Björn Jeffery

It’s been a long and tough week, and the weekend is looking to end in a not-so-good way either as I’m feeling a bit sick. But I feel I must write a few lines about an amazing event that I took part of this week.

I am, of course, talking about 24 Hour Business Camp that took place at Hasseludden Yasuragi, just outside of Stockholm. If you are not familiar with the event you can read up on it here. There has been so much media coverage of the event that one might think there is nothing add. Therefore, I wrote a few notes on the event from a more corporate perspective.

Firstly, the event shouldn’t be evaluated by what was created, but what can be created. Sceptics have noted that it is unlikely that many of the projects will amount to a real business. Be that as it may, but it is irrelevant if they do or not. Why would anyone – no matter the time frame – declare a business finished, ever? Running a business is a process. It always has been, and it always will be. Therefore the interesting parameter to look at is how much can be done in a mere 24 hours. A lot, judging by the projects delivered.

In the companies that I work with, product development cycles are long. Often several months. A lot of the time is spent making sure that all the stake-holders agree with the projects main idea, and making sure that it will be well received once it is finished.

Although time consuming – and often frustratingly slow – this process is not to be underestimated if you want the project to become successful. But keep in mind that this process only is needed when launching a project that is going straight into the operations of a large company.

The way I see it, the 24 Hour Business Camp projects should be classified as the things that precede such a process. The experimenting. The prototyping. The testing. The things that can give the projects stake-holders enough faith and proof that this is a viable project idea. After that, we can get started. Sometimes the project will have to be completely re-written, in other cases the 24 Hour mock-up is good enough to launch straight away.

Whether it works or not, or can be used straight away or not, is not important. Such criticism simply shows people´s lack of seeing progress through anything else but an immediate success. This is a very naive way of looking at any type of development.

What can we learn from failure? Loads, but let’s try a few examples: We can learn that the concept was entirely wrong, because nobody understood it. We can learn that the idea was good, but that specific way of executing it wasn’t very efficient. We can learn that a failure within the the area that we set up may well become a success in one that we hadn’t thought of. Learning any of these things after 24 hours of work is to be regarded as extremely cheap, and effective.

There are so many factors that precede a successful business. I think many companies could learn a lot from 24 Hour Business Camp when it comes to finding out these factors.

Disclaimer: I participated at the event for one of our clients, Bonnier R&D. Together, we produced a small RFID-project that you can read about here.

It has nothing to do with anything, but I was very happy when I found out that I was one of Medievärlden´s seven “Media Profiles” for 2009. Below is a PDF with the picture and short interview that was featured in their January issue.

medievarlden

http://www.newsmill.se/millord/Newsmills%20mill%2Dwidget

Trying out Newsmills new widget!

I’m glad you’re still here. The site has changed as you may have seen. If not, then you are reading through RSS and hopefully nothing has changed at all 🙂 Either way the colour profile is a bit off so far, but we’re getting there. Hold tight.

One of the things I’ve been thinking about is whether I should keep writing this blog in English or not. The rest of our site is now in Swedish so it might make sense to switch. Maybe stick to Twitter for English updates? I’ve got a feeling mostly Swedish people read this anyway. What do you think?

Please speak up as I’m trying to get organised for this years blogging. There’s going to be a lot of things to write about!

After being Jaiku-loyal for years, I’m giving Twitter a shot again. Would love to connect with people that read this blog! On both protocols of course. bjornjeffery@Twitter and bjornjeffery@Jaiku.

I agree with a part of the analysis – media companies are often disconnected from reality – but I don’t agree with the conclusion. For me, there is nothing saying that organisations trying to reinvent themselves can’t do as good a job of it as outsiders. Admittedly the ‘internal’ innovation is often driven by fear rather than vision. But the results don’t have to be affected by the motives.

(via Thomas Crampton, who also did the interview)

This is a long post that just follows my brain´s way of reasoning, not a coherent idea from beginning to end. Bare with me 🙂

I ended up in an interesting discussion the other day. If you speak Swedish you can find it here. In short, I responded harshly (although it was initially meant to be sharp, rather than harsh) to a comment about the legitimacy of the IPCC in a Jaiku-thread. As the discussion went on, I found myself having quite an unpleasant tone and started to reflect on that rather than yet another argument about the climate.

Two things stood out in the discussion. Firstly, I responded in such a different manner from my normal “Jaiku-tone” that many people reacted. A few examples:

1. I received several supporting comments via IM, IRL and so forth. But none in the thread.
2. Seven people, almost instantly, added me as a contact on Jaiku. Writing these things must have sparked some sort of interest.
3. Another few people said that they were very surprised because they had never seen me like “that” before. My behaviour was clearly outside the realms of what was expected, and, in some sense, accepted.

Secondly, I noticed that it was I that couldn’t handle another point of view. At least not in that social setting. I’m usually not like that.

In the Swedish Jaiku-bubble we all tend to agree and pat each other on the back. When someone steps outside of this jargon, it obviously gets disproportionately large (social) consequences.

Fredrik had a theory that Jaiku was the place for all social media enthusiasts that were sick of not being taken seriously or understood in their usual surroundings. It therefore became a safe haven and a continuous backchannel for all things social. In that context it makes sense to agree and cheer as the escape from criticism is what unites the people there.

There is much to be said about all of this. But let’s focus on one thing for now: is discussion and critique really a pre-requisite for development and improvement? Would Jaiku be better, or more interesting, if we’re argued more and were more different?

My friends know I often refer to Edward de Bono as one of the most interesting thinkers I have ever read. If you are not familiar with him I recommend that you start of by reading this 1997 article from the Guardian. A summarizing quote:

“Traditionally, we have solved problems by analysing them and seeking to identify, and then removing, the cause of the problem. Often this works, but at other times there are too many causes to remove or we cannot remove the cause because it is human nature. The ceasefire in Northern Ireland was squandered because the Government could not design any constructive way forward. That is mostly a design problem, but it is not getting any design attention. Argument will never solve the problem.

[…]

Does all this mean that traditional thinking is wrong and useless? Not at all. It has been and continues to be wonderful and highly useful. The front left wheel of a car is wonderful and essential. But it is not enough.”

What de Bono is saying is that design, not oppositional discussion or argument, is the way forward. And he means design as in the creation of new ideas rather than “graphic design” that it is often confused with.

With this is mind, the social framework that Jaiku offers to the Swedish crowd could have excellent pre-requisites to become a truly constructive area of ideas. No arguing in the way of designing ideas. Still I find that surprisingly few new ideas come up.

My current theory regarding this is that the framework itself lacks a way of presenting an opposing (or rather, parallel) view in order to drive the discussion forward without giving the impression that is was written to disprove the first persons idea. The sense that we should all get along is sympathetic – but limiting – as that makes the assumption that presenting another view would mean not getting along.

Before the mindset of parallel thinking is standard, we need to design social networks to minimize the flaws that language and traditional reasoning have created for us. Jaiku and similar social networks therefore needs a button or a symbol that indicates something to the effect of “I respect your idea and think you have an interesting point, but in order to expand the way we can think about this I will now present another idea. Although it may be perceived as opposing your idea – don’t take it that way, but simply regard it as a provocative statement aimed to help us improve and expand your initial idea.” Let’s call this button “PO”, as that is what Edward de Bono calls the same concept outside the internet.

In the spirit of this, I’ll end with a PO myself:

PO: Let’s rebuild Jaiku to fill in all the linguistic holes that modern society have created for us. Let’s leverage the fact that the internet can offer more sophisticated ways of communicating and not just recreate the same old patterns that have limited us all for so long.

I never thought I’d be impressed by Ace of Base, but I must say they’re on to something. It’s refreshing to hear a major band move away from the traditional business model in order to make more money – not less.

Far too often in surroundings like this, people drop buzzwords like it’s social media bingo. They do it because that’s what people want to hear. And there is a belief that just using social software or adding social functionality will make a big difference in what ever business they are in. This is obviously not the case, but it makes all of us within the bubble feel good.

This type of reasoning will never convince anyone in traditional business. That’s why we need Ace of Base-type of arguments. We’re letting people be a part of our product because it will make us more money. That why. It may be interesting, it may be in line with the trends, but we’re doing it for cash.

Next year will be all about this type of reasoning. Not only in the music business, but overall. That might be one of the few things that are good about this whole state of affairs.

There’s a wide range of things being discussed on stage at the moment. I’m hearing a theme of methodology, as that’s the way I’m inclined to think. How you can spot trends on a macro level, and how find specific interesting projects. A few thoughts:

Morten Lund spoke of risk. Risk equals return and risk equals impact, he said. In choosing these projects you shouldn’t over-strategize (management consultants got a serious bashing, specifically McKinsey) but instead trust your gut feeling. There’s a lot to be said about when the gut feeling is right and not, and how it differs depending on person, but let’s leave that for a moment.

Over to Joi Ito. He had an interesting introduction about communication layers and what happend when disruption entered on each layer. But at the end of the talk, he said that trends and innovation is found in the crossroads of technology evolution and the behaviour of young people. Short, but concise.

So, with these statments in mind, how to find trends and the next thing? First, research tech and consumer behaviour and then distill the projects by gut feeling. That would mean finding by process, refining by feeling. I instinctively think that the opposite would be equally interesting – finding by feeling, and refining by process.

Either way you go, it’s interesting that something as abstract as gut feeling comes up a key success factor (McKinsey word!) when knowing what’s next.

I’m at SIME08 and will be blogging now and then. No attempts to live blog, but we’ll see how it goes during the day. Check out the backchannel here.