Here are a few thoughts about what F1 says about social business as an homage to the start of the 2010 season. This piece was originally written by me eighteen months ago as part Seth Godin’s Triiibes Casebook. And yes, I’m a fan.
Not every organization needs to adopt an F1 type of fast track culture, but F1 represents many of ways social businesses and organizations can get into gear.
The world of Formula One has a dynamic power to it that burns serious rubber, creating a fabulous and visceral show where business as usual is never the name of the game. The F1 community’s enormous, capturing global imagination and attention on a regular basis and making hundreds of millions of dollars as it travels, nomadically, across the planet during the course of the season. That’s a pretty impressive communal and organizational formula.
Formula One’s a semantic form of organization and as a sports tribe it’s always looking to go faster, quicker, and sleeker. It’s in its DNA to be morphing and adapting at speed constantly. A fluid entity, F1 is adaptive, intelligent, and continuously learning and flexing in changing circumstances.
On the tarmac it’s the same. Every track, from Bahrain to Melbourne to Canada, Monaco, Singapore, Valencia and back to Abu Dhabi is different. In 2008 the street circuit of Valencia was completely untried. Singapore’s Grand Prix was the first to take place at night. In 2009 new tracks like Abu Dhabi were added. F1 pushes the envelope, it’s part of its DNA, it’s in its blood, it’s the engine oil of F1 to be always learning, continuously dynamic.
In the last 5 years of the F1 Grand Prix, the testing and qualifying rules have been rewritten before every season. Fuel loads, engine changes, basic set-up, all of them have been re-visited. Technological innovation drives change all the time. During every race strategies are re-calibrated second by second. This is moment-by-moment intelligence on its feet.
Everyone in the F1 tribe plays a big part, in their own right and as individual pieces of the whole. Each team member is a critical component and their commitment is relentless. Car designers, engineers, pit crew, test drivers, race drivers, technicians – they turn up every day to practice their craft, testing in real time, looking for excellence, perfecting the combination of man, method and machine working as one. This is iterative working through formative experiences, where everyone makes big contributions as part of a constant forging forward of the community and something they believe in.
And F1 can be the fluid network it is because of a powerfully strong sense of identity and purpose. Different identities sit under the umbrella of F1 as a logomania of sorts, all connected by a powerful unifying thread, entities within entities, and tribes within tribes.
If F1 is distinguished and distinguishable for many reasons, one notable reason is that it has rituals baked into the culture that unite. The must-have champagne spray after the race is one of them and it bonds people together, it’s a visceral experience. While racing teams, drivers, pit crews, constructors, manufacturers, sponsors, all co-exist and do their thing, it’s the spark that’s created off one another that ignites excitement and that works for them, individually and together. And the rituals enshrine that into things that make it special.
Formula One is different from many organizations because it takes itself to its audience, moving to where the experience is, circuit by circuit, being the catalyst for powerful experiences to happen. Imagine if your brand could lay claim to that. There’s a price of entry but no one ticket of entry, and this is no static tribe. New waves join and leave the tribe in each location. Race-makers and race-goers form around an activity, get fired up and then move on. Fans make a race relay across Twitter or Facebook, via the live streams off the Beeb, to coffee bars, pubs, cheering and recharging the energy as it goes.
As one of the earliest examples of a highly successful networked organization, the F1 tribe has a complex composition, and a range of leaders who look after different aspects of the sport both globally and locally; but it was Bernie Ecclestone who brought the groups together to ‘hunt as a pack’ and who has for decades encapsulated and driven the vision. When Ecclestone bought the Brabham team in 1971 he gained a seat on the Formula One Constructors’ Association and in 1978 became its President. Wikipedia describes it like this, ‘Previously the circuit owners controlled the income of the teams and negotiated with each individually’. Under Bernie’s leadership as a united tribe they raced ahead to prosperity.
Organizations with a sense of mission can learn much from F1. Formula One’s the epitome of a fluid social business that’s grown up around a sport powered by an evocation of purpose, and a visceral energy that comes from fans and participants alike, it’s genetically programmed to be an organization that goes places.
How many organizations do you know that could work in this way, that have the potential in them to develop a this kind of dynamic, organizational energy and memorable experience with their users but don’t? Networks and every kind of organization can learn something from the strength of F1 and apply it.