🗣️ Principles of ownership in your team
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🗣️ Principles of ownership in your team
A newsletter about design and creativity, and how they contribute to a better world.
Welcome to Edition #43 of the Creative Currents newsletter!
In today's issue, we explore the importance of ownership within your team. An ownership mindset is critical to the success of any team, as it empowers team members to take responsibility for their work and make decisions that lead to positive outcomes. We look at how transparency, autonomy and empathy help to cultivate an ownership mindset in your team members.
Ownership has many benefits, including fostering innovation, boosting team morale and attracting top talent. When team members take ownership of their work, they are more motivated, proactive problem solvers who strive for quality results.
Next, we share some tips on how to use ChatGPT effectively, including how it can help validate your brand, evaluate potential employees and benchmark agency/freelance work. We also offer insights into design, creativity and green initiatives from around the web, as well as interesting finds such as the LV Pharrell show and Adobe's new AI image generator tool.
In our trends section, we explore the trend of users seeking experiences and products that align with specific emotions or aesthetics. From TikTok trends to the popularity of aesthetics like #cottagecore, people are looking for products that evoke a certain mood.
So in summary of today:
Principles of ownership in your team
Some ChatGPT tips
This week’s interesting design, creativity, and green initiatives finds from the web.
AI-generated QR codes using ControlNet are insane.
Principles of ownership in your team
A new issue of creative currents, a new opinion from me on design team thinking. In this issue, we dive a bit more into the principles of ownership.
An ownership mindset in your team is critical to the success of any team. Within our studio, ownership refers to the ability of team members to take responsibility for their work and feel empowered to make decisions that lead to positive outcomes. When your teammates have an ownership mindset (which you should look for), they are more likely to take initiative, work collaboratively, and take pride in their work.
To cultivate an ownership mindset in your team, focus on transparency, autonomy, and empathy. By providing clear expectations, goals, and feedback, team leaders can create a culture of transparency that encourages team members to take ownership of (and be accountable for) their work.
In my view, empowerment is a key principle in building a successful and high-performing team. It refers to the mindset of taking responsibility for results and being empowered to make decisions that lead to those results. When you have team members with an ownership mindset, they tend to be motivated to take ownership of their work and are committed to delivering high-quality results, both individually and for the general team outcome.
The benefits of having an ownership mindset:
Innovation within your projects: Ownership allows teams to go off the beaten track and take calculated risks.
Better morale in your team: Teams that own an experience or outcome from start to finish can move quickly because they can make most decisions independently.
Attract better talent: Feeling like you're making a difference can be a great selling point to attract better talent.
I strongly believe that the most productive people are those who are proactive in finding and solving problems, and who are comfortable with increasing autonomy and decreasing supervision.
In a world where problems are becoming more complex, determined and innovative solutions will come from those who live as if help is not coming. Living with responsibility and ownership can make us stronger and more action-oriented individuals, which in turn, can lead to better outcomes within your team and projects.
Written by Martijn van der Does
Do you have a design or creativity-related question that you would like to have answered? Mail them to us at hello@wonderland.studio and we’ll take it from there.
Some ChatGPT tips
Let's face it, ChatGPT is becoming more and more useful in our daily work. So this time not a case or anything work related in this section, but rather something I found quite useful with ChatGPT. Especially when working on brand propositions.
Basic level Prompt (change the website name)"Using Jung theory and (www.url.com) conduct a review of the brand persona and rank it against the 12 archetypes, review using a scoring criteria of 1-10 1 being the lowest. The results should be presented in a table format"
This prompt was created by Matt Parry and I tried to use it with our own site/brand. It gave me the following summary; based on the evaluation, the brand persona of wonderlandams.com demonstrates a strong alignment with archetypes such as the Explorer, Magician, and Creator. These archetypes highlight a sense of adventure, curiosity, innovation, and creative expression.
I'm happy with this analysis because last September we launched our new brand and we looked at the archetypes while we were creating our brand. Without doing any further analysis, most of these archetypes are perfectly aligned with who we want to be (according to ChatGPT). So how can you use this prompt? It has several uses, some of which are listed below:
Validate your own brand to make sure your copy and tone represent who you are.
Use it to look at a company or agency/freelancer you might be considering working with. Particularly useful in a pitch scenario.
It also gives clients a brilliant tool for benchmarking agency/freelancer work.
Written by Martijn van der Does
This week’s interesting design, creativity, and green initiatives finds from the web.
Humans aren’t mentally ready for an ai-saturated ‘post-truth world’
Love to critique other people's work? Tips on a positive approach
Adobe just previewed an incredible new AI image generator tool
Figma’s awesome new Dev Mode brings designers and developers together
How Open AI designed the ChatGPT app to be addictively simple
Fitting into a feeling
Users are exploring brands, products, and experiences through the lens of a specific feeling, mood, or aesthetic. The first sign of this phenomenon (likely) emerged through the Reddit thread: "books that feel like." Here, users post a photo and fellow users would recommend books that evoked a similar feeling or mood.
Tiktokers have become atmosphere makers - using sounds and visual effects to immerse people in a specific moment and arouse a very specific emotion. On the platform, we can see a number of "it feels like" trends with billions of views on topics that range from "books that feel like [this song]" to "movies that feel like [insert adjective: summer, home, Lana Del Rey]” and every cross-section of books, movies, songs, tv shows, and outfits that you could imagine.
The popularity of aesthetics and cores that encapsulate a specific feeling have soared on TikTok since 2020. Just take #cottagecore, with 12 billion views on TikTok, it encompasses an entire lifestyle — from books to fashion to food and is rooted in a specific feeling that is difficult to describe but can be understood through the videos, photos, and content that falls under this aesthetic.
People are searching for more than just specific products, but instead want to be fed products that align with the specific feeling that they are looking for.
What does this mean for brands?
Discover a mood that aligns with your product or brand. Draw inspiration from the ambiance of the current season or consumption context, and strategically position your product within it.
Meticulously curate your content to captivate and immerse people in the ambiance. Use visual language, sounds, and effects to engage their senses and create an immersive experience.
Our data and strategy team will cover trend insights on a biweekly basis. See an insight or trend you'd like us to explain? Email it to hello@wonderland.studio and we'll take it from there.
AI-generated QR codes using ControlNet are insane.
It's amazing what you can do with ControlNet and QR codes these days. Here are a few examples of QR codes generated with the option to use AR.
