Aug 22, 2024 | Collaboration, Communication, Governance
Throughout history, humans have existed in small groups, tribes, and clans. We have worked together for the common good of the small tribe, and often, perhaps most often, been at odds with the tribe across the river.
British anthropologist Robin Dunbar introduced his theory that humans can maintain stable social relationships with no more than 150 people. This is a theory now so well accepted that ‘Dunbar’s number‘ has almost become a cliché.
The phrase ‘Stable Social Relationships’ has particular relevance in the age of social media platforms. How many friends do you have on Facebook, connections on LinkedIn, followers on Instagram?? For many, it is way beyond 150, often into the many hundreds, and often thousands.
How do you maintain Stable Social Relationships’ with that number of people?
Answer: you cannot.
Social media gets the blame for all sorts of things, rightly so, but it is not the fault of the platforms, it is the fault of evolution.
Our application of technology has run way ahead of our evolutionary capacity to manage it and retain the relationships that made us the most successful species ever.
It seems to me that the growth of private messaging, reversion to personalised even hand written notes, and emotional engagement of ‘Local’ things is a response to the ‘platformisation’ of our social relationships.
I think it is a trend that will continue and grow.
The power of social media platforms will slowly erode as more one to one enablers incrementally retake the ground lost. In the process, we humans will build up ‘evolutionary resistance’ to their power.
I do however see some hurdles in the way, the dark side of social media is as powerful as ever, and Dr Dunbar has little advice on that score.
Header cartoon credit. Lynch. (I have no idea where I found it)
Jun 14, 2024 | Communication, Governance
You cannot expect the right answer to come from the wrong question.
Too often we spend inordinate amounts of time trying to answer those questions before we understand the context or the ‘frame’ from which the answer will come.
Before anything else, to ensure the best answer possible, consider all the ‘frames’ through which the situation in front of you could be seen. Hypothesise what alternatives to the immediately obvious could be possible that might drive the situation you are examining.
Several months ago, early on a summer Saturday evening, I was walking my dog. As I passed the church at the end of my street, I saw a vague acquaintance crying.
There were a few other people milling around, so I just made an assumption without realising that is what I had done, and offered to help if I could. Her response was that she was Ok, crying for joy, her first grandchild had just been baptised.
Clearly the question that popped into my head led to an entirely to the wrong conclusion that her crying was from distress.
The frame through which I observed the woman crying led to making an automatic, but incorrect conclusion.
How often in our commercial lives do we ask questions which just assume the presence of some factor, when in fact that assumption is wrong?
The lesson here is make sure you have the context right before you start coming up with answers.
Header credit: Tom Gauld at www.tomgauld.com
Apr 10, 2024 | Analytics, Communication
It seems that ‘the truth’ is a malleable concept.
We are overwhelmed by opinion masquerading as fact, economic and social models designed to deliver a predetermined outcome, managed correlation equated to causation, and market research that asks the wrong questions of the wrong people.
What is truth to one person is nonsense to another.
We should be able to see ‘the truth’ about what has passed, there is data that should distinguish fact from fiction. However, we still fail to discern the truth from amongst the data available for analysis.
Who is winning the war in the Ukraine?
Depends on who you ask, and both sides have data that shows conclusively that they are winning.
Remember Vietnam? I do.
The Americans had an overwhelming advantage in material, technology, and logistics. How could a little country with few resources and no technology of their own, face and win against the mightiest war machine the world has ever seen?
Impossible but it happened.
Until the Tet offensive commenced in January 1968, there was no doubt in anyone’s mind, apart from the North Vietnamese, that it was only a matter of time until the might of the Americans became overwhelming.
The Americans had data that proved to them they were winning, despite the secret conclusions contained in the Pentagon Papers. It was not until the spring offensive in 1974 that it was obvious to all that the American ‘Facts’ that were being analysed were irrelevant, and the conclusions drawn were terminally wrong.
The clear answer to the question in the header is: ‘only when you analyse the right data.’
Header credit: Hugh McLeod at Gapingvoid.com
Feb 23, 2024 | Communication, Marketing
Blog posts live on, as does anything posted to the net.
Sometimes they come back to bite us, sometimes they merge from a long hibernation to live again.
Last thing you want is for that Facebook photo from that wild party at university to emerge a decade later when interviewing for that ‘ideal job’.
On the other hand, a simple idea in hibernation for a decade can suddenly wake up and add new value. For someone, its time has come!
It happened yesterday.
A simple blog post from 14 years ago that has hibernated without being disturbed for most of those 14 years woke up yesterday, and went ‘ballistic’.
(Ballistic is a relative term, but in the context of the billions of posts out there, and the usual readership numbers of StrategyAudit, it was ballistic)
Whoever you are that stumbled across this old post, and obviously shared it to your networks, thanks, and I hope you are able to leverage the idea to your great benefit.
Feb 12, 2024 | Branding, Communication, Customers
Last week I provided a template for a Customer Value Proposition. The template works well, but ‘Customer Value Proposition’ is a piece of marketing jargon which just means making a promise to your customers.
This presupposes that you actually know who your ideal customers are, and what sort of promise would be attractive to them.
In the January February 2024 Harvard Business Review there is an article called ‘The right way to build your brand‘ written by Roger Martin and two Co-authors. The article sets out research that proves the hypothesis that making a specific promise to customers is more attractive than a generic claim of some level of excellence. The specific promise is about the benefit a customer will receive with use of the product. A generic claim to greatness is just about the product.
It does not surprise that the first is more powerful than the second.
‘Your promise is your strategy’ is a sub headline towards the end of the article. When you think about it, the observation must be right. Strategy is a process of influencing factors over which you have no control in such a way that the subsequent behaviour of the customers benefits your enterprise rather than an alternative. Making a promise of performance in delivering an outcome desired by a customer is about the strongest driver of short-term behaviour I can think of.
Delivering on the promise, will build trust.
Right at the end the authors ask four crucial but simple questions that can be used to determine if a proposed advertising campaign is worth investing in:
- Is the campaign based on a clear unambiguous customer promise?
- Were customer insights used to identify a promise the customers value?
- Is the promise framed in a way that is truly memorable?
- Were product marketing, sales, operations, and customer service involved to ensure the promise will be consistently fulfilled?
To me, this sounds like a comprehensive framework by which to decide if a proposed communication campaign is a worthwhile investment.
Dec 11, 2023 | Change, Communication
Following on from a previous post about the value of information, it seems relevant to ask how long any value created lasts.
We are all familiar with the notion of the ‘1/2 life’. The time it takes for radioactivity of an element to decay by 1/2. Uranium 238 has a 1/2 life of several billion years.
What about the 1/2 life of information?
The 1/2 life of a daily newspaper is arguably 1 day, today’s news is ‘tomorrows fish wrapper’. For 99.9% of blog posts, and most other so called ‘content’, it is about 2 seconds. This seems odd in what is supposedly the ‘Information age’, why is the life so short in most cases, and what make the difference for the 0.1%?
The answer seems to be: It depends on the utility of the information, which is partly a function of the ‘friction’ or resistance which is applied to its transmission.
Businesses, and most institutions are structured to be top down in functional silos, a system that evolved before digitisation of information arrived at our inboxes. This enabled the scaling of effort and the most efficient allocation of resources. A 20th century solution to the challenge of information transfer and leverage.
In the 21st century, with digitisation, the structures of the 20th century are redundant. They are simply too slow to be competitive in an environment where the action happens at digital speed on the ‘front lines’ of customer interaction. It takes too long for the siloed decision making processes to work. Customers will now move quickly to someone who is able to satisfy their need on the spot.
We have to turn our power structures upside down, and give the front lines the authority to make on the spot decisions within a much broader remit than was previously the case.
This creates huge complications for organisations, as the status quo is upset. The power people at the top have worked to achieve all their lives is diluted, and for those at the bottom, suddenly they are being tasked to take decisions that last week were being referred up the chain.
There is a driver of activity, always present, but to date well in the background for most. This is the ‘operating rhythm’ of the market in which they compete. When their decision cycles are slower than the operating rhythm of the market, the market will go elsewhere, or at the very least, opportunities will be lost.
Getting ‘inside’ the operating rhythm of your market, being able to respond quicker than the market reacts, is an emerging key to strategic success.
The 1/2 life of information is now in the hands of others, those who really count, by being customers.
That is why the OODA loop, conceived by US fighter pilot John ’40 second’ Boyd in the 60’s is so relevant to 21st century competition.
