John Winsor

L > C

A few days after the 2006 Corante Innovative Marketing Conference, my head is still spinning. I was thoroughly impressed by the number of people who are recognizing that instead of relying on top-down strategic thinking that a bottom-up strategy must be developed in order to deal with the radical shifts that are happening as people outside the walls of the company are beginning to use new technology to co-create with brands, for better or worse. It seems that learning is at the core of understanding and capitalizing on the opportunities that these cultural shifts present.

Thus, the principle that learning has to be greater than or equal to change is at the core of a bottom-up strategy. The one constant in these turbulent times is that change is happening faster than ever; thus, learning has to happen even more quickly. Part of the learning process requires knowing what to do with the intelligence you acquire; this is the step that facilitates real change. This idea may seem quite simple, yet it may be challenging too many people who have traditionally been involved in product development.

While learning has always needed to be greater than change in order for a company to grow, the rate of this change has accelerated from the old business environment, where change occurred gradually, during a decade or over the course of someone’s career. Today, change seems to happen overnight. One day you are ahead of the pack and the very next day you are struggling to keep up.

This means that the rate of learning has to be greater in order for any company to survive. So what do you do? With more information available, people have to acknowledge that what they perceive as being the whole picture is only a small slice of reality. Any company’s world can be segmented into three areas: what we know, what we know we don’t know and what we don’t know we don’t know.

One of the problems that we all face in today’s more dynamic world is that the area of what we don’t know we don’t know cannot be blissfully ignored, due to its disruptive potential. Companies need to recognize this segment of their world and try to reduce it, using inspiration from the bottom-up.

Businesses often approach strategic planning as a very top-down, rigid process; even the language they use is far too structured and solemn. Planning, in its nature, requires an acceptance of the unknown and receptiveness to new ideas. Unfortunately, many companies’ reaction to an influx of new information is to fall into the ‘paralysis by analysis’ syndrome. Other companies react by panicking and making important decisions too quickly.

The ideal solution, but one that doesn’t come easily to most companies, is to rely more heavily on intuition. This is a huge paradigm shift for most businesses. People need bottom-up tools that give them the confidence to rely on their intuition when exploring the world. Businesses need fast, “real” and connected ways of making meaning of their quickly changing realities. The goal of the second section of the book is to help you build your own set of bottom-up tools, giving you the ability to develop relevant innovation faster. Inspiration developed using a bottom-up strategy can give a company the confidence needed to drive real innovation.

Bottom-up learning demands that companies are prepared to make serious mistakes when exploring their communities with their customers. It means that people inside companies need to be unintimidated, spontaneous, unconditioned, and expressive in these explorations. They need to be allowed the space to learn through stories from their communities. Companies need to revel in these stories and be creative in their interactions with other community members.

The Search for Meaning, Step 5 - Develop Narrative Thinking

In this disruptive age, the power of stories is becoming recognized as an important tool. It’s a move from cold hard facts to warm and fluid narratives. People crave a human connection with the companies whose products they buy. A cornerstone of good branding is good storytelling – but it’s a two-way street. Companies must learn to go beyond telling their own stories to listening to and understanding their customer’s stories.

By being more human and relying on storytelling and narrative strategic thinking, companies have the opportunity to be more relevant to other members of their community. Marketing strategy must be framed as a fluid, organic narrative instead of a static, immovable framework. It’s the tree versus the pyramid. Telling and listening to human stories not only provides a context to people’s lives, but also engages the imagination and interjects magic.

                                              

Founders of exceptional companies are seldom focused on their “brand” when they start their business. Instead, they focus on stories that eventually change the world, by using bottom-up strategy to see beyond the horizon.

The reality is that in the start-up phase you inherently rely on your customers, suppliers, and employees to help develop your strategy. Established companies often forget this, and try to distance themselves from their turbulent, risky beginnings. But companies would do well to rediscover their roots and revisit their own creative history.

Anthrojournalism

With all of the talk of Archetypes and market research lately, I thought I’d share some of the things we think about at Radar when we are in the field, working with consumers. First, we use a process called Anthrojournalism.

Anthrojournalism was first used as a term in 1985 to describe the pursuit of journalism that went beyond the traditional journalistic questions of who, what, when, where, and why to examine issues. It sees journalists and cultural anthropologists as workers in related fields, seeking different goals but sharing similar tools.

The focus of anthrojournalism is on the systemic nature of human relations and the cultural fabric in which these relations are imbedded. The goal is to find and report on commonalities in the human experience cross-culturally, giving participants in the process new and deeper insights that drive innovation and inspiration.

The aim of anthro-journalists is to develop deeper understandings of the communities they report about; they are willing and able to investigate and report on human events and issues in a comparative, holistic, and culturally sensitive manner.

Anthrojournalism draws on anthropology's understanding of culture, and its personal, face-to-face approach to data through participant observation and ethnographic methods; it borrows journalism’s communicative skills and its ability to synthesize information, its understanding of the cultural context of issues, and its methods of allowing events to be widely shared.

The overall goal is to use a tool that seeks context and perspective in understanding human interactions – with not only each other but with their cultures, including the products that they use.

In his book, The Turning Point: Science, Society, and the Rising Culture (1982), physical anthropologist Fritjof Capra suggests that

“...in the future, journalists will change their thinking from fragmentary to holistic modes and develop a new professional ethic based on sociological and ecological awareness. Instead of concentrating on sensational presentations of aberrant, violent, and destructive happenings, reporters and editors will have to analyze the complex social and cultural patterns that form the context of such events, as well as reporting the quiet, constructive and integrative activities going on in our culture.”

Companies can learn to use these anthrojournalistic tools to help them gain a deeper perspective in the context of the community when gathering intelligence to inform a more bottom-up strategy.

To better understand how to use anthrojournalistic tools, here are some principles to remember:

Being Aware of Context – Unless you understand the context, you can’t get the meaning. Only after spending time deal of time with a person, through several interactions over several days in the context of their world, can you begin to understand them.

Insisting on Eyewitness Perspectives – You have to go there, be where it’s happening, when it’s happening. You have to observe and ask questions until you understand the meaning from the point of view of those involved. Only when you get out on the street and spend time with someone do you really get to know them. It begins with honoring people and spending time with them in the context of their lives, which then helps foster the intuition that drives innovation.

Holism – Before focusing in on the details you need to look at the big picture – the whole experience within which a particular behavior makes sense. When you are developing a bottom-up marketing or product innovation strategy you have to be able to think about the lives of your customers in whole; and not just from your perspective.

Dynamism – You must seek to understand a living, evolving process – not a static snapshot. People do not lead simple lives. Likewise, their relationships with brands and products are dynamic, not static. Depending on who is asking the questions and what questions are being asked, the answers can vary widely. A bottom-up strategy understands the dynamism of the world and accepts the reality that there is more than one best way.

Descriptiveness – God is in the details: the story and its meaning are embedded in the concrete, particular details of what people actually do and say. This is “ecological validity” – keeping the level of abstraction low enough to keep the story honest. Sometimes the story is obvious, but it must be described in the context of the organization listening in order to be understood.

Rigorous Subjectivity – Anthropologists and journalists are only human. It is, therefore, their responsibility to know their own biases well enough to be able to keep them from interfering with telling the story in a fair and accurate way. We all bring our own lens to the work. This lens includes our beliefs, expectations, values, history and unwritten rules – as well as our ignorance, at times. It’s impossible to get rid of our lens. What’s more important is to recognize what we bring to the table and be able to put that aside and be as open and simple as possible.

Appropriate Interpretation – While all human interactions involve interpretation, companies have become so sophisticated in their strategic research that they can filter and interpret too much. The anthrojournalist’s job is to give an audience enough direct inspiration to allow them to come to their own conclusions and point of view. Because of the context, much of the most important inspiration is ignored simply because it comes out of the consumer’s mouth first or because we’ve heard it before, telling each other “They always say that.” Many listeners are so educated and so busy looking for the golden nugget that lies at the center of an interaction with a customer that they lose sight of what’s going on right in front of them – especially when sitting behind a one-way mirror in a focus group facility.

Selflore

Ray Podder just sent me an interesting article he's written about Selflore. Here's some of what he has to say:

Real is now relative to your own context. You can believe either side of any issue to be true and you’d be right. Why is that? Why is the most relevant context today defined by the individual not as society or collectively? Perhaps it’s not that our world has become devoid of meaning, but that meaning is no longer something that is fixed or fixable. It’s relative to your own version of it; your “Selflore.”