Archive for the ‘Power to the people’ 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?’
Humanity 2.0 on slideshare homepage
Nice one slideshare!
“Hey ResonanceBlog!
Your presentation Complexity & Humanity 2.0 has been selected amongst the ‘Top Presentations of the Day’ on the SlideShare homepage.
Our editorial team would like to thank you for this awesome presentation, that has been chosen from amongst the thousands that are uploaded to SlideShare everday.
Congratulations! Have a Great Day!
- The SlideShare team
p.s. Why not blog/twitter this and let the world know about the masterpiece you have created?”
Collaboration and democracy
Disappearing up your digital ass
Dirty meaning factories
People live, then they die. Get over it. We all die and life is short. This is the fundamental fact of life that causes us to seek meaning… to crave it (so as not to feel pointless – hence religion… and brands).
Marketers sussed this out. Roll on the brand campaigns that attach meaning to things they want us to buy… mass marketing and broadcasting (human standardisation). So we buy stuff. It differs according to our environment (e.g. I’m a London business dude so I really can’t possibly be a non-failing happy person without a flash car, expensive new boots and a crazy-priced flat). We buy loads of stuff. Our impact bias, influenced by the marketing bombardment (though not as much as they’d like to think!) causes us to overestimate how happy the stuff will make us. Conversely, the same bias causes us to overestimate how crappy we’ll feel if we take a risk and it all goes wrong. Hmmm.
Imagine accepting your lifespan and making the most of it. What’s the most useful thing I can do in my short window of opportunity, that’ll make me the most fulfilled? What would contribute most to the overall progress of the human race? What would be of most value to others? Do I care? Do I just want to pursue pleasure and to hell with the rest of them?
Whatever we decide to do, hopefully it isn’t on auto-pilot, with fear-clipped wings and hangups about stupid shit like the credit crunch, piracy, predetermined life-paths and hierarchies.
Big lumpy clumpy balls of crap
Leading on from the previous post about the coolness of chaos…
Have you ever had to deal with a big lumpy piece of complex old software that was written years ago, then updated countless times, new bits added on, a new guy adding another bit, bolt-ons, sticking plasters and fixes… until it’s a big slow cumbersome piece of crap nobody can change or work with?
That’s pretty much industry as it stands – and other big systems for that matter (e.g. government, education). Since the industrial revolution, we’ve built up this massive ball of crap. Now nobody can do a damn thing with it.
The most obvious example that’s hurting right now is the whole free thing. We can listen to music for free. We can watch TV shows for free. We can read books for free. This of course screws record companies, publishers, broadcasters… oh yeah, and then there’s the whole fact that we don’t pay a blind bit of notice to advertising. The big massive balls of crap are stuffed because they’re prisoners within their own structures – too slow, too fat, too inflexible. They’re waiting to die, with their fingers in their ears, screaming ‘lah lah lah!’ as nimble network-based businesses spring up under the radar, taking over the world at lightning pace.
At the end of the day, all a business traditionally does is ensure people get paid. That’s it, when you think about it. Traditionally the big boys get paid much more than the little boys, but it’s just a bunch of individuals getting paid.
Now, think about the overhead in a big-lump-of-crap business. Big shiny offices, management structures, HR departments, blah blah blah. Think about MARKETING BUDGETS… zillions and squillions… to make sure you sell LOADS to make sure you can pay the overheads and pay the individuals (staff, bosses, shareholders etc). So we pay more to make more to sell more to pay more.
And it ain’t just the hippies who know sustainability is an issue. We need to stop producing so much crap. Reuse, reduce, recycle and all that jazz. Yet still we need to make people want more so they buy more so we sell more to pay individuals.
What if we scrapped all the crap?
What if there were no management structures?
What if there were no multi-million advertising / marketing budgets?
What if there were more or less no overheads?
Answer? We wouldn’t need to sell as much, so we wouldn’t MAKE as much. Sweet! It isn’t rocket science.
And could we do business without these business-as-usual / this-is-business stuff that costs so much? Hell yeah. It’s already happening. It’s soooo easy to change from ground level, as a bunch of individuals, with no management, a pinch of leadership and a sprinkling of magic dust – in comparison to attempting change from the ‘top’. It’s no surprise that people feel pretty darn good when they’re an individual within a collective, creating profit through good growth, without all the psychologically, environmentally (and every other ‘ally’) damaging self-fulfilling prophecies inherent in business as we know it.
I mean, we all know we went a bit crazy over the past few years (decades). We all got a bit carried away. It’s like full on raving in the 80s/90s (or whatever equivalent!). Bloody hell what a blast. Dance your face off – time of your life. But after a few years everybody starts to feel like crap, go nuts and realise it’s no fun any more and life’s better when you feel good. The individuals-formerly-known-as-consumers are just started to ease off the uppers. They’ve been turning your brain cells to mush and it’s much nicer to be wide awake.
So what now? Sit back and wait until the chaos period is over and this network-based commerce phase kicks in and emerges as the new status quo?
Err… that would be pretty boring.
Instead you could join a tribe. Or you could start one. Soon it’ll pay way more than your job (if that’s what you care about)… and really when you get into the swing of the new way you won’t give a toss.
Take it a leap beyond ‘markets are conversations’ into the realms of DOING, not planning. ACTION IS THE NEW FORECASTING.
Scrmblr
I haven’t blogged in any great depth about Scrmblr (’scrambler’), so thought it was about time.
Scrmblr is a global network of content producers (Scrmblrs) who create anti-ads (Scrmbls).
Marketing used to be about advertising, but advertising is often expensive, fake and dumb. What remains important is the act of telling stories about the things we trade – stories that sell and stories that spread.
Scrmblr gives power to the people – the talented people of the world, enabling creators of great content to reap fair rewards, while enabling organisations who couldn’t dream of affording video ads the opportunity to air Scrmbls (much better!). Cheaper, better, faster.
Scrmblr removes the unfair, prohibitive supply-chain mess that sits between talented people who make stuff and people who buy great stuff.
Fair trade.
The Scrmblr website has just been launched here. 20% of profits will be donated to microcredit projects, in a drive to do something good. The first scrmbl created was for UK charity ShelterBox, by Tel Aviv scrmblr Danny Aronson.
Scrmblr already has a presence in UK, ISA, Israel and Canada… and is on the lookout for more talent (filmmakers, producers, animators, designers, creatives etc).
Companies Vs. Tribes
Let’s compare for a moment. You can compare in terms of pretty much anything: efficiency, effectiveness, happiness…
Some brief examples:
Communications
C: Spread from the top down
T: Spread from anywhere to everywhere, via the centre
Growth
C: Recruit from the top, hiring below
T: Recruit from anywhere, hiring everywhere
Innovation
C: Creation from the bottom, managed from the top
T: Creation from everywhere, no management needed
Bliss
C: Everyone spends their time inside the company’s expensive box, developing ideas with others from the same company
T: Everyone works from anywhere, developing ideas with a diverse range of people they like to spend time with
I know which one I’d rather join, or start.
Management is so last century
As David Weinberger said in The Cluetrain Manifesto, ‘Management is a powerful force, part of a larger life-scheme that promises us health, prosperity, calm and no surprises in every aspect of our lives, from health to wealth to good weather and moderately heated coffee from McDonald’s. We are all victims of this assault on voice, the attempt to get us to shut up and listen to the narrowest range of ideas imaginable.’
Here here.
It’s bizarre, when you think about it, that we seek health, prosperity and calm in a framework that’s configured to avoid surprises (not to mention the fact such management frameworks do quite the opposite, restricting prosperity and wrecking your health… duh!).
Essentially a framework that avoids surprises is setting us up for a fall, given that life is totally unpredictable (just look at the accuracy of trending, forecasting and predicting in retrospect – we’re pretty much always wrong, usually wildly, except for the one in a zillion folk who are hailed as heros / experts because they won the prediction lottery).
We’re actively encouraged (forced?) to surrender our individuality in return for a financial bribe and a supposedly non-disturbing, secure, predictable, managed environment. How damaging is that?
If we focused on understanding basic psychology – and in particular neuropsychology – rather than technology, management, or most things to do with ‘professionalism’, we’d learn to cope with surprises. There’s no anti-depressant and productivity tool quite like understanding what your brain is up to (which is normally the opposite of all the crap we reel off in our inner narrative). We’d learn to adopt calm by flicking switches that send neurons on productive paths, as opposed to destructive panic / depression / fear trains of thought. Most importantly, we’d learn that we have myriad choices… without all the BS constrains we confabulate, largely as a result of managed structures and irrational fears.
Coupled with the lack of cynicism and suckerism for imbalance and hype, our denial, biases and love of fallacy are at best sub-optimum… at worst bloody dangerous.
Every last pirate-lynching dinosaur the management structure spews out has been conditioned to fear change – to be unwilling to accept that bettering society involves doing new stuff that isn’t business as usual. It’s not business as usual! IT IS NOT BUSINESS AS USUAL!! Some folk never seem to get it. “But I’ll be out of a job!” they shriek. “More fool you,” we think quietly, while we bend and flex and change at pace with the world… mostly ignoring them and opting to avoid a ‘proper job’ at all costs (although some of us work form the inside).
The thing is, the pirates, the Scrmblrs and every single one of us are changing and bettering society from the bottom up. We’re faster, more innovative and powerful. We organise without organisations. We run on leadership, not management; passion, not KPIs. We’re not afraid to let one-another loose… in fact we love loose cannons. They’re our favourite.
You know who you are!
(Email me!)
It’s happening (scrmblr style)…
Seth Godin’s recent post here hit the nail on the head. He says ‘TV advertisers are finally discovering that YouTube + viral imagination = free media… The biggest shift is going to be that organizations that could never have afforded a national campaign will suddenly have one. The same way that there’s very little correlation between popular websites and big companies, we’ll see that the most popular commercials get done by little shops that have nothing to lose.’
Funny he should say that. It’s exactly what we Scrmblrs (’scramblers’) are up to (Scrmblr is a global network of producers who create low cost, good quality video and audio content… what you might call anti-ads).
Copyright ResonanceBlog 2009
Recent Comments