Archive for the ‘Neuroscience’ Category

The rise of the expressive web

Wednesday, February 8th, 2012

Human/Need/Desire. Bruce Nauman, 1983
 

As a living thing powered by billions of people, the web is constantly evolving and currently one thing above all others is emerging. It’s a trend we’ve been talking about with clients for a while, it’s the rise of what we’re calling the expressive web.

According to Techcrunch, Pinterest just hit 11.7 million unique monthly U.S. visitors, crossing the 10 million mark faster than any other standalone site in history. It is one of the top 10 social media sites in the world.

Platforms like Pinterest, Instagram and Foodspotting are challenging original titans of the web like Flickr and Youtube. They’re offering an altogether more sensual and collaborative type of social platform and providing people with a greater opportunity to express themselves, in new ways, that is proving highly attractive.

Four main drivers are powering this shift.

1. The expressive web creates extra value
We’ve laid the basic groundwork of the web, so what now? Reveling in the sensuality of rich, interactive content feeds into a basic Maslow-style desire for advanced self-expression. Increasingly people are finding their voice. That voice is creative, it wants to be expressed.

Smart brands will enable this and make it part of their culture. This is happening as a shift towards co-creation, too. As the web becomes more democratic, users also want to become more compelling by seeking out and adopting content platforms that are built on co-created expression, around them and their desires.

2. Masses of data makes socially powered curation attractive
Two years ago when we were saying to brand managers that brands of the future will need to be good at curation, many of them didn’t understand what we were saying. Now, reputations can be rapidly built and brand associations can be recast by good curation skills. Curation as a sense-making skill is only going to increase in demand. Platforms like Pinterest, Scoop.it and Storify that make curation easy are becoming big winners because of this.

3. Rich content contains more information
Ever since the logo was identified as a cool shorthand, a body of scientific evidence’s been amassed about how much information is conveyed by ‘the pretties’. Analytic types may gasp, but a good image contains substantially more information than the equivalent in words or numbers (up to 20 times more information in fact) which goes some way to explaining the popularity of the infographic.

Interactive features, responsive web design, sound effects, they all create what we’d call a ‘visceral’ reaction. A moment of interactivity that fires synpases has engagement potential and is also expressive.

So while words will always be around, the web’s giving us a whole new way of communicating in cool shorthands and it has big implications for information architects and content managers.

4. Doing a job is harder these days, being expressive’s an antidote
In fact, 225m people in Europe don’t have a job at all. Those that do have full plates and can be pretty stressed out. It’s a sideways issue perhaps, but the expressive web is providing an alternative to traditional spoon-fed entertainment that enables escapism and self-discovery in ways which are just as highly accessible but where the user is in control.

The expressive web is therapy. It generates ideas and sparks the imagination. Another reason that explains people are taking to it in such numbers.

For marketers this is a very big deal. It’s a signal that, thanks to the social web, the essential nature of communication is taking a turn and it’s demonstrating how the quality of the co-created user-experiences becoming key performance indicators.

IBM’s Global CMO Study shows around 70% of chief marketing officers are unprepared for the explosion in data and the social web that the expressive web intersects. Many of them are in organizations with legacy structures finding it hard to turn around the way they do things.

As sites like Pinterest show, the expressive web has just ramped up the communication challenge a notch. It’s making it even more important that communication isn’t being seen as boring or difficult to use. It’s asking marketers to think about the way they define and serve up content in a fundamentally different way.

The expressive, artistic, web is the high touch equal-and-opposite to high tech functionality. It was never not going to happen. Are we prepared to make the most of it?

Posted in Authenticity, Brand, Curation, Data, Human Relations, Neuroscience, Self development, Social business design |

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How will you make your mark in 2012?

Wednesday, December 28th, 2011

Picture credit http://bit.ly/vafRYw

One definition of genius we really like round here is genius is ‘the ability to connect two seemingly unconnected things’.

Truly successful social businesses do this, they make connections between ideas and people. They also stimulate responses to create action potential, like synapses do when they fire. Social businesses make things happen, powered by affinities and the connective tissue of networked technology. And there’s no doubt that 2012 will be hallmarked to no small degree by the impact social business will have on it.

This raises some significant considerations for marketers. For social marketers that concentrate mostly on the ‘media’ part of social media, the ultimate aspiration and the holy grail of social, is to go viral. Social contagion’s the big win, the coup. The crucial key performance indicator is to make things shareable.

What social media like that thrives on however, and not entirely healthily, is often a shareability based on the open-mouthed factor of things that are either insane or incredible, spread out of disbelief, or momentary pleasure, and not much more.

Are we shattering an ecosystem we can all thrive in by doing so? As this mildly amusing article in 2002 accurately predicted, and Nick Carr’s book The Shallows has covered since, our attention spans are getting shorter.

We’ve slowly been turning into digital goldfish where everything competes with a ‘best ever’ or ‘awesome’ kind of hyperbole for share of mind, in the place of simply being interesting and sustainably relevant to a particular group of people with a shared interest, purpose or sense of communal identity that has longevity.

If the two chief gratification buttons in life are ‘fun’ and ‘meaning’ what’s relevant in this context is how, as Thomas Friedman and the historian Walter Russell Mead have both observed, after the 1990s revolution that collapsed the Soviet Union, the Russians had a saying that seems particularly apt today:

‘It’s easier to turn an aquarium into fish soup than to turn fish soup into an aquarium.’

Have a think about that for a moment. It’s the essential reason why some viral social media campaigns can actually be unhelpful to brands. The sticking plaster on a short and increasingly unpredictable sales cycle, social media campaigns that are designed to go viral can end up fostering audience relationships based only on instant and temporary engagement in a similar way.

In 2012, social media tactics unconnected to core social values can serve up content that at a deep level devalues rather reinforces the impact of a social brand and its sustainability. Social business brands need a purpose beyond profit or product and a core sense of the big picture.

The good news is here though. Beyond going viral, is going scalar.

To make a mark in 2012, the genius of making connections between two seemingly unconnected things is the kind of social media integration that can quite literally scale your business. Going scalar is pulling people into your business who are advocates beyond the act of sharing.

Scaling business through the harnessing of participation and deep insights that go beyond likes, +1’s and unique views can mean walls can become permeable membranes between a brand and its users, that business becomes designed around connections instead of divisions, that being ‘on brand’ can happen anywhere by anyone, and that talent can be brought into the business; that target audiences can be replaced by shared experiences that have lasting impact.

There’s no internal and external in the social organization, so the costs of managing another marketing channel (as social is so often seen as being) or of outsourcing your voice (as agencies so often encourage) become part of a leaner, more connected and more empowered constituency of committed users that can co-create the future fuel for business strategy with you.

It’s a sustainable strategy for how a brand’s or organisation’s social voice can get bigger, and have lasting impact. That’s why the two words embedded into Visceral Business are ‘is us’. We really believe in enabling the kind of social business that can create shared value, long term stakeholders and sustainable cultures.

If you want social business success in 2012 going viral’s not necessarily a bad aspiration, but going scalar’s possibly going to be a better one.

So the question is your business sufficiently adapted and suited to scalar, or will it rely on the flash in pan of short-term virality? Can deep authentic connections help you make your mark in 2012? It’s a genius opportunity.

Posted in Authenticity, Brand, Business, Business model, Business performance, Corporate development, Human Relations, Identity, Leadership, Management, Marketing, Neuroscience, Social business design |

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The Social Media Supermarket

Monday, July 4th, 2011

 

It’s not what you’re thinking. This is about what lies beyond the many tracking, posting, collaborating and measuring apps there are out there, all of which are a veritable supermarket in their own right.

As any supermarketer will tell you, there’s a big shift involved in helping a consumer in from the point they see the banners outside the store – the media – to how they actually navigate through it and the nature of the user experience – the modeling. The point is that social brand architecture, or the lack of it, can make or break a social brand.

In the early to mid 1990’s a lot of my time was spent advising retailers. We used fundamental sets of assumptions that were in service to, and all about, how customers shopped a store. Many of them are still used today.

Navigating one’s way through a large supermarket is one of modern life’s complex organizational events. Navigating the web’s and virtual organisation’s a step on from that again, which is why services like Google helping by pushing stuff to us.

A socially branded organisation is somewhere between the two. It has a multitude of elements – social objects – and a complex range of activities going on inside it, similar to the number of lines a supermarket may carry on its shelves.

It has a wide choice of elements that consumer and participants can pick up and engage with. It’s accessible via the web, but is still one with a threshold, a sense of inside and outside in terms of belonging that makes it a virtual environment; a brand is by definition an identifiable space.

If you’re a maker of a social brand or business, or a consumer of and participant in one, the degree to which that social organisation can be thought of as your ‘local convenience store’ in terms of familiarity and loyalty, depends on how well the user experience delivers an interesting and sensible shopping experience that makes it something that’s easy to go back to.

In the same way as those retail principles did out of physical spaces two decades ago, there’s a big need to make sense of the digital cultures of brands today, because the curation and cultural meaning of social brands is crucial if people are going to come along and browse, select activities to participate in and commit to involving themselves in your brand, what we quite quaintly call ‘social engagement.’

There’s the things like the merchandising of your hashtags, how are you doing that?

There’s the clustering of social and digital events. How do people get a snapshot of all of it very quickly? It asks for a framework for social category management.

There’s the livery of your social brand architecture. Just as there are semiotics – colours, images, words – associated with fresh food, the pharmacy, the deli, the meat, fish and diary sections of a supermarket, things that create distinctive associations and triggers of understanding, so there are social semiotics. There are the ways people sense-make online around different parts of the social organization as well as unique and distinctive cultural attributes you can call your own, the social differentiators and protocols, visual and verbal languages and points of focus, that need to be easily known.

Many companies are using social media for rapid fire business as usual in the same way as supermarkets are geared to everyday transactional exchanges. The social media supermarket today is a trolley-filling of Likes and +1’s and Share buttons and clickthroughs. But these items are not where the value is for consumers. The cultural value of store environment, the ranging, matters just as much, the social ambience and the ease of shopping.

No social consumer’s going to go out and put 10 Likes and 5 +1′s’ on the shopping list of their social activity today. That’s why brands must become ‘go-to’ destinations to be truly socially potent.

Consumers shop the stores they like because they know where the categories are and because they’re easy to navigate. It’s not just about what social media can do to get people ‘into’ the social organization, it’s what you’re going to do with them once they’re in there that matters. The modelling of your social environment makes sense of the media and the platforms that support it.

What we see is that many organizations are currently frantically trying to put social media on their shelves while ignoring the basic layout of their social environment, but without a social brand framework at an operational level it’s an approach that can only lead to a shallow depth of engagement and restrict the size of user buy-in.

Beyond the frenzy of tooling up to be social, social brands and organizations have the challenge of creating special ambiences, experiences and making sense of what’s on their shelf.

They should be considering the question  of how they’re going to create a compelling user experience, because when there’s a high volume of goods and competing calls for their attention on offer, what really matters is the means to navigate through it in a way that’s capable of continually connecting with a consumer’s desire to shop.

 

 

Posted in Business model, Business performance, Corporate development, Management, Neuroscience, Social business design |

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Dialogue is authenticity

Thursday, March 17th, 2011

The best ideas come out in conversation.

Have you experienced how ideas often tumble out when talking with someone, or in the shower, or even talking to the voice in your head?

It happens a lot, collectively and individually.

It’s only when we engage iteratively in that way that ideas get honed and polished, stimulated by the prism of different perspectives.

What happens is that in dialogue, we engage more than our brains. The interaction sets off our sympathetic nervous system, the power ingredient that creates a better solution.

Listening to an excellent talk by Tim Wu at the Royal Society of Arts yesterday on the Rise and Fall of Information Empires made me think about this too.

Tim highlighted an obvious but at the same time profound insight. It’s the acid test you can use to see whether an organization or person is generating new value or protecting expiring value. It’s done by watching whether a company is devoting its energy and focusing its behaviours on innovation or defence.

An innovation mindset will spread to others, as the sympathetic nervous system reacts towards it; a culture of defence will spread fear and propulsion away from that mindset. This is a basic survival instinct.

Collaborative dialogue however, one in which both parties adapt a little, will create solutions. That is why and how organisations benefit by adopting the behaviour of leaning into situations and becoming lean and agile in terms of working across silos. As with contracting pairs of muscles, in partnership with others they’ll also generate power.

I’m bearing all this in mind when it comes to reacting to the news today in the Guardian that ‘the US military is developing software that will let it secretly manipulate social media using fake online personas designed to influence internet conversations and spread pro-American propaganda.’

It goes on to say, ‘the contract stipulates each persona must have a convincing background, history and supporting details, and that up to 50 controllers must be able to operate false identities from their workstations “without fear of being discovered by sophisticated adversaries’.

The article itself sparked a little conversation between Katie Smith and myself that led to this tweet -

Which led in another way, to this post – the observation that I want to share being that the grand shuffling of old protocols that disruptive technology’s creating is having quite a profound, but manageable, effect.

It’s having an effect across a number of management forms – across forms of government, upon business models, and upon marketing and communications. They all face having to accept a re-arrangement across traditional flows of power, and how to augment the duality of new power relationships into their businesses.

Even technology requires bio-feedback to work well, as the stricken Japanese are finding.

In all contexts, that feedback’s the single greatest reassurance one can have. Open data allows and enables this.

All this means that the value of win:win social contracts is ascending, whilst competitive power, based on I win:you lose management principles aren’t.

In communications and marketing terms, then, the implication is that dialogue’s never been more important to a successful operating model. We need to consider this and how to build dialogue into organizations through new processes.

It’s not enough to simply broadcast content using social media. Even if it’s done by as many people as possible within the organization who are ‘social communications’ literate, there has to be interaction and ongoing dialogue, as well as conversation which has the potential to be asynchronous.

Social media is about doing more ‘human business’ than has been done previously in the past. Increasingly, brand authenticity in this social media context is dialogue.

The kind of authenticity that breeds dialogue will be where relationships connect at a deeper level, that generate collaborative conversation, because the sympathetic nervous system will also be engaged at that point. Ultimately, this way of marketing and communicating will be more productive.

The challenge for organizations however isn’t small – all the triggers that reinforce the old ways of being have to be looked at as well as assumptions that can sit within a business model or marketing strategy.

This is one of the things we look at when going deeper into organizations to switch on dormant performance.

In real life and on-line, sock-puppets don’t do dialogue. A good volley of questions and answers and co-created conversation is where insight, ideas, value and satisfying user experiences are to be found.

Dialogue is authenticity. It’s also sustainability  – could this be something it’s now time to embed into an operating model and marketing strategy? What are your ideas on it?

 

Posted in Authenticity, Brand, Business, Business performance, Corporate development, Data, Identity, Leadership, Management, Marketing, Neuroscience, Self development, Social business design, Society |

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Getting nudged and getting visceral

Tuesday, November 30th, 2010

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

Posted in Authenticity, Brand, Business performance, Corporate development, Economics, Human Relations, Identity, Leadership, Management, Marketing, Neuroscience, Public sector, Self development, Social business design, Society |

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Working it through

Sunday, June 6th, 2010

It’s just a perception, but I sense an important threshold’s been crossed over the course of the last few weeks.

‘We’re working it through’, was how Danny Alexander described what was happening in the days immediately after the General Election in the UK a month ago, after the electorate handed back the most exquisitely hung Parliament to politicians for more than a generation.

‘We’re working it through’, is how Mark Zuckerberg might put having to deal with consumer mutiny over privacy control plus an increasingly deep questioning by some Facebook users about what the DNA of Facebook and the core values of ‘being Zucked’ are all about.

‘We’re working it through’, also describes the grim reality as B.P. struggles to find an authentic response to a global sense of condemnation, cynicism and disbelief that’s attaching itself to the B.P. brand as surely as the oil slicks are landing on the beaches of Louisiana.

These three situations all have something in common. They all ask for organizational adaptability at a deep level. They challenge what all the parties involved stand for and represent.

What’s interesting about the phrase, we’re ‘working it through’ is that it’s an iterative, hands-on approach to problem solving. It involves contradictory pairs of muscles and often the engagement of opposites to achieve progress.

In the case of the Conservative Party and the Liberal Democrats who have formed the Coalition Government, ‘working it through’ led to harnessing a collective imagination and a bigger ambition than either was capable of alone. It led to ‘new politics’, a clear and confidently articulated manifesto, a shared cabinet creating credibility for the platform of an inclusive ‘big society’.

It didn’t take much to turn the dial on the mood music about the election. In a few days it shifted from mainly doom mongering conversations of conflict, woe, indecision and a re-election within the year, to ‘lawn love’ and a decidedly pacified and somewhat surprisingly positive reaction from the electorate.

It was the body language that did it, a change in behaviour, the emotional maturity to go from combatants to colleagues in pursuit of a collective national interest.

There’s a creative truth that comes to my mind in this context which is, ‘if an idea’s not working then it’s time to get a bigger one’. I think both David Cameron and Nick Clegg became receptive to that as a result of that impasse; our politicians have become more consensual and to some degree at least, have adapted. For the time being, it’s paid off and the voters have been largely assuaged by their creativity.

The difference for Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg is the opposition to what’s being pitched on user privacy’s led to the biggest backlash a social media platform’s ever experienced. This is new territory. It raises questions about what happens when you represent the digital footprints of more than 500 million people and how much licence any provider has to act unilaterally in a connected age.

The response has been that there are privacy protection groups within Facebook promoting user control over privacy settings to fill this vacuum of management. In doing so, they’re acting like the cleaner fish of the network, helping Facebook stem the attrition of disgruntled users, in many cases persuading them to stay within the network better than Facebook’s capable of doing by itself.

It makes good business sense for Facebook to embrace these efforts and to knead them into their overall operating recipe. It’s an example of how the seeds of corporate strength and survival are often to be found within the opposable forces of a networked organization, in the same way as recombinant genes are said to be part at the core of our own DNA and our sustainability as a species.

The question in this is how many organizations recognise this and are equipped with the capability to be this adaptive?

As B.P. embarks on one of the largest shoring up exercises in corporate reputation we’ve seen in years, spending $50million on a slick damage limitation communications campaign, are they capable of being hands-on and credible enough to connect with the gritty realities and the issues, from a position of blatant integrity, to restore the trust that once existed in its brand?

Blatant integrity is present when people and organizations are comfortable with being held up to scrutiny and we’re big on ‘blatant integrity’ at Visceral Business. Organizations that can manage this welcome attention as a compliment knowing it’s a commercial currency, and welcome the opportunity to cushion and objections because they’re more interested in creating a moment of truth than making an expedient sale. Knowing that one leads to another in a skittish, no-mercy, click happy culture, they see the value in relationships over transactions.

Increasingly, corporate success is a co-owned and co-created experience. Increasingly, this is an experiential economy in which control has to be surrendered in the interests of benefitting from a multiplicity of voices, the voices that are at the heart of what’s known as swarm smarts, and of working that through.

B.P. illustrates how interested parties that give a brand attention have a range of perspectives that need to be incorporated into the strategy of the adaptive organization at speed. B.P. has often appeared in denial about this, which Tony Hayward’s ‘I want my life back’ comment only served to amplify. The quicker a business environment develops, the bigger the risk any kind of blind spot is, and the agility with which an organization can react is a severe test of how well a brand is truly aligned with its stakeholders.

For an engaged brand, challenges will come thick and fast because that’s a facet of iterative learning, and working through the unknown is ever-present characteristic of doing business that often requires a degree of faith and goodwill to succeed.

The big imperative for all organizations now is to know how to operate iteratively like this. In Rework, 37 Signals, an organization I greatly admire, suggest that these days a business plan stays relevant for about 15 minutes. This is an inherent characteristic of a lean organization and an important shift that all brands and businesses should now consider.

The UK Election, Facebook’s privacy saga and the social and environmental accountability of B.P. are all examples that illustrate formative organizational experiences. They represent a shift that goes beyond social media. What we are entering now is a new chapter in how we organize, a shift that goes beyond a social revolution to a semantic one.

The semantic web has arrived and the semantic revolution’s about collective smarts. It’s about how, when it comes to solving management problems, we’re going to need to feel comfortable ‘working it through’ and to be able to lead and inspire confidence from that position.

Smart organizations will evolve by creating adaptive fits with their stakeholders at a deeply engaged level.

Semantic value is going to be our daily bread of the future. Semantic value, as we’re beginning to see, depends on the ability for diverse forces to work together. Semantic organizations will have the kind of adaptable, recombinant genes, the big ideas, heightened ambitions and the new horizons that our survival as a species has always depended on.

‘Working it through’ is a means of communication and engagement that’s becoming a critical success factor. Which is one reason why organizations and brands need to know how to engage at that visceral level if they want to succeed in the semantic age, not be defeated by it.

Thanks to Erica Marshall for the photo.

Posted in Authenticity, Brand, Business, Business performance, Corporate development, Dot.life, Human Relations, Management, Neuroscience, Social business design, Society |

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Cogs and corpuscles

Friday, March 5th, 2010


HR operations for organizations make a fine art out of developing job descriptions, roles and responsibilities, duties, and key performance indicators.

They’ve led to management layers and mechanical thinking, and sometimes to zombie businesses that work to the script but can miss essential opportunities.

In effect, they’ve developed cogs for factory structures. This ‘division of labour’ model, whilst not necessary entirely obsolete, can have the effect of doing business today a lot of harm.

The problem with cogs is that a cog out of alignment can halt a whole machine. Cogs are geared to work in a pre-prescribed fashion, they’re passive processors, part of ‘the system’.

Many a corporate structure today is based on a structure comprised of cogs.

One of the principles of Visceral Business is that ‘affinity is stronger than structure’; we help organizations adapt to become socially calibrated so they’re more strategically connected and dynamic.

As we become more networked in general, as the lines between inside and outside the co-created business become blurred, I have a hunch that we may look at mechanical business models one day and see this way of organising as having as much sophistication as a set of meccano.

By comparison, corpuscles are rapidly adaptive receptors that respond to mechanical pressure or distortion. They balance introvert and extrovert stimuli within the corporate body as a whole, based on a combination of shared imperative and free will.

And because they’re adaptive, they can coagulate.

In business management today, there are strong arguments emerging to think of people as corpuscles not cogs, as vital, dynamic and highly differentiated elements of ability, and to work with them in this way.

Evidence is emerging to suggest incorporating (quite literally), the biological nature of human networks into business strategy, that strong organizations are ‘super-organisms’ as Nicholas Christakis, talking about the power of social networks at the RSA, described them last week.

Matthew Taylor, writing in the RSA blog yesterday, expanded on this by referencing the RSA’s Connected Communities project, and saying ‘it should be a key plank of strategies to build community resilience that we identify who these people are and that we give them resources (for example, access to social media) so they can apply their skills. These are the people public authorities should engage when they are designing some or other policy intervention.’

Coagulation, at a very primal level, breeds creativity. It happens when corpuscles cluster together through shared purpose and affinity and, today coagulation doesn’t just breed creativity, it breeds profit.

Have a look at this video of a talk Robert Scoble gave recently at Stanford. Making some leeway for the slightly amusing subtitles, it hints at the way social business is going and makes the point compellingly that how we need to be thinking and organising today, how people work and how ideas spread now, is a biological business.

Businesses can gain ground today by re-imagining their business frameworks to be less about structures and more about genetics, by thinking about making a move from managing cogs to cultivating corpuscles.

Organizational structures are highly interconnected, and as we move away from the mechanical concepts of organization they’re becoming more permeable; as such, I think they’re going to be more capable of spreading ideas through affinity, by receptive people as a process of osmosis and by working with the talent connected to their brand, both inside and outside the walls of the organization.

What are your thoughts?

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Posted in Business, Business performance, Business science, Corporate development, Human Relations, Identity, Management, Neuroscience, Social business design, Society |

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The synaptic fluid of social business

Saturday, February 6th, 2010

Questions about the nature of human connectivity are now at the epicentre of what constitutes and creates personal, commercial and social value.

How will leaders connect with stakeholders in order to be able to do their jobs, and what are the appropriate business models with which to develop connectivity to build business?

Many organizations are yet to integrate the benefits of network effects fully into their business models. As I watched the social media discussions at Davos last week from the comfort of my own desktop, what I observed was a group of decision-makers, however, becoming increasingly aware of the impact that social media is going to have, that when they make their decisions there may be, at least metaphorically, other people in the room. Social business is bringing with it a big shift, and the key is that it involves going from messages to experiences.

There’s no doubt that C level curiosity around this is subject has been aroused; it’s becoming palpable, but whether it’s a pandora’s box or a burning platform is unidentified and uncertain. As Jeff Jarvis tweets, what’s the endgame of ‘FT’s @johngapper sitting on floor; Facebook investor standing: Davos democracy’?

‘Who claims that open is good?’ Steve Jobs has said, and it’s a good question, but as Don Tapscott countered in the Davos session, ‘companies have to undress for success’. When it comes to positioning this, in fact the ethics matter as much as the technology. Blatant integrity might be better, more nuanced and more appropriate, than open.

From ‘Veni vidi vici’, Julius Ceasar and the first days of empire, to ‘ipod, iphone, ipad’, and the liberation of the individual through gadgetry, this is an iterative process. It has always been this way. Now is the time to open up to the experience with integrity.

Carver Mead, a leading computer scientist at the California Institute of Technology, once said, “Listen to the technology; find out what it’s telling you.” Biz Stone has said the same thing about Twitter. At a NESTA session in December, Biz talked about how he’s spent the last two years listening to Twitter, telling him what it wants to be.

Technology is a finite game. It will ultimately solve all the problems it’s capable of addressing, now matter how shiny and new it seems now. What’s a more infinite game are the opportunities of human connectivity, all the shades of creation that are possible to conceive collectively.

A very modern form of disenfranchisement, being denied a networked identity, may become the ultimate social sanction of this century. That kind of ban from the cloud may have the same tarnish as the casting out of convicts to the far flung reaches of Australia two hundred years ago, as just as far an isolation away from the heart of a new civilization. Do we want that, especially at a time when one of the biggest risks we create as we emerge from seismic change, is a lack of education literacy that leads to us creating two societies, not one?

To help answer the question, Chris Brogan’s ‘The Third Tribe’ community launched this week. Chris Brogan, the man behind the move towards more human business, has a price for connectivity and membership to his tribe in the form of a monthly subscription. Subscription however doesn’t create a community, it creates a service, and with it comes a different ambience.

My friend Ed Brenegar’s put it like this ‘popularity in a free environment does not necessarily equate to value in a paid one’ and social connectivity means cost equations have changed. Purchase and purpose are more related, they come together via shared commitments, and purchase might take many forms and currencies – time given, attention focused, contributions made, as well as cold, hard cash.

The old school calls to consume don’t count for as much as they used to, whilst generative connections are growing in value.

I’ve paid upfront sight unseen for the value of being part of collaborative initiatives I believe in. There are causes that are redefining what participation in not-for-profit initiatives can mean and what it’s capable of achieving, and there are communities worth investing in heavily simply because of the quality of the leadership and freedom of connection.

Trust is the synaptic fluid of social business. In that context I think Chris Brogan, as a Trust Agent and because his stock in trade is his humanity, has erred. Trust is an intimate thing and monthly subscriptions are what we do when buying a network utility.

For anyone who wants to monetize social connectivity like in Davos, the key lies in differentiating value delivery appropriately, in understanding where brokerage can be paid for and value consumed, and where service and facilitation that’s free are crucial to delivering co-created value.

There are a number of industries where liberating co-created value is an increasingly important item on the agenda. The government burden of management in face of budget cutbacks, the healthcare requirement to develop insights that can make R&D cheaper, all business that benefits from streamlining business processes that can remove overhead, that knows that pump-priming marketing an increasingly expensive activity.

Old business models are yielding fewer returns. Generative listening is an antidote to the velocity of today’s overloaded information flows. The action potential contained within committed, visceral and trustworthy human relationships, that’s at the heart of the social connections, has never been more important. It’s the synaptic fluid of social business.

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Posted in Authenticity, Corporate development, Economics, Human Relations, Marketing, Neuroscience, Social business design, Society |

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