Only Dead Fish

Toxic Assumptions

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Change, as we know, is a constant. But right now it feels like the change that is with all of us is both constant and all consuming. And often necessary. The hunger for a deeper understanding of how best to deal with massive change is tangible. I went to a seminar on the subject yesterday and you could almost feel it the room. Perhaps because the change that many organisations are faced with right now is more fundamental than simple behavioural change and is more like a cultural metamorphosis. Which is more about how people feel and think, the values they hold, what they believe.

In the seminar they described the difference between 'technical' change, which is often focused on process and where the leader's role is about providing solutions, clarifying roles, restoring order, maintaining norms, and 'Adaptive' change where leadership is about identifying the challenge, asking the right questions (rather than providing the solution), letting the organisation feel the pressures (within a range), challenging current roles, resisting the urge to clarify, exposing conflict, challenging unproductive norms. Adaptive change is about being comfortable with ambiguity, admitting that you don't know all the answers, but that instead it is enough just to frame the question.

There were a couple of interesting metaphors used in association with this including that of a lily pond, to illustrate the fact that companies often focus on the visible behaviours 'flowering' on the surface, rather than the values, norms and preferences that support them (the stems which are only visible through the water) and the hidden root system of shared basic assumptions that nourishes the whole plant. I'd say the same was true of whole industries.

A useful model is to think about organisational change as a cycle between contentment (characterised by arrogance, complacency), denial (something or someone else is responsible), confusion (lots of uncoordinated initiatives at once) and renewal (constructive, collaborative, dynamic). The challenge of-course is to lead people and organisations through this cycle, because there are no short-cuts.

One phrase that I particularly liked was 'toxic assumptions' - the kind of assumptions that are deeply inherent and deeply unchallenged. Like the fact that there will always be a market for what you do, that people out there really care about the stuff you're producing, that the way things have always been done are still valid. The example used was 90's Marks & Spencer whose mental model was that it was invincible in the UK, automatically stood for quality, had a loyal core customer base, that it didn't need to accept credit cards, or advertise, or stock brands, or have January sales.

Cultural change takes far longer and is much harder to achieve than just about any other type of change. It strikes me that in order to progress with the kind of fundamental change that is needed in many areas of our business, we have to look closely at our own toxic assumptions, and be comfortable with the fact that when we're embarking on a journey we don't always know where it will end (if indeed it will), but that shouldn't ever stop us from just getting going.

It's Only Natural

Another good image from Will, featuring research on the cognitive benefits of interacting with nature. I've been doing a lot of running in the countryside round where I live of late. Maybe it's not just my physical fitness I've been improving...

Always Be Bad At Something You Are Passionate About

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Gosh. Two posts about twitter (sort of) in two days. But then before yesterday I'd never posted about it, so I'm hoping I'm due a little slack here. I don't know why I find it so intriguing that the conceptual roots of twitter were in vehicle despatch. But perhaps it's something to do with my longterm fascination with the thought that some of the best ideas can come from taking the model, or principles, or practices from one thing and applying them to something totally unrelated.

Which leads me to the title of the post, a quote from Bill Buxton. It's explaining his belief about the importance of always being a beginner at something, and always being in love with what you are beginning. The former because it keeps you grounded and the latter because it keeps "fire in your heart and soul".

I've been rockclimbing for a couple of years now, and I'm still rubbish at it. But I love it so I keep doing it. One day, when I'm thirty feet up on the wall, maybe I'll be struck by a bolt of inspiration. Maybe not. Maybe it will happen when I'm doing one of the many other things I try my hand at but am equally crap at. Point is it's good to be doing it anyway. And it's good to be fascinated by stuff. For Jack Dorsey, twitter started with a fascination with cities and how they work. And out of that, came a people-focused, highly scalable idea. What I would call a high-leverage idea. The kind of idea that is a real game-changer. The kind that is more possible now than it has ever been. The kind that is increasingly important. The kind that may well not come from the area we spend most of our time trying to become an expert in.

twttr

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"On May 31st, 2000, I signed up with a new service called LiveJournal. I was user 4,136 which entitled me a permanent account and street cred in some alternate geeky universe which I have not yet visited. I was living in the Sunshine Biscuit Factory in Oakland California and starting a company to dispatch couriers, taxis, and emergency services from the web.

One night in July of that year I had an idea to make a more "live" LiveJournal. Real-time, up-to-date, from the road. Akin to updating your AIM status from wherever you are, and sharing it. For the next 5 years, I thought about this concept and tried to silently introduce it into my various projects. It slipped into my dispatch work. It slipped into my networks of medical devices. It slipped into an idea for a frictionless service market. It was everywhere I looked: a wonderful abstraction which was easy to implement and understand.

The 6th year; the idea has finally solidified (thanks to the massively creative environment my employer Odeo provides) and taken a novel form. We're calling it twttr (though this original rendering calls it stat.us; I love the word.ed domains, e.g. gu.st). It's evolved a lot in the past few months. From an excited discussion and persuasion on the South Park playground to a recently approved application for a SMS shortcode. I'm happy this idea has taken root; I hope it thrives.

Some things are worth the wait."
Jack Dorsey

Nutmegged

Absolutely love this, Wieden's latest work for Nike Five. They could so easily have done it differently but the whole CCTV thing just works. And best of all Graeme worked on it.

Graeme happened to mention to me a piece of footage from the shoot of Wayne Rooney being nutmegged by a local kid called Callum. Talk about spreadable media, this is pure class (and at time of posting had had almost 200,000 cumulative views). 

Been There

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Constructive Capitalism

This is an important post for me. I've been carrying it around in my head for a while, struggling to articulate it. Thankfully someone else has done it for me. The video below is a talk by Umair Haque who has been doing some important writing on the subject of the current economic malaise. Like me, Umair believes that what we are seeing is somewhat more than a 'normal' recession, and more than a financial crisis. It's a crisis of rigidity, of conflict, of stagnation, of nihilism, and a crisis of depletion.

If you're at all in any doubt about that last one, read this feature from New Scientist ("It has taken all of human history for the economy to reach its current size. On current form it will take just two decades to double."), and click on the visual below (if you can't read the annotations on the lines, they relate to things like population, CO2 emissions, water use, species extinctions, average surface temperature, loss of tropical rainforest and woodland. The time scale across the bottom is about 250 years. The unbelievably exponential increase is over the last 50).

 

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Umair's point is that we are faced with a crisis of interaction. Interaction has exploded. Changed the way we form institutions. Whatever happens now things will never be the same again. Like how we define value. And how we define growth. Capitalism itself is changing, and there is a better way to compete, and a better way to interact, based on new principles:

• Strategy is a commodity
• Competition is obsolete
• There is nothing more assymetrical than an ideal
• Tommorrow is today
• Connections not transactions
• People, not product
• Creativity, not productivity
• Outcomes not incomes
• Advantage is in the DNA
• The next revolution is institutional

A new set of rules are forming, and it is all of our opportunity to help shape that. I believe community can make a difference. And the We20 initiative that Johnnie posted about is not a bad place to start. This video is long, at an hour, but I urge you to watch it. If you can't do it now, bookmark it, and come back to it when you can. But do watch it.

Umair Haque @ Daytona Sessions vol. 2 - Constructive Capitalism from Daytona Sessions on Vimeo.

Clouds, Netbooks and Swiss Army Knives

Unusually good deck from Fjord on mobile trends for 2009. Like the way they frame some of this, particularly around how apps stores are 'digital innovation bazaars', how the real-life, tangible benefits of cloud-base services are the effortless way in which they put digital life at your fingertips, the burgeoning use of netbooks, the role of companion devices, and how microblogging will evolve "from a naval-gazing toy to the Swiss army knife of social media". Good stuff.

Fjord 09 Mobile Trends

View more presentations from Prashant Agarwal. (tags: mobile trends)

Via Chroma's new tumblr

Memes And Evolution

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John Naughton pointed me at an interesting piece by Chris Wilson in Slate. Wilson enlisted 3000 of his readers to help determine how the Facebook Meme "25 Random Things About Me" got started. But instead of finding a single "25 things" creator, he found something else much more interesting instead - that 25 things wasn't always 25 things. A "16 random things about me" had started speading it's way through Facebook in late Autumn, with people writing 16 things and then tagging 16 others to do the same. One of the rules dictated that those tagged should paste in the original instructions into their note, instructions which were soon tampered with meaning that "16 things" quickly morphed into 15, or 35, or even up to 100 (though Lord knows how people make that one work). More and more people changed the rules as the original structure crumbled:

"Like any disease, "Random Things" was mutating in hopes of finding a strain that uniquely suited its host. In this case, the right number was vital to its survival: The more people who are tagged, the more likely the note is to spread. The longer the list, though, the more daunting it is to compose and the fewer participants will be roped in."

Eventually (by late January) "25 random things about me" had begun to win through, Wilson's data showing a tipping point at which 25 things exploded.

 

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When Wilson showed the data to Professor Lauren Ancel Meyers (who mathematically models the spread of infectious diseases), several interesting things came back, primarily that the meme exhibited the "classic exponential growth of an epidemic curve": 25 things authors could be seen as "contagious" under what she called the "susceptible-infected-recovered" model for the spread of disease - effectively that the authors were "contagious" for the day that they tag all of their friends and on that one day each author typically inspire 1.27 new posts during the meme's ascent phase. And in addition, the number of days between being tagged and writing the post (the median being 3 days) was exponential, but in decline:

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I've been tagged on several blog memes of this type (and not always responded - sorry). The interesting thing about the blog versions though are that they typically involve a smaller number of random things - usually around 7 or 8, which is what (like John) I would have predicted the Facebook meme to have mutated into. Why it mutated into a higher number is perhaps a result of the difference in format (Facebook a slightly more informal form of communication, blogging perhaps more thoughtful), or maybe it's because the Facebook meme started out with a higher number to begin with?

Either way, the implications of all this are rather interesting. That rather than being created by "intelligent design", the propagation of ideas, as Richard Dawkin has said, has more to do with evolutionary principles of mutation and selection. And that, as Chris Wilson says:

"Facebook infections look remarkably similar to human ones. And like organisms, the odds do seem stacked against all but the fittest of memes...The best hope for someone looking to start a grass-roots craze is to introduce a wide variety of schemes into the wild and pray like hell that one of them evolves into a virulent meme. If evolution is any guide, however, there's no predicting what succeeds and what doesn't."

More here. Hat tip again to John.

***UPDATE***

Andy has pointed me to a great post he wrote a while back about this kind of thinking (and Dawkin's work) over here. My favourite line:

"I see social media not as 'more channels' but as a total meltdown of channels, derailing ideas from previously straightforward lifespans and instead boiling them down into a meme soup."

And also, here's Mark's take on this piece - as usual well worth a read.

Bothered

Since I presented the community presentation at the conference last week something has been bothering me. My audience at the event was comms planners of about 3/5 years experience. Part of what I talked about in the presentation related to why I thought it was professionally good for them to engage in the wider blogosphere, not least because it connects them to interesting ideas and some of the best thinking going on right now in their industry, but also because it tangibly shows the passion and interest they have for the job that they do.

The presentation I'd just given them was liberally sprinkled with references to and quotes from Clay Shirky, Mark Earls and Seth Godin (in fact Mark was kind enough to donate a couple of slides as part of the crowdsourcing idea). But when the audience was asked whether they'd read "Here Comes Everybody", nobody stuck their hand up. When they were asked whether they had read "HERD", no-one had. "Purple Cow"? No-one. So out of 50 comms planners from across a variety of different agencies, no-one had read even one of what must surely be 3 of the most seminal marketing books of the past few years.

Now, they might have just been a bit shy of-course, but I don't think so. If I'm honest, it kind of felt as though if I'd asked them about whether they'd read The Brand Innovation Manifesto or It's Not How Good You Are, It's How Good You Want To Be, or Ogilvy On Advertising, the answer would have been the same.

Of-course, it's not all about everyone reading the same books, and there are many sources of information and inspiration. But I think these recent pieces of work have all moved the debate on how we should view and practice communications significantly forward. So if I'm honest, I was quite shocked. This has been going round in my head ever since that day. Perhaps I'm wrong to be so bothered by it. Even if I'm not wrong, I'm not even sure what could or should be done about it. But I think perhaps something should.