Five Ideas That Matter

Five Ideas That Matter:

An Exploration of How Web Opinion Research Can Enlighten Brands and Leaders 10th July 2009

Haydn Shaughnessy, Partner, [email protected] Ted Shelton, Partner, [email protected]

Introduction As the first decade of the 21st century comes to a close it’s clear that there are profound changes underway in the systems that govern and condition our lives. The World Wide Web offers an opportunity to uncover where people's ideas and sentiments are headed and what they think about those changes. Never before have we had instant access to 8 billion pages worth of thoughts, ideas, or belief. The trouble is, as designer Matt Webb recently remarked, we have already passed the point where our attention can keep track of what is knowable and memorable. We need more shorthand. This document is a deliberately brief guide to ideas on the web. In it we put forward a new research methodology and conceptual framework for dealing with the web’s data stream – the METATREND. Metatrends are, we hope, a shorthand for understanding change - as perceived by many millions of people. A Metatrend is a trend that is parsed through the prism of web opinion and attitude. In place of a guru’s vision of we propose subjecting expert analysis and trend watching to social dialogue. What we present is a first approach to seeing trends through the eyes of people who routinely blog, comment, tweet and search the web. Why bother? Apart from the desirability of understanding large-scale opinion, in a parallel project The Conversation Group is witnessing increased interest in ideas such as creative destruction and system renewal, indications that people are seeking a new description for their experience and aspirations. That search should be central to the business planning of any company or Government because it represents a changing mindset, and a new approach to production and marketing, of products, services and ideas. Here we've had our first go at defining one element of that change. It's an ongoing project. Eventually we hope the project will help leaders, corporate and political, to create the messages, product and policies that respomd to what people are seeking.

Emerging Ideas Are On The Web Brands, politicians and newspapers still rely on polling to find out what people think. Yet people express themselves all day long on the Web. To tap into their memes we reviewed megatrend predictions from a variety of sources: futurists, market research, advertising agencies, banks, technologists and trending websites. The megatrend predictions were, overwhelmingly, made in the period 2005 - 2009. They are not disposed solely towards a crisis-driven viewpoint and they typically draw on economic determinants such as age, demographic patterns, health patterns, urbanisation and its consequences, technological innovation and geopolitical shifts. We then subjected these to a typical social media analysis, which means reviewing a variety of social uses of key terms around blogs, tweets, comments and search. With a series of diverse, sectoral and broad megatrends to hand what becomes apparent is that most futurists are talking a common language that doesn't, we beleive reflect the true nature of change. The common language says: "The fast developing economies globally will create further demand for oil and food resources that require significant breakthroughs to accommodate. Add in urbanisation and an aging population. The needed breakthroughs will not be possible in an oil economy. Coupled to the profound impact of negative ecological conditions, the established economies must draw on all their ingenuity to compete against low cost competitors or risk profound and disruptive change to the established way of life."

The question for those working with social technologies is whether the analysis of behaviours around the Web can provide a different perspective and maybe a platform that leaders can use to inspire and transform enterprises and society. 3

Democratization As An Example Do Meta-trends offer up a different way of looking at things? An example we can look at to explore this is the idea of democratization. In a web-democratised world, ideas about democracy should be profligate. Yet ideas around democratisation get very little currency within the blogosphere and only limited currency in web searches. So can it true that technology is democratising society if people don’t discuss or opine about democracy? For example the flattening of hierarchy, and with it the development of a more democratic workplace, is surprisingly under-played on the web. Where there are references to flat hierarchy or delayering hierarchy in blogs, for example, these are not always referencing the workplace. And a search phrase like democratizing work, though it gets approximately 250 Technorati returns, these are not at all relevant to the workplace. They are more likely to reference "making democratisation work" rather than "democratizing work". Technorati returned no posts that used the tag "democratization of work" in the three months leading up to this report. There were only 13 search returns for "democratizing the workplace," and there are under a thousand Google returns for "democratising the workplace or "democratizing the workplace". These preliminary reflections on a meme such as democratising work or delayering organisations obviously have a number of caveats attached. The most obvious is - it could just be a question of language used. Surely "flattened" or "flattening the organization" would add to the intensity metric? On the face of it, yes. These return around 300,000 pages on Google (with a broad search). However the term starts to run out of relevance after approximately 700 returned pages or less than 7,000 references. This apparent disparity between a megatrend and web conversation should surely raise questions about what really are the valid memes out there. 4

Which Five Ideas Used To Matter? A small set of ideas inform our traditional though processes. Arguably these ideas are now challenged as more cultures make their presence felt on the web.

Progress

Profit

Technological Breakthrough

The American Dream

Democratisation

The idea of progress is embedded in Western cuture. Progress means two things to is in the West. One, that most human activity contributes to material and other improvements; two that history itself1 moves in the direction of betterment. This second is significant to western values and to our deepest assumptions. For two centuries we have been imbued with a belief that we are meant to improve. In fact the idea of progress originally was originally a way of claiming that human history leads us to perfection.2 Progress also provides a context for the second assumption in our list that profit is the most appropriate economic activity or the only appropriate outcome. We have an interesting decade ahead of us as people begin to debate the role of "good" in the economic sphere. We will show below that alternative views of capitalism are currently flourishing - and for the first time. Another key but threatened idea is that whatever barriers to progress we might encounter, technological innovation is inevitable so all problems are resolvable by a technological breakthrough. The American Dream has told us for 70 years that wealth and status are available to us all if we play our role in society. Part of its power lies in the fact that that the majority of Americans live it vicariously – as dreams shoud be lived. Finally there is the idea of democratisation. Life is meant to become fairer, though there have been 250 years of debate about who defines «fairness».

Which Five Ideas Will Matter? Collaboration and Emergent Ideas of Democratisation 1

2

Democratisation retains relevance but we see it very much as an emerging meme that may not actually pass the emergent phase. Political democracy in the West has stalled over the

This second is the one that has persisted longest. See J.B. Bury 'The idea of Progress' Gotthold Emphraim Lessing ‘The Education of the Human Race’, 1780, quoted in The Guardian September 21st 2001

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past thirty years or so. The egalitarian instinct is supposed to work itself out in other ways principally in our work and consumer lives. There is no strong meme however that democratisation will be renewed within the workplace despite the academic and business school literature that says work must and will be more democratic. The literature suggests that systems that don’t defer to the instinct for fairness will ultimately be faced with opposition. However, there is no clear evidence from the web's sentiment stream that this is the case What gets real traction on the web is the idea of collaboration. Ranging from inter-firm collaboration, industry-wide collaboration and University-industry collaboration and collaboration tools, collaboration has considerable purchase on the minds of people in business. On Google's Timeline, references to collaboration during this decade outnumber all previous references by a factor of 4:1, though that is paratly a consequence of Timeline having a bias towards current sources. Blog references to collaboration in the past three months make interest in democratization look negligible. When you look at trends through the eyes of people who volunteer information online, the way that democratisation is making sense to people, the way they are absorbing and exchanging ideas around it, is through the language of collaboration.

Randomness

Randomness enjoyed a new lease of life with the publication of Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb but it has a long tradition. Quite apart from the broad coverage of Tabeb's book, randomness also features in rap songs, YouTube videos and Scientific American. It is integral to popular understanding of Chaos theory. And it is hip. From Spring 2007 it began to make its influence felt in fashion. References on Timeline to Random come in at around one third of Collaboration but far in excess of any idea we have discussed so far apart from "progress." Random outstrips the currency of "The American Dream" by about 50%. According to the Guardian: «Random is the new 6

order.» Why? The economy is being relocalised by Web 2.0 technologies and by a new sense of scale. In place of highly scaled companies we are observing highly scaled data, data on every person, data on every building, data on all consumption. And geolocation systems are trending activity increasingly towards the local. Fixmystreet.com, Lisftshare, Interactive heat loss maps of all buildings in a City are examples of personal services borne of mass data. There is a growing chasm between scale and personal service which is, we beleive, feeding the idea of randomness. Randomness is a reflection of the rising person-toperson culture that the millennial generation is in part forcing upon us and by waning old media control and predictability. The command and control economy is replaced not by chaos but by data flows on a scale where randomness seems inevitable.

Bioconciousness

Randomness is also closely associated with what is becoming known as "collapsonomics", a combination of precipitous economic decline and amoral and immoral behaviour by and within western democracies. Bioconsciousness is a term we use to group ideas that draw for inspiration on biological processes. It obviously includes the concern over depleted ecological resources and the constraints on our ability to pursue traditional activities, as climate change becomes more debilitating. BUT we also mean by it a broader change to biology and nature as exemplars for how we should live and work. Whereas trend analysis tells us we should be cautiours of urbanisation people are engaging with new biological models for co-existence. Biomimicry, or the use of nature to inspire and instruct on sustainable organisational processes or physical design, is becoming more popular. On the Timeline there are relatively few references to biomimicry even up to 2009. However in the past 12 months there are over 20,000 web page references to the term with nearly 2,000 of these coming in the past week. 7

As we more readily accept the idea of eco-systems guiding human activity the growth of business ecosystems is also worth looking at. Surprisingly the use of the term "business ecosystem" seems to have peaked in 2006/7 and currently runs at less than a 5:1 ratio biomimicry:business ecosystem. Nonetheless it is not a negigible term.

Abstracted Reward

“Community” is a newly revived term that competes with "eco-system" as the way to describe how people interact around businesses. There are an incredible 2 billion uses of the term community on the web (in other words more than Google can measure from its 8 billion pages) but if that is restricted to "online community" about 1.5 million of these were used in the past 12 months. The United States is the main home of people searching the term "online community". The rewards we get from work are now trending towards the non-financial. Abstracted reward is the piling of abstraction on to monetary reward. The trend is illustrated by the emergence during 1990s of emotional intelligence for managers and the soon to become popular spiritual intelligence and spiritual capitalism (a term peaking online in 2009). Terms such as good capital, spiritual capital index, spiritual capitalism, and ethical capitalism are negligible in quantity before the past decade. For example "ethical capitalism" as a term is referenced around 7,000 times in Google timeline, since 1880. Almost 5.000 of those references have come in the past 8 years, peaking during this crisis. By way of contrast, Technorati records only 1 blog post tagged ethical capitalism in the three months prior to writing this article (March - June 2009) and a very low level of references to ethical capitalism within posts (the term profit outperforms ethical capitalism by around 3,000:1). By way of contrast, Technorati records only 1 blog post tagged ethical capitalism in the three months prior to writing this article (March - June 2009) and a very low level of references to ethical capitalism within posts (the term “profit” outperforms ethical capitalism by around 3,000:1). The prevalence of the term “profit” however needs putting in context,as the web is also alive with consternation around issues such as “progress” and 8

“crisis of capitalism”. Currently the tag “progress” is closely associated with the tags “grant” and “loan”. Over the past three months there have been approximately 50% more blog references to crisis than progress, an indicator of where the collective consciousness is moving.

Individualisation and personalisation

The term spiritual capitalism likewise begins to make an appearance towards the millennium and then retains strong interest on Timeline. 2009 is a peak, with spiritual intelligence gaining ground over the past week. Spiritual intelligence also comprises the move towards Eastern influenced themes for how we live and how we regard wellbeing. These terms could be taking up some slack from "ethical investment" which declines on Timeline after 2002. The "individualisation of society" meme has been popular since at least the 19th century. In previous generations individualisation was widely thought of as a negative, a tearing apart of community and a route to alienation. Now it is a kind of springboard for the creative life. Individualisation is closely associated with experiences that are more personalised or that help create a stronger personal 9

narrative for a consumer. This is a curious transformation but a happy one. Individualisation appears to fly in the face of the more collectivist notion that is undoubtedly out there.3 Yet online references to individualisation outnumber references to collectivism by about 2:1 so far in 2009 and many of the page 1 references to collectivism in Google are non-Western sources. In comparison references to collaboration outnumber references to individualisation 200:1. PersonaliSation is a common search term in France and personaliZation is common in India,.On the Timeline personaliZation peaked in 2000 without recovering its volumes later, whereas personaliSation has been running at a peak since 2000. The combination of personaliZation and personaliSation exceed the number of references enjoyed by online community (1,960,000: 1.500,000) and taken together, customiZation, CustomiSation, personaliSation, personaliZation and individualiZation/indivualiSation number over 6 million.

Conclusions Meta-Trend analysis gives us insights into the state of the idea-sphere, the ideas that have currency and topicality. The five categories above can be contrasted with other prevailing idea-sets: the idea of progress, the American Dream, the probability of scientific and technological breakthrough, democratization, the value of a profit driven economy. The emergent idea-sphere is characterised bya pronounced investment in the idea of collaboration; the environment not just as a matter for concern but more - as a model for behaviour and organisation; personalization; nonfinancial reward; and randomness. Arguably through these concepts some groups are on their way to adapting to a post-indsutrial mindset and new organisational needs. Also, in place of fear of Eastern economic strength eastern spiritualism is being incorporated in the collective outlook. The context for the analysis weakening of the brand as a mechanism for connecting people with companies or for Governments connecting with electorates. Brands connected companies and people when companies neeed scale to provide cheap goods. And when Governments were able to rule on single issue politics. 3

Kevin Kelly ‘The New Socialism’ Wired, June 2009, American edition, argues for this collectivism.

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The context today is a different form of scale. Data allows extreme scale and at the same time personalisation. This in turn suggests that in future, society can achieve economies not through large corporations but through control of large data sets. Data is allowing us to move towards a person-to-person economy, and we might ask how will politics respond to that Highly scaled but personal services appeal to the growing sense that randomness is good and right. This isn turn diffuses the idea of progress, potentially transforming it into a challenge point where creativity and religious values compete, particularly as «capitalism» becomes more spiritual. And far from being hidebound by ecological doom or overurbanisation people are exploring natural ecologies as a model for living On the bigger stage the idea of the American Dream is gaining strength in India, a factor we had no space to include here, providing a clue as to the ideological strengths of BRIC countries. India seems to be generating a visionary future capable of motivating creativity and change., comparable with the American Dream. There are many other interpretations we could offer here. But this is a short paper. We believe Metatrends are a valuable way of addressing what experts think is changing by bringing some memetic discipline to that, ie really bringing the voice of the people in. We also believe ideas are becoming more profoundly influential and need to be part of any leader's or businesses' imaginative landscape.

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