Oct 13, 2023 | Governance, Innovation, Strategy
Australia has a problem, a big one. Our KAP Gap is huge and becoming ‘huger’ by the month.
Knowledge-Attitudes-Practise gap is the difference between what people say they will do, and what they actually do.
At some level, we understand what needs to be done, but are so cemented into the good life that we cannot see our way to absorb the pain necessary if our grandchildren are to continue to enjoy the fruits of this country.
How do Australians respond to the reality of the latest Harvard Complexity report which records a slip from 60th in 2000, to 93rd in 2021? Being sandwiched between the manufacturing goliaths of Uganda and Pakistan is hardly a point of pride. (Perhaps we are getting used to it, given the slip of Australian rugby from the top tier to a nation ranged with the minnows of world rugby, but that is another post)
There is a notable reluctance to embrace change. Inevitably, change makes some uncomfortable, so we substitute a fuzzy slogan. There needs to be meat on the bones of an effective slogan that resonates on a deeply personal level, or it remains just fuzzy words. This applies equally to big changes as it does to the little ones we are asked to make every day, it is just that the latter are rarely seen and measured.
How is it that we are still seen as a wealthy nation?
I have an acquaintance who is wealthy, always has been, but he is a lazy sod, pretending to work, being involved in stuff that amuses him. Luckily for him, his father and grandfather were of a different sort. They accumulated wealth from hard work, taking risks, and learning from their mistakes. My acquaintance is wealthy because he is lucky in his parentage, just as Australia is lucky in its abundance of stuff we can dig up and flog that the rest of the world wants.
Little of that nasty four letter word ‘Work’ involved.
Tomorrow, as this is written, there will be a referendum. Irrespective of the view you hold, and the way you will vote, it is hard to argue that the policy choices, and their implementation has not been at an acceptable level to date. You only need to look at the ‘Gap’ between first Australian incarceration rates, suicides, domestic violence, education, and others to come to that conclusion. What this vote will have articulated is the willingness of the Australian population to accept that change is necessary. It may not always be good for everyone, and indeed, will never receive complete agreement of the detail. However, if we reject all change, we also reject all opportunity, which is rarely a good strategy.
Oct 11, 2023 | Governance, Leadership, Marketing
These two words are often wrongly used as similes.
Complicated implies interdependence, you cannot pull it apart, and then put it back together in exactly the same form. Think of a knitted jumper.
Complex implies it can be simplified, much as you unfold a sheet of paper, then are able to refold it and end up in the same place.
Complex and complicated are at either end of a continuum, and rarely is something just complex, or just complicated.
Depending on where a situation or question sits in the continuum, you may be able to simplify somewhat, but not completely before you alter the form of the problem or task. It is rarely a binary choice.
Another way of describing this is the commonly used phrase ‘Think from first principles’.
Our brains have evolved a range of heuristics to deal with variables. However, depending on the people and the context of the variables, our brains can deal with only 3 to 5 at any one time before overload kicks in and confusion, procrastination, and poor choices result. By simplifying, we remove the need to consume cognitive capacity for those things we have classified as benign, to be allocated to the unexpected variables that present either danger or opportunity to us.
Simplicity enables optimisation, repeatability with little or no thought, as it is stable, and predictable. However, we are then tuned to miss the very things that can harm us, and sometimes offers opportunity.
Think about that first time you drove to a new destination. You are following a map or instructions, looking for street signs, and hazards of various types, you are concentrating on the drive. Now consider the same drive when you have been doing it every day for a while. The car seems to be on autopilot, and you are thinking of other things, only superficially aware of your surroundings. Your cognitive capacity is being used for purposes other than navigating you safely to your destination.
Therefore, the state we should be seeking is resilience. The fine line between optimised, but still vigilant to the unexpected variables and able to react to them in ways not locked into the way we did it before.
We need to be able to adjust quickly in a world of constant change, just to keep up.
Header credit: Hugh McLeod at gapingvoid.com
E&OE October 21. It has been pointed our to me that I got complex and complicated the wrong way around in the post above.
Dumb mistakes not picked up by editing do occasionally slip through. When you read the post, just reverse the meaning of the words Complex and Complicated. I considered rewriting the post, but am prepared to wear my mistakes, so left it as written. Also, I cannot help but wonder if Seth Godin saw the post, shook his head, and wrote a better one.
Oct 9, 2023 | Marketing, Social Media
Being able to market to a ‘persona’ the picture you build of your ideal customer, is a great leap forward enabled by digital. Our ability to define who buys our products, when, why, where, how, instead of what, and so on.
However, there is a flip side.
The flip is the customer, the real one.
They are not stereotypical ‘personas’ they are people, with homes and families, hopes, dreams, problems, prejudices, and challenges. They do not care about your marketing processes, how they fit into your profile, or where they are supposed to be in the ‘customer journey’.
They are people first, customers second.
Forget that simple fact amongst all the marketing tech tools, and you will lose them.
The fumbles in your process are not your customers problem. While they may like the convenience of you having some of their data, they are wary of having that privilege abused. They also like to be in control of their own lives, so be careful of denying them the ability to make their own choices as you pursue them, setting out to ‘catch and extract’ by a variety of means.
Choice is one of the few areas of our lives where the individual still has complete control. Compromise that, and it will not go well for you.
Oct 6, 2023 | Culture, Innovation, Leadership
Metrics increasingly drive our commercial lives.
We need the metrics to ensure that we are focused on the outcome, it drives the resource allocation choices that must be made.
Usually, we face a series of binary choices, do A or B, then X or Y. This is comfortable for us, our brains are triggered by binary, friend or foe, run towards or run away, is it a stick or a snake? Evolutionary psychology at work.
In the short/medium term this works well, it ensures focus on what is deemed currently to be important. However, it actively excludes stuff that is ‘interesting’ but not necessarily useful now. Those require us to accept risk, experiment, be comfortable with failure, all the things that our evolutionary psychology has bred out of us. Next time you want to spend some resources on something because it is ‘interesting’ but outside the plan, good luck getting that formally approved. You will have to be prepared to be an outlier, renegade, argue against what has gone before, and you know what happens to many of those who do that.
Breakthroughs only occur when someone forges a path towards the unknown because it is for some reason, interesting to them. It will always be inconsistent with the status quo, it will always be out in the fringes, messy, usually unseen by most, but that is where the breakthrough gold hides.
To see these outlier factors requires critical thinking, a disapproval of the safe optimised way forged by the status quo. By definition, you cannot plan for the unexpected. However, you can create a culture where critical thinking is encouraged, and fed into the processes that together can become a renewed status quo.
These interesting things do not comply with the way we create plans and budgets. They are long term; they do not accommodate the plans associated with most of the daily activities we undertake. They are the source of long-term breakthrough; they are often the result of serendipity. Penicillin was not developed because Fleming had an objective to develop an antibiotic. The product category ‘antibiotic’ did not exist. Serendipity took place, then it took 15 years and a war to become commercialised.
How many breakthroughs can you think of that emerged from a plan? They always come through long experimental slog, underpinned by critical thinking.
My conclusion is That critical Thinking and planning are not mutually exclusive, but are uncomfortable bed-mates. in the absence of the encouragement and culture that makes uncomfortable relationships possible, they will not survive together.
Header credit: It is a reproduction by Hugh McLeod of the wonderful copy written by the creative team at Chiat Day advertising for Apple after Steve Jobs returned.
Sep 27, 2023 | Leadership, Strategy
Intuition is widely misunderstood, often it is seen as a ‘gift’, a rare ability to generate ‘insight’ into a situation.
Over my long commercial life, I have come to a different conclusion. Intuition can be generated and managed when it is recognised that it is the outcome of a process, like most things. This process may be qualitative, and cumulative over a long period, but it remains a process. Again, over that long life I have seen it as the result of ‘environmental research’.
This is the combination of directed qualitative and quantitative research, thinking, wide reading, and engagement with people from as wide a palette as you can find. About the best source of what most would call ‘wisdom’ will come from talking to customers and consumers. Why are they buying product X instead of product Y , understanding the usually automatic trade-offs made subconsciously. What are they buying it instead of, how will it be used, how do they measure the ‘value’ of the purchase. I call it ‘Environmental research’
Do the data thing first, which avoids, or at least moderates and minimises the confirmation bias, seeing only the things that conform what you already believe.
Do this well, and your intuition will improve, while you may not even be aware of the improvement. It is a process, data first, hypothesise, test, look again to reform the hypotheses, and test. Looks a lot like the scientific method!
