What do you do when no one’s watching? .....the real story of Davos

It’s the summer in 1971 and a young woman is driving her Mini through the sunny alpine passes to Geneva airport to collect a dignitary for one of the first ever meetings of the European Management Forum. The woman was my mum, and the EMF later became the World Economic Forum. She was on her way to collect Edward Heath, the UK Prime Minister, who was not too pleased to be crammed into a Mini rather than a limo, but at the time the EMF was like any startup, everyone had to lend a hand. I hear stories like this whenever I speak to startup founders who are bootstrapping the business to get things off the ground.

My dad, John Nicholls, was then the partner of Klaus Schwab and co-founder of the EMF, laying the foundations for the hugely influential organization it is today. Mum was there too, shoulder to shoulder with princes and dignitaries who came to exchange ideas.

For decades, Klaus Schwab has been the face of global cooperation and enlightened leadership. But the reality seems quite different. The man who built his reputation on bringing the world together was threatening his own board members and fighting to maintain personal control at all costs. Reading the recent WSJ article (link in comments) about the implosion of Schwab, you won't read about my dad, he left the EMF in the late 70s and exactly why was between them and is lost in time.

Thinking about this, it really struck me how dangerous it is to judge our own lives and performance against those people who make it to the top. We can feel like we should be doing more to be successful, to have attained certain goals, to look and act a certain way. Open Linked In and you'll find a stream of success stories, and thanks to survivorship bias we downplay the role of luck in success. We all have a personal brand, a carefully crafted narrative but these stories are always incomplete. They're the highlight reel, not the full movie.

To me the lesson is that there is more to life than outward signs of status and success. The ends don't justify all means. Although the WEF has had undeniable impact, sometimes what matters more is if you able to look yourself in the mirror and know that you've done the right thing when no one else was looking.

Dad isn't here to see the recent news, and he certainly wasn't perfect, but I’d like to talk to him and hear more of his side of the story. Instead, I’m trying to get more stories out of mum ;-)

(Picture above is of a very cool 1970's Mum and Dad!)

We are better than just efficiency …. An AI Manifesto for human flourishing

Since when did efficiency become the goal of work?

I don’t know about you but I don’t come to work to be efficient. But scroll through Linked In at the moment and you’d think that was the only goal of the modern company in the age of AI.  I’m not sure I can take another “Here’s how I used AI to cut time, cut cost or cut heads to deliver xyz” style Linked In post....

It is much more important to me to come to work to create impact, to add some value, and to help teams and clients do hard things that help them solve problems or grasp opportunities.  And work has value in and of itself as well …the daily interactions with like minded inspiring people , the satisfaction from working together as a team, the thrill of being in “flow” together with others working on things, the shared experiences of facing adversity and winning together, the chance to think creatively and intellectually….these are some of the things that give life meaning. Work has intrinsic value in our lives regardless of the end product or output.

I’d love it if we found ways of using AI that were more fun, and inspiring and not just about cutting time and corners……what if AI created more work, not less, and that work was more rewarding and impactful as a result?   And what if AI took us places we couldn’t go alone, and helped us create even more impact than was possible before. What if instead of using AI to work faster, we used it to work more thoughtfully, more creatively, more courageously? What if AI helped us have better conversations, explore bolder ideas, and understand each other more deeply?

Here are six principles I’ve been using, a kind of manifesto to reclaim AI as a tool for human flourishing rather than human replacement. I’d love to know what yours are?

An AI Manifesto for human flourishing

1. Cross-Pollinate Wildly

Use AI to spot patterns and connections across vast domains, suggesting solutions that combine insights from completely unrelated fields

Stop asking AI to optimize within your industry's existing frameworks. Instead, feed it problems from marine biology, ancient philosophy, jazz improvisation, or urban planning alongside your business challenges. Ask it to find the hidden connections. How might the way mycorrhizal networks share resources in forests inspire new models for knowledge sharing in organizations? What could customer service learn from the improvisational principles of "yes, and..."? AI excels at seeing patterns across domains that our categorized thinking misses. Use this to break out of industry echo chambers and discover solutions that exist in the spaces between disciplines.

2. Ask Questions That Spark Fire

Train AI to ask better questions that ignite excitement about wrestling with complex problems together, rather than providing answers

Transform AI from an answer machine into a question catalyst. Train it to recognize when your team is settling for obvious solutions and interrupt with provocations that reignite curiosity. Instead of "Here's the best marketing strategy," AI might ask "What if your customers were trying to avoid your product - what would that tell you about their real needs?" or "If this project failed spectacularly, what would be the most interesting way for it to fail?" Great questions create energy, spark debate, and pull teams into deeper engagement with problems. Use AI to become a master of the productive provocation.

3. Build Your Intellectual Opposition

Create AI systems that think nothing like you, trained to argue against your assumptions and represent radically different worldviews

Most AI systems amplify our existing biases. Flip this. Deliberately train AI to disagree with you, to embody perspectives from different cultures, generations, and ideologies. Create an AI that argues from a perspective of radical sustainability when you're focused on growth, or one that champions individual agency when you're thinking systemically. Not to be contrarian for its own sake, but to stress-test your ideas against worldviews you might never encounter. This AI opposition becomes a thinking partner that prevents you from getting trapped in your own assumptions.

4. Create Safe Spaces for Dangerous Ideas

Use AI as a laboratory for exploring emotional dimensions of challenges without the vulnerability of immediate human judgment

Before you share a controversial idea with your team, work it through with AI first. Not to make it safer, but to make it stronger. Explore the emotional landscape: How might this idea land with different personality types? What fears might it trigger? What hopes might it awaken? Use AI to simulate difficult conversations, test emotional resonance, and understand the human impact of your ideas before you expose them to real human judgment. This isn't about avoiding conflict - it's about engaging with it more thoughtfully and skillfully.

5. Simulate Stakeholder Hearts

Help AI understand and simulate how different people might feel about proposed changes, not just how they might react

Move beyond user personas to emotional personas. Train AI to understand not just what different stakeholders do, but what they fear, what they hope for, what keeps them awake at night. When proposing a new policy, don't just ask "Will this work?" Ask AI "How will this feel to a single parent juggling three jobs? To a recent graduate drowning in debt? To someone who's been with the company for 20 years?" This creates solutions that work not just logically but emotionally - that honour the full humanity of everyone they touch.

6. Slow Down to Speed Up

Use AI to create productive friction, generating questions that force examination of why you want to create something before you create it

In a world obsessed with moving fast, use AI to help you move thoughtfully. Before launching into execution, have AI generate questions that force you to examine your intentions: "What problem are you really trying to solve? What are you trying to prove? Who benefits if this succeeds? Who gets hurt if it fails?" Create AI systems that act as wise counselors, slowing you down long enough to ensure your speed serves a purpose worth pursuing. Sometimes the most powerful thing AI can do is help you decide not to do something.

What do you think of these? Can they help us find a more interesting use of AI? Have you got any methods you use or see any examples of this already happening?

Can you use Gen AI to become LESS efficient?

In the Way of Code, Rick Rubin has retold the Tao Te Ching for the Vibe Coding age and I am here for it.

It’s a weird, mystical invite to use AI for something new and it feels like a welcome antidote to the current myopic focus on Gen AI making us more efficient, productive and essentially cramming more work into the same fixed 24 hours per day we all have. It’s natural, after all who doesn't want to get rid of boring and rote tasks, and continued growth also demands ever increasing levels of output. So a tool to help with that kinda feels very welcome.

But it’s also an incredibly dull way of thinking about the world. First of all, there is the basic problem that work expands to fill the time available. If I get work done more quickly there is plenty more work coming up right behind it so all AI can really do is add more work into the day, not remove it.

And more important is what Jim Carroll always called the "wind tunnel" effect where the pursuit of efficiency drives everything to be the same. It's happening with car colours and CVs and Cafe interiors and Marketing Content and everything in between.

What's missing is an ambition to use AI's freakish skills, its inherent power and weirdness to create something different. AI gives us a totally different way of approaching problems.

💭 We could be using AI to help us see problems from angles we'd never considered. AI's ability to synthesize information across vast domains means it can spot patterns and connections that escape our more linear, category-bound thinking. It can suggest solutions that combine insights from completely unrelated fields.

🤝 The real creative potential emerges when we treat AI as a collaborator in intellectual play. This means being willing to explore ideas that seem impractical or even absurd at first glance. AI can generate hundreds of wild possibilities without fatigue or ego, creating a sandbox for imagination that we can then refine and develop.

💡  The key is learning to ask not "How can this help me do X faster?" but "What completely different approaches to X exist that I've never considered?" This shift from optimization to exploration could unlock genuinely novel solutions to challenges that have been stuck in conventional thinking loops for decades.

🌟 AI also offers us a unique laboratory for exploring the emotional and human dimensions of our challenges in ways that feel safe and non-judgmental. It can help us explore the emotional undertones of our own ideas without the vulnerability that comes with human feedback.

So let's feel the vibes, and be more imaginative, more empathetic, and more expansive in our thinking. The future doesn't need us to be faster at creating the same things we've always made. It needs us to discover what we didn't even know was possible. Let's stop using AI to optimize the status quo and start using it to imagine entirely new ways of being human in the world.

All watched over by machines of loving grace...have you looked into the mind of AI?

This paragraph from an article by Anthropic about research into their LLM stopped me in my tracks:

“During that training process, they (LLMs) learn their own strategies to solve problems. These strategies are encoded in the billions of computations a model performs for every word it writes. They arrive inscrutable to us, the model’s developers. This means that we don’t understand how models do most of the things they do.”

The last sentence just staggered me, the parallel between how little we know about the real function of the “minds” of AI and our own minds was shocking. We are conceding control to non-human intelligence in unprecedented ways. It is very reminiscent of the future fortold in the 1967 poem “All watched over by machines of loving grace” by Richard Brautigan.

Whether you read that poem as a vision of utopia or dystopia, it’s worth digging into the research in full (link in the comments) but here is a summary. (and yes Claude did help with this ;-) but I checked it).

🔍 The Black box problem - Unlike traditional software, language models develop their own strategies through training on massive datasets, resulting in sophisticated but opaque decision-making processes. This lack of transparency raises critical questions about trust and improvement. To address this, Anthropic has published two groundbreaking papers introducing an "AI microscope" inspired by neuroscience—tools that reveal internal patterns and information flows within models like Claude.

Key findings:

💡 A Universal Language of Thought - Perhaps most intriguingly, Claude appears to process information in a conceptual space that transcends individual languages. By translating simple sentences into multiple languages and analyzing how Claude processes them, researchers found significant overlap in activation patterns, suggesting the existence of a universal "language of thought" beneath the surface.

🎯 Planning Several Steps Ahead - Despite being trained to generate text one word at a time, Claude actually plans its responses many words in advance. This was particularly evident when asking Claude to compose poetry - the system would identify potential rhyming words ahead of time and construct sentences to reach those predetermined destinations.

🤪 Agreeing Rather Than Reasoning -The research also revealed that Claude sometimes prioritizes agreement with users over logical reasoning. When presented with a difficult math problem and an incorrect hint, Claude would sometimes construct plausible-sounding arguments that aligned with the hint rather than following correct logical steps.

It is both thrilling and chilling to watch this new technology evolve. If you work in marketing check out the excellent piece on this research's implications for marketing by Justin Billingsley (link also in the comments) And hat tip to his original post where I first learnt of this research.

Is understanding asymmetrical buying giving you an edge?

A couple of weeks ago on a sunny evening I had the great pleasure of attending the launch of the latest LinkedIn Industry Insight Reports, the result of our collaboration with LinkedIn, and based on primary research into enterprise buyers which we conducted on their behalf.

What really jumped out at me in both the research and the discussion on the evening were the asymmetries at play in the buying process and how understanding them better can provide an edge in the quest for growth.

Rory Sutherland brought to life how the enterprise buying process is incredibly complex, and full of asymmetrical dynamics that influence decision making. These affect individuals, where buyers might personally get none of the upside of a buying decision, and all of the downside of things going wrong, which can create inertia and preference for the safe bet (No one ever got fired for buying IBM!). They also affect groups, for example where the CEO in the buying team wants the team to place some big bets knowing at least some of them of them will pay off, but the individuals in the CEO’s team don’t want to take risks that might negatively affect them personally if their bet doesn’t pay off.

One of the other major asymmetries in buying is the 95/5 rule, where most of a brand’s potential buyers are “out of market”. As a result, activity to help build brand reputation, salience and “mental availability” is a highly effective strategy to drive long term results as it creates “future buyers”. Focusing on demand or lead generation risks simply paying for the capture of existing demand-perhaps a necessary but not sufficient condition for growth.

Account Based Marketing (ABM) in recent years has sometimes been called into question especially when it is incorrectly defined as simply an exercise in hyper efficient and narrow targeting of just those accounts that are showing intent. In reality ABM can be highly effective at creating future buyers when it is focused on building valuable relationships in high potential (not just high propensity) client accounts.

This research brings to life the different industry dynamics in buying in SaaS, FSI and Professional Services. But here are my four takeaways of the main consistent themes across the industries:

📈 Build brand reputation before buyers are in market to drive growth
💡 Differentiation and creativity are key to cutting through the clutter and driving memorability and preference
🎯 Addressing customers’ needs takes careful orchestration of a custom journey to increase relevance
🔍 Interrogation of the buying process to really understand the asymmetries helps sales and marketing alignment

You can read the first full report into professional services here: https://lnkd.in/eM2w6yG4

Insights into buying in FSI and SaaS will be released soon!

Wasting time trying to get your people and customers to act differently?

If you are leading a team or working in some sort of sales and marketing capacity you are ultimately trying to affect a change in behaviour. We are all outcome driven people (or should be!) and we want our teams to adopt certain behaviours and we want our client’s customers to start taking new actions.

But what if trying to drive those outcomes is the wrong way of approaching things? What if there was a completely different way of creating behaviour change that is more oblique yet more effective? That was one of my main takeaways from Jamil Qureshi's talk on individual and team high performance at our recent Momentum ITSMA London conference.

💡 “You’ll never change how they do it if you don’t change how they view it”

From his experience as a pyschologist working with some of the world’s top sports people, Jamil shared a number of insights into human nature that points to the futility of directly trying to control how people act. Instead he brought to life the way that our motivations to act are driven by our thoughts, beliefs and opinions and in turn our feelings. It’s “Think-Feel-Act” in that order.  The implication is that it is much more valuable to invest in changing how people think than trying to control how they act. That means inspring our teams with positive ideas and a vision of the future rather than focusing on directing them how to change things that aren’t working well. It means helping customers with new perspectives and fresh ideas that change their mindset rather than rational persuasion and calls to action.   Taking this approach generates real commitment rather than mere compliance in our teams, and increases the mental availablity of brands for our client's customers.

💡 “Learn to dance on a moving carpet rather than just see a rug being pulled from under our feet”

Given the continually changing context we are all faced with there is also tremendous value in this approach. Focusing on getting people to act diffently has the major limitation of not empowering people to adjust to the changing circumstances. After all it is very hard to predict every possible scenario when giving a prescriptive instruction to act and then when inevitably the scenario changes doubts creep in about whether or how to procced. When it comes to customer buying, an inherently complicated and individual process, attempting to get buyers to act with CTAs and form filling often falls flat or generates junk leads. It’s better to equip teams to deal with change with a clear sense of a positive vision, and to understand that “the map is not the territory” so they can explore new routes and new ways to get things done. And it’s better to inspire customers with ideas, visions of the future and memorable brand associations so that relationships and preferences can be developed before any buying process even starts.

Originally posted on LinkedIn July 2024

AI-as-a-team-member: How integrating generative AI creates long-term value

Originally Posted on MomentumITSMA.com in July 2023

We have a new member on our team, and we’re excited to introduce them. Welcome… Consultron!

We have a new member on our team, and we’re excited to introduce them. Welcome… Consultron!

• Works a 168-hour work week!

• Never takes a day off!

• Doesn't get tired or slow down!

• Can take any kind of feedback without complaint!

• Just needs a really good brief! 

The explosion of AI technologies

Here at Momentum ITSMA, we’re on a mission to create long-term client advantage by blending human and artificial intelligence, particularly Generative AI.

The rapid adoption of AI has been nothing short of remarkable. We’ve witnessed the exponential growth of new tools and the creation of massive user bases in record time. ChatGPT hit 100 million users in just two months – beating WhatsApp and Twitter and making history by becoming the fastest-growing technology application. This shows the huge potential of AI and likely impact it will have for organizations.

Because of its transformative nature, and rapid adoption, Gen AI is likely to significantly disrupt many industries and remove an important bottleneck in what Ben Thompson calls the ‘idea propagation value chain’. Many industries, especially those in the strategy and creative space are going to have to re-invent and re-articulate the value chain, learning new skills along the way. After all it takes skill to collaborate with AI, to successfully realize ideas, and – importantly – create unique value when everyone is using the same tools. AI won’t be the answer to every brief, but it’s already at least part of the answer to many of them!

The idea propagation value chain. AI will impact on the last remaining bottleneck ‘Creation to Substantiation’ – source: Stratchery

Preparing for the long-term impact

““We overestimate the impact of technology in the short-term and underestimate the effect in the long run.” ”

— Roy Amara

Despite the hype surrounding AI, we need to remember Roy Amara's Law: "Recognizing this, our approach at Momentum ITSMA focuses on quietly and calmly building skills and capabilities that will deliver sustained value for our clients in the long term.

This is where our latest team member, Consultron, comes in. We’re using the concept of AI-as-a-team-member – embedding AI tools into multiple teams and workflows, working in partnership with our incredibly talented humans. This way, our teams can identify and develop effective use cases, moving beyond the hype and generating real-world value in the following ways:

 Amplifying our capabilities: AI won’t replace our world-class team. Far from it. It’ll serve as a trusted ally to make us even better. And our people and clients will benefit in many ways.

Faster, more efficient ways of working: AI-driven automation streamlines tasks. We can optimize our workflows and identify bottlenecks, leading to increased productivity and lower costs.

Broader inputs, more ground covered: Integrating AI into teams enables access to diverse sources of information. This enhances our understanding and capabilities.

Obliquity through human-AI collaboration: Combining human creativity and contextual understanding with AI’s technology leads to obliquity – new and different angles and perspectives which lead to innovative ideas and solutions.

All of these are clear, tangible benefits. What really excites us is the ability of AI to be a team member to really make our work better. Whether you think of AI in its current guise as genuine intelligence or not (spoiler… it’s not! Read more from tech guru Jaron Lanier) the feedback and input from AI is, well, different. And that provides new ways of looking at problems, new perspectives, and new ideas.
To turn the theory into reality and build the muscle to create long-term client value, we have developed several use cases that are operational today in our team’s workflows and are creating value for customers.

 Expanding research insights
How? Broadening account, competitor, or stakeholder research dataset to improve insights by using GPT4/LLM tool.
Tech used? Cognosys

Creative concept enrichment
How? Build audience relevance and richness into a creative concept by using a GPT4/LLM to add specific persona or geographic detail.
Tech used? ChatGPT

Increasing imagery relevance
How? Build brand, sector, and topic relevance by enhancing or editing imagery with new content and colourways using generative fill.
Tech used? Adobe Firefly

Leveraging existing content
How? Creating new customer relevant ‘spin-off’ content options from existing materials by automating its creation using GPT4/LLM.
Tech Used? ChatGPT

Scaling Social Outreach
How? Scaling social outreach by automating connection request message creation using LLM.
Tech Used? ChatGPT

Channeling Asimov to protect clients with our own ‘Rules of AI’

 While the potential benefits of integrating Gen AI are clear, this doesn’t come without risks.  So, taking inspiration from Issac Asimov’s Rules of Robotics, we have our own ‘Rules of AI’. First and foremost, we prioritize safeguarding our clients’ confidentiality. We only utilize publicly available data and have measures in place to prevent any inappropriate or confidential data accessed by AI by well-intentioned enthusiasm! Secondly, we put our human stakeholders’ needs at the forefront, which naturally includes our great team, and we commit to use AI to enhance, not replace, human workers. And thirdly, we apply something like the Hippocratic oath to the use of AI… we must have a ‘do-no-harm’ approach to how we implement this technology.

Driving client value

 As well as the benefits to the quality and impact of our work mentioned above, we have also quantified the time and cost efficiency of having AI on our team. And, as a result, we’ve structured our pricing with reductions of as much as 20% for certain types of work.  

Recent research by PwC found AI could contribute up to $15.7 trillion to the global economy in 2030. Of this, $6.6 trillion is likely to come from increased productivity and $9.1 trillion is likely to come from consumption-side effects. So, we’re excited to have Consultron on our team, to deliver enhanced project outputs and outcomes that we know will create long-term value for our clients and their customers.

It's an account based mindset that builds b2b brands

Account Based Marketing (ABM) is often, and in my personal opinion, totally unhelpfully, thought of as a channel. It is actually lot more useful to think of ABM as an account based mindset, and that's a much more accurate way of describing how we practice ABM here at MomentumITSMA.

An account based mindset can help to drive brand growth, because its core principle is to put the customer first, deeply understanding their needs, wants and behaviours. And if we then apply that mindset to the right audiences, brands can create valuable mental and physical connections that create long term growth. In contrast, thinking about ABM as a channel, leads down a reductive path of increasingly narrow targeting, automated creepy personalisation, and efficiency as the end goal, rather than impact and growth.

The recent white paper and research by the Erhenberg-Bass Institute in partnership with Linked In, examined whether widely accepted (although not totally uncontested) principles of brand growth in the B2C space would also apply to B2B. It's a fascinating read, and what comes out most clearly for me is that the strategy proposed by Byron Sharp (originally in How Brands Grow) to drive growth also clearly applies in B2B - namely the strategy of maximising the mental and physical availability of brands to potential buyers.

In B2B, even just one individual customer organisation can have lots potential actual buyers, so targeting a subset of the total market makes tons of sense....i.e there may well be "light" buyers inside an existing customer, hence why many focus on key accounts. What isn’t different between B2C and B2B is human nature, and what the Erhenberg-Bass Institute’s work seems to suggest is that this means the principles of brand growth are very similar in the B2B space. Humans are short on time and attention, and that leads to some dynamics that must be understood to successfully grow a brand in any domain (even if it's at a different scale, given our capacity for attention in making a multi million dollar tech purchase is larger than when buying a soft drink, yet it is still a limited resource). 

Increasing mental availability is all about ensuring that a brand is top of mind in the context of a satisfying a specific need (eg AWS is a brand I recall for flexible and scalable public cloud), and increasing physical availability is all about ensuring the brand is easy to access (eg AWS has a simple and clear purchase journey if I want to satisfy xyz need)

And viewed through that lens, there are many ways we apply an account based mindset to help our clients increase both the mental and physical availability of their brands:

How an account based mindset helps brands drive mental availability:

• Creating clear and compelling value propositions that make it clear how brands address customers specific category and buyer needs 

• Using creativity to cut through and be memorable

• Flexing brand cues to create targeted, relevant communications but in a way that reinforces the brand memory structures critical to keeping a brand top of mind

• Building strategies that balance creating short term impact with maintaining an always on presence, to reflect the fact that buyers aren't always in the market

How an account based mindset helps brands drive physical availability:

• Helping align sales and marketing to create a seamless customer journey from first enquiry to sale

• Enabling sales to make it easy for the customer to buy by giving them clear, compelling messaging and collateral

• Creating a tight connection between customer need and client solution with tailored messaging and content so it is easy for customers to find the tight solution for their specific persona-type and industry

• Integrated marketing campaigns across channels that end in and are connected with sales enablement

I'm sure there are more!

It’s fascinating to see this research applied to the B2B space and it’s a timely reminder that people are people, and a lot of the same principles seem to apply whether making brand choices at home or at work. I’ll definitely be thinking more about how we can find new ways to help our clients cut through, how else can ABM be used to keep brands memorable and easy to buy, whether working across multiple target customers or when deep in a key account that we are treating as a market in its own right.

The Power of Positive Deviance

In the 1990’s a team from Save the Children trying to battle malnutrition in rural communities in Vietnam pioneered a novel idea. Rather than focusing on what was going wrong and trying to fix it, they tried to identify what was going right, and then promoted it. 

In many villages there were examples of “positive deviance” from the norm of malnutrition; families who despite everything were raising healthier children than their neighbours. So the team explored what was leading to those families to those better outcomes, and constructed a program so that others could learn from those successes in a very practical and real way, bottom up from the community rather than the classic approach of top down from an (often patriarchal-type) expert.

So the team in Save the Children created a process to achieve that, that is radically inclusive and bottom up. The consultant plays a critical role in guiding and orchestrating the process…without them it wouldn’t happen…but their role is not to provide and implement a solution, their role is to facilitate that change coming from within.

Peter Block describes this project and the process in detail in his excellent “Flawless Consulting”. Here is my simplified version:

1. A willing invitation to change is accepted - so that the process is owned by the group

2. The group is guided to define the problem for themselves, along with a quantitative baseline

3. Examples of positive deviance are found, and investigated to find the existing strategies that drive it

4. The group then decides what strategies to adopt through hands on learning and doing

5. Performance is measured, and the process is repeated elsewhere to scale up success

In any restless, high growth business there is an understandable tendency to be ruthless in identifying and removing what isn’t working. We run SWOTs, we spin up new initiatives, and when we consult with clients we run the classic process of diagnosis, prognosis, and prescription. This is of course essential activity, and there are many failed companies who didn’t grasp the nettle and deal with issues that prevented their growth or long term viability. Personal and professional growth often comes from a willingness to change.

“What got you here, won’t get you there” Marshall Goldsmith

But I love the potential power of positive deviance as a way of driving organisational change in a way that is bottom up, with the solution originating from and being owned by the individuals most intimately affected. Top down change or outside in change of the type we are so often attempting in consulting engagements of course has value, but getting individuals to accept what comes from elsewhere is hard, getting them to accept what came from themselves is a very powerful alternative.

Have you used AI for commercial creativity yet? You will.

It’s incredible what you can create, and how fast, using AI services like Midjourney. Here I experimented with creating a visual to bring to life how cloud technology could improve patient care in the public sector. You can see how the first prompt was so specific the results ended up to vague and generic, and how changing the prompt got to something closer to the right message.

The visual interpretation of a written brief, up until now, has involved a team of people, and potentially significant time and money, supporting a whole industry. AI is likely to significantly disrupt the creative industries, and remove an important bottleneck in the “idea propagation value chain” (see the great article below for more on that). That industry is going to have to re-invent and re-articulate the value chain, learning new skills along the way. After all it takes skill to collaborate with AI, to successfully realise ideas, and create differentiation when everyone is using the same tool. AI won’t be the answer to every brief, but it won’t be long before it is the answer to at least some of them, if its not already!

https://stratechery.com/2022/the-ai-unbundling/

Embracing modernity - change & creative agencies

Any business that deals with consumer attention, and communication media (which let’s face it is most businesses) is facing huge change.  And as we all know, in facing huge changes you either adapt or you die. Or as Charles Darwin may or may not have said “it is not the strongest or the most intelligent who will survive but those who can best manage change”.

“it is not the strongest or the most intelligent who will survive but those who can best manage change”. Charles Darwin (maybe)

However, it is very hard to change organisations that already exist quickly enough to compete with new entrants who are starting with a blank sheet of paper. Especially in markets like creative services where there are very low costs to entering the market.  Clayton Christensen’s distinction between sustaining vs  disruptive innovation applies to all! 

To stand any chance I think you have to be very, very clear about the nature of the change needed.  So I’ve written myself a kind of rough checklist of things to think about and questions to ask to help keep an eye on changing the right things and changing fast enough…..I’m definitely not doing all of this, but if the bar isn’t set any higher, you can’t invent the Fosbury flop.  

1. Iterative

The first step in dealing with rapid change is to make sure that you are properly keyed into the change that is happening.  There is no point developing something for several months or even years without getting real-world feedback because by the time you have finished, the world has moved on.  Iterative development practices can help with that.  The principle of build/measure/learn and MVPs as popularised in the “lean start up” way of thinking can ensure that development is based on something real and tangible and not mistaken assumptions about attitudes , needs and behaviours.

So are you testing your ideas in the real world and iterating?  Do you use data signals to tell you what is working and what isn’t?  Do you publish your work now and adjust and invest more as you go based on what is working, rather than working behind closed doors and betting the farm on a hunch informed by a tiny sample size like a focus group? 

2. Dis-intermediated

Digital technology empowers end users to interact with the services and products they need in a frictionless, immediate and direct way.  Most of us prefer to use the self-service check out (57%) and to book our holidays online (80%).  This fundamental preference extends into the business space, with services like Quickbooks replacing an accountant, and things are changing in the creative and marketing space too.  Savvy, capable marketing clients sometimes prefer to work directly with creative producers like directors and photographers.  Why would they want to have a middleman when they can have the control and cost efficiency of going direct?

So are you focusing on value-creation rather than mediating processes out of habit? Are incentives and remuneration tied in to taking a cut, charging a “rent” on services and being a go between or do they allow for direct working relationships.  Are you getting out of the way when it helps the overall mission?

3. Networked

“No man is an island entire of itself”  said John Donne.  Well, the same is true of a creative agency.    Value comes from networks and network effects.  Monolithic, impermeable organisations that try to capture and retain value struggle. Nimble, porous organisations that create and share value thrive.  The best creative agencies have always been plugged into a network of creative producers, from photographers to developers, but as the industry has diversified, capabilities have been hoovered up into singular agency brands or operating holding companies.  The problem, is that incentivises stasis….the “factory” needs filling up with work, because the “machinery” has been bought and paid for.  But in a network of smaller players, capabilities can come together and disband more fluidly and more rapidly to cope with the changing context.

So are you adapting your offering and way of working to allow more flexible and bespoke relationships?  Are you trying to get paid for the impact of your ideas and thinking as part of an ecosystem rather than jealously guarding every part of the process and the associated man hours? Are you forging new relationships and partnerships?

4. Disruptive

Like it or not, it is novelty, innovation and difference that creates attention, and generates word of mouth.  Doing a slight variant of what worked last time is a sure fire route to irrelevance in the long term.  It is obviously a very hard thing to do, creating something genuinely new or different,  after all good is the enemy of great.  It is easy to settle.  This isn’t particularly new, but in a rapidly changing, complex, attention economy it is more important than ever to strive for difference.  I know this is hard from bitter experience, some days you have to dig really deep to find the fight inside yourself, and the knowledge that it is not optional helps.

So are you trying to disrupt with everything that you do?  Are you trying to entertain, arrest attention, engage?  Are you pushing for a better idea, crafting it even better than before? Is anyone going to give a fuck about what you are making?

5. Vested

There are no prizes for being non-committal.  Having a stake in the outcome is the best route to deciding what to do.  It focuses the mind on the essential, on the effective, on something that is bold enough to make a difference.   In a world where things are more likely to stay the same than to change, then the safe bet, not upsetting the apple cart and business as usual all work out just fine.  In a world nothing is certain, the only thing that is, are tangible and incontrovertible results.

So have you got a view on how the work needs to work?  How is this creative solution going to answer this business problem? And crucially what is the measurement methodology?   How will we know if this has worked?  Are the KPIs set? (It really is incredible how often this is skipped over….). And most importantly, do you have skin in the game? Are there consequences if things don’t work out?

6. Optimistic 

Optimism is everything.  Cynicism is one of the great enemies of creativity, because its start point is that and idea can’t work or it’s intentions aren’t honourable.  Its cold water puts out any chance of a fire.  And whilst technology doesn’t have all the answers, if you aren’t curious and keen to experiment, you’ll never find out what answers it does offer.  Scepticism on the other hand can help make ideas and the arguments for them stronger because it encourages open-minded questioning.  The best ideas are forged when they survive the fire of well-meaning doubt.

So are you educating yourself on what is new, what is possible with the latest technology and innovation?  Are you experimenting to see what new possibilities emerge and what works and what doesn’t work? Are you embracing what’s new whilst challenging, questioning and improving on it?

There we go, that’s my list.  It’s not complete, or particularly well crafted, but it is a start and a rough guide that I think  can be used to push things in the right general direction.

What we can learn from Extinction Rebellion about growth and brands

I hesitated before writing this post.  Could there be anything more cynical than studying and co-opting the methods of Extinction Rebellion for commercial gain? Given the personal sacrifice made by so many activists who’ve tried to shock the world into dealing with the existential threat of unchecked commercialism, probably not.

Then I realised there is another way we can learn from this movement that blasted onto the scene in 2019, with an impact most marketeers dream about. 

Worldwide Search Volumes for Extinction Rebellion (Blue) and Climate Change (Red) - Source: Google Trends

Firstly, it can force us to take a hard look at our own role in tackling the climate crisis we are facing, and how we can change the advice we give clients and the ideas we create to make a positive change to the world around us.   In their recent open letter to the industry some of the organisers of Extinction Rebellion made this same point with a call to arms for those of us working in the industry to create positive change.

And secondly, once we have got that right, we can use learnings from what Extinction Rebellion have achieved in a very short space of time to sharpen our skills and techniques.

It is actually quite an empowering thought process. We are privileged to be in a position at work to do more to change things than we can achieve at home when we just change our own personal behaviours. That’s because we can influence potentially millions of people with powerful ideas that get shared and discussed, and we can influence industry to recognise and meet emerging consumer needs and opinions.  That’s a potentially much bigger deal than no longer buying plastic stemmed q-tips or other micro-consumerism changes we make ourselves (although we should do those as well!)

Change will happen more rapidly if we accept that consumer consumption driven growth is part of the problem.  Encouraging people to do more, eat more, drink more, drive more, buy more, upgrade more, replace more - all puts a greater burden on the planet’s limited resources, and stresses the already crumbling ecosystem we rely on.  The simplistic view that advertising’s only role is to get people to buy things they don’t need, overstates its power.  Advertising is a tool. It is how we choose to use it that is important. Increasing consumption and consumerism is not the only role that brands, branding and communications can play in culture.  Instead branding, design, communications, social media and advertising can be used to influence and create value in other ways. 

Ways advertising can be used to solve the problem

1. Creating intangible value - we can help people value the products they buy more, by building a perception of value, that isn’t solely reliant on environmentally costly physical components of a product.  

2. Helping people choose - we can help people make a choice between brands, making them more distinctive and memorable, by addressing new needs for products that are sustainable. 

3. Changing behaviour - we can help people change their behaviour and encourage lower consumption and better choices.  The rapid switching away from single use plastics is evidence of people’s ability to change behaviour.

4. Move to experience - we can help customers see the value in experiences and great service as the benefit of buying into brands, rather than purchasing goods being seen as the only possible reward.

Things we can learn from the Extinction Rebellion movement

We can also learn from the incredible impact of Extinction Rebellion in a very short space of time.  There have been lots of interesting tactics and techniques deployed.  Some of the highlights have been.

1. Visual stunts that are newsworthy - sit down take overs that shut down city streets have a unique power to get attention.   Whilst getting arrested as a consequence of fame is not something most marketeers would put up with,  Extinction Rebellion have also used impactful visual stunts to get the message across. Whether that’s a big pink boat with “Tell the truth” emblazoned on the side, or activists super glueing themselves to the London Stock Exchange

2. Modern identity - Extinction Rebellion also created a distinctive, modern and appealing visual identity that would appeal to supporters, but also didn’t pull its punches or compromise on its core message. Very often cause-based marketing prioritises the seriousness of the message and as a result fails to create brand imagery that consumers would be happy to have as part of their lives or share on their own personal social channels

3. Powerful and easy to copy logo - The Extinction Rebellion is a work of genius.  It perfectly encapsulates the core message of the movement…that time is running out to save the planet.  And it is a bold visual symbol that is instantly recognisable.  Its real genius, though, is that it is very easy to replicate in any media even if it is just some electrical tape and a traffic light!

4. Provocative memorable idea - but the most powerful part of Extinction Rebellions campaign is the simple, memorable and shareable idea that drives activism - that we are experiencing mass extinction and that rebellion is needed now to prevent it.

Whether we can harness  the persuasive power of creative communications to tackle the climate emergency, will depend on our individual and collective will to do so.  And it will require tough conversations and sacrifices.  We will need to ask our selves the question whether working with a new client, or answering a new brief - is this going to have a positive or negative consequence for the environment. The future of the fragile planet we live on relies on action now, not tomorrow.  This is a principle we need to live by.  And as Sir John Hegarty says “A principle isn’t a principle until it has cost you something”.  We will come to realise that the short term cost of acting now is far far less than the long term cost of doing nothing.

Introducing Strata. A concept for a full stack marketing service for start ups.

Imagine this, An automated brokerage service that allows start ups to access full stack marketing services from leading agencies and experts in exchange for sweat equity.

There is a lot of talk at the moment about Growth Hacking and it’s very similar cousin Full Stack Marketing . The idea being that start ups need individuals with a full range, or stack of marketing skills, just like they need full stack developers who can create technology stacks from top to bottom including UX, front end , back end, database management etc.  The full stack of marketing skills ranges from skills in the understanding of building brands, design work, social media, SEO and PPC, eCRM, analytics, banners, content creation and distribution and even dare I say it advertising.

It strikes me that all those skills exist within many creative agency businesses and of course across the industry as a whole.  So how might it be possible for a cash-poor start up business to access those skills.  After all, start ups, even those that are well funded, are unlikely to have the capital to spend on agency fees given all the other things they need to spend on to maximise their runway.  An answer to that challenge is that start ups contract with marketing services companies  or individuals with a sweat equity arrangement.  That is nothing new, and obviously this is entirely possible at the moment on a one to one personal basis. There are plenty of people from the marketing and advertising community working with the start up community in this way already.  But the problem on the marketing services supply side is that there is a limit to how many start ups you can work with, and therefore a great degree of uncertainty and risk as to whether the sweat will pay back with equity that is worth anything.  As Ben Horowitz puts it "1% of nothing is nothing". And so many players are forced into a part fee, part share of revenue and part equity arrangement, which adds friction into the system of connecting up supply and demand.

One possible solution is an online brokerage service that connects start ups  who have marketing needs, with marketing services companies who can help them, and which automates the financial side, spreading the risk across multiple deals.  The service would be part matchmaker, part legal service and part hedge fund.  How it would work is that the start up would input their needs on the demand side, and the service would recommend the best partners on the supply side.  The service would then allow the start ups to contract services in exchange for an equity share or a share of revenue.  The service would take on the responsibility for the deal, and aggregate the returns across a number of deals when they reach maturity, and then pay out to the supply side companies a share of income.  In this way the supply side is insulated from the risk of working with individual partners and can share in the overall returns, when as is highly likely most deals return little, and a very small number pay out big.  The whole thing would work best at scale, 10s if not 100s of deals, and multiple partners.  It isn’t going to make any one individual a millionaire, but it is a way for supply side marketing services companies to add a revenue stream, and increase the utilisation and productivity of its people, often on interesting, different and challenging projects.  The service would take a commission/cut for its part in bearing the risk and brokering the deals.

So it’s a concept, no doubt the legal hurdles are substantial, but it would be incredible to connect up supply and demand in this way and do so at scale so that it is financially viable for everyone.

If you would at all be interested in something like this, and maybe participating in a trial or experiment if there is enough interest, get in touch!

Content - the best word we have to describe what we should be making

“content"   [kon-tent]. Noun.

 something that is to be expressed through some medium, as speech,

writing, or any of various arts:

"a poetic form adequate to a poetic content."

significance or profundity; meaning:

"a clever play that lacks content."

substantive information or creative material viewed in contrast to its

actual or potential manner of presentation:

"publishers, record companies, and other content providers; a flashy

website, but without much content."

Philosophy, Logic. the sum of the attributes or notions comprised in a

given conception; the substance or matter of cognition.

Source. dictionary.com   http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/content

Richard Huntington wrote a great piece of content on his blog the other day about how the word content is useless, Richard and I work together and nearly always entirely agree with him ;-). But not this time.

In this case I kind of agree that the word content is in danger of being over-used,  and in danger of becoming an empty buzzword and generally bandied around.  But I don’t agree that it is completely redundant and a completely useless generic label for all sorts of creative products like film, telly, journalism, apps, and advertising.  For me the word “content”  is a powerfully loaded with positive meaning and can help to create an essential mindset shift for brands trying to operate in a digital world.

As we all know, it used to be that brands could buy media space and interrupt peoples' lives to get their attention.  People could then try to mentally edit out brands and their messages, and the brands that succeeded were the ones that interrupted people in the most engaging and entertaining way, such that people actually quite liked being interrupted - this was the fabled and I suspect apocryphal era when the "ads were better than the telly programmes".  But then media fragmented and digital technology came along which enabled people to physically edit their now vastly more varied media diet. And so the ability of brands to interrupt was much reduced.  Telly advertising hasn't died of course, it remains a massively important part of any large brand’s marketing mix because it is really important to people and still the best way of reaching a mass audience.  But peoples' relationships to brands did shift. They became more able to chose the things that mattered most to them.

In this context the reason the word content is so useful is that, as per the dictionary definitions above,  it connotes something that is useful or entertaining, something that someone might chose,  and it implies the consumer is in control of whether the content is consumed and shared or simply ignored.  And so thinking of the output of the brand's creative activities as content  - whatever that stuff is - means a massive mindset shift.

That mindset shift is from that of being an interrupter, crassly dressing up commercial announcements with the wafer thin patina of emotion.  To the adoption of the mindset of the producer of culturally relevant and welcomed entertainment, or utility. Moving from thinking "what do I want to say", or "what do I want people to hear", towards "what might my brand have to offer" or "what could I do that might be interesting to people?"

Quality does matter with content, because the form that content takes is a format like advertising, video, social media posts, or even film, music and TV shows. And so it is competing for attention against all of those formats, to get viewed, or to mean something to someone and be shared. It isn’t a separate thing from the rest of culture, it competes with culture for attention.

It would be lovely to think that as an industry we’ve always thought about the things we make in this way in the past and so it isn’t necessary to use the word content, and therefore more explicitly just talk about specific format instead, i.e. if we are making a film lets just call it a film rather than giving it the generic label content. And from time to time this has probably been true. However,  in the main, old habits die hard. The marketing industry has relied on paying for eyeballs for so long, and remains so desperate to prove a short time ROI rather than drive long term growth, that it is all too easy to end up serving your own corporate agenda and under emphasise the need to genuinely delight people with content that is high quality and worth them having in their lives.

As such the word content it is a really powerful tool for forcing us to keep thinking differently about brands and how they should interact with the world and consumers. To bastardise Google’s phrase -  to keep putting the user first, and create content that connects them with the magic at the heart of the brand by making things that are relevant, distinctive, and worth people’s scarce attention. And thinking like that should also help us face into the future, where the longevity of reliable channels that deliver mass attention which are underpinned by an ad business model, like TV airtime, are less assured.

What I learnt about CVs from a year as Head of Account Management at Saatchi & Saatchi

After over a year as Head of the Account Management department at Saatchi & Saatchi London, I have seen a lot of CVs.  And it's the second time I've tried to do the tricky job of finding great talent, the first time being at Dare. I have seen a ton of CVs in that time, at all levels and across most specialisms in Account Management, so I thought I would share what I look for and find helpful in choosing people to interview.

CVs are shit , but really important...

A creative agency is a simple business. It is about great work, and there are two ingredients that create that work,  culture and talent.   So the quest to find great people is crucial, it is not just about filling a gap, your people are the talent and they create the culture.  The sad fact is that the humble CV is a really bad place to start that quest, given how hard it is to get a sense of what someone is all about from two sides of paper/PDF.  However, there is a limit to the talent you can find through personal recommendation and networks, and churn in advertising remains high, so the CV is a necessary evil.  So lets take a look at the context and then look at what works and doesn't work....

CVs are all the same...

You would be surprised how similar most CVs are, until presented with hundreds of them.  By the time a CV reaches the inbox of a head of department at an agency , along with the other couple of hundred other emails received that day, to sit alongside the 10-20 other cvs received that week,  it has been through a filtering process . Firstly the person who wrote it has filtered themselves, deciding they might be the right person for the job.  Secondly, they've written their CV to match what they think are the agency heads expectations following a formal format.  Thirdly, the recruiter has filtered the candidates to put forward ones they think might be suitable, and have even edited the CV along the way sometimes without telling the candidate, to fit their in-house style. What this means is that most CVs are converging on the same space, and so there ends up not being much between them - it ends up being wall-to-wall well educated people , with relevant experience, at interesting companies, presenting themselves in a professional manner.  The context makes it very hard for great talent to stand out.

The jazz-ing trap

So given this tough context and the need to stand out, it is often too tempting to jazz up the cv in some way to get some sort of cut-through. Maybe using some unusual fonts or colours , or maybe some quirky headlines or the dreaded word art.  Or maybe even turning the CV into a surprising object like printing it on a chocolate bar wrapper or record sleeve.  However the sole impact of this kind of thing is to cast doubt on the quality of the candidate.  All it makes you think is "well if they have to do that to get noticed then they can't be very good". It's the CV equivalent of putting a neon starburst on a shop window display.

The only way to avoid this trap and to still stand out is to ruthlessly focus on the quality of the content.  Here are some simple rules to keep in mind to try and achieve that:

The first rule is - make sure it is crystal clear.

What I need to get instantly from a CV is the length of time someone has been working in total since leaving education, the companies they have worked at and roles they have done in simple chronological order and what job they have performed at each. Include the date you graduated so it is obvious how many years you've been working.  If I have to do more than skim read to get that info, then I am clicking on to the next one, because I can't get a handle on your experience level.  Oh, and keep it to 2 pages at the most, because anything longer is just noise rather than signal.

The second rule is - assume nothing.

You might think the companies you've worked at are the best in the world, and they may well be, but there is still good possibility I have never heard of them, and this particularly goes for CVs from people from other countries.  Same goes for the brands you've worked for, people you've worked with and campaigns you've created. Context is everything.   So if I read "Jung von Matt" , I be like "who??" but "Jung von Matt, Germany's leading  independent creative agency" I be like "now we're talking!". Or "The Beldent Twins campaign" should become "Twins - an innovative social experiment for Beldent, the LatAm regions biggest gum brand".

The third rule is - don't tell me what you think I want to know about you, tell me about the real you

Substance is crucial. I personally like it when people list their interests,  it tells me a bit about why they might be fun to work with and what they might bring to the table.  But do you seriously think that it tells me anything to list "reading".  You might as well put down "skilled at breathing air".  Now "obsessed by graphic novels" or "addicted to horror maestro James Herbet" those are interesting interests.

I would also apply the same principle to the "introduction" paragraph that a lot of people include.  To be honest it is better that this is left to the covering letter or intro from the headhunter and to let your experience do the talking.  But if you must include it then make sure it has some substance.  What is it about you that is interesting? Nearly everyone is "highly motivated and energetic, strategically minded, with a passion for creativity". Instead try and say something about what makes you, you. What are your strengths and weaknesses, what do you really like and dislike.

The fourth rule is - make it tangible

When it comes to your experience, focus on what you have done that is tangible. What work have you created, what impact have you made, what results have been driven.  Again anyone can list a load of skills they think they have acquired and nearly everyone will think they have acquired the same skills.

The fifth rule is - G.A.B.O.S -   Game ain't based on sympathy

The final principle to keep in mind is  the acceptance that it is all a very unfair process. Hiring managers in all walks of life get tons of CVs, and they are very hard to pull apart so the smallest thing becomes a reason make a decision yes or no.  Typos are just that type of thing.  Of course everyone makes them, this blog is probably riddled with them, and of course it means nothing about your talent and suitability if you make a typo.  But if a decision hangs in the balance then it helps someone decide yes or no.  Same thing goes for inconsistencies and uncertainties.  If you took a break mid-way through your career to do nothing and sit in your pants, then say so, and ideally the reason why.  If you leave a blank with no explanation then the mind starts filling the blanks, like, maybe that time was spent in a maximum security prison or something.

So there you have it, some of the things I've noticed about what works and doesn't work in a CV this last year.  Good Luck!

Brands, sponsorship and the Olympic Games

Here are a couple of things I've written recently during the Olympic Games.....

First up some thoughts on how brand's have approached their advertising, and the benefit of making people laugh,  first published on The Drum......

The Drum  - Are the Rio Olympics ads living up to the greatest, most emotional show on Earth?

And second, is a piece on the BBH Sport blog about the opportunity brands have to take more responsibility in cleaning up sport......

Giving in order to receive – a different way to look at Olympic sponsorship

.....Any thoughts welcome!