Something that at first glance might look as a great way of solving problems or pushing projects forward is pre-appointed “grand”-meetings where everyone is invited and the agenda is to come up with ‘big solutions’ and ‘great progress’.

Just by pre appointing the meeting will make the majority of people passive, the people calling the meeting will sit on the majority of the information and be prepared but the rest will await the meeting and then follow, participate but still follow. After the meeting everyone often feels secure with the ‘high level’ of the outcome since everybody participated and out of that only the best ideas come.

I’d say; wrong.

The meeting itself might be the monkey wrench that keeps you and your group from coming up with the best and most brilliant solutions.

Reasons:

1. People act different in groups and when facing problems. Some people act fast and some has to digest information and have a little time to come up with their brilliant output.

2. Ideas and creativity comes uninvited. It does not care about you sitting in a meeting with 8 other people. It might decide to come knocking tuesday night 22.00 when you are taking a shower. So, bulls eyeing everyones creative peaks during a meeting is impossible.

3. These types of meetings tend to, in practice, be more closed than open since the goal is to come up with solutions for and decide on large issues. Anything coming up before or after the meeting is often killed off with “… that has to wait until the meeting” or “… already decided”.

4. In most meetings Mr or Ms Large Mouth (mostly Mr) tends to take over and start poison the outcome, dictating views, strategies and ideas.

Instead of having those grand meetings, start up, say two weeks before the solution has to be delivered, an online forum/discussion where everyone can, at their own pace, read through and come up with feedback and input. This will let everybody digest and evaluate information, it will also prepare everybody for the decisions that has to be made so instead of one or two hyped up persons in a meeting with 6 or 7 followers you get 8 or 9 people really involved in the process. And I bet that everyone will have at least three or four creative peeks during that two week period. Another major advantage of the forum is that you can easily recap what has been said earlier (something that is considered a major interruption in a physical meeting).

Finish off the forum/discussion with a short and effective meeting where you all agree and decide the final details based on the outcome of the forum/discussion.

So what has the last post about the city of Linköping to do with running a business. Well a lot actually. We are becoming more and more unphysical in our work- and business life. We are, daily, interacting with people and places outside where we live. It is now possible more than ever to choose to live where you want and work from there. We no longer have to move to where the jobs are.

Image by TIO.

Everytime I meet new people in an online environment we talk a about how and where we live/work. This is important since we have no physical place to refer to other than the place where we live. In the traditional set up you will love or hate the actual building or the office you work in, but since those no longer exists good and bad things will be attributed the place you live. It is crucial to us that we live in a place where we enjoy life and work and the city must realise that.

More and more I hear people working in a traditional set up talk about how important the place of living is rather than the perfect office, more and more I hear them demanding a non-physical office as an alternative to the traditional face-time set up.

If the city realises that the international PR, to some extent, is in the hands of the people working online then people from all over the world will notice.

A small town has huge opportunities to stir up a buzz internationally by meeting and take advantage of the way people are working today. It does not take much; free city wifi, “workstations” spread out in the city is two examples. The “workstations” has to be no more than a small tablet/bench where you can sit and place you laptop. With these two it won’t be a biggie working, hosting a tele-conference or anything else from a park, the river or any other nice spot in your city.

The free city wifi is too often, by the city, refered to as sometning “extra”, something fun for people to play with. But it will be extremly important for how people experience the city. Earlier everything was focused on getting people out of their homes during evenings and weekends, but with such a simple thing as the city wifi will get people out into the city during workhours. We in the nordic countries will benefit even more from that since we are in our offices during the best hours of the day and we leave for home when the darkness comes. If you could work more outdoors and in different locations we would be happier and more healthy.

A city visitor is no longer travelling business class or stops by the tourist office. A visitor today might get in and get out of a city in an hour or two but still be in, say, Barcelona and the only spokesperson for the city is the online-coworker. Tons of visits might happend everyday, and the people running the city does not know, cos they are too focused on measuring everything physical.

If the city realises that the international PR, to some extent, is in the hands of the people working online and if the city is meeting the needs of the people and organizations then people from all over the world will notice. I mean, if you ask someone about Carsonified a majority will think of Bath, Paul Boag is promoting Dorset, the boyos at 37 Signals is pushing, well a lot of places.

Last week I attended an event hosted by the business community and the city of Linköping (the city where I live since august 2007).

My expectations were quite low; I mean middle ages men talking about how the city shall develop, what can one expect? … but man was I wrong. Lars Hågbrandt, head of development of the city completely blew me away. The visions and the ideas that the city/council has is amazing.

Lars talked about the importance of “unexpectedness”; that people visiting Linköping has to leave the city with a feeling of “Wow, I didn’t expect that!”. It was not said out loud but to me it was obvious that to reach that the city is being treated as a brand more than acres and buildings.

Lars spoke about the flow of people in the city has to be encouraged so that people will live the city not just live there, the tempo and dynamics of the city has to be rearranged so there is no dead spots, no passive areas. There must be, as he put it, content in the city that surprises its inhabitants. Parks has to be vital so that people are encouraged to meet each other, streets and squares has to suit the behaviours and needs of the people not the cars or transportation. Also the pace and avrage speed of the inner city has to be lowered so that people will see and feel the friendlyness of the city.

The mix of culture and business, local and international, old and new. Old buildings shall, respectfully, mix with modern architecture and technology inspired by Barcelona and the Jewis museeum in San Francisco. The city must combine communications so that the airport, railway and busses are brought together into one place. The physics apperance of the city has to give the visitors be inhabitants that “wow” experience and then spreading the word about Linköping. The city has to have distinct landmarks to be sticky and stay in the minds of people.

The most striking part is that the city council has adopted a “get stuff done culture” that is more common among entreprenours than politicians.

The purpose of this “get stuff done culture” is to turn the politicians mindset from “if things happend” to “when it happends”. Because of that culture it was not all talk Lars delivered, the city has gone from “waiting” to “preparing”, from “if” to “when”. A few examples:

• - 50 acres of land are ready and standing by so when corporations decide to move to Linköping everything is prepared and the city can just say “Welcome, everything has been taken care of, just bring your stuff”.
• - Permits and paperwork has been arranged for 6000 future apartment in the city and areas surrounding Linköping.
• - Permits, electricity, sewage and water is prepared and built by the river so that floating restaurants can get running in just a few days.
• - Building a business community and making extra efforts for the small business in the city, cos thats where the initial vitality of the city is.

And above all, the people working with the city knows that God is in the detalis;

• - Get the information to the people; taxi drivers has to know the city so that they are able to give recomendation and tips to the people visiting.
• - Keep the city clean and keep everything fresh - the broken windows theory in practice
• - Implement unexpected and modern architecture in the areas facing the main roads.
• - Get the people living here proud cos they are the best marketing of all.
• - The city has an accout for “unexpected visits” meaning that the city is willing to fund any idea or event that would benefit Linköping on the sole ground that it is something that noone would expect. This has resulted in the “City beach” (a beach was built downtown by the river, sand, palms, the lot) and the “November lights” (illuminating the city) projects.

“November lights” illuminated the majority of the city, and also projected art on public walls.

It’s hard to be a client these days. A few years ago you could be quite sure that what you bought was a unique idea from the designer, today it can be something bought, a generic stock design masked by the designer to be something unique.

The good side of the stock image is that it saves a lot of time and money for both a designer and the client when used right. If you use stock imagery as a small parts or building blocks for your larger design projects it’s brilliant. I mean, if you need images of paper, post it notes, wood, pins, grass or something that needs to be presented as close to its natural looks as possible it is ridiculus to hire a photographer for the shots when you can get them for a few dollars instantly.

But still, as a buyer of design you need to beware of the authenticity of the designs you buy.

I attended the Cap&Design event today about why Sweden is doing worldclass work for the web. Sweden is producing stunning work for the web. Agencys like North Kingdom, Farfar and more are leaders in the business. But some thing has changed. In 2000 Sweden was leading almost everything that had anything to do with the web. Today we are outrun in every area except consumer communication. The UK is better then us in design and the US is far ahead of us in development.

So what happened?
Why are we outrun?

Maybe it has something to do with the fact that failure is by default bad in the swedish culture. If you fail you are a failure. Period. And you will be a failure for a longtime. If a swede fail we shy away hoping that noone do remember where others draw wisdom from the experience and advances.

I think that has ruined the personal risktaking. It has made creators and developers think twice before launching a startup or diving head first into an idea that they believe in.

So instead of continue the trial and error mentality of the 2000 era we have focused our creativity on presentation instead of innovation. We use existing technologies to dress existing problems in new solutions instead of creating new technologies for new needs.