How LV’s Virgil Abloh and UN’s Deputy Secretary General, Amina Mohammed helped me hack ideas and northern stars for Cali17
“pick what resonates in your life, and what you can do at work, and outside of work”
Amina Mohammed, UN Deputy Secretary General
UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)
Cannes Lions International Festival Of Creativity, June 2017
Hacks
Treat everything like a project, several projects. Giving things lightness, malleability, experimentation & playfulness, changeability
Everything is a “work in progress”. Let go of the idea killing perfectionist in you. Don’t over-think it. Build later or something else
Compare and build tension & compromise between the dissimilar similar
I’ve been so focused on the up-ahead that it took a volley of work-anniversary messages on LinkedIn this week to remind me, that one year ago I went rouge, well indie, and launched my own comms agency – Cali17. And yes, as you can imagine, doing that on the 8th month of what still continues to be, that once-in-several-generations’ didn’t-see-it-coming health crisis & fallout, was umm, kind of disorientating and challenging.
When the only certainty is uncertainty, and the assumed cannot be assumed; and calls to embrace & pivot or transform, seem at best, naive, but on-that-moment a little tone deaf, and realize that sometimes you just let go and fall into your own psychedelic Alice-in-Wonderland rabbit-hole and find your own Mad Hatter and Cheshire Cat to show a fresh new way. For me it was Amina and Virgil.
Why?
It’s not that easy to let go! To really explore the new, you really have to dig-deep and massage hard to untangle years of stubborn learnt behaviour and defensive reflexes. You soon realize that seeking new inspiration from those courses that sounded transformative: how-to-be-an-entrepreneur, disruptive-digital-for-a-new-era, unlock-the-martech-stack - just don’t seem to have that zing anymore.
And so it was the quest to find, umm, something/anything different, that one year and two months ago, my mind (and podcasts) drifted over to the arts, design, ancient history, anthropology, geology, social sciences. A place I spent I found my wonderment and when I stumbled on a video of Virgil Abloh LV’s culture setter, pre his LV days, a rising designer-architect-streetwear-sneakerdesigner-DJ-I-set-trends-&-shape-culture kind-of-guy). An October 2017 lecture he gave at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, sharing his design philosophy & hacks with soon to seek work graduates. Maybe like them, I wanted to see if just 3% of his creative superpowers would magically sprinkle off on me. I would be set.
That didn’t quite happen, but his fresh perspectives on building your signature design language, process and thinking impacted me. Design thinking I still use today inc . 1. Treat everything like a project, several projects. Giving things lightness, malleability, experimentation & playfulness, changeability
Thus, two months later, Cali17 was conceived as an on-going project. A hack that for me lifted the heaviness, the risk aversiveness, the over-cautiousness, instead freeing up more expansive ideas, more joyful development, not stuck with legacy. 2. Everything is a “work in progress”. Let go of the idea killing perfectionist in you. Don’t over-think it. Build later or something else, and 3. Compare and build tension & compromise between the dissimilar similar. For me, mish-mash up unlikely combos that could open surprising new outcomes. The mish, had helped me trick-myself to unwire the hardwired in me.
And the mash of the mish mash, was already planted in my head, four years and two months ago, today. On 21 June 2017, when I was rather lucky to be French Riviera, frolicking around the Cannes Lions International Festival Of Creativity. No not the glam-cinema one, the ad & creative industry pat-on-back annual flock gathering of not only the usual-look-at-me-creative-suspects, but the odd wow-you’re-kidding-me-they-are-here outliers. I remember how on another predictably stunning blue skies C’ote D’Azur morning, I was frantically rushing down the promenade dreading a must-see presentation I was desperate to see. I should have known better not to leave I to the last minute. The night before I just managed to squeeze into the wildly-popular the-real-deal anarchic intervention assemble from Russia, Riot Pussy. The experience was bizarrely confusing seeing raw-activists staged in front of a packed theatre of advertising creative types changing the world one ad at a time. So I was completely surprised when I stumbled into the four-fifths empty hall that would be one the most inspiring and challenging talks I saw the entire week.
Sitting centrestage, elegantly poised, Amina Mohammed, UN Deputy Secretary General, had come to Cannes to meet with the creative types to ask for a little help on what was to become one of the most significant defining and mobilizing forces, and call to action from the UN. A gentle shout out to end all forms of poverty, tackle climate change and fight inequalities. And of huge consequence, which I didn’t grasp at the time - the need for governments, and in time business, to take ownership of the triple bottom line: economic prosperity, with social equity and healthy natural environments.
And it was on that balmy June 2017 day that I learnt of the United Nations 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)(1). Launched 1st January, 2016, a list of 17 goals, legally non-binding, but setting down the expectations that national governments take ownership, and set national actions, with a 15 year countdown clock, by 2030. To date the UN SDGs are the core framework and mobilization point for what will be for us …. Sustainability.
Inspired and energized by the UN’s call to action, but completely overwhelmed on how to action, my short-term rational mind, filed SDGs under the to-be-reengage, sometime soon slot in my mind
When asked by the host, what can we do, UN DSG Mohammed closed by saying .. “pick what resonates in your life, and what you can do at work, and outside of work”
A work in progress ready for all of us to activate
And so on this work anniversary. I’m sharing out those UN SDGs, remember what UN DSG said, oh and thanks for the work anniversary messages. Thumbs up. More to do
Reference stuff
(1) https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/development-agenda/
