“Ideas have little value in today’s world”
Mesa Company creator Barbara Soalheiro talks to Gama about optimizing creative processes. With clients like Google, Nestlé, and Fiat, she created a method that promises to solve complex problems and get projects up and running in 5 days.
By Luara Calvi Anic, from Gama magazine
February 14th, 2021
“Let’s do a brainstorm or “let’s talk about our possible ways to go” can sound like an opportunity to gather good ideas in a work meeting. It could also mean that an avalanche of incomplete insights and random words will soak your notebook.
For Mesa Company creator Barbara Soalheiro, 40, from Minas Gerais (Brazil), there is no shortage of ideas in the world. But today, what really matters is the ability to transform them into projects, into something a little more concrete. “The only way to reach a solution is to build one,” she says. It was with this premise that she launched her company in 2011.
It works like this: the customer presents a problem, and in 5 days leaves with a solution. The Mesa method consists of bringing together a team of specialists, from different areas to put ideas into practice, create a prototype, and bring answers — “always with the problem owner participating”, as explained by Barbara.
This client can be an artist who wants to create a rainbow in the urban landscape, as was the case with dutchman Berndnaut Smilde. Brands like Fiat, which Mesa has helped to create a car nomenclature methodology; or Google, which came out of immersion with a project called, ‘I am Amazon’. In addition to others such as Coca-Cola, Natura, and Nestlé who seek out Mesa to for example, launch a new product for a new audience.
Barbara started her professional career in journalism — expertise that has helped Mesa’s ability to tie ideas and give cohesion to a project. She worked at Editora Abril in Brazil followed by Fabrica, Benetton’s communication research center in Italy, where she became editor in chief of Colors magazine (founded in the 1990s by Oliviero Toscani and Tibor Kalman). Back in Brazil, she took over as Creative Director at a digital advertising agency called Cubocc (part of FLAGCX). From there she left and founded Mesa, and this year marks its 10th anniversary.
G | Mesa has a premise which is to have a very clear question to be answered. Do you have any method of discarding those parallel ideas that can hinder the focus?
Barbara Soalheiro | In our view, the only way to solve a problem is to focus on its essence. We often start with more concrete projects — creating a website, for example. In which case you already have a little definition of what you want .You can even get there, but the way we start is from the essence of the problem. Because if you don’t start by knowing something more specific like,”I need to start my communication with potential customers”, you will not assemble the right team to make this website. If you need to improve your communication, then you will have to find someone who made a website that brought many customers; which is different from someone who just made a very beautiful website.
G | What is the importance of materializing an idea?
BS | The only way to reach a solution is to build it. If you are debating an issue, you might keep debating for ten years. You must enter the essence of an idea and focus on something tangible. Starting from the essence does not mean taking steps backward. It is simply to start looking at the thing that really matters, which is the problem. Sometimes, people put everything together in a project, here comes a little idea, research, the opinion that a friend gave. A tangle of things comes into play. We propose to start more empty, gather all the skills and knowledge that you will need, and focus on execution.
G | What do you think of the brainstorming, these meetings to bring and discuss ideas freely?
BS | I believe that all perspectives are valid, each one in your best situation. From Mesa’s perspective to have an idea is still just a few. You can have a lot of ideas, but the ability to execute them is what matters. In fact, I feel that ideas are of little value in today’s world, which might have been a little different in other times. Today ideas are in abundance.
G | So why are people so attached to the need to have a great idea?
BS | Because they have a feeling that for a thing to be built, the first step is to see the whole thing and then execute it. For us, the idea is a seed. And you don’t see a tree in a seed, but the potential it has. One of the things that Mesa does is to prove that the best way to choose an idea is based on its essence. You have to choose an idea at an early stage when you don’t see the whole yet. The idea alone is nothing. There is a whole universe of startups proving just that: the person has an idea, gets money, and then when he looks back at it in 3 years, he sees that there was a seed that was already there on the first day, but the company has become something else.
G | And how is the client’s reception regarding this proposition?
BS | You will have many people in the market saying that this is very difficult to do. There are consultancy exclusives that generate briefings for clients, for example. But from Mesa’s perspective, this is unnecessary because if you sit for seven minutes with the problem owner he will tell you the essence of his problem. We have a trick that goes like this, “tell me in the same way you would tell your girlfriend, your partner. Tell me in the simplest possible way”. The person speaks and the essence tends to be there.
G | Mesa proposes to solve a complex problem and deliver a solution, a prototype in five days. But from experience, we know that a project to gain body, identity, voice, takes time. How far is it possible to deliver in those 5 days?
BS | For us, what is important is that you can take a step. Our goal is to create a solution that will start to be implemented on Monday, right after the Mesa. And it is less about getting to a perfect answer. Mesa delivers a solution to the client’s problem; not ‘the solution’, because it does not exist. The client will start to implement and then it will change, remedy and that’s it. At the same time, one thing that we prove is that if you keep trying to reach the ideal world, you will never launch it, and you will have nothing at all. What we can do is put something tangible on its feet. In fact, it is at the end of a table that a project begins.
G | You say that the great talents of the world do not work for just one company. But I suppose that you at Mesa also have key and fixed people that you have trained. How to maintain the freshness that new people bring and the team that guarantees the company identity?
BS | I know it feels this way when I say that catchphrase, that ‘no one will want to work full time anymore’, but me, Barbara, who owns my own company, if you tell me the only thing I’m going to do is Mesas, I will say no to that. It’s not just about how I’m going to keep everyone here on my payroll, but now I’m not going to miss the training I’ve already done, the person I’ve trained. And you don’t have to lose anyone; people are also not interested in closing doors. There are a lot of possibilities in the world today and we look and say “I want them all. I want to be able to be in these opportunities, in these connections”. And then it’s good news, you don’t have to lose people: you create a project and you can work with very good people. This is the advantage of the project, having a middle and an end. It is difficult for you to hire Fernando Meirelles [who participated in the I am Amazon project, with Google and Mesa] for a very long project. Or for a former CEO to come and work for a beauty brand that is being launched. Now, for 5 days, per project, even a CEO of a company can say yes.
G | Do you think that the work processes created by large companies hinder creativity? How to grow without losing one’s freshness?
BS | There is no escape, to grow is to rely on process. But life is living in that tension, I must be as creative as possible and as big as I want to be. I have an appetite to be. Everyone knows what growth is for themselves. A level of chaos, of openness to the unknown is necessary. At the end of the day, Mesa is also a process. It has some framework and we will do our best within it. And if you have a problem for which there are no benchmarks, I really think that the best you can do is to bring together the best people, and for that, you need a time frame.
G | Sometimes there is criticism about the way big companies kill creativity.
BS | The problem is not the processes themselves, but the extent to which they make you lose contact with the essence of the problem and the totality of it. One of the challenges processing brings is that many employees completely lose their relationship with the final delivery. Creating is a human act, it is not for nothing that in many religions the idea of God is of the creator. For humans, what matters is not the efficiency of the process but the efficiency of creating new things, solving problems, moving the world forward. Things are all moving a lot, there’s this space to reinvent the world today. And when you have to reinvent yourself, you will pay less attention to the process.
G | The writer Itamar Vieira Junior gave an interview to Gama and said that he started writing “Torto Arado” at the age of 16 and realized that he had no maturity to finish it. He finally published it at 40 and won awards. What is the time to leave a project behind to continue (or not) afterward?
BS | What a beautiful thing?. I didn’t know that he started this book at 16. I have this story that when I came back from Fabrica I won a scholarship to write a book, I wrote it and said that when I was 60 I would stop again to finish it, precisely because of a lack of maturity. What you have to be always looking for is joy. When you are in a very difficult knot, in a lot of trouble to solve, it gives you that impulse of despair. We live this feeling a lot at Mesa, it’s an environment of great pressure, with a high promise, we have a great commitment to the delivery. So it’s a lot of stress. What I realize is that everyone who surrenders to this despair ends up succumbing. And if at that moment, you can connect with the joy of work, you will find ways out of it. And the other thing to look for is the truth… a very complex term today. But there are things that are solid because they are rooted in something that connects with other people, which is what I would call real, something that pulsates, something alive… A mantra of ours is , “all you need and only what you need”, so in the most difficult moment, we look for these two things. And I think that if you are in the middle of a project and find neither the joy nor the truth — the living thing that pulsates is almost a spring that comes to the surface — maybe it is time to put that project down a little.
G | When do you assume that some idea succeeded? What are the indicators?
BS | I love this question because I find it to be so subjective. Were we able to see and bring out the greatest potential of this project?. It’s a question that guides me. Facundo [Guerra, a São Paulo businessman] says that a business is a genuine form of expression in the world. So what will measure how well it works is also your perception of the world. In general, I would say: will you be proud to say that you signed this?. Do you tend to say ‘there’s a little bit of me here’?. Perhaps this is the right question to ask yourself. If you have “you” in there, you can consider it a success.
G | You already said that the way to engage people at work is not by setting up ping pong tables, as many companies do. What do you think it takes to engage people in a project?
BS | I think work is one of the best things in life. This ability to work that comes from creating is very inherent to human beings. So it’s about reconnecting people with that feeling, that ability to be a creator. The ping pong table, free food etc., It makes a difference when recruiting young people, but it has nothing to do with work. If you were simply able to encourage things that are in the world of work, for example, give the opportunity to do something for real, to take risks, to let work be an adventure. This type of connection has much more value than the ping pong table.
G | How did you get up and finish this project called Mesa? What came before and when did you feel that the thing went from being a project to becoming something?
BS | When I started thinking about Mesa, I was at Fabrica. I had this idea, this whole plan in my head and I was very afraid to start doing it. And one day, when I was still living in Europe, I went on a trip and I was on top of a rock in Croatia, watching the kids jump in the sea . This girl came out of nowhere, she looked like an angel, she looked at me and said, “Are you afraid? “ and I said “yes!”. And she replied, “Just run and jump”. And then she ran, jumped, and repeated that statement at the bottom of the rock. I then jumped off the rock and it was delicious. For me, that was something, a message. Your brain will give you a lot of reasons not to do one thing. Humankind evolved in an attempt to retain energy, you need to take care, save energy and not spend it frivolously because in a little while you may have to face winter or a predator. In a way, your brain doesn’t want you to ‘jump’.
G | And this has a lot to do with creating a project.
BS | Yes. There is a piece about putting on a standing project that is called ‘just run and jump’. I think this episode of the girl in the Croatian rock was very important to start with, and it took me a long time. The thing existed in my head since December 2010, and we made the first Mesa in October 2011. All that time I was afraid ‘to jump’. It was me there at the top looking at the rock at the bottom. My brain was asking me, “but what if it goes wrong?”. And my response was, “but I’m going to do this thing, I’m going to be half-naked in front of everybody, and is that bad?’. I remember the day I hired the first person, which was Ligia Giatti, who is now a partner. It was like “‘wow, I pay a salary every month”. It was only then that I had the courage to call Mesa a company, until then it was just a project. There is a time when you start to create a structure to be something else, maybe a project is still something really personal, individual.
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