Jag lyssnade nyligen (som vanligt) till filosofiska rummet och avsnittet om Aristoteles ”Fysik”. Inte bara är verket i sig uppenbarligen en obduktion av fysiken och naturen och hur den (verkar) funka, utan även avsnittet är ett metaforiskt intelligent böljande samtalshav, mellan tydliga exempel och analys av mekaniken och förhållandena bakom den. Ett bra case.
Detta är något jag saknar så otroligt mycket i många föreläsningssituationer. Case efterfrågas, gärna best practice, men de får gärna avverkas tillsynes utan djupare reflektion. Av många. Inte alla, så klart. Workshops är annorlunda. De kretsar inte kring case utan lek och utforskning av just mekaniken. Om den designats väl vill säga.
Min uppmaningar är att lyssna efter vad som ligger bakom exemplet. Välj aktivt att inte bemöta eller fråga om exemplet i fråga, utan principerna. Förstå mekaniken. Dyker då inte frågorna upp, ja då har du alltid en väldigt enkel. Att du hör vad personen säger och beskriver, men att du bättre vill förstå grundprinciperna. Kan personen i fråga inte obducera detta case på ett sätt som är upplysande bakom det uppenbara, då ska du istället befinna dig i en workshop.
I’ve experienced it, you’ve experienced it. Everyone has. To some extent, we know what’s not working for us, but often we don’t act on it. Some times, in many organisations (if I extrapolate on my own and colleagues’ experiences) it’s even hard to get acceptance when fixing the problem.
The problem of working effectively. With concentration. Focused.
I believe that industries in which you live by people, their minds, creativity and collaboration – how we work is going to be the primary competitive advantage. It’s organizational culture of course. Orgs can get really good people. Many of them can. Some are more attractive and have more traction (HR and employer branding being more and more important). But over all, they get good people.
Is it better to have 50% better people or an organization in which people can be 50% more effective and just work better?
On of the many active, collaborative, parts of the Digital Marketing Lab in Singapore, 2014.
Earlier this year I was in Singapore running a 4-day lab on digital marketing. Running it as in collaborating with Hyper Island (and the wonderful Maria, who’s responsible for the Labs within Hyper Island) in tailoring the different parts of the content around which to, well, lab.
Other labs include rapid prototyping and social – both very suitable to do hands-on lab type of workshops, especially rapid prototyping of course. Our first collective challenge with this lab was actually figuring out the labs ingredient.
A laboratory (/ləˈbɒrətəri/ or /ˈlæbərətri/; informally, lab) is a facility that provides controlled conditions in which scientific or technological research,experiments, and measurement may be performed.
We were definitely in a controlled environment. For 4 full days in a large, open, area approximately 20 people with different backgrounds worked together. Representatives from Google, business consultants figuring out what to do next, community managers, account directors, digital creatives and even recruitment professionals. We were experimenting with propositions, hypotheses and opinions – all open for debate. Hypotheses around how organisations needed to, perhaps, rethink and reorganize how marketing was viewed, budgeted and executed. Very much perceptions of what has been true, but not necessarily anymore.
One key challenge we gave the participants was a hands-on assignment – a brief – from a multinational brand, very much recognized for having momentum and guts to rethink its existence and purpose. Both from a consumer product/brand point of view, but also from an organizational sustainability point of view. This assignment was evaluated by key representatives from the company (the measurement part). My role very much being that of a nudger, suggester, questioner. Without digging into the ideas – there were some really great stuff, some of it actually already in the pipeline within that organisation which says something about its commercial viability. Impressive.
A participant’s recap and reflections on the digital marketing lab
I’m not going to share anything detailed, because one of the participants has shared a quite extensive summary of the digital marketing lab. It’s one individual’s summary, and someone else might recall it differently. But what strikes me is how some of the content that I shared (Simon Kemp of We Are Social, Singapore also shared his) is obviously referred to and has thankfully been helpful. I like that.
Posting your video on YouTube does not make it Digital Storytelling. Building a story of your brand, creating an experience, a feeling, a journey (that holds together across platforms), something worth remembering – and telling others about. That’s digital storytelling
But. If I were to highlight a few key nuggets that I keep coming back to as fundamentally important, from the digital marketing lab but also from doing presentations and workshops (and everyday work) around digital strategy (challenges), they’d be a bit different and framed in another way. Which brings me to the conclusion that I probably need to get my stuff together and share it in a properly packaged and connected manner. Easy to share with more people. Easy for people who have been in workshops to access and refresh or get clarification.
So, in a while I suppose this will be a link to the first of a series of post. Which means this post about a lab participant’s post is a trailer for posts to come.
I planted this trap at work today, to see how people reacted (kind of a case of bad research – I didn’t really know what I was looking for), just for fun. And it was. The majority of my colleagues avoided walking on it some just walked right over it saying something like “oh, I’m trapped”. Some people said it was a rational decision to not walk on it. “I thought; OK this is probably something I shouldn’t step on because it goes pop and it’s ruined”. Others didn’t really have a good answer as to why they avoided it. Just “Oh, I don’t know”. Fair enough.
