Only Dead Fish

Dear Japan

Mesmorising memoir of Japan, shot (believe it or not) with a Canon Eos 7D digital SLR.

Dear Japan from Matthew Brown on Vimeo.

HT

Being Weird

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I'm weird. Chances are that you're weird. In fact the society you live in is probably weird too. Western, educated, industrialized, rich, democratic. It's an acronym that was new to me until I read this piece about the work of Joe Henrich, a professor in Psychology and Economics at the University of British Columbia.

Dr Henrich is the co-author of a paper that is creating something of a stir in the fields of psychology, behavioural economics and cognitive science by questioning the validity of broad claims about human psychology and behaviour using studies which are based on samples drawn entirely from WEIRD societies. His researchers found that 96% of behavioural science experiment subjects are from Western industrialized countries, yet these countries account for just 12% of the world's population. In the field of psychology, the US accounts for 70% of all journal citations, compared with 37% in chemistry. Sometimes, a group of undergraduate students are used to stand in for the entire species.

The huge assumption behind the conclusions of many behavioural studies is that these samples are representative of all humans, and that there is little variation across human populations. In reality, says Henrich, this is not true. Psychology varies across cultures in ways that chemistry doesn't. WEIRD subjects are often outliers -  unusual compared with the rest of the species, seeing the world in ways that contrast with the rest of the human family, and reacting differently in experiments involving measures of visual perception (illustrated by distinct  reactions to well-known optical illusions like the Muller-Lyer illusion), fairness and co-operation (disimilar results to common economic experiments like The Ultimatum Game), categorization (westerners group objects based on resemblance so for example notebooks and magazines go together, while Chinese people prefer function, so a notebook would go with a pencil), questions of individualism and conformity, reasoning styles, and concepts of self. WEIRD societies, says Henrich, are among the least representative populations for generalizing about humans, and "if you're a Westerner, your intuitions about human psychology are probably wrong or at least there's good reason to believe they're wrong". Us WEIRD people, apparently, really are the weird ones.

It's a challenging point of view. And a reminder perhaps that we don't always know what we think we know.

Put A Grok On It

BBC Dimensions, the prototype designed by BERGLondon that "takes important places, events and things, and overlays them onto a map of where you are" rightly got some twitter love over the last few days. It's a lovely idea. One of the things I liked most about the story of how it came about was Matt Jones's description of how "something huge and momentous is made grokkable in the familiar".

Grok means to understand thoroughly, intuitively, empathically. Robert A Heinlein coined the term in Stranger in a Strange Land, the story of a man born during (and the only survivor of) the first manned mission to Mars. Raised by Martians, he returns to Earth possessed of strange powers but also as a true innocent. In the book, Grok is a martian word relating to the intermingling of two realities or intelligence to create a new shared reality or thinking that may be greater than the sum of its parts. Separate entities that become entangled in the same experiences, history, goals, purpose.

In hacker culture, Grok denotes a level of knowledge so intimate and exhaustive that it has become part of you and your identity, rather than merely learning in a detached instrumental way. In ideology, a grokked concept becomes part of the person that helped contribute towards its evolution by refining, improving or perpetuating it. Design and data visualisation is good at making stuff grokkable. Its a good aspiration. And a word I shall be using more.

Counting What Really Counts

"Every day, millions of people share how they feel with the people who matter the most in their lives..."

Ever since I came across the work of Adam Kramer (a psychologist from the University of Oregon) to develop a behavioural model of "Gross National Happiness" using analysis of positive and negative words in Facebook updates, I've been kind of intrigued by the possibilities of being able to measure something that is truly worth measuring - the happiness of a population. Kramer's work resulted in a quantitative GNH metric that could be tracked and plotted over time, like the visual below of UK happiness over the last six months (notice the big dip when England went out of the world cup).

And then recently, I see the work of Alan Mislove, a computer scientist at Northeastern University, who used twitter to map the emotional state of America:

In his TED talk, Chip Conley talks about how focusing on the more intangible, higher needs (the upper levels of Maslow's hierarchy) of not just his customers but his employees, transformed the performance of his business. It makes sense. Happy people really do work harder. He describes a visit to Bhutan, which has a long commitment to building an economy based on Buddhist spiritual values and measuring 'national happiness' through a complex set of subjective and objective indicators (including time use and balance, community vitality and psychological well-being). In Bhutan, the nation prioritises gross national happiness above gross domestic product, and that dictates what it measures.

When President Sarkozy of France commissioned a team of economists led by the Nobel prize winner Joseph Stiglitz to look into the measurement of economic performance and social progress, they reported that GDP was a flawed measure for progress. It only picks up activity that is paid for, not activity which might be deemed economic but is unpaid (such as volunteer work, or child-care). It is only an average measure, so whilst GDP might go up, significant proportions of the population might still be no better off. And it takes no account of sustainability. High GDP can happen at the expense of finite resources. It counts all production regardless of whether it's good or bad for us. And some have even said that it treats loss of eco-system services as a benefit instead of as a cost. Yet too often, this narrow measure of market performance, becomes an inappropriate and an inadequate proxy for broader, and likely unconnected (as the chart below, taken from Brookings Papers On Economic Activity, shows) measures of human well-being.

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Bhutan's goal is not to create happiness, but to create the conditions for happiness to occur. Like Stiglitz, I believe that what we measure affects what we do. And if we have the wrong measures we strive for the wrong things. It becomes an end in itself, leading to distortions of policy, perverse incentives, unsustainable growth. The message of that team of economists was that one number cannot capture everything. I'm left wondering why, if we're serious about creating the conditions for happiness to occur, we aren't thinking harder about how we might one day use the connections between us, and the data that flows along them, to define an altogether better measure for human well-being. One that, whilst inherently intangible, feels closer to what really matters to most people in their daily lives.

Post Of The Month - July 2010 - The Winner

Somewhat of a runaway winner on this months vote, with Mark Pollard's excellent Why Strategists Should Make Stuff post romping home with a clear lead. Well done Mark - you get the props of your blogging peers and are entered into the ThinkTank Hall Of Fame. Thanks again to everyone for taking part and don't forget to bookmark your good reads for next months nominations.

Agile Boot Camp

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Regular readers will know that the development and practice of agility in business and communications is something that I'm very passionate about. I've been writing and podcasting about it off and on for over a year now. So, I figured it was time I put my time and effort where my mouth is and did something more tangible about it.

I believe there is a huge need. A need that goes way beyond social media. A need distinguished by the move from a linear industrial model characterised by command and control to a networked post-industrial model characterised by participation and collaboration. The digitization of products, services, and communications is relentless, the connectivity (us to each other, businesses to their customers) is (relatively) ubiquitous, yet that network is fundamentally disruptive in it's architecture (as John Naughton has said: "The internet's disruptiveness is a consequence of it's technical DNA. In programmers' parlance, it's a feature not a bug"). It's an environment described not just by innovation, but by continuous and disruptive innovation, and not just by product but by business model innovation. Business latency is decreasing drammatically – the ups and downs happen quicker, can be bigger. Businesses recognise that they are being bombarded by change, yet admit to an inability to cope with the pace of change. Digital models are all about experimentation, adpatability, optimisation, beta. Lighting lots of fires. Yet how many established businesses really (I mean really) have the agility of working process, the culture, the flexibility in business cycle, and the responsiveness to successfully operate in, adapt to, and innovate in the new environent.

My hunch is very few. So I've partnered up with the brilliant Johnnie Moore, facilitator and improv supremo, to put together an Agile Bootcamp. Johnnie is a natural partner - he writes often and exceptionally well about innovation, organisational change, and the value of playfulness in business. He's also an exceptionally nice bloke.

I believe that agility in business and communications is about responsiveness, not about velocity. It's a critical difference. The software industry has a history of bringing new working practices to wider business including the principles of open source and collaboration. Through Agile Development techniques, it is again pioneering a way of working that is all about keeping close to your market and your customers. This is a workshop that interprets agile principles to offer a new way for teams, projects and organisations to be effective in the new environment.

Our objective is that the day will in turns be challenging, informative, useful, but also a whole lot of fun. As Johnnie says "It will combine serious content with seriously playful experience of agile using improv activities." We're running it at the lovely Wallacespace in St Pancras, London, on Sept 17th and the earlybird rate is a very reasonable £195 incl VAT.

And you can sign up here. It would be lovely to see you there.

Post Of The Month - July 2010 - The Vote

Thanks everyone for the nominations. Our shortlist this month is between:

Agency, Does Your Client Need You? by Mel Exon for BBH Labs

Why Strategists Should Make Stuff by Mark Pollard

The Diversity of Language, Media and YouTube by Alan Moore

What Everybody Already Knows by Bud Caddell

Making A Movie With Insects & The Cyberweasels by Filmutopia

Go Slow from Mark Cridge

The Problem Of Strategy by Ana Andjelic

And you can vote below:

Keeping It Small

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The good people of New Media Age kindly asked me if I would write a piece for them and so I penned an opinion column (I've not been short of opinion lately it seems) on being big, and being small on the internet:

We like big numbers, they make us feel comfortable. And the internet is very good at big numbers. The global internet population is likely to pass 2bn people in 2010. According to PricewaterhouseCoopers, internet advertising will overtake newspapers as the second-largest US advertising medium by revenue behind TV. In the UK, some are forecasting it will overtake print to become the largest ad medium of all.

The era of mass media, mass marketing and broadcast liked large numbers too. Consumers were grouped into vast, homogenous groups based on amorphous characteristics like age or demographics, and apparent propensity to act in a certain way. Business felt comfortable when it could manage relationships at scale. When they wanted to impress, media owners pulled out a big number. In reality, those people weren't all the same, those relationships weren't managed and that big user number was only one indication of how engaging that site owner's content was.

But we've moved on since then. In our, often obsessive, focus on scale, we're underplaying the greatest characteristic of the internet – that it's at its best when it's small. Tim Berners-Lee (and he should know) once called the web "a subset of humans interacting". There's nothing wrong with big, but let's not forget that it comprises lots of small. The web is the ultimate example of what technology and marketing pundit David Weinberger called "small pieces loosely joined".

Bud Caddell, strategy director at US crowdsourcing agency Victors & Spoils, once described his job as helping brands "remember what it was like when they were small, because on the internet they are". Small means personal and relevant. One of the lessons that social media teaches us is the value of understanding depth and type of interaction, and exactly who's bothered, excited and passionate about your market, your content or your product. The web is a participative environment, so benchmarking it by user numbers and views alone makes little sense.

"Don't count the people you reach, reach the people that count," said David Ogilvy. The web is the greatest opportunity we've ever had to do this. One of the most interesting dynamics in marketing today is that between art and the algorithm. The currency of the former is ideas, great ideas that spread. The currency of the latter is data. Ever-increasingly sophisticated techniques for targeting and relevance. One starts small and can lead to scale; the other starts big and becomes small. The mistake in applying 'big' broadcast thinking to networks is that we don't think small enough.

Original column on New Media Age.

Post Of The Month - July 2010 - Nominations

Nominations for the July Post Of The Month are open, so please do nominate your favourite posts that were posted in that month in the comments below. As a starter, I've listed four nominations of my own - please add yours and I'll stick them all up for a vote. My starting four are:

Agency, Does Your Client Need You? by Mel Exon for BBH Labs

Why Strategists Should Make Stuff by Mark Pollard

The Diversity of Language, Media and YouTube by Alan Moore

What Everybody Already Knows by Bud Caddell

And you can nominate your own favourite below...

Stuff You Know, But Don't Know You Know

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For all the talk of the momentous changes in media and marketing that we are living through, I felt there was a need to speak up for what I believe may be the greatest opportunity that businesses will have over the next few years to deliver real value back, accumulate not just knowledge but wisdom and understanding, and to recognise the huge opportunity we have to do things quantifiably better than we do now. So I penned a leader for the good people at Marketing Week on the subject, and they've kindly allowed me to reproduce it here in full:

So there’s a lot of big numbers flying around. Big numbers that reflect the momentous change in media that we are living through, with much focus on the metrics of consumption (2 billion video views a day on YouTube), and around the metrics of sharing (25 billion pieces of content shared on Facebook every month), yet relatively little on the consequence of all that consumption and sharing – the data. The tangible, explicit information we actively type-in, post, tweet but also the more implicit vapour trails of data we leave behind us in the wake of our participation, interaction and conversation online.

Marissa Mayer, Google’s VP of Search Product and User Experience, has described a data explosion ‘bigger than Moore’s Law’, powered by three big changes to internet data in recent times: Speed (real-time data), unprecedented scale built on unprecedented processing power, and new data (uploaded from sensors and objects - the internet of things). Eric Schmidt summed it up: "Between the dawn of civilisation and 2003, five exabytes of information were created. In the last two days, five exabytes of information have been created, and that rate is accelerating”.

Research by technology consultancy IDC estimates that the 'digital universe' grew by 62% last year to 800,000 petabytes (a petabyte is a million gigabytes). To put that into context, according to The Guardian that's enough to fill 75Bn iPads and is a digital output equivalent to the entire population of the Earth tweeting continuously for a century (God forbid). And this is forecast to expand over the next decade by a factor of 44.

About 70% of this digital universe is generated by individuals (Mayer estimates that the average person upload 15 times more data in 2009 than they did just three years ago). Individuals who continue to move towards data rich environments, like social media and mobile. But the remainder, also growing exponentially, comprises data uploaded by organisations (The Guardian open platform and data store, Best Buys' store and product data), Governments (UK and now US), and objects.

As part of the ‘Big Society’ declaration, the government have pledged to create “a new 'right to data' so that government-held datasets can be requested and used by the public, and then published on a regular basis", thereby unleashing what some have called a ‘tsunami of data’.

It’s all rather daunting. Yet it is also a huge opportunity. An opportunity to do things so much better than we do now. People want solutions at point of need. The great promise of the internet, especially now with ubiquitous connectivity for many of us, is that it will deliver this. The upside of the data explosion is that the more of it there is, the better digital based services can get at delivering personal value. Value that will increasingly be in how seamlessly data is aggregated, filtered, recombined and personalised.

The Guardian, for example, have recognised that as more data becomes open, journalists lose their privileged status as gatekeepers of information, but are embracing change by also recognizing the increasing need for curation and explanation: “The more data that's available in the world, the more essential it is for somebody to make sense of it."

There can be little doubt that the business development and entrepreneurial opportunities of the next few years will be all about building on top of existing and emerging data streams. Yet many organizations under-exploit the value that already sits in the data they currently have. We often talk about the value that be derived from cross-functional collaboration within organizations, transparency, ease of interaction, new ways of collaborating with our customers. Yet the data remains in silo’s, un-optimised, not joined up. Companies sitting on huge amounts of value. Things they know, but don't know they know. Data that can deliver the kind of intelligence and insight that can transform business performance.

We need to recognise that business value will come from not only breaking down the silo’s between our people, but in joining up, and opening up, our data. The businesses that win will be those that understand how to build value from data from wherever it comes. Information isn’t power. The right information is.

Original column on Marketing Week here.