Living Ideas

Research, ideated ideas, customer stories, competitor strategies, eye-opening & out-of-the-box(category) moves—how do we activate this data, bring it to life, so it can breathe life into our experiences?

The Living Ideas methodology, developed by Tom Ajello, is, simply put, a way to bring ideas to life—and the methodology is itself living and breathing. At Lippincott, we used it to bring customer stories to life, to bring commitments to life, and to breathe life into every brand and experience strategy.

It’s become part of how I approach everything.

It’s reinforced what I’ve learned about the value of bringing the customer’s story to life, in the center of all work. A shared understanding of the customer fuels a shared vision of the experience, the product, the company, the brand. My favorite part of so many projects has been hearing people from across the team—from engineers to execs—repeating parts of the customer story I helped to bring to life, often as a result of using this methodology.

At the heart of Living Ideas is the Experience Disruptor—an experience that we highlight as being disruptive of consumer expectations and/or behaviors in some way. The company itself doesn’t have to be disruptive in a business or innovation sense; rather, it’s a focus on a tiny Experience Factor that could be inspiration to our client in some way. It’s permission to play, to explore, to imagine. To ideate.

This way of thinking has turned me into a collector of Experience Disruptors, of examples of experiences that challenge and recreate expectations, and of best practices that push the envelope of what an experience can be—in any industry.

Customers don’t bring expectations of how an experience works from only direct, traditional competitors—customers bring their expectation from every experience they have.

My favorite projects include disruptor cards in the context of a Story Map — a day-in-the-life, let’s-get-deep-into-real-context picture of what our users are experiencing, complete with the expectations they import from the brands and products already integrated into their lives. It builds empathy. It sparks ahas. It builds shared understanding, viscerally, across the team.

The disruptor card itself is also a powerful tool, a window into other hiring approaches for a job-to-be-done, an opportunity to spark enthusiasm—especially with other user research and anecdotes already in hand.

The disruptor card has a basic anatomy: the brand responsible for bringing the interesting thing to life, a short description of the interesting thing, a sharp capture of WHY the interesting thing is interesting from an experience perspective, and some photos, videos, and other representation to bring it to life for the conversation at hand. It’s a surprisingly and delightfully effective tool to pry open the aperture—to think inventively and empathetically for the user.