Why mice get to eat dinosaurs

Photo by rawpixel on Unsplash

Many of us work for a reason. We have something we want to achieve. We want to make change, fix a problem, get stuff done. In the ideal scenario 100% of our efforts are focused on exactly that.

Funnily enough, that's also the reason for every business ever to start. Every start-up is a solution to a problem that someone stumbled on, woke up screaming about or otherwise identified a 'gap on the market'.

So why does it often feel like your ambition to get things done, to make things better, ends up being constrained by the very organisations that were meant to be configured to share in and scale your ability to make that difference?

It's an old conundrum - labelled variously Dis-economies of Scale, career politics, empire building, silo'd thinking etc. Whatever the name the result is immense waste, both for the businesses themselves and for the customers they aim to serve.

This waste gets formalised in structural inertia that constrains the organisation's ability to adapt.
And unless these are understood, acknowledged and a plan for responding to them is drawn up - well that inertia will keep things as they were, stalling the ability to compete.

Of course you don't need to worry if there are no new entrants to your market arriving without all those constraints. But if there are (there always are) then you must address them or try to compete with roughly half your capability and capacity to respond focused on dealing with internal drag instead of focused on meeting market need.

The start-up mentality comes without the brakes. It's little surprise therefore that in case after case the businesses that have succeeded since digital began (you know the examples off by heart by now) have been start-ups built on a different way of working. I'm not saying every start-up will out-compete every incumbent. I am saying that those that survive long enough to emerge to compete come without the inertia of incumbents and are instantly better positioned to perform better.

The inability or unwillingness to identify and deal with their inertia is also why it is so hard to point to a large scale incumbent business in any sector and claim they have pulled off a genuine transformation driven by digital. Orgs that were not born digital have to deal with a heap of internal inertia such as:

Resistance to:

• Ending old supplier relationships in order to establish new ones. Better the devil you know, right?
• Admitting you may have backed the wrong horse (eg ending investments you built the case for and/or supported in the past). I haven't got to where I am today without sticking to my guns, right?
• Moving monoliths of capability and capacity from old to new requirements. What do we do with all these mouths we always fed with the old, while we scramble towards where the market is actually headed?
• Cannibalising what you do with cheaper alternatives. But that hits my margins! (Sure, wait for someone to eat your business from outside instead then).
• Anything we aren't absolutely clear about, have little experience in, or isn't core to our strengths. We have no expertise in X. Hint - if it's new, nor does anyone else. The thing to be expert in is learning and responding at speed.
• New Data. Seriously - how many times have you heard 'we tried this before and it failed' when the whole landscape in which the plan was meant to operate has shifted? New guys don't have your hang-ups (or as you may prefer to call it in the boardroom, your 'corporate memory')
• Accepting that success in your old model is not what's required to succeed in the new. Proven leaders in the old are just the folk for the new, right?

All of these and several others lead to the most debilitating inertia of all - rabbit-in-headlights syndrome. This is the resistance to making a decision in time to jump.

Of course - not only must you be able to make a decision fast enough, you also need to know which way to jump. That's where real strategy plays, where you ditch the 4x4s to find the insight to really understand the landscape, your opponents, the direction of travel of change/market demand, the wisest places to attack and defend, and the challenges yourselves and your rivals face in implementing the tactics that attack or defence will require. And I've shared much on this in recent posts. (eg The Job Of Digital Strategy).

For today, let's focus on how we can remove some of this inertia.

Perhaps its worth taking some lessons from DevOps (and emerging DesOps). It seems odd to me that many incumbent organisations are taking up, or being sold on, the advantages of one or both to make things but rarely getting the hint that perhaps this is how they should be organising themselves to operate for value.

For example, high-level lessons from DevOps:

Measure: Localise accountability.

This requires the redistribution of the power to act - you can't ask for accountability without it. Flattened hierarchies are pretty much inevitable.

Speed: Get to “learn” as quickly as possible.

That demands some Scrum Mastery... driving the notion of server-leaders whose job is to support the makers on their mission, and remove obstacles. If the inertias are your obstacles then, game on. This one organisational focus could save it.

Responsive: Pivot on lessons quickly.

See above. Speed without the power/capacity/capability to respond is just a faster way to crash).

Automate: Use software to do more to help create and manage what can be automated.

See also the idea of Scrum Mastery - as in removing obstacles, accelerating pace, repeating what can be replicated (getting to nuts and bolts you can re-use vs making a new set of nuts and bolts for each piece of work).

Small chunks: Reduce risk through compartmentalisation.

This one large orgs really struggle with. Small teams working at speed, enjoying distributed power with the capacity and capability to act on their own decisions).

There is power in these basic tenets of DevOps, much of it writ-through agile approaches and all of it core to a new way of working.

But let's be clear, this requires a different way of working, different flows of capital, different distributions of power. These come as standard in start-ups. But unless and until you are able to match the freedom to move that a start-up is born with, you will be out-competed, as sure as mammals followed dinosaurs.

Standardising innovation will deliver disruption at scale

I joined in a conversation on Linkedin triggered by one innovator positing a view on what disruption really is - and a dozen more piling in to place their version of the truth on record.

My point of view was/is this:

A technology trend has the potential to be disruptive. 

The response to it is a business model built on the co-evolution of practice which that trend prompts. If that response is a new model creating value in a new way, it will disrupt the existing landscape.

I felt the lack of clarity/consistency/agreement about a pivotal term like disruption revealed how far from being truly disruptive the innovation industry currently is. This comes as small surprise given that it is a core part of digital transformation (being the way-of-working How of digital transformation). And as I have previously pointed out - Digital Transformation faces its own lack of clarity on the supply side, at a time when demand is outstripping the industry's ability to supply it.

The nuts and bolts of innovation remain too often hand-wrought. We can not expect innovation to become the new way of working at a scale and regularity that the speed of digital demands, unless and until we bring a little more standardisation and certainty to it.

This was something I also referred to in: A Shared Language of Innovation recently. In that article I discuss the way in which terms such as MVP, POC, Pilot and Prototype get used in multiple ways. This speaks to the current lack of standardisation and uncertainty (when the client demand is for more standards and more certainty).

But that was just a start. Take a look at the terms I italicised in my initial POV above. We could have a lengthy debate on the meaning of all of them. Which would waste effort, time and intellect which would be better spent on creating the higher order complexity in which value actually resides.

Innovation - particularly where it relates to digital transformation - must agree and stick to making standard sized nuts and bolts. 

Until it gets close to ubiquity its impact will be limited.

There is little Disruption in making nuts and bolts - but there is next to none without them.

Consulting faces a digital reset

Disruption creates opportunity. In the challenges to our cherished business models and organisational norms there is the requirement to act.
The burning bridge beneath our feet prompts us to make significant and often rapid movement. Just such a moment has arrived for the consulting world.
Platforms enhanced by AI are making application development, business process engineering and customer management all things a business can now do for itself - shifting the role of technology consulting. (in large part out of the door).
New ways of working are giving everyone in the business (and from IT) access to human insight, ideation and rapid innovation - blurring roles and delivering organisational adaptability to align with the needs of the digital world.
And these two drivers alone would be significant enough to force a change in perspective.
But add to the plans in the UK to overhaul regulations in respect of the big four accountancy firms and business as normal faces an existential threat.
KPMG has already announced is will no longer offer consultancy to businesses it audits. It, like the others, has been down this road before.
The Enron scandal in the US prompted a break-up and realignment that resulted in Atos, BearingPoint, Cap Gemini. and a merry go round of acquisitions, rebrands and bankruptcy. Accenture while moving first, was born out of the same climate of concern over  operating models.
So we can expect to see great change in the market.
And with this comes the opportunity to reconfigure consulting for the digital world.
In many ways the industry is late to the party. Digital has wrought its disruption to media, retail, travel, utilities, even government.  Now the consulting business has the opportunity to press its reset.
I believe that means becoming genuinely digital. Digital first. Because all business is becoming digital.  Business is changing/has changed the way it thinks about value, about customer, about experience, about responsiveness (to market mastery).
That means consulting must identify its own a clear value proposition that makes sense in a digital world - understanding its place in what are no longer supply chains or value chains, but eco-systems.

• It means setting a strategic position as a value hypothesis to be tested through rapid iteration with customer insight at the heart.
• It means embracing new ways of working and making them the way to work from pitch to delivery - emphasising customer-led design, agility and market responsiveness
• It means changing KPIs to deliver the open, collaborative, trust-building behaviours required of organisational vs individual performance.
• It means addressing digital capabiltity and capacity short-falls in creative and scalable ways (see also blurry people)
• It means establishing the legal and commercial frameworks to support rapid partnership models and value-led billing models
• It means organising around product/service design, development and life-cycle management
• It means tackling ambiguity head on - with minimum viable organisations from which to scale out fast, enabled by blurry people and responsive products and services

Make no mistake - when disruption comes knocking at this scale, incremental change will only delay the inevitable. The start-up mentality IS the digital mentality.

The networked world can make brands more relevant than ever

Brands risk losing relevance in a networked world - if they continue to apply broadcast, one-size-fits-all thinking to it.
But, by listening, responding and adapting to its group-forming nature, brands can become more relevant than ever.

Chuffed to say the following slidedeck was selected to be featured on the slideshare homepage on Aug 19.

Adapting Brands To The Networked World

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: brands marketing)

What the network (the internet) is for:
The internet is for forming groups.
The fact that people can use it to organise themselves around shared interests, passions and aims (communities of purpose) at next-to-no-cost, disrupts everything.
People can organise themselves to achieve what they want on a niched global scale.
This has world-changing implications for all forms of mediation - branding and brand messages included.

Three key disruptions:

1. Who gets to create content (control messages)? Any and everyone.
   
2. Who gets to distribute content (share messages)? Any and everyone
   
3. Who gets to control the user experience? The user is the destination now. They control their own A-where-ever journey.

You can't target every community of purpose. They can.

This 10-slide deck explains how allowing messages to evolve is the most efficient way of transmission in the networked world - and the only way of reaching into the increasingly long tail. It is the right response to life in a complex adaptive system.

Without this reach your ability to achieve scale in the networked world relies wholly on one-size-fits-all quality. That's fine in broadcast mediums. But the network is not a broadcast medium. In networks, where communities of purpose form, relevance wins every time.

Why Traditional Ad Models will not work in social networks (and what will...)

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: advertising networks)

The timescale:
The great disruption of the internet has only just begun.
It is only with the arrival of social networks that the majority of users have been offered an easy-to-use interface for accessing the power of the network; group forming (with purpose) on a global scale. When an interface becomes ubiquitous, then significant change occurs. Cite: The telephone.

It is only three years since myspace first clocked more page impressions than google. It is only three years since YouTube started changing the way we think about television.
The great disruption of the internet started just three years ago. You ain't seen nothing yet!

Key Lessons


1. Listen:

Brands are what their users say they are.
Noah Brier's Brand Tags illustrates this in a so-funny-it-hurts (and not in a good) way. Check out your brand now at brandtags.net. There is a UK version too, but data is currently a little patchy. Make it richer, here.

Users tweet about coke, british airways, o2, macdonalds, or anything else you care to name. Search using your own terms at summize.com (twitter search)

Their conversations tell you not only what they think about your brands, but also how, where and when they use them and who they are using them with. They use them as the content that sparks their conversations.

The conversations are happening with or without your consent, on or off your own mediated forums, branded social networks and chat rooms, in every connection between every node. Where people are, they talk. And where they talk, they talk about you.

Some brands are making great use of the new social mediums. Zappos (an online shoe retailer in the US), for example. And David Armano at Logic + Emotion offers a useful reminder of how brands should approach social media (using twitter as his example).

You can't build communities or control the conversation. You can enable. Join them around their campfires. Be prepared to listen, then serve them with things that are useful - things they they will think are cool enough to pass on to others, who they think will think its cool, too. They are best placed to judge this. Not you.

You've got to be joking?
Look on the funny side. Think how jokes are adapted to be passed on. How do you select which gag to tell which person or gathering. How do you adapt it to suit. That adaption = adoption by the next community of purpose.

The business case
Since approximately 70% of purchase decisions are made based on friend's recommendations (according to Forrester) - you have to seriously consider focusing more of your spend on connecting where the conversations are happening and placing higher value on the conversations and the results of those conversations.

Radian6 among other sentiment trackers, can reveal how your brands are being talked about. That's the information gathering phase... But there is a tangible connection between trust and responsiveness, as Jeff Sonstein says.

2. Respond
In the networked world marketing isn't done to them, it's done by them. Think less about where the eyeballs are and more where the mouths and ears are. And think about joining their conversations in real time.

Real time captures the moment of inspiration. "I want to buy X". It is the essence of two of my more simple concepts, the Intention Economy. and Lean-To-Marketing.

Responses that work:

Widgets with personal outcomes.
Widgets that allow users to adapt them to better suit them to the community with whom they choose to share them next, are a brilliant fit with the networked world.

There are numerous examples. One of my favourites was Pampers US campaign last Christmas. It lowered technical barriers to allow any and everyone to mash up pictures of their own kids with a beautiful video and Silent Night message of Christmas peace. And that made it a widget with a personal outcome. Anyone who did it would want to share it with their close relatives, at least. And each of the receipients may like the idea sufficiently to adapt it to include their own children, and pass it on to the next adhoc community... and on it goes. Unfortunately it is no longer available here.

Others include the Simpsonizeme.com (can you see what they'd done there?) which turns your mugshot into a Simpsons version of yourself, to coincide with the movie release. That does live on, in association with BurgerKing.

In each case we create a version for ourselves to take on our journey with us. And in the process it becomes our message to share with our communities.

Mark Earls (author of Herd) suggests "give them something to do together".

The Cadbury's Gorilla's manifold reinterpretations on YouTube illustrate the power of this idea. And here's an important lesson, whether or not Cadbury wanted the network to take its idea and play with it and share it or not, that's exactly what happened. (hint, they aren't in control of the message. They never were).

You can tap into this.
There are three conditions required for a successful widget.
1. A willingness to relinquish control.
2. Toolkits users can play with.
3. Creative users.

We've clearly got creative users. We can make their lives easier by lowering the technical barriers (as Pampers did) and providing tool-kits to make co-creation easier (just as NiN have by providing tools on their website to allow fans to easily remix their work and share the results).

And since that which we create, we embrace, we're more likely to take on the role of marketer on behalf of what we have created, selecting the right communities of purpose to share the outcomes with.

2 & 3 are relatively easy. It's number 1 many struggle with. But without it you're left trying to control a message - trying to dictate where and when and how it will be delivered. And you're not very good at that - at least you're nowhere near as good as the people living in those communities.

This post How We Are Made Great discusses how individually we cannot hope to be in control of turning the flock, how important it is to take a human social approach to changing opinion or behaviour.

In this world even the role of links is challenged (as I discussed in Portability is the new Linkworthy)
They did a great job at discovering people through content.
But we're entering a world in which content is discovered through people.
Here being pointed at is less important than being taken with. Widgets are consumate taken-with enablers.

Going on the journey all brands must make if they are to adapt to survive in the networked world goes more than skin deep. It requires cultural shift, a cultural shift that makes the brand itself a better fit with the networked world. We are in transition - so broadcast models still have great value - but the speed of the transition becomes faster by the day.



Great examples of brands listening to and adapting to the networked world:
Zappos understand that customer service (human interaction) is everyone's responsibility.
Pampers makes your kids the stars Christmas campaign.
NiN make mash-ups easy and shareable.
Where are the Joneses takes Ford to new places.
The Simpsons/Burger King
Itsmy.com (their user-chooses-the-ad model leverages the social graph in a brilliantly simple way).
Spinvox for listening and responding. (and that reminds me of qik's lean-too marketing)
Carphone Warehouse listens... (example of inevitable two-speed culture in a giant?)

Your further examples welcome. Post links in the comments below and I'll add them to the list as they come in.