
For our recent Google Firestarters (our 26th!), we revisited a successful format that we first did two years ago. In 2015, in one of our most successful Firestarters ever, seven of the best minds in the industry gave a ten minute perspective in answer to a single question: what's the best thing that you've learned in your career? This time we brought together another seven brilliant industry brains in the same quick-fire format to answer what is arguably the defining challenge of our time: what’s the best insight that you’ve learned for dealing with change and complexity?
Jim Carroll, erstwhile Chairman of BBH, kicked us off with a wonderfully insightful ten minutes drawing on some of the ideas he writes about over on his excellent blog. Jim talked a lot about how we often list out capabilities (both personal and agency) as a long tally of things we can do without really thinking about what our core competency truly is and how we can apply that in new or different ways. Using a lovely story of what happened when a famous taxidermist was asked to stuff a walrus when he'd never seen one in real life before, he took this into the dynamic that often exists between performance and transformation (to perform and/or to transform): 'If you want to stuff a walrus, you need people who know their walruses and people who know their taxidermy.' Transformational change requires cross-generational expertise. And finally he focused on how process can be a catalyst for change - if you want to change the product, change the process (the team, the brief, the meeting, the time, the context). Try new combinations and partnerships. Crash the procedure and crunch the schedule. Test and trial, experiment and explore. Be prepared for the unexpected. As John Bartle once said: ‘Be in the vanguard, not in the guard’s van.’
Mel Exon picked up on some of these themes in her talk, reflecting on a talk she'd given at SXSWi a few years back about Skynet vs Mad Max, and her own personal story of finding balance and establishing her own guard-rails within which to understand change. To quote Maya Angelou: 'The need for change bulldozed a road down my mind'. She pulled out some key thoughts on how important it is not to become overly-cynical ('cynicism is the enemy of creativity'), to question everything, to be brave in taking the leap. She quoted Paul Feldwick: 'We need to be respectful of the past and more critical of it'. I loved her point about how we need to embrace people who are different to us, but also how finding your gang (and the sense of belonging we get from likeminded people) is good. She emphasised the importance of being child-like in our learning and enthusiasm, how we should not lose our craft in the rush to management, but use pattern recognition, simplicity and adaptiveness as a way of navigating complexity.
For his talk Craig Mawdsley drew from Stoic philosophy (and The Daily Stoic), emphasising that the simplest approach to navigating complexity is to work out what's in your control and therefore what you can change, and then to let go of worrying about the other things:
“Some things are in our control and others not. Things in our control are opinion, pursuit, desire, aversion, and, in a word, whatever are our own actions. Things not in our control are body, property, reputation, command, and, in one word, whatever are not our own actions.”
Our main job is to be a human being, to just do the work, make the best of what is in your power and take the rest as it occurs: 'Look at what you've got and fall in love with that'. We have the potential to live a good and happy life if we can learn to be indifferent to what makes no difference.

Jerry Daykin, Head of Global Digital Media Partnerships at Diageo, followed with a high-paced but insightful ten minutes. Agencies, he said, need to understand that clients take big risks with their budgets and sometimes we just make things more complex than they need to be.
The number one thing that stop things from happening is time - comms is often a small part of what CMOs do, sometimes the benefits of digital can be oversold, sometimes we indulge in lazy-endism ('TV is dead'). The best way to create simplicity is to create guide rails for marketers, particularly around complex areas like programmatic, ad fraud. The opportunity is to generate more trust through making marketer's lives easier. Frameworks are useful, but execution is everything.
Lucy Jameson, Founder of Uncommon London, has had quite a couple of years. She told a personal and inspiring story of her transition from CEO of Grey, through a year in which she interned at Facebook, to her current choice to start her new agency. As humans, she said, we totally under-estimate the chance element of change and we love stories. So stories can be a powerful way to navigate change. Her own story about the choices she's made more recently in her career, and the work that she has chosen to do really brought this to life in a very heartwarming way.
Nicole Yershon describes herself as a maverick, inspiration and a troublemaker (in a good way). She's just released her new book 'Rough Diamond' which describes her journey of driving change, creating things from nothing, and turning disruption into advantage. Nicole also told a couple of vivid personal stories of how she'd made change happen when everyone around her was against it: 'ask not why we can do this, ask why we can't'. Disruption is so often seen as a negative word but it also leads to huge opportunity - but we have to get uncomfortable and persist through the pain barrier that change often brings with it. Innovate at the core.
Our final talk was a wonderfully witty presentation from Dan Cullen-Shute who rounded things off with a funny but insightful take on the theme which is difficult to do justice to here. He talked about working hard to solve the right problems, how we always think that we're living in the greatest period of change that the world has ever seen, and how if we look for complexity we'll always find it. But his final though was a brilliant way to finish our provocations: Never forget to be excited.
It was a truly fascinating event. My thanks go to all our speakers for their brilliant talks, to Google for hosting, and to all those that came along on the night. As we go into 2018 Google Firestarters is entering it's seventh year and (although I'm biased) it feels as though these events are more vibrant and challenging than they have ever been so my thanks to our community and speakers for making them so fulfilling to curate.
Thanks to @melex for the pic at the top