#93: Selling the idea, making the thing, respecting the duty of care
A Q&A with design and innovation leader, Ian Wharton
Hello!
It’s good to be back. I decided to take an extended newsletter break during my Swedish summer vacation, and I’ll be writing about some of my uncoverings soon. Today, we’re going to hear from Ian Wharton.
I’ve known Ian for almost a decade. We both worked together at AKQA, where he was leading creative teams at an unprecedentedly young age, producing top-class work. The industry noticed. Ian’s work has been honoured by the Apple Design Award, the Royal Television Society Award, D&AD, BIMA, Webby’s, and the Art Director’s Club in New York.
Today, Ian is the founder and CEO of healthtech company Aide Health, the author of Spark for the Fire: How Youthful Thinking Unlocks Creativity, and the creator of an online course, Sell the Idea, which helps people effectively pitch and present their work. (Pass It On readers get a 30% course discount. You’ll find the voucher code at the bottom of the post.) Ian also spends a significant portion of his time in creative education. For the past six years, he has been on the advisory board of D&AD Shift, a free night school for underrepresented young creatives. He is also a Governor at Arts University Bournemouth.
Ian is one of the most intentional leaders and creators I know. His career proves that great ideas can emerge through consistent commitment to the craft and caring as much about the process through which ideas emerge as the ideas themselves. How wonderful to watch him pass on these hard-earned skills to others.
Let’s start with an easy one. What’s the most important problem in your field?
It’s any time someone hesitates to make the thing they desperately want to make because they succumb to the avoidable things that kill creativity. There is never enough money or time. You will never feel you have enough knowledge. There are no perfect market conditions. Ideas never (read: shouldn’t) come with a guarantee of success. Just make the thing. We need ideas made to move society forward by reflecting on their success or failure. Apparitions of creative acts don’t serve anyone.
Why Aide Health?
I was pretty unwell as a child, and the time in hospitals and time with doctors left a lifelong impression. Chances are, anyone reading this will either be living with a long-term condition or have someone in their immediate family who is. Most people don’t have the tools or knowledge to take control of these health challenges and will feel isolated, worried or have a reduced quality of life as a result.
Medical science, broadly speaking, knows what to do with long-term conditions. We have the medicines and the lifestyle interventions. What we haven’t solved is patient engagement — enabling people to take a more active role in their health and to more effectively self-manage. We see that as a digital product problem, not a clinical problem, and we’re taking a design-led approach to try and solve it.
What’s one valuable lesson from founding and running Aide that you would never have learned from working in a creative agency, and vice versa?
A startup like Aide will reveal how capable you are of getting kicked in the face. You will meet rejection constantly. Investors will say no or waste your time. Some will do both. Along the way, people ‘of influence’ will grace you with input like “I think this will be really hard” as if it’s the promulgation of divine wisdom. And you sit and smile because while you know that person is as helpful as they are inspiring, you’re still staring at abject uncertainty, and they’re not wrong. The lesson is that you find out what it’s like to properly care about something and whether or not what you’re doing matters. Otherwise, you’d yield. You also learn to hold on to the quieter moments that keep you from wavering, like when one patient says, “I haven’t had an asthma attack since using this app, and I’ll use it for the rest of my life.”
Top-tier agencies that nurture their talent are exceptional at one thing: teaching you how to communicate an idea effectively. Especially if you are serving high-standard, high-performing Fortune 500 clients. That is a path through fire you wouldn’t learn the same way in a startup.
Let’s talk about communicating ideas. You’ve previously said that “the first hurdle every idea faces is the moment when you sell it to other people.” Why do exceptional ideas fail at this hurdle? What should we be doing differently?
The first mistake creative and entrepreneurial people make is being too optimistic about the ability of their audience to retain the information they are given.
Anytime you are pitching or presenting work, you are competing with every other idea, piece of information and decision that is trying to occupy your audience's mind. They are constantly evaluating volume. The threat your idea faces, however brilliant it may be, is obscurity. To overcome it, you need to focus on the most important part of narrative structure, the inciting incident.
The inciting incident is the major opposing force standing in the way of your hero (the people who will benefit once your idea is realised). It’s a deliberate piece of design when articulating your idea to capture and hold attention. People don't remember facts, figures, methods, industry doublespeak, or your company's ‘proprietary process’. They remember conflict and the steps that can be taken to overcome it.
Helping others pitch ideas better is a big part of your work, yet you also believe that people should care less about the idea itself. Why is that?
Having a certain degree of indifference about your idea, your work and its potential outcome will serve you better than giving every ounce of yourself to it and assigning it all your hopes and dreams. Find a way to care a little bit less. This is the opposite of what we’re told, but humans are exceptional self-saboteurs when we want something too much.
You take the opposite view on care when it comes to end users, believing that designers, entrepreneurs and creatives all have a duty of care to the people who are the intended recipients of their work. What does executing in line with a duty of care look like?
It looks like all the obvious things that are easy to lose sight of:
Having a deep, real understanding of the world of your intended user or audience and empathising with them.
Being disciplined enough to consider the impact (positive and negative) that your design, creation or business will have on these people and those close to them.
Avoiding the temptation and ease of short-termism.
What has your journey at Aide taught you about the relationship between the tech and non-profit sectors?
We have built some great relationships with charities like the British Heart Foundation and Asthma + Lung UK. But, and rightly so, we’ve had to work hard to earn their trust and demonstrate that we stand on common ground.
The difference in speed is probably what causes reluctance or tension, or whatever you might refer to it as. Early-stage healthtech needs to build things quickly, prove or disprove them quickly, and become commercially active quickly if they are to live long enough to make an impact. I think it’s fair to say the same is not true of non-profits. If the reasons for that speed are miscommunicated or misunderstood, it’s easy for the non-profit sector to interpret it as being cavalier with patient safety or being in it for the wrong reasons. At least from the vantage of the community of early-stage healthtech companies Aide is in, that couldn’t be further from the truth.
Which three books or other media have impacted you most and why?
Wallace & Gromit: A Grand Day Out — made me want to make animated films
Back to the Future — made me learn how to play the guitar at age seven
Total Recall (Arnold Schwarzenegger’s biography) — made me want to pursue a deliberately diverse career
More questions for Ian? Find him on LinkedIn and subscribe to his free Substack.
Pass It On readers get a 30% discount on Ian’s course, Sell the Idea. Voucher code: PASSITON.
Thanks so much for reading,
Lauren