Cammy Bean's Learning Visions: Unlocking Cool: Jeremy Gutsche, 2013 #DevLearn opening keynote

This are my liveblogged notes from the opening keynote at the eLearning Guild DevLearn Conference, happening this week in Las Vegas. Forgive any incoherence or typos.

Jeremy Gutsche, MBA, CFA, CEO, TrendHunter.com – author of “Exploiting Chaos: Spark Innovation During Times of Change” - @JeremyGutsche

You are not selling a product. You are selling an experience.

Brand and creating a cultural connection are important between you and your end consumer.

Human nature is to communicate and teach things in a way that’s specific. We think in terms of bullet points.

But what supersedes everything is the cultural connection…it’s not just listing the bullet points of what we do.

“The world has changed and it never returns to normal.”

Brands that were founded during times of chaos – very successful (e.g., Disney). In times of chaos, our minds are changing. We have to adapt. Chaos = opportunity.

You’re here at this conference to push yourself…so how are people in our companies changing?

Success leads to complacency. Encyclopedia Brittanica example…they didn’t want to adapt.

People want to protect what’s working now and resist trying something new.

Popular is not cool – cool is unique, it goes viral,…

If your job is to help your orgs adapt, how do you find what the next cool thing is?

When you look for new technologies, there’s micro-trends and innovation all around us.

Chaos makes inspiration distracting….it’s overwhelming. So instead we skip steps and rely on gut instinct to innovate.

http://www.trendhunter.com – looking for patterns of opportunity. Crowdsource and crowd filtered – lots of people out there spotting new trends.

How can you find what’s new? Knock on doors. Ask people.

Some rules:

Family comes first
Be genuinely interested in other people
Be ambitious
Make people feel like they’re part of what you’re doing
There is always upside in times of difficulty

“Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” What matters is whether you can make it happen.

Perspective, intentional destruction (destroy what worked in the past to try something new), be tolerant with experimental failure, be obsessed with your customers.

Don’t look at your competitors to see what you should do and what people want…look to your customers.

Situational framing dictates the outcomes of your process…think about the grander experience, not just the features.

Customer obsession:

Functional (tell)

Benefit (motivate)

Emotional (connect)

Cultural (empower)

E-learning often falls into the first three categories. We need to make that cultural connection.

To figure out how to stop littering – you need more than the crying indian PSA (The Keep American Beautiful http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keep_America_Beautiful) The problem with that campaign was not understanding who actually litters. Turns out it’s males, 18-30, who drive pick-up trucks. Instead they came up with the “Don’t Mess with Texas” campaign…(which reduced roadside littering by 72% between 1986-1990).

When you make a cultural connection, you’re not speaking TO someone, you’re speaking WITH someone. They’ll endorse you, your team, your product, they’ll share it.

Think about your next big e-learning endeavor. Don’t get caught in the trap of trying to make something that just works for everyone. Instead, if you focus on getting it right with a core group.

In all industries, innovation starts by observing CUSTOMERS.

How deep in their mindset can you get? In all industries, even CEOs need to observe customers.

The more immersive we can get, the more obsessed we can get with our customers…the better. People who use our products care about different things…typically more simply. Communicate with your customers the way they communicate with each other.

“Infectious communication” – 3 ways to cultivate infection:

Viral creations (your product needs to be so good that people talk about it)
Viral mediums (in a powerful way)
Well packaged story (portray your product as AVERAGE, and that’s all it will ever be).

How do you become irresistible to people?

Why should people choose you?

Give people an answer to the question “what do you do” – in seven words. Make it highly memorable.

Relentlessly obsess about your story. The same story might get 1,000 views or 1,000,000 depending on the headline.

Story obsession: