icelab: think below the surface

Less mass, more energy

There’s a temptation to try to optimise your business by cranking out the same thing, efficiently, again and again. It’s the agribusiness model: get good at doing one thing, then do it as cheaply as you can in the greatest volume. Because you need to keep volumes high, you need to market to people who don’t actually want or need your product – and that’s just what it is, a generic product, the same as the last, the same as the next.

But agribusiness monocultures are boring and brittle: they’re prone to disease, and they’re easily wiped out when the market shifts.

We’re more like hunter-gatherers: we improvise, adapt, try new approaches. For us, a new project is an opportunity to explore different ways of doing things: to learn from the past, but also to try to build for the future. It means we need to have a broader range of skills because we do different things at different times. We stay agile and light. It’s more diverse, and it’s more interesting.

Working Hard, Playing Long

We’re trying out a new work rhythm at the lab, coming in early, going home late, working hard from Monday to Thursday, then taking Fridays off. So far, so good: doing five days’ hours in four days concentrates our concentration, as it were, and gives us unstructured time on Fridays – time to think, time to play, time to paddle our new kayaks. The cost/benefit is good too: by reducing our working days by 20%, we get a 50% increase in our weekend! [If you really want to talk to us, email or call: the phone diverts, we have laptops.] Try it at your workplace; you won’t be disappointed.

Verbs, not nouns

You don’t want a CD-ROM, or brochure, or a logo, or a website. What you really want is the outcome, the service, the result that those things provide.

You want to tell a story. You want to sell something—an idea, a product. You want to show off what you do.

Don’t constrain yourself. Don’t think about a thing. Think about the result. Think about what it does, not what it is.

Design, not decoration

One of the reasons we started Icelab is that we wanted to spend more time designing and less time decorating.

The question is not ‘how can this look better?’ The question is ‘how can this work better?’

That requires deeper thinking. It means asking more questions. What is it for? What should it do? For whom? What assumptions do we need to unpack and discard? Which ones do we recognise as valuable and keep?