November, 2015 - Servant of Chaos

How to Avoid Busy Brain

There is no doubt that we all feel overwhelmed from time to time. It’s natural. But a few years ago I noticed that the pace of change had markedly accelerated to the point where it was changing other things. It was changing our capacity to create and innovate. It was crippling our ability to effectively “spend time” with people that we care about. And it was skewing our sense of entitlement and investment.

What we all seemed to be suffering from as the state of “busy brain”.

Think, for example, how many times you have done the following in the last week:

Shared a link without checking it first
Stayed awake too late at night doing work
Relied on alcohol or drugs to slow your body rhythms
Avoided exercise because there is not enough time in the day
Were impatient with a child or a colleague

Because we are consistently rushing from meeting to meeting, task to task and tweet to tweet, we forget.

We forget the reason. The purpose. The force of the activity that drives us.

And we do so because we have given over to busyness rather than focusing on business. Sometimes it seems that we are barely in the business of living.

We are not just distracted but alerted. Buzzed and connected. We hurry between places, spaces and events not because we fear missing out but because our presence is marked on a hidden scale of check-ins, appointments and leaderboards. We have given over to the machine and it keeps its own counsel.

So what are we to do?

I like these simple suggestions from Deepak Chopra. And like everything simple, they require us to forego complication. Here’s to a less busy brain. Sleep well.

Taking Charge of Your Brain from Deepak Chopra MD (official)

Don’t Tweet at Me in that Tone of Voice

Marketing, Performing Social Media, Social Media, Web/Tech

Setting tone of voice in social media is a challenge. How do you balance the assertiveness and authority with a sense of engagement and approachability? How do you strike a tone that delights your customers and attracts new prospects? And what is that “distinctive” personality that can only be expressed through text and how do you create it consistently?

Tone of voice is not just a problem for social media. In a business world where communication occurs largely through the written word – in email, messaging, enterprise social networks and so on, a misplaced word or misconstrued meaning can cause much drama.

Consider the hastily worded email that you sent after a bad meeting. Or the tweets you made in response to a troll. What about the situation where you really wanted to recall an email but realised that you could not?

IBM has been experimenting with language and semantics for some time. Their Watson platform specialises in natural language processing, and with the Tone Analyzer service, you may just catch an overly aggressive email in the nick of time.

How Tone Analyzer Works

We often rely on the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator to help us profile individuals. It is still widely in use despite being largely dismissed as a scientific method – but I have always found its indicators lacking. I much prefer Sam Gosling’s OCEAN framework. It measures:

Openness
Conscientiousness
Extroversion
Agreeableness
Neuroticism

This framework is used by IBM to assess your social tone of voice. Watson also gives you a score on writing tone and emotional tone. You simply cut and paste your text into the field on the demo page and have Watson analyse your words. It then returns a visual assessment. This is the assessment from the first half of my last blog post. You will see, the post was:

80% analytical (good for this kind of article)
96% confident (I do want you to believe me)
87% agreeable (please, please like and hire me).

You can also integrate this platform into your enterprise tools using the API platform. That could make for a very different form of communication within and beyond the enterprise.

But here’s a question – would you dare to run your marketing copy through this system? What would you find?

Marketing Skills of the Future, Now

Advertising, Future of Work, Marketing, Trends

I have dozens of conversations with marketers every week. And in almost every conversation, the topic turns to skills. Skills shortages. Employee capabilities. And technology. The rapidly changing marketing technology landscape shifts each quarter with new features, functions, platforms and data coming into play. Meanwhile, universities are pumping out graduates whose capabilities are already out of date.

It is becoming clear that we need marketing skills for the future. But we need them now.

I recently discussed these skill gaps with MediaScope’s Denise Shrivell, AOL’s Yasmin Sanders and RadiumOne’s Adam Furness. Each week Denise presents a 30 minute live video chat on the topics impacting Australia’s media and advertising industry, and this episode focusing on skill shortages was a cracker. On a positive note, we are seeing forward momentum. But are we seeing the gap closing? Watch a replay of the episode below.

Addressing skill gaps by improving your innovation fitness

Over the last 12 months I have been working with a range of clients on their digital and marketing strategies. As part of this work, we map out not just the strategic landscape, but the skills needed to deliver. Sometimes this means:

In-house teams need training
Finding the right agency to fill the gap
Every now and then, creating something entirely new – which is when the project gets really exciting.

One of the programs we have developed to help organisations to continue to move forward in this environment is called Innovation Fitness. The Innovation Fitness program, with its bootcamp, ongoing mentoring and support and target skills audit process is not just about closing the gap, but about delivering changes in the ways that you work.

After all, the future is not determined by technology but by our reactions to it. The questions we all need to ask ourselves is “How clear is our future skills strategy? And are we even on the right path?”.

#CoffeeMornings for Evening People

Coffee Mornings

The Sydney institution that is #CoffeeMornings has now been running regularly for the last nine years. And while we have many who turn up each Friday regularly, there are some that come only occasionally. Rarely. Hardly at all. Some people even tell me that they “just can’t get up early enough to make it to Single Origin by 8am.

So if you are one of these so-called “evening people”, then you may want to come along to a Coffee Mornings for Evening People next Tuesday evening. It’s like Christmas party way ahead of the Christmas party rush that happens in December. If you can make it, we’d love to see you.

Where: Papa Gedes Bar, Rear 348 Kent Street
When: Tuesday, 24 November 2015 @ 6pm

Talking Social and Digital Trends on the Echo Junction Podcast

Future of Work, FutureVisions, Podcasts, Social Business, Social Media, Trends

Podcasts are one of my newly discovered joys. A well curated list of subscriptions basically means that you can remain up-to-date with your fields of interest independently of the mainstream media. This is particularly useful for topics that are too niche for the media or too controversial – which is why my personal subscription list includes podcasts on the topics of digital and social media, Australian history, and the history of writing and language (often including large amounts of swearing).

Podcasts also mean that you have a greater role in programming your own media content, so if you don’t like what you hear, you can unsubscribe and find something you like more.

One of my regular casts is Adam Fraser’s Echo Junction. With dozens of podcasts recorded this year, he has been seeking out and presenting some of the best thinkers and doers in the online world for the last year or so. He meticulously researches, prepares questions and challenges his guests to connect the dots between the enterprise and digital worlds. Some of the best episodes include:

Back in April 2015, I joined Adam to talk social business and the enterprise landscape, and last week we got together again to think about the future – 2016 – and what it might hold for the world of social and digital. It wasn’t an interview. It was a discussion. You can listen in here (and argue with me on Twitter).

Beyond Innovation Bingo: Doing Business with Government in the Digital Age

Conferences, Digital Disruption, Digital Strategy, Disruptive Technology, Innovation

We have been living in the 21st Century for almost 15 years, and at last it seems, that governments at all levels in Australia have finally got the carrier pigeon. With Primer Minister, Malcolm Turnbull’s very public recalibration of the business conversation towards “innovation”, there has been a remarkable level of energy and dynamism pumped into the the business world. From Wyatt Roy’s PolicyHack to the Telstra Digital Summit, and from the SydStart startup conference to the opening of the Australian Digital Transformation Office, it feels like we are constantly playing innovation bingo.

Will all this talk result in action? And will that action result in anything like lasting change? More importantly, will the benefits of this innovation – the digital transformation programs – actually deliver value and opportunity for anyone other than the big end of town?

On Thursday, 5 November 2015, InnovationAus.com is hosting an Open Opportunity Forum to address these questions. This breakfast event at the offices of Swaab Attorneys, aims to “provide the highest level briefing of digital engagement – to give [mid-tier technology companies] a practical guide to meeting public sector demand.”

Speakers* confirmed include:

The Hon Karen Andrews MP, Assistant Minister for Science, Australian Government
Professor Roy Green, Dean Business School, University of Technology Sydney (UTS)
Martin Hoffman, Secretary, NSW Department of Finance, Services and Innovation
Adrian Turner, CEO, Data61
Patricia Kelly, Director General, IP Australia
Audrey Lobo-Pulo, Data Scientist, Australian Taxation Office (ATO)
Latika Bourke, Press Gallery Political Reporter, Sydney Morning Herald (Event MC)

In addition, Wyatt Roy MP, Assistant Minister for Innovation will kick off the breakfast with a live cross from Israel. Rounding out the event, I will share some practical tips on what businesses can do today to make a difference tomorrow. It promises to be informative and perfectly timed to help us all make sense of the newly emerging innovation landscape.

Hope to see you there!

Does Medium Matter?

Old Media, Rant, Trust

When publishing platform Medium burst onto the internet a while back, it seemed like fresh life had been breathed into a stale medium (no pun intended). The integrated comments, sharing and community building capabilities were a fantastic way to turn the one-way, author-to-reader format on its head. And the limited release, invitation only availability drove demand for access superbly.

Medium also arrived at a time when LinkedIn’s publishing platform was growing in popularity. As a centre of gravity for business conversations and thought leadership, LinkedIn’s clunky Pulse technology could rely on its integrated access to YOUR business networks and news feeds, and seemed to grow on a daily basis. Using the same “influencer-led” strategy to launch, LinkedIn initially restricted access to the publishing platform, creating a clear distinction between those who had access and those who did not, but this was gradually relaxed, and the publishing platform began to open to others.

Yet as the “thought leadership” grew, so too did the clutter. LinkedIn attempted to categorise content to create a feed of relevancy as did Medium. It reminded me a little of the proliferation of blogs a few years back – resulting in an explosion of content and comment. But there is a clear difference. All this content are building OTHER PEOPLE’S networks. And those networks are picking winners – based on a few random elements (also known as algorithms).

In this experiment on Medium, Henry Wismayer, shows not only the new challenge of surfacing “new” voices on these new platforms, he also suggests that there has to be a deeper alignment. That the algorithm is not value free, but self-referential and self-reinforcing. You are either part of the game or you are well out of it:

The ease with which Triumvirate articles — even depressingly hollow ones — accrue views and Recommends provides an irresistible incentive for other people to follow the formula. As a result, Medium risks becoming a click-bait factory, a lame production line pumping out articles around the same limited themes.

And the point is that this is all a game. And can be gamed.

The core factor here is trust. Who do we trust and why?

In a time poor world, we increasingly rely on technology to filter the signal from the noise. But increasingly, there is a blandness to the experience of the “world wide web”. It’s no longer worldly nor wide.

And this is where the true opportunity lies. Medium has become, for me at least, a vast, shallow sea of thinly veiled opinion masquerading as insight. It’s not offering the richness it promised in the early days. In many ways, it’s the distinction that Alana Fisher calls out between subject matter expertise and thought leadership.

And the same is true for LinkedIn. Will either of these platforms matter in 2017? Perhaps they are simply on the path to inevitable disruption. Perhaps it’s not that Medium doesn’t matter, but that media itself is under threat. Now, that’s an interesting thought.