Only Dead Fish

"Holding Knowledge Is Not As Valuable As Evaluating Knowledge"

"We are becoming symbiotic with our computer tools, growing into interconnected systems that remember less by knowing information than by knowing where the information can be found". 

Jonathan Mugan's new book The Curiosity Cycle looks rather intriguing. It talks about the importance of very human attributes such as creativity and curiosity in equipping our children for a world increasingly dominated by computation and (to quote from this interview piece with the author) of "learning the lessons that search engines and social networks have taught the world – mainly that holding knowledge is not as valuable as evaluating knowledge". In other words, when most human knowledge is accessible via your computer keyboard, it is the application of curiosity and creativity to develop adaptable and evolving models for understanding the world that matters more than what you can hold in your head.

Reading about it reminded me of this recent study (from which the quote at the top is taken) that suggested that when people have an expectation of future access to information, they have lower rates of recall of the information itself and enhanced recall instead for where to access it. In this way, the internet has become "a primary form of external or transactive memory, where information is stored collectively outside ourselves".

If true, it's a pretty big shift. Not necessarily in a bad way, but a shift nonetheless.

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Making Room For Innovation

One of the big challenges in these budget-crunching, resource-stretching times is finding the space to innovate. The idea of adopting a 70:20:10 approach creates some interesting possibilities for building innovation into the fabric of what you do, as does opening up the raw material (data, content, ideas) to third parties through APIs and customer interaction platforms. But it's all too easy for fragile ideas to be sacrificed at the alter of the latest quarterly target.

So I think it's interesting that when Walmart bought a small Silicon Valley start up called Kosmix last year, they chose to turn it into WalmartLabs - a unit designed to push Walmart’s capabilities in mobile and social R & D. For me, this approach has several benefits:

• It provides a route to bringing in new tech talent into a large organisation
• More than that, it protects the culture from being stifled by corporate-world and stops the talent from getting caught up in the system. In doing so it provides a better environment to attract other tech talent.
• Being unshackled from existing business cycles and processes means a better chance of increasing the speed of innovation
• Freedom to structure around small, nimble, non-hierarchical teams – like Amazon’s Two Pizza teams approach
• Facilitating the ease with which the organisation can work in flexible ways with third parties and external tech talent
• Giving you the space to create the future (Box 3 in Three-box thinking)

The downside of this I guess is the risk of compartmentalising innovation in ways that isolate it or worse, disenfranchise others. My hunch though is that done in the right way, the benefits of this approach (particularly for large organisations) far outweigh the drawbacks. Anyone agree/disagree?

HT to Tom for the Vijay Govindarajan link

Post Of The Month - January 2012 - The Winner

After a very strong showing for Richard Huntingdon's post on Crimes Against Social in this month's vote, it was Mel Exon's excellent two-part interview with John Willshire of Smithery that edged it and won through. So well done to Mel (and to John of-course). As is usual, they get not only the props of their blogging peers but are also entered into the hall of fame. Thanks to everyone for taking part and don't forget to bookmark your good reads to nominate for next month.

Post Of The Month - January 2012 - The Vote

Thanks all for the nominations. So our vote this month is between:

Web Second, Mobile First by Mark Suster

Crimes Against Social from Richard Huntingdon

The Flipside Of A Big Audience by Gina Trapani

Mobilityness And The New Marketing from Thom Kennon

Culture Eats Strategy For Lunch by Shawn Parr

Interview With John V Willshire Part One, and Part Two by Mel Exon for BBHLabs

And you can vote below:

The 70, 20, 10 Model

The 70,20,10 model for learning and development seeks to blend different approaches to into a sum greater than its parts. Powerful learning, the theory goes, is comprised of:

• around 70% from real-life and on-the-job problem-solving and experiences
• around 20% from feedback and working with role models
• around 10% from more formal training

In 2005, Eric Schmidt articulated a model for innovation at Google which advocated that employees should utilise their time:

• 70% dedicated to core business tasks
• 20% to projects related to the core business
• 10% dedicated to projects unrelated to the core business

Last year, when Coca Cola announced their new strategy to shift focus from 'creative excellence' to 'content excellence' (something of a marker in the inexorable trend toward brands-as-content-producers, and explained in two rather jargon-filled short films), they talked about applying a 70/20/10 investment principle to content creation:

• 70% of the content should be low risk, bread and butter marketing
• 20% should innovate off what works
• 10% should be high risk ideas that will be tomorrow's 70% or 20%

In the same year as Schmidt was espousing the Google approach to innovation, McKinsey published a report (`Boosting Returns on Marketing Investment’) in which they recommended that in the face of declining effectiveness and trust in mass advertising and the increasing fragmentation of media, brands spend 80% of their budget on banker strategies and tactics, and 20% on learning through well structured tests. It's a useful approach, and one that I've advocated before now as a pragmatic way to enable a greater experimentation with under-pressure budgets. But reading around those different approaches makes me realise that 70/20/10 is a much more useful contemporary model, not only for learning, and innovation, and content, but for something of fundamental importance in marketing: the allocation of budgets.

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Post Of The Month - January 2012 - Nominations

It's time again to open up nominations for Post Of The Month for the month of January. So do please nominate your favourite posts that were posted in that month, in the comments below. As usual, I've listed a few of my own favourites as a starter, and I've had one nomination already (thanks Rick) which I've included. But please do add to them and once I have a good list I'll stick them all up for a vote. OK, so the starting four are:

Web Second, Mobile First by Mark Suster

Crimes Against Social from Richard Huntingdon

The Flipside Of A Big Audience by Gina Trapani

Mobilityness And The New Marketing from Thom Kennon

Please do nominate your own in the comments below.

Good For Nothing: Occupy Blue Monday

Occupy Blue Monday Good for Nothing Film from Good for Nothing on Vimeo.

The smart folk at The Pipeline Project (Dan, Tom, Tom and Anouk) have been running Good for Nothing weekenders now for just over a year. They describe them as creative, collaboration gigs that "bring together a large diverse group of talented people to work with grass-roots, cause-led social innovators in a playful, competitive, experiential experience lasting from 4 to 48 hrs".

They are amazing. A hugely diverse group of coders, strategists, designers, creatives, film-makers, animators, and general likeminded do-ers coming together to design, make, build, and create a little magic. And some genuinely useful and potentially transformational stuff comes out for the usually very small but very worthwhile social enterprises who provide the briefs on which the work is focused. 

A little over a week ago they ran one in the Fallon London offices under the banner of Occupy Blue Monday, focusing on briefs from three amazing social enterprises: Do Nation, Sustaination and The Pop-Up Festival Of Stories. Sadly I couldn't be there for the whole weekend because of family stuff, but I went along to show my support and was reminded of the wonderfully electric atmosphere that pervades the weekend.

The guys have made a rather lovely film about the event which is worth a watch, and I'd encourage anyone to be a part of this wonderful initiative. If you're interested you can find out more on their site or join the community over here.

Google Firestarters 4: Entrepreneurship

"Entrepreneurship is the pursuit of opportunity without regard to resources currently controlled."
Howard Stevenson, Harvard Business School

You'll know by now that I curate a series of events for Google designed to facilitate different thinking and debate around some of the more interesting issues facing planners today, and I'm delighted to say that our first event of 2012 (the first of four quarterly events this year) is going to focus on the subject of entrepreneurship. As we've said in our description of the event:

"With the current movement toward maker culture, and learning to code through services such as Code Academy, there is real appetite amongst planners for more making, doing, creating and just playing around with stuff. Might this be where the real entrepreneurialism in agencies will come from? With technology empowering people like never before, how do we use it to tell great stories for new projects? How do we make room for innovation? What makes someone take the leap into the unknown?"

Part of this is all about understanding what this means in the context of agencies and building on the themes of the events that we had running through 2011 on Agile Planning, Design Thinking in Planning and the New Operating System for Agencies which have each seen some brilliant speakers and some fascinating debate. Another part is about how technology is empowering entrepreneurs in new ways and the growth of 'professional amateurs'. But another very important part I think, is about what this means for us as individuals. Whether we can make room for starting our own fires, what it takes to bootstrap a business and build a brand with very little money, and the value to us and our employers of our own side-projects.

It's a lot of ground to cover but we have two exceptional and inspiring speakers to help us do it: ad-man turned serial entrepreneur David Hieatt (founder of The Do Lectures, and Howies which became one of the most influential sports brands of the last decade, and now founder of Hiut), and the very smart Toby Barnes of Chromaroma and Mudlark.

The event is on 21st February at Google's HQ in London and is strictly invite only (limited on space I'm afraid). But as before, I have a few guest passes to give away, first come first served, to readers of this blog. If you'd like one, please do drop me a line (please note I won't be able to respond to everyone but will notify the successful applicants).

Media = Maths + Magic

Before Christmas, in an exceptionally insightful post on Ad Age, Adam Cahill suggested that it was time to change the orientation of media agencies and departments to be more reflective of what people do and toward what he called the math and the magic (hence the borrowed title to this post) of media. The maths bit of this referred to the kind of automated trading platforms and exchanges (like DSPs) that are becoming increasingly prevalent in traded digital media, and the magic referred to an approach driven by creativity that seeks to bring people in to fun/interesting/entertaining experiences.

"Math is about dispersion: the functional delivery of impressions to people who haven't asked for them, but whom we hope to influence. Magic is about attraction: creating impressions so perfect that people choose to spend time with them, and maybe even pass them on."

Of-course, much media is still traded in non-automated ways, but you can quite see that as more media becomes digitised and therefore more advertising becomes ad-served, margin pressure and the need to facilitate real-time optimisation across channels will drive trading relentlessly towards automation. The win is just too big for all but a minority of specific placements not to be traded in this way.

This, as the piece points out, changes the whole notion of digital media planning. With automation, the emphasis changes from specific media channels to the skills of the people using the platform. More agile and adaptive approaches become far more of a reality as planning becomes a process of testing hypotheses, learning, adapting and optimising rather than a laid down, upfront plan. So the best plans, as it were, will likely not be plans at all.

The magic comes from a particular breed of people - tinkerers: "people who are immersed in digital culture, and who see connections between trends and technologies that others don't, and then fuse those things together to create programs that otherwise wouldn't have existed". Unlike its more scientifically driven counterpart, whilst paid media is important to these ideas, they are not driven by it. Instead it is motivated by the desire to create rich, unique, ambituously distinct experiences. The kind of ideas that are not originated from an RFP process.

These points are echoed nicely in Graeme's exceptional deck on the future of media agencies. There's lots of rich stuff in here, building on some existing smart thinking and taking it on to make some great points about the evolving and future capability of agencies. It's definitely worth a look:

Media Positive Planning

View more presentations from Graeme Wood

As a part of this, Graeme makes some good points about a key part in this jigsaw: content. One of the big challenges for brands and agencies is just how content hungry emerging, always-on channels are. As more activity and spend flows into these areas, the appetite and need is for not just a continuous feed of high quality content, but for a longer-term content strategy that looks quite different to that which might be originated for campaigns. Part of the solution to this (ironically) lies in automation. Curating content through algorithm and aggregation. But a big part also lies with people.

Having worked media owner side I can appreciate the unique skill this kind of content production and thinking involves. In the face of potential dis-intermediation (as brands become content producers in their own right and establish direct unmediated relationships with customers) and commoditisation (as an ever larger proportion of media trading becomes automated making it increasingly difficult to maintain premium yields) the biggest opportunity for media owners is in their content expertise. This is not about one-off sponsorships, content syndication deals or even branded content campaigns, but rather far deeper and longer-term partnerships that externalise content expertise in ways beyond current practice and thinking.

As Adam Cahill points out, the maths and the magic of media may come from totally different places, but both involve a hands on approach to digital media and both require the kind of skills that are in pretty short supply in the industry. The agencies and media owners that will win, will be those that can find a cogent and compelling balance between the two.

Reinventing Libraries

According to the 2010/11 Taking Part survey published by the Dept of Culture, Media & Sport the proportion of adults in the UK who visited a public library in the past year fell from 48.2% in 2005/6 to just 39.4% in 2009/10. At that rate of decline in less than two decades nobody will be visiting libaries.

This upsets me. I remember weekly childhood visits to my local library, gathering up another small pile of books to take home. Those visits were full of anticipation. I can remember the almost overwhelming sense of wonder when I first walked into the Library at the sheer number and diversity of books in one place. But in the face of our modern day almost universal access to knowledge and information through digital means, libraries are slowly becoming irrelevant.

In response to Kodak filing for bankruptcy protection, I saw a tweet that opined that the company's long-term decline had come as a result of misunderstanding their core business: "They were in the memories business not the film business". In his Observer column on the subject, John Naughton paraphrased Clayton Christensen's The Innovator's Dilemma, saying that whilst big companies are often good at fostering 'sustaining' innovations (the type that enhance their positions in established markets) they are (perhaps inevitably) much less adept at dealing with innovations that completely disrupt markets. To me, libraries have a Kodak problem - they are shackled to a legacy medium and model (books and lending) from which (despite efforts to diversify) they seem unable to escape.

And yet I believe there is an extremely useful long-term role that libraries could still play in local communities. The first thought most of us have when we think about libraries is that they are places to go to to borrow books. Yet if I think back to those visits to my local library the thing I was really excited about was the opportunity to connect to amazing stories and how those stories made me feel. Borrowing books was merely the means by which this happened.

The art of storytelling is one of the greatest of human attributes. So what if community libraries became places that were dedicated to that art? Places where people could connect and interact with stories in a hundred different ways. Story centres, if you like. Places that were about inspiration and firing the imagination. Places that were equipped not only with books, eBooks, and DVDs that you might borrow, but with the tools for digital creation and the means to inspire and enable people to create stories of their own. Places that were not just about quiet, passive appreciation but active, noisy, exciting learning. Places that might connect the young to the great stories inherent in film, literature, and history in meaningful and relevant ways. Places that involve people with the stories of their local area and the people who can tell them, and maybe even lived through them. Places where people could go to celebrate great storytellers and hear them speak. Authors, film-makers, game-makers, artists, animators, illustrators. Or to be a part of a massive but very tangible story-telling network spread out around the world.

There are plenty of reasons why this might be a good idea. Some have said that storytelling is dying art, and yet the diversity and depth of the tools we have at our disposal to create stories has never been richer. The creative industries in the UK employ around 1.5 million people and their contribution to the economy is growing. Think of the ground-up innovation this could galvanise. Think of all the stories that could be brought to life that would otherwise be forgotten. Think of all that might come from people inspired not just by reading, but by doing and making. But this is also about reconnecting people to their local communities. How great it could be. Re-invigorating a national infrastructure that has enormous potential to bring even more value to millions of people. Capitalising on the amazing things that can happen when you bring people and technology together and add a dash of inspiration.

So that's what I'd do. Turn every library into a story centre. I don't think we should accept a slow gradual decline for our libraries into irrelevance. I have some sympathy for the long-suffering librarian attempting to deal with increasing expectation and dwindling resource. But instead of disenfranchising them, we should empower them. There are no doubt plenty of reasons one can think of for not doing this. But I think there's one very compelling reason for believing that there needs to be radical change - in less than a generation community libraries may well not exist.

HT to Diemkay for the DCMS link

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Shut Down Or Restart?

Regular readers will know my views about the need to completely reinvent the ICT (Information and Communication Technology) curriculum in schools. Having written a few pieces on the subject I was invited along last week to an interesting meeting of representatives from industry and education (including Google, Microsoft, Rewired State, Nesta, BETT, the IPA and UKIE) who have come together to structure a response to the government-sponsored Next Gen report which called for a radical revamp of the tech curriculum.

The good news is that there seems to be real consensus about the need for change and a constructive approach toward building a new curriculum that will better equip our shcools and teachers with a relevant course of study to replace the old one as it is phased out, and better equip our kids for the kind of world they will emerge into as adults. It will be interesting to see how this response shapes up over the next few months and how the government will react to it, so watch this space.  

In the meantime, it's worth taking a look at the Shut Down Or Restart report from The Royal Society (another attendee at the meeting) which provides a great summary of key issues and recommendations that have provided some good focus and direction for the response. Critical to the report are recommendations around terminology (disaggregating the amorphous 'ICT' into clearly defined areas such as digital literacy, Information Technology and Computer Science to enable proper focus on under-represented areas - notably recognising Computer Science as a rigorous academic discipline and making it available to every child), recognition of the shortage of specialist teachers, industry help with the continuing professional development of teachers, the development of fit-for-purpose technical resources and school infrastructure, and proper incentives, resources and qualifications to help teachers build long-term change.

This is a subject I believe to be critical not only to our education system and our kids, but to the future of our country.

What Is Competitive Advantage?

Terminology like competitive advantage, differentiation and value creation tend to get overused in businesses. This HBR piece on the work of Michael Porter from Joan Margretta who worked with him for almost 20 years succinctly captures how often such terms are misappropriated ("Competitive advantage, for example, is often used to mean 'anything we think we're good at'. Any plan or program is called a strategy. Managers confuse differentiation with being different…most companies think they have a strategy when they don't"). It pulls together a list of Porter insights that are so pithy I'm going to re-produce them in full:

1. Competitive advantage is not about beating rivals; it's about creating unique value for customers. If you have a competitive advantage, it will show up on your P&L.
2. No strategy is meaningful unless it makes clear what the organization will not do. Making trade-offs is the linchpin that makes competitive advantage possible and sustainable.
3. There is no honor in size or growth if those are profit-less. Competition is about profits, not market share.
4. Don't overestimate or underestimate the importance of good execution. It's unlikely to be a source of a sustainable advantage, but without it even the most brilliant strategy will fail to produce superior performance.
5. Good strategies depend on many choices, not one, and on the connections among them. A core competence alone will rarely produce a sustainable competitive advantage.
6. Flexibility in the face of uncertainty may sound like a good idea, but it means that your organization will never stand for anything or become good at anything. Too much change can be just as disastrous for strategy as too little.
7. Committing to a strategy does not require heroic predictions about the future. Making that commitment actually improves your ability to innovate and to adapt to turbulence.
8. Vying to be the best is an intuitive but self-destructive approach to competition.
9. A distinctive value proposition is essential for strategy. But strategy is more than marketing. If your value proposition doesn't require a specifically tailored value chain to deliver it, it will have no strategic relevance.
10. Don't feel you have to "delight" every possible customer out there. The sign of a good strategy is that it deliberately makes some customers unhappy.

I'll admit there were a couple here that made me do a mental double-take (in a good way). I'm curious to know what everyone here thinks of them.

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Stop SOPA And PIPA

It's a day of many voices of protest across the web (even on the Google homepage), but I didn't want to post about anything else today. I don't believe that censoring the web is the right thing to do and I don't believe SOPA and PIPA are the right way to end piracy. So for what it's worth I'm adding my voice to the many calls to vote no. If you are one of my US based readers, please consider signing the online petition.

#lookupmore

I'm loving Instagram's weekend hashtag project. It's a simple but rather lovely curation of Instagrams around weekly themes that have included stairs, reflections, corners and shadows. Ages ago, I started hashtagging a few pictures that I took with #lookupmore. It's a simple thing really. Rushing about every day, I think it's easy to only look at the stuff we see at eye level or what's down at our feet. This is a way of reminding myself of all the good things you see when you occasionally pause, lift your head and look upwards. Since I started posting on the hashtag, a few others have used it too, which is nice. So any suitable Instagrams you'd like to add to the group would be lovely to see.

Massive-Scale Online Collaboration

I caught up with the super-smart Richard Sedley yesterday and he pointed me at this astounding TEDx talk by Luis Von Ahn, who was one of the people that invented the CAPTCHA. Luis talks about reCAPTCHA, the project to create human gain from the 200 million CAPTCHAs that are solved by humans around the world every day and apply all those millions of tiny actions towards helping to digitise old books (apparently over 10% of humanity have so far helped digitise human knowledge).

As if that weren't amazing enough, he then goes on to explain his subsequent work to create a product in which millions of online users around the world work together to translate the internet as they learn a new langauge. For free.

What's so fascinating about these ideas are the models and economics they are based on. The indirect but not insignificant benefit that can come from millions of actions from millions of people at a scale uniquely enabled by the internet. Fascinating.