After a few weeks of well deserved rest I have now returned to work. During my vacation this blog was left idle, as I saw fit to prioritize all and any outdoor activities that I could think of. We have precious little sun here in Sweden. It’s get it while you can or not at all.

But now we get crackin’ again and I look forward to it. We have an interesting time ahead of us. Apart from the excitements from the every day grind we also have a few interesting events at the horizon.

I’ll kick things off with an attendance at the Sweden Social Web Camp (SSWC), an un-conference taking place at Tjarö, a small beautiful island in the Blekinge archipelago. I attended the web camp last year, and it was truly a great experience. This year the number of participants have doubled and I do hope the format can survive the growth.

In late September we have a new event called Disruptive Code. The event takes place in Stockholm and features some interesting speakers, among others Andreas Ehn, former CTO of Spotify.

Later, in October I’ll be heading for Reykjavik and the You Are in Control Conference. It was announced today that interactive entertainment legend Ian Livingstone will be the keynote speaker, which is really cool. This will be my second time at the YAIC. Last year’s conference featured both high’s and low’s but all in all it was well worth the visit. The itinerary this year looks very promising indeed.

More exciting events to come, I’m sure.

Finally, on another note: Mattias Bodström from Piratförlaget is putting together a special Sweden Social Web Camp book, a collection of texts from the minds of people who will be attending the conference. Mattias asked me for a contribution and obviously I ‘m glad to help out. You can read my text below.

Information is not intelligence

One of the ways that I earn my keep is by gathering and processing information. Basically I try to keep an eye out for information that can be of value for my employer. I do this through the usual channels. I have my RSS feeds, I follow interesting people on Twitter, I read relevant publications and books online or offline. Sometimes I pursue threads that lead me to research papers, and sometimes I end up reading fashion blogs. I follow topics, conversations and people.

Information is currency, but almost all the information I get my hands on is out there for everyone and anyone to find. I guess it does take some skill and experience finding, filtering and evaluating information, but it’s hardly rocket surgery.

The hard part comes later when you try to make sense of it all. But surprisingly, it is not uncommon for the whole process to grind to a halt after the information has been gathered. Now that, I don’t get. Serving people with information without aiding them in ways such as putting the info in perspective, in context and then stepping up and proposing strategies and directions, is really a half ass effort. It’s luke warm.

To me this is obvious since I’m always interested in generated value – the end game of things. Not everyone feel that they can afford the luxury of applying a whole system approach to information and intelligence. But this is because we only value the outcome of the every day grind, and we only value this because we have found a way to measure it. That which we measure, we choose to think of as extremely important.
But by making your Competitive Intelligence process more lucid, you can measure it, and when you do you begin to see that the process of turning information into intelligence is at the very core of your business. You make your most important decisions based on the outcome of this process. How can you not want to get this right?

The whole chain of Competitive Intelligence is really a six step process:

1. Gather – What’s going on?
2. Analyze – But what ever does it mean?
3. Focus – What does this mean for us?
4. Suggest – Based on the above I suggest we do this: X, Y and Z.
5. Act – Do X, Y and Z.
6. Evaluate – In what way did doing X, Y and Z bring us any closer to our goal?

The chain of events – Information becomes Intelligence becomes Action. And then we evaluate and loop.

Consider this: Information not processed and acted upon is only of value for those who buy and sell information, i.e for those whose end game is the info in itself.

Doesn’t that make you think of shady characters in old movies, you know, those creepy fellows with a cigarette but in the corner of their mouths? And they say to the cop that they’ve got a hot tip that will move the investigation along. A hard boiled dialogue always follows, and it ends with:

- But it’s gonna cost you another five bucks Mr…
- You filthy swine!

The cop reluctantly pulls out his wallet, and the information creep grins and grabs the fiver with his dirty paw. And then he says something along the lines of “go ask big daddy kingpin”, and then he scurries into the night, not giving a hoot for the rest of the story.
Now that’s no way to run a business.

Getting this process right has never been more important than today. New information is generated at such back breaking speed that it can easily freak you out and make you lose your way. If you allow this process to float around in an ad hoc manner, which is not unusual, I suggest you think again.

Competitive Intelligence needs to be a prioritized process. It needs to be deliberate. And it needs to be embedded as an integral part of your day to day operations.

Placed in a Product Development context the “good enough” concept is not hard to understand. As I have described earlier – the Agile mindset is to cut back on the scope side of a project triangle, in favor of delivering value at a certain set point in time. This means that all requested features might not be present in the first release. Naturally, a “good enough” mindset works very well in this context, if for no other reason than that it can help prevent “feature creep”.

This mindset also encourages a “release early” concept, based on the belief that the sooner customers get to fiddle with your product, the sooner you can gather information about the value of what you are building and how the users and “the market” feel about your efforts. This belief is supported by basic information theory, and I subscribe to the idea. After early release, continuous cyclic improvement follows, and iteration after iteration you improve your product – based on feedback – striving to reach the Product Vision.

The misunderstanding here is that the Product Vision, or even the whole business idea, should also be surrounded by a “good enough” mentality. Obviously, it shouldn’t be. And I’m not sure if anyone really has suggested that it should?

But I can see where the confusion comes from. In the debate, I felt the spirit of Seth Godin hovering between the lines of the “good enough” bashers rhetoric (don’t be good enough – be remarkable). But even Seth Godin is paradoxical when dealing with the subject.

Godin has in many books propagated that we reach for the stars, that we strive to be “remarkable” or make remarkable things (Tribes, Purple Cow), but he also propagates that we deliver (Linchpin). Because what we do is “art” and art only happens when our efforts meet the outside world. The last section represents a debatable, but interesting point.

It boils down to this: We have to deliver. We have to throw ourselves out there. The good enough mentality is a very helpful idea that can help us get there. An early focus on perfection will severely damage the work process, your spirit will be crushed, and you will run out of money. So start with good enough – find your feedback loops and then go conquer the world with your remarkable vision.

Branding - in every sense of the word

- I still don’t know much about the industry. I never met any of those mysterious investors and sending applications and keeping my fingers crossed is still a bit scary for me. But I do know what kinds of movies I want to make, I know who my audience is and where I can find and connect with them. Knowing that, you can count on me to make the best movie I can while taking them on one wild unique adventure. THAT I can do. THAT I will do.

So how do you connect with your fans?

- I started my fan club. It’s simply a way for me to start up a relationship with my audience. You know. The people I actually make the movies for and in that extent the only people I actually care about. I don’t really care about the middle men. I care about that ONE person who wants to see that little movie I’m about to make and I really want to get to know him/her, I want to take him/her on as cool and exciting and unique adventures I possibly can. It’s as simple as that. Like I state on the Fan Club sign-up page over at www.andrehedetoft.com.
Signing up basically means that you becomes one of the most important persons in my life and that I will do everything to treat you as such. So what are you waiting for?

What is the thought behind the personal questionnaire on your fan blog? Why do you want this information, and what do you intend to do with it?

- I’m trying to be really transparent on why I want the info and what I intend to do with it. First of all I call it “20 questions (so I can get to know you better)” and that is really the gist of it. This Fan Club is not just about me, in fact, it’s all about them. The more I know, the more I can do for them. If they trust me with their facebook/twitter/blog I’ll befriend them and connect with them for more casual and daily interaction. I used to have a facebook fan page but quickly gave it up when I realized that I didn’t get to see what they were up to or interact with them. It was all about me. So now I just have my regular profile instead.

- If they trust me with their address I will start out by sending them a personal handwritten snail mail and in extent I might connect with them this way when the occasion calls for it. For example on their birthdays, etc.
It’s ALL about getting to know my audience better and connecting personally with each and everyone of them. Be they 5, 50, 500, 5000 or 5 000 000.

How did you come up with the perks for your fans? Why the 1000 exclusive dvd’s?

- In reality I could think of 10 000 things I would like to offer as perks. But at the same time I really wanted to keep it simple. So I decided that I was going to offer ONE thing. And that ONE thing became 1 of 1000  signed, numbered, extremely limited, awesome special edition DVD:s. But: The awesome DVD:s is absolutely just the beginning of an adventure I will take them on. Because here is a lesson I had to learn the hard way and live by these days: Under Promise and Over Deliver. THAT I intend to do.

You seem to be as much a storyteller in marketing and branding as you are as a filmmaker. Why, in your mind, is this approach still the exception rather than the rule?

- I think most people grow up with (I know I did) the romantic/exciting notion of what an artist should be like. I mean who didn’t dream of living for the arts, poor and preferably suffering, sleeping during the days, partying during the nights, create whenever inspiration hit, only to one day be miraculously discovered and thrown into the superstar life. I mean that sure sounds a whole lot more exciting then waking up early, sitting down each day to create, putting in the hours, doing the hard work, incrementally making your way forward. Sure you can choose that first life and you may get really lucky. Some do. Me? I don’t care much about luck and I sure don’t care for one hit wonders. I much rather go up early, sit down each day to create (inspired or not), put in the time and care to connect with my audience, figure out ways to sell them a unique experience, get to make THIS movie and another one and another one and another one

There’s really no question that André is very conscious about the story he’s telling. When I asked him about the whole deal with the tattoo, I received a cut-and-paste answer. Rehashing the same pitch available in several locations on the Internet. I’m sure he knows it by heart:

- I was born 7 weeks early in an elevator and had to spend a lot of time in hospitals where I found my salvation in the geek culture. A while ago I combined my love for the geek culture with my lifelong dream to make movies that I myself would like to see and made a promise: When I have 1000 fans I will tattoo in Geek Movie Director on myself and make a superhero-series that is going to spread all over the world, for free, on the Internet.With that said and done, we created a short teaser to generate interest in the project. We got the 1000 fans. I got the tattoo. Now it’s time for “Extraordinaries!”.

That’s about as effectively “branded” as anyone can hope to be. A compelling story, an effective pitch, and he went and got himself inked, for heaven’s sake.

Do you think this way of funding, promotion and marketing is scalable (i.e do you think it could work for large scale projects as well?)

- Great question. Could they have funded, promoted and marketed say the $170 million dollar production Iron Man 2 this way? Why not? At the end of they day we are all only selling to our audience. Could they have found a way to connect with their audience, offering them not only the chance to see it at the cinemas and buying the DVD but also a whole range of unique experiences? Why not? Would this audience maybe spend double or triple what they would have on just the cinema tickets and DVD? You bet. Could they have cut their HUGE marketing budget ($150 million dollars) by  half and still made more impact by leveraging it to just their audience? Indeed. Are there 1 million other factors to consider in all of this? Absolutely. I’m not preaching that crowdfunding and audience building is the answer to all and everything. Just that we all have so much to learn from it. Be it a $170+$150 million dollar hollywood blockbuster or a small independent superhero-webseries.

We hear much about how creatives need to become more entrepreneurial in order to survive. Do you agree with that and if so, do you think this will change the film industry in any way? Will it change what films get made?

- By putting creatives and audiences together something incredible can happen. Remember the old expression “Everyone has a story to tell”. Well, now they actually can! No matter how niched a story you want to tell there is an audience for it out there and if you can connect with them, together you can bring it to life. We live in exciting times.

Indeed we do! And when will you release the first episode of “Extraordinaries”?

- The script will be ready in a week or two. Then plan is to shoot later this summer and after post production start releasing them in Nov/Dec.

All in all, marketing guru Seth Godin would be proud. In Linchpin, Godin wrote this, which resonates well with the marketing work of André Hedetoft:

“One author I know is willing to watch his books sit unsold, because that’s a better outcome for him than changing the essence of what he’s written. He has passion for his craft, but no real passion for spreading his ideas. And if the idea’s don’t spread, if no gift is received, then there is no art, only effort”.

With André, we get the art, not just the effort. And that’s pretty cool.

More about André on these pages:

www.indiegogo.com/Extraordinaries
www.andrehedetoft.com/

Believe it or not, this is my angry face.

I touched upon this in an earlier post. But I thought it was worth repeating from a team perspective.

If you’re on my team a very quick outline of some sort of expectations management statement could read:

I expect you to speak up when something is wrong.
I expect you to speak up whenever you spot a problem.
I expect you to speak up when something doesn’t make sense to you.
I expect you to tell me when I’m wrong.
I expect you to bring your skill and passion to the table.

And what can you expect from me?

I will listen to you.
I will gather as much input as possible and facilitate a process that leads us forward.
I will kill all nonsense coming your way.
I will get out of your way and let you work your magic.
I will trust and support you.

Basically, we are all problem solvers. If the circumstances surrounding our project, or the very essence of our project deliverables, are completely free of obstacles, or in no need of solutions, I would venture a guess and say that the project in itself is probably rather meaningless, or rather: of little value. In a sense, value is created when difficulties are overcome. For this very reason, hiding problems out of sight out of mind, means compromising the whole process of delivering value.

If you are on my team, you are allowed to fail, if you just made an honest effort and hope to learn something from mistakes made. But the one thing you cannot do. The one thing that will earn you a shit storm of hellish wrath, is this line of thinking:

“It’s crap, a road to ruin, but that’s what the customer wants so hey, by any means – let’s go build it, see if I care!”

Think like that? Time to quit.

Photo by: Erik mit k

But I stand firm: only teenagers collect and worship idols. I admire a lot of people, but I don’t worship them. With regards to me I could mention The Buddha, Donald G. Reinertse, Michel de Montaigne, Hunter S Thompson and David Eugene Edwards, just to mention a few people from various walks of life. But I remain sceptic. If they’re wrong, they’re wrong.

This is important because everything the guys at 37signals does, might not be the right way to go for you. Every move from Steve Jobs is not necessarily worth repeating in awe. Everything that Chomsky writes is not holy or untouchable. Everything in the Bible might not ring true. Richard Dawkins is not the ultimate source of all accumulated wisdom between heaven and earth. Neither is Seth Godin, Malcom Gladwell or Chris Anderson.

I choose these examples simply because I often come across people who all express unhealthy admiration for their work – to the point of worship .

In the words of the great Seneca:

“No new findings will ever be made if we rest content with the findings of the the past. Besides, a man who follows someone else not only does not find anything, he is not even looking. ‘But surely you are going to walk in your predecessors’ footsteps?’ Yes indeed, I shall use the old road, but if I find a shorter and easier one I shall open it up. The men who pioneered the old routes are leaders, not our masters. Truth lies open to everyone. There has yet to be a monopoly of truth. And there is plenty of it left for future generations too.”

But, I hear you say, aren’t you a bit of a Seneca fan right now with this quote and all?

No. I admire his writing. No more, no less. Please, learn to know the difference.

Anders Lindqvist - someone who knows.

- As part of a major reorganization of Sony Ericsson back in 2006, I was involved in creating a global organization focussing on what we called “launch support and management”. In very simple terms: We tested, customized, profiled, packaged, and sales-supported the whole portfolio towards our Sales and Marketing teams. Vice versa, we funnelled and aligned the feedback from the markets towards our R&D teams. Previously this had been carried out both by each product business unit and by teams in Lund, Sweden, who had been doing it since the dawn of time. In other words, we undertook a major defragmentation operation.

In this context I built and managed a project/expert office responsible for customization, packaging and documentation, customer launch quality management and launch schedule alignment between markets and product development. When the big bad recession hit we were approx. 120 people in China, Sweden, Taiwan, USA and Japan.

I was able to take away a lot of extremely valuable experience and learning from this, not only from successes but also from biting the multi-cultural dust at times.

What in your mind were the greatest challenges in managing people from different cultures?

- I must be frank and say that I might not have seen the greatest challenges there could be. One reason for this is of course that the industry we work in is quite young, and thus it’s not extremely different culture-wise between countries. Also, having different cultures working together in one room, in one country, is not that difficult in our industry. But if I am allowed to base my answer on my recent environment, i.e. working with telecom professionals with similar education, in a multi cultural AND multi-site environment – I’d like to mention a few challenges that we faced:

One obvious challenge was to throw the stereotypes overboard and realize that the Japanese CAN say no, and that the US folks are not ALL Cowboys. A very real challenge was also the differences in attitude towards authority, accountability and lines of command communication. These differences are known to most and would normally not create any major problems. But when conflicting or tough decisions were called for, such as cost savings, increased workload, reprioritizations, negative feedback etc, these issues pop up as hot bread from a toaster.

Can you give us an example?

- Sure. This is a good one. I spent a week in Beijing with my trusted manager (Chinese). We had a very good relationship and no issues between us. After I left Beijing, the very next day a local executive manager stepped into his office and contradicted the decisions we made together. I can tell you that it’s VERY hard for my guy to say ‘nope – you are not my boss’, especially since my guy was locally employed and could even risk being suspended from promotion evaluation.

For similar reasons it could at times be hard for my local manager to act as a representative (there) of our management team (here) and enforce decisions that met opposition. If there would be a disagreement he risked escalation locally, not to me though, which would have been the right way. And once issues escalated locally – the chance that my guy’s local executive would call me up and asks for advice were slim.

I need to be clear here that although I choose a ‘neutralized’ Chinese example, the problems existed everywhere but in different forms. Sometimes the problem could even be the other way around. Let me give you a funny example. Once, a local executive with a conflicting directive approached my site manager in the US. My guy simply said ‘Piss off, my boss is in Sweden. Call him if you have a problem.’ Although in this particular example he had good reason to react like that, it illustrates the potential problems with global chains of command vs. local culture.

This sounds like problems originating in geographical distance, rather than culture?

- True, but it’s hard to clearly separate the two. But obviously, differences in how people think about stuff like gender, age, education and position of course add to the cocktail. Sending a female Swedish manager to Japan to manage a team of Japanese, in an environment where a majority of managers are male, and they have all worked at least ten years in the company and plan to retire there, is NOT easy. But it can be overcome and it can be really beneficial for everyone involved.

Can you give us an example of a time when there was a clash between cultures?

- There are of course quite a few. One could be that the attitude towards what is acceptable when it comes to jokes that can be perceived as sexist, or that make fun of religion.
Another is the tolerance towards being late for meetings because of a hangover; this differs a lot between southern/eastern Europe and Scandinavia. Another example could be the definition of what an assistant can be expected to carry out. My assistant was once asked by an Asian Gentleman to bring some fresh milk for his coffee. He didn’t exactly score any points with her, to say the least. But back at his office he had a lady that ONLY makes coffee and makes sure there are fresh lemon slices in the water pitchers.

On the other hand, our Asian and US colleagues sometimes marvel at the fact that Swedish managers spend a huge chunk of their time with travel planning, expense reports, invoicing, accounting etc ‘administrating instead of managing’. And a Swedish manager in Asia making his own copies and whom act ignorant to the local hierarchies is soon going to loose all respect. What is right and what is wrong? Hard to tell!

An important lesson for me has been to stop thinking that Swedes always know best, and – even more important – not to give the IMPRESSION that you think so. A strong and well thought through corporate/team policy to regulate what you feel is important is always more efficient than individual do-gooder managers running their own schemes. I’d say trying to treat women and men equal is the only thing I will never compromise with.

Interesting. And what about the language barrier?

- Well, indeed. That’s an obvious one. Sitting in a room, or even worse in a conference call, with people from six countries, with varying patience, language abilities, humour, and communication skills can be a circus at times. And then you need to make sure that everybody leaves the meeting with the same view of what needs to be done, and with an understanding of the urgency level of it all. That is truly a challenge, and if nothing else, very time consuming.

I have been surprised at times by the lax attitude towards enforcing ONE corporate language. Swedes emailing in Swedish because ‘there are only Swedes on the distribution list’ and Japanese executives corresponding with Japanese engineers in Japanese are only two examples of ignoring the potential of ONE common language.

You could of course argue that you need to respect the fact the people have different skill levels when it comes to English. But should that excuse falling back to a language that leaves a majority of the employees in the dark? Should you even be hired as a senior manager/expert without decent command of English? Training and/or stricter screening of new employees combined with enforcing a one-language culture is the key I think.

Do you feel that people from different culture respond differently to leadership?

- Yes, very much so. It’s however hard for me to talk about it without falling into the stereotyping trap. Let me just say that culture-originating difference in attitude towards management can only be overcome by clarity and earning your respect through living your mission and ensuring that everybody under your wings can see the goal and their own role in reaching it.

I also want to kill a common prejudice here by stressing that a very hierarchal, traditional and hard to penetrate leadership culture by no means causes more difficulties for a global enterprise than does a lax, accountability-shy and consensus-ridden ditto from another part of the world.

What in your mind are the benefits of combining the efforts of people with different cultural backgrounds?

- A given but boring fact is that my American direct report has a greater chance of implementing our decisions back in North Carolina than a Swede would have. The same goes for the fact that a Chinese ear to the ground in China picks up more than a Japanese would.
I would also say that the fact that different people that can contribute to the creative process from different angles really adds to the benefit, not different cultures per se. But the likelihood that the spectrum of different angles increase with the spectrum of culture is a given.

The easiest way to go management-wise would of course be to run a single language, single culture, and single country team with the exact right composition of competencies. But what you loose then are the social benefits. You enjoy time together, you learn new ways of thinking, and basically have fun together. All of this most definitely add to the quality of the output. Also, we mustn’t forget the stay-awake effect of a collective effort to keep it together over the borders.

When you first started working with internationally with people and projects in this way, did anything about these operations and this line of work surprise you – for good or bad?

- A positive surprise, and later something I was able to proactively use, was the enormous additional potential and productivity you could unleash by ensuring that every single individual in a global team agree on why, where and how to go about the work to reach the common goals, and also buy into what is expected from the individual in terms of contribution. Over the years I have learnt (of course also from mistakes) that this can not be achieved with emails, PowerPoints and the odd business trip, but have to be massaged into a multi-cultural organisation with a lot of time and face2face meetings invested.

I assume that leading operations of this nature requires a lot of travelling – how important is face-to-face contact with your crew?

- Recognising that business travel as we used to know it is soon a thing of the past, I’d still say face2face to some extent is crucial. Far too many companies, collaborations and projects have failed because people do not know the guy making the decisions and – even worse – maybe haven’t even seen him/her live in the flesh. OF COURSE it’s equally important the other way around. I mean, how can you make the right decisions if you do not know the guy at the receiving end? Then, when the personal connection is made, it’s easier to work remotely, do phone conferences etc.

What skills or traits do you think a leader of cross-cultural teams and operations need to have in order to be successful?

- Make sure you are well read up on the big picture but leave the details to the specialists. Ask questions to learn and to show that you appreciate expertise. Be yourself! Do NOT pretend to be someone else! The team will see right through you and it will be hard to gain back lost respect. Another important trait is to be humble, and arm your self with a lot of patience. Be prepared to explain over and over why the team needs to do what they’re doing, what the other teams are doing (and why) and what benefit it brings to the company. Motivation and agreements are so much more effective than orders and directives (that are oh-so-easy to fall back into sometimes if you are not on your toes)

Being a bit of a social chameleon helps too when you need to feel as home in a stiff boardroom-style meeting in Asia as you must by the cowboy coffee machine run-in in North Carolina. And last but not least you need to listen, enjoy learning, and show that you might not always know best just because you do not eat chicken feet.

Last but not least. You must never forget that it is as hard for a multi-cultural team to be managed by a single-culture manager, as it is for the manager to manage the team. Understanding this and working with it, rather than only marking your emails ‘important’ and bold your title, will help the team a lot.

If you want to get in touch with Anders you can reach him here

Angle Alert!

As always, I try to add a few notes for you to consider when it comes to press ethics and how a journalist works. But there’s really just one thing that’s fishy here, which is that Anders is my cousin. But that just makes him cooler.

Clausewitz

Take for instance a squad of Marines. The team is at the front line, they are there when it happens, they are at the scene. And when reality hits and renders most plans completely useless, (as Carl von Clausewitz, the famous strategist who wrote the classic “On War” is noted to have said: no plans survive contact with the battlefield [UPDATE: Now I hear that it's actually a quote from Helmuth von Moltke the Elder who was inspired by Clausewitz]), they still manage to adapt and overcome and get the job done. We can only hope for this outcome if the teams have the capacity to solve the problems they encounter themselves, without the involvement of others. This means that we need a combination of generalists, people who understand the basics of many things, and experts, that excel in one area. In other words: we have cross disciplined teams, and with the right team assembly, we have a shot at success. The team also has to be self organizing. There is no room for delays, and waiting for directions from a HQ somewhere is sure to slow things down. People at the HQ are not in a position to assess the situation nearly as well as the people at the scene. We need local initiative.

So we have cross disciplined, self organizing teams. That’s a great start. But how can we be sure that this team will work towards the correct goal?
To accomplish this the self organized teams need to understand the wanted outcome of the system in which they operate. One useful method borrowed from the military is the one of “Commanders Intent”. One can find a definition of Commander’s Intent here. It reads like this:

“A concise expression of the purpose of the operation and the desired end state that serves as the initial impetus for the planning process. It may also include the commander’s assessment of the adversary commander’s intent and an assessment of where and how much risk is acceptable during the operation”.

Here they talk about “the desired end state”. This is synonymous to what I throughout this blog have called the end game of things (and what Goldratt calls Global Goals). It’s about pin pointing the wanted outcome of any system. In other words, this is a question of understanding the whole picture. Take for instance the Lean method of asking “the five why’s”, i.e. five questions asked in order to discover root causes of problems. One might express this in terms of curing the disease instead of curing the symptoms. Curing symptoms are temporary solutions. Even with the fix, the system is still broken. Anyone who enjoys “House M.D” should be able to grasp this. Obviously, asking the many “why’s” is also a good practice for understanding the scope of possibilities, not just the scope of problems.

I believe it wise to have what the Poppendieck’s call a “framework” for proceeding – as plans will be subject to change as learning occurs, frameworks provide a space for this learning to occur. Basically this means that instead of getting upset when work fails to happen as planned (and it always does), you build this change into you work and embrace it as a learning possibility.

We enable and empower teams so that they can make even high end decisions themselves. We trust them. No need to involve a massive amount of people with MBA’s who are severely confused whenever they are forced to stray more than five feet from a spreadsheet.

To conclude: What we want is self organizing, cross disciplined teams with a good understanding of the whole system and what it is we want to achieve. Armed with the commander’s intent and a healthy level of trust, we are sure to succeed.

Note: I first read about the concept of “commanders intent” at the excellent Target Process blog here.

It's not war. Photo by: Jayel Aheram

In my mind your goal is to deliver the best product or service possible, your goal is to advice your client on how he or she could achieve his or hers goals in ways they never thought of. In pompous terms borrowed from Seth Godin, your job is to be remarkable.

When you enter a project together with a customer you enter into a collaboration – a relationship even. Just as in any relationship, we need involvement and passion. Much “us-and-them” thinking is floating about creating a lot of tension. There’s a clash between Customer and Client – which of course boils down to “payer of invoice” vs. “sender of invoice”. That’s a business transaction – and that’s probably where all tension originates. Nothing adds pressure as short-sighted financial goals. But this is not war, people. It’s collaboration.

I believe it was in a tweet from Jeff Patton where I caught this spot-on statement:

“We should be more like doctors – helping, and less like waiters – taking orders”.

Well put! How many times have you heard, or maybe even uttered, sentences like: “It’s crap, a road to ruin, but that’s what the customer wants so hey, by any means – let’s go build it, see if I care!”

Now for some prejudice based on experience: If you’re a consultant you’ve probably said the above one too many times yourself. Consultants are the hired guns of our world, and how to work with them intelligently is a whole different chapter for another day.

But back to essentials: All in all, it’s actually really, really easy: The customer has goals, you should go above and beyond in order to help the customer achieve these goals. Here’s where my much repeated mantra returns to haunt you: keep an eye on the end game. What is it really that the customer wants to achieve? This is a question of communication as well as commitment. Communicating what’s possible, what’s realistic and what is not. And committing to the work at hand, – whatever could anyone gain from NOT stepping it up and with solid and well researched arguments direct the customer in the proper direction?

You need to go above and beyond. Should your customer have a lousy process at their end, a process that you KNOW will cause an awful mess, then for the love of Taiichi Ohno, tell them so, and help them improve. If you don’t – go find yourself a line of work where such indifferent behavior is accepted. On the top of my head I can’t really think of one. But as you know, Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

It might be that this calls for a different breed of project managers, or maybe a different team setup – a configuration of people for whom system thinking and understanding of business goals is well rooted. A team where everyone involved truly understands the big picture and not only the role they themselves play. In my world, this means making designers and hackers take at least a minor interest in economics, law, marketing and other areas not directly associated with what they are hired to do. Difficult, but not impossible.

And again: a goal is an end game. I will repeat this until my nose bleeds. Helping your customer reach his or hers end game, even if this means not taking the job because what your customer really need is something you can’t offer.

Helping your customer excel. That’s the only success factor you should be interested in.

Johanna Olsson of BoostHbg

First, in the interest of full disclosure, I should of course mention that the interview person here is actually my fiancée. In the world of journalism that’s a no-go. But since this is a blog, and not a publication guided by press ethics, we can throw caution to the wind and get our hands dirty without a second thought. But as the content in this blog now takes a step away from solely traditional blog style opinion pieces, I will make further use of the opportunity and discuss the subject of professional journalism vs. amateur blogging. An interesting text about this written by Andreas Ekström, entitled “We must be better than the amateurs” can be found here (sorry, Swedish only).
I will discuss these matters at the end of each piece under the clever headline Angle Alert! In the same spirit, my opinion pieces will end with an even cleverer headline called Stay Sceptic!, where I urge you to read whatever I write critically. Finally, please note that I have translated this interview from Swedish, so if the tone of language sounds familiar, I guess we know why.

Enough said. I hope you will enjoy this interview with Johanna Olsson of BoostHbg.

So, Johanna, please enlighten us, what is a Cross Media Lab anyways?

- The shapes and forms of a cross media lab can vary depending on the facilitator. The lowest common denominator is that a group of people with skills from a range of different types of media come together for a limited time period to experiment using their combined knowledge. Usually this happens under the guidance of a facilitator.

I see. And what’s the goal here?

- This too can vary, as well as the construction of the group. For instance, in our case we have a focus on moving media. This is just to clarify where we have our base though. If we want to be able to change how we think about our industry, we need to include people from others areas as well as allow for the emerging ideas and products to land outside of our moving media definitions. Now, even if the goals can vary, they are all spawned from the same identified need: the lack of common ground in co-production. Which is to say a lack of common understanding, common knowledge and common processes. In a lab such as ours, focused on moving media, we do have a common ground in the sense that we all work in industries such as film, TV, the game industry, web, and mobile – which are all in a sense moving media. And even if we all work with basically the same thing, the way we work vary a lot. These great variations with regards to creative and workflow processes are what make co-production such a hassle. And if this was not enough of a struggle, add to this that people in general have no idea what their own process looks like.

- With these problem areas as a starting point one can choose to pursue various goals, a part from the obvious which is to see what kind of magic will come out of letting these creative people work together for a few days. In our lab we have three main goals.

- First: we want the individuals in the group to develop their own creative process and be inspired. We want them to learn from each other, and find new angles to their own work. As it turns out, all industries have some weaknesses in their production process, but at times, one industry’s weakness is another’s strength.

- Second: we also want to build cross industry networks. Sadly, the case today is that there is little interaction and communication “across genres”, so to speak. It goes without saying that this makes collaboration more difficult.

- And finally, our third goal is to have created a few projects that have sprung from a collaborative effort where everyone’s input is traceable. These projects will be true cross media projects in the sense that they have sprung from a collaborative process of idea generation and development. The final product does not necessarily have to have a leg in each industry though. It can still be “just” a film, but the narrative technique can be borrowed from the gaming industry, and the method of distribution can be inspired by how the web people work.

Inspiring stuff. But how does it work more specifically?

- In our case, we start with a long planning process, where we set our goals, explore the needs, set up our core values and find our participants. We use several established models to set this up, such as the Team Performance model and the AI 4-D. We use these models as a framework to lean on. In this way we know where to start, we know where to finish and we know what must happen in between. Then we go into detail. We have hundreds of models, tools and exercises prepared, but they’re really just there so that we can discard them at a later stage. Everything of interest happens at the scene, and that’s when and where it really gets determined what tools are necessary to move the process along. As the saying goes, we strive to be “over prepared and under structured”.

- During the lab we want to be 100 percent loyal to the group. Sure, we know where we are heading, and where we want to be, but the group must make that journey by their own accord. We’ve got the tools, but it’s up to them to respond. This makes a lab quite straining, both mentally and physically. We use two facilitators so that one of us can concentrate on reading the group to see where we loose people and which emotions are triggered by which input.

- More hands on, the Lab starts with a day where the group gathers knowledge and inspiration. We supply lecturers that can provide this. As everyone in the group all have different starting points, and different terminology, these lecturers give the group a common ground to stand on when it comes to terminology. It really doesn’t matter if the terminology is “accurate”, the important part is that they share a common terminology. For instance, for the participants in this Lab some core words were “heart blood”, “pollination” and “myspacemange”. This means nothing to you and me, but for the group the meaning of these words is obvious.

- We also strive to build trust and understanding within the group. During the progression of the Lab we work with idea generation, audience analysis, idea- focus, selection, and deepening as well as industry inventory. We then move on to developing the projects that emerge from these processes. We also try to pin point what the term “cross media” means to the group. During the process we have lecturers that can help deepen the understanding of various aspects, as well as “lifelines”, i.e. experts in various areas that the group can contact with questions.

- The lab is carried out in an isolated area, away from distractions, in this case an old snowed in brewery situated in the south Swedish countryside. We fill the facilities with game consoles, computers, film, cameras, writing material and more. Something interesting happens when you can see, touch and feel various materials and tools. The respect for these gadgets disappears as the understanding deepens, and they become your tools, not tools just to be used by experts.

- Like I said, this is hard work. For this reason we also provide small events to allow for reflection and relaxation. In this case there was chocolate testing, massage, and dinners. These events are important for the creative process, but it’s also interesting to see how the group reacts to them. Some become more focused, some less.

- At the end of the first four days of work, a few weeks of solo work ensues, and after this we arrange for the group to pitch their projects to possible investors. This is followed by a day of evaluation.

How did you find the participants?

- Finding the right group of people is mission critical. It’s not just a question of finding people with the right set of skills; it’s also a question of finding a dynamic group assembly. Furthermore, the people involved must be open to experimentation and have a general ability to just let go and throw themselves out there.

- The application process has been quite demanding. We have had applications sent to us for consideration, and we have managed to find some participants through recommendations. As we look for diversity in the group, we have been forced to turn very competent people away as their profiles have been too similar to other applicants.

- When we had filled all moving media positions, we went on the prowl for “jokers”, i.e. people from other disciplines and forms of expression that can really offer a fresh angle to the subject. In this Lab, for instance, we had a playwright and an art collage student. The group was really amazing, not just with regards to their attitude, but also in terms of diversity. We had a game designer who’s also a poet, and a filmmaker who has won a large game pitch.

So, who ended up participating in the Lab?

Drazen Kuljanin, Filmmaker, Arkey
Nick Schröder, TV producer, Maj maj måne

Daniel Bernhoff, Game designer, Planeto

Pål Hedberg, playwright
Michaela Schmeidt, AD, Mis-printed

Johanna Stillman, Art Collage student
Klara Lewin, Documentary filmmaker
Tobias Lundqvist, Filmmaker

Are you happy with the outcome?

- I am. But the Lab is really only half finished, since the pith and the evaluation remains to be done. But yeah, so far I’m really, really pleased with the outcome. In many ways this was a dream process. It’s never a good sign if things run too smoothly, and in this case there was not much friction from a team perspective, but they did continuously halt and questioned, even revolted, against the concept of Cross Media. It’s quite the luxury to have to have a group that trust in the process, but still deliver surprises. We were constantly forced to change direction, find new perspectives and directions. The stuff that surfaced was incredibly exiting, for me as well as for the participants.

Speaking of which: how did the participants feel about the experience?

- From what I’ve gathered, they are very happy about the experience. That’s the best thing about a Lab; it’s virtually impossible NOT to get something out of the experience. Even if we disregard the whole journey of being carried trough a process, being forced to battle with convictions and conventions, workflows and new ideas 24 hours a day for a few days, on a weird place with toys and lecturers, lifelines and massage, the impact of the meeting itself remains. Meeting seven people and getting to know them on another level than one usually get’s to know people, joining them in frustration and facing challenges together, giving as well as receiving knowledge. This seldom leaves anyone untouched.

I can believe that. So, what happens now?

- Right now we’re in the middle of things. Four primary projects emerged from the lab and the participants are now working with these projects with the support of BoostHbg. In a later stage they will pitch their ideas and hopefully find a way forward beyond that. After the pitch and the evaluation we let them go out on their own. Then we start all over again.
All in all we will arrange four labs, and we build on the experience of previous labs, tweaking the set up as we learn more. It’s really a luxury project for me as I have the opportunity to develop this concept and deepen my understanding of this kind of process. The next Lab is scheduled for September.

Sounds great. I wish you all the very best for the future. And thank you for finding the time to answer my questions.

- You’re welcome.

If you want more information please feel free to contact johanna@boosthbg.se

Angle Alert!

So, as I promised earlier, here are a few notes for you to consider when it comes to press ethics and how a journalist works:

Now ask yourself: Is there an agendum here, hidden or otherwise? Is this text serving a master somewhere? How is the text written? Shouldn’t I’ve made the effort to talk to others than just Johanna about this? Is this journalism or a piece of writing that could have been produced at a PR department somewhere? Is there a difference – and does it matter? What about the form – a straight up Q&A, is that a good way to publish interviews? I leave these questions out there for your consideration.