Only Dead Fish

Digital Content Trends 2013

I was asked by the Content Marketing Association to give a talk to their members on my view of the upcoming trends in digital content for the coming year. There's so much I could have talked about but I had 40 minutes so chose to concentrate on some of the macro stuff, and incorporate a nod to the odd really interesting idea that has crossed my path of late.

The positioning of content marketing within the wider marketing mix is pretty interesting right now, given that such a large proportion of marketers agree that it will become significantly more important over the next year, and that agencies of all kinds are converging on it. Yet it's not without its challenges, not least that most clients don't have a defined strategy, dedicated skills or resources, and the fact that (as I quote Josh Sternberg) brands are simply not set up to be publishers.    

Thinking about the changing dynamic that is going on between Paid, Owned and Earned media provides good context for this shift. Whilst paid media may not be getting any less important, the increased focus on always on means a greater focus on owned and earned as well as more nuanced ways of using each element, often in support of the others. So as I've said before, the most interesting spaces within the POE model are how they can work together to amplify each other, how content can flow seamlessly between them, and where they overlap.

One of the biggest challenges here is adapting to what Robin Sloan has called the 'Stock and Flow', and the tricky balance of building value slowly over time, whilst adapting to/capitalising on the short spikes of attention. Content distribution (or circulation as Matt Locke called it) thinking needs to adapt to incorporate the bottom-up type of approaches that the internet is very good at, as well as the more traditional top-down type of approach.

Which brought me on to talk about curation - already an overused word, but an increasingly important concept. So here I talked about my vision of the three pillars of content curation, overlayed with the layer of our own actions and decisions, as being central to how we discover content, and how this can also be a model for the approach to content taken by brands. The shifting dynamic in each area of curation is endlessly fascinating I think, so I gave examples of each: the wonderful Maria Popova as an amazing example of a new type of professional curator of culture; The Guardian's Zeitgeist project as a great example of social curation, mashing up analytics and social media metrics to visualise the most popular stories on the site right now; and the super-smart Percolate as an example of how brands can utilise algorithmic curation to 'create content at social scale'. I think bringing these different forms of curation together (as Flipboard does) creates fascinating possibilties.

No talk about trends would be complete without mentioning mobile, but rather than show lots of charts with lines heading northwards I chose to focus on how content is being created and repurposed for mobile devices. Here I referenced Craig Mod's excellent recent post on Subcompact publishing, which talks about how often we take try to skeuomorphically take formats and approaches from one medium and try to make them work in a new medium (newstand being a good example). The interface of touchscreen devices encourages us to be additive in our approaches to content delivery whereas Marco Arment's (founder of Instapaper) The Magazine is an exercise in glorious simplicity that is designed for mobile from the bottom-up. And that's what people want - stuff that works, and enables a great user experience.

I then talked about the 70,20,10 model as a way of working and allocating resource that is altogether more appropriate for the world I just described, and used the example of GAFA (Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon) and the vertical stack as a way of understanding platform approcahes and the idea of taking data and value from one place in order to deliver a better experience in another part of your ecosystem. This led on to talk about how brands can use the idea of distirbuted and destination thinking to create content that both attracts and is sticky, but also lives out there in the fabric of the web.

To finish off, I talked about how the most interesting places in our industry right now are at the edges, in the art and the science - the programmatic buying of inventory, and the focus on planning for participation and the creation of immersive content exepriences. Algorithmic trading is enabling new levels of granularity and real-time optimisation, and the growth in native advertising formats leading to new opportunities via mobile and interest targeting. Meanwhile all types of agency (including media agencies) are converging around the opportunities provided by content driven solutions and experiences. These two extremes, although in many ways divergent, are leading to a squeezed middle characterised by average experiences, poor creative, lazy targeting. So we are in for interesting times.

My finishing point was to question the term 'Big Data', which I'm sure will feature large in many upcoming predictions posts. Whilst there can be little doubt that the volume, velocity and variety of data that companies can have access to has exponentially increased, and there is a real job to do within organisations to join-up disparate data silos, like Stephen Few I suspect that there are many out there who see the sudden popularity of the term as an opportunity to sell big pieces of kit to large organisations. Just as important though, are the skills to derive actionable insight and value from all that data and if you're not able to do that with the data you already have it's highly unlikely that you will be able to with a big shiny new piece of kit. A great example of how data can add value to what we all do came just recently with the Obama campaign and the prescient marriage of data and storytelling that we were all witness to.

Many of the ideas that I featured here are ones that I have thrashed out here on the blog so my thanks to those who have contirbuted to the debate and a namecheck to some smart folk whose thinking helped me along the way: Noah Brier, Craig Mod, Nick Burcher, Dave Chaffey, Simon Andrews, Patricia McDonald. Maybe one day I'll get around to writing that book.

Brands As Publishers

Content marketing is not exactly a new thing. Neither is the idea that everyone is a content producer or that we're all journalists now. But I wonder if we're still underestimating the huge shift that this brings to marketing in terms of approach, timescales, process and resources.

This presentation from data visualisers Jess3, whilst obviously skewed towards storytelling in social media, makes some good points about this shift and includes a quote from Josh Sternberg about how "brands aren't set up to be publishers. They don't necessarily understand the editorial process or have the stomach for the length of time it takes to build an audience"

The Practitioner's Guide to Creating Content Like a Publisher

View more presentations from JESS3

One of the real changes in marketing has been the increasing focus on 'always-on' channels, and (to use the Paid, Owned and Earned way of looking at the world), on Owned and Earned media rather than just Paid. This CNN piece talks about how Nike's US spending on TV and print advertising has dropped by 40% in just three years, even as its total marketing budget has increased to a record $2.4 billion. Not every brand is a Nike of-course, but as I've said before the interesting places in Paid, Owned and Earned is how they work together and the spaces where they overlap, and this requires different content thinking.

For me, part of the challenge here is around resource. What Red Bull do with content is amazing (they are one of the top five sports content producers on YouTube globally, for example). But the Red Bull Media House employs 400 people worldwide. In the absence of this type of scale, organisations have to get smart about skilling up existing resource and using things like content curation in interesting ways.

Another part of the challenge is about mindset. As Sternberg points out AmEx’s OpenForum took four years to get 1 million people aboard, and now gets about 150,000 unique visitors per month. Without this kind of long-term view and commitment, projects like this just get suffocated or shut down.

And yet another part is around approach. The most interesting part of Coca Cola's shift toward 'content excellence' is the 70,20,10 approach that focuses 70% of output on low risk, bread and butter stuff, 20% on innovating off what works within that, and 10% on newer, high risk ideas. Without this kind of flexibility to budgeting and resourcing, building a proper content plan that is enduring but adaptive is impossible.

The role of agencies in all this is up for grabs. I'd say that the smart ones are already working in ways that take them beyond the kinds of processes and mindsets associated with simple campaigning, and are making themselves an essential part of this process. There are compelling reasons why not just thinking, but also process and practice need to be different.

I was struck, listening to David Hieatt speak at the recent Google Firestarters, how much the Hiut Denim brand and company is being built around a compelling story right from the beginning. Have a read of this inspiring interview in which he talks about some of the themes he touched on at the event ("I believe that your first 1000 customers are your real fans. They can help you get to the dream. They need to know the dream and the plan to get there"). In many ways this has always been the case, but the way in which companies use content to tell their stories, the kind of skills they are building, and the way they are working with their agency partners is fundamentally changing. We can all get excited by the latest social tool or app but this, to me, is where all the exciting stuff is happening right now.

Paid, Owned and Earned Media

My friend Nick has been busy working away on a shiny new book which has launched today, focusing on a way of viewing the communications world which is fast becoming the default: Paid media (paid for communication placed in third party channels), Owned media (brand assets with direct contact with consumers), and Earned media (customers as the channel, third party endorsements, word of mouth, advocacy).

For me, the interesting spaces in the POE model are where they overlap, and work seamlessly together. This is where the most innovative stuff is happening right now, from people who have a great understanding of not just one of these constituent parts, but all three.

As far back as 2004, Seth Godin was writing in Purple Cow about how if the web is a mass of conversations, then the way in which you market in that environment is to do stuff, and create content that is remarkable. Much has been said around this basic concept since then but we're now seeing more and more smart executions that bring it to life, notably through adept forms of curation, dynamic content, widgets, mash-ups and visualisations that amplify paid and owned through earned, and then pull earned back into owned and out into paid again.

As the lines between channels become ever more blurred, newer forms of algorithmic and social curation such as Facebook's Edgerank and Google's Search Plus Your World increasingly impact content discovery and the correlation between people talking about what you you do and sharing your content, and the visibility of your brand. The implications and possibilities of the dynamic between Paid, Owned and Earned are myriad. 

So Nick's timing is pretty good. The book draws together some fundamental principles, illustrated with a huge number of examples. There's a blog to support the book, and you can see some sample chapters here. 

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.

Image courtesy

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.

#Firestarters At Google

As you may know, Google asked me to curate a series of events for them designed to facilitate different thinking and debate around some of the more interesting and challenging issues facing planners today. So the inaugral #Firestarters event on Thursday, on the subject of Agile Planning, saw a couple of fantastic talks by long-time ad provocateur Mark Earls, and Stuart Eccles - co-founder of smart digital agency MadeByMany.

Mark gave a thought-provoking preview to his new book ('I'll Have What She's Having') due out later this year, building on the idea of how things don't spread unless people see other people doing it first, and how this means we need to shift focus towards the concept of lighting lots of fires and 'curating diffusion' (isn't that a lovely idea?), using data in smarter, more agile ways, identifying patterns, and how in this regard it is the space between people that is the truly interesting bit.

Stuart gave an inspiring rapid-fire talk on the subject of 'The Lean Agency', exploring the ideas around the application of agile and iterative techniques to the practice of planning (and of building useful digital stuff), and building on the thoughts and processes outlined in his Planningness presentation from late last year. Using Gareth Kay's Ideas That Do and Noah Brier's thoughts on Invention, Innovation and Diffusion as a starting point, his talk was full of quotable nuggets and ideas including: 'it's not iterative if you only do it once'; 'take what works, ditch what doesn't'; 'what's the minimum thing you can do to start testing something?'; the frequent confusion between iteration and incrementalism; the idea of a necessary balance between intuition and iteration (a great point to which I shall return), and the virtuous circle of Learn, Make, Test. 

In the short open-space session that followed, the conversations focused around some genuinely interesting areas...

Martin Bailie curated a discussion around some themes he has written eloquently about before - namely how the very anatomy of insight is changing from ad-hoc to real-time and reponsive, but the market research industry has (largely) been slow to innovate in equipping clients to deal with a world that needs to be characterised more by always-on collaboration with audiences, and responsive marketing on the fly. I really liked some of the thoughts that came out about how the very fact that there is 'a Plan' (with a capital 'P' no doubt) is a blockage, the idea of setting the vision but allowing the route there to be flexible (a 'journey' rather than a campaign), the challenge in understanding the signal versus the noise from real-time insight, and making the point about the need to step back from iteration to understand where you are.

The critical issue of combining short-term campaigning (for want of a better word) with longer-term value building was talked about in a conversation hosted by John Willshire. Some good thoughts here, asking the question about whether we get too hung up on continuity and making the point that lots of interesting innovative ideas in the short-term builds longterm effects regardless of consistency. Building on this, the discussion spent some time on John's analogy (which I really like) of bonfires and fireworks (eloquently explained in this deck he's just put up), and augmented that with his truly smart ideas around reverberation and amplification (there was even equations involved!). There's a great post on this that John has penned as a follow up to the event which I recommend you go read.

One big question that arose out of the conversation that Mark Earls hosted around the subject matter of his talk was about how companies might analyse patterns in the data they already have access to but don't currently mine to its full potential (good point: how often do you see businesses sat on huge amounts of untapped value in the data they already collect?). There was also a thought around this about  the potential of using long-term research communities over extended periods of time, and of our ability to track cultural networks (interesting thought here I think about combining feedback from brand communities with broader use of social analytics across networks).

Stuart's conversation arrived at a truly interesting question: what are the comms version of agile software frameworks? Along the way they talked about reducing the cost of failure by developing a culture of learning ('failure is only useful if it is followed by learning'), whether the creative and media planner should really be one (now there's a controversial thought), the idea of decentralising approval processes and stealth budgets, how you might bring production time and costs down to enable more speed and iteration, but how important it is to find the features that people really love ('take something away until people scream').

One question that seemed to come up again and again in the discussion was around the agility of clients and whether, even if agencies start working in more agile ways, it will be all be in vain if clients don't do the same. Ramzi Yakob hosted a discussion on just this subject, which ended up focusing on some pretty fundamental questions such as budgeting (whether clients are ready to be flexible enough to budget for experimental activity - Agile Budgeting if you will), and culture (whether a client can ever be truly agile if their organisational culture, expectation and working is still rooted in inflexibility and process). On the positive side, some good thinking seemed to be coming out around the idea of connecting with advocates in client businesses, championing examples of where different working has led to success as totems for a broader, new way of working, and (building on the idea that rather than tell a client you have to show them) giving clients the tools for a day and involving them in the process so that they might see the value first (the idea of running a client hack day for example). 

As well as picking up on these points, the conversation that Michael Litman hosted around what is stopping us from being more agile, seemed to have many contributions. We're not short of potential blockers to change it seems, but we do risk them becoming overwhelming unless some of the fundmamental areas are considered: how agencies are remunerated; embedded processes; jargon; hierarchical structures and decision making; people thinking iteration is just doing extra stuff without clients paying for it; overcoming inertia. Clearly we don't have all the answers to this yet, but I liked some of the thinking that came out around encouraging an open, collaborative ideas-from-anywhere approach, empowered front-line staff, and flatter decision making. The notion also, that making new stuff, rather than focusing entirely on comms, helps create an opportunity for at least some of these issues to go away, and for a new way of working to be created.

Curating this event and discussion has brought it home to me just how broad this subject is, how many parts of our industry it touches, but also how fundmental it is to the changes we need to be making in order to be fit for purpose in a connected, always-on world. As I said in my wrap to the event at the end, I'd like to think that this was not the end of an event but the start of a debate. Too many conferences it seems, feel like they're trying to solve issues in one event and in the end only succeed in raising questions to which there is little opportunity to debate potential answers. That's why we deliberately didn't make this a conference, but a provocation and a discussion. Judging by the feedback on the night and since, it feels like that really worked, but it's only the start. So rather than it being a one-off, our aim here is to curate a series of events, and explore and build on the points that I've attempted to capture here.

Props to Google for taking the approach that they have in facilitating that debate, and thanks to all who came and participated, particularly the presenters and conversation hosts. You can view the fantastic illustration that the guys at Scriberia did to capture the talks and the debate in full effect here. The date of the next event (likely in June) will be confirmed here soon but in the meantime contributions, feedback and thoughts around some of the ideas captured here (and the themes for the next event) are more than welcome. 

Written Images, Visual Life

So much rich and inventive stuff around at the moment. Check out this lovely film featuring an interview with Scott Schumann (aka The Sartorialist). It's part of the Visual Life project from Intel. I love the way he talks about taking time to observe, react and relate to what you're seeing (as my favourite artist of the moment Stephen Taylor would say, "Don't Glance, Look'). And I love how the way he learned his craft was by just started to do it. Through instinct. And refining what little he knew (he describes how his lack of knowledge in the beginning really helped).

I know it's far from a new story, but I continue to be amazed by the diversity and richness of possibility afforded by how technology is now so intertwined with content. Written Images is an amazing project that combines the use of self-programmed digital tools that can create individual works of art from internet data with the opportunity of personalised printing afforded by digital publishing technology to create an ever-changing, continuously regenerated 'programmed book', printing a unique reading experience for each reader. It's currently on Kickstarter. At time of writing it had succeeded in raising over two and a half times it's $10,000 goal. When passion meets talent meets means, wonderful things happen.

Written Images from d_effekt on Vimeo.

The Futures Agency

My good friend and well known media futurist, Gerd Leonhard, has initiated a collaborative venture between some of the sharpest and best known global futurists and strategists specialising in aspects of media and mobile, called The Futures Agency. And I'm delighted to say that he has asked me to be a founding associate. The Futures Agency is a talent network that provides advice and services to clients in a number of different areas, and I have a truly awesome list of co-conspirators:

• Glen Hiemstra (Futurist.com) Seattle, USA
• Jonathan MacDonald (Marketing / Social Media Strategist and Consultant), London
• Alan Moore (Community, Branding & Marketing Strategist), London
• Mike Masnick (Techdirt Founder and Content Strategist), San Francisco
• Jack Myers (Media Economist and Futurist), New York
• Rudy de Waele (Mobile Guru and Strategist), Barcelona
• Clive Rich (Digital Media Law Expert, Strategist), London
• Didier Marlier (Leadership and Change Expert, Coach, Professor at FDC Brazil), Geneva, Switzerland
• Lars Cosh-Ishii (Japan Expert, Mobile Guru), Tokyo, Japan
• Kei Shimada (Mobile Expert, Founder & CEO  Infinita, Japan)
• Ross Dawson (Futurist), Sydney, Australia
• Brian Newman (Film Futurist), New York
• David Smith (Futurist at TheGFF, London)
• Mikael Jensen (Digital Media Strategist, formerly at TDC Play, Copenhagen, Denmark)

You can read more about the launch over on Gerd's blog. The future's bright, the future's collaborative.

Agile Marketing

Image courtesy

As part of my ongoing obsession with all things agile, I've written up a summary of some key practices around Agile Marketing, building on the principles outlined in The Agile Manifesto. This is also cross posted over on The Marketing Society blog:

The last IBM Global CEO Study (‘The Enterprise Of The Future’) interviewed 1,130 CEO’s in 45 countries and 32 industries, and found that organisations not only felt bombarded by change, but that many are struggling to keep up. Eight out of 10 CEOs saw significant change ahead, and yet the gap between the expected level of change and the ability to manage it had almost tripled since the previous study in 2006. That’s pretty serious.

Late last year Forrester released a report on ‘Adaptive Brand Marketing’. Subtitled “Rethinking the approach to brands in the digital age”, the report set out how today’s brand marketing organisations are ill-equipped to handle the world of ‘always on’ marketing, and advocated an approach that embraced “rapid response to align customer and brand needs”, and saw channels as an outcome, not an organizing principle.

We live in exponential times. A time of accelerating change. A time when transformational technologies are increasingly embedded in cultural norms. As John Naughton has said: “The internet’s disruptiveness is a consequence of its technical DNA. In programmers’ parlance, it’s a feature not a bug”.

The relentless digitisation of products, services, and communications has created an environment of ubiquitous connection, and a shift from a linear industrial model characterised by command and control, where advantage comes from scale, scarcity, hierarchy to a networked post-industrial model distinguished by participation, collaboration and agility.

But what does that actually mean? The software industry (the industry that gave us radical new working practices for collaborative business and innovation in the form of open-source) is once again showing the way. Agile Development offers up both new working practices that are inherently more adaptive, and a philosophy and mind-set that keeps businesses close to their markets and is altogether more fit for purpose in the always on world in which we now operate.

Taking the broad principles outlined in The Agile Manifesto, and reinterpreting them for wider business, and for marketing, gives us a model for the kind of change that the marketing industry is crying out for:

1. Individuals and interactions over processes and tools

Corporate ritual often places high value on organisational processes, habits, and technologies, and comparatively low value on things that individuals enjoy and derive value from – relationships, conversation, play, interaction.

Seth Godin wrote about how organisations work relentlessly to de-personalise every communication medium they encounter: “the public works tirelessly to flee to actual interactions between real people, and our organisations work even more diligently (and with more leverage) to corporatize and anonymise the interactions.” The irony, he noted, was that an organisation with guts can go in the opposite direction and win. Agile working values interactions between individuals, active customer involvement, continuous feedback, transparency.

2. Working outputs over comprehensive inputs

Corporate ritual places high value in inputs – productivity, documentation, meetings. Agile working recognizes that it is more important to measure and focus on working outputs, so Agile requirements are barely sufficient, captured at a high level, not every detail specified upfront.

This allows for swift adaptation and minimises the time spent on anything that doesn’t actually form part of the end product. A constant pace is maintained through a regular rhythm and pattern of sprints and iterative work cycles. Instead of waiting until an entire project is finished, priority is given to satisfying the customer through early and continuous delivery of value, meaning the output is highly relevant to the needs of the end user.

3. Collaboration over contracts and hierarchy

The value that can be obtained through low-friction collaboration toward a common goal is often greater than that which can be obtained through tying relations up in over-detailed contractual relationships or organisational hierarchies.

Silo culture does not respond well to iterative change, so a softening of traditional boundaries is required. Peter Drucker said: “In the knowledge economy all staff are volunteers, but our managers are trained to manage conscripts”. Dan Pink pointed out that ‘management’ is an invented technology from the 1850s, and that “management leads to compliance, but only self-direction leads to engagement”.

Equality and empowerment of participants, or at the very least a more subtly dynamic rather than rigid hierarchy, is more motivating for employees, and for customers. Self-forming and self-organising groups that congregate around an objective or a purpose are naturally more efficient, effective, and motivated. The organisational role shifts from control, to one of facilitation.

4. Responding to change over following a plan

Business latency is decreasing dramatically – the ups and downs happen quicker, can be bigger – businesses need to react to changing customer opinion and needs, but agility is about responsiveness, not about velocity.

The institutional urge is to plan ahead, wait for completeness, clarity, and stability before making decisions. To craft the perfect plan, and focus rewards and incentives around how well that plan is executed.

Once the plan has been agreed by the business, it becomes a commandment, subject to change control and taking little heed of changing circumstances. Iteration becomes a cumbersome, laborious and often painful process with management time sucked into creating artificial or virtual value (justifying change, reporting), rather than generating real value (ideas, innovation, business outputs). If the plan doesn’t work, or is no longer what the market requires, you don’t find out until the plan is complete. By then, it’s too late to adapt and deliver a more fulfilling and successful end product.

Agile says ‘just start and iterate along the way’, and welcomes changing requirements. Digital models are all about experimentation, rapid prototyping, optimisation, beta. The idea of lighting lots of fires, gaining feedback, and using it to adapt the allocation of resources, of chunking down big ideas and long timescales to smaller pieces which might adapt and change in response to a changing environment. Small, incremental fulfillment helps minimise risk, results in better control on costs, and allows for change. Beta is good but perpetual beta is better.

The Agile Manifesto does not talk about the death of traditional models, but of a significant change in emphasis. Whilst there is value in the items on the right, the items on the left should be valued more. Similarly, agile enterprise and marketing offer up a way to close the gap that exists between digital ways of working and more traditional processes and practice. The time is right for change.

The Creative Internet

It deservedly got some twitter-love on Friday, but if you haven't seen this resource from Google Creative Labs go check it out. An updated 119 slides of digital awesomeness including some of the most talked about, creative and inspirational ideas and web projects from recent times, and featuring sections on advertising, tech, art, visualisation, audio, politics, sport, history and books. I've embedded it here, but for the full effect go view it on Google Docs. Put together by Tom Uglow. Lovely.