Cuts this deep require model change - and a platform approach

There is much talk within UK Government of using digital means to reduce costs. Reducing costs is what this government does. Or at least attempts to.

When the discussion is about the use of digital means the focus is usually on delivery of existing (or reduced) services or benefits - providing a replacement, lower cost customer interface when compared with bricks and mortar offices. (Image courtesy sjsharktank)

Essentially what they are seeking to do is deliver the same old same old at a lower cost. Efficiencies. Hopefully.

But as those with long expertise and experience in business will tell you, the kind of cuts, the kind of savings our current Government is trying to make don't happen without a significant change to the model, too.

So it's time they stopped looking at driving people online to do what they used to do in offices and instead use the advantages of online to develop new models in keeping with the network.

A great example. Fellow Twitter user @siliconglen and I were discussing 'the cuts' this morning when he suggested there should be some kind of site where the 500,000 public sector people who will be put out of work by these cuts could be helped - where they could pool resources and skills.

This is a very different kind of digital thinking than applied by the Government in its channel management focus. This is platform thinking.

Imagine a site where users register their all important meta data - ie their skills, their interests, their location, their resources - where users pitch ideas to each other, aggregating support, pulling together teams with the right key sets and who, thanks to redundancy payments, may even be able to provide seed funding for the idea. Augtomated cross matching could bring together new groups focused around their shared purpose.

Self-organised, self-starting, highly-motivated businesses launched from the ashes of job cuts - perhaps supported with matching funds by the Government for those ideas reaching a critical level of support. People building things they believe in - and which others believe in, too.

Yes, I appreciate there are elements of this model distributed here and there throughout the web. Places where seed investors are matched with entrepreneurs. Places where ideas are pitched and communities vote. Places where people log their interests and skills. Places where their assets are listed.

What may be necessary is a selection of the essential elements and a distillation into one functioning whole. Hell, some of those cast aside in the spending review could probably do the build. People could share skills and retrain each other through it, too.

With a relatively small investment and a grip on the realities of our self-forming future, the Government could inspire a new self-organising style of entrepreneurial business - contributing to the economy, creating new things and new value - matching real needs. Instead of standing by and keeping fingers crossed that the existing private sector will take up the slack - or even watching helplessly as the unemployed become a long term cost.

Of course this would become valuable not just to the 500,000 public sector folk at risk - but also to all those whose jobs may tumble in the cascade around those public services. In fact, any one could join.

That's Big Society, Dave. Writ large
As I've often said, the future isn't digital - it is self-organised.

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An Open letter to David Cameron (with the emphasis on Open)

Hello David.

Long time no see. I want to catch up on one or two things and suspect it may be a while before I bump into you in Starbucks again.

You see, I love the idea of the Big Society. But in order for it to save us from a generation of savage cuts and all that goes with them, we must move it from the village hall to the heart of Government.

David, your speech in Milton Keynes yesterday paved the way for a dark future. It sounded much less 'Yes We Can' and much more 'You Just Can't'.

Where has the Big Society gone, David? Cuts imposed from the centre? Under whose guidance? Whitehall's 'experts'? When do we actually get to be in this together, rather than have this done to us?

There are more experts outside Government on any given subject than inside (witness, the digital economy act). That was the Big Society trying to act - and revealing the reality of the potential power of us being 'all in this together'.

So David, I urge you, for the sake of that deficit - and its impact on future generations - start walking the walk of The Big Society.

Make it a priority to use social tools to discover those who can make a difference to any given subject. And use your resources to bring them together.

Collaborative co-creation works. It creates best-fit policies and less waste, more efficient services. It creates engaged citizens: Ones who aren't just told we're all in this together, but actually are in the process of it rather than at the receiving end.

Using social technologies all this can be achieved so much more cheaply than through the focus groups and traditional stakeholder engagement methods of the old approach to policy making.

Government is not something you do to people, it is something you do with them. Social technologies lower the transaction costs of making that more than just a slogan.

Through social tools we can make best use of those things we DO have in abundance: our desire to do things together (as the highly social ape we are) our willingness and desire to connect one to another and to talk about what bothers us, our creativity - our desire to make a difference.

Make use of all that we have in abundance to make the best possible use of our more scarce resources.

Use real-time auditing of digitally expressed intent, and need, to target resources (there are millions of us publishing what matters to us to our peers on social networks and through social tools right now).

Use the army of experts outside Government to make policy that fits the real needs of more people - decide how to cut and where to spend.

Use the solutions of the networked world to provide a long tail fit with real need. Move away from the ill-fitting, waste-ridden application of lowest-common denominator policies (pleasing few), to niche-focused service provision to truly serve the diverse needs of all (sounds like a vote winner to me...).

Recruit a whole army of service providers, as those who contribute to the co-creation of policy find they care enough to want to make things better on the ground. This is how you will engage that army of volunteers. And how they will recruit another. If they have a hand in making policiy it becomes their policy - one they want to make work and will help to make work.

In short, David, the world has changed from mass to niche, from broadcast to network. The way it must be governed must change too.

The future is about self organisation. Government must become about enabling that self-organisation: Platform Government.

It means less power at the centre. And that's tough for those with power to accept. So it needs a new breed of politician. One which truly puts the people before their own power.

Are you one of the new breed David?

That self-organising future gets to happen with or without you.

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Platform Government cuts costs AND improves services

Who ever wins, loses (or draws) the UK's General Election next month, we are in for a world of pain.

But that may equate to the single biggest opportunity we've ever had for fundamental, structural, governmental change (not the small c 'change' you may have heard the politicians tell you they want - theirs is the kind of change which leaves them in both command and control).

The leaders can tell you they will cut a smidgeon here to invest a little there but the reality of the burden of the UK's record breaking deficit and debt is that we must expect both a reduction in services AND an increase in the amount we all have to contribute for them.
If you had a contract between you and UK plc you would be quite within your rights to tear it up and take your business elsewhere.

Unfortunately we don't have that option (yet... the when of that 'yet' is quite another story which we must leave for another day. Suffice to say the networked world doesn't recognise geo-political borders).

Government, does however have an option which can both better target resources AND engage voluntary effort which will have the net effect of both cutting costs AND improving services.
And just as businesses require crisis to change (excellent performers, or flat-line ones like the Ad Industry tend toward head-in-the-sandism) so perhaps our crisis of cuts and tax rises will provoke just the kind of strategic shift in how we govern ourselves that we so clearly need.

I'm talking about Platform Government of course.
To reiterate: an organisation should use its available resources to discover people who care about the same issues they do, bring them together, surface what they think needs fixing and work with them (enable and join with them) to fix it.

Government - or 'resource allocation against the needs of the people' to give it its full name (ok, that's my definition) has:

• Never had a better set of tools to discover the real time needs of people.
• Never had a better set of tools to engage with people.
• Never had a better set of tools to enable people. I'm talking about social networks, technologies and tools of course.

Government must be redesigned to meet the needs of, and take advantage of, this networked world.

Our current process of Government, like mass media, has been built to serve the lowest common denominator needs of a mass production world. It's resulted in one-size-fits-all policies, resource allocation (and, incidentally, political parties).

That world is ending.

Now we can all find people who care about the same stuff we do in real time. We can come together to discuss an issue. We can surface what needs fixing. And in engaging in the conversation we discover that we care enough about this thing that we are prepared to act to make it better (at least enough of us to make change). The Government can be a platform for exactly this kind of collaborative innovation.

Apply this to things such as policy development: Instead of a small group of Government appointed experts beavering away; share the aim.

• Expect that there are more people outside of government who care about the issue than inside.
• Expect that there are more people outside of government who are more expert than those inside.
• Expect that will be the case with every single issue confronting the UK.

A platform government approach would open its doors to that freely given expertise and insight.

And how about that issue of resource allocation? Ongoing online listening will not only reveal where the people who care about each issue are (so you can invite them to participate), it'll also reveal what the issues that matter are, where, and in real time. And it'll reveal this in a long-tail, rather than lowest common denominator, way - ie it will reveal all the niche interests that need serving, rather than the single biggest need.

The result of this is a wikifixing approach to resource allocation - to make Government services a better fit with actual, real-time need. That equals less waste and more effective services for more of the people they are meant to serve. Real efficiency.

The flipside (other upside of this remarkable win-win) is that in engaging people in the change they want, you get an army of volunteers to make the change happen. More people willing to take responsibility instead of leaving it to 'the government' to sort out. More people willing to put their action where their conversation is.

And that means better services can be delivered at lower cost because more of us get involved in making, sharing and delivering them.

We could maintain taxes at current rates, provide better services at lower cost, and pay off that deficit.

Oh, and we'd also end up with a Government people felt part of - which is kind of a good thing, since it was meant to be ours all along.

Who knows, we may even start trusting politicians again? Ok, maybe that's an ask too far...

Angry of Percy Street

I'm fuming.

I've just wasted more than an hour on a call which could have lasted 30 seconds. If the caller had been upfront and honest.

An organisation called me because they had been 'given my name' in association with my work with NinetyTen and CitizensOnline (at least that's what they said). They felt we should be introduced to senior people in the UK Government to help effect change after the next election.

They asked questions about what I/we do. They listened carefully as I outlined the impact of the network on every aspect of our lives - and how what we do focuses on creating new efficiencies through social technologies.

They asked how we could see ourselves and our services fitting in with local government and national government requirements and processes.

And when I asked what they needed from us they said a 650-word document about what we do, to place in front of Public Sector commissioners (the people with the purse strings).

It would be part of a book (a page in fact) guiding these commissioners in what needs to change.

Oh - and that'll cost me £3995.

Stunned.

I'm angry (image by darrenhester) for a number of reasons:

1. I feel like a fool. I feel fooled. I was (mis)led on to believe there was genuine interest among senior government officials in trying to make sense of the power of collaboration, of wikifixing, of a platform approach to the organisation. In fact I was being asked to buy an advertorial. A 650-word listing. The whole approach was disingenuous and as far from transparent as I ever want to try to see through.
2. This is no way to serve the community of commissioners this content is intended for. Serving the community FIRST is a guiding principle in media for me. To do this you get the best, most relevant content you can get from all sources, rivals included. Certainly NOT JUST FROM THOSE WHO WILL PAY.
3. As a UK taxpayer, I'm concerned at the implication from the vendors of this listing that commissioners will spend public money based on a company's appearance (or otherwise) on a paid-for listing (you say 'book', I say ad listing.) Any UK public sector commissioners that does should be shown the door for both negligence and incompetence.

For the record, those of you with an interest in public sector (particularly commissioners), a number of 90:10 consultants have deep experience of working with UK Governments at both national and local level.

We use listening technologies to discover people who care about issues and use social tools to bring them together and surface their concerns to enable improved efficiencies in the production, marketing and delivery of products and services.

We don't need to appear on a paid-for list to tell you that. If you'd like to know how we can help you, give us a call, drop us an email, let's meet face to face. Ninety Ten awaits.

Just don't expect us to show up in a book sent to you free any time soon.

Tip for everyone else on planet earth: If you are expecting me to pay to create your content say so right up front. It'll save us both a lot of time.

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We want more than incrementally better messages

There's a rule about new technologies - bleeding edge tech doesn't equal bleeding edge demand. I'm old enough to remember Betamax.

Electronics companies have a track record in this kind of failure. Famously (and quoted in Blue Ocean Strategy) Phillips CD-i was a commercial flop because it tried to do too many things - and customers weren't sure what value it could add to their lives.

That and the fact the games were rubbish.

Phillips added and added technical functions and spec. With all this 'special stuff' - the execs were convinced the market would lap it up. But they forgot to ask what the user would find useful.

Innovation is only any good if it's useful to people. The more people it is useful to, the better the outcome.

Often the focus of innovation is on ourselves - how can we make things better for us. Or it's on showing off how technically clever we are (our spec's bigger than your spec).

And isn't that what a huge chunk of digital marketing has been all about? Sharper and sharper focus on tracking and responding to online behaviour - cleverer and cleverer tech, more and more spec?

All the better to serve the right ad at the right time with.

All the innovation focused on building a better advert.

What we're talking about here is a technological arms race in pursuit of incremental improvements in quality or relevance of messages.

Which is the answer you'd come up with if you asked advertising and marketing teams what they wanted from digital innovation.

But is it what all elements of the route to market actually WANT from the best-ever ability to connect with people that digital technologies enable?

Is a better advert what the manufacturers and service providers want from digital technology? Is it the best they can expect from our growing ability to form communities of purpose at the drop of a hat?

And is a better advert what 'consumers' want?

Oh, I know, the right information at the right time becomes really 'useful' so you could argue the more effective you are at this the more effective your 'adverts' for all parties. There is some truth in this. Ads that take this approach attain much higher click-thru rates (but all those that don't get clicked must still be counted as spam).

More importantly, this is defaulting to the belief that what we all want is better messaging.

What if that isn't true? What if what we all actually want (manufacturers and service providers -
customers, too) is improvement in quality or relevance of products and services?

More potential 'customers' for advertising would find that useful.

So the role of advertising and marketing may just be in deploying your skills and relationships to improve the quality and relevance of products and services.

How do you innovate that using digital tools? Well that's pretty much what I'll be talking about at OMEXPO in Madrid tomorrow.

Expect references to the best set of tools to bring us together (the social technologies which form the web) being wasted on gathering eyeballs - and how platform thinking can put them to their best use: innovating better and more relevant products and services.

See you there (slides will follow :-)

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It'll be a sad day when we finally understand influence

A fascinating post by fellow 90:10er Stowe Boyd (... The Dark Matter of influence) has been rolling around my head since I read it yesterday.

Stowe discusses this Arvix Post, titled Best Connected Individuals Are Not the Most Influential Spreaders in Social Networks.

To summarise; influence is derived from how close you are to other influencers in a network - how low and short the number of links from you to how many other influencers (not the number of your connections, as often assumed).

Which validates why network analysis is such a crucial element when trying to 'identify influencers'. (image via Beth Harte)

Stowe concludes:

The subtle, dark-matter mystery of social networks is that influence is oblique, and not easily determined by the sorts of tools we have today.
It is not your follower count, or who you follow, per se. But, instead, do you have short paths into other social scenes, both incoming and outgoing? That is the deep structure of being truly connected: bridging over different social scenes, acting as a conduit, a vector, a filter and amplifier for ideas good and bad, the best insights, and deadly viruses.

Influence is fluid. It resides less in the node and more in the interactions between the nodes. It is the interactions which change the state of the group, not a change in the condition of the nodes (think water H2O molecules and ice, water, steam - an example Mark Earls (another 90:10 collaborator) refers to in his book Herd. (Update, Mark has now posted his own response)

This means that giving interesting things to people to do together - bringing them together around things they care about (through shared purpose), to act on those things, has more value than spotting the influencer and giving them some sort of message you expect them to go off and influence others with.

Influence has a certain value: in crisis management, identifying those with the likelihood of having their voice heard by a greater number and in giving likely start points for the real job of peer to peer distribution. If you're going to try to turn the flock, you're bound to think it best to start off by working with the big birds.

And to Stowe's point about the tools, influence is complex, but not complicated. It can be deconstructed nuance by nuance; function by function.

One day - and perhaps quite soon - we will have the tools to fully understand it in real time. And that concerns me. Because at the point we can truly understand influence we're but a tiny step from using that power for ill. Manipulation, springs to mind. It could all become very 'broadcast'.

People influence each other. They change the state they are in. Help them find each other, support their conversation, help them act on it. That will always generate more value (for ALL parties) than an influential voice.

Be the platform.

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