Talk given at Internet World

I gave this talk with Karen Peeters from Toyota a couple of months ago. It covers the rational and approach we took to the restructuring of the Toyota Europe and other Toyota market sites. The project was about structure not about visual design.

Review of “I’ll have what she is having: mapping social behaviour” by R. Alexander Bentley, Mark Earls and Michael J. O'Brien.

This book is from the authors of Herd, another good book also concerned with social behaviour. So many books in this field and the general behavioural area repeat the same old mantras. You hear the same arguments and examples again and again. What makes this book stand out is that the authors pull together research from a variety of disciplines and say something new.

It is obvious that as individuals we behave differently form when we are in a  group. Social decision making is a hot topic. The authors cover how and why we make decisions within a social context. Although they do not give golden rules for how to predict how groups of people will behave they do map out a landscape that helps to determine the strategies people are likely to adopt.

They make many interesting observations along the way, some seem obvious but are rarely acknowledged, for example :

“we tend to envisage the social landscape through which these ideas are spread as firm ground, often as a fixed social network. What in reality are transient interactions and relationships – a conversation, a schoolmate, a co-worker – are now so often portrayed as if they were fixed “wires” between people in social networks…..those who picture this fixed network of wires between us are excited to launch their ideas to spread across it through careful strategic placement, to get it to spread on its own, say from one Facebook page to another.”

We have all been at presentations where these network diagrams are used to explain socail groups. The adoption of simplistic models is understandable but as they argue it there are more appropriate and accurate ways of viewing idea dissemination. Gladwells influencers may exist and have an impact at a local level but their individual influence within large dynamic networks is reduced.

They talk about social cascades where small changes can cause an avalanche of change. This is based on the notion of self-organized criticality where a system is in a state of continual flux but bound by its interdependencies. In these systems change tends to be a gradual smooth process but critical points can trigger avalanches of change that have a much wider impact. Within social networks the level of interconnectivity, the rate of change of connections and the receptivity to change of individuals all contribute the likelihood of an avalanch.

The book is full of interesting titbits and references to other concepts which deserve following up. For example the marketing scientist Andrew Ehrenberg who came up with the Dirichlet model which assumed that consumers had no inherent brand preferance and that they made choices based on chance and availability. His views in the 60’s were radical and disputed but later research has shown them to hold true across a wide range of different product categories. I expect he is not news to those with a marketing training, but it was a revelation to me.

The book’s structure leads you a long a path of increased understanding of the subject, not mere repetition of one or two key ideas. The final chapter presents their conceptual map of how people choose.

It presents the two axis of the number of people in the social group against the number of options to choose between. Although the map is a continuum, one can define the overriding method that is likely to be used in each quadrant.

It is interesting to note that only in tehe case of few similar options and few people do consumers make rational choices.  Directed copying is where indiviuals copy either types of people such as friend, relatives, celebrities etc or copy other groups or the majority which are seen as having the perceived wisdom. Undirected copying is where the similarity of choices and size of the groups are so large, the way individuals choose will appear to be the result of no obvious influence.

Knowing the position of your product in the map helps to understand how users may behave and what, if anything, you can do to influence them.

Notes on creativity: Creativity is old but not part of the lizard brain

 The capacity to develop original or novel ideas or to produce novel, beautiful, and useful artifacts is perhaps the most important cognitive trait that human beings possess.  

Dr. NancyAndreasen

These are a collection of thoughts plucked from other sources around the notion of creativity. They are just some aspects which interested me, at this point in time.

Earliest forms of creativity may well have been in story telling. When Jazz musicians improvise researchers found that the same areas of their brain are used as whenpeople tell stories. The first human artistic representations, markings with ground red ocher, seem to have occurred about 100,000 B.C. in African rock art. Visual creativity is likely to significantly pre date this in the form of body decoration.

Creativity is good for us.

The psychological basis of creativity has been described variously as the need to be different (Joy, 2004), the decision to create (Sternberg, 2003), creative attitude (Maslow, 1967)

According to Maslow, peak moments arrive when all your struggling for survival is over. You have climbed the pyramid of basic needs, security, food, finance and now have the time – not just time, the luxury- to reflect on your situation.  The good news is, you do not have to go to an exotic place to experience this. They happen anywhere- while weeding the garden, walking to the bus stop, or washing the dishes. 

One of the characteristics of peaking is euphoria- known to some as a ‘high,’ as altitude represents literally a feeling of being out and above your normal bodily restraints.  Even to remember such a moment can trigger the body’s hormones: serotonin and endorphins –which tend to enhance the capacity for even more enjoyment. 

Source

It can strike at any time and requires us to reduce our self criticism

Interviews with creative people reveal that inspiration and ideas often come to them when they aren’t looking for them, when they are in the shower, or running, or having trouble falling asleep, Dr. Andreasen reported in a recent research paper.

This suggests that creativity involves an unconscious rather than a conscious process, she said.

Toronto researcher Oshin Vartanian suspects that creativity is related to the ability to stifle our inner critic. He is interested in how some parts of the brain are silenced so that out-of-the box ideas can emerge.

This silencing is blocking out the fear impulses of the old – lizard brain. The lizard brain is there to ensure you protect and survive. Being creative is about putting out ideas which can be criticized, which puts us in danger. The lizard brain protects us. (http://james-watson.com/why-creativity-is-over-rated )

As we grow older we grow fearful of our creative abilities

Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.“  

Pablo Picasso

At around about the age of five, we are using about 80% of our creative potential. We invent daily - no matter than our inventions have been invented before, the fact is that we are innovating at a remarkable rate.

The scary coda to this story is that by the age of twelve, our creative output has declined to about 2% of our potential, and it generally stays there for the rest of our lives.

We are straight-jacketed and smart-stepped into doing what others do and not reinventing our worlds every day. When someone is being creative, they are also rather unpredictable, which can make living with them an uncertain and perhaps threatening experience. So we are taught to be polite and be nice to people, including not scaring them with our creative thoughts.

(How to Invent (Almost) Anything by David Straker and Graham Rawlinson)

…and the education process does not help…

As witnessed by Ken Robinson's great talk(s) on TED

We also know that rewarding creativity creates negative results.

In doing so we turn the creative process form which provides intrinsic rewards to one where the rewards are extrinsic. Creating things for the sake of making them and for the pleasure the process of creativity delivers is much preferable to creating in order to gain external reward.

(Social influences on creativity: The effects of contracted-for reward.

Amabile, Teresa M.; Hennessey, Beth A.; Grossman, Barbara S.

Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol 50(1), Jan 1986, 14-23. Doi)

Summary

• We have a deep rooted need to create
• We always have
• We gain from the process of being creative without external reward
• But as we age we use less and less of our creative ability
• Seek stymulus and variety, change and  create dissonance in ones daily experiences.
• Find ways which suit oneself to be creative, and do not worry about the opinion of others and ignore your internal critics.
• Go with the creative flow and feel the benefits.