I recently learned something about affect from a counselor I met at a networking event.  Just to be clear, we were using the word “affect” to describe the signs of feeling in a person’s face (or body) rather than about the feeling itself.

The counselor (let’s call her Jane) told me that a human face is never in a neutral position.  It is always somewhat animated and showing some sort of energy in reaction to what is going on outside or inside the head.

I had never thought about this.  I usually assume that a face shows no feeling when I can’t tell what someone is thinking.  But when Jane showed me pictures of clinically depressed people, I understood what it means for a face to be entirely without affect.

The pictures showed people with utterly blank faces.  It’s what I would imagine a zombie would look like (although I’ve not seen the films) - not from medication, because none were on medication when the pictures were taken.  These people didn’t look sad.  They just didn’t look present.

We Can’t Think Without Feeling

The experience reinforced for me that human beings can’t think without feeling — something.  They can’t really exist without emotion without seeming seriously off kilter.  We might not know WHAT we’re feeling, but it shows on our face.  And even if others can’t interpret those signs accurately, the fact of those signs is part of what makes us recognize each other as functioning human beings.

So if we can’t exist without feeling, and we often don’t recognize THAT we’re feeling, how can we diagnose the relationship between emotion and thought?  How much more would we understand about our own opinions and convictions if we could untangle this knot a little better?

Looking forward to seeing what Benchmark7 can teach us about this at the Fringe this summer.

The article’s definitely worth reading in its entirety, but I wanted to highlight some of the difficulties with real-time conversations that she mentions. A great example is the Michael Jackson Tweet-splosion; if you’re taking a purely search-based view, what do you search for? “MJ”? “Michael”? “King of Pop”? As Mary says, that’s a relatively easy example!

More interestingly is the comments Mary makes about authority. How do you measure authority online? Well, as part of my initial PhD research I looked at various web-structure algorithms (yes, including PageRank) and how you might exploit them along with semantic information to gain a true understanding of the importance of an article.

This research is rooted in scientific publications, in fact; we can learn a lot from the relatively ‘clean’ case of scientific paper citations, although the language used on the web is about a thousand times more interesting. (And, thus, a thousand times harder to process.)

If I told you how we actually track influence, of course, I’d have to kill you. But check out Mary’s article, it’s great food for thought.

I was at a workshop today held by Women Unlimited. It was for beginners at social media, and I wanted to see what business people tend to know. Then I can know better how to help them.

A seasoned marketing professional piped up that she’d never get on Twitter. She doesn’t care what her friends’ cats are up to. She deals with corporates and believes they probably won’t either.

Forget the Cats: Why This Is Important

I can’t argue with that last bit. But what I can argue is that companies do indeed need to know what’s happening in the social networks.

You only need to look at the Tweets on the Iranian protests to see that people talk about a lot more than trivial details. And if someone bothers to cram a comment about your brand into a Tweet, there are strong feelings behind it.

Strong feelings are the things you want to know most about.

Back to Basics: Where Do Convictions Come From?

Most intellectual decisions come both from a combination of analysis and feeling. Inspiration is a meeting point of intellectual and emotional insight, and when “moved” to act, it’s not just your intellect doing the pushing.

It’s not just the fact of a comment that reveals the importance of what is said in social networks. It’s also the language and context. People write conversationally, and the meaning is often more transparent than in a more formal review. In terms of context, they might feel outraged (or delighted) and want to broadcast warnings (or praise) about your company because of the feeling their experience generated about your product or brand.

In a social context, an individual’s credibility is built on the reliability of his or her comments.

And to get back where we started, wouldn’t your marketing department benefit from knowing what someone feels so strongly about that he or she would bother smashing into 140 characters?

Emotional Reactions and Business Decisions

Business etiquette does not favor evidence of feeling. It’s as though emotional reactions signify a lack of control — and therefore cloud our ability to identify, consider, or present the truth. Those who seem inflamed with even a small amount of emotional energy become suspect, and their ideas are considered unreliable and biased.

What This Means for Innovation

The assumption here, of course, is that truth is singular and objectivity not only exists but can be demonstrated as such. If there happens to be more than one answer, each must have the capability to be quantified in very specific ways. Measurement is established in numerical terms, and these numbers can be translated directly into financial currency.

This way of thinking, considered THE bottom line and unquestionably objective. Sticking to one way of thinking reduces variables, and although it might offer more control over results, it also consequently reduces the possibility of new ideas.

What would happen if we remembered to be curious?

Auditing the Results of Emotional Intelligence

The insistence on disconnecting feeling from thought ultimately will not serve innovation. In fact, it’s not even possible. After all, what is inspiration but the meeting point of emotional and intellectual insight?

An Example

A friend of mine, David Firth, worked with technologists felt that narrowing their focus would be good for innovation. When David tried an alternative approach, they circled the wagons to keep out those with problem-solving strategies different from theirs.

Clearly, this is not a decision based on clear thinking about developing new ideas. Instead, it’s an emotional reaction dressed as a rational decision. The real issue here is not generating new ideas but preserving a comfort level at work.

In this case, recognizing the relationship between ideas and feelings would have benefited the project. It takes courage to broaden one’s focus to answers never before considered, but it’s the only way something new will happen.

It certainly won’t if you don’t.

Back to Basics: Learning Can Be Scary (Especially for Grown-Ups)

Integrating anything new — creating connections between the unfamiliar and what we already know — can be scary. With the unknown, we have no control over what we understand, any idea about how we feel, or any knowledge about what can do about it or our position in its presence.

As we’ve been discussing, learning is disorganizing. We have to give up tight control on the universe with which we are comfortably familiar — and our feelings about the world and items within it — in order to acknowledge the value of something outside it.

The next post continues on how this connects to business decisions, so stay tuned.

I recently interviewed Emma Gilding, an anthropologist and brand guru based in NY. Emma’s current group, Insite, at Omnicom, sees brand as more than just another sales tool. Instead, the focus is on the ways in which brand encourages citizenship.

Or doesn’t.

“Citizens opt into a brand’s rules and regulations because they get benefits from adhering to them.” In order to sell, Emma believes that the product must fulfill its promise.

Emma often talks about her work in political terms. “Brand has to have a genuine value to citizens or they fail.

Before new technology, companies could get away with a top-down approach – people had to look to the governor of the brand for the value(s) of the product”. These citizens could never be sure if they were the only ones finding or not finding the value themselves.”

These days the Web forces transparency. There’s nowhere to hide. Consumer-led groups gather to hear from and tell each other about the value of the symbol.

If a brand is not persuasive, the product is no longer a symbol – it’s just a product. It won’t distinguish itself among its competitors.

On the other hand, a coherent and responsive conversation between a company’s brand and people they target is the only way for promises to remain credible.

Learning by Example

Perhaps the most famous illustration of a failure to really enagage with people who buy a product exists in the famous Mentos/Coke video. Mentos was thrilled and encouraged the distribution.

Coke, on the other hand, objected. Their brand stated “Coke is fun,” but executives put out the message that “this isn’t the sort of fun Coke means.”

“The citizens of the coke world spoke up – just like any civilization,” says Emma. “To them the explosion WAS fun.” In a democracy, if you deny the voice of the people, the brand fails — or at least is weakened.”

And no one will buy what you’re selling.

Annette Kramer, Affect Labs

For creative or product-focused businesses, it seems crowdfunding is really taking off as a concept, though I’ve yet to hear much in the way of actual success stories. The idea’s fairly simple: get loads of people to chip in when you need cash, and cash out later - either by owning part of an artwork, or by getting a discount on future products, etc.

It reminds me a lot of the way our Young Enterprise company was funded; we sold shares for a pound each to friends and family, then they got their dividend and return when we closed up at year’s end with a profit. But that was back in the nineties and so cool words like crowdfunding don’t really apply, non?

Quirky has more of a central-organisation take on stuff. Armed with designers, the ability to rapidly prototype, and some way of actually making real products, you pay to submit an idea - then cash in if your idea gets picked by the community. If you contribute along the way, either to your idea or to other people’s (you don’t have to ever pay or submit an idea yourself, mind), you gain Influence, and are rewarded based on your influence when the product finally sells.

For example, I voted for a product that turned out to be the community winner, so I gained a tiny bit of influence. I submitted a product name that wasn’t chosen, so nothing there. I answered a couple of market research questions, gaining a bit more, etc.

What’s nice about this is the company in the middle is doing a lot of the legwork but is also able to profit from zero creative outlay. I assume the funds paid by each round of idea-submitters cover the costs of internal development on those products, if not now then at least in future. Plus you’re guaranteed a winner because the community chooses the product.

Organisations are taking the middle stance in other industries as well. From brokering fashion investment to putting together crowds of art backers, there’s already several places you can go to find people willing to back you. It’s a bit like Kiva for the first world, or Zopa for businesses; Colectivo seems another name that springs out of Google (as I can never, ever remember Zopa’s name). Maybe one of these will become the place to go, especially for more traditional web or product businesses rather than creatives, where philanthropism is partially a factor.

I can totally see a hacker’s Quirky emerging, though. Almost like SiCamp in a way; people submit a ton of ideas, the crowd votes for the favourite, then the hackers split off and make the thing happen. Those who were involved get credit, dividends, returns when the business is sold, etc. But software doesn’t quite work so easily, and the middleman will need a lot of glue — plus, would you invest in a business with two thousand minority shareholders?

So if international leaders — from primary school teachers to CEOs — want to develop the same innovative capabilities in those they teach, why are creative thinkers said to be so scarce?

Conversation as Best Practices

The first step is for stakeholders in different fields to begin conversations about common needs and find a sustainable solution together.

Let’s start where learning begins formally. It became strikingly clear to me that crossing silos can be a sustainable solution to innovation when I attended a primary school conference on writing skills in a New York suburb last year.

Why a Conference on Teaching Writing?

For those of you who have never had the challenge of teaching communication skills, writing is one of the hardest processes to model or teach. It involves the complex network of creative thinking skills which are challenging to develop and sustain.

They are exactly the skills sought by business leaders.

What Makes Writing Hard

Writers need to feel a sense of ownership and purpose, and often in a classroom, the subject matter or process doesn’t offer obvious connections to personal connections. Mentors need to offer frequent and rich feedback over time to develop a process can internalize and use across contexts.

Furthermore, effective writing requires the ability to think clearly and then articulate those thoughts in a form whose importance hasn’t been emphasized outside of schools, particularly since the advent of email. If any further evidence of this challenge is required to persuade other than everyday living, the language of Edward R. Murrow in the recent Goodnight and Good Luck makes it clear enough when compared with that of today’s television broadcasts.

Whose Job Is It, Anyway?

Writing is hard to teach because developmental issues and goals can be muddy. At what age do you emphasize grammar and at which age free expression without formal constraint? Teachers, too, must help their charges succeed on tests that require no more than a five paragraph essay with rigid requirements of evidence and format. By the time most students reach high school, they are taught to make patterns on a paper in order to fulfill the needs of an assignment.

If that weren’t challenging enough, persuasive writing also demands fluency of grammatical and stylistic conventions often overlooked in spoken language. The process can intimidate both teachers and students, and the result is often that ideas are discussed while the mechanics are neglected.

And Back to Our Story . . . .

For connections between all this and innovation, watch this space.

…entrepreneurs find any excuse to work outdoors instead of indoors. If only a laptop existed that wasn’t entirely unusable in a bit of sun, with an infinite battery, and with the ability to pick up WiFi signals from the middle of the Meadows.

Fortunately, I’ve been doing a lot of planning lately, and planning is something I do best on a piece of paper with a pen. Another important task that can be done outdoors is thinking; not to be underestimated in its value!

I’ve been thinking about data, see.

My Pavlovian association of “sunshine” and “Edinburgh” awakes a deep-seated belief in me that it’s somehow August. Which means Festival time. And what does the Festival mean to a sentiment analysis company? Why, tons and tons of data!

What I’ll dub the “Festivals problem” is an interesting one. Thousands of people. Thousands of shows. Thousands of opinions. Thousands of options. How do you unite the opinions with the people to define the best option for someone wondering what to see? Is this even a valuable piece of information? Do people like the pot luck aspect that you usually get? (Answer: yes.)

I mean, I’m never, ever going to forget the time I decided Doktor Cocacolamcdonalds was a good choice of show. Look, I’d vaguely heard of him from TV and the description sounded OK. But had I had access to even one review of the show, I would have saved myself an hour of excruciating torture and a tenner.

So I’m now beavering away on, let’s rename it, the Doktor Cocacolamcdonalds Problem. The DCP is defined thus: How do I get the opinions of everyone at the Festivals, crunch and process them, and deliver that back to Festivalgoers?

Stay tuned for the answer!

Continuing from the last few posts:

What about the relationship between observation and analysis — the space between sight and insight — demands attention for successful business practice?

Executives are not the only ones who are challenged by sustainable innovation. After all, executives — and their business habits — come from their work as employees.

So where do employees come from? And how do they end up in that Box so many bosses complain about?

In addition to a need for and challenges of sustaining curiosity and understanding the value of and need for conflict, it’s also essential to build sustainable disciplines for practices of observation and analysis.

Like the complete group of practices with which it combines for sustainable creativity in business, insight is only possible by understanding from the beginning that you don’t know the answer. It also requires balance, focus, practice, and persistence.

That can be, in turn, frustrating, stressful, thrilling, scary, dull, and a hundred other feelings that go with success and failure. The important thing is that one recognizes that feeling is key to success rather than something that indicates you’re off track.

Here’s a case study to further illustrate the point

Background: Learning a Credible Pitch

Fifteen participants gathered for a course in self-presentation. Each brought to the class more streets smarts than formal training.

The Set Up

One by one each participant made a pitch for a new perspective on an idea or product. Each story was prepared beforehand, and each lasted about five minutes.

The Challenge

It quickly became apparent that the participants were struggling to discover a physical gesture to support the meaning of their words. Each participant looked for body language that would put across a genuine investment, connection, and belief in what they were saying. None succeed in finding a way of moving, standing, or emphasizing points that seemed naturally connected to the story.

Even the Smoothest Talkers Go Blank

Remember, all of the participants had given very effective pitches before. But in this classroom, they seemed to search for gestures out of the air, as though they had never done this before.

Why?
The problem was that none of the participants had consciously observed and noted their own past presentations. Put in new circumstances, they felt lost.

None had focused on process in past pitches. Because they had all concentrated only on results, they couldn’t transfer the skills that were strong in familiar environments and with familiar subject matter.

Without the usual cues in familiar contexts, they all went blank.

Going blank CAN be an opportunity — to begin to observe what’s in front of you, to remember your goal, to see what’s going on in your head.

Or you can panic.

It all depends on how you FEEL about going blank. And that’s determined by accepting how you feel as it comes and your focus.

Annette Kramer, Affect Labs