Tim Leake at Saatchi & Saatchi, NYC on Hyper Island

“Three days of rewiring your brain”. That’s how Tim Leake at Saatchi & Saatchi, New York describes the Hyper Island Master Class. The Hyper Island speaker – who books meetings with himself and runs away from anyone who calls themself an expert – shares his view on the industry where change is your only constant.

How and why did you first get involved with the Hyper Island Master Class?
I signed up for the very first Master Class that Hyper Island did here in the United States, about a year and a half or 2 years ago. I come from a very traditional background and I have always been into digital stuff but not practicing it as a professional so it was overwhelming to me. It was scary and I could tell it was changing the industry. But I couldn’t put my finger on how and what I was supposed to do about that. I had taken on a role where I had kind of volunteered myself within my group at Saatchi to lead this change. And when I was reading the description of what the Hyper Island Master Class is meant to achieve I said ‘YES! That is exactly what I need’.  After that first Master Class, I kept in touch with Anders Sjöstedt, the managing director at Hyper Island, US. We would just get together for breakfast and chat about how things were going. Eventually that led to me putting together a presentation on implementation. The one big thing that was missing from the original class I felt was some specifics on how to take the sort of ‘perfect world’ you are dealing with in these three days and actually apply it in your daily work. So I started doing that presentation and that eventually lead to speaking on other topics as well, and now I am much more involved with Hyper Island on many levels, which has been fantastic.

So, what is a Hyper Island Master Class? How would you describe it?
In a nutshell it’s three days of rewiring your brain to prepare for this digital world. It’s three days where thought and reflection becomes more important than just responding to emails, which is a really important thing these days. You get to sit down and focus on the right things for a little bit.

What do you think the ideal conditions are to inspire creativity?
In general you need the freedom to fail and the freedom to look stupid. If you are talking ideal conditions you need to remove judgements. You either have to be the sort of person that does not care about judgements or you have to some- what remove them from the equation so you have the freedom to try new things and you need not be worried about the fact that they may or may not work.
Lack of focus is becoming a huge problem. As we get bombarded by more stimuli we start to lose focus. “Ok I need to check Twitter, I need to check Facebook, I need to check my emails, I need to read up on Quora, there’s all these blogs I want to read”. Cultivating an environment that allows people to focus is a really important thing for creativity. Not that you need a lot of time but you need to be able to focus on things for at least a little bit without being distracted.

So on that note…focus, how do you get in the zone?
I think a stopwatch helps. There’s something tangible about starting a stopwatch that lets me know ‘ok now I am working on this’ and I am going to keep working on it until the stop watch gives up, however much time you want that to be. I also think pulling the Ethernet cable out of your computer helps so there are no new emails coming your way and you are just focused on working.
I also like booking meetings with myself. Nobody questions meetings. So, if I book the conference room for a two-hour meeting, I can just go there and work. Sometimes I don’t even have anything planned for that time. I just go in and focus on something. It tends to be a huge help.

In your opinion, how does a Master Class help professionals face the challenges currently faced by the industry?
The biggest current challenge we have to deal with now is constant change. And so it’s not necessarily some technical or technological thing we need to bone up on because a few years ago we thought it was flash. Flash is not as big of a deal now as it was five years ago and five years from now it might not even be around anymore. What we need to do is get really good at change because in a changing industry, in a changing environment, the change itself is your only constant. So if you understand how to adapt to change you will always understand how to keep up with everything.
I think that is the biggest thing that I walked away from the Master Class with. It gave me a skill set and a mind set to constantly keep up with change. And I do think it really does open your mind. It gives you a certain sense of clarity. “Oh, this isn’t as scary as I might have thought”. There is so much out there that you can’t understand but it is not nearly as daunting as a lot of people might think, because once you start to look at the unknown as being something exciting, something you want to go figure out, then it’s a fun challenge rather than something intimidating.

What have you learned about learning?
Learning never stops. Anyone that ever calls him- or herself an expert on anything is a person you need to run away from, really fast.
People act like they know it all when, in fact, the world and the environment are changing around them. So it’s the person who is constantly questioning and trying something else that I am attracted to. They are the ones we want to be around because they are going to discover new things and new ways of solving problems.

What is yesterday?
A lot of people in the tech world are chronic neophytes. It’s always about “what’s the next best thing”. They are already bored of Quora or Foursquare, which are still relatively new. I’m not really like that. I actually think there is a huge opportunity when something like Facebook becomes widespread. That’s when it has a real opportunity to be useful and valuable.
I don’t know why we are constantly looking for the next Twitter, when Twitter itself hasn’t necessarily been fully realized yet.
There’s a greater utility to the things that are seemingly boring, and ‘yesterday’. Everybody is using them and they become a mass communication tool. Television, in a way, is yesterday yet it’s still vital to most people in everyday life. It’s still a very relevant medium. It just needs to be used in the context of a digital world.

What is today?
Today is a little easier to define. The buzz is in social and in mobile. The ability to have a phone or an iPad, or whatever, with you all the time means that you are always connected. And the way that social spreads ideas and helps keep communication instantaneous on a mass level – as opposed to an email which is instantaneous but on a one-on-one level. That’s all really interesting. Some people would still call those things “yesterday” because they are already bored of them. In my mind this is what’s happening right now. It’s where the little revolutions are taking place.

What do you see as the major future development – the seed that is going to grow?
I don’t know if it’s possible, but I wish for simplicity, clarity and truth. There is so much information flying around the Internet and anybody can put anything out there. I wish some coder out there would create some algorithm for truth. I think that would be huge.
“Speed” is another trend that needs addressing. The crowd moves a lot faster than organisations can. I think the next big thing, over the next 5 years, will be the tools that can help organizations keep pace and respond to the crowd.