Posts Tagged ‘scalable’
Fast is better than slow (loose is better than tight!)
Tight, centralised control mechanisms are super attractive to comfort-seeking humans. The trouble is, they aren’t working.
The tougher the times, the stronger the compulsion to issue reams of rules, legislation and policy. Just look at the state of politics, drinking and drug laws; and long-winded employee handbooks nobody ever reads.
Arse-covering document production lures us into a false sense of security, skews our priorities and often demolishes common sense. We focus on empty words and numbers, lazily neglecting to change people’s behaviour and instigate true culture change beneath the surface. Back offices grow, coal face shrinks (NHS?!) and leaders cover their ears as their people grow distracted, mindless and even corrupt – manipulating old school systems by hitting targets at all cost; and producing results that are often the opposite of what was intended.
Did you know that kids are more likely to be hurt or killed by the deluge of vehicles at the school gates than they are by walking or cycling without adult supervision?
And what about the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority, created as a result of the MPs’ expenses scandal, at a cost of £6.6m – six times the amount the MPs were forced to repay? (Not to mention the 80 staff and £6m per year needed to keep it going).
The world is suffering from The Control Delusion.
Just as faith in institutions has collapsed; tight, linear, rational models of behaviour have been proven to steer us blindly in the wrong direction. The sharpest leaders are beginning to recognise the challenge we face in business is fundamentally human. What makes people work better? What’s our clockspeed? How can we make it faster? How can we make decisions in real time?
The pace of change in the world is rapid and accelerating. Business is slow as hell. It’s time we took a serious look at reconciling, before the gap gets so wide we all fall in (particularly the big ones).
The only way for a high clockspeed business (i.e. most businesses, except perhaps those with decade-long product lifecycles and long-lasting asset value) to survive, let alone thrive, is to get real and loosen up.
The law of diminishing returns states that the more experience an industry accumulates, the harder and slower it is to take the next incremental step forward. Meanwhile, the network effect tells us that the more you add, the greater the value for everyone. The vast majority of businesses are living with the former state in blissful ignorance, as their lifespan compresses. Those who adopt the latter as a means of doing business – thinking of business as a network, an ecosystem, a loose and flexible organism – are thriving.
If you aren’t investing in developing a loose culture, you’re probably going to wake up one morning soon, buried knee-deep in data, wondering what the hell happened. A flat, decentralised, trust-based, collaborative, loosely networked approach to business will win.
It’s not the big that eat the small, it’s the fast that eat the slow.
Resilience & Adaptability
A while back I posted up this deck on Unleasing Innovation & 21st Century Scale.
Just thought I’d follow up with a new Palindromic Query:
The greater the external influence on something, the more resilient and adaptable it becomes.
Consider children, immune systems, evolution, nano-architecture and the way a plant grows thicker on the surface that’s most exposed to the elements. Consider societies or social groups with least external influence and the affect on their resilience and adaptability.
This is a statement you can apply in multiple contexts that will always result in improvement. The more you unpick, the more obvious and fundamental the concept seems. So I think it definitely qualifies as a Palindromic Query.
Constructing business models, products, services and companies that are inherently exposed to high and increasing levels of external influence – whether through open source / platform components and APIs, or collaborative cultures and partnering approaches – will ensure resilience and adaptability, just as in evolution itself.
How much external influence is enabled in your business or offering? Or does it feel insular, siloed, or stringently controlled and centralised?
From machines to ecosystems
When we talk about thriving in the digital age, we tend to revert to discussing how to leverage social media, mobile and other cool channels. There’s nothing wrong with that (and I do it myself!), but it can be useful to consider the bigger picture now and then.
The challenges we face in business are not related to technology, they’re related to human beings. The industrial revolution brought us machines; and with it linear, machine-age thinking, articulated in machine-age language that in turn makes us think more like machines. This machine metaphor shaped the 20th century. We viewed biology as a big machine, we searched for machine-like predictability in economics and physics – and you could argue that it served us fairly well when we lived in a world that was changing less rapidly, with fewer choices.
However lately we’ve started to realise that our rigid financial forecasts, waterfall development methods and other attempts at predicting what’s likely to work or not work in business and product design are very flawed.
A more useful metaphor for the 21st century is nature. Instead of technology and nature being enemies, I believe our most successful innovations will be like living things. Concepts like self-organisation, co-evolution, emergence and feedback loops are coming to the forefront.
If you look at thriving companies – like Facebook – you can see the characteristics that make them fittest. They’re thriving within millions of systems and sub-systems (i.e. markets). The structure of what they’re creating is all about fluidity, feedback loops, interlinking; people, applications, APIs – lots of iterations and replications.
We need to start focusing on developing traits that make us more likely to be fittest within any given system. Traits include: agility; the ability to replicate; the ability to get undistorted, accurate feedback and a fine balance – between impulse and restraint, competition and cooperation, chaos and order.
Meanwhile, on an individual, personal level, each of us should seek the conditions and environment in which we’re fittest. Nobody is fittest in every situation, so move fluidly through different systems in seek of a place where you thrive; and if energy dissipates (which it always does, according to the 2nd law of thermodynamics!), shift to another system.
If we do things as nature does, we’ll see real progress.
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.
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?”
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.
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!
More media zombies on slippery slope
I just spotted this article from last year, in which Michael Grade, ITV’s Exec Chairman and ex BBC Chairman slates Joost and YouTube, labeling them ‘content parasites’.
He said, “The day that Google or Joost or any of these people start investing £1bn a year in UK content is the day I’ll start to be worried.”
Duh! I’ll bet those cash wad buffers in his big shiny office don’t feel so protective now. Sound proof, maybe, but not protective. Forgetting the cumulative talent of the people of the world perhaps? Err… completely forgetting the whole essence of scalability and the power to organise without organisations and their £1bn budgets??? (I hear Yahoo’s Chief Exec made a similar daft remark at a conference the other day – they’re all screwed).
Meanwhile, more recently, ITV reported a loss of £2.7 bn for 2008 and subsequent staff cull. And what do you know, Google’s revenues exceeded those of ITV.
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.
Copyright ResonanceBlog 2009
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