Authenticity: A Proverb You Can Believe In

Facilitator: Darin Westrich, Carolyn Grant, and Jill Zimmerman
Company: Procter & Gamble
Session Title: Authenticity:  A Proverb You Can Believe In
Session #: 406

Date: Tuesday, February 24, 2009
Time: 2:00pm - 3:30pm
Room: Valley

Description

When developing consumer or customer-centric communications, it’s vitally important to keep the story authentic, genuine, honest, and true to the data in order to build credibility and believability.  In corporate environments, business culture drives us to tell stories using company lingo (think acronyms and buzzwords) and typically in third person using facts and statistics (think forecasting and demographics).  Even our communications can be tainted with “spin” and can leave the participant yearning for clarity and direction (think complexity and ambiguity).  In this session, we will discuss how visual thinkers are the catalyst for translating insights into believable, authentic stories and communications, bringing to life the narration of an individuals point of view using their thoughts, words, actions and emotions using real imagery and verbatims (think scrapbook).  The brand of authenticity we should look for does not always result in aesthetically pleasing communications; rather it can be raw, provocative and at times disturbing (think documentary).

In this session we will share our thoughts on authenticity and how it provides a path to rich empathic learning and understanding for product and development teams.  We will discuss the approach of using common principles that enable development of authenticity, regardless of the subject matter.  Examples will be shown of how the presence of authenticity (or lack thereof) affects a participant’s understanding.  Finally, we will give the session participants an opportunity to apply authenticity in a short, fun exercise. 

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