Shift happens - nach der Textil-Diät

Nach meiner 365-Tage-Textilkauf-Abstinenz (die ich inzwischen dem Trend zur "Apparell Diet" zuordnen kann) stellte sich - nein, kein Jojo-Effekt - sondern bewußteres Einkaufen ein. Katalog-Ware und Ladenketten, nee, das kommt mir inzwischen wie Kantinenessen vor: Aus zu billigen Zutaten für den Standardgeschmack gekocht. So habe ich dawanda für mich entdeckt. Hier gibts nicht nur originelle Teile und Unikate, ich unterstütze ausserdem kreative Köpfe darin, von ihren Schöpfungen leben oder sich damit etwas dazuverdienen zu können. Toll finde ich zum Beispiel die upcyclingmanufaktur, in der aus gebrauchten Textilien neue, ausgefallene Stücke entstehen.
Zu einem Lieblingsladen ist ausserdem auch manomama aus Augsburg geworden: Hier wird nicht nur faire und ökogerechte Mode gemacht, Gründerin Sina Trinkwalder beeindruckt auch  mit ihrer offen-ehrlichen Art und ihrem Einfallsreichtum. Und wer was über den Umgang von Firmen mit "Sozialen Medien" lernen will, kann sich von ihr abschauen, wie man's richtig macht.
Im dawanda-Shop von karlita hab ich übrigens den Kettenanhänger aus der Umschalt-Taste einer alten Schreibmaschine entdeckt. Shift happens. Ich hab den Umschalter dabei.

365 Tage Einkaufsstopp im Selbstversuch

Ende Juli 2009 stehe ich vorm Kleiderschrank und bemerke – mal wieder – wie voll der ist, für eine frisch gekaufte Jacke ist kaum noch Platz. Dabei trage ich nur einen Bruchteil der Sachen, die dafür aber regelmäßig. Und natürlich bin ich auch regelmäßig der Meinung, nichts zum Anziehen zu haben. Dann brauche ich etwas Neues, ist ja klar. Besonders nachhaltig ist das nicht und auch nicht besonders einfallsreich.

Ich beschließe ein Experiment: 365 Tage keine neuen Klamotten für mich kaufen. Stattdessen die vergessenen und schrulligen Teile in die Garderobe einbeziehen und neu kombinieren. Vorhandene Ressourcen kreativ nutzen, so die Philosophie. Flohmarkt-Käufe und –Verkäufe sollten erlaubt sein. Wie würde es mir damit ergehen?

Ein Jahr ist vergangen. Zeit für eine Bilanz:

• Habe ich durchgehalten? Wenn ich von den 2 Paar Sandalen und 2 Gürteln, die ich mir gekauft habe, großzügig absehe, habe ich mir tatsächlich nichts Neues gekauft. Vom Flohmarkt kamen einige wenige Sachen in meinen Schrank. Verkauft habe ich selbst nichts (wie ursprünglich geplant), nur ein paar Kindersachen, aber die zählen nicht. Der Radius der Kleidungsstücke, die ich regelmäßig trage, hat sich schon erweitert, aber es gibt immer noch genug ungenutztes Potential. Ein paar Sachen habe ich auch endgültig weggegeben. Kaputte Reißverschlüsse und aufgerissene Nähte habe ich tendenziell häufiger repariert oder reparieren lassen.
• Welche Auswirkungen hatte das Experiment? Der wichtigste und am wenigsten erwartete Effekt war der Zeitgewinn. Kataloge wanderten ungesehen in den Müll, keine Streifzüge zum Nur-mal-so-Umsehen durch die Läden, keine Modezeitschriften, kein Klicken durch Online-Shops. Vergleichen, Auswählen, Anprobieren – das ist auch Stress und den hatte ich nicht mehr.
• Wie hat es sich angefühlt? Zunächst war da die Erleichterung, dem Kaufstress entronnen zu sein, auch eine gewisse Selbstzufriedenheit (Vorsicht, Gutmenschentum!). Dann kamen auch Momente, in denen ich gern etwas Neues gekauft hätte. Eine Lieblingsstrickjacke war versehentlich in der Kochwäsche gelandet, am liebsten hätte ich mich mit einem neuen Ersatz getröstet. Der Kauftrieb war also da. Perfiderweise wurde in solchen Situationen aus dem ursprünglichen Gedanken („Ich kaufe nichts, weil ich aus dem Reichtum meines Kleiderschranks schöpfe“) ein ganz anderer Gedanke: "Ich darf nichts kaufen, weil ich Ressourcen sparen muss." So wie man zwanghaft kaufen kann, kann man auch zwanghaft nicht kaufen. Der Gedanke, nicht genug zu haben, der jedesmal dahinter steckt, ist extrem hartnäckig.
• Und nun? Vor ein paar Tagen bin ich durch einige Läden gelaufen – und habe gestaunt: Neue Hosenschnitte, andere Stoffe. Auf die neue Mode war ich ja nicht vorbereitet. Natürlich war mir Vieles schon hier und da auf der Straße aufgefallen, da fand ich es kreativ und individuell. Aber als ich die Sachen dann nach Größen sortiert in den Regalen sah, war die Vorstellung von Individualität dahin. Keine neue Erkenntnis, aber so krass hatte ich es noch nicht erlebt.

Übrigens: Auf die Idee mit dem Experiment war ich unter anderem durch das Uniform Project gekommen: Sheena Mattheiken trug ein Jahr lang das gleiche Kleid, aber jeden Tag mit gebrauchten oder geschenkten Accessoires völlig anders gestylt. Mit dem Projekt zeigte sie nicht nur, dass nachhaltige Mode individuell und fantasievoll sein kann, sondern sammelte auch Spenden für die Schulbildung von Kindern in indischen Slums. Dafür wurde sie von der Zeitschrift Elle sogar zu einer der Frauen des Jahres 2009 gekürt. Unbedingt ansehen!

If Creativity was Currency

Some weeks back, the little Gallery Patrizia Zewe hosted Munich’s first art- for-service swap. Artists traded their works (see picture) for services they could use, like a course in digital photography or a ride to Frankfurt. Many similar exchange projects exist  – one of the latest that caught my attention is Clothing for Correspondence,  a service by professional texters, who will write your fun correspondence in exchange for second hand clothes.

Just odd experiments? Well, most of the time, creativity has to be translated into an accepted currency before it pays the bill. This is what David Thorne learned, when he allegedly tried to pay his electricity bill with a spider doodle in 2008. Now a Brooklyn hospital finds that time is an acceptable currency, too, and that health care services can be paid with performances.

In May, the Woodhull Medical and Mental Health Center in Brooklyn will launch the Artist Access program , which will allow artists to collect health care credits for a performance in the geriatric ward, for teaching drawing in the pediatric unit or for decorating the hospital interior with murals. Health care credits (40 credits per hour) can then be used to pay for fees incurred at Woodhull for health care services.

Transactions without money will become less exotic in the Gig Economy, I am sure of that. And, well, the reason I am shedding a light on this topic is that I am willing to exchange 5 of my doodle art envelopes for a decent sun hat.

Trends affecting Creative Industries

Last year I had the pleasure to take part in a project that investigated developments related to the Creative Economy. A presentation with some of the results has been published now.

Trend Pulse For Creative Industries

View more presentations from Ines Seidel.

The most obvious result has been maybe that the Creative Economy has started to unfold already. And there is no going back. Looking at the amount of studies on Creative Industries that result is certainly not a surprise anymore.

What became increasingly clear is that the professional inside the creative economy is a different animal than the professional of the age of industrialized mass-production. This has implications for education, work organization, measuring success etc. These implications are also obvious, but nevertheless have mostly not led to conscious changes of educational systems or organizational structures. Indeed, changes seem hard to implement, because they require more than just a few add-ons or adjustments to the existing economy. They require to make decisions from a different mind set.

Or do they? What became clearer to me after the study finished was that mind sets evolve as well, even if there is no intention to change, simply because we're all witnessing the paradigm shift around us. Yes, mind sets evolve too slow to avoid a certain level of friction and dissatisfaction, but nevertheless...

From Job Frustration to Responsibility

Over the past weeks, I have had some informal discussions with people (in Germany) about their job situation and what I heard was a deep dissatisfaction with management, the organizational culture or "the system" as a whole:

People are frustrated that they are treated "as if we were stupid" (for instance when management does not communicate the background of decisions).

People are frustrated that their personal engagement (doing more than what is expected) or experience is not valued or is even regarded as a nuisance.

Often, personal engagement ("the reason why I wanted to do this job") is cut short because the focus inside the organization is merely on quantity of results, efficiency of operation and there is no time to do something "as good as it should be done", for fostering personal work relationships or for developing new ideas.

People are frustrated about a focus on control rather than trust. Consequently, executives are often viewed as inflexible or authoritarian.

In sum, the people I talked to had the feeling that they are not seen or not recognized by management. As a result they tell themselves that their organization does not deserve or want anything else but medium performance.

People seem to put up with their frustrations because...

• They feel helpless ("this is how things are, they will not change and I have to cope somehow").


• They feel dependent on the money or other benefits ("better than no job so I can't complain").
  
• They cannot imagine a different kind of working. Fun or passion are not associated with a job. (And that I find really sad.)

Now, if all of the above was only true for the 10 to 15 people that I spoke with, there would still be no reason to be sad. However, I suspect that I spoke with representatives of the 87% of the employees in Germany that are not emotionally engaged with their work (which means they just "work-to-rule" or are completely disengaged) - this is the figure Gallup found in their 2008 Employee Engagement Survey. I would expect the situation to be worse in the new survey that will be published in spring. And, mind you, I am not talking about a specifically German problem. Compared to some other European countries, Germany is still doing ok.

One might think that having a workforce that is, by and large, neither very committed nor productive should ring a few alarm bells. Not just among companies, but nationwide. After all, national competitiveness, the holy cow, is at stake.

Yet, when politicians talk about the need to increase innovation and creativity (as they do for instance in the "EU 2020" strategy), they don't seem to be aware that the level of de-motivation and mistrust in organizations is working against their planned measures (which focus on R&D investments, new financing models and digital networks).

A key word here is empowerment. Managers should be empowered to shake off the habit of controlling and take on the responsibility to truly see the potential of each employee. Employees need to be empowered so that they can shake off the habit of helplessness and take responsibility for their work engagement.

Empowerment is a process that can be facilitated...yet, individuals or organizations have to go through a learning process on their own. Nobody can do that for them. Facing the anger and frustration is a good start as a lot of energy and power can flow from this. - Exactly what is needed to take responsibility for positive change!

Hello, Prima Donna

A few weeks ago I had the pleasure to attend the CEB (Creative Economy and Beyond) conference in Helsinki - a great place to mingle and to pick up ideas.

Among the people I had met was Roosevelt Finlayson from the Bahamas who spoke about Festivals as a model for building creative communities, and for establishing commitment and self-esteem.
His presentation was the last one that first conference day, so in the conversation afterwards we not only moved from one topic to the next, but also from the harbour district to the city center. I noticed that people responded to Roosevelt as if they knew him, as if they regarded him as a friend, even before he said a single word. (And that is certainly not the typical Finnish mentality). "How do you do this," I asked Roosevelt. "Well, I love people," he said simply. And by then I could tell that this was indeed a fact, not an idealized vision of himself.

In a way, Roosevelt Finlayson embodied a finding from a study that Helle Hedegard Hein presented at CEB the next day. In order to find out how highly creative employees should be managed, she had spent three years at the Royal Danish Theatre observing how managers and creative specialists behaved. She found that creative specialists can basically be grouped into four categories:
The Prima Donnas who feel that they have a higher calling: Prima Donnas experience flow and get kicks out of working hard and stretching their personal limits. What they want from their managers is honest feedback, recognition and a shielding leadership. Status and financial rewards are not motivating for them, as they feel they have a mission to give their personal gift to the world.
The calling to a higher mission was totally missing in creative specialists in the other three categories: The High Achievers, the Pragmatists and the Pay Check Worker are, in varying degrees, more motivated by status, public praise and financial rewards, while their creativity and commitment decreases. The most difficult creative specialists are those in the "Pay Check Worker" box, as they constantly demand a higher salary while at the same time they defend low performance standards. For them, just coming to work already deserves a special bonus.
Two observations were especially interesting:

1. No one is somehow genetically tied to one category. But creative people can regress to a lower category, either voluntarily (if that makes sense for a period in life), or involuntarily, out of frustration. And unfortunately, the latter seems to be the case most of the time.
2. Managers should never address Pay Check Workers as Pay Check Workers, Pragmatists as Pragmatists or High Achievers as High Achievers as that will cause them to regress even more.

So the solution for managers is very simple: Everyone should be addressed like a prima donna, everyone is at a deep and maybe hidden level, a prima donna, a person with a unique gift to bring into the world.

Which brings me back to Roosevelt Finlayson, who can see the prima donna and the lovable side even in the strangers around him. Strangers, who then started to see him in the same way, as a trustworthy friend.

Connecting to Urban Space

Connect To Urban Space

View more documents from Ines Seidel.

Recently I had a look at trends and developments that are related to the creative industries. And there was a aha!-moment for me when I realised that for many of the creative professionals, who often have a message that they are passionate about, the street is the place to go. It is not the gallery and not the virtual world in the first place.

And as we know, also activist movements and flashmob activities use the web as a tool to interact but the "place were things happen" is the street, the public place, the city.

At the same time it also seems to be true that cities can have a deadening effect: The urban environment is a post-natural environment which gives us the impression that we as humans stand outside nature. This may be one of the reasons why people find it hard to act about environmental issues. The environment seems to be a place far away that has little to do with everyday life.

So, to sum things up, I came to the conclusion that the urban space is one of the hottest interactive platforms that we have for social transformation, but many people feel not connected. So I created this fun presentation which suggests various ways to develop a relationship to the wild nature that even the urban space still has, ways that at the same time also work to strengthen one's own creative muscles.

Transformation through Story Telling

While on a rational level, most people agree that a fundamental shift in society and culture is necessary to tackle the problems of today, it seems very hard to make that leap on a personal level, leave alone a community or institutional level.
I was reminded of that when I watched the speech that UK prime minister Gordon Brown recently gave at the TED conference. He states that we are at a unique historic moment where we are more interconnected than ever before and we are also developing a global ethic, both promising preconditions for solving global problems - poverty, climate change, economic crisis - in a global way.The solution he proposed remained vague but he clearly saw a need for a central institution which would have the means to globally enforce agreements or regulations. While this may certainly be part of the solution, I missed concepts of co-creation, empowerment, collaboration and individual responsibility in his vision. Being inside a politician's story maybe did not allow him to see that new forms of governance would be central to such a solution, if it is not just to repeat the patterns of administrative institutions stricken by political power-struggles.

Another example for a solution that repeats past patterns is the idea of a British company to put RFID barcodes on trees so that controlling the sustainability of forests becomes more transparent. They even assume that tagging trees could play a role in fighting deforestation, and therefore, could be seen as a measure to stop global warming. But the underlying concept is still that we can care only for things that we can control and that nature has to be properly put into our warehousing system for us to see its value. An alternative to applying technical control mechanisms could be to bring forests and communities together, something that Roald Gundersen and Amelia Baxter are trying to do with their Community Supported Forests. Members will get a specific part of the forest where they "can camp, hunt and garden on the land. They can forage for mushrooms, garlic mustard and wild ginger. They can get firewood, sustainably milled lumber, landscaping stone or fresh spring water." And in doing that, they will have a chance to get to know the forest as a friend and not just as a distant resource. That's a very different story, right?

Recently I heard of the Dark Mountain Project, a literary movement to rewrite the stories that we base our assumptions on. "We aim to question the stories that underpin our failing civilisation, to craft new ones for the age ahead and to write clearly and honestly about our true place in the world."

Becoming aware of the narratives that we live by and re-inventing them is very much what we need, in my view, to have a new context for transformation - on a personal, community or even institutional level.

Creative Corporate Culture Reality

"Most companies do a magnificent job of smothering the creative spark. Over the past five years we have probed the innovation strategies of 25 organizations in multiple industries and countries. Our findings are simple and somewhat disturbing, given the acknowledged necessity for innovation: Companies usually develop leaders who replicate rather than innovate. Thus rising stars realize that to be promoted, they need to mirror incumbent leaders." From: Finding and Grooming Breakthrough Innovators. Jeffrey Cohn, Jon Katzenbach, Gus Vlak, Harvard Business Review, Dec 2008

Cooking up the Future

How To Cook Up The Future

View more documents from Ines Seidel.

I came up with this little "How to" after thinking about Empowerment.

Empowerment is certainly one of the key words of our time. We see the empowered web-user, the empowered consumer, the empowered employee, the empowered learner,... Empowerment leads to a certain demystification of the expert - the expert is valued not so much because of the facts that she knows but because she can facilitate others to behave in an expert way: teachers are to facilitate learners to teach themselves, leaders are to lead people to lead themselves, brands let consumers create their own brand experience.

What does or could empowerment lead to in the field of foresight consulting? And what is the role of the expert here?

I think that also in relation to THE FUTURE, the expert has to be demystified. Empowerment of everybody is necessary as everybody should understand that THE FUTURE is not something that happens to us, but is instead an experience that we create collectively, by choosing to live one way rather than another way.

Much like a soup can - for better or worse - be cooked by many cooks, we all create the context for the next-moment-experience together. Typically, without being aware of it. Conscious decision making could lead to better results, right?

Creative Economy and Trojan Horses

I just browsed through the United Nations Creative Economy Report 2008, which provides "empirical evidence that the creative industries are among the most dynamic emerging sectors in world trade." There is a huge number of similar reports on country, region and city level, which underlines the increasing role that creative enterprises have for the economy (especially today's economy that so badly needs to reinvent itself!) - and also the growing appreciation of this role.

The upgrading of creative folks to business people also has a disruptive potential for the economy, which hardly ever shows up in Creative Industries reports.

For one thing, fostering Creativity means encouraging a certain degree of chaos. This is easy to understand, as Creativity flows from a disregard of rules, from crossing boundaries, from experimenting, from challenging oneself (and others) continuously, and from cultivating a beginner's mind. In other words, creativity comes from continuous self-development, it is more a path than a gift.

No big news probably, when you think of creative professionals in arts, design, or architecture, which often work self-employed or in very small firms. They take care of their creative freedom within a self-defined system.

But as a growing number of people (categorized as the "Creative Class" by Richard Florida ) working in areas such as programming or services have chosen the route of creative empowerment (and are encouraged to do so), the anarchistic side of creativity needs to be able to play out in organizations with more traditional structures. Some of these traditional structures are already being replaced: Flexible working hours, inspiring office spaces and learning opportunities, are not unusual anymore. Yet, working (or rather: collaborating) with only a limited set of pre-given rules and with a larger degree of freedom is still a challenge and we can expect to see some unfamiliar approaches to this in the Creative Economy.

The other, even more disruptive feature is the role that creative workers see for themselves. In the mentioned reports, creative entrepreneurs are seen as growth engines and also as central knots in sustainable, thriving communities. Increasingly, creative professionals also see themselves as creators of an alternative future. That, too, is only logical, as the act of creating something - be it a dress, an ad or a user interface - is tied to making a conscious choice about how others will experience that dress, that ad or that user interface in the future. But creators today go even further. Robert Fabricant at design mind writes: "We’re experiencing a sea change in the way designers engage with the world. Instead of aspiring to influence user behavior from a distance, we increasingly want the products we design to have more immediate impact through direct social engagement." He calls this "Design with Intent". GK VanPatter of NextD strikes a similar tone when he describes the new level of design (Design 3.0) as Transformation Design - a "design approach that reimagines systems and takes leadership toward change in social and organizational structures and systems" (see an explanation at the on Social Design blog)

Examples abound and we've all already seen them in the field of media. Think of successful videos like The Story of Stuff, the HOME movie project, blogs like inhabitat or treehugger. All of this has been thought of by creative minds. What we see more and more today is creative people going out on the street, directly engaging with people in "public interventions" or enabling fellow citizens to see themselves as creators, too. One cool example is the bubble project by Ji Lee (see video above), who is also creative director at Google, another one the Free Beats in NY Central Park (see below).

So, what is the subversive element here? The creative people who contribute to the above examples are not in for money or fame. They are prototyping a world where you do not ask "what's in it for me" but "what can I give or how can I inspire". Sure, they need to live and they know their worth. But they are not likely to sacrifice their values for industrial growth. Again, it is easy to imagine this "values first" approach for freelancers or self-employed. But what if this trend catches on inside corporations? Embracing the Creative Economy could be like inviting Trojan Horses that will start a transformation, a cultural revolution, from within.

Bubble project and Free Beats spotted through freshcreation.

Creative + Economy

The Creative Economy. I did not like that phrase too much. To me, it lost its meaning from being said, written and powerpointed too often. Just one of those buzzwords. Until recently.

A few weeks ago I visited the town I went to school to - a beautiful, small town in the Eastern part of Germany. Strolling through the once busy mall had a sobering effect: Every second shop had closed, the remaining stores could not take away the air of neglect and depression. I wondered if the empty space could be put to some better use, at least as an interim solution.

The question is relevant for many small and big towns and city districts today. When consumption is low and commercial rents are still high, shops are closing, inviting decay and vandalism into the neighbourhood.

Many districts or landlords have already found an answer to the question what to do with empty storefronts: They rent the space at a low price or even for free to artists.

Especially in the U.S., storefront art is very common (see random examples here, here and here), the same can be said about the UK, where the government is now even funding such projects with a GBP 3 Million grant scheme.

That creative folks are often primary settlers who breath new life into run-down districts has been demonstrated before (e.g. in Berlin). More Governments, municipalities or local business alliances have understood the positive impact that artists have on local business - and are now purposefully supporting them. Jo Leahy, director of the Stroud Valley Artspace (UK) sees that creative residents may ultimately what it means to speak about a busy town. "It's another way of judging a town. We're used to measuring a place by how busy the cash tills are. This is about measuring somewhere by its ideas, by the things that people are making happen here." (quoted in the Guardian) - Apply this to Economy as a whole and you get the Creative Economy everybody is talking about!

Picture: Anelia Lazaroff, "Twilight" in an empty store in L.A. - part of the Phantom Galleries LA (see their flickr photostream here)

Learning for Life

When you hear the word „SCHOOL“, what do you think of?
Joy? Encouragement? Acceptance? Trust? Love?

I don’t. Most of us don’t. And I realized how sad that is when I was flying to Helsinki and back last week. Or rather, when I read the newspapers, as I always do on the plane.

Somewhere between Düsseldorf and Helsinki a small article caught my eyes: In Tokyo, parents can track wether children safely arrive at school with a card that originally was developed as a ticket and payment card for public transport. When the child uses the RFID card to check-in at school or leaves a train station, or arrives back at home, the parent is notified with a text message or email. (See here)

Sounds like a good idea for parents? Hm. You could also see it as a service that lives off parental fear, a service that manipulates parents into feeling either “assured” or “worried” without making the way to school safer.

The other piece of news jumped at me and everyone else who passed by a German newspaper stand last Thursday: Tim K., a 17-year-old boy had murdered 16 people in a shooting spree that started at his former school in Winnenden, a small town in southern Germany. The boy was described as “inconspicious”, “average” and “shy” by those who knew him. Apparently, he did not have close friends and some suggested that he had been mobbed at school.

We need better security solutions, more stringent gun control laws, experts were quoted in the news. Other experts said that no security measures could have prevented the killings. It reminded me of the RFID security card in Tokyo: We long for more security, but technological solutions or legal restrictions may not be the answer.

Clearly, for Tim, school had been a place that was associated with problems, frustration, anger and hatred. Better security for the school would not have prevented these associations.
But imagine Tim had associated his former school with joy, encouragement, acceptance. It would have been impossible for him to even think of school in combination with shooting and killing.

For me, the massacre of Winnenden tells more about the current educational system than about gaps in security monitoring.

Schools that encourage children to be responsible actors and creators, rather than victims or recipients, schools where children feel accepted and loved and can develop their individual gifts may sound like a naive dream. Yet, I think societies must invest in these dreams, in educational reforms, school infrastructure and a holistic learning experience. Not only in order to prevent school massacres, but in order to instill creative energy, constructive power and respect for others in the next generation – qualities which our communities and in fact our earth need so badly.

Alternative to Mistrust

Greenwashing, credibility of companies and new trends in marketing have been following me as topics over the last months. If you look at these issues closely, they are all related to trust. What constitutes trust and how do you get others to trust you or your products are topics that fuel research and fill racks of books.
It appears that the more researchers find out about the mechanics of trust, and the more companies or marketers apply this knowledge, the more people feel manipulated. Which makes it in turn harder to gain their trust.

Taken to the extreme this build-up of attack and defence would lead to a society of mistrust.

Or alternatively, to a society were people understand as much (and more) about their usually unconscious decision making processes as neuroscientists and marketing specialists. Given the choice, I would like to live in a conscious society, were people do trust each other but on a thoroughly conscious level. The word "trust" would become obsolete as there is also no mistrust, just clarity.

And as I was reading "The Back of the Napkin" by Dan Roam, the idea of creating a picture story about trust and mistrust formed in, well 3 evenings :-)

Little Picture Book Of Trust

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: trust mistrust)

What if Ikea ran an airport...

Cracked.com ran a photoshop contest, asking what everyday household objects would look like if Batman was put in charge of the design. This coffee-maker is one of the 20 best suggestions - see them all here.

I found similar mix-it ideas at a Wikinomics posting. What if the US government was run by Apple? One of the suggestions: “In God We Trust” would be changed to “Getting Things Done”.

What if the United Nations were run by Google? "The Kyoto Protocol would be restructured with targets for member nations tied to the number of servers each country possesses. " Not bad.

Man, I like this game! What about a batman themed hairdresser? Bat-shaped mirrors and chairs, black dyes only, rubber gowns,... What if Ikea ran an airport? DIY security check, a place with toys in every departure lounge - see more suggestions at the brainr I created. How about a World of Warcraft fitness studio? Now that one reminds me of the "Jedi Gym" featured in a YouTube video:

Idea Dispenser

Jake Bronstein invented a vending machine for fun ideas (the Fun-O-Meter) and tested it at several locations in New York (here it is at Time Square). Read his report at zoomdoggle.

An idea dispenser could be exactly what people in the knowledge economy need :-)

Spotted at swissmiss.

Mix it!

One great recipe to fuel brainstorming is mixing (seemingly) unrelated industries/ products/ devices/ services/ lifestyles/.... Here is an inspiring example by Jan Vormann, who filled cracks in walls with Legos in Italy.

Found through: Make

Collaboration Incentives

Forrester Research predicts that Enterprise 2.0 applications will be a market worth $4.6 billion globally by 2013. Which basically says that it is a hype in 2008.
Anyway, there will be an added $$$ market for training & consulting: Even though web2.0 applications are pretty common nowadays– e.g. 73% of internet users globally are reading blogs according to a UniversalMcCann survey – that still does not make web2.0 users good collaborators. While sharing and working together may come natural to the “net generation” who grew up with internet and mobile phone, the same cannot be said of older employees.

But how do you teach collaboration? One way seem to be multiplayer online games: A recent HBR article described how online multiplayer games can be used for leadership training and for simulating team structures. The authors concluded that “nonmonetary incentives built into a game economy strongly motivate individuals to accomplish group aims.”

What’s wrong with monetary incentives? Research - e.g. by Adrian Furnham, a Behavioral Psychologist , author of “The Psychology of Money” - found that that the concept that better paid people are more productive and happy does not tie in with the evidence found in the workplace. In fact, money is more likely to be a cause of dissatisfaction rather than satisfaction. (see here).
Money may also not be the best motivation to get high quality contributions in an enterprise wiki or team workspace. Niko Nyman describes two ways to motivate people towards collaboration with money– and why they have their limits:

“The $1 million challenge” — The real incentive here is not direct
monetary reward, but the opportunity of winning a significant reward.
What kind of people take part in such lottery? Are these the people whose contribution you really want? How much effort are people willing to put into the slim chances of winning?

Paid content production — Paying people by contribution. It will get very expensive to pay any significant reward to content producers. If the reward is not significant, money is not the real incentive to contribute. One way to make the rewards bigger is to reward only the best. But how do you rank the content and decide who should be paid more? Squidoo and Mechanical Turk come to mind, both of which have not been that great successes.

At the end of the day, it all boils down to intrinsic motivation again, the type of motivation that is hardest to influence from the outside. Nevertheless, intrinsic motivation is getting increasing attention because not only collaboration but also creativity thrives when people are passionate about what they do. And even though intrinsic motivation basically is a personal decision (Is the glass half full or half empty?), it can well be taught (uncovered, encouraged, trained,...)

So, when that enterprise2.0 software is implemented, don't just offer manuals.
And, to get back to the HBR article, subscribe to a "multiplayer online role-playing game perspective" on team work: Players advance by collaborating with other characters, using each other's individual strengths for the common goal.

Moving out of Slavery

Every year, Gallup surveys German employees' motivation in the workplace. Every year the results are sobering (see this graph at Spiegel online): More than two Thirds of the working population only work to rule, passively, with low emotional involvement or loyalty to their company. Just around 13% are highly motivated and productive. I told this to a colleague and she said that in ancient times the passive two Thirds were the slaves. Hm.


The Harvard Business Review has an interview with Twyla Tharp (unfortunately not free content), a leading American dancer and choreographer and author of "The Creative Habit". What she has to say is useful advice for business leaders as well as employees: Creativity, personal development is not something restricted to a few fortunately gifted people. (In fact, believing that creativity is a closed domain for a few selected is a comfortable excuse for staying passive.) There is always a choice. Be a slave or not.
And one way to keep the mind open and creative is to move the body. What would Twyla Tharp tell Steve Jobs to do, if he came to see her?

"Hit the deck, let's do 30 push-ups." That's the first thing I'd say to any
businessperson: Get moving. Because one of the things I think I have to offer
people is the knowledge that using your body makes your brain work better.

See Twyla Tharp giving practical tips here:

Creativity predicted

Subliminal Advertising by Derren Brown.

Fascinating video which claims to show how two advertising guys are tricked by subliminal adverts and messages into creating a predicted image. Numerous comments on Youtube - some suspecting the film has been manipulated afterwards, some just finding it awesome.
Even if the movie does not tell the whole story, I still think it shows that "out of the box thinking" is hard to achieve.
No matter where the two guys got their ideas from, they also ordered them exactly as predicted. This was maybe triggered by Derren's task, nevertheless, the instructions left room for variations. But no experiments here... As if there was a common layout, to do with fashion maybe or even with following a textbook case? Well, the guys only had 30 min, obviously not enough to go beyond the normal... And the lesson is, if you really want to create something truly original, don't take the same route every day. And if you hire advertisers, don't let them take the same route every day either, if you want something truly "out of the box".