The Plan SucksWhy successful transformation starts differently

Contents

Fluxx Ltd4th Floor, 5–9 Hatton Wall, London, EC1N 8HXembrace@fluxx.uk.com

© Fluxx 2018Edited by Tom WhitwellDesigned by Jay Prynne ( jayglow.com) Riso printed by Hato Press

2 What have Fluxx teams been doing recently?

6 Eight things that should keep you up at night

16 Fluxx story: How we built a start-up inside a multinational

18 The best is yet to come: why change isn’t scary

22 Nine bad excuses (and our tricks to get around them)

24 Fluxx story: Delivering behaviour change at scale

26 Smart ways to hire (and retain) innovative people

30 How to build a culture of innovation inside a big company

34 Fluxx story: Food hygiene ratings for the Deliveroo generation

36 WTF is an MVP? Making sense of innovation jargon

40 The Whiteboard HQ: How to run a start-up from a handbag

42 Fluxx story: Helping a health-tech start-up for teenagers

44 My mum is becoming a data scientist at 54

48 Seven throwaway designs that changed the world

52 Fluxx story: Helping GAME reconnect with their customers

54 What watching Friends taught us about service design

58 Fluxx story: How News UK built their incubator

60 Fluxx villains: Designs, services and ideas we loathe

64 Ten ways to find out more about us at Fluxx

“Everyone has a plan,” said Mike Tyson. “Until they get punched in the mouth.”

This is a book about working differently. It’s about becoming an organisation that can respond to change. The Big Plan sucks not because it’s a bad plan, but because a conventional plan implies we can predict the future. That we know how customers will react, how technology will evolve, how staff will respond. That the future (tomorrow, next week, next year) will be like today, when all the evidence suggests otherwise.

Instead of a plan, successful companies are built on two foundations. First, a clear purpose that defines what they are for and where they are going. Then, instead of a Plan, they have a different way of working; a method for developing ideas and inspiring teams. A playbook for moving fast and staying flexible that inspires people and catches light — spreading a wave of change through the company.

Let the Big Plan gather dust…

The Fluxx Book

Giffgaff

This mobile network is ‘run by you’, with no conventional call centres. Members are rewarded for supporting each other and coming up with new ideas. Together, we created Giffgaff [X] Labs, to test new ways to get members involved in developing new ideas. They called the project “genuinely transformative”.

Innerstrength Health

Securing funding via customer insight: we got on the road and visited hospitals, medical teams, parents and teenagers with cystic fibrosis to design a novel three-way app (with views for teens, parents and doctors) that has now won a big NHS funding bid.More on p. 42

Atkins Flo

Flo is a radical new idea combining mobile tech, machine learning and aircraft safety. After a high-intensity design sprint and an incubation and prototyping process, the product is now being beta tested at one of the world’s biggest airlines. More on p. 16

Just Retirement

In a fast-paced project based in Just’s call centre, we empowered staff to ‘just do more’. Working with a team of six we piloted changes to help customers self-diagnose adjustments to their pensions.

Coaching HSBC

Fluxx has been teaching ‘language of lab’ – innovation, lean working and how to get closer to customers – to HSBC teams around the world, from Hyderabad to Dubai.

GAME Content Lab

When is a gamer not a ‘gamer’? In a high-impact series of experiments, we helped the video game retailer to rediscover their mojo; empowering a passionate team to create social content that their customers love. More on p. 52

Office for National Statistics

The Head of HR at the ONS asked us to find innovative ways to motivate their 3,000+ employees. We set out to find pockets of brilliance, then ways to spread that goodness around the whole organisation.

The Times

Helping The Times build on the success of their subscription model by developing and testing new business ideas, including their new Legal Intelligence product The Brief Premium.More on p. 40

Legal & General

Disrupting the group protection market using real-world experiments – getting out in front of real customers where they worked – helped us make insane progress in a short time.

Food Standards Agency

How do you make those familiar green Food Hygiene Ratings stickers relevant in a world of Deliveroo and Just Eat? We designed the complete end-to-end solution, co-creating new tools with restaurants, start-ups and customers.More on p. 34

Department for Transport

The DfT have huge quantities of data that could be put to work to create better services for citizens. We started with customer needs, working with policy-makers and economists to find pain points that a better system could fix.

British Library

Fluxx mentors over a hundred growing start-ups and small businesses each year as Product and Service Innovation partners for the British Library’s Innovating for Growth project.

Timeline What have Fluxx teams been doing recently?

2

Then

The Fluxx Book

Abellio East Anglia

UK rail companies have to invest in infrastructure but cannot increase ticket prices, so they need to find new ways to generate revenue. We’ve been running the ‘Revenue Accelerator Squad’ within Abellio, testing new ideas at 125mph.

Energy Systems Catapult

The Catapult runs a Living Lab; a network of sensor-loaded homes where energy companies can test scenarios for a low-carbon future energy market. Fluxx designed a business model to make the Living Lab sustainable and available to all kinds of business.

BEIS : Energy Efficiency

We designed a suite of new Energy Efficiency services for the Department of Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, working with both small businesses and large ‘energy intensive’ factories to understand how they could save energy. More on p. 24

Now

News UK Startup Lab

Almost 300 start-ups applied to join the first start-up incubator project backed by the publishers of The Times and The Sun (facilitated by Fluxx). After a 12-week process, five companies received direct funding and are currently operating in growth mode. More on p. 58

National Grid: Hack TheDemand Curve

We’ve been working with National Grid since 2016. Fluxx helped them build an immersive VR experience to help explain how they balance the network, then kick-started their innovation process to help make the UK energy system greener and more efficient.

A Global Perfumier

In a short project we helped one of the world’s largest perfume companies look at the future of fragrance by getting close (not too close) to customers and validating new products in hours, not years.

Thames Water

Wouldn’t it be good if utilities companies coordinated their work, digging up the road once and minimising disruption? We helped Thames create a tool which combines multiple data sets to increase hole-digging efficiency.

Dubai Autonomous Vehicle Competition

How do you convince the world’s autonomous vehicle community – from Silicon Valley start-ups to major car companies – to test their vehicles in the Gulf? We ran grass-roots customer insight for this major international competition.

Fidelity Internationl

The investment company wanted to explore ‘regtech’ and machine learning to modernise manual assessment of regulatory change information. Together, we’re creating labs to experiment with a new digital collaboration platform, that is bringing together expert insight from around the world.

Mobility As a Service for Greater Manchester

Fluxx helped Atkins and Cambridge run a remarkable transport trial called Zume. The following year, the trial moved to Salford. Fluxx are designing behavioural nudges, finding new ways to reduce car use.

Anglia Ruskin University

Improving the student experience lead to cultural change. We worked with the University to understand the student onboarding process. This led to an incubation phase where we validated desirability and feasibility of ideas around a radical new mobile first application process.

Severn Trent Water

Reduce water usage by 50%, reduce leakage by 15% and change company culture to be more innovative. From working with one business area to the entire company, Fluxx is now helping Severn Trent achieve their ambitious goals.

4

Timeline What have Fluxx teams been doing recently? Now

The Fluxx Book

6Eight things that should keep you up at night Fluxx works with some of the largest companies in the world, helping them respond to big challenges; new technology, new competitors, customers with drastically changing needs. These are some of the questions they ask us and we ask them.

by Clare Flitton, Richard Edgley, Brett Bircham, & Tom Whitwell

Are we doing innovation in the

best possible way?

How do I attract and retain the best

employees?When is the right time to ‘transform’?

How do I encourage collaboration?

Is my company culture healthy?

How do I know we’re focused on the right

problems?

Are decisions being made at the

right level?

What do we mean by transformation? Like ‘digital’ and ‘innovation’, it has become an ambiguous term.

If enough people chant ‘transformation’ then it must be a thing. We might not know what it means for our organisation, but we need it and we need it now.

Transformation is not new. Companies and organisations have always been transforming. Rethinking business models and repositioning themselves in the market. Organisations that

The Fluxx Book

8 have gone through transformational phases that have resulted in differentiation, empowered colleagues, happy customers and shareholder value.

In the 1950s, under Ray Kroc, McDonalds transformed from a local Californian fast food joint selling burgers, soft drinks, milkshakes and apple pie into a global franchise. Today, after a period of uncertainty the company is setting a new vision for transformation, from introducing healthier menu options to touchscreen ordering in restaurants, table service and partnership with UberEats. They’ve listened to customer need and changed – at phenomenal scale.

Lego have gone from selling individual toys to becoming a media and entertainment brand, with many missteps along the way.

Netflix have successfully transformed themselves not once but twice. They started out sending DVDs through the post, then abandoned this remarkable logistics capacity to become a tech company, streaming video directly to customers. Then – starting with House of Cards in 2013 – they transformed into a dominant player in original TV production, spending $8bn on content in 2018 alone.

But McDonalds, Lego and Netflix aren’t normal companies. What can normal companies learn from their experiences, and how can they learn to thrive in an environment of constant change? This where ‘transformation’ comes into play.

Going ‘digital’ might be a good move – perhaps doing what you are currently doing but better, faster or cheaper.

It might be about catching up or perhaps getting slightly ahead. It might do for now but it won’t tomorrow. Maintaining your position will require more than digital technology. It’s also about having a flexible organisation agile enough to operate. This will require thinking about organisational change as well as technology.

Transforming the business model is about doing what you are currently doing in a fundamentally different way.

Plenty of companies invest in innovation labs and accelerators for the wrong reasons. Keeping up with the Joneses, trying to look cool, hoping to tell a good brand story for investors.

They risk burning investment through innovation theatre and damaging the potential for real transformation and innovation.

Innovation can be fast and fun and can bring instant gratification; a new feature that customers love, a significant saving from the bottom line.

Genuine transformation takes time – shifting the entire business model for a major organisation isn’t something you can do overnight. But real transformation is the enabler for sustained innovation, for making it stick.

Transformation is not an end game, it is ongoing… it must become part of the DNA of an organisation, it is about evolving the essence of an organisation

Question 1. Are we really doing innovation in the best possible way?A. ‘I’m frustrated. I have so many great ideas,

but we can’t get anything done.’ B. ‘We don’t really talk about ‘innovation’ any

more now that it’s part of business as usual.’ C. ‘I’m backing innovation. I’ve already backed

15 different projects in the last 18 months.’ D. ‘I want more innovation in my department,

we’re the highest earners, so we deserve more innovation.’

McDonalds, Lego and Netflix aren’t normal companies. What can normal companies learn from their experiences?

Read more about emerging technology and how companies can better respond to change on p. 18

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10 3. Are decisions being made at the right level? A. ‘Power in this company is distributed;

decisions are made within the teams that own products and are closest to customers. Senior leaders are able to focus on strategy and having longer-term issues.’

B. ‘Our organisational structure keeps changing. Important decisions are made inside small teams, and sometimes the head doesn’t know what the tail is doing.’

C. ‘Our company leaders act as role models and mentors. They enable teams to act autonomously and make decisions quickly, trusting they’ll be supported.’

D. ‘There’s a real sense of loyalty in my division: we’re the real power behind this company.’

Working in a change-friendly company can be disorientating. When breaking down silos, traditionally positive traits like loyalty to a team [D] can be problematic, causing real distress. Staff and leaders can be surprised when decisions are made rapidly in response to data and customer insight [B].

In many successful organisations, a great deal of power is devolved down to autonomous teams [A] giving leaders the time to lead and set company culture[C].

The relationship between leadership support and useful innovation is complicated.

Many leaders [A] make a lot of noise about wanting to do things differently, without taking responsibility for the structural changes required. Others throw money around [C] backing projects indiscriminately in an unstructured, short-term way.

When different departments are competing to spend money on projects [D] it can be exciting and positive work can get done at the risk of repetition and solving problems in silos.

In mature, optimised organisations [B], innovation becomes a core capability. Amazon spends more on R&D than any other company in the world, not least because so many of its activities can be recorded as ‘R&D’.

2. How do I know we’re focused on the right problems? A. ‘Our innovation strategy is clear. We’ve appointed

a new head of innovation.’ B. ‘We have a mixture of short, medium and long-

term projects. Some things take time.’ C. ‘Our innovation strategy is clearly set out:

we focus on projects that can add £1m revenue in 18 months.’

D. ‘I joined the company because the strategy was clear. If we can change the business model like this, we can win.’

Almost every organisation can articulate the importance of innovation, but there’s a difference between saying it and doing it. Everyone needs to start somewhere, and hiring a team or a ‘head’ is a sensible first step [A].

At Fluxx we often see these teams hampered by short-term thinking or simplistic goals [C]. Successful companies are able to balance short-term optimisation while developing new longer-term revenue streams [B].

But the hardest challenge, for all companies, is re-invention; challenging the business models at your core [D]. That’s one reason why Netflix is so impressive; disrupting itself twice as it turned from a DVD-by-Mail business to an online streaming service to a world-beating TV production house.

The hardest challenge for all companies, is re‑invention; challenging the business models at your core.

Fluxx helped Atkins respond to

technological change – learn more on p. 16

Positive culture was a big part of

the success of News UK’s Startup

Lab – learn more on p. 30

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12 5. How do I attract and retain the best employees?A. ‘We have a good time – we break out the beers

at 6pm, and there’s a ping-pong table.’B. ‘The job titles and induction were great, but

once I got here I realised that the reality of the role was different to what was advertised.’

C. ‘I’m doing a different job from the one I was hired  for, but my boss has mentored me to make it work.’

D. ‘I’ve been here 20 years, and I feel like the shackles have been lifted.’

Employers have stopped taking the time to understand what their employees truly need and value from their roles.

They often make the mistake of bucketing people by age group and expecting they all want the same thing. Superficial benefits [A] won’t mask the lack of fulfilment from a job. Equally, the Employee Experience (EX) doesn’t stop after the induction [B].

EX is just as important as Customer Experience and your vision and strategy should be aligned and visible at every stage of the employee lifecycle.

Providing a structure in which employees can define their own path [C], will dramatically increase retention over a rigid performance management process. Finally, rockstars attract other rockstars, so by empowering your existing employees [D], the next generation will follow.

6. When is the right time to ‘transform’?A. ‘We’re waiting for the big re-organisation. Once

that’s done, we can start hiring for new roles.’B. ‘We can start the fun stuff once we’ve got

few quick wins in place first.’C. ‘We can’t start until we get the strategy

in place and approved.’ D. ‘We’re going to start by starting.’

To understand this, you must first understand what is the driver behind your need to ‘transform’. What are you hoping to achieve through the transformation?

4. Is my company culture healthy?A. ‘An organisation’s ability to learn, and translate

that learning into action rapidly, is the ultimate competitive advantage.’

B. ‘It’s cheesy to try to define our culture; everyone here knows and feels part of the family.’

C. ‘My people have amazing ideas, and they’re encouraged to develop them, so long as it doesn’t disrupt their normal work.’

D. ‘It was a big shift to get comfortable with rewarding things that can feel like failure, the way we used to look at things.’

Setting company culture can be the hardest and most important job that a leader needs to do, and it requires an acute level of self-awareness.

Too often organisations lay out an exciting vision of their culture, but when this clashes with a key metric it’s quickly forgotten [C]. Lip service to culture breaks trust and motivation rapidly.

Conversely, failure to articulate your culture can lead it to be hijacked by a few [B] and built into something toxic or niche that detracts new hires. A healthy culture is one that enables your employees to live your organisation’s strategy and vision [A – a line from Jack Welch] and one that grows organically as your organisation evolves [D].

Retention is a good litmus test of health within a  company culture. Where possible measurement shouldn’t be confined to a quantitative annual survey, but a core feature of your Employee Experience design.

If you wait until the conditions are perfect, you’ll start to see diminishing returns.

Read more about the excuses companies use to resist innovation on p. 22

Read more about setting company culture on p. 30

Read more how the brightest talent wants to be treated on p. 26

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14 Defining the vision and purpose at the outset is key, but that doesn’t mean a five-year plan. The strategy will evolve [C] along with the transformation design.

If you wait until the conditions are perfect [A] or you’ve chalked up some incomparable successes within your team [B] any advantages from the transformation will start to see diminishing returns. You just need to start [D].

Identify a discrete, tangible project related to your core driver for change, and use it as an exemplar to test out the main elements of the proposed large-scale transformation. Building engagement and momentum behind an actual project is far easier than a set of slides based on ideas on a whiteboard.

7. How do I encourage collaboration?A. ‘We’ve introduced a new collaboration platform,

so now… we’re collaborating.’ B. ‘We’ve hired the best specialists from around

the industry. Now they’re working in our centres of excellence, with great resources.’

C. ‘We have a team for each product. They have a mixture of skills and everything they need to ship their product.’

D. ‘Our board is diverse. It’s not just the traditional accountants, but people from a range of backgrounds inside and outside the company.’

The rise of the start-up gave us proof of the benefits of collaboration and ever since we’ve been trying to replicate its success.

The reason the majority of attempts fail is it’s a systemic, cultural and process issue, not a technical one [A]. Employees have been taught to (and rewarded for) work in siloes.

While centres of excellence build expertise and intra-team collaboration, they’re often a black box [B] and can leave other teams feeling isolated or intimated.

Assigning ownership of a product (with its own P&L and metrics) to a cross-functional team [C] is a great solution if supported by clear leadership reporting lines to one individual. Finally, demonstrable collaboration as an example from the leadership team adds legitimacy to the overall ask [D].

8. Should we create a separate company or try to work within the mothership? A. ‘Start something new. It’s too hard to make

the changes internally, we need a clean slate.’ B. ‘It has to work internally, otherwise what’s the

point of doing it?’ C. ‘It doesn’t matter, so long as the team have real

autonomy to make decisions.’ D. ‘We’ll do a perfectly blended hybrid – with just

enough new blood mixed with the DNA from the mothership.’

This is one of the questions we hear most often from companies and organisations with big ideas that they want to try. It throws up a lot of further questions and it’s hard to generalise.

However, a rigid approach can be damaging. We’ve seen failures in arms-length approaches, where a team is taken out of the parent, relocated to fancy offices in London and given new managers [A], and we’ve certainly seen failures where teams weren’t given enough space. It’s very hard to act like a start-up when you’re still having to deal with business as usual from your ‘proper’ job [B].

One of our favourite case studies is British Gas’s Hive project [D]. They created a blended team with just enough old-school utilities expertise underpinning a team of digital natives; playing to their strength while bringing in new blood. At the end of the day, the real question isn’t ‘where do they sit?’ but ‘do they have the autonomy we need to make decisions and succeed?’[C]

At the end of the day, the real question isn’t ‘where do they sit?’ but ‘do they have the autonomy we need to make decisions and succeed?’

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16How to build an internal start‑up to sell new ideas in a new marketWho says radical innovation has to come from start-ups? Fluxx worked with Atkins to get a novel aircraft safety idea off the ground.

by Richard Bassett

Atkins is part of the world-leading engineering consultancy SNC, with 18,000 staff working in 150 countries. Like other industries, engineering is changing at an unprecedented pace.

A huge range of technologies are impacting how Atkins works, from drones and Internet-connected powertools to machine learning and blockchain-powered building information systems.

The challenge isn’t just technical. The entire business model of a engineering consultancy – one that has been in place since 1938 – is changing. If your consultant is an algorithm, can you still charge for time and materials?

Over the last three years, Fluxx have been helping Atkins develop a new vision of digital engineering. Together we’ve developed new ways of working, in order to unlock the extraordinary potential and skills within the company.

In one example, we equipped a team at Atkins with the creative confidence to free their ideas and develop them, at pace, into a viable digital service that could

Fluxx storyAtkins

be sold to new customers alongside their traditional engineering services.

This approach of ‘learning by doing’ has given people within the organisation the belief to aim higher, fail fast and persevere with their ideas.

Engineers within Atkins are creative, imaginative people who often come up with solutions that stretch beyond the normal activities of the company.

One of these ideas had the potential to transform the way that aerospace engineers capture, report and repair damage on aircraft.

It was inspired by the development of consumer-grade 3D scanning technology. The engineer worked out a method that could improve both accuracy and efficiency of aircraft damage repairs, and was able to create a very simple prototype as a proof of concept.

Ideas like this can be a challenge for established businesses. It doesn’t fit neatly into any of their established services. A novel mixture of hardware, software, subscription and consulting is difficult to develop, tricky to validate and hard to price.

So, working with Fluxx, Atkins created a small, independent team to develop the idea, challenged to build out the prototype technology and prove the business model in just a few months.

The multifunction team worked just like a start-up, launching with a one-week ‘design sprint’ that set the project off at a remarkable pace.

They spent time in a secure aircraft hangar in Cambridgeshire, working alongside Hercules bombers, getting close enough to aircraft engineers to really understand the process – which is currently distinctly analogue; paper forms, steel depth gauges and bits of string.

After the initial design print, the idea was incubated. They worked with two of the biggest airlines operating in the UK as initial partners, and were able to calculate that this new digital service could deliver savings to the global aviation market worth approximately £733 million.

Together, we worked like a start-up and ran experiments to test the desirability, feasibility and viability of the proposition.

Within 12 weeks we had designed a blueprint for the business, built relationships with two new customers, and had tested the tech inside the hangars of commercial airlines. It’s been a good start.

The Problem: How can a vast and traditionally organised company work more like a start-up to develop ideas that stretch their business model into new areas?What we did: Fluxx and Atkins created a Super Start-up; the speed and agility of a start-up combined with the expertise, scale and connections of a multinational. The outcome: By experimenting at pace we demonstrated that Atkins could design and sell digital products alongside traditional engineering and design services.

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18The best is yet to comeIt’s easy to feel overwhelmed by technological progress, but the real work – solving problems, building businesses – still has to be done.

by Richard Poole and Tom Whitwell

The Oxford Nanopore MinION is a £1,000 DNA Sequencer the size of a Mars Bar. In 2015 a scientist flew to West Africa with three MinIONs in his luggage, and was able to sequence the Ebola virus in 48 hours; a task that would previously have required a lab full of equipment. In 2016 it was tested in zero gravity on board the International Space Station.

Technological advances like the MiniION can give a sense of vertigo. The floor and roof drop away, and possibilities suddenly can seem endless.

In 2018 it’s easy to feel like any idea that didn’t use a handheld DNA sequencer, perhaps in conjunction with Blockchain, and Machine Learning and Augmented Reality goggles, would hardly be worth considering.

But that’s wrong. In 2018 you can make good decisions, create

radical products and change the world, without obsessing over the bleeding edge.

What’s important is understanding customers, finding real problems and bringing imagination and hard work to bear on solving those problems.

Starting with technology and building back is almost impossible because, as 1970s futurologist Roy Amara said, ‘We tend to overestimate the impact of a new technology in the short run, but  we underestimate it in the long run.’

Gene sequencing is itself a good example of Roy’s law. When Bill Clinton and Tony Blair jointly announced the first human gene sequence in 2000, their optimism (‘Our children’s children will know the term cancer only as a constellation of stars,’ said Clinton) seemed far-fetched. Ten years later it seemed absurd. Almost 20 years later, with scientists sequencing Ebola cures on their laptops, it’s starting to sound reasonable again.

The GPS navigation system has undoubtedly changed the world, but it took decades. The first GPS satellites were launched in 1974, and the constellation of 30+ satellites still wasn’t complete during the first Gulf War in 1990 – constant funding challenges and the Space Shuttle crash slowed it down.

By the millennium, the constellation was fully in place, signals were unlocked for civilian use and receivers were miniaturised. In 2004 TomTom built a vast business, selling tens of millions of sat-nav units for drivers.

At the time, TomTom felt like the logical conclusion – the end state of satellite navigation. Getting into location services in 2005 would seem foolhardy. In reality, it was just the start.

GPS chips were added to iPhones in 2008, and a year later Uber was born. Looking at the first backpack-sized GPS units in 1974, you might have imagined TomTom (now worth $2bn). You could never have imagined Uber (now worth $72bn).

Fluxx often helps companies respond to these kind of technology-led opportunities. What we see, over and over again is that people working in technology imagine that it is a force of nature, improving and ‘disrupting’ everywhere it goes.

But the important thing isn’t the technological breakthrough, but the ecosystem it creates, the need it meets, the societal change it makes possible.

It’s happened before, and will happen again. The invention of the electric motor didn’t

immediately change manufacturing. Factories were designed around steam engines, with power distributed by belts and gears. Electric motors (and the power stations they required) started to appear in 1881, but even 30 years later in 1910, many new factories were built using steam power.

Why? Economist Tim Harford explains: ‘To take advantage of electricity, factory owners had to think

People working in technology imagine that it is a force of nature. But the important thing isn’t the technological breakthrough, but the ecosystem it creates, the need it meets, the societal change it makes possible.

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20 oh, you didn’t really have the Internet (or whatever they’ll call it) back then.

‘And they’d be right. Because from our perspective now, the greatest online things of the first half of this century are all before us. All these miraculous inventions are waiting for that crazy, no-one-told-me-it-was-impossible visionary to start grabbing the low-hanging fruit .’

Sometime around 2019, perhaps? At Fluxx, we’re often invited in to help understand

how a revolutionary tech might help a business, but – as with electricity – the bigger victories come from re-inventing the way a process works.

For RSA we helped introduce simple but powerful tech to enable customers to send photos of claims rather than try to explain in words and drawings, but far bigger than that together we inverted the claims process to be a help process.

Rather than a combative stance to limit claims and payouts we started from a perspective of what could we do to help? The results were remarkable, including an NPS score moving from -12 to +97.

We’ve helped a water company use that Uber stack of location+communication+payments to reduce water leaks. We’re helping an engineering company re-fashion their business model in the face of automation. We’re using consumer-grade 3D scanners to improve aircraft maintenance schedules and building digital tools can help pensioners get the most from their pension pots.

It may be that the technology involved is the telling difference in each case, but it’s probably just a catalyst for thinking bigger about re-inventing the whole process and organisation that surrounds it.

in a very different way. They could, of course, use an electric motor in the same way as they used steam engines. It would slot right into their old systems. But electricity meant you could organise factories differently.

‘Old factories were dark and dense, packed around the shafts. New [electrified] factories could spread out, with natural light and air. Factories could be cleaner and safer – and more efficient, because machines needed to run only when they were being used.

‘But you couldn’t get these results simply by ripping out the steam engine and replacing it with an electric motor. You needed to change everything: the architecture and the production process… the way workers were recruited, trained and paid. Factory owners hesitated, for understandable reasons.’

Technology happens, but change takes longer, with progress a long way behind.

The people who find it hardest to change can be the people with the most power in the old world. As economist Chad Syverson explains: ‘Incumbents are designed around the current ways of doing things and so proficient at them that they are blind to or unable to absorb the new approaches and get trapped in the status quo—they suffer the “curse of knowledge”.’

It seems we’re reliving history at the moment, and the productivity gains of the digital revolution remain mostly in the future.

That feels counter-intuitive when every big company has been thinking about digital for at least a decade, and Apple and Facebook are vast companies, but it’s undoubtedly true.

In his wonderful (and short) essay ‘You Are Not Late’, Kevin Kelly imagines the first sixty years of the Internet, from the first .com domain name in 1985 to 2045. We’re bang in the middle:

‘In terms of the Internet, nothing has happened yet. The Internet is still at the beginning of its beginning. If we could climb into a time machine and journey 30 years into the future, and from that vantage look back to today, we’d realize that most of the greatest products running the lives of citizens in 2044 were not invented until after 2014.

‘People in the future will look at their holodecks, and wearable virtual reality contact lenses, and downloadable avatars, and AI interfaces, and say,

You couldn’t get these results simply by ripping out the steam engine and replacing it with an electric motor. You needed to change everything: the architecture and the production process.... the way workers they were recruited, trained  and paid.

The people who find it hardest to change can be the people with the most power in the old world.

The Fluxx Book

22Nine bad excuses (and our tricks to get around them)It can be hard to make progress quickly when working inside a big company, but it’s not impossible…

We don’t have the capacity.Excuse: ‘The call centre is at capacity; we don’t have the bandwidth to accommodate your experiment.’Solution: Fluxx helped a newspaper set up a new mini call centre in a morning. We bought an 0800 number, diverted it to a pay-as-you-go mobile, while routing live support chat to team mobile phones.

The brand police won’t sign off.‘It takes time to develop and launch a new concept under our existing brand.’Fluxx helped a global fashion publisher to launch a new skincare service. We got round the brand police by launching under a disposable brand, developed in a couple of hours. Customers liked the proposition, and – later – it became even stronger once the famous name was added to the mix.

You can’t just talk to customers.‘You need to follow procedure and talk to the insights team if you want to speak to any customers.’With most consumer brands, it’s surprisingly easy to find users willing to talk; ask friends, put out a call on social or search forums like Mumsnet. Grass roots insight can be surprisingly quick and insightful.

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We don’t have time to ask difficult questions.‘We just need to prove our customers want this.’Some companies don’t want to face the hard questions. Publishers like making new publications, insurers like developing new policies. Our role is often to ask harder questions: is there a completely new business model, and how can you test that?

Not this idea again.‘Not this idea again! We have tried this before and it failed… it will never work.’Fluxx helped a leading utility company run small experiments in a small area. It was an old idea, but had never actually been tested. It worked!

Innovation is just a sideshow. ‘The innovation event was great but I’m too busy to now work on the idea.’Fluxx helped a retirement company bring some new ideas to life. By sharing the ideas with a wider group of staff, we were able to find the individuals who wanted to work on the project – and clear it with their bosses.

Our brand is at risk if this all goes wrong.‘We don’t know how our customers will react to this... we don’t want to risk it.’A focus group hated a bank’s new idea, calling it intrusive. We ran a small, controlled experiment. Customers loved the service they told us they’d hate.

This might cannibalise our core business.‘Anything new, if not delivering immediate profit, is just a distraction from BAU.’Fluxx helped a financial services institution to set up an internal innovation lab to identify and validate new products. If the future is a distraction, it sometimes has to be done quietly, to one side.

We have a plan. The plan says no. ‘We can’t do anything new, because the releases for≈the next quarter have already been signed off.’Fluxx helped a cancer charity to test a novel contactless payment donation idea. By using cheap, easy, off-the-shelf tools, we were able to build and deployed the experiment with very little time from the in-house development team. Better still, it worked first time!

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The Fluxx Book

24Stop talking and start listening: Behaviour change at scaleBy uncovering the needs of small-business owners, we pivoted the government away from their standard approach, helping them to spark real behaviour change.

by Ariel Lerner

What if the government could help small businesses save £500m from their energy bills and reduce pollution and carbon emissions? That was the challenge that the Department of Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy brought to Fluxx.

Promoting energy efficiency is difficult; those £500m savings are spread very thin, so the impact on individual companies is often small. Traditionally, the government has believed that there is a knowledge gap.

Businesses, they believed, don’t know what savings are possible, so education and marketing is the most effective solution.

Fluxx started by interviewing dozens of real business owners. We quickly learned that knowledge is not the problem, and that energy initiatives are often undertaken for surprising reasons.

Over the course of six weeks, we spoke to many colourful characters running different types of businesses across the UK: the owner of a building company who came to life when she spoke about

Fluxx storyDepartment of

Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy

teaching her employees to pack a skip like a game of tetris, a restaurateur who built a supply chain based on friendships, a heating engineer who got health and safety certifications to make his company look bigger, an office manager whose goal was to make the company feel like home.

So it’s not that these business owners don’t care about the environment, it’s just that there are other things they care about more. With that in mind, we uncovered five broad motivations that drive business owners and office managers: business growth, self-fulfilment, people, ethics and money. We also discovered that the financial savings to be made by individual businesses are so small that most don’t bother pursuing cost-cutting energy initiatives.

Why, then, were these business owners doing things to reduce energy consumption? We found that the reason always traced back to one of the five motivations. For example, we spoke to the facilities manager of an events venue who was completely driven by people, going to great lengths to ensure the happiness of his employees and customers.

When he realised that the kitchen staff felt uncomfortably hot and customers in the event space felt uncomfortably cold, it was a no-brainer to install a ventilation system that would even out the temperature between the two. It happened that this system was highly efficient and massively cut energy costs, but he had been motivated by people rather than money.

The reason why BEIS’ energy initiatives haven’t worked in the past is that they tried to remove barriers that don’t exist.

Few people would admit that they don’t care about the environment, so if a survey asks why an individual isn’t energy conscious, they’ll answer that they haven’t learned about what they need to do, or say they don’t have the money to make improvements.

These aren’t barriers, they’re excuses. Because, ultimately, no one wants to feel like

they’re being judged. The best way to encourage energy efficiency is to shut up about energy efficiency and start talking about the things that actually motivate people.

This new way of approaching the problem went on to inform the alpha phase of work, where ideas based on insight are iteratively tested and measured.

The Problem: UK SMEs aren’t engaging with energy efficiency initiatives.

What we did: We spoke to business owners and office managers from small businesses across the UK to discover their everyday needs, frustrations, worries and behaviours, as well as their attitudes toward energy efficiency.

The outcome: We discovered five major motivations that drive business owners, and we showed BEIS that rather than remove reported barriers, it would be more fruitful to tap into innate motivations.

The Fluxx Book

Forget beanbags, these 3 things will actually help you hire millennialsHiring and retaining talent is getting harder every year. What do today’s bright young people look for from a company and a career?

by Ariel Lerner and Rory Keddie

A year at a consultancy, two years at a fintech in Slovenia, a year at a think-tank in New York? The most talented young people flit between jobs, cities and industries.

Big ideas need bright people, and competition for people is harder than ever before.

A landscape that was once intelligible has become baffling. Employees don’t only respond to money or status, but to purpose and lifestyle. They don’t want a job for life. They might not even think this is a job for a year.

Even successful companies now risk losing staff not just to higher-paying competitors but to tech giants like Facebook or Google and to start-ups. A gang of friends in a beaten-up office in Shoreditch or Berlin is now more attractive than a job for life.

How can traditional companies compete in this new world? We interviewed professionals early in their career journey. We heard how they found themselves in their current roles, what they value, why they’ve stayed, and what would make them leave.

Here’s what we learned.

1. The Tinder generation wants to explore their options at work as well as play.Young people are taking an experimental approach to finding the right job. Job-hopping isn’t necessarily due to indecision. Many of today’s roles have low barriers to entry. Becoming a social media manager, for example, doesn’t require board-approved certifications or postgraduate degrees, so it’s easy to accept a role for a period and then move on.

With so many options available, it can be difficult to cut through the noise and find what’s right for you. As part of the generation that’s hyper-aware of advertising, Chris was sceptical of how companies advertise themselves to new recruits: ‘My company has very good branding. The website is slick, the perception they give of themselves is different to what it’s actually like working there. I realised I wouldn’t know what any of these jobs would be like until I actually do them.’

Arianna put this thinking into practice: ‘I decided not to decide. I worked in a bakery, I worked in journalism, I worked in investment management. And then I kind of decided, actually, I’m gonna try banking.’

Instead of accepting short-term roles, Darius preferred a ‘try-before-you-buy’ approach; he joined a start-up after having drinks with the whole team, something that they include in its interview process: ‘There’s real transparency before you join,’ he said. Takeaways: • Host Meetups or other public-facing events that

allow curious jobseekers to see your office and meet employees in a casual, low-pressure environment.

• If possible, create rotational graduate schemes that allow young people to find what they love within the company, instead of leaving to find it elsewhere.

• Be honest in how you present the company and the work that a new employee can expect to do. They won’t stick around if it doesn’t align with expectations.

2. The Instagram generation won’t tolerate boredom when it looks like everyone else is having fun. The People Analytics team at Facebook compared employees who stay long-term to employees who leave quickly. They found that people who stay find

26Who we spoke toAriannaEconomics and Chinese at Edinburgh UniversityIntern at HSBC in Hong Kong

DariusHistory at the New College of HumanitiesRecruitment manager at an education start-up

ChrisMaterials Science at the Cambridge. Financial consultant at a major business consultancy

RalfProduct Design Engineering at BrunelSenior Category Manager at multinational drinks company

BillyClimbed company ranks to become a Business Analyst at a UK utility company

AndreaLeft a graduate scheme at international beverage company to found her own business

The Fluxx Book

their work more enjoyable and they feel they’re learning skills they need to grow their careers.

In a fluid, chaotic job market, people don’t know what skills their next job will need, so they want to cast the net wide.

Ralf has based his career around tackling his weaknesses: ‘I had a creative background, but not much commercial experience and I wasn’t great with numbers. I wanted to join a company where I could develop some of those skills.’ This is very different to the typical approach of playing to your strengths, but it has meant that Ralf never gets bored.

Andrea left her job because she felt she wasn’t doing anything of value, and therefore wasn’t learning anything new: ‘I want to be doing something that has an impact as a result, rather than just pushing papers. My old company hire young, ambitious graduates then they tell them to be quiet and not be too ambitious.’

She left to pursue her own business, and her desire for variety has been met: ‘I love that I get to learn everything. One day I’m a content creator, the next I’m on a plane to California pitching my business idea. I get to do ten different things in a day.’

It’s also possible to make an impact in a big company. Ralf lights up when he talks about [a big beverage company]: ‘One of the first things my manager said to me when I joined was, ‘You should do whatever you think will bring value to your role and to the business.’ I had an immediate sense of freedom and the opportunity to develop, and do the role how I wanted to do it.’

Takeaways • Instead of exit interviews, conduct entry

interviews. Sit down with new employees and find out what they’re passionate about, what excites them. Then do your best to integrate that kind of work into their role.

• Give younger staff projects to own within the company. Find tricky issues, publicise them, and let junior employees get their hands dirty.

3. The Myspace kids personalised their accounts in 2008. They want to personalise their jobs in 2018‘I’m trying to find a way to balance it all; money, health, culture. I still haven’t found that,’ says Arianna. She wants a stable job, with people she likes, where she can have fun and stay healthy.

Less eager to sacrifice their early years, working long hours to make it by the time they’re 30, millennials place high value on work-life balance. ‘I know people say being successful is what  you should always strive for, but at what cost?’ says Marcus. ‘If I managed to get up to that level and have that work-life balance then that’s amazing. But not many people are able to do it. There is always sacrifice, but where do you put that sacrifice?’

Working long hours in an office environment is a big turn off. Juan (24) a Policy Analyst at a political think tank, tells us that he is more productive at home and finds the intensity and distractions of a office environment quite stressful at times.

The lure of overseas work can be very attractive for many young people, a real opportunity for global organisations.

Like his parents, Ralf looks for ‘a global career with a company that’ll take me around the world.’Takeaways • Encourage impact, not hours. At companies

like Netflix, even holidays are unmetered. • Granting employees sabbaticals after a certain

period of service and actively promoting this to future talent. This way, their appetite to take career breaks is satisfied without losing the talent you have spent time training for leadership positions.

• If possible, allow for a level of flexibility when it comes to working location and working hours.

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‘I worked in a bakery, I worked in journalism, I worked in investment. Then I decided, actually, I’m gonna try banking.’

'PRINCIPLES OF THE LAB'

The Fluxx Book

What we learned about company culture running a start‑up labFluxx launched the first corporate accelerator for one of the biggest media companies in the country and experienced first-hand what works. And what doesn’t.

Words: Jenn Torry Illustration: Chesca Kirkland

Ben Horowitz, the Silicon Valley VC behind Skype, Facebook, Oculus and Twitter, couldn’t be more clear: ‘Take care of the people, the product, and the profits in that order.’

For start-ups moving into an incubator backed by a major company, some degree of culture shock is inevitable.

And culture is not ‘the soft stuff’ you can think about later. Get the culture wrong and you could spoil your chances at ever turning start-up potential into ‘the hard stuff’ – cash.

When Fluxx launched News UK’s first incubator in 2017, we chose from over 200 applicants, welcoming a lucky seven into our programme. The one thing they had in common was a shared ambition to make their business a success.

In a short period of time, we had to get them working well with each other, working well with a big corporation and working at an accelerated pace of progress. This is how we did it.

On day one in the lab, the companies came together to create a set of principles to share how they wanted to work and collaborate.

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The Fluxx Book

32 was being favoured over another, risking a culture of resentment that will quickly poison a culture of productivity. We learned the importance of communicating the ‘equal but different proviso’. Everyone won’t be having the same experience, but that they will all be having an experience of equal value and benefit to their business.6. Choose fluidity over structure Fluxx designed the News UK Startup Lab to provide specific resources to whom they were needed, when they were needed — rather than create a rigid structured programme to which the entire cohort must adhere. The flexibility helped the start-ups get things done quickly no matter how different their journeys and put them in the driver’s seat where entrepreneurs tend to be most comfortable.7. Celebrate learnings publicly… especially failuresOne of Fluxx’s principles is that ‘if you cannot fail, you cannot learn.’ By publicly sharing both successes and failures, we helped foster a culture of collaboration, humility and prioritisation.8. Make a positive working culture a success metricAs a product and service-innovation company, Fluxx treated the lab as a product in its own right. Its success would not be measured by how much investment the companies received, but rather if the founders would write a positive testimonial about their experience regardless of the outcome. We measured the health of Lab weekly using anonymous Survey Monkeys which enabled us to change what wasn’t working while there was still time to influence the experience. Build, measure, learn — it’s in our DNA and it just works.

Looking back at News UK’s first Startup Lab, we’re proud of what we created. And we’re even more proud of what our start-ups achieved as more than half achieved a positive outcome.

Setting out on this journey can be daunting — and when you’re staring at the numbers on a spreadsheet, focusing on culture might not seem very important. But at the end of the day, we do this to unlock the potential of people.

It’s people who change the world, and if we get that right, the numbers might just follow.To learn more about the News UK Startup Lab, visit: newsukstartuplab.co.uk

1. Set expectations up-frontAn incubator is a contractual relationship between the start-up and the parent, often with a monetary value attached. What does the sponsor expect the start-up to achieve during the accelerator? And what value does the start-up expect to get from it? We’ve also created ‘Discovery Days’ to make those expectations more explicit from the start.2. Speak like a humanNobody likes jargon. And being open, transparent and timely is especially important when it comes to legal documents. We worked hard with News UK’s legal team to remove any traces of ‘legalese’. Instead of using the typical 300+ words to discuss intellectual property, we said, ‘You own your own content. What you walk in here with is yours when you walk out.’3. Prioritise collaboration over competition Start-ups often feel like they won their place in the lab and are competing against one another for the prize of investment. So when Fluxx brought together the start-ups on day one, the first activity we designed into their programme was to co-create a shared set of ‘lab principles’.

This let them decide for themselves how they would work best together and gave us a forum to emphasise that they are not each other’s competition.4. Demonstrate your commitmentThere was no doubt that the start-up founders in our lab were committed. So News UK needed to show them that they were just as committed.

Each start-up was assigned an executive sponsor from the News UK board, two to three mentors in areas they needed guidance with, and support from business functions like commercial, UX and data.

This not only had an emotional impact in helping the residents realise they were a priority for News UK, but had a practical impact in demonstrating a fair value exchange for their time in the lab.5. Treat people equally, but differentlyEach start-up in our lab received a place in residency for different reasons. So we tailored the lab experiences for each to give each of them the type of support they needed to prove their business model.

This caused tension – a sense that one start-up

Instead of using the typical 300+ words to discuss intellectual property, we simply said, ‘You own your own content. What you walk in here with is still yours when you walk out.’

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wasn

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The Fluxx Book

34Cleaning up the business of food delivery By understanding consumers’ habits and their changing needs we helped the Food Standards Agency take mobile food hygiene ratings to the Deliveroo generation.

by Adam Slawson

Helping consumers and businesses make informed and safe decisions when it comes to food is important. In 2016/17, the FSA investigated 2,265 incidents.

Offline the Food Hygiene Rating System (FHRS) ‘scores on the doors’ green stickers are an iconic and informative piece of graphical communication.

Online there is no equivalent; customers ordering from Deliveroo or JustEat have no way to understand how hygienic the kitchen preparing their food is.

The Food Standards Agency asked us to develop an online equivalent of the green stickers that might be embedded into apps and websites.

We didn’t set out to alarm the people we interviewed, but a few of them became rather anxious when they started to think through the process: you pick a meal from an app, and it’s made... somewhere. It might be a beautiful clean kitchen, it might be a shipping container infested with who knows what.

The consumers we spoke to told us food hygiene online is often ‘not given a second thought’. People assume everything is okay because within a few clicks ‘as if by magic’ food just arrives.

Worse still, research shows that ‘hunger levels can have a detrimental impact on the brain’s ability

Fluxx storyFood Standards

Agency

to digest information, which in turn can lead to poorer decision-making’.

Over an intense six-week period, we built prototypes, ranging from text-only versions that could be pasted into Instagram to a full end-to-end system including an API that allowed developers to start hacking together their own apps using the data.

Providing real and ongoing feedback to the FSA team maximised the amount of time to iterate the design and confirmed their confidence in the process.

In a series of co-creation workshops with customers, restaurant owners and developers, we asked individuals to create their own version of the badges. This was fun, and unearthed a lack of common understanding of what the ratings mean.

Testing in a real environment, on customer mobiles, allowed us to optimise badge designs; improving contrast for users with vision difficulties, and ensuring designs would work with screen-reading software.

We learned that to encourage adoption by the aggregators, the design needed to strike a balance between ‘totally obvious to consumers’ and ‘taking up valuable space on the page’. The final version of the design struck that well and adhered to the FSA’s strict brand guidelines.

In parallel with the design process we developed and tested the supporting digital platform. This was the ‘back-end’ for businesses to download the versions of the badge required for display on various locations online.

We ran a hack day which included representatives from Just Eat, PizzaExpress and the FSA, building prototypes with the food hygiene API, including the Hygiene Heatmap, which could help food inspectors identify trouble hotspots.

The project was a combination of the Discovery (research) and Alpha (prototyping) phases of the Government Digital Service standard approach.

By the end, we had a refined, functional prototype that had been designed hand-in-hand with a diverse group of stakeholders with often conflicting needs (for example about where in the purchase flow the ratings should appear).

That prototype is now being tested by the FSA and will form the basis of future versions of the Food Hygiene Ratings System.

The Problem: Food hygiene online isn’t visible. The FSA wanted guidance on the design and placement of an online version of their Food Hygiene Rating System (the ‘scores on the doors’ green badges).

What we did: We spoke to customers, restaurateurs, supermarket officials and food-delivery aggregators to design then test the placement of the online badge and the supporting digital platform.

The outcome: We delivered an online toolkit which works for all involved and evidence for the FSA to inform the government of the importance behind their suggested placement of the badges.

The Fluxx Book

Daily StandupA 15-minute meeting at the same time every

morning. Preferably face-to-face, preferably

actually standing up (it discourages long-

windedness). Each team member answers the

following three questions: • What did you do yesterday?

• What will you do today?

• Are there any blockers in your way?

‘We held daily standups during some key pieces of

work with Barclays, ASDA, and Amazon and found

it incredibly helpful in ensuring the level of focus

required is achieved on a daily basis.’

Richard Edwards, Director New Partnerships,

Legal & General plc

Agile (part 1)At Fluxx, we understand agile in two ways. An agile business is one that can quickly adapt to market and environmental changes in a way that is productive and cost-effective. In a changing world, businesses need to be able to change. Obviously.

Agile (part 2) Agile (with a capital A) is also

used to describe a specific way

to do software delivery. Instead

of defining the entire product

upfront, an agile team will

create software in short

iterations, where each feature

has a measurable impact.

RapidStartA RapidStart is a two day innovation event, created

by Fluxx in 2012, where ideas are brought to life.

Employees from different parts of a business come

together for 48 hours to pitch and work on ideas to

improve the service or products they offer

customers.It is not a hackathon or a talking shop. Teams work

through real customer problems and challenges

and consider technical feasibility, business

viability and customer desirability.

‘A RapidStart is a highly facilitated workshop where

ideas to solve a particular business problem can be

identified, prioritised, and shaped into an initial

view of the solution along with the business case.’

Andi McCann, Innovation Programme

Director, HSBC

Portal Like its evil twin the ‘one-stop

shop’, a portal is a website that

is supposed to do everything.

When a project involves a portal, it’s often a sign that the

real customer need hasn’t yet

been found.

Ethnographic research Observing and talking to people in their environment — home or workplace. Usually more interesting than inviting them to join a focus group.

Gallery Walk Instead of sitting down and watching a PowerPoint deck around a boardroom table, the team update is done by walking around the team’s working space, talking through everything on the walls; post-it notes of customer insight, sketches of journey maps on brown paper sheets.

Build‑Measure‑LearnWhat does a start-up actually do all day? They turn ideas into products, measure how customers respond, and then learn whether to pivot or persevere. This is the Build-Measure-Learn loop. The faster it spins, the more quickly you learn.

‘Ascential worked with Fluxx, using Build-Measure-Learn to understand the potential of a new business concept in the fastest possible way. We created the simplest possible incarnation of our product and tested it with customers. ‘By measuring their response, we were able to adapt our strategy and quickly learn whether there was a market for the product. Then we could decide whether to persevere with the idea or pivot.’ Nicky Ashwell, Senior Product Manager, Ascential

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WTF is an MVP?

by Karl Jansen Some people enjoy using too much ridiculous jargon when talking about innovation. This is how the people we work with at Fluxx understand what it all means.

The Fluxx Book

Problem Definition For any new business idea, you

can get to valuable solutions

quicker by first defining the

problem being addressed.

‘It sounds easy, but it turns out its not! Getting to a shared

understanding of the real problem takes both time and

skill. It’s an activity best undertaken with customer input and a clear head.’Kathy Liu, Head of Innovation,

Global Operations, HSBC

Scaling UpExperiments start small,

testing the big assumptions.

As projects gather evidence of

a viable model, the experiments

get bigger — drawing in more

customers, creating something

that feels more like the real

deal. The start-up ‘scales up’,

transforms into a real business,

which continues to grow.

MVPThe Minimum Viable Product is a term that has changed its meaning over time. In Eric Ries’ The Lean Startup, the MVP was an early experiment designed to test an assumption. Today, the MVP is often the first, minimally featured release of a product to users. The MVP should have just enough features to be useful in the real world, but might fall behind what you’d what to build to be truly competitive or future-proof. “An Experiment is a quick way to check that you are building the right thing. I have used this with Fluxx in large corporate scenarios to test market propositions; Would customers buy a ‘Name your price’ insurance product, and what price would they name? When you’re ready to start building the real thing, it’s important to build an MVP with only the features you know customers really need in order to get to market quickly” Matt Poll, ex Commercial Director, More Than, now Founder and CEO Neos.

PersonaA persona is a fictional-but-credible character,

built from the insights gathered in user research.

These characters are a shortcut to having actual

users or customers in the room – we’ll sometimes

even print them on life-sized boards.

‘Personas become the centre of the proposition

development work. They become very real in helping

to articulate how the proposition is right for a real

individual. This was a critical stage of winning the

Barclays Life business, as it really showed our desire

to understand their customer’s needs, and not simply

offer an off-the-shelf solution.’

Richard Edwards, Legal & General plc

Hassle Map When talking to customers, you often hear about all the frustrations that make it hard to use a product or service. A Hassle Map sets out all those irritations in a logical, idealised journey; everything bad or slow or painful about using a service. When designing improvements or new services, the Hassle Map helps you focus on real customer problems.

ExperimentExperiments are a practical, low-risk way to validate our key assumptions without the effort or cost of building the full solution. They also provide evidence from real customer interactions, rather than opinions from the team or from research.

‘We needed a low-risk way to validate a smart home insurance proposition, so we created a fake company and took an stand at The Grand Designs Show. ‘We had the technology on the stand and were able to demonstrate it to our target audience in order to get direct feedback. ‘As the show was over five days we were able to iterate different versions of the proposition each day, in order to test assumptions and get realistic reactions from potential customers.’Steve Jay, Head of Innovation, More Than

Wizard of Oz This is an experiment where you build a product that looks real, but behind the scenes it’s held together with sellotape and manual labour. Fluxx once ran a smart transport system that was really a minicab

service run from our our office.

Accelerator For ideas that have had initial traction, and initial customer signups, accelerators are a way to promote very intensive periods of growth, often to get an idea ready for investment.

‘This is a way to get help, support and expertise necessary to really speed up the go to market process.’Matt Poll, ex Commercial Director, More Than, now Founder and CEO Neos.

AssumptionsInnovation is inherently uncertain. Every new idea is made up of any number of assumptions: ‘People will buy this’, ‘People will understand this’, ‘This is a real problem that people have’.

The process of product development is all about testing those assumptions. The assumptions canvas is a step-by-step diagram to map out and reveal key assumptions – all the things required for your idea to be successful. ‘When we started to experiment with student onboarding, we needed to find out if we really knew what we thought we knew. Confusing times! So we wrote down everything we thought we knew. Then we could evaluate and test which of those assumptions were important, and whether these were true.’ Matt Burge, Senior Analyst,

Anglia Ruskin University.

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Minimal viable HQ: How to run a lab from a handbag and a flip chartSometimes it’s not possible to make space for a slick beanbag-filled lab. Usually, that’s not a problem. Here’s how we created a minimum viable HQ in a break-out area near The Times newsroom.

Words: Lucy Willett

When Fluxx helped launch The Brief Premium, a new legal product from The Times, within a few days we had over 100 customers and after a couple of months we had over 500. This is how we managed the product and kept customers happy.

1Find your spot Select your start-up ‘HQ’ space wisely. Make it open-plan with plenty of natural light.

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2Get close to the buzzFind a position where there’s a bit of buzz or activity – a break-out area near the canteen. Closed offices are quiet and comfortable, but it’s much harder to make an impact or meet the people you need.

3Wall space Is more important than desk space. If necessary, use whiteboards, screens or even flip charts on stands as temporary walls.

4Customer investigations Act like a detective, and get everything you know about customers up on the wall. Use Post-Its for customer anecdotes, unsolved questions and important facts. Get it all out!

5 Critical metrics What numbers will prove your business model? We used total customers, engagement (average pages per visit), total revenue and cost per acquisition. Write them big and update them every day.

6Helpdesk operations Track the total number of support queries, and Post-it any unresolved issues. You don’t want to lose this stuff in a dusty spreadsheet.

7Progress metrics How many customers have you spoken to? How many experiments have you launched? For passing traffic, this is progress in action.

8Call centreFor the customer service hotline, we used callready.co.uk to create a disposable dedicated customer service number that diverted to an old Pay As You Go Nokia handset. We were up and running within an hour or so.

9Nerve Centre Spreadsheets to track customers and support calls, the email inbox, and the place to use tools like Unbounce to launch experiments quickly.

10Live ChatWe used GoSquared to provide live chat. With the app on our own smartphones, we got used to answering customer questions in the canteen queue (and yes, on the loo).

11All the answers A FAQ and a script to answer key questions about the product is really helpful and keeps you sounding slick to new customers.

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42How to really help those people who cost you the mostHow do you empower customers with digital technology? Spending time with teenagers helped secure a €500k funding round for an innovative health-tech start-up.

by Digby Killick

Innerstrength are a health-tech start-up helping those with serious medical issues stay fit and healthy through physiotherapy, coaching and better self-management of their conditions. They have already launched one successful app – Tickerfit – which helps those who have had heart attacks or similar cardiac events.

Their challenge is one we’ve seen before – how do you empower customers through digital technology? Before building anything, they realised it was essential understand their customers, their lives and their habits and their needs. We had to remind ourselves what it was like to be a teenager.

Getting patients to self-manage their conditions better not only improves their health, but also helps the NHS manage its budget better. However, looking after oneself is difficult for even the most responsible adults, let alone teenagers. The situation is even more challenging when the condition is a complex life-long disease such as cystic fibrosis.

Avril and Greg, co-founders of Innerstrength,

Fluxx StoryInnerstrength

Health

knew they could apply their expertise from building Tickerfit to other conditions, and cystic fibrosis seemed ideal.

It requires daily physiotherapy and exercise – Innerstrength’s specialist subject – and staying on top of that exercise has a real impact on the number of times patients are admitted to hospital – something the NHS is keen to reduce.

Fluxx was brought in to help Innerstrength get closer to their customers. In the first week, we spoke to doctors, nurses, dieticians, psychologists and physiotherapists – anyone involved in helping look after teenagers with cystic fibrosis.

They gave us a clear view of their problems, challenges and frustrations, but it wasn’t until we went out to visit the teenagers in their own homes that we understood the reality of the situation.

We had been looking at cystic fibrosis one way – as a serious life-limiting disease – another way to look at it is it just sucks.

The teenagers we spoke to wanted to go to karate, play Minecraft, watch YouTube and go out with friends. cystic fibrosis is something that gets in the way of living the kind of life they want to live.

It became clear very quickly that our customers didn’t identify themselves as patients at all, not even as customers.

They were teenagers and if we wanted them to use an app it would have to be interesting, useful and easy.

Through our interviews the teenagers gave us a list of features an app must have, should have and could have to make it interesting. Not all requests made it through though. One teenager said ‘Oooh, I’d really like it if you could build me a magic microwave!’ That sounded odd until when asked ‘what would the microwave do?’ they said ‘remind me when to take my medicine.’

Using the teenagers’ (very) honest feedback Innerstrength were able to iterate the app and build something that really serves their needs – something they actually want to use.

The learnings were equally valuable to the business case too; as the evidence gathered convinced investors to provide funding worth over €500k.

With that investment Innerstrength are now growing and are soon to launch their first clinical trial – watch this space!

The Problem: If teenagers could better self-manage their lifelong conditions there will be fewer hospital admissions.

What we did: We helped Innerstrength get closer to teenagers to uncover how they would want a medical app to work.

The outcome: Our research informed Innerstrength’s designs and business case, securing them two rounds of funding.

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44My mum is becoming a data scientist at 54

Having experienced first-hand the wonders of modern medicine that are keeping us alive for longer, my mum is taking the time to explore the opportunities her life has to offer.

by Rory Keddie

At the age of 54 my mum is training to become a data scientist. Voted sexiest job of the 21st century, it’s a career option that didn’t even exist when she first entered the job market.

The term itself was first coined in 2008 by DJ Patil and Jeff Hammerbacher, then the respective leads of data and analytics efforts at LinkedIn and Facebook.

Tenacious and driven, my mum enjoys embracing new challenges. Between raising two boys and gaining a PHD, she has also spent the past 25 years working as a maths teacher.

Last year she ventured into the world of entrepreneurship by launching her own sports massage product, Wellbrix. She describes this experience as opening her eyes to jobs she never knew existed. Careers, like data science, that could provide ways for her to apply her mathematical ability to new challenges while earning more than she could as a teacher.

But prior to undertaking the necessary steps in making this career change, she encountered her own serious setback.

Just a few days before the application deadline for a data science course at General Assembly, she was hit by a car when riding her bike.

I received the news of my mum’s accident in Edinburgh airport, waiting to fly back to London. I arrived at the hospital the next day to find my fearless mother mummified in bandages, her head supported by a neck brace.

She had suffered breaks to both arms and a fracture to her neck, millimetres away from the spinal cord. And yet, through the pain, she was able to muster a smile and greet me as I arrived.

Unbelievably, she was also determined to submit her application to the data science course – the deadline was just one day away. Despite every effort from myself and Nick, my mum’s partner, to convince her to rest, she remained determined.

Even as she was wheeled away for an operation on her broken arm, Nick and I were tasked with preparing her application for submission. Depending on the amount of morphine administered, she would try and inspect our work upon return.

Three months later, Mum was making a steady recovery, working towards the General Assembly data science course that started in the summer.

Metal plates are supporting a number of her limbs, but with yoga and daily physiotherapy, her strength and flexibility is returning. Psychologically she has suffered too, but with pain has come a renewed focus to make this change in her life. As a walking cyborg she may now be even better suited to a future-forward career in data science.

Living a multistage life Nearly ten years away from the UK retirement age it may be hard to grasp the reasons behind a career move of this magnitude this ‘late in the game’.

But the ‘game’ is no longer what it once was, as the current three-stage life of education, career and retirement is being replaced by a multistage life. A life which rewards flexibility, demands continuous learning and remains agnostic to your age. Age is no longer stage.

With the wonders of modern medicine, the length of life, and with it time to explore opportunities, is ever increasing.

As a walking cyborg she may now be even better suited to a future-forward career in data science.

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46 Born in 1964, my mum can expect to live for 91 years (according to the Human Mortality Database, Berkeley) so long, of course, as she avoids dangerous and elderly drivers.

A staggering 50% of babies born in the UK in 2007 can expect to live to reach their 104th birthdays.

As the world continues to move at such a fast pace, the need to adapt is becoming all the more critical.

As Lynda Gratton and Andrew Scott write in The 100 Year Life, ‘If you are in your forties, fifties or sixties then you need to reconsider your future and think about how you will reinvest in the second half of your life. Failure to innovate in response to a longer life will mean stresses and strains in your life as existing models are stretched uncomfortably over 100 years.’

Increasingly, people of all ages are embracing the opportunities of a multifaceted career and are taking steps to learn new skills and move in different directions, regardless of what stage of life they’re at.

Having spent 31 years at the Financial Times as a columnist and associate editor, Lucy Kellaway made the decision to leave the newspaper to become a maths teacher in a London Secondary School.

Kellaway has co-founded Now Teach, a scheme designed to help older professionals move into teaching. In its first year the scheme received over a thousand applications, with 45 places being awarded to an eclectic mix of professionals, from marines to diplomats, film-makers to athletes. Their ages range from the youngest at 42 to the oldest, 67.

Some applicants were disaffected with the corporate world, but not all. One applicant, who had previously spent 30 years working in the city, said, ‘I always loved my work. But I thought, how much time do I have left on the planet? Do I want to go on and on doing the same thing?’

An appetite for changeThere is an appetite for change and the professional role models of the future are beginning to make this feel more accessible.

Currently, it may feel like a luxury to change career, a choice reserved for the fortunate few who

have saved enough or lack the responsibilities of a young family, for instance. But as the job market changes radically over the next few years many jobs will disappear as new jobs, like data scientist, come into existence.

Some may fear that we lack the necessary role models to help guide us forwards in this new multistage life. The career decisions that worked for previous generations won’t work for us.

But new role models are emerging. My mum is one, Lucy Kellaway another. It is possible to change career later in life, and soon it may become a necessity. Companies need to be prepared for this change by providing their employees with skills for the future, while finding new ways to define loyalty  –  not only restricting the definition to length of  service.

Attitudes will need to shift somewhat in order to ensure that ageism in the workplace does not prevent career changes later in life.

Companies and employees alike must embrace the opportunity to hire older people into more junior positions. Diversity in the workforce is of greater importance than ever before and this includes diversity of age and experience.

My mum shows that with the will power and determination, you can make changes to your career, regardless of your age.

And now we’ll be living much longer lives – well, it’s worth taking the time to find the thing you like and will thrive at into the future. Even if that job doesn’t exist yet.

50% of babies born in the UK in 2007 can expect to live to reach their 104th birthdays.

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48Seven throwaway designs that changed the worldIt’s a real culture shock when established brands have to work fast to compete with nimble challengers. But some of the most iconic and powerful designs in history were created very quickly indeed.

by Thomas Dowdell

The transition from working in a conventional design studio to working in a company like Fluxx is at first a shock to the system. Instead of poring over a design for weeks, pushing pixels to perfection, we work at speed; creating just-in-time designs for experiments.

It’s always inspiring how much value even the simplest designs can add to prototype products and services – making something feel just real enough.

Building a product, even in the simplest possible way, makes it real and forces us to explain our propositions clearly. This enables us to test, learn and validate our assumptions, and over time builds strong foundations to improve and iterate on.

It’s a challenge faced by designers for centuries.

1. Suffragette protest posters It’s 100 years since women won the vote in the UK, and design was a significant factor in the success of≈the Suffragette movement. Founded in 1909, the Suffrage Atelier was a kind of underground design studio, where professional and non-professional

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50 illustrators created posters. They hired women like Hilda Dallas, an art student who joined the Suffrage Atelier in 1909 and created beautiful, clear, angry images inspired by Art Nouveau, like Joan of Arc – sword in hand – on the cover of The Suffragette Penny Weekly in 1914.

2. The first daily newspaper In 1702 paper had – for the first time – become so cheap that the world’s first daily newspaper emerged, The Daily Courant. It was the first time any form of daily media was made available to a mass audience.

The Daily Courant was specifically designed to have a shelf life of 24 hours and then be thrown away. The purpose of the Courant was to share the truth with the masses, without comment or bias: ‘Nor will the Author take it upon himself to give any Comments or Conjectures of his own, but will relate only Matter of Fact; supposing other People to have Sense enough to make Reflections for themselves.’

3. Propaganda Through the 20th century propaganda served as a powerful tool to tap into our unconscious, to change opinions or ultimately push an agenda and alter society itself.

The format was often crass; cheaply produced throwaway flyers, leaflets or posters, but many of the century’s greatest artists worked in propaganda, from Russian El Lissitzky to Shepard Fairey’s Hope poster for Barack Obama.

4. Punk zines In the mid 1970s, the Xerox photocopier became mainstream. Copy shops appeared in every town, and it became possible to print a few hundred folded A5 magazines for the price of a few records.

Punk zines were cheap and quick to produce, giving a voice to the youth. In a pre-computer era they were crudely designed, hand drawn, typewritten or pasted together from borrowed imagery.

This do-it-yourself attitude caught on. Big names in zine culture such as ‘Sniffin’ Glue’ wanted to ‘flood the market with punk writing.’ That was exactly what happened, otherwise siloed voices were empowered to let themselves be heard.

5. Junk emailThe first junk email was sent in 1978, advertising a mini computer to users of ARPANET, the military precursor to the Internet. The reaction was so negative that it took almost 20 years for the idea of spam to recover.

But by the mid 1990s, unwelcome email marketing was becoming a serious problem. Spam emails are intricately designed, using graphics, language, psychology, data and computing power to deluge millions of people with offers for Viagra tablets and Nigerian princes in trouble.

6. Memes Memes have changed the way we criticise and satirise. In some ways, they work like traditional cartoons used to satirise politics. But unlike traditional satirical cartoons, they are a tool for the masses.

Born in anonymous online forums in the early 2000s, memes (in this case meaning an image with some big words overlaid) came of age in the mid 2010s. In the 2016 elections, memes shared on Facebook were credited with Labour’s success. In the US, Donald Trump was said to have ‘won the meme wars’.

7. Emojis Emojis grew organically from the emoticons ( ;-) )used in text messaging, being codified in Japanese phones in the noughties, going worldwide in 2010.

They’re the perfect metaphor for the work we do at Fluxx; making the complex seem simple while at the same time finding complexity in things that at first seem simple.

Spam is intricately designed, using graphics, language, psychology and data to deluge millions with offers for Viagra tablets

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What happens if your target customer doesn’t really exist?Omnichannel retailer GAME used ultra-rapid guerrilla experimentation to get closer to their customers, test new formats and get past the cliches about what ‘gamers’ want.

by Amanda Howe

GAME is a British high street institution, selling video games from 300 stores since the early 1990s. Despite stiff price competition from online-only retailers including Amazon, the firm has diversified – opening BELONG game arenas and partnering with Sports Direct to enter the eSports market.

GAME’s secret weapon is the passion of its customers, which is reflected in the knowledge and enthusiasm of its store staff.

However, they’d struggled to capture that passion online. Despite having a huge online audience, they’ve found it hard to find a compelling, distinctive voice, particularly when competing with the vast amounts of video game content that can be found in channels like YouTube.

Fluxx were asked to help GAME get closer to customers and to find new ways to rapidly develop products and content ideas.

Instead of spending a fortune on high-end studios and content production, could we help them find a niche simply by understanding British video game players better than anyone else?

In a small cross-functional team with researchers, designers and product managers, both from Fluxx and GAME, we started with customers; getting out into stores, going into people’s homes and lurking at the back of eSports tournaments. Very quickly, we learned something unexpected.

We met lots of people who played games, often for hours every day and often spending significant amounts. But they really didn’t describe themselves as ‘gamers’.

Someone who plays football, 5 a side, four nights a week with their friends is very unlikely to call themselves a footballer. They just wouldn’t say that, and some of these committed video game players were the same. For these people, gaming was a hobby, an interest, even a passion. But it wasn’t an identity.

Back at GAME HQ, we set up a small, lean content lab with a clear brief: Given what we’d learned about people who play games, how could we create content that would click with people who play games, not just hardcore gamers?

Over a few weeks, we ran dozens of small-scale content experiments; testing different video formats, trying different tones of voice.

We found that cheap-looking home-made videos were sometimes more appealing than slick studio-filmed videos.

We tested ‘intersectional’ content – a bit video games, a bit music – that definitely resonated.

We found that in some cases locally produced (store based) content outperformed centrally produced content by 71%.

Every time we work with a real brand, and real customers, the tests have to be tightly controlled. We’d expose an idea to 20,000 viewers on Facebook, then take it down. The scale of GAME’s audience, and their commitment to the project, meant it was very quick to run experiments at a significant scale.

Within six weeks we helped the committed GAME team to create the tools and techniques they needed to turbocharge their content output. They had personas – pen portraits of types of customer – that they used to check content ideas against.

They felt empowered to give more of a voice to front-line staff. Ultimately, they were able to create and deliver the right content to the right people at the right time.

The Problem: GAME were producing endless amounts of expensive content and not reaping benefits.

What we did: By getting them close to customers and exposing the business to test and learn experimentation, we were able to prove the value of any content production moving forward.

The outcome: Far more effective and sticky content was created based on genuine appetite and understanding of the role that customers want GAME to play.

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The one where Friends teaches you how to be a great service designerAs someone who grew up with Friends narrating every aspect of my life, I can say with confidence that there is no lesson worth learning that isn’t taught in Friends.

1. The one where you talk to actual customers (S04E22)Chandler notices that his new girlfriend doesn’t ‘agree with me as strongly as she did with Joey’ in bed. He asks Monica and Rachel (people with experience of the service) to explain the holes in his current performance. After a diagram and a some user testing, Cathy is delighted with the outcome and becomes a frequent returning customer!This taught me to… Speak to the people who actually use (or will use) your service. It’s tempting to take existing data or research as fact without actually asking people what they want and need now.

2. The one where you make sure you’re solving a genuine problem (S06E08)In anticipation of a hot date, Ross decides to whiten his teeth, thinking the current colour is why he’s unsuccessful with woman. He leaves the treatment on for too long, his teeth start to glow, and he’s unable to open his mouth during the date. This taught me to… Before starting a project, get to the bottom of the problem. Is it based on real customer data, or just a HIPPO (HIghest Paid Person’s Opinion)?

3. The one where your customer’s experience starts way before you think (S01E09)Joey modelled for a medical advert warning against the dangers of VD. While trying to chat up a girl on the subway, she realises where she’s seen him before and makes a quick exit.This taught me to… Ask customers questions like ‘What made you start looking for a product like this?’ to learn when they first became aware of their need. There may be opportunities for influencing them and driving them towards your service. Ask about interactions that aren’t directly related to your service; competitor visits, friend’s opinions. They may explain decisions made further down the line.

4. The one where you design for employees as well as customers (S06E05)Phoebe offers to babysit triplets, enlisting the help of Monica and Chandler. It’s a disaster; they lose one baby, destroy the apartment and Monica has a

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by Clare Flitton

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nervous breakdown. They didn’t think through the reality of actually looking after even one baby.This taught me… Employees will make or break your service. If your design is difficult or confusing for employees, it won’t be delivered in line with your vision. Interview employees alongside customers so you can evaluate both sides of the value exchange and get to the root cause of seemingly inexplicable customer experiences.

5. The one where the solution might be obvious and easy to steal (S05E14)Ross is trying to convince Ugly Naked Guy to rent him his apartment. Rachel suggests he finds out UNG’s hobby and uses that to bond with him. Ten minutes later, naked Ross turns up.This taught me… Customers compare across every industry and category. They’ll compare their credit card application process to that of their gym or nursery. While it’s tough to keep on top of their expectations, it also means someone has already tried to fix this problem. Get your customers (and employees) to describe a great experience and steal like an artist.

6. The one where you think it through (S08E11)Panicked Ross gives his girlfriend the key to his apartment as a romantic gesture, leaving himself locked out. When she returns to the flat to try her key, Ross is with a locksmith changing the lock.This taught me to… Map out the customer’s end to end journey and make sure you understand the cumulative impact of each touchpoint on their experience. If you don’t think about the journey as a whole you’ll miss the downstream effects of each interaction and may cause stress or confusion.

7. The one where you experiment (S07E03)As a wedding gift Phoebe wants to give Monica her grandmother’s cookie recipe. Finding it was burned in a fire a couple of years ago, they set out to try and recreate the recipe from an old frozen batch. They go through many iterations before learning it was a store-bought cookie her grandma lied about...This taught me… You will never get a concept or design right first time and you’ll never learn as much about how customers will interact with your service as you will by just watching them use it. Never stop

experimenting with your service, customers needs are never fixed.

8. The one where you have to meet the baseline expectations (S04E11)After being appointed Ross’s best man, Joey loses the wedding ring. He spent so much time focusing on the bachelor party (stripper, t-shirts, beer) he neglected the most important duty of the best man. This taught me to… Spend time understanding your customer’s baseline expectations for your service, remembering they may be benchmarking you against an experience from a very different industry. Your customers will see straight through any attempt to distract them from the lack of basic ‘hygiene’ factors.

9. The one where you help people walk in customers’ shoes (S08E15)Rachel’s preparing for the arrival of her baby, and has read all the books she can find on the subject, but she still can’t picture what’s going to happen. Nothing gives her this insight quite like the birthing video of Phoebe’s friend Cookie.

Unfortunately, Chandler watches it, thinking it’s porn. ‘Remember the first time you saw Jaws, how long it took to get back in the water?’This taught me that… Presenting research findings in a 30-minute PowerPoint won’t help the audience emotionally understand their customers’ experience. Immerse them in the things customers go through every day. Videoing your interviews or user labs will give them first-hand accounts of how their customers feel, and make it harder for them to argue with it.

10. The one where you build a case for change (S10E17-18)In the final episode, it’s only after Ross has gone over all the history with Rachel that she realises there’s no reason big enough to keep them apart.This taught me to… Help business leaders support your  ideas. Build a business case from assumptions and data, add the cost of each touchpoint together to demonstrate the cost of the current state experience.

‘If we make changes x, y, and z to the service although it will cost us £200k it will reduce the cost to serve to £10’. It’s not really very romantic, but it usually works.

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Presenting research findings in a 30-minute PowerPoint won’t help the audience emotionally understand their customers’ experience. Immerse them in the things customers go through every day.

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How to work with start‑ups to develop big new ideasHow Fluxx helped the publishers of The Sun and The Times to move into exciting new markets by partnering with some of the most innovative start-ups in London.

by Charlotte Schofield

News UK is home to some of the most popular and well respected media brands including The Times, The Sun and Virgin Radio.

Their strategy is focused on maximising their existing print products while driving profitable digital growth. Fluxx has worked with News UK for many years on a variety of projects, most recently successfully launching The Brief Premium, a new subscription legal product.

News UK could immediately see the potential of partnerships with start-ups where there was an opportunity to collaborate. Announcing the scheme, they said: ‘The focus for the chosen companies is to work together to use our combined assets to generate more value for them, News UK and our audiences. This will mean providing insight as well as hands-on mentoring and expertise.’

Where do you start? Thousands of start-ups launch every day and thousands fail. How do you go about finding start-ups that can add value to your business, want to work with you and have the ideas

Fluxx StoryNews UK

Startup Lab

and entrepreneurial skill to succeed? That’s where Fluxx stepped in.

From inception to the end of the first cycle of residency Fluxx collaborated with News UK the whole way, designing the programme, building the website, creating the ad campaign, screening applicants, facilitating the pitch day and mentoring the selected start-ups during their time in residency.

Together, we launched the first News UK Start-up Lab in just under two months. The first cohort was in the Lab for just four weeks; a very accelerated process designed to prove that the incubator could have value both for the start-ups involved, and for News UK.

By running this short experiment we uncovered an incredible amount of learning that allowed us to design an improved, validated and repeatable process, and News UK made their very first start-up investment.

Some of the questions we were able to answer during the first cycle included: • Where can the parent company provide most

value to start-ups? • What’s the best way to attract a wide range of

start-ups, then identify those who will get the most out of our programme?

• What kind of entrepreneurs thrive in this environment, and which wilt under pressure?

• How is working in a lab environment helpful for a major company making an investment decision?

• How much time will the parent company need to commit to the process? With this level of knowledge and experience we

were able to redesign the process and launch a second round, just months after the first finished. The second lab has a financial focus, working with the incredible ‘Sun Savers’ loyalty team to select the start-ups and help define experiments for the lab.

By moving quickly, and really listening to the needs of start-ups, we were able to open News UK up to the world of start-ups quickly. Experimenting, learning and failing fast together to uncover start-ups that genuinely help enable News UK to deliver their strategic priorities now and in the future.

Learn more about the techniques we used to build a positive company culture in the Lab on p. 26.

The Problem: News UK wanted to respond to changing technology and customer needs in a fast, cost-effective way.

What we did: Fluxx helped News UK to help, collaborate with and learn from start-ups.

The outcome: Fluxx introduced a repeatable, cost-effective and low-risk process which has uncovered exciting ideas from hundreds of start-ups. News UK has already invested in one start-up from the initial cohort, with more in the pipeline.

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Dumb ecommerce. Why do I have to manually order and pay for two different sizes of clothing upfront, then return one, to ensure I get the right fit? Particularly if this is the 15th order from the same company, and the sizes are never consistent. Delay repay. They know I bought a ticket, they have all my payment details. They know the train was late and that I was on the train, so why do I have to fill in any kind of form? In fact, why don’t they just bill me for what I owe at the end of each month? Reward cards. Reward schemes are just databases, but when companies set them up, they want to make them ‘tangible’ by offering a card. It’s there to remind the user that they’re getting value. But as one of those users, I hate having to own, carry, store, manage, acquire multiple means of receiving rewards or benefits from various brands. Having a wallet, just to hold all those different reward cards, when I pay for everything with one debit card. With open banking, surely there’s a way companies can see what I’m spending with them if I always use the same card? Buying concert tickets. Having to take part in online queuing systems that are ridiculous and stressful, just to buy tickets to events I’d like to attend before they sell out. Flexible pricing or rewards for long-term fans would be much more friendly. Paper bills. How are these still the only valid proof of address to prove I’m not a money launderer?Paperless billing from banks who then demand paper bills as evidence that I’m not a money launderer. Small print as an excuse for rudeness or terrible customer service.Ryanair and EasyJet Haters. It’s easy to complain, but these airlines revolutionised air travel once in the 1990s, then reformed themselves in the 2010s. They’ve reduced dark patterns on their websites, scrapped the most hostile charges, and Ryanair even now claim ‘being pleasant’ is their USP. People who walk slowly like life isn’t rushing them by and they don’t need to be someplace. In 2015, Liverpool introduced fast-walking lanes in the city centre. A survey showed that 69% of the 16-24-year-olds surveyed were in favour of fast lanes, while only 37% of over-55s backed the plan. Hard goodbyes when companies allow you to sign up online, but require a phone call (with a 15-minute

Ticket machines at Gatwick airport. Every year, 20 million tired passengers arrive at Gatwick Airport. After long flights, they try to buy train tickets to London from a machine so incomprehensible that each one has an attendant, helping the victims avoid buying a ‘Restrictions Apply’ ticket that will get them thrown off the train in East Croydon.Message Notifications that pop up without any indication where to find the rest of the message. Was it WhatsApp? Instagram? Twitter? Email? Five minutes of clicking around and I wonder if I imagined the whole thing.Car hire. We need a cost-effective alternative to car ownership that meets our changing needs, enabling things like cross-channel travel. Non QWERTY keyboards. Qwerty is ridiculous, but ABCD is somehow even worse. And nothing matches the horror of typing a 15-character password into Netflix using the remote control on a ‘smart’ TV.

Fluxx Villains The Fluxx team talk about the little things that make modern life almost unbearable.

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wait to get through) to cancel. Particularly painful when that phone call is international. Loyalty tax, when the best discounts and rewards are reserved for new customers only; or worse, those that threaten to leave. The best customers become the ones paying more for the same service.Apple Pay really doesn’t work seamlessly and until it does, what is the point? A cox or Granny Smith is more likely to open the barrier as I touch out at Farringdon Station...Security questions. Those tiresome ‘what was the name of your first pet’ questions aren’t just silly and insecure, they’re unnecessary. When I call Amex, they greet me with my name because they know it’s me from the number I’m calling them on. I only need to give them a pin number, one I use every day, not one I only use twice a decade when calling my bank. Why can’t all banks do this?Kinder egg toys are crap these days. You used to get something to build with moving parts. Now every time it’s just a figurine of something rubbish. Kinder Eggs are banned in the USA (the Food & Drug Administration considers them a choking hazard for  children), and more than 60,000 smuggled eggs were seized by border officials in 2011. Cheap air travel is still a data and system failure. First class travel is amazing not because of comfy seats, but because their systems really work; they know who you are, they hire the taxi and tell them where to wait, they deliver your bags to the taxi, not a belt in the airport. There’s no reason this can’t be done at a much bigger scale. People who don’t let you off the the train before trying to get on themselves. Why do they do that? ‘You have inserted your card too early.’ Hang on a minute… that message was displayed on the screen. So your software knows I’ve put the card in, but now you want me to go and press an on-screen button in another part of your software in order to activate the card reader? Grrr… Inconsistent recycling in every single part of the UK. How can the rules be so different? And I really don’t mind if you’re burning all the rubbish to generate energy, but don’t pretend it’s being recycled. Hotel check-ins and check-outs. What are you doing tapping away behind there? I booked a room weeks ago… What are you doing printing out my

unnecessary receipt and folding it delicately like it’s the Magna bloody Carta? Why are you putting it in an envelope?Returning online orders to bricks and mortar stores, and being turned away. Logistics and distribution are not consumers’ problems. Graduate job applications to big companies. These are endless, requesting reams of data, essays, your CV in five different fonts, seven references, online tests etc. leaving you exhausted and with very little room to be creative. Dyson Airblades. The Airblade completely ignores the human interaction when drying ones hands of rubbing them together. AND it doesn’t take ten seconds, you have to go up and down multiple times and still the tips of your fingers remain wet. People who text while they are walking. In Hawaii, there is an immediate $35 fine for anyone caught looking at their phone while crossing the street. In Amsterdam, they have a different approach – embedding red and green lights in the street where they’re visible to distracted pedestrians. Airport queuing barriers. Often they are just there to annoy passengers, who have to needlessly snake their way through to the passport control. Car Rental people. After an epic, sweaty queue, the surly, sighing, tutting individual in a pristine white shirt with a lanyard and not a bead of sweat stares at their screen and avoids eye contact. They always look confused despite having done the same process dozens of times every day. Coffee chains who look at me like I’m an alien when I pass them my re-usable coffee cup.Filling in payment details online. Still mostly as fiddly as it was in 1999, and magic like ‘take a photo of your credit card’ only works on a handful of sites. News sites that are unreadable on mobile because they have so many ads and newsletter signups and cookie warnings.Bank statements where outgoings and incomings are the same colour and font. Calculators and phones. Why are the numbers in a different order? Calculators have ‘1’ in the bottom left, phones have ‘1’ in the top left. Why? The slightly disappointing answer is that Bell Labs tested 17 different layouts while developing pushbutton phones in the 1950s, and 1,2,3 beat 7,8,9 for speed.

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Interested? Ten ways to find out more about us at Fluxx1 Come to Experiment Studio, our

monthly Meetup in our office in Clerkenwell*

2 Email our managing partner Richard Poole†

3 Follow us on Twitter or Instagram‡

4 We publish regularly in the Fluxx Studio Notes channel on Medium§

5 Ask for us at the Hat & Tun, Hatton Wall, EC1

6 Talk to people who’ve worked with us.

7 Work with us. We’re always looking for great people to join our team ¶

8 Invite us to speak at your event Δ

9 Stalk us on LinkedIn #

10 Read more about us and our work at www.fluxx.uk.com

*meetup.com/ExperimentStudio

† richard.poole@fluxx.uk.com

§ medium.com/fluxx-studio-notes

# bit.ly/flinked

‡ @fluxxstudios

¶ talent@fluxx.uk.com

Δ tom.whitwell@fluxx.uk.com

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“You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” Buckminster Fuller

“To improve is to change; to be perfect is to have changed often.” Winston Churchill

“I have accepted fear of change as part of life… I have gone ahead despite the pounding in the heart that says: turn back.” Erica Jong

“No plan of operations extends with any certainty beyond the first contact with the main hostile force.” Field Marshal Helmuth von Moltke

“Fluxx has totally transformed the way we look at internal decision- making within our business.” Ben Corrigan, Pouch

“Stellar stuff. Your hard work over the past 4 weeks has been genuinely transformative.” Timo Tolomen, giffgaff

“I am always blown away by the weekly updates on what this team is achieving.”Eliza Dungworth, Global Chief Compliance Officer, Fidelity

“I can honestly say this has been the most enjoyable work I have been  involved in for quite some time.” Rob Ryder, Head of Technology and Data Labs at Severn Trent

“Fluxx morphed seamlessly into our team and worked in a very self sufficient manner to produce an extremely high quality output. At the start, I was unsure of what they would be bringing to the table, I am now a complete supporter.”Helen Zarac, Change Management Lead, Jaguar Land Rover