Neil Perkin organised another Firestarters event at Google this week and a good time appears to have been had by all. Neil’s done a very thorough write up here.
I particularly enjoyed John Willshire‘s contribution in which he challenged agencies’ attachment to supposedly clever processes. He made fun of how agencies get into a predictable conversation with a client. Agency sells their WTF process client forks over large amount of cash. Agency rolls out said process and finds it doesn’t really work in this context. But in view of said cash, agency pretends to client that it’s going great. Both client and agency, in fact, end up with an investment in maintaining the fiction of this process as no one wants to appear party to a waste of money or the returning of said money to its source.
I’m afraid that Agile and Design Thinking are sometimes at risk of being turned into graven images in the same way.
As I often point out, there’s a great spiritual saying:
God spake the truth. The Devil looked at it and said, “That’s awesome. I’m going to organise this and call it religion.
Years back, I blogged about Process, Schmocess and, at the risk of sounding like I haven’t grown, I still like what I said there.
