Check out the piece that Dev Patnaik of Jump Associates wrote for the Fast Company blog recently.
In it he argues that the growth due to innovation that
happened at P&G over the last 6+ years was the result of integrated
thinking that launched their design revolution.
As a planner who has always succeeded by being a bit of a
round peg in the square hole of advertising/media/technology I have to agree of the importance of this type of thinking, especially at P&G.
Of course many planners (and designers and artists and creatives and my wife) who benefit from such
holistic/hybrid/integrated/lateral thinking tend to come from slightly strange or mixed backgrounds which explain the predominance of funny names, bizarre ethnic mixes
and odd personal histories in all of those professional creative communities.
Diversity breeds inventive minds. Fortune favors the hybrid
mind.
But one question is why that thinking hasn’t spread
throughout the company. I have the
great pleasure of working with P&G for the last few years in both
advertising, ethnic marketing and PR.
And while I never cease to be impressed by the quality of the minds with
whom I’ve had the chance to work in marketing and research, I can only wonder
how those great minds would benefit from being unleashed by a similar desire
for integrated thinking further downstream in the product development process than described in Dev's piece.
In other words, as Dev says, hybrid thinking or "the
conscious blending of different fields of thought (has helped )to discover and
develop opportunities that were previously unseen by the status quo”
You could
say that this hasn’t happened in marketing or communications at P&G in the
same way as it has in product development.
I know we’ve started to try at my agency, with some success (to cite one example among others I can't quite share yet). If I
have one promise to make or one goal to set for myself for the coming year,
it’ll be to unleash what this kind of thinking can bring across the board to
make these products or brands to live in the world.
To do any less would be to do less than this
great company deserves (even if they haven’t always realized it themselves) and less than we ourselves deserve.
Let's see how this works out. Have you tried in your sphere of influence?
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