Spot On

Ah Hah! I coincidentally and conveniently stumbled across the drawing on the back of a business card that Hugh did for me in June 2007, and which I mentioned back here.

Anyone who knows me can vouch for my endless opinions. I'm obsessed with economics at the moment and really hope I'm approaching the light at the end of the tunnel, because I've now reached the miserable point that I think Adam bookmarked, and which I've just dug out from the New Yorker which is diagnosed as 'pessimism porn'.

It's mainly about only finding the evidence which suports my analysis of the economic state of affairs. Taleb might diagnose this as narrative fallacy behaviour but I'd have to throw in that I'm interacting with what appears to me, to be my entire social group hooked on Platonic fallacy. They're printing money folks, and that means everyone will want a mini Heidleberg too.

I've also begun thinking about Johnnie Moore's 'notice more, change less' mantra. If only because it's a very good reason to be more polite and listen to people rather than the compelling interruptions I excel at. See, I've gone on again. I do like the way Hugh doesn't leave a question mark though. More generous I think.

Any of you freelancers out there recognise the business card? Oh and one last question. Does anyone know how to format draft blogger properly so the paragraph spacing doesn't disappear when I press Publish Post?

That would be a small mercy.

Just checking :)

More Black Swan

Y'all know my appreciation for Taleb's interpretation of the world. There's nothing new here for me but it might be of interest to those who haven't come across him yet.

Via Smashing Telly

Burn Down The TV Stations

This is pretty much what I've been advocating for the new advertising agency business model in my post over here and first aired over here. Its gets simpler the more I see people explain what I'm trying to attempt as it becomes more self evident of where we are heading.

Roughly speaking, ditch the interruptive messaging and get experimental/useful/collaborative across lots and lots of relevant communities in Lo Fi - Also be prepared to fail plenty and as a consequence succeed more demonstrably by embracing the upside of risk. Lo Fi is the new Hi Fi. Collective participation is more authentic than corporate brand synthesis. As audiences get smarter, the big switch comes closer. Its just a matter of time.

By way of the impressive Johnnie Moore

White Swans

I've been borderline garrulous recently about a potential new model for the marketing communications business which is classic recombinant culture theory that I nicked off Faris. It would take some balls from an agency and even more from their respective clients to seriously implement but in principle it's about mixing and remixing some transmedia planning along with fair chunks of the book, The Black Swan which I talked about at length here.

To save a wee bit on time I want to cut and paste from that post:

"Our view of history is always explaining backwards as best we can. This is a linear approach that cauterizes the true story. Even more breathtaking is the idea that viewing history by working backwards is a fallacy, because history is actually always moving forward."

I ran this by Johnnie Moore the other night (you should check out his ace podcasts) at The Endurance pub in Soho while Piers was in town, and without even ruminating for a second, Johnnie cheerfully fired back that Kierkegaard wrote something similar as follows:

"Life is understood backwards, but is lived forwards"

This was the first seductive simplification that knocked me for six, and I scribbled it down quick on my hand because I knew it was, as are many of Johnnie's thoughts and occasional silences on lots of stuff, really important. It was lovely to see the ink on my skin the next day to remind me to give him a shout about it. I just did. Thanks Johnnie :)

So it's not like I've really discovered anything new, or I'm responsible for inventing anything seminal, but earlier today, as once again I ran the thoughts I've been bundling together on "transmedia-planning-meets-black-swan-mashup" by a generously attentive listener who works in the strategy game, she encapsulated the bit about The Black Swan that takes ages to explain. Describing narrative fallacy and how it leads to the illusion of predicatability that many draw from so called dependable data is not easy, and is actually probably just me trying to be too smart for my own good, but in essence Tania my listener, chipped in and captured the thrust of my long monologue with a lovely expression which she and her colleagues call 'the upside of risk'.

That made for two very seductive simplifications.

That'll do for the time being as I've still got lots of things about China that I'm practically bursting to blog about. So in the spirit of some timely recombinant culture media here is that White Swan I saw walking down the road in Marlow. The file wouldn't open from the Sony mobile phone when transfered to a Sony Vaio PC which Rob has nothing to do with, so instead, I've squirted a Nokia N95 mobile phone video on to it. I may come back and rotate it to portrait, if I find someone who can actually do important stuff like that, but in the meantime here's a White Swan doing a 'Black Swan'. Or put another way, a bird walking down a street that is right up mine.

The Black Swan

It often feels that planning likes to assume the role of being responsible for great advertising. The truth is more often than not, it helps to improve the efficacy of advertising which is a different thing all together. For evidence of this you can take a look at the next 50 advertisements you see starting from right now. Did anything blow you away about those highly targeted and planning intense executions (comments below)? There's a disconnect there and it's largely resolved by taking a closer look between life as we imagine it and life as it really is.

Black Swans really is an anarchical and brilliant book. I use that word 'brilliant' sparingly when referring to think- pieces and of course more generously when people suggest a quality pub or bar I hadn't thought of to meet up in. This book by Nassim Nicholas Taleb a former derivative trader turned professor (who urges us to distrust people with ties) has been nagging me for sometime and only today listening to the author on Tech Nation Podcasts did I hear the essence of the book that I could encapsulate in a post. On one level it's about interpreting failure differently and is supportive of the idea that embracing failure is a good thing. The title of the book however does need careful attention. It comes from Karl Popper's assertion that it only takes one black swan to undermine the statement that 'all swans are white'.

In a nutshell we would definitely describe Google as a positive black swan. It came out of nowhere to achieve world dominance. I remember clearly the day when the email recommending Google's superiority was sent round by the new IT guy at Howell Henry. It was put simply, a better search engine. Absolutely nobody could have predicted how huge they would become. A negative black swan example would be Lloyds Insurance whereby a seemingly stable business made it's very rich investors and 'names' liable to bankruptcy overnight. Banking and Insurance are negative black swans (that Taleb says hire dull people and make them look even more dull than they are) because while on the surface they appear to be stable businesses, they are subject to forces that can sink them, as mentioned just now with Lloyds when it was forced to deal with asbestos claims in the 80's.

At the heart of the book is the theme of trend prediction and certainty which is surely as close to the output of a planner as can be sought. It should teach us to be a little more humble about our glaring weakness for as the WSJ puts it; confirmation bias (our tendency to reaffirm our beliefs rather than contradict them), narrative fallacy (our weakness for compelling stories), silent evidence (our failure to account for what we don't see), ludic fallacy (our willingness to oversimplify and take games or models too seriously), and epistemic arrogance (our habit of overestimating our knowledge and underestimating our ignorance).

A point that is raised nicely in the podast is to picture a small pool of water on a table. We have no evidence to show that it came from an ice cube or even more inspiring that the ice cube was carved and shaped into a small figure before it melted. Out view of history is always explaining backwards as best we can. This is a linear approach that cauterizes the true story. Even more breathtakingly is the idea that viewing history by working backwards is a fallacy because history is actually always moving forward. This is where the brilliance of Dr Nassim Nicholas Taleb excels. It's a huge thought and one that undermines a lot of people in suits and ties and uniforms that get it wrong.

The author of this book is not so much showing us a way to predict events as showing us a challenge to the the myopic and causal way of examining history to predict the future. If anything it's the good doctors advice to be sceptical of things that matter, and equally so, to not be sceptical of things we can do nothing about. I urge you to listen to the podcast if nothing else.