You need to embrace ambiguity. When people outside your business are contributing ideas you’re bound to go through periods of ambiguity, when you don't know what the outcome will be and you can’t predict or control it. That's a skill most people in Britain find it very hard to develop. Nick Jankel
As one of Britain's foremeost experts on the subject, Nick Jankel is well placed to evangelise about the problem-solving potential of collaborative innovation. At the Redesigning Business Summit 2010 he outlined some of the business opportunities being opened up by recent technological and social trends.
Read the transcript below.
Nick Jankel, Chief Executive Officer, wecreate
Good morning everybody, it’s a real privilege and honour to be here. I’ve actually got 12 minutes to give you an understanding of the seismic shifts going on in the world of people; all of us out there inwhat’s now called the social media space. So, what I’m going to do, I’ve got a lot of stuff to share with you, and I’m going to put this up on our website with notes – first time ever – and you can download it there. And I’ll be around until after lunch if you want to talk through stuff.
So, how are we thriving, and how to thrive in a collaborative age? The story actually starts back in the '30s. This is the headquarters of GM, obviously quite an important company to think about now, based on what’s happened in the last few years of its history. In the '30s, Alfred Sloane invented, essentially, the form of the modern business; how to manage vast numbers of business units efficiently within a hierarchy. It was the time of the beginnings of a real understanding of what’s now called command and control management. He invented things like the line manager, which I’m sure most of you have experienced; KPIs, output measurements, etc, to keep people managed.
But it was also the time of the invention of, or the perfection of authoritarian marketing; telling consumers what to buy next, making sure they go up the ladder of your brands, and even the idea of planning obsolescence, forcing people to buy again in five, seven, eight years. Now, this is all premised upon understanding of us all here as cogs; cogs in the cycle of produce and consume. Very simple understanding of human nature, and it’s based upon homo-economicus; the understanding of us as economic units, self interested, putting ourselves and our interests first. This is essentially what the last 100 years of business has primarily been about.
Now, of course, people don’t like that very much; people don’t like to be put into a little box, and it’s actually the birth of the union movement. Again, in the '30s, in GM, was the first ever sit-in in one of the GM factories. In fact, GM's history has actually been as much about cars as it has about relations between the unions and the company. And it’s not surprising that it’s having troubles now.
I’m going to introduce to you a very important law pioneered by a cybernetics expert, and a psychiatrist, interestingly, called Ross Ashby. It’s the Law of Requisite Variety – it’s a really important thing to understand. Basically what it says is, 'In an environment where there’s minimal variety (i.e. we’re all cogs doing what we’re told) an organism, to thrive in that environment, needs to have the same level of variety (i.e. very little variety).' But if you live in an environment where there’s massive variety, an organism (i.e. a company or organisation) must reflect the nature and structure of the outside environment.
What’s happening now is, we are moving from a world of monolithic media where the BBC essentially tells us what to believe – imagine the communities that we had in the '50s – to myriad media – which is just a fraction of some of the social media that’s out there at the moment; people talking and sharing and finding each other and connecting and having ideas and complaining in a massive hubbub of noise. So, essentially what I’m here to say, is we’ve got to move from an understanding of the world as mechanistic – you already heard this from a couple of the speakers – cause and effect, linear, put in this input investment, out the other end will come out some kind of something we can measure at the end of it, to a much more networked understanding of the world.
This is a really big challenge for all of us to engage in because, essentially, the world has been rewired by the web. I really mean this very clearly. The way, particularly the younger cohort think about the world is significantly different from the way we do. We have been rewired.
Here’s a few stats just to give you a little sprinkle: There are now a billion tweets a month being tweeted, but a trending topic only last five to ten minutes, on average; things come up, things die, things come up, things die. There are 350 million people on Facebook, and half of them go on every single day. There are a billion videos served by YouTube every day, which means every person on YouTube is watching, roughly, they day, 187 a month of videos, short videos, short form videos.
And in case you think it’s all about 17 year olds, the average Twitter user is 39, the average Facebook user is 38, and over 80% of all social media sites are dominated by women. So basically what’s happening is, power is shifting to us – to people. And it’s shifting virtuously, as we see what power we have, we’re realising that we have more power. It’s called the network effect; it happens with faxes but it also happens with people. We are realising that we are powerful; and as power shifts, hierarchies are subverted.
So, we’ve now got peer powered media. This was the plane going into the Hudson; people saw it on Twitter before CNN had a whiff of it. This is the Iranian revolution, but you might as well look at the Obama campaign; people are now driving politics from the grassroots level. You’ve got peer power with science. Massive arguments about what is legitimate science because people like ourselves can all contribute to websites and projects that are developing knowledge that used to be kept for just the professionals to say, 'Yes, this is science.'
You’ve got peer power creativity happening. People taking IP that you’ve made, remixing it, and creating something different. And you’ve got peer power consumption. This is Kevin Smith, an actor and director and a filmmaker – this is him on a Southwest Airlines plane a few weeks ago, having just been told that he was too fat to fly. This is him in the aeroplane, and he just Twittered in that moment, saying, 'I know I’m fat, but did I really need to be kicked off the plane?' Next thing you know, that night ABC, CNN worldwide, this is on the news. Worldwide in one day, forcing the VP to come back on Twitter and create some kind of response. But there’s pressure on business to respond in the way that the people are now using and talking about media.
Now, this is actually not a new thing. This is from a manifesto I signed when I first started my own consultancy in the late '90s, called the Cluetrain Manifesto, saying; powerful conversations are starting (as we obviously now know), as a direct result markets are getting smarter, and getting smarter than most companies. Very interesting thought. So, this could be a crisis, but as we know in the Chinese language, crisis actually means danger – clear danger for all of us that we have to respond so quickly and so urgently – but it’s also an opportunity.
And these are some of the characteristics, strategic directions that companies that win in this collaborative age seem to show. They empower the edges; Craig’s List, Amazon, Google – it’s all about empowering the people who didn’t used to have power; people on the fringes. It’s about dissolving boundaries. You’ve got open innovation, open IP, this kind of stuff. It’s about co-creating the unthinkable with your peers. So they’ve now got things like NASA trying to get people – us – to contribute to what’s happening on Mars, what’s happening on the moon. The £30 million prize to see who can send a robot to the moon, by Google.
These are all things that are unthinkable when there’s one organisation doing it. It’s about using the long tail, which I’m sure many of you heard about; using niche markets, finding those people who have got real interest in something and serving them using the internet. It's about redesigning business models; this is Amazon's Mechanical Turk which takes the community and gives them very, very simple human tasks to do, and thus creates major impact for organisations that use it.
It’s about using petabyte intelligence. This is the amount of data that’s bring created every day; one petabyte. Then it’s going to be two, then three. So you'll actually be able to see – as Google did recently – outbreaks of mumps occurring, or the flu, before anyone else has seen them, just by analysing vast amounts of data. It’s about augmented reality, which I’m sure some of you have seen about, where your actions with your iPhone or your computer and what you’re seeing, start to interact with the data and everyone else’s contributions.
And a big thought process in this area is about taking the web to the world. The last ten years has been all about 'The web, the web, it’s all on the web,' and now you’re seeing people go, 'Hold on a minute, we live in real lives. Take the web to the world.' There’s Google Earth using its technology to help a tribe in the Amazon protect their boundaries of forest from loggers.
But where I work mostly is actually in culture. This is some really interesting research came out last year from the Judge Institute and in the Journal of Marketing; 4,000 firms researched over 27 countries, and cultural traits are the most important drivers for innovation. Process is important, but process is not as important as the cultural traits, an organisation shows. So, I’m going to show you ten traits that I think are vital for an organisation to survive, possibly even thrive, in an age where we are talking and sharing and consuming and discussing and debating.
The first one is to nurture our collaborative natures. Science has now proven in the last two or three years, that we’re not selfish; we’re actually inherently collaborative, but most organisations treat us like we’re not. So actually, it’s about working at how to nurture the collaborative instincts of your people and the people outside your business. It’s about being radically open. If you want open innovation, which is something I work in, then you also have to be radically open about some of the problems that come up, some of the issues that come up in a collaborative partnership. You have to be able to talk about the frustrations and the anger and the angst, rather than trying to manage it away in a professional hierarchy.
It’s about embracing ambiguity; if you’ve got people outside your business contributing ideas to you, you’ve got suppliers working with you as partners, at design companies working with you as partners, you’re going to have to understand that you’re going to go through these periods – often long periods – of ambiguity, when you’re not going to know what’s going to come out and you can’t predict and control it. And this is a skill that most people in Britain find it very hard to develop, in my experience.
It’s also about working out how to let things emerge; part of that is letting things emerge over time. You’ve got all these different people coming together, not in one team that can be controlled, but they’re coming together, often voluntarily. Things emerge over time, and it takes patience and experimentation. It’s about heeding intuition. You cannot process and analyse all the past data before you need to make a choice. You cannot do it anymore. There’s too much information, there’s too much going on, there’s too much complexity; you’re going to have to start heeding your intuition – your intelligent intuition. Over a period of time you’ve perfected it, and you go, 'You know what, I can’t prove it, we’re going to have to do this, and we’re going to have to work it out and make the best of it that we can.'
It’s about something that I call cycling between the node and the network. Being able to go really, really detailed – the psychology of your consumer, the psychology of your staff – and then in the same moment go right the way back to the big picture; how is that manifesting in the big stage? And then back again, and then back again. So it’s keeping this dialogue, this cycling between the micro and the macro. It’s about celebrating mavericks, not kicking them out or ostracising them into the corner in some weird little hut in Switzerland. This is actually about bringing them in and making them the heroes, because these are the edges of your own organisation who can provide you with some of the ideas and some of the guidance for the future – they’re the prophets, if you like.
It’s about trusting peer leadership. Trusting people – when given the right tools and the right support – will do the right thing in any given situation, with what they know and what their intuition and their insight says. And this is a really important area for me. It’s also about; if you’re going to get people to contribute to your business success, you’re going to have to share back the rewards – you can’t just take all the excitement and the ideas and the interest from social media, use it for your ends and re-churn it out. You see a lot of companies trying to use social media to shove adverts down them rather than to understand this is a different way of living, it’s a different way of doing business.
And finally, it’s about being mission motivated. People, given a chance, want to work in organisations that have a mission, a purpose, and values. And they will respond in kind if you have that very clearly. So, ultimately this is about moving from an understanding of humanity, where the workers, employees, consumers, suppliers, as cogs in the machine, the economic machine, to a holistic understanding of human nature, where we’re all intelligent, we are all intelligent beings in the network. We are interconnected in a very profound way; what happens to me does have an impact in Malawi, and back again; and we are interdependent. And if you allow that to happen in the organisation, you have what the scientists call self-organisation where this is some proteins and a bacteria, they will organise themselves based upon what the environment is telling them, right there and then. They will innovate, mutations and adaptations that solve the environmental challenge without direction.
If can allow this kind of thinking to permeate from organisations into culture, we have a sense of some civic innovation that could happen – civic renewal. And finally, when that happens, what you’re essentially doing is you’re liberating collective magic – and the jazz band is possibly the greatest example of this. Everyone’s an expert in their own instrument, they come together voluntarily, they have a vision and a sense of what they’re going to create for you, but in that moment they’re doing things because they feel it happening. And out of that emergence comes genius. And it has been a real privilege to share some of these ideas with you, so you can get this presentation on the top URL.