now in colour | andy whitlock's grubby blog

June 20, 2013

Potent writing

Shorter sentences have sharper edges. And the greater the noise, the more important potency is.

I’m making a daily effort to say more with fewer words.“If you can’t say it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.” More importantly, others won’t understand, or even listen.

Longer reads remain valuable, for the right audience. And for the author, because “how do I know what I think until I see what I say?” But when your words exist to directly empower people, your goal is to make them impossible to forget or misinterpret.

Simple explanations are Trojan Horses; seductive nuggets of complex understanding.

Here’s an example:

1. Find an everyday problem
2. Map steps people take to solve it
3. Make a product that eliminates steps

That’s a 17-word instruction manual, edited by Nick Marsh, from a post by Nate Kontny.

I used Nate’s product, Draft, to write this post. Hoping its principles rub off on me.

‘Lean Strategy’ – 3 things you should know

This is cross-posted from the Made by Many blog. It’s a post about strategy, written with these assumptions in mind:

Lots of marketing strategists are increasingly interested in product innovation.
More and more innovation companies will adopt Lean methodologies.
Migrating strategists will have a massive shock and appreciate some tips.

You’ll be relieved to note that this isn’t a philosophical post. It’s a practical one. Because after all, we’re interested in making things, which means less talking and more doing…

Everything that follows falls out of one simple belief: the less we know about the future, the less time we should spend guessing without trying. This doesn’t mean ‘not planning’. It means rapid, potent planning, woven into shorter development cycles with regular testing in the wild.

Here are the three things you should exercise as a strategist in this environment:

1. Holistic Involvement
Strategists and Planners have long championed the broadening of knowledge, but more often than not, it’s applied to generate better, more original guessing. When you’re exploring strategies through the act of making, you need a deeper, more practical appreciation of technology and design. You’re probably used to a process where technology is how you achieve something, but it is also why you achieve it.
Detach ‘can we do it?’ and ‘should we do it?’ conversations at your peril. Work intimately with technologists and designers, instead of ocassionally asking for their conclusions. You will not understand the implication of every nuance, so be there when they arise. The less you know, the less use you are.

2. Actionable Reasoning
One of the most toxic traps a strategist can fall into is becoming a good convincer: creating a persuasive, intellectual fog between reality and execution, and transforming bystanders into insecure, nodding fools. You’re not clever if you manage to sell the wrong idea, so beware of the power to convince — it should be results that convince and nothing else.
Divorcing strategists from the execution process has fuelled some of this negative behaviour. But with an emphasis on making and testing, combined with short development cycles, strategic input must not only be devoid of illusion, it must empower the team to act - with minimum friction and maximum value. Learn something from designers. Like them, your job is to quickly manifest collective thinking in a form others can recognise, understand and help to progress.

3. Responsive Guidance
With shorter cycles, you need to be less precious than you’ve been in the past. No locking yourself away until you ‘have the answer’. Use the straw man approach, move things forward faster, in smaller bursts. Retain malleability. Prototyping and testing can expose new problems and opportunities several times a day. You have to help the team and the client adapt constantly, and maintain purposeful shape as the edges of previous assumptions are frayed.

If you can demonstrate these three qualities then everything else will follow. The only other thing to say is that in this environment, you don’t own the strategy. I mean, you don’t own it even more than you currently don’t own it. The better the job you do, the more ownership the whole team will feel they have over it. It’s refreshing. I promise.

Faking the Future: prototypes and hype

I’m cross-posting this from the Made by Many blog.

A couple of weeks ago, my brain was treated to a Pint of Science in the form of a talk by Dr Eileen Gentleman on making body parts. Dr Gentleman whooshed us through a brief history of genetic engineering, including how eye injuries to World War II pilots led to the invention of contact lenses and why golden plates sealed in an ancient skull proved that not all alien materials are rejected by human tissue. And we were, inevitably, shown a photo of a mouse with an ear on its back.

The Vacanti mouse was (is) famous, and not just in the scientific community. In 1997, it was splashed across front pages, causing the world to marvel at protest about the genetic modification of the poor rodent… wrongly. Gentleman corrected the story for us: the ear had not been ‘grown’ on the mouse. And it contained no human DNA – another public outrage – it was cow cartilage, grown on biodegradable scaffolding in a lab. The point of the experiment was to see if the cow cartilage would bond with the mouse’s tissue, a clarification delivered with visible satisfaction in the eyes of our speaker. She urged us to read the ‘real’ papers, not the newspapers and went on to dispel other myths propagated in the media. Which was a bit sad, really. Genetic modification is not as far forward as we might have thought.

I asked Gentleman if the hyperbole had any positive outcomes; whether a little hype might put more wind in the sails her peers. Her stories about the rise of genetic modification showed that each new glimpse at the future got people more excited and motivated to find out more, regardless to how close to the truth they were. She agreed. And even said that the funding she receives is largely thanks to the raised profile of her field in light of these media stories.

It didn’t take much of a leap to start thinking about our own field of innovation. And to be reminded of the same dual impact of prototyping anything: learning & selling, both of which are critical for success.

A purist could be tempted to see a prototype as simply a learning tool, to get fast feedback on a minimal product – or aspect of a product. But whether you like it or not, when people see an actual ‘thing’ it will have an emotional impact too. It will excite, or concern them. Despite any effort not to, stakeholders will imagine a more advanced version of that thing, based on their own biasses. And that’s not entirely a bad thing: it can be exactly what’s necessary to get suppot for the project, both operationally and financially.

On the other side, a salesperson might view a prototype as a pure selling tool: show the board something flashy; demonstrate capability — we can always change the product later! But that’s a dangerous route to go, undermining the process and skewing perceptions of the results by bowing to an unvalidated strategy. If you mis-educate people about the role of learning in favour of the sell, you’re going to hit more roadblocks in the future.

I think the mistake is to assume everyone is looking for the same signals. Some people want to make meaningful progress, others might want a mouse that can grow ears on its back.

leave a comment tagged: productdesign, prototyping

May 23, 2013

The tumbleweed slide that your Keynote deck needs

Like using Keynote?

Make terrible jokes?

Then you need this tumbleweed animation. Here’s what it looks like (although it’s much smoother in Keynote – I messed up the screen capture):

You can download the keynote file HERE to use at your leisure.

Bye!

What makes a beautiful explanation?

This Explains Everything is a curation of essays that attempts to share ‘the most beautiful and elegant theories of how the world works’.

One of the contributors, a philosopher called Rebecca Newberger Goldstein examines the concept that ties the book together:

“Where do we get the idea that the beauty of an explanation has anything to do with the likelihood of its being true?”

An excellent question. We love pithy soundbites and neat sentences. But do these qualities unfairly give ideas greater weight? Goldstein reminds us of a genetic truth:

“As our lustful genes know, the achievement of symmetry is a sign of genetic robustness; we find lopsidedness a turnoff…we want to mate with them because our genes are betting on them as replicators.”

She offers a suggestion:

“is it just that any explanation that’s satisfactory will, for that very reason and no other, strike us as beautiful, beautifully explanatory. [...] explanations aren’t satisfactory because they’re beautiful, rather they’re beautiful because they’re satisfying.”

When I land on an idea that feels important, I try to share it in a way that’s satisfying. It helps people to remember it. It helps people to repeat and share it. The danger is that you might trick people into thinking an unhelpful idea is useful because you made it sound poetic. It becomes a sales tool, intoxicating, but misleading.

All this reminds me of another important quote, by Einstein:

“If you can’t say it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.”

Only when you strip an explanation right back, can you see whether it’s truly satisfying. Rather than an unformed thought hiding inside a poetic sentence. Oh, that brings me to a final quote, by Spiderman:

“With great power comes great responsibility”

1 comment tagged: copywriting, language

May 20, 2013

Designing for the world around you

Jamie Oliver continues his smart use of Instagram by posting an image of the new menu for his restaurant, Fifteen:

One of his followers made a suggestion…

Rennet!
Anyway, Jamie’s response was brilliant (if you can excuse the lack of punctuation)…

What I like about his reply, apart from his passion and unwavering vision, is that he understands the role of the menu in its physical environment. The menu doesn’t have to do the entire job. As he says, a more important feature in the experience is the service provided and the advice given.

There are parallels here with design in the digital space — especially mobile. Too often, the temptation is to think that the thing you’re designing needs to carry the entire experience. That every possible feature should be crammed into an interface. When it comes to mobile services especially, the on-screen experience is only a part of it. The app should do as much as it needs to and no more.

Design means considering the role of each component, and in my opinion, like Jamie says, we should be allowing face-to-face interaction to breathe when it is a richer experience. Don’t build in social functionality if it’s easier for people to email each other. Don’t include all the information under the Sun if it’s easier, or more enjoyable for people to ask a question.

Everything you make is part of something bigger.

Made by Many stole my blog posts

Sort of. Over at Made by Many’s blog, I blogged about blogging and then I blogged about operational feasibility. If you’re interested…

Nice ideas vs good ideas

‘Ideas’ are the currency of the creative industries; we love to bicker about whether big ones are better than small ones or if new ones are actually new at all. We are idea connoisseurs and need only a sniff of one to say whether it’s ‘good’ or not.

Unfortunately, we’re mostly wrong.

When we say an idea is ‘good’, we actually mean it’s clever, or novel, or simple, or appealing. Or worse: on-brand(!) This is because we’ve become so obsessed with ‘ideas as currency’ that we’ve reduced them to stories: things to tell each other about.

We confuse good ideas with what are just ‘nice’ ideas. Nice ideas are things we like in that low-commitment, fuzzy kind of way, as they whizz past us and onto the pages of trend blogs.

A ‘good idea’ can only be deemed such in hindsight. Once it’s resulted in unquestionable value for the desired parties. In a commercial context, this means making money (directly or indirectly) for the organisation that funds it.

Ideas are good when they work.

Me and a couple of friends are about to release a Spotify app. It’s called Guilty Pledgers. It helps people throw guilty pleasures house parties and it lets their guests add songs to the playlist for donating to charity — to offset their music guilt.
I’ve been working on it for over a year, so I’d love to tell you it’s a good idea. But the truth is, for now, I just know it’s a nice idea. It’ll be a good idea if people use it to fundraise.

I realise that I’ve opened a can of worms. And out pop new conversations: execution, marketing, optimisation are all key to making a product a success. An ‘idea’ is just that: a thought. And all this is semantic cat-and-mouse.
But the general point remains: We’ve got really good at ideas, but we need to stop falling under their spell and placing a disproportionate amount of value on them. It’s time for our creative brains to mature and focus on real-world impact, rather than intellectual and emotional seduction. Because actually, ideas are the easy part.

5 comments

April 25, 2013

When straw beats stone

Nothing is certain, now let’s build on that.

It can be paralysing, during the early stages of developing a product or service, if you find yourself with inter-dependant unknowns. E.g. The feature-set is dependent on partners, but the partners’ interest is dependant on the feature-set. Time spent working on one side feels wasteful without confirmation of the other.

A great way to avoid going in circles is to adopt the ‘straw man’ approach. You quickly create a complete model of how things could work whilst acknowledging that it will almost certainly change in many ways. Quick is important, to minimise waste – and impermanence bypasses disagreement.

This duality (tangible + temporary) is empowering. The former gives the team and partners something palpable to discuss quickly, exposing potential issues. The latter keeps all parties relaxed. You can even create several versions of these straw man scenarios to confront different eventualities. It’s a simple idea. Obvious in hindsight, but incredibly useful.

It turns out we may have been misusing the phrase ‘straw man’.
The straw man fallacy is when one person misrepresents another person’s view and then tears the false representation apart. In this context, the straw man is a dangerous phantom; the result of one person’s wrecklessness, and a smackdown that lacks credibility or usefulness. Thinking more about straw men, I’m reminded of the scarecrow in The Wizard of Oz, who didn’t have a brain. If you’re made of straw, it would seem that popular mythology will call you out as lacking in intelligence and purpose. And if you’re part of a piglet trio, you’ll note that building your house out of straw is a pretty bad move too.

I can’t help that all these ill feelings toward straw are the result of an outdated belief system, where certainty, confidence and solidity are seen as strength and anything short as weakness. Heroes used to be those that offered clarity amidst the chaos, but that idealism is dying. A new respect is rising for those driven enough to ‘fail quickly’, roll with the punches and emerge victorious after a sweaty wriggle in the muck.

These are characteristics of the new entrepreneur and they run through the veins of the Lean movement. In the opening pages of Running Lean, author Ash Maurya suggests turning your Plan A (instinctive, initial idea) into a one-page business model in 20 minutes flat, and to start testing its contents straight away. It’s a nice example of the straw man at play. And in my mind, it’s a product-based extension of what Clay Shirky framed for us in Here Comes Everybody: that we’ve moved from an edit-then-publish world, to a publish-then-edit one. Make something quickly and start hammering it against a little reality. This is where straw can be the best material you have.

For the record, the Scarecrow turned out to be the “wisest man in all of Oz”, so perhaps an unassuming form can be an advantage. A small budget and a rough exterior can help ideas to develop quietly and quickly, offered a chance to breathe before they’re ‘solid’ enough to appear a threat to people capable of squashing them. If you’re scared of starting, or are worried about the implications of cementing an idea (or having others believe it’s cemented), then you should try the straw man approach. It’s so simple it shouldn’t really need a blog post. So why don’t more people do it?

**Update**
Isaac just sent me this relevant – and excellent – story about shitty first ideas. Worth a read :)

Simple, clear, personality, penguin

Drawing is a great metaphor for writing. And the kind of writing I particularly value at the moment can be expressed by Picasso’s famous line drawings:

Say it with as few (key) strokes as possible. Make your point clear. Add a touch of personality. And everyone loves a penguin.

1 comment tagged: copywriting