Great day of sessions today at WebVisions. I particularly enjoyed the opening keynote by Luke Williams of Frog Design. The topic of his presentation was Thinking the Unthinkable: How To Spark Disruptive Innovation.
The key takeaway here: stop replicating and start innovating. By breaking traditional patterns, you can create an expectation gap, limit your competition, and leave others scrambling to catch up.
“You don’t want to be considered the best of what you do, you want to be the only ones who do what they do.” ~ Jerry Garcia
Few probably do this better than a guy by the name of Steve Jobs. Luke led with how Apple came to Frog Design in the '80s during the heat of the Apple vs IBM battle. The only direction Steve Jobs gave them: "I want Bob Dylan songs".
What he meant by that was Bob Dylan was always going opposite of what everyone expected. He wasn't competing, he was innovating. As soon as he would establish a style and fan-base, he would go in a totally different direction and do it all over again.
This is why today you never see Apple trying to play catch-up to their competition. It's always the other way around. They live by their own rules and beliefs for how a product should work, and they sell a lot of product in doing so.
"I dont have to change myself to fit the product, it fits me." ~ Jonathon Ives, Apple lead designer on the design of the iPad.
The Expectation Gap
The brain recognizes patterns in our daily life, and comes up with expectations for how the outcome should be. By changing the outcome of a pattern you can change that expectation and how it is received.
He gave an example of a competition where the rules were to make a trailer for an existing movie, and all you can change is the voice-over and the soundtrack. The result: a movie many consider to be the scariest of all time, suddenly becomes a feel-good romantic comedy about family:
The Black Swan Theory
The more unexpected the success of a venture, the smaller the number of competitors and the more successful the entrepreneur who implements the idea.
Another great example of pattern switching he gave was that in the 80's and early 90's, all sitcoms had a hug-it-out and learn-a-lesson mentality. The Cosby show, Full House, Perfect Strangers, Family Matters -- basically the whole TGIF lineup. Then a show called Seinfeld comes along where nobody hugs it out, nobody learns anything, and the show ends with tension and a punch-line. They were able to take that expectation that a sitcom should end with a wholesome message, changed that pattern, and created one of the greatest sitcoms of all-time.
Quentin Torrentino, Luke mentioned, did an interview sometime ago where he said that he was sick of the American morality in movies. Not enough revenge was being taken. He wanted to change that pattern when creating his movies.
Did you see Patriot Games? It's a revenge movie, but they don't let Harrison Ford get to kill the bad guy at the end. The guy falls on a shovel, which is an asinine, chicken-shit way to kill the villain. They should go to movie jail for this! The only way to end it is for Harrison Ford to beat this guy to death. ~ Quenton Torrentino excerpt from an interview at the Montreal World Film Festival - August 1992
Comedians: Masters of Breaking Patterns
"The rush of a creative insight is the same as a joke's punch line: unexpected, and logical in hindsight" ~ Luke Williams
Luke went on to talk about how comedians are masters at figuring out patterns and then breaking those patterns. He left us with an example of Eddie Izzard's "Death Star Canteen" bit. The premise of the story is that Star Wars movies never show anyone actually eating. So he thought, "surely there mush have been a cafeteria on the Death Star. I wonder how that dialog would go?...".
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