Wolff Olins Blog

Returning from the RISE Conference in Hong Kong where I spoke about Open Design, it was clear that China has already eclipsed Silicon Valley on many fronts. While there is exceptional talent in the Bay Area, a vast educational system spread across 50 states, and a high degree of tech fluency among the general population, this alone will not sustain the US as a tech leader.

The untapped potential for American tech lies in the cultural capital of its increasingly diverse population. If China’s technology ascent is predicated largely on population scale and density, then America should see population diversity as its vital and differentiated asset. With that in mind, it must reframe ‘Diversity & Inclusion’ from quotas to competitive advantage.

Company leaders often have altruistic aspirations. They want to build a meritocratic culture that represents the larger populace. But people, as social animals, don’t like change. They recreate cultural communities that are familiar and self-affirming. Talent is drawn from a wave of former colleagues, university classmates and friend-of-a-friends, which means many groups are overlooked. This has lead to inadequacies in the tech giants’ EEO1-reports, covered broadly in the media last year, and new personnel appointments to address these shortcomings.    

While cognitive diversity is a proven engine to drive superior products, this heterogeneity is tied as much to identity diversity as it is to inter-disciplinarity. The often overlooked talent pool of women, people of color, military veterans and older, mature workers can provide essential and challenging perspectives, and expose teams to greenfield opportunities. The appetite for greatness is also an exercise in embracing the unfamiliar. Misfits provide magic. Within a homogeneous culture, biases often go unchecked, and seep into the products. For much of the 20th century for instance, the dynamic range of Kodak film favored white skin, and was calibrated against the famous Shirley card. Today, machine-learning algorithms are observed to incorporate race and gender prejudices, concealed within language patterns and image preferences. While the recent ‘cultural strife’ at various tech enclaves point to advancing stereotypes, they also serve as a warning. They remind us that in order to create transformative, human-centered products, harmful biases mustn’t be baked into the products themselves.

Though there are common excuses — lack of quality applicants, talent pipeline deficiencies and compromised search funnels, diversity shouldn’t be classed as a nice-to-have. For the tech sector, it’s a functional necessity. Enough lamenting brogrammers and the technocracy. Diversity is the signature of a winning future-facing company, and thriving industry-at-large.

Today I step into the role of Global CEO at Wolff Olins – a place that I love, surrounded by people that continually inspire and amaze me.  

It’s a real privilege.  To be given this opportunity, to be the first woman in the role and to be building on such a great legacy.

I also take into the role the friendship and wise words of my partner in crime for the last few years – Ije Nwokorie, who I’m thrilled to know will remain in the business mentoring clients and teams.

So what will I be building on and bringing to the role?

An ambition for progress

It’s the incredible drive that we, and our clients, have for progress and making a positive impact that has kept me at Wolff Olins for over 20 years.

Whether it’s creating and building iconic brands, delivering useful and satisfying experiences or asking how we can use our creativity to solve the world’s biggest challenges.

We’re progressive in what we do and how we do it.  We’re passionate about what we believe.  And we’re committed to making a difference.  That’s why our clients remain partners and become close friends.

You’ll be seeing more of this.

A belief in the power of people

As my wonderful colleague, Robert Jones likes to say, “If you want to go fast, go alone, if you want to go far, go together.”

People are at the centre of the work we do, how we do it and the impact it has.

And our best work is achieved partnering and working alongside ambitious clients, as well as a vibrant network of partners.  Delivered by the most incredible team of thinkers, creators and makers.

Working with or at Wolff Olins should leave you feeling inspired, in a new league and part of a community that’s making a difference in the world.  It’s why many people, like me, have made ourselves at home and built long careers here.

I’ll be making sure this remains at our core.

A spirit of optimism

The world is complex, the journey can feel bumpy and we’re living through interesting times.

We’ll always be glass half full, brimming with solutions rather than problems and ready to creatively tackle any challenge.

50 years of history gives us deep knowledge, expertise and confidence.  Being born in the 60’s gives us a natural optimism, energy and enthusiasm for what’s possible.

Something we’ll be nurturing and bringing to everything we’re part of.

And so I start my new role feeling a deep sense of appreciation and gratitude for what’s gone before.  As well as an incredible excitement and ambition for what we can achieve next.  

I’m stepping down as CEO of Wolff Olins, after three and a half years in the role. My friend, colleague, and Wolff Olins’ long-time COO, Sairah Ashman is taking up the reigns. She’ll bring fresh energy and her usual vision, integrity and care to the role.

For Wolff Olins, these are exciting times.

As part of our transition, Sairah asked me what my most important learnings over the last three and a half years were, and I thought I’d share them:

1. That to be radical is to be human

I’ve learnt that no matter how big, systemic, important the change you are trying to make happen, you have to make it about people and bring those people along, methodically, thoughtfully, one by one.

This learning should not be mistaken as an excuse to aim low or avoid the radical.

On the contrary.

To be radical is to go back to what is fundamental to us as people, and there is nothing more fundamental than our humanity itself. When change is conceived and articulated in terms that make it clear why it’s better for individuals and society in a way that transcends efficiency and profits and speed; when you give people the time and space to interrogate that change and go through the stages of grief (killing off the old) and discovery (giving birth to new), there is literally no limit to what you can get done.

When I’ve done that – for our business or with clients – we’ve had great success. When I’ve not done that – perhaps because I’m running too fast or I’ve just not been conscious or thoughtful enough – the results have not matched the promise.

Luckily, I’ve been surrounded by people (like Sairah) who haven’t let me make that mistake too often.

2. That inputs are as important as (maybe even more important than) outcomes

I’ve learnt that the metrics that society uses to measure success and failure are not really fit for purpose, measuring only, as they do, progress towards some soulless upper right quadrant. When the dust settles, I’ve found it’s not been the hard measurable outputs alone – sometimes not at all – that have defined success or failure. Instead, what we put into it, in time, care and thoughtfulness, has produced results that endure: belief, commitment, growth, change.

The modern world asks us to set measureable goals. This is not a bad thing. But inputs, sometimes with no firm objective, have their place. To take more walks. To create more time for people. To learn something new. To be truly present.

In this fast-paced, ambitious, have-it-all-now environment that our people and clients operate in, I’ve learnt that sometimes the job of the leader is not to make the boat go faster, but to encourage people to stop for a second, take stock, recalibrate how they’re showing up. With fresh perspective, not only are people healthier, the work is often better.

3. That the primary challenge of today’s leaders is to unleash everyone’s creativity

In this era of infinite access to knowledge, to the means of production and to capital, creativity is really the only difference human beings can make to any process or system or organisation. And so learnings 1 and 2 become even more important for me as a leader, and my task becomes, quite singularly, to create the conditions that allow people to be their most creative selves. To accept that those conditions mean allowing vulnerability, allowing people to bring their (often odd) passions to the job, aligning their personal agendas and ambitions to the organisation’s purpose, and re-codifying work, fundamentally, as a creative endeavour.

The big questions our clients ask us: ‘where are we?’, ‘where should we go?’ and ‘how do we start?’, each requires a creative response – to observe the world with fresh eyes, to imagine a future that shouldn’t be possible, to take inventive steps towards it.

Even with our 200 people, thinking this way is a daily challenge. For the ambitious leaders of the huge organisations that ask for our help, it’s a mind-boggling task. Yet, it’s a task each leader has to take on to remain relevant and attractive in these turbulent, exciting, unpredictable, thrilling times.

When the BBC asked me a couple of week ago to take part in the radio programme The Bottom Line, I jumped at the chance. I’ve always admired the programme’s no-nonsense coverage of business, and the gently probing style of its presenter, Evan Davis. It’s business without the jargon and without the hype – very Wolff Olins.

The topic was brand architecture: why do companies often have more than one brand? We recorded the programme on a Friday afternoon, and I was joined by Ed Pilkington from Diageo and Jana Ignatova from Johnson & Johnson, two people who know the topic from the inside. We talked for two hours about everything from brand loyalty to brand storytelling – and we could have gone on much longer. The producers cleverly packaged it all down into half an hour, and here’s the result.

I’m not the first to ask whether tech is a double-edged sword. It’s given us unparalleled access to information, enabled instant connectivity and brought us new forms of visual communication :)   

By the same token, it’s obviously had a huge impact on the pace of life. An attention economy has emerged and we’ve become hypersensitive to external stimulus.

We click, swipe, scroll. Scroll, swipe, click.

We’re approaching media saturation, a ‘hyper-reality’ where physical and virtual realities merge. This dystopian film by Keiichi Matsuda is kind of alarming.

It seems like our emotions are hijacked, given less chance to settle, and we’re left with little patience as a result. We’re aggravated by short waits, by minor inconvenience, and embark on digital detoxes that promise separation from notification-induced dopamine.

In my recent talk at the Wolff Olins Tech Week event, I argued for the need to reassess our relationship with our tech. We need to create space in which we’re conscious of how it affects us, as well as how we can affect it.

Harvard psychology professor Ellen Langer - pioneer of ‘non-meditative mindfulness’ - identifies with this. She talks about ‘awareness of the interactions between your self and a designed object’, and how that ‘encourages positive behaviour and wellbeing’.

I’d like to join the call for us to actively engage in our technology, rather than hiding from the discussion of its impact. If we embrace it fully, and become more mindful of our intention, we can use it to positively influence our states of minds.

I suggested to our audience that, as fully invested tech community members, we must design around the needs of people, not users, embracing the irrationality and unpredictability of human emotion. I’d like us to go beyond speed and ease, to create moments for contemplation and exploration, awe and wonder even. This chimes with a lot of our recent thinking. Members of our leadership team have spoken in the last few months about fighting the tyranny of optimization and being mindful about our role in the development of AI.  

To understand the deeper impact of products and services, we should observe the longer cycles of human behaviour and explore how we might better serve basic physical needs. For example, could website owners put their websites ‘to sleep’ at specific hours, as envisioned by the founders of this project? What other interventions should exist?

Designers must work to reveal instead of obscure; build friction instead of hide it; allow control over limitation; invite participation rather than demand interaction. We could all take inspiration from cyberneticist architect Cedric Price and his fun palace concept.

A more conscious relationship with technology - one that questions and engages deeply rather than simply accepts reductive interfaces - will not only help us to improve our own wellbeing, it will help us shape its impact on larger socio-economic systems.

“The hefty price for accepting information uncritically is that we go through life unaware that what we’ve accepted as impossible may in fact be quite possible.” - Ellen Langer

EY reported that global technology mergers and acquisitions activity soared to an all-time high last year. Despite failure rates of 70-90% according to HBR and a run of mega-deal U-turns of the Kraft-Unileverkind, analysts have told us to expect M&A volumes to remain high in 2017. When done in a considered, thoughtful and nuanced way, post-merger brand strategy gives focus and sets a clear path for future growth.

In this, the first in a series on leaders’ questions, we’ll ask how a company can leverage brand strategy for post-merger success. When done in a considered, thoughtful and nuanced way, it gives focus and sets a clear path for future growth. It provides the perfect opportunity to re-evaluate, re-align and renew.

Through our experience with clients over the last four decades, we’ve found there isn’t one solution. We believe in rigour and logic, but we don’t have a framework that leads to a definitive answer. Claude Lévi-Strauss, widely regarded as the father of modern anthropology, said in the first volume of his iconic Mythologiques:

“The scientist is not a person who gives the right answers, he’s one who asks the right questions.”

In the case of M&A brand strategy, the following ten questions are a useful start point:

1. Why are we here? Financials and diligence surrounding hard factors aside, the best mergers happen when there’s a deeper meeting of minds. Common themes across brand, culture and leadership approach are rich springboards for strategic discussion. Much as differences should be respected, shared values point to a common philosophy. Defining this in the first instance grounds harder-edged debate around future propositions and offers helpful parameters for innovation.

2. How big is our future? Mergers fall down on short-term thinking and resulting pragmatism. To avoid this, start with a view of long-term success. Be radical and ask, ‘how big is our future?’ Being aligned around the direction of travel and working back from distant points in time is vital. By factoring in moments for measurement and analysis, you’ll ensure transitional objectives add up to annual outcomes – and beyond.

3. Where’s the world going? Alongside internal ambition and operational reality, external perspective is essential. In planning conversations, global trends should be front-and-centre. Exercises associated with the user experience design discipline can surface previously unanticipated challenge. For example, can you create future-facing profiles or user journeys? Cultivate curiosity and prepare to revisit your conclusions regularly, drawing on Keats’ theory of ‘negative capability’.

4. What’s our story? The world’s an ever increasingly complex, complicated and noisy place. Your brand strategy and company narrative should slice through with a distinctive point of view that captures who you are, what you believe, how you create value and why it’s important. Your story’s a rallying cry for your new workforce, a clear position for external audiences and a point of competitive difference. Renowned Bulgarian writer Maria Popova has these words of advice:

“A great storyteller is the kindly captain who sails her ship with tremendous wisdom and boundless courage; who points its nose in the direction of horizons and worlds chosen with unflinching idealism and integrity.”

5. Who’s driving it? By collaborating and involving a cross-section of people in planning, you’ll get a richer result. A multi-disciplinary taskforce with representation from all former entities helps. The post-merger story needs to be crystal clear in the minds of the ultimate brand advocates – employees – so the importance of internal engagement and communication strategy can’t be underestimated. It should substantiate claims, set the agenda and generate excitement around the possibilities the future presents.

6. Who are the audience? Brand strategy should create trust with shareholders and stakeholders, and build connection with customers. It’s wise to understand what these constituencies need, to craft a compelling story for each and to make sure what you say matches what you deliver. Making this part of the process, and involving the newly-merged leadership team, means everyone’s clear on the mission.

7. How should we organise ourselves? Brand or product architecture isn’t a flat organizational chart, or an abstract exercise in tidying up. It’s a powerful basis upon which to build understanding around your suite of propositions, and connection with your ambition. It informs visual expression and naming systems, and results in perfect coherence.

There are three basic models: In a monolithic structure or branded house, all products take one name, like Nike. In an endorsed model, all sub-brand names are linked to the name of the masterbrand in some way, like Apple and its i-everythings. In a house of brands like P&G, the corporate brand name operates as a holding company and each product or service is independently named. Having a good knowledge of the theory can facilitate effective decision-making.

8. How should we present ourselves? Mergers raise questions not just around what you stand for and do, but how you present yourself and communicate. Do your name, visual expression and communication toolkit best represent your needs? Sometimes a tweak is needed; other times it’s a more radical overhaul. With big changes in play, a merger can offer an opportunity to present your new entity to the world in a fresh way.

9. What can we lose? Mergers usually take place in pursuit of market consolidation and future growth. There will undoubtedly be short-term trade offs as the business realigns around its future, and a brand strategy should make them easy to identify. (This is different from making them easy per se, but that’s no bad thing if you believe Nietzsche’s case for the value of difficulty.) Brand strategy should articulate what the business is becoming, why it’s doing so, how it will happen and the role its audiences will play. This groundwork determines the tone of the transition.

10. What can we learn from others? It’s obviously worth reading around to see how other companies have steered post-merger brand strategy. Grubhub, a partner of ours, has had recent success. The first generation of a fast and growing group of online food ordering businesses, it merged with Seamless in late 2013. Today they serve diners and corporate businesses from more than 55,000 restaurants in over 1,100 U.S. cities and London.

The team, led by Barbara Martin Coppola (CMO), developed an ambition that was translated into a clear brand strategy, a supporting brand architecture and a communications program made fit for all its audiences. The results have been quick and effective.

“Collaborating with Wolff Olins to develop a thoughtful approach to our brand strategy and architecture has been transformative – for consumers, business users and shareholders. Combined with additional company-wide initiatives, our new brand vision helped us grow orders by 21% and revenue by 36% in 2016, based on year-on-year results.” - Barbara Martin Coppola, CMO

Branding predicted Brexit. This bald statement points to a fascinating truth about the art of branding. Because branding feeds on, and feeds into, popular culture, it’s often a leading indicator of bigger, political phenomena. Where branding leads, the rest of us follow. Let me explain.

2016 was the year of populism. Among other things, the phenomenon of Brexit and Trump was a popular backlash against the globalisation – the corporate mainstream of the last 30 years. It signalled the end of an era: the political and economic consensus that started with Thatcherism in Britain and Reaganomics in America. Suddenly, people rose up against the negative effects of globalisation – the inequalities it has produced, and its failure in the last ten years to increase household incomes.

So have people also rebelled against branding? Branding is a phenomenon that’s similarly global, also corporate, and that also reached its peak in the last 30 years. Reagan and Thatcher championed the idea of the market, and wherever there’s a market, there’s branding. Competitors in any market need to signal what they stand for, how they’re different, why they're better – and that’s what branding does. Rejecting pure market economics, you could argue, also implies questioning the whole business of branding.

There’s certainly a spectacular growth in mistrust of large branded corporations. In a 2017 survey by the PR company Edelman, only 58% of people trusted businesses, and this figure was falling in 18 countries. Powered by the internet, people are better informed, more sceptical and less deferential. Consumers are certainly less loyal to the big brands. According to a 2015 study, 90% of the leading household goods brands in America are losing market share.

But people continue to buy branded goods. We might reject unfettered market capitalism, but that doesn’t stop us going shopping. In many ways, branding is more powerful than ever. The VW emissions scandal did terrible damage to the company’s reputation, but somehow its brand emerged unscathed. People still like the brand, and still buy the cars.

In fact, branding responds very quickly to changes in the popular mood, to shifts in the zeitgeist – faster than politicians. For that reason, it pays to watch what’s going on at the frontiers of branding, because it may tell you what's about to happen more broadly in society. And in particular, it pays to have a look at what big companies are doing that seem to break the conventional rules of branding.

For example, branding prefigured the populist rejection of the global in favour of the local, in a phenomenon called ‘debranding’. Starbucks has stores in Seattle that look like neighbourhood coffee shops. The bookseller Waterstones has stores disguised as (for example) Southwold Books. Companies like this want to look like citizens of somewhere, not citizens of the world. And there’s a remarkable new demand for things – from bread to beer – that are local, artisan, craft-based and, seemingly, unbranded

Branding for a while has championed the past – the good old days when America or Britain were ‘great’ – another feature of populism. Dozens of companies, particularly retailers, now include their heritage in their logo. The supermarket Morrisons is now ‘Morrisons since 1899’. Marks & Spencer is ‘M&S est 1884’. John Lewis is ‘Never knowingly undersold since 1925’.

Branding even anticipated populism’s support for the ordinary person against the institution. To take a trivial example, in 2013, Coca-Cola replaced its name on its cans with people’s names – Ahmet, Cristina, Laura and hundreds more. Superficial perhaps, but a significant gesture by one of the world’s most valuable brands.

How does this happen? As the popular mood changes, often at a subterranean level, branding people notice. As people started to feel uncomfortable about globalisation, branding started to respond. This isn't usually sinister manipulation by cynical strategists: more often, it’s creative people responding intuitively to the atmosphere around them. Branding people are very finely tuned to twitches in contemporary culture. And sometimes they start the twitches themselves. Or branding that’s a response to a mood change in one country becomes a stimulus to that change in another.

So branding is an example of how the corporate mainstream preserves itself. Global business can quickly morph, or put on a new coat, in order to survive.

But more interestingly, it’s worth watching where branding goes next. In the last couple of weeks, we’ve seen the rise of ‘brutalist’ design in user interfaces with brands like Instagram. Simpler and more childlike visuals for Häagen-Dazs. And in the branding consultancy where I work, the emergence of branding based on Chinese philosophy, and on the aura of artificial intelligence. What does all this tell us about the referendums and elections of the 2020s?

Meanwhile, as globalisation falters, branding as a cultural practice seems unstoppable. All those local, artisan craft breweries are, of course, exquisitely branded.

Robert is our Head of New Thinking and his new book, A Very Short Introduction to Branding, is available now.

Our experience of life at home is changing in fundamental ways. We recently asked members of our network to share their views on this topic here. There are contributions from our leadership team, senior practitioners and clients from TeamKnowHow and MMB Networks (key to our zigbee alliance work). This is our CEO, Ije Nwokorie’s piece.

Something major happened in 2007. My daughter got a baby brother.

Oh, and something else happened…

The iPhone.

About a year later, big sister, in an act of generosity she’s rarely demonstrated since, offered little brother her cherished toy phone, with its bright protruding buttons that screamed “press me!”

He took one look at it, gave it an almighty heave, and made a b-line for his mother’s iPhone. And we realised, this guy only had time for things he could interact with directly; input mechanisms like buttons and mice represented an inefficient way for him to make the world do what he wanted it to do.

For business thinkers, designers, technologists and makers of all sorts, the last 10 years have presented us with an incredible creative brief. Not just for interfaces and creative expressions, but for organisations’ and products’ very reasons for being, for the ways they saw their customers; all was being rethought.

We failed.

Sure, phone calls got cheaper. Booking travel got faster. Information surged to our fingertips more easily. We gained an incredible facility to make things faster, simpler, cheaper, familiar.

To optimise everything.

Optimisation celebrates the rational over the intuitive, the functional over the spiritual, the individual over the shared. While it is an important tool, when we set optimisation (or its wingmen simplicity and pragmatism) as our main objective, we’re less likely to do things that make the heart sing.

And maybe that’s contributed to the fact that we have too many companies without moral compasses, too many echo chambers accusing other echo chambers of being echo chambers, too many leaders who depend on exclusion and division, instead of inclusion and common good.

We can’t let that happen in our homes.

The ultimate safe space, our homes are increasingly being invaded by services on demand, some of them even ambient and predictive. Our serene, sacred, intimate spaces, now have ears listening in on them, eyes watching over them, people beaming in from thousands of miles away.

For a bit of convenience – anything we want, in near-real time – we are not only trading away the sacredness, we are opting out of some of the things families and room-mates did together: the weekly food shop, the visit to the library, the monthly budgeting exercise.

The most articulate promise of the connected is to bring the things, people and expertise we need to run a smooth home to us, so we don’t ever have to think about it. It’s a thrilling promise on the surface, but is there any outcome that makes us more, not less human? New forces of AI, machine learning and ambient technology present us with amazing opportunities not just to design for new realities, but to shape them into better ones: surprising, human, optimistic, thoughtful.

They present us with a new brief.

And it’s an invitation we should accept right now. Not to optimise for their obvious application to our current realities —faster, cheaper, simpler. Not to sign us off the daily chores of life over which families and neighbourhood have been forged with emotion and real human connection. Instead, to apply our crafts with people at the heart. To tap into the things that define us as human: making things that are more beautiful than they need to be, embracing joy and sorrow, laughter and tears, the in-crowd and the disenfranchised.

Participating fully in determining our own futures:

Connected homes should not be about selling people more stuff, but about helping families thrive.

VR and AR should not be about replacing, substituting or even augmenting physical experiences, but about creating new kinds of spaces that make our homes more private, more secure, more intimate.

And automation and machine learning should not be about finding cheaper, more efficient ways to execute tasks, but about creating new ways to bridge the gaps that are growing ever larger in our homes: between old and young, the tech-addicted and the tech-phobic.

Maybe instead of connected homes, we should start thinking about Conscious Homes. Places that help nurture relationships frayed in increasingly fraying times; that give us power to define what’s right for us and our families, creating private spaces to switch off or catch up; that bring into sharp relief hyper-local connections so we can help each other in life-affirming ways, because of, not in spite of, technology.

That strikes me as a better brief for this next phase of technology in our homes: something that makes us more, not less human.

‘The Secret Power of Brands’, which we created in collaboration with FutureLearn and the University of East Anglia, launched its ninth run just last week. Designed for people developing a career in branding and related areas, it gives them an opportunity to contemplate the future direction of the industry, with fresh ideas on the concept of brand loyalty and the evolution of brand experience.

With this, our course on Building Resilience in the arts, and another learning piece for a big automotive client in the offing, it feels like an opportune moment to reflect on what we’ve learned as practitioners. I’ve covered some of these points in previous posts, but they’re increasingly relevant in the work we’re doing.

There’s huge appetite 85,000 people have signed up to the FutureLearn course. We’ve been astonished by the level of interest, from practically every country on the planet. Not everyone starts the course, let alone finishes it, and it’s up to each learner to choose how deeply they want to get involved. But there’s no sign of interest petering out: this is not a fad. People discover for themselves With 20 years experience as a branding practitioner, I’m not short of things to say. But putting content into an online PowerPoint isn’t the same thing as helping people learn. We had to find ways to show things, not just tell them. And to help people discover things for themselves. We learn best from peers FutureLearn encourages learners to post comments all the way through the course, and that’s exactly what they do. On the first run alone, they posted 30,000 comments in total – how could I possibly read them all? After a while, I learned to relax, to just dip into the discussion, and to let the learners get on without me. Feedback shows that people have a brilliant learning experience just from interacting with each other. You can test even the most amorphous knowledge Branding is not a subject where there are right and wrong answers (or even an agreed terminology). You can test people through essays and projects – but could online tests, which have to be multiple-choice, ever work? We learned that they can. The most unstructured knowledge is testable in a structured way. A face helps Of course, online learning can become depersonalised, and we quickly discovered that it helps to have a face on film, and a voiceover behind slideshows. I do a short YouTube message at the end of each week, to create a sense of personal contact. And on each run of the course, we put on a Google Hangout or a webinar, so that learners can talk to us live. MOOCs change lives By far the most common word used in feedback on the course is ‘eye-opening’: the course opens people’s eyes to the things that organisations do to build their brands, so they never quite see the world the same way again. Many learners tell us they’ve used the course to influence branding at the company they work for, or to help build the brand of their own start-ups. And we’re just starting to see a flow of learners applying for our full-time course at UEA. The biggest discovery for me overall is that online learning really works. It’s often seen as second-best to face-to-face learning: not true. People can learn at their own speed, in their own time, review things as often as they like – it’s all on their agenda, not the teacher’s. It’s an exciting time for ed-tech and we’re thrilled to be part of the revolution.

Today is International Women’s Day - a global day celebrating the social, economic, cultural and political achievements of women. The day also marks a call to action for accelerating gender parity. The theme this year, #BeBoldForChange, resonates with Wolff Olins and our desire to pit creativity against the big challenges.

With all this in mind, we asked a group of millennial women across our 3 offices to share the bold changes they’d like to see help accelerate gender equality. Here’s what they had to say:

FAMILY COMES FIRST?

“While I’m extremely proud to work at an organization that participates in programs like the Pledge to Parental Leave, I’m aware that many companies across the U.S. don’t prioritize equal and fair approaches to parental leave. It’s hard to believe that in America paid maternity leave is not a legal requirement. With that said, I’d like to see companies also working towards paternity leave programs, as family structures and dynamics continue to change. We can’t assume based on historical family models that fathers be deprived of the right to spend time with their newborns. A child needs both their parents, and an equal partnership means setting up a solid foundation to parenting them.”

– Katie Banaszak, Program Manager, New York

“Unfortunately we have failed to eliminate the stigma and disadvantages that come with using maternity benefits. Being bold means redefining and reclaiming what it takes to be a working mother; because no woman should have to choose between raising a family and feeding one.”

– Chidera Ufondu, Associate Strategist and Elaine Lin, Designer, San Francisco

“I would love to see organizations take a stronger stance on work/life balance through company policies and celebrations (i.e. annual family days). Policy changes that allow for more flexible schedules and childcare options would help ensure employees have a smooth transition back to work after starting a family.”

– Liz Benson, Strategy Intern, New York

SUPPORTIVE SPACE

“In London, only 14% of creative directors are women. While there are many actions we can take to help increase this number, I would like to see more spaces that support female designers.

Personally, I’ll be closely involved in the launch of a Commune Club - a female-forward work and social space. Our mission is to provide the right environment for you to be your most productive, happy and authentic self. It's entirely important to celebrate female designers and create a strong, collaborative community.”

– Erika Baltusyte, Designer, London

WORDS MATTER

“I don’t understand why we keep referring to and treating women as a minority. We are not a minority and as a matter of fact, we represent half of the population. We need to start with the fundamentals and using the right language. Words not only impact how we are perceived but also how we are treated.”

– Samar Ladhib, Senior Experience Strategist, New York

SPEAK UP

“As part of my job, I often attend conferences and networking events and I have been astounded by the ratio of women to men attending. There are times I’ve been the only female in a room of over 100 people! While I’d like to see a more equal ratio at these events, I vow to do my part and use these opportunities to ensure that my voice is heard. To be bold we must be proactive contributors and challenge points of view, regardless of who is in the room.”

– Amy McRae Johnson, New Business and Marketing Manager, London

“In many ways we are conditioned to view other women as a threat or competition; as if there isn’t enough space in the world for us all to be successful. This can make us feel wary of other women and reluctant to celebrate their achievements. But do we really think trying to dim another woman’s light will make ours shine brighter?  

Speak up if you witness people unfairly criticizing a woman for her accomplishments. It happens more than we think, whether it’s conscious or not.”

- Shalini de Abrew, Management Accountant, London

“What surprised me most upon graduating last year were conversations proving how distorted and overt the assessments of worth were between genders. One instance stands out in particular when two of my friends, evenly matched in credentials and applying for the same career, had a discussion with their parents about potential job options. The sister was advised to make sure her offer would allow her to comfortably support herself, while the brother was repeatedly discouraged from accepting a similarly compensated one because he shouldn’t “sell himself short.” After, my friend remarked that she had thought it odd, but probably not worth the headspace because “it’s just different for guys.”

Yes, it is, but that doesn’t mean it has to be this way. It’s so easy to just accept these inequalities as standard - indeed we’ve become so accustomed to them that they are.

But if we are to be bolder about change, we must give inequalities the headspace and the fight that they deserve. At the end of the day, the only people we are offending if we keep quiet is ourselves.

And to channel Poet and Writer Rupi Kaur:

‘What’s the greatest lesson a woman should learn?

That since day one she already had everything she needs within herself. It’s the world that convinced her she did not.’”

- Aimee Shah, Strategist, London

Daniel Keller, former Director of Brand Strategy and Experience at Orange and now a Global Principal at Wolff Olins, talks about how to make brands real in the world. From both sides of the fence.

When Wolff Olins pitched to me for the brand evolution of Orange four years ago, they also talked about the need for a strategy for delivery – but I wasn’t ready to talk about it. When your head is engaged in getting your board to buy in to your vision, and then locked in to driving towards launching that vision into the world, the detail of how you then roll it out and embed it in the business is ‘something to think about later’.

The problem is that if you don’t have a strategy for how you make your new brand real in the world and in the business from the outset, all your hard work leading up to the launch can fall apart when the tyres hit the road on the day after.  

This is the conundrum that I was asked to help Wolff Olins solve when I joined them this summer. How to bring together strong ambition with operational reality.

My starting point was to define what Delivery isn’t: it’s not the artist formerly known as implementation, nor is it a set of guidelines that we hand over to our clients with a fond wave over our shoulders, and it’s certainly not an event. Rather it is everything we do that gives the work real impact in the world.

This means that three stars need to align: people, time and money. People, because success depends on stakeholder management for buy-in as much as roll-out and on-going management; time because you need to align with the commercial realities and complexity of the organisation along with everything else that might be going on internally. And money, because you need to manage resources efficiently and prioritise.

Understanding this, the most useful way for me to look at how to make our delivery offer real was to chart my journey at Orange from kick-off to activation. Some key things immediately surfaced.

Houston we have a problem.

The problem is that delivery isn’t at the forefront of the client’s mind when reinventing the brand. But ignoring it will come back and haunt you post-launch (and it did). Most organisations will identify a case for change but don’t consider how to make this plan real in the world. And then we are all rabbits stuck in headlights.

Mind the gap

Here at Wolff Olins we want to push on the ambition, produce paradigm-shifting work, using the best people for the job. But at Orange, I needed to make an ambition digestible to all, focus on designing for real world applications for a complex organisation with a range of agendas, motivations and dare I say skill levels. High ambition meets difficult operational reality. The natural tension ambitious leaders invariably face and fertile ground for compromise, unless the right tools and conversations are in place to bridge that gap.

The cost of impact

It’s easy to ignore the budget question of course and in some cases that might even be necessary to let things mature for a while. And it might all work out fine. More likely though it will turn into the battle of the cost centres and at this stage a compromise found might not align well with the priorities of your project. So yes, considering the cost of impact from early on, however hard it might feel, will pay dividends.

Like I said, my head wasn’t in delivery mode when Wolff Olins originally pitched to me, but the elements were in place. Once we both started to match ambition to operational reality, a number of tools came into play like our roadmap for change, governance model and cost of impact analysis. But also signature experience prototypes to energise and inspire people and digital brand management tools to equip them to work with the brand, at scale.

At launch, we needed to create maximum internal and external impact, facilitate operational activation and manage hand over to suppliers. So in addition to launching the strategy and experience, we needed a suite of activation tools and platforms – clinics, learning platforms and so on.

Post launch, we needed to run campaigns, scale experience and advise teams of the new propositions. So we needed innovation platforms, briefing templates and tools. Internally we developed culture change programs for parts of the organisation to evolve the way we worked, shift behaviours.

Applying the learning

And on it goes – the long tail of delivery, all the way through to evaluating the impact of the launch against the ambition, and how we learn and evolve the brand.  For us this is about driving our passion to make our work real in the world, using our experience (the good, the bad and the ugly) to work out the best options, make connections for shared experience and leverage our best people for the job.

For our clients, and ourselves, there are four key learnings:

- Define the desired impact at the outset, agree goals, and most importantly, distribute ownership internally beyond the brand team

- Be clear about the cost of change, and use this knowledge to make conscious choices. After all you can’t do everything.

- Build a roadmap that takes capabilities into account (can you really do the work in a week?) as well as priorities and moments.

- Think governance, and how it evolves from buy-in, to roll out, to managing the brand in the new world.

All of this has now shaped our roadmap at Wolff Olins for enriching our delivery offer in a way which is uniquely us: full creative partners, for the journey.

In October our London team moved into our new office in Bayswater. Like all change, the move was anticipated with some trepidation, but quickly was unanimously voted a change for the better.

But at Wolff Olins we don’t rest on our laurels. And to maintain the momentum and positive energy of the move, we decided to run a hack day to imagine the future of our workplace.

We immediately steered teams away from the more predictable website and app ideas and asked them to build something with a physical component. We provided tons of kit, from arduinos to beacons as well as sensors, RFIDs, security cameras and even conductive ink. 

The four teams had 24 hours to come up with an idea, build it and present it to the group.  Ideas varied from a fish scale meeting room availability indicator to a 3D printed Duck that tells us when it’s time to go to the pub. The judges voted WOPA (a button/slack integration manifest as an online PA with attitude) the most useful and innovative idea and we’ll be rolling it out in our London office next year. And team Pepper Spray’s concept of a welcome hologram for our new reception won the public Twitter vote (#WoHack).

If you’re curious, you can learn more about these ideas on our hack day microsite or watch this whistle-stop video tour of the day. 

You can also find our favourite bloopers from the day on our Snapchat account, (WolffOlins).

Next year we’ll run more hack days like this: hacks for working women over 60 and ideas to kick start client change programmes, so... 

A group of scientists have recently declared that we have entered a new geological age, the Anthropocene. I have often thought of Digital as an epoch rather than a channel or medium and this is a useful analogy when we are considering the real-world impacts of our Digital strategy. The eras of Digital since the birth of the World Wide Web might look something like this:

1994 — 2001: The web era

A technology which connects documents to one another explodes, ushering in the Digital Age. People are connecting to information in a world-changing manner.

2001 — 2007: The application web (2.0)

The web evolves to a platform for applications - commerce, communication, utility. People are connecting to services and transactions.

2007 — 2015: The Social web

People are connecting to people. Businesses have also had to learn how to have relationships directly with people again.

2015 — Now: HTTP everywhere

The basic unit of transaction within most Digital systems and the driving force of the web - a simple call for a request and response from a server - now connects us not just to information, services and people, but also to our lifestyles and environments.

When you think about Digital this way, you don't consider individual technologies in the traditional "cool list" fashion, but one thinks more of how this new paradigm might change how people interact with brands and each other. Technology does drive paradigm shifts, but it’s far more valuable to look at what those shifts are, instead of the technologies themselves. Here are a few to consider:

1. The receding interface

There is a gradual shift away from sharing through social networks in favour of messaging. Whereas we might have been inclined to share an interesting article or video through our social networks, we are now tending to share through WhatsApp and the like. This behaviour is now also extending into transactional interactions and has given rise to technologies such as conversational applications and chatbots which act as agents. Uber has been experimenting with booking cars directly within the chat interface and others will surely follow. The interesting thing about this is that the transaction is happening directly at the point of need, and in the natural flow of conversation. Technologies like Amazon’s Echo/Alexa will break this down even further, removing the need for a visual interface entirely. This creates new challenges in digital design and strategy as non-visual cues - inflection, natural language processing, haptics etc. - become more and more important.

2. Everything is a service

Whereas we might previously have built apps, channels and platforms (often on enterprise software) for specific uses (there’s an app for that!), we are now understanding the importance of having our business logic available in discreet micro-services which are accessible through any interface (your phone, a chatbot, the web, a physical interface). The new breed of digitally driven businesses (Uber, Airbnb etc) have, again, been incredibly successful in erasing the friction of interfaces, and focus purely on meeting the users needs through the exposure of their services directly at the point of need. This can be a huge architectural challenge, not to mention information security and user experience, but increasingly vital.

Services need to be smarter and to understand our context better.

3. Machine understanding

We want our services to be smarter and to understand our context better. Personalisation has been a blunt tool up until recently. For example, recommendations engines make generalised suggestions based on previous browsing history to serve us relevant ads. They are rarely relevant, often giving us ads for things we’ve just bought. They don’t truly understand our needs because they don’t understand – or ask us for - the context that we are currently browsing in. I was delighted on a recent trip to Slovenia when my Android phone’s interface automatically placed a translation window on my home screen with the Slovene for “good morning” pre-populated. It did this on the basis of my location, knowing that English was my native language and the time of day where I was, without my asking. The more that machine based processes can understand the data which I’m giving them about my environment, the more useful they can be.

4. Environment sensing

We will continue to be more and more connected to our environment. This comes with some utility. My smart home can be aware of my presence and be energy efficient. My wearables connect me to my lifestyle better - what are my patterns of movement, how much sleep am I getting? For example, my phone always gives me a traffic report for the A1 at 6pm every Friday, knowing that I frequently travel to my cello lesson in St Albans at that time. Sensors are becoming sophisticated to the point that they can now reliably control a self-driving car. Lidar (a passive radar system) will be commonplace in the next 10 years, and tiny and cheap enough to place in many different devices. The consumers’ understanding of the Internet of Things has largely been confined to a fridge that orders milk when you run out, but actually this is really about our digital lives understanding our context more readily and providing better service. This utility will become so commonplace that we barely notice it.

5. Automation

The final paradigm shift really ties all of the above together. When we talk about automation, we are once again talking about passive service at the point of need through an understanding of a user's needs. It’s the world of difference between ordering a cab after a party in 1995 and 2016. So much of that process is now dealt with by background digital processes, the upshot of which is that my needs get met far more quickly and easily. The automation of our cars, our homes, our cities and our lifestyles will, optimistically, provide us with great service and utility, and brands will continue to need to be radical in order to provide this service layer.

What began as a networking technology has evolved to become the underlying mechanism for how we live now, and it will continue to go in directions which we can barely imagine right now. This is ultimately what I mean when I say that technology itself isn’t the driver for change. Digital hasn’t just been about HTTP in the same way that VR itself (whilst undeniably ‘cool’) probably doesn’t have much application for, say, an insurance brand. But what these technologies do impact is how we experience the world and they do so broadly. Brands need to consider how they fit into these shifting paradigms and how their customers are living digitally.

Andrew Dobson is Technical Director at Wolff Olins London. You can follow him @andrewdotdobson

At the start of 2016, Wolff Olins helped Enel Energy take the lead in shaping a new digital, and participatory era of energy. Together with Enel we developed Open Power - Enel’s strategic platform for growth, combining the strength of a truly global organisation with the opportunities of a new, open and connected world. You can read the full case study here. 

Nine months on, our Chairman Brian Boylan discusses the impact of our work with Enel CEO, Francesco Starace.

In 2015 the financial industry was blown wide open. Hundreds of fintech companies entered the market backed with brains and capital, challenging the traditional players and raising new questions about the role banks now play in our lives.

At Wolff Olins we’ve been exploring how this exponential rate of change in financial services is impacting brand and customer experience. This has turned up a handful of impressive start-ups upending the status quo. Among them is Monzo: a new kind of bank built for your smartphone. Founder and CEO Tom Blomfield recently took us through the journey of one of the most hyped start-up banks, which was granted a UK banking license in August, just before his 31st birthday. There are four key differentiators he described which add up to a transformed banking experience in the age of mobile.

A bank that lives in your pocket

Tom co-founded Monzo 19 months ago on a belief that finance is fundamentally broken.

“When you can order an Uber at the click of a button or start seeing self-driving cars on the street, the idea that banking hasn’t changed in decades is extremely frustrating.”

“While technology has transformed our lives, mobile banking has simply come full circle: we’re back to Victorian passbooks but on a mobile platform. There’s no reinvention.”

Monzo is built on a different philosophy. It’s not about the typical financial products such as current accounts, credit cards or mortgages – it’s about solving everyday problems, however trivial they might look, to help you live a simpler and easier life. Monzo wants to be a single interface between you and your money.

Full of little moments of delight

But the experience is more than just transactional. As Tom walks through Monzo’s features, he talks about emojis with a big smile. Through machine learning, it recognises your spending category before pairing it with relevant emojis. For example, it displays a little donut when you shop at Dunkin Donuts. Used this way emojis become a tool to make dry content more engaging and create little moments of delight for the customer.

"There’s no business case for the emoji donut, but people get ecstatically happy when seeing it and go on social media to share the moment.”

A fundamental shift in customer service

Monzo’s customer service experience is also more friendly than you might expect when dealing with a bank. When you start a chat, you usually get a response within minutes (or hours at most.) While the informal tone of the agents makes it feel more like you’re talking casually with a friend on WhatsApp or Snapchat.

When asked about their not-so-serious personality, Tom admits that Monzo is not for everyone: “There are people who value face-to-face interaction, and there are banks for them.” However, he doesn't believe investing millions in branches and suits is the best – or only – way to build trust: “Building trust is about how quickly and empathetically you respond to a problem."

A single interface between you and your money

Transparency continues to be a big deal for Monzo – they’ve even published their product roadmap online for everyone to see. So, what’s next?

For the next 3-4 months their development team is focusing on ‘Monzo with friends’ – a feature that explores how a bank can be social. In the longer term Tom sees Monzo as a marketplace for financial products, with a single user interface helping you access the best choice and price in the market. Since they have no branches to manage, they can operate with much lower margins and keep prices down for customers.

Start with a deep understanding of customers

New generations of users are now jumping directly to mobile and social platforms. To stand any chance of sustainable success, a digital financial services business has to build itself around the smartphone. A transparent brand and product with a great user experience and clear functionality will trump any traditional bricks-and-mortar strategy.

New start-ups like Monzo are changing the way we interact with money, by integrating a social and emotional layer into what was once a purely transactional experience. And that can only disrupt banking for the better.

Illustration by Erika Baltusyte

The fish have been fed and the coffee machine's frothing away inside our leafy new Bayswater home.

For us, it marks the start of an exciting new era, in a flexible space that has open ways of working and regular collaboration at its core. Think workshop, rather than shop window. For you, we hope that makes it something of a home away from home. Somewhere you'll want to come often, stay longer, and do more. 

You can now find us at:

31 St. Petersburgh Place London W2 4LA +44 (0) 203 655 9850

Getting here by tube is easy, with three tube stops close by: Bayswater (3 minute walk), Queensway (5 minutes) and Notting Hill Gate (8 minutes). While Paddington is just a 15 minute stroll away. We look forward to welcoming you soon.

I work at Wolff Olins. You have seen our work over the years. Orange. NYC. EE. London 2012. Microsoft. Google us and you will find both a business and a philosophy. Do the best work of your life. Shift paradigms. Be radical. Make things better for people.

But ask anyone in our London office one of their top three reasons for working here and they will always say, quite simply: the food.

We have a kitchen. We call it a kitchen, not a cafeteria, not a restaurant. It feels like your kitchen at home on its best day. Bustling, noisy, sharing what’s up, cackling about your morning, hearing about the cool places someone has visited in Copenhagen, groaning at the latest GOT plot twist. Oh and Brexit. That was a dark day.

Did I mention the food? Shame not to, it runs like an enveloping chocolate sauce through our culture.

The menu gets posted first thing. Duck breast in plum sauce, Poached Salmon in an Asian broth, Crisp skinned Pork Belly, Tarte au Citron, Chocolate Sorbet. OMG the chocolate sorbet. Gastro pub choices on Friday with triple fried chips and an array of salads that would make Ottolenghi go back to the test kitchen, sobbing a little.

Emotions run high on Chicken Schnitzel day. The queue runs out into the front courtyard (that’s a long way) and people start rubbernecking and tutting if those in front start over-hovering their tongs over the coleslaw or picking out slices of avocado from the rest of the Tricolore salad. Anyone with meetings booked out of the office on that day smells a conspiracy.

Ever since the business was founded back in the sixties, feeding and nourishing people was an imperative that sat at its heart. Like our obsession with the work, only the best is good enough. Best ingredients, flavours, variety, delight. Right from those early days in Camden, we always had a big dining room table and a well-stocked fridge. Fast forward 50 years and we have a four-strong kitchen team, fruit and vegetables growing on our roof, a herb terrace and bees. The honey those bees produce tastes distinctively of elderflower. And people are seldom off sick.  

If that sounds like magic, let me introduce you to the incumbent Sorcerer.  Sam, our chef, ran the Wolseley kitchen before he came to us seven years ago, having paid his dues in the Steam and Curses New York food scene. He wanted to leave the long hours and dungeon-like environment of the professional kitchen, and was about to change careers – one with lots of natural light - when the Wolff Olins gig came along. And now, seven years later: “This is the longest I have been in any kitchen, any job really.” 

Sam fusses and tastes and checks until every flavour, every detail, drizzle of jus is perfect. But he isn’t cheffy. For him creating food is like giving people a big hug, which he and the rest of the kitchen team do every day.

How many businesses have a culture that would even entertain the idea of giving their people food affection rather than function? How many chic corporate buildings have a glamorous canteen matched with an uninspired limp-lettuce food offering that intentionally keeps people shackled to their desks with a sandwich? Imagine trying to get the board to sign off subsidized gourmet and an unspoken rule that you leave your laptops for an hour every day to recreate Babette’s Feast, and emerge nurtured, delighted and energised? Not many, if any. And that’s their problem.

This month, a new era in our story will be starting in West London. A new kitchen, new food imaginings. And it’s a new era for Sam and the kitchen team – Gilbert, David, Davide and Carmen - who will be staying here in King’s Cross and continuing to delight the new tenants. 

So time for one last play in the kitchen.  Sam and I came up with the perfect menu to delight our crew: Schnitzel (made the proper way with Veal, not Chicken), Roast Vegetable Lasagne, Tarte au Citron and Chocolate Sorbet. And the recipe for his Tarte au Citron is here for you to try in your own kitchen.

Now pass on the love. 

Sam’s Tart au Citron

One of Sam’s secrets to the perfect shortcrust: 50g of Bird’s Eye Custard Powder added to the flour. He freely admits he has no idea why it works. It just does.  Serves 10-12

Ingredients:

For the Sweet Pastry:

250g plain flour

125g unsalted butter

25g custard powder

1 egg

88g caster sugar 

For the filling:

6 eggs

4 egg yolks

175g caster sugar

4 lemons – zested and juiced

180g butter

First, make the pastry. In a food processor blitz the flour, custard powder, butter and caster sugar until the mixture resembles coarse breadcrumbs. Don’t overwork or your pastry will end up heavy and leaden rather than light and crumbly. Add an egg and mix to and bring it altogether into a dough. Roll into a ball, wrap in clingfim and pop in the fridge for an hour to rest and firm up.

Put the oven on to 170C. 

Take pastry out of the fridge, roll to fit a 27cm loose-bottomed tart tin. Prick the base all over with a fork, then whisk an egg and paint the inside of the tart to coast it, then bake blind oven for 20 minutes. Set aside to cool while you make the filling.

Turn the oven to 100C

Put a saucepan half filled with water on to heat. Put all your filling ingredients except the butter into a heatproof bowl and then whisk constantly over the pan of simmering water until the mixture starts to turn pale and thicken. Once the whisk is leaving behind a trail in the mix, add the butter a little at a time and keep mixing until thick and glossy. Take off the heat and pour the filling into the pastry case.

Pop into the oven, and bake for anything from 30-50 minutes until it is still wobbling but not too loose. Keep checking from 30 minutes in and keep jigging the tart. Take out of the oven and cool.

When cool, you can dust with a heavy-ish layer of icing sugar and caramelise with a blowtorch. Serve with thickened cream or crème fraiche and fresh berries tossed in a little lemon juice and icing sugar to give them a gloss.

For more of Sam’s recipes, and a lot of her own, visit Rose’s food blog: the-coconut-asado.tumblr.com

Illustration by John Provencher