Issue 15: the hard truths about innovation culture, a giant leap for packaging elimination, the pursuit of the perfect answer and when is a dog not a dog
So many interesting things to see, read and watch, so little time…. So here is our curated view of 5 things worth a tiny bit of your time in these busy days. That said, the last one is just 30 seconds of joyful humanity, but we might all need a bit of that too right now.
Davidope for Quanta
The Hard Truth About Innovative Cultures
This is a must-read from the Harvard Business Review, especially at a time when commercially viable growth is increasingly hard to come by. Innovation should be an enjoyably creative task but it should also be tough if it is to succeed. This article brilliantly summarises the five key areas of paradox that need to be navigated if an innovation efforts are to succeed. Read on to find out why:
A tolerance for failure requires an intolerance for incompetence
A willingness to experiment requires rigorous discipline
Psychological safety requires comfort with brutal candor
Collaboration must be balanced with individual accountability
And flatness requires strong leadership
Leonardo Cendarmo/Getty Images
What Saturday Night Live teaches us for session planning
When facilitating, one of the recurring challenges we face is how to put information across to big rooms of people in the most effective way possible. One school of thought is to prepare a powerpoint or prezi deck to wow the room with your use of imagery and font choice. But as this behind the scenes look at Saturday Night Live demonstrates, getting down and dirty with some handwritten charts with helpful use of colour can often be the most effective way. It's a great example of how, if you look outside your direct area of interest, you can learn and adapt from how others approach their challenges. Check out the video and the “rules” they’ve developed over the 820 live shows they’ve used cue cards on too – great tips for how to keep energy, focus and clarity in both your session and the output
Lush
Lush goes (even more) naked
Here we celebrate one of Britain’s consistently innovate fmcg companies going big on the removal of packaging, particularly plastic, from their supply chain. It’s a timely lesson in lateral thinking, and whilst other personal care brands are honing their logistics heavy doorstep collection of beautiful aluminium reuse/refill solutions, this is a faster to market set of solutions that consumers can easily adopt into their daily habit - introducing solid shower gels, packaging free face scrubs and much, much more
Jacob Burge
The unforeseen consequences of the rise in voice control
This issue’s longer read is not, for a change, a scare story of how Alexa will buy stuff behind our backs. Rather it discusses how the pursuit of the one-shot answers that voice control requires, will render the Google style orthodoxy of serving top 10 links to any question irrelevant. Aside from seriously messing with Google’s fundamental commercial model around SEO, it raises more profound questions around how our world will have to transform in a future where only one answer is offered.
BBC/EUPA
and finally a shaggy tail of mistaken identity….
These good Samaritans in Estonia got a lot more than they were bargaining for when they rescued a dog from icy water. Our favourite picture is our lupine hero being apparently being subdued by a handy roll of duct tape.