Herd - the hidden truth about who we are

Me, Jacko and the HERD: free gift

Here's the piece I did for the Spectator on what the Jacko story tells us about ourselves...

Hope you like!

Book covers

Very amused that Seth nails the debate I've been having with certain folk recently

Let's not have the debate again, hey?

It's the human stuff, stupid (again)

"Why are milk jugs more important than people? In 2008, Doug McMillon...the CEO of Sam's Club, a division of Wal-mart, expounded on innovation in milk jugs and his company's introduction of a rectangular, and therefore, stackable jug. He proudly noted how the new design extended the shelf life of milk, reduced costs by between 10 and 20 cents and elminated more than 10,000 delivery trips, thereby saving the company money. Meanwhile, Wal-Mart paid its employees almost 15 percent less than other large retailers and, because of the lower pay, Wal-Mart employees made greater use of public health and welfare programs"

Awesome article [HT The Economist] by the great Jeffrey Pfeffer Download SSRN-id1352627  which talks about sustainability in human (rather than material) terms.


This human stuff we're on about isn't just a silly geeky obsession - it's part of a much bigger re-adjustment and rebalancing of our ideas about business.

Genius.

It's the human stuff, stupid. It always was and always will be.

Crowdsourcing lessons from the Grauniad

Top piece here from the Nieman Journo lab

It didn't pass me by that i. making the task like a game (i.e. interesting) really helps encourage participation ii. showing the mugshots of the politicians whose expenses were being examined did also (and big time)

Monkey see, monkey do

Had this great book by neuroscientist Marco Iacoboni around for a while and have been re-reading it properly, prompted by contact with the great man.

The way It describes the story of the discovery of 'mirror neurons' by the team in Palma is excellent.

[If you've not been paying attention, these 'mirror neurons' are the unusual braincells which provide the basis for our species' extraordinary ability for interpersonal skills by straddling the motor and cognitive systems in every way.]

I think it's just tiptop. This opening passage gives you a taster:

"When we get right down to it, what do we human beings do all day long? We read the world, especially the people we encounter, My face in the mirror first thing in the morning doesn't look too good, but the face beside me in the mirror tells me that my lovely wife is off to a good start. One glance at my eleven-year-old daughter at the breakfast table tells me to tread carefully and sip my espresso in silence. When a colleague reaches for a wrench in the laboratory, I know he's ging to work on the magnetic stiulation machine, and he's not going to throw his tool against the wall in anger...[]...we all make dozens - hundreds - of such distinctions every day. It is quite literally, what we do...

[for a long time] nobody could begin to explain how it is that we know what others are doing, thinking and feeling.

Now we can. We achieve our very subtle understanding of other people thanks to certain collections of special cells in the brain called mirror neurons. These are the tiny miracles that get us through the day. They are at the heart of how we navigate through our lives. They bind us with each other, mentally and emotionally"

Now go buy it and read it for yourself

Pic credit Andrew N Meltzoff (whose innovative work in the 70s demonstrated how early the copying mechanism operates in humans...)

It's the human stuff, stupid

Nice piece tucked away in Adage Digital which reminds us that however we get excited by the promise of particular technologies, the answer normally lies in some all-too-human stuff that we might otherwise overlook. All too often (NHS database project, ID cards) we look to big tech stuff to solve the problems in front of us, rather than thinking about simple, human-scale answers that might get us much of the way there, quicker and cheaper, too. Technology as 'magic' science...?

So rather than getting overexcited by the technological equivalent of Frodo's magic Ring - in this case using twitter and twitter analytics to market your goods and services proactively - it's often better just to sit and listen hard to what customers are doing and saying. From this you might even work out how to make the thing better and worth your customers interacting with each other around...

A generation of individualists?

Pic from flickr

Have a look at all those kids at this summer's festivals.

Read their tweats and the FB posts. Watch how they dress and how they talk. How they behave.

Of course, they all believe they're unique individuals, but - gathered in their tens of thousands - are they really so individual?

Is this anything other than the gathering of the young folk 

What does it all mean then?

Pic c/o inkstains

Here - c/o Surinder and the Brainjuicer gang - is a video of me pondering the implications of all this new cognitive and behavioural science stuff (and getting a bit over excited) - at a recent HSBC-hosted free festival

If you've not seen me do my schtick before, I'm told this is a pretty good intro...

You'll also find the rest of the Brainjuicer show and Faris's cool "be nice or leave" gig

Back on the pitch - social proof or just plain old copying?

Pic c/o inkycircus.com

Back from my sojourn in Spain revived and with fresh eyes.

First thing up [hat tip Nico Herzog] is this neat little idea for social change which uses copying at its core mechanism (or what the great Cialdini - the inhouse scientist - calls 'social proof')

Positive Energy creates:

software that assesses energy usage by neighborhood. Results are sent to consumers on behalf of their local utility, praising you with a row of smiley faces (you’ve used 58 percent less electricity than your neighbors this month!) or damning you with none (you used 39 percent more electricity than your neighbors in the past 12 months, and it cost you $741 extra)....

And of course it works in the same way as the big C has described previously for hotel towels (Monkey see, monkey do). As the Atlantic journo puts it:

In Positive Energy’s reports, a once-intangible bit of social information—how much energy you use relative to your neighbors—is made tangible.

Or "visible" as Josh's supercool visualisation of Amazon's social design underscores. 

I know "social proof" seems nicer and more acceptable in mixed company, but can we just be honest here: we're talking about a when-in-Rome...copying type of behaviour; 'social proof" makes it sound like there's some deliberation going on - like individuals are prone to acting independently of others unless you force them to do otherwise - when what we're talking about is enabling folk to see each other so that they do what humans normally do i.e. copy their peers.

Shaping perceptions of what folk round here & folk like us do is what the whole game's about

Great initiative though and I'm sure Rory will be adding it to his list!

M

Twitter degree

Pic c/o tveskov

HT The lovely Jamie

Don't get me wrong, I love my twitter and my fail whale but...

...a "Twitter" degree?

Bloody students...