In the last post, I tried my best to describe the challenge of Overlap10: solving for Wicked Problems. Now, I can tell you the story of scalable solutions (or, How To Solve For Wicked Problems): the basis for the work we did over the weekend.

Everyone who attended was asked to post a short video describing either what they thought a scalable action was, or what their idea was for a scalable social action.

Looking back, while a lot of really incredible scalable social concepts were generated, what I’d like to share are the innovative exercises and presentations that helped me understand that we need new ways of generating platforms within which people can create solutions. Here are the highlights:

Bodystorming

The first exercise was to assemble in groups of 7-9 people to grasp the complexity of a Wicked Problem by taking on childhood obesity. To start, everyone in the group took a few minutes to write a series of ideas about the factors they thought were involved in the problem. Each idea has its own sticky note, and we came together as a group for five minutes to arrange all of our ideas into groups that made the web of influences on the problem apparent.

At that point, Dennis’ Schleicher’s Bodystorming came into play, literally, where we had another 10 minutes to create a short play showing the problem space and varied interests involved in the childhood obesity issue. Then each group had to perform their conclusions in front of the rest of the group. It was an excellent process to iterate through a number of ideas, and because we went through it all together (after the initial five minutes), in two hours the fifty or so people were able to present a depth of understanding this complex problem space that any other method would have failed at producing.

Yes, it felt silly at first. But going through it, and then improvising through the performance only underlined the importance of using this method to create understanding of issues that groups in very typical corporate or government settings would have trouble to produce in conventional meetings.

Kinesthetic Ideation

Did you know that the nerve endings in your hands connect to 80% of your brain’s synapses? The premise of the kinesthetic exercise was to show more specifically how much more effective it is to generate and iterate on really valuable concepts by using your body than it is to be confined to a chair in a meeting room, office or cubicle.

To do this, we were broken into groups of about 10 people at standing tables with a huge box of Legos. In the first five minutes, we were each tasked to build a freestanding lego tower. The only condition being that it had to stand on its own.

Next, we were given five minutes to work with the person sitting next to us and create a bridge between the two towers. The only conditions here were that you had to be able to pass your hand underneath the bridge, and the bridge had to be able to hold the weight of a post-it note pad.

At that point, we were asked to write down our favorite city and one or two attributes that make that city great. We then got together as we did at the beginning of the bodystorming to assemble these city attributes into like groups.

Here’s the twist: we then had to create opposite groups. So if a city was centrally located and friendly, it became a note of remote and nasty. Then, we had ten minutes to work together to create that awful city.

In contrast to our earlier group strategy of working together through final output, this group decided that we would split apart and work in 2-3 person groups to create our own part of the city we would then integrate to create the larger city. It didn’t work out as well.

Our city reflected the organizational structure: we had a group of neighborhoods instead of one cohesive creation. And when it came time to relate the different awful attributes of our city, we had a much harder time improvising our way through it. We didn’t have that clarity in the roles we were playing, and we couldn’t support each other as fluidly in the presentation.

Everything is a Performance

We also had a few fantastic speakers, one of which was Michael Dila, an Overlap founding member, who talked about performances: that in every scenario, you play a part on a performance.

To start, he described a situation in which he tried to hand an empty milk pitcher to a Starbucks Barista. Instead of saying something like, “Thanks, let me take care of that for you,” the reaction was one where the Barista seemed taken off guard and accosted by the request.

Why would that reaction happen? In a customer service system like Starbucks, there’s a point of scale in training (ostensibly getting people to learn a script for interacting on behalf of the system/brand), that what gets hammered home are the specific scenes in which Baristas interact with Customers. Somewhere along the way, the fact that both of these players are people gets lost and forgotten.

In contrast, Dila then described a newly designed check-in process at a hotel he stayed at. Instead of a long, high check-in desk separating the employees from the customers, the hotel remodeled the area into a few podiums: not unlike what you might find at an airport counter.

As he approached the check-in area, the hotel employee came out from behind the podium and met him about 6 feet in front of the desk. They took his ID / credit card, went behind the podium to check him in, and then came back out to hand him his cards and keys.

Think about what that means for a moment. This may be the only interaction with a human that you have during your stay, and they make it special by giving you actual human contact. It’s at least as efficient to the systematic elements, if not more savings across the board in terms of customer service because now you’ve been in direct contact with a person.

So how do we start embarking on solving Wicked Problems in a scalable and effective way?

Two concepts: Frameworks and Questions

Frameworks instead of scripts and single goals

In designing for scale, we have a habit of creating cattle chutes we want people to follow to contribute to a single-goal “replace the lightbulb,” kind of solution. But wicked Problems are often too nuanced and dynamic for that.

So what we need to strive for is the creation of frameworks, creating a “place,” whether real or virtual, where the agenda is set, and the participants allowed to break down their own smaller pieces of the problem, and solve for them using their own methods.

This is where the notion of maturing co-creation platforms like Jovoto (who’s president, Bastian Unterberg was in attendance at Overlap) start to become very interesting.

Platforms and questions

All too often, as global brands, corporations, even governments try to create solutions at scale, the discourse is filled with declarative statements about what people need to do.

What’s really needed is to build on the frameworks idea to create platforms where questions can be asked, and discussed. Maybe with no declarative statements or answers. What does a platform like that look like? What kind of potential for solutions exists in a place where you’re only building and iterating on questions?

Thanks for reading all the way down here! Hopefully, this stirred some thoughts and questions of your own. Please, let’s continue the conversation in the comment section, or on Twitter @mleis.

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The weekend started with the presentation of our greater challenge: solving for Wicked Problems.

Usually, when we have a problem of the ordinary variety, there’s a clear goal or solution that we can direct ourselves and other people towards. Take a light bulb burning out: we know how to frame that problem; we can quickly design and implement a solution. We can make jokes about how many people it takes.

At the other end of the spectrum are Wicked Problems. Think about how to solve for a problem like cleaning Lake Michigan, childhood obesity, poverty, national health care, or moving from a manufacturing economy to a service economy. Or in the case of our clients: how to design a brand experience across a continent, or many continents; how to design a communications system for a brand that employs tens of thousand of people, and has tens of millions of customers. How to tackle social media.

These are Wicked Problems: problems that are so wide, and so deep, so deeply cultural and systematic that there is no single answer or single goal that you can adequately articulate — no single end-state that you can really wrap your mind around and call it solved.

I was reminded again of a corporate Wicked Problem when Jared Spool put together this list of airline redesigns. When you look at the Websites as design problems without the organization, the solutions are often self-evident, unfolding before you in a “Why didn’t they think of this?!” way.

But once you put the problems in the context of that global corporation, you see there’s a Wicked Problem that needs solving for the brand first because the Website can only ever truly be a representation of the blend between that culture’s operations, communications, and technology. The Website becomes an output from the organization’s machination rather than an attempt to communicate effectively with the people using it. It is the product of people trying to frame something Wickedly large and organic and living into a single-light bulb solution.

So what do we do with these Wicked Problems? How do we solve for them? This was the purpose of the Overlap, and the topic of the next article.

And as always, let’s continue the conversation here in the comments section or on Twitter @mleis.

[This was originally posted on the DRAFTFCBlog]

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1. Big Web brands are accelerating targeting, and now content creation that is hyper-local. From location-based services to ad buys, everyone wants to help you know what’s happening right around you.
2. Brands really want to find ways to make every experience more “personally relevant.”

What’s resulting is large-scale messages that focus on what’s similar, most familiar, and/or closest to you. I love creating consensus as much as the next guy. And concepts like the Big Sort indicate we’re wanting that: moving into ideologically homogeneous neighborhoods, safe in our sameness.

But think about the really big trends, especially in very responsive programmatic content channels like radio, and there’s a good two-decade long example of how much people want to be exposed to local perspectives on a national or global level. What is the music that describes life in Los Angeles (gangsta-rap)? Atlanta (hip-hop/ATL)? Philadelphia (soul)? Chicago (Kanye)?

Brands like Whole Foods have made a killing off this exact premise: National brand and distribution network built upon stories of local farmers and product sourcing.

Curious what you think. Add your perspective in the comments below or on Twitter @mleis.

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Seeing Andy Baio at SXSW give his game mechanics talk led a chain of learning to look more seriously into cognitive psychology, variable reward structures, and creating flow state. This in-turn lead to seeing Amy Jo Kim’s incredible presentation on what game mechanics contribute to, and learn from the social web.

That’s when I started to look at the ways game mechanics seem inexorably tied with narrative to create immersive experiences in a range of settings: from the very literal (game shows, card games); to places you wouldn’t expect: doll houses, Lego sets, Progressive TV spots. It’s amazing to think that Progressive has transformed the cumbersome process of applying for insurance online to feel easier by making the on-ramp ads feel like a game users are just a form away from winning.

Below is my collection of Baio and Kim’s ideas, with a few of my own, presented to a lot of really great DraftFCB folks who opted out of the Blackhawks parade to join me (and free pizza) to discuss gaming.

Looking forward to your comments and feedback, either below or @mleis to continue exploring these ideas.

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Since April, I’ve left my own practice to join DraftFCB as Vice President, Digital Management Director. Clearly, you can see right in the title that if there’s digital management that needs direction, or directors who need digital management, or managerial directors who need digital, I’m the guy to do the digital, management and/or directing.

Basically, it’s a new position where I’m most focused on digital context (who, where, and why of audiences interacting with brands), integration (of agency and brand communication models), and tech strategy (the what and how of digital interaction). The mix of these changes depending on the client and team.

As I round the first quarter of this new position I can write about what the position has evolved into being at this point:

Learning and linking

There are a ton of incredibly smart, talented people here working in a variety of media and disciplines. In many cases it’s my job to be someone who can quickly learn what they do, what they need, and how to effectively apply creative technology solutions for the benefit of the audience, their work, DraftFCB short/long term, and the business goals of the client (in many different orders).

To do this effectively it means I also need to be constantly learning about as many other people inside the organization as possible, and what’s happening in technology (usage / design / programming trends) that can be applied to help. Just since April I’ve had the pleasure of working with teams that range from mobile and kiosk to CRM, Social Networks, and site infrastructure.

Modeling and sharing

The other part of my job is helping people understand the underlying structures and abstract notions of how digital works. Sometimes it’s frameworks and modeling at a high level within an account or the agency to make these abstractions become tangible and applicable – or when a model doesn’t apply. Sometimes it’s helping people understand that digital models are really very similar to the broadcast models they’re used to working within. I’m the dude who says, “You know radio? Yep, programming social media is just like that.”

Sometimes it’s talking through banners with account and creative teams to strengthen interaction design. And at times it’s what I’ve been calling “Digital therapy sessions,” helping account leads know they’re not crazy, giving them a different way to approach and articulate problem spaces and solutions.

Making the new traditional

I’m lucky to be right in the middle of the changing definition of Traditional Agency. Marketing communications is being enabled by technology to provide a hybrid service / communications infrastructure and logistics for brands. It’s a globally networked fabric of people that brands need to be connected through. From static interactions through bringing relevant intelligence through organizations to the people in the networked public who need it; Brands know it, agencies know it, and I get to work to make it a reality. And that’s cool.

It’s a whole new world for me, getting to work with an incredible digital leadership core of Chris Miller, Emily Brennan, Patrick Moorhead, Nicole Haygood, Jason Mitton, and Kevin Drew Davis (as Mr. Cunningham) who are all dynamic and talented as just part of an ever-unfolding agency of dynamic and talented people.

Very neat things are happening (even more than I’ve written briefly), and I’m looking forward to sharing more, here, as time marches on.

And please, if you’re working with me at DraftFCB, please use the comment space to throw in your two cents on what you think my job is. One of the best parts so far has been hearing the many ways people have been filtering my work through their own lens, and I’d love the chance to get those perspectives here.

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I feel like every time a new technology product starts to gain mass attention, we also must pay homage, in words, to the bright shiny object debate. Can’t we just assume that it’s part of our jobs as marketers to take the shiny objects that captivate any segment, experiment with them, and understand where brands can capitalize on this technology? Isn’t this the R&D we all need to do?

So whether we like it or don’t, buy it or not, let’s agree that it is significant and think about what we can learn now. Here’s what I’m seeing:

Rent the long tail, or own the aggregation of all the long tails

To buy into the apple brand as a content creator or advertiser (in the case of new iAds), you must believe in the long tail, that all the incremental revenue you get from having content accessible through iTunes, App store, etc., will eventually add up to a lot. This makes sense to a lot of people because it is mimics the dissonance of the American Dream: keep saving and you can own the house of your dreams. A few will win, well timed, well positioned, and well publicized to further the myth. Who really wins here is Apple by collecting a piece of everything along the way.

Build a platform, experiment with the distribution

I sense that a lot of what frustrates agencies is the feeling of having to start all over again with brands every time a new shiny object comes along. But look at the path Apple took to get to iPads: First, introducing the dashboard and widgets into the operating system. Once that audience and developer community matured, widgets became easily adapted to be iPhone Safari sites and native applications. Once iPhone had gone through three iterations, the iPad is introduced.

In other words, the shiny new thing of widgets was built on to become the iPhone, which was built on to become the iPad. Same core engine in terms of iTunes and multiple ways to access the content. With every new device is a lower organizational cost on addition, or in the case of complete failure, subtraction. There is a base, and it is built to handle the attrition of shiny objects with one-click purchasing.

Brands need to start understanding this model and executing on it. There will only be more avenues to distribute information, and there will always be attrition among those channels. The brands that can quickly distribute through these emerging channels; whether it’s the next Facebook or iPad, it will be something that sits on a foundation of SOAP (Standard Open Architecture Protocols).

Maybe it’s only supposed to be for a few people

The great problem today is the battle between the obvious successes of niche marketing and the tried-and-true equations of scale. Instead of thinking that apps or iAds or Safari-formatted Websites are only effective if they reach a large scale, what if you flipped it completely? What might happen if you built a captivating experience for a small, lucrative segment of an audience, and used that information to influence decisions made in other products or marketing channels? What if you made an application only for your employees and clients? What if you made an application only for kids who listen to the radio together?

What do you think? Leave a comment below or continue the conversation on Twitter @mleis.

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All of social media is a game

Like it or not, make it explicit or not, but every social network (and to me, every interface), is a game. Even if you’re not designing it to be a game, the people in the network make it a meta game.

Games are great for teaching complex tasks

Huge underestimation of games right now in terms of just how well they teach people complex task sets. I’ve noticed this for some time as my kids have grown up: console games all have the challenge of teaching a completely new set of rules and operations. The best games make that process fun and rewarding.

A great example of this is Office Lab’s Ribbon Hero that Baio presented. It turns office into a series of game-based tasks, like formatting a paragraph, etc — gives you rewards when you achieve proficiency, and updates you on your friends’ scores. The MS Office suite is an incredibly complex, bloated system. Ribbon Hero makes it fun.

Create Completion Sets

Really good games provide players with clear, small sets of tasks to be completed in exchange for rewards. In the presentation, he used Farmville as an example of this in every level of gameplay — right down to how the farm gets divided into cubes that are very small completion sets. The faster, easier your completion sets, the more involving the game is.

Since seeing him discuss completion sets, the more I see them, and the more vital I think they are to any kind of digital strategy and design across the board. Take the case of a casino: what game doesn’t operate on small completion sets? Or look at how popular social networks create completion sets like “You’re X% away from a complete profile.”

Don’t use leaderboards*

Leaderboards are often the death of any site that uses them. In the strategy phase they seem like a great idea: incent people to use the site or service more by displaying their level of use. But in reality, leaderboards only attract people who need to be on top of the leaderboard — and the result is that it de-motivates the users who you really want to encourage, because they all end up being touched by the people who are trying to get atop the leaderboard.

*Unless you manage scope or reward specific activities

There are places where leaderboards can help. One is where you manage scope. One example of managing leaderboard scope is FourSquare, where you can only see point totals of local friends. In this case the scope is managed by friend group and location.

In discussing the problem of leaderboards with Bastian Unterberg, his company Jovoto uses a really interesting two-pronged approach. First is to work with sociologists and mathematicians to create algorithms to understand, and get ahead of the ways that leaderboard junkies will try to game a system. Second, frequently reward the behavior that you want to encourage, which makes a leaderboard truly reflective of the people who use the system “the best,” instead of valuing all system interactions as similar absolute point values.

In the SXSW talk, Baio gave a great example illustrating the problem with assigning absolute values to social network identity: Tumblarity. Since killed by Tumblr, Tumblarity was an absolute number assigned to your use of the platform. The metrics behind it were vague at best, and it encouraged negative use cases where people would try to achieve a higher Tumblarity number just for the sake of having a better number.

What metrics add up to identity?

Whatever metrics you assign to the individual profile level make up a vital part of that person’s identity in that platform, even if that’s not your intention. Twitter is a great example. Users get very few statistics: how many people you follow, how many follow you, how many tweets you’ve entered in the system, how many lists you follow.

All of these metrics are hot topics of discussion, because without clarification or a larger breadth of identity data, people project a lot of themselves and their personal meanings on those metrics, simply because they’re presented in the interface. There are many, many other metrics that Twitter is looking at, but it has decided to show individual users these numbers, thus forcing people to use them to create meaning for their identity in that context.

How much can the system talk back?

What I was left with as much as anything from this talk was what we always strive for in digital design: how and when should the system you’re using communicate with you based on your actions (or non actions, or patterns, or anti-patterns)? Should the system wait to tell you that you’ve filled out a form field wrong until the end of the process? At the end of that state? As soon as the error is made?

That’s one classic example of systematic feedback. But flip it over and ask how often the system can give users a message or icon or reward for a positive action? If a Website has a 1:15 average time on site metric, should the site time each visit, and offer a free icon or coupon at 1:10?

Ultimately, this is where I think we need to start heading in digital strategy overall. We need to recognize the discourse with a person for what it is, be clear about what they (and we) want them to achieve, and reward frequently with tokens that people can use as social or real currency.

Well, you got down this far. What do you think? Leave a comment here or on Twitter @mleis and let’s talk more about it.

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The SXSW Interactive conference is very much at the convention center, with associated social stuff in concentric rings outward in Austin. But if you follow this panel/social metaphor, then think of every single venue in Austin having panels all day, every day with free beer and food. That’s what the music festival is like.

Luckily, the interactive week inured me to knowing that you will always be missing something, and the feeling is exponentially elevated during music week. For every excellent band you watch, there could literally be 100 concurrent shows going on, sponsored by a wide range of brands looking for awareness with this crowd.

We started the day maybe too well at the Louisiana showcase tent. Prefaced by free chicken, spicy rice, danish, and shiner bock, we got the pleasant surprise of Big Sam’s Funky Nation, an incredible New Orleans’ band. I had caught them at the lucky lounge on Monday night, sure that yet again I was catching a fleeting glimpse of an yet another incredible band in Austin. Seeing them again at noon was an incredible treat. Big Sam is easily the best Trombone player I have ever seen live, and has incredible energy. And his funky nation is almost as talented, and my almost, I mean they could front any other band easily. They did a great job of starting songs with familiar hooks, like Gnarl’s Barkley’s “Crazy,” and then quickly evolved into their own brand of party music.

The only drawback is that the crowd there seemed much more interested in showing how cool they were by not coming into the tent and dancing — which Big Sam’s ability to get people to dance is so powerful, it even moved me to shuffle my feet around a bit. If you can believe that.

After that, we continued our epcot-like day by hanging out at Canada Blast. Thank you Canadian taxpayers! The free fajita buffet and Molson Canadian’s were delicious. We saw two very Canadian acts who’s names I didn’t catch. The first was an adorably fun pop-sounding french-singing singer/songwriter woman, followed by a french-speaking rap trio who capped off their set with a french rap tribute to Kenny G. It almost made me wat to learn french-canadian. Almost. The cool thing about the Canada showcase was a terrific veranda on the second floor that gave you a nice seated view of the bands inside and the people flooding downtown.

Speaking of which, did I mention that downtown Austin is now full of people partying and playing music? It’s a bit incredible, as everywhere you walk is an incredible range of people. At the Comedy Central showcase, a comedian had a great line about panhandler confusion. From UT college kids, to hipsters, to non-hipsters like me: it’s a combination of Halloween and spring break.

And dinner last night did not disappoint at Uchi: a Japanese restaurant about a mile from the hotel. Just off the beaten path of SXSW, the dishes are a kind of tex-sushi that you won’t find anywhere else. I’d go into more detail about the Hot Rock on which you cook your own dressed Wagyu beef strips, but you really have to see and taste it to believe it.

And now we go headlong into the weekend: slightly burned (literally and figuratively), promising ourselves no beer before 1pm and hoping for the best.

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With the social game business discussion that just ended on the always illusive third floor of the Austin convention center, that closes the panel curtain on SXSWi 2010.

The last panel was interesting, talking about the different dynamics in making successful social games on facebook, just how hard it has become to be noticed, and how many millions of dollars need to be thrown at fb in order to get a share of voice in a small period of time.

Though to be honest, I’m already looking forward to bed tonight. For all the panels I missed and the people I haven’t had time to see, it was still nonstop learning, and for that I am walking away from this sxswi as tired and pleased as I was two years ago.

With one major twist: now it’s time for the music festival. I’ll continue trying to publish and update you on what happens, as this is my first time attempting to make it through both weeks.

If you don’t see another post on this blog in three days, tell my mom I love her.

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Can any session compete with Jared Spool as Cornholio?

Last time around at SXSW in 2008, the challenge was keeping it going through the many presentations I saw, not knowing many other people here in Austin. This year, however has unfolded a completely different and more complex challenge: between all of the panels I want to see and getting quality time with the people I haven’t met and those I’d just not get to spend the quality chunks of time with another way.

Through most of the experience so far, the people have won by a large margin. Crepes, long lunches (in part because of the long lines), dinners, drinks, and there’s still more people I’m looking forward to seeing. Even more are the incredibly smart people that I’ve just met the first time.

And yet, the panels I’ve missed are burning me badly. Yesterday I missed a triple play of Gondry, Tambor, and the Hubble IMAX 3D that I’ve been looking forward to for more than a month. Let alone the time spent in incredible panels on game mechanics, future interfaces, and social search while looking at the schedule and wishing I could be two places at once.

Keyboard Man pretty much schooled everyone. Cogaoke was a clinic he led.

And yet and yet much of the time I’ve spent with people hanging out have been an incredible experience all their own. Talking the future of interactive narratives, copywriting prototyping modeling, how the iTunes store made the transition to being HTML-based, cultural affordances in identity creation for multinational sites, baseball parks, desktop apps, social communication infrastructure design for business… it’s dizzying.

Really, it’s a too much of a good thing problem. Except for the I’m-running-out-of-clean-clothes problem. That’s an actual problem that I don’t want to take time away from panels or people for.

How’s your balance been?

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