True insight or the myth of experience

Tufte long ago shaped my belief that the way in which we present data is more important in shaping the way we think about it, than the data itself. This belief was taken to a new level when I saw this illustration representing research findings (Courtesy of Bob Waddington).

At stake here is the myth that direct experience leads to knowledge. The graph is simple enough. It represents the effects of various experimental treatments on a sequence of different crops (black represents an improvement, white represents "no-imporvement"). This is not dissimilar from the brand manager's experience of sitting through focus groups and looking at the impact of different concepts on various sample groups.
The key organising factor of the data is time sequence. This is how we as humans remember things; "this happened before that", "this caused that to happen". The fact is that by looking at things this way makes it really hard to develop any insight into the nature of either the crops or the treatments!

A simple reorganisation of the data reveals a truly stunning new interpretation of the results. By clustering the data around the response of the crops to the treatments, rather than by the sequence in which they were administered we get a completely new pattern. We can see that there are roughly three groups of responses to the treatments.

This is true insight. And as is always the case with true insight, it looks obvious once revealed.
True insight penetrates the substance of what we are observing rather than following the random path of observation and experience.
Most people find it hard to break free from the illusion that what we see is real. Think about how a typical brand manager "learns" through her/his career.
Step 1: Get new job
Step 2: Flurry of activity to prove that the company made the right choice
Step 3: Brand share and performance improves
Step 4: Promotion
Step 5: Product share starts to decline reinforcing the belief that the brand manager did a good job
Step 6: New brand manager, new logo, new agency
Step 7: Cycle repeats until brand dies

The consequences of our actions are usually removed in time and space from the decisions we make. Things take time. Most people are more engaged with managing their emotional state in a meeting than making links to distant consequences.

It takes between 18 months and two years for the consequences of management decisions to be evident in a complex organisation. The feedback cycles, lags and unintended consequences need to take shape before we can really call something a success or failure.
Ask yourself if you can remember a decision you took 18 months ago. Ask yourself if you can see how that decision is playing a role right now. Can you see how the excess marketing materials you ordered are piling up in the warehouse or lie around unused in shops around the world. Are you dealing with cleaning up the the messes you made or the ones of your predecessor. If you are cleaning up their mess, ask yourself how they can learn from something they will never see and then ask that question about yourself.

Because we do not experience the consequences of decisions, we cannot learn from them.

Our learning experiences are mostly structured like the chart on the left. Building up a Boolean model for predicting the outcome of future decisions based on the sequence of our personal narrative. As long as everything in our immediate vicinity looks good, we'll keep operating on these assumptions.

To get true insight though, we need to break free from the filter of immediate experience.

So how do we counter the effect of short-termist thinking?
1. Cultural diversity: By bringing in different ways of experiencing the situation you reduce the dependency on one set of assumptions. This should bring us closer to experiencing the true nature of things.
2. The wisdom of crowds: Brainjuicer are doing really good work at allowing us to see a view of things less biased by personal prejudice.
3. Systemic thinking: Linking events in a system allows us to break free from the school ground logic of "he hit me"/"she hit me". Making dependencies visible to the group allows the team to think about the problem more completely.
4. Stretching the time frame: Quarterly thinking, chasing analyst reports is the wrong model for building value. Instinctively people know this but few people are bold enough to stand up against this wrong-headedness. Nothing of value was ever created in a quarter.

These methods allow us to re-present experience in a way that aids insight.

As we head into 2008 the challenge for business is increasingly to understand the true nature of things and to separate truly strategic action from reactionary busyness. The impact of pollution on China's ability to maintain growth will impact your outsourcing strategy. The cost crunch on India's IT outsourcing will impact political stability. But how?
The result of long term trends, these and other factors will be accelerated by a tipping point in human history. In 2007 we reached the historic moment where more than 50% of the human population became urban. We are living in a new world that requires new ways of thinking and acting.

The solution as always starts with challenging our own assumptions about what we know, versus what we think we know. Most importantly we need to break free from the notion that experience leads to knowledge.

Context is king

I suppose that is the only way you can excuse a two month gap in posting! the content was there, really, just waiting for the right moment to arrive.

So are we moving to a world where context is king? When I can see the same content, served up in any manor of business models, the endorsement of context starts playing a new role. In the web 2.0 world, you are known by your references. The biggest challenge for wikipedia is to maintain the quality of content as context starts to override.
The scary thought is that fact becomes a matter of persistence. If we get them to repeat the same story with enough references it must be true. This obviously rewards the ones with the biggest networks, but does it support the development of fact?

Content is becoming ever more context dependent. The read/write devices we use to access information become more sentient to geographic and contextual location. I need different information about the little chapel in Valletta when I am actually in Malta. I need different product information when I have skimmed through 15 sites about it in the last 20 minutes.

How are we building this contextual knowledge into the way we slice and dice content?
- references; who endorses a product may mean completely different things to different people. If my uncle endorses a game it may mean something different than when a 14 year old endorses it. The role of social networking in terms of product endorsement is becoming ever more clear as marketers try and latch onto the key references.
- history; already airlines are changing pricing information based on how regularly you search a specific route. As the man said: "Polly want a cookie?" The key to so much contextual adaptation.
- interface; device dependent content shapes the richness of the experience. How this moves forward becomes a challenge to developers. iPhone has shown that device dependent content can also be handled at the device end..... interesting mr watson, how do we adapt the device to context? Ask samsung I suppose?

Fact is, context is playing a bigger role in determining relevance, access and engagement. This challenges the basic strategic models of (message/medium)Xfrequency=impact.
What would you suggest as the new model?

Total Carbon Ownership?

Many retailers and brands are now scrambling to position themselves as “Green”. As Carbon becomes the “New Satan” consumers are increasingly seeking reassurances that they are not burning the sacrifices on the wrong altar. Seeking even the slightest form of reassurance that somehow their purchase is going to keep the rivers flowing and the birds flying, they latch on to labels and signs of “eco-absolution”.

But how does this help? Just about everybody is using a different standard. How can I compare between brands or between retailers? Tesco has been quick to call in the Cambridge cavalry, yet, until an industry wide standard is accepted, the consumer will have little help and can continue being blissful.

So how do you measure a carbon footprint? There are many sites now offering quick answers with the obligatory dose of tutt-tutting. But where do you start?

The carbon footprint of an idea:
Did the designer draw up the idea on an energy saving PC or with a pencil and paper and was the pencil made from sustainable sources? Recycled paper that is chlorine free? How many copies did they run off before they were happy with the final product? And just how were those printer cartridges produced and transported?

Nope, I think we’ll stick to the products designed with pencil and paper.

Then came the sourcing trip and all good intentions flew out the window. The good news is that the product manager or sourcing agent can fly first, business or economy with exactly the same carbon footprint! The fedex package with the first and second prototype too!

The carbon footprint of the t-shirt:
So I suppose we’ll opt for the hand stitched prototype shipped to the factory.

What I wonder though is: "how do we account for the waste before, during and after a product is produced?" A high fashion item will go out of fashion quickly. This leads to many of its kind being made redundant and taken off shelves to be burned (in e-bay auctions or real furnaces) leading to spiraling carbon costs, after the product has been delivered to the retailer and displayed. A dark carbon “second life” begins. Does my individual T-shirt carry the carbon weight of all its failed siblings? Am I now compelled to buy only M&S standard ware that can be found year in and year out without the risk of redundancy?

The carbon footprint of the value chain:
There are already strong signs that politicians and small business alike are relishing the prospect of promoting local industry on the basis that it saves excess transportation and emissions. In supermarkets local apples are now again on equal footing with those Spanish and Brazilian imports. Will this newfound interest in sourcing strategy be extended to product design? More options means more emissions after all. So will we calculate for the Total Cost of Ownership?

The implication is that consumers will increasingly buy “process” rather than “product” How does this affect branding and communication? How will we make “process” obvious at the point of purchase?

How did you get here?

I am absolutely thrilled that Matt is traveling again. Defining the dream in one simple idea: Let's dance!
Dancing is most probably one of the most underrated ways of discovering things. When is the last time you used dancing to think? We don't often think of our body's as part of our minds and I think we are moving further away from being aware of how we move.

For me, one of the most amazing things that has come out of the field of neuroscience in relationship to marketing is how we store and remember words. Simple words like knife and fork, often used together can be saved in two completely different parts of the brain. "Fork", or at least your personal concept of it could be saved in the part of the brain related to taste. "Knife" on the other hand may be saved under touch, perhaps reflecting an early experience of being cut.

The implications of this fact about how the human body works is extremely significant. How can we continue to believe that brands are primarily built via the stalwarts of marketing communications: printed and audio-visual media. The richness and depth of what a brand depends on how deeply we engage all the senses. Loyalty seems to be related to the richness of these associations and how many parts of the brain light up in association with a brand. Do you know where your brand is remembered? And how it got there?

Ironically, the more people become obsessed about the shapes of bodies, the less we are using them to learn and observe. I think this is related to a reduction of our awareness of how our bodies move. I once read a description of a character by Thomas Pynchon. He observed that the character was in fashion, based on the way he walked. The hips tilted slightly forward with the feet falling outwards on the stride. Do we see such descriptions of characters today? Are we aware of or looking at how people move?

The photo above is from from an attempt to break the world record for a Tai Chi performance. Tai Chi has always been dancing with a purpose. I wonder when brands will learn to dance.

The web we weave

A lot is being said about the whole 2.0 thing. Web 2.0, enterprise 2.0, economy 2.0, all a bit like the cybermen and their upgrades, marching towards people 2.0. Or perhaps that should be 2.0 people.
Anyway, this got me thinking about the web we weave. We have created the web and it's supporting technologies in our image. The behaviors, the expectations and inadequacies. In the same way, the social development taking place in the 2.0 sphere seems to reflect the same.

I recently worked on a project for a major national public transport company. When looking at the user base it was split clear as day down the middle according to one criteria, whether people were internally or externally motivated. Internally motivated people understood and used rail transport because they valued their time, understood the benefits of shared resources and all the other benefits that come with it. Externally motivated people cared more about what others would think and needed the security and status of their metal cocoons to get around. The car had become a social shell which both defined and protected them. They felt less confident being by themselves in this sea of people.
People have an attitude towards public goods based on where they fall on the confidence/insecurity axis. This attitude also drives their engagement with public p2p platforms.

There is an element of this in the web 2.0 evolution. The basic insecurities that define people will remain hidden in the way they embrace and use technology. Their degree of comfort in going naked. Their need for social recognition and ability to invest in the public, rather than personal good. Does this mean the future of the web will still be mired in cliques (or shall we call them clicks?) that use their superior knowledge to bully and intimidate other people. Is web 2.0 a compensation for or shield from personal human interaction? The more people invest in their new space online the less likely they are going to invest in building up face to face relationships. It just becomes too easy to refer someone to your blog. "I've had those ideas already, read my post from 14 April....."
And this brings me to the basic dilemma we now face. The basic human processor has not evolved. The brain is still only capable of presenting the Cartesian theatre, no matter how well our parallel processors and universes are plotting away.

Are we nearing a tipping point where our inventions will start molding us in their likeness? I think so. The web is brutally honest about exposing just how much of your time and energy you are willing to sacrifice on the qwerty altar. It becomes immediately obvious how intensely you serve the webgod "content". Once people realise that their sacrifice is rewarded proportionately and that it comes at a cost the self mutilation and martyrdoms will begin.

Black and White strawberries

we seem to forget what an issue artists had with photography. At first, photography was not seen as an art form. It was far too crude, insensitive, primitive to render the artist’s hallowed dreams. The discussion got more intense as the 35mm camera took photography to places unimagined.

The progression from metal plates, to grainy gel and film had an indelible impact on the way we now view parts of our history. We cannot think of the vietnam war without having a certain sickening tint and blur in mind as burnt children run down the street. History is written by the winners but remembered by the images.

Now we have photoshop and photographers are once again painters. Although the word “retouch” has a certain sensual appeal it doesn't quite deliver the raw intensity of dirty fingers and smeared brushes. In theory we have again allowed the visual artist to come as close as technically possible to rendering the inner eye.

Do you remember any black and white pictures of a strawberry though? There is something about the sensual intensity of red strawberries that just refuses to stay locked up in a monochrome world. This emotional dimension can only be experienced, it cannot be rendered or reduced. The colour and fullness of an experience seeks a fit with the visual reality that represents it.

In the 80’s the FCB grid aimed to guide media planners in choosing media in line with the natural state of engagement and attention of the audience. If you were selling a high involvement message, best use a high involvement medium. The talk was of synergy and fit. We were looking for resonance. In the 90’s the model was simplified to lean forward and lean back. Internet, lean forward, TV, lean back.

But now we realise that attention is guided by emotional engagement. The organism aims to reward relevant learning with those seductive doses of seratonin. The first filter on any message is engagement. This hasn’t really changed McLuhan. The medium multiplies the message. The funnel feed content jam just reduces experience to the lowest common denominator.
So what is the full colour rendition of our emotions. How do we shape the memories in techni-colour which will ultimately decode my defenses. I suppose it is all back to people, the ultimate cypher in the battle for emotional survival. What are the moments of sharing and engagement enabled by your brand? Enter the MILK economy.

Wet and dry

Thanks to Gregg Clarke for a good laugh yesterday. He gave me a wonderful story. A scientist once explained to him the wonders of science; how we could explain everything about the H²O molecule, how we knew the exact weight and forces involved to make and destroy water and how exactly none of that could explain that it is was wet.

We are good at measuring the measurables. Then again, do the measurables count? Professor Robert Winston illustrates a similar point in his documentary on the human body. Standing on the deck of a ship, he describes that human tears have the same chemical consistency as the water at a certain point in the Thames. We know that the average human sheds 40 litres of tears in a lifetime. Without knowing if those tears are shed in joy, or distress we know nothing, Except perhaps that tears have the same consistency as river water at a certain point of mixing with sea water....
So are tears and river water interoperable? You would think so looking at the way we deal with market research data. Does one person watching "Desperate housewives" equal another?
Can the one watching it in anger, as she recognizes the struggles she faces compare to the other, watching it in disinterested absence? "My friends are not like that..."

The key thing really is, how does it move them? Emotionally, physically? I suppose it brings us back to resonance and the transfer of emotional energy. The difference between wet and dry will be in how much energy there is to make the atoms dance.

The shape of things

It is said that the aboriginal people of Australia use songs to navigate their way around the desert landscape. Walking along in the featureless plains they will sing a song to themselves, feeling how the song flows not only through them but also through the environment around them. They then navigate by this feeling of connectedness. When the song feels out of tune, or does not fit they know that they have taken a wrong turn or have gone too far. Feeling "in tune", feeling a resonant connection with the world around them is essential to tracking their way through this ancient wilderness.

Resonance can be a powerful thing. All young engineering students are imprinted with the fantastic images of the Tacoma Narrow Bridge progressively ripping itself apart. Cars are thrown from the bridge as concrete is turned into jelly as the resonant energy progressively builds in amplitude.
As the human species moves progressively from relying purely on the innate abilities of our bodies to a more augmented experience of time/space we will surely develop a new form of resonance with our environment. During the great Tsunami there were some interesting observations about ancient tribes, especially the Andamanese, surviving the onslaught due to innate awareness of the impending disaster. A nearby tribe, assimilated into more western lifestyles were struck badly, as their innate senses were dulled.

Psychogeology has played a fundamental role in the development of man's consciousness. Louis Liebenberg wrote a phenomenal book on how tracking is the origin of science. Our orientation in space is one of the first challenges we face as babies. As we grow up and evolve we develop a more intricate way of finding our way about, even defining ourselves by the piece of political geography we are born in.

Increasingly however this link is becoming more tenuous. Geography is no longer destiny. As greater distances develop between the cause and consequences of our daily lives, it becomes harder to pinpoint the exact location of our awareness. Weren't we all in New York on 9/11. Are we not all sharing in the 14 hour day of the sneaker stitchery?
The new map of the world, with shifted experiences, assimilated awareness's and a sharing of emotional insecurity is heralding a new form of tracking. We still carry songs with us as we navigate the urban landscape. The songs are now entering an open source plug and play environment with mobile devices becomming our most intimate confession booths.
Songs are important because they provide an emotional resonance. The church and before that the shamans knew this. Religion, rituals and a connection with god is so innately connected with music that they are indistinguishable. The Resurrection of Apple was entirely defined by it's embrace of music. Interestingly, Steve Jobs's brief for the first Macintosh computer to Harmut Esslinger was "Make it look like a Bob Dylan song sounds". Shape and sound, sound and resonance, resonance and shape. A closed loop where things are shaped by the resonance of their ambient sounds.

Defining the shape of the future consumer experience is the interesting thing from the marketing point of view. The interplay between shape and sound is what gives resonance it's power. How do we incarnate the emotions that are locked up in music? How do we provide physical reality to emotional engagement? Will we provide the urban soundtrack for the day? Walking through town looking for a new coat, the songs will guide me to perfect match for my budget and style? When I walk off Oxford street I start hearing 80's tunes?
Increasingly however the resonance we seek, the emotional resonance, will match a process and not just a well designed product. Sustainable production processes, green and eco profiles that connect beyond the immediate moment of gratification. Perhaps the new form of navigating an emotional landscape is the evolutionary necessity for surviving in a world plagued by climate crisis and individual isolation?

Mapping moving markets, or Magellan 2

It is said that the true innovation that lead to Ferdinand Magellan's historic circumnavigation was the ingenious use of an underlying grid to map the geographical layout of the continents. This essential open source technology allowed people to pull together personal experience in a way that connected each individual experience in a meaningful way.



Think about it. Before the use of a universal grid, each traveller had to rely on simple routes, outlined with simple observations. The spacial accuracy was never guaranteed as the scale was not applied consistently. The river that looks so huge in one sketch can be a minor stream in another traveler's sketch book observation. Confronted with disparate pieces of information the confused adventurer had to make it up as he or she went along. The resulting maps were patchworks that have little relation to the real space as this map of 1544 shows.

By unifying all these observations in an open source environment it was possible for a traveller to know exactly where they are relative to landmarks and destinations. They could plan and interact in a way that was unprecedented in an age where everything over the horizon, or beyond the amateur sketches of personal experience contained dragons.

I believe that google maps and it's sisters google earth and wikimapia will prove to be the most significant innovations of this century. They structure context. This enables people to pinpoint personal experiences and relate those to the local knowledge of others against the backdrop of a defined open source realworld reference. (The interplay between IRL and URL) By overlaying this basic grid of human endeavour, we now have immediate context of our daily adventures. The key has been delivering access to this context in a live and interactive way. Think about your own travels, and the power that individuals have when they have "the in" on the local know how. The iPhone has shown the way, and many more such devices will follow to enable quick access to such local know how. An enhanced reality where we begin to see in four dimensions. The accumulation of information over time will enhance the experience to give depth and options to every moment.


The real revolution however will only come when the environment becomes intelligent as well, responding to the people who move through it. Websites do it now. The cookies and data that warn a site of who is about to enter it is used to "customise" the experience for the visitor. How long will it take before the environment starts showing more intelligence and responds in kind. This was often talked about in the heady days when MIT medialab was an iconic reference point. Will we need to wait for Samsung to show us all the way?

For the marketer this will be unprecedented. Where the word "marketing" literally means "to bring to the market place" we have an opportunity to redefine the design and operation of the organisation to stay in step with the moving market. Rethinking communication and display, packaging and distribution in line with an intelligent environment, sensitive to the actual people in it. This impact will be most pronounced in the poor countries where existing infrastructure is being leapfrogged for an open, mobile infrastructure. Have you figured out how to make money in India and China?

Moving ahead

A lot of thought was put into how people move when Karl Schwanzer designed the iconic BMW building in Munich (Olympic Tower). Shaping the outside of the building like a four cylinder engine only reflected the internal intent of the organisation working like a well oiled machine. The workflows, connections between departments and culture determined where people sat, and ultimately how they interacted.

We can only begin to conceive the long term impact this has had on the independent car maker. In the words of the company, the building represents "Prosperity, Autonomy and technical perfection". The incarnation of essence, supported by a flow of information and energy which all aligns with the intent of the organisation. Very few companies begin to understand this fundamental resonance between form and content, between sign and intent. Why is it that most workshops take place in stuffy rooms, with crap coffee (if any) using pieces of paper and random thoughts that happen to enter the mind of the participants on that day. The context, flow and intent of the assembled energy is hardly ever considered. How can one not but develop explosive ideas when you are sitting in a combustion engine? And how can one but repeat history if the process is repetitive and purely intellectual?

Years ago a friend observed that we are all doing the same work in essence these days. If an alien had to come down and look at humans at work they would see little difference between a doctor, an engineer, and bank clerk. We all assume a position in front of a terminal (lovely word that) and push buttons arranged into neat rows.
Brian Eno said ages ago, the problem with computers is that there is not enough Africa in them. The kineasthetic nature of human learning has been surgically removed from our productive output.

An interesting thing happened to P&G a few years ago when A G Lafley took over the reigns. The organisation quickly adopted an open plan policy. Meetings took place in little huddle rooms. The interface was complete. You could not hide from the people working with you. This emphasis on the human interaction seems to have come at the same time when P&G managed to move ahead of Unilever, and open a commanding lead.
How do we track the impact of coffee breaks and photo copier runs. The random interactions that happen when the corporate corpus is in motion. When the individuals are forced to meet each other and interact, by the very shape of their workspace. P&G managers also spend a lot more time than anyone I know listing to consumers. They travel intensely, spending time in people's houses and research groups. This is the movement of an open system, an organisation open to assimilating learning and information from it's context.

So back to the original question, how do we bring more movement, the whole body, into corporate behavior which ultimately leads to potent brands?

Kinaesthetic Brands

Funny thought occurred to me today as I was walking. What if organisations used different forms of learning in the same way that people do. This thought came to me after watching the TED clip about educating for the future.

Sir Ken Robinson did an extremely good job at showing how the universities have created education systems in their own image. All humans are designed to learn in different ways. Some learn best through motion, some through visual observation, some through talking. It is interesting that although this is well documented, very little has been done to apply this knowledge to effect on children, let alone adults and organisations.

Very often companies will call in some management guru who most likely connects with whatever style the top dog uses to learn. In the 80’s companies went off on a lot of team building trials where a lot of movement was involved, but this was seen as team building and not used as a conscious form of problem solving/learning. How does an organisation develop a healthy, natural relationship with this form of learning?