Blogging again – inspired by Headshift and social business design

Big day today, something important has happened in the online/digital services sector. I’ve been involved in it for the best part of 15 years now and periodically something happens close to me that I believe will have an important and potentially significant impact.

My pals at Headshift have announced today that they are becoming part of the Dachis group. In the emerging field of social business design, this is really big news. As Lee and Livio, the founders of Headshift,  have compellingly demonstrated over the last six years, collaborative tools, enterprise 2.0, social media and a whole host of other related emergent activities, such as user-centred and network-centric design, agile programming and project management methods – all innovative ingredients, are generating new design and service frameworks that are now legitimate. To me, they’re at the forefront of a business movement that is as they say moving beyond early stage experimentation.

What I’ve experienced first-hand and continue to admire about Headshift is their commitment to principles and practices that are congruent and represent a vision. Headshift’s readme.doc from 2003 continues to resonate. It’s not often easy engaging in pioneering activity and committing to innovation is something that’s vital for most businesses in order to evolve, but few have the bravery and long-term vision to embrace in my experience to date.

There’s lots more to do to realise the group’s vision of smarter, simpler, social businesses but that’s the whole point. Social Business Design as Headshift and Dachis group call it, sums up the learnings and the potential – from the early stages of the journey, from the birth of the accessible internet, through it’s recent social awakening, to how this continues to evolve into the everyday system and lifeworld.

I’m delighted for all involved which includes me as a friend and collaborator. Operating internationally with a kick-ass team in the US and a talented team in the UK is something I’ve been lucky to do with great success during my time with iCrossing. Not only was it a real adventure with some brilliant experiences and outcomes but it made it all seem real. The web exists to connect us. To allow for new relationships, new experiences, new services, new forms of design. So with extended networks and new opportunities Headshift  are in a great position to realise their vision.

Good luck my friends

Now’s the time for all UK banks to become social investment banks

With the daily stream of news about governments forcing banks to rethink some fundamentals about their role in society, it would seem a good time to revisit the idea of social investment banks. I while back I posted about the moves in the UK to establish such a vehicle which would tap into dormant funds in UK commercial banks to open up a finance channel for social initiatives such as social enterprises. The establishment of Social Finance in the UK, tasked with opening up such a market is a concrete step.

Given that the governments in most western nations now own substantial equity stakes in the major commercial banks, surely it’s time to focus the executive teams on longer-term social responsibilities that now lie well beyond short-term shareholder interests? Research by Triodos Bank which appears to have weathered the recent crisis, shows that survey respondents would certainly welcome and support such a move if only the government were brave enough to direct it.

Brand and culture: two sides of the same coin

I started this post with a purpose. To offer up my thoughts on where I’m at with my thinking. It was stimulated by some great feedback on this blog last night. My dad and my sister, both regular readers gave me some great insights. First up, from Punkdaddy: “too much stuff. I can’t find your thoughts”. Yep, fair enough. Since redesigning I’ve been using the blog as a personal platform, a space to gather my various online footprints such as magnolia links (stuff I find), last.fm (what I’m listening to), flickr (images I’ve captured), twitter (observations and snippets of thinking aloud) and moonri.se (feelings expressed visually or with quotes). My sister said that she’d grapsed this and had passed on some of the links to friends who found them interesting and useful which is pleasing in itself. Sharing is part of the wide angle. What follows is synthesis of some of the experiences off the last eighteen months and some reflections on innovation, one of key roles at work. It also explains the thinking behind the Social Spaces Framework, a strategic service I’ve co-created with Antony Mayfield and others at iCrossing.

Finding focus with a blog comes naturally to some, whilst for me it’s part of a broader journey of self-awareness and exploration. Much like my work in general. That’s the current purpose of this blog. Underlying all of this, I believe there are many aspects to life and work that are changing. This is a major culture change. Being myself first and foremost is my personal goal. Sharing with others comes naturally, hence writing a blog and working in the online sector. Freeranging is a style of living and working that I’ve adopted as a loose descriptor for my approach and motivations, based on the experience of spending time with dozens of individuals, teams and clients across a range of sectors and disciplines. So that’s the focus, gathering what emerges from experience and allowing it to grow naturally. I’ve learned that the growth requires me to synthesis my gatherings, observations and reflections into constructive perspectives. Topics and themes are the best way to zoom in on this broad interest in life and work.

Particular topics of interest include styles of working and living that allow individuals and groups to be themselves and create new benefits from sharing and collaboration. At iCrossing I’ve established three guiding principles to drive the innovation agenda. The first principle is smart collaboration. This gives individuals and teams a guiding sense of how we can interact to fulfill our aims and achieve our goals. The assumption underlying it is that connections and relationships can generate growth. Through collaboration we can create meaning and value, and can drive business and personal learning and success, which is a holistic perspective on growth. It’s been a real pleasure of late seeing this played out in some fantastic group sessions where teams are forming, norming and increasingly storming the rules and behaviours that may no longer be applicable to the wider economic, cultural and social context that we find ourselves in. My observations lead me to further believe that this is encouraging individuals and groups to make new connections with the confidence to take risks.

That gives rise to the second principle, dynamic specialisation, one of many concepts I’ve found roots in the work John’s Hagel and Seely-Brown. This guiding principle when understood by a smart team of collaborators facilitates a rapid means of creating new services or propositions that can immediately create value and generate benefits for a range of people with reason to connect. Some of the most interesting and exciting experiences of the last eighteen months have emerged because of the relationships fostered with individuals and groups: iCrossing colleagues and new partners in wider networks of shared interests. We all share a curious interest in learning on a journey where the old power and order structures are changing. Changing to what, is what we’re all seeking to find out.

The third principle is that of engagement. This has become a major area of interest to many working in the wider area of communications, be that design, marketing and advertising or technology, particularly those seeking to understand or create online social spaces. What are social spaces? My definiton is

“Places where individuals and groups hang out, get things done, pass the time, share ideas and information and create and maintain relationships with other individuals and groups.”

Comments on a more succinct version welcomed

Organisations are just groups of people with norms, behaviours, identities etc. and many manifest aspects of their values, principles, behaviours in the brands they introduce. I see the broader culture change going on as one where the perspectives and behaviour of individuals and groups inside organisations (company or organisational culture) are keys to understanding how to share the appropriate dimensions of that culture to share in the real brand perception within social spaces such as online social networks. This has the knock-on effects in real-world relationships manifest in power relations between corporations and individuals. So brand and culture are two-sides of the same coin. An example: I collaborated initially with Headshift a couple of years back and worked on some really innovative programs with one of their clients BP. Both used social software tools to create engagement with individuals and groups. One was an internally focused knowledge-sharing and collaboration initiative to celebrate individual success and leverage the great work going on inside the organisation. The other was an experiment in harnessing the passion of a group that took pride in owning cars. Doing both at the same time was what gave me insight into how brands and company culture need to reinforce each other. The key to this – remove friction in marketing and communications by working with the emerging forces changing the relationships between individuals and organisations. Engagement is the key to this. Not as a wooly marketing term, but genuine engagement based on creating the conditions for relationships to thrive.

It’s engagement that’s really driving the Social Spaces framework, a strategic toolset that I’ve been developing with Antony Mayfield, Scott Lawson, Simon Mustoe, Ben Bose, Jason Ryan and many others in the team at iCrossing in the UK and US. The framework provides a suite of tools to frame the context and purpose, principles, processes and platforms that individuals and groups inside an organisation need to consider in order to engage with the people that use social spaces such as blogs, forums, social networks and emerging tools for various forms of one-to-one/one-to-many/many-to-many communications and relationships. It also provides the means to learn from and evaluate success, taking an implicit view that marketing is about learning through interactions with what we call Engagement Metrics. So in summary what we’re trying to do is help groups and individuals make sense of and engage in the social web. That’s a zoom on one specific aspect of my work.

This has all been great learning on a personal level as I’ve found a new way of harnessing my theoretical and practical interests in communication, social theory and psychology. I’ve also created a lot of new relationships which go beyond pure work matters, because the principle of openness suits many who find the social web a natural place to express themselves or create something new and valuable.

Designs of the Time reporting to parliament

John Thackara, a true 21st century design visionary reported to parliament recently on the positive actions being taken by people as social innovators in the north-east of England.

An inspiring vision of the future being played out now. Particularly inspiring is this:

The lesson we have learned in Dott 07 is that creativity and innovation are all around us. People are busy – dealing innovatively with daily life – in all manner of creative ways. Everywhere we look.

Our approach in Dott is not to design solutions outside-in, top-down, or from scratch.

We use design, instead, to enhance, connect and accelerate existing grass roots innovation.

Link:

http://www.doorsofperception.com/archives/2007/03/dott_goes_to_pa.php

Out of the wilderness into Spannerworks/iCrossing

At the tail end of last year I stopped doing the London commute and said goodbye to my new friends at Headshift. Whilst I enjoyed the company of the people and the buzz of the social software/enterprise 2 thang it proved too much. I missed reading stories to the girls at bedtime and hated standing from London Bridge to Haywards Heath more often than not (if I could get on the bloody train in the first place!).

Fortunately, a good contact of mine, Ray Richards at Spannerworks, phoned me in November and asked what I was up to. His timing couldn’t have been better. Having spent a couple of months in a consulting capacity at Spannerworks, working with Ray and helping my good friend Antony Mayfield develop the Content and Media offering I jumped at the chance to get more deeply involved at the turn of the year.

I did read John Batelle’s book in October last year which was typically freerange of me and thankfully it served to confirm much of my thinking about the evolution of search as a marketing framework and the success of Spannerworks and where it’s heading.

Here’s the five reasons for joining Spannerworks:

1. The people. I’ve known Arjo Ghosh the founder since about 2001 and have always thought him to be a man of integrity, incredibly smart and focused on growing a great company. I’ve known Ray for a similar period of time, and his decision to join Spannerworks full-time five years ago confirmed many instincts about the company. When Antony Mayfield joined Spannerworks, another penny dropped. To be working with these dudes is great. They’re sound and going places. As I gradually get to know the other members of the team – now around 60, I can sense purpose and a very positive attitude to learning and growing.

2. The challenge. So far I’ve been extremely freerange in my work with involvement in projects spanning brand and product development, social media research and consultancy and an emerging focus as a client partner feeding all of the above. This is great as there’s nothing better than a mix of challenges that draw on my strengths and experience.

3. The tie-up with iCrossing. Creating a global digital marketing organisation of the future is a very interesting thing to be involved in. I completely subscribe to the Jeff Herzog (the founder of iCrossing) view of search marketing turning advertising on it’s head.

To quote Jeff:

“The interactive capability of the internet has turned the traditional advertising model of blasting out messages to the masses on its head. Today, the customer seeks the business – where and when they want – ushering in a new generation of media and advertising.”

4. Technologies
There’s some tools emerging at Spannerworks that make me smile. Having been part of the team that made AOL a huge success in the UK in the late ’90s and a pioneer in open source with Getfrank, (even if Charlie Leadbeater refers to me as Frank Byford ) I like to think that I can spot useful tools for communication every now and then.

5. Brighton (and beyond)
All of the above happening and I’m in Brighton. Yes, the home of the football team I’ve supported all my life, where I can walk to work and all that. But even better, there is a now a work-related beyond as Spannerworks begins it’s overseas expansion.

Bring it on.

ps: Haven’t been posting much recently as the last couple of weeks have been all about getting the brand integration and website ready. A remarkable story in it’s own right given the timescales.

Openness: Jobs makes the case for scrapping DRM

Apple’s Steve Jobs calls for Europeans to lobby the big 4 music labels to scrap DRM.

Put simply, he states, 97% of music is sold DRM free. Only 3% of music on iPods (the only source for which he has accurate data) is bought from the iTunes store.

In an interesting piece he explains why (and how) Apple has evolved the iPod/iTunes success and dissects the reasons why DRM is held as necessary by the major labels.

That figure, 97% is huge and to me represents a reasonable assessment of those of us that are lucky enough to be early adopters in numerical terms. Makes me think that the old school (major labels) really must believe that we are influential. As Jobs suggests, innovation is what it’s all about and protecting crap systems is an expensive waste of time that the labels must scrap if they want us, the early adopters to give them any attention down the line. There’s a big battle to be fought yet however. Openness though, it’s a recurring theme.

A history of technology we use – rather than invent

Really looking forward to the publication of the The Shock of the Old: Technology in Global History Since 1900 by David Edgerton, Hans Rausing Professor of History of Science and Technology, Imperial College. Hmmm.. wikipedia only has an entry for David Edgerton the Burger King franchise founder..

There’s a Demos event entitled Shock of the Old” to launch it next wednesday at their Tooley St HQ in London. From the description:

Standard histories of technology give accounts of when things were invented. Edgerton concentrates on what people actually use. So instead of the usual timeline of inventions we are faced with a patchwork of global use: rickshaws and bicycles alongside hybrid cars and aeroplanes; stealth bombers in a struggle against suicide bombers. The world we live in today is as reliant on corrugated iron and furniture as it is on the Pill and the supercomputer.

More interesting food for thought in relation to measures. Hmm.. getting closer to the post on design thinking and metrics and it’s wider applicability and benefits.

Great site for Demos developed by Headshift who I spent much of last summer working with.

On What you measure matters the most

Measures, targets, metrics, ROI, KPIs.. we can’t escape the things. In a gem of a post, Tara Hunt explores the idea of measures for economic, social and online community health. Related and also interesting reading is the Futurebrand 100 as reported on Antony’s blog.

I think Tara’s identified a really important missing element in a shift towards social progress that’s occuring in commercial, public and private spheres, particularly amongst online communities across all three. Replacing GDP with a General Progress Indicator is spot-on. There’s more to life than economic growth indeed.

In a comment on the piece, Colin provides a great quote: “what gets measured gets done”. Or, attempts are made to get it done, and lots of effort goes into working out how to measure it, and a large amount of faffing about with powerpoint goes on regardless.

I think some politicians and many communities in the UK and elsewhere are waking up to the opportunity cost of a perpetual economic growth based model. In basic economics (as I hazily recall from university) opportunity cost is a really important concept for measuring the true cost of an opportunity – including the lost benefit of alternatives. So scary stuff for businesses that pollute overly the environment and obsessively use powerpoint. I love Edward Tufte on powerpoint by the way. I’d also love to be involved in determining the true indicators of progress.. They would surely have to be developed by an independent entity, not a single political party.. Perhaps it this could happen if the wave carrying social enterprise continues. A cross-party body balanced with outside representation?

Back to measures.. Been thinking about the Social Investment Bank concept a lot. For the benefit of those who haven’t read the previous post – this a concept of the utilisation of unused assets (or idle finance/dormant capital) by channelling it into socially beneficial initiatives – eg projects aimed at reducing poverty in deprived areas, through the support of social enterprises that generate social value as well as profit.

So a venture capital fund of sorts but with the key metric, social value, as it’s primary indicator of success. At a micro level, it’s pretty easy to set up a social enterprise as a legal entity. The growth of social enterprises would be a good and relatively easy to determine measure of progress. Amongst the metrics could be the volume and diversity of lending and success of funds shared by a Social Investment Bank. I guess I should read the full report and see if this sort of stuff is included in it’s objectives.

As for online.. for commercial entities. It seems to me that an important approach to take is to rethink what constitutes brand equity amongst groups like boutiquers and work out ways to measure it. My colleague Antony Mayfield’s post on Futurelab 100’s remix of the Interbrand 100 discusses the Futurelab criteria and the positive and interesting shift that could occur if theses measures were the norm. It’s a great way of looking at which brands ‘get it’.

Link: The Futurelab 100

Towards a social investment bank?

In an interesting episode of In Business on BBC Radio 4 tonight, Sir Ronald Cohen outlined the idea of a social investment bank. Taking the long term view, he described how idle finance (my term) or unclaimed assets could be diverted to tackling market failure on a large scale through investment in deprived communities.

Having been briefed by the Chancellor, as Head of the Social Investment Task Force, Sir Ronald’s report on idle finance led to Ed Miliband’s statement earlier this winter about further stimulating the social enterprise sector. My money’s on social enterprise becoming a central part of government thinking if Gordon Brown assumes the top job later this year. Perhaps even the establishment of an independent Social Investment Bank within the first budget. The Tories have already made noises in this area too and so there’s likely to be cross-party support for the broader idea, but as James Blitz in the FT points out, there may be dividing lines in the debate over voluntarism around the scale of enterprises, with Labour accused by the Tories of favouring larger over smaller, more localised organisations.

Under Blair, big initiatives have been the way, often fizzling out – such as pathetic ‘Big Conversation’ in 2003. I hope that if Brown is elected by the party, that he takes the long view and gives a greater role to localised, small scale social enterprise.

Finding your mojo and why Flickr’s got it..

For those of us in the business of creating online strategies and spaces to connect and live out passions, Tara Hunt, one of my favourite bloggers sums up what it is that sites such as Flicker possess.

“There are some products and services that have it. You can’t quite put your finger on it, but they do.

Then there are others that don’t. And, on the surface, it looks like they are doing everything right, but it doesn’t feel right. It’s forced. It’s….gah…hard to explain.”

More on Finding your mojo.. and why Flickr’s got it.

Nice.

iPhone – patenting and parenting

Apple’s decision to restrict the iPhone to Apple generated software is a controversial one. Whilst going against the grain of everything open standards and user-generated, it’s not a bad decision if viewed through the lens of innovation.

As a company Apple is innovation to many of it’s most committed customers, me included. Innovation has to be viewed as a mindset, a strategic commitment and equally valid in its radical and incremental/evolutionary forms.

I’ view Apple as an innovation exemplar because it combines both approaches.

There’s lots of examples such as moving from OS9 to OSX – both radical for using FreeBSD as the foundation, and incremental in the maintenance of the Classic environment. The move to Intel has been even more evolutionary with the creation of Universal applications. The launch of the iPod was radical for Apple as a business but evolutionary in the market. The iPhone also is radical for Apple as a company and thus parenting their patents makes a lot of sense.

As a user, my view is that Apple has parented it’s developers in an appropriate way. It’s given them great frameworks to create wonderful tools. Perhaps not with the same degree of freedom as Linux users enjoy, but then again, I’m sold on the experience which is not the simple utility of the software, but the joy of using the software. I haven’t experienced anything like it on any other platform. Because Apple insists on a set of values, which translate into quality standards, when put together, they keep the Mac platform way ahead of Windows and Linux in user experience terms and over the last fifteen years I’ve used every version of windows, given Gnome and K on linux a fair crack, but at the end of the day, the values inherent in Apple’s mission to provide tools to the benefit of society are in my opinion reflected in their user interfaces.

As a parent I’m well aware of the challenge of instilling values, ideas and rules that create stable and creative environments for children to grow up in. It’s hard and I’ve realised that we (Mrs and I) really have got to believe in what we think’s right and be consistent until we’re convinced that we’re ready for our children to define and create their own rules and experiences.

So I’m happy to be led by the Cupertino crew on the iPhone and choose to believe that they will allow their partners (developers and users) to help them shape the future incarnations of the product. At the end of the day, it’s only a phone and patent law does still exist to allow the creator to exercise their competitive advantage, so I’m happy to let them get on with it.

Diversity – difference and friction

I found a really interesting link about the productive value of diversity via John Hagel’s Edge Perspectives. As yesterday was Martin Luther King day, he reflected on Scott Page’s new book, The Difference: How the Power of Diversity Creates Better Groups, Firms, Schools, and Societies. John says: “it provides the most penetrating and systematic exploration yet available of various forms of diversity and precisely how diversity enhances both problem-solving and predictions.”

Sounds fantastic.. looking forward to reading that.

‘You’ and Agencies of the future

The Time piece on ‘you’ as the person of the year made me feel initially relieved and then a bit queasy. Relief in that as mainstream a media title as Time was attempting to embrace web culture, but queasy in that it still misses the whole point which is that it’s a two-way thing. Honestly.. ::sigh:: grrrrr etc..

Realted to this, a really interesting view from Neilsen/BuzzMetrics’ Max Kalehoff on why AdAge was similarly wrong to name ‘you’ as agency of the year. In his splendid riposte he sets out ten attributes that an advertising/marketing agency or more importantly, I would argue a hyrid marketing/design/technology agency needs to demonstrate in order to be considered worthy of an agency of the year title: Network utility, great experiences, word of mouth, campaign to platform mentality, expertise in innovation, product and customer service (when client’s offering is err.. lacking), listening over speaking, organise around the individual.

Btw – “>FIP is the best radio station I’ve ever heard.. I usually hate the film Grease, but right here and now, the title track, Grease is the Word is perfect. Back to twitter..

Long tail, openness, people-centricity, push-to-pull, network utility: 1 year 2.0

This time last year I was working with a service design consultancy in London, sharing insight on web2.0, social media and new business trends.

Reporting on the new to visionary marketeer and pioneer Kevin Gavaghan of FirstDirect fame, I summed up the main facts and trends as I saw them in January 06 as follows:

Openness

People(user)-centricity

Push-to-pull

Long tail

When sketching out how these themes affected customers, users, people and humanity in general, I distinctly remember sitting in the same seat in the kitchen as now feeling amazed to be part of a revolution. The thought piece I wrote is attached to this post to download. It’s broad, wide-ranging and in a format inspired largely by Kathy Sierra’s great new/old contrast posts mentioned in a previous post.

What I realised is that for my entire working life I’ve been participating directly in the evolution of a transformation of business, culture, education and life in general.

Particularly since the open-source adventure at Getfrank (we ran our infrastructure and products on linux, perl, mySQL, Zope, Plone, Python etc) the social media/software movement has increasingly really been embraced into the mainstream – we were far too early in the UK. Being one of the founding partners of the Zope UK Trade Association at the House of Commons in 2004 was a great moment and just tonight on BBC Radio 4 In Business ran a half-hour feature on the impact and of the movement.

Of course there’s stacks of other memes and variations and derivations on the 4 main themes above but I guess the only one that I’d add to that list after a year is network utility. By that I mean being useful to networks and this largely derives from the insight I’ve gained from working with the great folks at search marketing specialists, Spannerworks, at home in Brighton.

The road ahead looks great – there’s stacks more adventures to be had, it really is just the beginning. I’m so glad I didn’t become a chartered surveyor.

Guardian – Jonathan Ive profile

Came across this short profile of Jonathan Ive today from The Guardian and was left inspired by these words in particular from his first employer, Martin Darbyshire at Tangerine in London:

“He’s particularly good on a broad basis, in that he can work on anything… He has a gift of not putting too much in, which is a danger for many designers. His passion to keep going and his attention to detail set him way, way apart from anything the majority of his contemporaries could produce.”

Image source: InfiniteLoop

An honorary freeranger indeed.

How much excitement in one day?

I switched to football on BBC after checking out the reaction to the iPhone on Digg and caught the last half hour of the Liverpool v Arsenal Carling Cup quarter final. Blimey – what a match! It was already 5-1 Arsenal and ended up at 6-3 with Baptista, on loan from Real Madrid hitting four.

What to me sounded like one of the most exciting matches of the season for a neutral fan, was unfortunately subject to Mark Lawrenson’s abysmal co-commentary. He really adds nothing other than negativity when a celebration of Arsenal’s attacking flair was in order. I sincerely hope that BBC’s openness to user-generated content extends as far as inviting knowledgeable and genuine fans to support or replace their commentary teams in the future. Hopefully we’re not too far away from user-generated live audio over the web which will allow the likes me and my father who has a similar disdain for Alan Green, Lawro and the rest to choose our commentators, or do it ourselves.