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No idea of any value is constructed systematically. Good ideas are born whole, and the details develop within them as they mature. Ideas behave like life.

The most reliable way to see and understand differently is to learn from other people with divergent perspectives. This kind of learning differs from factual learning. It is insight — learning  to see familiar things in an unfamiliar way and understanding what is seen in new ways.

These other person’s way seeing and understanding does not replace our old perspective. We are not (often) converted over to the other person’s perspective. Rather we incorporate both our old perspective and the other’s perspective and find a new and more comprehensive perspective. We expand our horizons.

Looking back, we see that we weren’t exactly wrong, but we were certainly unaware of how we could be even more right. And looking forward, we discover lying in plain sight possibilities that were invisible prior to the perspectival shift.

But here’s the rub: between familiarity and the new vision is painful perplexity that cannot be overcome through any linear process. It is this perplexity that many people find intolerable, and which kills innovation before it can even begin. This is why most so-called innovation is mere experimentation with recombinations of “best practices” — groping for novelty, sparks of ingenuity, incremental improvements, clever inventions. What intoxicates, surprises, inspires and compels, though, is conceived differently.

Deep innovation requires courage. However, investing in a new, untried offering is the easy part. The hard part is coming to the kind of understanding that yields innovation.

We still have to design artifacts as a means to “designing an experience”. It is not as if we stop designing artifacts and start designing experiences. It is not artifact OR experience. It is artifact AND experience.

With experience design, both the artifact and the experience are designed together. To speak of “experiences” instead of “artifacts” — to lose the distinction between the artifact and some person’s experience of the artifact — the concept of experience will be garbled, degraded and leveled down and made more and more identical to artifact.

Before we know it we will find ourselves designing things or strategizing about technologies and channels and processes — with no reference to anyone’s experience of anything — and calling them “experiences”.

To design an experience means to design artifacts in such a way that the designer never loses sight of one key truth: the experiencer of the artifact will certainly experience it differently than the designer. The point of the artifact we are designing is to provide a particular kind of experience to particular people. And this difference cannot be a general fact that a difference exists. That is only relativism. And it can’t be mere goodwill. That is only sentimentality. The difference must be taken seriously — seriously enough that the specific differences are researched, that the insights from the research guide the design, and that the design is tested with those who will encounter it, interact with it and experience it.

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One more important point: a lot of craftsmanship  goes into the design of an artifact wonderful enough to provide a wonderful experience. In the end, craft has everything to do with whether we experience love or indifference or annoyance when we interact with a designed artifact. Real craft cannot be researched or tested or processed into existence. It is not the mere absence of flaws. But part of great craft is the ability to respond not only to what is being crafted, but also to the person for whom the artifact is crafted.

(This line of thought is borrowed from James Spradley: Learning about means learning facts — attributes, behaviors, affinities, etc. Learning from means turning away from the informant toward their world and learning about things as the informant sees them. Some of what is learned will remain connected with the informant as belonging to their own quirky vision, but some of it find its way into the researcher’s own view of things. It might change his view of the sponsor’s brand, or one of their offerings, or the meaning of the project he is informing.)

So, I rely on reality to compensate for these deficiencies: To compensate for my memory I use reality as a cheat sheet to remind me of the truth. To compensate for my lack of acting talent, I draw my inspiration from reality as I experience it, and allow the reality of my inspiration to carry my credibility. And I buttress my self-respect by always staying faithful to reality as I see it, and I try to get others to do the same in order to cultivate mutual respect.

Notice — I haven’t even touched on any of the advantages of scientific soundness, which are also very important. But those are well-recognized.

The importance of subjective and social truth is under-recognized, and we’re suffering for it.

We’re forced to pretend in stuff we just don’t believe. We suffer the effects of having to tell little moral and aesthetic lies, just to get along with the people around us. We suffer from the strain of having to act all the time. Free, spontaneous action might carry us away and cause us to reveal what we really think and feel about things. Or we try to squint and blur what we see, or re-engineer our attitudes to make them line up better to what’s expected, and consequently we lose contact with our own immediate sense of reality become self-alienated. And worse of all, we become cynical as we lose our capacity for respect. There’s this belief that nothing is true or real or felt. We don’t even expect things to be as people say — much less for any of it to line up with what we value.

The reason I care about brand is this: People are noticing that companies that learn to shake cynicism are more charismatic to customers, and the shaking of cynicism takes the form of great brands. Through the discourse of brand the business world is rediscovering the objective truth: Subjective truth is not a mere nicety, it is a competitive necessity.

I don’t have good defenses against soul-sucking. I think it’s a consequence of the state of openness I have to be in to do inspired work. I’m ok if the work itself has a soul, because then soul flows into me, instead of the reverse — but when a client is trying to fake a soul and forces everyone to work in a strictly systematic manner without any guidance of meaning, it is soul-killing.

It is a matter of truth and lies. If a brand has a real perspective on truth, we’re free to just say the truth from the brand’s perspective. We can speak from that place, nearly spontaneously, and feel pleasure in seeing things in a new, and sometimes better, way. I’ve tried and seen it for myself: some brands show us new truths.

But if a company’s brand is a big lie it is the same as it is with all lies — whether the lie is a matter of fact or of a whole life — we are forced to pay excessive attention to all the details, keep our story straight, make sure we don’t self-contradict, calculate up the effect of each little detail and make sure it’s properly manipulative. This is the soullessness people feel when they call something “corporate”.

To tell coherent lies is both difficult and exhausting and compromising, and frankly I’m not smart enough to pull it off. I’m spiritually honest partly because I’m too dumb to be spiritually dishonest.

At any rate, lies are not an option for me. I have to look out and see the world according to the brand, and be able to simply say it as I see it, and work with my eyes and intuition wide-open. The world serves as my reference. I don’t have to memorize what the truth is supposed to be.

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Brands are not invented any more than truths are.

But that does not mean they are not collaborative or personal. They are highly personal, but communicable, sharable, truths about value and fact.

The usual language of perspective maps perfectly to what I am saying:

There is a factual state of affairs. It is what it is. We, however, are intellectually mobile. We are situated within a situation, and we play a part in the truth of this situation through our active moving about and looking. We are free to move about and see things from many angles, like photographers. Like photographers we will and should prefer some angles to others because of what they emphasize or reveal. If other people are willing to stand together with us and look out at what we are seeing, they can see what we are seeing for themselves. This sharing of seeing is vision.

But, continuing the photography allusion, if we doctor a photograph, the picture is not an image of truth, but a made-up thing that does not represent reality. You won’t find the truth of a doctored photograph no matter where you stand. It’s just an image. So a vision is not a verbal image, painted in the air arbitrarily for others to imagine. It is a showing — or potential showing — of a new way to actually see things, by someone who has already seen it.

We stand on common ground, seeing from the same point-of-view, the same perspective. And from where we stand, we will naturally approach the situation from the same angle.

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Obviously, there is one purely theoretical “Truth”, represented by innumerable concrete human “truths”. These human truths are all we have, but each must attempt to be as faithful as possible to the one unattainable but indispensable Truth. The faithful (and futile) pursuit of Truth is what separates human truths from lies.

For every human truth there is an infinite number of lies, many of which are told out of innocence. Often the subjective liar does not know subjective truth even exists, and has never developed subjective honesty. Many people equate truth with objectivity, and this can turn truth into a perspectiveless inventory of discrete facts, connected with near-arbitrary spasms of logic, so the whole looks like a cubist nightmare.  Or worse, the whole thing can be perfectly consistent and arguable and really come from one perspective, but a perspective where people have to stand on inhuman ground to see it. We cannot care. We are not at home. We adhere to an alienated truth, and our hearts have to be elsewhere.

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We’ve got to learn to discern between human truths and human lies, especially in the subjective realm.

A true brand is the subjective truth of an organization that gives objective truth coherence, relevance and moral meaning.

A bullshit brand is an assertion about an organization that is either not true, or not relevant, or not valuable. People don’t believe it, or they don’t care about believing it. If nobody cares, the brand is bullshit.

A real brand is felt.

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We can’t go on thinking we can invent brands, or assemble brands like machines. True brands are discovered like the personality of a baby or a fact, and developed in some direction or another, hopefully toward even greater truth.

If companies are providing services similar enough that customers see no difference, the services are also commodities. And if companies aim at the same “good experience” based on talking to customers and arriving at the same understanding customers needs and expectations, then conforming their offerings around that understanding — or worse, imitating one another’s best practices — that experience will also become a commodity.

The only way to avoid becoming a commodity is to do something the other guys can’t do — and hopefully won’t even try to do after you’ve laid claim to it. That something might take the form of making a product nobody else can make like you make, serving customers in some way nobody else can serve them, or providing a unique experience nobody else can deliver.

It’s got to come out of the unique capabilities of the organization, or it the difference will be swallowed up immediately by competitors and made into commodity table-stakes.

Any organization on earth can do UX, and/or hire a flash animator, or invent a brand definition. Developing the separate pieces of a brand experience in isolation is pretty trivial, which is why it’s usually done that way. The whole “experience” is processed assembly-line style, bolted together step-by-step. But getting it all to line up around the uniqueness of the organization and the known and latent needs and wants of customers is much, much harder.

Artist’s ambition. – The Greek artists, the tragedians for example, poetized in order to conquer; their whole art cannot be thought of apart from contest: Hesiod’s good Eris, ambition, gave their genius its wings. Now this ambition demands above all that their work should preserve the highest excellence in their own eyes, as they understand excellence, that is to say, without reference to a dominating taste or the general opinion as to what constitutes excellence in a work of art; and thus Aeschylus and Euripides were for a long time unsuccessful until they had finally educated judges of art who assessed their work according to the standards they themselves laid down. It is thus they aspire to victory over their competitors as they understand victory, a victory before their own seat of judgment, they want actually to be more excellent; then they exact agreement from others as to their own assessment of themselves and confirmation of their own judgment. To aspire to honor here means: “to make oneself superior and to wish this superiority to be publicly acknowledged.” If the former is lacking and the latter nonetheless still demanded, one speaks of vanity. If the latter is lacking and its absence not regretted, one speaks of pride.

Most companies act like ordinary people and just brainlessly pursue the common ideal and make themselves into commodities. They miss the opportunity to look at who they are as a culture, what they have at their disposal to create unique, sustainable competitive advantage. They make themselves and their offerings generic up to the point where they present themselves to the public, at which point they look for ways to pain themselves as unique and attractive.

The legacy of user experience is computer operation. It conceives of people as users, active operators of some useful thing.

It is tempting to try to subsume one of these legacies within the other.

It is possible to claim that networked computers are a new marketing medium, a newer cooler form of television. This attitude results in experiences with the qualities of video games. There’s interactivity, but it’s shallow interactivity. The audience doesn’t fully interact with the organizations employees so much as it interacts with an experience pushed out to them. Similarly, advertising can be subsumed within UX, which means that messaging about how a company can be useful is pushed out to users along with the online services offered as part of the experience. This attitude creates c-clamp experiences. Interactivity and content goes in the middle, messaging goes around the edges.

If we want to transcend video games and c-clamps we need to keep the best of each legacy, but shed the reductive views of people that guide their respective approaches. Organizations must stop thinking of people as audiences or as users of experiences, and re-conceive them as participants in the life of their organization, through the medium of brand.

“Brand-participant” is awkward, but someone will eventually come up with the right word.

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Advertising is more sensitive to brand than UX is, but it must learn to stop projecting brand out to customers as something exterior to be seen, and instead to think of brand as extending the organization’s culture out to customers who participate in the brand in the role of customer.

UX is more sensitive to service, but it must stop being so self-effacing. Most of us prefer interacting with people with palpable, authentic personalities to people who are trying to please us by conforming to our opinions and wishes. UX often forgets that brands are intrinsically pleasing, and that allowing the particularities and quirks of brand to influence and stylize service (not only presentation) not only helps the organization differentiate and position itself, but it improves the experience.

What is needed — and what is happening right now — is both advertising and UX are searching for a new ideal that can subsume both

Living brands are discovered and cultivated.

It is like discovering the enthusiasms and talents of a child and cultivating them toward an integrated adult personality.

It is like gathering plants, arranging them in a garden where they can flourish individually and create a pleasing effect as a whole, then caring for them.

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Living brand means…

…discovering inherent unity within a diverse organization — perhaps latent, but perhaps pervasive to the point of invisibility…

…then identifying and articulating the virtues and values that constitute this already-existent unity as its living parts, as the organs of the organization, as its anatomy…

…then conversing with the participants of the organization — within it and outside it — to discover the meaning and value of this unity and its anatomy…

…then cultivating that unity in whole and part (holistically) toward ever-increasing value to all participants, toward the organization’s greatest health…

…and finally, intentionally manifesting the organization’s virtues in the qualities of its interactions and its service…

…and intentionally reflecting the organization’s values in the qualities of its self-presentation and its products.

At first, the brand is a discipline, something that must be practiced relentlessly despite initial unnaturalness. Gradually, stilted awkwardness melts into gracefulness. Eventually brand becomes second nature. Then brand is simply the organization being most faithful to itself, to its purpose and to those it serves.

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Branding is like practicing the piano, working on one’s golf swing, learning the counts and steps of a dance, learning to think logically, learning to obey the law of the land.

The goal of these activities is to become second nature.

We are trying to come to the point were we simply are in the music, in the game, in the dance, in the thought, in the life of the culture . The activity does itself through us, but paradoxically, somehow, this is when we are most ourselves.

This second nature we acquire is the fulfillment of the discipline, and that fulfillment is intrinsically good. There is no external, rational justification for them, because justification means tracing a thing back to some intrinsic goodness.

To put it as simply as possible: Disciplined practice is justified through fulfillment in second nature.

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We love brands because they are the radiance of a fulfilled organization which simply does what it is, and lives through natural individual participation.