Heller Communication Design

Academics in Austria, a young man with no hands at the boat doc in Freetown, Sierra Leone, Anne-Marie Slaughter’s book “The Idea That Is America”, and a distinguished group of people role playing scenarios of innovation in Thomas Jefferson’s library.

These are the ideas and images that converge in my head after a few weeks of intense travel as I head to Camden, Maine for PopTech.

Talk of innovation is everywhere. Businesses, foundations, entrepreneurs, government, institutions of every sort are all fixated on it, wanting to own it, map it, master it. Americans are, as always, addicted to the new – but now with an air of desperation. We look for the killer app to fix the broken institutions that kill creativity and block progress, and to clean up the mess we’ve made.

The DOM5 Conference in Linz, Austria was heady and loosely facilitated.  My fellow speakers and attendees were there to talk non-stop about ideas, and how change comes about in organizations.

My time in Sierra Leone was spent working with an NGO to facilitate a conversation about innovation in maternal and child health. Real, personal, passionate and close to home. About as far from the conversation in Linz as could be.

Then to Darden, the University of Virginia, for the Jefferson Innovation Summit – a thoughtful program, carefully put together, attended by a remarkable group of diverse people who have come from all over the country to talk to each other about innovation and entrepreneurship in America. Literal bus loads of brains as we are transported from mountain top to mountain top in Charlottesville to try to think together.

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More evidence that design is at the center of social innovation, and social innovation is what the world needs now.

Two inspiring authors have surfaced recently, one wrote thousands of years ago, one is an observer of our own time.

Gary Younge, has just written a book about the massive consequences of identity, and the role it plays in every aspect of our lives. Distinctions formed by identities that define “other” include racism in Britain, ethnicity in Rwanda, Islam and Christianity, gender as it’s played out in all its varieties, liberal, conservative and radical politics or religion anywhere, real estate in Israel and Palestine – to name but a few of the deadly distinctions. But those are just the extreme and easy-to-name examples. Identity creates “others” in far more seemingly benign ways, such as every enterprise that’s part of our capitalist system, every club, network or community on the internet, every city or town in the world, every family, nationality, generation and individual creature on the planet.

Identity, of course, is a good and necessary thing. Meg Wheatley describes it as one of the three dimensions of a living system and says, “Life organizes around a self; organizing is always an act of creating an identity… Identity is the filter that every organization uses to make sense of the world. New Information, new relationships, changing environments – all are interpreted through a sense of self.”

Identity has also traditionally been one of the mainstays of design – an unquestioned area of expertise that belonged solely to designers and could be counted onto bring in hefty fees – the bigger the company, the more they expected to pay for their identity. It became, before it was eroded by open source quick and dirty logos, a fairly standard process that delivered a fairly standard product, and the lasting outcome the client got for their money in the end was a logo and guidelines for how to use it.

I think about identity almost constantly, and it grows and takes on more importance for me all the time. Much of what I do with organizations now is about identity, but it rarely ends up as a logo. It has to do with helping them define, or remember, why they matter in a culture where the things that used to count don’t and where none of the old rules apply. It’s understanding how to inspire behavior through clarity of values and the communication of them in a way that makes people want to join in. It’s helping them align in more engaging ways with the identities of the people they count on to support them.

The name is the same but the challenge has shifted as our businesses and community leaders wake up to the need to engage society in their plans for the future. The stakes are higher, and it’s still design.

The other writing is an ancient poem that Steven Greenblatt brings back to life in the New Yorker. “On the Nature of Things” was written by Lucretius, who was born about a thousand years before Christ. His principle vision was “of atoms randomly moving in an infinite universe”, and if that were not prescient enough, he went on to argue that, “In a universe so constituted, it is absurd to think that the earth and its inhabitants occupy a central place, or that the world was purpose-built to accommodate human beings….There is no reason to set humans apart from other animals, no hope of bribing or appeasing the gods, no place for religious fanaticism, no call for ascetic self-denial, no justification for dreams of limitless power or perfect security, no rationale for wars of conquest or self-aggrandizement, no possibility of triumphing over nature. Instead, he wrote, human beings should conquer their fears, accept the fact that they themselves and all the things they encounter are transitory, and embrace the beauty and the pleasure of the world.”

Lucretius’ wild notion about atoms became scientific certainty 2,000 years later. On the other hand, his advice to us to see ourselves as part of the ecosystem of all creatures around us, stop fighting, conquer our fears and embrace the beauty and pleasure of the world is something that, as a species, we have so far failed.

The “living system” definition of identity has application far beyond the world of logos. It can be applied, as a design process, to all the potentially deadly forms of identity listed above. And it has the power to help create a larger and more diverse identity in which we can see others as part of ourselves.

It’s easy to forget beauty and pleasure when we’re trying so hard to create impact and change. But what a wonderful reminder from Lucretius that one of our greatest pleasures – creating beauty – is also one of the most powerful tools we have to create positive change.

Insights from from two writers 3,000 years apart, which none can address more successfully or fully than designers of social innovation.

Meg Wheatley said that “So much of human behavior is habitual. And behind every habit is a belief – about people, life, the world. If we can know our beliefs, we can then act with greater consciousness about our behaviors.”

It appears a growing number of people agree that if we are to have a different future than the one we are heading towards, it will require changing our behavior. In other words, no amount of green buildings or consumption of green products will suffice to reduce the environmental destruction and social inequality we are inflicting on the planet and each other. Stands to reason.

What this points out is a fundamental truth about humanity that we have pretty much been able to avoid thinking hard about until now. Of course it’s more comfortable to place the responsibility elsewhere, but it is dangerous. That’s why I cringe whenever I hear someone use the cliché that they want to “change the world”, since it so clearly isn’t the world that needs changing, it’s us.

The implication for Design for Social Innovation is that the most important design of all is invisible. It’s not the “stuff”, not the artifacts, not the technologies. It’s the beliefs, the ethos, the values, the systems behind the campaigns and products and events that form them. It’s designing events and products and behavior before they happen. And that is precisely where we need to be designing.

Design for social innovation begins with the design of conversations themselves – it requires treating a conversation with the same care, and the same planning, that would be appropriate for the design of a product. Conversation starts everything – and yet we rarely think of them as an opportunity for design. This is not only the most important, upstream part of the systems that we need to change, it’s the fastest way for a designer to become a vital part of a strategic initiative. It’s where things begin, and where the most important things are decided.

On the hard side, it doesn’t provide much of a portfolio. Nothing to enter into design competitions, few samples to put on your website, harder to explain at a cocktail party just what it is that you do. In fact, most of the invisible things you’ll be designing are private and sensitive to CEOs and leaders of all types of organizations. You can’t even talk about them. This can be a tough shift for designers who are loathe to give up the artifacts of their work. Of course it doesn’t mean that you won’t design any artifacts, it only means that they will be the last thing you design, not the first.

New Scientist (sorry they won’t let me link to their articles) ran a story on hydrothermal vent mining. It’s the next frontier of mining rare earth elements from the deep ocean floor, and needless to say there is competition building for the best locations. Also needless to say, we risk damaging remarkable ecosystems of which we know very little about (sound familiar?) – mysterious ecosystems of giant tube worms and unknown species of shrimp and who knows what else. The point the author was making is that before we have another gold rush like we did in California in the 19th century, we should put in place the legal frameworks that will help avoid the potential destruction of still untouched ecological riches.

But is that enough to change our behavior and prevent us from repeating history? Isn’t this a process that would benefit from the involvement of Social Innovation Designers? Isn’t this one of the big conversations that needs thoughtful architecture to gain alignment around what’s best for the planet and not for the same rich countries that always prevail? Wouldn’t it be an important thing to design communication so that everyone understands the risks as well as the benefits? What about integrating all the wisdom we have about these places into our actions?

This is design at a point where it can significantly impact the future. The most important design challenges in the world are the ones we can’t see – until they are upon us. The answer is yes, let’s get involved.

This is about people and things that lead us to new lives, new meaning in the lives we have, and help us build things beyond what we ever imagined possible.

Ten or 11 years ago, I was smack in the middle of one of my tormented career crises (there have been many, just ask my husband). Jaimie Cloud was a neighbor who, over a bottle of wine, told me about her organization devoted to sustainability education which she called SEC (Sustainability Education Center). Appropriately horrified that anyone doing what she was doing would risk being confused with the other SEC, I volunteered to re-think her identity. The next morning was Saturday, and she dropped off a stack of reading (Peter Senge, David Orr, Donella Meadows, Paul Hawkins) so I could start getting up to speed. I remember saying “this is going to change my life, isn’t it?”  And Jaimie said, “yup, usually does”. All those voices, and the real truths of nature did change me forever. Once you know a truth, you can never not know it again. It made me crazy trying to figure out how to apply the principles to my work in communication design at a deep level – because the awareness of principles so big and important made the work I’d been doing seem small and ephemeral. I wanted my work to matter at a planetary level, not just a client level.

But I was clueless as to how to connect the power I felt in sustainability and systems thinking to design in a systemic way. It was the most exciting problem I had ever considered – purposeful, intentional, connected to the world: A design opportunity bigger than I had ever contemplated.

Yet as we know, when one is successful in business, the success defines you no matter how hard you try to stay loose. Clients tend to hire you based on what you’ve done in the past, and that’s a very tough thing to change if your parents forgot to set you up with a trust fund. The crisis came at the end of a huge project – an identity design and launch of a new global television network for Discovery. I had been working intensely 7 days a week for almost a year. Whether or not I could ever develop a design career in sustainability or social innovation (not in anybody’s vocabulary back then) I knew my current trajectory was unsustainable.

We engaged David Baker of Recourses to evaluate our business and help us figure out what to do. His advice was unforgettable. He said, “I would take away your big fancy computer, say good bye to your employees, and have you become a writer and strategist”. At the time, he might as well have said he’d like me to walk off a cliff. The thought gave me vertigo.
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In politics, celebrity, the greenwashing business and the beauty industry, there is a religion based on the notion that perception is reality – that if an individual or an organization appears as something – and is perceived that way – then that perception becomes the truth. In essence, it’s a belief that how we look, and what we say is more important than who we are and what we do. Perception is reality is the story people tell themselves about themselves often enough that they believe it.

This is the religion of celebrity, consumption and denial. On the surface, it’s a prettier reality than the one we live in day to day. It allows us to believe the man in the nice suit who tells us that Exxon is a caring guardian of our future because natural gas is the answer to all our energy problems (ignoring the hideous death and destruction fracking causes), that tuna is the wonder food and we should eat more of it (ignoring the fact that we have rolled in rice and practically wiped out one of the most magnificent creatures in the ocean), that congressmen make laws that benefit the people of this country (ignoring reality entirely), that Pepsi actually cares about the health of humans (ignoring the role they play in …you get the point). Deception on the part of the deceiver, denial on the part of the perceiver, a relationship of mutuality.

But not so simple, and not so clear. First of all, an element of what is projected is almost always based in truth, no matter how small or illusive. And second, it isn’t always bad, when you consider these examples in nature: Crows and ravens “lie” about where they hide their cache – pretending to store food if another crow is watching, then moving it or hiding it for real when they’re alone. Some frogs disguise themselves as poisonous to avoid predators, and other creatures have mastered the art of masquerading as turds so they won’t be eaten. The difference is that in nature, the deceivers don’t believe their own deceptions.

So what’s this got to do with being an entrepreneur?

I have switched “perception is reality” to “make reality perception” for a very practical reason.

Entrepreneurs are critical to our future – not only because you create new businesses, jobs and new ideas, but also because you get a fresh start on truth. You get a conscious choice to NOT create a life of deception and denial. You have the opportunity to reinstate and revere the truth so that we can act on it together to make it beautiful again. You get to make all your decisions based on their real consequences – not only for yourself but for all the people and creatures you touch and for the planet.

Most established companies can’t come clean without self-destructing. Pepsi (not to pick on them, but hey, sometimes the truth hurts) can support all the socially innovative ideas it wants, but it can’t tell the truth about the toll its manufacturing processes take on the environment, or what damage its products cause to consumers’ health, or how coldly its marketing strategy aims to get kids to drink sugar. It has to rely on deception – of itself and others – if it wants to survive.

But entrepreneurs don’t, and that’s why I love you. You have all your decisions in front of you, and the truth is yours to tell.

Some truths to be learned from the big deceivers

First, find your truth and own it, because everything about the rest of life will try to
confuse you. Meditate. Sit with yourself and make sure you’re in touch with your true purpose, not simply aware of all the things you think you’re supposed to think and do and care about. Consider your ego, and the role it plays on your world view and ability to make decisions. According to the Talmud, “We do not see things as they are; we see them as we are”.

Think too about your goals and their unintended consequences. Make sure you are ready to take responsibility for them, and to be transparent about them.

Lying is more expensive than telling the truth. Making up a story is costly. You have to remember it over time, train others to tell it, keep reminding them about it, work harder to convince them and continue to keep the curtain closed. That all adds up to a lot of energy, time and money that can be invested in more productive ways.

Only the truth is sustainable. I mean this in both definitions of that word. Deception never lasts. Just ask Bernie Madoff or the former governor of California. Besides, when people lie, they tend to lie to appear like somebody or something else – either a standard of normal or an accepted definition of super-normal. For that reason, they are never really unique. The truth is always more distinguishing, more interesting, and far less destructive to the really important things in life, like relationships.

Have nothing to hide. Ensure that everyone in your company and everyone who represents you is armed with the truth and emboldened to tell it. It’s the only way to tell a consistent story.

Spend 95% of your time making your reality as impressive as it can be, and 5% of your time talking about it. Instead of thinking about what to say first, think about what to do – saying it will be a hundred times easier. Your marketing costs will be cut in half if you have something truly exciting to say, and in half again if people experience it the same way you promise they will. Think of it as truth-telling instead of marketing.

As an entrepreneur, you are creating a story that just might be one of the most important stories the world has ever heard.  Fiction has a place in art, but not in business.

Rolling Stone ad by Fallon McElligott Rice, 1985

Social Innovation Design is simply (and remarkably) the design of innovation and change that assumes ethical responsibility for creating positive outcomes for people and the planet.

It has application everywhere innovation is needed: in every business, mission-based organization, community, society and government.

It includes the design of everything: from conversations, communication campaigns, experiences, structures, technology platforms, systems, products, business models, strategies, art and culture.

It incorporates all traditional and new design disciplines and mediums – from identity to interactive, film, product, movement and game design, and it also lives outside these disciplines – in the hands of millions of citizens who are working in communities around the world to bring wellbeing back to their lives and their environments.

Social Innovation Design has the potential to be the single integrating force we need to take on the challenges we face – systemically and sustainably.

Social Innovation has become the bigger-than-big-new-new-thing – in corporate board rooms, academia and on the ground everywhere from developing countries to US cities looking to change their prospects for the future. It is garnering more attention, and more funding all the time. Even the G8 at Deauville said: “Drawing on experiences across countries, we underline that a holistic approach to innovation and growth is needed, which would include both technological and non-technological innovation as well as innovation in social and public services”.

The big question all this begs of course, is why we have any other type of design, or innovation, at all. The answer lies within us, in our seemingly intractable need to create silos, our addiction to the cult of the expert and our need to flatten the important things in life into a soundbite.

Here’s how it usually goes: We “discover” a new idea or process, mainstream it, create a separate silo for it instead of seeing it as part of the larger system, create jargon, soundbites and experts that over-simplify it, misunderstand and misapply it, then tire of it and judge it as inadequate. Finally, we move on to whatever we deem the next cure-all quick fix.

Let’s not do that any more.

Social Innovation, like design, is not separate from life. It’s the way we need to navigate life now. It isn’t a silo or a quick fix. It needs practitioners who are passionate, broadly curious generalists, integrators, listeners, systems thinkers and doers, and people who want a life with both success and purpose.

While the definition of Social Innovation Design that began this post is simple, getting it right is not. It cannot be seen or acted upon as a silo, only as a system. It is a learned way of being, and of seeing. To achieve consistent, measurable outcomes requires immersion in all the contexts where innovation is needed, the specific skills and tools to develop and scale ideas, and mastery of diverse, game-changing collaboration.

We are launching Design for Social Innovation at SVA to change the course of social innovation, design, and most of all, of all of us.

Christine Aaron

In a game-changing stroke of brilliance, the Australian government has proposed legislation that would require all cigarettes to be sold in plain brown packages.

For many decades now, a battle has raged for the brains and lungs of smokers. On one side, governments and the few advertising agencies that do public service anti-smoking campaigns, and on the other, the tobacco industry and their package design firms. On the “smoking will kill you” side, government legislators strive to make health warnings un-ignorable and frightening, and anti-smoking campaigns employ all manner of cleverness and drama to convince people to stop. My undergraduate class at SVA was compelled, as a group, to take on fellow students who smoke outside the building and stink up the elevator with their clinging fumes. On the “oh go ahead, one more won’t kill you” side, the relevant design firms plot to maintain the cigarette packs role as supreme marketing tool and every addict’s gold foiled paraphernalia of choice. Everyone keeps their head down, doing what they know how to do, mesmerized by the relentless pursuit of incremental progress – or in their most inflated projections, something resembling a win for either side.

And then, a law that would just shut down the battle – designing a win by undesigning it. If this legislation passes, every brand name will appear in the identical block type font, next to the health warning. There will be no slims, no longs, no foil tips or bands on the cigarettes themselves, either. Research has proven that without all these fancy branded graphic elements, people can’t tell cigarette brands apart, and in general, expect a lower quality smoke from them. This is a stunning example of social innovation design, regardless of whether or not a designer came within miles of it.

What does this mean for design as most people know it? If you’re a designer considering the consequences of this kind of innovation, concerned that it might put you out of a job, take it as a wake-up call to think of something better to do. That’s exactly what we’re working on.

Part four of “A few things every entrepreneur should know about communication” for Sheepless.org

I don’t mean what you think, and I’m sorry if that’s what you were hoping. But trust me, this is more important, and much better for you in the long run.

All the problems we face as a species can be boiled down to two huge, upstream issues that are the root cause all the others. First, there are way too many of us – and we need to talk about that – but it’s a subject for another day. Second, we live in our heads. Our entire reality is manufactured in our heads, and too much of it is lived there.

There are a whole bunch of reasons why we don’t get out of our heads much, like Descartes, the Age of Enlightenment (during which a bunch of white dudes declared that reason was the primary source of legitimacy and authority, and therefore anyone but an educated white dude was inferior), and the computer, which creates interesting faux realities for us inside our own and others’ heads and requires nothing but small movements of our wrists and fingers. If you’ve been wondering why we’re disconnected from our own true nature, sedentary and fat, this goes a long way toward explaining it. And we are actually less smart and less able because of it.

Thankfully – along came scientists – who questioned what and where our brain actually is, and as it turns out, it’s not so simple. To begin, we have about 100 million neurons in our guts, so the notion of making gut decisions, frowned on forever in business, is not only not just a figure of speech, it’s a pretty good idea. Likewise, there’s another cluster of neurons in our cardial sac, so we actually do involve our hearts in the thinking process.

In addition, the vast majority of our brainpower goes to unconscious thought – making our organs function, our bodies move, perceiving things far faster than we can with our conscious minds, registering our senses and emotions, accumulating and integrating it all through our instincts. But you don’t need me to tell you all of this, Blink by Malcolm Gladwell, The Neurobiology of We by Dan Siegel, How we Decide by Jonah Lehrer and many other books tell the story wonderfully.

The biggest reason by far for us to stop living in our heads is that it severs our connection to our senses – our ability to touch, smell, taste, see and hear that makes us the amazing sensing machines we are. These same senses connect us to each other, to other species and to all of nature in ways that go far far deeper than words ever can. These are our tools for non-verbal communication.

So, back to business. Non-verbal communication isn’t talked about much in business. (Pun intended). And even though we’re making progress, it’ll be a long time before you can walk into the board room of a major corporation and say, “My gut tells me we should invest in this…” without being viewed as a wacko. But as an entrepreneur, you are free to involve all your senses and your instincts as well as your brain in growing your business, and in fact, the most successful entrepreneurs always have.

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Part 3 of “A few things every entrepreneur should know about Communications”.

Until you have sat in a darkened room for days on end, watching through a two-way mirror as groups of total strangers discuss their interpretations of messages you spent months crafting to make a different point than the one they are getting – unable to intervene and explain what you meant and on the wrong side of a sugar rush from eating too many M&Ms out of frustration – you cannot truly appreciate the gulf that can exist between the messages you intend to communicate and what it is that people receive.

How could they be so dumb (you think), how could they not appreciate your cleverness or laugh at your joke? Have they never heard of irony? How can they not see that you are telling the truth, unlike all the other companies making the same argument? Did they not get the reference to Hemingway? Why didn’t they work a little harder to see that you were using that word to mean something more specific than most people do?

A focus group with consumers, like the one described above, is only one place you can experience this gap between intended message and received meaning. If you pay attention, you can feel it live in a room full of potential investors. It’s there every time you send an email, conduct a job interview or create a presentation. It’s hanging in the atmosphere between your web site and the people who visit it. The more aware you are of this gap, the more skilled you will become at bridging it. Until you do, you’re not communicating effectively.

The invaluable lessons I learned sitting in the dark listening to people as they tried to comprehend my work, while hard won, are relevant to everybody everywhere who wants to be understood, and are the basis for just about everything I have learned about communication since. I’ve tried to summarize them here.

There are three parts to any communication.
What you want to say, what’s received and what gets lost in translation. We’ve covered the first (how to say what you want to say) in the last few articles, we’re getting to the receiving part here. The loss in the middle can be viewed as what splashes out of the water bucket on the way back from the well. You need to make sure you’re carrying enough to begin with so that it doesn’t render the whole trip futile.
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One common misconception for entrepreneurs is the belief (because they’re told repeatedly) that they need to capture their business idea – however radical – in the structured and declarative statements called mission, vision and values. I know this, because I used to tell clients the same thing.

Almost seven years ago, I went to Cairo to lead a three-day workshop for Egyptian entrepreneurs, and included the glossary below as a way to shed light on the confusion around the many forms these elements can take. I share these definitions in the same spirit with which people admit to a time in their lives when they didn’t recycle.

Mission: Why you exist, your organization’s purpose in life.

Vision: Where you want to take the company, what you want to accomplish, how you want to impact the marketplace.

Goals/Objectives: The specific, detailed accomplishments that are necessary in order to make your vision a reality.

Value proposition: The core benefit that you offer clients, partners, etc. Can change with each customer segment.

Positioning: The underlying platform for marketing and communications. It distinguishes a company from the competition by articulating unique strengths and values.

Strategy: The creation of a unique and valuable position, involving a different set of activities.

Character: The personality of your company. Defines the experience that a customer or employee will have with it.

Elevator pitch: Fast answer to the question “Who are you?”

Tagline: Evocative, creative, emotional shorthand for your mission or elevator pitch…depends on communications need and context. Frequently change every few years.

Make sense? I hope not.

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