Archive for the ‘Economics’ Category

Photo by Paula Bailey

The economics of happiness has come into sharp focus, courtesy of David Cameron.

It rode, cavalry-style, over the horizon last week; offsetting a general retreat on financial returns and the near-on collapse of Ireland’s economy and potentially Portugal, Spain, and the Euro. Some might call it emotional rescue.

An attribute of the post-bureaucratic age that’s emerging, and part of the essential nature of what we call ‘visceral’ business, is that organisations know how to value, develop and play to collective free will.

With that free will comes the irrepressible, autonomous and authentic instincts in all their diversity that lie at the core of human nature.

These are the characteristics that propel how we learn and develop, both as individuals and collectively as a species. Psychologists have agreed for over fifty years that this self-actualisation is an essential, if not the ultimate, happiness component.

The virtual world of the world wide web is now established. It’s highly valued as an intangible asset. So it could be argued that its equally intangible counterparts – quality of life and the value of well-being – have been late in coming to the party; they should be on the radar, equally recognized.

Because when people are connected globally online, where we are doesn’t matter as much as how we feel. This simple point is having a big impact, altering previous terms of reference, impacting upon traditional measured of states of value and motivation as well as changing the fundamental nature of many conventional social, commercial and political contracts.

‘Human universals’ make previously crucial boundaries less interesting and less important, others more significant and influential than ever before. Happiness is, after all, a worldwide measure, the global Holy Grail.

This map illustrates the extent to which leading digital global brands are now capable of occupying as much share of mind or wallet as the territories we’ve traditionally thought of as our ways and means of government in the everyday lives of millions. Citizenship today, as well as value, can come in many forms and contexts.

Brand value has arguably lead the way when it comes developing an approach to an intangible economy over the last two decades. It’s the most common means of evaluating and measuring qualitative and quantitative value and tangible and intangible reward.

That said, the challenge is that a large expanse of marketing thinking is as misconstrued and as close to obsolescence as the economic platforms of wealth generation running so close to the buffers at the moment. In fact, it could be argued that ‘Nudge’ thinking, that’s at the core of the thinking within the Behavioural Insights Unit looking at the National Index for Well-Being scopes out a race to the bottom as much as factory models of capitalist value generation have done.

When we look back, ‘nudge’ thinking may well turn out to be as clumsy and awkward as the first mobile phone in the hands here of its proud inventor, Martin Cooper, and here’s why:

It makes virtually nothing out of the things that move people at a deeper and more visceral level. It’s the clunky solution to going wireless.

Devoid of connection with gut-level, instinctive, intelligences and visceral stimuli and instead reliant on conditioning, ‘nudge’ management and marketing is a slow, mechanical means of leadership.

Nudge thinking is symptomatic of an abject lack of ability to inspire people at a leadership level, with all the potential loss of creativity, and therefore innovation and growth, that’s implied.

Interesting stories come from asynchronous not synchronous events, the ones you can’t make-up, the ones that fascinate because they don’t fall outside the known model, the ones beyond the obvious. They’re the ‘fact that is stranger than fiction’ and they ask for leaders with some imagination, enough to cultivate the social growth opportunities they contain.

But nudge thinking and mechanical leadership doesn’t accommodate this. Nor does it accommodate the excitement or the thrill of the new, the unexpected or the mindblowing. Nudge thinking works on the basis of incremental benefit. It doesn’t account for opposable views, nor encourages the energy and dynamism that comes out of freely expressed ideas and opinion.

A necessary ingredient of your brand idea, or your successful leadership of a social organisation, is the capacity to cope with and contain the inherent friction of truly dynamic, ‘visceral’ business.

By comparison, many organizations and individuals handle objections poorly and see them as a threat to defend against; acting ‘off-script’ is seen by ‘nudge’ thinking as being unwelcome and unhelpful, but is precisely what releases the prospective value many organisations need. Social organisations and movements can thrive by upskilling and recognising its constituents’ creativity, their ability to innovate and solutions and growth opportunities as propellants for national progress and collective well-being.

By taking techniques like gamification and putting it into the behavioural economic pot, the essential qualities of enjoyment and play move to an absurd mechanical domain with inherently limiting implications, as some of the smarter designers are now suggesting.

The risk is that what emerges out of nudge is sludge, where the edges of both technical capability and human connectivity are blurred and blunted, where the opportunities for resonant,relevant, instinctive and visceral experiences are sidelined, defeated by the very model that’s supposed to develop them. This has profound implications for what we might term well-being overall.

The spread of nudge thinking as a management and marketing ideology is fashionable right now, but it does ask us to consider fundamental questions about the ways governmental and organizational momentum play into it. It presupposes that people can be conditioned, it’s arguably the GM equivalent to spontaneous growth and diversity, grown in the petri dish of the boardroom when it can be informed in real time by a biofeedback loop as an alternative.

Every organisation that aspires to be a social brand might want to give this behavioural and economic equation some thought. What constitutes socio-economic well-being for a social organisation exactly? How can it be differentiated by a culture that stands out, that’s distinctive from the bottom-up, not just modelled from the top-down?

As John Hagel puts it ‘we need the productive friction that comes from bringing together passion and wisdom’. If organisations want to galvanise, mobilize and develop options for growth is nudging them the answer?  Or should they be visceral? You decide.

Photo by Christopher Schmid