I first went to Sri Lanka in 2001 when the Tamil separatist movement was at its height and large parts of the country were no go zones for foreign visitors. Ten years on and with the Tamils decimated, the country is shifting into tourism overdrive.  At one end of the scale this means people are trading up from hyper-efficient two stroke ‘tuk-tuks’ to cars and people carriers, at the other it means the country is commissioning its first ever coal fired power station on Tuesday 22^nd March.

As Eastern parts of the country (among the worst hit by the civil war and the Tsunami) reel from a massive spate of floods that have seen over 325,000 people displaced and up to 400,000 children facing a food crisis, it is clearly wrong to argue against the need for economic development.

All too often we in the West treat these countries as separate from us, as an exotic other place to be visited briefly and then left behind. The fact is that we are very connected. A high proportion of the clothes in our wardrobes have probably been made in Sri Lanka. Lots of the tea we drink is grown in the country’s lush central highlands. We are bound together through travel, through trade and most importantly through our shared environment. Carbon dioxide knows no boundaries. Climate change affects us all.

What is odd is that we do not really want to think about this stuff. In a sneak preview of a report collating UK attitudes to sustainability I was struck by the fact that people want and expect ‘brands to do the heavy lifting’ around sustainability issues. We want a badge on our brand to take the guilt away. We want our ‘easy solutions’ served up in easy to digest chunks.

The real challenge facing us as buyers of stuff and as travelers and tourists is that it can never be that easy. Just before I left Sri Lanka I saw two men and a woman being ferried out of a garment factory convulsing and unconscious after a solvents accident. The horrified look on their colleagues’ faces as they held on to them in the back of a tuk tuk has stuck with me.  The people with me said these kinds of accidents are common even in ‘good’ factories. The fact is that in order to produce the stuff we need at the prices we want to pay the people behind the factories struggle to put in place the measures required to make their working environments safe.

So what can we do? On the big stuff like energy generation it’s tough to see how we can have an impact. Coal beats all in terms of short-term costs and reliability. But thinking it through maybe our role is to be pushing for faster development of clean technologies here in the west so they can be exported elsewhere more quickly. Mobile phone technology is doing this already, enabling countries with less fixed phone infrastructure to skip an expensive out-dated and environmentally costly tech-stage for something lighter, cleaner and more effective.

On the smaller stuff the answer is simpler. We need to keep pushing to make sure the stuff we buy is made ethically. We cannot assume brands are taking care of this we have to take more of the responsibility for the heavy lifting here.

Inspiring trip over to Ecobuild 2011 yesterday to see the latest sustainable innovation in design, construction and the built environment.

5 years ago, just 950 people attended the event. This year between 50-60,000 people will go through the doors.

An explosive fifty-fold increase tells the story of a growth industry in a stagnant economy, with a real sense of purpose, buzz and momentum. And a lot of innovation, collaboration and new, more resilient business models emerging.

The energy in and around the UK Green Building Council stand was particularly high – where we bumped into an old friend Simon McWhirter who’d done an ace job helping to pull the content together for their stand

Highlight for me was seeing InterfaceFlor, famous for their Mission Zero – a promise to completely eliminate the negative impact they have on the environment by 2020.

This little film talks about how they use Biomimicry – taking design principles from nature and applying them into business…

What a great example of innovation with purpose….

Innovation = what’s needed + what’s possible

This was the first description of innovation I ever came across. As a science graduate in 1996, I’d joined the ranks at P&G. I was in R&D working in beauty care. We were making a big ‘push’ for profit growth from new products. It was exciting. It felt like anything was possible.

I remember being astonished but proud to know that P&G employed more PhD scientists than MIT, Berkeley, and Harvard combined. The ‘mantra’ was ‘Stretch, Innovation, Speed’. FMCG was the place to be.

The equation was pretty simple. What’s needed was marketing’s job. Uncovering the ‘unmet’ needs that lead to new ideas. What’s possible was R&D’s role. Developing new technologies and processes to meet those needs.

Almost 15 years later, it’s funny to look back on those times as we go about setting a more purposeful and positive innovation agenda for business and society. On almost every level we need to reframe our efforts – not just what we make, but how we make it and most importantly, why we’re doing it

Looking at the world today, it strikes us that this definition of innovation is still pretty good. But the scope for how we define needs and the nature of possibilities available to us has moved on - driven by a deeper purpose about the role business can play in society.

To innovate with purpose, we’re starting to ask 3 simple questions that lead to new possibilities.

1. How good is good enough?

One of P&G’s big things was blind product testing. We aimed to make noticeably better products with scientifically validated claims. Stripping away the ‘halo’ of branding to see if the product does its job better than others. My first job was running these tests, and analysing the data. What we found was that most products scored over 80%, often nearer 90% – skin creams, shampoos, shower gels. We’d reached the point of ‘good enough’.

Squeezing out an additional 5% improvement helped but frankly it was a law of diminishing returns. Adding washer balls to detergents, or shower puffs to shower gels created ‘systems’ – this moved the game on incrementally and drove up consumption. But did it really improve the experience? And make the best use of resources?

If you are good enough, don’t over-engineer or tinker too much – celebrate the fact, and use your energy and resources to make what you do better….

2. What does better look like?

The real challenge for today of course is not just being good enough – but better. Better used to look like more features and benefits. New ingredients. More attractive packaging. Leading to premium pricing. But maybe better can be defined differently? Better for the environment, better for society, better for the economy.

For example, could you provide the benefit without a product? Make it into a service? Or deliver the same benefit using less of it? Or make it last longer? Can you provide access instead of ownership? Could you make the product way cheaper and still do the same thing? Could you change the ingredients to be less harmful? And the supply chain? Could you create a system that optimises resources using biomimicry – designing in the way that nature does? Could you create fairer trading and more local opportunities in the way you develop and deliver your product or service? Can you use your product as a vehicle for change – as a communications tool? Or as a way of encouraging more active participation in communities, or towards causes?

What great stuff might happen if we ‘pointed’ all those PhDs and the next generation of graduates to really innovate against this definition of better?

3. What do we really need?

The word ‘need’ is in crisis. We’ve all sat through endless presentations about needs. There’s Maslow’s famous ladder. And Damasio’s emotional decision-making. Zaltman’s Metaphor Elictation. Benefit laddering. Semiotics. Ethnography. Observational insight.

All this effort focused on uncovering ‘unmet needs’ – finding something that people didn’t realise they needed.

To be blunt, marketeers have bastardised the word ‘need’. We need to collectively get over it, and get back the real meaning of the word. At best we’ve been playing around incrementally. There will always be new inventions and technical breakthroughs. But much so-called innovation has really only lead to wasteful, pointless and ineffective brand extensions and incremental benefits.

Branding has played its part too – moving us into the world of wants and desires – our aspirations. This is not necessarily a bad thing. We need hope and optimism in our lives. But the issue is a deeper one of fuelling a consumption-based economy where we’ve been trained to expect a continuous stream of novelty. Where we seek validation in our self-identity via brands rather than more fundamental, restorative human activity ‘Now with 5 blades’ ‘Contains aloe vera’ ‘Because you’re worth it’…

I’d personally be delighted if I never have to sit in another meeting to find a positioning for a toothpaste or a shampoo around a ‘higher-order need’. Do we really need products or brands to perform that role? Can or indeed should a soap help me to self-actualise? Hmmm, I think not.

Instead, couldn’t we be repurposing the communication of brands to change what it means to consume – based on real needs?  To remove ‘status’ and ‘positional competition’ which fuels inequality, to help not just individuals but whole communities to make ‘better’ choices, and to shed light on real societal or environmental issues that brands could help solve?

Real human needs are of course a much more interesting startpoint for innovation. We’re optimistic that business (and all those PhDs) will create a completely new forms of value and profit if you look at the world through this lens. Every business can find a relevant social challenge to tackle positively….

Could you help address poverty, inequality, the prosperity of societies? Or environmental challenges? Biodiversity, climate change, natural resource depletion?  Or health? Or education? Or simply human energy challenges – how we use our time, participate in society, and improve our health and stress levels?

Innovating with purpose

Innovation = what’s really needed + the awesomeness of what’s possible

So maybe this is where this idea of innovation with purpose is heading. The process of identifying a bigger purpose and meaning. Reframing innovation against real societal needs that create new forms of value. Setting a heartbeat, and soul in your business that will lead you to choose paths that others might not.

Any ideas on expanding this manifesto on a postcard please. It’s exciting, difficult and important. We’re up for it – are you?

Image props to Hugh Macleod

In January this year, inspired by the awesome ‘Born to Run’ story, I decided to try barefoot running. As I kid, I spent most winters cross-country running. I loved the isolation, being in nature and the endurance challenge of 10 miles of frozen fields and horizontal pissing rain. But at about 18 I started to struggle with chronic shin pains, then diagnosed as shin splints, I never really recovered and running became just too painful.

So most weekends this year I’ve been out running in these – barefoot/minimal running shoes. Barefoot running is a response to the intervention of the running shoe industry, it is based on a body of medical research which suggests the continuous innovation of the running shoe has resulted in the disconnection of the foot from the earth, an inability of the foot to naturally respond to the terrain beneath it, and using thousands of years of evolutionary innovation to naturally adjust the posture of the body and prevent foot, knee and back problems. That made sense to me.

It’s actually been a very painful transition, because I’ve been learning to run again, but this time by ‘listening to my feet’, noticing how they feel against the terrain, responding to calf pains and achilles aches, understanding how the system works, tweaking my gait and posture accordingly.

Learning to unlearn.

So what’s this got to do with brands and business?

Learning to unlearn is I think one of the uber challenges of the now for brands and business and more accurately the human folk and communities behind them.

Because much of what we have learnt in our marketing and business careers and indeed from mainstream culture is now becoming increasingly irrelevant, and more importantly dangerous, if we are serious about trying to maintain a healthy planet and societies which can provide for future generations.

Or for those in denial that we’re reaching a tipping point of resource depletion, energy constraints, societal inequality and runaway climate change, I would say that the inability of an organisation to learn to unlearn will result in the collapse of the business in the not too distant future.

Arne Naess who kick started the ‘deep ecology’ movement, (essentially a systems thinking idea, which puts people and self as part of and connected to a vast web of life, human and non), said that what is destroying our world is the persistent notion that we are independent of it, aloof from other species and immune to what we do to them. He argued that our survival requires a shift to more encompassing ideas of who we are.

I think this is extremely relevant to business today. Environmentalism aside, what is the role of a business or a brand and indeed a marketeer in the 21st century in the world which we find ourselves in?

Challenging and exploring our ingrained assumptions is enormously difficult, especially in the corporate and marketing world, but without it, imho it is impossible to evolve, at least for the long term, to be fit for the future.

Justin’s post on the future of marketing made me smile, the future according to the majority of male dominated CEO’s of 50 of the worlds most successful companies appears to be the consumer is king, life is digital and growth. Few signs of unlearning there.

Peter Senge from MIT (who if you’re interested in more spiritual approaches to business and organisational learning and development I would highly recommend), talks here about what is the actual purpose of the corporation in the 21^st century? In a world with extraordinary inequalities between rich and poor, with accelerating climate change, massive resource and energy pressures and finite growth. What is the game we are now playing?

For me there has never been a more critical time for learning to unlearn. To start to challenge and explore our everyday business and marketing assumptions, to look at the world we operate in with a much wider lens, to start to try and see things in wholes and to understand that we are part of a vast interconnected system. A creaking system.

To ask ourselves why are we here? What are we really trying to create? Why does this matter?

Part of the mission with the pipeline project is to help support teams to get on this journey of learning to unlearn, of helping organisations be effective in dealing with the realities and complexities they face but at the same time creating an empowering orientation of where they want to go.

Why?

To help create resilient businesses with strong internal cultures built around a shared purpose and a positive legacy vision.

Joanna Macy argues that living systems evolve in complexity, flexibility, and intelligence through interactions with each other. These interactions requireopen-ness and vulnerability in order to process the flow through of energy and information.

Far out? Spot on I reckon.

Open-ness and vulnerability I think are key in learning to unlearn, because challenging our assumptions, acknowledging and accepting that much of what we have learnt in our career’s and what we know about the world is no longer that relevant is at times extremely tough to accept. It requires honesty and trust, compassion, the ability to really listen to others, to examine and be open about our own behaviours and beliefs.

But open-ness and vulnerability are also the sort of behaviours rarely encouraged in organisations.

So here’s the rub, I’d argue we need to rapidly start developing a more reflective, honest and open culture within business to really create organisations that want to learn to unlearn. Only then can an organisation truly progress, evolve and prosper in the long term.

I’m hoping we can help more business and brand teams with this challenge.

And the running?

After several months of pain and late night questioning, time reflecting, noticing, adjusting, researching and experimenting, my feet feel awesome, the pain has gone. I’m running twice a week and l’m feeling reconnected, focused and totally energised.

But I’m still learning.

And unlearning.

And hope I always will be.

Bring on the Cardiff half.

We’re pleased to say that we’re contributing towards an exciting new blog called Conservation Economy that’s launching this week. Head to www.conservation-economy.org and check it out.

There’s some fantastic contributors from a range of marketing, advertising, communications and innovation backgrounds all looking to provoke a debate that fundamentally questions the role of our industry in driving consumption. There’s already some fantastic posts up on there that are worth a few minutes to digest as well a set of resources if you want to get more information.

Our first post published on Conservation Economy is below, so have a browse and let us know what you think.

WHAT IS IT, EXACTLY, THAT YOU DO?

Here’s a question. What do you tell other people that you do?

In fact, have you ever stopped, paused for a second, and reflected on what you’re actually doing? Or gone one step further. And also asked yourself why?

This is not easy stuff. It’s a line of enquiry with the potential to get deep, meaningful and unravel itself faster than you can say ‘psychotherapy’. Or even ‘nutter’. It’s hard to step back and see the things that shape how you view the world. It’s hard because it’s a hard thing to think about. Full-stop.

Yet, these questions are absolutely central to this debate we’re starting. They are the key if we want to unlock the door in how businesses meet their social and commercial agendas in the face of seemingly impossible resource challenges.

So why is this sort of change such a real challenge to our industry?

First, we’ve had it all a bit too easy. We’ve been on a comfortable, lucrative journey where it’s normal to put the serious issues to one side and get on with the fun job at hand – growing the consumption economy. We haven’t learnt to sacrifice or place value in things other than profit.

Second, we’ve got really good at driving consumption-based economics. It’s a well-oiled machine, quite literally. We’ve ridden the wave where the answer was always growth and more growth. The system thrived on it. The training taught for it. The rewards incentivised it. And no-one questions it.

Third we’ve created very little evidence for or indeed aspiration to experiment with new social business models. New ideas that can both turn a profit and contribute positively to society. Put more simply, we need more success stories to point the way to the future.

Lastly, and maybe most importantly, it’s challenging to step away from the herd. We’re part of a generation that’s had very little to get behind. Sure, we might have felt part of a movement – a sense of belonging from being part of rave culture – the tribal feeling of supporting a sports team. But we’ve not personally been to war. We’ve never had to ration. We’ve never really been under attack. We’ve never been on a real mission.

Coming back to my original question. I’ll be honest. I’ve never really succeeded in explaining what I do. Just ask my mum.

It’s not because what I do is that hard to explain.

It’s because what I do is loosely called “marketing”. And “marketing” is part of business. And business has become part of a world that seems somehow distant to many, or even most people. An alien, impersonal and slippery game of snakes and ladders that’s a couple of steps removed from the nuts and bolts of how most normal folk think.

The closest I’ve ever got to a tangible answer was making soap. My mum had heard of Procter & Gamble. I was a scientist in product development and she was proud of me, especially as I was using my biochemistry degree. But she was still disappointed that I’d not followed my dreams of being the next David Attenborough. Or been a doctor. Or done something that, you know……was worthwhile…was good.

I’m excited by this debate because for the first time, I’m seeing an opportunity to reconcile what I’d previously seen as irreconcilable challenges.

To put the insight and creativity skills that sit at the heart of marketing to much better use. To help create new social norms where we reset the dials a little in a more balanced way, and build more aspiration around innovative, sustainable business models and brands. To tackle head-on the niggling feeling I keep getting that the world does not need yet another ill conceived, profit-grabbing line extension to that brand.

To be able to proudly and clearly answer the question about what I do to anyone who asks, and not get punched or laughed at (too much!).

It’s exciting because it’s not business as usual. It’s radical, challenging and important. And when I explained it to my mum, she got it – first time; and it was good.

I don’t think I was alone in being quite excited in the run up to Sunday’s grand prix. The mix of returning champions, new team configurations and new rules made it feel like something good was going to happen. Well I was wrong. Only the most ardent of F1 train spotters could have found much excitement in the Bahrain procession.

For me the most interesting thing that happened in Bahrain was the past masters session where 20 former world champions burned around the track in the old school kit they won their championships in (all except Mansell who allegedly couldn’t fit in his old car and had to drive a wide bodied 1950’s Ferrari instead). Seeing them made me think back to the late 70’s and 80’s when F1 felt exciting and glamorous in a way it just doesn’t anymore. A lot of the glamour stemmed from the simple fact that back then (and particularly in the 70’s) F1 was incredibly dangerous. The glamour equation was simple – high speed risk + charismatic drivers + edgy technology  = glamour.

So if today’s F1 is a bit flat what could it do to regain some of its former glamour?

Clearly making it more dangerous is not an option (it’s still very dangerous anyway).

It also feels a bit out of order asking the drivers to be more ‘charismatic’ when you think about the big brands they’re fronting and the degrees of fitness and technical expertise required to drive the current cars.

So that leaves the technology as the principle route to renewing F1’s glamour. It’s easy to think that technology can never be glamorous in a way that people and danger can, but I’m not sure that’s right. Technology does have the capacity to get lots of ‘ordinary’ people’s pulses racing (and by ordinary I mean not total geeks). A quick look at the way people lavish attention on their iPhones suggests technology might actually have more glamour potential up its chrome plated sleeve than we might think.

What’s the problem with current F1 technology?

Yes, the cars go very fast and they look pretty slick, but in the grand scheme of things the technology is pretty dull. At their heart the cars are still based on stuff that’s over a century old (combustion engines). And in many cases, the more cutting-edge stuff like the electronics and the aerodynamics are helping make things more dull rather than more exciting. Surely it’s crazy that current aerodynamics packages stop the cars getting close enough to one another to actually race?

So if technology is a potential route back to glamour and excitement for F1, what kind of thing could work?

Something a bit more full-on than rule tweaks maybe? Something that looks and feels as different to today’s audience as the first F1 cars did to people back in the 30’s?

Well how about electrifying and de-winging F1 next year? Hang on I can hear you saying. That could be very rubbish and not at all glamorous. Electric cars don’t go very fast and they look awful. Well I’m not sure that’s true any more – check out this footage http://bit.ly/a48MYB and look at what Porsche http://bit.ly/d6o2td and Ferrari http://bit.ly/cJZFEJ are up to on the road car front.

Electric is the future whether the petrol heads like it or not. F1 needs to be up there shaping the future if it wants to stand any chance of being glamorous again. An electric F1 could also have a dramatic impact on the development of next-gen electric car tech. Competition breeds innovation and there aren’t many things more competitive than F1….

As Britain creeps out of recession Pipeline’s thoughts have been turning to the wonderful world of luxury. Maybe we are being a bit presumptuous, what with all the ‘double-dip’ talk, but what the hell we’re optimists.

The first thing we’ve been trying to agree is what ‘luxury’ actually means. Wiktionary defines luxury as: 1. something desirable, but expensive and 2. something very pleasant but not really needed in life. This has not really helped us close down the debate. After all ‘expensive’ is a relative concept (when you are starting a new business with your own cash most things feel ‘expensive’), as is ‘pleasantness’ (one person’s ‘pleasant’ can very easily be another’s ‘totally grim’) as are ideas of what people feel they ‘need’ or don’t need in life.

It seems we are not alone in struggling with the meaning of luxury. The way in which the luxury world throws out qualifications – we’ve had ‘classic’, ‘mass-tige’, ‘uber’ and ‘ultra’ and now we’ve got ‘recession luxury’ – shows how loose the word’s concept is. There are even reports that LVMH boss Bernard Arnault has started avoiding the term luxury altogether, preferring to talk about ‘quality’ instead.

The reason for all this name juggling is that the meaning of luxury is subjective and relative. As the Harvard Business Review put it recently – ‘All luxury brands are not the same-they can mean different things to different people or even different things to the same people.’ Here at Pipeline we think of luxury as being a bit like beauty. Yes it is subjective and ‘in the eye of the beholder’, but there are lots of cases where pretty much everyone agrees that someone or something is beautiful. Just like beauty, luxury operates on personal and shared, social and cultural levels. There are things that only a few people would consider a luxury and then there are things that are established in culture as shared symbols of luxury. And as with ideas of beauty, the symbolic, shared ideas of luxury change over time.

So where is the shared, symbolic world of luxury turning right now? Significant change has been brewing for some time already. In western markets ideas of luxury have been shifting from a focus on owning expensive things to a greater emphasis on the value of less tangible things such as time, experiences, creativity and ideas.There have always been these kinds of ebbs and flows in ideas of luxury in the past. Periods of relative austerity have invariably followed bouts of excess and vice versa. So perhaps we should be seeing what is happening as just another slightly more austere lull, with full luxury service set to resume some time soon?

The interesting thing for us is that current luxury shifts are set against an exceptional background of stark crises of resource availability and climate change issues. If the recession has been a catalyst for underlying attitudinal change, the resource and climate debates are making paring back your luxury lifestyle socially acceptable and in some cases aspirational. We think this is important because it could mean that excessive, relatively purposeless consumption (the building block for many of our most iconic luxury brands, think luxury cars, luxury houses, holidays etc.) will lose its allure in a lasting way versus just being a short term swing.

So what does all this mean for luxury brands?

It means they may well have to act quite differently to sustain their long term luxury status. The ones that last will develop ever smarter ways to derive symbolic luxury status through increasingly less tangible offerings. They will learn to rely less on the value being in the things they sell and more on the meaning of what they sell. They will need to become more like the curators and artists who turn relatively inexpensive media (paint, clay and canvas) into priceless objects.

So, how might the next generation of luxury brands add meaning to what they sell? Here’s just a few areas we think are worth exploring and are set to grow….

1. Things that help you use less not more

2. Things that can genuinely last a lifetime

3. Things that help you slow down

4. Things that help you enjoy taking responsibility

5. Things that help you connect more strongly with people you care about

6. Things that can be adapted and made better over time

So, if you’ve got ideas on how this will evolve, or think differently about it, please let us know and we’d love to hear from you.

The Battle of the Big Thinking is upon us.

If the twittersphere is anything to go by, lots of very smart people are pumped up for it.

We’re rooting for Justin Basini (www.basini.com) who’s got an idea that blows us away. Not for it’s size, but for it’s potential impact. He’s getting into a topic very close to our hearts, and not far from what we try to do. Just far better articulated.

Sadly we’re not able to be there to support but wish everyone going the best of British, and hope the biggest and best thinking wins out.

Which is also the reason for this blog. We think we might have had a good idea on how to make it even better.

There’s 20 or so very clever people tomorrow. And about 200 people going to watch.

If we assume the 20 people have already spent 1/2 day each at least on their ideas, we’re already talking 30 days of very clever people’s time for the speakers in preparing and attending the event. Assume their time is worth about £1000 a day on average, you’ve got £30,000 just there.

Add to that the 200 days of other very clever people’s time for the day and the entrance fees they’ve paid. That’s another £120,000 in money alone.

Which got us thinking. We’ve got 220 clever, passionate people. With skills from all areas of marketing. And a budget of around £150,000 (in time/cash). You can do a LOT with that. And more than just talk. You can create something tangible. Something that could have a real impact.

So our idea is simple. What if next year we got the same time/money on the table, but decided to create something with it? Pick a theme. A topic. A cause. And come up with a solution. Something that makes a difference.

We can’t wait to hear how it’s gone. And for anyone who’s involved in organising this event, or others similar, we’re prepared to help design and run a day that could do something along these lines. For free.

So if you’re interested, let’s start the conversation now. And let’s turn the big thinking into some big doing!