'Creative-Class Consulting' - Weapons Grade Business Thinking

Business is tired of the old tools for solving problems. 

Things like changing course, creating a new vision or building successful strategy for the enterprise. It's an open secret that the tools and techniques being used are no longer fit for purpose.

So too business is tired of the consulting industry. Consulting is a good idea but it is just failing to cut it. We know it as the act of observing, analysing and advising others from a position of experience. But it has been abused by those wishing to use it as 'cover' for selling expensive software or an extensive boiling of the ocean for its own ends. Solving the wrong problems really well!

The 'idea' of consulting has to be revisited. It has to be elevated by many notches if it is regain it's prestige position. And especially if is to deliver the value required by today's leaders. This new order means a complete redefinition of consulting. Consulting needs to deepen its value in every direction if it is to cover the new dimensions required by clients in the turmoil of todays business context. 

Enter what I call – 'Creative-Class Consulting' – weapons grade thinking and solutions for business.

Two alternative scenario's I read recently -

In 2010 an IBM survey of more than 1,500 global CEOs discovered that 79% of chief executives anticipate facing greater complexity in the future than they do today. Doh! We are surprised that that figure isn't higher – like 100%. The statistic suggested that the ideas, and experience of a single senior leader will not be sufficient for the successful sailing of the enterprise super–tanker through the tsunamis and tornados ahead. Greater creativity and collaborative endeavour will be required if game-changing ideas are to be generated.

And 2…

In 2007 –19 senior managers of GE Power Generation – one of the company's oldest businesses – convened at GE's management development center in Crotonville, N.Y. It was the first time that all of the senior executives of a GE business had been through leadership training together. The result? They created a framework for thinking, drafted a vision statement and developed plans for growth, including focusing on regulatory and other staff in emerging markets, which is now a key area in GE's overall strategy. In just four days, the team efficiently devised, agreed upon, and began implementing a unified strategy. 

Why?

Creativity achieved in close collaboration by a passionate team. That was the key to GE's success - no matter how much employees might admire a single figurehead – ideas remain only ideas until a team of people makes them real, profitable, and scalable over the long-term. 

How can anyone disagree with this reality? The question is why isn't this now the traditional way to do this – every time? Why do we still find silos of thinking, subjective and opinionated advise, partial thinking, self-serving and amateurish (inexperienced) managers. I could go on.

'Creative-Class Consulting' - Turning chaos theory into chaos practice.

Well as always, there's a lot of noise about a lot of stuff going down at the moment. The business world knows that it needs new tools and techniques to fix all the sticky problems it faces. But where to turn? Silver bullets are flying around - easy fixes and things to say (and do) – things like – collaboration/co–creation, disruptive creativity, social business and networking, innovative business models (eco–systems/value networks) and the inevitable leverage of the latest technology fad – the cloud. 

As Tom Peters said - "Crazy times calls for crazy people." 

Crazy because alongside these new ideas, the fads that business wants to embrace, remain the basics that still aren't fixed. In reality we would agree with the sentiment and requirement of some of this stuff but it isn't going to be enough.

Let's remember – the way the organisation has been designed to work in a world that no longer exists. Inappropriate behaviours and cultures that have been conditioned over generations by poor leadership, lack of inspiration or motivation. Indistinct visions, operating models, processes and systems. Add to this the lack of talent and the conditioned attitudes to risk and the picture is a complex one.

And add to all of this the political and global systems that are geared to persistent and unsustainable shareholder growth (City analysts expectations). Creative thinking is a business imperative.

Crazy People. Not so Crazy Idea.

Creative thinkers may often be called the crazy people but they are the salvation. They are required alongside (and directing) what we used to think of as the traditional consulting service. We need the people with the capability to master all this stuff – but they will have to have some experience – valid context and possibly even a few case studies to base intelligent judgement on. 

Paradoxically if the problems are all so new then how can anyone have the experience or track record to deliver it?

This new 'creative-class' of consultant needs to be able to drive strong points of view out of an ability to think the crazy thoughts. They need to be able to compel vitally new emotions and carry the team with them as they do it. They need to know how to balance curiosity, contradiction and conflict. They need to know how to channel their personal obsession for creative thinking whilst exploiting both deep vertical and general knowledge. Their role is to 'create' some direction out of the complex patterns of the known and unknown contexts. They can combine insightful moments of intense immersion with high-intensity collaborative work in varied teams and dispersed working groups. 

You would have to be crazy to want to do this. 

The Not So New Context

Business is a soup, a chaotic context of sliced and diced bits - a cacophony of moving parts - entities and agents, degrees of understanding and maturity. Forces and dynamics that compound and confound even the most capable of leaders. Running the traditional business was hard enough – now add to that the 21st Century set of challenges - "Do it all at less cost and higher quality with better returns on every $ spent. Now."

This is not new anymore.

The rise of the social business (social network) has created 'virtually-real' communities. It's a matter of time before people will conduct the majority of their business transactions this way. They are becoming comfortable working through these platforms and as we all become more fluent in their use and their ability to mirror real–life transactions then another paradigm gets smashed to pieces.

Eco-systems and value networks mean that complex business ideas/models can now be delivered simultaneously by multiple people globally – that has changed everything. The ubiquitous idea of the 'cloud' means that businesses can support a diverse and mobile workforce without the need for traditional buildings and infrastructure. 

Real-time working collaboration and co-creation of value is now no longer an idea. It is here. We are now used to the way these platforms work and the power that they can deliver. With the rise of the iPad and yet more sophisticated hand-held devices the way the business thinks and works has changed forever.

So…

Creative-Class Consulting heralds the next era of practical solutions for business. 

The sort of consulting that can help business to navigate the immense complexity of the 21st Century. Fundamentally it is calling for an entirely new competence to emerge from within an existing paradigm. It needs the skills of qualified 'consultants' but now has to embrace the idea of creativity at the edge. It has to master the ability to hold and nourish all these things in the heads of a wide team of people from differing perspectives while allowing the emergence of value and sustained success for the business. 

“I want to stand as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all the kinds of things you can't see from the centre. We have to continually be jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the way down.” – Kurt Vonnegut

What others are saying

I really take a lot of encouragement from the vast amount written and debated about this topic. I drag fragments from all over the place about these ideas and here are a collection of just some of them.

On Innovation & Dynamics

"Is innovation the result of the prophetic reflections of lone creative geniuses, or instead the fruit of the collaboration of a group of talented contributors working together?"

"Bringing an innovative product or service to market involves a multitude of vectors. Imagine them individually stretched amidst the opposing constraints that often define their conceptual and practical boundaries (time to market, development cycles, user experience, technical feasibility, branding, business models, just to name a few). Now imagine all these vectors as taut guitar strings, one alongside the other. Imagine fine-tuning each string so that it’s in harmony with all the other ones when they are strummed together. Imagine this being not a one-off task, but a near-continuous activity that a talented musician needs to constantly perform as he or she is playing, not before.

"Does innovation come pushing out ideas that start as flashes of individual insight, or from taking the time to learn what users want?"

On Capability & Creativity

"Creative people can work while holding opposing thoughts in their heads. Their is a preconception that designers are industrial artists that purely rely on their intuition to give shape to their solutions. Not so. The truth is that designers often confidently leap off an unstable conceptual platform – and into an empty pool and a hard landing."

"There is no single specific behavioural trait, methodological approach, or carefully selected set of contextual factors that guarantees success in the ability to think differently and translate that thinking into success in the market."

"Change is continuous and unavoidable. the most productive way to become adaptable is to make flexibility part of your culture there are many ways this can be done: from sketching first and specking later leads to fast execution and exploitation of opportunities to developing a trusted network of suppliers and freelancers allows you to respond to specific needs as and when required to allocating an 'ad-hoc' budget that can be spent where and when needed for greatest impact, keeps you quick on your feet and ensures faster turnaround the competitive advantage of flexibility and adaptability is extreme, as it gives your competition a limited view of what your next move might be

On Ambiguity & Collaboration

"Successful creative thinkers see opposites and apparently contradicting goals not just as a potential for dissonance, but as an opportunity for dynamic harmony. To paraphrase one of Walt Whitman’s most famous verses “creative thinkers are vast, they contain multitudes.” And to paraphrase F. Scott Fitzgerald, the mark of a truly intelligent person is the ability to still function while holding two, opposing ideas in their head. Creativity is inherently inclusive. And that applies whether the creative thinker is a designer, artist, technologist, or CEO."

"The truth does not lie in the extremes, and definitely also not in the middle. The truth lies in harnessing the positive tension between the extremes, and fine-tuning it until it resonates with what current technologies can enable and with what intended consumers and end-users are ready to adopt in a given sociocultural economic context."

"Collaborating adds extreme stability to an organisation by the combined power of support from others it ensures that other skills and capabilities can be collectively used to build more value…"

"It’s simply wrong to see brainstorming in opposition to solitary thinking, or user research as antithetical to disruptive innovation. These apparently opposing approaches are actually complementary, and effective innovators already use them as such, picking the right mind-frame and the accompanying tools and methodologies according to the specificities of the challenge at hand."

On Disruption & Semantics

"When it comes to talking about progress, disruption can be both a powerful and confusing word. It's emotionally charged, high risk and crucial for business success. Fortunately, the current vogue for disruption holds a different promise, one that creates tremendous opportunity, for brands or governments. Despite its fierce-sounding nomenclature, disruption is not ultimately a harbinger of revolution but rather the basis of a competitive reset founded on the fundamentals of good customer - or citizen - engagement."

"Historically, it seems we’ve arrived at a moment where disruption has succeeded revolution as a meme of historical change, providing us with better results and a fresher understanding of who our customers are and what they need."

Posted via email from Just Thinking!

Plain Journeys 2. Love - Getting Good At Stopping

If you read the start of Plain Journeys 1 - 'Viakal, The Universe & Everything' - then you will know what's going on here below. If you didn't then shame on you. Go and read it.

Whilst reflecting on our genetic legacy Alexander Von Humboldt journeyed through Venezuela in 1799 and remarked so profoundly –  

"In the evening when the sky denotes rain, the air resounds with the monotonous howling of the alouate apes, which resemble the distant sound of wind when it shakes the forest. Yet amid these strange sounds, these wild forms of plants, and these prodigies of a new world, nature everywhere speaks to man in a voice familiar to him."

I got a shiver when I first came across that fragment of text. The shiver was as much because I didn't understand it the first time I read it and because, when the penny dropped, I realised just how much meaning passes me by every day - without any problem. How awful is that! It is a criminal act that I don't stop, reflect, cogitate and get the meaning from everything. And then I got another shiver realising that that isn't going to happen either. No way. Not a chance. Too much stuff!

"Life has no meaning unless one lives it with a will, at least to the limit of one's will. Virtue, good, evil are nothing but words, unless one takes them apart in order to build something with them; they do not win their true meaning until one knows how to apply them." - Paul Gauguin

So there you have it - and I'm right with Paul the painter. He did everything he could to live life to the full and admittedly made some fairly bonkers choices along the way but at least he showed ambition and presumably did all his deeds with some conscious knowledge and forethought. Well he picked great places to go for his holidays right?

He managed to get some meaning into his life and he certainly used his imagination. What he put that imagination to also resulted in some amazing deliverables. I'm sure he would have said with hindsight that he had a plan. Ambition too - Gaugin would most probably have disagreed violently with Mr Wittgenstein - but then a lot of people did.

"Ambition is the death of thought." - Ludwig Wittgenstein

I've long puzzled with that statement. I get the blinded by ambition bit - and the frontal lobotomy that that the brain can inflict on itself when it is driven by blind intention and maybe I'm being semantic but I have ambition and it actually drives my thought and makes me become more imaginative. I get to be disruptive about my own vision and mission just to test that it is the best thing for me to want to be doing – ever.

I guess I would say I have designed my life that way – to re-imagine the world around me – to think everything through to help me achieve my ambition. I guess Ludwig would have me believe that I should just think without any ambition attached and see what best thing emerges and go with that. Keep exploring by new thinking. So if that is correct then given my relationship with the AA (Alouate Apes) then I would naturally side with the French Captain when he suggests that – "Imagination rules the world." - Napoleon I – is that Treason?

As it turns out yes. And anyway I now know what Wittgenstein meant. He was spot on!

They say that "Design is about causing a radical change in meaning." Re-building our world needs that more than ever. And this level of disruption is most likely to come from people who you are least familiar with and likely – initially anyway – to disagree with. Like Mr Wittgenstein for example. A gathering of rebels constantly forming themselves into groups of others who are also operating outside of your current comfort zone.

The problem with too much reliance on what we know and how comfortable we are with anything is that it tries to make us at ease - when what we often need is to be uncomfortable, uncertain, in doubt and to act differently. This is harder and harder to do in large societies and of course in large organisations. How do we get comfortable with what we don't know? Stuff we don't feel comfortable with?

We have to challenge everything – even that which we preach. Even that which we speak to and obstinately call our ambition. Our own personal goals and objectives. We can't just accept that they are right or what we need anymore. We just can't. Wittgenstein has made his point - the smart ass.

You will shiver when you read the following the second time. It will make you realise the meaning that you simply don't get. Simply.

"I will not talk about the importance of design, every company knows that. I will not talk about user centered innovation, every company knows that you need to look at users to understand how to do innovation. I will not talk about the importance of having ideas, we have seen right now that there are plenty of ideas around. It’s so easy to have ideas. It’s so difficult to have visions.

Designers have been much less the visionaries than they used to be. There’s been a movement against the designer who had a vision - everything was just transformed into processes. If you look at how designers have evolved in the past ten years - if you buy books on design, everything is about the processes. You know, creativity, brainstorming, ethnography, metals – the tools. And actually the effect is that designers are looking much more like businessmen and MBA students today than they used to be, and they risk losing the capability of vision.

Design is not about styling. It’s not about technology. It’s about radical change in meaning. These are the things that people were not asking for, but when they saw them, they fell in love.” - Roberto Verganti

To be continued…

Posted via email from Just Thinking!

Plain Journeys 2. Love - Getting Good At Stopping

If you read the start of Plain Journeys 1 - 'Viakal, The Universe & Everything' - then you will know what's going on here below. If you didn't then shame on you. Go and read it.

Whilst reflecting on our genetic legacy Alexander Von Humboldt journeyed through Venezuela in 1799 and remarked so profoundly –  

"In the evening when the sky denotes rain, the air resounds with the monotonous howling of the alouate apes, which resemble the distant sound of wind when it shakes the forest. Yet amid these strange sounds, these wild forms of plants, and these prodigies of a new world, nature everywhere speaks to man in a voice familiar to him."

I got a shiver when I first came across that fragment of text. The shiver was as much because I didn't understand it the first time I read it and because, when the penny dropped, I realised just how much meaning passes me by every day - without any problem. How awful is that! It is a criminal act that I don't stop, reflect, cogitate and get the meaning from everything. And then I got another shiver realising that that isn't going to happen either. No way. Not a chance. Too much stuff!

"Life has no meaning unless one lives it with a will, at least to the limit of one's will. Virtue, good, evil are nothing but words, unless one takes them apart in order to build something with them; they do not win their true meaning until one knows how to apply them." - Paul Gauguin

So there you have it - and I'm right with Paul the painter. He did everything he could to live life to the full and admittedly made some fairly bonkers choices along the way but at least he showed ambition and presumably did all his deeds with some conscious knowledge and forethought. Well he picked great places to go for his holidays right?

He managed to get some meaning into his life and he certainly used his imagination. What he put that imagination to also resulted in some amazing deliverables. I'm sure he would have said with hindsight that he had a plan. Ambition too - Gaugin would most probably have disagreed violently with Mr Wittgenstein - but then a lot of people did.

"Ambition is the death of thought." - Ludwig Wittgenstein

I've long puzzled with that statement. I get the blinded by ambition bit - and the frontal lobotomy that that the brain can inflict on itself when it is driven by blind intention and maybe I'm being semantic but I have ambition and it actually drives my thought and makes me become more imaginative. I get to be disruptive about my own vision and mission just to test that it is the best thing for me to want to be doing – ever.

I guess I would say I have designed my life that way – to re-imagine the world around me – to think everything through to help me achieve my ambition. I guess Ludwig would have me believe that I should just think without any ambition attached and see what best thing emerges and go with that. Keep exploring by new thinking. So if that is correct then given my relationship with the AA (Alouate Apes) then I would naturally side with the French Captain when he suggests that – "Imagination rules the world." - Napoleon I – is that Treason?

As it turns out yes. And anyway I now know what Wittgenstein meant. He was spot on!

They say that "Design is about causing a radical change in meaning." Re-building our world needs that more than ever. And this level of disruption is most likely to come from people who you are least familiar with and likely – initially anyway – to disagree with. Like Mr Wittgenstein for example. A gathering of rebels constantly forming themselves into groups of others who are also operating outside of your current comfort zone.

The problem with too much reliance on what we know and how comfortable we are with anything is that it tries to make us at ease - when what we often need is to be uncomfortable, uncertain, in doubt and to act differently. This is harder and harder to do in large societies and of course in large organisations. How do we get comfortable with what we don't know? Stuff we don't feel comfortable with?

We have to challenge everything – even that which we preach. Even that which we speak to and obstinately call our ambition. Our own personal goals and objectives. We can't just accept that they are right or what we need anymore. We just can't. Wittgenstein has made his point - the smart ass.

You will shiver when you read the following the second time. It will make you realise the meaning that you simply don't get. Simply.

"I will not talk about the importance of design, every company knows that. I will not talk about user centered innovation, every company knows that you need to look at users to understand how to do innovation. I will not talk about the importance of having ideas, we have seen right now that there are plenty of ideas around. It’s so easy to have ideas. It’s so difficult to have visions.

Designers have been much less the visionaries than they used to be. There’s been a movement against the designer who had a vision - everything was just transformed into processes. If you look at how designers have evolved in the past ten years - if you buy books on design, everything is about the processes. You know, creativity, brainstorming, ethnography, metals – the tools. And actually the effect is that designers are looking much more like businessmen and MBA students today than they used to be, and they risk losing the capability of vision.

Design is not about styling. It’s not about technology. It’s about radical change in meaning. These are the things that people were not asking for, but when they saw them, they fell in love.” - Roberto Verganti

To be continued…

Posted via email from Just Thinking!

Plain Journeys 1. Viakal, The Universe & Everything

 

I apologise in advance if what you are about to read seems familiar.

I realise that I can be quite monotonous about some things. For example I write often about - 'Systems That Are Utterly Useless' - (Politics, Banking, Airport Security). 'An Institutionalised Lack Of Creativity' (School, Business, Politics) - and 'My Own Curiosity About Random Things' (Systems, Creativity, Viakal).

So this little ramble finds me sitting on a plane killing old e-mails. I just came across a draft entitled - 'Things that should inspire me to riff on/off.' - basically very worthy odds and sods from things - blogs, articles, signs in streets - that I fall over and keep to inspire me. So I am. Let's see what happens?

"The allure of a great mind is the startling originality of the insights it produces." - Dean Simonton 

Isn't it wonderful when you find a small fragment – a sentence like that one that just has enough unusual but right words in it to spark another thought or a visual idea in your head? - Allure and mind, originality and insight all crashed together to create a mighty fine phrase that fashions a new axiom. 

Dean was on fine form - in whatever I was reading (and I don't know who Dean is by the way) - because he went on to espouse very profoundly - 

"With rare exceptions, the lone genius is a myth. Creative genius is almost always embedded in a rich network of distinguished predecessors and contemporaries."

Corr-ect! And to me very interesting that it can happen at all just now. Especially given the permanently intense and increasingly bizarre – impossible to navigate - web of a world we've all gone and created. Part train wreck of competing societies – each sitting unhappily beside one another. Part humans trying to understand an ever more chaotic world - newly filled with mind-boggling technologies and gadgets themselves quickly becoming the next commodity. And finally part Frankenstein – demonically interconnected, constructed by hideous designers - wrought in a completely unfathomable way by generations of sinister conditioning – we often call that consumerism. Take it away Steve -

"A great mind has to make the connections - to bring together apparently unrelated bits of information into a coherent whole. It's an ability to make intellectual leaps between seemingly unconnected subjects." - Steve Jones

Bring 'em on! I seriously hope we find some new great minds and fast. I am optimistic that they are out there. In fact I would guarantee it. The concern I have is that they won't step forward in time to save us. More worrying is that they would rightly fear the intense media scrutiny over whether they once smoked a doll, bit some leather thong, or supported the use of the apostrophe in Waterstones - rendering them sub-human and the fair object of derision and water boarding. 

"Ninety-nine percent of all the species that ever lived are now extinct." - E.O.Wilson

To be continued…

Posted via email from Just Thinking!

The Night Train Part 1 - The Language of Familiarity.

Like flying, it's a very poor nights sleep - but with the night train you never leave the runway. 

As you finally fall out the other end, dishevelled and fatigued you feel like an unpaid extra in Dr Chicago. Awful. They should change the livery from 'Sleeper' to something truthful. I had no idea that railway lines were designed to keep you awake and not lull you to sleep with that familiar repetition. 

At some point during the night the train changed direction - as I peered out the scenery seemed to be propelling me south - back to London. It was endless. A nightmare loop of horror. 

Totally confusing.

Am feeling like my eyes are still in London - but I'm very far north. It's not midday yet but it's already getting dark. Thankfully the hotelier makes reasonable coffee but the Muzak remains a toxic loop of those bloody awful life threatening seasonal songs that you love to loathe. Early darkness suggests warm and pleasant evenings in front of a fire. Meaningful conversation, good food and safety.

In these parts the locals only passion is being in the bar by 10am! 

A thunderous disco kept me awake all night.

I left this bizarre base camp early the following morning, now 36 hours without sleep and head north by 4 Wheel Drive. Into the unknown. A forbidding and mountainous horizon.

“Remember that the most beautiful things in the world are the most useless; peacocks and lilies, for instance.” - John Ruskin

The least populated part of our island, the last great wilderness, the Celtic Fringe. A place where blood once flowed into impossibly bleak moors. Incredible beauty. Driving through incredible storms, clouds below and all around - through the village with more rainfall than the Amazon rain-forest. 

In spite of everything you have ever been told the local people are in fact rather unpleasant. Pissed off most likely with 14 months in every 12 being blasted by an incessant universal un-forgiveness. I felt I had left the last smile a long way behind.

Be careful who you sit next to - ever. Really. 

"No the wi-fi doesn't work. Ha Ha. I do miss the typewriter anyway. I love the sound of the keys. They send me back to my night school. We keep cats, lots of them. I commute – do you? Have you seen the Otters? Are you from London?"

Now literally hundreds of miles from anywhere how come I have to sit next to other people - especially those that I don't want to. And why are they within ear-shot. Within touching distance. It's wrong. I'm agitated. And increasingly. I paid a lot of money to be on my own. It's dinner for goodness sake. I'm not being unfair but these are the type of people I would happily sign documents to be kept from. To ensure I never met them. Ever.

"We've been here six times before. We get on the night train 45 minutes before it leaves, just so that we can eat. We love it so much. We know the crew. They know us really well. They change."

I ignore them. Outside the bleak house it's all kicking off. The storm - a truly amazing experience - immense power and noise. Yet inside the bleak house I'm somehow forced to hear the deluded ramblings of plankton. I can't switch them off. 

No I will not tell you what roads I came up here on. Fuck off! 

Incredible beauty, wet as hell. The sea and the sky are one - each alive with white spray. They are at one but also seem to hate each other. Impossible to part them - each a persistent and wholly diabolical force. Both so immense and awe inspiring that it took away any sense of anything. Time, selfishness, breath, balance, football results. The noise in incredible. Comparable only to the awful din next to me – ridiculous conversation carried out with incessant glee by horrible people who live, and should have stayed, way south of here. 

Nature is trying to speak to me but there are retards doing their best to break into my head. They are abusing me. They are now debating the best method of dispensing the ashes of their (most recent) cat. I could help there.

And so it goes. 

There's a really important conversation going on all around me and I'm processing it in my head. Stuff I really want to listen to. Stuff I came here to understand. Me. It's a mashup - a confusion of new voices. I haven't been properly introduced to them.  

Black clouds sit on top of blacker clouds. Everything is wet, even the horizontal rain is being poured on by more rain - and that is wetter yet. Incredible. Somehow, and miraculously, stupid sheep cling onto vertical rocks with their jaws. They are in search of bits of grass that are surely dissolving. Battered incessantly by raindrops the size of cricket balls shot out of medieval cannon. 

The security of the City, I convince myself, means I have control over my existence there. I've left the City. The soundtrack here is just plain bleak. Bleak Is the word. Insanely, beautifully bleak. Bleak - First Class.

My body and my multiple minds tell me conflicting things. I'm not ready to leave the City. I want wild open spaces, I don't want wild open spaces. I want the solitude and creativity of the wilderness, I want very high-speed broadband and home delivery. Crap. I'm torn. 

The Storm Of The Eye

The storm shouts out very loudly now, demanding the full attention from its audience. Earth, Wind & Fire is on stage and the show is in full flight. The guy on the lighting and effects mixer is sheer genius. The amplifiers are set to 11. Waves bigger than houses pound away at impossibly formed rocks - they are all stars. 

The roof of the shack stays firmly put. 5 days now. 4 days of 60-80 mph storms and I'm still entirely captivated by it. It's all so beautifully chaotic. At times it's impossible to separate the sky, the sea, the river or the land. Separated from it all only by plate glass and a shared language. The days are never light - this far north it's a permanent dusk fading to pitch black. The sounds remain gale force, the visuals are comprehensive both in their range of colours and their unexplainableness. All so intensely beautiful. A feast for the eyes.

As with any live orchestra - no recording can do justice.

The natural force of the storm is quite literally breathtaking. If there were words to describe it then language would be the more powerful for it but we have insufficient tools in words alone. The storm speaks in a voice that I recognise but can't really engage with - certainly not as I would want. I watch spellbound but would rather be fully integrated into it. Consumed.

It takes a while to translate voices in your head. In my case decades. Intense storms and the power of nature has a way of highlighting the ridiculousness of ones own thought processes. I've been privileged to be embedded inside the wrath of nature for days here and yet oddly juxtaposed with the kind of excruciating humanity I would seek to avoid at all costs normally. In the remotest part of the island thrown together with sidelined x-factor contestants. Out of control and in the extremes of natural events. 

I intensely dislike overhearing other peoples conversations. I know some people like it. I hate it. It takes me out of the spell of a reality I only just found.

Posted via email from Just Thinking!

2012 - Consulting is Dead. (Jumping off the 'Snake Oil' Train)

"No I'm not a bloody consultant!"

I never accept dinner party invitations anyway but I was unavoidably thrust next to people over dinner recently and luckily wasn't asked what I did. That was probably because I wasn't dressed in your typical hill-walking, shepherding, hunting, shooting or deep-sea fishing garb – so they daren't ask. I usually dress like a terrorist.

But I was ready.

"I'm helping to prove or disprove the Higgs-Boson." No?

"Well actually I've been asked to trial super fast broadband in the Outer Hebrides so that local people can stop making useless effigies of 'Hamish the Lighthouse God' from roadkill and driftwood."

In fact anything but say -

"I am a creative person on a mission to change the consulting industry."

People are interested in the 'creative' part but visibly shrink when I get to the word 'consultant.' Rather like the Grim Reaper arriving at a baptism or that unfortunate introduction to an Estate Agent/Insurance Broker with the damp handshake - it's effective.

What's wrong with consulting?

It doesn't work. Well that's extreme but I've lost count of the number of clients who have complained to me about consultants in the last year. They usually tell me something like that as they arrive to be shown how we work. They are quick to make remarks like these as they hear the words 'business issues', 'innovation' and 'valuable outcomes' in the same breath. They recoil in horror and shock as if some massive granite ball just blocked their exit from our offices - Raiders Of The Lost Ark style. As if they have been compromised in a way they vowed never to be again.

On a bad day clients will state that consultants are any one or more of the following - too expensive, don't deliver what they said they would, take too long, get viewed as the enemy by the enterprise (making their strategies hard to follow through to deployment), are far too often self-serving - oh, and they lack innovation or creativity. Other than that!

Progress or Die!

They will also say that they are in a pact with the devil because they don't have the skill or capability in house. They say they are trapped. I will say politely that I would like to disprove that.

Is it the fault of consultants that they get such bad press? Well yes. They all know it's getting to be a problem. Of course there are countless great consultants - brilliant ones. Just like there are countless great physicians and art directors and Higgs–Boson scientists. Trouble is when any sector becomes complacent - the whole sector gets blighted and they become easy targets. Dead ducks.

Back in the day the Advertising Industry got a bad reputation for champagne lunches that lasted three days. They also couldn't measure their impact and they couldn't compete with the niche 'boutique' creatives when it came to real talent. Same is now true of the consulting industry, massive overheads, you don't get the best talent and it's proving hard to see the ROI.

Consulting has failed to become creative.

Creativity is the name of the game. By any measurement the world has sped up. It's now not worth writing a business plan that lasts more than a year. The word on the lips of the progressive business leaders these days is the imperative for the entire senior leadership to become leaders in their own right. To become designers of their own destiny and therefore to embrace creativity in all it's forms. 

Think about this time last year. Did you predict your business would be where it is now? Two years ago had you figured on the 'apps' revolution? - the iPad? That platform is barely two years old. Did you guess the idea of social media or the impact of the economic crisis on your business? The Cloud? 

Think different. Embrace creativity.

Redefinition is the 2012 game.

1. The definition of success?

Every enterprise on Earth needs nimble, real time and distinctive strategies. Your customers want you to excite and surprise them or deliver service as if you mean it. You demand that the whole enterprise gets behind the mission. You need to do more with less and you need to engage with your people, tour markets and your systems like you never had to before. You will insist that every choice has been exhausted until the best answer with the smartest risk profile has been identified.

2. Being creative with consulting.

In defining creativity (and on any given day) I argue that it is in all of us but that it demands constant attention, nurturing, tools and techniques to help it surface. It needs to be sustainable and it requires ingenuity. It demands a culture of courage and leadership to let it flourish. It is about curiosity, persistence and a continuous pursuit of the edge. True creativity insists on being at the front of the edge. The creation of breathtaking ideas and being different. And it demands to be heard because it inspires each and every one of us on to greater things. (NB: This is not typically seen as a strategy consulting service.)

In defining consulting (and on a good day) I suppose most people would suggest something like this - 'Smart people analysing serious business issues, solving important problems by recognising all the vital dynamics and then deploying smarter answers to solve each one as required - within a clients firm.' They are most likely armed with expertise and capability (in various fields) or they are the best of the business schools. (NB: This is not typically known as a creative service.)

3. Redefining the Consulting Firm!

So, in what kind of business do these two important functions collide? The consulting firms are trying hard to redefine themselves right now because the problems their clients face got a whole lot harder and the old tools that used to work well enough were designed for a wholly different era. So do the consulting firms get the best people to solve the problem or should the best people actually be inside the firm that needs the solution? And where would this talent prefer to work? Well given that the issues are not going to get any easier what would you suggest?

We need an entirely new type of approach right?

The business world now needs consulting to be everyone's job – two axes.

'Smart people, being curious about their work and doing smarter stuff daily - inspired to resolve the continuous (and ever more) dynamic context that is part of being alive in the business world of this century.'

'Creativity applied to consulting means that everyone in the business has the chance to get engaged, pull their weight and contribute because they have been made aware of their own responsibility and their own capability - by being engaged in the strategy and deeply understanding the direction of the company.'

And finally…

Don't sit around making souvenirs for wandering tourists, get out there and make a difference to the world and your business. Creativity has crashed into every part of business but the jury is out as to whether consulting can stay valid, redefine itself and embrace creativity.

Posted via email from Just Thinking!