The100: being wrong, dispensing Ketchup and drawing some mud

Good news! You can be wrong

In fact, you can also spend less on innovation and claim that a meeting which has no objective will be more productive than those with one. What’s not to like!

1. Admitting you don’t know – explores whether having intellectual humility leads to greater discovery, learning and progress.I think I might start using the phrase intellectually humble as it does get embarrassing saying I don’t know all the time.
2. Not spending a fortune to innovate –  Tim Harford uncovering the power of cheap innovations and those innovations we may be overlooking because they’re cheap, rather than magical.
3. The best meetings can accomplish nothing – looking at the value of hunches. Try inviting some people to a meeting with no objective. Lori Melichar did.

You can observe a lot just by watching

This article raves about Heinz employing user research to constantly reinvent how people dispense Ketchup, ending with the awesome truth that you can observe a lot just by watching.

“This is the type of research data that Heinz would never have gotten by just talking to customers or running a focus group. It would never have cropped up in conversation and researchers would never have thought to ask it. You’ll only get this type of insight by observing people using the product itself.”

I couldn’t agree more – be odd if I didn’t!

Bonus: here’s an ad by Heinz (60s).

At the end, a lady squeezing the upside-down ketchup pack makes a rasping (polite version) noise. Eagle-eyed watchers will note that the pack still has loads of ketchup in it. Perhaps that’s a use-issue they may want to fix… or perhaps it is a master-stroke of signalling:  the noise translating to buy more!

Heeeeeere’s Mary

Mary Meeker does her thing each year in predicting where the internet is going. It’s always a mammoth slide deck,  so here’s the key takeaways – I bet you could guess half of them.

Our own key takeaway (bias alert) was that people are spending on average 30m a day watching videos on their phones. So perhaps using video internally to communicate could be a good thing? It’s how we do it here in Watch Me Think’s towers. Consumer closeness anyone?

Deconstructed slapstick

Everyone loves a bit of slapstick – don’t they?  

This super short gif has more to it than initially meets the eye as it gets the almost frame-by-frame analysis.

“‘Draw some mud”

I’ve always had a fascination with languages even though I’ve always been awful at them.

My dad used to speak Noo Yawk slang to my mum – I thought it was ace, even though I had no idea what it meant. So this on the lost lingo of soda jerks was a joy to read.

Just me?