Warning: liveblogging. Typos, errors and grammatical insanities likely. This post will change repeatedly over a period of time. Refresh for the latest updates. You are warned.
Like Minds 2011 is underway, and first off is a series of four speakers look at how the world has changed...
Yan Gourvennec - Confessions of an Intrapeneur
Yan is not French. He's from Brittany... However, he has 20+ years of experience of implementing new technologies. An Intrapeneur is someone with the ability to implement change within big organisations. It's difficult to effect change in big companies, even those with lots of money. An intrapeneur bridges the gap between the thinkers and the doers - they make things happen.
If you want to be an instrapeneur, you don't have to ask permission; you have to ask forgiveness. You will attract detractors and naysayers, but you're not a troublemaker - you always have the common good in mind. It's very hard to change things in a large organisation. And there's always someone coming saying "What's the ROI?". A thick skin is a necessity.
He's learnt nine lessons, which will appear on this blog later on. Here's three:
- Change begins with a prayer: the serenity prayer. Work around the things you can't change.
- You have to think big and start small - if you want to change everything in one go, it won't work. People detest innovation because it changes their habits. People resist change. Go step by step. Start with the small things and work up to the big things - but have the vision right from the start.
- Choose the path of least resistance. Don't go argue the toss with detractors. They're uninterested in changing. There are zealots who will never like you. They have fixed ideas. Work with the nice - the interested - people. And eventually you'll change everyone bar the detractors, who will probably work with the movement.
- Eat your own dogfood. You have to leas by doing what you're advocating. Everyone always says that they don't have time to blog. The best response is to say: "I know you have the time to do this, because I do it". Persuade senior people to blog on topics that they are passionate about - they will succeed, and persuade others.
Molly Flatt - Graveyards vrs Maternity Wards
Molly is going to talk about the book - because it's THE innovation to beat. New technology has provided new formats for books, but the formats have often been short lived - CD-ROMs. Book may be perishable, but for centuries the have survived and been the best way of transferring information. She recommends Umberto Eco's book - This Is Not The End Of The Book.
When she's talking about the book, she's actually talking about the Gutenberg Press. It made publishing clear - and social media does the same. Sometimes with think that by using innovative technology we are being innovative. This is often not the case. Look at Dan Brown novels for an example from books...
She's gone part time to become a writer, and is working on a novel. And she's blogged about some of the revelations that process has brought her. Sometimes technology isn't the best way to get things done - she retreats to a pen and a Moleskine to get writing done. She also read Making Ideas Happen at the same time. Social media is the most seductive thing for our lizard brains. We keep ourselves busy, without actually doing anything. Steve Jobs got things done because he was a tenacious son of a bitch.
Delayed Gratification is a quarterly publication that celebrates the reflective, the long look back at the last three months news, rather than the constant buzz of the now that social media brings. It brings back hindsight - and that's valuable.
Ask yourself if any initiative really change anything? Will your customer notice the difference? Otherwise, you run the risk of just tinkering around the edges. The failures, the idiots and the almost-weres are as important for us to look at as the successes.
"Culture is essentially a graveyard for books and lost objects," wrote Umberto Eco. Libraries are cold rooms of culture and the past. With social media we have a filtering problem - how do we determine what is left behind? Have you exhumed your graveyards? What have you left behind to innovate? And has that diminished you?
The utopianism around social technology is inspiring - but so is figuring out what we've lost. Richard Attenborough has dared to suggest that we breed too much. Molly thinks that thinking applies to social media - we're just producing too much. Sometimes you have to destroy to create. Unless you get rid of things, it's always too tempting to improve the old rather than embrace the new. The fetish for creativity is overblown - look at where things can really improve the world.
Neuroscience shows we have longer "brain pauses" after reading Shakespeare - so read some Hamlet every morning, and you'll be more innovative.
James Moffat - The True Nature of the World
The role of social media in events like the Arab Spring is much discussed. But can it really effect change? Malcolm Gladwell's article in the New Yorker suggested that it can't. Sometimes we jump on the bandwagon and say they're important when they're not, suggests Moffat.
The truth is that people effect change, not media. The media (including social media) just facilitate that. The changes happen wether or not we have the tools. So why do we think they're so important. Digital advocates are often to blame. We abuse three letter abbreviations, and the language we use stops people understanding.
We all need a new level of media literacy, to find the genuine information in the hype. There's a generational factor here - but there's also a risk with the ironically isolating nature of social media sometime. The most rewarding experiences are often face to face one - a smile from a child, and good chat with colleagues. We need to stop shining lights on the technology, and instead refocus on the people; the ones who use the tools.
Complex Adaptive Networks - the world is made up of dynamic, nested communities that comes together in different forms to undertake specific tasks. Communities happen because there's a need for them, not because you want them to emerge. They're imperfect, but dynamic, flexible and iterative. And they're self-organising. So - you need a hands off approach:
- Create spaces for them to grow in
- Measure, monitor and maintain - figure out what's working and isn't, and make changes
- Enable exchanges
The most used tools in his company are Skype and Google Docs, because they make collaboration so very easy. They all blog, and are all expected to contribute to training and learning.
Glenn Le Santo - the future is always now
He's been around a while, and the one thing he's seen a lot of is change. He's a journalist, and was just entering the profession just as HTML was emerging. He recalls the days of newsrooms, reporters calling in copy over the phone, and toilets at events full of photographer with their hand in black bags developing their films... Digital has changed all that. There used to be whole teams to produce a single article. Economic reality and technology has changed that. You can use digital kit to do all of it in one place at one time. This means... less quality control. Sub editors would spot things in your copy you wouldn't.
Deadline have moved closer and closer - next month... next week... next day... now. And now people are expected to write things as they're happening. (Uh, like I'm doing now...) That's when he got out. Slowly the money went away. Syndication disappeared. Publishers hoped that HTML would go back in its box. It didn't - has any new technology ever? In the late 90s, fed up with the direction a company was moving in, he arranged a board-level meeting to introduce the internet, and recommended that at the very least they should buy the domain names for the titles they published - and was told it was just a fad. You can't buy those magazines now. They're dead.
The future is coming and it often has headlights and a honking horn...
Did the publishing industry react properly to the internet? No. The couldn't react creatively. They didn't understand that the paper was the supplement and that website was were the news happened. At the time they had so much money they could have made money from the transition. It's not that they couldn't change, it's that they wouldn't. Best quote from the Asterix books: "tomorrow never comes". You wait for tomorrow, and you wake up and it's still today. The future is today. What stops you seeing that is being too busy doing what you're doing now.
The modern creative needs to be familiar with tech. If you don't like computers, you're lame. Go and get another job that doesn't involve computers. Get interested in everything. Words, pictures, video...
You've got to monetise. Magazines that sell for five quid can't afford a photographer. And the websites that replaced them are nearly as broke. So how do you monetise? You have to be a pimp now. Write what you're told to, take the cheque, and then go and write what you want on your own blog.