Bit late writing up, but wanted to give a shout out to the fantastic guys at Pipeline for their truly wonderful Good For Nothing creative collaboration hack day type shindig last weekend.

Last Saturday a group of planners, designers, writers, developers and other assorted smart folks got together for a day of doing.

The idea for the event was prompted by last year’s APG Battle of Big Thinking (link is to this year’s event, no archive for the 09 event). Tickets for the event are pricey. As I recall, they’re around the £600-700 mark. A room chock full of some of the biggest brains in the industry all gathered together in one room. And yes, there’s a lot of clever thinking shared. But the observation was made that thousands of pounds were spent to bring together all these super smart people and the result was quite a lot of hot air, a fair amount of navel gazing, and even more PowerPoint. It’s called the Battle of Big Thinking so we shouldn’t be really surprised. But the Pipeline guys couldn’t help but think this seemed like a missed opportunity. Imagine if all the people in the room had put their collective brain power to actually trying to solve some real problems, instead of just talking about it. And learn a lot by doing instead of just talking. And imagine if it didn’t cost the earth to do this.

Instead of just talking about it, they thought they’d do something about it. And so they dreamed up Good For Nothing. A “think/hack/do/creative collaboration challenge event thing”, bringing together a “large diverse group of talented people to work with grass-roots, cause-led social innovators in a playful, competitive, experiential experience”.

As a counterpoint to the Battle of Big Thinking, I thought it was more like a ‘Love In of Big Doing’.

And it was awesome. Really really ace. A fantastic way to spend a Saturday.

Three inspiring briefs: Global Generation, The Great Football Giveaway and The Good Gym.

(You don’t have to be a cause with a lot of Gs but it obviously seems to help)

I was on the team working on The Good Gym brief. Which was particularly lovely as I’d blogged about the Good Gym being a fantastic idea a few months ago, so was chuffed to bits to be working with the team on it.

We started the day with a bracing 3 mile round-trip run to an old folks daycare centre to go and put up their Xmas decorations. (I should add here that I don’t run. The last time I went running was cross country at school. And I was crap at it then. Add in a cracking hangover from the Profero Xmas party the night before and I was obviously primed for a Usain Bolt-style performance). We put up lots of tinsel and left their main hall looking a lot more festive than when we arrived.

Then we ran back to start the real work. We divided and conquered to try and tackle the brief from several fronts.

Some of the team looked at the website design and layout, and how this could be improved to create a better experience for the different groups the Good Gym’s seeking to engage. Designs were produced, we didn’t have time to implement it all in the time we had but we’re planning to pull together to help make this all go live.

Others looked at the leaflets they had and how they could be improved – and fully completed redesigns were worked up. When they next do a print run, they’ve got brand new designs ready to go.

Some incredibly smart developers worked on drafting a web app to enable runners to track their runs. There’s a tonne more work needed in this area, the guys did a brilliant job but we just didn’t have enough technical types to do the kind of work everyone wanted to do, but we’re really hoping the next event will have more developers, as there’s doubtless tonnes that can be done with existing run tracking apps and similar. So, all very exciting stuff.

I worked with a few people on the user experience and how we could try and improve the user journey. From the email signup process to the content on the site making the process simpler and clearer (e.g. they’ve now got FAQs) to thinking about ways we could keep momentum while the torturous CRB process was completed, including ideas for purposeful things like working with the guys at FixMyStreet so that runners waiting for their CRB to be processed could still have something ‘good’ to do.

We had a really great day. Everyone bonded, we felt like we’d accomplished a lot in a short space of time.

The whole day was also beautifully scribed:

[ photo courtesy ]

Huge thanks to the Pipeline crew for organising the whole thing. I love the philosophy behind Good for Nothing, which isn’t just going to be one-off event, it’s the start of a whole lot more, guided by the following principles:

1. Doing not talking

It’s not that hard to talk clever and think big and there’s an oversupply of that in our world. Too often big thinking doesn’t lead to big doing. We look around and see so much that needs doing. Roll up your sleeves and ‘fail gloriously’. Good for Nothing stands for the permission to have a go, get involved, participate and to try stuff.

2. Collaborate and experiment
Words we all hear a lot but true collaboration, where real diversity and openness is welcomed, where we let go of power and control, where we self organise and allow ideas and energy to emerge more naturally and where we prototype and develop them rapidly. We want to do more of that.

3. Support the true innovators
Give creative energy to the real innovators trying to make positive change happen. When we look around for social, environmental and human innovation, a lot of the most exciting stuff is happening at the grass-roots. We provide creative support to those pioneers. We think that can help accelerate positive change and impact.

There’s a lot of talk at the moment about how important it is for planners to make stuff. See Mark Pollard’s Why strategists should make stuff and Willsh’s The Planners Book of Things To Make for starters.

I couldn’t agree more – thinking is great, but only in so far as it informs great do-ing.

A little less talk and a little more action. Bring it on.