Don't Be A Snippy Chimp

I had the good fortune of going to a brilliant 'inspiration' talk from Dave Brailsford, the Performance Director of British Cycling. It was anything but the charicature motivational speaker thing event. Brailsford established his credentials by comparing the 1 Gold medal won in the 76 years to 2004 by British cyclists with the haul gained in 2008, that would have put British Cycling, if it were a country, ahead of France in the medals table; 8 golds and 14 medals in total.

He put his success down to three key points (plus a huge increase in lottery funding).

1. Focus. Taking only cyclists with podium potential. Brailsford was offered 46 places by the British Olympic authorities, but they took only 23. The rest weren't good enough. They set goals; not goals of beating others, but of being the best they could be, identifying a time as the goal. The times were audacious but were not unrealistic. They had been carefully worked out.

2. People. Brailsford got in the right people. The one he talked about most is Steve Peters, the only psychiatrist working in the top echleons of sports apparently (mostly, it is sports psychologists). In essence Peters talks about the emotional 'chimp mode' that if left uncontrolled, can take over, just when you don't need it. You can't change your chimp, but you can learn how to manage it so it doesn't impair performance.

Brailsford also doesn't believe in 'fear' coaching. Only positive coaching. It was part of a value system that on the team had to buy into. One very senior coach was fired for not buying into the vlaues, and others didn't last. Podium potential riders needed podium coaching.

3. Aggregated Marginal Gains. When the prepartion for the 2008 games began Brailsford gave everyone on the pursuit team, including all backroom staff, a short film for inspiration. It essentially showed their 2004 Athens defeat by the Australian team with a dramatic voice over from a movie, by Al Pacino I think, about winning one inch at a time. This laid out the philosophy to the team. They were ruthless and ingenious about breaking down every tiny element of performance. For example, McClaren F1 team did modelling on aerodynamics (helmets, body position) and race strategy. One resulting change, that defied conventional wisdom, was the start 0ff man switching from 3/4 lap to 1 and 1/4 first leg. They also got the team to 'feel' the right speed so that riders could change when they wanted to keep the speed up, rather than everything being pre-set (ie one lap per rider). In the final this resulted in one of the riders riding an unheard of 2 and 1/4 laps without a change. But it also took in learning how to wash hands properly, so avoiding the main source of passing bugs. They went to such lengths that team members were employed in Bejing to keep door handles clean. Brailsford even 'joked' about taking an inch out of riders collar bones to lessen the wind resistance. It was a joke, but I bet he had the figures!

One other comment Brailsford made was the importance of removing all stresses from the race itself which meant the performers were then freed up, as far as possible, to perform to their best. In essence it was all about preparation and leaving as little to chance.

There are some good implications for individuals and for organisations alike:

Focus

Audacious but realistic goals carefully worked out

Best people

Best people on side

Don't focus on the competition, focus on your own performance

There are improvements to be made in many many areas.

There are improvements to be made in many areas you don't even know about.

Every area should be looked at from scratch - conventional wisdom needs to be challenged.

Get rid of as much stress before the event so you can focus on performance during the event (not the stress of it).

Understand the chimp inside and work on it.

A Different Perspective On An Orc

This is an Orc. It is from Warhammer, a fantasty strategy game that George has got into. The Orc is only about an inch in height but this picture makes it look bigger. And angry.

It minds me of some really good work we did for LEGO company a few years ago. Initially, we couldn't find an interesting way to present the LEGO models. Then Phil and Graham got involved. They started thinking about the models from a kids perspective, namely lying down with head on the floor, playing at the same level as the toys themselves. It was brilliant insight. Whilst adults are looking from a vantage point five or six feet up in air, the kids who play with the things see them much more eye to eye level. Everything flowed from that.

The ads we did, and I don't know if I can find them a few years on, had a sense of dynamism and scale that just couldn't have been achieved it we had looked the issue from our adult vantage point. It was one of the best examples I know of, literally, understanding the perspective of your target.

Brussels Building

This is a cool building in Brussels, opposite the Sheraton hotel. Click to see the light show.

It is the lights moving, not the camera! There were also had multicolour displays as well. But by then I was off in a cab. This was filmed with trusty old blackberryvision.

Brand Architecture

It's always good to have access to Aaker's brand relationship model. There are many different architecture models. This one is one of the more comprehensive. It is from the 'Brand Leadership' book. It looks like a picture taken from my trusty blackberry camera. Unfortunately it wasn't. I had to play around with scanners and proportion. Apologies for the final result. You may have to peer a little. I will try to find a better, more legible version.

Cartoon Time

I got the set!!

Genius or Graft

Great article in yesterday's Guardian, an edited extract from Malcolm Gladwell's new book 'The Outliers', that questions the notion that genuis is born and not the result of other factors.

Gladwell suggests that hard graft is vital. That there seems to be a magic number of around 10,000 hours 'practice' to obtain expertise. He quotes Daniel Levitin, a neurologist, who contends that this holds true across sport, music, programming and many other subjects.

He argues that timing is also vital. For example Gladwell demonstrates that the richest Americans ever were all born between 1831 and 1840, just the right time to take advantage of the industrial transformation of America that happened in the 1860s and 1870s. He also suggests the best time to be born to take advantage of the personal computer revolution that started in Jan 1975 with the announcement of the first assemble-it-yourself at home PC, the Altair 8800, was between 1952 and 1958. He shows that a whole raft of computer legends were in fact born in this period.

It is a beguiling argument. But many people were born at the right time, and many of those people worked hard, though not all of them are "geniuses", so I suspect there are still other variables that distinguish the "geniuses" from the rest of us. Nevertheless, the theory gives us hope that we can, with hard graft and good timing, make it big. It is nothing if not democratic.

Extracts from the book are here.

One last thought, the hard graft and timing theory, as a prerequisite for success is not totally new, as here suggests!

Design Time

I love this digital/analgoue radio. Not just because I can listen to the BBC World Service broadcast in great clarity, but because of its super design. It has very simple lines when we see it face on. All the dials and buttons are on the top so it is pretty easy to use in this vertical position.

Swivel the handle right the way around and it can be used as a stand/rest for the radio.

Put it on a desk, like I do, or a shelf, and operate it in the horizontal.

It was designed by the innovation house, IDEO .

I can't do a post on design without quickly showing this:

It must be nearly 5 decades old, and with kind hands it still works very well.

I Wish I Had The Confidence to Say Less

The Power of Emotion

Listening to some of the speakers at The Battle of Big Thinking last week, I found myself becoming rather cynical at the weightiness of their intellectual models as a way into their subject. We had two papers about the quantum theory of communications, a paper grounded in theories of sex and death, one on bio-mechanics and another on how the brain works (it was too complex to make any more sense of it). Whilst not against interesting hooks to introduce a subject nor borrowing from other disciplines to make a point, see here for an example, I did find myself longing for something very simple and very persuasive.

An example might be that all we are attempting to do with communications is to move people, connect with them as emotional beings. Whilst I realise it isn't an easy task, it is does form the basis of a lot of what we do.

I just happened to chance upon a brilliant example of this. The blog is Richard Huntington's adliterate, the particular post I have in mind is this one; 'The Power of Raw Emotion' .

The Battle of Big Thinking

Graham Fink receives the Mexican wrestling belt as winner of the 2008 Battle of Big Thinking from Malcolm White yesterday afternoon. Graham's idea was big and brilliant. Driven by the belief that we need to put different, or opposite, thinking in the same place to create ideas, he proposed a way to put people in touch with their 'opposite brains' by meeting people from a different walk of life. These people would meet for an hour and see what happens. Any ideas would be submitted to a website. He called it the bigthinkingclub.

His master strokes were twofold. Firstly, that he was going to make it happen, not just talk about it. And by pledging to launch the club if he won, he pulled that one off. Secondly, he seduced us by recognising us as founder members! How flattering is that.

The other outstanding piece was Nigel Newton, CEO of Bloomsbury publishing, who spoke about trusting our instincts rather than the analysis whilst we watched a seemingly random series of data slides about the minutia of Lloyd's life pass by.

Obama!

This is one night I wish I was back in the States.

I woke up in some Dutch hotel at what seemed a random time in the middle of the night. I turned on the TV to see if Obama had been elected, and by some odd coincidence within a few minutes the polls had closed on the west coast and Obama was projected as the winner.

Wonderful and amazing.

It's Absurd

Why are there so many luggage shops in airports? How often have you seen people turn up to an airport carrying heaps of clothes, looking for somewhere to buy a suitcase, roll-on or hold-all?

Molecular Boardroom

Having posted yesterday, here, about looking at the world in detail, it was a wonderful coincidence that I was lucky enough to see a boardroom that does just that earlier this week. This is the boardroom at DSM in the Netherlands:

The idea was to signal a more creative environment. The company understands the world at a molecular level and used that as an inspiration for the room. As well as the amazing walls, the room has a glass ceiling as well; and effect that makes it even more extraordinary. Below is a good example of how the ceiling amplifies the effect:
The company also has a history of buying art from local artists and employes a curator full time to run the collection. I couldn't resist putting some more shots of the boardroom walls in my 'Artzy Surfaces' flickr collection, here .

Microslicing and Insight

I don't think marketing folk spend enought time thinking about the small things; by which I mean the really small, the nano, the granular, miniscule and the tiny. In amongst all the talk about big ideas, perhaps we should flip the telescope and look through it the other way around. In other fields we are seeing the world very differently through new detail, such as the example below, perhaps we can as well.

The world of insight gathering might benefit from some miniscule thinking. Though research may be getting faster, easier and cheaper - primarily due to the internet - I don't know if it is getting any better. In fact, I suspect the opposite. I also see lots of research being commissioned that is a triumph of process over thought and is probably a re-run of some previous research project that has already given us enough information to save us the cost of doing it again. I should confess at this point, I am thinking more about 'exploratory' research or insight development work. As a side point, and the subject of another post in the future, I suspect there is a business to be had in delving through back archives of research for answers before any more research is commissioned.

Anyway, back to the subject of getting more insight by microthinking. I am convinced there are insights to be found, hidden in the small nooks and cranies of the mind and behaviour that conventional research, especially internet research, will never find. They may be things that people are never able to articulate, and therefore can't tell us about, without some skillful input from the researcher, but they exist.

I love the idea of breaking down processes, psychology, and behaviour into tiny little units and investigating each little unit in turn. In those tiny moments there is some real, and new, insight.