Creative confidence and the eternal student

In school, I was informed by a professor that creativity and originality was dead. Or rather, they no longer existed. Ideas we considered new are just recreations of something we’ve already experienced. This is how you kill imagination. What was the point of trying to produce something new if it had all been done before?

I recently joined Wolff Olins as an intern and two weeks into the company, I was invited to attend an Alley event where Tim Allen, our North American President and Jules Ehrhardt, co-owner of the digital product studio, Ustwo would speak on the topic of “Creative Confidence”.  

The talk was designed to feel like an intimate conversation between old friends albeit ones who happen to be leaders and innovators in their fields. In addressing the topic, both Tim and Jules stated their relationship with creativity and confidence was a result of their extensive work history, which happened to be an extension of their personal growth into leaders.  It was insightful to hear about their backgrounds and in particular, the language they used and the key moments of their careers they chose to highlight. The two most important takeaways I left with were:

1) Environment is key 2) Craft & courage go hand in hand

In discussing creative confidence, Jules emphasized the importance of creating the right environment because environment sets the tone for the type of work people feel inspired to produce. He believes it is crucial to create an atmosphere where people are free to be creative, to be human, and to feel safe. If you can manage to have that ambiance, the work you receive from your employees is of  high value.  They know they can take risks without repercussions and those risks can be amazingly executed. Jules emphasized that creating the right environment is all encompassing and includes things such as a fight for better policies that create the best workspace like compensation, team coaches, and more.

For Tim, he defined creative confidence as craft and courage. He explained that initially, it is about finding and perfecting a craft and being passionate about it until you reach a level of excellence. Then, you must have the courage to puncture it. Tim stated, “Make your ceiling your floor.” And the best way to accomplish this is to stay humble and self-aware. The beauty in Tim’s definition is that it focuses on eternal growth so you will never really “make it”; you should never be too comfortable. It’s about being a forever student because you should always be looking for the opportunities to develop a new skill to make your craft stronger.

Tim and Jules are exemplary leaders because they are progressive in how they manage and inspire their teams. They encourage other leaders to do the same, to create a better environment where people learn and lean into their limitations and can therefore grow.  And for people apart of teams or organizations that lack “creativity,” Tim believes courage can take two forms: leaving or staying. It takes strength to leave a job and go in search of a new path. It takes another type of strength to stay and find a cohort of people around you that believe similarly.  

Creative confidence is not easy to attain. Finding the “right” environment can be difficult and pushing boundaries requires demanding a lot of yourself.  But through a rigorous process, you can stumble on something completely your own. While the inspiration might not be unique, it’s building on that inspiration that allows your own ideas to grow.

Creative confidence helps people be better leaders and individuals be the best version of themselves.  And isn’t that all we can ask for?

Illustration by Kate Rinker

Natalia Garcia is currently interning at Wolff Olins New York. You can follow her @NGS_1295

SF: A 24/7 City in Disguise

Our Strategy Director Lauren Liao recently transferred to our burgeoning San Francisco office from our New York office. In the land of Fernet and fleece, Lauren shares her thoughts on the hustle and bustle of the city by the bay and why she’s excited for Wolff Olins SF to be apart of NewCo this year:

12:05 am.  Damn, San Francisco, I thought you were supposed to be more chill than New York. I’m not a night person. What am I doing up?

California is the land of opportunity and pioneers, where people go to make great things happen. In San Francisco, the lights might turn out at night but don’t let the fleecy façade fool you. It’s a 24/7 city in disguise.

As creative partners, Wolff Olins works intimately with organizations. Their ambitions become ours. If it’s possible to care too much, we do. In the SF office, we’re currently working with both start-ups and stalwarts. Three SF things I’ve learned from them so far:

1. Everything needs to have happened yesterday. There is a huge sense of urgency. Just like in NY, the speed is fast. But here, you feel like you’re in a never ending sprint and Usain Bolt could appear out of anywhere. Many startups call NY home but not as many as in the Bay Area. On the whole, SF companies are younger and faster sprinters, which makes the whole vibe feel super intense.

2. People out here are really f***** smart. Or at least act like they are. Not that people aren’t smart in NY but every city has its own cultural measuring stick. In NY, it’s about how cosmopolitan you are. What are you wearing, where’s your next vacation, did you see the latest exhibit? In SF, it seems to be about how intelligent you are. I’ve noticed in meetings that people never accept things at face value and love to question and debate. They do, and don’t, want to be the smartest person in the room. You have to earn your way into conversations.

3. Everyone is revolutionizing something. It’s very comical yet very real. People here are serious about changing the world for the better and they’re doing it. They’re creating new kinds of organizations that are redefining not only the meaning of business but the way business is done. NY has never been guilty of slacking but the heart of this movement is in the Bay Area. What’s awesome is this ambition and optimism has spread around the world. Many of the companies that epitomize this movement (Airbnb, Uber, Omada Health, Salesforce etc) are part of NewCo SF which Wolff Olins is co-sponsoring next week, and will be opening their doors for people to take a behind the scenes peek.

This is why I am up and why I am here. It’s the Wolff Olins dream. To do radical work that pushes boundaries. To be pushed to work faster, smarter and more creatively than ever before. To be a part of the future that is being made.

6:47 am.  I am a morning person. I’m catching my breath, standing on a ridgeline watching the sunrise over the sailboats of Sausalito, while clouds cascade over the hills to my right. It looks like something straight out of this video. I’ve just spent 30 minutes running uphill. I’m exhausted exhilarated.

Illustration by Nejc Prah. 

Lauren Liao is Strategy Director at Wolff Olins San Francisco.

5 moves to drive change in tech culture

You need to make big changes at your company. You see it plain as day.  But no one else seems to.

The work your colleagues do is complex and specialized.  They view enterprise-wide initiatives as “soft” and irrelevant.

This is a frustration we hear all the time from leaders. It’s something we see most often in industries where technical expertise is valued above all else: engineering, technology, science, finance.

You have to find a way to break though. Giant shifts are happening in the market. Customer expectations are transforming before your eyes. The competition is adapting in ways you would never have imagined. Old ways of doing business aren’t keeping pace.

Despite the gathering storm, your colleagues greet you with blank stares when you suggest it’s time to rethink your company’s strategy. Or, if they agree to a new strategy, they dig in their heels when it comes time to roll it out. Or, if they adopt new structures and systems, they resist thinking about their jobs in new ways or changing how they work every day.

This happens a lot in business-to-business companies, but it affects any business where proficiency trumps empathy for customers.

So what can you do? Our work with clients has taught us five big lessons.

1. Make it urgent. Rally cold hard facts to build an air-tight case for change. Show each employee what’s in it for them—in a way that’s emotionally visceral and practically actionable. Demonstrate how a shift in strategy would have a material impact on sales. This is how one of world’s biggest accounting firms came at the problem. They conducted quantitative research that revealed that their offer was mismatched with the needs of several critical customer segments. And it uncovered how the competition was doing much better. They were losing market share, and leaving billions of dollars on the table. They presented the findings using powerful design and straightforward language to lay the facts bare, and make the implications land hard.   The result was stunning. Almost immediately, the conversation shifted from whether change was necessary to how much and how soon it needed to happen.

2. Make it irresistible. Lift people out of their day-to-day preoccupations by painting an exciting picture of what’s possible. Create future scenarios that spark employees’ imaginations, and reignite their passion for the business. That’s what a major technology company did when they needed to recapture the innovative spirit that had made them pioneer in e-commerce in the ‘90s. Their community of engineers had lost the desire to push the envelope. Instead, they were consumed by a seemingly endless series of bug fixes. They had taken their eyes off of how consumers’ expectations of great experiences had evolved. As a result, the company was losing ground in the market daily. The CEO held a series of immersive work sessions that brought the executive team face-to-face with how the world is changing. He created the conditions for a frank, future-forward conversation. Together, they reimagined the company’s user experience. And they captured their thinking in a provocative animated video that told the story in a way that everyone could relate to. When it was screened at companywide meeting of engineers, the shift in tone was palpable. The moment rekindled people’s hunger to do something great. Bug fix lists came down. A new manifesto for the future went up.

3. Make it everyone’s. Generously share responsibility for creating and applying strategy. Invite as many leaders as possible into a co-creative process. Including more perspectives makes the strategy stronger, and it forms a ready-made community of internal advocates who own the thinking at the end. That was the approach that one of the top healthcare companies in the US took. They created a war room where ideas could take shape on a hundred linear feet of wall space. Leaders from everywhere in the company circulated through the room for structured conversations that drew on their diverse areas of expertise. Together, they asked new questions and invented new concepts, which were stress-tested as soon as the next group entered the room. At the end of eight weeks, the result was a long-term strategy that bore the imprint of the best minds of the organization. And nearly a hundred people could claim true authorship.

4. Make it adaptable. A rigid strategy will never fit the varied activities and people of a large organization. And attempting it often does damage to productivity and morale. Instead, create systems and principals that share a common core, and give room for people to make them their own. This was a priority at a global applied science company. They needed to develop a new brand system. While it had to stand for the whole company, it also had to work for dozens of unique businesses and thousands of products. When it came time to deploy it, it couldn’t distract the scientists from their work. Indeed, it needed to make them more efficient. So, from the start, the visual system was designed to be flexible and adaptable to the needs of the company’s nearly 100 thousand employees. And it was introduced using a digital platform that makes it easy for people to access and use. The outcome? A new visual system that unifies the company, inside and out, which was implemented in weeks, instead of months.

5. Make it effortless. Lean into the things that people are already doing, and use them as platforms for introducing new ideas. Embed strategy into existing workflows, systems and meetings.  That way, employees are more likely to see the strategy as a positive contribution to their jobs, instead of an aggravating diversion. That’s what mattered to a multinational telecom company headquartered in India. They wanted to recast the definition of the company. At the same time, they wanted to keep their employees focused on achieving ambitious business targets. Their line of attack was to introduce tools, not rules. The leadership team designed a strategy for the future, and then embed it in tools designed to help people reach their individual goals. The launch was implicit. Compliance was automatic. Employees came to believe in the new strategy because they experienced its benefits every day. 

Ironically, the reason these approaches work to drive change in a technical culture is that they’re fundamentally human. They demand empathy for what work is like for people with highly specialized expertise. And they require insight into what motivates all people, no matter their profession.  

John Hearn is a Global Principal at Wolff Olins New York. 

Reading the tea leaves

“Big investors say social media influence investment picks” - so runs the headline following a new report from Greenwich Associates (1,457 followers on Twitter, broadcast only, no engagement. Ahem). The summary conclusions of the report outline how social media presence is increasingly a factor in how and where corporate and public pension funds, insurance companies, endowments and foundations in the U.S., Europe and Asia choose to invest.

While the importance of fund returns is paramount, the impact of content that is unique, insightful, and ideally, actionable can be significant. For successful firms to retain and grow their footprint, using social media to distribute the company’s messages and ideas could bring a greater return than a full-page ad in the financial press – Institutional Investing in the Digital Age, Greenwich Associates.

The maturation of social media means that the likes of Twitter and Facebook are now legitimate sources of company information alongside traditional media. And yet, this maturation means that a scan down a company’s Twitter feed often tells just half the story. Yes, it will likely give investors a synthesis of a company’s latest campaigns, releases, hires and press, but there are other, perhaps more critical issues that are there if you know where to look.

VCs regularly cite team, product and market as being the only things that matter, when it comes to investing. So, what can social media tell us about these? And, perhaps more importantly, what is worth looking for?

Team: Beyond the corporate account, do the founders or key personnel have social media accounts? Do their Twitter and Instagram feeds suggest committed, balanced leaders, or a burnt out, distracted team “phoning it in” from their vacation homes?

Given that 68% of CEOs have no social presence, what about staff? Do location-based social updates show a positive, collaborative culture? Is the company Facebook page or blog full of pictures of staff birthdays, away days and tenure celebrations? How’s their profile on Glassdoor shaping up? As an investor, I’d be looking to find brand ambassadors at every level - people proud of the work they do and wanting to share it with the world. As the Greenwich report asserts, “While company updates are useful, social media is rooted in personal interactions”.

Product: Here I’d be on the hunt for transparency. If the company is a service provider, I’d want to see SlideShare presentations on their company culture and service philosophy (supplemented by favourable press). I’d scour their LinkedIn to see what proportion of employees are dedicated to HR, training, user experience and service design. If they make products, then I’d be looking for behind-the-scenes films on YouTube and Vimeo.

For B2C brands, investors should be especially focused on user content. Social media can tell investors everything from who the core user base is, to how customers use the product/service and what they feel about it - good and bad. Smart investors will also look for signs that the business is responding to user feedback and insight, both one-to-one and in their product development.

Market: There’s a limited amount of information about the market that can be gleaned from social media. Nevertheless, blogs and social media is an ideal space for businesses to develop a strong point-of-view and thought leadership about the future of their industry (and their role in it).

Fortunately, this is probably where most investors’ strengths lie anyway - the old school practices remain and stand fast. That said, there’s a lot to be said for old dogs to learn the new tricks of being socially literate. Keeping an eye on key influencers and players via social media buys you time - it may only be an hour, but in a fast-paced market, that can pay dividends. Literally.

Will social media ever supercede the more traditional go-to sources of business information for investors? Probably not. But knowing how to read and analyse social media streams (and no, that's not just 'like's and follower numbers) to shape investment decisions can only be an advantage in a hyper-competitive market. And the lesson for businesses? Social media isn’t a side project, it’s where your brand meets the rest of the world. If you invest smartly in the experience of your brand, you may find people are willing to invest big in you.

Almost all of our blog images are original illustrations by Wolff Olins designers and design interns. Today’s post is illustrated by Leon Hapka. Leon is a London based graphic designer whose work spans various media ranging from the hand-made sculptural to the digital. His move to graphic design, as a field of study however, happened in 2010 when he gave up his career in science at the University of Oxford to pursue his passion for design.

A non-techie look at Facebook’s F8 developer conference

I’m a news junkie, daily Facebook user and overall Facebook fan. I dig it. It helps me stay connected to friends and family and allows me to share what’s on my mind – which is usually something about my puppy, politics or pop culture. But when it comes to tech, I’m more of an “early majority” than “early adopter” and a strategist, not a developer. So, I’m not the obvious attendee for Facebook’s F8 developer conference, held March 25 and 26 at Fort Mason in San Francisco. That didn’t stop me, though, from finding my inner geek and reveling in the excitement of seeing Mark Zuckerberg up close (he’s shorter than I expected) and the robust future that Facebook envisions for itself and the world.

Here are 8 things that struck me about F8:

1. F8 is not just for developers From the people I met (CEOs, CTOs, entrepreneurs, publishers, engineers, writers and developers) to the talks (now I understand how my Newsfeed really works) to the demos (Oculus demo was fantastic), the conference served and satisfied a broader audience than I expected – including a non-tech professional like me!

2. “Facebook Inc.” > Facebook For a long time, Facebook = a single “blue app”, the consumer app 1.4 billion people around the world use monthly. Now Facebook = a family of apps  - Whatsapp, Messenger, Facebook, Groups, Instagram – and this family will continue to grow to stay instep with the future. Think: spherical videos and virtual reality.

3. Facebook is fundamentally mission-driven Nearly every company has a mission and a lot of them talk the talk about its importance, but in my experience, few of them walk the walk. Facebook’s mission – to make the world more open and connected – is central to everything it does. These words were sprinkled throughout the talks and Zuckerberg ended his Keynote with a simple invitation: “let’s go connect the world.”

4. Ironically, F8 itself didn’t feel open and connected One reason a lot of people go to conferences is to meet the other attendees. And many of the conferences I’ve attended in recent years, make a concerted effort to help attendees meet each other in informal ways. F8 didn’t facilitate anything among attendees. Missed opportunity?

5. Facebook learns from its mistakes In fact, it’s the first place it looks for opportunity. One example of this is Facebook’s old mantra: move fast and break things. It sounds cool and resonated with a developer audience. Yet, it led to critical stability issues and tarnished Facebook’s reputation with developers. Underscoring its commitment to stability, Zuckerberg emphasized this theme throughout his talk. And, the old mantra has been updated to reinforce this renewed commitment: “move fast with stable infra”. Obviously!

6. Facebook has a warm and fuzzy side Throughout the Keynote, panel discussion and other talks, there were frequent references to noble ideas like putting people first (“give people complete control”), relationships, communities, respect, value, together, and transparency. And Zuckerberg was humble and accessible, repeatedly expressing gratitude to his audience while simultaneously promising that Facebook is committed to helping them build, grow and monetize their apps. I believed him.

7. Facebook’s biggest driver of growth is…word-of-mouth Yep. And it has been from the beginning, from the horse’s mouth, Alex Schultz, Facebook’s VP of Growth Strategy.

8. I actually want to download Messenger now I’ve been silently protesting Messenger becoming a separate app for a while. I didn’t like the idea of multiple Facebook apps on my phone or understand the unique value of Messenger. Now I do and I’m downloading it immediately. More than simple text, Messenger enables payments (so long Venmo), gifs, animation, video and a host of services that will help me say anything I want, better. And in the next few weeks, Messenger Business will launch with Everlane and Zulily, reinventing how people communicate with the businesses they care about – real time. Are you listening Gap?

Mark Zuckerberg may be small in physical stature, but what he has created and accomplished (at the youthful age of 30, no less) is enormous. And inspiring.

So if you want to find your own inner geek – and help make the world more open and connected – I’ll see you at next year’s F8!

Photo courtesy of Facebook

Creativity vs. Illiteracy

We recently kicked off Creativity Vs. X, a series of breakfast brainstorms in New York. The concept is pretty simple: inviting a diverse group of experienced people into our office to shake up their thinking on how to tackle a big social issue they’re all passionate about. With coffee and granola on the side.

The first big issue on the table was illiteracy — a global problem that impacts the lives of millions, and not just in developing countries. Here in the US, 20% of high school seniors can be classified as being functionally illiterate when they graduate, and two thirds of those who can’t read proficiently by the end of 4th grade will end up in jail or on welfare.

We hosted a group of leaders from Pencils of Promise, Girl Scouts, McGraw-Hill Education, The Uni Project, Nook and Lit World, set them some creative challenges and facilitated as they work-shopped potential new solutions. Together, they shared their struggles to keep kids learning for the long term, and imagined ways to make reading more visible and engaging: like leaving tantalizing unfinished stories in public spaces throughout the city.

The event was an experiment. We didn’t solve world peace — we never intended to. But it was inspiring, energizing and (according to our willing guinea pigs) productive. Ideas were shared. Minds were opened. Connections were made between people who really do make a difference.

For that, Creativity vs. Illiteracy was worth doing. We can’t wait for the next one.

Q&A with GV Prasad of Dr. Reddy's

“Management is doing work through people, whereas leadership is developing people through work.” - GV Prasad, CEO and Co-Chairman of Dr. Reddy’s Laboratories

Excerpts from a one-to-one interview with GV Prasad conducted by Zia Patel, Director of Wolff Olins in India, for the Wolff Olins Report, Impossible and Now.

Tell me a little about how you understand leadership?

I don’t like to define leadership with words but I will try. There are many ways to interpret leadership and many qualities that define leadership. I look for three main qualities in a leader:

One, table stakes are their ethics and values. They are essential qualities that a leader should possess.

Two, the ability to raise the aspiration of the people and make them ambitious for where they can go, give them the freedom to self-direct and give them the opportunity of self-mastery.

Three, including everyone, not playing favorites, unleashing everyone’s potential and supporting them to take them where they want to go.

Dr. Reddy’s is a global company. What aligns your business from Hyderabad to Moscow to Princeton and anywhere else in the world?

Purpose. It sits at the heart of our business. People need to find motivation and once everyone has a common purpose and are all aligned; this unleashes a lot of energy that finds inspiration and motivation.

Purpose driven organizations are now emerging everywhere. Purpose is important big or small – may it be an independent pharmacy or a global pharmaceutical company.

I don’t see a difference between the east and west on this.  All great companies are driven by purpose, a purpose that is higher than making profits and creating wealth. It’s about solving humanity’s source of pain or dissatisfaction. In that sense wherever they are in the world you can identify great companies by their purpose.

Change is the one thing that is constant. What are your views on this?

The world is changing faster every year. Specifically, there have been changes in technology, globalization and the Internet. Technology is steering a lot of industries in new and different directions.

You have four different generations working at Dr. Reddy’s. How have you adapted your leadership style?

I find that we are now leading many more young people. They are less attached to a company or a profession. They really push the envelope. It is a bit of a struggle for us to keep up, I must admit. I need to ensure that I’m able to learn at a much faster pace. The leadership needs to learn to give them more freedom and space.

You talk about purpose being a common thread in your business. What do you observe between an organizations’ purpose and an individual’s aspirations?

I think in the past, the relationship between an employer and employee was very different. Today different things motivate people and they don’t want to wait 20 years to lead an organization. They want to do their own thing – what gives them the greatest fulfilment so careers have become much more accelerated. The younger generation pursues things they love and things they want to do.

I think loyalty is often seen as something misplaced. People don’t have to be loyal to an individual or an organization; they have to be loyal to the passion they pursue, the cause they believe in and to the impact of their work. I see more of that in the younger generation, which makes me very hopeful. Today’s interconnected world offers them many opportunities to pursue their passions.

And lastly, what advice do you have for the younger workforce?

Passion is also extremely important and passion outside of work is even more important. If you don’t tap into that passion you won’t get employees who are fully engaged.

If I look at my own example, in the past I was very uni-dimensional, I used to focus only on work and not many other things. I expanded my horizons by reading books, by taking on hobbies like photography and wildlife. These hobbies have taught me the importance of leading a complete life. I believe that passionate people – whatever they are passionate about are the people who make a difference. You just need to tap into that passion. The organization must also give people the opportunity to pursue their passion. Passionate people can achieve extraordinary results.

To learn, To change, To grow

What does it mean to be in a learning organisation in 2015?

The speed of business has never been faster. We know that rapid change is the new constant. How can youmake sure your organisation doesn’t just keep up, but stays ahead?

One answer: Become a learning organisation, an organisation with a shared purpose that liberates the learning of its people to build capabilities that shape the future.  This isn’t a new and groundbreaking idea, but it has never been more important.

Creating a company where individuals are always learning -- insatiably curious, open to new and different ways of working, looking at how to make things better, thinking holistically and systemically, discussing and debating with co-workers as easily as if they were breathing air.  

According to McKinsey, “half of executives rate capability building as one of their companies’ top three priorities”, however, we believe it’s more than just about knowledge and skill building; it’s about building a culture of learning that leads to innovation and growth.

Bersin by Deloitte’s research shows that companies with strong learning cultures are 17% more likely than their peers to be top of their market. And C-suite leaders are paying attention. In the States alone corporate training grew by 15% in 2013 to over $700 billion.

 So how do you become a learning organisation in 2015?

Here’s a first go at a hypothesis based on our experiences working with leaders to create change and grow their companies through learning:

Shared story, not another boring strategy deck

In the Fifth Discipline, Peter Senge highlights shared vision as one of the key elements of becoming a learning organisation. Fewer than 45% of Learning & Development leaders have written a business plan for learning, a plan that outlines and rationalises investment. We think it should be more than just a plan or strategy, but a story that clarifies objectives, focuses energy and inspires your people. It should be based on a combination of data, rigour and empathy around what people need to learn. It should articulate a shared vision, not a top-down ideology that motivates your people to change their attitudes and behaviours in positive ways for themselves and the business. The story might change, but it’s important to have a starting place.

Open for individuals

In our recent leadership report, 42% of CEOs said they are starting to find ways to mould their companies around the individual. You can’t just tell your employees what to do or learn. At Wolff Olins, we encourage our people to be masters of their career. We think brilliant learning creates brilliant people and work, which means higher retention and revenue. Inspire your people to take charge of their own learning – to see how their own development can help them reach their personal aspirations and your organisation’s ambitions. Help them understand The Overlap, what we define as the intersection between what they as an individual stand for and what their company stands for.

Think beyond the classroom

As humans, we’re biologically wired for learning. We learn all the time because we can’t help doing it -- whether we’re in a classroom, at the pub, on the bus,  in a boardroom. The problem is we’ve created a false dichotomy around learning in a classroom versus anywhere else. The best business leaders think beyond traditional training, they look at how they can set up the cultural conditions and learning interventions that help people learn even more -- in greater amounts, with more openness yet also intention, with more diversity yet also focus. Think about how Steve Jobs set up a large atrium at Pixar to encourage chance encounters across departments that would often lead to unexpected collaborations and innovations.  

Curators of Content and Experience

“Today’s effective learning and development organisations should strive to become facilitators of learning and curators of content, not just developers and deliverers of training programmes,” wrote Josh Bersin. This means stepping outside the box (if there ever was one.) We take inspiration from the content space from organisations like the RSA to the content publisher Inkling to the podcast The Moth. Who’s setting the bar for learning? What do people enjoy and consume all the time in and outside of work? These are a couple of the questions that should keep you up at night.

Real outcomes, Real Change

“Change without outcomes is no real change at all,” wrote Amar Kumar, Senior Vice President, Pearson, in a previous post. No has quite cracked the code on ROI in corporate learning. Some research shows that some 90% of new skills are lost within a year. To ensure learning stays within the company, it’s important to understand how learning interventions tie to individual development and larger business objectives. Work with your senior and mid-level leaders to define the right tools to measure progress -- both qualitatively and quantitatively. Could we create the equivalent of Net Promoter Score (NPS), the likelihood to recommend? A universal measurement for corporate learning in the way that nearly all marketers use NPS?

 If businesses must continuously re-invent to grow, then becoming a learning organisation is an imperative, not a change. The organisations for and of the future will never stop learning, changing, growing.  

Taking change all the way to the edges

"Amar Kumar was one of our guest speakers at Wolff Olin's recent leadership summit on Change. As a senior leader in an education business we were particularly fascinated by his ambition to instil more learning into the business itself. Here, Amar outlines how to change the business for a world where change is vital" - Morgan Holt, Global Principal.

In the past four decades, the world has made spectacular strides to get children into schools and young adults into universities. But despite this great progress, there has been a lack of focus on what happens when they’re there and whether they’re actually learning very much. The focus on quantity has greatly overshadowed an emphasis on quality.

Take India, which now boasts a primary education access rate higher than 90%. Yet for every 100 children in rural Indian schools, 90 don’t meet the expectations for their grade level; 75 cannot do simple division after primary school; and 50 cannot do basic subtraction or even read a simple text.

When I was a school principal in Bangalore, India, I was around hundreds of first-generation learners; the first people in their family to ever go to school. Yet when I taught 10th grade Mathematics, I was trying to teach the Pythagorean theorem to kids who couldn’t multiply two numbers. They had been passed on year after year by teachers without the skills – or potentially desire – to support them.

Change without outcomes is no real change at all.

That’s a reality I’ve been getting very familiar with. My role is to lead Pearson through the most radical change in our company’s history. It’s a change that’s designed to improve outcomes; as the world’s largest learning company, we want to – need to – ensure that education fulfils its potential to transform people’s lives. It’s a change that needs to be bold of vision and that we commit to everyday, in every decision we make. It’s a change that cannot be compromised – it needs to find its way into all the edges and corners, and the nooks and crannies of our company.

When 250,000 assembled in Washington, DC in 1963 to hear Martin Luther King, Jr, spell out his vision for America, they didn’t hear him talk about a strategy, with work streams, timelines, and deliverables. They heard him talk about his dream; he made it clear to each and every one of them what cause they were fighting for and why.“Follow me, for I have a work plan” may not have marshalled a nation into the next chapter of its history.

But isn’t this exactly what we do in large companies?

Too often, organizations try to usher in change using the jargon of strategies and work plans. In doing so, we forget about the two things that change is utterly reliant on: the dream and the people to carry it out: the why and its change-makers.

We also often try to use top-down fast-burn programs to ram change through the organization: the “if I move really fast, they won’t be able to stop me” approach. But, taking people with you takes time; the forces of inertia are too great, too diffuse, and too entrenched to rush it. Go too quickly, and you’ll leave people behind.

The science of change is one of gentle pressure, relentlessly applied. In nature, gentle pressure applied relentlessly turns carbon into diamonds; in a corporate transformation, it can turn your most vocal opponents into your steeliest allies. Slow and steady, you make your way until you get to the point of irreversibility – where when the budget runs out, you don’t roll back to where you started.

The change we’re going through makes business sense: a move into emerging markets and a shift to digital products will unlock new commercial opportunities. But it’s also a change that is predicated on a single principle: efficacy. As our chief executive John Fallon describes it, “This [is a] deceptively simple but incredibly powerful idea, that every product we sell can be measured and judged by the learner outcomes it helps to achieve.”

That passion at the top paves the way for the practicalities – the processes and the pounds needed to make change happen. And in turn it gives you what Martin Luther King, Jr., recognized, and what any great agent of change recognizes, as crucial – people, empowered.

It’s exactly how we’ve been going about our change. A central team agrees on the rules of the game, and then departments are empowered to invent the rest. It is implementation by open-source. It’s an approach that builds pride of authorship, and therefore ownership. It reduces the burden of the central change team. And most importantly, it means we can embrace the power of positive deviance – centrally, we don’t know exactly what will work best, where and why. So why not let the change evolve as it filters through the cells of our organization?

So, what does change mean to us? It’s a commitment to improving every single one of our products for every single one of our learners. We’re two years into our journey and we have got to get it right. Not only are we betting our company on it; the future for a better world depends on it.

I can’t think of any better mission to be a part of.

Less nodding, more doing

Ever been in this position? You identify the need for change in your organisation. You set up a taskforce to tackle it and come up with some great answers. You present it to the company. It makes perfect sense, everyone is nodding in agreement. No one would disagree. But a month later nothing has changed.

My role is all about making change actionable through technology. I have been grappling with how to make change stick and get people to not just nod, but go do. Here are 5 things we can all do to make change actionable.  

Make it personal

Presentations tend to be quite broad brush and addressed to the company as a whole. They don’t explain how each individual will need to behave to make change happen. Each person needs to work through what the change means to them with someone who wholeheartedly believes in and understands the strategy.

Furthermore, it means that people won’t act in a way that is counter intuitive - whatever goals are set, they should align with the individual’s personal working style and career ambitions.

Support managers

One of the issues with a taskforce is it bypasses the normal management structures that are in place. Ensuring managers understand how they can support their teams is essential – they are the people who can help translate objectives into actions and measure performance. If they don’t understand what is required, your change will fail.

Find the triggers

The change will mean a whole heap of stuff will need to be updated; performance objectives, job descriptions, document templates, sales presentations. Ensuring people have constant triggers to think differently should help to embed the change.

Campbell Butler, Wolff Olins Design Director suggests framing things differently, “like a rubbish bin that doesn’t call itself a rubbish bin, but calls itself ‘landfill’… It makes people think for a moment before they act.”

Identify the barriers

There may be simple stuff that is preventing people making the change. It is worth stepping through the employee journey and removing any barriers, real or imagined.  Do they know where to find the documentation? Do they lack the words to help sell the change into clients? Are there reward mechanisms working against the change?

Share the good stuff

Maybe challenge people to share one thing they have done this week to make the change real. And, as soon as you see good stuff or behaviour going in the right direction, share it. It’s easier for people to learn from actual real life examples.

Thoughts from our New York Summit

On November 5th in New York, Wolff Olins hosted a select group of 60 leaders, from dozens of industries, to share stories and gain insights about How to Change. We drew inspiration and perspective from an extraordinary collection of speakers. Each shed new light on the moves we need to make to affect change:

1. Set a north star, to concentrate people’s energies

2. Walk the talk, to link ambition to impact

3. Pit creativity against challenges, to open new possibilities

4. Go human, to design experiences that truly resonate with customers

5. Rally communities, to co-create the future

We could write a book about what we learned that day. While we wait for that, here’s a short video of what went down.

Everything will change, but people come first

This year we’ve not only been renovating our website, but also developing a new strategic direction and offer. We’ve asked some of our people to explore what being creative partners for ambitious leaders really means in practice. To paraphrase Chris Moody, “Creativity is what we bring to the party”. Creative thinking, creative planning, creative design, creative action all help us unlock the potential in every business - and every individual - we partner with. This week we're explaining how, continuing today with Morgan Holt, Global Principal, on Culture.

Every company needs a clear promise for its customers and for its employees, but the bigger challenge we set our clients is to create a culture where these individuals can support each other.

No two cultures are the same. Amazon champions extreme customer service, making it a hard-nosed place to work. John Lewis has built a cooperative mindset over a hundred years so that each employee sees the other as a partner. Both are incredible retailers with much-loved brands. Each has a culture that works for them.

So a value proposition between employer and staff can't be a cookie-cutter process. If it borrows too heavily from 'best practice' it settles for platitudes like 'working together' or 'trustworthy'. These kind of generics really bother me because they're fundamentals. Do you want to trust your employer? Well, duh. They're expected by every human being on the planet, and no more useful than saying 'we want food'. It could well be that trust is an issue that needs addressing, but if that's where you start and finish then you'll have cultural ambition that is little more than a borderline personality disorder built by a computer.

So at Wolff Olins we've been working on tools that drive a valuable and unique brand deep into the organisation. We help clients get into the business of creating tangible, powerful moments of change that bring the purpose to life every day. Our model of change creates behavioural shifts in a way that is visible, desirable and effective. If there's one thing I've learned in this process it's that the little things matter - grand statements set a direction, but it is the informal, emotive moments of change that resonate. Like when 2,800 Expedia engineers sign a 20-foot-high manifesto with silver pens and a lot of noisy, happy chatter.

But first, you need a clear statement of ambition for your culture. Not just a tagline, but a description of the behaviours that are going to create the impact you want to achieve. It is how you hold all your culture activities accountable. We take the time to get really clear on the promise the company makes to customers, and the promise it makes to employees.

A traditional employee value proposition stops there but we go a step further: we clarify the promise between employees and customers. This contract gives everybody a role, it spurs recruitment and retention activities, and it identifies ways to bring the purpose to life in the hands of the people who matter.

For example, our work with Orange means the leadership now has a clear ambition for employees to be accountable to customers, and an engagement program that puts this experience in the hands of the frontline. It empowers employees to deliver the company's new listening brand - and compels the business to provide the necessary tools for its people to listen and do something with what they hear.

A promise like this creates an incredibly powerful platform of employees and customers collaborating in service of something greater than themselves: a shared goal, like a simpler life, or a braver use of technology, or a smarter understanding of money.

And that means it never calcifies. Society doesn't stand still so culture doesn't stand still. We want our clients to grow a beating cultural heart that is continually adapting, one that helps people continue to help people as life changes, one of empowered individuals working towards the empowerment of other individuals.

 Now, who wants to work for that company?

We invite you to share your thoughts in the comments section below and - as always - to get in touch if you’d like to talk to us about bringing creativity to your party.

Hollywood and AI

What the advent of robotics means for our cultural world

In our innovation-obsessed society, there’s a lot of talk about automation, about robots, about the end of jobs and of supercomputers. This is the adoption of technology as corporate tools. Elon Musk has been in the news recently saying the same thing he said a few months ago, talking darkly about Terminator and the dangers of artificial intelligence. This is the science fiction of human disaster films.

  A year of robots

At the end of this month in London, the BFI will screen the showpiece to its Sci-fi season, 2001: A Space Odyssey. Kubrick’s masterpiece is probably the most iconic exploration of the human perils of developing artificial intelligence. It is a pertinent choice for this season, given the coverage afforded the issue in mainstream cinema.

The first half of 2014 welcomed Her and Transcendence. The coming months will see Alex Garland’s Ex Machina and Neill Blomkamp’s Chappie. All, in different ways, explore our relationship with AI. The conventional understanding of Her is a romantic tale of a man who falls in love with his OS (although it’s more a rebirth or overcoming the monster story, if you subscribe to Booker’s schema); Transcendence is a cautionary tale about Kurzweil-esque Singularity; Ex Machina and Chappie appear to examine our uneasy relationship with superintelligence, collectively and individually (Blomkamp’s, naturally, looks at our propensity to segregate what we fear). 

Having more supercomputers in film is not interesting in itself. Rather, it is interesting that Hollywood insists on the anthropomorphosis of their robot protagonists, choosing implausible portrayals of otherwise plausible storylines.

  Are film robots made more human to warn us of the implications of AI, or to confuse us?

Moravec’s paradox asserts that when it comes to AI, the hard problems are easy and the easy problems hard. More specifically it states that, contrary to conventional assumptions about robotics and AI, “it is comparatively easy to make computers exhibit adult level performance on intelligence tests or playing checkers, and difficult or impossible to give them the skills of a one-year-old when it comes to perception and mobility.” In short, Google can now – extraordinarily- recognise pizzas, but C-3PO is still quite a way off, let alone Kubrick’s Hal or Spielberg’s David from AI.

It is understandable that films try to make machines seem more lifelike, more human. It allows us to look at man vs. machine, loneliness and segregation as part of a socio-technological discussion, of course very relevant to our lives today.

The real world does the opposite, and tries to make us more robotic. It does not take a particularly hard look to see that Apple is not about humanising technology, but automating humanity. Similarly, it isn’t the world’s information Google is organising to make accessible and useful, but us. We see the effects in the most mundane aspects of our lives in the real world, beautifully illustrated here by our homogenous, robotic, physical behaviours. We also see the effects in our personalised, predictable and hyperreal digital lives.

  How film reflects our world

In a fascinating book, the film critic James Hoberman shows how the aftermath of 9/11 saw a huge surge in popularity in films with high body counts “to capitalize on the nation’s new bellicosity”(although, interestingly, just two weeks after 9/11, President Bush urged Americans in an act of defiance to “get down to Disney World”, the utopian hyperreality). Black Hawk Down was rushed into cinemas early, Collateral Damage, We Were Soldiers, The Sum of All Fears and Attack of the Clones all came out in spring 2002, to greater success and marketing than envisaged. The political, social and corporate context at the time forced a response in culture (normally this happens the other way around); but the story of war is a more straightforward one to tell on screen.

One might wonder whether the current swathe of films examining AI is performing a similar function. Rather than reflect a wounded and angry country in the aftermath of a shocking attack, films – like us - are grappling with the more complex ramifications of the information age. In a post-Snowden, post-Wikileaks, post-Matrix era of Facebook and drone delivery, these films are trying to create powerful human stories instead of the mundane, everyday deference we show to automation. It may be less cinematic, but is no less significant.

Dan Gavshon Brady (@DanGB88) is a strategist at Wolff Olins, London.

A new way of leading?

I was recently in Budapest talking at the Association for Coaching’s  international conference. They’re a not-for-profit organisation focused on improving and extending the capabilities of the coaching profession worldwide. It was a thoughtful and brainy bunch as you’d imagine.

I was invited along to talk about the coaching model we’ve adopted across all of our offices at Wolff Olins and to lift the lid on what it’s been like moving away from a more standardised approach to organising ourselves.

Over the years we’ve honed our skills and capabilities in delivering ‘change’, and acquired a truckload of practical experience in what it takes to help an enterprise and the people in it become more collaborative, energised and able to deliver. So it’s only natural that we’ve become our own lab for testing out our thinking.

This year we took the final symbolic step of dissolving the role of local MDs, moving away from individual office P&Ls and fully organising ourselves around our clients and our client teams. We now have an arrangement that puts the emphasis firmly on delivering impact, bringing out the individuality and leadership of our people and making sure the right systems are in place to make all of this possible.

In simplistic terms our ‘structure’ now looks something like this, although there’s obviously a lot of movement and integration.

Three core elements have informed our approach. The first is the Service Profit Chain with its focus on creating a thriving environment for employees so they can do the same for customers. The second is Dan Pink’s notion of Purpose (I know my work is meaningful and contributing to something powerful), Autonomy (I have the freedom to act and perform individually and collaboratively to achieve the best outcomes) and Mastery (I have access to the kind of assignments, expertise, tools and training to be brilliant) from his book Drive.  The final piece is Distributed Leadership with its roots in Holacracy and aspects of Six Sigma. The stuff that Zappos, Google, Spotify and others are currently experimenting with.

We’ve taken liberties for sure and we’ve combined these raw ingredients in a way that makes sense for us. It’s a path that’s felt entirely natural, although speaking at the conference really hammered home how radical what we’ve achieved can feel to others used to seeing more formal hierarchical arrangements.

Instead of line managers we have community practice coaches.  They’re responsible for encouraging, supporting and developing the uniqueness of those in their communities. Instead of office MD's we have lead coaches. They make sure our culture and talent is thriving overall so everyone can perform at their best and enjoy what they do.

All of this is joined up globally - by great people and systems - removing any obstacles and barriers to working across borders and cultures successfully.

We’ve also put ‘learnability’ at the heart of our culture, with many opportunities to learn, teach and experiment within our practice – on the job, through our in-house curriculum and the tools we’ve created.   

And we’ve abandoned the usual tedious annual reviews in favour of self-penned Personal Plans and ongoing exchanges, as a way to help us achieve our fullest potential and connect us with opportunities in the business that help us to do so.

“We look to hold on to individual distinctiveness, not to drown it out, and the coaching system is the way that we let individual interests, passions and aspirations shine through. Sometimes we end up re-designing someone's entire role and job description on the back of what they set out to achieve in their plan. “ Suzanne Livingston, Strategy Coach, London

Is it perfect? Of course not. In fact at times it’s been rather messy and chaotic. And we’re definitely not all the way there yet. Is it the right thing to do?  Well it certainly has been for us.

Globalisation and the widening use of technology has the ability to create a kind of flattened out domesticated sort of cultural homegenisation that glosses over our differences. Alternatively, it has the opportunity to celebrate what make us unique, interesting, special and diverse.

We believe the world needs more creativity, more individuality, more invention, and more leaders. Which is why we’ve thought long and hard about what will help us bring out the best in ourselves and do the best work that we can. We think it’s good for us and we know it’s good for business. 

We’re also hearing a lot of other folks feel the same way, through our report last year that emphasised the shift of power into the hands of the individual and our next one which characterises 21st Century leadership through the voices of 50 global leaders we’ve interviewed.

Thoughts from the summit

This is a great time to explore what Change means. The nature of change itself is changing, from long-range consultancy programs that focus on business efficiency… to moments of change that are more agile, more democratic, better aligned to the needs of individuals inside and outside the building. So the nature of change was the topic of our 3rd leadership summit, hosted at Wolff Olins this October. We gathered a group of CEOs, marketing directors, and senior strategic leaders to discuss how the approach to making effective change is itself adapting to fit the diversity of a modern business world and society. Here's a short video about the day – and watch this space, there are plenty more opinions on Change to come.

How To Change from Wolff Olins on Vimeo.

To request an invitation to our Summit in NYC on November 5th, please email [email protected].

Getting our hands dirty

By Pierre-Antoine Arlot

Something that unites pretty much everyone within Wolff Olins' world wide diversity is food. Food as a well-being vector, something intrinsically rooted in our culture as a way to keep the energy high and to achieve better balance in our life.

Now eating food is one thing but making it is another kettle of fish. One of the great initiatives of Wolff Olins well-being programme is the Cookery Club. Every once in a while, a few of us gather in the kitchen with our beloved chef, Sam, to follow his directions. Everyone chips in and the money raised is donated to a local association, the Manna, helping people who are marginalised or vulnerable.

This time we learned how to make a delicious traditional Mediterranean fish stew, La Bouillabaisse, followed by a DIY sponge cake contest. Full recipes are available here.

We all got our hands dirty and shared a great moment of convivialité. Something precious, that reminded me that you never achieve great things without getting all in and the process is as, if it is not more, enjoyable than the outcome. Totally worth getting my hands dirty – yum!

I'm scared of tech (Back to the Future)

I've come to the conclusion that I know nothing about technology, and it's freaking me out.

I mean, I spend time on social media – too much on Facebook and occasional rants on Twitter about cars that nearly crash into my bike – use GPS apps to track my running and browse Wired every now and then. But I am otherwise utterly clueless about what's next and frankly slightly averse to it. Will I pick up wearables? I've worn contacts for nearly 20 years, so I can't imagine going back to glasses that make you look like a cyborg. Ditto to talking into my watch, Go-Go-Gadget style. The Internet of Things just makes me think it's one more thing to worry about breaking. Is there a repairman you can call to fix The Thing if it goes down? And what about Big Data? How much do companies really know about me just by monitoring what I buy?

Tech confuses me because I don't know what I am supposed to pay attention to and what's a fad. If I adopt a new device now, will it still be The Device next year? Everything changes so quickly that I feel like I'll never catch up – but I don't want to be left behind.

So I sympathise with the cabbies who went on strike a few weeks ago in London. They were protesting TFL's licensing of Uber as minicabs; Uber charges passengers a rate based on distance traveled, instead of a flat fee, and black cab drivers want Uber cabs to be licensed as they are and held to the same rates. They feel that Uber is beating them at their own game.

But really, the protest was against how something that was once a given (the black cab business model) is being disrupted by the world changing around it, and how cabbies aren't in control of their own livelihoods. You don't really need to do The Knowledge to drive a cab in London anymore, because there are satnavs. You don't really need to own your own cab, because there are tons of companies to drive for. And the cabs themselves are changing too, in design, colour, emissions technology. It's very possible that one day there won't be London black cabs on the streets at all – in New York, taxis will shortly go from being yellow to green.

So I've been thinking about what I (and London's cab drivers) can do to feel better about our quickly changing lives.

There are a few easy shifts we can make right now that will help us sleep better.

First, I think we should stop being afraid. So many amazing things have happened because of seemingly small technological advances, and there are so many more to come that shrinking in fear of tech will limit how far we can go as a society. The opposite of being afraid is being confident and brave, and I think we can all be brave and start to view the big expanse of 'technology' through the lens of what positive changes it can make. For instance, I am really inspired by how technology is making important things like education available to people who couldn't afford them before. I am really excited about 3-D printing of organs for transplants. I am really energised by the promulgation of free speech through new channels. I am really optimistic about how some of the world's biggest problems can be solved by innovations that couldn't have been dreamed of just a short time ago.

And in a related point, I also think that we can take comfort in going slow. It may seem that things are changing so quickly that we as human beings can't keep up, but relatively it's all moving fairly glacially. We just have to look back at movies made 30 years ago, like Back to the Future, to see how our imagination runs much faster than actual technological advancement. Marty McFly went to 2015 and found hover boards, mobile trash cans, power shoelaces and holographic movie theatres all in wide use; it's possible we will see these innovations emerge next year, but probably not to the extent that we saw on-screen. It's even more reassuring if you look at films made in 1965, thinking about 2015 – we're not wearing silver suits or populating the moon (yet). So whilst we can imagine a world that's radically different due to technology, in reality we're all, en masse, a lot slower on the uptake than we thought we would be. And that's okay.

Finally, lets all just be curious. So many studies point to ongoing learning and playing as a way to keep the brain and body young, but also as a way to stay relevant. So just trying new things, investigating new developments, and dabbling in tech is a start. My guru in this is my 86 year old grandmother: she recently added me on LinkedIn. Until recently, I had no idea why; at her age, I thought, she has no reason to join LinkedIn. And then I realised, she's just checking it out – and why not? She's not limited by an invisible boundary that this network might not be for her, or not relevant to who she is. Lets not think about technology as something for someone else, or potentially not relevant to your world because of your age, gender, job, or some other invisible restriction. The beauty of technology is that's democratic, open and available to all of us.

Of course there will be downsides, and real negatives that we will need to confront together as a society. Technology will change sectors, jobs, livelihoods, our homes, our health – everything. But ignoring it or resisting it won't make it disappear. Instead, we need to challenge it – together. Let's discuss why Facebook experimenting with our emotions doesn’t feel right. Let's discuss how we feel threatened by multiple screens and devices in our daily lives. Let's discuss why our kids spend more time online than off. And of course lets discuss what mobile technology means for the transportation industry as a whole, and cab drivers in particular. What we'll ultimately find is that technology will bring us together, rather than rip us apart – we'll find more ways to share, connect, learn and grow, online and off, through technology in the future.

Therefore, I'Ve decided to embrace technology holistically. I know I won't ever understand coding and the nuances of 3D printing, nor will I follow the latest software update releases with the excitement of some of my peers, but I won't ignore them either. I am trying to see how tech can positively influence growth, change, and the future for business and society. And I'm trying to empathise with those who haven't made the leap I have – some won't ever get here, and that's okay. But at the end of the day, technology is part of who we are as humans. Like it or not, we'll always keep innovating, making, thinking, creating, and expanding. Because if you can't beat em, join em.

And besides – I'll bet my lunch that London's cabbies organised their strike over email and texts.

Danielle Zezulinski is Account Management Coach and Account Director at Wolff Olins London.