tiny gigantic

So last week during an interview for a radio show, we were asked what our single driving purpose is. What, the interviewer wanted to know, was our one bottom line? It’s hard question for anyone. But it’s extra hard for us because we don’t believe it’s a good strategy to be rigid about anything. Especially the thing that drives your business. But in the interest of answering the question we’ve defined a number of bottom lines that we’re always paying off in one way or another:

1. Money, for obvious reasons.

2. Inspiration. We can’t help anybody if we’re not excited by the ideas we’re working with. So we make it a huge part of our daily practice to feed our creative impulse. Lotsa people talk about the importance of making time of inspiration, but very few follow through because it takes a shitload of work to really sustain it.

3. Community. It’s important to build and contribute to community. Because, like it or not, the world is all about the quality of your relationships.

4. Reputation. When you’re in the business of solving unprecedented problems, your reputation for doing that very thing is more important than your portfolio.

5. Opportunity. You can have all the talent in the world, but if there’s no opportunity to apply it, you’ve got nothing.

What do you think? Are the things you’d include?

Have you checked out LinkedIn lately? It’s become seriously good.

Three points:

1. No walled garden.
By far the best thing about LinkedIn is that I can export my contacts. All the connections I make belong to me, and I can take them with me. All the value I create in my social network is fully accessible to me, as it should be. This is not possible on Facebook, and this is the number one reason I’ve stopped investing time into Facebook.

2. Super smart partnerships.
LinkedIn has recently launched a bunch of apps that are actually useful and interesting. For example, when I read the nytimes online, the right hand column has a LinkedIn-sponsored sidebar that sugges ts articles relevant to my work. It’s really good. And there are some new apps/partnerships that facilitate greater collaboration and biz dev, such as ftp dropboxes and portfolio presentation platforms and embedded google docs. All of this suggests a trend that makes a lot of sense to me: the contact list is becoming the hub of web-based collaboration.

3. Niche focus.
LinkedIn has a clear purpose: work-related social networking. Every aspect of their offering is aligned with that focus, and everybody is the network for the same reasons. As a result, there’s way less clutter than you’d find on FB or MySpace.

So yeah, check it out. And while you’re there, go ahead and add me and Josh (and select “friend” when prompted). We’re always psyched to make new connections:

My (Axel’s) profile
Josh’s profile

Wow. You must visit tineye.com.

It’s a new kind of image search. TinEye will look at any image you give it, and then compare it to other images. It can find a wide range of matches, including cropped images and photoshopped images. It actually searches visually, unlike Google’s image search, which uses keywords and image names.

As you know, we’re, like, nanomoments from finishing our book for written on the city. And today, our friend Richard Oliver of Purposive Drift sent us a timely note, sharing his experiences in the final sessions of finishing his book Understanding Hypermedia 2.0 for print.

Enjoy:

Just thought I’d share an experience with you. My last published book, “Understanding Hypermedia 2.0″ was a bit of a nightmare. My co-author, Bob Cotton fell ill at a crucial point in the process. I was having conversations with Malcolm Garrett, the designer, at 4.00 in the morning, where we were swearing we would never do an illustrated book again. I was doing lots of processes that should have been sequential like writing main text, captions, choosing illustrations, and so on, in parallel. We had what was beginning to look like an impossible deadline. And so on. I guess you get the picture.

Anyway, the point of all this is that I was having a final meeting with our editor where there were a few tiny bits to tidy up before the book was sent off to the printers. Everything we needed to deal with could have been done in about ten minutes. After half an hour I realised that I was dragging the meeting on because I was reluctant to let go of our baby and let it go out into the world - very weird.

In the end, despite all the pain, I think it is my favourite of all our books.

Thanks, Richard. Wish us luck!

Kevin Kelly, co-founder of Wired, has developed a countdown clock to tell him how many days he has left to live, so he can make the most of them.

I am now 55 years old. Like a lot of people in middle age my late-night thoughts bend to contemplations about how short my remaining time is. Even with increasing longevity there is not enough time to do all that I want. Nowhere close. My friend Stewart Brand, who is now 69, has been arranging his life in blocks of 5 years. Five years is what he says any project worth doing will take. From moment of inception to the last good-riddance, a book, a campaign, a new job, a start-up will take 5 years to play through. So, he asks himself, how many 5 years do I have left? He can count them on one hand even if he is lucky. So this clarifies his choices. If he has less than 5 big things he can do, what will they be?

I decided to take the idea of number days seriously, and to revisit my earlier experience of counting down my remaining time on this lovely mortal plane. My hope was that a reckoning of my numbered days would help me account for how I spend each precious 24 hours, and to focus my attention and energy on those few tasks and projects I deem most important to me. Indeed, it might help me decide which ones are most important, which is the harder assignment.

I’ve been using this system for several months now and it has been very powerful. Day to day I am aware — and can rattle off if I am asked - how many days I have left. I decided to post my project today because on my clock it shows a handily rounded off sum. So here is the news: As of today I have 8,500 days left to live. That’s not much in my book. I can almost hear them ticking away as we speak. I look at my lifelist of current dreams and I realize that in only 8,500 days I won’t get to but a few of them. And what of any new dreams?

Link.

Via Boingboing.

We’ve put together a new pdf for your reading pleasure. It’s called Dirty words & dick jokes, and it’s all about the seemingly innocuous words and phrases that consistently make the job of creativity harder. You can download it over there in the middle column. Enjoy.

This post by Grant McCracken is right on.

…how important it is to have noise in the signal, noise in the brand, noise in the corporation.

If once the meaning managers of the corporation hoped for perfect clarity, now they know that clarity is a problem, a barrier, and a failure.

Hells yes. We’ve talked before about this with the problem of the elevator pitch: how it’s very clarity kills conversation, and limits your own growth and the potential of your relationships.

But today we don’t want to talk about elevator pitches. We want to talk about conversation, what motivates it, and what you can do to keep it going. Here’s a few more lessons from our month-long moratorium on small talk.

Be vulnerable
If you want conversation to happen, you’ve got to open yourself up to it. You’ve got to be willing to be changed by the person you’re talking to. But most of us aren’t—instead we’re trying to change them.

Don’t panic
In any conversation, there’s gonna be scary moments of misunderstanding (hmm…can you explain what you do again? I don’t really get it) and you’ll be tempted to fall back on easy answers (Oh, well. I’m in marketing) that take you back into safe territory. But safe territory isn’t where good conversation happens. It’s okay not to know where the conversation is leading. You’ll find out together.

Be cool with quiet
Some people see the lulls in conversation as problems, or moments of failure. But they’re not. Your silence among friends and loved ones signals comfort and trust. And you can send that same signal to someone you’ve just met simply by being okay with the silent parts of the conversation. This may be the fastest way to build intimacy and rapport. Which is what good conversation is all about.

Here’s a good New Yorker article on a beautiful emerging sport called parkour, which is the art of moving fluidly over any terrain.

Parkour, a made-up word, cousin to the French parcours, which means “route,” is a quasi commando system of leaps, vaults, rolls, and landings designed to help a person avoid or surmount whatever lies in his path—a vocabulary, that is, to be employed in finding one’s way among obstacles. Parkour goes over walls, not around them; it takes the stair rail, not the stairs.

Read the rest here.

Don’t miss this sweet VIDEO here.

They’re boring. They don’t spark conversation. They don’t ask questions worth answering. They most often sound like this: “the new logo we created for (client name here) uses powerful diagonal lines to symbolize (generic brand values here).” Fucking kill me.

Okay, okay: I’ll back up a little.

We’re in a business that deals with the messy goo of creativity, something that, all by itself, is hard enough to grow and manage without having to figure out how to sell it to someone else. But we do sell it. And so we need proof of its worth, something potential clients can look at to get a feel for what it is we do. Enter the case study: a rehashing of an old creative brief, a glorified description of old work, and some pretty pictures.

The problem with the case study is that it only shows what you have done. Showing old work will only bring more of the same. If a client sees something you did in, say 1999, and it matches the thing in their head that they think they want, you’re going to wind up replicating it. So it can’t be different. And different is what the client came to you for.

This why we rarely show our past client work (not to mention that none of our potential clients really wants to see some brochure we made for a company they don’t care about). We’d rather have a conversation that gets the potential client excited about the possibilities of newness, that shows them the depth of our thinking, that poses questions they’d like to have a hand in answering. Of course, it’s only certain kind of client with a certain amount of courage who signs on to work with us. And that’s good. It means we won’t be sentenced to do the same work over and over and over.

I know. Easier said than done. But, if you must cite past work, for god sakes, don’t put the emphasis on what you did (brand refresh, new logo in blue, bold website design) but rather on what you learned about communication that can help others.

So what should you show, if not past client work? One good option is to show your self-initiated projects. You do have some of those, right?

To continue the conversation:

What if every brainstorm began with a meditation on impossibility, failure, stupidity, shame, etc? It might do wonders to get all that stuff over with before the brainstorming begins.

Yes! And here’s why: Idea generation sessions are often mistaken as idea selection sessions. There’s an expectation that part of the job of a brainstorm is to play the devil’s advocate, to make sure that nothing short of brilliance gets through to the execution phase. And as its much easier to write cheesy poetry about being sad, angry, or depressed, it’s also much easier to be negative and judgmental, than it is to find the worth in every idea. So ideas get killed in the moment they’re born. And that sucks, because:

1. If all ideas get shot down, participants will be much less likely to continue to contribute. And when nobody contributes, you get no new ideas.

2. Negativity is as contagious as positivity. If one person is bludgeoning every idea that gets floated, it gives others license to do the same. And again, you get no new ideas, only old dead ones.

The beauty of Axel’s buddy’s exercise is this: it sucks to wallow in the shit. It’s toxic. And you can only handle toxicity for so long. So it stands to reason, if you spend time exhausting all that negativity, letting the toxic stuff run its course, that by the time you get to the brainstorm you’ll want nothing more to be full of positivity, hope, and acceptance. And if you want to be it, you can.

Has anyone tried this or some other perhaps less formalized way of exhausting negativity? We’d love to know about it.

Last night my buddy told me about a sort of “negative meditation” he does to get himself out of a bad mood. It seems pretty straightforward and def worth a try:

1. find some privacy

2. set an alarm (1hr)

3. force yourself to be as negative as you can be until the alarm goes off or the clouds pass, whichever comes first

Apparently, my buddy can make it about 45 min before he’s unable to be negative anymore. That’s a 45 minute cure for depression!

And Josh had the brilliant idea of incorporating this technique into creative work. What if every brainstorm began with a meditation on impossibility, failure, stupidity, shame, etc? It might do wonders to get all that stuff over with before the brainstorming begins.

There’s a lot to be said for scrapping your action plan and just making things using intuition and passion as your guide. Some call this rapid prototyping. We call it makin’ shit. The idea is to commit to a high pace of creation and make your decisions on the fly (not ahead of time). When you eliminate the boundaries set by your client, your boss, your inner critic or your preconceptions, you make room for unknowns, some of which could be monumentally valuable.

“We make a lot of this stuff up as we go along,” the lead designer said. Everyone in the group laughed until he continued, “I’m serious. We don’t assume anything works and we don’t like to make predictions without real-world tests. Predictions color our thinking. So, we continually make this up as we go along, keeping what works and throwing away what doesn’t. We’ve found that about 90% of it doesn’t work.

That’s from an article about the web designers at Netflix. I quoted it because I want you to know that one of the most successful websites in the world gets designed by the seat of its pants. It gets designed by taking chances, not by making plans.

Sure, this approach is a little scary. It comes with more failure and more uncertainty about outcomes. So you gotta be okay with that. It comes with the extra burden of getting the people who are stuck in old ways of thinking and doing to trust the process. And this, my friends, requires a ton of patience.

But it works. And it’s super fuckin fun. It prioritizes those moments of pure creative play. It focuses you on the making of the thing before the thing itself. And isn’t that why you got into the business of creativity in the first place?

Something happened today as we were experimenting with possible layout directions for the Written on the City book: I stopped looking, I stopped thinking, and I finally felt like progress got made.

Designers are trained to look. Scratch that, they’re paid to look. So I’ll understand if you want to kick me in the crotch when I tell you that when beginning a design project, it’s sometimes a good idea to stop thinking, stop looking and start simply making.

Because here’s the thing: we’ve been so trained to look for a solution at the end of a project, we don’t see all the wonderful, serendipitous possibilities in what happens along the way.

So we floundered around like this for a good week or so. And if it hadn’t been for our good friend, the kick-ass Audrey Kallander we’d be floundering still.

She told us to shut the hell up and then held us at scissor-point until we began making collages of possible spreads. I know, it seems obvious. But no one really seems to take the time (and it does take some time) to use collage as a tool to figure out some smart design directions. Mostly, we go straight to the computer, and start designing from there. But starting with the computer forces you to think immediately about a grid, it forces you to think and re-think your actions, and it makes the design process too precious.

So here’s what you do:
Make a whole bunch of black and white copies (in many different sizes) of all your images. Then do the same thing using lorem ipsum text. Make some bold, some in italics, some giant and some tiny. Get some tape and start cutting and taping.

And don’t worry about what it looks like. Seriously. This means that you shouldn’t have an idea about what it’s gonna look like, before you begin. You just have to start laying your text and your images down next to eachother without thinking about your rule of thirds or your golden ratio or your rags or a grid or anything else for that matter. You can tap those things into place after you’ve found a direction that feels good. So work with your gut. And make as many different spreads as possible.

You’ll find that once you let go of seeing the process as the product, your designs will become a lot freer, they’ll lend themselves more to conversation and narrative. And you’ll have a damn good time, too.

Have you tried this? How did it go?

If you’re in any kind of creative services business, you’re probably used to having potential new clients ask you “How much will it cost for you to [insert creative service here] for us?”

And if you’re like most of the people I’ve worked with, you squirm a little (even if you pretend to be chill), and make some sort of gut calculation based on a few factors:

- How much money you think they’ve got
- How much you need or want money at the moment
- How much you want to have the project in your portfolio
- How well you get along with the people on the client team
- How likely they are to give you more work
- How elite you want to appear
- How tight the deadline is
- How much you care

Then you light some candles, slaughter a goat, commune with the spirit world, and come up with a number.

It’s not a very good system. No matter how confident they may seem, very few creative people I know actually feel confident about the prices they quote. It’s a game full of second guesses and crossed fingers. And it’s often a game full of regret.

And asking for an estimate ain’t so good for the client either, because it forces the creative firm to think adversarially about the client right from the get go. It forces the creatives into games of intrigue, maneuvers, posturing, and bluffs—all to “win” over the client. This is no way to start a relationship, especially one meant to thrive on collaborative creativity.

A good solution is to tell the client how things really work. Maybe say something like this:

“Look, a [insert creative service here] project can get done a lot of different ways. It can be big or small, deep or shallow, quick or slow. There isn’t necessarily one right way to do it. It’s very much a matter of chemistry and excitement and personality types. We’ve found that the best thing for a project is for you to first tell us how much you want to spend. We’ll take that number and think about the project, what it’ll take to get it done, how much we want to do it, and any other obstacles and motivators. Then we’ll tell you how to best use the budget you’ve got, and you can decide if you like what we suggest or not. Then, instead of negotiating abstract dollar counts, we’ll have a conversation about how best to get the work done with your budget. It’s more concrete, more human, more collaborative, and more transparent. For these reasons, it’s a much better approach, given how creative services really work.”

Got any other ways to make it easier for creatives and clients get together?

It goes a little something like this:

“We’ve got [or we want to have] a room where people can get away from their desks and cubicles and really get creative. In this room, the rules are different. Everyone sits on bean bags, and there are no computers allowed. Instead of staplers and keyboards, we’ve got toys and children’s books and magazines. The walls are colorful, and one of the walls is painted with blackboard paint so people can write all over the walls and have a really wild brainstorm. It’s a sanctuary and war room and lounge all at once. We do our best thinking in there.”

I’ve heard this story in one form or another at just about every “creative” organization I’ve worked with. I really respect the spirit of it and the desire to create a space where creativity can thrive. But it’s a stupid-ass story, because a “bean bag lounge” isn’t a very good way to make creativity happen.

There are two things wrong with the bean bag lounge. The first problem is that it’s an isolated room. This sends the message that creativity has to be underground in your organization, that creative people are refugees, constantly fighting against the overwhelming tide of cubicle conformity. This is no good for creativity, no good for keeping your creatives on staff, and no good for your organization.

The second problem is that bean bag lounges are crappy environments. Sure, cubicle farms suck, and a brightly colored room is better, but in my experience, creativity does best when people feel at home. And no one feels at home in a bean bag lounge. Seriously, when was the last time you went over to someone’s house and found it set up like a bean bag lounge? The effect is that bean bag lounges are self-conscious spaces (I’d even go so far as to say that they are caricatures of themselves) and so people feel some sort of expectation that they must “be creative” when they are in the room, and that’s just the kind of thing that kills creativity.

All of this might explain why all the bean bag lounges I’ve ever seen are always deserted, which is sad because they are built with the best intention. But they just plain don’t work. It’s time we killed this false idol.

In 1975, two artists—Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt—collaborated to create a deck of cards designed to help break creative deadblocks. Here’s what Brian Eno has to say about them:

“These cards evolved from our separate observations of the principles underlying what we are doing. Sometimes they were recognized in retrospect (intellect catching up with intuition), sometimes they were identified as they were happening, sometimes they were formulated. They can be used as a pack (a set of posibilities being continuously reviewed in the mind) or by drawing a single card from a shuffled pack when a dilemma occurs in a working situation. In this case the card is trusted even if it appropriateness is quite unclear. They are not final, as new ideas will present themselves, and others will become self-evident.”

There are now 5 editions, and they are filled with super interesting, super cryptic advice that feels (to me at least) very powerful for provoking a new way of thinking when you’re stuck.

Want to draw a card from the deck? Do it online here or here or here.

Wikipedia for Brian Eno here, Peter Schmidt here, and Oblique Strategies here.

Image credit Peter Schmidt.

Brian Eno previously in Tiny Gigantic here.

Here’s a problem: Brainstorming ain’t what it used to be. All the recent hype about innovation has got people scrambling into their conference rooms to conduct brainstorms to generate ideas for next big thing. Problem is these brainstorms often aren’t as successful as they could be. When I was still muddling through the agency life, the idea of a brainstorm made me go numb: the conference room, the white board, the facilitator—usually my boss—and a bunch of bored, or scared, “creatives” sitting around doodling on their notepads. Usually all that came out of it was a sugar crash and some mediocre ideas. My boss’s solution: “okay team, let’s have another brainstorm session tomorrow until we get it right.”

So let’s talk about what it takes to have a fun and effective brainstorm.

First of all, you gotta know the rules, and follow them. If you need a refresher, they’re right here. But in my experience we often did a fine job of following the rules, and the brainstorms still sucked.

Why?

First, the sessions were often run by my boss. When you feel like you performance is being evaluated right there in the moment, you tend to get uptight. That makes you question your ideas instead of simply sharing them. Beyond that, your co-workers are all feeling the same thing, and the session becomes a competition for the boss’s approval.

This isn’t to say there shouldn’t be a leader to the session—it can even be your boss—but the leader/boss must make it ridiculously clear that it’s the quantity of ideas that matter, not the quality. That means praising the motormouths, not necessarily their ideas.

Another problem is the setup. When you have a bunch of people facing a whiteboard or a flip chart, you get an audience dynamic. People become spectators when they should be participants. So instead seat people in a circle not a horseshoe. Give everyone a pen and lots of paper. And if you want to get pro about it, think about how you seat them around the table. You want the same kind of dynamic as a lively dinner party. Wired Magazine has a good way to go:

»Eight to 12 people per table works best.

»Never seat friends next to one another.

»Ignore the old etiquette of alternating males and females.

»Sort place cards into four “energy density” piles: H (high), M (medium), L (low), and ? (wild card).

»Assign the H guests first. Seat them diagonally from one another. Never seat H people directly across from each other.

»If you have guests with strong opposing views, seat them diagonally from each other, too.

»Seat the L people next to the H people. When conversation bounces around the table, The Ls will be more inclined to participate because of their proximity to an H.

»Scatter M and ? guests among the remaining open seats.

And if you want to get masterful about it, a little whiskey sometimes helps to get the ideas flowing.

Another thing: group brainstorms allow people to slack. They can hide in the group and let the eager beavers and caffeine-heads do all the work. I know, I’ve done it. So make sure that every brainstorm has a solo component. Usually it’s a good idea to do that before you meet as a group.

This last one is the hardest to overcome: People will naturally want to respond to the most provocative good and bad ideas. They’ll want to raise them up or shoot them down. But both these responses kill the flow of ideas. So here’s what you do:

Celebrate your favorite ideas silently. Write them down along with the all the ways you might build on them. Then set them aside and get back to the task at hand: quantity.

Give the bad ideas time to live. The rules already say not to judge them. But If you can’t contain your criticism, you’d better follow it up with a new idea right away. Otherwise, you’ve just killed the conversation.

Here’s the shortlist:

1. Know the rules

8. Make damn sure that it’s fun.

What brainstorming techniques do you use?

The NYC chapter of the AIGA has just put out this nifty guide with all kinds of resources.

[Insert cheesy stock photo of a banker with a telescope here]

A friend of mine from college made a comment not long ago that I haven’t been able to get off my mind. He said, “I can really tell the difference between our friends who have vision and those who don’t. And I’m pretty sure I’d be more successful if I had it too.”

I definitely agree that vision helps. What bugs me about his comment is that it frames vision as something you either have or you don’t. But vision is not a gift you’re born with nor an object you possess. It’s not an animal you pursue and catch. Vision is the pursuit itself: a constant questing, a constant questioning, a pursuit of answers that do not sit still. Vision is a practice.

The practice of being visionary is a matter of looking out as far as possible, setting your sights on a destination in the deep distance, and using that to inform your next small step. It ain’t easy to set your sights, especially when the landscape is dark or cloudy or hazy, but you do it as best you can, and you take a step in one direction or another. Along the way, your eyes change, and so does the landscape, and this prompts you to reset your sights on a new and presumably better destination. Then you take some more steps and get your bearings again.

Being visionary requires imagination (to dream of new worlds), wisdom (to choose between them), and faith (to persevere in a task that defies certainty and is designed to be “too big”). These are things that every human is born with. So it stands to reason that anyone can be visionary if they choose to practice.

As a practice, vision can be taught. Maybe not by me, but my friend wants help, so I’m gonna try.

The first thing is that you can never stop asking yourself big questions, because the big questions challenge your imagination and wisdom and faith all at once. They force you to look far far out, right into the vanishing point. And it doesn’t matter which big questions you ask—or whether they are abstract or concrete—so long as they are big as can be.

The second thing is that the answers to these questions will always change, just like you and everything else. But often the answer of the moment will help you answer a smaller, more immediate question.

Easier said than done, mind you.

Here are some questions I’ve been caught up with lately. Maybe they’ll help you:

What would you do if you knew you could not fail?

If you could change or create one law, what would it be?

If you had 2 minutes to speak to the world population all at once, what would you say?

What would your ideal city be like?

Over at This Blog Sits at the, there’s a good post on building reputation and identity in a way that defies traditional branding logic.

Here’s how it starts:

When theatre people say why Cate Blanchett is a good actress, they say she is:

* transformational and fluid
* open
* filled with contradiction
* uncontrolled at the core
* elusive
* ambiguous

Hah! Traditionally, this is the “no fly zone” of the branding world. It may do for actresses to work the more difficult and meaning rich tropes. Not for brands. No, brands preferred a rhetoric that emphasized emphasis, repetition, clarity and, um, emphasis.

But why can’t the brand be more like Cate?

It’s an important question to ask. See where it leads here.