Raise the Hammer

"Hamilton needs a new approach to citizen engagement & participatory democracy." - Jay Robb

Well maybe it is time to look at our council as "our customers... i.e. our corporate clients", and not as our elected officials.

5 Traps You Have To Avoid When Pitching Bold Ideas by Mark Rolston

A client’s resistance to an innovative idea has a lot to do with how you present it.

"Here, Frog’s Mark Rolston delivers tips on how to re-frame your pitch: My experience leading Frog, a 1,000-person global creative organization, for 18 years, has left me with a few key insights about how the creative industry needs to improve its communication with its corporate clients. If we do, the result will be a win-win situation for companies, innovation consultancies, and, most important, consumers. We will all see more innovation come to market."

"Seeing the Problem Through the Client’s Eyes: A group of young designers in a workshop recently came to me and complained that their clients were treating them as vendors. They expected more respect from the relationship. My answer was to ask them about the opposite situation: Were they treating their customers as “merely” clients? It turns out that’s too frequently the case. All basic qualities of customer service aside, the primary fault lies in designers’ failure to take the time to understand the full scope of a client’s specific challenge."

"Lately in design, it’s been very popular to speak of our work in terms of storytelling, but I believe that the story we tell is really made of (at least) three core lenses: narrative, parametric, and experiential. Through the narrative lens we describe our work through the sequential action of the user’s experience--often a day-in-the-life scenario for our target consumer. It’s the most basic form of storytelling. In our narrative, we illustrate how the proposed design will change something about the end user’s experience, or how they will behave. Second, the parametric lens is the physical description of your design. “It’s this big and has these features.” Lastly, the experiential lens is less about how we as designers describe the design but how we allow the artifact(s) of the design to tell their own story. It’s about how our customer, the client, takes in the qualities, the details, the story, through their own eyes at their own pace. As I often say, hand the model to your customers and then shut up."

On Wet Blankets and Reframing Failure - 4 Strategies For Winning Over Innovation Naysayers.

Comment edited by Mahesh_P_Butani on 2012-09-07 13:33:40