Only Dead Fish

Shipped in 2019

Every year around this time it has become my habit to do something that I find really useful and yet never seem to manage to do in the rush of the day-to-day - to take a step back and actually look at the shape of what I've been doing all year. It's also my habit to think in the open through writing so I've ended up writing a post like this each year since 2013. For me it's a useful reminder, but also a way of reflecting on how I spend my time. It's now ten years since I set up my own business (TEN YEARS!) and the shape of my work has evolved markedly over that time. In the previous few updates I noted how (inside and outside of work but for different reasons) the year had seemed even more bonkers than the last, and this year was no different.

So in no particular order...

• I've not been blogging as much as I'd like this year (although somehow there were still 62 posts here and a few more over on the Agile Business blog) but this is something that I'd really like to make more time for. Most of my writing was instead concentrated into the first few months of the year which resulted in one of the biggest things to happen professionally for me in the last twelve months - the publishing of my second book: Agile Transformation: Structures, Processes and Mindsets for the Digital Age. Happily my first book has done well and this one, which goes much deeper into organisational structures, leadership and culture, came out in early October and seems to have got off to a good start for which I'm grateful
• Over recent years I've found myself doing much more agile transformation work with the senior leadership teams of organisations looking to change thinking, ways of operating and company culture and this year saw quite a number of new projects in this space. I've done quite a bit of work with a global pharmaceutical company this year starting with a session with the board out in San Francisco, and then a series of workshop engagements with the senior leadership teams in various markets and functions which looks like it will continue into next year. I really enjoy these more in depth, integrated, longer-term engagements - it feels as though you're really getting to understand how an organisation works and are able to affect real lasting change. Alongside this I also worked with the leadership teams at NBCU in Asia, TUI, FitFlop and Bosch in Turkey and did a series of leadership webinars for MetLife.
• In amongst this there were a couple of standout projects that I particularly enjoyed. I got to work with Hyper Island again on a year-long engagement with Scandinavian finance business Entercard helping them to transition to a new way of working. And there was a two-day workshop that I ran in August for the leaders of African micro-finance banks which was lots of fun. One of my favourite leadership sessions that I ran was with the CEOs of a number of NHS Trusts, and I hope to more with NHS leaders in 2020. 
• The retail category (another sector that is undergoing huge amounts of change) was particularly fruitful for me this year. I did a whole series of rapid prototyping workshops for the leadership team at Asda in Leeds to help build a culture of experimentation and innovation. And I also worked with the TJX team on understanding and responding to retail and digital trends, and with the Kingfisher group team on digital brand building and marketing.  
• I also worked a bit with agencies like RAPP and Red Fuse in Hong Kong, on various projects helping them to think about how they can work differently with clients. 
• 2019 was the eighth year of Google Firestarters and we ran events focusing on ever changing marketing, bringing human and tech capability together in optimal ways, secrets of growth and data strategy for performance marketers, and also on how perspectives from outside the industry can inform planning practice. Many highlights as always but some personal favourites included Justin Lines talk about what planners can learn from comedians, Amelia Torode talking about lawyers at the same event, Rob Estreitinho bringing together philosophy and planning, and Sally Weavers talking about how not to be ignored. I love doing Firestarters - getting to curate events and hear from people that I've always wanted to hear speak around subjects that are really topical in the industry is a dream gig.
• Throughout this year, alongside all the agile transformation and leadership projects, I've kept a foot in digital marketing, content strategy and digital capability work, running Masterclasses and Fast Tracks for Econsultancy, scripting a bunch of microlearning modules, and also taking on a project to help General Mills evolve their marketing practice which involved workshops in Brazil, Mexico, Australia and Switzerland. I also did digital capability consultancy projects with the Post Office and WWF.
• There were a few research-based things that I did this year primarily with Econsultancy, which resulted in reports on Change Management For Marketers, Learning From Digital Disruptors, Effective Leadership in the Digital Age, and Storytelling for Marketers. And I continued to do their quarterly Digital Shift trends webinars and reports. This type of work always stretches my thinking and learning and so I really like having them as part of what I do.
• I've also enjoyed speaking at a range of conferences and in-company leadership events this year - highlights included FEST_19 in Peru (which I LOVED), Brand Week in Istanbul, the Festival of Marketing in London, Warner Bros, Hitachi Capital, YCN, William Hill leadership day, the Dot Digital Summit (which I also enjoyed helping to curate), School of Marketing, Cello Signal and the Directors 4.0 event in Edinburgh. I'd like to do more speaking in 2020 - I love the variety and its great for meeting new and interesting people. 
• This was the ninth year of my weekly newsletter curating digital goodness from the week - it's always hard to assess what payback I get from doing it but I kind of like the process, I get good feedback which is lovely, and the subscriber base grows over time and now numbers several thousand. So I'm going to keep it up. 

Overall it's been a bit of a crazy and challenging year but in a good way. I've continued to be really busy and have learned a huge amount for which I'm extremely grateful. If I look at what worked less well for me this year I think I can immediately say that I failed to really carve out enough thinking or reflection time for myself. This is a consistent problem and one I want to work harder on solving. The work has continued to evolve in interesting ways and I need to think more about how I can make sure that I keep stretching my thinking and knowledge and how I can apply it in the most interesting and useful ways. The environment outside of work continues to be full of uncertainty but I've worked with some excellent people and organisations this year (you know who you are) and as long as I'm moving forwards and staying busy that feels like good progress so long may that continue. 

Post of the Month - November 2019 - The Winner

Thanks to everyone that took part in this month's vote. Happy to say that the winner is Justin Lines with his excellent post Fools Speak Truth to Power, despite a strong showing from those penned by Helen Edwards and Trevor Beattie. Well done Justin - you are entered into the hall of fame. Don't forget to bookmark good reads for next month's vote. 

Post of the Month - November 2019 - The Vote

Thanks for the nominations. So our vote this month is between:

Of Bananas and Butlers by George Tennenbaum

Newish Things that Haven't Made Advertising Better, Part 3: Decks by Ben Kay

Fools Speak Truth to Power by Justin Lines

Even the Simplest Metrics Require Forensic Analysis by Helen Edwards

Paul Silburn. Heaven Couldn't Wait by Trevor Beattie 

The new dot com bubble is here by Jesse Frederik and Maurits Martijn

And you can vote below:

Post of the Month - November 2019 - Nominations

Time again to open for nominations for the illustrious Post of The Month. As usual I've put down a few posts below that I enjoyed to start off the list but if you can add to these with your own nominations (direct or in the comments below) that would be good. As soon as I have a good list I'll pop them up for a vote. So my starting three posts are:

Of Bananas and Butlers by George Tennenbaum

Newish Things that Haven't Made Advertising Better, Part 3: Decks by Ben Kay

Fools Speak Truth to Power by Justin Lines

Please do add to these nominations with your own.

Google Firestarters 33 - Thinking Differently - The Event

Last week the interesting and interested of UK planning came together for our 33rd Google Firestarters event for planners and strategists. We'd taken 'Thinking Differently' as a broad theme but really this was about the (perhaps under-recognised) value of perspectives from outside the industry and more specifically what planners can learn from the way that lawyers construct arguments, comedians understand human behaviour, politicians communicate, and meteorologists understand the weather. And we had four amazing speakers and talks.

Amelia Torode is one of the select few people that have now spoken at Firestarters more than once. Back in 2015 when she spoke as part of our Magnificent Seven event she began with something that legendary planner Jon Steel had once said to her - you're not a planner, you're a lawyer. His point was that when selling in the work and doing pitches planners needed to 'read the jury' and bring them on a journey. It's not about being right or being the best, he said, it's about winning. Amelia built on these themes in her talk with four key insights around how lawyers argue their cases (drawn from interviews with Barristers, and she even went to the Old Bailey to watch them at work). Beyond this she framed a wider context for how planners can learn from techniques deployed in other professions: 

• Think like a detective: keep everything, use walls, make connections, photograph everything, keep asking yourself why, use your hunches, follow up leads.
• Story like a journalist: find an angle, make it topical, think about what makes the story interesting, use direct quotes and anecdotes, find the scoop, write the headline
• Persuade like a lawyer: use memorable soundbites, build the argument, think about the people you need to convince, lay the breadcrumbs to the answer. 

There were three things she highlighted in particular from how lawyers work:

• Mooting and drafting: the former is the specialised application of the art of persuasive advocacy (like debating but more formal). The latter is the idea of learning to create compelling arguments through writing - 'the more clearly you can write, the more powerfully you can persuade'.  
• Pupil Masters: lawyers learning through observation (by shadowing 'pupil masters') and by doing (they spend time working solo in the lower magistrate courts. 
• Socials and Inns of courts: these give lawyers access to a network of professional mentors, advice, networks and advocacy training (more mooting) for life. 

Amelia talked about how each Barrister does persuasion in their own way, but how the whole thing is a performance, improved by continuous practice (you only make money if you are in court). From her time observing Barristers in the Old Bailey she noted how it was the stories and anecdotes that stuck, how they used questioning in an artful way to make a point real to the the jury, and how getting people to doubt works as well as getting people to believe. It was a well researched, fascinating talk.

Justin Lines has spent a year studying comedians to understand how they create and deliver material and set out how they can help marketers to reveal insights in a captivating talk. He began with a story from King Lear to articulate how nobody can speak truth to power except the fool, the jester, the comedian. His suggestion was that we should no longer position ourselves as the wise ('haha is far closer to aha than you think'). For a long time, he said, the dominant theory of humour was around incongruity, how odd things make us laugh. Yet there are things that are odd that still don't violate expectations and generate humour ('give a monster a baby’s voice and it is funny. Give a baby a monster’s voice and it is scary'). Justin referenced Peter McGraw (Psychology professor in Boulder) who called this a benign violation - something that is odd, but simultaneously okay, and it doesn't pose a threat. If that is the 'ha,ha', the 'aha' of insight comes from acceptable oppositions (Liam Fahey called an insight 'a new marketplace understanding that makes a difference'), an understanding which is perhaps opposed to the old one. The link is that both insights (acceptable oppositions) and the funny (benign violations) are incongruous combinations:

'Things going together that don’t usually go together. Humans can tell both how things are, and how they should be. Incongruous combinations show that how things are, is not how they should be. They provide the spark of recognition that interests an audience. Incongruous combinations are interesting.'

Justin made the point that many insights are non-oppositional, bland and uninspired so if we can understand benign violations in the way that comedians do we can reveal better acceptable oppositions and better insights. He went on to talk about how comedians go about making the odd okay and okay odd in order to create humour, how they create exaggerated characters, reframe truths, test material, make the uninteresting interesting, and focus on how the joke is delivered. It was an inspired talk full of rich insights - it's really worth reading the full text which he's generously put up on his blog.

Rob Blackie then went on to give an excellent talk on how strategists can learn from how Donald Trump communicates (without celebrating his beliefs, attitude or policies of-course). He talked about the power of simplicity and repetition in language, with some insightful research on Trump's speeches, making the point about how this makes key points much more memorable. And he also described how good Trump is at grabbing attention and courting controversy but doing it continuously, every day, and how this results in a disproportionate amount of free media and impacts the policy areas that people feel are important. Trump likes a good fight on social media, and Rob talked about how this created the perfect signals that play well to platform algorithms, and helps to seize the agenda every day. The net effect being amplification and little space for anyone else. Techniques like using social proof (if you want people to do something show other people doing it) in simple ways help encourage more interaction and more amplification. Trump's relentless self-promotion and ability to position himself alongside big celebrities help develop his positioning. It was a really insightful look at the power of language, amplification and simplicity.

Our last talk came from Bogdana Butnar who spoke about meterologists and how weather systems are a great metaphor for the internet, building on her excellent post that won Post of the Month a while back. Bogdana's point was that how planners and strategists think about the internet affects how they work with it. She used several examples of how some prescient people had talked about the impact of the internet including David Bowie (in 1999 believe it or not), the Pirate Bay founder who coined the phrase 'away from keyboard', the Cluetrain Manifesto. But she drew a parallel with how meteorologists view weather systems as constantly evolving, unpredictable, only minimally man-made, and fundamentally inequitable, as a metaphor for the modern internet. It is one thing, but not a separate thing. Weather fronts are like patches of information that move within a set space, defined by various coordinates (like a community online, or a forum). Occasionally small but intense storms, like dust devils and tornados rise up like memes and trends, starting small but then becoming big. Then there are bigger shifts that implicate on many other systems, like jetstreams - data practices, privacy, adblocking, passwords and security. The opportunity is for planners to think of the internetas connected systems that can only be influenced:

'If you embrace the idea of the Internet as something less directional and more networked and entropic, you can start thinking about your role as less of a provider of direction and more of a provider of hierarchies of influence.'

Bogadana's talk was fun, smart, and a good way to round out the session. 

At the end of the event my head was spinning somewhat, but it felt as though we had heard four very different but somehow complementary perspectives and provocations. And it also felt as though there was an opportunity in the future to take more external perspectives and really think about how other professions learn and solve problems and what planners can take from that. My thanks to Google for hosting, to our brilliant speakers, and to all those that came on the night. As always, Scriberia did an excellent job of visualising the talks, and you can see the full visualisation here. Our next Google Firestarters will be in Q1 2020. I can't wait.