It’s looking like we should be able to seat 94 maximum which should be fantastic in terms of getting us settled for the next few years. We will kick off with 20 or so less desks than this. Freeing us up to consider new spaces and fun stuff for the teams across Hive, Ebee and Pollen, and give us some space to consider new offers the group can provide to existing and new clients.

In the early days when we had space at Linen Hall (2008 – 2009) and here at National House (2009 – 2012) we threw the door open to anyone who wanted space, it was a great ways of meeting new people who wanted a  place to play whilst setting up businesses or  doing something cool. I hope that we can return to this as it certainly led to better work from me, and a richer set of suggestions and approaches  for my clients. It was immensely fresh to sit and discuss challenges with cartoonists,  illustrators, novelists  all of whom healthcare was a personal rather than professional thing.

I have been immersed with floor boxes, desk layouts and meeting anatomy, and planning the  all illusive but achievable in-house pub for us. This was sent to me by some interested parties, pretty cool eh?  More to follow. The Social guys here are planning a launch party. Shout if you want to come.

What was apparent was that all of them had an inert fear of losing, so winning really was the only option available and although it wasn’t really a ‘winner take all’ extravaganza, I thought that on balance the General came out on top, if for no other reason that he taught all their present the excellent expression ‘rot you up’! (As in those dirty rotters trying to trip you up, or at least that was my outtake.)

Evident from all those on the panel was that there really isn’t any magic solution to devising strategy and in fact those long, sometimes lonely hours we spend churning stuff around is all par for the course. It requires passion, energy and the endless questions of why and what if, but there’s no escaping the fact that it can take time – as the General put it, it’s about ‘thinking long and thinking big’.

In my mind it was refreshing to have a few pre-conceived thoughts I had, smashed. Who would have thought that a soldier would have been talking about doing things differently (and embracing Russians!) and a creative director talking about everything we do having to have a purpose (as opposed to just looking good). But I guess this is what has separated them out and allowed them to get to the top of their respective trees – the fact that they don’t just follow the norm and try and find alternative ways to engage – whether that be physically or from an emotional connection point of view.

More from APF Worlds collide here and here.

Way back when we were on Regent Street we dedicated a wall to the 2,000 sq. Ft we were moving into here in Soho. Asking the 12 of us to input. Well its that time again, except now there 53 or us around and about. We need a bigger wall!.

We are midst the legal stuff, on 7,200 sq. Ft about 200m or 4mins (cheers google)  from where we are now. 7.200sq ft is a big area. (Rural folk; 0.16 acre = enough to feed a vegetarian for a year, Greek; half an Olympic swimming pool, Devon; detention centre sized), so we are midst two hackathons to get everyone’s input in the features, fun and stuff our new home needs.

We kick off with a list of problems for the office to solve, and a list of assessment criteria for the ideas we are going to solve these problems with. Last night amidst Princi Pizza and tarts the ideas kicked off at great pace. Dozens of them. From the simple to the extravagant, to the coolish to the foolish, all up there for everyone to vote on.

With one exception all ideas are up for grabs. All of us early bees when looking around offices in the early days noticed one consistent feature. Every office we had visited which had housed an agency that had gone bust had a table foosball. Usually with one leg kicked off as a last rebellion prior to handing the keys in. This icon of misplaced budget and Toy-town business snuck up on us in every dusty, paper strewn depressing office. They are the early warning tremors for clear financial downfall and as such categorically they are banned – never never never.

Once we have got to a list following Mondays final session I will ping it up here to hopefully encourage you to input in the usual way.

Culminating in a biggie transition event where the baton was handed over to the markets to start to build local plans.

Usually this would take the form of a M4/Heathrow/PowerPoint orgy/branded pads/pens/salad bar. This week has seen us kick this tradition into touch and activate using 27,000 sq. ft of The Old Truman Brewery, (that’s 4 times the size of an Olympic Swimming pool), 19 countries, 150 people, 9 sets built, 1 stage, cool caterers and a rather fun sized graffiti wall. An uber-rollout.

The opportunity proved to be a step towards us using some of the principles of experience design that Central St Martins set me up with – focus on the narrative, not just the story, examine the geography, figure out the level of covert/overt communication you want and don’t do a sticker campaign. With these in mind we have been working hand in glove with our guys on the inside to develop a journey, support and train facilitators, developed some cool stimulus and set the brand above and beneath all activities. It culminated in a pretty mind blowing 5 days, with action stations/audiences in the room for 2 of these.

As with anything new risk was present. If you want predictable then head to the Radission – they do meetings really well, just the same one. If you want Wow, then grow a pair and strive for the new. It’s been a mixture of bloody scary, buzzing like mad and organisational focus.

I was lucky enough to be host/master of ceremonies for the two days. A far easier job than the rest of the team, who I could see the other side of the footlights orchestrating the most creative meeting in my career. As we set up sessions, hired heaters, built the energy, the team made it come together like no other. Matt, Nat, James and I certainly had the odd moment  where the scale and distance from the traditional certainly caused us to need to get our shit together. But for me that has been part of the joy.

Once our ace client team left to head off on well deserved holidays, we all experienced a Ocean’s Eleven moment of reflection and classical realisation. We did it. Simply smashed it.

The pressure was most evident about an hour into our post event wash up/quiet drink that turned into a Lock Stock style session that resulted in me being banned from a restaurant for life, us highjacking a 21st birthday, a trapeze artist’s manly chest being touched up and a wine waiter pretending to be a pirate. It was surreal, only now are the receipts starting to help it all make sense.

I wish you were here to see some of the set up, ideas and scale of the event. It’s truly awesome. Truly. We are showing and telling next week to the group and beginning to plan the next wave which sees us take on 35 local markets. James (midway through 21st birthday shots with a stranger) kicked us off with an interesting idea regarding approaching our next task as an sequential experience theatre. Now there is an idea.

I haven’t always been a writer. After many years of study (probably a few too many), I started my career as an embryologist working in a fertility clinic. Although I loved making babies for people, the routine of the job got to me and I decided that embryology wasn’t for me. I didn’t really know what else to do with myself and I started looking into all sorts of options including starting my own business, getting into the travel industry and even a career in finance. I only considered writing after a chance conversation with a friend who was a copywriter. She loved her job, so I thought that I might as well give this writing thing a try while deciding what I was really going to do with myself. Four years later, I still love writing, I still enjoy the challenges that my job brings and I think I’ll be sticking with this writing thing for some time!

My first month as a copywriter at Hive has been absolutely great. My colleagues have made me feel very welcome and helped me feel at home. Starting at 9:30 every day means that the morning commute is a tad quieter than it could be and being based in Soho is fantastic!

Workwise, it’s been nicely busy which has made the days fly by. Each day has been different and I’ve had the chance to do all sorts…e-mailers, banner ads, content for websites, brainstorms…the list goes on. I feel like I’m learning something new every day, and I’m being kept on my toes…just as it should be!

For me, the highlight of my time here has been taking part in two pitches. It was a real opportunity to get creative, think as part of a team, and show the world what we can do. I can’t wait to do more!

Although I’ve only been here for a month, I don’t feel like the ‘new girl’ anymore and I’m really excited about the future. I hope that I have as much to offer Hive as Hive has to offer me and that I earn my place as part of this great team!

So, to sum it all up, since starting here at Hive, I’ve met some really great people, learned loads, experienced the excitement of preparing for a pitch, and thoroughly enjoyed my new improved commute! What more could I want? Apart from a lottery win or a marriage proposal from George Clooney, nothing at all!

Below I’ve included a few lines from various people that contributed to the article, which may be of interest. I’ve also included a few thoughts of my own, which may be less interesting:

-          ‘Perhaps in chasing the best prices, the character of the brand became uninteresting and generic. Maybe the line in the brief that stated ‘brand personality’ was left blank because they weren’t sure what to write.’

You would have thought in today’s economically depressed climate that price would still have been a major motivator. Actually it seems from other stuff I have read that people are getting sick of always searching for bargains. Whatever – it’s well documented that you can’t build a brand on price alone – because people like Lidl will come along and very quickly take-over. Clearly price allows no emotional connection with a target audience – it’s purely a rational relationship – once that goes there’s little else to connect you to the brand. Also – it’s interesting that people are referring to price and not the close relation – value – just a subtle difference that would have made (perhaps) a massive difference.

-          ‘Tesco has not looked after its core UK proposition’.

Years of neglect have now caught up with it. I think I’ve discussed this with a few of you – but as soon as you start getting tactical with a brand it’s really easy to lose sight of the bigger picture – perfect example this – all about price, nothing on a deeper connection.

-          ‘The answer ‘ easy – keep it simple’.

Mmm – me thinks that if the Red Brick Road suggested that to Tesco they may be slung out on their arses – but I do like the sentiment behind this. It’s all gone Pete Tong and some bright spark suggests simplicity – but I do think it’s probably bang on. Don’t over complicate the problem – it’s more about re-establishing an emotional connection (in my mind) – but if I were the planning punter or creative jonnie I would love the comfort that these words would no doubt bring – after all it’s not rocket science….

This has happened because ad libitum feeding and zero exercise are standard conditions in the rodent-breeding factories that provide scientists with mice (a $1.1 billion dollar industry). But why does it matter? It matters because, as Engber writes, ‘the inbred, factory-farmed rodents in use today – raised by the millions in germ-free barrier rooms, overfed and understimulated and in some cases pumped through with antibiotics – may be placing unseen constraints on what we know and learn.’

The problem is, so invested are researchers in the mouse that no one wants to acknowledge the possibility that there’s a problem. But if there is a problem with mice, there’s a problem with drug development: scientists chew through 88 million mice a year in experiments and drug testing, and since 1965 the number of papers involving mice and rats has more than quadrupled. According to Engber ‘we’ve arrived at something like a monoculture in biomedicine,’ the main reasons being cheapness, docility, and the mouse’s amenability to ‘the most advanced tools of genetic engineering.’

In late 2010 Francis Collins, director of America’s National Institutes of Health, established a new agency to analyse what he called the ‘pipeline problem’ in biomedicine. The problem is that ‘innovation has slowed to a trickle. It takes more than a decade, and some $800 million, to produce a viable, new drug; among the compounds considered for testing, only 1 in 10,000 come to fruition.’ Could this perhaps be because ‘rats and mice were never so good at curing disease as they were at making data for its own sake’? Of the thousands of mouse studies for tuberculosis, ‘not one has been used to pick a new drug regimen that succeeded in clinical trials.’

The geneticist and statistician Michael Festing, one of the world’s experts on inbred lab mice, notes that ‘“the more research you do on something, the more valuable it becomes.”’ ‘A format war hides in the history of biomedicine,’ Engber writes, describing how not just one species but one particular strain, the Black-6, has become the most widely used organism in drug research. The problem is, since 1999 it’s been accepted that, for one, different mice have different responses to pain (prior to that the consensus was that every kind of mouse was essentially the same). And mice have different pain responses to other rodent species. And rodent species have different pain responses humans.

Experimental science does recognise certain fields where specific animals prove useful: for example armadillos in leprosy, prairie voles for autism, finches for language acquisition, but these models ‘live only at the margins of biomedicine…For most questions [the mouse is] a skeleton key that’s tried at every one of Nature’s doors.’ This despite the fact that, in the case of cancer, mice are prone to lymphomas and sarcomas as opposed to the carcinomas which are much more common in humans. Mouse tumours are much less varied than those seen in any hospital oncology department. They serve up ‘a bland and homogenized product, a fast-food version of the disease’. According to Robert Weinberg, the MIT biologist who discovered the first human oncogene and tumour suppressor gene, mice are ‘“the rate-limiting step in cancer research”’, and drug companies are ‘“wasting hundreds of millions of dollars on animal research that has little predictive value.’”

Engber’s article, which portrays both the problems with the mouse model and the ‘institutional inertia’ that prevent those problems from being formally acknowledged by the very people who would benefit most from their resolution, is essential reading.

What has struck me more than anything is the calibre of facilitators I have been sharing this week with. The time spent working one to one and in groups with my nine European colleagues has been incredibly useful. Arriving Sunday night and returning tomorrow we have started at 8ish and worked through til 10pm finishing up individual projects and applications of the techniques we have been learning.  Finishing at this time, I have had 20mins to clear my head on the walk back to the hotel tired with the pace, the full on nature of the technique and the sheer variety of learning methodology. 4 days with not one single powerpoint slide, has been deeply influential on us all. Proper skills training, using a variety of proper teaching methods and approaches.

My late evenings have been spent finding restaurants that are open at this time, settling in and ordering something that is going to match the day. Food that can inspire, challenge and be successfully different. Most of these restaurants have been proponents of fusion food a craze that continues in Holland for blending of two or more cuisines. Whether that be Spanish thrown together with Japanese, or last nights malay and french effort its been a mixed bag of tom yum foam, with pimenton prawns or a prawn cracker topped with olive oil snow. The highlight gave me an omelet with chilli sauce in the centre, a sort of thai egg wagon wheel. Luckily this sense fest was accompanied by 7 wines to taste*. It’s fair to say that my evenings have been filled wanting some identity and confidence back in the kitchens of my hosts.

Whilst not wishing to be confused for AA Gill. This local trend sounded a connection. My days have been filled with framing questions, grounding approaches and metaphors this one is too approximate an opportunity to pass over. It strikes me that I have been making a similar mistake in our strategic kitchen. I think I need to get considerably better in defining where I as a consultant starts, and where me as a facilitator ends. Across all the agencies I have worked in we have consistently clouded the two roles. As a consequence failing to do either job with the clarity of purpose required, the independence needed, or having missed out on our input mid session when we have been guiding the group. It’s fusion of competencies.

One requires guidance, framing questions and independence and the suspension of solution provision. The other value judgement, input and subjectivity. Both have huge value but the danger exists in the middle ground facilitating the answers to core questions where we feel we should also be part of the answer. As a consequence influencing and skewing the result. This lack of clarity is a concept that I have seen present in many if not all of the facilitators I have worked with over the years in healthcare, and as much so in myself.

I feel the solution is for more of us to be up-skilled and competent to a much higher level than the marketing communication industry requires us to be. Accompanying this to strive for a set of guiding approaches/set formats that allow us to work across each others accounts when independent facilitation is needed.  I think this should be pretty doable for I/us here at Hive. We have more leadership level people per unit business than anyone else. Our resource model insists on an hour glass in place of a pyramid shape with our senior members making up a healthy wodge of client focused talent. We have the resources to get us all to a beyond industry level of competence, the desire to develop standardised approaches for typical challenges and certainly the humility and track record in learn from other sectors.

The week has been a steep learning curve and provided me not only with a new vocabulary, but a new respect for my European colleagues in their professionalism and discipline. From technical skills, to focus and purity of role I hope to put much of this into practice at Hive. I shall be striving for some fission, and kicking fusion into touch.

*This was a week of training permitting some low level relaxation. It’s possible to drink 7 glasses of wine on your own in a restaurant by following the following guide;  You certainly need a tasting menu, and do start with a beer, and a copy of a good book ideally something featuring food, drink and servant girls. Ignore the wine list and suggest your restaurant match each course. Do bare in mind that these types of gaffs will insist on sending 3 little bites to amuse prior to one of your starters arriving.  Then hang up your taste buds, and travel the increasingly hazy world.

Our focus for this inspiration titbit, was the exciting time filmmakers and storytellers are having exploring ways to enhance their stories via the web. One of the new genres to emerge is the connected documentary. These projects seduce you to go to a deeper level of engagement, using approaches to storytelling ar much more experiential than broadcast.

Facilitated by the efficient and straightforward to use Lotuslive Meetings software , 17 of us from across Hive and Ebee pushed towards the bleeding edge of people development. What resulted was a publication centred around our specific development requirements.

Once through name co-creation, and prioritising a list of our desired skills. In hacking pairs we searched, filtered and curated content from across the world on time management, presenting with nerves, selling creative, communications strategy, leadership, giving feedback, negotiation, communicating ideas, adapting behaviour, regulatory environments, dealing with change and also facilitation.

LotusLive was brimming with banter, encouragement, and articles to be scooped into Swarm. We voted for Hack favourite; pizza (thanks Dominos - 2 for 1 Tuesday and all) and washed it down with Stella/Carling/DC.

In two and a half hours we packaged up a diverse group of 72 articles to make anyone of us better all in a readily accessible format. Having never run a hackathon before, the most rewarding aspect for me was the vibe, everyone buzzed with efficiency and the quality focus was really there. Skills development has never been thus! If you fancy having a look through Swarm do stop by. If you want to follow the evenings activity check out  Twitter, the pace of activity was pretty cool to follow. Live it was ace.

A worlds first? Maybe. Regardless looking through the output this morning I think we can be rightly proud.