Efficiency is lazy. But hard to shake.

I have just returned from my daily, government-proscribed, exercise. Thoughts gathered on that walk, inspired somewhat by Dave Snowden's COVID-19 & Leadership initiative, led me to identify a 'weak signal' which may gain significance as we find ourselves having to relearn how to respond and organise.
Let me explain.
I'm very keen to maintain my 2 meter minimum distance from people. I am lucky enough to be able to walk into the countryside so the folk I do encounter are relatively rare. When one does hove into view I usually have 2-3 minutes to adjust my direction to keep well clear. As do they.
Often I will cross the road to ensure we keep well apart. Often I will pause, slow my direction, change my trajectory. As do many others.
I would guestimate its 19/20 times that I do the making way. Joggers sometimes bounce past a little too close for comfort (I don't hear them coming from behind if I have my earphones in). Cyclists sometimes fly by on the same path - rather than trouble themselves with the change in direction that would take them onto grass or a very quiet road.
We could see this as a metaphor only - it is inefficient to step away from the path you've set yourself. It may add steps to your journey. It may take you longer. You may expend more energy.
But it's more than metaphor. It is how we behave. It is how we behave even under the threat of a virus that is changing so much else about how we live.
And that's the weak signal that is still there four week's into lockdown and longer still into social isolation. We seem to prefer efficiency even under threat to our health. Perhaps this is as much because the default behaviour for us - recognised in the whole 'don't make me think' culture of Easy we have delivered - is to be lazy.
It is harder to take extra steps, it costs us more to replan our direction of travel - in energy and time.
One other weak signal to consider, emerging from my walks: The larger the group, the less likely it is to change direction. There is both metaphor and real behaviour in this.
As we face the chaos of COVID-19 and attempt to sense our way to what comes next, we must do so recognising the threat to change from our fixation on efficiency - and the potential for faster responses inherent in smaller groups.

The efficiency obsession - price isn't everything

Ross Hitchenor has written a great summary of a great session on the damaging impact of our obsession with efficiency.

Read it. I do think Professor Roger Martin's call for a switch away from efficiency towards resilience echoes Nicholas Taleb Nassim's valuable concept of antifragility.

And I'm glad that someone from the floor raised the ghost of Marx. Classical Marxist theory maintains that fewer people getting richer faster is a necessary consequence of unconstrained markets. Markets operating with perfect efficiency will always centralise capital. The market's ability to price-in cost should make it the ultimate resource allocator.

But it can only work if the price of each transaction reveals the total cost (including environmental and social impact). 

This requires rapid and insightful calculation and transparency on a global scale - as I wrote in a Linkedin article - Can We Code The Economy To Cut The High Price of Low Cost

Finally we may know the true cost of everything - and even its value.

2020 vision

I know. I'm meant to review the last decade or predict what'll happen in the next year around this time.

Thing is, I'm not going to follow the rules, because for the years following 2009 it simply wouldn't be appropriate to follow rules which may have applied up to this point.

We're in for a big change: Where the noughties were a decade of discovery, the teens will be a decade of realisation. And not discovery of new tech. The future isn't digital; it is self-organised.

The noughties were when we discovered our self-organising power - little by little. And new models started to emerge.

But we are embarking on 10 years in which people all over the globe will realise the self-organising power now at their fingertips - and start turning that realisation into the world they want; niche by niche.

Which means everything you know is up for grabs. Everything.

Everything that is organised or mediated can and will be disrupted by this.

That's pretty much every aspect of society, then. (image courtesy Life Archive on google)

As the realisation dawns, you can be certain no one will be talking about 'social media' anymore. They will just get on with using the best ever set of tools and platforms to communicate: With each other, find each other, form groups, act.

They won't wait to be directed. They will simply come together and debug their world. Niche by niche. The edge in action.

Which is bad news for those who would organise and those who would mediate.

It's not just traditional media, advertising, marketing etc that's going to be replaced. Even the 'new media' stuff that relies on central organisation is threatened. Traditional search (for example) is already being replaced for many by collaborative filtering.

Ubiquitous, always-on computing will arrive as the enabler. Digital social tools which allow us to express meta data beyond silos (including language) will emerge to enable all of us to find all of us when we need each other most. Those tools and platforms which fulfil those roles most successfully will be those with the best chance of commercial success.

And by 2020 we will have the tech and the will to make communities of purpose the primary form of organisation: adhoc self-forming groups brought together to collaborate - driven by common purpose.

The self-organised future will begin taking shape, new structures for education, law, government - all the aparatus of the state - will emerge. And as they do the state itself, as a formalised centrally-controlled collective based on geography, will submerge.

This new form of organisation will over-ride more traditional methods primarily because it provides a more effective tool for the allocation of increasingly scarce resources. But also because people like doing stuff together. It's a better fit with the reality of our social selves.

Lowest common denominator models will disappear wherever communities of purpose can self-organise (which is pretty much everywhere and anytime).

One example? Mass party politics will decline. New democracy will formulate in open systems - with collaboration delivering a better fit, niche by niche,

In repeatedly failing to understand the cross-border collaboration of 'their' people, our national leaders remind us of the failure of lowest common denominator politics and broad and assumed national interests.

The issue of global warming may prove a key catalyst. We gave our leaders the chance to sort things out with their big, broad, one-size fits all policies (they found that none did).

In a decade of realisation we move beyond being passive consumers in all aspects of our lives - government policy included.

We won't sit back and wait for the centre's solution. Instead we quietly and determinedly get on with wikifixing our world - collaborating across borders, ignoring the fictional silos the nation state has imagined and attempted to impose.

The impact of the edge on the centre has the potential to be cataclysmic. If change from without happens faster than change from within, something will tear. Fundamental organisational change is hard to imagine as a gentle process.

Judging when to cede control will be a key skill for leaders of all organisations in the coming years. Protecting the vulnerable, another.

My daughter has just finished her first term of traditional schooling. I have to wonder if she will complete her education (what a curious pre-network phrase...) within a similar lowest-common-denominator structure. And if she doesn't - then how does the morph from old to new happen? With a meeting of a parents collective and nods of assent - or with teachers manning the barricades?

There is much to consider; much I (and we) could strive to predict.

Instead, in the words of BBC Childrens TV long gone (and with more than a nod to Clay Shirky's Gin-swilling tales of newly industrial London), Why Don't You Just Switch Off Your Television Set and Go and Do Something Less Boring Instead? Start inventing the self-organised future - niche by niche - with someone you care about, today.

By 2020 a person's worth will be valued by what they share, not what they keep. That may be the most significant shift of all.

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Using + Social Media = Fail

I was at #Online09 (Online Publishing) at Olympia in London, to do a keynote in the Social Media Marketing theatre today.

I'm delighted to say (and perhaps its a sign of the times) that the room was packed - standing room only. They even stayed until the end :-)

I was kicking around what happens when you deconstruct the social media thang, into its social + media parts (I have blogged about this previously).

But I started from the perspective that the future is not digital.

When Gutenberg invented movable type (circa 1450) a new era was ushered in. Within 50 years there were 20 million books on the planet (to share among 450m people - I know there were 450m people at the time because I asked my friends on Twitter).

That's 20m in 50 years from a standing start (as described by Stephen Fry in his BBC show on Gutenberg). And that standing start included zero mass production techniques or technologies. Quite staggering.

And I wondered what the big prediction would have been in 1500 among the soothest sayers of the day. What next? More books?

Not likely is it.

Yet we keep banging on about a digital future.

1450 is also regarded as the beginning of the great age of exploration. The future was the renaissance, new forms of organisation (capitalism replacing feudalism) the destruction of the power of the old order (the Reformation across Europe). That's the effect of more books - it is what people did together with this new 'book' technology.

And right now, the future is not about new and better digital tools, or their prolifieration - it is about what we do together with them - the new self-organising future that dawns.

And that, and what businesses and organisations can do to benefit from all this, is what my keynote was about this morning.

Here's the slides - and, as always, your thoughts are welcome.

Using + Social Media = Fail

View more presentations from david cushman.

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Social + Media = Change

Let's deconstruct the phrase 'social media' and try social + media instead.

It helps me understand where the focus should be: 90% on the social, 10% on media.

That doesn't mean there's no role for the media side. It plays a critical one, without which the social doesn't get to happen - but it does reflect where the value lays, who creates it and how.

Social =

• The social technologies that connect us
  
• People
• Groups
• Hands and feet
• Action
  
• What we choose to do together

Media =

• That which flows through social technologies
  
• Content
• Distribution
• Mouths and ears
  
• Conversation
  
• What they would seek to do to us/get us to do

The media side is where we pass on messages from one to another, do the viral thing, create content and publish it - in social networks and on blogs and in tweets.

It is where we fulfil those mutliple roles that once were the sole domain of the media industry - we publish, we advertise and market (to our peers). We provide the distribution through peer-to-peer pass on. We do it all in networks rather than channels, in real-time rather than their time and many-to-many rather than broadcast from one-to-many, with the one at the centre.

It is a CRITICAL part of the mix. You don't get the social without the media. The Eighth Mass Media. Us.

To recap on The Eight Mass Media:

• We are the distribution
• We are the content
• We are the user journey
• We are how messages are transmitted
• We are the medium and the media carried within it
• We are the connections AND how the connections are made

In this Eighth Mass Media element we find each other - we discover those we didn't know we needed to know, we come together to serve a common purpose. We become communities of purpose.

And there is a great deal of value in this. We recommend stuff - our friends buy it or buy into it.

But the greater value lies in the new, fast, user-centric, efficiencies of the 'social' part of the phrase.

That is, that all our media-like activity brings us together with people seeking to solve the same problem or improve the same experience

And this is where the efficiencies happen.

A very small-scale example:

• A social technology (Twitter) is created (social)
• I (social) tweet a complaint about a brand (media)
• A person (social) representing the brand uses social technology to discover this (social)
• The person (social) contacts me (media)
• We engage in conversation (media)
• My problem is resolved (social)
• The person representing the brand (social) discovers a way to improve their current system - making it more efficient for brand and consumer (social)
• I (social) tweet my peers to say how pleased I am with the outcome (media)
• I (social) recommend the brand representative to my peers (social)

How does that scale?

Remember: The people who can make most difference to your organisation don't work for it. Adapting to the network means that they can.

So broadening the listening for what's wrong with your brand, as experienced by end-users, effectively delivers crowd-sourced improvements - R&D and NPD - in rapid iteration and at small cost.

Make no mistake - there is much more to this than reputation management.

Social + Media generates low-cost NPD, R&D, P2P Marketing, Advertising, Recruitment and all that reputation management warmth, too.

The process adapts the org to the expressed needs of the network (people) - it transforms your organisation into one in which the greater part of its energy is generated from beyond the organisation - and one in which that increased energy nourishes a growing, changing and responding org.