It’s just a perception, but I sense an important threshold’s been crossed over the course of the last few weeks.
‘We’re working it through’, was how Danny Alexander described what was happening in the days immediately after the General Election in the UK a month ago, after the electorate handed back the most exquisitely hung Parliament to politicians for more than a generation.
‘We’re working it through’, is how Mark Zuckerberg might put having to deal with consumer mutiny over privacy control plus an increasingly deep questioning by some Facebook users about what the DNA of Facebook and the core values of ‘being Zucked’ are all about.
‘We’re working it through’, also describes the grim reality as B.P. struggles to find an authentic response to a global sense of condemnation, cynicism and disbelief that’s attaching itself to the B.P. brand as surely as the oil slicks are landing on the beaches of Louisiana.
These three situations all have something in common. They all ask for organizational adaptability at a deep level. They challenge what all the parties involved stand for and represent.
What’s interesting about the phrase, we’re ‘working it through’ is that it’s an iterative, hands-on approach to problem solving. It involves contradictory pairs of muscles and often the engagement of opposites to achieve progress.
In the case of the Conservative Party and the Liberal Democrats who have formed the Coalition Government, ‘working it through’ led to harnessing a collective imagination and a bigger ambition than either was capable of alone. It led to ‘new politics’, a clear and confidently articulated manifesto, a shared cabinet creating credibility for the platform of an inclusive ‘big society’.
It didn’t take much to turn the dial on the mood music about the election. In a few days it shifted from mainly doom mongering conversations of conflict, woe, indecision and a re-election within the year, to ‘lawn love’ and a decidedly pacified and somewhat surprisingly positive reaction from the electorate.
It was the body language that did it, a change in behaviour, the emotional maturity to go from combatants to colleagues in pursuit of a collective national interest.
There’s a creative truth that comes to my mind in this context which is, ‘if an idea’s not working then it’s time to get a bigger one’. I think both David Cameron and Nick Clegg became receptive to that as a result of that impasse; our politicians have become more consensual and to some degree at least, have adapted. For the time being, it’s paid off and the voters have been largely assuaged by their creativity.
The difference for Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg is the opposition to what’s being pitched on user privacy’s led to the biggest backlash a social media platform’s ever experienced. This is new territory. It raises questions about what happens when you represent the digital footprints of more than 500 million people and how much licence any provider has to act unilaterally in a connected age.
The response has been that there are privacy protection groups within Facebook promoting user control over privacy settings to fill this vacuum of management. In doing so, they’re acting like the cleaner fish of the network, helping Facebook stem the attrition of disgruntled users, in many cases persuading them to stay within the network better than Facebook’s capable of doing by itself.
It makes good business sense for Facebook to embrace these efforts and to knead them into their overall operating recipe. It’s an example of how the seeds of corporate strength and survival are often to be found within the opposable forces of a networked organization, in the same way as recombinant genes are said to be part at the core of our own DNA and our sustainability as a species.
The question in this is how many organizations recognise this and are equipped with the capability to be this adaptive?
As B.P. embarks on one of the largest shoring up exercises in corporate reputation we’ve seen in years, spending $50million on a slick damage limitation communications campaign, are they capable of being hands-on and credible enough to connect with the gritty realities and the issues, from a position of blatant integrity, to restore the trust that once existed in its brand?
Blatant integrity is present when people and organizations are comfortable with being held up to scrutiny and we’re big on ‘blatant integrity’ at Visceral Business. Organizations that can manage this welcome attention as a compliment knowing it’s a commercial currency, and welcome the opportunity to cushion and objections because they’re more interested in creating a moment of truth than making an expedient sale. Knowing that one leads to another in a skittish, no-mercy, click happy culture, they see the value in relationships over transactions.
Increasingly, corporate success is a co-owned and co-created experience. Increasingly, this is an experiential economy in which control has to be surrendered in the interests of benefitting from a multiplicity of voices, the voices that are at the heart of what’s known as swarm smarts, and of working that through.
B.P. illustrates how interested parties that give a brand attention have a range of perspectives that need to be incorporated into the strategy of the adaptive organization at speed. B.P. has often appeared in denial about this, which Tony Hayward’s ‘I want my life back’ comment only served to amplify. The quicker a business environment develops, the bigger the risk any kind of blind spot is, and the agility with which an organization can react is a severe test of how well a brand is truly aligned with its stakeholders.
For an engaged brand, challenges will come thick and fast because that’s a facet of iterative learning, and working through the unknown is ever-present characteristic of doing business that often requires a degree of faith and goodwill to succeed.
The big imperative for all organizations now is to know how to operate iteratively like this. In Rework, 37 Signals, an organization I greatly admire, suggest that these days a business plan stays relevant for about 15 minutes. This is an inherent characteristic of a lean organization and an important shift that all brands and businesses should now consider.
The UK Election, Facebook’s privacy saga and the social and environmental accountability of B.P. are all examples that illustrate formative organizational experiences. They represent a shift that goes beyond social media. What we are entering now is a new chapter in how we organize, a shift that goes beyond a social revolution to a semantic one.
The semantic web has arrived and the semantic revolution’s about collective smarts. It’s about how, when it comes to solving management problems, we’re going to need to feel comfortable ‘working it through’ and to be able to lead and inspire confidence from that position.
Smart organizations will evolve by creating adaptive fits with their stakeholders at a deeply engaged level.
Semantic value is going to be our daily bread of the future. Semantic value, as we’re beginning to see, depends on the ability for diverse forces to work together. Semantic organizations will have the kind of adaptable, recombinant genes, the big ideas, heightened ambitions and the new horizons that our survival as a species has always depended on.
‘Working it through’ is a means of communication and engagement that’s becoming a critical success factor. Which is one reason why organizations and brands need to know how to engage at that visceral level if they want to succeed in the semantic age, not be defeated by it.
Thanks to Erica Marshall for the photo.
