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20 Things That Need To Be Thought About Differently In The New Decade & The 10 Disciplines That Will Be Required. Straight to the A To Z WHAT'S ON OUR MINDS?

Friday 03 of September, 2010

Group Partners - The 'Pixar' of Consulting

Well, let me tell you a story!

Once upon a time when I was working in a large company. Getting things done, stuff thought through - tough!. Getting anything agreed and developed - mind numbingly dull and almost impossible.

All up it was a demoralizing, tedious, stupid and wrong headed process. Brainstorms, meetings workshops were simply to be avoided. Apart from that it was great.

In desperation I would grab a marker, a flip chart and shout at my colleagues - pleading with them to just discuss the basic ideas. I would do anything to get some kind of value from it but boy it was hard. I tried everything and the only thing that seemed to work was some kind of picture of the conversation. I left.

Interactive Systems

The 'Pixar' of Consulting Communicating Complexity Our aim is always to find the best possible way to move our work from 'thinking' and 'deciding' to 'engaging' and 'communicating' with the enterprise... See also Visual Displays Go to the demonstration of the Vision Model Creative Logic systems This model explains that all our systems thinking and the sustained communication that emerge from it is built on a rigorous logical model and architecture...Go to Global Model The Platform for connectivity In this image you can see how complex schema's are underpinning the simple user interfaces are able to access almost infinite degrees of richness and governed by robust engineering...Go to SVT Live' Everywhere. Anywhere By thinking differently about users and the possibility of 21st Century devices and technologies we now have the ability to dramatically engage remotely and virtually by smart devices...Go to Augmented Visual Thinking Demonstrating Application We have proven the efficiency and power of these tools in training education, induction, knowledge transfer and general awareness...Go to Vision Model

My abiding recollection of it all was the stuff of nightmares.

I knew everyone hated it as much as me. But two things will never leave me: - Everyone said to me that alas this was how it's always been (and with a sneer) if you can show me a better way then go for it!

So there was the challenge! Right there

I looked, I huffed, I blew - and because there was no internet back then - I asked everyone I could corner - "Show me the 'Better Way'...!!!"

My journey was a long one. It took me to the distant corners of the world and my head. I waged unholy wars against the advancing armies of the flip chart. I slept in the freezing caves of the ancients - brewing Power Point broth long into the night. I sat and meditated. I stared out from 'Word Doc Mountain'. I took counsel from the consulting Gods and listened intently to the wise methods of countless facilitators and booksellers.

In here somewhere must be the 'Better Way'

Rubbish. All of it rubbish!

Well OK not rubbish but my goodness it was so dull - still. To me it lacked, well everything. It lacked excitement. Who could engage with this stuff? Who would care about this? Who would remember it 5 minutes after this or that? Who would want to turn up to even do it? Why would anyone get involved with the outcome of it?

So I started to search for excitement. I wanted to find fun, drama, glamor and reward. Lots of reward. Lots of fun. But I got captured. When I wasn't looking I was caught by a spell. It was magical. I was totally blinded. It was only many years later that I looked back at this time and realized how powerful it was. It was a strong potion.

It was the Advertising Industry!

Eek!

The curious case of The Big Black Case

These we're strange and heady days. It was dynamic, it was exciting, it was powerful, it was ridiculous. I loved it. I hated it. I left.

The potion I had received was to wear off with the realization that the land I had wandered into was part brilliant and part fraudulent. But because I was under the influence of the spell I could stray between the two with abandon. I wandered like a very confused and strangely dressed addict with a big black folio case.

But hey did people take notice of the big black case. They gave it some serious reverence. It held its own space on the board room table. It even had a name. The spell worked on other people too! Magic!

Now I look back what was actually going on was simple. The thing that spellbound everyone was that the big black case was full of pictures. Pictures that had mysteriously arisen from people who had had a conversation, hadn't 'benefited' from Power Point, couldn't spell consultant and hadn't scaled 'Word Doc Mountain'.

Rather than jump to conclusions we had drawn some.

It was spiritual, mesmerizing and weird. But cool.

As each new picture emerged from the big black case the audience would gasp, smile, frown and nod in varying degrees. But they would all engage. They couldn't always explain why but they would always comment. Conversation of a whole new order would spring up.

"Yes that's it!!" - "We've struggled with putting that idea over - brilliant. You've captured it..."

I was of course really happy with that. For a few moments and then angry. They were missing the point. We had slaved week after week - deep in the visual mines. Multi-colored sweat had been poured over our toil - thinking outside of boxes. That Pantone® reference meant the world to us. That font, those specific words - and yes in that order. The stock. The choice of timing on the media schedule. That voice over. That Photographer - yes him!

It all made so much sense. Trouble was it only really made sense to us. The folk on the other side of the big black case didn't get that bit of the potion - weren't under our spell. They dug the effect. They just didn't quite have the same affection for our craft.

I had sniffed something - one small clue - but one very large part of my crusade. People loved the pictures.

Banging your head against the wall is an overused expression.

I'm certain it was coined by an Ad guy realizing that the spell of his big black case had taken the day off. I became sore. My head hurt. I wanted/needed to stop banging it. The problem was mostly to do with the fact that while they might like the pictures - they didn't get my mojo. It simply didn't add up to the real value I had intended. In fact in that industry I could easily lack the right audience too.

I needed an audience that could really understand that the pictures meant more.

Enter the storyline. Exit this particular Stage.

Any good storyline is based on structure. An end, a middle and a beginning if you like. That's simple. We humans seemed to be more comfortable if it added up like that. If we want this effect we needed to do this and that and the other. So I was starting to get the hang of something new. My problem though was that I began to notice that the people in front of me were just not able to get the story I was trying to tell. It wasn't that they were stupid. But they were not in the picture in the sense I needed them to be.

They were not at the right spot in their company to do much about the storyline I wanted to write. That's a whole other story. So I had to find a new audience. A different theater.

From fantasy to reality

So it was written. A momentous moment on this journey had occurred revealing things that had been under my nose all the time.

Also I realized that I was in fact repeating history. I recalled that whenever I could add a visual and more structure into the conversations things changed. I had also begun to observe that all conversations were at some level the same conversation. That you could in fact apply a common structure to them to create better understanding and force better storylines.

Hey Presto.

I saw too that the pictures in some way brought everyone together and caused folk to smile with relief or suspend disbelief until the plot came through. I was now creating these pictures with the clients and I realized that complex conversations could be fun. That people just wanted their say and often simply for it to be honored. This removed conflict as in fact there point was simply the same as everyone else's - but with a different definition. And over time I realised that with today's technology we could bring all of this power to everybody.

Through multiple media and via any device we really could change the way people thought about work just like Pixar has done in the world of animated cinema.

By now my head had stopped hurting long enough for me to seek new shores

I had by now long tired of the excesses and frustrations of the Ad Industry. I sought the sun kissed uplands of strategy. A place where all the Chiefs live. The paradise of Chiefdom. The gated communities and privileged parking of Chiefville. I would spend my holidays in Spreadsheet City. I would gamble at the casinos on 4 Box Boulevard.

These guys would surely get it. They would listen. I would show them my new tools of conversation, meaning through pictures and way better story-lines. I would impress them all with my razor sharp - High Def. pallet of value propositions.

Well thankfully it was immediately a much better place to be.

To be honest it wasn't an outright or immediate hit but oh what a spectacular new world I had found. It was possible to discuss more important things. We discussed growth, targets, stakeholder value long into the night. We drank the heady cocktails of balanced scorecards and hockey stick curves. Marvellous.

Well actually most people I met on those roads were pleasantly surprised. Obviously in the early days I noticed a few people cross the road to avoid my stare and my lack of Power Point. They only saw the pictures. Couldn't quite see the logic or point of it all. Felt safer back in the traditional safety of the 4 box model and the spreadsheet. Dunno.

And so it went

I learned how to combine my visual storylines with theirs. I drew different pictures, created whole new vistas for them and painted new horizons. We really started to create better results and told better stories. Along the way we've added better people and polish too. A ton of richer and better bits now involved with all this. Now we are a family of folk telling better strategic stories to far more people. We learned the techniques by experimenting. By trial and error and with the permission of our audiences.

Today we have perfected and invented whole new ways of delivering what we do.

We have stayed avid - totally curious about each new technology. We talk with everyone about this and that aspect of our subject. We follow Apple and their incredible attitude to perfection in the user experience. We follow the technology platforms for better social collaboration and knowledge sharing.

We are building applications in Augmented Intelligence and Virtual Worlds and we will never stay still in the pursuit of better thinking - better ways of working in the 21st Century.

Above all we admire the work of the innovators, the great story tellers and in our world today there is one outright winner in the art of storytelling, visualization and just thinking better and that is you know who!...

Yes. Thinking could be fun, and meetings could be valuable and then they could really make a difference

You know what its like. You find yourself asking what would Apple do to this or that product. What if Ferrari were planning my holiday or Hugh Hefner was designing my study. You know.

Well when people ask me what we do I describe it like this. The 'Pixar' of Consulting.

Over time it's become a remarkable comparison as we've combined technology, pictures and storytelling like they have but we do it for the world of business. We don't market animation to the public but we turn ideas and visions of the new worlds of our clients into reality. We create new character for an enterprise and we enable varied audiences to get engaged in topics and areas that previously was just not meaningful or fun.

It's not kids stuff, and it's not just for kids...

Technology + Art = Magic

Interactive Systems

Group Partners Fully Interactive Vision Model The Main Landing Page This landing page explains the three main aspects to the initial levels of the system. The Current Reality, the Future Vision and the Roadmap of how to get there. These are all 'clickable' with the mouse and gets the user to various other levels of information. These are integrated to blogs and wiki's and other survey tools if required to keep the Conversations going. Inclusive and immersive. Go to the demonstration of the Vision Model Note the Options Menu and the Lower Left Navigation to get to subsequent pages. The Site Map To the top left of the screen another menu will show you the Site Map As you 'Mouse Over' it will reveal which elements of the site are enabled in the Demonstrator. The original of this specific system clearly has many more aspects than we are showing here. You can click straight to the page from this page. Go to the demonstration of the Vision Model The Vision Screen As you would expect this page demonstrates the vision as imagined by the team and carries click throughs to movable and resizable text boxes. These boxes are again linked to discussions and forums for further debate. This image explains the outcomes as well as the systems that underpin the overall approach. Go to the demonstration of the Vision Model The Consumer Journey There are a whole series of types of consumer/traveler in this world. The traveling public. They are explained as a journey. At each of the 'touch-points' it explains an event that by clicking reveals the change in process or future procedure. These display deeper insights or parts of the story and that a given stakeholder can further understand or debate. Go to the demonstration of the Vision Model The top lens enables the user to see where further content lives The Flow Of Information - Use Case This clearly shows, through animations, the new process and organization design. The system has an unlimited ability to display complex processes at multiple levels of granularity and detail. Aligning stakeholders to change and giving them confidence in the new world and a way of proving the future design. Go to the demonstration of the Vision Model The Ports Use Case Another example of possible future environments and scenarios. In this case it plays out the process of how the future design will work in real world examples. Go to the demonstration of the Vision Model The Operation Model This displays how the operation will work. In this version it will display how the three layers interoperate and line up. Firstly how traveler centricity will be central and therefore at the top. The stakeholder engagement will be critical to making that work and in turn all that will be enabled by the Information and Intelligence layers. All of this will be unpacked in deeper layers of the system. (Not Shown) Go to the demonstration of the Vision Model

"You get great creative people, you bet big on them, you give them enormous leeway and support, and you provide them with an environment in which they can get honest feedback from everyone" - John Lesseter. Chief Creative Officer. Pixar Studios

“True creativity is a team sport. People tend to think that creativity is a mysterious solo act. However, in filmmaking and many other kinds of complex product development, creativity involves a large number of people from different disciplines working effectively together to solve a great many problems.”

What is a team?

In Pixars case a team consists of a Director, a Writer, some Artists, and some storyboard people.

“During early stages you can't judge the teams by the material they are producing as its too rough - many problems and open questions. But you can assess whether the teams social dynamics are healthy and whether the teams are soving problems and making progress. Both the senior management and the development department are responsible for seeing to it that the teams function well.”

The Directors have to be ‘masters’ of knowing how to tell a story and how that story will translate into the medium of film. There are huge analogies to us and what we do. Having a unifying vision and one that gives coherence to thousands of ideas is also a direct map. Turn that vision into clear directives that others can implement. Set others up for success by giving them all the information they need to do their jobs without telling them how to do it. These Directors posess strong analytic skills themselves but also can harness the analytic skills and life experiences of their people. They are superb listeners and strive to understand the thinking behind every suggestion. They appreciate all contributions regardless of where they come from and use the best ones.

Pixar’s Operating Principles

Everyone must have the freedom to communicate with anyone. The decision making hierarchy and communication structures are two different things. People in any area, department or domain must be able to approach anyone in any other are to solve problems without going through 'proper' channels. It's ok - even good - to go to meetings and be surprised. It must be safe for everyone to offer ideas. Make it safe for people to critique work in progress. Widen the communication, involve many people as the creative process develops and encourage new thoughts, ideas or suggestions to improve in a safe environment. We must stay close to innovations happening in the academic community. Talking at conferences, publishing what we do and what we think widely - it may give ideas away but it keeps us close to new technologies, people and thinking and gets back far more innovation in the process. Training and cross training. Interaction, involvement and collaboration by everybody in everything. Its good to work and learn together.

“The impulse to tightly control process whilst understandable is almost impossible as problems by definition are unforseen. The most efficient way to deal with numerous problems is to trust people to work together to figure them out.” - John Lesseter

The Peer Culture

The brain trust. Powerful, trusting and in constant review. Working and talking openly about everything builds the best results. Everyone fully invested in helping everyone else. No ego. Nobody pulling any punches either. Nobody just trying to be polite. Trust and respect for each other the only way.

“The primacy of people over ideas. If you give a good idea to a mediocre team they will screw it up. If you give a mediocre idea to a great team, they will either fix it or throw it away and come up with something that works.” - John Lesseter

Group Partners - The Art of Strategy

These images illustrate the flexibility of our approach to new business thinking.See also The 'Pixar' Of Consulting

The 21st Century

The Art of Thinking