Jed Hallam

I’m sat trying to hammer through about twelve books in search of something inspirational ahead of a pitch next week. It’s not working. However, I did just find this little gem…

It’s Stephen Covey’s seven habits of highly effective people, and it’s from the 80s, but it’s obviously massively applicable today, so I thought I’d share.

1. Be proactive

2. Begin with the end in mind

3. Put first things first

4. Think win-win

5. First understand, then be understood

6. Synergise [ed. don't laugh, listen]

7. ‘Sharpen the saw’

My favourites are (obviously) one and two.

I’ve been wrestling with this blog post for two weeks now. What began as an argument for complexity in business became a 4,000 word animal on complexity in life, sexuality, politics and ecology. Needless to say I’ve had to drastically edit it for it to be even barely readable. I stress barely.

I may post the sections on life, sexuality and ecology at some point in the future, but for now, here are my thoughts on the importance of complexity and the dangers of simplicity in business. (Also, this is very much a word in progress.)

I’ve always thought that the simplest route to understanding was to break everything into smaller pieces, understand each piece and then slowly put it all back together. Breaking complex systems into manageable, simple blocks. After I failed my maths A-Level (long story) I started to become quite interested in numbers, and in my first job I spent a lot of time looking at how to break down complex systems to create algorithms which produced simple, understandable numbers.

Simplicity out of complexity. That’s what people want, that’s what sells. It’s easy to buy something that’s very neatly packaged and seems simple to operate. In fact, (and I have no research to back this up) it seems the brain functions by filing things into boxes.

Taxonomies for our beliefs, our morals, our looks, our friends, our sexuality, our jobs and our possessions.

Everything in its right place.

The problem with this is that life isn’t simple. And things don’t tend to fit into categories.

“Categorising always produces reduction in true complexity” Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan.

Anyone that knows me will understand that my whole outlook on life has been shaped a fair bit by the philosophical and economic theory of ‘the black swan’. One of the biggest components of this theory is that we post-rationalise and force things into categories in order for us to be able to understand them within current constructs. Except life is slightly more chaotic and random than our constructs will allow.

There are simply too many variables.

John Maeda is (I think) the father of the simplicity versus complexity debate. His book, The Laws Of Simplicity, is a manifesto for the importance of simplicity. He explains how simplicity is the process of removing the meaningful from a situation and focussing on that. Creating singularity out of complexity and putting the focus on the core, rather than the periphery. Which is fine, except when we look for the singular meaning, we do so with our internal taxonomies in play. We look for meaning in the known knowns and we cast aside everything else. It is this type of template/category approach that (I think) hurts business strategy.

There are very few brands that employ true innovation. We constantly view new ideas through our old experiences. We use empiricism to judge the future, and as Taleb would tell you, just because it has always been, does not make it always so.

The thinking behind the black swan concept comes from David Hume, who said “No amount of observations of a white swan can allow the inference that all swans are white, but the observation of a single black swan can refute that conclusion”. If we always plan and innovate based on what we’ve always done, we’ll never do anything new. But we look for simple solutions that we can replicate. But there are no templates, because the world is constantly moving.

What works for one brand won’t for the next, and what has worked in one market might not work in the next. There are too many variables. Employee experience, customer base, media, economy, culture – there are simply too many actors on the stage for a one size fits all approach to work. But a one size fits all approach is easy to buy (and sell) because it creates simplicity out of complexity, comfort out of uncertainty.

You can also see this in the way in which many agencies sell themselves too. They’ve forgotten why they set up business in the first place (to help brands either make more money or save more money). A huge multi-national recently said that it was planning on taking ideas from any agency, regardless of what category that agency fell into. It was a revelation. It made the front pages of the trade press  – it made the front pages that any agency can have a good idea. The front page. This is very brave, many brands still define their budgets and work by their agencies, rather than the ideas. And agencies reinforce this in order to stay safe. They carefully edge their way into categories that get them onto rosters in order to hoover up work, and then they become comfortable. “Well we’ve done some great digital campaigns, if it isn’t broken, don’t fix it.”

I come back to Taleb. Just because it always has been, does not make it always so. The world is complex and things change. Ideas are here and now, experience was yesterday.

This is a problem with wider business, too. The majority of businesses are eager to scale, so they build departments. Those departments then contain staff whom each do a specific job (very Adam Smith) and each of those employees is then responsible for their role. Except it’s more complicated than that and as the business starts to grow, more and more cracks appear (read this excellent post from John Willshire). Everyone absolves themselves of responsibility for the bigger picture, “I do my job to deliver my outputs”. There is a culture of micro-business.

But what has caused such a conservative approach to business? In my opinion, it’s a combination of short term thinking and fear of failure. The average tenure of a CMO is currently 18-24 months. Usually less than two years. Two years. There is obviously a mass of pressure to make an impact in a short amount of time, and so the temptation is to ‘short’ your brand – hit short term goals at the expense of long term goals. Then move on with your success to a new job. This is akin to the cartoon strip where the character cross the lake by stepping quickly over crocodiles noses – move fast enough and you won’t get caught out, stand around waiting and someone will get eaten.

One of the things that John Maeda nailed was simplicity in branding and communication (he gives a great TED talk on this too). If human nature prefers to receive information in carefully wrapped packages, then sell them products in the same way. The iPhone. Google. Music. Home insurance. Gym memberships. Everything is made as simple as possible in order to make people feel like they’re empowered and free (regardless of the complexity that lies behind the facade). But this has led to people ‘collecting’ things. Because brands can produce things en masse that appear simple, people want more things. Social media has also accelerated this. “I can have information neatly packaged and handed to me by Wikipedia immediately, so I want more.” Except that information is much more shallow and so we know less about much more.

This short term, aesthetic approach is fine, until we hit a much bigger issue, at which point we try and rationalise complexity in a dangerous way (see the London riots).

One of my favourite examples of ignorance of these types of constructs and categories is children. Children approach life with such a lack of experience that everything is to be wondered at. In his essay Painter of Modern Life, Baudelaire said “The child sees everything in a state of newness; he is always drunk. Nothing more resembles what we call inspiration than the delight with which a child absorbs form and colour”. Those annoying moments when a child continuously asks the question “why?” are always massively revealing, because so frequently we don’t have an answer and we answer “because it just is”. At what point do we stop (rightly) questioning the world and give in? When do we simply slip beneath the water and look for simple answers?

I think that (for many people) that moment is the moment that their creativity dies.

Ideas and inspiration come from conflict. It is in clashing ideas that new ideas are born -  when our brains drop all of the boxes of categories on the floor of our mind, we finally see something new. That’s why the best ideas that we have are out of context – on the bus, in the park, in a restaurant – talking or thinking about something completely out of context (listen to Jon Steel for further proof). Foucault said that inspiration came from the self-destruction and convulsion of our minds – so why do we try and force creativity into a process? If Steven Johnson’s idea of the adjacent possible is right, why aren’t we spending more time destroying the categories we’ve built in society (and our minds)?

Process is, in my eyes, the antithesis of action. It’s like organised fun. Nothing new comes from process, because process is built around empirical constructs. “It has worked before, so it will work again.” And it’s probably true, if it’s worked before, it probably will work again. But it won’t achieve the same result, because the world will have moved on since then. Just because it always was doesn’t make it always so.

This also probably goes some way to explain our fear of death. Most  people are afraid of death, they cannot comprehend it (unless they have specific religious leanings, in which case they’ve already simplified death and given it a name) because they haven’t experienced it before and cannot liken it to anything else (or any other category). Why do we fear death? Because it is inevitable. But why do we not question what existed before we were born? Because surely it is the same? We knew nothing of life before we were born, and we will know nothing of it after we die. Empiricism and simplicity falter at death.

I genuinely believe that we should embrace the chaos. We should rely on our ability to navigate complexity. You just have to look at the work of Hans Monderman and his traffic experiments to see the value and benefit of relying on chaos. Chaos and complexity saves lives because they force people to think more. If you cannot buy simplicity, you have to begin to unpick complexity. You have to think (there’s an excellent article on the death of thinking in the NYT).

Once we begin to understand the systems and life more intricately, we can begin to accept our limitations. Umberto Eco had a library full of books he’d never read – why? Because they then became known unknowns, rather than unknown unknowns. And knowing what you don’t know is the biggest part of the battle.

 ”No amount of observations of a white swan can allow the inference that all swans are white, but the observation of a single black swan can refute that conclusion.”

David Hume, 1711-76.

“It is often said that he “is wise who can see things coming”. Perhaps the wise one is the one who knows that he cannot see things far away.”

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan.

“I don’t care what the future holds,
‘Cause I’m right here and I’m today,
With your fingers you can touch me.
I am your black swan, black swan.”

Thom Yorke, Black Swan.

“Perfection is not just about control. It’s also about letting go.”

Thomas Leroy, Black Swan.

Thom Yorke – Black Swan

I obviously spend a lot of time on Twitter, mostly (these days) grabbing interesting links and publishing random thoughts and ideas. I’ve been on Twitter a while, I’ve got a fairly good handle on it, and in general, I love it. It provides me with an accelerated adjacent possible into things I wouldn’t usually encounter and I try and follow a really broad mix of people. But there is one thing, one constant meme, that frustrates me.

The “madding crowd’s ignoble strife”; the cry of “#FAIL”.

The major and minor social media backlash when we don’t like something that someone else (usually a brand, but not limited to) has done.

I hate it.

When did we become the judge, jury and executioner? Maybe, just maybe, we’re not the target demographic for the latest social media campaign by FMCG brand X? This type of negativity helps no one. The internet is a big place, and we have to share it with other people, other people that might not be just like us. Our sense of entitlement seems to be skyrocketing well beyond our freedom of speech.

This is part of two much wider problems; 1) the expectation brigade (which Paul Carr, Charlie Brooker and Becca have written about fairly extensively) and 2) the speed at which we want to criticise others. We’ve been empowered by access to information, people and brands, but it’s gone too far and people are demanding, not collaborating or talking.

I am in no way exonerated from this. In fact a few years ago I caused a storm in a tea cup when I publicly criticised a telecomm brand’s social media agency – so my hands are just as dirty. Except I learnt two things pretty quickly; 1) my opinions are my own and it isn’t always necessary to share them in a very public way and 2) the #FAIL brigade can work against people (after the blog post went up, there were about 500 tweets about why I was an idiot for sharing my opinion – you can see that there was a certain irony ).

As marketers, we spend hours and hours advising brands on how to become more human and more collaborative, yet a lot of the time we’re criticising other brands for putting a foot wrong. The human interaction works both ways and if we want brands to become better at interacting, we need to stop burning their fingers with flippant remarks and snarkiness.

This is the second post in a series of three on the future of social media and social technologies – specifically, integrating social technology and thought into organisations.

The first post was my thoughts on how the social media industry has evolved and where the market may or may not lead. This post will look at the developing social business market and the next post will look at how brands might start to actually implement this stuff. You know, the ‘how we make money out of all of this’ post.

Every business is, in some shape or form, a social business. It relies on a simple process of creating a product or service and then selling it. To sell that product or service, you need to communicate what it is to the people that might buy it. You also need to communicate with everyone in the organisation to ensure that they understand what the product or service is and why people might buy it. So in this sense, communication is a fundamental part of business, as it’s a fundamental part of being a human. So every business is social.

But however social the principles of businesses are, organisations are still slow to move and in a hyper-connected world, this is presenting a series of issues;

• Increasingly empowered consumers
• Geographically disparate and departmentalised employees
• A lack of organisational agility or adaptiveness

In my (humble) opinion, many organisations could resolve these issues by using social technologies and processes.

The modern consumer has changed – prior to digital technology, our network of friends would be fairly local and our experiences would be shaped by that network. Robin Dunbar proposed that the number of meaningful relationships that we could hold at any time was around 150, it would be easy to suggest that with the rise of social networks such as Facebook and Twitter that this number has increased, but I would argue that it hasn’t. We still maintain a similar number of meaningful relationships, but what has changed is the dynamics of these relationships and our number of ‘weak tie’ relationships has increased, giving us greater access to wider networks that transcend geography. Where my network used to be contained by Nottinghamshire, it is now global. (Of course the convex of this argument is that by spreading our network wider we become less intimately connected, but I would seriously challenge this as social media allows us to connect on a more frequent – and often more intimate – basis.)

Over the past ten years networks of people have become much more dynamic but it seems to be only recently that people are beginning to realise the effect that this change has on their lives. The scale for the potential reach of word of mouth has dramatically increased because we’ve become hyper-connected and our networks have widened.

The effect that this has on business is that a negative or positive brand experience used to be passed around in the village church or the pub and it would reach a single (but strong) network. However, the rise of communications technologies and weak-tie networks means that that experience can have travelled across the globe in a matter of minutes.  And this power-shift hasn’t gone unnoticed.

The empowerment of the consumer now means that businesses need to be more responsive to their audience. Businesses are built on communication and the relationship between supplier and buyer, and that relationship is becoming much more open because they’re communicating more often.

One of the reasons for this is the breakdown of professional and personal lives. As our networks of weak ties become wider and communication across borders increases, it’s much easier for our networks to blur. Where we once had very defined boundaries between who we socialised with at the weekend and who we worked with, we now have merged networks. Or, an alternative way of looking at it is the shift from social networks to interest networks (but that’s a conversation for another post).  What this also means is that every employee of an organisation is now a spokesperson and the ease with which a message can reach a large audience means that internal communications and a singular brand message have never been so important.

Below are two diagrams, each represents the communications flow inside an organisation, but one is pre-social media and one is post-social media. The most important point to take from these diagrams is that where we once used to control the external brand touch points (public relations, advertising, customer service) we now have every department exposed to the outside world in some shape of form.

This breaching of communications barriers means that it has never been as important to create a cohesive brand message. Businesses have attempted to create unified brand messaging for years and struggled because too many external agencies interpret the message and communicate that in their own ways. But now added to external agencies communicating on behalf of an organisation, we now have more employees doing so too.

This is where social technology can play a major role in business. By engaging with all staff in a ‘flat’ way (every member of staff receiving the same brand message at the same time) we can begin to combat the ‘multiple brand message disease’ that confuses consumers too frequently. After all, a consumer sees a brand, not individual departments or external agencies (when was the last time that you heard someone outside of the communications industry say ‘that was a great piece of work from the digital agency’?). We’ve already become more connected on the outside of the business, so now the challenge is to become more connected on the inside, and then we can begin to become more agile and responsive to our customers needs.

I was introduced to the idea of the agile business by Tim Malbon, a co-founder at Made by Many, who got me thinking about the iterative brand and how we can beg, borrow and steal from the software industry to create better, more connected brands. This idea of the agile business has been popular for a long time now, but what social media is doing is forcing the hand of business to become more agile and more responsive.

This is one of the greatest challenges in this changing landscape – businesses have been built with scale in mind rather than innovation or creativity and this makes them very, very slow to move or react to market changes. But the empowerment of the consumer and the employee now means that business needs to react quickly and, as Brian Solis believes, use social media and mobile media to become more adaptive.  Social media and social business doesn’t mean having to have a Twitter stream or using Yammer. It means having an understanding about what this new information and these new communication lines have on a business. Even on a basic level, using the conversations that take place in a forum to help understand brand perceptions and add to existing research is an effective way of becoming more social as a business. The challenge, however, remains the same.

One of the other major challenges to organisations becoming more responsive is that businesses have built departments and these departments have become silos. We no longer work for a brand, we work for our department. I do my job to deliver my outputs, I create this website for this website’s sake, I draft my social media strategy for my department. In an environment where the consumer sees only a single brand, we’ve created a culture of hundreds of ants rather a single millipede…