Björn Jeffery

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.

Just in case you forgot (we are going back to 2006, after all). Henrik wrote about it a year earlier than me even.

John Koten, Mansueto ventures:

“Social publishing,” or aggregation, is what pays, Koten says. And in recessionary times, that’s obviously more crucial. Koten: “Having regularly updated, fresh content is different than having people who are trying to break stories five or six times a day.

And it’s still true.

I often wonder why so many traditional media companies have missed The Technical Divide, and why the internet changes everything. It’s a million dollar (in lost advertising revenue 😉 question.

I think a part of the problem is not understanding the separation of content and distribution. They used to be tightly interlinked – news (content) through newspapers (distribution), tv-shows (content) and channels (distribution). From that perspective it would make sense to apply the same logic to media on the internet.

But the internet is not a medium – it is a carrier of media. The content is not connected to the distribution in the same way as it used to be. Therefore, producing content that is meant to be exclusive for any one specific channel/space/area is not understanding how the internet fundamentally works.

Proprietary thinking is therefore something of the past. And that’s why business models built on proprietary content will always stop short of what they could have been.

This is not a political blog, but the video clip below is not politics either. It is a profound, and what appears to be sincere, tale of worry about the next few years in America if this coming election doesn’t go the way that it should. It touched me it the same way that this did.

These are rough times. I visited ETRE08 and everyone there was noticeably moved about the current state of affairs (except maybe Tim Draper who sang a different tune, literally). Sure, a few of them worked for investment banks and were probably more worried about their penthouse down-payments more than anything else – but still. Even there, amongst the IT-Davos-esque crowd, something seemed to have changed.

What we need at a time like this is clarity, responsibility and genuine long term thinking. Strategy, if you will. Whether we work for Goldman Sachs, are the former US Secretary of State or – like most people that read this blog – work with the web in some way, it doesn’t matter. We should all address our respective issues with these parameters in mind. I’m glad that a man with such a questionable track record has decided to do so now, at least.

If you weren’t at Reboot this year, or even if you were – don’t miss this. I had the privilege of meeting JP in London a while back and I think his view on internet life is amazingly interesting and inspiring.