The Vine

Amie MacPhee points us to this intriguing perspective from David Brooks, reflecting on the value of emotional education—life’s formative experiences that shape us in ways that are unexpected, unknown (at the time) and indelible.

Unlike the traditional, structured education we get in school, emotional educations are “unsupervised and haphazard.” And they are, Brooks argues, far more important to our long-term happiness and quality of life.

“In a normal schoolroom, information walks through the front door and announces itself by light of day. It’s direct. The teacher describes the material to be covered, and then everybody works through it.

The knowledge transmitted in an emotional education, on the other hand, comes indirectly, seeping through the cracks of the windowpanes, from under the floorboards and through the vents. It’s generally a byproduct of the search for pleasure, and the learning is indirect and unconscious.”

For Brooks it was the music of Bruce Springsteen. For me, I suppose it was discovering (as a ten-year-old) the early writing of Stephen King (The Stand and ‘Salem’s Lot still among my all time favorite books). Not exactly classical literature, granted, but being drawn into his rich and bizarre imagination utterly engaged my own. The work I do today is, at its core, the transfer of emotion. And the path to get here began, I now realize, there.

Where did yours?

Young & Rubicam’s John Gerzema shows the upside to our economic woes—the opportunity for positive change, as consumers recalibrate values and habits, and businesses and brands evolve to connect with them.

Here’s a wonderful story about the power of one passionate, dedicated individual to engage a community.

After losing his grandmother to cancer, Joe LaBelle wanted to create better access to cancer-screening equipment for women in rural locations. His initial idea—staging a girls’ high school basketball game—was stifled by bureaucratic red tape. So with the support of his employer, Ashland Health Center, he went bigger.

On October 31st, a who’s who of women’s basketball stars arrived from all over the country to stage a charity hoops event in Ashland, Kansas—a town so small it doesn’t even have a hotel; players and coaches stayed in the homes of local residents.

What began as a fundraiser is now growing bigger still. Five neighboring communities and two hospitals have partnered to form WEPAC Alliance, a non-profit organization that provides resources and education to encourage local women to take active responsibility for their health. The partnership has earned national media attention and is becoming a model for other communities around the country.

“Lack of size and/or resources should not hinder [small communities],” the organization declares on its website. “With the state of the economy, it is easy to find reasons to complain or excuse low performance. These are five rural Kansas communities (totaling approx. 2,500 people) that are finding solutions instead of excuses.”

At the Urban Land Institute’s Fall Meeting a couple of weeks ago, I attended a dinner for one of the councils, a group of 100 or so homebuilding executives.

The conversations, for the most part, went something like this:

“How you doing?”

“Hanging in there. This market’s just brutal. You?”

“Yeah, brutal.”

“Yeah.”

I commented to one colleague that in times like this, my work actually gets more interesting. That’s not to say I enjoy the plunging revenues, slashed budgets and layoffs. But we’re now trying new things and moving in new directions that we never would have risked when the money was pouring in. And that’s a lot more interesting than simply riding the wave.

My colleague gave me a funny look and said, “You must be comfortable with ambiguity.”

I’m not sure he meant it as a compliment. But I sure took it as one.

Last week’s salon at IDEO was, well, pretty much everything you’d expect from a day with the world’s preeminent design firm.

One participant called it “The most stimulating, thought provoking exercise I’ve experienced in a very long time. I’m still trying to wrap my mind around all the concepts we explored.”

It was so successful, in fact, we’re doing it again.

On March 2, 2010, we’re holding a second installment of The Vine Salon at IDEO. This will be, once again, a collaborative workshop on User-Based Design Solutions created and hosted by IDEO at their Palo Alto headquarters — a rare opportunity to go inside “Imagination’s Playground,” as the Wall Street Journal has dubbed it.

Attendance will be limited to 65 people, and seats will fill up well in advance, so you’ll want to sign up early. Registration and program details can be found here.

What went down on our first visit, you ask?

Our day began with a series of short presentations — “provocations,” in IDEO-speak — by a team of designers from a variety of disciplines. By exploring examples of design-driven change through different lenses (individual, organizational, behavioral, attitudinal, among others), we got insight into IDEO’s acclaimed design thinking process, which we then applied to the afternoon’s Town Design Challenge.

Breaking into small, cross-disciplinary teams, we were first given a town profile (based on actual cities throughout the country) with details about population, geography, demographics, economic conditions, and challenges facing the area.

Next the project got human…as it always does with IDEO…and The Vine. Each team was assigned a specific user (whose profile was drawn from in-depth interviews with an actual person), and we were challenged to create solutions that would address both the needs of the town and our user’s unique circumstances. For example: a retired high school teacher with limited means but a deep desire to continue educating and shaping lives; a single mom struggling to balance the demands of work, money and time with her kids; or an aging nurse practitioner who’s committed to staying active and helping others, while at the same time coming to terms with her own physical limitations.

Considering we packed what would normally be a multiple-week prototyping process into a single afternoon, the exercise was obviously frenetic — and very taxing, I was surprised to find. And yet it was an extraordinary learning experience that, even a week later, continues to unfold for me. Three things in particular stand out.

1) Constraints can be a good thing. It’s remarkable how deadlines and competition (solutions were reviewed and voted upon by peers) will sharpen your focus.

2) Our team’s diversity of backgrounds (by design, of course) greatly enriched the process. And the two most seemingly dissimilar members, the engineer and the artist, yielded the most interesting and symbiotic results.

3) Small details matter. The solution that our team ultimately chose to put forward was drawn from a single comment in the user profile that, when we first read it, seemed idiosyncratic and irrelevant to the task at hand.

By the time we got to wine and hors d’oeuvres at the end of the day, my brain was exhausted.

I can’t wait to do it again in March.

Here’s an insightful and amusing perspective on behavioral norms from Jessica Hagy.

Funny how conformity takes on different meaning in different contexts. When did A become B without our even noticing it?

(Yes, I realize there’s a distinction. Teenage drinking = bad. Adult social constructs = for the most part, good. But let’s at least acknowledge that we’re assigning separate names to the same phenomenon. And that “being a team player” is not automatically a good thing.)

As the French playwright Albert Guinon once said, “When everyone is against you, it means that you are absolutely wrong — or absolutely right.”

Hugh MacLeod is a brilliant, unorthodox, provocative thinker on brands and relevance and creating meaningful interactions with customers.

Hugh nails it yet again with this recent post. He writes:

“Too many brand managers ask the question, ‘What message do I have to craft in order to get people to buy my product?’ It’s a dead end. A far more useful and profitable question would be, ‘What can I do to make my customers’ lives more interesting and meaningful?’

And ‘Meaningful’ always has a social dynamic. We find meaning via our relationships with our fellow creatures. ‘People matter. Objects don’t.’

A bottle of barbecue sauce isn’t going to instantly change anyone’s life for the better. But that 4-hour-long conversation with an old friend, sharing a plate of ribs and brisket, with some Shiner Bock… Well, that might. So you want your product to be there when it happens; you want your product to be around during your customers’ significant moments.”

If you’re a builder or developer, good news, your product already is around during your customers’ significant moments. But walls and windows (and patios and parks and plazas) are just objects. It’s not until human beings animate them that they become places of significance.

Okay, duh, that’s stating the obvious. Then why is real estate so often marketed on the basis of objects, and so rarely as a story of people and relationships? As Lisa Kalmbach recently commented, “no homebuyer thinks in terms of price per square foot.”

One last thought. A lot of marketers now get this, and all kinds of brands are rushing into the “significance” space. It’s the sophisticated ones, however, that understand how and when (and when not) to insert themselves into the picture.

Dev Patnaik makes an excellent case here for the virtues of hybrid thinking, a discipline he describes as “the conscious blending of different fields of thought to discover and develop opportunities that were previously unseen by the status quo.”

He cites the widely celebrated transformation of Procter & Gamble from a 200-year-old consumer products manufacturer to a world-class design innovator. Much of the credit is attributed to Claudia Kotchka, P&G’s VP for design strategy, and her success is heralded as the power of design thinking applied to traditional business models.

Except Claudia’s background is accounting, not design. In fact, Patnaik asserts, the key to her success is that she isn’t a designer. Instead, she immersed herself in the world of design and blended in her previous experience in accounting, marketing and other fields.

It strikes me that Dev is speaking to the very reality of our industry today. With staffs now stripped to the core, it’s unlikely that anyone in your company is doing just one job (or two, or four). Everyone on your team is multidisciplinary—and that’s to your great advantage. Hybridity is precisely what you need, Dev suggests, because the challenges you’re facing are too great for any single skillset to solve.

Taking it a step further, he writes:

“Hybrid thinking is much more than gathering together a multidisciplinary team. Hybrid thinking is about multidisciplinary people … folks who can connect the dots between what’s culturally desirable, technically feasible, and viable from a business point of view.”

Granted, this housing collapse and the dismantling of our organizations has been painful. But the recipe for growth and reinvention and discovery of new opportunities—previously unseen by the status quo—calls for precisely the conditions we have today.

We already have the hybrid people. Now let’s engage them in hybrid thinking.

Michael Cannell has an entertaining piece in Fast Company about the (not incidental) connection between architectural and footwear design.

As he points out, “What are shoes, after all, but mini buildings for your feet?”

To offer one illustration: the Eamz shoe, inspired by Charles and Ray Eames’ iconic chair.

What’s even more interesting, to me anyway, is the shoe’s backstory. (It has a ring of mythology to it, but, like Fox Mulder, I want to believe.)

As the story goes, designer Rem D. Koolhaas—nephew of the Rem Koolhaas—had a broken heart.

In his attempt to win the girl back, he downsized architecture “to its smallest and most vulnerable scale, that of a woman’s foot.” The girl, alas, was gone. But a shoe company was born.

Caterina Fake—cofounder of Flickr and Hunch—offers this great perspective on work, productivity, clarity, and purposeful meandering (contradictory as that may sound).

She writes:

“Much more important than working hard is knowing how to find the right thing to work on. Paying attention to what is going on in the world. Seeing patterns. Seeing things as they are rather than how you want them to be. Being able to read what people want. Putting yourself in the right place where information is flowing freely and interesting new juxtapositions can be seen. But you can save yourself a lot of time by working on the right thing.”

Amen.

 Here’s a great way of shaping the path…make it fun.

I scored an advance copy of Chip and Dan Heath’s next book, Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard, due out Feburary 2010. (You probably know the Heath brothers from their previous bestseller, Made to Stick. If you haven’t read it, buy a copy now. It’s remarkable.)

I’ll honor the authors’ request to not quote or review the pre-release galley, but there’s one idea in particular I can’t resist exploring here:

What looks like a people problem is often a situation problem.

In other words, we frequently conclude that people behave the way they do because it’s their fundamental nature—that’s just the way they are—when in fact behavior is largely influenced by circumstance or environment.

Case in point: roundabouts. Unlike the traditional, four-way intersection, which is regulated and stop-and-go, a roundabout is inherently cooperative. To drive through one, you have to be more aware and accommodating of other drivers. And while roundabouts don’t necessarily reduce the number of collisions, they dramatically reduce the severity of them.

Roundabouts don’t make us better human beings. But they do, apparently, make us better drivers.

I don’t mean to oversimplify change. It’s hard. But in many cases, the way to make it easier is by addressing the situation, not the person.

If you want to lead people to a particular outcome, shape the path that gets them there.

Tongue-in-cheek humor, courtesy of my three-year-old daughter’s favorite cartoon series.

Here’s a fascinating talk from USC faculty member David Logan on the five stages of tribal culture.

He points out that humans naturally form tribes, always have, always will. But tribal influence can range from destructive to empowering to life-changing. What great leaders do is forge tribal culture that nudges people—individually and collectively—toward a greater purpose.

It’s a powerful message delivered in just 16 minutes. Well worth watching.

The Daily Beast recently unveiled its rankings of America’s smartest cities.

The study reviewed the 55 major metropolitan areas with a population of 1 million or greater. Judging criteria were divided into two halves: Education, measured by per capita bachelor’s degrees and master’s degrees; and “intellectual environment,” measured by nonfiction book sales, institutions of higher education, and levels of political engagement.

Nice showing by Vinesters Walker Smith (Research Triangle), Bert and John Jacobs (Boston), Nate Garvis (Minneapolis-St. Paul) and multitudes in the Bay Area and Denver.

Yours truly (Sacramento), not so much. But hey, we beat Fresno.