Maybe now it’s time to think about innovation.

Pivoting to grow

Being honest, if room44 had stayed wedded to its core business at the start of 2019, we probably wouldn’t be here today. When the pandemic shut the UK economy down, we had already opened a new venture that became our growth opportunity for 2020 and 2021. Since then we’ve also added a new ‘artisanal’ product stream to our portfolio and room44 innovation consulting has resurged.

This all came about from a reading of market trends that indicated strong growth in areas that we may not have leant into without an understanding of the probable impact of world events. We were deep into the Brexit transition back in Q1 2020 so ‘change’ was inevitable. All we had to do was take it seriously.

Old business clinging on to old ways

Since Lockdown #1, many thousands of people have seen huge shifts in their work lives. Lay-offs have released people to pursue their own dreams, as well as throwing others into the grip of financial despair. One impact of this is that the UK is doing better than ever at creating new businesses and poorly at letting old ones die naturally.

In Q1 2021 Companies House recorded a record increase in new company incorporations – up by 24%. According to Fathom Consulting, the UK now hosts @4.5 million privately owned companies and more Unicorns (£1bn+ companies) than France, Germany and Sweden combined.

So, the government has made it possible for new business to start, grow and thrive with more bounceback funding, including another £1.5bn available to support start-ups* but the same financial support has also allowed businesses that were struggling to stumble on for longer. Loans, grants and furlough funds have let companies reset. The downside is that some of them should have simply stopped being. 

Hope as a strategy

An article by Matthew Lynn in The Saturday Telegraph a few months back argues that old business is clogging up the very system that should help new companies grow (Recovery depends on killing Zombie companies). It’s a good point. SMEs are a tenacious bunch and won’t give up easily, but hanging on and hoping isn’t a strategy.

Building a new vision based on new market dynamics, seeing a less-than-obvious opportunity and then acting on the vision is what will help old business survive. If you have any doubt, look at the current crop of start-ups – looking at things differently is exactly what they have done.

What is innovation?

If you’re a follower of Clayton Christensen, you’ll recognise the definition of disruptive innovation as being “a process by which a product or service takes root initially in simple applications at the bottom of a market and then relentlessly moves up market, eventually displacing established competitors.”

In the context of re-imagining a business’s potential in order to survive, maybe a less ambitious definition is appropriate. How about something like – taking ideas that work in other places that we can make work here. 

Business development asks you to grow your business. Innovation asks you to offer your customers something different than they can get today to satisfy a need differently, or to meet a new need entirely. This isn’t innovation in its truest sense but, if the process demands that a failing business changes what it does for the survival of the company and gives their customers something newly valuable to buy, let’s give it the benefit of the doubt.

If you’ve relied on government funding to get you through a tough patch and are worrying about how to cover the wage bill now that furlough funding is over, now is a really good time to think about a change in direction.

As the saying goes, the best time to plant a tree was twenty years ago. The next best time is today. If you’re an established business who wants to talk to an agency that has done exactly that, drop us a line. 

Future thinking. Future proofing. It’s what we do.

 

 

*Future Fund & Breakthrough Fund

“You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” – Buckminster Fuller*

When a crisis, calamity or catastrophe hits, you can be sure of one thing: there’ll be a load of advice about what to do next. This will often be from people who talk in platitudes and generalisations, and who don’t have your particular problems.

It’s always easier to see the problem objectively from the side-lines than being stuck in the middle of it. But while you’re trying to regain control of what used to be your ‘normal’, this sideline advice is all too easy to ignore.

The future was always going to be different

The problem here is that the future was always going to be different to today, and you were always going to have to respond by being courageous and creative. It’s just that the level of courage required has gone up.

The truth is, nothing changes by looking at it, so you have to be the difference. 

The COVID-era

COVID-19 has launched us all into a world of WTF happens next, when we’re still in the middle of WTF do we do now?

We’re not immune to this at room44. Only three weeks after we launched our new eBike business, and while our city centre partners can’t keep up with demand from commuters trying to avoid public transport, out in the provinces these issues aren’t felt in the same way – yet. 

In fact, while carbon emissions are reported to have dropped by 60% in city centres, there is a growing sense that the only way to stay away from other people is to cocoon oneself in a car when the movement restrictions lift. It’s going to take a pretty determined attitude to fork out £2k+ for a decent bike to get to work, when you’ve already got a car on the drive.

Two sides to every story

But, as with every story, there are two sides to this one. Limited access to city parking is going to make your life pretty difficult if everyone drives themselves to work. Traffic will increase again and air quality targets will mean local authorities will need, once more, to encourage you out of your car. How will they do this? By raising parking charges and restricting parking spaces. The answer: get yourself a bike. 

Immunity

Have you noticed that, just this week, news media have started saying ‘immunity, while it lasts’?

As with everything, COVID-19 is expected to mutate and because we know so little about it, the level of immunity, from becoming infected and getting over it, is limited, maybe. Watch this space.

Here are a few more readings from trends that you can ponder while locked-down. If these help you to see the world we’re heading into differently, please ‘like’ the article so your colleagues and contacts can see it too.

Air Travel

Air travel after lockdown is likely to be very different than before COVID-19. Companies must now consider the health and safety of travelling staff in the context of risk of infection. Working from home has provided everybody with the perfect conditions to monitor the experiment, and guess what? People can be trusted to be productive when not in direct line of sight, and IT is enabling closer monitoring too. The absolute need for a face-to-face meeting has been re-evaluated, so fewer business trips will be necessary.

Fewer planes in the air, fewer pilots in cabins, fewer cabin crew working, fewer ground staff, luggage handlers…if you work in the aviation industry, now could be a good time to consider retraining.

Choose your travel like a 12-year-old

When you were a kid, you could travel four ways: get a lift, ride a bike, catch a bus (or a train), or walk. This is how our transport options are looking for the future too. Terms like shared and multi-modal are coming soon to a vernacular near you. 

After lockdown, you can always revert to the way things were and go with the flow until there is no other option. That’s your choice.

High streets will become local again

We may all rush out to eat again in town centres after physical distancing restrictions lift – for a while. Then we may wonder why we’re running the risk of contracting COVID-19 (it isn’t going anywhere for a while yet) and high street restaurants and coffee shops will shut down, while other local and regional speciality outlets will thrive.

Fewer planes moving masses of homogeneous packaging and less shopper inclination to visit interchangeable retailers will allow speciality stores to find an audience. Less moving of food around the world will help locally produced, seasonal foods step into the spotlight. It may end up being more expensive, but perhaps we’ve now reached the point at which food should cost what it costs to grow, and not what it is subsidised to be sold at. Perhaps we’re looking at a brighter future when the norm is that we can’t get strawberries out of season, all our cauliflowers come from Cornwall, and our pork from Suffolk.

The miracle of globalisation has lost its shine

If you work in a business that manufactures in China or India, you know that you are hostage to the supply chain. When COVID-19 happened, your supply chain failed. 

Solution: shorten the supply chain, retake control of your production and get to know your production partners so you can call in a favour.

Effect: production comes back to the EU and US and others. Market countries start to rebuild vocational industries.

Can this really happen? Those tuned into economic modelling seem to think so.

Furlough leads to Universal Basic Income

It’s possible that, where industries and companies have failed through COVID-19, governments may introduce a basic income. This will shift the measurement of an individual’s value to society from the value of their output, in terms of a wage received, to one of measuring their consumption – how they choose to spend their funded support, and how they top it up.

UBI may only move people from an existing social benefits structure and income support to a different fund name but, if attitudes shift, it could become an acceptable alternative to the 9 to 5. Gig-economy workers may see the sense in this and, after the first phase of COVID-19 has played out, there are likely to be many more of those.

Less work to do

Considering UBI also prepares society for a time (not too distant) when robots and AI have succeeded in reducing the number of people needed in the workplace.

Who pays? Good question. Logically, we could ask the robotics infrastructure industry to compensate displaced workers, or newly rejuvenated manufacturing to contribute. Just ideas.

Delivery gets multi-layered

In this unprecedented** time, you can order every consumer good you want and it’ll arrive in 48 hours, but you can’t buy flour and you definitely can’t easily see a doctor. You can thank the God of Home Delivery, Amazon, or think again.

The people who are getting you the things you need, who aren’t prepared to give up to Amazon, are the local and small businesses who have adapted. The guys with a deli down the road or the bakery in the high street you can call to get a delivery next day are the ones we should be thanking. Support local. 

When the chips are down and chips are all you want, Amazon won’t be there for you the way the local fryer has always been.

Work security 

Jobs that were gold-plated like air crew, retail buyers, baristas and GPs look a bit less secure. Service provision that has shone through during lock-down, like small food producers, online health services, delivery drivers and, dare I say, eBike delivery riders are not going to fade away. Job-security has been a declining concept for years and, now more than ever, people are realising that their trust in larger corporations might need a rethink.

The trends we’ve listed here have some inter-relation. They are suggestions of a degree of change that is happening now. 

How much these changes will affect you remains broadly in your hands.

To some degree they will come to bear on your life whatever you do. You can consciously try to modify your behaviours after the peak of COVID-19, or you can resist. 

________________________________________

Many of these will be changes for good. Less airborne pollution has such a wide range of environmental and health benefits that it’s hard to see why we would allow it to reoccur. 

‘Nothing changes by looking at it’ – and the least painful route forward is to take responsibility to change now. Trying to go back to how things were is going to be frustrating, expensive, and probably doomed to fail.

Better to devise a new set of behaviours while you have the time to think.

Future thinking. Future proofing. It’s what we do.

*Richard Buckminster Fuller was an American architect, systems theorist, author, designer, inventor, and futurist.

** This ‘unprecedented’ time is relative. The world has seen population-changing epidemics and pandemics before and the intervals are surprisingly regular. The decisions you make today will have a direct effect on the health and well-being of your grandchildren – and that must be worth thinking about.

Plan for normality and keep a focus on the future, whenever and whatever that might be. The highly unusual situation we’re in isn’t forever.

It’d be foolish to underestimate the effect that COVID-19 is having and will continue to have on our day-to-day lives, but if we can keep some sense of perspective, we may hold onto the belief that it isn’t for ever. Panicking about what we cannot control is detrimental not only to our mental health, but also to our potential for recovery from this situation – be it physical, social or financial.

It’s hard to write this and not appear dismissive of what’s happening and what’s to come. I’m not. I don’t know anyone who is. The situation is frightening and changing so rapidly that news is old as soon as it’s out.

But we must believe that it isn’t for ever.

It’s for now and it’s for some time to come, but room44’s strategy is always to look forward, look up and look out to a different horizon. The journey may be bumpy but the destination is up to you.

If you’ve been in business for a while and have overhead and COE to think about, if you’ve just taken on a loan, or if you’re starting out and need money to subsist, you have the same bottom line.

Planning ahead.

However speculative, hospitality, events and entertainment organisers are rebooking dates for September and October. We all need to believe to survive and these guys are planning for a more definite medium term.

Even in ‘normal’ circumstances, businesses today can’t easily predict demand for their services. room44 has an order book but it never extends beyond six months, and our eBike business is still a fledgling enterprise. We feel your pain.

Focus on your future.

What we can all do, though, is plan for the day when our situation has stabilised again. By keeping a focus on what we would like to happen, we can press pause on thinking about what can’t be controlled. In itself, this offers stress relief and other psychological benefits. Here’s a blog that might strike a chord – When the long term is the hardest thing to focus on, that’s when it’s most important to retain that focus.

Focus on what you want.

Yesterday, Paul Freedman posted a video about the Stockdale Paradox, which says that in challenging times we all need to believe the situation is temporary, even while dealing with it. As Jack Reacher would put it, hope for the best and plan for the worst.

The last time I found myself in a position where things were going badly wrong, a close friend asked what my plan was. While I was looking around for someone to bail me out, the answer had to come from me. Work it out and execute the plan.

Be kind and stay healthy.

My plan has always included writing to promote my business. If you’ve read to this point, thank you and I hope it helps.

If a chat would help some more, let’s do that. Here’s my diary. Book some time, no charge. Be kind and stay healthy.

Future thinking. Future proofing. It’s what we do.

The ideas economy is great. Having ideas is where innovation-based strategy starts.

The problem that business leaders have, is not looking for great ideas; it’s choosing one.

Unless ideas translate into action, a launch and an experience that consumers value, what started out as a good idea with potential will never make it as an innovation.

Everybody loves biscuits

Nearly everybody loves an ideation session. Loads of biscuits, a day out of the office and, at the end of the day, a wall covered in coloured Post-Its.

The energy, the buzz, the empathy, the synergy and meeting of minds that ideation sessions generate are testament to the power of creativity.

And this is where the work really starts When you get back to your desk, the sugar crash hits right about the time the first client calls and you’re back into the humdrum.

Work with room44 and that won’t happen. Sure, you’ll still get the client calls but you’ll also have expert resource working in and alongside your company to get the first idea to market – then the second…

Assess your options

Our specific method of assessing your product options will make the order of priority clear, the thing to do next apparent and the eventual result measurable.

We have delivered products that started as an idea on a Post-It and know every part of the supply chain intimately. If you want to hear about some examples let’s talk.

In addition to strategy, we have delivered:

• product design,
• positioning,
• creative design,
• communications strategy creation,
• prototyping,
• branding,
• testing and manufacture,
• supply chain builds… and we’ve done it many times over.

If there’s a practical element to delivering a product to market without distracting your team from what they’re paid to do – we’ve done that.

In our opinion, ideation needs to lead to an actionable plan that gets actioned.

Future thinking. Future proofing. It’s what we do.

Companies are recognising that consumers are attracted to brands who do more than just tell them how great they are. Brands with a purpose rate more highly in the EQ stakes (for more about EQ/Emotional Quotient read my blog here).

Your brand marks you out

The legacy of a brand’s actions can get in the way of its being convincing to consumers today. ‘We will be carbon neutral by 2030’ or ‘committed to reducing unnecessary plastic by 2025’ are platitudinous examples of brands blindly following the crowd.

More and more, manufacturers and service providers must realise that setting a distant target for performance improvement is not good enough. Here are a few examples of why.

Plastic Waste

Brands make all manner of declarations to persuade consumers they are doing their bit to reduce plastics in the environment.

In 2018, Coca Cola pledged to recycle a used bottle or can for each one they sell by 2030. Every year Coca Cola turns more than three million tonnes of plastic into bottles and sells over 100 billion single use plastic bottles.

Surfers Against Sewage, an environmental action charity, collects waste products washed up on the beaches around the UK and records the brands it finds. They’ve been doing this for over a decade. Coca Cola was, and remains, the single most present brand of plastic rubbish around our coastline.

Consumers will eventually see the disquieting connection, as they’re kicking a Coke bottle down the beach, between the company’s commitment to recycling plastic and their continued production of more and more.

Other, newer drinks brands are already positioned to offer alternatives.

Eating habits

The UK government says that it expects to see a 50% reduction in human consumption of beef and lamb by 2050. ‘Plant-based’ and vegan foods are now available in every supermarket. There was a joke that went, ‘how do you know when there’s a vegan at the table? They’ll tell you.’ It’s not a joke anymore.

To a business making meat products, the timeline above leaves a comfortable distance until they need to worry about revenue contraction. But, between now and 2050, the same company will see a new CEO at least three times, and a change in CMO 10-15 times.

If consumers are making changes to their eating habits now, what should the company do? If it’s a good idea in 2050, it’s a good idea to consider it now.

Clothing

McKinsey tells us that 60% of all clothing finds its way into landfills or incinerators within a year of being made. Within a year. Staggering. At the same time, production of clothing is up by 100% since 2014 and consumers are each buying 60% more clothing.

The Ellen McArthur Foundation tells us that 20% of global industrial water pollution comes from dyeing and treating textiles, and in 2015, carbon emissions from textile manufacture were measured at 1.2 billion tonnes.

To anyone with an interest in change, these figures are extraordinary.

Most high-street consumers aren’t that bothered and clothing brands are very happy taking their money now, despite what the brand’s future environmental intentions may be. Brands such as Know The Origin and Vildnis however, are emerging as sustainable, affordable fashion businesses and starting to get consumers’ attention.

If it’s a good idea for 2050, it’s a good idea for now.

Businesses who genuinely want to make a difference, grow a point of differentiation, and help consumers to do the right thing are emerging every day.

While established brands use bland, time-based statements of intent to persuade consumers their hearts are in the right place, challenger brands are making more immediate declarations and winning market share. This is how change-making companies with an interest in growth must also behave.

Why is Design Thinking useful?

The methodology of Design Thinking puts consumers at the front and centre of product design decisions. The purpose of innovation is to offer them new and better alternatives than are available today. The purpose of room44 is to help business to survive and thrive into the future.

You probably know that your company will have changed by 2025/2030/2050. It’s likely that you’re putting off the work that should be done to work out what it will change into.

As I said at the top of this article, if it’s a good idea for 2050, it’s a good idea for now.

If we can be helpful to you, let’s talk. Here’s my diary.

Future thinking. Future proofing. It’s what we do.

When it’s done effectively, innovation defines a roadmap, sets explicit objectives, and provides a guide for everyone in your organisation to follow.

There are two issues that innovation must resolve to succeed:

1. The need for change must be owned right across an organisation.
2. There must be someone to do the work after the training team has departed.

Let’s deal with #1 today…

Because the ‘need’ for change is the hardest.

Companies evolve to be super-efficient at delivering their product or service. Their systems and processes develop to avoid waste, and every aspect of production and client service is streamlined for profitability.

Kaisen, Lean, J.I.T. and all the other Toyota Business System-inspired processes help to do this. While everything within the company’s control stays the same, it’s all good – operationally.

So, why worry?

Well, the need for change has a habit of sneaking up on you – not necessarily because you don’t see it coming, but because there isn’t a process to decide what should change, or a system to manage that change.

Knowing that a trend will, unavoidably, hit your top and bottom line isn’t enough. Once you’ve acknowledged that probability, the hardest part is convincing your peers and your management that they should take note of it too.

One of the ways that room44 tackles this challenge is to deliver innovation training in the most democratic and agnostic manner: across the workforce and from top to bottom.

If we can’t gain the support of your directors before we kick off, we won’t start. Resistance to the need for innovation must be resolved before a project gets underway.

It’s been suggested that company directors only ever see 4% of the problems that affect their business. If we start from there, alert the right people to what is coming down the line, and change some perspectives, we can have a significant impact on a company’s chances of survival as its market changes.

We’ve become very good at opening the eyes of management to the reality of their situation. To talk about your management team/ leadership team/ board of directors, please get in touch. 

Here’s how Click here.

This is a tale of missed opportunity. It features an emerging trend, an industry struggling to grow and short-term decision making.

In March 2017, we picked up chatter about a concept that we thought would interest the insurance industry. We interviewed the UCLA Anderson Professor, Hal Hershfield, who had invented and developed the idea, and he clearly thought so too. Professor Hershfield was generous in describing his vision, his ambition and the benefit that he envisaged for consumers.

The idea? It’s a piece of technology that takes an image of a person’s face and modifies it digitally to represent that same person in the future, maybe in 20, 30 or 40 years’ time.

Professor Hershfield’s research showed that, when confronted by themselves in an older, more vulnerable state, people are inclined to make different investment decisions.

Hyperbolic discounting

We’re all very aware of our own inclination to take a reward in the short-term over waiting for a bigger one later. This concept, hyperbolic discounting, is widely studied. In times of recession, shoppers buy more chocolate and small cosmetics purchases, rather than go without completely when they can’t afford to buy a car or have a holiday.

So, the thinking behind Professor Hershfield’s concept is well-supported and evidence-based.

Hershfield’s believable representations of an older ‘you’ raise the question of what the results of your investment decisions might be. Recent studies of Generation Z revealed the consequences of these people having been born into a world of uncertainty: peak water, war, terrorism, global ecology choked on plastic, and other significant factors leave young people making very short-term decisions on the basis that the future is not guaranteed. 

Candidate sectors

There are a few industries that need an injection of ‘invest for tomorrow’, one is insurance. We took Hershfield’s idea to a well-known UK insurance brand. We explained the concept, but only briefly, because they were too busy to look at new ideas. Too busy doing business and making money – and when you’re selling the future, that’s a hard argument to win.

The result was that they didn’t get the low-down on emerging technology, and Professor Hal didn’t get a new customer. Two years have passed without their customers having the benefits of that technology, and any potential competitive insulation has evaporated. Hal Hershfield’s invention is having a significant impact on those consumers with access to it. Insurance companies are turning on to the idea.

Our commitment to you

room44 is committed to continuing to bring you new insights. The value of searching for trends and seeking competitive advantage is crucial to the sustainability of business. Thanks to our constant exposure to emerging trends and innovations, we recognise unique opportunities in ideas that, at first, might seem disconnected.

Do get in touch. I promise a conversation will get you thinking differently.

This is where we arrange to talk. Click here to book time.

This is how we train teams. Download the prospectus here.

Future thinking. Future-proofing. It’s what we do.

The ideas economy is great. Having ideas is where innovation starts.

However, unless ideas translate into action, a launch and an experience that consumers value, what started out as a good idea with potential will never make it as an innovation.

There’s a saying that goes; start putting ideas into one hand and crap into the other and see which one fills up first.

Nearly everybody loves an ideation session. Loads of biscuits, a day out of the office and, at the end of the day, a wall covered in coloured Post-Its.

The energy, the buzz, the empathy, the synergy and meeting of minds that ideation sessions generate are testament to the power of creativity.

The problem is that most times nothing changes. When you get back to your desk, the sugar crash hits right about the time the first client calls and you’re back into the humdrum.

Work with room44 and that won’t happen. Sure, you’ll still get the client calls but you’ll also have expert resource working in and alongside your company to get the first idea to market – then the second…

We have delivered products that started as an idea on a Post-It and know every part of the supply chain intimately. If you want to hear about some examples let’s talk.

In addition to strategy, we have delivered:

• product design,
• positioning,
• creative design,
• communications strategy creation,
• prototyping,
• branding,
• testing and manufacture,
• supply chain builds… and we’ve done it many times over.

If there’s a practical element to delivering a product to market without distracting your team from what they’re paid to do – we’ve done that.

In our opinion, ideation needs to lead to an actionable plan that gets actioned.

Future thinking. Future proofing. It’s what we do.

Innovation consultants aren’t obvious in every coffee shop. We can’t be picked out by our black uniform (architects), or that slightly dishevelled and wired look (junior doctors), or even the button-down shirted, penny loafer and blue suit-wearing business type (McKinsey). We are a relatively rare breed that sits on a stool with a quizzical look. We’re what Reid Hoffman of LinkedIn and Graylock fame calls ‘the infinite learner’.

Question everything

In room44’s case, we have an internal mantra that sits at the heart of our brand essence –  question everything. How did you get to where you are? Why do you still do what you do? Have you seen that trend yet? How about the macro trend sitting out in the future that promises to knock your growth plan off-course, or that looks like an opportunity to latch onto?

One of the reasons our clients work with room44 is our enquiring minds – the most central tenet of which is: who is it for?

Consumer-centricity sits at the core of our being. We don’t work to deliver ‘innovation’. We work to create a strategy that delivers products and services to let your customers experience innovation: a better experience, or a more satisfying solution to their problem.

The father of disruptive innovation, Clayton Christensen, defined it as being what creates new markets by discovering new categories of customers. In our opinion, the best place to start to disrupt is from an established market position. From this position, you have everything you need to succeed and all the tools a start-up would kill for: customers, brand presence, market penetration, shelf space, relationships, track record, trust and revenue.

In the coffee shop

When we’re in the coffee shop, we watch. When we’re at the bus stop, we watch. When we’re at the checkout, we watch, and when we aren’t watching, we’re reading or listening. There’s a good reason for this. There’s as much merit in observing people going about normal business as there is in dive into the internet. In fact, they’re interrelated. Seeing the world in action and following a line of enquiry with ‘why?’ at the heart of the matter is essential to the development of new ways to meet consumer need.

This is how we learn and how we apply an objective consumer perspective to any market segment.

To learn how an innovation consultant can help your business, you can read our guide to strategic innovation. We call it the Programme for Changemakers.

[button link=”http://room44-co-uk-4918163.hs-sites.com/programme” type=”big” newwindow=”yes”] Access The Programme for Changemakers here.[/button]

Future thinking. Future-proofing. It’s what we do.

Try this: when you leave the house, see what you need to pick up and say out loud, I’ve got my case, my coat, my coffee, my keys, my lunch, my kids…

By calling it out, you’re giving yourself the chance to notice what’s missing: wallet, computer, water bottle, dog…

This habit starts to build a picture of what’s normal and expected. It helps avoid mistakes.

Pointing and calling is a method that is used in some unusual places. Stand on a railway station in Japan and you’ll see station staff walking up and down the platform pointing at things and calling them out: signs are red, doors closed, platform edge.

Action follows.

By doing all this while the train is stationary, they are noting the normal. When something unexpected happens, they see that too and they call it out. Action follows. If a door is open, it gets noticed before the train moves, and gets closed before a more serious incident can develop.

These actions become habit. Habits build into an unconscious awareness of the station staff’s surroundings and staff become attuned to changes in the air. They are expert in their tasks and they know when the picture looks wrong.

room44 adopts the same approach to your business.

We immerse ourselves in your world for two reasons: to see it the way you see it, and to see it the way you don’t – in other words, the way everybody else does.

Doing this – pointing and calling out what we see, taking a view of the broader environment – competitor activity, emerging technology, flagged consumer behaviour – helps to call out the non-standard. It’s a simple, but powerful, way of seeing things as they are and as they aren’t. This is where the opportunities for possible products hide.

Get us to run a design sprint or an innovation audit, and you’ll see how quickly your colleagues pick this up, and how they develop the habit of noticing the normal and the non-standard.

The compound effect of pointing and calling.

Little habit changes, practised every day, turn into major changes over time. Eat a piece of cake a day, or an apple, and see what happens. To form a habit takes commitment. It takes resolve, and it requires you to prioritise this new action so that it happens regularly – a bit like a habit. In fact, exactly like a habit.

This is how we start. Take the first step to a new habit. [button link=”https://meetings.hubspot.com/tristan28″ type=”big” newwindow=”yes”] Click here to book time to talk[/button]

Seeing it differently. Future-proofing. It’s what we do.