Ideally we would have something for us to share tips on honing and developing the core skills we need everyday.  It would save any doubling up of efforts in tracking down useful tips and articles for our personal development. It’s not unreasonable to presume a load of  agency folk need this too. Not just us bees. Taking on board some feedback I received recently I thought I might ‘work with others’ rather than consigning the task to my solo To do list. Plus it needs to get up to critical mass quickly as it’s people development and it’s likely to be funner/better with us all working on this challenge.

We recently suggested to a client that rather than run a traditional global workshop with local markets to gain input we co-opt the Hackathon approach. A hackathon is an event where programmers meet to do collaborative computer programming and increasingly it’s a term used to describe any open approach to co-create a solution to a defined problem. The spirit of a hackathon is to collaboratively build bottom up, grass roots stuff, without too much authoritarianism. Sound kind of cool? I think so.

So here is the idea.

Core Skills Hackathon is a group of us (and you of course) working together to kick start and curate a online resource that covers a range of core skills we need in our day today. Working together with transparency on our individual development needs (time management, assertiveness, presentation skills, storytelling etc etc) to develop a bank of useful articles etc that help one and all get better at what they do.

Event details – 13.3.2012 6.30pm – 9.00pm

We sort

• Hive boardroom/tables/sofas/fire escape
• More pizza/beer/soda than is healthy
• Broadband/WiFi a plenty
• Loose facilitation

You sort

• 2.5 hours of your time
• Laptop
• Enthusiasm and openness
• List of skills gaps/development desires
• Bringing along anything that has made you better – articles, crib sheets, models etc

Hackathon structure

1. Welcome and introductions
2. Name development
3. Consolidate the skills list
4. Team/task allocation
5. Curate content – find, sort, sift and select
6. Publish and build magazine

If you are interested then get in touch, ideally you should have enough experience in the healthcare communications world to understand what skills you/we need and to be able to assess good stuff when you see it.

I was intrigued by the article in the Metro today, mainly because the legend that is Clint Eastwood stars in it. If you missed it this morning, I have attached.

What do you think? Clever half time themed advertising or cheesy politically charged nonsense?

We covered Maslow last week and an adapted model for assessing engagement in scientific events that is used all over the place including our very own Science Museum. Dead relevant to us? I think so. It made me think of the countless advisory boards, co-creation sessions and events we have run and attended. I am pretty sure that these can retrospectively be placed along this scale, and their success measured accordingly.

Given this I am going to give this a bash proactively, and use it to assess the plan for a client event, and see whether it helps us as much as it does the museum bofs.

From this January onward, the Hive writing team produces a monthly review on a key text. First in the series is the 2011 Pulitzer non-fiction winner – a vivid biography of humanity’s  greatest mortal dread.

At the conclusion to his extraordinary history of cancer, Siddhartha Mukherjee, an Indian-born, US-based cancer specialist, posits that ‘as the fraction of those affected by cancer creeps inexorably in some nations from one in four to one in three to one in two, cancer will, indeed, be the new normal – an inevitability. The question will not be if we will encounter this immortal illness, but when.’

That Mukherjee’s book is so compelling isn’t due solely to the drama of the story he tells, but because he is alive to the efficacy of art as well as science. ‘Normal cells are identically normal,’ he writes, ‘malignant cells become unhappily malignant in unique ways.’ His repurposing of Anna Karenina’s opening line is more than a rhetorical flourish: it’s indicative of the intelligent and illustrative way he approaches his material. Like all well-executed ideas, the question it raises is “Why hasn’t anyone done this before?”

The Emperor of All Maladies follows cancer from the palaces of ancient Persia to the R&D campuses of modern pharmaceutical companies. The majority of the story, however, takes place in the mid-to-late 20^th century, when increased life expectancy in the western world saw the prevalence of cancer skyrocket (in third world countries cancer doesn’t even make the top 10 causes of death).

Mukherjee’s story centres on two figures who defined the post-war struggle against cancer. Sidney Farber was a paediatric pathologist who became the father of chemotherapy. Mary Lasker was a wealthy socialite and fearsome lobbyist who believed that if enough money was aimed at it, cancer could be vanquished. In 1971, after nearly 20 years of their campaigning, President Nixon declared the ‘War on Cancer’: legislation that devoted millions of dollars in federal funds to finding a cure.

Farber and Lasker’s achievement was of mixed worth. ‘Cancer,’ Mukherjee writes, ‘a shape-shifting disease of colossal diversity, was recast as a single, monolithic entity’. Scientists competed to find cures, theories of prevention were all but non-existent, and misguided treatments such as megadose chemotherapy did more harm than good.

Mukherjee’s recreation of the ambitions, disappointments and, occasionally, triumphs at each stage of the fight against cancer is one of his book’s greatest achievements. He successfully places the reader in whichever era, lab or ward he describes. He also renders cancer itself in a way that’s both horrifying and gripping. Of leukaemia he writes, ‘Its pace, its acuity, its breathtaking, inexorable arc of growth forces rapid, often drastic decisions; it is terrifying to experience, terrifying to observe, and terrifying to treat.’

The book’s final section is its most optimistic and most complex. Harold Varmus and J. Michael Bishop won the Nobel Prize in 1989 for proving the link between cancer and genes, which led to the subsequent identification of many oncogenes (genes with cancer-causing potential). ‘Having wandered in the darkness for decades,’ writes Mukherjee, ‘scientists had finally reached a clearing in their understanding of cancer. Medicine’s task was to continue that journey toward a new therapeutic attack.’ This came with development of drugs such as Herceptin, which targets an oncogene in a particular type of breast cancer.

But Mukherjee is too knowledgeable about cancer to be swept up in an optimism that has, time and again, proved false. Other gene-targeted therapies like Herceptin and Glivec may emerge over time, but that’s a forecast quite different to the ‘cure for cancer’ that has been dreamed of for so long. ‘This War on Cancer,’ he cautions, ‘may best be “won” by redefining victory.’

Mukherjee says the idea for his book was hatched when a patient asked him the simple question, ‘“What is it, exactly, that I am battling?”’ His answer, all 500 pages of it, is fascinating, depressing and exhilarating, and his writing on lung cancer is so affecting that, after 24 years of smoking, I haven’t had a cigarette since finishing the book six weeks ago.

Have you read this book? We’d love to have your comments.

I used to think New Years’ resolutions were cynical and flimsy. Now I act upon the clarity that comes with early January. You know it: after the cleansing rituals of giving and eating, taking stock of our human treasures, contemplating the mouthfeel of true happiness. Time slows. A light snowdrift may pass.

At some point, heart and mind airpunch their way off the sofa. This is so good it must never ever end! We delve for the will to be less apathetic, to punch up the system.

This year I’ve got the big one. I’ve stopped smoking. For a long time my habit has housed me like a condemned building. I was smoking because I didn’t know what to fix first. Trigger:  a natural spasm in concentration – you think you need a change of scene. Trigger: all kinds of hunger. Trigger: tired. Feeling awkward in company.

I’m 8 days in. I feel good. The lust has needled only once: when I got off the phone from Haringey Council. Trigger: despair.

This January the general kick-butt movement hears from the Harvard School of Public Health that, in the long term,  nicotine replacement is no more effective than cold turkey.

This was by no means a massive study, with only 787 smokers followed over three non-consecutive time periods. While many studies have shown that NRT significantly aids quitting, the study does remind us of the importance of a sustained outlook (read Brooker’s article for an insider’s take on that). We all know behaviour change doesn’t stop being hard.

I’ll be looking to find out whether patients who received professional or self-directed support had better luck with their quits – in the UK at least, NRT is bundled with patient support programmes and efficacy is rarely attributed to the product alone.

To my mind, understanding your smoking habit is key to cutting it loose. Charlie Brooker had plenty of relapses, mostly on pub doorsteps. If we know our weak points, let’s never leave them undefended, and not just for January. I’ve boarded up the condemned house and I’m out of there, but not in the pub just yet.

Experience design is just that and far from just that. Dozens of man-years have been spent crafting a definition that still struggles with the difference between art and design, let alone the requirement we have to trap, cagoule and force down the edges of what it is to be experiential or to provide experience. The wooliness of the subject is refreshing and helping get my head out of the structured, problem/solution world that billable work often requires (especially on a Monday!).

From 5 senses, to 360 degree immersive sessions it’s clearly going to be an awesome 10 weeks.

My reading list is whizzing past Hegel, Marx, through terms as diverse as relational aesthetics and dystopian community. It’s been a while since I read something (Harvard biz review tends to pride itself on accessibility!) that had me rubbernecking to google this regularly. Blindingly good stuff, even this early session got me thinking like mad on a stack of plans/briefs/trickies I have in front of me.

In a world where ‘Brand is…’ is cumbersome and ‘brand does’ becomes more central to our planning model - experiential planning is pretty sexy for me. It channel planning with lipstick on, spinning on a table, air thick with perfume.

With HBR continuing to kick sand in the face of goods providers with yet another article on the worth of the experience economy. Joining the greying of the boundaries between sponsorship, co-branding, commissioned design, corporate installation etc. And Josephs Pine conforming that customer value has run away from all the  commodities and goods, towards tailored services or authentic experiences. It it  the time to try and consider how we offer these experiences, planned, proactive and of course with an audience insight bang in the centre.

With crossed fingers, in a dark, endless cold room . I am hoping that experience design and the time spent with the talent at CSM contributes a component  to me working on a structured approach to behavioural change achieved along a considered, multichannel, richer journey.

In the meantime – a rather nice Nokia experience, corporate installation, co-branded event, light show or Son et lumière (your choice).

I have promised myself that I will find something academic to write about, but it’s sunny outside, and I have diary chunks all over the day. I feel I need some inspiration.

Those resolutions to date are;

1. Continue to fuel the agencies future growth. Slot an entire vertical into Account services. Thus far the implementations pretty much perfect. This quarter finds us slot individual talent into the team a few weeks apart allowing us to transform these newbies into New-bees with thoroughness and get this capacity up and buzzing. For us at Hive, it’s a growth focused way to start the year; people in place prior to the sales curve – a great way to stably grow the biz into 2012 and beyond whilst maintaining our focus on the awesome set of clients we are delivering with already.
2. Get on those Q1 pitches! Ian’s juggling Prezi, Powerpoint and MS Word today alone, and the new biz leaderboard is brimming with invites, chemistry meetings and requests for proposals across the management team. those deals need closing!
3. Finalise the 2012 development plans. Seriously long writing tasks for me this week. Bullets points, individual tasks, a training programme and people stuff all cover my desk currently. I need a list.
4. Diversify hivehealth.com’s blog contributors list. Encourage the great, good and bold to deliver views on us, healthcare, communications and the agency. It’s a plan; in a mice and men way!
5. Find bigger offices. Staying in Soho we kick off the task of hunting down big spaces for us all to beapart in.
6. Buy Werthers Original to share with all those wearing progressive knitwear today. Paul Smith is topping the list today and the Granddad look dominating the offices. Cardigans and cable-knit hand in hand with innovation and cool? Really?
7. Formulate a service design toolkit. It’s an area I have written about lots, done a few workshops and now its time to consolidate the learnings and structure this offer. Its out of lab stuff and into the marketplace time.
8. Get to grips with the current W1 bubble tea craze. I means what’s it all about, it’s beyond odd on a cold January afternoon.

I think that’s it for this week. I shall now hit my iCloud To Do List of blogs/ideas/rants then come back with some higher end content. To make our first week back more Open University than Fresher’s week.

We finished our year with walks in the heartlands of Scotland warmed by knitwear surrounded by snow (imagine a less aesthetic Marks’s & Spencer ad).

I post this from the seriously snowy french alps, where 50 cm fell last night and the slopes are calling. My Mac is reminding me that I should complete the appointment set by me a whole year ago – it feels like I set it last week.

As usual this ‘year in numbers’ finds me rushing around trying to get some new statistics with which to summarise our year. Numerically  2011 saw;

1 patient centric strategic approach

£5.3 million billed

43 brands

13 client companies

27 pitches

8 losses

1 burglary

100% clients retained

1 torture seminar/bobotie/marathon /in-office gig

66 blogs

5 podcasts

16,493 web visits

Our first eBee baby – bouncing little Josh

1 new company started

38 fantastic people

562 hours of team training

1 Scottish adventure

8 bottles of single malt

1 heartfelt thank you to everyone we have worked with in 2011

1 Happy New Year to you all.

Allowed to use only a mobile phones and limited editorial software the event was showcased whilst we were up in Scotland. Hosted by a suitably smart Kieran and Morgaine who despite strict rules managed to enter as well.

Canape fueled voting saw Prateek and Debbie spanking the rest of us with this copywriting and iphone etch-a-sketch effort. Views from the huddled voting masses indicated that ‘Adam’s bulging vein’ won them over. Prateek’s drawing skills clearly demonstrating that all the talent lies in Accounts not creative.

Matt and I are heading up to Salford on the train, it’s pitch black, and dead depressing. This cheered me up somewhat and stirred a long gone memory.

I only just remember my sister being ill when I was about 6. A more distinct memory was her accompanying bear; Peri.  Peri pretty much was present all the way to health. Every now and then Peri is discovered still with his hospital wristband on and much smaller than I remember.  I now know that this little bear was named after a Heath Robinson looking yogurt pot, tube and bag gizmo that provided her with the peritoneal dialysis needed whilst her kidneys took a kicking,

This enterprising inspiring mum took her son’s similar requirement for a cancer companion to the next level. Just after his first birthday, Gabe’s mother, Lu Sipos, made the very first Chemo Duck for him. She thought he could use a companion to take to the hospital, one with whom he could share his journey back to health. Both Chemo Duck and Gabe finished treatment in November 2003 and have remained cancer free since.

Since then Lu along with a board of directors and a newly formed not for profit organisation have taken the chemo duck and made him fly. Chemo duck is now in production and the team are striving to give away 10,000 of these donated friends by Gabe’s 10 year birthday.

More than a companion chemo duck has become a vital part of ‘medical play’, a concept that allows children to communicate with parents and healthcare professionals, offering a window into their world midst the turmoil of cancer. Chemo duck is used time and time again as a powerful therapeutic and teaching tool used in medical facilities to familiarize children with cancer protocol and procedures.

Pretty cool eh?