The Rt Hon Chief Product Officer

If you were planning to build a successful product called Brexit where would you start?
Well - you could, like the least successful product makers, sit around a table and work from a set of assumptions about what you think the British people are likely to buy.
You might even run a 'what do you like' survey. You would then invest the farm (or in this case, the country) on what you assume IS 'what they want'. And then spend, spend, spend on advertising to convince people that the thing you now 'have evidence that they want', is what they should invest their hard-earned in.
This is the way of the 95% of product innovation that fails.
The trouble with this approach is that even if the con(vincing) job works, and the customer does indeed buy, that customer ends up with something that doesn't fit their needs or answer the pain-points in their lives. They won't find it of value - they won't recommend it and they won't buy it again.
No, if you want to build a successful product called Brexit you must start with understanding the core needs of those you are making it for.
What are the core needs of the citizens of the UK? There may be some complex emotional ones (known as Esteem needs in Maslow's hierarchy) about fear of change, loss of status etc. But there are some tangible and more basic ones too: Security; Food; Clothes; Shelter.
And right at the top of the hierarchy is all the 'self-actualisation' stuff about being able to achieve one's full potential.
When those needs are understood - then is the time to move to developing concepts that could be best shaped to meet those needs, to solve their pain.
And in a series of iterations in which you shape the direction of that concept, always validating that it is meeting the needs of those for whom it is intended, always testing they understand and get value from what it is you are shaping, you may move to low-through-high-resolution prototypes until eventually you are in a position to launch something you can be pretty sure meets the actual needs of the people it is meant for.
I have yet to see a version of Brexit that serves more than a very narrow band of the nation's needs. You may see it differently.
We don't need (yet) another PR Guru in No10 to con(vince) us of what we want. At this point we need a very capable Chief Product Officer to respond to what we need.

Voters must learn to trust voters again

Image via A-Z Quotes.com

Trust. Given the seismic societal and geopolitical events of the last year I think it's worth reminding ourselves about Trust.

58% of eligible Americans didn't bother voting. Liberal democracies work on the assumption that the voter knows best. This is built on a basic trust. We have faith that the 'other' has our best interests at heart.

As the world has globalised, the question of who should vote on what issues arises. If you take a global perspective why should a nation vote alone on whether or not it leaves (for sake of argument) The European Union. The impact of the decision made by voters goes far beyond the impact on themselves. Do they have the right, within one nation, to vote for things that harm others?
Climate change, accords and fast-growing heavily polluting nations raise similar concerns - as does the free movement of refugees. People moving from difficulty to plenty has been the story of human expansion over the face of the Earth - until we invented passports and border controls.

Democracy it seems can only work if we share a basic beliefs/traditions/outlooks with most other of your fellow voters. When fellow voters are like us we accept the results - and I reiterate, we do so because we assume they have our interests at heart, too.

When those interests are ignored, we don't accept the results. If their experiences are far removed from my own, if they don't understand how I feel and don't care about the things I hold dear then I'm unlikely to accept the result no matter how 'conclusive'.

Is this what we have seen at play in Brexit and in the election of Donald Trump?
Or is there more that binds the people of the UK and the people of the US than divides them?

To move forward both nations must find a place where voter can trust voter again (this is more important than whether we trust politicians, for whom we all have our crap filters set to stun permanently anyway).

I do believe that trust can be rebuilt - I wrote a book (The 10 Principles of Open Business) which lays out how we can do it in brands and business and the principles are equally applicable to our institutions and way of life.

In the main we do share basic beliefs and traditions. If there are differences it is in outlook. Some see the post-globalised, digitised world through fearful eyes. Others with optimism.

If we connect more, share more, enter more transparent discourse, act ,more as what we are - partners in civil society - we can help rebuild trust. In so doing we can enable more people to identify and access the benefits of the connected world so many of us have enjoyed.

If we cannot we will break down (and self-organise ourselves) into the bubbles our Facebook timelines seem intent on generating.

Think for a moment how important trust is in winning this battle, in rebuilding the partnership we aim to have with each other in civil society -
The following are excerpts from The 10 Principles of Open Business.(Palgrave-Macmillan 2014).

"Without trust there can be no relationships of any value. Without relationships there can be no organizations, no customers, no believers, no advocates, no future. Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt went as far as to say in his 2009 University of Pennsylvania Commencement Address that: “In a networked world, trust is the most important currency.” Every politician, every newspaper editor, every CEO, every brand manager, every one of us knows it is essential. It is what ties customers to brands, families to each other, organizations and societies together. It is a very human trait and one which has given us an evolutionary advantage defined at its simplest as: “I’ll scratch your back if you’ll scratch mine.” 

Evidence from neuroscience (e.g., “The Neurobiology of Trust” by Paul J Zak in Scientific American, 2008) suggests we get chemical feel-good rushes to reward us when we trust and are trusted, and that there are large portions of the brain developed specifically to deal with its complexities. Being able to trust our neighbor allowed us to build civilizations. We’ve evolved to demand it. To work closely with people, requires it. Partnership, the paradigm of Open Business, demands it. And when trust diminishes we are in crisis.

Trust,... is a measure of the belief in the honesty, fairness, or benevolence of another party. Build this kind of reciprocal trust and your partners are more likely to forgive your failures of competence; they will cut you slack if they trust that you are trying to do your best for them and being honest when things go wrong.  

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Immigration is not your enemy - bad handling of the impact is

I rarely comment on global politics on this blog - but the UK's vote to leave the European Union - marginal though it may be - prompts me to try to rebalance how the mainstream media is characterizing this event.
TV and press reporting is consistently telling us that the key reason behind the Brexit vote were concerns about immigration.
The concerns about immigration that people had were NOT about immigration itself, but about the impact of it on their lives. These are different and distinct things over which there are separate controls and separate controllers.
Freedom of Movement does mean people can come to the UK to work. In good times the net flow will be inbound. All these people arrive, work - and pay taxes.
The local government - in our case the UK - then decides how to spend that cash.
The decisions our government has made in how to deal with the impact of immigration are pretty much (barring a few language issues) exactly those they would have to deal with if we had a zero immigration policy but the native population boomed. New schools, additional hospital beds, ensuring there are job opportunities for all, infrastructure is kept up to pace..
. Freedom of movement means more people can come to help service those who are already here, if you have shortages in, say, science and maths teachers...
The Remain campaign was led by a PM and Chancellor who were themselves responsible for the inadequate response to the impact of a growing population. That was not a reality they could dare to confront in the campaign. But it's one Labour should of.
But from now on in it's essential that the opposition is heard - that immigration (and freedom of movement) is not the enemy - bad handling of the impact is.
Those responsible sit on local councils (having much to do with resourcing on the ground) and central government (having everything to do with providing enough for local councils to do something positive with).
We've punished the wrong institution for entirely the wrong reason.