How Does Cecily Sommers Know What You'll Be Doing Next?

Sommers is the founder—and, other than a five-member board, a part-time assistant, and a dozen or so volunteers, the sole operator—of the nonprofit Push Institute, which she bills as an “an independent think tank.” She has a lot of ideas about what the institute might eventually do, but its main project so far is the conference. From her office in the Minneapolis Warehouse District, Sommers organizes an event that isn’t about business and includes virtually no business speakers, but draws a rapt audience from Twin Cities companies (Best Buy, Target, General Mills) and others around the country (Intel, GlaxoSmithKline).

What are they coming for? The really big picture, as framed by a restless and creative mind. Sommers doesn’t claim to actually know what the future will hold. And she doesn’t have futurist credentials. She’s just raising questions and possibilities that extend farther afield and farther ahead than most people get to think in their day-to-day work.

“It’s All the Same to Me”

Push, the institute and the conference, were offshoots of another business when Sommers started them four years ago. She had, and still has, a “brand futures studio” called Unit 1, a consultancy she started in 1999 and runs from the same Ford Center office as Push.

Through Unit 1, she does seminars and research for clients on branding and trends. She also hires out as a speaker: In March, she was prepping for a meeting in Boston of the E-Learning Guild, whose members work in electronic education and training.

But the idea she built Unit 1 around, and what makes it a “studio,” is her belief that: 1) businesses have trouble asking themselves the most central questions of identity when they develop brands or do strategic planning, so they get stuck in an imitative mode of looking at best practices, and 2) the creative processes of the arts can help.

“I was really clear from the beginning that strategy is composed of two essential questions: Who are you, and where are you going? People and organizations have insufficient tools for answering those, so they don’t,” Sommers says. “The thing that the arts do so well is create that zone of discovery.”

So for clients including local retailer Cooks of Crocus and Minneapolis design and printing firm Bolger Concept to Print, she’s conducted “brand theater workshops” that include exercises like the one she calls “Like That.” People look at bits of film and at literature and science writing, and listen to music, collecting the pieces that they feel evoke their brand—it’s “like that,” which might be the sound of an artist’s voice, or the lighting in a certain shot.

It’s an unconventional approach to brand strategizing. But Sommers, who grew up in Massachusetts and Illinois, didn’t come to the work via a conventional route. Before Unit 1, she was a chiropractor and homeopath; before that, an anatomy instructor, a dance instructor, a member of a modern dance troupe in Chicago, and of the Omaha Ballet.

It’s not obvious how that curriculum vitae leads to brand work or to Push. But Sommers’s chiropractic clinic began to tie her experiences together.

“The thing that I did very well in that environment, which is what I’m bringing [to Push] now, too, is that I created a world.” She describes her clinic in the Colonial Building in the Warehouse District, where she used kilim rugs, an installation of birch trees, and an art gallery to set a tone of creative energy rather than clinical distance—reflecting her belief that the answer to core questions of health and life “lives at this intersection” of the physical and creative, she says. To market her services, she held seminars that explained health and disease, nutrition and detoxification, Western and Eastern medicine—giving a big picture to help people make decisions about their health. At the clinic, Sommers says, “I had framed something and tested it and really owned it.”

She sold her clinic in 1998, after seven years—“I kind of got what I was going to get from this set of learning and was ready for the next thing”—then spent a year in Germany working with friends who were homeopaths and artists. When she returned to Minneapolis, rather than starting a new practice, she found herself giving former colleagues advice on branding and marketing theirs. That was the beginning of Unit 1, which later took on clients outside of alternative health care.

Sommers is ready to move on from it now, too. Push is the way she helps people frame big questions and answer them now, and it’s given her a new way to frame herself—as a futurist more than a brand strategist. “It’s all the same to me. I just do what I do,” she says. “But how to represent it in a way that other people can understand it? I think ‘futurist’ has been the next generation of, you know, ‘Let me try this on,’ because it seems to say a little more to people about the kind of thinking and skills that I bring.”