I have been listening to TED talks for about 3 years. They are brilliant! Here’s a Seth Godin talk about Tribes. Here’s the blurb:
Seth Godin argues the Internet has ended mass marketing and revived a human social unit from the distant past: tribes. Founded on shared ideas and values, tribes give ordinary people the power to lead and make big change. He urges us to do so.
An interesting thing happened 2 days ago:
My daughter was playing a DVD memory game on the TV. The game required that you observe a freeze-frame image taken from the DVD movie for 10-15 seconds. Then you are given 3 questions to assess your powers of observation. The challenge became irresistible and soon I was also competing against the clock. Unfortunately for my self esteem, I did not fare well, no matter how hard I tried!
My wife, who was sitting with us, then made an insightful comment. “It would really help to know the question before scanning the image. It would make getting the answer so much easier.” Its obvious I know, but dwell on this wisdom for a moment.
If somehow we were empowered with the questions before being presented with a matter, wouldn’t it be easier to discern or perceive answers more astutely?
The significance of this? Perhaps in the quest for knowledge and enlightenment, we need to spend more time working on the questions!
Seth Godin’s blog post about benefiting from history is just up my alley. Here are some key points:
Marketers are good at looking ahead. We predict/create the future, working to build an idea or a product into something that will matter more tomorrow than it does today.
The focus on the future, though, encourages us to take our attention away from what has worked in the past.
My question to marketers with a huge idea, something that will change everything, is, “tell me about how someone has done this before.”
In other words, identify the relevant pattern of success, and apply it to where you want success.
Here’s an interesting observation. It’s from an excerpt from Steven Levitt’s book Freakonomics.
Fear best thrives in the present tense. That is why experts rely on it; in a world that is increasingly impatient with long-term processes, fear is a potent short-term play. Imagine that you are a government official charged with procuring the funds to fight one of two proven killers: terrorist attacks and heart disease. Which do you think the members of Congress will open up the coffers for? The likelihood of any given person being killed in a terrorist attack are infinitessimally smaller than the likelihood that the same person will clog up his arteries with fatty food and die of heart disease. But …
I noted a cynical blog post the other day (I forget where) that both Bush and Obama have strategically worked this principle to push through their pet projects & ideologies. (Incidentally, Obama seems to be better at it than Bush – he managed in his first month to spend what took Bush eight years.) George Soros endorses this viewpoint in his book The Bubble of American Supremacy. He argues therein that Bush opportunistically used the fear generated by 9/11 to further his “misguided pursuit of American supremacy”. Current media-fanned fears of hyperinflation, deflation, systemic economic collapse, depression and financial Armageddon has, in effect, given Obama a very large, if not, open check book.
Revert back to the opening quote from Freakonomics, and I think a pattern emerges – statistics, fear and manipulation.
So it was with interest I read in a blog post today that “There’s still risk it could all blow up.” These were the words of AIG CEO Edward Liddy when he testified before the House Financial Services Subcommittee yesterday regarding the AIG bonuses debacle. Note the catastrophic language.
Hmmm, not sure what that has to do with bonuses. With so many out of work finance gurus, surely these AIG bonus recipients would be grateful to just have a job. Seems like some just took the money and ran!
p.s. Regarding Freakonomics, why do we always remember Steven (Levitt) and forget Stephen (Dubner)?
Photo by Muffet
In science, chaotic systems are a higher level of order than the brain can comprehend. They are complex, which is different from complicated. Sometimes we mix these two adjectives up. For a certainty, they are not the same.
Complex systems are, well, complex. (Sorry to state the obvious – I just can’t think of a better way to describe it.) The lesson though is that they are too complex to fully comprehend. It is interesting that natural complex / chaotic systems produce beautiful, magnificent, awe-inspiring events. Take for example the earth’s climatic system. It produces the snowflake which is truly beautiful.
I digress.
Yesterday, I wrote about pivitol points. (Actually Seth Godin wrote about them, I just picked up on his theme.) So it was fascinating that today I came across an article penned in 1997 by Dana Meadows entitled Places to Intervene in a System. Here’s an excerpt from the beginning of the article:
Folks who do systems analysis have a great belief in “leverage points.” These are places within a complex system (a corporation, an economy, a living body, a city, an ecosystem) where a small shift in one thing can produce big changes in everything. The systems community has a lot of lore about leverage points. Those of us who were trained by the great Jay Forrester at MIT have absorbed one of his favorite stories. “People know intuitively [emphasis mine] where leverage points are. Time after time I’ve done an analysis of a company, and I’ve figured out a leverage point. Then I’ve gone to the company and discovered that everyone is pushing it in the wrong direction!”
There is a lot of interesting stuff in this article – way too much to digest in one small post – suffice to pick up on this idea that we intuitively know where the leverage points are.
Let’s test this out. Economic systems are emergent; complex. (Whether the latest events in the modern economy are magnificent is debatable. But let’s resist the urge to get sidetracked.) Where are the leverage points in our modern, ailing economy? What did your intuition tell you when you first heard that the US government (and later Europe) was going to (attempt a) rescue ? Was your reaction that the leverage points being pushed were in the wrong direction’?
Photo by Muffet
Humans in general seem to resist change; so when change is forced upon us, panic often results.
“We cling to our presumed choices, our dreams, our distant plans and hopes, as if they were lifelines keeping us from careening off into space [my comment: chaos] , and perhaps they are.” -A quote from David Pollard’s blog How to Save the World.
Simply our comfort zone (pattern) is under threat.
What do we do when we have no choice and change is thrust upon us? Seth Godin has some sound advice. Rather than change everything, look for pivtol points to make change work for you. Here are his examples cited on his blog entry:
- Keep the machines in your factory, but change what they make.
- Keep your customers, but change what you sell to them.
- Keep your providers, but change the profit structure.
- Keep your industry but change where the money comes from.
- Keep your staff, but change what you do.
- Keep your mission, but change your scale.
- Keep your products, but change the way you market them.
- Keep your customers, but change how much you sell each one.
- Keep your technology, but use it to do something else.
- Keep your reputation, but apply it to a different industry or problem.
Trauma counselors are trained to apply what Seth is suggesting. They term it reframing. Apparently, this pattern of reframing can be used in various situations and by various practitioners.
Photo by HansSolo
Ever had a hunch, a “gut feeling” about something? Often this intuition process proves to be much more accurate than a normal linear thinking process. Why?
I suggest that this is the result of a pattern recognition capacity inherent within our mind. It seems that our subconscious mind is continuously organizing and grouping stimuli into relevant patterns. When faced with situations that trigger previously recognised and organised patterns, our intuition is invoked.
The result – we often anticipate what comes next with surprising accuracy.
When I have overridden these “gut feelings”, I seem to have paid a price every time. Is that your experience too?
Wikipedia is amazing, but it seems that ants have been at collaboration long before Jimmy Wales came up with the idea. But then again, observations recorded in Steven Johnson’s book Emergence, humans often unconsciously behave in similar ways. Wikipedia is proof. Ants achieve their goals, it seems, without active interference of a leader. So does Wikipedia. But as Johnson observes, there must be enabling rules.
Is there a lesson herein for the leader? Perhaps. Focus on establishing rules that enable and encourage collaboration, which in turn will result in significant results.
I read Seth Godin’s blog everyday. His post What are you good at? was an aha moment for me. In the post he explains the difference between process and content.
Why should you care? If you consider yourself an entrepeneur, its a key success factor. Here’s are some key excerpts from Seth’s blog:
Domain knowledge is important, but it’s (often) easily learnable.
Process, on the other hand, refers to the emotional intelligence skills you have about managing projects, visualizing success, persuading other people of your point of view, dealing with multiple priorities, etc. This stuff is insanely valuable and hard to learn.
As the world changes ever faster [my comment: becomes more chaotic], as industries shrink and others grow, process ability is priceless. Figure out which sort of process you’re world-class at and get even better at it. Then, learn the domain… that’s what the internet is for.
