B2B Prototyping part 2: How to collaborate

Welcome to Attention Matters, the newsletter from Storythings which gives you practical insights and tools on how to tell better stories and grow your audiences’ attention.

Thanks to everyone who shared or commented on last week’s first post - shout out to Ash Mann for adding it to his newsletter (although he removed the ‘B2B’ bit!) I’m a big fan of Ash’s newsletter, so if you’re not a subscriber, sign up today. Especially if you work in the arts sector on digital stuff.

Right then - a quick reminder of what we’re covering today, and where we are in this series on building a prototyping culture:

- Create space in busy schedules to build and test prototypes
- Collaborate with internal and external partners on prototypes (that’s this post!)
- Test these ideas with your internal and external audiences
- Create metrics to measure attention and engagement
- Scale ideas from prototypes into full projects
- Know when to stop or kill and idea, even if you love it
- Demonstrate how prototyping saves your company money and time
- Build a sustainable workflow and culture for prototyping in your team

THE PROBLEM

When I ran the BBC Innovation team in the early 2000s, I had the job of transforming them from an separate ‘skunk works’ team working mostly on their own projects, to a network of innovation experts working with other teams inside the BBC, external digital agencies, academics and hackers. I was heavily influenced by Henry Chesborough’s writing on Open Innovation, and Eric von Hippel’s work on Lead User Innovation. Both those ideas argued that the best sources of new ideas don’t always come from inside your company - they come from users, partners or other people who might have new insights or needs from your products and services.

The same is true when you’re making content prototypes. If you’re finding yourself stuck making the same kind of content again and again, the best way to break that cycle is to bring fresh perspectives and voices into your prototyping. The problem is that working with collaborators adds complexity to your workflow, and can make prototyping an idea longer and more frustrating. I faced all these challenges, and more, running an open innovation programme at the BBC, so here’s some of the things I learned.

THE INSIGHT

Many years later, I was asked to talk about what I learned building innovative prototypes at the BBC, and I ended up basing the talk on one thing that always seemed to make collaboration harder - rhythms.

There’s a saying that “culture eats strategy for breakfast” - you can make a plan of action, but if your team culture isn’t aligned, you’ll struggle to deliver the strategy. I think there’s something deeper than culture, and that’s rhythm. Rhythm is the cadences and forces that shape the way you do work, not just in your organisation, but in your sector.

For example - book publishing rhythms align to the release of the major summer book titles in May, and the even more important Christmas book titles in October. Museum and Galleries have rhythms that align to their exhibition and events programmes. With Universities and colleges, it’s the academic year. The important thing about these rhythms is that they’re not created by the individual orgs - they develop across entire sectors, aligning the work of major organisations, supply chains, marketing and audience behaviours.

If you are collaborating with someone from a similar sector, this probably won’t cause too many problems, as you will both have an innate understanding of the cadences and forces that shape your workflow. But if you collaborate with someone from a completely different sector, the friction caused by your clashing rhythms will make it very hard to work together. At the BBC, this friction was most noticeable when fast moving digital agencies were trying to build prototypes with TV production companies. I’ve also seen friction when Museums and Art Galleries try to work with big tech partners like Google. If there’s one thing big cultural institutions don’t like doing, it’s moving fast and breaking things.

But even if you’re only collaborating with people inside your company, there can still be friction between different rhythms. I saw this at the BBC - the rhythm of the news department, for example, was focused on getting the daily news bulletins out, so making time for prototypes was difficult unless they were aligned to a more predictable news event rhythm - eg a UK or US election. Meanwhile, the Natural History Unit would come to us saying they were about to film a major series like Blue Planet that would come out in 5 years time, and wanted to know what content they’d need to shoot for innovative digital platforms.

In a lot of content and comms departments, the most common clash of rhythms is when teams are trying to collaborate with internal contributors for social media formats. Social platforms require fast turn arounds and an iterative, data-led approach to content strategy. But contributors will require sign off and approvals, dragging the process out and breaking the workflow. This is particularly hard when you’re trying to make regular weekly or monthly formats, like newsletters or podcasts.

THE ACTION

Friction between rhythms is one of the biggest barriers to building a culture of making and scaling prototypes. If you don’t recognise and deal with this problem, the chances are you’ll keep finding projects get stalled, delayed, or your teams burn out. Here’s a couple of things you can try to solve it:

1 - Create a bubble
This is the most common way people try and escape the dominant rhythms in their organisations. They create a ‘skunk works’ team (like the one I inherited at the BBC) who can choose what rhythms they work to, or they create an event or workshop where teams can pretend the usual rhythms don’t matter. This is a fantastic way to build quick prototypes, but the trouble comes when you take them out of the bubble and back in to the rest of the organisation. A lot of the projects in our BBC Innovation team never achieved scale-up because they weren’t easy to do in the existing rhythms of the different BBC departments.

2 - Take it outside
This is the idea behind the Open and Lead User innovation theories I mentioned at the start of this post. If you work in a very mature sector with well established (and probably slow) rhythms, it might be easier to ask outside agencies or users to come up with new ideas for you. This is what we do for a lot for our clients at Storythings - we’re a ‘content as a service’ offering with a team that is specially set up to work with different rhythms of our client and their stakeholders. It’s much easier for us to adapt and shift rhythms than it would be for an internal dept.

3 - Let one partner’s rhythm lead
This can be tricky to do, but it can be really effective. If you are working with an internal or external partner, ask them to map out what they would expect the project cadence to look like, and then change your team’s rhythms to match theirs. This puts all the potential friction on one side of the collaboration, but it is particularly effective if the lead partner will be the one responsible for scaling the prototype afterwards. If you build a prototype with a workflow that would be unsustainable for the team who will end up scaling it, you’re just saving up problems for the future. You might as well try and solve them in the prototype stage.

4 - Use a bigger event to set the rhythm
Sometimes, there is a rhythm in your sector that is bigger than any friction between your collaborators. It might be that there’s a major strategic or technology change in your organisation, or an annual event in your sector (eg an exhibition or trade show). Tying your prototypes to the rhythm of this bigger event gives everyone the opportunity to step outside of their usual rhythms. I definitely saw this at the BBC and Channel 4 in the run up to the London 2012 Olympics and Paralympics. Having such a major broadcast event on the horizon helped people break out of their existing rhythms to collaborate on something new.

I’ve spoken about rhythm at a few different events over the last decade or so, and it always seems to have a profound effect on people. It can really help you see some of the unseen forces that impact your collaboration and workflow. There aren’t easy answers to it, but just understanding the impact rhythms and friction have on your projects can feel like a revelation. If you want help understanding and changing rhythms that are affecting your content workflow, we’d love to talk!

Next episode, we’ll look at how you can test audiences and get valuable feedback. Because the whole point of prototypes is to make the thing you finally launch as good as it can be.

See you next week!
Matt