BIGBrave has its roots in television production, and anyone who has ever been part of the television industry will know that it pulls hard. There is always the longing to return and be part of the magic that is creating content that can be enjoyed by many.  So when we had the opportunity to create a studio game show that used the power of the Unity gaming engine as well as our knowledge of the television environment we leapt at it.

### How it developed
BIGBrave has a close partnership with Shine Interactive and we have built many game mechanics for channels such as VIA on the Multichoice’s, DSTV platform.  The formats of the channels ask for cost effective streamlined productions, and the realtime  HD graphics the are generated means turnaround to broadcast is reduced and provides the ability to shoot multiple episodes a day.

### Why we got so Excited
The mechanics!  Getting an idea to work in studio is always easier said than done, but when you get it right it’s awesome! We get to integrate real world elements with the power of digital. With the advancement in graphics technology we have been able to enhance productions we are a part of and add value to the format enjoyed by viewers in their homes. Whether it’s a fastest finger first buzzer system or integration into a scale system the auto generates beautiful in studio HD graphics, with lighting and audio cues. (Die Super Skool, Is That A Fact, Die Kliek, Million Rand Money Drop, BlitsBrein)

### We believe in engaging content.
At BIGBrave we strive to design engaging content, TV game shows fit into this vision. At some point or another we have all shouted at the TV when a game show contestant got something incorrect or made a mistake, we aspire to the opportunity to have our shot as we play along at home.

### Let’s collaborate
We work closely with production companies to make sure that the games aren’t just visually appealing and engaging but effective as well. We ensure that the game mechanic fits into and supports the production in terms of streamlined workflows and ease of use during the filming of episodes.

If you would like more information or to setup a meeting where we can discuss the opportunity of working with you on your next production, corporate event or activation – please contact us: [info@bigbrave.co.za](mailto:info@bigbrave.co.za)

### BLITS BREIN
Season 1 and 2 of the fast paced quiz show on the VIA Channel in the DSTV Multichoice Bouquet.

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### DIE KLIEK
Die Kliek season 5 was awarded a SAFTA for Best Game Show in 2017, and are now in their 7th season of the hit TV dating show.

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### DIE SUPER SKOOL
Snotkop hosted the high energy quiz show for season 1 of the VIA game show.

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### IS THAT A FACT
Comedian Chris Forrest presents this celebrity focused talk / game show.

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### We started as humble designers
Traditionally trained designers are engrained with aesthetics, form, shape, colour, layout, fonts, and the list goes on… The points are, though, that traditionally designers are tasked to focus on one side of the equation only: what it looks like at the end. That was until the term UXD (User Experience Design) was coined by Don Norman during his time at Apple, Inc. He wanted a term that encompassed a user’s entire experience with the system. Little did he know he would unleash new careers and whole new ways of thinking.

One of the main tenets of User Experience Design is incorporating user feedback into the design evolution process or co-evolving the system with its users. This means we are no longer just adding the aesthetics to the end of a project, but designers are starting to get involved earlier in the process. The complexity and sophistication of the discipline of design grew over time as designers sought to systemise and generalise what they did. This evolved into what we now know as Design Thinking.

### Design Thinking – Taking a Human-Centric approach
At the heart of Design Thinking is taking a human-centered approach to creative problem-solving. Traditional methods of starting with prevailing business constraints, marketing budgets, or technology will at best give you incremental ideas and results. Starting with the user at the centre increases your chance of breakthrough ideas and finding a receptive market as all your research is based on the user and their needs.

To achieve a user-centered approach you need to get out into the world, do field research, talk to users, observe their actions and understand their needs and emotions while interacting with your product or service. This allows us to learn to see our customers not as “end-users” but rather as participants in a two-way process.

### Interdisciplinary Teams
Design Thinking is not just for designers, it’s for anyone willing to participate and follow the toolkit and resources as a way of learning about our users and building better products and services for them.

In the best Design Thinking teams and firms around the world, it is not uncommon to see team members from designers, HR, people with MBA’s, doctors, to accountants. Everyone has a unique perspective and will have something to add. Especially when it comes to divergent thinking.

### Divergent and Convergent thinking
Westerners are taught to take a series of inputs, analyse them, and then converge upon a single answer. When it comes to Design Thinking we take a different approach.

As Thomas Edison said: “To have a great idea, have a lot of them”. Design Thinking is all about exploring different possibilities, and the biggest mistake you can make is to go with the first idea you come up with. The art of divergent thinking is taking a problem statement and coming up with as many solutions as possible. It doesn’t matter how crazy some of them might become, it’s quantity over quality at this stage. More choices mean more complexity, which makes life difficult in certain respects, so be careful to not go too overboard and know when to stop.

When you’ve reached this point, it’s time to enter the convergent phase of problem-solving to make choices and drive toward solutions. Often, testing competing ideas against each other give us an increased likelihood that the outcome will be bolder, more creatively disruptive and more compelling.

To summarise the objective of divergent thinking is to multiply options to give us choices, build on those ideas and then use convergent thinking to funnel it down to the best idea.

### Building on the ideas of others
This is arguably one of the biggest traits of a Design Thinker. This typically happens in the divergent phase of Design Thinking and involves one team member to build on the idea of another team member. We do this not only to help diversify our ideas and come up with a lot of them, but also to strengthen the ideas. By the end, we will end up with ideas that the group own as a collective.

### Keeping the balance
Design Thinking balances the perspectives of users, technology and business and is by its nature integrative to be successful. The brief being handed to Design Thinkers are to find new ways of balancing desirability (from the user) to what is technically feasible and finally needs to be a viable business proposition to pursue. Innovation happens at the intersect between desirability, feasibility and viability when you get the balance right.

### Ask the right questions
Design thinking will always involve reframing the question or problem you are trying to solve. As a designer when approached with a new brief to sell soap as an example, one might come up with engaging packaging or even online experiences, but a team of design thinkers will see a broader brief. It’s not just about selling soap, but rather selling the idea of sustainability, wellness, and responsibility that support the brand and product at the end of the day. By thinking in terms of the whole experience we are enabled to capture bigger opportunities and results that have more impact. Design Thinking by nature extends the perimeter around a problem helping us to think of the experience holistically.

Our human nature is to assume we know before we ask, so always question your assumptions. Don’t simply test with a target user for validation of your assumption, test to learn, so you have something to go back with.

>“An organisation that commits itself to the human-centered tenets of design thinking is practising enlightened self-interest. If it does a better job of understanding its customers, it will do a better job of satisfying their needs. That is simply the most reliable source of long-term profitability and sustainable growth.” – Tim Brown

### Experimenting and Failure
The true nature of Design Thinking is experimentation, so it goes without saying some experimentations will fail. The key is to get ideas and prototypes out early, the earlier you get them out the earlier they can be tested and improved. If some fail, its better to fail earlier, and shut it down, and to fail fast. The key metric behind the failure is learning, everything we do should become a source of learning, inspiration and something we can take back with us.

>“Fail early to succeed sooner.”

### Design for Experience
When we are designing experiences it introduces the 4th dimension: time. To design an experience is to allow a story to unfold over time. Design has the power to enrich our lives by engaging our emotions through image, form, texture, colour, sounds and smell. The intrinsically human-centered nature of design thinking points to the next step: we can use our empathy and understanding of people to design experiences that create opportunities to active engagement and participation.

### Why we do it
The rise of Design Thinking corresponds to a culture change, and what excited the best thinkers today is the challenge of applying their skills to problems that matter. They search out the problems that allow them to work at the cutting edge because this is where they are most likely to achieve something that has not been done before.

### TL;DR: The Design Thinker’s Toolkit
This article is just an introduction to Design Thinking and some of the techniques used. When it comes to a toolkit, keep the following in mind:
- Get out into the world to be inspired by people
- Empathy for user-centered research and observations
- Brainstorming with divergent and convergent thinking
- Experimentation to learn
- Prototyping – to craft strategic plans and to learn with our hands
- Creating stories to share our ideas
- Collaborating – joining forces with people from other disciplines (all of us are smarter than any of us)
- Optimism (To cope with all the experimentation)
- Communicate complex ideas with masterful simplicity
- Ultimately you’ll understand how to bridge the gap between thinking and doing in an effort of deepening what we know and widening the impact of what we do.
<br>
### To wrap it up
Design Thinking is rarely a graceful leap from height to height, it tests our emotional intelligence and challenges our collaborative skills, but it can be rewarding with spectacular results.

As the circle of Design Thinkers grows, we will soon see solutions evolve that will improve the products we buy and services we experience.

### Podcast
We spoke about this toolkit and more on Design Thinking on the Futurology Show, catch the podcast [<u>here.</u>](http://cliffcentral.com/futurology/futurology-gartner-2017-design-thinking/)

### Need Help with Design Thinking or solving big problems?
At BIGBrave we are a team of interdisciplinary creative problem solvers diverse in Design Thinking and engaging digital experiences, so get in contact if you feel we can be of any assistance.

At BIGBrave, we have dubbed 2016 – The Year of Innovation. Innovation is like summiting a mountain peak, it is no small task, it takes months (if not years) of planning. Every last detail is planned for and thought of, and even after all the meticulous planning, there are still things that do not go as planned and one has to adapt and improvise.

As with ascending a mountain, there are certain contributing factors to Innovation: 

### 1) Collaboration
Individuals don’t innovate, it takes teams of people to innovate and to build on what the previous people built. We don’t have all the answers, but through exploring solutions within our teams and with our clients, we can identify opportunity which in turn we can use to innovate. We > Me. 

_Even if you climb alone, you still need teams of people to be able to summit a mountain._

### 2) Don’t follow the competition
If you follow the competition, you simply aim at catching up to them, at best, being on par. This will never be innovation, if anything, do the complete opposite to the competition. It’s more likely that you’ll be more imaginative than them when you start thinking outside the box.

_When climbing a mountain, you never blindly just follow others’ tracks. You work out your own best way to reach the summit and stick to that._

### 3) Perspective
It takes the right perspective when looking for innovation, and when what you are trying isn’t working, go at it from a different perspective. One of the biggest assets one can have in today’s age is the ability to adapt to different viewpoints.

_You can’t just look at a mountain and start climbing it – You investigate it from all angles before beginning your journey, and you can even adjust your course once you are in motion. Knowing when to change is key._

>“Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again but expecting different results.” – Albert Einstein

### 4) Desire for Innovation
You must possess a desire and a certain drive to attain innovation. You can’t keep doing the same thing over and over again and expect results. What worked for others, or even for you in the past will not necessarily work for you again. If you aren’t actively looking at problems and thinking of ways to turn them into opportunities you will come short.

_Without a desire to reach the top, you will really struggle to ever get there. You can’t reach the summit of any mountain based on others’ hard work, you have to put in the hours and effort to achieve greatness._

### 5) Go beyond your comfort zone
Think outside the box is what a lot of people would say, I believe you should go beyond your comfort zone. To reach the extraordinary you can’t do ordinary. To develop and grow your ideas you will have to push your limits and sometimes try tactics you haven’t tried before. 

_Summiting a mountain is an extremely physical challenge and it goes without saying that you’ll be pushing yourself beyond your comfort zone physically and mentally all the time._

### 6) Persistence
Mistakes and failure are learning processes that are part of any journey. It depends on the way we look at these “failures”, learn from them and keep persistent in our strive for innovation. 

_If you gave climbing a mountain only one shot, not a lot of people would make it to the top. Persistence is key when trying different things and finding your way._

### 7) Iterate
Iteration is one of the concepts introduced by Eric Ries in “The Lean Startup” which comes in the form of the “Build, Measure, Learn” feedback loop, as well as the MVP (Minimal Viable Product), which could be used as building blocks for innovation. You can’t always hit innovation on the head straight out of the gate. It takes time, putting something out there, measuring the result, and learning from that result before restarting the process multiple times. 

_When training for a climb, you test different equipment, try different techniques and ask various knowledgeable climbers for advise. From this you can learn and develop your own style and preferences. No one goes mountaineering without these steps, the more iterations, the more you learn._

At BIGBrave we believe in doing extraordinary things by always thinking outside of the box, pushing the boundaries of innovation by thinking bigger and being braver than ever before.

The only way to keep growing is to keep challenging yourself.

Everything we approach during 2016 will be taken with these 7 factors in mind ensuring we are on the brink of innovation whenever we touch something new.

The age of the mobile device has created the opportunity to create or consume whenever and wherever we want.  The ubiquity of this technology enables access to the sharing of experiences and allows for engagement in a real and authentic way anytime, any place. 

Not since the dawn of commercial air travel has a technology had such a profound impact on how we connect people, places and experiences, ultimately allowing us to start living a shared human existence no matter where we are on the planet.

### Abundance is the New Normal
We live in a truly exciting world of abundance, a world of “video first”. We’ve been exploring the future of mobile video and the users of mobile devices that choose to create or consume this immersive engaging content.

>“By the end of 2017, online video will account for 74% of all online traffic.”  
    – Mary Meeker’s Internet Trends Report

Our world is not only abundant with video content but also abundant with the data analytics that follows each view, like, share, comment, tweet or pin. You name it we’ve got the stats…

### Social Media and Video
In just the last 18 months, social media platforms across the board have adopted a “video first, video native” approach to how we share content. You don’t have to look far to see evidence of this in any news feed across Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn – all filled with thumbnails of videos as you swipe your way through news feeds and instant messaging platforms of your social life.

### How the stats stack up
The top 3 Social Networks – Snapchat, Facebook & YouTube gather 22 Billion video views per day and YouTube reports that mobile video consumption rises by 100% every year.

- 82% of Twitter users watch video content on Twitter
- YouTube has over a billion users, almost one-third of total internet users.
- More than 500 million hours of videos are watched on YouTube each day.
- More video content is uploaded in 30 days than the 3 major U.S. television networks have created in 30 years.
- 72 Hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every 60 seconds.
- The 25-34 (millennial) age group watches the most online videos and men spend 40% more time watching videos on the internet than women. 

With so much content available, a single platform just isn’t enough, one screen isn’t enough and linear programming broadcasters are out the window.

### The Age of Experience is NOW
At BIGBrave, we have been predicting the “Age of Experience” since 2013. What this means, is that as a society, we have accepted and assimilated connected digital devices into our everyday living. 

We don’t give these smart devices a second thought, we simply expect them to do what they promise without exception. Our expectations furthermore lean heavily toward quality experiences and smartphone manufacturers are undoubtedly aware of this. Think about it, when was the last time you saw a mobile device being marketed for its exceptional audio quality  – it simply doesn’t happen because quality audio is simply assumed on all new devices. The focus has completely shifted onto the additional features on these devices that have nothing to do with making a phone call. Many of these additional features are becoming part of the basic expectation users have of smart devices – think internet connectivity for example.

### Sharing Moments – the premise of mobile video
Mobile video is having a profound impact on how we live, learn, work & play. This is true now and will continue to be the case as we move into the future. It is bridging gaps using shared experiences to enhance understanding to bring about vicarious knowledge and allowing us as humans to focus on things that really matter.

The new digital person has more to say about their life because they look at the world with the knowledge that they have the ability to capture the “moments” with their mobile devices. We also have easy access to other people’s “moments” which has never been possible before. Sharing in moments of family and friends through social media or digital communication platforms is becoming the whole point.

The most important takeaway here is that people engage with people! If a brand wants to engage with the new digital market the hard sell approach definitely isn’t the way to do it. Use people to talk to people. People love to watch other people doing things that are aspirational, inspirational, exceptional, amazing & amusing.

### The Role of Mobile Marketers
The important thing to remember is that, as mobile marketers, we’re not just trying to get into people’s wallets, we’re trying to attract their curiosity, their interests, their experiences and their opinions. The world is changing through the unpredictable disruptive forces around exponential technology, and their convergence to produce even more amazing ways of experiencing life. This includes travel, communication, work, food and health and moving forward, one thing is for sure, it will be hard to replace mobile video and its ability to reach and teach a global audience.

The awesome thing about mobile video in 2017 is that it enables a generation to have a wider perspective on the world while maintaining a local focus – “Think Global. Act Local”. Learning can happen anywhere on any topic information is just a search and a click away…

67% of Millennials agree that they can find a YouTube video of anything they want to learn.

As technology advances, we are able to make use of new mobile devices that provide better quality imagery. For example,  the small form factor cameras and drones allow us to explore any place on earth, to see things we’ve never seen – all part of the evolution of video technology. This allows for a better-documented existence and makes way for new perspectives, new experiences & new opportunities. Opportunities to not just to inform people but to tell stories… which is one of the most powerful ways to communicate.

 >As with the laws of progress and improvement, the adoption of new technology gives rise to new needs from the market. In response to these needs, mobile video will have to become more immersive in order to find new moments within which to create content worth sharing.

### Moments Explained
It’s all about devices, platforms and humans. 

A the intersection where Humans and Devices meet we find the ability to create. The overlap of Devices and Platforms provides the opportunity to share and at the intersection of Platforms and Humans, we have access to consume. 

However, it’s the bit in the middle that we’re really interested in because it’s there where we find “MOMENTS”.

![fullsizeoutput_1015-1024x576.jpeg](https://res.cloudinary.com/dxrvqywct/image/upload/v1690193757/fullsizeoutput_1015_1024x576_f668c999e0.jpg)

Inevitably, change is coming and it is imperative to be adaptable enough to meet the needs of the market throughout this process. 

Here is our challenge to mobile marketers out there: Let’s not just capture moments that are happening, let’s create moments that inspire more content creation. Why? Because one great moment is worth endless great memories and each memory is a story that has to potential to touch countless people.

We are excited about the leaps and bounds we are experiencing in the mobile video sphere and keen to see where we as a business can push the envelope on what is possible.

Create Moments, capture memories, share the future!

Design has a powerful quality that renders desirability and appeals to both the products and services we use and create. Companies, now, aspire to ‘think’ like designers and make use of the design principles to excel at the workplace. Design thinking helps us to understand how to bridge the gap between thinking and doing in an effort of deepening what we know and widening the impact of what we do. Previously I wrote about the design thinker’s toolkit to highlight the tools and practices of individuals practising design thinking. This article aims to highlight the power of design thinking for teams and how design thinking is changing the way we work together in teams.

### Design Thinking gives us the building blocks to focus on
I would summarise design thinking as a way of creative problem-solving that puts the user at the core of the process and further allowing the business goals and technical feasibility of the solution to have equal seats at the table. If we are truly seeking innovation as a company we need to look at those elements and what they represent in the problem we are facing. We do not need to solve all three (User, Technical, Business) at the same time, but by the end, we should have equally addressed all three in order to have a solid solution and any hope of innovation.

### The building blocks are:
1) USER: Is what we are proposing desirable by people – would they want such a solution, does it fulfil their needs?

2) TECHNICAL: Is the solution we are proposing technically feasible, can we achieve it technically, or are we proposing something that might not be possible yet?

3) BUSINESS: Is it viable from a business perspective, can we make a healthy profit from a business perspective?

### Design Thinking makes us project-focussed not title-focussed
A designer’s life is always arranged around projects. When you ask a designer how things are going or what they are up to, they start talking about the projects they are working on, not the latest title or promotion they’ve achieved. When looking at a designers portfolio, it is arranged according to their projects and what they contributed to the projects rather than their progression of titles.

What this means for a firm practising design thinking is that teams could be arranged around projects, everyone gets an equal seat at the table and opportunity to contribute to his or her team. It’s not about titles or hierarchy, but rather the design thinking ideology and users’ needs at the end of the day that prevail.

### Design Thinking cultivates multi-disciplinary teams
While the design discipline is the main driver for design thinking, it does not own it. It’s no secret that design thinking is not an exclusive club for designers only. Design thinking stretches across multiple disciplines. We need an array of people, with varying skill sets in the room when practising design thinking. People are unique, their views might differ and it is exactly because of this variation in ideas and different perspectives that we need multi-disciplined people in the room. The true potential of design thinking is its collaborative force of bringing the disciplines together to create a team that has the ability to look at things holistically.

### Design Thinking teams expect collaboration
The project-based work style emphasises collaboration. Projects are typically assigned to the team rather than to individuals. Even though the individuals within the team might take on (temporary) positions and roles (similar to the captain of a sports team), ultimately the solution is expected from the team (and not the captain).

The true sense of what sets one team apart from the next is how easy it is for them to collaborate and work together. Make no mistake, I’m not advocating for the team to sit together and work together all the time. It does take individual research and preparation followed by key strategic sessions of collaboration by the team to get the most of your team sessions.

Team members start talking about “our responsibilities” rather than “my responsibilities” and the job is not done until all team members are done.

### Design Thinking is an iterative process
Design thinking is an iterative process where we, as a team, work our way through the process of Exploration, Creation to Implementation. Typically designers would produce a prototype during the creation phase ready for feedback, but managers are accustomed to final delivered projects.

The thing to realise is that design thinking will deliver results a lot faster, but they are not to be judged as final projects, rather they are unpolished prototypes ready for constructive criticism before going “back to the drawing board” to go through the process again. The way design thinking solves this divide is by recruiting their key stakeholders into the team.

### Design Thinking teams recruit their stakeholders/clients
The key differentiating factor is how we involve the client or stakeholders in the process. The true power of design thinking is the ability to identify what we need to build before actually building it, and because of this reason we need to include the stakeholders in this process and as we are proposing and exploring solutions that they are part of the process. A lot of the time if an expected hypothesis is tested and it does not seem to be a viable option the stakeholders will come to the same conclusion with you and realise it is not feasible to pursue that avenue. This will result in no time or budget wasted down the wrong path, which the stakeholders will appreciate at the end of the day.

The closer we keep our stakeholders during this process the agiler our team will be to move and react to new knowledge discovered along the way.

### Design Thinking teams see constraints as opportunities
Normally we might see constraints as the enemy, but designers take constraints as the boundaries that frame the problem we are trying to solve. They force you to be creative. They focus your attention and clarify your thinking. Rather than an enemy, constraints are features that make the task at hand more exciting, and the problem more wicked to solve. Instead of telling us what we cannot do, constraints help us reframe the problem and discover new opportunities along the way.

Think about the character constraints of Twitter where we have a 144 character limit. 144 characters are merely the boundary and create the opportunity for us to be creative in.


### Design Thinking teams do not look back to predict the future
As analytical thinkers, we value reliability above validity and one thing that can predict reliable results is looking at the past to predict the future.

When you are practising design thinking, however, you have to be prepared to evaluate opportunities for what they can become and not from a perspective of what’s worked in the past. This is very difficult for companies that have built their products by critically analysing the past to chart a course for the future, this cannot be done when you are trying to innovate. The whole point is that you found a path no one has taken before, and this cannot be done by looking at the past.

### Design Thinking unlocks abductive thinking
When first framing a problem to solve, design thinkers have to look at everything, because they don’t yet know what to leave out. The obvious danger comes in that what’s omitted might just prove integral to the solution. With little to go on by this stage, the design thinker employs abductive thinking to distill any patterns in what to others still seems very unclearly defined.

The design thinker that employs abductive thinking chooses to embrace a form of logic that doesn’t generate proof and operates in the realm of what might be, a realm beyond the reach of data from the past to prove reliable. Through abductive thinking, the design thinker comes up with a conclusion to the best explanation which does not guarantee any success. Typically it is these conclusions that encapsulate a prototype and gives the team something to test and learn from.

### Design Thinking teams welcomes failure
Design thinking teams understand the uncertainty of abductive thinking and because of this, they allow for failure. The key difference is that we see failure as learning opportunities. Any failed hypothesis should inform us as to what didn’t work and fail in the hypothesis. This is why we welcome an iterative process, to fail fast and early ensuring we can avoid going down a path that won’t work. In the next iteration, we can focus on what worked and omit what didn’t.

### Design Thinking makes people happy
According to John Maeda of the Rode Island School of Design, when people are challenged and have the freedom to be creative, they are happy. When a team can come together around a creative cause or a wicked problem, they want to come to work every day, to practice their design thinking skills to that extent! According to this logic, a tough design challenge might just be one of the best retentions tools a company today could apply for their best innovators.

### To wrap it up
The only way to achieve success with design thinking is to see it as an essential activity to driving organisational change and innovation within our organisations. There are no half-hearted attempts, we’re either all in or not.

Above I’ve just started touching on various aspects of how design thinking will change the way we work in teams and how we go about creative problem-solving. As we grow as design thinkers so should our teams by embracing it and evolving with it. By doing this it will improve the products we buy and services we experience.

(A retrospective look at the ripples of what changed, how it changed and how it will continue to change)

I finished my marketing degree just in time for everything I had just learnt to start changing. The world we all knew, the world we all thought we knew, was having the rug pulled from under it. Social networking as we know it was just beginning to catch on, Facebook was only months from being launched and at the beginning of my degree the twin towers still made their presence felt in New York.

All in all the world perception was that we were in a good place. Al Gore’s movie, about global warming,”An Inconvenient Truth” had not yet been released and we were still riding the wave from the economic boom of the 90’s and somewhat celebrating the fact that we didn’t grind to a halt because of the infamous Y2K millennium bug!

What was happening though was a series of very unfortunately timed global events that will forever change the way we think, the way we trust and the way we invest both our time and our money.

The early 2000s saw about the beginnings of a recession that economists had been predicting for years before, the 90’s economic wave couldn’t last forever and Facebook hadn’t begun to distract employees yet either.

[“Some economists in the United States object to characterising it as a “recession,” since there were no two consecutive quarters of negative growth.” ](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_2000s_recession#References)

On the terror front, Osama Bin Laden had laid out his dastardly plans and executed them to a precision that was terrifying enough next to the true horror of watching a passenger plane slam into one of most revered world landmarks of the modern age, not once but twice! And a third attack being thwarted by the bravery of a few passengers.

Travel & security as we knew it was gone and so was the trust and cosy living we had all gotten used to in the decade before. So the world was about to change and as we know, thanks to François de La Rochefoucauld is that,

>[“The only thing constant in life is change”](http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/109082.Fran_ois_de_La_Rochefoucauld)

It is, however, the rate of the coming change that flipped the world on its head and caused people to start thinking, “Hang on, wait a minute!” and as I said earlier Facebook is coming and with it the wealth of social networking that will bring about the dawn of the information age as we know it today!

The problem with “Hang on, wait a minute!” is that while hanging on and waiting minutes a new world will pass you by. In the information age the world has access to all of the world’s knowledge and so ideas spread quickly and solutions to new problems can be solved quickly.

>How often has someone said to you “just google it”?

The irony of this is that it can be a problem as well, for those who haven’t been aboard the train to digital connectedness or had their heads in the sand hoping for the winds of change to just blow by and let them carry on doing what they have been doing all the years before.

There is no doubt in my mind that we are in a new renaissance, a “Digital Renaissance” and just like the renaissance of centuries ago it will bring about change in the form of a revolution, not an industrial revolution but an “information revolution”, a “virtual revolution” and a “revolution of new perceptions & philosophies”.

I have spent many of my formative years in business questioning why things were done a certain way. Perhaps it was the precocious nature of youth, or the arrogant confidence brought about by naivety and ignorance, or perhaps it was just the way my generation had begun to have our “awakening”, our own “renaissance”, a generation that searches for the solution rather than dwelling on the problems.

Whatever it was I was inquisitive and would do my best to try and understand not just what I was tasked with, but also what the person before me was tasked with and what the person after me did with what I had done. I did this in the hopes that I could help improve the overall quality and efficiency of what it was we were doing.

I suppose on a subconscious level I was training my brain to equip me to be able to deal with the coming change, and I am glad it did. I am also glad to admit that my inquisitive nature hasn’t really disappeared in fact with all the “mind amplifying” tools we have access to, through our ubiquitous smart phones, tablets and laptop computers, it has been honed and ready to absorb new information and new ways of doing things.


>“Blessed is the person who sees the need, recognizes the responsibility and actively becomes the answer.” – William Arthur Ward

I have heard too often the tired whines of people who aren’t able to deal with the overwhelming amount of information available at the moment. People who don’t know what to do with all of this information that comes across as useless clutter rather than the valuable resource it is.

The fact is that some people focus so much on the problem that they can’t see the solution, and perhaps never will without help. It is not that these people are all necessarily afraid of change, they just have no Idea what is required from them in order to make any sort of change, the first step is more of a leap into the unknown, a leap of faith.

Like my years at university studying a dynamic and completely changing syllabus of ideas and methodologies, the information provided to me may as well have been in another language, what I did learn at university was how to think about business and the information related to it, a new way of creating tools in my mind that will help me to discern what is relevant information and what isn’t.

So after years of working and learning in countries like South Africa, Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda, The UK, Zambia and Mauritius and through my many other travels which I have been privileged enough to experience to other countries I have learnt this…

### I LOVE TO COOK!
Elaboration to follow in next blog post.

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