Archive for the ‘Discovery’ Category
Brookside, postboxes & SaaS development
Loads of illuminating analogies have emerged in conversations with Andrew Missingham, but today there’s one in particular that popped up…
You may remember when the soap Brookside launched on Channel 4. The storylines were based around folk living in a close of houses. They had some trouble at the outset however, in that script writers realised they hadn’t created enough ‘stock devices’ – places where people could meet that would fuel the dramatic unfolding of events. Their answer was to put a postbox on the street, so residents would accidentally meet.
Given that the ability to innovate relies on diverse skillsets and knowledge banks coming together, this analogy is more relevant than ever. New knowledge uncovered by researchers, for example, needs to be matched with entrepreneurs who can interpret and understand the opportunities, then commercialise… in turn with the help of skilled troops, whether designers, developers, craftsmen etc.
Barriers to entering this innovation ecosystem are lower than ever – and the very reason for the existence of Scramblr is to lower them even further.
The question I’m asking myself today, is ‘What are our postboxes?’
More complexity theory & humanity 2.0
The discovery of complexity
Networks are an essential ingredient in any complex adaptive system. In biology, molecules interact in cells, cells interact in organisms, organisms interact in ecosystems. As Eric D. Beinhocker points out in one of my favourite books, ‘The Origin of Wealth’:
“The economic world likewise depends on networks. The earth is girdled by roads, sewers, water systems, electrical grids, railroad tracks, gas lines, radio waves, television signals and fiber-optic cables. These provide the highways and byways of the matter, energy and information flowing through the open system of the economy. The economy also contains massively complex virtual networks: people interact in companies, companies interact in markets and markets interact in the global economy. Just as in biology, the networks of the economic world are arranged in hierarchies of networks within networks.”
BUT… traditional economics glossed over networks because they didn’t fit neatly into the equilibrium paradigm, whereby the economy was likened to an equilibrium system, i.e. behaving like a ball dropped into a bowl, rolling around until finally settling in a predictable place, until something external disrupts it. More recently the perfect sums have been ditched in favour of the idea that the economy is a complex adaptive system, i.e. a system of dynamically interacting parts in which micro-level interactions lead to the emergence of macro-level behaviour patterns. A single ant or water molecule is boring on its own, but naturally becomes an army or whirlpool as a byproduct of complex interactions. People are the same – the internet is the same. If a system reaches a state of equilibrium, it’s essentially dead.
Physics has likewise evolved to embrace complexity in favour of neat maths that doesn’t fit reality. The second law of thermodynamics states that entropy, a measure of disorder or randomness in a system, is always increasing. The universe as a whole is drifting from a state of order to disorder.
Our brains are made to deal with complexity, but we don’t make decisions by logically churning through every available piece of information. Instead we satisfice, taking the information we have and doing the best we can. Cognitive science has grown to recognise that we’re much better at inductive than deductive reasoning. We spot patterns and weave stories around metaphors and analogies.
Computers are the opposite, helping make up for our deductive shortfalls. It’s interesting that the rise of agile development follows the same pattern as new knowledge in physics, biology, economics and other advanced fields of discovery; as does the creation of new business models that embrace our inherent sociability and the complexity of networks. We’re no longer seeking the perfect, no longer adopting unrealistic assumptions to make the maths work out in the equilibrium framework we’ve been convinced explains everything for so long.
We know the energy inherent in what we’re doing renders equilibrium not only irrelevant, but impossible.
Our world might be a giant hologram
Craig Hogan, who has just been appointed director of Fermilab’s Center for Particle Astrophysics, reckons “If the GEO600 result is what I suspect it is, then we are all living in a giant cosmic hologram.”
For the past seven years, a team in Germany has been searching for gravitational waves – ripples in space-time thrown off by super-dense astronomical objects such as neutron stars and black holes. GEO600 hasn’t detected any gravitational waves so far, but it might inadvertently have made the most important discovery in physics for half a century.
Check this out.
Investment in science
On Monday Obama delivered this speech, stating that “Science is more essential for our prosperity, our security, our health, our environment and our quality of life than it has ever been before.”
He said his administration would double the budgets of key agencies, including the National Science Foundation and the National Institute of Standards and Technology; and pursue the goal of cutting carbon pollution by 80% by 2050.
“Energy is our big project,” he said. “My recovery plan provides the incentives to double our nation’s capacity to generate renewable energy over the next few years.”
The word ’science’ comes from the Latin ’scientia’, meaning “knowledge”. Science is the effort to discover and increase human understanding of how reality works.
Sad that the percentages are so low…. Obama’s goal is 3% of GDP by 2010. Meanwhile Japan spends almost 4.0%; Korea more than 3.2%; and China over 1.4% of its GDP on R&D. Heading in the right direction, but not exactly Rargian.
Skipping the curve
Most people at some point question what they’re doing… where their life is going… whether they’ve achieved enough or made the correct choices. Whether they should be playing this game or jacking it all in for a beach shack. This post is for all you guys. 
I, for one, sometimes get sick of the sound of my own voice, repeating the stuff of ‘those who get it’ – as if it’s still brand new. As long as there are ‘those who don’t get it’, perhaps we still feel good about ourselves. Or maybe we’re all secretly afraid we’ve wasted our lives on a load of old bollox?
Here are a few typical state-of-play regurgitations:
- Markets are more competitive and we have more choice (long tail etc)
- Broadcast is crumbling as we filter the noise
- Marketers increasingly have to justify their budgets (and silver bullet solutions fail to deliver on promises)
- Markets are conversations
- Word of mouth recommendation is the biggest influence on purchase decisions
- People no longer trust authorities, institutions and advertising
- There has been a power shift from brand to consumer
- 360 degree, relevant, targeted, tailored, personalised blah blah
etc etc
We bang on about social media and word of mouth as if they’re actually marketing disciplines. Word of mouth is not a marketing discipline. Social media is not a marketing channel.
The reality is, they’re just more of the same thing humans – people of the world – have always done… more communicating. Not rocket science. We’ve always done it and we always will – with increasing speed and ease via technology, in our evermore fluid, diverse societies.
Unless we’re all gagged, of course we’ll share things and recommend stuff. It isn’t a phenomenon; and it doesn’t even necessarily have to be ‘harnessed’.
Okay, so there’s a general coming-around to the idea that advertising is dead. Market research is also balancing on a credibility knife-edge. Back in 2005, Simon Clift, CMO and Group VP of Unilever’s Personal Care Division, said, ‘I just don’t believe in predictive research. And we don’t use it.’
No surprise there, when you think about it. We ask people what they think, what they do and what they’ll do in the future – and take their answers as if they’re objective truths. We extract wads from brands knowing full well that’s somewhat counter to common sense, particularly as we’re in the futurist half-arsed scientist’s club and we know better.
Perhaps we need to ‘fess up and admit the truth… i.e. that we don’t have a clue. Our predictions are based precariously on platonicity. We suffer from confirmation bias, historical bias and more or less any bias you can think of that makes us think we will be and were right.
If you consider the kind of industry thinking and activity we had in the past; the kind we have in the present; and the kind we futurists have about the future… how’s about we skip all that – skip the curve – and start making things happen in line with the future beyond our current prevarications.
Maybe it’s worth considering that marketing is dead (or at least will/could/should be). That business models are people-driven. That nobody wants to have a conversation with a Brand. That there are no Us and Them divides between brands and consumers – we’re all just people. That scalability comes from putting the people of the world in control. That the complex supply chains which leverage the hoarding of knowledge for big bucks are no longer needed nor wanted (we see them falling by the day). That we marketers are no longer needed nor wanted. As individuals, we’ll control our incoming and outgoing communications ourselves; in a punk-capitalist-come-communist society (if you feel the need to name it). The knowledge of the people of the world is out there and it’s spreadable, mashable, monetizable and free. So many of our positions are no longer relevant. What a bloody fantastic opportunity!
Discovery, discovery, discovery
‘This is the story of Rarg – a world of peace and tranquility. A world so perfect that the sun never rose until it was absolutely sure everybody was awake.
Their vast library is filled with books, documenting the revelations of generations. For they discovered simply for the sake of discovery. So everybody was happy. The senator was never happier than when he was discovering new forms of happiness.
Every day discoveries were made, some were large, some were tiny, and some discoveries had to be seen to be believed.’
Fabulous. Discovery is everything. New rule: if it wouldn’t get into the Rarg library, don’t put it out there.
Consider the whole idea of contributing to a library that documents the revelations of generations; and what that means… and how about Discovery as a vision for the world – consider the impact of that on what each of us achieves during our lifetime and the collective lifetime of the human race.
Okay, it’s a kid’s cartoon, but Rarg says it all!
Get out of the way
A few words on the publishing industry, inspired Alan Rusbridger’s [Editor in Chief, Guardian Media] recent comment that “These are the last printing presses we’ll ever buy”; and by an email I just received which included the quote “I would never read a book if I could talk half an hour with the person who wrote it”.
Decline factors…
- Inefficient many‐to‐many supply chain = high levels of wastage
- Risk adverse publishers hamper the emergence of new authors
- Entry to distribution channels is a fundamental barrier to new publishers setting up
- Market data isn’t successfully harnessed to allow better decision making on which titles to produce
- Publishers place more emphasis on fulfilling orders than on understanding customer needs
- ICT adoption is only as fast as the slowest adopter in the supply chain, so uneven skills levels between companies hampers innovation
Given that individuals now have the power to organise without organisations, it’s time to get out of the way and enable readers and authors to interact. We need to strip away copyright hang-ups and enter into the Web 2.0 spirit of sharing and co-creation (it’s going to happen whether those with the sand slipping between their fingers like it or not, so everyone might as well admit it and leverage all things ‘free’ in lucrative new business models instead of clutching at straws while they die a slow death). While we’re at it, how’s about stripping away all the supply chain complexity and providing tools and environments where authors and readers can communicate directly; and gain all the benefits of doing so in a mutual value exchange.
Publishing, music, film… very similar problems, very similar solutions. Armies of fanatics aplenty. Massive opportunities.
Check out The Music Industry Manifesto for a good dose of common sense.
Reading is a means of learning, self‐educating, exploring and broadening horizons. Ultimately, it’s all about DISCOVERY. Think for a sec how we’d advance loads of fundamental human endeavors if we stopped putting up barriers to discovery, for misguided (non)commercial gains.
If discovery is the action, the state required to achieve it is RESONANCE.
Out of the Silent Planet
Here’s a pertinent passage from C.S. Lewi’s ‘Out of the Silent Planet’…
‘Ransom, as time wore on, became aware of another and more spiritual cause for his progressive lightening and exultation of heart. A nightmare, long engendered in the modern mind by the mythology that follows in the wake of science, was falling off him. He had read of ‘Space’: at the back of his thinking for years had lurked the dismal fancy of the black, cold vacuity, the utter deadness, which was supposed to separate the worlds. He had not known how much it affected him till now – now that the very name ‘Space’ seemed a blasphemous libel for this empyrean ocean of radiance in which they swam. He could not call it ‘dead’; he felt life pouring into him from it every moment. How indeed should it be otherwise, since out of this ocean the worlds and all their life had come? He had thought it barren; he saw now that it was the womb of worlds, whose blazing and innumerable offspring looked down nightly even upon the Earth with so many eyes – and here, with how many more! No: Space was the wrong name.’
So often what we see en masse / as mass (’above the line’) is only 0.00000001% of what’s actually going on in reality. The long tail enables us to realise significant profits from selling small volumes of hard-to-find items to many customers, so it’s worth remembering all the resonance taking place in the ’space’ between mass (marketing). The combined sales of less-popular products can now surpass the total sales of top-level, big hit products. The real opportunity for serious growth lies in the niches.
We thought the earth was flat. Then we thought the earth was at the centre of our solar system (with everything revolving around us… funny that!). We thought there was ‘nothing’ in space, when our limited senses didn’t allow us to see anything there. Then we noticed the effect, while we still couldn’t see the force causing the effect (e.g. gravity, spin, dark matter).
Let’s keep thinking (not necessarily just looking) beyond the obvious and tangible.
Supermassive black hole jets
Copyright ResonanceBlog 2009
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