Factories are the perfect place to get your face on in the mornings xoxo

// Innovation is both a buzzword — and a non-buzz-word that is artificially injected with far more buzz than the original ever had.

Yes, yes, innovation is real. It’s got hands, hopes, feet, fantasies, and a price-tag — you can’t buy air (unless it’s canned, and then you’re buying the convenience).

But… that’s only one of its Faces.

And, funnily enough, this Real Face, is not the one you see. The surface, the stories, the manufactured hearsay — that’s the other face: the False Face. THAT is what we are exposed to.

✺ ✺ ✺

That False Face smirks at us from the top, its pearly whites inviting you to a new world, one where things will never-EVER be the same again, taking our cash-clutching hands and leading us to the register/digital-landing-page.

And, funnily enough, the False Face hasn’t “scammed” you. The product/service/idea/innovation doesn’t disappoint (often). The strategic narrative has worked.

The buyer’s happy with their purchase. They’ll show it off, speak about it online, display it prominently in their home, or will recommend it to others — eager to spread the Innovation Virus far and wide. And because the more infected people, the more the False Face is accepted. E.g., if everyone believes the new iPhone is a technological wonderland compared to last year’s model… the belief is justified, and the belief becomes True.

(In other words: they spread the belief outward, because the more people who carry the belief, the truer it becomes).

One may look “false,” but every coin has two equally important sides.

The Real Face

The Real Face is Real.

It DOES something… And it does it in a one-step-forward type-of-way. It doesn’t lie about itself. It knows what it is, or, at least, it never discusses it, because that’s not its job.

The Real Face’s job is to be the +1 Innovation.

The baby step. It’s One Small Step for Man that has a physical footprint you can point to and go: “Look, Ma, I made innovation!”

It can happen in any industry. To any idea. To any product. To any service. To anything. At any time.

Finding a universally understood example is harder than you’d think. As every +1 Innovation is very industry-dependent. And yet, they happen every single day. R&D departments are pumping these small steps out like penny sweets. Their impact is hardly even recognised by those who create them. Thus, if you’re on the outside of a specific industry’s (or even a specific company’s) happenings, you probably won’t give a fraction of a percent of care about it.

E.g. A bottling company discovers a new way of embedding a synthetic polymer into their labels that reduces the amount of ink needed to create the same colour on the bottle’s label.

Yawn-worthy, for many.

(Me included).

But that, my darling? That is the Real Face of Innovation.

The +1 Innovation.

The False Face

So many masks to choose from… (which is where consultants such as I step in to help you manage the chaos).

The False Face is where Real Innovation is turned into a STAR!

• Name in lights!

• Broadway billing!

• Walk of fame name beneath celebrity feet!

• Adoring fans!

• Awards-awards-awards!

Those tiny shoes the Real Face used to shuffle a single square forward in life’s chess board get hooked up to a bike pump and vigorously injected with more undetectable steroids that the entire Olympic Village combined, until those shoes we used to squeeze the cheeks of with delicate pride become monstrously-beautiful planets.

They have become marketable machines.

They have been spun.

They have +10,000 Innovation energy now — assembled like a boy band created as an industry plant to sate ALL the needs of the modern audience.

(That’s how you begin Worldbuilding a brand or an Identity/persona)

P.S. There’s the stereotypical example that is easy to lean upon as it reaches the mainstream:

The +1 iPhone

= “you can now have a screen you control by touching it with your finger”

= this was not a huge leap forward by any means. This type of technology has been slowly growing and metastasising for years. We’d been tapping at our BlackBerrys and our LG Cookies for years with a little plastic pencil. Now? We can use our finger. Cool, but big whoop when you put it in perspective.

The +10,000 iPhone

= “this. changes. everything.”

= the PR/marketing/buzz machine has gotten its claws on this +1 step and turned it into something it never claimed to be.

= BUT, just because the False Face starts off False… doesn’t mean that the stories it tells don’t eventually become the “Truth”. (That’s the beauty of Hyperstition).

= Today, the iPhone is a manufactured milestone/watershed moment — thou must bow to it.

The Innovative Conclusion

Assemble your Personal Branding Bible piece by piece.

But, we are bowing to the story. To the myth. Not to the +1 innovations that were amplified and brought together beneath it

We worship the campfire song, not the small act that inspired it.

We worship the Bible, not the original actions of its characters.