Tim Kastelle

Category: book riffs

  • Should You Be Out on Your Own, or Part of the Herd?

    Hugh MacLeod’s great daily newsletter (which you should subscribe to here) had this cartoon today:

    Don’t try to stand out from the crowd, avoid crowds altogether.

    In the commentary, he acknowledges that this might not align with the fantastic work that Mark Earls has been doing over the past few years. The basic point that Earls is working very hard to get across is that we are not independent actors – when we choose things we are inevitably influenced by others. He has discussed this in two terrific books, which I highly recommend – Herd and I’ll Have What She’s Having (co-authored by Alex Bentley and Michael J. O’Brien). Here is what he said in a recent post discussing the new book:

    …we all spend most of our lives in a world of other people (Freud famously quipped that we can never escape the Other) and much of what we do we do in imitation of other people or at least following the example of others (and not as the result of independent decisions, whatever we tell ourselves, our spouses, our therapists and any passing market researcher).

    [There is a] much bigger insight into human nature that the science highlights: we are a fundamentally social creature, one evolved largely for a world of others like ourselves (and not for isolated, independent lives); we live almost all of our lives in the company of others (in the modern idiom, that we are always embedded in social networks of our peers. Most of what we do, we do in the company and under the shadow of other people – under the influence of others, if you like.

    These two viewpoints lead to an issue that MacLeod frames like this:

    But there’s a paradox: it’s hard to be any use to the crowd, until you’ve learned how to stand alone.

    These guys are two of the best thinkers about business around right now. So while this is indeed a paradox, I’m not sure that it’s either/or, but rather it may be a both/and situation.

    You do have to be apart from the crowd to be successful, but at the same time you have to understand how you’re connected to it. How? There are two ways. One is to be connected to a smaller part of the crowd – as Seth Godin says, a tribe. So maybe you end up with a little cluster of blue squiggles down in the corner.

    Alternately, maybe you think of it in network terms – the way to keep in touch with the crowd is through a series of weak ties. You could redraft MacLeod’s drawing to look like this:

    It’s less catchy, but maybe we should say:

    Don’t try to stand out from the crowd, avoid crowds altogether – just make sure you have some links back.

  • Get Your Process Right to Innovate Successfully

    What wins in innovation, great ideas or great process?

    Ideally, you’ll have both. But I suspect that if it’s either/or, process wins.

    There is an interesting example from the world of chess in Michael Nielsen’s fantastic new book Reinventing Discovery: The New Era of Networked Science. The book discusses how our improved ability to network via the internet is changing the face of science. It’s an interesting book, and also an important one and I recommend it highly.

    One of the stories that he tells is of a tournament sponsored by playchess.com in 2005. It allowed humans and computers to enter together as hybrid teams. The expectation going in was that the teams put together by the dominant chess-playing computer of the time, Hydra, would win because no one could beat their computers.

    chess

    However, the Hydra teams didn’t even make the quarterfinals. The best machines didn’t win. Neither did the best human players – the grandmasters. Here is how Nielsen describes the tournament:

    The grandmasters could beat the Hydras because they knew when to rely on their computers, and when to rely on their own judgment. Even more interesting, the winner of the tournament was a team called ZackS that consisted of two low-ranked amateur players, using three off-the-shelf computers, and standard chess-playing software. Not only did they outclass the Hydras, they outclassed the grandmasters with their strong chess-playing computers. The human operators of ZackS demonstrated exquisite skill in using the data-driven intelligence of their computer algorithms to amplify their chess-playing ability. As one of the observers of the tournament, Garry Kasparov, later remarked, “Weak human + machine + better process was superior to a strong computer alone and, more remarkably, superior to a strong human + machine + inferior process.”

    It’s an amazing story, and a counterintuitive one. We like to think that genius always wins, but it doesn’t. You need to execute as well.

    It’s an important innovation lesson. Here is a quote from le Corbusier that makes the same point:

    Genius is personal, decided by fate, but it expresses itself by means of system. There is no work of art without system.

    (Photo from flickr/irodman under a Creative Commons License)

  • Learning From Failure

    What’s the biggest new product launch failure ever? The biggest I’ve seen was New Coke, but the example that often springs to mind is the Ford Edsel.

    Ford put a lot of effort into the Edsel. They had lagged behind GM for a few years, and the Edsel was supposed to put them back in front. Ford sunk a lot of time and effort into product innovation for the Edsel, and into market research as well. They launched one of the biggest marketing campaigns ever.

    And the Edsel sold miserably.

    Steven Johnson has followed up Where Good Ideas Come From (discussed here) with another book on innovation, this time, an edited volume called The Innovator’s Cookbook. The first chapter is by Peter Drucker, who remains one of the best management thinkers we’ve seen.

    Drucker outlines seven sources of innovation opportunity: unexpected occurrences, incongruities, process needs, industry & market changes, demographic change, changes in perception and new knowledge. The essay was originally published in Harvard Business Review, and one way or another, it’s worth tracking down to read.

    In discussing unexpected occurrences, Drucker has an interesting take on the Edsel story:

    Everyone knows about the Ford Edsel as the biggest new-car failure in automotive history. What very few people seem to know, however, is that the Edsel’s failure was the foundation for much of the company’s later success. Ford planned the Edsel, the most carefully designed car to that point in American automotive history, to give the company a full product line with which to compete with General Motors. When it bombed, despite all the planning, market research, and design that had gone into it, Ford realized that something was happening in the automobile market that ran counter to the basic assumptions on which GM and everyone else had been designing and marketing cars. No longer was the market segmented primarily on income groups; the new principle of segmentation was what we now call “lifestyles.” Ford’s response was the Mustang, a car that gave the company a distinct personality and reestablished it as an industry leader.

    In other words, Ford learned from the failure of the Edsel. Here is how Matt Haig describes it in Brand Failures:

    As Sheila Mello points out, between 1960 (when the Edsel was phased out) and 1964 (when the Mustang was launched) Ford, along with most of the car industry, had shifted its focus towards what the consumer actually wanted. ‘The success of the Mustang demonstrates that Ford Motor Company did learn from the Edsel experience,’ she writes. ‘The key difference between the ill-fated development of the Edsel and the roaring success of the 24 Brand failures Mustang was the shift from a product-centric focus to a customer-centric one.’

    Here are some key points from this story:

    • Failure is only useful if we learn from it: we often talk about the need to fail in innovation, however, there is only value in failure if it helps us learn.
    • Try to fail as cheaply as possible: the main problem with the Edsel isn’t that it failed – it’s that it failed so expensively. There is a hierarchy of failure, and we need to figure out how to fail as early in the process as possible. One way of doing this is through prototyping.

    The lesson from the Edsel is to learn from ideas that don’t work. And also, if you’re knocked over, get back up…

  • You Have a Choice – Act!

    There are plenty of excuses for not innovating – for not taking steps to change things. However, if you see a way to make things better and you don’t do anything, then you’re letting your situation control you. If you’re dissatisfied with the situation, you have to change the way you act.

    Here is the way that Tom Peters puts it in a post from Innovation Excellence:

    I believe there is one and only one source of innovation – pissed off people.

    (If you go to the link, you can see a good video from Peters, but I had to take it out of this post since it only autoplays, which is annoying.)

    But in addition to being pissed off, you actually have to take action. Here is how Gary Cox frames it in his book How to Be an Existentialist:

    Existentialism holds that you can only truly change the way you think and feel about your life by acting differently, by acting rather simply reacting, by asserting your will rather than simply allowing yourself to be swept along by circumstances, by always taking responsibility for yourself and what you do.

    When there’s a gap between where we are and where we want to be, we need to innovate.

    These are some of the issues that I was thinking about when I did an interview for Brian Driggs’ excellent Distillery series – here is what I said there:

    If you could distill everything you’ve learned so far into a single word of advice to yourself, what would that one word be?

    Impact

    Why does this one word mean so much to you?

    For much of my life “think” has been more important than “act”, and that’s been a source of weakness for me. So I constantly remind myself that to get anything done, I have to act. One way to remind myself to do this is to focus on having an impact – on people and on events.

    How does this one word impact what you do (or want to do) with your life?

    It guides how I interact with people. On my best days, I remember that I’m trying to have a positive impact on everyone with whom I interact. On less good days, that slips down the priority list, but I try to keep it as an objective as much as I can.

    What has this word done for you so far?

    It’s helped me figure out what things I should and shouldn’t be doing. There are always more opportunities than time, so filtering is really important. Sorting based on impact can be useful at even the very micro level – it’s what helps me in the evenings when I know that writing a blog post does more good than watching television (at least, I hope it does!). It also helps me make decisions about what jobs I should have, and what projects I should be doing. That said, it took me nearly fifteen years in the workforce before I even started to get this right. But what I’ve found is that the more I focus on the impact that I want to have, the better my decisions get.

    Here’s another way of approaching it, also from Gary Cox’s book:

    If a person really did live each as though it were his last he would spend each day panicking while partying and rapidly reduce himself to a nervous, drunken, insolvent wreck. Nonetheless, a person should live his life recognizing that each moment, each day, is precious and utterly irreplaceable.

    If each moment and day is precious and utterly irreplaceable, then there’s really only one choice: act!

  • Ada Lovelace Day 2011 – Inspiration from Jane McGonigal

    I missed writing about someone on Ada Lovelace Day this year because I was actually teaching my MBA class about a great technology heroine – Jane McGonigal.

    I love the concept behind Ada Lovelace Day. In order to encourage more women to consider careers in science, technology, engineering and mathematics, the day is used to discuss women from these fields that have had an impact on your life. It’s named after Ada Lovelace, who was the world’s first computer programmer and an expert on Charles Babbage’s Difference Engine.

    I talk about Lovelace in all of my classes too. But yesterday on Ada Lovelace Day, I played this video for my class:

    When we discussed it in class, there were a few good innovation points that came up:

    • McGonigal is innovating the business model for gaming by adding a key ingredient – purpose. If we look at the conclusions from Dan Pink’s drive, there are three factors that lead to satisfying work: autonomy, mastery and purpose. Video games currently provide players with the first two – autonomy and mastery. That’s why they’re so addictive. But the games that McGonigal designs also have a purpose – to save the world. That’s revolutionary.
    • If you’re going to innovate something, you might as well innovate something that matters. There are plenty of people writing new video games. But writing games that are specifically designed to enable positive changes in the way people live is more rare. In her book Reality is Broken, McGonigal is saying that the games we play should be designed to have an impact in the world. In other words, we need more opportunities to feel what gamers feel, but that we should be achieving this in contexts that pertain to the real world. That’s why I love Evoke – it’s a game, but the real world outcomes are substantial (the website for Evoke is worth some of your time – it’s fascinating). There’s a nice review of RiB by Joe MacCarthy here.

    That’s why Jane McGonigal is one of my technology heroes. She is fantastically creative, and she is using her skills and talents to try to create meaningful change. That makes her a great heroine on Ada Lovelace Day.

  • Innovation Aphorisms

    Over the weekend I read Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s thought-provoking book The Bed of Procrustres. It’s a very slow read disguised as a quick read – it’s ~100 pages of aphorisms. You can go through it quickly, but most of them both require and reward deeper thought.

    I’ve picked out some which provide some insight into innovation. Taleb suggests that aphorisms are devalued when explained, which is probably true, so I won’t expand on them. One of his main themes is that when faced with systems which can neither be understood nor predicted, people will try to frame the situation in a way that provides the illusion of certainty, and that this leads to major problems. Obviously an important point for those who court uncertainty by pursuing innovation.

    Here we go:

    The test of originality for an idea is not the absence of one single predecessor but the presence of multiple but incompatible ones.

    Technology is at its best when it is invisible.

    We are better at (involuntarily) doing out of the box than (voluntarily) thinking out of the box.

    For the robust, an error is information; for the fragile, an error is an error.

    Knowledge is subtractive not additive – what we subtract (reduction by what does not work, what not to do), not what we add (what to do).

    They think that intelligence is about noticing things that are relevant (detecting patterns); in a complex world, intelligence consists in ignoring things that are irrelevant (avoiding false patterns).

    The ancients knew very well that the only way to understand events was to cause them.

    It’s a challenging book, and it’s worth a read.

  • Innovation Obstacle: Bureaucracy?

    What is the innovation that led to civilization?

    There are some interesting answers to this question in Why the West Rules, For Now by Ian Morris. As part of his research, Morris has developed a Social Development Index, which he uses to track the progress of civilizations from 14000 BC to present. The index tracks improvements in areas such as energy capture (both as food and as fuel), organizational capability, technology development, and information sharing capacity.

    Here is what the graph shows (taken from this .pdf that summarizes the research):

    The first big jump happened between 2000 and 1000 BC, indicated by the very crude arrow that I’ve added. What was the innovation that caused that jump?

    The invention of Bureaucracy.

    Morris (and many other historians) argue that it was the invention of bureaucracy that actually triggered the development of agriculture, written communication, and other tools that are necessary for people to undertake complex tasks.

    Bureaucracy is one of the most important innovations in human history – without it, we’d still be in caves. So why does it get such a bad rap whenever we talk about innovation? It’s nearly impossible to discuss innovation within organisations without hearing complaints about bureaucracy and bureaucrats.

    The problem isn’t actually with bureaucracy. Bureaucracy makes systems, supports the development of routines, and gives us some constraints – which are actually essential to innovation (see here and here for examples). We need all of these things to innovate.

    The problem with bureaucracy is when we follow rules simply for the sake of following rules. This is another form of path dependence, which leads to lock-in on sub-optimal systems. The problem is with bureaucratic systems that don’t support strategy – these stifle innovation.

    Bureaucracy is actually a neutral term, like aerodynamics. To call a car “aerodynamically designed” is a nonsense – all cars have aerodynamics. It’s just that Teslas and Porsches have excellent aerodynamics, while minivans and SUVs have terrible aerodynamics.

    In the same way we can have excellent bureaucracy, which supports innovation, and terrible bureaucracy, which obstructs innovation.

    Bureaucracy isn’t actually an innovation obstacle, but bad bureaucracy is.

  • Innovation: Do What You Can, With What You Have, Where You Are

    One of the key points that Peter Sims makes in Little Bets is that if you wait until your idea is perfect before you act on it, your chances of success are greatly reduced. This means that if you are trying to innovate, you have to be able to work with what you have right now.

    When I worked at the radio station, we used to joke about the technical manager that fixed the control board using “a piece of string, a bandaid and a fish” – though I’m still a bit fuzzy on the role of the fish. In New Zealand, this spirit is captured by Number 8 Wire – the idea that anything can be fixed with a bit of barbed wire combined with Kiwi ingenuity.

    Here’s another example from the surprisingly good and very well written book The Gospel According to Coco Chanel: Life Lessons from the World’s Most Elegant Woman by Karen Karbo:

    … Bob Dylan, another master of self-invention tried once to explain his success: “I was just doing what I could with what I had where I was.” He was not just making it up as he went along; he was also using everything he stumbled upon. He was both weaving the rope and climbing it at the same time.
    And so was Coco Chanel.
    …
    Most of us, when we land upon a great idea, a lifesaving idea, immediately turn it into our baby. And like our real-life babies, we only want the best for it. We love it. We coddle it. It’s our great idea, and who knows when we might have another one! We want to implement it at the right time with the best materials possible. We want the stars to be right.

    But Chanel’s chutzpah dictated the opposite. She was going to reinvent the female wardrobe, and she was going to do it now with whatever was at hand.

    Coco Chanel
    Coco Chanel Pictures

    Here are some key points:

    • “Both weaving the rope and climbing it at the same time” is a great metaphor for innovation. It captures the imaginative leap that you have to make to execute a new idea. Even though new innovations usually come from connecting ideas that already exist, we’re still making this leap.
    • Ideas actually are a bit like babies: this is a metaphor that I’ve used before myself. We can think of ideas as rare and precious, like one of our babies, or like an albatross chick. Or, we can think of them as numerous, like salmon eggs, where the key issue isn’t nurturing our single idea, but rather it is to figure out which idea is the good one.
    • Finally, I love the just-get-to-work attitudes shown by both Dylan and Chanel. Sims is right in saying that waiting too long to execute an idea leads to failure. You can’t wait for permission to innovate. The way to find the good ideas is to try them out right now, using whatever resources you have available.

    The odds were heavily stacked against Coco Chanel when she started out. And yet she really did reinvent women’s clothing (and she’d make a terrific topic for an Ada Lovelace Day post, which everyone should be thinking about now). She did it by having a series of great ideas (and a few that weren’t so good), and more importantly, by executing them to see which ones really were great.

    That’s innovation – doing what you can, with what you have, where you are.

  • Anything You Want by Derek Sivers – “Experiment. Go!”

    Experimenting is the key to innovation success.

    The new book Anything You Want by Derek Sivers is worth a read (there’s tons of information about the book, and some great videos here). The book tells lessons that Sivers learned while running his website CDBaby. My first thought in reading the experiences of one person is “your mileage my vary” – but Sivers makes some excellent points that do generalise, including a couple about experimenting.

    One is that whatever business model you have is simply one option of many possible ones.

    He tells the story of the voice coach that he had when he was singing in a band. He’d have Sivers sing a song an octave higher, then an octave lower, then fast, slow, like Tom Waits, etc. After doing all of that there was always a choice about the best way to sing each song.

    It’s the same for business models. Here is how Sivers puts it:

    I’m taking an entrepreneurship class now. I’ve never studied business before.

    We analyzed a business plan for a mail-order pantyhose company. Like all business plans, it proposed only one plan.

    After reading the whole thing, I felt like saying things my old voice teacher would have said:

    • “OK, make a plan that requires only $1000. Go!”
    • “Now make a plan for ten times as many customers. Go!”
    • “Now do it without a website. Go!”
    • “Now make all your initial assumptions wrong, and have it work anyway. Go!”
    • “Now show how you would franchise it. Go!”

    You can’t pretend there’s only way to do it. Your first idea is just one of many options. No business goes as planned, so make ten radically different plans.

    This is good advice for business plans, and it’s good advice for implementing any new idea.

    The more ways you work out how an idea might be executed, the more likely it is that you’ll stumble upon a good plan once your idea hits reality.

    Remember – every part of a business model is actually a hypothesis. You should figure out how to test each part.

    Here’s another bit from the book:

    If it’s not a hit, switch from Derek Sivers on Vimeo.

    Watch the whole thing, but here’s the key quote:

    We’ve all heard about the importance of persistence, but I had misunderstood.

    Success comes from persistently improving and inventing, not from persistently doing what’s not working.

    We all have lots of ideas, creations and projects. When you present one to the world, and it’s not a hit, don’t keep pushing it as is. Instead, get back to improving and inventing.

    Innovation is about experimenting. This story from Sivers is a story about experimenting – keep trying things to improve them. You show persistence with the experiments, not just by sticking with an idea that’s not working.

    “Experiment. Go!”

  • Innovation Lessons from Orson Welles

    I’m still in Italy, where one of the topics of conversation is the recent special issue of The Economist, which discussed some of the problems that the economy here has experienced during the Berlusconi years (the special articles are summarised and linked here).

    Paul Kedrosky points to a response to this issue, where a reader quotes this great scene with Orson Welles from The Third Man:

    Watching Welles deliver the quote is worthwhile, but in case you can’t access it, here is what he says:

    “In Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love, they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.”

    There are a few innovation lessons in this, including:

    • Geography still matters: Welles talks about different innovation regimes in Italy and Switzerland, which he believes are the outcomes of differing political systems. And one of the key issues addressed by The Economist is the continuing economic divide between the North and South of Italy. Even in our highly interconnected world, geography still matters.

      Geography matters because face-to-face is still the best way to communicate. And it matters because different political and cultural systems have a big impact on how easy or hard it is to execute great new ideas.

      After to Silicon Valley, Northern Italy is the most-studied innovation region in the world, a point that was brought home again in the conference that John & I just attended. One point that is very clear from this research is that this innovative region functions very differently from Silicon Valley. You could make a pretty good argument that instead of trying to recreate Silicon Valley all around the world, local governments might be better of trying to recreate Florence and Milan.

    • New innovations crowd out old technologies: one really important lesson here is that if you haven’t already done so, you must watch The Third Man – it’s a masterpiece. I know a lot of people that don’t like watching black and white films, but The Third Man uses the media perfectly. Director Carol Reed and Photographer Robert Krasker use light unbelievably well in this film – it is one of the best looking movies I’ve ever watched.

      However, this use of light is a skill that seems to be getting crowded out by new technologies. If you’ve seen any of the recent spate of 3D movies, it’s pretty obvious that no one is thinking much at all about light. Once Roger Deakins retires, it may well become a lost art.

      New innovations crowd out old ones – something that you can see if you watch The Third Man (which you must!).

    • Diversity drives innovation: I’m not sure I agree with Welles that it was murder, treachery and betrayal that led to Michelangelo, da Vinci and the Renaissance. I’m currently reading The Pursuit of Italy by David Gilmour**, and it is clear that one of the drivers of Italy’s Renaissance era innovation was the enormous cultural diversity present there.

      This was in part a result of the country being so easy to invade, which led to this diversity of culture, thought and world views. This kind of diversity drives innovation.

    Within an organisation, you might be as peaceful as the Swiss and still come up with more than just the cuckoo clock. The way to do this is to ensure that you have a mix of backgrounds within your people. Different areas of expertise, different nationalities, different educational backgrounds – it’s differences that create interesting edges and intersections in knowledge.

    **The book also makes it clear that the regional innovation differences within Italy haven’t been deterministically caused – there was a time when Naples and South were well head of the North culturally and technologically.

  • Scarcity as the “Mother of Invention”

    Can we decouple growth from consumption of resources?

    Guest post by: James Bradfield Moody

    Co-Author, The Sixth Wave: How to Succeed in a Resource-Limited World

    Over the last 200 years, since the industrial revolution, we have seen economic growth strongly coupled with the consumption of more and more resources.  The more we grew, the more we consumed. 

    This model works well in a world without limits, with plenty of resources to go around.  We’re starting to realise however that these resources, from ores to phosphates and water to topsoil are not as plentiful as we once thought.

    For example, a report released at the World Economic Forum last year estimated that we are already consuming 95 per cent of the existing reliable supply of freshwater on the globe, yet also forecasting demand for freshwater to increase by 61 per cent  to 2030 in China alone.  Something has to give. 

    And what might give is the model that rewards the conversion of as much resource as possible into outputs to drive growth.  Instead we might start to see a model where resource scarcity drives many of our choices.  This is a shift from an old mode of operation where we have been harvesting resources that were plentiful and cheap to one where we are managing resources that are scarce and valuable. 

    In this world we start to decouple economic growth from resource consumption. 

    But does this mean that we will see any less growth in our economy?  Not if we rise to the challenge.  Indeed, our recent book ‘The Sixth Wave: How to succeed in a resource-limited world’ identified areas of massive business opportunity for companies and countries that come from focusing on scarcity as an opportunity, not a challenge.

    The first place to look for growth without resource consumption is in waste.  If you want to succeed in a resource-limited world, find a major source of waste and develop an innovation that either dramatically reduces that waste or does away with it altogether. New and old businesses are extracting methane from landfill to generate electricity, turning organic waste from supermarkets into compost or minimising heat and light waste from houses and office buildings.

    Many companies are also finding business models that take waste and turn it into something productive, such as the Canadian Brewery that found it could use its grain waste to grow Shitake mushrooms.  Car share businesses are finding that as many as 10 families are sharing a single car, making much more use out of a single capital asset. 

    The second big idea for separating growth from resource consumption is this:  Sell the service, not the product.  Companies and nations are learning that the best way to create value without consuming resources is through services, which has far reaching implications for the world economy, the internet and the way of life as we know it.  Do you want a car or do you want mobility?  Perhaps a car share service might be good for you.  Do you want energy or do you want heat and light?  Woking Borough Council in the UK has found a way to sell ‘heat’ to households and then works out how to deliver that heat through as little energy as possible.  Businesses that sell services quickly find that it is in everyone’s interest to deliver the service with the least consumption possible.

    With more value in monitoring our natural resources, more and more devices will emerge that connect the digital and the natural worlds.  Think of this as having absolutely everything around you connected to the net (you already have your digital analogue – the mobile phone).  The whole planet and all of its natural resources will be measured and monitored to the point that everything in the natural world will one day have a digital counterpart, and many companies will emerge to manage and take advantage of this rich source of information.

    Put these together and you get a fourth idea: Information is global, consumption is local.  Reducing the consumption of natural resources will drive everything to do with natural resources to become more local, while services that don’t consume resources will be truly global endeavours.  Energy production will be distributed and localised and resources will be recycled as close as possible to the point of consumption. 

    If we do decouple resources from growth, what will our world look like? It will be a world where nothing is wasted and everything has a value.  It will be a world in which we don’t think so often in terms of ‘products’, but of ‘services’, and a world where resources are mapped and measured to a degree never before seen.  We still enjoy the quality of life that we expect, but we have changed our business models and incentive structures to reward what we really value and get rid of everything else. 

    Dr James Bradfield Moody (@jamesbmoody) is Executive Director of Development at CSIRO and co-author of The Sixth Wave; How to succeed in a resource-limited world (www.sixthwave.org) with Bianca Nogrady (@SixthWaveBook).

  • How to Use Networks to Spread Ideas

    Here’s a question for you: imagine that you have a package that has to be delivered to someone that you don’t know and you’ve never met that lives across the world from you – let’s say a particular lawyer in Antinanarivo, Madagascar. The only way to get it to them is to pass the package along to someone that you know on a first-name basis, and you ask them to do the same. The chain continues to grow using this method until the package eventually reaches the shop owner.

    If this sounds familiar, it’s basically a version of the small-world experiment that Stanley Milgram ran in the 1960s. He had people from the Midwestern US trying to get letter to a banker in Boston. This experiment was the first test of the six degrees of separation idea – that any one of us is only six handshakes away from anyone else in the world.

    But now, think about this: if you had the actual task of getting that package to Madagascar, who out or your friends and acquaintances would you actually send it to?

    Do me a favour and take a minute to think about this and come up with an actual name.

    Do you have a person in mind?

    Good, now here’s a question – did you think of someone that is highly connected? Here’s what I mean – here are Facebook pictures for four people that I know (the stats are all from about 18 months ago):

    At the time, the average number of connections that people had on Facebook was about 100. The for people are me, with 111 connections, and my friends Kate (75 connections), Siri (1320 connections) and Robert (2178 connections).

    So the question about your choice in trying to get the package to Madagascar is this: did you pick someone that is less connected, like me or Kate, but which may have a particular connection to our target? Or did you pick someone that you know is highly connected, like Siri or Robert?

    The story that we often hear about getting ideas to spread through networks is that the best way to do this is to find the influencers. Often, these are the superconnected people. This is how Ed Keller and Michael Berry describe it in their book The Influentials:

    One in ten Americans tells the other nine how to vote, where to eat, and what to buy…. Few important trends reach the mainstream without passing through the Influentials in the early stages, and the Influentials can stop a would-be trend in its tracks.

    Duncan Watts has been right in the middle of the development of social network analysis over the past 20 years or so, and he’s not so sure that this is how things actually work. In his new book Everything is Obvious (Once You Know the Answer), he describes an experiment that he put together with some colleagues to test how influential the Influentials were. They recreated the small world experiment, this time using email chains – they had over 20,000 chains trying to reach 18 targets in 13 different countries.

    Here is how he describes the results:

    We also asked people why they chose the next person in the chain, and here, too, we discovered little evidence of hubs or stars. Subjects in small-world experiments, it turns out, do not typically pass messages to their highest-status or most-connected friends. Instead, they pass them to people they think have something in common with the target, like geographic proximity or a similar occupation… Ordinary individuals, in other words, are just as capable of spaning critical divides between social and professional circles, between different nations, or between different neighborhoods, as exceptional people. When you want to get a message to a graduate student in Novosibirsk, Russia, for example, you don’t think about whom you know who has a lot of friends, or goes to lots of parties, or has connections in the White House. You think about whether you know any Russians. And if you don’t know any Russians, then maybe you know someone from Eastern Europe, or someone who has traveled to Eastern Europe, or has studied Russian, or who lives in part of your city that is known for its Eastern European immigrants.

    If I were trying to get that package to Madagascar, I’d probably pick Siri to send it to next. Not because she’s highly connected (though she is), but out of the four of us in that picture, I know that she’s been to Africa most recently and that she has good connections there.

    Which type of person did you pick?

    These are important questions for anyone trying to get ideas to spread. They do spread through networks, and the structure of these networks is important. If we can’t target the Influentials to get our ideas to spread, what should we do?

    Watts’ solution is to try using a Big Seed Strategy. Instead of using money and resources identifying and paying to get the Influentials to spread your idea, he suggests spreading the effort out across a wide range of “normal” people. In other words, his data suggests that rather than paying Kim Kardashian $10,000 to tweet your idea, you’d be better off paying 1,000 people with lower profiles $10 each.

    This experiment was actually run once recently, when Connected, a book about how things spread through networks by Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler was spontaneously promoted by Alyssa Milano to her 1.2 million twitter followers (read the full details here). Unfortunately for Christakis and Fowler, the extra publicity didn’t sell any more books.

    Curious, they then had Tim O’Reilly (1.5 million followers) and Susannah Fox (4700 followers) send out tweets about the book as well. The one that produced the biggest bounce was Fox – and she was chosen because her followers were the ones that seemed most likely to be interested in the book.

    It seems obvious that the best way to get ideas to spread is to find influential or highly-connected people to buy into the idea. However, this doesn’t seem to be the way that things work in practice. It’s a topic about which we still have much to learn. However, since networks are so critical to spreading ideas, it’s a good topic to keep up with – especially if you’re coming up with your own great new ideas.

    Other resources:

    There are all kinds of good resources on the importance of influence within networks – some good ones include: