Thinking Faster

The Tipping Point debate

Malcolm Gladwell has probably occupied the pedestal long enough.  In a new article in Fast Company, a researcher from Yahoo questions the concepts behind the Tipping Point - especially the concept that there are a small number of influencers who create or drive new trends.  Researcher Duncan Watts suggests that what drives trends is less about who is driving the trend, and more about how susceptible people are to the trend.

In the article the author seeks balance and contacts Gladwell for a response.  In typical Gladwellian fashion, Gladwell neither accepts nor rejects Watt's theory.  Well, which is it?  Are trends driven by a very small cadre of people who advocate new ideas and communicate them broadly throughout their network?  Or can anyone create a trend as long as people are ready and susceptible?

It would seem that there are several other rationales for why an idea, a trend or a fad gets spread and how quickly it is adopted or rejected.  For instance, how easily accessible is the trend?  Hush Puppies are available in many shoe stores, so they are ubiquitous in that sense.  Another factor is the cost of acquisition and trial.  Hush Puppies don't cost all that much, and we all need shoes.  I think another factor is the "fun" factor - is the new idea really different and does it make your day more interesting or more "fun"?  I don't know if Hush Puppies did that.  Finally, it would seem that how communicable the trend or idea is would have an impact as well.

It would also seem that these theories should be easy to test.  If Influencers do drive most of the adoption of a new trend or idea, let's run an experiment where they advocate a really crazy or hideous idea - for example, pink angora sweaters with lime green trim.  If theses Influencers drive others to purchase these sweaters, then we can assume the Influencer model is correct.  I tend to have my doubts however. 

Gladwell's book is interesting and a great read, but on further consideration it should have been clear all along that a number of factors play into whether or not an idea or trend takes off.  We as managers or marketers like the idea of influencing a few people who then communicate and influence a much broader swath of people, and to an extent that concept is still true, but there are a number of other attributes that come into play that we need to take into consideration when marketing a product or service.

Using what we know

Next to the corporate data stacking up in your server farms, institutional knowledge is probably the most under utilized asset in your company.  What we know, and how we use what we know, has got to improve.

Think, for a moment, about how we promote people for example.  Usually, if a person does a very good job at his or her role and grows in ability and knowledge, we move them out of that role into another role.  That's good for the individual and hopefully good for the corporation, in that a strong performer has been given more responsibility.  The problem lies in how we use what that person learned in his initial position to help others come up to speed quickly and leverage the investment in learning.

In business, since we are in such a hurry, we do a poor job of appreciating and capturing the experience and knowledge that people have and what they've learned from it.  It seems to be that we are constantly re-inventing the wheel only to discover that someone else has struggled through the same issues we face.  If we all agree that this is a problem - and we do, don't we - then what can be done to reduce or eliminate this problem?

One step we take after every project is a one to two hour meeting in which we attempt to capture what we think we did right in the project, what we could have done better and what we would or would not do again.  For example, in a recent project we felt that we should have done a better job building prototypes to demonstrate functionality for clients.  In another project we felt that we'd done a particularly good job running a beta test and gathering the results.  In these post-project meetings we discuss these actions and decisions and try to determine what we should learn from these actions and decisions and how to apply them in our next projects.  How do you use what you or others on your team or in your organization have just learned to make your team more effective next time?  Do you take the time to capture the learnings - good and bad - from your internal and external projects?  If you do capture that information, how is it shared with others?

We are also fortunate enough right now to be able to ask everyone in our company before we start a new project if they've ever done work with a particular technology or had any experience using a certain type of methodology or approach.  In a small company (less than say 100 people), simple communication networks can get these answers quickly.  In a larger company, I think to use corporate knowledge effectively a collaborative information system is required.  You simply can't ask everyone about everything all the time and expect to get decent answers.

Finally, it seems to me there are fewer and fewer "wise old men" around anymore.  When I first started working as a consultant, every business had a few long time employees -men and women - who knew the organization, the formal and informal networks and the corporate history.  They were the keepers of the corporate knowledge and were usually very connected if not very powerful in the organization.  Today there's less emphasis on connectedness and corporate knowledge across the organization.  We've become increasingly specialized in our roles and overly busy.  Who makes the connections and knows where the bodies are buried in your organization?

Managing corporate knowledge and using it effectively means that we have to value that knowledge, capture it and refresh it constantly.  Otherwise get comfortable building that wheel.  You'll be doing it again.

Know what you know

A problem with many businesses today - large and small - is that it is hard to know what the firm has done in the past and what it is currently doing. By that I mean that many projects are started, conducted and completed without the knowledge or information gained from that project being shared throughout the organization. If you consider that most firms have multiple initiatives and projects underway at any time, you can quickly see that there's a lot of information and data generated and knowledge gained that resides in the heads of just a few people.

Too often, we re-invent the wheel. We don't know what others in our organization know, and we start a new project or kick off a new initiative since we don't know or can't discover that the information already exists somewhere in the organization. In any large organization, if you or your team confront a business challenge, it is likely that someone in the firm has encountered the same problem before. It will save time and money if you can find out what their learnings were, and what they felt they did well and what they could have done better. Problem is, how do you find out about that knowledge?

Most businesses don't "Know what they know" and therefore lose a lot of productivity and competitive advantage since they can't capitalize on the knowledge they have internally. In most cases, the lack of knowledge sharing is not a turf issue, but a storage and categorization issue. How many times have you sent an email to "ALL at company X" asking for information about a particular subject. In a firm I consulted with recently, it was not unusual to get one or two emails like that a day. Unless the sender and receiver both agree on how we define knowledge and the business challenge, we won't connect.

If a project is worth doing, the knowledge gained from that project is worth collecting, publishing and storing. At the end of any project, major task or initiative in a business, there should be a step in the process to sit down, capture what we learned (good and bad) and decide how that information should be categorized and where it should be stored. Once that information is stored, it should be searchable through categories and key words, and should reference the team members who created the information. This solution could be as simple as a blog like the one you are reading, or could scale to a true knowledge management system.

Probably 80% of the people in your organization know something about a project, a task or a business process that could be valuable to someone else. Our collective intelligence is distributed in islands of information walking around for the most part in people's heads. In fact - what's the last thing we ask someone to do before they leave our company to take a new job - a brain dump. If the information was important before, why not get some of it written down?