Archive for the ‘Public sector’ Category

Going beyond ‘Not for Profit’. Thoughts from The Third Sector Conference.

Tuesday, June 14th, 2011

 

There’s been an intensive look at the state of social media in the Third Sector going on at the Not For Profit Social Media Conference in London this week and the hashtag’s been #nfpsm for anyone who wants to check it out.

Here’s me and Steve talking a little about this, with many thanks to the marvellous David Wilcox who never eases to amaze me about the things he can do with an ipad. Thanks and appreciation go to everyone who put on and was a part of the making of the forum into a significant stock-taking event, both at the venue and online.

It certainly was a conference full of friends. Steve Bridger did a fabulous keynote and Lucy Buck and Kirsty Stephenson spoke about how the Child’s i Foundation’s campaign to save Joey was so successful through its approach to using social media.

Standing back and taking a look at how the whole thing rolled, it’s encouraging to see how much social media’s being adopted and it was also obvious there’s still a long way to go. The journey from managing social media to being a social organisation, packed with social leaders able to inspire, support and solve big problems collaboratively, is full of opportunity as well as some substantial challenges.

On the opportunity side, much of what’s being done now is largely proprietary and off-the shelf; there’s a road map to follow which is comforting but that also contains the danger of being a bit ‘me too’ in terms of social brand marketing.

NFP’s now have a great basis on which to build on what they’re doing by developing truly differentiated social brand strategies and identities as part of the way they do things. They can develop social values and social cultures capable of creating communities of purpose, belonging and compelling points of difference.

On the challenge side, the scope to welcome, accommodate and adapt to marketing activity coming in from outside the organisation and to embrace the experiences of supporters and volunteers into ongoing product, service and process design has yet to be started in earnest.

Organisations do find it hard to adapt to and embrace all the experiences of those connected with NFPs at the moment much beyond listening and in that sense there’s still a hangover from the old days and sense of ‘us’ and ‘them’ to grapple with. I look forward to the day when, for example, community participants in Not for Profits come to these events and talk directly and spontaneously about the difference that their one is making, to them.

Ultimately we think there’s no inside or outside in a social organisation. Yet the architecture of participation at this point is not quite the collaborative dialogue it’s capable of becoming. It’s still about target audiences instead of target moments. Job descriptions remain fixed, corporate reputations struggle with how to accommodate and integrate personal profiles into their own, the scope to build on the kind of affinity that can reshape organisational structure so it’s more fluid is limited. Hopping over the walls of internal departments to contribute to initiatives is often regarded as too provocative and challenging to the status quo.

Making meaning by being better connected at a deep and more intimate social level is a big ask for many brands. Old sector divisions and boundary lines between commercial and not for profit are clearly evident too, just the name of the Third Sector Conference also suggests that. We do rely and need these labels and definitions to a degree as things to hang our hats on of course, but the question around how much these labels help or hinder organisations should be asked as part of where this all goes from here.

Doing the work on business modelling that we do, we know there’s a point to taking another look at the whole way Not for Profits view themselves. To be socially successful as user-centric organisations there isn’t one that shouldn’t be thinking about how they can make their core purpose come alive in the minds of the people who are connected to them as ‘not only for profit’ and ‘beyond profit’ organisations whatever they do, so that they’re fully effective. NFP’s can be social businesses in the pursuit of big important causes. For NFP’s there’s an irony in that being well-meaning isn’t necessarily the whole social story. The organisation, its processes and protocols, overarching strategy and social brand positioning, have to be fit for purpose too.

Adding a social media overlay to a brand won’t make it resonate and make a difference to people at a netroots level, and perhaps that’s the cautionary note of the conference. There’s developing revenue streams and network effects in tandem with partners and advocates to think about, different types of relationships and social technology to embed at deep levels, new ways of working to raise the effectiveness, efficiency and value of social knowledge flows and streams of activity. What happens next in terms of commitment, making the business case and the appetite for being social’s going to be crucial.

Posted in Authenticity, Brand, Business model, Business performance, Charity, Management, Public sector, Social business design |

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Injunctions, interventions and engagement

Sunday, May 1st, 2011

Andrew Marr decided to drop a super-injunction he took out in 2008 the other day. Even if the move was provoked by the Private Eye, it was a small but significant shift in the unfolding narrative around privacy and reputation.

The visceral value of the news comes from the influence it has on collective storytelling and how it creates step changes in collective consciousness. Deconstructing news headlines can be a worthwhile exercise because they contain kernels of awareness around new opportunities, new perspectives and new ways of doing things based on the front-of-mind memes on offer.

As a journalist of course, Marr knows this well. What’s interesting about this story is how we’re wrestling with issues of engagement and living below the water line.

The eclectic nature of change at the moment is creating a wake-up call for organizations, businesses, brands – everyone operating in the public space; a wake-up call to reconsider and reappraise the fundamental root causes of their value.

We’re all public figures now, and being a public figure isn’t a tag that simply belongs to ‘other people’. This emergent fact of life comes with being part of a joined-up information environment. If you’re alive you’re going to get Googled, and if you’re digitally active in any way, consider it part of the territory.

In the past, if one’s not a celebrity or a CEO we have been quite used to, and comfortable with, being hidden. We’ve been used to being passive consumers of media, inside and outside organizations, rather than eligible producers of it, with all the shades of opinion that come with that. Factory-oriented, hierarchical, frameworks have demanded it be this way and in that world, of course, the news brokers have benefitted.

The problem comes with how in the networked world, productivity and efficiency doesn’t come from the 1% doing the heavy lifting. This has been our model of engagement and participation up till now and the platform on which we’ve created an expensive world either of paid media of expensively enforced embargoes.

We know there’s a real need for us to raise the engagement stakes within organizations and communities of interest for them to be more effective. De facto that means an environment where one size does not fit all. We’re bound by the principles of connected networks to be doing things that some people don’t like some of the time, which is why tribal organising becomes significant.

What the change highlighted by the subject of superinjunctions represents is obviously a very different conversational landscape compared to controlled publishing and one-way media we’re used to. The superinjunction is perhaps a symptom of a lack of comfort with where media management has got us to, a contra-indication of the rapacious and intrusive nature of mainstream journalism that itself prefers to peddle one-dimensionality.

Yet we live in an attention economy, attention is a form of social currency, all news is supposedly good news and the breaking news is that the socially connected and savvy have a natural and balancing remedy at hand, to connect with users direct through social media.

The subject of superinjunctions touches very deep nerves in our collective psyche about influence, integrity and social identity and it asks a question, which is the most desirable? - appearing to be better, or actually being better?

Superinjunctions have emerged as an attempt to bridge a widening gulf between two opposing positions. In the red corner, the rounded set of perspectives increasingly gathered and accessed by the socially interconnected, powered by the openness necessary to create social value and social enterprise.

In the blue corner, the die-hard legal defence mechanisms, hands-off media management policies, one-way traffic and the injunctions and superinjunctions that have emerged out of a friction-led, rather than a friction-free, business model.

These interventions have been deployed to paper over the veneers of public reputation that a few public figures and corporations have come to rely on in lieu of an authentic engagement with their audiences.

What a sad indictment this is, because ‘perfection is for the Gods’ and in the social web it’s very much easier to win out by just being decent. And it’s not a bad idea to have a few militant points of view that are prepared to get up and participate, too. They demonstrate a sense of passion, that it’s ok to think outside the box, the place where most of the progress we make springs from.

The basic framework of the web is granular and significantly more fluid than the large scale, fixed forms we traditionally associate with organizational frameworks.

All these factors suggest that acknowledging the social web involves rethinking how people communicate, how we organize, how we go about developing reputational value and enable social influence through the use of new strategies.

History tells us that no matter who rules the world, if they fail to adapt they’ll become obsolete. There’s no point being too King Cnutish about this.

When the sandbags are put away and the word ‘injunction’ is reframed, it can refer to another kind of intervention – an entreaty to deal with a fissure in a brand’s integrity. When social interest puts the integrity of what one does in the public domain, an emotionally and social intelligent brand will take this to mean working with its audience, not denying or fighting against them.

Contracting pairs of muscles work in symbiosis to create energy. Think of social dialogue in a similar way, and it becomes an intercession that directly utilises similar opposable forces around your brand where both parties gain.

I respect Andrew Marr for taking it on the chin today. This is something that public figures and brands can learn to do a lot better. If they lean into issues of public contention, using them as a cue to develop a dialogue with their audiences, then public opinion can serve them well.

There’s of course a weird tautology in suggesting that superinjunctions give celebrity a bad name, but it’s true. The reputations of public figures, companies and brands will be severely tested one way or another if the currency of celebrity and social influencers is devalued by not embracing user-centricity.

Whilst incongruence is as much as deadly a threat to public relationships as the silence that comes from avoidance and lack of engagement, it’s also important to realize that for every pearl in an oyster there has to be a bit of grit in it. So it pays to be publicly open, to encourage your brand managers to embrace the grit in social conversation, the nuances that come with the territory of a complex narrative, collective collaboration and the support of a broad church, as well as having the courage to fail occasionally, and to listen to what people think when we do.

Increasingly the building of reputation and influence, and ability to fascinate, to lead and inspire are aspects of value dependent on understanding the duality required in creating productive communication, where working well with adverse opinion and favourable points of view together in combination is a key part of creating satisfying user experiences.

The moral of ‘Marrgate’ is that to avoid public figure fail it’s worth getting closer to your users, especially the faster and looser you chose to go. It’s an indemnity, and the goodwill of being real is your insurance.

Social brand identity management is about being tuned into public opinion more than trying to configure audience perceptions via partial avoidance or a denial of who you are.

Rethinking injunction as a call to bridge a credibility gap is a cheaper, more effective and ultimately a more inventive way of dealing with challenges than hiring a team of lawyers and building a crisis management barrage.

And seeing opinion as an asset instead of a threat could make a difference in creating more trust and depth about who you are as a brand, and the nuances that go with it, if you want to garner goodwill, social connectivity and user interaction of lasting value.

 

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Posted in Authenticity, Brand, Business, Human Relations, Identity, Leadership, Public sector, Self development, 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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Joining forces

Wednesday, September 15th, 2010


Visceral Business exists to help organisations thrive; smart, agile and purposeful organisations, socially potent brands, organisations as movements; the kind of organisation that happens because it offers the potential of making connections that move people, the kind of organisation that makes people want to respond and contribute.

This is organisation as phenomenon not factory, powered by strategic intent and collective intelligence in which a visceral moment shared is a visceral moment squared.

Social technology, connected leadership and network effects offer the ability to generate spontaneous growth in new ways. If we consider social business to be more about relationships than about transactions, then it follows that the conjoined forces of a compelling singularity of intent, aligned with indomitable human initiative, is what powers social businesses and is the fundamental foundation for growth for organisations today.

To ensure we’re completely aligned with the full potential of this way of doing business, Visceral Business has always operated as a networked partnership, based on the principles of collaboration, integrity, (the more blatant the better), sustainability, inventiveness and mutual respect between ourselves and our clients.

It’s been important to us that we walk the talk, representing the change we provide in the way we act and in what we do. It’s mattered to us, for example, that we aren’t talking about how social media can benefit our clients in the way a VC funded business does, driven ultimately by debt and the bottom line.

We’ve been crystal clear from the beginning that our objective is to empower our clients to be effective in supporting themselves sustainably by developing their own capabilities; helping them to develop their own vital social voice instead of encouraging ways to process or outsource it.

We haven’t grown by putting together a payroll. We’ve been a fluid business framework for supporting talent rather than exploiting it, and we’ve shown that these principles can all work to improve an organisation’s potential as part of a new, effective user-centric business model.

We want to amplify the potent points of difference that are sourced directly from the existing inherent strengths of the organisations we work with, as the smart alternative to offering them artificially manufactured marketing veneers and the kind of factory models that are costly to prime and maintain.

Visceral Business has developed organically as a social impact enabler first and foremost, not a profit machine. We care about the ecosystem we exist in as much as we do about ourselves because we recognise that the two are interconnected.

We’re here to help existing organisations and brands become socially enabled and discover their latent talent, so they can create new forms of value for themselves and their customers and stakeholders through the power of their networks and, essentially, we want to be the best ally any organisation can have when it comes to thinking about how to create a social strategy or to develop an existing one, and for our work to develop deep relationships that resonate with everyone that comes into contact with us.

With all this in mind then, it’s with enormous pleasure that Steve Bridger has joined forces as a networked partner in Visceral Business.

Steve’s one of the wisest and most considerate voices around within the social networking community with a highly respected perspective in particular on not for profit and public sector social organisations where together we’re currently doing some exciting stuff.

We first met up about a year ago through our mutual connection with The Child’s i Foundation and Lucy Buck, through whom we’ve had a great opportunity to get to know each other (and if you haven’t yet come across The Child’s i Foundation, please check the community out and prepare to be inspired by the infectious enthusiasm that Lucy’s vision generates.)

The idea that ‘affinity is stronger than structure’ is one of the guiding principles of our combined approach. Working together with Steve on developing truly social organisation has been such a synchronous and hugely all round enjoyable experience that the obvious next step was to take it further.

So, our ecosystem’s expanded, the synapses are firing, and forces have conjoined. We’re looking forward to the action potential on every level.

Posted in Authenticity, Brand, Business, Business performance, Identity, Management, Public sector, Self development, Social business design |

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Data and dopamine

Monday, October 26th, 2009

data and dopamine small2
Dopamine controls the flow of information in the frontal lobes from other areas of the brain. It is commonly associated with the pleasure system, providing feelings of enjoyment and reinforcement to motivate a person proactively to perform certain activities.

Dopamine disorders can cause a decline in neurocognitive functions, especially memory, attention, and problem-solving. Reduced dopamine concentrations in the prefrontal cortex are thought to contribute to attention deficit disorder. Without enough positive experiences, the reach and the action potential of dopamine as a neural transmitter becomes limited.

I mention this because behavioral science and economics hold some possible answers to questions about how can we improve the efficiency of resources and quality of care across public and commercial services, and for many the answers can’t come soon enough.

In the midst of public spending cuts and ongoing recession, the burden of management of government agencies is magnified. It may become potentially overwhelming. The need exists to find new ways to free up resources, to work together on the continuous improvement of local communities, to create more efficient and collaborative gain.

Couple this burden with a disengaged and increasingly cynical public constituency and it’s enough to generate a severe social dopamine shortfall, however. There are already signals of cognition and engagement diminishing, of collective problem-solving running the risk of impairment. Many people neither know nor care about what potential exists in their communities and the benefits of local management beyond their own doorstep.

And it’s in this context that the lively, warmly welcomed and stimulating session at the London’s DataStore Workshop (@londondatastore) happened on Saturday, a great initiative led by Emer Coleman and the GLA Data Team and facilitated brilliantly by Paul Clarke. (Thanks to Emer too for the pictures used here).

GLA’s Help Us Free London’s Data #londondata discussed the why’s and how’s at the heart of a more open approach to data, what it might take to make it happen and a great bunch of intelligent people gathered to get the ball rolling. Alongside the hmg.gov.uk.data initiative, this is a fine approach to shared problem-solving, using data to unlock the hidden value of social communities collaborating in public services and looking at practical data-driven applications that can find new ways to manage them.

Yet the aches and pains of an impasse were evident. Developers are ready to get excited and make things, but the ease and convenience of accessing the data to do it is limited. Local government may dream of a reduced cost of management, but open data opens up risk and well as reward. In this context, to a behavioural scientist, the dopamine is already on a bit of a downslide.

So, what to do? The gap between intended and actual benefit of an initiative like this will be a margin of some measure until data visualizations and the proof points of data applications can inspire imagination, the dopamine required to encourage release of more data, to create a tipping point.

From the GLA and London DataStore’s point of view the crucial audience is the public agencies in London that have problems to solve. As the risk of stating the obvious, they have to ‘get excited and release things’ and, importantly I think, to be given the social capabilities to know how to deal with the consequences.

In Jonah Lehrer’s excellent book ‘How We Decide’, he describes how a real and specific value has been identified at the heart of learning from one’s mistakes and how the process of decision-making starts with fluctuations in dopamine. Errors are internalized by dopamine neurons, and the consequent shortfalls provide the stimulus to realize it. This is an iterative and formative feedback loop.

The dopamine neuron is an urgent and primal pulse. Put it together with data that’s open and it offers opportunity for local community management to improve, to do more with less, in ways that local and public services can benefit from.

At the heart of it all though is a new mindset, where public agencies re-evaluate what they stand for. To be favourably looked upon as adding value in an economically squeezed environment they have to see themselves as facilitators, instead of process managers, they have to have brands that champion their local communities, not themselves, and they need to learn to work like retailers of their local communities and their capabilities by harnessing the power of open data.

The reiterative learning that open data development can provide has the ability to insulate local public agencies from perceived management incapabilities. The creative value of @londondatastore and the developer community can really help visualize the benefits of this.

Navigating the way towards ease and convenience through use of data is a journey and it’s of paramount importance.

Congratulations are due to the whole GLA Data team involved with @londondatastore for the steps taken on Saturday. Now let’s work out where the biggest wins are so that data and dopamine combined can improve the health and function of public services, local community management and get us to the results we need.

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Posted in Brand, Business performance, Business science, Corporate development, Management, Public sector, Social business design, Society |

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