape biased toward nonfiction.” In his own words:

The way to flourish in a mediascape biased toward nonfiction is to tell the truth. This means having a truth to tell.

Brands that embark on projects manufacture their truth. This is not necessarily a bad thing, in fact, when the project solves a relevant problem it turns the focus of marketing on producing real outcomes.

Projects are consistent with a moment in time in which people create meaning out of their experiences with brands.  As our media diet limits the role of advertising, organizations begin to acknowledge the fact that their products or services (and therefore their brands) are not at the end of the story anymore but rather stand at the very beginning.

Here’s a great 2010 New York Times article on Converse’s Rubber Tracks project.

Via gizmag:

For the last ten years, Michelin North America has challenged designers from around the world to create innovative vehicle concepts. The company put those concepts before some judges, and then displayed a chosen few at the North American International Auto Show (NAIAS). The 2011 “Plus 10: The Best is Yet to Come” challenge was to come up with a vehicle that could be enjoyed by people local to the designers in 2021.

Personal mobility is one of the most challenging problems of this and upcoming generations. As the world becomes more urban, our means of transportation will make a huge difference in quality of life and energy efficiency. Michelin as a brand has a long history of promoting itself through adding real value to the people it seeks to engage. One could argue that The Michelin Guide (launched in 1900) is one legendary example of brand strategy that improves the lives of customers.

The latest version of Michelin’s Challenge Design adds real value to the conversation around transportation through adding the local element to the design brief. Reading through some of the entries we can see how the brand is stimulating thinking that leaves the industrial revolution and mass production paradigms in the past and that encourages the design of solutions that incorporate geography, people’s attitudes, climate, and other local traits into the final product.

Some of the outcomes are very impressive and demonstrate the potential to solve big global issues one community at a time. Here’s one of our favorites, the Ventile by Thierry Dumaine:

The area where [the designer] lives is densely populated and a small car is a necessity. Most people prefer cars that are noticeable. It is very windy and it would be interesting to recover this energy source.

Ventile is a translucent car with very special wheels - integrated fans in the wheel and the choice of light materials.

The powertrain has two motors - one electrical and one with fuel. The two motors are connected to a large fan. The fan is propelled by the wind. If there is no wind, it can turn from the speed of the car in a descent.

The wheels use very small tires for an economic friction with the road. Between the tires is another fan. The large fan in the base of the car - the wind makes them turn to help the rotation of the wheels.

Morgan Spurlock on his latest film. In today’s culture transparency is not really an option. Brands can’t choose to be transparent or not, they just are and some know how to deal with it, some just ignore this fact to their own peril. The real choice is one of relevance, substance, and whether to play a real role in culture or not. Good stuff.

GE’s healthcare’s CMO via Contagious Magazine:

‘There is a common point in healthcare around the world: no one likes their healthcare system,’ says GE healthcare’s chief marketing officer Jean-michel Cosséry. ‘So you can go to france, US, Uk, and everyone wants a better healthcare system. why is that? They’re very different. because the healthcare system doesn’t fulfil the customer or consumer needs. why? because the systems have a lot of money put towards them, without any goal to achieve what the consumer wants. what does he want? Quality. he also wants good cost effectiveness. if you go to emerging markets like China and india, my problem is access to the healthcare system. So when you realise that the issue in healthcare is cost, access and quality, it’s obvious for our company which touches the healthcare system to make [those three issues our business] strategy.’

Check out Big Spaceship’s case on the digital approach for Healthymagination: Commitment not campaigns. Nice.

GE - Healthymagination from Big Spaceship on Vimeo.

BMW: Wherever You Want To Go - Ch. 4 : How We’ll Learn To Stop Worrying And Love the Future from Prologue Pictures on Vimeo.

The Economist reports this week on “capitalism’s waning popularity,” after a global study by GlobeScan shows an important decline on “public support for capitalism” among usual suspects like France (6% strongly support in 2010 versus 8% in 2002), and old champions like the US (59% support in 2010 from a massive 80% in 2002).

Not surprisingly support among America’s poor (income below $20,000 per year) sank sharply to 44%. In the article GlobeScan’s chairman warns about business in America “losing its social contract.” The question is which contract? Joseph Stiglitz’s Vanity Fair piece on inequality describes a situation were anything that resembled a social contract died a slow death over the last few decades.

Assuming that there is no contract could be the first step in actually writing one that makes sense for society today. Brands must play a role via developing a system were meaning is created through tangible value. This can be a powerful point of departure.

Time Magazine’s Zachary Karabell asks the right questions about social media in this week’s issue of the magazine. We could use more thinking on how the most successful brands in the space are actually improving the “social” in social media. The massive adoption of these platforms only intensifies the urgency and relevance of this debate. We need a catalyst for more inclusive systems strong enough to not only transform how we shop, communicate, play, and consume media, but also be transformative in ways that enable real social progress.

There can be little doubt that these companies enrich their founders as well as some investors. But do they add anything to overall economic activity? While jobs in social media are growing fast, there were only about 21,000 listings last spring, a tiny fraction of the 150 million — member U.S. workforce. So do social-media tools enhance productivity or help us bridge the wealth divide? Or are they simply social — entertaining and diverting us but a wash when it comes to national economic health? 

The answers are vital, because billions of dollars in investment capital are being spent on these ventures, and if we are to have a productive future economy, that capital needs to grow the economic pie — and not just among the elite of Silicon Valley and Wall Street. The U.S. retains a competitive advantage because of its ability to innovate, but if that innovation creates services that don’t turn into jobs, growth and prosperity, then it does us only marginal good.

What is probably most relevant about Karabell’s piece is the implicit idea that size and influence take these players into a space where they can actually make a difference in society and therefore must. Twenty-first century ideas are not truly innovative if they don’t push society into a better place, the sheer quantity and size of our challenges require that we all demand more from the institutions and organizations that seek to benefit from our participation :

…Like so many things these days, social media contribute to economic bifurcation. Dynamic companies are benefiting from these tools, even if the gains are tough to nail down in specific figures. Many individuals are benefiting too, using LinkedIn to find jobs and Groupon to find deals. But for now, the irony is that social media widen the social divide, making it even harder for the have-nots to navigate. They allow those with jobs to do them more effectively and companies that are profiting to profit more. But so far, they have done little to aid those who are being left behind. They are, in short, business as usual.

Groupon ranks #5 in Fast Company’s World Most Innovative Companies.

The newly formed Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) held a symposium last December focused on redesigning the mortgage disclosure form (MDF). Monica Bueno (Head of Continuum’s Service Design Group) writes in Fast Company’s Co.Design a very useful reflection on the process and the sobering (and perhaps unintended) insights that her team and others uncovered when addresing the challenge of “making an easier-to-use version of the document that banks use to communicate to prospective home buyers the terms of their mortgages.”

As the interdisciplinary team started to work through solutions, they quickly realized that the problem was in fact deeper and way more complex in scope:

As we looked more closely, we found that the actual process of getting a mortgage looks nothing like the straight line assumed by the step-by-step tools currently available to home buyers.

People often start with house hunting instead of budgeting; they fall in love with a home and then talk to a mortgage broker; they compare loans, put together a budget, and realize they can’t afford their dream home and start house hunting all over again with a better idea of what they can afford. And weaving through this network is a web of high-voltage emotions: familial obligations, attitudes, and values both explicit and deeply buried. It wasn’t just a functional problem we had to solve; we needed to take into account a mess of emotion and anxiety that rarely has anything to do with what’s rational.

We could argue that the cultural context that surrounds the housing and financial collapse adds yet another layer of complexity to the task. While the usability of a key component of the system (the MDF) is critical and might very well solve a great deal of problems, we can no longer approach this and other similar challenges in isolation. Those who realize this and systematically pursue problem-finding frameworks are better positioned to create the kind of value needed to make real progress. In Bueno’s words:

This kind of reframing, this habit of stepping back to see the human context of a problem, needs to become a regular habit as we reimagine human systems. If we’re going to “win the future”—and take up President Obama’s challenge to out-innovate the rest of the world—we’ll need to move beyond a use of design to handle aesthetic problems and tap into the power of design to solve for meaning.

Problem definition frameworks address the desire for a shared understanding and a common point of departure among interdisciplinary teams. No matter how intense, the process of collaborating with others to frame the problem (and create a tangible connection with culture) brings substance, clarity (e.g. better role definition), and a common purpose which often becomes a powerful driver of creativity.

Frog Design founder Hartmut Esslinger in A Fine Line, reminds us that creativity centered on “human-adaptive solutions” (as opposed to “commodity-like products”), is the key driver of our evolving economic order, and those at the top of their game “understand that truth and embrace the power of creativity and innovation as they drive their organizations toward a more prosperous and sustainable future.”

Esslinger is another important contributor to the idea that modern organizations cannot detach sustainability (social, ecological, etc.) from prosperity. In this context, elevating our understanding of the problem we are solving to its higher connection with society and culture is not only a powerful catalyst to bring complex teams together but is also a catalyst to building organizations that deliver shared value through inspired creativity.

There is no coincidence in the fact that organizations that are aiming high at establishing a real role in culture for themselves are also reinventing R&D. We are at the very beginnings of a deep transformation in the way people and institutions come together to share ideas and solve problems, and organizations that understand this are already experimenting with different methods to drive meaningful innovation via establishing networks of people and ideas.

Via Steven Johnson’s Where Good Ideas Come From:

Protecting ideas from copycats and competitors also protects them from other ideas that might improve them, might transform them from hints and hunches to true innovations. Ans indeed there is a grow-ing movement in some forward-thinking companies to turn their R&D labs inside out and make them far more transparent than the traditional model. Organizations like IBM and Procter & Gamble, who have a long history of profiting from patented, closed-doors innovations, have embraced open innovation platforms over the past decade, sharing their leading-edge research with universities, partners, suppliers, and customers.

In early 2010, Nike announced a new Web-based marketplace it called the GreenXchange, where it publicly released more than 400 of its patents that involve environmentally friendly materials or technologies. The marketplace was a kind of a hybrid of commercial self-interest and civic good. By making its good ideas public, Nike made it possible for outside firms to improve on those innovations, creating new value that Nike itself might ultimately be able to put to use in its own products. In a sense, Nike was widening the network of minds who were actively thinking about how to make its ideas more useful, without putting anyone else on its payroll.  But Nike’s organizational values also include a commitment to environmental sustainability, and the company recognized that many if its eco-friendly patents might be useful in different contexts…

Robin Chase is busy targeting some of the most visible wicked problems of our time. So far, this has translated into cool brands, great business, and real progress. 

Via robinchase.org:

I spend my life building the world I want to live in:  high integrity, where we care about sources and consequences of our lifestyle, where individuals and companies thrive in a mutually beneficial and delightfully efficient system, where opportunities to participate and engage abound.

Things I didn’t mention above that I work on often:  the future of transportation; location privacy and how to preserve it; the need to reduce CO2 emissions now and in the next few years because technology, R&D, and revamping hard assets (cars, transportation infrastructure, housing, urban planning, electrical sources and grids) won’t produce significant reductions in the necessary timeframe.

Lucius Kwok via Bits & Pieces:

The idea behind the Slow Company movement is that instead of trying to be the first or to get the most mindshare or market share of any company in your vertical, you try to make something that people genuinely find useful and are willing to pay for it. And instead of trying to woo celebrities and plastering your name all over SXSW, you make something that people like so much that they tell their friends, and it spreads by word of mouth based on how well made it is and how awesomely it solves problems that people have — real problems, not ones that marketers make up.

Mark Earls’ 2007 book Herd uncovers many useful truths about our social nature. It also presents them in ways that are relevant today and welcomed by most who before then could only reference pragmatic philosophers and other academics to explain the fact that “the individual mind can exist only in relation to other minds with shared meanings” (George Herbert Mead circa 1920ish).

According to Earls one key mandate to harness herd behavior is “be interesting,” which is a direct result of businesses that are not only driven by “deeply held beliefs” but that can inspire employees, customers, and other stakeholders to join them wherever these beliefs take them.

The principles under which “believe-based businesses” stand are even more relevant in 2011 than in 2007:

First, you must change your view of the outcome you seek; the trick is to create something of social meaning above and beyond the product or service…

Second, the meaning must come from deep inside you. From your personal beliefs about what’s right and wrong in the world. In general or specifically in your industry. Or in the lives of your customers or employees…

Third, you must follow your beliefs and let them shape how your business works. You must turn your business from a vanilla one, a machine for making money, into a living, breathing embodiment of your beliefs; a vehicle for your personal convictions and not just another business…

It’s easy to see how these will only become more and more important as our lives continue to grow in complexity, be filled more sophisticated concerns (from data privacy to the world overheating), and cluttered with both digital and analogue stuff. No matter how big or small the organization, being interesting today begins with being able to articulate what’s wrong and focus attention and resources to make it right.

We seem to be stuck in discussions around the size of the idea and other meaningless lingo. Let’s shift the conversation from quantity and size to meaning and purpose.

video via Totally Naked