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Sketchnotes: Agile training day at Made by Many
Over the last couple of weeks we’ve put everyone at Made by Many through a day of Agile Training with Simon Baker and Gus Power from Energized Work.
These guys really are the Penn and Teller of agile software development, and I thought the session was excellent. Most of us here have been trying to work in agile ways for five years or more but this was an opportunity to get better at it by broadening our knowledge and understanding. Another post follows containing some more considered takeaways, but I wanted to share these sketch-notes I made during the day. They petered out towards the end of the day as proceedings became more discursive.
There are 10 pages in total, including a ‘page of evil’ where I tried to capture all of the things that we decided one way or another were EVIL.
See the whole set —-> Read full post
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Backing The Bucket (Follow The Twitter List)
Bud Caddell’s collaborative Kickstarter project has three days to go but his backers have more than doubled the initial target amount $5k. I just upped my contribution to $100 so that I can fully participate in the adventure.
$100 gets you full Editorial Board Membership, a voice in the evolution of the book and access to full interview transcripts. Bud also promises to “set up a place where we can chat together”. A very interesting micro-community of digital thinkers has already gathered around the Kickstarter page, and so I thought it would be useful to create a Twitter List and feed from the backers – it’s called ‘Backing The Bucket’ (sorry for those few who had followed it when I was calling it #imbackingbud – I thought the new name would work better and be more consistent with Bud’s blog posts at What Consumes Me).
You can follow the list at: http://twitter.com/malbonster/backingthebucket
The exercise of creating the list prompted a few thoughts:
- The greater proportion of the people backing Bud have joined Kickstarter specifically to do so
- Although Kickstarter allows users to add a biog, avatar and linkage (including Twitter names) to their profiles most people have not – although it wasn’t that hard tracking them down using Twitter’s Find People search: most of them are *tweeting hard*
- The way in which a community is naturally forming around Bud’s ’cause’ demonstrates the power of Kickstarter projects to create really meaningful – action-oriented – social connections. However, this is currently under-exploited by Kickstarter who could try harder to persuade people to complete their profiles (think about the way LinkedIn nags you for years to do this). I also think that a button that allows you to follow all the backers of a Kickstarter project who are on Twitter would be an excellent and presumably very simple enhancement to make – in other words, auto-creating a Twitter list for each project (where users are sharing their Twitter details).
- There is a massive collective desire to ‘do something’ and not just talk about it – Bud’s project is a lightning rod for this networked inclination.
I apologise if you are a backer and have not made it into the list at this stage – that’s because a few people (around 20) proved too difficult to track down. Please send me your details and I’ll add you.
For those who are new to the idea, I’ll quote Bud – and you should read his various blog posts about it too.
This book will be for anyone interested in creating products that are not just market exchanges, but cultural exchanges – for anyone that wants to build or reshape an organization for doing business in a world gone digital – and for anyone just finding their footing in the marketing industry today. Ultimately, I want the book to serve as the how, not just the why or what, for transformational growth at a time when a commitment to strategic change will reshape the entire business landscape. At the core of the book will be ten new principles for creating, promoting, and distributing products in the future – my ten new commandments for brands and marketers.
It’s really exciting and I’m looking forward to learning a lot and having fun. If you haven’t yet backed him, you’ve got 3 days!
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Clay at The RSA… Yay!
A few of us went to see Clay Shirky last night at the Royal Society of Arts. Some stuff we heard him talk about before, and some new stuff. I had sprinted from Embankment tube to make the 6pm start time, and I couldn’t face using Twitter — and so I tried the visual notetaking methods we enjoyed so much from SxSW (and some inspiration from awesomeist Len Kendall). My first attempts are a bit sh*t by comparison but I found it to be a much more thoughtful way of interacting with a talk than making snarky comments on Twitter. Not that this will stop me in the future…
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In case of emergency: Kevin Kelly
There’s nothing like a dose of Kevin Kelly to blast away any weak thoughts that might start creeping into one’s brain after reading something like this super-alarmist article in the NY Times.
The article – Your Brain on Computers – says technology is frying our brains and destroying our families and social lives. We’ve all read the same article at a dozen different newspaper websites a dozen times before: lots of information about how much time we spend (delete as appropriate) online/on Twitter/on Facebook/at work/with a computer/on our mobile phones. But actually very little in the way of any hard evidence – and in fact in the NY Times article even admits that:
“The bottom line is, the brain is wired to adapt,” said Steven Yantis, a professor of brain sciences at Johns Hopkins University. “There’s no question that rewiring goes on all the time,” he added. But he said it was too early to say whether the changes caused by technology were materially different from others in the past.
Nevertheless, five pages of heart-rending personal stories about a bunch of white-livered, malingering chicken-shits later, the dark thoughts come creeping back. Am I on Twitter too much? Am I addicted? Am I some kind of faint-hearted quitter?
That’s where Kelly comes in, and I must say thank you to the @AdHack blog – discovered via Twitter btw – for pointing me towards the only rehabilitation I need. AdHack has posted NOT MERELY a full transcript of Kelly talking about The Technium but ALSO a hypnotic video that makes it easier to swallow these words directly through the eyes and into the brain. Even a few minutes of exposure to this will help. I have picked out a few of the choice phrases below for those who are too busy even to watch online video these days.
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In The Night Garden: Transmedia storytelling platform for babies
A recent post by Henry Jenkins got me thinking about In The Night Garden as a Transmedia storytelling platform.
In his post, He-Man and The Masters of Transmedia he describes the way kids’ cartoon He-Man and The Masters Of The Universe and the many bizarre action figures it spawned as:
An authoring system which encouraged young people to make up their own stories about these characters much as the folk in other time periods might make up stories about Robin Hood or Pecos Bill.
And he notes that:
In some ways, contemporary transmedia is being produced by kids who grew up playing with He-Man to be consumed by kids who grew up playing Pokemon.
This set me thinking, as I have recently become a regular viewer of In The Night Garden.
For those of you without kids or living in foreign parts, I should explain briefly. In The Night Garden, or ‘Night Garden’ as professionals like myself call it, is a BBC children’s television series aimed at one to four year olds. It launched in 2007 with 100 half-hour episodes and cost £15m. Everything in it – literally everything – is merchandised, and the show’s creators designed it specifically to plug in to the universal bedtime ritual, as Producer Anne Wood has described:
“We became very aware of the anxiety surrounding the care of young children which manifested itself in all kind of directions – but the one big subject that came up again and again was bedtime. It’s the classic time for tension between children who want to stay up and parents who want them to go to bed… so this is a programme about calming things down whereas most children’s TV is about gee-ing everything up!”
At the end of the day – and for once I really mean the actual end of the day, when Night Garden is on air – it meets a real need for parents as well. It’s basically half an hour off before ‘the final assault’.
The show is huge in the UK, and although parents have expressed anxiety about the fact that something is going that they don’t quite understand, it’s become a story world with multiple entry-points that facilitate generative play – in this case for babies who aren’t even at the talking stage. We’re starting them young on this stuff. I think Night Garden is already the biggest brand in my little son’s life. Can they get any earlier? I mean, can we do Transmedia for foetuses?
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My name is Tim Malbon, and I am a Soreen Addict
I’ve been meaning to post thanks and share my exciting Soreen unboxing moment. Yup, *amazingly*, the good people who look after Soreen’s PR sent me a hamper of malty goodies for my birthday recently.
Yes, they sent it addressed to “@Malbonster”. Nice touch.
I say “amazingly” because along with some other fans of ‘the dark loave of malty fruitfulness’ (notably @SaulPims) I initiated an experiment…
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“Sometimes you have to destroy something you love”
That’s one of the many stirring quotables from a blog post published last week at John Winsor’s blog.
John is the CEO of Victors and Spoils, the new model (ad) agency that’s applying crowdsourcing models to creativity.
The piece is really quite inspiring, drawing a distinction between the great people and creativity you find in advertising, and the business of that business “which really sucks”.
In the post, John discusses the impact of abundance on the advertising industry. It’s a big theme that we saw Clay Shirky applying to the broad sweep of human history and nature at SXSW this year. In this context, both John Winsor and his guest and recent investor Jon Bond chew over the way the ad industry mistakes abundance for over-supply and commoditisation of their business models. This reminds me of another nugget from the Shirky keynote, which was actually the most re-tweeted line from it:
“Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution.”
Both men lament the fact that structures, complexity and fear are blinding agencies to opportunities, but I have to say that neither is holding out a quick panacea – or any kind of panacea – to the legacy players. I don’t think they believe that it’s possible to change things gently and piece-by-piece without really radical renewal, by which I mean epic-scale, biblical, creative destruction. It’s not about tinkering about at the edges any longer. This paragraph nails it:
I love ad people and the ideas part of the business. It’s the “business” of the business that really sucks and brings down the rest of it. Sometimes you have to destroy something you love in order to rebuild it again, and that is what the new models, like Victors & Spoils, will do. There will be pain. But there is no alternative to the slow, painful death that has been eating away at the soul of the business for the past 15 years.
That’s my highlighting – but it can’t make for very happy reading if you run a big holding company, unless of course you don’t believe the hype and think things will sort themselves out just like they always have. I think that’s ignoring the bigger picture. I know it’s hard to imagine chaps, but what’s happening is somewhat bigger than the ad industry.
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Why is Facebook so hard to love?
Here’s a phrase I’ve been reading a lot on blogs and comments recently:
“I’m finally through with Facebook. Seriously, I’ve made my mind up and I’m going to quit (I haven’t yet, but it’s getting closer every day.)”
It’s sad. They sound a bit like smokers when they’ve got to the stage where they hate cigarettes but they can’t give up.
I should know. Somewhat shamefully, I am a smoker and I’ve been on Facebook since 2006.
Despite using Facebook quite a lot I have never managed to ‘bond’ with it in the same way I have with other social technology brands, like Twitter, Flickr and Delicious for example. I keep going back to Facebook (less these days) but only ‘cos I have to. It’s a bit like an abusive relationship, Facebook is always cross these days.
In spite of all the lovely time we’ve spent together, I just don’t have anything left inside me for Facebook any longer. It’s over. I feel cold. More seriously, the brand totally fails my t-shirt test: would you wear the logo on a t-shirt? Twitter, yes. Flickr, maybe. Delicious, yes. Facebook, no way.
Why? Because I genuinely feel something for those brands. They have a voice and character over and above just what other users bring to them (apart from Delicious, which kind of has an autistically brilliant way of resisting change whilst remaining cool – only half-joking…). By contrast, Facebook has always been almost grotesquely, spectacularly, monumentally dull.
Sure, I know the argument that Facebook must be deliberately bland so you can fill it up with your own good self and shiny, vibrant friends. The argument goes that Facebook doesn’t necessarily need a personality, because it’s a utility. I asked the good people of Twitter and it’s clear that many of them agree with the ‘completed by you’ argument. However, I’m not so sure.
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When I grow up I’d like to be more like a start-up
Justin’s ‘Agile versus Strategy‘ post has tapped an excellent debate.
One of the most interesting comments comes from R/GA’s William Charnock, who makes the point that traditional ad agencies got rid of ‘the makers’:
They outsourced production to directors, photographers, digital technology specialists etc and carved off media execution to separate media agencies. With no ability to prototype, experiment or execute in the real world, the only option for them was to focus on ‘conceptual thinking’ or ‘BDUF’.
Some forward thinking agencies seem to be addressing this, if only on a small scale, setting up labs for experimentation (a la Ogilvy, BBH, Media labs etc.); creating partnerships with content creators, VC’s and start-ups (who truly are the leaders in market agility and fast fail learning/prototyping).
As William and other commenters say, it’s the start-ups who are the true leaders in this space – not least in terms of overall value creation. Indeed, you could argue that the ’start up culture’ of high-growth tech start-ups has become a defining (and disruptive) force in work cultures well beyond tech, marketing and media.
To traditional agencies start-ups must seem superhuman, and super-scary. Look at FourSquare: in just 12 months and with a mere handful of smart, motivated people they’ve created an entirely new media ecosystem and platform, not to mention a service that people actually love. They’re already working with lots of brands, including Starbucks, Pepsi, Zagat, Bravo, Conde Nast and The New York Times. Thousands of awesome campaigns for thousands of clients will run on FourSquare in the coming months and years. Brands will use FourSquare to add real, everyday value to their customer’s lives instead of wasting money pissing them off in expensive bursts. Agencies must look at FourSquare and worry.
Traditional agencies would love to bring some of these uber-makers inside the castle walls – but how’s that going to work? Unless agencies can find some way of giving these start-up punks some skin in the game, what’s in it for them? Why would they? They don’t need agencies, because they’re busy replacing them.
Of course, we’ll see agencies piling into software development, and they’ll certainly look more like tech start-ups – but that’s different to getting the ’start up culture’ inside. Unless you can address structural issues like ownership, autonomy and putting engineers in at the top this simply won’t work – and those are fairly big asks. Stuart and I were discussing the fact that most industries realised they’d needed CTOs and CIOs in at the top a few years ago – but which ad agency has a CTO sitting at the highest level, on the Board? They may be frightened right now but perhaps not enough – until this happens I’m just not sure you could really say it’s being taken seriously enough.
Meanwhile, FourSquare is launching brilliant stuff on a weekly basis – and there’s still only 16 of them. And there are many, many FourSquare’s out there. If you were starting out today and were bright and ambitious – who would you rather work for?
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We’re hiring
We’re looking for a few people to join us and so we’re asking about to see if anyone knows anyone. We need some creative geeky types with an obsession for the new Web who like making things.
Recently, someone in the office asked, “Who here was the last person to be picked for a team in the school playground?” Around half the company put their hands up – and that’s the kind of freaks we’re interested in meeting.
If you’re interested in finding out more please email us on jobs@madebymany.co.uk.
There are several of different roles:
- And we also need developers with Ruby on Rails, XHTML/CSS/JavaScript and the Photoshop skills – I think we’re looking for ninja levels of skill in this respect
If you know anyone who fits the bill please send them our way. Thanks.
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