.oO Tailwind

Articles on innovation theory, culture an management practices have been written ad infinitum. Many books weigh down my bookshelf and my mind.

So I’m not about to write a lengthy blog post on innovation or mistake embracing culture. I just want to point out a nice anecdotal story about a man who didn’t know the rules that I read via Viewers Like You, via a friend’s blog that’s about changing the status quo and achieving results no-one thought possible.

Cue ‘Voice Over Man‘

“In a world where men race men in a death defying race, one man fights the norm… to do things his.. own.. way”

Okay, I’ll stop.

In 1983, Cliff Young, a 61 year old sheep farmer from Australia, entered one of the world’s most gruelling ultra races wearing galoshes and boots. Up against trained, elite ultra athletes he competes in the race over 875 km and 5 days, sets a record and wins the heart of Australians everywhere.

All because he didn’t know the rules.

He competed with ‘less’ knowledge than his competitors and as a result saw the challenge very differently indeed. His unique angle ultimately won him the race and changed the practice of ultra running forever.

It’s time for a ‘think outside the box’ quote.

Pah.

A while ago I suggested to some colleagues that we should revisit a bunch of failed .com ideas from circa 98-02 purely on the basis that many were good but we didn’t have the skills, technology or appetite for them.

‘1973: Sorry, Out of Gas‘ has been curated by Mirko Zardini for the CCA (Canadian Centre for Architecture) to study architectural innovation spurred on by the oil crisis in 1973 where prices ballooned triggering a bit of a fracas across the globe.

Many of the ideas were probably ahead of their time, but are now very relevant and downright sensible. Okay, some aren’t.

The ideas don’t just concern energy efficiency and the environment they concern societal ideas, models and lifestyle. The exhibition looks at Sun, Earth, Wind and Integrated Systems.

It’s an interesting idea, looking back to look forward, it makes me wonder how many great inventions, cures, thoughts, ideas etc have been lost because they weren’t incubated correctly.

Maybe we need a worldwide ‘idea bin’.

What great ideas have you forgotten about?

Our company is currently going through a bit of a change after some fairly heavyweight mergers. Firstly Oyster with Framfab and then Framfab with LBicon. The group is now an 1800 person, multinational full service design agency. It’s essentially a rollup of Oyster, Framfab, LBicon, Lost Boys, Wheel, MetaDesign, Scient, iXL and some bits of Razorfish.

We now have offices in the UK, US, the Netherlands, Germany, Sweden, Denmark, Belgium, Italy and China (!). Pretty huge I’d say.

But with this growth there are the inevitable challenges such as knowledge sharing, creative agility, familiarity and moreover team culture and individual identity. Certainly in the London office where I work.

I wrote about the begining of this challenge, here and here.

The team culture has no doubt been impacted which breeds some questions around personal identity and the sense of place an individual has within the whole. On the whole everything is positive, there are just some interesting challenges afoot. there are also some very interesting opportunities afoot in cross-polinating the disciplines from one country to the next as there is so much to learn.

I’ve already been part of a knowledge exchange with out Dutch counterparts at Lost Boys in Amsterdam. Cool bunch they are too.

Anyway, in order to deal with this the London outfit has arranged into ‘ecosystems’ and these groups seek to deliver small group thinking, sharing and agility within a large, well supported network. The are teams of about 60 people grouped around clients with a natural affinity.

Growth brings process as process is required to control the new chaos. Process can all too often equate to bureaucracy and bureaucracy is an innovation killer in my book. So we’re working on ways to reintroduce chaos (a bit anyway), to reinvigorate a mistake-embracing culture where it’s okay to try new things and get it wrong.

This is design. It’s about invention and experimentation.

All this starts with people and my key observation about agency culture after a few years first hand experience is that very talented people join to work on ‘cool’ brands. Those same talented people are used on projects from week to week, month to month so that all the ‘learning’ takes place on-he-job. Yes there are training course and development packages etc.. but that’s all too often structured around a skill-deficit and is rarely about just trying things out.

I don’t like that and I think that it’s wrong. Who has ever been on a course where they say “Just play. make and break stuff, be curious”?

My colleagues at LBi who lead our ecosystem also agree so we are currently introducing an 80/20 culture to our team.

80% on billed client work. 20% making mistakes working on things that excite them.

It’s not new but the reasons for pursuing it are obvious. It is all about creating an innovation culture where people are challenged and encouraged to work on subjects that intrinsically motivate them. To create a sense of ‘play’ in our workplace.

Any professional service company worth its salt has this approach but I haven’t heard of anything similar in a digital design agency. Yes in product design, but not in digital and certainly at none of our competitors.

I’ve always said that our discipline has a lot to learn from other design disciplines, being the new kid on the block and I stick to that.

So. 80/20. How do we make it happen?

Well there are 2 challenges to deal with from the off:

1. In a culture of 100% billable, creating breathing space for the ‘20′ to happen
2. Finding out what topics individuals should work on and what the prospective projects might be

Firstly we can consider blocking out sometime each week where we switch mode from billed work to private work. I like the idea of this all happening at the same time each week as I think it will create a nice buzz in the team to have everyone on ‘pet projects’ at the same time.

To get started we’re thinking of setting ‘Design Challenges’ to run for a time-boxed period just to introduce the 80/20 way of life. 80% on projects, 20% on other stuff.

We can let this run for a while, enjoy the distraction and nurture our capacity planning to accommodate the new activity.

While we are re-engineering ‘how’ we do things we can be thinking about those ‘pet projects’, what they are, what interests us all as individuals. Some people can team up and start making, trying and developing ’stuff’. The Design Challenges will help us establish the time slot and be a conduit for developing some personal ideas.

I’m always up for feeling our way towards this by trying things out rather than talking talking talking too much.

We’ll let you know how it goes.

We’ve discussed it and it’s all systems go on our new innovative, mistake embracing, creative, fun, developmental culture.

Yay.

So, I’m currently down in Cadiz, southern Spain taking in part in Orange’s second Partner Camp this year. The camp is a 3 day event aimed at sharing, discussing and un-peeling Orange’s world, it’s customers and it’s business with a view to information exchange with suppliers/partners etc.

I was also at the Partner Camp held in May which was in Sarasota, Florida.

At LBi, Orange is one of my key clients and I really enjoy working with them. The work we do is mostly web and/or application based and we’ve been working right across the business at all levels for some years.

We do a lot of work with both Orange Group in the UK and with the various divisions of FT, based in Paris. now so our knowledge of where this converging business is going, really is front line.

Events like this are great because they give us an insight into other parts of Orange’s business that we don’t get to see, so we shore up our understanding even further. but what I really like is the open, discursive and collaborative nature of the sessions.

People are here to learn about Orange and Orange is here to listen.

There are a bunch of suppliers here, content, service and technology, whose reason for being here is different to ours - i.e. they want to sell something to Orange, but even so this makes for interesting observation.

Some topics for this blog are occurring to me as I attend sessions on Web 2.0, product and service convergence, product/service ecosystems, HSDPA, user generated content etc etc. The topics themselves aren’t new to me, of course, but seeing how an organisation of this size is adapting itself to a community economy is.

Being here is invaluable to my understanding as to what motivates this business and what the challenges are as well as providing me with the forum to discuss what we do and how we do it with my key clients within the company.

As we engage on day-to-day projects and issues, events like Partner Camp provide a useful forum for brokering conversations aimed at doing things better. It’s an open chat.

Good stuff is coming from this. More later.

In a recent posting I  wrote about how we are driving our company culture towards a more innovative and collaborative environment. I also talked about the notion of 70/20/10 as a utilisation philosophy and that it should cover not only the way in which we allocated skills to clients but also to the space in which we operate.

Well check this out from Google. 20% innovation time.

3M had 15%, Google has 20%, We’ll have 30% - ner ner ner nerrr nerrr.

How often to you get to really shape the creative environment in which you work? And I mean REALLY influence it?Influence it in terms of creative philosophy, learning ideology, physical environment, resourcing, utilisation models, core and niche skill-sets, client base?Not often. That’s for sure.We’re in the middle of some very exciting changes at work and we’re currently challenged with maintaining an innovative, creatively charged, motivated team whilst we have all the challenges of growth.When you get bigger, things can become less creative. Cross-pollination of disciplines becomes more difficult, teams get bigger, collaboration tends to fall away and what was once a personal environment becomes more… well, corporate.In the past 2-3 years the Experience Design team have grown about 400% in terms of team size and whilst that has obvious spacial challenges, the ones that most affective our business are the affects on creativity.Someone once said “Innovation is the lifeblood of any organisation” – I can’t remember for the life of me who it was, and my MA professor won’t be impressed with my memory lapse, but it is true. If you take away the innovation and creativity from a design consultancy, you not only kill your client interest through lackluster work, but you also cause huge problems with your teams.Anyway, at the moment we’ve decided to create smaller, more agile groups called ecosystems. These ecosystems represent a group of people arranged around a set of clients that have a natural affinity, where the group have a shared work ethic and ideology. They work well, inspire each other and are generally organised complimentary personalities and skill-sets.What is great is the working philosophy of 70/20/10. 70% client work, 20% knowledge sharing and service development, 10% Skunkworks. We are aiming to foster a ‘guru culture’ where ‘restless innovation’ is key to the things we do. We’re now about harnessing people’s intrinsic motivation and giving them space to do things with it, so that, ultimately, our client work gets way better.This ideology of 70/20/10 should also apply to our environment, so that we work in a space that is 70% about doing, 20% about sharing and collaboration, developing ideas, and 10% about innovation and chaos. Couple this with a willingness to experiment, and I think great things will happen.It’s interesting how people react to this kind of opportunity, how people get emotive and start worrying about their fiefdoms. But then again I guess people will always resist change.Me? I think it’s brilliant - I’m looking forward to it. I already work with some really talented people. Seeing them charged and with the remit to experiment and given the head-space to do it and think about it will be a good thing.You wait and see.(P.S. What a great word fiefdom is).