How best practices kill innovation
In this live episode of You’re Not the Audience, Parliament Creative Director Calvin Ross Carl takes on a long-held Parliament belief: best practices never create new ideas. He lays out the tension inside every company between optimization, which reduces risk and runs on measurable data, and innovation, which creates possibility and can only be measured after the fact. Drawing on Darkthrone and Scandinavian black metal, the role-playing game Mörk Borg, the board game Root, art history, and brands like Apple, Liquid Death, Supreme, and Patagonia, Calvin shows that every best practice started as a risky idea. He then looks at how companies protect innovation, from Nike Innovation and Valiant Labs to bringing in outside partners, why AI is an optimization technology rather than a source of original ideas, and why the biggest threat to most brands isn’t a missed swing but becoming indistinguishable. Along the way he recommends the Parliament article Why rebranding can’t be rushed.
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Outline
Summary
In this live episode of You’re Not the Audience, Parliament Creative Director Calvin Ross Carl makes the case that best practices kill innovation. Parliament is a brand transformation agency in Portland, Oregon, that helps companies facing big changes through strategy, positioning, identity, and messaging. After a couple of recent obsessions—a theater screening of Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet, which Calvin calls peak postmodern aesthetic, and the new Parliament article Why rebranding can’t be rushed, which explains how a lack of organizational clarity stalls rebrands—he opens with a story that plays out with almost every client.
Clients begin strategy insisting they want a dramatic change and don’t want to look like anyone else. Then, once the work moves into visual identity or a campaign, fear creeps in and they ask to see examples that look like their company or their competitors. Calvin sees that moment as a reminder to push harder, because Parliament has long believed that best practices never create innovative ideas—a conviction captured in the studio’s motto, “Be brave, stand apart.”
The core of the episode is the tension between optimization and innovation. Every company needs both, but they have opposite jobs: optimization minimizes risk by making things cheaper, faster, and more reliable, while innovation creates possibility by asking whether something should exist at all. Optimization wins because it can be measured, and measurement can only look backward. Best practices, Calvin reminds viewers, are just yesterday’s innovations that everyone copied, so they can’t produce originality. Meanwhile, organizations obsess over the measurable risk of trying something new and ignore the invisible, cumulative risk of becoming forgettable—the fate of the once-safe choice, IBM.
Calvin then pulls inspiration from brands and from outside branding entirely. Apple invented new product categories and a new standard for retail. Microsoft’s stores, which Parliament served as agency of record for many years, always lived in Apple’s shadow. Liquid Death made water heavy metal, Supreme rewrote fashion distribution with drops, and Patagonia set out to save the world. Scandinavian black metal turned doing it wrong into a strength, Mörk Borg threw out the textbook style of role-playing games for a punk-zine aesthetic, Root reimagined historical war games with woodland animals, and art history is a long record of rejecting best practices.
Finally, Calvin covers how organizations can make room for innovation: by creating protected internal divisions like Google X, Lockheed Martin’s Skunk Works, Nike Innovation, and Nike’s Valiant Labs incubator, or by hiring outside perspectives like Parliament. Either path requires leadership with conviction and vision that goes beyond org charts. He warns that AI is an optimization technology that predicts the statistically likely, which makes it a poor tool for the brainstorming moment where the magic happens. His closing point: optimization should protect innovation, not replace it, and the bigger threat to most brands is becoming indistinguishable.
Highlights
Clients who ask for dramatic change often retreat to “show us what our industry looks like” once the work gets real; that’s the moment to push harder.
Optimization minimizes risk and innovation creates possibility; companies need both, but optimization usually wins because it can be measured.
Best practices are yesterday’s innovations that everyone copied, so they can’t produce originality.
Measurable data can only measure the past, so the value of an innovative idea can only be measured after the fact.
The invisible risk nobody measures is the cumulative risk of becoming forgettable.
Black metal, Mörk Borg, Root, and art history all show that rejecting the established way can create a whole new movement.
Companies protect innovation through separate divisions like Nike Innovation or Valiant Labs, or by bringing in outside perspectives, and both require leadership with conviction.
AI predicts what’s statistically likely, which makes it an optimization tool, not a source of truly new ideas.
Key insights
The moment conviction meets fear
Almost every rebrand hits a point where a client’s vision of being totally different runs into the fear of making a mistake. It usually happens when strategy turns into visual identity or campaign work and the client asks for examples that look like their industry. Calvin treats that split second as the real test: it’s why clients hire an agency in the first place, and it’s the moment both sides need to remember why they’re there.
Optimization and innovation have opposite goals
Optimization wants things cheaper, faster, more profitable, and more dependable. Innovation questions whether something should exist at all and then invents new systems. Both are necessary, and Calvin is clear that sales, growth, and procurement teams aren’t villains—they pay everyone’s salaries. The problem comes when optimization becomes the only thing that matters.
Best practices are yesterday’s innovations
Every best practice was once risky, weird, and wrong-feeling until enough people copied it. Calvin remembers how quickly new ideas spread across the early web. Once everyone can produce the same thing, it can no longer produce originality, which is why following best practices is a reliable path to looking like everyone else.
Measurement is always behind innovation
The question of how to sell an idea to your boss usually means finding the numbers behind it. But measurable data can only describe the past and old best practices; there’s no way to measure whether a new idea will work until it’s done. That’s why you don’t ask efficiency departments to create originality, and why a client sometimes simply has to trust the work.
The invisible risk of becoming forgettable
Organizations obsess over the measurable risk of trying something new, but nobody measures the cumulative risk of doing nothing new. That is the risk that destroys brands over time. “Nobody was ever fired for hiring IBM” made IBM the safe choice, and the safe choice eventually becomes the one nobody thinks about.
Doing it wrong can become the strength
Scandinavian black metal rejected everything, from singing to readable logos to decent production, and that commitment created an aesthetic people recognize even if they’ve never heard the music. Mörk Borg made a rulebook look like a punk zine and opened the door for a new wave of game designers. Root took the structure of historical war games and changed the art, and the war-game old guard hated it. None of these ideas would have come from asking the experts for the best way to do it.
Innovation needs protection and conviction
Because innovation can’t survive under the metrics of optimization, big companies peel it off into separate units, like Nike Innovation, whose project room tracks every idea on paper, or Valiant Labs, which runs small startups such as a kids’ shoe subscription. Companies without that structure bring in outside experts for bigger leaps, but those leaps only land when leadership has the conviction and vision to accept them. Part of a brand team’s job is to bring that confidence with them.
AI is an optimization technology
AI’s job is to predict the statistically likely next thing, so it can only extrapolate from prior data and prior best practices. Calvin is wary of the growing acceptance of AI for concepting and brainstorming, because that’s exactly where a human reaches into the ether and pulls out something unexpected. Viewers in chat agreed that it can help with mood boards and mockups but rarely inspires.
Detailed analysis
Calvin’s argument is less an attack on optimization than a case for knowing when it’s the wrong tool. He goes out of his way to credit the departments that run on data, then draws a firm line: data describes what already exists, so any process that demands proof before acting will only ever produce variations on the past. That framing explains the client moment he opens with. The request to see comparable work isn’t bad faith; it’s the optimization instinct asking for evidence that can’t exist yet.
His examples deliberately reach beyond brands. Black metal, Mörk Borg, Root, and the march of art movements from impressionism to cubism to minimalism each succeeded by rejecting what had quickly become standard, and each was considered wrong until it proved itself. The brand examples follow the same logic, with an instructive twist in Microsoft’s stores: arriving second with a great execution still leaves the idea owned by whoever took the risk first.
The episode also reframes brand strategy itself. Organizations often treat strategy as research that yields measurable, provable points, but Calvin sees it as uncovering a deeper, harder-to-measure truth. That gap is why clients and agencies sometimes butt heads, and why organizational clarity and leadership conviction matter as much as the creative work. It also sharpens his concern about AI: if the tools that predict the likely take over the stage where ideas are born, companies optimize away their best chance at something new.
Conclusion
Every best practice that exists today is there because someone ignored a prior one. Optimization should protect innovation rather than replace it, and the biggest threat to most brands isn’t taking a big swing and missing; it’s becoming indistinguishable from every other brand running on the same best practices.
Calvin’s challenge to people in the brand space is to push back when the pressure for measurable proof arrives, to build enough confidence with clients that they can take a big swing together, and sometimes simply to rally people around a good idea. Sometimes, he says, our guts are right.
Transcript
Intro and recent obsessions
Hey everybody, welcome to You’re Not the Audience. Sorry about the few-minute hangup. It wouldn’t be another week of You’re Not the Audience if it didn’t start with a little bit of camera trouble. So yeah, this is You’re Not the Audience. This is a weekly live show where I break down brands, products, and subcultures that stand out by not appealing to everyone. I’m Calvin, creative director at Parliament, and we are a brand transformation agency from Portland, Oregon. We help brands when they’re facing big changes, and we help them become the next version of themselves with strategy, positioning, identity, messaging, all that good stuff.
The episode will be just like any other. We’re going to start with a couple of recent obsessions, and then we’re going to talk about how best practices kill innovation. Very clickbaity title today. And then we’ll just kind of keep rolling from there.
How’s everybody doing today? It’s been real nice here in Portland lately. It’s been good weather. It’s kind of dreamy. It’s this time of year where it’s hard to want to stay in the house. Next week we have our big golf tournament coming up, so we’re going to be out getting sunburnt all day next Friday. I’m excited about that.
Okay, let’s talk about a couple of recent obsessions. I think the big obsession for me today is that last night I went and saw the classic Baz Luhrmann, Leonardo DiCaprio Romeo + Juliet movie, and it still stands up. It’s incredible. It’s funny. I hadn’t seen that movie in I don’t know, 15 or 20 years, and the Hollywood Theatre here in Portland, which is a classic old theater that plays great stuff, played it last night. It was wild to see it. I’ve been an art kid forever, so Romeo + Juliet has come up in discussions about postmodern media and what it meant to mix different senses of culture in it, where there’s Euro stuff, like Euro trash meets punk meets Mexican culture, all of these different things. And it’s crazy to see it now, 20 years later, where it really was kind of peak postmodern aesthetic for that time. So it was really, really interesting to see. It’s still great. The editing is awesome. It’s goofy as hell. Somehow John Leguizamo is great in it. So it was a very good one.
Oh, let me check chat here. My chat’s hidden. Now we got it fixed. Oh yeah, fuel in the tank. It’s Ryan here. Sweet.
So yeah, go watch Romeo + Juliet. It’s beautiful. Great. Love it. The other thing that’s been kind of just a recent little thing we’ve [inaudible] … can’t be rushed and what you can control when the urgency is real. Very [inaudible] title, but this just got posted by Aaron on our crew, and it’s this really great article that is going to be really relevant to talking about innovation and everything today. I think this article is great. It talks about the problem of when brands need to do a big rebrand, they’ve often already been trying for a long time. So when they finally pull in outside experts, it’s this rushed thing. But usually part of the reason it’s taken so long, and they can’t do it themselves, is because there’s actually a large lack of organizational clarity. We run into this with pretty much every client when they’re doing a rebrand. You kind of have to go back to basics. So it’s just a great article. There’s a link down below. Go give it a read. I really love this one.
Oh, we’re going to talk about this later. Some dark—some Darkthrone. But let’s get into it today. We’re going to be talking about best practices and optimization and how they can kill innovation and new ideas.
Story time: when clients get cold feet
But let’s start with some story time. This has been on my mind a lot, because recently we’ve been working with … well, this kind of happens with almost every client at some point. We usually start doing brand strategy with a client. We’re diving deep into the background of the company, and the client says they want a dramatic change, and they keep saying this over and over and over again. They don’t want to look like anyone else. They don’t want to look like any competitors. And they really want it to be shocking and stand out and be truly distinct as soon as this whole new rebrand launches.
But there’s always a point that we hit every single time, where you get through strategy and you start entering the point of visual identity, or sometimes it’s a campaign. You’re having to start actually executing on the campaign, and clients will then take a little step back. You can see the fear of the risk kind of creep up. They say, “Can you show us examples of work that looks like our company, or looks like us, or looks like how other people in our industry look?” And it always happens in just a split second, where that vision and the conviction of “We need to look different, we need to do the thing” butts up against reality, and the fear of making a mistake starts hitting them. I think that’s a really, really important moment, because that’s usually where, internally for them and for us, it’s a reminder to push harder. To remember why we’re all there—why they’re paying us, essentially—which is to get them to that point of distinction from others.
This is all on my mind a lot because—it feels like a provocative statement—it’s been a really long-held belief at Parliament that best practices never create innovative and new ideas. That’s maybe a little bit hyperbolic, but it’s just been something that we’ve really stood by. And I think it takes a lot of courage to remind ourselves that innovation only happens when you defy best practices. We’ve always had the motto of “Be brave, stand apart,” and that’s always put this idea at the forefront for us. So I encourage anyone out there to always say be brave, stand apart. That’s our challenge to everyone: it’s okay. It’s scary. The future is unknown.
Oh yeah, Ryan: the realization of marketing saying, “Oh, how do I sell this to my boss?” Yes, we’re going to talk about that, because how you sell it to your boss is usually a question around measurable data. We’ll chat about measurable data and how it is kind of the enemy of innovation in a little bit. Yeah, that’s always the big one.
Optimization versus innovation
Okay, we’re talking best practices and innovation. One thing to start out with is that corporate thinking—larger corporations, companies—both need and tend to focus on optimization. Big elaborate companies, even small companies, want to focus on optimization, and you want to kind of min-max all the effort you’re putting in, assessing risk, all these things. But within every company there are always these two opposing forces of optimization versus innovation. Both are necessary, but the problem is that most brands and companies end up letting optimization win, and best practices become the only thing that matters. And that’s because—to get back to the “how do I sell it to my boss” thing—you can measure optimization. Generally it’s something that already exists and you can put numbers to it. You can assess whether it was successful, whether it might continue to be successful, things like that.
So that’s where the tension between these two things comes in, the tension between optimization and innovation. The two are just accomplishing completely different things. Innovation and optimization have two completely separate goals within a business. One minimizes risk, and the other creates possibility. Optimization wants to do things cheaper, faster, more profitable, more dependable, more reliable. That’s the goal of optimization, and it would also help you sell things to your boss. Innovation challenges whether something should even exist at all, and if it challenges whether something should exist, it then creates new systems. That is the job of innovation: to invent new systems and question whether something should continue to exist.
What best practices really are
But we should probably establish what I mean when I talk about best practices. We all know what they are. It’s the standards: this is the way you’re supposed to do it, this is the right way, this is the guaranteed way to get to success. But I think we also forget that best practices are just yesterday’s innovations, and they were so good everyone started copying them. You especially saw this—I mean, it’s still happening—but I remember in the early days of the web there were new, fast-paced innovations nonstop, and they would really quickly get adopted. You’d basically see it in the span of a week, where all of a sudden somebody would create something new and it would start getting pushed out through everything. It was really cool.
So that’s the reminder: best practices were once crazy ideas. It just became so popular people started copying it, and then it became the best practice. And since everyone starts using it, best practices can’t inherently produce originality anymore, because everyone is capable of producing that same thing now. But it is worth remembering that every best practice was once risky. It was weird. It felt wrong until enough people copied it. That’s it. All it takes is one of those things breaking through, and then enough people start copying it.
The other part of this tension that exists between optimization and innovation—I really hate saying innovation this often, since it’s been such a buzzword for so long, but it does have a real meaning. I’m going to say innovation a lot today. Sorry. If I start saying synergy or things like that, just put me out of my misery immediately.
So the tension here is that companies want innovation. They know they need to do something new to stay relevant, but they usually build organizations that punish it. At some level, your org gets so big you start having elaborate org charts, and anything that starts falling outside of that gets scary. It gets unreliable. It becomes unknown. So that’s where one of those tensions exists.
Measurable data can only measure the past
But I think the other important thing to know is that when I’m thinking of the parts of organizations that kind of quell or punish innovation—your sales departments, your growth departments, your procurement, all of those different parts of an org—that doesn’t kill creativity. Those things are just doing their job. The difference is that all that stuff relies on measurable data. Here’s back to how do you sell it to your boss. Those ones are easy because there’s all this measurable data. On most of those, it’s “this line goes down, that money line goes up,” or something of that sort. The optimization side helps them reduce risk and costs, and it helps them project into the future, which is a big one, because usually you’re assessing the past and you can establish where it might keep going.
And it’s super good that those departments exist, all those optimization departments. We need them, and we literally can’t do our jobs without them. I mean, they’re the ones that actually pay our salaries. So thanks, optimization departments. But the problem with measurable data is that it can only measure the past. It can only measure the old best practices, and there’s inherently no way to measure if an innovative idea is going to be successful. It is inherently a risky process. That is the challenge: measurement is always behind innovation. There’s truly no way to get ahead of it. That’s why you don’t ask the efficiency departments to create originality or new ideas or new products. It’s not in their wheelhouse.
So the value of innovation just can’t be measured when it’s happening. It can only be measured later. Going back to story time at the beginning, that’s kind of why I think about that with clients, because the biggest thing you can do at that point is just reiterate: you have to trust us. It’s risky. It’s a big change. We’ve done our work. We all have the confidence that this is all built on a platform that we understand and we all believe in. So now we have to make the leap. And making that leap is pretty scary.
Brands that took the leap
We all know brands that have made that their thing. They’re really good at doing something weird or risky. You’ve got Apple, for example: great at innovation, great at the optimization side, but they did weirder, riskier stuff. They created completely new product categories, the iPhone, the iPod. And the other innovation they did that I think a lot of people don’t talk about is a completely new style of retail experience. They have become the gold standard for how a retail experience should look. Then you have companies like Microsoft, and Microsoft did their Microsoft stores, for which Parliament was kind of the agency of record for the rollout once upon a time, back in the old days. The problem was that Apple had done it. So anything that comes after it, Apple still owned that idea, you know?
And then we know other folks. I’ve got this up right now, so I’ll just show it, because we all know Liquid Death. Liquid Death had a stupid idea that was genius: to make water cool and gnarly and violent and heavy metal, rather than making it about being pure and clean, where every other brand was before. Some other brands that I think have done important things and changed the way we think a lot—a brand like Supreme. I’m not into Supreme. I’m not into that world of fashion, but the way they have completely changed how fashion is marketed and distributed, with drops and things like that—I think Supreme was a really big one. And then we all know Patagonia is another great example of taking big risks. Their job is saving the world, you know? So when you pitch the idea of “We’re a clothing company, but our goal is to save the world,” that’s kind of a big risk.
The invisible risk you can’t measure
I want to come back to some things that inspire me more than brands do, bringing back some other episodes. But the other part of this: I was just talking about how measurement and optimization are all about reducing risk. And honestly, this is maybe the most important part of this whole discussion: there’s an invisible risk you can’t measure. If you are focusing on numbers, on best practices, on gaining measurable data, and you’re not pushing yourself to have conviction and vision about where you can go in the future, there’s a big invisible risk. Organizations end up obsessing over all this measurable data, the measurable risk of trying something new, but nobody measures—or really can measure—the cumulative risk of becoming forgettable or indistinct. That’s something you can’t measure. And usually the way you avoid being forgettable is you have to keep pushing yourself forward in whatever way works for your brand.
So that’s the risk that eventually destroys a brand over time. The org starts obsessing over optimization, nobody can really measure the risk of doing nothing new, and eventually the brand starts falling apart. That’s how you get behaviors like—there’s the old saying, “Nobody was ever fired for hiring IBM,” and things like that. But over time even those companies just became reliable. It was the safe choice to choose them, so that company keeps doing the same thing over and over again. And at some point you’re like, “Oh, we don’t think about IBM a lot these days, do we?”
Scandinavian black metal
Okay, let’s talk about some fun things, because I always like to bring back some things from past episodes. Before we dive into more innovation talk, let’s talk about some things that aren’t brands that I think did innovation really well, and big worlds that they have affected. So let’s go all the way back to the beginning. I think in maybe my first episode of this, we talked about good old black metal music from Scandinavia. If there’s anyone who ever watches this who is a diehard black metal person, they’ll be like, “Well, this band that you see here—you can’t read their logo, Darkthrone—is technically a part of the second wave of the black metal movement.” But this is, I feel like, when it really peaked and started hitting the aesthetic that we now think of.
I want to run through some things that I think are innovations I get inspired by. This one is thinking about how Scandinavian black metal was an absolute rejection of everything, and there isn’t any reason we can’t apply this to how we think about brands. Black metal was constant screaming, no singing, unreadable logos. With the branding, you had to be in the know to understand even their name. It had terrible, shitty lo-fi production. They were mostly all recorded in bathrooms, and that actually became a part of the aesthetic because they did it so well. The whole idea of doing it wrong became the strength of this whole genre, which is why we now understand this as an aesthetic. Even if you’re not a metal person, you understand the aesthetic of these guys.
This, from the mid-’90s, is the cover for Transilvanian Hunger, a classic album by Darkthrone. Honestly, it looks terrible, but it was so committed to the vision, and they inspired so many other people, that it created that whole movement. I mean, look at these—just a bunch of dummies. This is all Mayhem. They were a very problematic band. This is also to say they didn’t do everything right. Lots of problems in the Scandinavian black metal world. But we’ll save that for another chat someday.
Mörk Borg and Root
And then there are some things like—oh, I didn’t pull up images for this, but I will. Another thing we’ve talked about [is] games a lot, and we all know D&D, the Dungeons & Dragons role-playing game. It is now the standard of what role-playing games look like. If you’re a nerd into games like that, the books you buy are these big, thick textbooks. Let’s just pull up some images, because not everyone knows. They’re these big, thick books. They have this cool old-school fantasy stuff. But one thing I want to show you is how the interiors look. They’ve got cool illustrations and stuff like that, but they still read like textbooks. It’s all about rules and things like that.
So there was a big shift when a new role-playing game came out called Mörk Borg. I think it was a really interesting example of looking at how everyone has done it. These games have been around for a long time, 30, 40, 50 years, and somebody looked at it and was like, why hasn’t anybody tried this? The aesthetic of Mörk Borg was created by—oh my god, I’m going to blank on his name—a designer named Johan Nohr, another Scandinavian fella. He had this idea of taking the rules for this game and basically defining this whole aesthetic where it looks like a punk or metal zine. It’s messy. It’s janky. It communicates the world in this gnarly, gross, heavy metal, insane way. Some of the pages become almost unreadable. It definitely feels like the resurgence of David Carson’s school of grunge design, but no one had created books that looked like this. It’s exploded in popularity. It threw out that old boring textbook style and leaned into this heavy art, heavy metal punk aesthetic, and I think it was really, really great at doing that.
The proof is in the pudding. Since this game has come out, it’s inspired this whole new wave of thinking about games and designing them, and who gets to design them. There are a lot more role-playing game designers who feel like they can make games now, because they work in this kind of punk zine style. So it is very popular. It’s cool.
Actually, let’s talk about one other one. We’re going to keep talking games. I’m in the mood today. Let me pull this up. There is a large world of board games usually called historical war games, and it tends to be games that look like this, which are—being nice—for old guys that still love to think about World War II and every other war, simulationist games where you’re recreating battles. This is an established genre. It’s small, but it’s definitely established.
And then along came this great board game called Root, and their huge innovation is all art-related. That’s kind of why I love this one. You can see some images here. In structure and play style, it is very similar to those old-school war games that are only for crazy military heads. But their innovation was they pulled in an illustrator named Kyle Ferrin, and he created this whole world—as it says, “a game of woodland might and right”—with this whole aesthetic of anthropomorphized animals fighting over territory in a forest. This game is massive now. It’s blown up like crazy. Just by doing that art shift, it changes the way everyone thinks about it, and no one was doing anything like this. And all those old heads were like, “These aren’t war games. They’ve got cute animals in them.” Of course, they got all upset.
Yeah, Ryan: “Boomer.” Yeah, major boomer time. They just got really upset. They were like, “This isn’t a war game.” And you’re like, the only thing that changed is the setting. It is also an incredible game, but I think that’s worth noting: if you went and asked every single one of those war game guys what the best way to make a new war game is, you wouldn’t have gotten this from a single one of them. This was all in someone’s head who dared to take a risk, and that is good. I love it so much.
Art history as a rejection of best practices
Since we’re talking art, it’s worth also thinking about—I like to bring art into brand work as much as I can, specifically contemporary art. Whenever I’m pulling mood boards, I often include a lot of actual art in them. “Actual art”—that’s a loaded phrase when we’re talking about design. No, not design. We’re talking about actual art.
Another thing that inspires me, a big innovative thing, is art history throughout all of time. Art history is basically the history of rejecting best practices over and over and over again. You have impressionism, from Van Gogh—someone’s going to correct me and say, “No, it’s Van Go.” But you know what I mean. Or when you look at cubism, a complete falling apart of shapes in art, and then the response to that was something like minimalism, where it was about stripping away all possible excess. They were always in response to what had quickly become the best practices before them. All of these art movements were basically making decisions about their brands, where they rejected everything, and they were deemed wrong at first until they proved it.
Is there anything else—any brands or any other things in the world—that people can think of where they’re like, “You know what, they did this one thing and it was pretty crazy. Nobody thought they could pull it off, and it did”? I’m trying to think. There are even brands like Dyson, where the idea for them as a company was, “We’re going to make these absolutely batshit crazy engineering inventions and double down on them, and that’s all we do.” They focus on that and created a whole brand out of it, and I love it.
Setting up an organization for innovation
Okay, so this sets up the idea that optimization and innovation are at odds with each other. It’s really difficult to have both of those things coexisting in your organization. We run into this even as a design firm: how do you invest in your current client work? How do you invest in possible future projects? How do you invest in your own portfolio? That’s a whole other story. But how do we keep pushing our thinking as an agency forward when we also have to deal with the daily optimization and daily aspects of the job?
So that asks: how do you start setting up an organization or a brand for innovation? There are generally a couple of ways you can set up a company for innovation and get it on the right track. You create an internal division, whether that’s truly a different org or some other rules that guide innovation in your company, or you hire outside perspectives. That’s where a company like Parliament comes in.
The first one is how and why you create an internal division. A lot of big companies, when they get to a certain scale, know they need to keep the innovation aspect of their business going, so they end up creating innovation labs or startup incubators. I think this is a thing a lot of companies should try, even on a smaller scale if possible. The reason you create a completely separate innovation lab or startup incubator within a company is that it peels innovation off into a separate little org, because that innovation side can’t really survive under the metrics of optimization. You see companies do this all the time. Google X was, or is, Google’s R&D innovation department. You’ve got Nike Innovation. Nike has a whole separate part of the company that is just focused on innovation. You’ve got crazy ones like Skunk Works from Lockheed Martin. Not necessarily a great company, but they created Skunk Works, and they did insane things there.
Nike is a really good example of this in general, because they have this whole part of their organization that is all about innovation. It’s literally called Nike Innovation, and it’s protected within the org from all of the other stuff going on. It’s responsible for creating new ideas and bringing them to market over a multiyear process. I’ve been lucky enough to be in the Nike Innovation room. I hope they still have this room there. It’s incredible. It’s a giant room where every single project they’re working on is printed out on a sheet of paper with a quick little summary, so they can track all of them visually in one space. I’d be impressed if they still have this, but it is one of the coolest rooms to ever go into, because it’s all right there in person. You can see what part of the process it’s in and how many more years it will take until that innovation is even ready. That might be new fabrics, new types of shoes, completely different crazy inventions. Every little piece that counts as an innovation is there.
Nike is also interesting because they’ve started these incubator projects. One is called Valiant Labs. I don’t know how much Valiant Labs is still around. I hope it is. They’ve done cool things. Valiant Labs is this part of Nike where they run a ton of tiny little startups inside the company, funded by the larger org, but they are essentially run as completely separate companies. One reason is to mitigate risk coming back on the larger org, and the other is so they can be free to create insane ideas. Some folks who used to work at Parliament worked at Valiant Labs, and they made a product that was basically a shoe subscription service for kids. The idea was that kids grow out of shoes so quickly, so they’d send you a pair of shoes, you’d send it back as soon as your kid grew out of it, and then they’d send you another pair. Awesome idea. I think they may have ended up closing that down, but then what they do is take all the learnings from that and work them into other parts of the business: “Okay, can we learn something from this?” So that’s a great way to actually set up your company for having some kind of innovative aspect in it.
Outside perspectives and leadership conviction
The other aspect of this: you can either create an internal division or you can bring in outside perspectives, and that’s where a company like us—like Parliament—comes in. Not all orgs can create that really clear separation within. They might not have the funds. They might not have the vision or conviction to do so. It takes a specific belief system to create those kinds of divisions. So not everyone can do that, but that’s why they come to people like us for brand work, or that’s why you hired IDEO to do your product design and systems thinking and things like that, because you just can’t do it.
I think that is a good way to do it. It still doesn’t necessarily imbue your whole company with that. With an internal division, a brand like Nike gets a good incremental rise over time. But when you hire an outside expert, you get these big leaps. The challenge with that—I mentioned organizational clarity earlier—is that it becomes a big leadership and organizational clarity challenge, because you hire these outside experts to come in and bring new ideas to you, and your business is not set up in a way to fully accept those types of new ideas. That’s when you get the kind of situation where a client keeps saying, “Yeah, we want to be totally different. We want to do this,” but once the rubber hits the road, they’re like, “How do we take a step back? How do we minimize risk?” You always see that.
So one of the biggest things is that all of this focus on innovation at a company, whether it’s through hiring others or creating your own internal division, requires leadership that has conviction and vision for the company, and it has to go beyond org charts and optimization. I think that’s the challenge to branding folks: our job is often to step in and bring that conviction and vision with us, to bring the confidence that they might be lacking.
Brian says, “One issue in big orgs is that a company will hire really talented people, but they spend all their time in meetings, not creating.” Yes, that is also an optimization problem. Absolutely. We’ve probably all been in jobs where you spend a huge part of your day in meetings talking about the work you’re supposed to be doing, and yeah, it’s rough. I’ve definitely been there. And it is absolutely an optimization problem, because for a lot of people it’s scary if you just need to go work on and make things for weeks on end, where the effect you’re getting out of it is immeasurable until you get that one breakthrough. But if you’re in a bunch of meetings every day and you’re getting your face seen around regularly, there’s this hidden little optimization puzzle happening: “Okay, I’m seeing this person’s face a lot, they must be doing lots of work.” It’s definitely got that aspect to it. But you’re too bogged down in meetings to really make any big change. That’s a tough place to be.
AI is an optimization technology
One other thing to talk about with this that I think is pretty important to start thinking about right now: we have these two worlds within any corporation or organization. There’s optimization, and there’s innovation. One is maintaining the standard of business. Its goal is to keep pushing the business forward and, no matter what, make sure money is coming in. That’s the optimization side, essentially. And the innovation side’s goal, hopefully, is “Let’s keep doing this forever.” We need to invent new things, new ways of doing things, new ways of approaching things, new products, new ways of looking at the world, in hopes that we can continue to affect that world and we don’t optimize ourselves into nonexistence.
But the one thing that gets talked about a lot right now is how people are using AI for ideas and for brainstorming and things like that. That’s cool. AI tools, sweet. Use them if they help you. But we just have to remind ourselves—a lot of folks are using AI for generating ideas and brainstorming, but it is worth remembering that AI as a whole is an optimization technology. That is what it is. Its whole job is to predict the likely next thing statistically. That is its actual job. It’s incredible how it works, but if you’re always predicting what is statistically likely, you’re only basing it off of prior data, prior best practices, all of that stuff. So you’re never really getting a truly new, innovative idea. It’s just an extrapolation of what you’ve fed it.
That’s always the big red flag for me when I hear a lot of people talking about using AI in brainstorming. Excuse me—inhaled water. I have a lot of really complicated thoughts about AI and using it in creativity. But one thing that always makes me nervous is you’ve started seeing almost an acceptance, where when people are talking about AI, they’re like, “No, no, no. As long as it’s not for the final stuff in the end, I’m okay with it.” If you’re using it for concepting or brainstorming, that always puts me back on my heels a little bit, because that’s the moment where the magic happens, especially in brand and design work, where you reach into the ether as a human and pull out something completely unexpected. That’s a lot harder. It’s much more difficult to do, nearly impossible, but somehow we find ways to do it.
That’s why I always get really nervous when I hear about people using AI for generating concepts and brainstorming: you’re taking away the chance of finding true magic. You might find something insightful. You might find something you can sell to your boss. You might find something that proves a point or a perspective. But it’s really hard to get a truly unimagined idea.
Orion says here, “It’s good for mood boards, example imagery, but not for the act of inspiration itself. I’ve never felt inspired by a creative solution that GPT has spit out.” Yeah, I think that’s totally how people are often thinking about this, and I totally get it. Mood boarding stuff, it’s probably good for pulling things. I’ve seen people use it for design stuff, like throwing designs into mockups and things like that. But I come back to the same thing you noted: I never end up being inspired by anything it spits back at me, because anything it spits back is just adjacent to what I’m thinking about. It’s never a fully lateral move.
And yeah, Jared: it’s only fed by what has been done. Yep. That’s the challenge. We humans are our own little filtration machines, and the only way we ever get to new ideas is by understanding something about the old. But for some reason, machines—yet, I should say—aren’t great at that super lateral thinking, where you jump completely outside of the knowledge base and run with a different idea. So maybe we’ll be there someday. I don’t know. In the meantime, I’ll keep it old school for now.
Optimization should protect innovation, not replace it
Okay, that’s a lot of thoughts about optimization and innovation. But if I have any final thoughts about it, I also like to remind people—I don’t want this to seem like I’m totally dragging on the side of the business that’s focused on optimization, like the sales department and all of those people who need their data. Those are good. Every company needs optimization. But it should also be there to protect innovation, not replace it. That is definitely one of the biggest challenges: optimization often replaces a chance at innovation, because you have this crazy idea, and someone asks, “All right, let’s see some numbers behind it,” or “Let’s test it,” and you’re like, “We won’t know until it’s done.” That’s always the challenge.
So it is definitely worth remembering that every best practice that has ever existed, and exists today, is there because someone ignored a prior best practice. I think that’s a really important thing for us to remember: nothing is ever set in stone. Even when somebody says you need to follow up, do this, crunch these numbers, sometimes it’s okay to say no. The big goal is to know when efficiency and optimization is the wrong tool.
We run into that a lot, especially on our side of the biz, in brand strategy. Brand strategy is often perceived as a research process that results in some kind of measurable or provable points or data. That’s actually really the opposite of what brand strategy is usually focused on. It’s usually about uncovering some deep truth within you, so it’s much more ethereal. It’s much more immeasurable. And that’s what happens when these orgs bring in an external party like Parliament: sometimes we butt heads—always in a nice way—because they’re a company that’s focused on that kind of creation of an idea, as opposed to our style.
There is generally a pretty big fear of making that choice. But it’s also important to remember that the biggest threat to most companies isn’t taking a big swing. Usually, if you take a big swing and it misses, it’s not actually that huge of a deal. Sometimes, if you invested all of your—we’re seeing this some in the video game world now, where you’ve invested all of your millions into one single project—maybe sometimes that big swing can be bad. But the biggest threat to most brands isn’t taking that big swing. The real big threat is becoming indistinguishable from all those other brands, because you’re all just operating off of best practices.
What’s inspiring the chat
So yeah. Anyone in chat have any new products or new brands or anything like that that have really inspired them lately because they felt totally different? Or new music? I think that’s the important thing about this too: when you’re in the branding machine, it’s hard to get all those new ideas, because you’re stuck looking at other brands and other products. I was talking earlier about when clients ask, “Can you show comparable work?” And it’s like, sure, but the process we took to get there is dramatically different, because it wasn’t your company. So yeah, anyone in the chat have anything that’s really inspired them lately that seems kind of crazy and new?
I’m trying to think if there are any other fun little innovations I’ve been thinking about lately. The Mörk Borg one is big, just because I love its approach to layout design. That one’s very fun. This is not innovation, but this is product design stuff. Oh, Ryan, sadly uninspired lately, man. I hear that. You can get in those moments every once in a while.
Oh god, I’m going to try to find this thing. I’ve got to get better at Googling. How do I find this? I’ve been seeing this thing advertised. Okay, here we go. This is the opposite of innovation, but it’s been a big inspiration to me lately: analog products that look like these. This is just a trend thing, probably the opposite of innovation, but I’ve been obsessed with this big resurgence all of a sudden of all of these different products that, to me, look exactly like a reimagined, drop-shipped Nintendo, and I’m so in love with them for some reason. I think it’s because I’ve also been obsessively playing sci-fi video games lately, so there’s some aspect of that too. But for some reason I keep thinking about how all of these products look, and it’s jumping me back to looking at old Braun products, because they all come out of that world. Looking at a lot of this work lately has had me think about how you can pull from some old stuff for new ideas.
Oh yeah, Ryan reminds me of the boom in cyberdecks: “The DIY computing space is awesome right now.” Yeah, it absolutely is. Just the explosion in weird little emulation devices, people making their own bizarro pieces of hardware at home. Yeah, that area is awesome right now.
Jared says, “From an ad perspective, I think Mischief is changing the activation space and getting brands to really trust them to deliver ideas that are very unconventional and yet bring huge awareness numbers.” Oh yeah, I haven’t followed up on them lately. Is there anything I should look at specifically? I don’t follow as much of the activation world specifically, so if you’ve got any links, drop them in the chat or something. That’s a world I definitely don’t follow quite as much, but I know their work is great. Bonus points if I can remember how to spell it. Oh boy, they’ve got a cool-guy website. Did some fighting work. This is fun. All right, I’ve got to dig in. I haven’t looked at their stuff in quite a while. Oh, this is great. Logos all riff off of everyone else. Okay. All right, I’m going to dig into some Mischief stuff after this. I haven’t looked at them in quite a long time. Hell yeah. Thanks for sharing that. See, that’s where the inspiration machine happens, just right there. Ask your buds for new ideas. It’ll take you to things you didn’t expect.
Wrap-up
All right, sweet. I think that’s probably it for the week. It’s 1:00. I’ve got to get back to work. Yeah, no AI involved. Totally. I guess if I can sum up everything, it’s just a good reminder to those of us in the brand space that when you feel that pressure coming up against you, of needing this measurable aspect to prove that something’s going to work, sometimes it’s good to push back a little and be like, “It’s going to be okay. You have to trust.” I think the real challenge is that our job as branders is to build confidence in the people we work with, and sometimes that means we haven’t built the right type of confidence, or enough confidence, in them. So that aspect is definitely worth looking back on when you’re doing brand work: did you do the steps ahead of time to get that confidence level up, so you can take a big swing with them?
But also, sometimes people just need to be rallied up a little, you know? “It’s okay, we’re going to do great.” I feel like something about our focus on optimization has made it so you can’t also just believe in a good idea and get someone really excited about it. There are a lot of people on that optimization side who are skeptical of that, but sometimes our guts are right.
All right, well, I’m not sure if we’re going to have an episode next week. If we do, it might just be a short, quick, fun thing, because next week I’m going to be out for a day for our Caddyshack Invitational Parliament golf tournament. If I am on next week, I think we’ll have some T-shirts and koozies and stuff for that, so I’ll grab those and show them on stream. So maybe it’ll just be a quick little fun one next week, because I’ve got to make sure I actually take some time to do some real work. But this is great. Thanks, everybody. Thanks for talking about innovation and how we can actually make it happen inside big corporations and the companies we work in. Cheers, everyone. Have a good rest of the day.