Archive for the ‘Self development’ Category

Tethering ourselves to the web

Sunday, April 29th, 2012

What are the next steps for social interaction, and what happens after the conversation’s been going on awhile? Do we stop pouring forth linkage and retweets, what Seth Godin calls, random pokes, and go out and make something?

What how does the social factory make value?

When thinking about where we are in social business at the moment, what comes to mind is the image of the child still on walking reins, trying to be let loose in a playground. Children who are held onto for safety by their parents.

We’re still in the infancy of the social revolution, but the dawning sense is one of spectacular change on the horizon – a new renaissance of the self.

Depending on the quality of our leadership it’s a change that can be an emergence or an emergency, as some people call it. We are at a crossroads.

It’s a change that for many means they are unanchored, like life is for the 250 million people, and counting, who are unemployed across Europe with the means to feed their futures.

Social business is us. As Danah Boyd has written, social business is what we will make it.

Right now in the evolutionary chain of our connected development, we’re all plankton, on our way to creating spectacular new life forms.

This TED talk is a six-minute metaphor of what we are capable of and a film that recognizes traits we’re all capable of, including the species that eat their kin.

The biological nature of social organization in business is based on the idea that affinity is stronger than structure.

When affinity is stronger than structure, social molecules collide and they find each other using social media. Instead of the ‘eat or be eaten’ karma of the primordial soup, enlightened and connected society can support and nurture one another as a healing and generative mesh in action. We have the means to create useful action out of shared interests. We can define the types of interaction and cultural collaboration that add and generate value. Using social technology and social crm we can create a contribution economy out of a return on involvement.

So the question becomes, how can we create sustainable, collaborative culture and move towards enlightened evolution this time around?

Well, it might have something to do with tethering.

Consider the hashtag as a digital maypole around which people converse, share ideas, and commune generally. The hashtag is an example of tethering.

In a social organization, contractual ties are looser, sufficiently loose to allow the kind of personal expression that supplements corporate reputation and personal reputation. That’s especially appropriate perhaps, given that the fixed contract relationship is increasingly being seen as an unnecessary overhead and people who are out of work want ways to contribute and prove their worth. That’s another kind of tethering.

These days most of the best people would not like to be employed, but they may choose to be tethered to a good organization and be part of it that way.

People with social leadership skills, the linchpins, are able to consider now who they tether themselves to, which raises the talent bar, saves costs and builds a better culture. When good people associate themselves with an organisation, it enables them to up their game.

Social organisations can help develop this sense of tethering, and platforms like Kaggle show how it can be done.

And finally, it’s worth that in the digital age, we all want to connect and release what we’re capable of as generative value which can be the better for society, as a new kind of cultural interaction, one where people choose what they associate to, because the web enables that.

For all organisations going social, consider the nature of the contract that underpins it. Tethering can be a good source of generative value because it works two ways, symbiotically, as we stretch our legs into a new social chapter of interaction.

Tags: tethering
Posted in Authenticity, Business model, Dot.life, Human Relations, Leadership, Self development, Social business design, Society |

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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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Falling in love with the back of the product

Saturday, August 27th, 2011

Few people in the modern industrialised world haven’t got something to thank Steve Jobs for. Some of his legacy’s very obvious, some it goes much further than the products themselves and is less so – cultural narratives of empowerment we’re only beginning to fully appreciate in reflection.

Absence is, sadly, often a way to view true value.

The ‘blow the top off my head off’ moment for me, and my first encounter with Steve Jobs’ genius, came in 1984. As a 23 year old account manager, I was given the job of producing the first advertising that Apple ever did in the UK.

It was nothing as glamorous as the famous Ridley Scott ads shaking up the States at the time. The budgets they had over there were way beyond what we had. Apple was still a relatively fledgling company and we were a new market, but we did get to do some classy and arresting black and white advertising in the quality press, perfect for the slightly unconventional architects, creative agencies and other firms that Apple were pitching to at the time.

What was really great about the gig though was the free prize that came with it, an Apple MkII that cost £5,000 installed in my office. £5,000! That alone made it a bit special. But when I got to move that mouse and wiggle a MacPaint digital spray can around a screen that it did it for me. Nothing like it had ever existed. It was a wow moment, a creative wonder that went way beyond working, and I was sold.

I think I can honestly say I can put my entire love affair with geekery down to that moment, just in the same way a stroll down the Kings Road at the age of 11 made me fall in love with creative design. Those moments are visceral, they go deep down and they stay with you.

A whole plethora of stories of Steve’s insight, vision, daring, focus and social impact have been unbundled as he steps down as CEO, and the reputation of the man, how it’s translated into serious dollars and cents in a way that has briefly made Apple this week the world’s largest company, is worth thinking about. Because Apple, despite everything about it that has been about product design, has also been about the quality of its people.

Brands like Apple are personality-led. Their culture, values and ways of doing things, built from and inspired by passion, have set it apart. And what stood out in the tributes for me is Robert Scoble’s take on something very important, nothing to do with the shiny sleek surface design that Apple’s renowned for.

What Robert Scoble’s said about what was special about Steve Jobs was this: Steve’s the ‘only one guy in the industry [that] has ever told me to look at the back of a product to understand its beauty’.

It’s worth considering that back in the day when Apple was spawned, user-friendly was a term that didn’t exist before then. Quite simply, no-one had ever thought of things that way.

Now, user-friendliness has become a holistic user experience. As organisations and all their touchpoints become more social, we can all learn a great deal from that little piece of Steve’s wisdom.

The look and feel of a product, the way Apple approached it, was ground breaking, it still is. Product focus is still important, but needs service and making meaning attached to it, now, to matter.

Today, the ‘back of the product’ is its people.

What makes Apple distinctive is the legions of fanboys and girls, people happy to be defined in no small measure by that ethos and what it’s led to for them.

Social organisations are all about this. Falling in love with the back of the product and understanding its beauty in the social organisation is about bringing out the people who are a part of it, making connections that go way beyond technical.

We can take people out of the boxes they live in within organisations and make more of them, relishing the inventiveness and creativity they have inherently. We can produce things of wonder as connected networks, like Steve Jobs did. The intellectual understanding and emotional commitment is there, often disaffected and unused; as with a technology reinvented and reimagined, with guidance, vision and social leadership, it can transform, in just the same way he did it.

Business didn’t used to be personal. Now it is.

Steve Jobs’ focus can live on in a new way.

Posted in Authenticity, Brand, Business performance, Corporate development, Human Relations, Identity, Leadership, Self development |

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Being on Fire

Tuesday, June 21st, 2011

(With apologies to Seth Godin for riffing off one of his favourite pictures).

There’s a phrase we’re all familiar with, ‘So and so’s on fire today’. You hear it all the time.

Being on fire’s a state that talks about the temporal nature of influence, how it’s no longer a permanence, as well as the patchy nature of knowledge, and how it’s lumpy.

Another phrase I like describes what I think is the true nature of talent, and it’s ‘everyone’s a genius some of the time’. Einstein apparently couldn’t navigate his way home from the office too well. We’re all better at some things than others. Peak experiences are peak experiences because they do exactly that – they peak. Elizabeth Gilbert in her TED talk speaks about creative genius as a divine attendent spirit and Ruth Stone, the poet, who first encouraged her to recognise that genius as something that comes to visit, when we’re ‘on fire’.

This approach to creativity and talent development is a substantial shift in thinking away from the imperative of ever accelerating performance that people have been conditioned to, where there’s no room to relax in driving operating performance to new levels.

When it comes to talent development, the phenomenon of metaphorically being ‘on fire’ asks us to recognise that genius and flashes of inspiration come at the least expected moments.

Eureka breakthroughs involve accepting the nature of value is undulating. Social community expects that people will ebb and flow in their interest levels to us, in fact it’s part of the attraction. In being this way, it offers the opportunity to create human resource principles for developing social business equity that are more sustainable.

Fortunately now, there is the ability to aggregate the responses and contributions people make through social CRM. We can recognise and accommodate undulating performance, more easily and more of the time. We can develop a body of work as a part of our online credentials, the tracks and markings of the digital footprints we’re making, individually and as organised social brands collectively over time. And we can create a contribution economy in which people are freer to play to their peaks.

So now, the question is, what can you do to enable your fans and supporters and employees to be on fire, more of the time? What can you do to enable your organisation to do the same? What is your strategy for embracing imperfections and off days? Is your brand capable of fostering and holding the fire in people, or is it in danger of going downhill by saying ‘use the stairs’?

Posted in Business model, Business performance, Human Relations, Identity, Leadership, Management, Self development |

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Social brand curation: How are you doing yours?

Sunday, June 12th, 2011

Brands are moving on from being labels and concepts, packaged and sold to others.

Social brands are collaborative exercises, created from user-centric approaches to business planning embedded into the core of the organisation.

Social business applies emerging technologies and organizational, cultural, and process changes to improve business performance, and in an increasingly connected global economic environment this means collaborative workings that flex together, creating synaptic action potential, right through to the fingertips of customer service.

Social brands are collective experiences too, to some degree or another, where everyone’s memories matter, the sum total of the moments that shape them, that make an impact.

What matters isn’t just how many click throughs or likes a brand gets; a social brand has traction because events happen in which people learn something about themselves, they’re iterative in nature and value is co-created. Gamification is a hot flavour at the moment because these moments that tingle are being recognized as part of the collective experiential value of a brand.

It’s also why data aggregation tools like Intel’s Museum of Me are fascinating. They help us see things in a new way.

As human beings, we’ve an innate need to see ourselves reflected in order to know who we are. This is a fundamental part of how me make sense and meaning, a strand of social anthropology that’s been going on since ancient man first picked up a shiny stone or looked upon its image in water.

As organizations coming together socially, the ‘collective we’ in the social brand has the same urge in it.

For individuals drowning in information, brands can create significant value by curating their stories, the purpose beyond the profit, the place where collaborative management makes sense in exciting and visceral ways.

All brands and organizations have a story in their soul and a whole set of stories within their collective culture. As has been mentioned before in this blog, there’s an opportunity for these stories to be told in highly compelling ways by brands, ways that help them to become distinctively social. Point of differentiation 2.0, if you like.

This Guardian timeline of modern music’s a really good example of the opportunities available in social brand curation and part of the excellent work in data journalism the Guardian data team are doing.

With data dashboard and performance management front and center as part of a brand story, think what your organisation’s next annual report could be like. There are immense opportunities for adding value through social brand curation.

What could your social brand be like if it was based on a wiki of collective experiences that you gather, as a movement? Thta’s the kind of brand people want to be part of, either as a fan, employee or an investor.

Social brand curation’s a good way of creating a contribution economy, where there are levels of sustainable participation built into the brand. It can help deliver the kind of brand experience that can boost value and differentiation around what brands do.

We think how brands tell their stories is going to be a cornerstone of future operational success. Good social brand curation creates compelling and credible stories based on the logic of the data and the magic of the people. What’s your approach to social brand curation?

Posted in Authenticity, Brand, Business, Business model, Business performance, Corporate development, Curation, Economics, Identity, Marketing, Self development, Social business design, Society |

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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.

Tags: reputation
Posted in Authenticity, Brand, Business, Human Relations, Identity, Leadership, Public sector, Self development, Society |

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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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Social leadership and the Gutenberg conundrum

Saturday, November 13th, 2010

There’s an aspect of social leadership for businesses and brands, and how it develops, that could be called the Gutenberg conundrum.

Up until now, opinion formers have most often relied on forms of leadership that have been derived from the structures they’ve operated within.

In organizations, that flow of influence has been the pipes of the corporate system and the hierarchy of the organogram. In brands it’s been the channels of the marketing mix. In society at large it’s been pundits within the media.

But in the face of social networks and what they’re capable of achieving, one person to another, those corporate pipes can seem slow and rusty; those media channels abstract and intrusive; those pundits often un-nuanced and uninformed.

Social media has been compared by Clay Shirky as being the single greatest revolutionary change in communications since the invention of the Gutenberg Press, and when looking at social networks in that context today’s forms of influence run the risk of being as obsolete as the tools of the monks of old during the invention of movable type.

That was 1439… and now, as then, the answer to how to develop social leadership is not to do ‘more of the same’, or even more of the same in new ways.

It was tough for the monks nearly 600 years ago; they had to give up the thought of their quills as being able to influence the known universe. But they gained a niche within a far bigger society as a result of doing so, and this is the essence of the Gutenberg condundrum.

Because for social influencers today, contrary to accepted belief, it is possible to be in control and open. Social leadership involves having a personality. It commands a following because the ones doing it are more fascinating than they are perfect; social leadership is human business; it is generous.

All of which adds up to how value in the 21^st century comes increasingly from a combination of passion and performance as John Hagel describes it, the people who care, whether they are inside or outside the organization, and people on the fringes of thinking we ourselves feel comfortable with.

It asks that we acquire new skills. The need for this skill set is often dangerously underemphasized in how organizations and brands adopt and use social media when it comes to making the most of what it is capable of achieving.

Just as with the invention of the Gutenberg press, social media requires as much new capability as those who held books in their hands for the first time in 1439. We have reading and writing under our belts now, sure, but we haven’t had much need for connecting openly through digital means on global networks, any more than hardbacks were a part of everyday life before printing was invented.

In terms of its true value, there’s a parrallel to be drawn; social media without social leadership skill is worth little more than a book when someone does not know how to read and write.

So what are social leadership skills? Well, they include having a congruent sense of one’s identity, a definable set of values capable of being consistently expressed in a multitude of different ways, not all of them predictable; a willingness to participate in open space and to express oneself; the skill to embrace opposing forces and be creative with them, the desire to inspire others, to contain catharsis; in short, agility in thinking, resilience in doing, authenticity in being.

Brands fail socially when they play the numbers and try to penetrate a market more than connect where there is receptivity. To improve business performance, social organisations and brands require permission to operate in their community more than their competitors and to stimulate enquiring minds. This is something social leaders understand. It’s a different kind of impression.

When people come together to share ideas creatively there is an ‘unmanagement’ at work. Social leaders create the space in which that can happen, the results of which can move people dramatically and be exceedingly powerful. Quite literally, they can exceed expectations.

Going ‘off-script’ is a disaster scenario for many organizations, and yet the compound effects of many voices is that quintessential representation of leadership that so many seek. It’s also a path to progress of unparalleled potency. People love mind blowing experiences.

Rest assured, when the masses went ‘off parchment’ it was thought of as a disaster too, mind blown. But at that moment and when the Gutenberg press led to astonishing levels of social and commercial opportunity and growth, things changed for the better.

The lessons of the past ask the leaders of today to solve this Gutenberg-style conundrum as part of their social strategy and their operating model, that they appreciate what makes social media work is embedding social leadership skill into the future development of their brand and their organisation.

What do you think? It’d be great to hear your thoughts on it.

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

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