Well, it seems that the discussion around whether there is value in elevating someone within a creative agency to the role of Chief Innovation Officer is actually more of a heated debate than I thought. I posted a short piece on Friday of last week - 'Do We Really Need 'Chief Innovation Officers' in Ad Agencies? Four of them tell us what they do' - which comprised (literally) four tweets from four of the most respected and prominent CIO-types of the moment: Mullen's Edward Boches, VivaKi's Rishad Tobbacowala, MDC's Faris Yakob and Saneel Radia from BBH. The post was inspired by news that another member of the digerati, David Armano, has just been promoted to a new role at Edelman, as EVP, Global Innovation & Integration (details here).

As Edward Boches (so generously) pointed out, the response to the post was of infinitely higher quality than the post itself (always the intention: unless you're Seth Godin, use blogging to learn, not lecture). To date, twenty-nine super smart people have responded with views and counter-views, and the post has been RT-ed over 100 times.

I thought it might be worth me diving into the comments and opinions and attempting to distil some clarity, all focused through my own relatively well-formed and hyper-biased opinions (which I deliberately kept out of the initial post). So, writing as possibly one of the first ex-CIOs in our industry (another post, another day), here are Ten Things I've Found To Be True about 'Chief Innovation Officers'.

(Note: I use 'CIO' throughout to refer to 'Chief Innovation Officer'; yes, I know it also means 'Chief Information Officer', but hopefully if you've got this far you know this post isn't about the latter. If you're looking for the latter, click here and you'll be on your way shortly. I also use the term CIO to describe similar roles such as Head of Innovation, Executive Director of Innovation, EVP of Innovation, Most Innovative Person In the Agency, and so on).

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1. Only The Innovative Survive: To survive, let alone thrive, agencies must effectively become innovation companies, moving at least as fast as culture (to steal something from Gareth Kay's response). If you think your agency is doing that, you're very lucky. If you don't, what's your plan? Making a CIO responsible for driving the agency there is one plan. There are others. One thing that's clear is that fortune favors the fast. To quote Jobs, 'innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower'.

2. Forget the Title, Focus on the Remit: Not every agency needs a CIO, but every agency needs what a CIO does to be done. Yes, done by everyone if possible; failing that, to at least be led by someone who can bulldoze aside barriers and make shit happen fast. The CIO's role is to instil a culture of innovation within the agency; as Steve Wax says, to draw attention to the essentials of truly innovative work and then create programs and initiatives that get the agency producing that kind of work as quickly as possible. At the Creative Lab we are guided by a simple mantra: 'Know the User, Know the Magic, Connect the Two' (coined by Andy Berndt, who founded the CL). Simply put, this could well be the remit of the CIO: to be responsible for understanding how people are behaving with technology, media and communications, to be at the forefront of understanding how current and emerging technology can deliver magic for users, and to connect the two (all, of course, through the lens of that agency's current or desired client base).

3. If Everyone's Responsible, No One is Responsible: Yes, in a perfect world everyone in an agency would be responsible for both constant internal change and fighting for breakthrough work. In practice, everyone can't be. So someone probably needs to be, even if they are merely the lightning conductor of action for a far wider group (if everyone in your company is, congratulations, you can stop reading now).

4. Innovation Does NOT Equal 'Digital': While much of a CIO's role inside an agency will be focused on removing outdated machinery, people and processes and installing the necessary talent, mind-set and systems from which digital ideas can grow, it's wrong to see the role as *only* about that. It's as much about integration as interactive, as much about people as product, as much about the basics as the experimental. Right resources, right processes, right values, right culture, right partners, right clients - all of these (the 'operating system of the business') are, at least partly, the responsibility of the CIO to get right.

5. Hold Both Maps AND Bayonets: It's impossible to be an effective CIO if you're simply directing others in their work. Strong CIOs will be deeply involved in projects that are pioneering new platforms or processes, or working with new partners. Ideally they will be co-leading them, getting their hands dirty with real, grubby, work. It is impossible to learn and iterate quickly enough to be useful unless you are on the front line. If your CIO is not on the front line, they may well be a fraud. If their currency is PowerPoint, they're definitely a fraud. Remember, 'Making, Not Models'.

6. Be A Revenue Center, Not a Cost Center: It might be unrealistic to expect a newly-minted CIO to be delivering bags of gold to the CEO on Day One. But it is not unfair to expect revenues to flow - directly - from CIO-inspired projects and pitches. If a CIO tries to tell you their role is 'external profile-building', 'speaking at conferences' or 'building the network' then you should be suspicious. It *might* include these, but they are the easy bit, trust me. People in CIO-type roles should be bringing in new business, new talent and new partners to the agency, and directly touching and influencing the best work the agency's doing.

7. CIOs Are Not the Same As CEOs: I fully agree with the point made by Mel Exon (of BBH Labs). Of course, we discussed this many times when we persuaded BBH to allow us to set up BBH Labs in 2008 (our first post, fittingly on April 1st 2009, is here: no tweets, no likes, one comment). Most people would agree that final responsibility for the financial performance of a business rests with the CEO, yet most businesses have a CFO (or similar). If the CEO can drive his or her supertanker of a business as fast as a speedboat then that's awesome work; if they can't then it's super useful to have one (or more) speedboats out in front of the supertanker scouting into the future.

8. Not All CIOs are Created Equal: Just like CEOs or CCOs, not all CIOs will be successful, will know what they're doing, or even should be in the role. Don't be put off by people you may have come across who execute this type of role in the guise of buzzword-wielding buffoons or charlatans, or who attempt to reduce it to a focus on social media or digital. There are so few people to learn from (the five people I mentioned in my original post are a good start, plus Mel Exon), it's better just to focus on what you think is right in your situation, for your business. Ignore anyone who says they're an expert.

9. A CIOs job is Never Done: Unless you think the pace of change is going to settle down any time soon (are you planning a trip to Albania?), it's inconceivable that the role of better equipping agencies to thrive around emerging platforms, processes and partners will ever come to an end. Yes, if successful, others in the agency (including the CEO, CFO and CCO) will become partners-in-crime. But there is always room for the new; indeed, that is at least part of our currency in creative businesses. I disagree with those who suggest the role of the CIO becomes redundant if successful; I believe the opposite to be true.

10. Everything Changes, So Just Start: Don't spend too long plotting out a masterplan for how a CIO (or whatever title or anti-title you deem appropriate) might work in your agency. Because while you're busy PowerPointing together an awesome thesis on why the role matters and what it might look like if and when you navigate the 37 layers of approval to get buy-in, you're simply a gigantic cost. If you're not putting someone's nose out of joint by getting going early, you're probably doing something wrong. If people inside your agency wriggle uncomfortably when you describe what you're planning, you're almost certainly on the right track.

Being 'the pirate within' is by no means always comfortable. The road won't be smooth. Many will want you to fail. It can be lonely. Speedboats can easily become swamped by supertankers. As Machiavelli once noted, there is 'nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things'. Despite all this, I believe it's the best job you can have in an agency; it's certainly one of the most important.

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I was ruminating on David Armano's new role at Edelman, as EVP, Global Innovation & Integration (details here). Armano describes his new role as 'doing what keeps your business on the front line'. There's been a rash of Chief Innovation Officer / Director of Innovation roles within agency groups and holding companies. Indeed, I myself argued strongly for the (at the time) unusual title of Executive Director of Innovation at BBH, back in early 2010. But do we really need them? If so, why? And what do they see as their value to creative businesses?

I asked four of the most prominent and respected of this new mutation of communications professional to try and capture what their role is in a tweet-length summary. This is what they said.

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Edward Boches (Chief Innovation Officer, Mullen)

Opening minds. Inspiring change. Creating unexpected connections. Dissecting cool stuff + re-applying. Sharing. Experimenting.

Saneel Radia (Head of Innovation, BBH New York)

Help BBH NY do what we aren't currently doing but want to. Criteria: make clients & talent happy, be credible.

Faris Yakob (Chief Innovation Officer, KBS&P)

Asking Why? And What If? Instead of How? + When? - Hopeful midwife to new *kinds* of ideas.

Rishadt Tobbacowla (Chief Strategy & Innovation Officer)

Help drive future competitive advantage. Seek fresh insightful connections.

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What do you think? Does your agency have a CIO? If not why not? If so - who is it, and what value do they add? Smoke & mirrors? Or Pirates & Pioneers?

Would love to hear your comments; I'm on a panel next week in NYC about Innovation (details here) and am keen to take the temperature of people in the industry.

So, 'having a bunch of smart people in a group doesn't necessarily make the group smart'.

This is one of the conclusions from new research on collective intelligence by Carnegie Mellon & MIT (full story below). While this seems counter to what we might expect at a superficial level, on reflection it makes perfect sense. Any of us who've been in group ideation or creative processes can attest to the fact that sometimes things just seem to click, other times the group or team just never quite gets up to speed, even if all the smart people have been painstakingly fought for, gathered, briefed, fed Haribo & put to work.

What the research team found is that the emotional intelligence of the group was as important as its raw cognitive power. And that the better group members perceived each other's emotions, the better the performance of the group (ceteris paribus). They also found that having women in the group made the group more effective as a group (again, ceteris paribus), because of what they suggest is the higher emotional sensitivity displayed by women, on average.

My own extremely amateur efforts in this area support this thesis entirely. At BBH we were working on improving the way we collaborate - especially in more creative phases of projects - for some time. We frequently convened 'ideas sessions' when working on the various Google projects that BBH handled. Anything between 10 to 14 people would get together for perhaps three hours in carefully briefed and run creative sessions. We'd try and include creatives and senior people (clients) from the Creative Lab. We'd have a mixture of core Google team, plus interesting and smart people from every discipline. What we found as we progressed through a year of trialling this approach was (a) there was a definite ceiling of around 12-14 attendees before it became ineffective and inefficient; (b) that carefully casting the attendees (to the point of sometimes not including people on the core team) was critical to success (it's just an unavoidable fact that not everyone's good at this); and that (c) we got much much better at these sessions as we did more of them, learned to trust each other, learned to relax into them, and learned about each other. I guess that might be called 'emotional intelligence', in some way.

Every situation requires a bespoke solution, and some creative teams both prefer to work alone and, indeed, are more effective when working alone. So I would hesitate to prescribe the above approach for all situations. It depends. But if you are in a creative agency or business in which collaborative creativity *is* something you like to utilize, here are three observations - weaving in the research results from Carnegie Mellon / MIT - on how things might be made more effective:

1. CASTING: When casting a team for a collaborative session, the smartest people in the room are not always the best people to have in the room (or, at least, not all of them); many times in agencies over the years I've been in group creative or strategy sessions that have imploded because of 'smarts overload'. While not being selected for a group session can be disappointing, it's better to disappoint one or two than waste the time of 12 or 14. It's relatively easy to get to very good. Somewhat harder to get to awesome.

2. TRAINING: Spend time training people to thrive in and enjoy group situations. At BBH we found the Master Classes run by Hyper Island to be especially effective at this. People (me included, I confess) turn up to these classes thinking they were going to get a crash course in digital creativity; in fact, 90% of the focus was on the 'how' not the 'what'. On tearing down the invisible walls that separate silos and permit egos to run amok. Priceless stuff.

3. TOOLS: Explore new online collaboration tools. We used a tool called Kluster a fair amount within the Google team, especially in late 2009, and had started to develop our own bespoke collaboration engine when I left. The advantages here are many: participants can escape the physical (& some of the emotional) confines of a face-to-face ideas session; a more enduring and iterative idea development platform is created (it's the start of something, not merely a punctuation); the right people can be cast from any part of a business (any division, timezone, office); and the whole endeavor is automatically recorded / archived as you go (so you lose less value).

As I've noted before, one of the things Nigel Bogle used to say that resonated with me most during my time at BBH was 'none of us is as good as all of us'. I think this remains spot on, but needs qualifying. It might be more accurate (if less elegant) to suggest that while none of us is as good as all of us, all of us might be more effective if we let some of us organize all of us properly.

While process surely isn't as glamorous as hiring big name rockstars, it's actually even more important. Get the operating system right and the software will perform.

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Original article from Carnegie Mellon website is below.

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New Study by Carnegie Mellon, MIT and Union College Shows Collective Intelligence
Of Groups Exceeds Cognitive Abilities of Individual Group Members

Groups Demonstrate Distinctive 'Collective Intelligence' When Facing Difficult Tasks

PITTSBURGH—When it comes to intelligence, the whole can indeed be greater than the sum of its parts. A new study co-authored by Carnegie Mellon University, MIT and Union College researchers documents the existence of collective intelligence among groups of people who cooperate well, showing that such intelligence extends beyond the cognitive abilities of the groups' individual members, and that the tendency to cooperate effectively is linked to the number of women in a group.
     
Many social scientists have long contended that the ability of individuals to fare well on diverse cognitive tasks demonstrates the existence of a measurable level of intelligence in each person. In a study to be published in an upcoming issue of the journal Science, the researchers applied a similar principle to small teams of people. They discovered that groups featuring the right kind of internal dynamics perform well on a wide range of assignments, a finding with potential applications for businesses and other organizations.
     
"We set out to test the hypothesis that groups, like individuals, have a consistent ability to perform across different kinds of tasks," says Anita Williams Woolley, the paper's lead author and an assistant professor at Carnegie Mellon's Tepper School of Business.
     
"Our hypothesis was confirmed," continues Thomas W. Malone, a co-author and Patrick J. McGovern Professor of Management at the MIT Sloan School of Management. "We found that there is a general effectiveness, a group collective intelligence, which predicts a group's performance in many situations." 
     
That collective intelligence, the researchers believe, stems from how well the group works together. For instance, groups whose members had higher levels of "social sensitivity" were more collectively intelligent. "Social sensitivity has to do with how well group members perceive each other's emotions," says Christopher Chabris, a co-author and assistant professor of psychology at Union College in New York.
     
"Also, in groups where one person dominated, the group was less collectively intelligent than in groups where the conversational turns were more evenly distributed," adds Woolley. And teams containing more women demonstrated greater social sensitivity and in turn greater collective intelligence compared to teams containing fewer women.
     
To arrive at their conclusions, the researchers conducted studies at MIT's Center for Collective Intelligence and Carnegie Mellon, in which 699 people were placed in groups of two to five. The groups worked together on tasks that ranged from visual puzzles to negotiations, brainstorming, games and complex rule-based design assignments. The researchers concluded that a group's collective intelligence accounted for about 40 percent of the variation in performance on this wide range of tasks.
     
Moreover, the researchers found that the performance of groups was not primarily due to the individual abilities of the group's members. For instance, the average and maximum intelligence of individual group members did not significantly predict the performance of their groups overall.
     
Only when analyzing the data did the co-authors suspect that the number of women in a group had significant predictive power. "We didn't design this study to focus on the gender effect," Malone says. "That was a surprise to us." However, further analysis revealed that the effect seemed to be explained by the higher social sensitivity exhibited by females, on average. "So having group members with higher social sensitivity is better regardless of whether they are male or female," Woolley explains.
     
Malone believes the study applies to many kinds of organizations. "Imagine if you could give a one-hour test to a top management team or a product development team that would allow you to predict how flexibly that group of people would respond to a wide range of problems that might arise," he says. "That would be a pretty interesting application. We also think it's possible to improve the intelligence of a group by changing the members of a group, teaching them better ways of interacting or giving them better electronic collaboration tools."
     
Woolley and Malone say they and their co-authors "definitely intend to continue research on this topic," including studies on the ways groups interact online, and they are "considering further studies on the gender question." Still, they believe their research has already identified a general principle indicating how the whole adds up to something more than the sum of its parts. As Woolley explains, "It really calls into question our whole notion of what intelligence is. What individuals can do all by themselves is becoming less important; what matters more is what they can do with others and by using technology."
     
"Having a bunch of smart people in a group doesn't necessarily make the group smart," concludes Malone.
     
In addition to Woolley, Malone and Chabris, the other co-authors were Alexander Pentland, the Toshiba Professor of Media Arts & Science at the MIT Media Lab; and Nada Hashmi, a doctoral candidate at MIT Sloan. The study received funding from the National Science Foundation, the Army Research Office and Cisco Systems.

Thanks to @silfverberg from Hyper Island for the heads-up.

From Variety Magazine, June 7th 2010

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TV and toys set to relaunch 'Voltron'

Latest project to scrap plans to reboot via bigscreen

By MARC GRASER

'Voltron' 'ThunderCats'

The reintroduction of "Voltron: Defender of the Universe" will begin with an animated series on Nicktoons and a new toy line from Mattel rather than leap straight onto the bigscreen.

That's the plan from rights holders World Event Prods and Classic Media, which are attempting to relaunch the massive robot, popular in the 1980s, to a new generation.

It's the latest of several properties to scrap plans for an initial film in favor of relaunching the brand through TV and toys.

Warner Bros.' animation aims to produce an anime-influenced version of "ThunderCats" for Cartoon Network to revive the '80s property, which has had a feature treatment stuck in development.

Likewise billionaire Haim Saban bought back "The Mighty Morphin Power Rangers" from Disney last month for about $100 million to reboot as TV shows on Nickelodeon and toys.

Starting next year, Nicktoons will air 26 half-hour episodes of "Voltron Force," about five space explorers who pilot robotic lions that combine to form Voltron, an invincible guardian sworn to defend the Universe.

Series will remain faithful to the old show, while introducing new recruits to fight alongside the original characters.

New episodes will be timed to the 25th anniverseries. It's the first "Voltron" TV project in 10 years, although an iPhone game came out in December.

WEP and Classic Media ("Casper the Friendly Ghost," "Where's Waldo?") will produce the toon with Kickstart Prods. ("Wolverine and the X-Men"). Classic Media is shepherding international distribution, merchandising and licensing deals.

Mattel will tie-in with the anniversary to launch toys based on the classic "Voltron" range, as well as action figures and playsets that revolve around an edgier, modernized robot. There is no date on when the toys will hit shelves.

"What's paramount is getting the toys right," Ted Koplar, president of St. Louis-based WEP told Daily Variety. "They're pretty involved toys that have to transform and fit together."

WEP and Classic Media had been developing a live action feature for some time but scribes, including Justin Marks, have yet to lock down the right tone, producers said.

Hasbro took the opposite approach with "Transformers" and "G.I. Joe," relying on the first films in the franchises in 2007 and 2009 to introduce new toys for the lines.

The move to TV makes sense: "Transformers," "He-Man and the Masters of the Universe" and "G.I. Joe" were introduced to kids via shows produced by Hasbro and Mattel to sell toys. "It's an exciting way to introduce the brand to a generation that isn't familiar with 'Voltron,'" Koplar said.