Live from Strategyzer book cave, episode 3: How to create timeless content?
The Invincible Company by StrategyzerIn June 2018, I accepted the challenge of project managing and leading the content team for the creation of Strategyzer fourth book, The Invincible Company.
There will be regular updates on the progress of the book on the Strategyzer blog and on Alex Osterwalder’s social feed. Here I want to share an insider perspective, (almost) live from the book cave, on the key learnings from this great conceptual and creative endeavour, and the main challenges the team had to overcome on our way to create Strategyzer playbook to build invincible companies.
Earlier in this series I shared our challenges to perform as a distributed team and to find the right distance with our busy, bestselling authors. Here I want to explore another big one we faced: How to create content at a whole new level?
For the new members of the book team this challenge was actually a double challenge. Members of the Strategyzer content team are selected for their deep understanding of innovation and the methodology laid out in Business Model Generation and Value Proposition Design books but there is still a steep learning curve to be able to create content that is useful to Alex Osterwalder and Yves Pigneur. That was our first challenge for new team members: how to go through that steep learning curve as quickly as possible? The second challenge was linked to the ambition of the book. The objective is to write a timeless book, a book with content that will be still as relevant 10 years from now. This year, Alex, Yves and Alan Smith are celebrating the 10 years of Business Model Generation so we understood where this ambition was coming from. But how do you prepare for this kind of challenge? How to prepare yourself to create timeless content?
We started by working on our mindset. With a willingness to learn and improve we committed to regular practice. One aspect of this practice is the weekly conceptual thinking call facilitated by Alex where the book team and other members of the Strategyzer content team gather to exercise their conceptual thinking muscle. It often takes the form of a feedback session on a tool prototype that one of us is working on. But my favourite calls are when someone brings a business tool that our clients are using, or an interesting framework that we just came across, and we do a design critique. I learned so much on designing tools thanks to those weekly calls and the same is true for the rest of the book team.
Openness to feedback obviously enables those learnings, as well as acting upon feedback.
To capture his feedback on our prototypes, make it visual and share it widely, Alex would often use Stattys, take pictures and then record a short video that he would post on the book Slack channel so everyone interested can learn from it.
The other key aspect of our mindset in the book team was a commitment to work as designers, navigating and progressing through the uncertainty of our creative endeavour with short loops of design and test.
To be more efficient in our design work we aligned on some fundamental design principles. The most important design principles for the book are the principles we apply for every Strategyzer tool: it has to be visual, simple and relevant.
“Visual” means so much more than a book illustrated with images, graphics and charts. Our visual principle means we start our conceptual work with the visual and words only come later.
“Simple” means that we accept the effort to understand concepts in the book so deeply that we break through complexity and can present them in a simple way, but never simplistic.
“Relevant” means that we need to go way beyond interesting content. Our content needs to be relevant for our readers. They need to be able to do something with it that is important for them.
As mentioned already we also added some principles that are specific to this book such as timeless. “Timeless” means that we will not let ourselves be attracted by fancy objects and write case studies on cool blockchain start-ups that might disappear in the time it takes to print the book. When choosing cases, we will focus on companies that illustrate deep patterns that were already relevant decades ago and will still be relevant years from now.
With the clarity of those design principles we could start building prototypes:
Starting with Stattys prototypes, e.g. on the picture below with the “mechanic”, the pattern followed by visionaries such as Tesla to explore a new market,
Then moving on to Keynote (PowerPoint) prototypes, e.g. with Spotify illustrating the freemium model on the picture below,
And continuing with InDesign prototypes to get a feel of how a case would look like on a book spread. The picture below shows the very first spread we created for the Invincible company book in preparation for our offsite in Boston in November 2018.
As months pass, it is fun to come back to those early prototypes and realise how much we have progressed thanks to those short design iterations.
The only way to know if the content we are creating will resonate with our audience is to test it. From the start we have been committed to testing important elements of the book with early prototypes even when it means cringing as you go through an incomplete prototype with an Executive. The learnings always compensate the temporary discomfort.
In the last few months we did a lot of testing, including:
A/B tests on the book landing page that proposed different titles to different people and analysing which title performed better in terms of email signups,Multiple A/B tests on how to name one of the key concepts in the book from Alex’s twitter account,
And lots of face-to-face, or video conference, tests on early prototypes. On the below picture I’m about to test a section of the book that presents the mini-patterns that enable better business model design during the Strategyzer community meetup in Melbourne in April 2019. My focus was to test how the audience reacted to the case studies in terms of content and visual style. I was using slido to gather data points along the way
Of course, there is no guarantee of success in life, but equipped with our designer mindset, and with those quick iterations of design and test of book prototypes we feel that we’re giving ourselves the best chance at creating a timeless book. And at this stage that’s all we need.
There are still many challenges ahead of us in the book team. I feel strongly motivated to write about at least one more, one that almost every project team faces: completing the work. So I’ll come back with another post in the summer to share the key learnings from this critical phase of our book adventure.
In the meantime you can get more information on The Invincible Company book website or on the Strategyzer blog.
Live from Strategyzer book cave, episode 3: How to create timeless content? was originally published in Notes from the innovation and transformation fields on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
