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

How brands can keep it personal

Recently, I attended the first ever Fast Company Innovation Festival in New York.  The week-long event was created to inspire creativity and innovation through workshops, panels and on-site visits. The candidness and depth of information shared by each speaker inspired me to share my takeaways from the event.

Regardless of industry, we are all bound to face challenges within our business. So why not share our experiences and find common ground in the areas we should be working on thriving in?

1. Identify what makes you special…then execute on it

I should preface this by saying I’m a big Oprah fan. Abnormally so for someone who was still a college student when The Oprah Winfrey Show came to an end (I’m still recovering.) So when I heard the co-presidents of her television network OWN, were speaking about ‘Inspiring Innovation,’ I was excited to say the least. Specifically I wanted to hear what these individuals had to say about the conceivable pressures and expectations when working on a new venture with one of the most powerful women in media.

I listened closely as Sheri Salata and Erik Logan shared what it took to turn OWN around after a dismal start to the network just a few years ago. In an arguably short amount of time, they pulled the network out of what was reportedly going to be a complete failure for my favorite daytime talk show host. As they worked vigorously to increase ratings, Sheri stated the turning point was when the team finally asked themselves, “What do we have that nobody else does?”

While I thought the answer was obvious, it seemed the solution wasn’t solely Oprah. It was strategizing how to best infuse her into the network because she was always going to be OWN’s greatest asset.

It’s undeniable that asking, “What do we have that nobody else does?” is so vital. However asking the question isn’t enough; it’s how you execute on the answer. Wolff Olins’ President for North America, Tim Allen, talks about promise and delivery often and those two words are really what it comes down to. With so much competition in the marketplace, it’s not sufficient to just have something that sets you apart. You have to find how to best deliver that unique offer so it captures your audience’s attention. Maybe it’s time to take a step back and have that Aha! moment Oprah’s always talking about.

2. Make your philanthropy personal  

In high school I worked with The African Millennium Foundation, a non-profit that provides tools for self-sufficiency in the poorest areas of Africa. I traveled to Mozambique to visit one of the orphanages we raised donations and supplies for. My most vivid memory was spending the day with an energetic young boy whose shoes were completely damaged. They were worn to the point of uselessness but I knew he had no other choice but to walk in that pair.

It wasn’t long after my trip I heard about TOMS. I was immediately intrigued after learning that with every pair of shoes purchased, a pair would also be donated. This One for One concept (also known as the “buy one give one” model) was completely innovative at the time, which is easy to forget in today’s emergent socially conscious market.

While their One for One model has evolved since launching in 2006, TOMS’ brand story and messaging have remained clear due in large part to founder Blake Mycoskie. I was able to hear him speak alongside model and founder of the non-profit Every Mother Counts, Christy Turlington-Burns.

It’s been almost a decade since TOMS was founded and the popularity of companies incorporating charity into their business, from Warby Parker to The Honest Company, has increased significantly. Studies continue to prove that consumers are more likely to support businesses with a philanthropic component. What used to be a revolutionary way of thinking is becoming the new normal. This should only give organizations further incentive to keep thinking of new ways to set themselves apart.

If TOMS launched today, I wonder if it would still be as successful as it’s become. A lot of the attention that led to their initial success was a result of Blake sharing how his life-changing trip to Argentina inspired both the shoe design and the One for One model. Regardless, TOMS proved it’s more than just a fleeting trend, which it very well could have been. As the business and product line expanded, they remained true to the brand they built, in everything from the content they produced to their partnerships – one most recently with Christy’s non-profit, Every Mother Counts.

Every Mother Counts is dedicated to making pregnancy and childbirth safer for mothers around the world, and through TOMS they sell tote bags and backpacks. It was a natural partnership according to Blake and Christy, who both discussed the importance of having a personal connection to what you do. In Christy’s case, it wasn’t until she had complications giving birth that she became an advocate for maternal health. She talked about the irrationality of celebrities she knew who were “matched” with charities and couldn’t understand how anyone could find the authenticity in that.

If your story doesn’t feel genuine, it will always be harder to get people invested in your cause, regardless of if it’s a non-profit or for-profit organization. Being able to communicate why giving back matters to your business is necessary, given that it’s becoming such a large part of organizations’ DNA.  

3. Go with your gut

On the last day of the festival, I visited STORY. If you live in New York and have never shopped there, you’re missing out. The 2,000 square foot space is advertised as a “Retail concept that takes the point of view of a magazine, changes like a gallery and sells things like a store.” Every one-two months an entirely new “issue” is produced for the store consisting of a new store layout, merchandise and theme. I was there to hear STORY’s founder, Rachel Shechtman, speak about creative collaboration with fashion icon and businesswoman Iris Apfel.

Iris, who had a successful interior design career, shot into the spotlight ten years ago when The Metropolitan Museum of Art exhibited her vibrant personal collection of clothing and accessories which she’s renowned for. Since then, the self-proclaimed “oldest living cover girl” has had successful partnerships with everyone from MAC Cosmetics to Bergdorf Goodman. She’s now more popular than ever, thanks in part to the late Albert Maysles’ documentary Iris which was released earlier this year. At 94 years young, Iris has had enough life experience to inherently know what collaborations she’s interested in being part of. She truly enjoys involving herself in each project, which is probably why every partnership she’s done thus far feels so authentic.

When asked to explain her thought process behind choosing collaborators, Iris expressed there was no real strategic method and that luck was her reason for success. While a little luck never hurt anyone, she has her own unique creative process whether she was aware of it or not – Iris follows her gut. “I don’t intellectualize it. I just feel it.” In an age when we’re taught to overprepare, overanalyze and overproduce, can it really be as simple as going with instincts?

After hearing Rachel Shechtman speak alongside Iris, I’d trust she bases a good portion of her decisions for STORY on intuition as well. There’s clearly a strategic plan behind everything her team does but I imagine it might be difficult to develop a distinct voice when so much of who you are is rooted in a constant rotation of collaborators, sponsors and merchandise. Rachel, a former brand consultant, acknowledged nonetheless that without STORY’s partnerships, the entire concept of the store couldn’t thrive in the way that it does. Having only opened in 2011, they’re still continuing to grow their audience along with their brand. I’m confident STORY is on the right trajectory but their biggest challenge will be continuing to ensure their consumers understand their individual brand and what they represent. Maybe they’ll just have to go with their gut to find the story.

Post-festival, I had a greater optimism and curiosity for the future of business and creativity. I stand by Blake Mycoskie’s notion that being philanthropic soon won’t be perceived as the right thing to do in business, but the necessary thing to do. Still, without an authentic connection or delivering something that sets you apart, it can only be done so successfully. Whatever story you’re going to tell, make it a distinct one that people want to hear. Then if you follow your gut, perhaps the rest will follow.

Illustration by LA Hall. 

Rebecca Dersh is Marketing Manager at Wolff Olins New York. Follow her @rebeccadersh

Art with heart

It's over 30 years since the Turner Prize was set up and it's still creating a stir. Known for awarding some of the most exciting, intriguing and controversial artists its monetary prize and prime real estate at the Tate, the Prize has also consistently drawn the attention of the media who simultaneously applaud, analyze, scrutinize and question its winners. You don’t have to look further than the media attention surrounding this year’s prize recipient, Assemble, who’ve been on the receiving end of journalists questioning not only the validity of the Turner jury’s decision but the artists themselves.

Assemble don’t naturally self-describe as artists; instead they call themselves a “collective based in London who work across the fields of art, architecture and design” using various creative media for social good. The winning “work,” sited at Liverpool’s Granby Four Street, consists of the group reclaiming a cluster of houses made derelict by riots and neglect.  Which they've managed to nurture and curate into a thriving ecosystem of local partnerships and DIY-creativity in the service of a better society.

Granted it's a bit tricky imagining their work lined up next to previous winners like Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin and Martin Creed in a gallery.  And the international press certainly don't seem to like it much, but I love it.

It's an unexpected and interesting decision from the Turner jury and the Tate. If you think about art at its most basic sense, it’s the expression of human creativity. What it results in - whether it be a cow and calf duo in formaldehyde or a refurbishment of houses in a community accompanied by a social enterprise plan, why does it matter? That it's provoking questions, creating debate and challenging our everyday assumptions is what's important.

Assemble and its award-winning project bring together three elements we need a lot more of in the world today: creativity, compassion and community. In our congested world overwrought with strife, who’s to say that using artistic impression and imagination to enact positivity to help society isn’t art-y enough? But somehow, a disheveled bed is?

Art and especially conceptual art has always been contentious and subjective. With not just artists, but curators, tastemakers, buyers and us as the public ultimately colluding in what qualifies.  In this respect, judging and awarding the Turner prize is an act of artistry in itself.  Demanding that we question convention and our own preconceived notions and getting tangled up in debates we might not otherwise. Isn’t that what creativity, self expression and making is all about at the end of the day?

Illustration by LA Hall.

Sairah Ashman is COO at Wolff Olins. Follow her @SairahAshman

Scaling Peter Pan

NewCo SF has wrapped and our Director of New Business, Carolyn Centeno has been reflecting on the companies she encountered and how they’ll maintain their Peter Pan magic as they grow.  

It’s not every day you get to peek inside some of the world’s most influential disruptors. At NewCo festival, a conference that takes place in San Francisco inside various company headquarters, I was able to step inside the offices of companies such as Pinterest, Uber and AirBnB amongst others and hear their executives speak about their explosive growth, plans for the future and unintended influence on the world. They were not jaded or gate-kept away from the community but expressed a positivity, a creative freedom and an unabashed openness that allowed them to think beyond limits and silos. Their headquarters were physical manifestations of their company’s purpose – Pinterest a physical scrapbook, Uber a sleek limo, Airbnb an apartment with unique furniture – the excitement was palpable. There was a Peter Pan-like magic to each of them. And yet, there seemed to be an underlying sense of fear that perhaps some of this magic would be lost as they grew in size and influence.

It made me wonder: How can you keep this creativity and passion alive as you scale?

1. Positivity & Creativity Freedom When the future seems uncertain, limiting beliefs and unnecessary fear kill creativity. The thing that keeps companies functioning at their highest and most creative is a positive mindset – one that sees opportunities rather than obstacles.  Celebrating the success of others and bringing a positive mindset can be infectious throughout an organization.

2. Intentional Focus To avoid becoming a one trick-pony, these companies need to ensure they continue to develop a pipeline of disruptive and innovative ideas and multi-disciplinary jam sessions. Their focus must be laser sharp on the biggest bets and they must create strategies that will shift and transform.

3. Mature Empowerment True disruptors outgrow their competitors and their industry. In their next phase of growth, they need leaders who are cool under pressure, maintain a strong point of view and consistently behave compassionately and fairly; leaders who empower and trust others to create an environment for their teams to flourish autonomously.

4.  Tools to Scale As companies increase in scale and employee/business size, they find it hard to get everyone on the same page. When there are more people to answer to and bottom lines targets become much bigger, the pressure increases. To scale at size, tools are essential: roadmaps, workshops, online learning platforms, or videos to name a few. They need ways to get behind the growth in a personal but structured way.  

I’m excited for companies like these to keep their Peter Pan-like magic as they focus, grow and scale.  Not growing up in the way the world expects them to but in the way that allows them to continue to fly.

Illustration by Alison Haigh.

Carolyn Centeno is Director of New Business at Wolff Olins New York. Follow her @CarolynCenteno

How to get your new on

NewCo kicks off today and our San Francisco office is proud to be a part of the impressive and inspiring lineup. In celebration, our design team in SF has been thinking about what it takes to stay on top of the new new in a city with the insatiable appetite for the next big thing. 

In San Francisco, everyone is prototyping the future. Here, companies are redefining how we shop, eat, drive, communicate- LIVE. Tomorrowland isn’t tomorrow, its here. And it’s San Francisco.

In our rapidly growing SF office, our team is working fast to be at the forefront of creativity as we jump into the deep end with these  companies right at the beginning; defining and refining who they are- sometimes before they’ve even figured it out themselves.

It’s exciting and immense and exactly how we want to work. Here are some of our thoughts: 

There are no rules

New companies are still figuring out what they are, where they are going, and how to get there. The big established businesses are far younger than you think but evolving just as fast. The rules are being written as you go. It’s an exhilarating experience that can lead to unexpected results.

Look out

Since everything is changing so fast, it’s easy to get caught up in the mix. Get out of your comfort zone and find inspiration outside your world. What can the world of high fashion teach small tech startups? How could robotics influence a retail experience? How can lighting fast delivery services inspire healthcare?

New is tasty

This city is full of people who invented the appetite for the new. That’s a fresh and rewarding place to be. You have to push massively far to rise above the noise.

Embrace the weird

People are working on some of the weirdest and most amazing things in SF. That makes for some great opportunities to do things you wouldn’t be able to pull off anywhere else. Dive in and make some magic.

Written and illustrated by Steven Reinmuth, Rosie Isbell, Ada Mayer and Joanna Cheung. 

Robots are NOT taking over

With a near constant stream of headlines about advances in artificial intelligence and recent peeks at mind–blowing technologies like these Boston Robotics' four-legged beasts, this feels like a good moment to revisit a question that's been asked many times before: Are the Robots taking over?

That was the topic put forth to a panel at last week's Northside Festival in Brooklyn, New York – and the consensus, thankfully, was a resounding no. The discussion featured four experts working every day at the intersection of technology and humanity: Robbie Allen of Automated Insights, David Rose of MIT Media Lab and Ditto Labs, Michael Solana of the VC firm Founders Fund, and Wolff Olins' own Mel McShane. As the group talked about how the relationship between machines and people would (should?) play out in the future, a few themes emerged:

1.They won't be our friends – MIT's Rose made the case that we should think of and design machines as tools, not as humanoids. We create these things to serve us, he argued, and we shouldn't be trying to build them in our own image. "The industry made a huge mistake putting faces and names on robots," he asserted, pointing to Apple's personified Siri and the personal assistant app Charlie as exhibits. Instead, he believes, most of the machines of tomorrow should and will look more like smart objects than anthropomorphized robots.

2. They won't be our enemies – This group of technoptimists generally maintained that machines will complement us and change how we live and work (as they always have), but they won't replace us. Looking at the big picture, none foresaw an "us vs. them" scenario. Instead, they argued, machines will enhance our capabilities and make new things possible. "Advanced intelligence is generally good for the world," explained Solana.  Reinforcing this point, Robbie Allen described how his company's software can automatically turn quantitative financial data into prose, a translation previously performed by journalists. But this technology, he argued, didn't steal jobs – it freed professionals up to focus on higher value assignments that humans are better at, like analysis and opinion.

3. They won't all be the same – The group also called for more machines with different shapes, sizes, styles – made by all different kinds of companies. Instead of one monolithic AI system, Rose predicted a series of "Atomic AIs" designed to do specific things. From an outward appearance, too, they hoped that robots and machines could soon move beyond the aesthetic that we're currently seeing so much of. The next generation of things will be smart, but won't necessarily feel like the "tech"we know today; this hardware, one of the experts predicted, would use wood, leather, and even soft squishy materials.

To me, it seems like the best way to think about the question is this: Despite Hollywood's best efforts to make us think otherwise, we shouldn't fear a race robots taking over the world. Instead, we should welcome a class of machines that might help us to reinvent it. 

Illustration by Ben Gibbs.

Sam Liebeskind is a Strategist at Wolff Olins New York. Follow him @samliebeskind

Notes from the F5 festival

The F5 festival in New York presents people working at the intersection of design and technology. The diverse lineup of speakers are not the typical group you’d expect to see at a conference celebrating motion graphics. However, they do represent the potential of the industry and the ideal norm in the future. The questions emerging as we move forward deal with not just the limitations of the technology but our limitations to comprehend the information it can report back to us. F5’s speakers provided insights to some of these tough questions.

The medical field is quickly learning the benefits of using animation to visualize disease and bacteria infections. Dr. Janet Iwasa and her colleagues at the University of Utah are working to make animation more accessible for biologists who work on some of the most difficult and deadly diseases facing our society. Traditionally biologists studying on a molecular level could only see flat, 2D representations presented by the microscope. By animating these processes with 3D software, scientists can get a better idea of the spatial relationship and adjust their hypothesis accordingly. Their project is called Molecular Flipbook, and is available for free online.

Seek the Fear: There were many parallels between Dr. Janet Iwasa’s talk and Rama Allen’s talk, which followed. Rama’s work takes the best of the old and remixes it with the freshest new technology. His titles for OFFF St. Petersburg encapsulate this. Rama and his colleagues at The Mill were able to leverage motion capture technology and blend it with the work of skilled calligraphists seamlessly. The resulting work is a beautiful piece that abstractly portrays human methods of creation in a digital environment.

Tech can do incredible things when we ask it to think for us but what happens when we ask tech to think like us? Darius Kazemi asks his bots to do just that everyday. Among Darius’ twitter inventions is Two Headlines, a bot that mixes two of the days leading headlines together with hilarious results. Darius also detailed his latest twitter invention: Sorting Bot. With a simple line of code this bot sorts other twitter users into Harry Potter houses. While Darius assured the audience that the code pulls a random house every time, that hasn’t stopped people in the twitter community from creating rituals around the sorting process. Unexpectedly the outcome of this bot has been a commentary on our paranoia regarding the intrusion of technology into our social interactions online. Darius’ projects can be found here.

F5’s biggest success was contextualizing technology within creativity. What came out of the conference was a deeper understanding of where the industry is headed and how creatives on the fringes of the motion design industry are leveraging it. The F5 homepage boasts unexpected insights and the speakers definitely delivered. 

Illustration by Leon Hapka, photographs by Peter Kearney

Those who need it most

This week, in our Dubai office, we were presented with a Silver award from the Dubai Lynx - The Middle East's equivalent of the Cannes Lions. The award was for our work on the packaging for Salma, a global halal food relief programme designed to alleviate hunger.

Oftentimes, we linger in a supermarket aisle, our eyes drawn by a bright cereal box, or our heads turned by the promise of a flavorful taste. When thinking through brand solutions, these are the usual end-consumer considerations.

For 805 million, or 1 in 9 people, suffering from malnutrition, the context is assumed to be entirely different, informed by necessity and identification. This is even more pronounced with Muslim refugees – who comprise 70% of the global refugee population- in search of halal food.

‘Halal’ is a certification given to food that has been prepared according to a set of Islamic principles, thus making it permissible to eat under Islamic law. Halal food currently sent to affected areas is often inadequately packaged and certified, and if Muslims do not trust the food they are receiving, they would rather not eat it, further compounding their already complex situation.

Yet, in times of hardship it is often faith that provides an anchor and empowers one with a sense of hope. Building on this insight, we knew it was critical to preserve, and not compromise, the values of the consumer when coming to a final design solution, especially with something as fundamental as food. Marie Succar, Senior Designer, reflected, “Design was an integral tool in providing a creative solution to help people that are in need of Salma understand that it is Halal and sustenance in a pouch. What is ultimately important about Salma - is what is in that pouch.”

“At the same time, we wanted the pack to be uplifting enough to give them hope of brighter days to come,” she said. As well as being intuitive and simple, we wanted the packaging to be vibrant and positive. Ameen Malhas, Lead Strategist stated, “The unique thing about Salma is that it is an aid project that could work as a supermarket product. And that’s sort of the point; aid agencies focus on getting nutrition to the malnourished, Salma complements and enhances that aim through lifting the spirits of those who need it most.”

In August 2014, the first plane touched down in Gaza, carrying 200,000 Salma meal packs onboard. Stefano Ferro, Managing Principal of the Dubai office stated, “The project was important to me because of the real and immediate impact our work was going to have on individuals and communities in need across the world”.

Malhas further added, “The Lynx win is a testament to how Wolff Olins harnesses the power of collaboration and co-creation to produce exceptional results; we worked in close partnership with our client and an array of other entities to deliver the final product”.

For 2015, Salma plans on sending an additional 1,000,000 meals by building sustainable partnerships with key entities such as the UN Food Programme and Dubai International Humanitarian City.

Ferro summed it up, “The Lynx silver award is a clear recognition of what you can do when you pit Wolff Olins's creativity against some of the biggest challenges facing the world today and they don't come much bigger than hunger”.

Maryam Mir is a Strategist at Wolff Olins Dubai. Follow her @mmircat 

Q&A: The Heart Index

Recently, Wolff Olins was asked to participate in a great project called The Heart Index, a not-for-profit design compendium, raising money and awareness for Heart Research UK. The book showcases a collection of hearts, illustrated by some of the most influential practitioners from around the world. We caught up with the organizers Craig Atkinson and Grace Bond, who are about to run the London Marathon to further their impact, to hear more about their initiative.

First of all, that’s a wonderful cause you guys are working for, and you’re clearly passionate about it – enough to run a marathon next week! How did you become interested in the subject?

We both watched the London Marathon last year and were amazed by the atmosphere surrounding the day. Once we thought about running it ourselves we were too stubborn to give up on the idea. We secured our places back in 2014 and immediately saw it as a great opportunity to put our design skills to good use and raise money for a good cause. I like to think my work as a designer helps people, but this was one of the rare opportunities where the design and the charity are so connected.

How did the idea for the book first come up?

We went through an endless number of ideas before we settled on The Heart Index. It was one of those decisions where you are your own worse client. Once we started visualizing a heart, we ended up asking ourselves, "what does a perfect heart look like?". Our visual audit found that different people draw hearts differently, but all can be recognized instantly. The heart symbol is graphically very simple, but is arguably one of the most powerful symbols in human communication. We wanted to see how some of the worlds top designers interpreted such a symbol.

On that note, the list of contributors is very impressive. How was it to approach some of the biggest names in our industry? And how did everybody respond?

We were completely overwhelmed by the positive response from the design community. We had over 75 submissions and even more that wanted to take part but couldn't fit it into their work schedule. Sending cold emails is something I've always tried to avoid but most people didn't seem to mind if it was for a good cause.

As soon as the book came out, it was immediately featured in some pretty well known design websites (see it here and here), and it seem like it’s been selling quite well. What did you guys think of the impact of the project so far? Were you expecting such a positive outcome?

It was a lovely surprise to see it doing the rounds on our favourite blogs – reaching such an influential audience was key to the sales of the book. We've always aimed to sell out before the marathon - not an easy task for an edition of 250. We're well on our way to selling out so it's been a great success, especially for Heart Research UK. Fingers crossed if the book sells out we will have raised a considerable amount for the charity.

What are your plans for the future? Any more projects like this lined up?

We've both really enjoyed the project so I certainly don't think this will be end. The Heart Anthology has a nice ring to it…

Pedro Messias is a Designer at Wolff Olins New York. Follow him @_pedromessias

Satin Island by Tom McCarthy

Can you explain your job to your Mum? Anyone who works in branding (yeah, it’s a bit like advertising but…) or consultancy has probably struggled to pass this test. Tom McCarthy’s new novel, Satin Island, tracks the life of U, a corporate anthropologist working for a firm called the Company, on a large international project called… the Project. It’s a timely and thoughtful read on the weird existence of people who look outside the business world in order to feed the machine of corporate life.

U describes his trade as that of an anthropologist, but in a business, as opposed to a tundra or jungle: “Structures of kinship; systems of exchange, barter and gift; symbolic operations: identifying these, prising them up and holding them up, kicking and wriggling, to the light – that’s my racket”.

He describes what the Company does: [It] “advised other companies how to contextualize and nuance their services and products. It advised cities how to brand and re-brand themselves; regions how to elaborate and frame regenerative strategies; governments how to narrate their policy agendas – to the press, the public and, not least, themselves. We dealt, as Peyman [the charismatic founder] liked to say, in narratives.”

And he describes his role: “a purveyor of cultural insight […] unpicking the fibre of a culture and let a client in on how they can best get traction on this particular fibre so that they can introduce into the weave their own fine, silken thread, strategically embroider or detail it with a mini-narrative (a convoluted way of saying: sell their product).”

In essence, this is what any consultant, designer, researcher or strategist is doing all the time in trying to create futures for their clients. Reading a book like this is uneasy territory for anyone working in an agency or consultancy, people who live between the lines of the real world and the structures that shape it. Mainstream popular culture about corporate life and corporate individuals deliberately and exaggeratedly shows it all as a bit ridiculous (Office Space, Silicon Valley, Mad Men). They are grotesque examples of broken systems and the often-unwitting players in it, not a reflection of the dual agent role U, or anyone in a similar position, holds.

This book, however, is subtler in showing the complicity between the individual and the system. It’s more akin to William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition, where the lead Cayce (physically allergic to brands and selling her services as a cultural barometer to ad agencies) is a hugely sympathetic character caught between an odd vocation and its application. There’s a great line where U says what he does is essentially not that different from the work of soothsayers and ichthyomancers, cutting open fish to gain wisdom from their entrails. “The difference being, of course, that soothsayers were frauds”.

Like U in his work, McCarthy has openly appropriated and repackaged other ideas, through direct and indirect reference to an enormous range of sources. U himself matter-of-factly talks of stealing concepts from French philosophers Deleuze and Badiou to help sell jeans, “leaving out all the revolutionary shit; big retail companies don’t want to hear about such characters”. My favourite reminders were of William Gibson, David Foster Wallace, Yevgeny Zamyatin, Martin Amis and Euripides, but what’s great about this book is that any reader will create their own personal longlist.

With its numbered sub-divisions for chapters, the book is structured like a debrief or final presentation from consultant to client, but one you want to re-read rather than discard for the next project. There is so much strong imagery and so many winding trails of thought and ideas to pore over; this is just a tiny snapshot. For anyone working in this world, it’s thoughtful and funny and offers many further clues for describing your job to your mum, although you may not want to use them at work.

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.

Creativity + Kanye

Listening to the recent Zane Lowe Kanye West interview, it struck me how Mr West's thinking on creativity can be applied to the changing landscape of our own industry. Riffing off a few soundbites from the man himself, here’s some things creatives, and creative businesses, could learn from Yeezus…

'Think, and be involved in the product' Focus on making the product, the service, the thing better, beyond the visual.

We live in increasingly messy creative times, lines are blurring between agency specialities and as a result, problems and solutions no longer fit neatly into buckets. This presents a great opportunity for all creative businesses to get to the heart of a problem early and explore the important issues, like how can we make the actual product and the experience of that product better?

‘Nothing should be exclusive' Think mass, not design for other designers.

All too often the strength of new work is judged on an exclusive collection of voices on a super niche blog or magazine. Who cares? The work must impact positively on the everyday to be great. Does it make someones life easier? Has it improved something? Will your Mum and Dad notice?

'Fusion is the future. Period.' Collaboration is key for creative work to be great.

Like a team of super producers huddled round a mixing board creating sonic odysseys, it’s important to get people with different perspectives around the table to solve business challenges using creativity. Not only designers, programme managers and strategists but technologists, animators, typographers, sound designers, the list goes on. More minds make better solutions.

‘The world can be saved by design’ Don’t underestimate the potential of the work.

As design and creativity become a regular topic of conversation around the boardroom table, design is a big deal. We live in a time where it is no longer seen as the ‘arty fluff', but as a credible business tool with the potential to drive cultural and societal change. As Yeezy may say… dat shit kray.

The New Creatives

This morning, our CEO Ije Nwokorie is giving the Presidents Jury address at Dubai Lynx. Here's a preview of what he'll be saying. Follow him on Twitter for his latest updates and more of what's going on at this leading festival. 

The world as you once knew it, has ceased to exist.

From industry to industry, market to market, nation to nation, the old ways of doing things are not only out-of-date but increasingly only relevant for the few. At a time when the many have all the access and power and information they need to make things happen for themselves.

The threats to those who persist with the old ways are existential and arrive with little warning. But the opportunities for those who can rapidly pit creativity against the challenges of our times – and make things radically different and infinitely better – are endless. As others react, retrench, and retreat, they are the ones pushing forward by tackling the big issues regardless of what they do, where they live or who they are.

They are the New Creatives. They are wrestling the word back from a half century of superficial, ghettoised use, and and returning it to its roots: the development of new realities.

These New Creatives are stripping away all the controlling layers that secure advantage for the few. They are creating cultures and experience that are anchored in things with real meaning and value for everyone. And they are being rewarded with brands that stand out and business models that stand the test of time.

The New Creatives are coming to a business, institution or government near you.

Hiring Creative People 101

So many organisations want to put creativity at their heart yet peddle the same old tired recruitment practices.  Others adopt rather crazy techniques which don't get results either; I wonder how many companies adopted those bizarre Silicon Valley scenario questions before they themselves scrapped them.

  I don’t subscribe to the view that to hire creative people your approach must be creative – in fact, most of the changes I advocate are subtle modifications to widely-adopted practices.

Offer opportunities, not a job 

The thing that creative people want to do at work is create (duh!) so employers must provide opportunities to create. Creative people get excited about opportunities to build things, change things, make something out of nothing, make something out of something, tear things down and build from scratch, work with new tools or technology, tweak things, work with different stimuli, hack things and work with different collaborators. Do your roles allow people to do that? Do your leadership practices? Do you articulate that? When designing roles or writing enticing copy for a vacancy, ensure you can clearly articulate the opportunities.

Millennials have been said to differ from their ancestors in wanting to develop a ‘portfolio career’. I believe this term was meant to convey the idea of moving between organisations, picking up skills and experiences on the way. But what if you could find a way of making it so that your candidates didn't have to go to several organisations, they had only to come to you?  Employers should consider ways they can provide a portfolio of meaningful, engaging, developmental experiences. Providing pathways through these experiences will give people a sense of career, not just a job. And if you can provide options or menus of these experiences allowing individuals to create their own portfolio, all the better.

Use Personality and Behavioural Assessment

Creativity has its roots in personality. Employers can get a lot of rich information about their candidates – beyond a simple gut feeling – if they use psychometric instruments. Creativity can be predicted by scoring highly on personality dimensions such as openness, group affiliation, positivity and well, yes, creativity. If you use psychometric questionnaires that places candidates on the scales of these personality dimensions, you can establish whether candidates have a predisposition to working creatively. You can also hire according to your organisation’s values. Research I did at London Southbank University showed that personality dimensions could strongly predict the extent to which an employee thinks and behaves in accordance with an organisation’s brand. If you hire people who, by virtue of their very personality, have a natural affinity with your organisation they are more likely to behave in positive, constructive and creative ways (unless of course, your organisation’s brand is not at all creative!)

Even if that seems a stretch, you can still use practical assessment sessions designed to assess creative behaviours. Presenting the candidate with a relevant business scenario and asking them to work through it with others – with specific resources they can transform, use or leverage – is an ideal way of seeing how a person will operate in your organisation. It will also tell you how comfortable they are with creative thinking – from within themselves and when it comes from colleagues.

Hold a conversation, not an audition

Lots of employers still insist on making hiring an audition process. The candidate is expected to jump through a series of hoops, processes, formulaic questions, speak when they are spoken to and if they are lucky, they’re permitted to ask questions briefly at the end. I wish organisations would think about the recruitment process more like dating. Who wants to have a relationship with anyone who says, “I think I’m the catch here” or “I don’t care what’s important to you, describe how you meet my needs”?

While the employment relationship is inherently transactional, the way we make choices about our careers are much more emotion and relationship-led. And to make a sweeping generalisation, creative people are even more emotion and relationship-led in their decision making than most. Therefore, you have to make your recruitment process human. Even if you don't agree with me on that, believe that creative people thrive on ‘talking things through’, generating ideas, trying things out, exploring and testing – a Q&A interview structure will never work for them. By all means, have your criteria and your set questions but make sure you allow for a ‘meeting of minds’ – time for free-flowing discussion.

If you want to know if someone is creative, ask them to show you things they have created. That could be a portfolio for more traditionally creative roles but it could also involve talking through experiences where they invented something, where they applied learning from one environment into another, where they used resources in a novel way, a time when they had to do things on a shoe-string budget, a time they did something for the first time and had no guidance, an example of when they played or had fun with something, when they attempted something that hadn't been done before. All those things are hallmarks of a creative person.

Let your talent bring you talent

It's a bit of pop psychology that we tend to hang out with like-minded individuals (or indeed people of a similar level of attractiveness which totally explains why I'm constantly surrounded by super models) and creative people generally like to hang out with other creative people.

If you're lucky enough to have creative people in your organisation already, engage them in the hiring effort. Treat them so well that they become ambassadors for your organisation on every channel from word-of-mouth to social media. Help them to create content and raise their external profile so that other creative people swimming in that big ocean out there, gravitate towards them.  Be ready to reach out or approach the people that are engaging with them. Offer incentive programmes for people to refer in candidates, or simply ask them to share or re-tweet and re-post your job adverts. You could even help your staff hone their networking skills, equipping them to talk about job opportunities with people they meet in creative pools.

Know the market rate

There’s a reason why good HR teams spend so much time benchmarking and pulling together data from respected industry sources on salaries. It is a no brainer that in order to secure the best talent you will have to pay for it. Knowing the current market rate is the first step in making a decision about what to offer. If you do not know what the market rate is, specific to the role, industry and geographic location, you cannot quantify to what extent your chosen candidate commands above the market rate. I would encourage you to forget what they currently earn and what they are asking for; come to your own determination of how their skills, experience and potential should be reflected in a pay offer. If you can’t match the market rate then make sure you can articulate the value of the experience (both professional and personal) and other elements of the package clearly, so that candidates always get a full picture of what working with you will be like. 

Xander Hough is HR Manager at Wolff Olins, London.

Every kid needs creativity

Nicky Morgan, UK Education Secretary, let me tell you that, speaking from a business that solves c-suite business problems with creativity, I think you are absolutely, 100% wrong. I was sitting at a dinner table in San Francisco this week with cousins I haven’t seen in years and talking, as you do, about robots. In a moment of inspiration the smart and considered 15 year-old Aidan said “So, the most valuable thing in the future is going to be creativity?”. In the not-so-distant future automation will soak up the repeatable jobs, and algorithms will take care of anything that involves searching, interpreting and gathering data (which is arguably the majority of most service sector jobs today). Aidan’s instinctive grasp of economic theory - that what is rare becomes more valuable - gets to the heart of why we have redoubled our commitment to creativity at Wolff Olins. Solving gnarly business problems in the same way as yesterday is becoming less and less successful. When a problem looks like it can’t be solved, you have to get creative. So my heart sank when I read the Education Secretary’s warning that kids choosing arts subjects at school would "hold them back for the rest of their lives". She thinks Science, Technology, Engineering, and Maths (STEM) is the winning formula. She is wrong. What the future needs is the full range of human skills to understand and solve the challenges of tomorrow. You think that’s going to come from a lonely dive into engineering? Maths? I’m a huge maths fan (check this out if you want a bit of maths series nerd fodder). I’ve paid my geek dues (my first job was coding at the Cambridge University’s Downing Site), but STEM is an approach full of under-confidence in the value of human beings in tomorrow’s business world. Kids who will be successful, like Aidan, are those who recognise the rarity (and therefore value) of creativity. Half of today’s jobs will be automated by 2034, according to The Economist. If you’re 15 and you want a job by the time you start settling down with a family, you simply HAVE to be creative. And in the shorter term, right now, repeatable approaches are struggling. All the efficiencies have been stripped out. We are at minimal viable product already. How does a CEO, or a CMO or any senior strategic leader make a difference in their business? By applying the experimental, design-oriented, slightly random skills of creative leadership. So let’s put an A in our STEM. Let’s put our belief in creativity, start a new STEAM age, and consign anyone who thinks creativity is going to “hold them back for the rest of their lives” to the back row of politics.

The Borg

By Daljit Singh

I am not, by any stretch of the imagination, a Trekkie. However, I would like to introduce Star Trek’s Borg: a malevolent force composed of half-machine, half-organic matter, linked in a hive mind (nothing to do with bees). I find these guys quite interesting and I think we might be able to learn a little from them.

The Borg seek perfection by touring the galaxy assimilating the key features from all other living creatures they encounter. They forcibly mind-meld them into their hive mind through violent abductions and injections of microscopic nanoprobes.

In their daily encounters they exhibit no desire to listen, negotiate or reason, only assimilate. It’s all about ploughing in and taking over. I’d like to see the Borg in a pitch.

These aliens communicate by circulating a collective audio message to their targets stating that "resistance is futile", followed by a swift assimilation involving a takeover of “technological and biological distinctiveness”, which they add to their own composition. Clever, but hardly embracing of the open-source culture that we humans have embraced. I can’t see these guys sharing a tin of Quality Street at Christmas. Nevertheless, one has to admire their tenacity and single mindedness. Their communication strategy is focused: get in, get all the good stuff out and improve their proposition – perhaps there are some clues here for us all.

Being straightforward like the Borg is not easy and sticking to a single, dedicated approach is hard. The creative human mind naturally leads us in multiple directions, which is necessary to create new thinking. But recognising ‘the right’ idea at the right moment requires commitment, confidence and being a bit ‘hive-minded’.

New business thinking tells us that ‘always in beta’; ‘agile’, being minimal and ‘failing fast’ are useful methods to increase success. And that these techniques can save us time, money and allow us to launch our products whilst minimising failure. That's good, right?

Or do we just need to connect the bits together better? It’s all at our disposal but we tend to think in isolation, without connection. The Borg connect in a single-minded, un-human way to self-improve and better their network.

Indeed they do learn from mistakes – they just do it differently, by not pausing or relenting, and this is a good attitude for any business. Setbacks are merely instances to be ‘analysed and adapted against’. Think about all those forgotten pitches and ideas that dwell in the bottom drawer. Sometimes our best thinking becomes someone else’s success. Maybe we need to be a little more hive-minded in our approach and add more digital rigour to our hard work so we can be reminded of that valuable thinking.

All businesses need to be on the lookout for new. New techniques, new tools, new methods and just simply looking in new places. That's important but it’s also essential that we look back at where we came from, what we have done and apply that knowledge to developing the new. Maybe we need to ‘be a little more Borg’ – that sounds far more friendly.

Daljit Singh is a part of our visiting creative director programme, an initiative intended to help us stretch and enhance our creative thinking.

  Image: All rights reserved by Photos by Pogue

Five questions with... Carolyn Dailey

In the sixth of a series of interviews with inspiring female leaders, Wolff Olins’ global COO, Sairah Ashman, interviews Carolyn Dailey.

Carolyn is one of the most influential figures in the creative industries, currently founder and CEO of The Dailey Partnership, the strategy and branding boutique for the creative industries, and previously MD of Time Warner International in London. Wired Magazine recently named Carolyn one of the top 10 women Digital Powerbrokers.

What are the biggest shifts influencing your business?

It’s undoubtedly technology and how it’s making creativity and the creative process a real-time two-way conversation. It’s transforming how we interact with creative talent too. Making everything more direct, more mobile and more visual. It’s allowing us all to move from a monologue to a dialogue. Through technology creative people can reach new audiences, express themselves in new ways and create new products. With audiences reacting and responding directly.

Technology is also lowering the barriers to entry for all of the creative industries – For example a talented filmmaker can make a fantastic film for very little money and distribute it themselves - this focuses competition on talent rather than on who can afford access to expensive infrastructure. It’s a really exciting time to be creating and making things.

Lastly, technology is breaking down silos in creativity - so people in fashion are starting to work more with people in TV, or with digital media or in design. There’s an enormous amount of crossover and interesting collaborations taking place as a result.  Just look at fashion icon Burberry work with film and at Zaha Hadid, whom we think of as an architect, but who is now designing shoes, furniture and jewellery with other creatives. And then there is fashion designer Jonathan Saunders being asked by museum curators to stage his fashion week catwalk show at the Tate Modern.

What are the key growth accelerators for your business over the next 12 months?

The wonderful things that tech has enabled mean that my clients - creative people and companies who are all innovators - can now do entirely new and different things.

Established creative forces are starting to do brand new things – like moving well-loved literary characters across the worlds of digital, film and television and vice versa and often simultaneously - and newcomers are emerging who previously couldn’t have. And these two groups have an effect on each other, they’re starting to cross-pollinate in a serious way.  This means we’re beginning to understand there is currency in creativity, connection, and cross-pollination and it is driving huge growth in the business of creativity.

Aside from my own business I am also very involved in a number of social enterprises and, in that context, I see people measuring value in new ways, such as social impact where money is not the only currency. New models are emerging that are about more than that and altering our traditional definitions of value and that is accelerating growth greatly in the social enterprise space.

What role do you see brand playing in helping achieve your goals?

Brand has always been the most valuable asset – it can literally transform a business, as I was lucky enough to learn first-hand working with HBO. Brand is now more important than it has ever been. Content is brand and it helps you make choices more clearly and easily in a world that is non-stop. We’re overwhelmed with so much information that the most important thing is to be distinct, to be known and to own whatever space you operate in.

There used to be a broadcast mentality in branding. The approach was, ‘we’ll just find a couple of consumer insights, build this thing called a brand and then find a way to promote and sell it’. But now creating a brand has become much more of a dialogue or a conversation and what is interesting is that that conversation is starting to influence the product and ideas – shaping them in real time as they move along.

So brand is increasingly about the influential distinctive voice – both online and offline.  In terms of having one and also letting others freely influence by becoming your co-creators and ambassadors.

What or who inspired you in the early years of your career?

Family was my early foundation – instilling hard work, shooting for the best and living your values.  Then no question about it, the person who inspired me most in my early career was Ted Turner, the founder of CNN. 

At the time I’d never met anyone quite like him - the ultimate visionary and imaginer of new things and new ways of doing things. He was absolutely fearless and that was the most inspiring thing. He found out the most he could about something and then went with instinct. I don’t think he’s ever done a focus group. Ever. He just imagines things and then makes them happen.

In a small way that is what we were asked to do while launching CNN in Europe back in the 90’s – pursue the big ideas like bringing more freedom of information to more people and then figure out how to deliver the things that would make that happen, from dealing with government decision makers who’d never heard of satellites to finding out the cheapest place to buy office supplies! That time taught me to always look at things in a non-traditional way and find new ways to deliver.

What advice would you pass on to others just starting out?

It sounds really simple, but figure out what you’re really good at and do more of it. Experiment and be really open to doing whatever it takes to learn everything you can. The happy coincidence is that that what you’re good at is usually the thing that you really love. So decide what things you love, and then think very open-mindedly about the jobs you can pursue that will let you put the things you love doing into practice.

  Sairah Ashman is global COO of Wolff Olins. 

Click here to read the other interviews in the series.