Harnessing the power of innovation: networks are at the heart

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Every organization understands they need to innovate, not just in bringing new offerings to market, but in continually becoming a new and better organization.

Networks are always at the heart of innovation. The new comes from combining the old in original ways.

Chemist Kary Mullis aptly described how he arrived at his innovations that won him the Nobel Prize in 1993:

“I put together elements that were already there, but that’s what inventors always do. You can’t make up new elements, usually. The new element, if any, it was the combination, the way they were used.”

Whether it is bringing together existing ideas to create new ideas, or connecting people in ways that generate new insights, organizations must design how they work to facilitate value-generating connections.
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The best futurists ever: How Buckminster Fuller anticipated today’s challenges over 50 years ago

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220px-BuckminsterFuller1By Ross Dawson

When I’m asked who my favorite futurists are, usually the first person who springs to mind is Buckminster Fuller. He was an extraordinary inventor, a true visionary who had a massive impact on how we think, and was way ahead of his time.

You can discover more about his work from the Buckminster Fuller Institute.

Today I was looking again at some of his work, and was struck at how prescient his thinking was. Five decades ago he was talking about many of the issues that are today dominant in our considerations of the future. He brought deep and powerful insights that are exceptionally relevant to us today, not least to the future of work. His work remains powerful and useful.

I have taken a selection of quotes from his work (from WikiQuotes) below that are still highly relevant today. Let us learn from his wisdom.

Talking about Massive Open Online Courses and the pull of education:

Children, as well as grown-ups, in their individual, glorified, drudgery-proof homes of Labrador, the tropics, the Orient, or where you will, to which they can pass with pleasure and expedition by means of ever-improving transportation, will be able to tune in their television and radio to the moving picture lecture of, let us say, President Lowell of Harvard; the professor of Mathematics of Oxford; of the doctor of Indian antiquities of Delhi, etc. Education by choice, with its marvelous motivating psychology of desire for truth, will make life ever cleaner and happier, more rhythmical and artistic.
– 4D Timelock (1928)

Talking about the role of humans versus computers:

“Man is going to be displaced altogether as a specialist by the computer. Man himself is being forced to reestablish, employ, and enjoy his innate “comprehensivity.”
– Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth (1963)
[Note: Fuller was an apostle of “comprehensive thinking” – thinking about the whole and not just the parts]

Talking about the very current debate on a basic living wage as automation replaces jobs:

We must do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian-Darwinian theory, he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living.
– “The New York Magazine Environmental Teach-In” by Elizabeth Barlow in New York Magazine (30 March 1970), p. 30

Talking about the Circular Economy:

Pollution is nothing but resources we’re not harvesting. We allow them to disperse because we’ve been ignorant of their value.
– As quoted in “The View from the Year 2000” by Barry Farrell in LIFE magazine (26 February 1971)

Talking about augmentation and extension of our senses:

Up to the Twentieth Century, reality was everything humans could touch, smell, see, and hear. Since the initial publication of the chart of the electromagnetic spectrum, humans have learned that what they can touch, smell, see, and hear is less than one-millionth of reality. Ninety-nine percent of all that is going to affect our tomorrows is being developed by humans using instruments and working in ranges of reality that are nonhumanly sensible.
– R. Buckminster Fuller on Education (University of Massachusetts Press, 1979), p. 130

Describing the rise of the living networks:

The new human networks’ emergence represents the natural evolutionary expansion into the just completed, thirty-years-in-its-buildings world-embracing, physical communications network. The new reorienting of human networking constitutes the heart-and-mind-pumped flow of life and intellect into the world arteries.
– Grunch of Giants (1983)

Talking about applying technology to create better futures:

I do know that technologically humanity now has the opportunity, for the first time in its history, to operate our planet in such a manner as to support and accommodate all humanity at a substantially more advanced standard of living than any humans have ever experienced.
– Grunch of Giants (1983)

On everyone’s personal responsibility to shape a better future at a time when our capabilities are massively amplified:

I have to say, I think that we are in some kind of final examination as to whether human beings now, with this capability to acquire information and to communicate, whether we’re really qualified to take on the responsibility we’re designed to be entrusted with. And this is not a matter of an examination of the types of governments, nothing to do with politics, nothing to do with economic systems. It has to do with the individual. Does the individual have the courage to really go along with the truth?
– Only Integrity is Going to Count (1983)

These quotes just brush the surface of the depth of Buckminster Fuller’s work. I will come back later to some of his important themes and work.

How Stories Drive Sharing: 3 Insights on Harnessing the Power of Word-of-Mouth

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In today’s hyper-connected world, a brand has become less what it tells the consumer it is than what consumers tell each other it is. The beauty of word-of-mouth marketing is that it’s not only simple, it’s also free, and can work wonders for your business. According to marketing expert, author, and CEO of Zócalo Group, Paul M. Rand, more than 90% of people buy a product or a service because someone they know recommended it to them. In the age of social media, word-of-mouth marketing has become a great leveller for businesses, regardless of their age and their size.

Nonetheless, word-of-mouth marketing is sometimes underrated or has untapped potential. So how can a business harness the power of word-of-mouth marketing? Here are three useful tips from Paul M. Rand, as summarized in the video below from MSNBC.

1. Develop a purposeful story

Storytelling has intrigued the human psyche for millennia. There is something deeply personal about telling your story, and this includes the story of a brand. Rand believes that a brand should have a clear angle for its story, and one that customers find appealing to share. He recommends devoting 90% of communication to the topic of interest to both a brand and its consumers, and only 10% to a brand’s commercial messages.

2. Live your brand

Rand emphasizes that a brand’s message should not be restricted to marketing channels alone. Instead, it should be reinforced through all the functions of a business. The “live your brand” mantra can help to create a convincing and unified company ethos.

3. Encourage customers to share

Getting people to spread the word about your brand on a daily basis is vital to gaining a competitive edge. “If you have a good idea of how you want people to recommend your brand and you help them do it, they will very likely participate in that,” says Rand. He suggests developing a relationship with people who are already talking about your product: “If somebody is talking about your company, give them some things to share and make it easier for them to do so.” Rand points out that people thrive when they are given inside information, experiences and ideas that do not come through normal channels.

Search rankings and the case for word-of-mouth marketing

Rand sums up the crucial interconnections between developing a story, living your brand, and encouraging customers to share: “If you know how you want to be talked about, you build that into where you’re sharing information, and you’ll actually pop up higher in the search rankings as well.” This is because “seven of the eight leading things that drive search behaviour today are social conversations: how consumers are talking about brands”.

What happens when the home of the future crashes?

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This morning I was interviewed on the Mornings TV program about the future of homes, based on an interesting interactive infographic of how our homes may change over the next 15 years.

Click on the image below to watch a video of the segment.
Mornings9_210715
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The future of analogue people in a digital world

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A little while ago, I gave the keynote at Bridge Point Forum on Future Directions in the Digital Age, the title riffing off the conference’s theme of The Rise of the Digital Age.

I opened by making the critical point that, while the digital world is rising around us at an extraordinary pace, humans are completely analogue. Nothing about humans is digital. While we can conceive of and enact digital processes and thoughts, these are created from fully analogue neural networks.

This means that one of the most important frames on our future is understanding the interface between analogue humans and our increasingly digital external environment.

I illustrated the idea with segments of this movie of three Geminoids – essentially robot replicas of humans – together with their human models.

There is obviously a long way to go, but digital (and some analogue) technologies are getting closer to replicating some aspects of what we understand to be human.

Our analogue nature is in fact at the heart of what makes humans so much better than computers at many things such as conceptualizing, synthesis, and relationships.

There are many capabilities that were long considered to be uniquely human, such as playing chess at the highest level, yet brute digital processing power beat us long ago. Other amazing capabilities built on our analogue structure, such as facial recognition, are now being matched or transcended by digital capabilities.

All of which means that human interfaces with digital machines must be a large part of our future. They may be simple, such as visual and gesture interfaces that play to our analogue strengths. Or they may be more direct, such as the thought interfaces shown in this movie.

Perhaps an increasing number of people will choose to make themselves partly digital, as Kevin Warwick of I Cyborg fame has done. Or perhaps we will simply create better interfaces.

I do not believe our human analogue richness can be fully captured in digital structures (which is a subject for another post). Which means that the interfaces between analogue humans and the digital world in which we are immersed will be absolutely central to our future.

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The future of travel and tourism: safe adventures, real-time guidance, and new frontiers

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Recently, I spoke about the future of travel and tourism on the Morning Show.

MorningShow090513

Some of the things I talked about:

* The impact of the ageing developing world population, including the quest for “safe adventures” and the likely continued rise of cruise ships as a way to travel.

* The desire for greater experience in both travel and destination, resulting in the possibility of glass-topped aircraft to see the night skies as never before, and moving beyond the usual tourist itineraries to ever-more exotic locations.

* A massive rise in sustainable tourism, with low impact hotels and activities and the opportunity to observe rare species.

* Medical tourism continuing to grow, supported by ageing populations and soaring costs of medical attention in developed countries.

* Technology driving our pre-holiday and vacation experiences. We will be able to experience what it’s like being there before we go. We will get personalised recommendations based on our interests and profile on where we should go and what we should do.

* Real-time translation will allow conversations with people wherever we go.

* Space tourism is on the verge of reality, with Virgin Galactic already having sold 500 tickets at $200,000 a pop and many new competitors arising.

* The spaceships that allow space tourism could enable far faster global travel, including potentially 4 hour flights from Sydney to London.

Passion and the Future of Work

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A little while ago, I spoke in the keynote session of the Richmond Financial Industry Forum in Interlaken, Switzerland.

I spoke on Passion and the Future of Work. Below are some distilled thoughts from my keynote presentation.

The future of work is perhaps the most important lens to understand the future of business, society, and indeed humanity.

Over the next decade and more we can expect the global landscape of work to change to an extraordinary degree.

There are two primary driving forces that are transforming work.

In a connected world, almost all work can be done anywhere.

And the exponential growth of processing power is enabling computers to outperform humans for an ever-increasing scope of work.

At the same time we have long been designing organizations in a way that dehumanizes work. As we design workflow around increasingly precisely defined jobs and roles, this has often taken out the scope for uniquely human characteristics such as imagination and ingenuity.

Today we must focus on the work and activities at which humans can express their unique capabilities and excel far beyond machines. (Read more on the dehumanization and humanization of work.)

What we are passionate about is very likely what we are best at, what enables us to express ourselves and our capabilties to the fullest. We can be sure that passion will be at the heart of the future of work.

For most of us there are two domains to have a real impact on the future of work: ourselves as individuals, and the organizations in which we are leaders or employees.

For individuals, real passion always comes from beyond ourselves, in being inspired by or having a positive impact on others, whether it be our family, or humanity, or even beyond.

Organizations must understand the reality of an increasingly fluid global talent economy.

One useful definition of talent is those who have complete choice in what they do and who they work for. These talented people are those who will drive the success of the organizations they work for.

Money alone will certainly not attract the most talented. They look for far more, including the ability to develop their capabilities, to work with equally talented peers, to enjoy their work environment, to have flexibility and choice, and to achieve worthwhile things that have a broad impact.

There will be a rapidly increasing gap between companies that truly offer these possibilities and can thus attract the most talented, and the rest.

One of the massive emerging opportunities for organizations is to tap the full breadth of capabilities of their employees. Everyone is multi-dimensional in their skills, of which usually only a part is expressed in a job.

Internal crowdsourcing is about tapping the ‘crowds’ inside companies, by drawing on their insights, experience, and creativity that may not be used within their formal job description. This not only gives the organization access to more capabilities, it also allows staff the ability to draw on more of who they are and their fullest potential.

Climbing mountains is a powerful metaphor for our lives. Early in our lives we can see the opportunity to rise from the valleys, to go up and engage with the extraordinary beauty around us. Yet after we have spent much of our life climbing a mountain, we may realize it is the wrong mountain.

We all have aspirations. It is important that we ensure those aspirations are true to ourselves, express who we are rather than what society or our parents tell us is important. Those ‘true aspirations’, when we find them, will always engender passion.

That passion, and nothing else, will drive us to create a future of work that we want for ourselves and for our children.

Seven Capabilities for the PR Agency of the (Near) Future

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Back in the day, PR agencies only needed two things to succeed – be a better than average writer and have a rolodex (aka database) of media contacts. (A bottle of scotch in the top desk drawer was optional.) While both of those are still important today, the complexity that’s been created with the popularity of social media and an unquenchable desire for visual content has added multiple new demands on the PR agency of today that will be in play well into the foreseeable future.

Given these trends, here are seven capabilities (including a variation of the two already mentioned) for the PR agency of the near future:

  1. Data capture and analytics – In the past, the only data you had to be able to analyze was the number of hits. Today, with so much data available on campaigns, trends and audience behavior, there’s really no excuse for a PR agency to say they can’t measure ROI. Notice the point here is that it’s data analytics not just data collection. All of that data only becomes actionable once it’s analyzed and that means having someone available who’s skilled at doing so. That means not only having data analysts on board, but making sure they’re trained in PR and having established processes in place.
  2. Social media measurement – Unfortunately, many PR firms and practitioners have resorted to simplifying this the same way two or three generations before them did with counting placements as the sum total of how to measure results. Today, there’s a mistaken comfort level in counting likes and follows (quantity) over engagement and referrals (quality). Since the popularity of social media channels is rapidly shifting with generations, measurement will continue to be difficult. But if agencies don’t get in the habit of doing this now, other entities will be doing it for them – and owning it as a result. Facebook, Twitter and Google offer a variety of free analytical tools to give you at least enough data to understand basic levels of reach and performance.
  3. Community engagement – Reams of paper and terabytes of text have been created about the importance of this. PR agencies have actually gotten quite good at it, but it’s quickly becoming commoditized. It doesn’t have to if you’re truly engaged with online communities. Take this example related to Kellogg’s the cereal company known for Corn Flakes and Froot Loops. After Tim Burgess lead singer for the Charlatans tweeted how the phrase “Totes Amazeballs” sounded like a type of cereal, Kellogg’s created a limited edition Totes Amazeballs cereal and released it via social media. That’s called true engagement and all it took was paying attention.
  4. Crisis communication in the 24/7 age – PR and crisis management have gone together like butter on toast. What has changed is the 24/7 news cycle and the ability of trolls to turn what may seem like a small complaint into a near life-threatening situation. The solution is to be hyper-vigilant about how any element of a campaign could be misconstrued, and by being hyper-responsive when things go south. Gone are the days when there was time to consider a response. While a crisis plan has always been a necessity (though often ignored until a crisis presented itself), it’s even more important today. And every possible contingency and response needs to be included.
  5. SEO and SEM – While most PR agencies are at least familiar with SEO, agencies that specialize in SEO are probably more aware of PR. They see the benefit of securing coverage with a link and are probably more in tune with how to make the most of it. PR agencies must become more adept and aware of how SEO works, but also look at how SEM complements it. Just because there’s marketing in the term, doesn’t mean PR should walk away and leave it to other types of agencies to understand and adopt it.
  6. Writing Varied Content for Different Media – Because content has become so vital and yet there’s so much of it, the need for good content that stands out from the rest is even more important. What’s changed is that PR agencies must learn to write well, write visually, and write about a lot of different topics. That means knowing how to use video and pictures to tell the story in ways that the written word alone cannot. This flies in the face of how PR has been taught and practiced with a reliance on the written word that is almost sacrosanct. But considering the prevalence and desire for more and more video content, that dependence on the written word alone will have to be broken.
  7. Influencer Relations – Having access to key media and influencers is still important to PR. No other element within the entire marketing umbrella can lay claim to this or should. Until every consumer who wants to can influence a reporter, publisher, blogger or editor, PR will still be the primary conduit for conveying information to the media. The conundrum today is the continually blurring line between the media and influencers who require a similar level of attention and relationship building. That line is apt to become even further out-of-focus as reporters are forced to both publish and promote their work and media outlets hire social media icons to create content.

In a couple of years, this list could look different, but any PR agency that embraces these seven capabilities now will be well-positioned for what the near-term future may hold.

Trend of Top Journalists Moving into PR Can Enhance Integrity and Transparency

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By the time recipients of the 2015 Pulitzer Prize were announced in April, two of its winning journalists had already switched professions to public relations. The news dismayed many media people as it served as a reminder of the dwindling newspaper business, and particularly the downfall of small-town news and its public service stories.
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The newspaper reporters, Rob Kuznia of The Daily Breeze in Torrance, California, and Natalia Caula Hauff of The Post and Courier in Charleston, South Carolina, left their jobs for different reasons.

Kuznia, who won a local reporting Pulitzer for a series of stories on corruption in a local school district, was struggling to pay rent, living paycheck-to-paycheck on his former wage. Hauff, who won the public service award for a seven-part series on domestic violence in the state, wanted to start a family and needed a reprieve from her demanding work environment.

Their moves into public relations don’t seem as shocking as perhaps they do timely. Newspaper reporter regularly ranks as one of the worst careers due to its low pay and high stress situations. Paired with the decline of print journalism and subsequent job cuts, the choice to change professions is often made for journalists.

Yet the loss of journalism’s top reporters is primed to become PR’s gain. Similarities between the professions, such as great storytelling, the ability to work under tight deadlines, and the need for a wealth of good contacts, make journalists appealing additions to the industry. The shift may also shape the attitude of the future of PR, and offers the potential for more transparency and integrity in the industry.

Transparency

In our current digital age, keeping news and facts hidden from the public is increasingly difficult. It’s also potentially risky for client reputation if data is leaked from an outside source without context, and may give the impression that a company is concealing important information.

More than ever, we are living in a time of instant global sharing, with the looming prospect that one can’t hide, so why try? Emails can be forwarded in seconds and social media posts may go viral and show up in search engine results before involved parties have a chance to shape the course of dialogue. It’s a time of co-creation between brands and the public, and being prepared by being open can put a company ahead of the game.

Since journalists have been trained to uncover the truth and share the facts with accuracy, this mindset in public relations can help brands control the message and better serve their customers by welcoming conversation and honesty.

Integrity

With transparency comes integrity. Of course, public relations has its own code of ethics, and top professionals in the field already operate with a keen sense of moral principles.

According to the Public Relations Society of America, upholding integrity and public trust are essential to maintaining the profession’s role and reputation.This is done in part by allowing the free flow of truthful and accurate information, as well as open communication to promote informed decision making.

Welcoming award-winning former journalists into the industry can further strengthen and protect high ethical standards with their dedication to sharing the facts in an unadulterated manner. This focus on embracing openness and actively disclosing company data can bring further confidence to the field, as well as from clients and potential clients. It may not only bolster client reputation, but also make the company at large more appealing to do business with.

In the future, public relations will remain in strong demand, especially as new technologies create different channels of communication and environments that foster the rapid exchange of information.

Perhaps not every journalist is suited for the field; however, exceptional reporters with shrinking news outlets available to them are finding public relations an attractive alternative for sharing their talents. Their commitment to imparting honest information in fast-paced and fast-thinking situations may also make them an asset to public relations in our hyperconnected era of digital communication.

Consumer expectations continue to rise: advocacy reduces, antagonism rises, but trust enables value creation

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The latest results from IBM’s annual Smarter Consumer Study provide interesting insights.

If consumers are smarter, they are expressing it with not just increased expectations, but an increasingly active expression of their displeasure if expectations are not met.

The following chart, provided to me by IBM in response to a request for more detailed information, shows that in all major countries advocates – those who actively advocate for their primary retailer – have decreased, while antagonists – those who would actively discredit their retailer – have increased.

IBM_advocates_antagonists
Source: IBM
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