Only Dead Fish

Revisiting 'T-Shaped' People

“Regardless of whether your goal is to innovate around a product, service, or business opportunity, you get good insights by having an observant and empathetic view of the world...empathy allows you to have original insights about the world. It also enables you to build better teams.” Tim Brown, IDEO

I've been doing some work for a client recently around digital skills and structures, which has given me cause to revisit the thinking around so-called 'T-shaped' people, a concept of which I've long been fond. 

As a term, it was popularised by Tim Brown of IDEO of-course (notably in that well-referenced 'Strategy By Design' FastCompany article) yet it was originated by McKinseys, who used it to describe the kind of people they were looking to hire as those who possessed a strong vertical skill (the vertical stroke of the T), but who also had a broad empathy toward other skills and disciplines encountered in the business. These were the people whose adaptability and capacity to learn made them ideal management consultants.

In McKinsey’s case the vertical stroke of the ‘T’ described deep analytical skills, but Tim Brown used it in the context of recruiting designers or engineers who were inquisitive about and empathetic with other skills (such as anthropology) and able to "explore insights from many different perspectives and recognize patterns of behaviour that point to a universal human need".

So why revisit this now? For a very real reason. I'm a big believer in the value of specialist skills. As well as the kind of deep knowledge and expertise that can be applied to the completion of specific tasks, specialists keep you in touch with the latest techniques, thinking and opportunities in specific areas and enable expanded thinking.

But I also think that as brands move increasingly toward having multiple digital touchpoints and creating digital experiences with and for customers (as opposed to simply messaging), the successful integration of multiple digital channels from the beginning becomes more important. And this requires interdisciplinary teams that work together in highly collaborative ways, building on each others insights and knowledge. In this scenario, people who are able to apply deep vertical skills but have empathy with other skills in the team and an appetite for (and attitude conducive to) effective collaboration will be highly prized. As Ben says, “we need people fluent in one language but literate in many” and like Ben, I think, my own version of what T-shaped actually means has always been as much about attitude as it has about skills and knowledge. 

At Firestarters 3, Mel talked about how the agency operating system of the future might be characterised by (and able to deliver scale through) small, nimble teams with hybrid skills. It's the kind of thinking that is applicable not just to agencies, but to broader business. Having the right kind of 'T-shaped' people, might just be the critical competitive advantage of the future.

Image courtesy 

The Divided Brain

"The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant" Albert Einstein

This latest RSA Animate by reknowned psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist (and the accompanying book) is a powerful evcoation of how the divergent, contradistinct nature of the thinking from the two hemispheres of our brain (and how they interelate) have shaped, and continue to shape, our world. 

The right hemisphere, he says, is the 'master', with a capacity for handling uncertainty and a sustained, broad, open, empathetic, flexible view of the world. In contrast the left hemisphere is the 'emissary', narrow, with a sharply focused attention to detail and a preference for the mechanical, the absolute, the literal. Whilst the left brain "yields clarity and things that are known, fixed, static, isolated, decontextualised, explicit, general in nature, but ultimately lifeless", the right hemisphere "yields a world of individual, changing, evolving, interconnected, implicit, incarnate, living beings within the context of the lived world but in the nature of things never fully graspable, never fully known".

Gilchrist's argument is that the two hemispheres offer us two very different views of the world that we combine in different ways all the time, but that whilst most societies (including our modern one) often begin with a wonderfully balanced view of the world that combines both types of thinking, slowly over time we drift toward favouring left-brain. This is due in no small part to the fact that the left hemisphere's view is attractive and convincing. It's vocal, self-consistent, economical model reducts everything that doesn't fit. We get trapped in a 'hall of mirrors' effect whereby the more we favour this kind of thinking the more we just get reflected back into knowing more about what we know, about what we know, about what we know. In doing so we create a society that "honours the servant, but has forgotten the gift".

I think the same is true in much of life, not least in marketing. We automate for efficiency. We favour the virtual over the real, the mechanical over the conscious, the technical over over the personal. We like certainty. It's an attractive route that has its own advantages and benefits. One of the biggest contrarient contentions in our industry right now is between the art and the science in what we do. We shouldn't lose sight of the fact that great marketing is all about achieving a good balance between the two. Technology is an enabler of creativity, not a substitute for it. 

You can see the full lecture, and of-course buy the book.

Tappety-Tap

My first job out of college was a telesales job in a small publishing company. After the comparatively easy-going atmosphere of education, I found myself in a busy, noisy office, filled with young people sat at desks with little more than a phone, a headset, a full ashtray (yes, it was that long ago), and an expectation to make a minimum of 70 phone calls a day. The atmosphere was fun, loud, competitive and more than a little rambunctious. It was a baptism of fire. It was work hard, play hard. A proper sales office. It wasn't exactly Boiler Room (thank goodness), but it was something of an education, and I learned an enormous amount from the time I spent there.

The thing is, I don't think I'd have learned half as much half as quickly if it had been a different type of environment. Many offices you walk into these days (even some sales offices) are comparatively quiet because people are communicating via email. In some, the loudest sound is the tapping of keyboards. It's a point that David Hepworth notes, his observation being that we learn at work in the way we learn most other things - by copying at first and then gradually developing our own style. If the modern office environment makes it more difficult to copy, it's likely that it's making it more difficult to learn. 

Some would no doubt say that too much surrounding noise is bad for productivity, and there's undoubtedly certain types of work that require quiet and space. But I wonder if the counterpoint to this is that we simply learn quicker and better if we're surrounded by more overt evidence of how people are doing their daily work. Which is perhaps another reason why the kind of practices I see in some areas - encouraging talking rather than email, short, stand-up meetings, whiteboards on the walls with people clustered round them - are a good thing.

Sometimes A Little Friction Is A Good Thing

My latest column for New Media Age is out, in which I talk about so-called 'frictionless sharing', as characterised by the functionality built in to Facebook's recent redesign. I don't usually link to the columns I write for NMA here (perhaps I should do so more), but this one is about something I think is important.

The heading given to the piece is slightly misleading but in it I talk about the importance of defaults, and how 'frictionless sharing' changes a pretty big one - from sharing being an active process to becoming a passive one. Which has all kinds of implications that I don't think we've even started to think about. Anyone who is a fan of Behavioural Economics will appreciate the power of defaults. So I wanted to write something about it - and you can read it here.

Occupy

"This is not a movement with a traditional narrative arc. As the product of the de-centralized networked-era culture, it is less about victory than sustainability. It is not about one-pointedness, but inclusion and groping toward consensus. It is not like a book; it is like the Internet." Douglas Rushkoff

Something has quite fascinated me about the 'Occupy' protests that have spread across a significant number of cities across the US and around the world. The same question seems to come up again and again in the coverage: what is it precisely that they are protesting about? As Paul Mason wrote in this truly insightful blog post, "if you ask 50 people why they're here and what they want you'll get 50 answers".

The institutional and reactionary response struggles with this uncertainty and fluidity. It wants to know: 'what is it that they want from us?' Yet this is, of-course, the wrong question. It responds dismissively, seeing it as an incoherent, messy, apparently leaderless movement. Yet that is, of-course, precisely the point. It seemingly labours with the diversity of dissent. Yet it is in that same diversity that the protestors revel.

This incomprehension is symptomatic of what happens when institutions are faced with ideas, events and thinking from a world characterised by protean, bottom-up, collaboration that spreads effortlessly across borders. A world outside of current institutional frames of reference. Populated by people who no longer relate to them.

To quote from Paul Mason, the Occupy protests are much bigger than a single-issue campaign. It's a meme. An action "transmitting itself independent of any democratic structures and party political hierarchies...the kind of movement you get when people start to believe mainstream politicians have lost their principles, or are trapped by vested interests, or are all crooked."

Regardless of what happens now, I think it is a powerful admonishment.

HT to Dan for the image, and for the link to the interesting story behind it

Sound And Vision

"Sound" from SoundCloud on Vimeo.

Lovely little film for Soundcloud and a lovely little story from VC Fred Wilson about how founder Alex Ljung pitched him for funding several times before he was successful: 

"...He showed me one slide. It had various media types (photos, videos, long form text, short form text) and underneath each was a large social platform that had been built on and for that media type. At the end was an empty space and it said 'sound'...That's what sold me. One slide."

The film features my Futures Agency colleague Julian Treasure who runs The Sound Agency and who, in one of his TED talks on the subject of sound, talks about how 60% of our communication is listening, yet only 25% of what we hear is retained. If your vision requires a long explanation, if you have to sit round a table debating words that will go into your mission statement, I think you've already lost. Better a vision powerful enough to be captured not with many words, but with few. Not on many slides, but on one.

Playing The Long Game

As an interesting addendum to the post below I came across this Quora answer from an ex-Amazon employee to the question 'What allows Amazon to be so innovative?'. Alongside mentions of visionary leadership, entrepreneurial culture and future-focused approach, there is of-course talk of the relentless customer focus for which Amazon is famed (and the 'working back from the customer' approach that I've mentioned before). Following the links led me to this brilliant Bezos-ism about why, when so many companies claim to be customer focused, so few pull it off. I'll quote it in full because it's so true:

"Companies get skills-focused, instead of customer-needs focused. When [companies] think about extending their business into some new area, the first question is "why should we do that—we don't have any skills in that area." That approach puts a finite lifetime on a company, because the world changes, and what used to be cutting-edge skills have turned into something your customers may not need anymore. A much more stable strategy is to start with "what do my customers need?" Then do an inventory of the gaps in your skills. Kindle is a great example. If we set our strategy by what our skills happen to be rather than by what our customers need, we never would have done it. We had to go out and hire people who know how to build hardware devices and create a whole new competency for the company."

But the really interesting bit for me was around the long-term view that Amazon explicitly takes of its business. This is one of the big challenges that face many organisations threatened by rapidly changing markets - attempting to balance priorities which are inevitably focused on delivering short-term shareholder value or hitting the next quarterly profit target, with allocating time and resource to stuff which, whilst not contributing to intermediate objectives, will likely have the kind of long-term value that can transform a business.

The author links to a 1997 letter from Bezos to shareholders that included a section called "It's All About the Long Term". He wrote:

"We will continue to make investment decisions in light of long-term market leadership considerations rather than short-term profitability considerations or short-term Wall Street reactions.... When forced to choose between optimizing the appearance of our GAAP accounting and maximizing the present value of future cash flows, we'll take the cash flows."

Reading that vision, and looking at where Amazon are today, it's worth reflecting on the short-term tail-spin that many organisations get themselves into, and just how damaging that can be.

'Two-Pizza' Teams

Werner Vogels: Amazon and the Lean Cloud from HackFwd on Vimeo.

“Amazon is a technology company. We just happen to do retail”

So much insight in this fascinating talk from Werner Vogels, Amazon CTO, at the recent HackFwd event in Berlin. Werner essentially tells the story of how Amazon Web Services (their cloud infrastructure offering) came about but in doing so makes the point that many of the principles talked about around Lean Start-Up are ones that remain central to the way in which Amazon operates.

Scaling quickly had always been the key priority for Amazon, more of a priority than maintaining a coherent architecture, which led them to developing services based around APIs rather than direct database access. This in turn leant itself nicely to an organisational structure focused around small teams typically comprised of 8-10 people ('Two-Pizza' teams - the number of people who can be fed easily with two large pizzas). There are currently around 800 such teams in the business behind 800 different services which go to comprise the wider Amazon offering (calling the home page requires about 200-300 such services to construct the page for you). Teams of 8-10 people are able to stay in touch with what each of them are doing, whereas meetings would be required to do this for larger teams. 

This decentralised structure has several major benefits. It is a structure that is built for speed. They can bring a new service or product to market in 10-15 days. But it also means that they inherently design for flexibility, for on-demand and, where appropriate, for automation. Processes are distilled into their simplest form because they have to be. It means that they can enable a culture of continuous innovation ("Amazon Web Services looks like a collection of 15 or 20 or 40 startups") and a relentless customer focus (benefits from additional scale are passed on to customers, innovation is focused on the things that don't change, those that will always be important to people). Amazon Web Services launches a continous stream of new products, each with minimal features sets. More features are launched only through close co-operation with cutomers. 

At the recent Google Firestarters event, Mel Exon talked about how the new agency OS might be characterised by small, nimble, networked, task-based teams (as Nigel Bogle had put it "Big is a collection of smalls"). Despite building a huge business, Amazon have been able to retain the flexibility and adaptability of a start-up. In a world increasingly characterised by the need to respond to and design for on-demand, there's a lesson in that for all of us.

Post Of The Month - September 2011 - The Winner

Another hard fought battle in this months vote, notably between Martin Weigel's excellent post on the bankruptcy of 'engagement', and Mark Sorrell's piece on TV as the Second Screen. But in the end it was the latter that won through (just), so well done to Mark - as always, you get the props of your blogging peers and are entered into the Hall Of Fame. Thanks to everyone for nominating and voting, and don't forget to bookmark your good reads from October for next months vote.

Post Of The Month - September 2011 - The Vote

Thanks everyone for the nominations. So, our shortlist this month is between:

'Engagement': Fashionable Yet Bankrupt by Martin Weigel

Bless The Toolmakers by Robin Sloan

Will You Become Irrelevant? from John Winsor

Check Against Delivery. My Speech to the IAAC by Ben Hammersley

TV Is The Second Screen from Mark Sorrell

The Woes of Frictionless Sharing by Mike Phillips

It's The End Of The Web As We Know It by Adrian Short

Bridging Back to Content from Giles Hedger

And you can vote below: