Thriller in Lego

Howabout this: a lego version of Michael Jackson's Thriller. Hat tip: Andrew Sullivan

Leadership as participation

Phil Dorado highlights a little anedote from Richard Branson's autobiography:

“I...insist that we continually ask our staff for any suggestions they might have, and I try my hand at their jobs. When I tried pushing a trolley down the aisle of a jumbo, I found I crashed into everyone. When I talked to the crew about this they suggested we introduce a more waitress-style service and keep the trolleys to a minimum. As it turned out, by getting rid of trolleys altogether in Upper Class, we were able to use up some of the aisle space to provide the longest and largest seats in the air.”

I think this is a great example of leadership being about being willing to learn, rather than just trying to teach. And leading by making yourself part of the process, not merely supervising it.

Neuroscience of change

Shawn at Anecdote finds another interesting article about the neuroscience of how we change, and why we resist change. I blogged about another of Shawn's finds a few weeks ago, and this new one explores similar territory.

I liked this observation near the start:

Maybe your resistance to change manifests itself in a different way or in a different setting - a refusal to throw away that old slide rule, for example, or to look while the nurse draws your blood, or to dance at weddings. We all refuse to change our ways for reasons that are often hard to articulate.

Yes, it's easy to bemoan others unwillingness to change and not notice how much we get set in our routines without noticing.

The central point is that processing change - ie learning - involves lots of activity in the prefontal cortex, which has limited capacity. Thus...

The prefrontal cortex crashes easily because it burns lots of fuel of the high-octane variety: glucose, or blood sugar, which is metabolically expensive for the body to produce.

Given the high energy cost of running the prefrontal cortex, the brain prefers to run off its hard drive, known as the basal ganglia, which has a much larger storage capacity and sips, not gulps, fuel. This is the part of the brain that stores the hardwired memories and habits that dominate our daily lives.

Extrapolating from this finding, the authors continue

The traditional command-and-control style of management doesn't lead to permanent changes in behavior either. Ordering people to change and then telling them how to do it fires the prefrontal cortex's hair-trigger connection to the amygdala. "The more you try to convince people that you're right and they're wrong, the more they push back," says Rock. Even well-meaning advice quickly raises warning flags in the prefrontal cortex that it is soon to become overloaded and exhausted. And just as quickly it begins to defend itself. "Our brains are so complex that it's rare for us to be able to see any situation in exactly the same way," says Rock. "So when we get advice from people, we're always finding ways that the advice doesn't match up with our own experience or expectations."

So if bossing doesn't work, what does? The answer is epipanies, which is delightful notion to come across in an article about change management.

The way to get past the prefrontal cortex's defenses is to help people come to their own resolution regarding the concepts causing their prefrontal cortex to bristle. These moments of resolution or insight - call them epiphanies - appear to be as soothing to the prefrontal cortex as the unfamiliar is threatening

Well it certainly makes sense to me.

Problems, problems...

JP has a good post about how Open Source makes you responsible. He quotes Chuq van Rospach thus:

Open source requires you, as a manager of IT, or as a staffer, or as the CIO, to be willing to commit to being responsible for fixing a problem, and therefore, be responsible for the problem itself.

The support contract is not about fixing the problem. The support contract is about allowing you to shift responsibility for the problem. It is the tool that allows you to go (as the IT person, manager or organization) to the customer, or your manager, or the CIO, or the VP of whatever organization is pissed at you for the problem, and say “we’re doing everything I can, but we can’t fix it until we hear back from the vendor”.

I think this argument would apply in all sorts of other places, and I'd also take it a bit further.

I think it's a powerful shift when we stop seeing ourselves as separate from "the problem" and instead see ourselves as connected to it. Maybe seeing ourselves as part of a larger whole including "the problem", one of the ideas emphasised in Presence. It might lead us to wonder about the change we need to make - or allow - in ourselves and get beyond finger pointing.

Co-creation

I noticed that Wikipedia didn't have a page for co-creation, which struck me as a bit ironic as wikipedia is one of the finest examples of it. So James, John Winsor and I exchanged a few thoughts and put together a very simple first draft. Please do go in there and improve upon it.

Science and doubt

A moving clip of Dr Jacob Bronowski from his TV series in the 1970s, on the dangers of absolute certainty. Standing at Auschwitz he says

"When people believe that they have absolute knowledge with no test in reality, this is how they behave. This is what men do when they aspire to the knowledge of gods. Science is a very human form of knowledge, we are always at the brink of the known; we always feel forward for what is to be hoped. Every judgement in science stands on the edge of error and is personal."

Hat tip: Andrew Sullivan, who is always high on my blog reading list.

Exploring Enron

Charles Armstrong at Trampoline Systems emailed me this offer:

to mark next week's sentencing of jeffrey skilling (former enron ceo) we've launched a website where you can browse 200,000 enron internal emails from 1999-2002. powered by trampoline's sonar platform, "enron explorer" generates visualisations of each executive's social network and analyses the thematic content of their correspondence.

get exploring at enron.trampolinesystems.com

We live in transparent times I guess. Just thought I'd pass it on.

Free wisdom

Well after Dave Snowden's free book chapter yesterday, today some other great bloggers are sharing their ideas in little books.

From Canada, Chris Corrigan offers us the Tao of Open Space. Chris inspires me and this little book evokes the paradoxical excitement and challenge of the Open Space process. Snippet:

The key to holding space is letting go of your self and becoming unattached from the work. If you can't do this, then people will blame you for their failures and praise you for their successes. Neither condition is fair.

When you walk the circle, when you sit with the process, watch that your body language does not say I am in charge. Align your actions with your statements, and your being with the invitation you have just issued.

Across the Pacific, the Anecdote boys are giving away The Ultimate Guide to Anecdote Circles. My favourite nuggets in this are... their comment that

Research has shown that the facilitator is often quiet in anecdote circles

... and this quote

What happens is fact, not truth. Truth is what we think about what happens.

Ouch

Hmmm. perhaps it serves me right for blogging about presence, but my own lack of focus in the moment hit me on the head last night, literally.

Somehow on my way home I stumbled on the pavement. In falling, my head collided with a cast iron bollard. This came as a bit of a shock. I was aided by several passers by. As a measure of how cosmopolitan my home city has become, these consisted of a British Asian, a young French couple and a middle-aged American woman. I was offered, with great kindness, several different bits of advice and offers to call ambulances. I was sufficiently ok to appreciate the diversity of suggestions and decide, after a minute or two, that I was probably going to live. The Asian man was able to assure me that my pupils were doing something that it was good they did. The American gave me additional information by showing me my rapidly swelling forehead in a vanity mirror. And the French couple were... well reassuringly French and kind.

I wandered home and applied ice for about an hour. Gradually, a variety of other lesser injuries made themselves known and I took myself gingerly to bed. This morning I am in reasonable shape, but it does look as though I have been the victim of incompetent botox treatment to my forehead. Frowning is uncomfortable, and I feel a tad depressed about this fleeting encounter with a sense of mortality.

I suppose its a good reminder to try and stay in the here and now...

What is an organisation?

Dave Snowden has just posted online a book chapter he has written with Cynthia Kurtz, called Bramble Bushes in a Thicket. It's about the "relationship between narrative and learning networks. It also explores some key issues in respect of the complex issue of Identity." For me, that doesn't quite do justice to the dense riches you'll find within. Dave has an indecently large brain and this is a tour de force on his and Cynthia's part.

I enjoyed their contrasting of idealistic and naturalistic approaches to understanding - and attempting to change - organisations.

In the idealistic approach, the leaders of an organization set out an ideal future state that they wish to achieve, identify the gap between the ideal and their perception of the present,
and seek to close it. This is common not only to process-based theory but also to practice that follows the general heading of the learning organization. Naturalistic approaches, by contrast, seek to understand a sufficiency of the present in order to act to stimulate evolution of the system. Once such stimulation is made, monitoring of emergent patterns becomes a critical activity so that desired patterns can be supported and undesired patterns disrupted. The organization thus evolves to a future that was unknowable in advance, but is more contextually appropriate when discovered.

They come down in favour of naturalism (count me in) and go on to look at the impact of narrative (ie storytelling) within learning networks. If you ever needed an academic explanation of just why blogging has mushroomed, you'll find plenty of stuff here.

They look at three different ways of understanding multiple identities inside organisations, citing work by Martin and Meyerson.

According to the integration perspective, organisational identity is strongest when it is shared and reflects the goals and beliefs of its founders or managers. From an integration point of view, "alignment" between expressed values and informal beliefs is desirable, leading to increased loyalty and coherence. This perspective is particularly prominent in the popular literature on culture and leadership. By contrast, the differentiation perspective highlights subcultures and sub identities within the organisation, derides efforts at false unification, and believes that it is necessary to recognize differences of class and power within the organisation to make sense of its identity. The ambiguity (or fragmentation) perspective views the organisation more like a web in which coherent subidentities are always appearing and disappearing and in which fluctuating elements of organisation-wide identity form and dissolve on particular issues. Martin and Meyerson emphasise that no one of these perspectives is entirely correct, but that all three must be considered when viewing the organisation. Thus an organisation is a coherent body (integration) that is divided against itself (differentiation) and always changing (ambiguity). In other words, organisations collectively manage multiple types of coexisting identities.

I found this very helpful, as I think a lot of people view organisations only through the integration viewpoint and miss out on the subtleties and paradoxes that the other perspectives show us. One of the most interesting I find using Improv actitivies is it that they illustrate how teams do something much richer than aligning with some notional set of values, and that the richest and most satisfying moments embrace differentiation and ambiguity.

They go on to rethink the old complaint about silo mentality, with a delightful section that says that this gives silos a bad rap they don't deserve. Apparently real world silos are rather brilliant things and we could learn a lot from them when figuring out how we want groups and teams to share their knowledge with each other. I haven't even got into their insights on storytelling. I won't abstract more, but recommend you chew over the whole thing, it's worth it.

Presence and leadership

I'm continuing to work through Presence. The chapter on presence as a form of leadership is one of the strongest for me. It articulates a non-heroic idea of leadership that I really agree with. Here's the nub of the argument, as articulated by co-author Betty Sue Flowers:

One of the roadblocks for groups moving forward now is thinking that they have to wait for a leader to emerge - someone who embodies the future path. But I think what we've been learning... is that the future can emerge within the group itself, not embodied in a 'hero' or traditional 'leader.' ... we have to nurture a new form of leadership that doesn't depend on extraordinary individuals.

I found her quite eloquent on behalf of on older wisdom of leadership that emphasised the cultivation of awareness:

The old idea that those in positions to influence such organizations' power must be committed to cultivation or moral development has all but completely disappeared... the ancient Greeks and Chinese believed such cultivation required a lifetime of dedicated work... But many people seem to think these old ideas don't speak to the realities of today's technology-driven world... our leaders are more likely to be technologists than philosophers, focused on gaining and using power, driving change, influencing people and maintaining an appearance of control.

I'm not big on poetry myself, but I enjoyed this, quoted in the book:

Why are you so unhappy?
Because ninety-nine percent of what you think,
And everything you do,
Is for your self,
And there isn't one.

Hmm, I'll try to keep that in mind!

Memo to CMOs: We're subjects, not objects

Whilst tweaking copy for our Co-creation Rules Manifesto with James, I found myself riffing on the Cluetrain notion that marketing should no longer be done to people... and combining it with our interest in social objects or ooze. I came up with this paragraph which in my vain way I quite liked.

Marketing 1.0 treats customers as objects of communication: marketing is done to them. In co-creation, everyone is a subject - an initiator of action, a creator - and your brand, and your promotions, are the objects everyone gets to play with.

Kind of puts brands in their place, I think.

Art of Hosting

I'm giving serious thought to attending The Art of Hosting in Boulder on 18-20 November. It's a long way to go, but Chris Corrigan made it sound very attractive in a Skype call the other day.

Presence

Warning: Esoteric post follows.

Over the last few years, I've become more and more interested in the power of presence in working with people, though I often steer clear of talking about it as I find it a hard concept to explain in words. So I think I have to give credit to others' efforts to do so, even if I do have misgivings.

In that spirit, I appreciate the book, Presence by Senge at al. This is despite the bad review by Rob Paterson. Interestingly, another blog mate Chris Corrigan stuck up for it in the comments to Rob's post. You'll find their divergence of views reflected in the Amazon page for the book. (I was finally tipped into buying it when I noticed Alex Kjerulf had bought it on a recent trip to London. I wonder what he is making of it.)

I have to admit, the whole topic easily becomes very hard to describe, and I apologise in advance for the following attempt to summarise the central idea of the book.

The authors set out a U shaped curve as a model of what happens to groups who make decisions using presence. The downward slope of the U - they call this phase sensing - is about suspension, essentially the willingness to suspend our default mental models and thus give more rich attention to what is actually going on (as opposed to the stories we tell ourselves about what is going on). Together with suspension comes redirection, which I'd summarise as a kind of shift of paradigm in which we experience ourselves as a part of the whole, so that the "problem" is not something separate from us. This leads us, according to the authors, to the bottom of the U and presencing - "a third kind of seeing, beyond seeing external reality and beyond even seeing from within the living whole. It is seeing from within the source from which the future whole is emerging, peering back at the present from the future". Finally, we go into the upward curve, realizing, where action takes place, but not in the conventional make-a-decision-and-act way; one interviewee in their research described it thus: "It's almost as if I'm watching myself in action. I'm both engaged and simulataneously detached. When that happens I know there will be magic."

Maybe an example might help? A story in the book that I really liked was told by co-author Otto Scharmer. As a young man, he returned home to see his family house burning to the ground. The fire stuns his habitual patterns of thought into suspension. As he gazes at the flames, it's as if the flames sink into him - this is redirecting, seeing the living the whole embracing both himself and the fire. This is followed by a sort of out-of-body experience (presencing at the bottom of the U) where Otto realises that he is not attached to the tons of stuff smouldering infront of him and that "I, my true Self, was still alive.. more acutely present than ever before." With that came a sense of being drawn into the future that he might "bring into reality with my life". (Realising)

I think you'd have to practice a fair bit of suspension reading the book and indeed this post. Rob's comments certainly highlight some initial reactions to the book that I had to suspend - especially to the fairly constant use of "high status" clients as examples of the authors' work. I think attempts to present what happens in moments of deep connection between humans run a big risk of abstracting out the real mystery in favour or something a bit clunky. I'm not sure that real life quite follows the logical pattern of the U model.

Having said all that, I found the book fascinating and thought-provoking because it's a genuine attempt to point to something that I feel is incredibly important and generally excluded from most management books: the mysterious stuff that goes on between we human beings that cannot be reduced to a business process. And I know there have been seminal moments in my life where I've experienced groups of people thinking together in a way where one begins to sense something really powerful at work, below the surface.

I'm excited by the notion of moving beyond solving problems as if we are separate from them. I dislike a lot of organisational change practice because it embodies the idea that the top managers are somehow separate from the organisation they want to change. (With this comes the dubious cult of personality that seems to surround CEOs). To suspend problem solving and enter the discomfort of trying to sense how you are part of the story, feels important. I think it's important to seek that connection rather than deluding yourself into thinking you are some separate external force for change. I think this is where we want to get beyond trying to be clever or expert and use other parts of our intelligence - the parts that don't fit inside a spreadsheet or make logical sense. I think when I'm facilitating, that's the kind of sensibility I am working for.

Thank goodness for blogging, as I could never tackle this subject as an essay. A blog post which might start a conversation.. that I can just about manage...

Good question

Phil Dourado asked a really good question the other day. I wish I had some kind of answer.

So, if 19 million people were moved by a piece of viral communication to talk like a pirate yesterday (see post below), how come only 150,000 people a day regularly click on www.thehungersite.com ?

I remember when the hunger site started up in the heady dotcom days and some naive optimists (yep, that was me) saw an inkling of a possibility of this one initiative making a real difference to world hunger. My God, we thought, look what the internet might achieve in channeling goodwill and, more importantly, food, to hungry people while delivering millions of eyeballs to advertisers for a few seconds at a time to pay for it?

After all, who wouldn't want to spend five seconds a day clicking on a button to give a cup of free food to people who have none? And at no cost to themselves?

Actually, perhaps this is a case where there I don't really want to answer the question, but just to go click the button at thehungersite.com. Maybe you would like to do the same?

Beyond the black box

Some months back, Ross Dawson sent me a free copy of his book, Developing Knowledge-Based Client Relationships: Leadership in Professional Services. I am not a prolific reader and the book sat on my desk for a long time, leaving me feeling guilty.

But I disciplined myself to read it recently and I liked it. Ross has really been thinking hard about his subject and paints a clear picture of a big shift in professional services, away from the "black box" model - where the firm does mysterious things for the client and makes sure no-one ever finds out their secret. Ross chronicles lots of examples of a knowledge sharing approach, where sharing knowledge is the basis for creating value.

One simple but high end example of this: law firm Lovells went to their client Prudential Propety Services and told them they were doing a lot of routine work for them that they could get done much more cheaply elsewhere. Then co-created a programme to assess each brief, and separate routine tasks from complex ones. Lovells would then contract-out the routine work to smaller, regional firms and focus their efforts on the curved balls. They saved the Pru a lot of money... and created so much trust that they were given a bigger portfolio to work on . Then they took their application and won over new clients with the same idea.

That example is going straight into James' and my new Change This manifesto (Co-creation Rules, coming soon). And I recommend Ross's book to anyone who wants to substantiate the idea that co-creation is way more than just getting customers to write your ads for you.

Sharing knowledge

One of the benefits of an open approach to marketing is that it allows your own staff to create little bits of extra value for customers. A small but interesting example cropped up the other day in the Southwest Airlines blog. One of their pilots, David Evans, says that when you have 25 minutes to turn a plane round, you start to get pretty savvy about where to grab a good sandwich in a hurry at airport. So he's starting to gather recommendations on where to eat at US airports to share with customers.

Aren't all airlines sitting on mountains of really good information about airports tucked away in the minds of their staff? Wouldn't it be nice, cheap and easy to serve some of it up to us like this? Way better than the tired old plugs for the Car Rental company you've done a deal with.

Beyond the hamster wheel

I've added Paul Robinson to my aggregator. (Funnily enough, I only found him when he announced he was going to stop reading my blog regularly.) Paul's a coder and I don't run into many of them socially, and it's interesting to get his craftsman's perspective on his work.

He said this recently which I liked:

Strangely, some of the best code I’ve ever seen out there is open source, which feels counter-intuitive - it’s a bunch of people doing hobby code, not something they are being paid to produce. I think it’s because there is no deadline with open source that makes it better. It has been said that programmers work on open source projects in the evening because it’s relaxing. Without the deadlines, pressures and insistence things are done a certain way, developers can revel in the intellectual nature of development. As a result, they take the time to unit test, to comment, to document to re-factor properly.

This reminds me of my speculation that the net is allowing us organise around our passions, rather than trying fit our passions around organisations. It makes complete sense to me that work done for its own satisfaction, outside the hamster wheel of deadlines and pavlovian rewards, is going to be better. That's part of the genius of Linux.

This looks like fun

I think I'll have to try out the new exhibit in the giant Turbine Hall of the Tate Modern gallery. Looks a lot of fun. And a real object of sociality...

Hat tip: Lee McEwan

Hallam Foe: in praise of emerging adulthood

I've been continuing to think about the film Hallam Foe and my experience of it in the company of fellow UK bloggers (see my recent post). The film is, amongst other things, an exploration of adolescence and many of us I think identified with the hero's journey, sometimes funny, sometimes painful, often bewildering. Trying to figure out his place in the world.

I suppose Hallam experienced what I often feel. The Groucho thing of not wanting to join a club that would have me as a member. In that sense, I think I'm still fairly adolescent, caught between my desire to belong and my reluctance to conform. I rather think you'd find that quality among many of the people in the audience that night.

And I am pretty sure that Dave Mackenzie, the director, must have put a lot of his own inner adolescent into the movie... right down (as I noted before) to his attractive awkwardness in putting his unfinished baby in front of us.

Anyway, I'd like to stand up for my own inner adolescent, or maybe I'll go for what the wikipedia post calls "emerging adulthood":

Some scholars have theorized a new stage of development, post-adolescence and pre-adulthood. Arnett (2000) calls this stage "emerging adulthood," and argues that it is characterized by "relative independence from social roles and from normative expectations. ... Emerging adulthood is a time of life when many different directions remain possible, when the scope of independent exploration of life's possibilities is greater for most people than it will be at any other period of the life course." (p.469). Arnett, notes, however, that this stage is situationally and culturally constructed (i.e., people in other countries may not experience this as a unique life stage.)

Hey, isn't adulthood largely about coming to terms with things always emerging anyway? And don't us older folks have just as much scope for exploring life's possibilities as our less wrinkly peers?

PS Oh look, Hallam even has his own MySpace page.
PPS Links to other bloggers' views of the movie at the Hallam blog.

Open Sauce in London

James and I will be running our next Open Sauce Live workshop in London on Tuesday 17 October, in conjunction with our friends at NMK. Our blurb says

From the highest-spending brands, to the smallest agencies, everyone is wondering how to succeed in a brave new world of marketing.It's a world where people are better informed, better connected and have more choice. Where the media are increasingly fragmented. Our Open Sauce workshop offers a lively, practical way to get to grips with this world.

As usual, we'll blend some interesting bits of content with some improv activities and open facilitation.

If you're interested, please contact NMK direct to book a place.

Open Space on Education

Last week, I facilitated (with my friends at PolicyUnplugged) an Open Space for Channel 4 at their offices in London. They were inviting educators to help shape the way C4 does its education programming.

David Wilcox and his son Danny made a visual record. You can see pictures at Flickr and here are some video interviews with participants.

I'm showing a picture of Dan, a geographer who opened the discussion marketplace. In the background are some blanks sheets of paper; the only word on them is "Dan" because at this point, Dan is making the first discussion proposal. Over 2 rounds, those sheets were filled with over 20 different conversation topics. Dan's proposal was a classic Open Space thing: he wanted C4 (and the world in general) to pay much more attention to Geography as a subject. I don't think anyone would have thought of putting that on a standard conference agenda; but Dan and 5 or 6 other equally passionate people had a lively conversation which clearly engaged the programme makers in the room. Here's his video clip summing up his ideas.

Cognitive biases

I m enjoying the wikipedia entry on cognitive biases. I generally dislike jargon, but right now I like the idea of hyperbolic discounting. The Von Restorff effect really jumps off the page. And all facilitation types will recognise déformation professionelle.

Hat tip: Psyberton.

Hallam Foe

Yesterday I went to the bloggers' screening of Hallam Foe, orchestrated by Hugh Macleod. It was a really good evening and as JP Rangaswami says, very bloggy in nature. I loved the way Dave Mackenzie, the director, introduced the fillm, asking us not to review it, and inviting us to help him figure out what the film's identity is. That request itself reflected the sort of adolescent angst and search for meaning that the film evokes so hauntingly. Like Gia and JP, I'm not going to spoil the experience of figuring out Hallam Foe for yourself by saying much more about the plot. I will say that I found it engaging, intelligent, funny and mysterious in roughly equal measure.

Of course, I'm biassed. Hugh is a friend and this was a freebie. I like being biassed that way... that's what happens when people are successfully engaged in the conversation around any marketing object. Showing us his film in unfinished form was a risk for Dave, but one that I'd say will pay off for him. And totally appropriate to the messy world of blogs where we never really finish anything...

Another straw in the wind

AdPulp spots this from Online Media Daily: NFL team the Cincinatti Bengals are getting into user-created videos.

The [team] will send out e-mail messages today to 40,000 fans asking for user-created videos. The best videos as voted by fans will also be shown on the scoreboard during home games this season at Paul Brown Stadium.

Coffeehouse challenge

In response to my last post, my friend Michael Ambjorn let me know about an interesting evening event about personalised learning. It's in Chelmsford on October 9th. Here's the theme:

Dr West's theme is that it seems obvious that the more learning is tailored to the needs and interests of the individual, the more effective it will be. Education providers are meeting this challenge through modularisation, new combinations and new methods of delivery. In the long run, a radical individualism will affect the concept of knowledge as a social construct and we may come to regret fostering a pic'n'mix approach to education.

I'm pleased to see that the format is conversational. For myself, I quite like the notion of pic'n'mix in education and would enjoy the dialogue that is promised.

I'm busy that evening but it sounds fun.

Organising round passion

I had lunch yesterday with Euan Semple, Alex Kjerulf and Lars Plougmann. The world was generally put to rights and I got to see how many books Alex buys each time he comes to London. I talked about how I think the internet is helping to create a world where it's easier for people to organise themselves around what they are actually passionate about, the same principle that makes Open Space such a great approach to meetings.

I think this presents an interesting challenge to schools and many coporations and brands which put the cart before horse: they try to get us to be passionate around the organisation.

Alex chipped in a thought about knowledge sharing, which is what we're all supposed to be doing these days (instead of knowledge hoarding). Actually, knowledge sharing is something we do quite naturally once we're talking about what we really care about. So many dreary KM initiatives and collaborative tools seem to fail because they miss that point.

Objects of sociality and ooze

On Friday, I gave the opening talk at the annual marketing conference sponsored by Post Danmark. This was a lot of fun.

I got about 50 minutes to talk about Participation Marketing. Basically, that's the same thing as Open Source Marketing: stuff that attempts to engage the customer as co-creator of the product or service, or at least of the conversations around it. I spoke in English, but the rest of the day was in Danish, which was interesting. My friend Jesper Bindslev was able to explain a lot of what was going on, but it was intriguing to see how much I could figure out just from body language and the occasional familiar English marketing expression.

I talked about Objects of Sociability (see this post for the history of this idea, and the notion of ooze that goes with it.) I kept hearing those words amidst the otherwise mysterious Danish that was being spoken.

Basically, I suggested that one thing good marekting does is create these objects - physcial things, or maybe just ideas, around which conversations and play take place that engage the audience. The ipod is an object of sociability, so are lots of successful products and a few promotional ideas.

As per the post I just referenced, I then played the idea of objects of sociability into the acronym OOS and then into the word "ooze". Maybe this muddles things, but I like the idea of ooze too. Consider this picture:

This kid, like all kids, loves the slimy ooze. Ooze is a bit chaotic, it can't be completely controlled, it has a life of its own. I think it makes a good metaphor for what marketing, indeed organsiations in general, are really like. They don't really conform to the idealised diagrams, spreadsheets and flowcharts. Managing ooze is managing complexity, requires flexibility and give and take. Marketing can't be seen as the disciplined imposition on the target audience of the marketing department's dogmas. It needs to be more playful than that. Mentos and Coke probably have detailed marketing plans, but neither could have predicted the spate of videos that arose when people discovered what happened when you combined them. Mentos responded playfully, Coke was a bit straitlaced. Mentos said Yes, And to the customers, Coke said No. But.

I suppose you could also think about what comapanies ooze, as distinct from what they say. Southwest Airlines, at least on a good day, seems to ooze good humour, enthusiasm and playfulness. A lot of brands ooze stuff less agreeable that belies the advertising image. For me, ooze is about the reality that seeps out of organisations, not the image put upon them by the marketing whizzkids.

PS Kudos to Lars Meller Jensen and the guys at 3rd dimension who organised the event. They certainly got their act together. I also loved that as people left the room they got an 8 page newspaper reporting what had just happened. That's a nice bit of ooze too.

The Fox Hotel

I am back from a very interesting trip to Copenhagen. I stayed at the Fox Hotel, based on the general buzz about the place and because it looked different.

It was. I spent the night in a tent! I knew the place was creative but I wasn't quite ready for this. Room 121 is mostly taken up with a tent, with a big duvet inside it. And that's great. I'm bored of supposed luxury hotels that provide "every amenity", which often means hoping you'll pay $10 for a packet of peanuts in your room. It's exciting to run into marketing that makes some kind of demand on you as the customer to engage and to play along. The Fox is cheaper than most of those famous international brands and a lot more interesting.

The next day I was talking about participation marketing and creating conversations. I think the Hotel was a good example of a brand that gets the idea.