Serendipity Book

Predicting the future of the internet

Edelman's Steve Rubel shares his predictions for the future of the internet in a presentation he gave last week to Next 08 in Hamburg:

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Thanks to Osgur Alaz

The role of boredom in creativity and innovation

This is a great post from Regine at We Make Money Not Art which documents and explores the idea of 'Strategic Boredom'.

Following from Kierkegaard, Molly Wright Steenson sees boredom as an inspirational and provocative state of mind that demands a response and spurs creativity. In her talk she reports on the historic role of boredom in bringing about innovative thinking.

Google's approach to collaboration and creativity

The Feb '08 issue of Fast Company contains some interesting interviews with Google staff which give an insight into the culture of the company.

One of the more interesting interviews was with Marissa Meyer (pictured right) who shared her "9 principles of innovation at Google":

1. INNOVATION, NOT INSTANT PERFECTION.
2. IDEAS COME FROM EVERYWHERE
3. A LICENSE TO PURSUE YOUR DREAMS
4. MORPH PROJECTS DON'T KILL THEM
5. SHARE AS MUCH INFORMATION AS YOU CAN
6. USERS, USERS, USERS
7. DATA IS APOLITICAL.
8. CREATIVITY LOVES CONSTRAINTS
9. YOU'RE BRILLIANT? WE'RE HIRING

There is much to agree with in there but three things stood out for me as being worthy of comment, some good, some bad:

1. Google use search internally to increase knowledge sharing. Getting people to share their knowledge is a notoriously tricky thing to get right as anyone who has ever used a corporate intranet can atest. Google's answer is to make it really easy for people to submit their knowledge which they they index and make searchable. Google merely asks that "every Monday, all employees write an email that has five to seven bullet points on what they did the previous week." This differs from most attempts at gathering and sharing information in that it is a) likely to be nearly comprehensive because b) it asks so little of employees.
2. Google use data to manage creativity. They actively discourage people from having an opinion and they believe they have the right metrics to use instead: "Some companies think of design as an art. We think of design as a science. It doesn't matter who is the favorite or how much you like this aesthetic versus that aesthetic. It all comes down to data. Run a test and whichever design does best against the user-happiness metrics over a two-week period is the one we launch. We have a very academic environment where we're looking at data all the time." Cynics might argue, however, that Google isn't exactly a leader in the field of design.
3. Google believe that creativity thrives on constraints. Marissa says that "people think of creativity as this sort of unbridled thing, but engineers thrive on constraints. They love to think their way out of that little box." Sure, but like anyone I'm sure that they also take it upon themselves to challenge any constraints placed on them first before trying to work within them.

Some Free Thinking

First up, a great presentation on the future of marketing from Paul Isakson. He concludes with the statement "modern marketing = making people's lives better":

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Which reminds me, I never posted this t'riffic presentation on Insights from Matthew Milan of Critical Mass in Toronto:

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And, while I'm at it, I also forgot to post Gareth Kay's splendid presentation from late last year on what makes for a good idea:

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As Paul Arden said: "Give away everything you know, and more will come back to you". Start by putting your schtick on Slideshare.

Ideas as chaotic thought mutations

In James Webb Young's classic 'A Technique for Producing Ideas' he recommends that we "turn a problem over to our unconscious mind and let it work while we sleep" and then "out of nowhere an idea will appear".

All very Delphic you might think. But of course we all know that it works. The question is how?

One established theory in cognitive science that might go some way to explaining how we come up with ideas was put forward by Skarda & Freeman. It has been their long standing claim that our brains are random and ruled by chaos:

"Chaos constitutes the basic form of collective neural activity for all perceptual processes and functions as a controlled source of noise, as a means to ensure continual access to previously learned sensory patterns, and as the means for learning new sensory patterns. Without such a mechanism the system cannot avoid reproducing previously learned activity patterns and can only converge to behavior it has already learned."

It is this chaos which perhaps helps us to invent, create and surprise. Applying the language of evolutionary biology, it might be appropriate to think of ideas as thought mutations which provide us with an evolutionary advantage.

"Chaos has a role to play that sets brains apart from all other information processing systems. Chaos is not just an inevitable consequence of a highly interconnected complex system, it is essential for the creation of information. The brain, unlike machine systems, is selective, i.e., it does not process whatever information is received at the receptor level."

The fact that creating new combinations becomes easier when we are not consciously thinking about a problem is no great surprise if you believe that the selection of of the information that we attend to is random if we are not explicitly directing it.

The rise of the Commuter Marriage

PSFK pointed to an interesting article on the rise of the 'commuter marriage' in Forbes which states that in the most recent U.S. Census there were 3.8 million Americans in commuter marriages, a 30% increase over the previous six years.

Demographers define commuter marriages as couples who spend at least three nights apart each week for a minimum of three months.

Commuter marriages are interesting because they represent the extreme form of the modern work life balance dilemma that many families face as a function of the trends towards more women in the workplace and more dual-income familes. Whilst families in this situation are not representative of the experience of the majority, they are nonetheless illustrative of the problems that modern families face in getting time to really connect with each other.

The perception that technology can reduce the emotional separation of distance may be another  driver of the trend towards commuter marriages. However, as one of the inventors interviewed for the Forbes piece admits: "Technology is already bringing people closer together but we haven't figured out how to design these experiences so that they're something meaningful, with an intimate effect. That's where the next era of innovation will be."

And as Gregory Guldner, director of the Center for the Study of Long Distance Relationships, says "While innovations like e-mail, video chatting, instant messaging, Twitter and Second Life have increased the volume of Internet chatter, they haven’t necessarily made long-distance relationships any more successful. Communication’s quality has always meant more than its frequency. Information technology has definitely led people to believe that long-distance relationships will work more than in the past. Whether that’s true is the big question we’re dealing with right now.”

A 2006 article in CNN Money called "Two Cities, Two Careers, Too Much?" also discusses the issues faced by families suffering from similar stresses. They quote a therapist who recommends that families who spend a lot of time apart have "a formal sit-down no less than once a month to discuss short- and long-term goals" because given their situation "it won't happen spontaneously."

This subject has been under discussion by sociologists since the late 1970's. For a full list of academic references go here.

From Unreason to Idiocracy

I found this brief review of Susan Jacoby's 'The Age of American Unreason' in The Observer yesterday (they regularly syndicate old NYT articles).

The book highlights the rise and convergence of two trends in American culture: anti-intellectualism (the attitude that “too much learning can be a dangerous thing”) and anti-rationalism (“the idea that there is no such things as evidence or fact, just opinion”). She argues that "not only are citizens ignorant about essential scientific, civic and cultural knowledge but they also don’t think it matters."

This is, of course, a common refrain in our culture - you'll find that the dumb are always getting dumber if you listen to the elites that dominate them. Still, no one wants an Idiocracy:

Pre-testing reduces effectiveness

In the current issue of the Marketing Society's journal 'Market Leader', Les Binet & Peter Field make the somewhat contentious claim that, far from improving the chances of getting an effective ad out, quantitative pre-testing actually reduces your chances of success.

Their data shows that ads that have not been quantitatively pre-tested have a 71% chance of being effective whereas those that have been pre-tested have only a 44% chance of success:

Their analysis is based on the IPA dataBANK of 880 case studies. The 'Market Leader' piece is based on their recent book Marketing in the Era of Accountability which analyses the dataBANK in detail.

In the article Binet & Field provide very little to explain this poor performance by the pre-testing industry apart from deriding the overreliance by pre-testers on 'standout' as a metric.

Whilst pre-testing has it's detractors (and I must admit to being less than comfortable with the claims made about most if not all of the pre-testing methodologies that I have encountered), I'm sure that there are factors at play here apart from the use of the wrong metrics. For me the biggest factor influencing the result we see above is the difference in the cultures of the clients that pre-test and those that don't.

Celebrating curiosity

A snippet of the wisdom of Petworth's finest former exec creative director, Paul Arden, courtesy of the wonderfully obsessive image hunters of fffound.com and the type-obsessed graphic design blog AceJet170:

Keep it simple, keep it visual: 1/3rd of adults struggle with reading and writing

Crikey. In the UK there are an estimated 12 million people who have a reading and writing age of between 9 and 14 despite speaking English as their first language. This represents almost a third of the adult population.

I was introduced to this little factoid by Jon Cohen, MD of quallie agency Rosenblatt and a one-time Leo Burnett grad trainee, in a paper he wrote for the Market Research Society Annual Conference last year. Those of you who have a subscription to the indispensable WARC can read it in full here.

In his paper, Jon reported that "almost all self-define themselves as 'visual' people. They like to see visual representations of things. They are often far more keen to 'watch' a story, than to read about it."

Picture credit: cormac70 taken at the Bluewater shopping Centre in Kent