Posts Tagged ‘Resonance’
Introducing Palindromic Queries
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.
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p.s. Why not blog/twitter this and let the world know about the masterpiece you have created?”
More complexity theory & humanity 2.0
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.
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.
Cognitive dissonance
Cognitive dissonance is central to many forms of persuasion; changing beliefs, values, attitudes and behaviors. It’s a high-tension state between two opposing beliefs, often inducing confusion, then anger and finally an intense desire to correct the imbalance and rediscover consonance (RESONANCE).
Rather than using cognitive dissonance by manipulating people into making decisions they wouldn’t normally make, e.g. by asking someone a daft question (e.g. (“Do you ever worry about your monthly outgoings and wonder how you could reduce them?”) before pitching… the new way involves turning the mundane on its head, giving us a jolt to make life-altering choices.
Sympathetic resonance
Sympathetic resonance is a harmonic phenomenon wherein a formerly passive string or vibratory body responds to external vibrations to which it has a harmonic likeness. In other words, if you have two similar tuning forks, whack one and the other will sing, despite the fact they’re not touching.
In communication terms, brands are attempting to create sympathetic resonance… emanating vibrations in the hope that they’ll affect people. In fact the frequency of the vibrations is so high, it threatens to shatter everything: trust, auditory range (we won’t listen / can’t hear it any more) and effectiveness. Any cool new underground vibes emanating from the bottom up – from parkour to capoeira – are leapt upon by trend-spotting brands and thrust it into the mainstream.
But brands are missing a trick. To emanate vibrations that’ll make people respond in sympathetic resonance, they must have a harmonic likeness to those they’re trying to affect. The only way to achieve this is to stop pumping out deafening fake-folksy vibrations and start enabling the people of the world to create their own. Then you can be sure others in their social clusters will respond, start vibrating and cause a ripple affect to yet more social clusters; and eventually millions will sing in harmony. Mass marketing via facilitation – as enabler, not doer.
Equilibrium and fractal business models
A fundamental law of physics (in one formulation) states that left to itself any closed system will always change towards a state of equilibrium from which no further change is possible. One example is swinging a pendulum… if you hold it up to one side it’ll be in a state of extreme disequilibrium, then as you let go and it swings back and forth, gradually losing energy, it’ll come to a standstill.
Other examples include many media agencies and advertising agencies. You know why.
Someone said to me today, ‘but we need to prove the ROI – how much is it [implementing a vision that gives power to the people, to cut a long story short] going to cost and what will the return will be? How do we show that listening to the customer has better ROI than direct marketing?’
Errr…. I’m not even going to answer that.
Our obsession with plotting loads of numbers in loads of rows in so-called forecasts, that ‘demonstrate ROI’ may be a comfort blanket for some, but are forecasts ever accurate or meaningful? If we look back at them later (which we seldom do thoroughly, because they’re so irrelevant and unfriendly) we’ll be astonished (or not) at how far off the mark we were.
Way too many business models set themselves up for equilibrium. A scalable business model should be fractal in nature… infinitely scalable, independent of any company’s resources. You should be able to zoom all the way in… or all the way out… and see a repeatability, recursiveness and simplicity. We should focus on setting ourselves up to leverage the unforeseen opportunities, rather than attempting to predict the unpredictable and produce reams of comfort crap on autopilot.
The rotary motion of a harmonograph produces a series of complex drawings influenced by relative frequency, amplitude and direction.
Brands should communicate with a harmonic balance between relative frequency (WHEN… don’t interrupt), amplitude (WHAT…loudness…don’t shout / broadcast) and direction (WHERE… targeting, permission).
Companies should seek to produce beautiful pictures… not chaos (disharmony / dissonance). Business models that can be boiled down to a simple, beautiful picture tend to have inherent scalability.
Things don’t resonate coz they’re dense, innit.
According to general advertising industry relativity, black hole budgets are entirely compressed into a region with zero meaningful volume and near-zero relevance, which means their density and gravitational pull towards the 30 second TV ad and print campaign are infinite; and so is the curvature of space-time and agency-time that they cause.
These infinite values cause most physical equations – common sense, general relativity and good manners (i.e. not interrupting), to stop working at the centre of a broadcast industry black hole. So physicists, Resonance Jedis and every single one of us call the zero-volume, near-zero-relevance, infinitely dense region at the centre of the broadcast industry black hole a singularity.
A gravitational media agency singularity is a location where the quantities which are used to measure effectiveness (eyeballs, click-throughs etc) and the gravitational field become infinite in a way that does not depend on real life or the co-ordinate system. These quantities (with lots of zeros on the end which must mean brands should pay us loads for stacking them up) are the scalar invariant curvatures of agency metrics and ad-space-time, some of which are a measure of (the) density (of matter).
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
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