Birmingham vs Paris: the bottom line

 

My colleague David Walker had been working in both Birmingham and Paris. He spends a lot of his life at airports.

 

‘Paris is so elegant,’ he told me, ‘but the people – so rude.’

 

‘How about Birmingham?’ I asked him.

 

‘Well, it’s completely the opposite,’ he said. ‘The Brummies ‒ so warm and friendly. A delight. But the place itself – nothing to write home about.’

 

‘Here’s an idea,’ I proposed: ‘What if we were to switch the populations over?’

 

‘Oh, God no. Those Brummies in Paris? They’d immediately start double-glazing everything and building conservatory extensions.’

Searching for flaws

At last week’s Brand Renovation Masterclass at Cass Business School, our guest speaker David Walker talked about the need to use testing and research not as stop/go indicators, but rather as springboards to improving the innovation or renovation.

It put me in mind of the great philosopher of science, Karl Popper. Popper totally rejected the commonly-held notion of scientific method – that research leads to knowledge and that knowledge leads to ideas or hypotheses.

Popper held that the only reason for conducting research is because you have an idea in the first place (however sketchy it is) – and the purpose of research is to test the idea rigorously, so that it can be improved. In short, in research we are not looking for confirmation of the concept, rather trying to identify flaws, so that they can be problem-solved.

As he put it: “Science must begin with myths, and with the criticism of myths.”

So often, in the commercial world, managements want the warm and comforting feeling from the data that they are backing a winner – and end up going to market with an innovation that does not work in practice in some way or other because there are still issues that need to be addressed.

And in academia, I often seem to read papers that apparently have no idea behind them at all. Often the work is prefaced by a question to be answered, where no one has interrogated the idea behind the question. The result is usually just to add to the bottomless pit of never-to-be-seen-again “knowledge”.

A useful way of thinking about all this is to focus at each stage on the question, “What’s our BEST CURRENT THINKING?”, and go forward from there.

Views?

11/10

At the new Brand Renovation Masterclass at Cass Business School on 7 October http://bit.ly/cNPhQl , I’m being joined by the wonderful Dr David Walker, who leads the successful innovation consultancy, Happen.

We were colleagues for several years, and, thinking about the forthcoming event, it came back to me that David and I together achieved the rather remarkable result of scoring an average of 11.3 recurring out of 10 when we asked for feedback from the group we had just trained together in creativity and innovation at Unilever in the Netherlands.

I’d love to say that this kind of thing happens frequently, but no such luck. The team had clearly managed to escape from the constraints of logical thinking.

Happened to you?

Me and My Shadow

Even today, with the benefit of psychological profiling tools like Myers-Briggs, I notice that so often managers hire people in their own image. This can be comfortable, but it’s unlikely to be very potent in terms of innovation or leadership.

In my own case, I noticed quite early on that the partnership I had with Jennifer Laing at Saatchi and Saatchi was extraordinarily effective. Yet in personality type we were quite different. Somehow or other her strengths mirrored my weaknesses and vice-versa. Everything we touched turned to business.

And I’ve been lucky enough to have had a number of these symbiotic relationships later in my “career” – with Max Gosling at Lintas, with David Walker at Synectics, and now with Alison Duffy at Per Diem. In each case these partnerships have been associated with periods of major innovation and of sustained business success.

Of course, there is a great elephant trap involved in this. As polarised personalities it’s quite likely that you’ll not appreciate each other, maybe even disliking each other. So unless there is genuine mutual admiration, a real appreciation of the value of the other, and a shared sense of direction, success is unlikely to follow.

Knowing which is me and which is shadow in any given situation can be tricky. Flexibility as to who leads and who follows can be a moment by moment thing.

Do you have a terrific shadow?