An Unthinkable Manifesto
Wednesday, February 15, 2012 at 11:23AM Well, here we are at the beginning of our third year. It's been a great couple of years for us, but like any new business, we acted with a mixture of instinct and opportunism, hunches, idealism and realism. In the background, though, we've been quietly building an understanding of our shared goals and passions, of our complementary skills and of our strengths and genuine points of uniqueness. An understanding is one thing, of course; an articulation is another. Never afraid of stridency, we've synthesised these goals into an Unthinkable manifesto. So here it is. As ever, all thoughts welcome!
Justin, Matthew, Sarah, Simon
Four Unthinkable Positions
One: It's all about people
Technology doesn’t exist without people. Technology is something that people and organisations make, use, adapt and subvert constantly. Sometimes it breaks.
Two: Better connections, not more
Digital technology, more than anything else, is about connections - between people, things, companies and information. And it is better connections, not more, that can make everything we do fuller, more productive, more enjoyable and more likely to surprise.
Three: Remember your own agency
There is a tremendous pressure to keep up with the next big thing. Simply responding to that pressure means letting technological change happen to you. It’s all too easy to forget that you are making the decisions.
Four: Don't fear complexity
Human life consists of a set of interlocking technological, social, corporate, political and cultural systems of astonishing complexity. If we don't confront that complexity, we will remain its slave (which is never a good thing - unless you’re into that).
How we work
Unthinkable offer deep and careful analysis of the problems we are set by our clients, in the light of these beliefs, and based on decades of collective experience of the digital economy. We know that only by taking human culture, motivation, frailties and processes as seriously as we take technology can we hope to reach fresh insights.
Working with us is sometimes tough, but it's always exhilarating. We bring serious, rigorous, straightforward and cross-disciplinary thinking to our work - and seek to inculcate it in our clients' work, too. We enjoy getting to know our clients, in large and small organisations, as individuals and as businesses. We never want to stop learning. And we never want our clients to stop learning either. We believe that good things happen when smart people listen to each other. Even if we wind you up a lot on the way there.
By working together to understand your needs, and those of your customers, we can help you define what you need to do and we can help you do it: quickly, cost-effectively and with less pain than on your own.
What we do
We help you take better informed risks that will set you apart from the competition. We help you form stronger digital processes that suit your organisation. We help you find the right agency, the right funding opportunity and the right audience. But we are also honest about what we don’t know and can’t do, and can make an introduction to people who do and can from our networks of contacts across the worlds of media, culture and technology. We like making these connections.
These beliefs and these opportunities are what get us out of bed in the morning. That and the kids and the alarm clock.