Back in the early days of web before the first dot com bubble burst and when the most ridiculous ideas were getting funding and everyday some spotty youngster was being made a paper millionaire, I had the dubious honour of working with a small team developing car insurance online. In those early days it was important in this new market to talk about ideas, as well as listen to everyone’s views.
We at Volcanic are very proud of the way we work, our ideas and our creativity. When we deliver our ideas to our customers they are amazed at how we have changed their original concepts and made them more effective or more social.
This week we had probably our most creative week yet but it came at a price. It all started on Monday when to be honest I came bouncing into the office with lots of changes. My problem was that I couldn’t explain them, whilst I knew it was important to get the changes understood and actioned at the same time the team were not happy and quite rightly challenged the proposal. The more I explained the less they understood and the more everyone got more and more frustrated – The result well lets just say that productivity increased ten fold while people calmed down.
In fact it took the rest of the week to explain the concept and by Friday we had it nailed. When we work in the digital space often, there are lots of people telling you what to do but there are very few that are looking at what we need to do tomorrow. We at Volcanic do both but how do you explain what tomorrow will look like when people don’t understand what to today is?
My communication problem is that nobody can tell me what tomorrow will be so when I’m explaining my ideas for tomorrow today – it’s very difficult and when designing solution or campaigns you need to be different.