take two of these, and call me at the IPO...

Aspirin

I just got off the phone with an amazing person in regards to a potential project. This was the very first time that I talked to this particular person, BUT I could tell that she was a big thinker. Creative Director & CEO of a New York based Production Agency. She makes things happen. It's her art. 

When we got into the conversation about what it is that I do, we went back and forth until I said one simple thing... "I help organizations shift from competition thinking to possibility thinking..." Something about that made her understand what I was talking about. It was almost like an "ah ha" moment, BUT the problem was... This "ah ha" moment came after about 10 minutes of me talking about what it is that I do. My art. 

When I tell people that I am a Design and Innovation Consultant (which does NOT always do the trick) I get nods and sometimes a glimpse of understanding. When I say I am a Designer, the next question is always... "What do you design...?" LOL!! It's quite the experience... AND when I say what I really do, IT really throws things off... "I am a design thinker, highly tactical in the conception and development of breakthrough ideas for new products services and brands..." The question behind that is always ... "Okay... So what is it that you DELIVER", which translates to "What pretty things do you create..." So... I decided to write this little blog post to help transition people into the way I think, and the foundation by which my company is built on... 

Take two of these and call me at the IPO.

What I do is actually pretty simple. I engage my clients, rather it be proactively (I see a gap in the marketplace a "problem" and I find luminaries in the correlated industry) OR reactively (they know they have a need for something that deals with design, they just don't know "what" yet...) and I ask about 1000 questions (really about 995). Then based on their answers, I begin to re-imagine their business in my mind, finding areas where automation (systems) can be designed to simplify work flows, I take an assessment of their visual strategy and rethink how messages are being communicated, I think about how technology fuses with what they do and how it can amplify or add genius to their art, I then articulate all of this through what I like to call "master ideas", and the process that I used to get to the ideas is called "Ideation" and even more specifically "design thinking".  So in an essence, I am a problem solver, and my solutions are generally based in possibilities vs degrees of competition. 

So... If I had to say it in simple terms... I would say... Take two of these (ideas) and call me at the IPO (when you transform your industry).