Divergent Thinking: Making a Breakthrough

After attending sxsw, I've resisted just reporting on one panel, thinking there's got to be an overall theme to most of the things I saw. And I think I've finally come up with it, read on.

1. Brainstorm, a lot
At "Being a UX team of One" I committed to brainstorming, a lot. Usually we can come up with one or two ideas right off the bat, the problem is pushing past that wall to come up with something more interesting. Leah Buley suggested coming up with a minimum of 6, hopefully much more.

Why does coming up with more ideas make them any better? In my experience, I tend to do the most rote and expected things first, kind of like regurgitating. Forcing myself to move past a couple ideas makes me uncomfortable, but it's oddly freeing at the same time. If I'm in the mindset that I don't have to come up with THE IDEA right away, I'm actually more at ease and open minded. I begin to make better kinds of connections.

Leah's tools for pushing past this wall were to use:
1. conceptual frameworks (this is good for user experience designing)

2. word associations

3. an inspiration library (I just take screenshots and pictures of anything and everything I like, no matter what it is.)

Both the "Objectified" panel and "Journey to the Center of Design" discussed the value in creating a lot of ideas, being rewarded for risk taking and learning from those mistakes. Basically you cannot edit yourself in the beginning.

Journey to the Center of Design Highlights:


2. Start on paper
Several panels admonished not to start in WORD or a PROGRAM of your choice. The format is constraining and you think more broadly and have more freedom on paper or napkin.

3. Involve other people
Ask for specific feedback and ideas. Another perspective is valuable. One of the panelists suggested hosting a session where everyone plays the devil's advocate to poke holes in the idea. Doesn't mean you listen to every criticism, but could help you look at things in a different way.

4.You don't need to know the end at the beginning
In speaking about his movie, "Objectified", Gary Hustwit said he didn't start out with a plan of how the narrative would work, it unfolded with the footage. The challenge in coming up with good ideas is to let go of control and not get stressed out by uncertainty. Kathy Serra in "Change your World in 50 minute: Making Breakthroughs Happen" said "The surest way to guarantee nothing interesting happens is to think you know how it should all go. "

5.There is no right and wrong
My favorite discussion was lead by Charles Sayers, the global marketing director for Sapient. He's worked with brands like Coca-cola, Home Depot, UPS, and Auto-trader in all aspects of brand development and design, marketing program strategy, messaging and corporate communications. In his panel, "Brand Noir: Crafting a Who-Why-How Dunnit", Sayers talked about War rooms and the rules he had:

1. If you go into the war room, leave an idea

2. NOTHING is thrown away, put it on the wall

3. There's no structure in putting it on the wall

Why these kinds of rules? Because people think they have to get it right before they say anything. The point is getting a reaction and response from the team. My doodles or questions may spark something for someone else. Along with no right or wrong, there is no perfect. I like this idea because it frees everyone up from coming up with the Big Idea.

Part of there not being a right and wrong is the idea of suspending disbelief. Acting like there are no limits will get you farther then imagining every possible road block.

6. Create a little discomfort
How do you know if it's a good idea? If everyone feels comfortable with the idea, does that mean it's a good idea? "Oh, Ok, I get it" in not very compelling. A good story or idea will have multiple reactions, you want a lot. If it makes people think, that's good.

The possibilities for creative thinking?
One of the speakers on the "Objectified" panel made an observation on the difference between analytical and design or divergent thinking: "In design or divergent thinking you're trying to create new choices, you're not just picking from the choices you already have, which is analytical." They were discussing product design but then summed it up by saying, "we need to get better at different types of thinking so that we can apply it to current issues" like policy making and health care. They believed that including divergent thinkers in any problem solving process was the key to coming up with breakthrough solutions. Amen.

Share everything. Play fair. Don't hit people.

The SXSW conference started with opening remarks from Zappos.com CEO Tony Hsieh on how fostering a passionate culture of employees while proving extraordinary customer service can massively extend your brand. He spoke about good deeds, chasing your dreams, greater life purpose, goals, inspiration and ended with a strong recommendation for a book by Jonathan Haidt called, "The Happiness Hypotheses". Heavy stuff for a company that known best for selling shoes.

It was inspiring and while obvious on many levels, became an underlying theme throughout the conference: sharing, open, trust, playing fair.

Over the next four days, the number of references to relationships, friends, community, openness, honesty...were many. While not a new concept to business chatter; individuals, brands (countries, civilization...), are realizing the need to focus on the basics to create, foster and extend their image, products, brands and survival.

Concepts like sharing, openness and free may be the new buzz, but would never have made it to the white boards of corporate America as a priority or requirement to remaining relevant. It's a monumental shift for companies formed around protecting intellectual property to now open their doors to the open sharing of content, often for free.

The panel on Becoming Social: This Changes Everything, lead by the heads of development for Myspace, Yahoo, Google and Reuters Thompson was interesting specifically in that the former was a perfect example of a company founded on the dissemination of proprietary information finding it a difficult transition to becoming transparent with it's data, while acknowledging that there was not a choice. To survive, brands need to not only acknowledge consumers, but to open their doors, give them something they don't expect and foster the open conversation that drives perception, respect, trust and happiness?

Share everything. Play fair. Don't hit people. Figure out how to monetize free.

CrowdSourcing

Crowdsourcing has been a hot topic for a while now, but I thought while at SXSW why not hit this panel and find out what's new? I found out it is just more of the same - but still it got me thinking of how fast our world around us is changing and how this will ultimately affect advertising.

Crowdsourcing is a term for delegating a specific task (that perhaps was considered a specialty) to a large diverse group to gain results. One of the best examples is within the stock photo industry. It used to be that if you wanted quality stock photography you had to go to Getty or Corbis, but now there is a multitude of stock houses that get their photos from Joe Traveler or Jane Amateur Photographer. Now the market is flooded with stock photos. These vendors, such as iStockPhoto pay the artist, but it is pennies compared to what the professional photographers get paid with Getty or Corbis. The savings are passed on to companies like Fallon that use this type of photography. While this may be bad for the major stock houses and their associated photographers, it is great for the businesses purchasing the photographs. A great example of the "supply and demand" model for business.

Now take this idea and apply it to science or technology. It's expensive to hire a fleet of scientists, developers, or engineers, but crowdsource your problem and you got yourself an army of people looking at it. A while back NetFlix put out a million dollar challenge for anyone who could make their algorithm a mere 10% better. This algorithm is used for predicting whether someone will enjoy a movie based on how much they liked or disliked their other movies, making suggestions on their user page. This challenge caused some stir in the technology world. People put together teams, started sharing information, and ultimately created a community. It has been over 2 years and the best success so far has been 9.65%. The return for NetFlix is great. They could have never hired this many developers/engineers/statisticians with a million dollars - and even if they put one million into their own staffing, there would always be a chance that they wouldn't reach their goal. (Read a Wired article on this here)

As you can imagine, this has got some photographers and scientists pissed off. They were getting top dollar for their work and now there is uncertainty to their future. So what does this mean to us in advertising? Well, we are seeing many effects of crowdsourcing around us whether we recognize it or not. Social Media has become the ultimate brand crowdsourcing. If people like, or don't like your brand they discuss it on Twitter, Facebook or blogs. Brands are reacting to that. Fallon needs to keep an eye on the discussion. All of a sudden this is used to measure our success.

Recently we did a site where we asked the user to upload a video explaining why they were Phil Mickelson's biggest fans. The winners were placed in a TV ad with Phil. It was a great success and the spots were funny. Well, what if we put it out there that we needed an idea for a brand campaign? If your idea is picked you get credit and we will send you copies of the completed work. Maybe we pay that person a small fee - say a couple hundred bucks (think of the salaries Fallon would save!). Would we get entries? You know it! Would they be good? Well, I am not going there, but I will say that none of us are safe. We need to constantly question our importance to the industry and make ourselves valuable by understanding the changes around us.