#frontierimmersions

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Immersed in Seattle: One Photographer’s Thoughts

“I’ve photographed many immersions for Frontier. But this was the first one where I’ve truly felt like a participant, soaking up the experience and knowledge alongside all of the amazing business leaders who joined us on the trip. The city, the stops, the speakers—everything worked so well together. It’s hard to capture the energy of it all, but hopefully these photos can do just that.”

-Diego

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Take a Detour

You're a tourist in San Francisco. You want to take a guided tour but don't like the options at the Tourism Center. You could just use a standard guidebook, but don't want to visit only the predictable tourist highlights. You want off-road and offbeat. You want the true story of a place and its people. And you definitely don't want your face submerged in text when you're here to see and notice and watch.

Now imagine an immersive, hands-free audio tour read by Gary Kamiya, the author of Cool Gray City of Love: 28 View of San Francisco. An expert on the history of San Francisco--from 20,000 years ago to the present day--Gary injects his personality and perspective, taking you and your group of friends, or like-minded strangers, on a curated tour of the underbelly of San Francisco. A tour not replicated by any Frommer’s guide or local tour company. It’s unique. It’s personal. You start and stop the tour at your leisure. You take as much time as you need to complete the journey. Your iPhone stays securely nestled in your pocket, with your headphones in both ears. Or one. And when you choose to pause the tour, your friends--synced with you--have their tour paused as well.

This is Detour.com, an app company born from the mind of Groupon founder, Andrew Mason. Technology powering place-based, interactive, social experiences.

We met with Andrew after his keynote...

...at Launch Festival in that cool gray city of love to talk audio journalism, oral history, experiential media, immersive storytelling. As content nerds not easily impressed, we think Detour's pretty freaking cool. 

So we're building it into a new product for our enterprise clients, taking the consumer-facing idea above and mapping it into employee engagement, retail immersions, conference experiences, and more. Stay tuned. 

- Becky

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Ahh, N'awlins. Wait, why are we here?

The Client

Our client has a strong legacy as a consumer goods company with highly effective and profitable means of procurement, manufacturing, distributing, and branding its products. The company was undergoing some major internal shifts to stay competitive, including a mandate for each function to innovate and find new ways to deliver value.

Some Background

What does innovation mean for a function like procurement? How can leaders help employees, who think they're tethered by prescriptive policies and processes, see where or how innovation is relevant to them?

Employees wrestle with many things around innovation:

Highly tenured employee bases often value infrastructure, process, and risk mitigation. They operate by best practices, and are comfortable performing their jobs in a certain way.

One kink, break, or gap in supply chains can have long-lasting and broad-reaching implications for price, product, reputation, quality and brand. This makes the notion of experimenting very scary.

Decision life cycles can be long and complex, which can make experimentation tricky.

Internal communication to stakeholders and clients is increasingly important to avoid being seen as gatekeepers and police.

Employees are challenged to help supplier partners innovate without making them feel that their heritage is under attack.

How can we create a culture of innovation that's relevant to those challenges and opportunities? We believe culture is the collective habits of the organization, shaped through:

Mindset 

Behaviors 

Skills


What We Found in New Orleans

We also believe that culture is the shadow of the leader. We went to New Orleans so leaders and ambassadors from the company could create a  mindset to embrace and model the following behaviors that will bring this aspirational culture to life:


Discovery (curiosity, observing, questioning, challenging assumptions)


Test & Learn (experimenting, placing small bets, learning from success and failure)

Story Telling (engaging stakeholders through narrative to be a part of the journey)

NOLA provided the perfect backdrop and learning analogue as a city that is actively reinventing itself by building on its rich heritage and embracing new elements to remain relevant in the 21st century.

For three days we explored elements that have made the city famous and considered how reinvention and innovation are impacting its evolving story. At the heart of each story are people who are engaged, focused, and committed to making an impact and engaging and empowering a workforce.

Laissez les bon temps rouler!

Interested in learning more about an immersive experience for your company? Contact Natalie.

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Ahh, the Motor City. Wait, why are we here?

The Client

The CIO of a Fortune 500 company was eager to think about the role innovation plays for his team. The company was undergoing some major internal shifts to stay competitive, which brought new challenges to a legacy brand.

Some Background

We looked at the cultural elements of an innovative ecosystem:

Soliciting and valuing multiple perspectives

Ability to take risks and make fast decisions

Transparent communication and knowledge-sharing

Celebrating and learning from both success and failure

These give teams the language with which to talk about tackling problems and opportunities effectively. But how do they get put into practice? To what end? What does innovation mean for their team? How does their team add value to the organization and power the broader strategy?

What We Found in Detroit

We went to Detroit to explore answers to these questions because we think it is an interesting analogue for the company -- a city that could help answer the question, “what can our team mean to innovation and the future of the company?”

For more on why we chose Detroit, check out our previous post on the city that's reinventing itself.

For more on the discussions and learning during this specific trip with this specific client, keep reading.

Innovation = Ideas + Execution. That’s an equation applicable to all functions. Don't over-complicate things by making innovation seem unattainable.

Creating space for risk. In the event of failure, we can focus on the learning.

Understand the broader company's expectations of you and your team and the contribution you make throughout the entire company. Think differently about your role.

Interested in learning more about an immersive experience for your company? Contact Natalie.

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Ask The Right Questions To Create The Right Culture.

During a recent client immersion in New Orleans the leadership team and I spent time with the artwork of Candy Chang.

Should you cross the street to a nondescript parking lot and look at the side of the adjacent building, you’ll see a giant chalkboard mural. Written across the top in repeating measures is the sentence “Before I die….”.  Observers are invited to become participants in this interactive art display by spelling out their personal responses in chalk.  

This project is one of many such projects that the New Orleans based artist has created around the city and recently exported all over the globe.  

The right question invites participation from unexpected people and places and sometimes changes the entire conversation. 

The original conversation Chang entered into was about blight and neglect.  As she has scaled and shared her work, the conversation has changed to be one about inclusion, connection, and community. 

But to have experienced all that, you have to slow down.  You have to be lucky enough to stumble on this, you have to value the power of the right question as much as having the right answer.  As a leader, this can be challenging. We value forward movement and momentum and certainty, And by all means, try to quickly fix the broken places before anyone notices them.  And whatever you do, certainly don’t shine a spotlight on those cracks.

What if the value of a leader was seen in shedding light on the cracks before they became full breaks? 

What if the value of a leader was in shedding the light on those broken places not place blame or accountability but as a means to identify the places as spaces for reinvention and possibility?

What if the value of the leader was not in having all the answers but in asking the right questions?

What if the value of the leader was in creating the spaces for connection and reflection on the right questions, encouraging people to slow down in order to go fast?

- ST

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Detroit - more than magical

Last week we had the privilege of taking clients to balmy Detroit for three days of experiential learning. Why Detroit (in February, no less)? We’ve all seen the photos and followed the bankruptcy headlines. But there is so much more to the story. Neither the industry nor the city is the force it once was; however, it is far from dead. Interestingly enough, Detroit's motto (created following a devastating fire that leveled the city in 1805) is "Speramus Meliora; Resurget Cineribus" (Latin: We Hope For Better Things; It Shall Rise From the Ashes). Detroit is a city rich in legacy and heritage, responsible for birthing giants of industry and shaping much of our American culture. As an industry town, Detroit has a core capability that few cities can rival. This city is teeming with engineering and manufacturing expertise that until now, has been almost singularly focused in purpose. Detroit is a city with a core identity. Today, the Motor City is valiantly wrestling with leveraging that core identity and forging it into a more relevant one (with capabilities to mirror) for a new, global, tech-centric marketplace interested in sustainability and impact. For three days, we bore witness to better things rising in the city as we explored throngs of innovative business models transforming the city. Yes, throngs. While you weren’t looking, Detroit became a hotbed for tech startups. Why you ask? One answer is low barriers to entry. Talent, space, and capital are available to entrepreneurs who have been priced out of Silicon Valley. As large, established organizations wrestle with how to make innovation part of their DNA, the question should be asked, “what are the barriers to entry internally?” Is the cost of taking risks too high? Is the price for challenging the status quo to steep? Is the payoff for not doing business as usual to low? Perhaps the Motor City can be the perfect learning analogue for organizations with strong legacy struggling to engage a workforce to innovate for a better future. - ST

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Invisible Loyalty

Just wrapped up great session with a client and members of the innovation team at Four Seasons.

Probably the most human-focused company we’ve dealt with in a while. Accepting limitations on real estate and technology capital, the company’s relentless focus is on local innovation at all levels to upgrade “guestcentricity”.

The measure of their success in transitioning to a fresher, individualised Four Seasons? The absence of the need for a guest rewards loyalty program.

SW, Miami

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Recycling for $$$ - United States' Answer

In a country filled with waste, one machine will change the way we handle the recycling of electronic devices - and pay us for it.  

Welcome the "ecoATM", a machine designed to collect your used electronics (cell phones, MP3 players and smart tablets) for an immediately delivered cash value, or the allocation of that cash value to a charitable organization. Through a process that includes drivers license verification, device scanning, and an easy-to-use touch screen, the user is able to engage in a transaction comparable to that of a standard bank ATM. 

- BC