Choose 'hard to do'

A lesson learned from recent networking:

Choose 'hard to do'. If you're brainstorming, the choice of what to follow up is often driven by the 'low-hanging fruit' philosophy.

The 'hard to do' rarely gets selected for follow up... in ordinary organisations.

Guess what? That's being repeated in most companies. The handful that understand 'hard to do' is where they should aim get calm blue seas to claim for their own.

The tendency to deficit thinking.

I've been giving a bit of thought to thought recently. Most recently of all I've had a nudge around the idea of deficit thinking - the way we will in some circumstances look for the negative.
It's generally a defence mechanism - it protects us against risks and dangers.
The phrase"Why is this lying bastard lying to me?" springs to mind.
This way of thought becomes a little too automatic - and becomes endemic in the average corporation.
Examples include the way you'll always find plenty of people on the team to tell you what's wrong with your organisation - but few who will tell you how to make it right.
Cynical, critical, looking on the bad side, glass half empty - no matter how pejoratively we describe it, we get so comfortable using it we find it hard to stop.
One real life example of why we should make the effort came across my radar recently (and no, we're not talking about the company I work for...).
One organisation measured its absence-through-sickness and found the average days off per person a year ran at (let's say) 4 days. The national UK average is closer to 9.
It didn't seem to occur that there might be some lessons about what they are doing RIGHT to be be learned - some carrots to be considered.
No, they went straight for the stick. If you're off work for x amount of time you have to be interviewed by your boss. The idea (actually expressed as such internally) is to scare staff away from swinging the lead. And the best way to make things 'better' is to make sure managers are doing those interviews.

It doesn't exactly communicate trust.

Of course, you probably need a bit of both. But to have a bit of both, you have to think a little less negatively - with a little less emphasis on the deficit - a little more on the trust.

The Ideas Marketplace

In this post 'Content sucks - if that's all you sell' I discussed the lessons we might learn from the collapse of content vendors in the music business.
In considering their dilemma (and the media industry's) I thought about how digital communities have better replicated the marketplace experience than bricks and mortar stores have chosen to.
And that made me question how ideas are 'exchanged' in corporations, in particular.
The mass industrialised mindset of Corporations tends towards hierarchy and the silo effect.
And that emerges (in corporate idea-exchange models) in the propensity towards broadcast of information: Centralised, one-to-many flows. eg "I'm here today to tell you about my great idea" echoing around an aircraft hangar...
I believe ideas are improved by more intimate two-way flows - conversations and challenges.
As Alan Moore likes to say "People embrace what they create". Confucius has effectively been saying something similar for 2500 years: “Tell Me and I Will Forget; Show Me and I May Remember; Involve Me, I Will Understand.” (Confucius, 450 BC).
So I'd like to see how ideas might evolve and new ones emerge by applying the model of the marketplace, rather than that of broadcast.
A traditional marketplace does three things:
1. Allows people to buy (AND sell)
2. Allows the exchange of information
3. Entertains
How might we take those elements to create an ideas marketplace within a corporation?
I have some vague ideas about literally allowing people to set up their marketstalls in a selected venue, putting on some related entertainment, and inviting everyone to just wander in and wander around, having conversations (ie not being broadcast at) with people with ideas/information to 'sell'.
It could be how someone wants to change how your IT department works, or loves a book they've read they want to market to their peers, or has a plan for a fantastic new digital play but no one in his/her silo has wanted to know...
But this is a first draft - an early iteration.
I'm bringing the idea to the digital version of the marketplace. Let's talk?

n

Am I just a figment of the community's imagination?

I've been striving to communicate better with one of the communities I'm currently working with while I prepare their website for relaunch.
It has a very active forum-based community.
One of the steps I've taken is to set up a blog where I am (I think!) honest and transparent about what we are developing, what's on time, what's not, what isn't working - and welcoming feedback.
I've also recruited around 30 users to help us test it and offer their ideas and feedback. I hope they'll not only hone it, but also become advocates for it.
We've started a photo-moblog for users. And all this 4-C style stuff has been going fairly well.
But I got an unusual response to one email I sent direct to one user. After receiving it he posted this on the forum:

"OK, the TRUTH is out there; who else has been getting unsolicited PM's & e-mails of our new on-line edditor?'cos it's got me wondering; has any-one ever actually met him?I can see lots of stuff popping up on the mag site and the new blog bit, and stuff, and I was thinking it must take a lot of activity to do all that.Do they let him out at all, or is he locked in the bowls of an Emap basement somewhere, hooked up to wires, that give him electric shocs if he doesn't upload enough bites by set deadlines?Maybe, he's actually been locked in the forum hamster wheel with a lap top?Maybe he IS the lap-top. A 'virtual' person; a figment of the 'Matrix'!I dont know.Replied to his latest and asked him, but, not sure. If he replies, could still be a ghost in the machine, couldn't he.I mean, like artificial intelligence, kinda stuff.Any one care to comment?"

There followed a bit of piss-taking etc

The thing that interests me about this is the writer's automatic assumption that he's been the target of a group email of the worst corporate kind.
It was in fact an email sent to him and just five other people who have provided us with email addresses - and was an invitation to write a news story about anything he liked and have the community judge how long it stays on the homepage/comment on it etc (a bit of a warm up for the blogs mechanism we're due to launch).

What this tells me is that he has learned to expect corporate, non-specific communications from representatives of the brand. And that may take more than a few blogs and pleasant emails to change.

Just six months ago I might have thought - 'idiot, doesn't he understand what we're trying to do?'
Now I think, I'm the idiot, I've got to work harder to make my communication with the community less corporate (even though I thought I'd taken giant leaps in that direction, they clearly haven't gone far enough). I have to work harder to break down the barrier between the brand and its community.

There has been, in the past, a real ignorance of the online community view within (particularly, but not-exclusively) print editorial teams. If people posting on our forums complain or tell us we've got something wrong, I've seen print teams close their ears and bad mouth the users as their ONLY response. If you're still in that camp - you have to change.

The other thing that became clear from the recent posts on our forums was that users have worked out that this brand is not the only one I work for - that they're getting a shared resource. I think they are ok about that (they discuss it in a relatively humourous way) but what I have learned is it's not worth trying to pretend I'm entirely dedicated to them. If you aren't honest, your community will find you out, so just play it straight.

UPDATE: My response to our user above, seems to have worked quite nicely. He has responded by email to me again - in an amusing, philosophical way. He's now actively testing our new blogs. I've tried to continue to be human rather than corporate in my communications and the thaw is discernable.