Matt Ballantine
In the summer of 2016 I found myself in the sleek marble, steel and glass offices of a City of London law firm. It was a stiflingly hot July evening, and the drinks were flowing as partners in the business celebrated the end of their annual gathering.
I was helping the organization to get a better handle on how digital would impact on how it operated and serviced its clients. Somehow I had managed to convince them to buy a virtual reality system and on that evening I was offering their senior lawyers the opportunity to immerse themselves at the bottom of a virtual ocean to swim with digital blue whales.
The response from people fell into one of three categories.
Some looked at what we were doing and haughtily scoffed that it was utterly irrelevant to the world of law.
Others looked at what was going on and asked me ‘So what has this got to do with the world of law?’ ‘You tell me’, I’d say to them. ‘You’re the lawyer!’
The final group looked at the system and asked if they could have a go. They explored it. They had fun, and then they started asking questions like ‘I wonder how we could use this with clients to explain issues of health and safety law?’ or ‘I wonder if our real estate clients are using these types of technology yet?’
The firm’s chief executive was firmly in the first category.
Back in the early 1990s, as an undergraduate in the School of Social Sciences at Loughborough University in the UK, I vividly remember the prognosis of our Information Systems lecturer about the future of what was a clutch of emerging new ways of navigating data on the internet. He saw much promise in WAIS and Gopher. He thought the new world wide web was a gimmick and couldn’t see much of a future for it, especially given the expensive workstations on which it was required to run.
When a new technology emerges to the world, it’s common for us to dismiss it, to fail to see how it might be of use or benefit. We see such new things as toys, and mostly in the world of work, we will dismiss them as such. This trait can be seen as much in experts in a field, as by the chief executives of law firms. Work is a serious thing, and toys are frivolous.
In hindsight, it is quite apparent that the world wide web was going to change the way we live in a way as profound as the telephone or the internal combustion engine. In hindsight, as I write this, it appears evident that ‘virtual reality’ is yet again a failure. By the time this book hits the shelves what will have happened? Well, only time will tell.
However, if there’s one thing of which you can be assured, there’s only one way in which you can practically make use of a toy. You play with it.
I am blessed to have two sons – lively, energetic, funny, curious and playful boys born thirteen months apart. They’re best of friends for all of the time that they are not, and that can change like the wind. One of the things, though, that will almost always bring them together is Lego.
They can spend hour upon hour lost in their imaginations playing with Lego, and, over the past few years, I’ve observed that they have four main ways in which they interact with the toy.
The first, Battle Combat Mode, is where, in short, they throw it at each other. They are boys, they are thirteen short months apart in age and their moods change like the wind. They do it because the other is doing it. They have little idea why.
The second, IKEA Mode, is reminiscent of the way in which in adult life we construct flat-pack furniture from the Swedish home furnishing behemoth. The kids will select a model that they wish to build and then methodically follow the instructions until they have completed the three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle.
The third, Pokémon Mode, fuses Lego with another favourite from their world, the characters from the Japanese collector game. At present, there’s no licensing deal between the two brands, so when the boys want to create a character, they need to work it out for themselves. They figure it out, piece by piece, and Pikachu or his friends duly emerge.
Finally – and as a child of the 1970s, where I still believe the spiritual heart of Lego lies – there is Tinkering Mode. The kids will go off into flights of imaginative fancy, creating characters and worlds on a whim.
As I have observed all of this play, my mind has drawn parallels with the worlds of activity and adoption of technology I see in the organizations with whom I have the privilege to work.
There’s an awful lot of Battle Combat Mode. ‘We need a Social Blockchain Big Data AI Machine Learning Bot!’ comes the cry.
Why? Because our competitors are doing the same, and we have a fear of missing out. Or we have a fear of being seen as not innovative enough. Or we are just not confident enough to call out that the digital emperor is as naked as the day he was born.
There’s a particular type of technology investment that I have taken to refer to as ‘PR Tech’ which is perfectly valid but serves no business purpose other than to build innovative credibility around a brand. In part, this is why so many businesses had their social presences run by interns for so long and, in the business-to-business (B2B) sector, many probably still do.
IKEA Mode is the way in which industrialized organizations grew and why so many of the things that surround you at this very moment exist. Develop repeatable, finessed best practices and processes and execute them with efficiency and effectiveness at scale.
This way of working is terrific. However, it breaks down if you don’t know what you want or aren’t sure if your way to solve a problem is the right way, or if a situation is new or novel or utterly ambiguous.
Pokemon Mode is often what organizations are trying to achieve when they talk about agility. You have a direction, but you have no way of knowing how to get there. So you take small steps and accept change and failure, limiting exposure to failure through assessing and learning and not being afraid to pull the plug entirely.
Agility is hard in any organization. It’s hard because we have trained generation after generation to work in the ways described by the likes of FW Taylor and Henry Ford. We want certainty in outcomes, and agile approaches don’t necessarily provide that. We talk about disruption and yet want anything but disruption. We talk about volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity but struggle de sperately to account for any of them.
Which in turn brings us to Tinkering Mode. Without a doubt, the most depressing thing I have heard in the last few years was from the Head of Learning and Development at a client who told me, bluntly, that ‘we don’t have time for the luxury of play’.
However, if you don’t make time to tinker, to play with the toys of emerging technology, then how will you or your organization ever be able to spot how to apply new things until after your competitors have already done so?
Don’t get me wrong. Organizations can’t operate if everyone is spending all of their time playing around with gadgets. You need to create a portfolio of activities that cover all bases. Moreover, that journey starts, for a leader, with the personal as well as the organizational. The tone that you set will be role-modelled throughout your business. If you are tinkering, you are giving implicit permission for others to do so. If you resolutely do not, you are closing the door for the whole organization.
There is no technology more pervasive or persuasive for setting the agenda for exploration and curiosity and change and innovation in business than social media, because everyone can see what you’re doing.
And that, particularly for leaders who have been schooled to believe that their role is to be unambiguous and all-knowing, is fantastically disruptive. To not hide behind the ranks of corporate communicators, elegantly crafting messages to paint an illusion of the executive.
To survive in this chaotic, disruptive world of ours, you need to learn to disrupt yourself. Tinker with new things. Find out how they might fit into your world, and how they might evolve within your organization to provide benefit and competitive advantage.
This book provides a wealth of ideas about how you might do that. Here are some of the ideas I share with my clients about how to take steps towards tinkering with social as a senior executive.
Understand your work/not work continuum and concepts of formality
The boundaries between our work and our time outside of work are becoming increasingly blurred, especially as technology permeates deeper and deeper into our day-to-day lives. I’m not sure if there are clear distinctions any longer between a ‘work/life balance’. But that doesn’t mean that we can’t make some mental separation in our minds which can help to provide context with different social channels.
There are no absolutes but personally I’d struggle to see how LinkedIn could be viewed as a place of leisure. Similarly, for me, Facebook is a place I tend to keep free of work conversations (although I know many for whom that is very much not the case).
I have WhatsApp channels for work and for friends and family. The streams rarely cross.
My blog is mostly about work but tends towards ‘Working Out Loud’ and is a description of the things that I am doing as I am doing them. It’s raw and unpolished, deliberately so; my column for Forbes (essentially another blog) is much more carefully curated. Formal and informal and work and not work shouldn’t be totally correlated.
Try to place where a social channel might sit in the work/not work spectrum and how formal a channel it is (and where that might or might not work for you). But then accept that as you start to explore any channel you will find out how it really works for you. That’s the nature of tinkering.
Don’t create a new, and poor, customer-service channel
A common fear when senior executives enter into the world of social is that the channel will become a new route by which disgruntled customers will vent their frustrations. There are two important things to take note of here.
The first is to establish routes by which any customer service issues can be triaged and dealt with quickly, effectively and – appropriately – publicly. That last point is important – if customers are taking to public channels to complain, resolution that happens in the background does nothing to bolster your corporate reputation.
But far more fundamentally, if you are fearful that by going online you will be opening yourself up to a flood of customer complaints, then that is the issue which you should be really concerning yourself – that is, what is so bad about your current service channels that customers are looking for ways to avoid them?
Don’t just broadcast, engage
One of the best metaphors that I’ve heard to describe a social platform is my sometime colleague and CTO of transportation business Addison Lee Ian Cohen’s description of Twitter as being like a pub. It’s public. It’s a place, primarily, of conversation. Some people know each other. Some are strangers. You’ll probably find the odd drunken bore who just shouts at the furniture.
Don’t be that drunken bore. Social channels are not, despite the best efforts of the traditional marketing industry, yet another media channel on which you push your messages. The power of social comes from engagement, not broadcasting. From being curious, humble and empathetic. From being, to coin a phrase, social.
The clue really is in the name.
Make it a habit
There is much spoken about how we are becoming addicted to technologies. We send people off on Digital Detoxes and install wellness applications onto their smartphones to regulate their addictions.
But at the other end of the spectrum, there is a broad cohort of senior leaders who seem to have unwittingly formed a digital temperance movement, abstaining entirely from the social world. We shouldn’t forget that it’s perfectly possible to form benign habits, and the effective use of social channels depends on it.
Build it into your day or week. Make time for it; otherwise it will never happen.
The single most useful habit that I have built into my own working pattern is that of the weeknote. Every Friday I spend a few minutes to write a short blog post that in no more than a few bullet points sums up the key things I‘ve learned in the preceding seven days. It was an idea that I picked up from an article in WIRED magazine back in May 2010 and something that I have done habitually ever since. Ten minutes of my time, once a week, and it keeps those I know in touch with the things that I’m up to.
So there we have it. And so to work – it’s time to get tinkering.
Work out loud. Start a blog. Tweet. Create a podcast.
Start conversations with customers, clients and suppliers.
Share what y ou are doing. Share how you are doing it.
Disrupt yourself. Become a social CEO.
Because if you can’t do it with social networks, you won’t stand a chance when it comes to the rest of the technologies that are going to turn your sector upside down.