Let’s build worlds, not just write decks
Why the future of innovation should be immersive, explorable, and designed to be used again and again
Imagine being able to share an idea with someone so completely that they see the world the way you do. No need to make an argument or write an article. No need to convince them of anything. They simply step into your mind and experience it for a while.
A little less ambitiously, imagine inviting a client in to experience an innovation project you’ve been working on. They can watch interviews first-hand, see the connections you’ve made, and empathise with the people you’ve met. There’s no slide deck and no final report. Instead, there’s an immersive space they can explore.
This isn’t a new idea. Science fiction plays with it. Immersive theatre companies like Punchdrunk build worlds for audiences to experience as entertainment. Futurists talk about experiential futures. Designers use speculative fiction. But there’s always felt like a big gap between those kinds of experiences and the reality of research and innovation projects (although I’d like to think some of our workshops come close).
What’s changing now is that new analysis tools make it possible for us to connect our clients directly with raw research, so they feel much closer to their customers. This is becoming the foundation for more immersive innovation deliverables, more like worlds or knowledge systems, in which slide decks play a much smaller role.
Based on our experience so far, good immersive systems share common characteristics:
1. Searchable and explorable
It should be easy to ask questions and follow threads to find relevant evidence, rather than hunting through folders or skimming dozens of slides.
We want to create an interconnected body of material rather than a linear document. Headlines link to analysis, then analysis links to examples. Examples link back to raw evidence, like interview transcripts, clips, and notes.
You shouldn’t have to know where to start and you’re not restricted to one path. You can follow your nose, depending on the question you’re trying to answer.
Recommendation: Create hyperlinks within text, including links to concrete artefacts. Use AI tools to make long form analysis, transcripts, and video searchable.
2. Flexible, playable, and remixable
It should be easy to look at the evidence from different perspectives.
An insight or territory might make sense when viewed through one group’s experience, and quite different when viewed through another’s. It should be easier to shift perspectives without starting again from scratch.
Clients should be encouraged to explore, using frameworks that make it easy to put modules of insight together in new ways.
Our first port of call, before commissioning new research, should always be to go back and look at what we already have. Not just reading the decks but going through the raw evidence to see what’s relevant and what could be reused.
Recommendation: use modular frameworks that break insights and ideas down into recombinable blocks. Create artefacts that encourage play and experimentation, like a deck of cards.
3. Concrete and practical
In an immersive experience insights should feel tangible and concrete.
They should go further than recommendation and ideas, into scenarios and prototypes that embody what the consequences for propositions, products, and services could be.
These concrete artefacts would be intrinsically connected to the research, so it’s easy to move back and forth. They become a new way in to exploring what customers said and the way it’s been interpreted.
Recommendation: Bring insights to life as prototypes, even if they’re just a sketch that you can show to customers
4. Complete and referenceable
The system needs to be built on a solid foundation.
When people try to get to the bottom of the story then they need to be able to find it. A headline and a few bullets is not enough, they need to see detailed analysis and all relevant evidence and supporting references.
Recommendation: Write a long form report - last year we worked on a project that covered so much ground that we needed to write a 50,000 word report to do it justice.
5. Reusable and accumulative
Insights should connect together to build a body of knowledge that can be referred to again and again.
The best insights in peoples’ lives remain true after a project finishes, and should be the first place we look when we have a new question to answer. A team can go back to the evidence and notice a pattern that nobody could see the first time around.
Instead of every new piece of research creating another folder and another deck, evidence becomes part of an expanding, navigable base that future teams can return to. Sense-making becomes a continuous and iterative process.
Recommendation: Build a repository of research at the level of evidence (transcripts, videos, raw data). Create a standard format, so all evidence fits together no matter which agency worked on it. And make it easy for each agency to search the repository to reuse past studies.
Conclusion: lets build the biggest and most immersive experiences that we can imagine
We will still write decks, but we won’t treat them as permanent records. They’ll be snapshops, or temporary stories used for one meeting. Just moments in a longer lifecycle of insight, that gets richer over time, and from which new insights and perspectives emerge.
We’ll use AI to help us build the worlds - especially to make evidence searchable and create concrete artefacts - but we won’t need AI to touch the content. That way, AI can be a tool that enables us to create bigger and more ambitious work. It doesn’t need to replace any part of the work that depends on being human.