Duncan D. Bruce
The Dream Café
This edition first published 2015.
© 2015 Duncan D. Bruce and Dr Geoff Crook.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Bruce, Duncan D., 1957-
The dream café: lessons in the art of radical innovation / Duncan D. Bruce and Dr. Geoff Crook.
pages cm
Includes index.
ISBN 978-1-118-97784-2 (hardback)
1. Strategic planning. 2. Branding (Marketing) I. Crook, Geoff, 1945- II. Title.
HD30.28.B78423 2015
658.4′063–dc23
2014043908
Cover Design: Mackerel Design and Art Studio
Cover Image: To Come
PREFACE
The Dream Café offers an introduction to the lessons that brand owners can learn in a way that deliberately defies logic – that is, by emulating the way that the radical creative practitioners we commonly called avant-garde broke with convention, dismissed the naysayers and invented the future. The fact that artists and creative thinkers, from a wide range of backgrounds, could change the way we all think and do by initiatives that began with interdisciplinary conversations around a café table provides compelling evidence for a new way of engaging with the urgent task of brand innovation.
In order to practise what we preach we have avoided a conventional structure for our book and created an A to Z list of characteristics, actions and qualities that distinguish business that thrive from those that merely survive (and sometimes, don't), which is more akin to a series of ‘Menu Cards’. We believe that in a ‘time-short’ world the insights we offer are best read on the run, much in the way that you would snack at a café. When the experimental French film maker Jean Luc Godard was asked about his apparent lack of interest in conventional narrative principle, he corrected his interviewer by pointing out that his films do have ‘a beginning, a middle and an end’, but ‘not necessarily in that order’. It's much the same with this book: we want you to engage with it in ‘bite-sized chunks’.
Despite innovation's ubiquitous nature nowadays – along with its profound and exponentially significant influence on our lives – we still tend to respond to new and disruptive concepts with a mixture of apprehension, disinterest and disbelief. Science fiction writer Arthur C Clarke summarized how our reaction to new thinking evolves from scorn to ownership without any awareness of our power to delay or indefinitely postpone innovation, as we undergo the following reactions to any given new concept:
1. It's completely impossible.
2. It's possible, but it's not worth doing.
3. I said it was a good idea all along.
Anyone who has read about, or was involved with, Steve Jobs' return to Apple will empathize with Clarke's summary. Jobs had to ignore the entire board in order to reinvent the business, but we doubt that many of those board members would now be wanting to own up to not seeing the future.
A number of the brand examples quoted in this book reference the tenacity that is needed to overcome the naysayers, or as in Kodak's case the danger of giving way to them. Our resistance to change provides a convenient alibi for those who see innovation as a threat to the status quo and act as gatekeepers against that threat. Not long ago, the cautious represented a key part of business strategy through their ability to perpetuate the maxim of: ‘if it's not broke, don't fix it'. The Dream Café acts as an important reminder that THAT was THEN by enabling brands to live in the NOW and take ownership of THE FUTURE.
Businesses today operate in a context where the unpredictability of competition and customer loyalty has changed the rules of engagement – one where chaos rules caution and predictability becomes the enemy of economic sustainability. This is why companies need to do a lot more than simply re-educating their gatekeepers to create opportunities for inclusion that encourage everyone to participate in anticipating and owning the future. For most businesses, embracing disruption as an opportunity rather than a threat begins with a commitment to disrupt their own values and processes.
The Dream Café argues that business has a lot to gain from emulating the radical and edgy ways of thinking and doing that we associate with the avant-garde practitioners.
Our research has led us to understand how the ad hoc informality that enables a café to become a location for brewing up extraordinary innovation can be emulated by business. This is why we've titled our book The Dream Café.
You'll see how café culture can provide a business with much more than a site for relaxation. We reveal how the unpredictable meetings between individuals who bring varying degrees of knowledge and experience will create greater value if you involve a café model. When we develop a Dream Café innovation opportunity we are always careful to find a location that will take our clients out of their everyday routine. We believe that the contemporary Google imitation obsession with creating a ‘third space’ in house misses the central point of innovation opportunity: to disrupt everyone and everything. We know that constructing your innovation strategy around what we call the ‘fourth space’ – because it's not familiar – will enable you to attract and develop the kind of unanticipated range of interactions and opportunities that are rarely attained by the type of rational planning that still dominates innovation culture. Psychiatrist and psychotherapist