Antonym redux
Antonym redux
5.7 minutes to read. A whole week of going down rabbit-holes.
Dear Reader
Antonym is back and in a slightly adjusted format. Let me know what you think and I hope there’s something interesting in here for you.
Reflection
This newsletter is my reflection on notes I’ve made, things I’ve watched, read, done etc in the last week. Reflecting on the week is something I want to learn to do more effectively and more often.
Having decided this, naturally I took a brief diversion into writing about reflection and facilitating that. There’s lots out there, much of it connected to studying in academia (this is a good collection) but useful for the rest of us too. My new favourite is the Rolfe et al reflective model, because it just three simple questions to ask yourself about whatever it is:
What? The facts.
So what? What they mean.
What now? What should be done, based on what's been learned.
Organisations that learn
The idea of the learning organisation has been around since the 90s, but is more relevant than ever to my company and the brands we work with.
My brilliant (in every sense) business partner Jason Ryan distilled his ideas around applying the test and learn method at scale for a senior team at a client last week, and it was the first thing I read when I started back this week from holiday. We’ll have a public version of this talk available soon, but in the meantime we have the Netflix documentary Return to Space which sums up the SpaceX test and then method in the phrase “every explosion is an opportunity to learn”.
It connects with how we are re-focusing our business after the pandemic, but also in the face of extreme uncertainty in the global economy.
The Karpman drama triangle
It’s a new one on me: three patterns of behaviour which feed each other and in which we can become trapped: victim, rescuer and persecutor.
I’d heard about this concept recently in the context of personal relationships, and a colleague pointed it out as something that can happen in teamwork as well.
Wikpedia has this:
Karpman described how in some cases these roles were not undertaken in an "honest" manner to resolve the presenting problem, but rather were used fluidly and switched between by the actors in a way that achieved unconscious goals and agendas. The outcome in such cases was that the actors would be left feeling justified and entrenched, but there would often be little or no change to the presenting problem, and other more fundamental problems giving rise to the situation remained unaddressed.
The power of the concept is as a label – if we understand it we can call it out and notice how interesting it is that we are coming under its thrall. Labelling creates an opportunity for a pause and distancing so that we can talk about what’s going on here.
If you’ve not heard of it before, you may spot it everywhere from now on. (See the Baader-Meinhof effect for an explanation.)
Market orientation, Simon Martin's strategy for Oliver
On Wednesday I was in Shoreditch for an event with the wonderful Drum Network. Simon Martin, the founder and CEO of in-housing agency Oliver was being interviewed, and was usefully clear and candid about the company’s strategy.
What was immediately apparent was that Martin has a definite strategy and has implemented it rigorously for over a decade and half. (To paraphrase strategy expert Richard Rumelt, “Your competitors don’t have a strategy and they don’t expect you to have one either”.1)
Oliver’s strategy is a version of market orientation strategy and goes like this:
Deliver sustainable client benefits—evolve with their needs.
Competitive differentiation—very clearly stand out from the competition.
Operational capability—the ability to deliver on your promises to clients.
Like most good strategies that sounds very simple—what obviously sets Oliver apart, and you could see it in the focus and intensity with which Martin spoke about it, is that they consistently do these things.
Books
Things I’ve enjoyed this week include:
Remote Work Revolution, by Tsedal Neeley.
I’ve been dipping into this book over the last year and found it useful, practical and thoughtful.
The Odyssey, by Homer — Emily Wilson’s translation.
This is my first time reading The Odyssey. Wow — talk about a killer first sentence:
"Tell me about a complicated man."
How Writers Journey To Comfort And Fluency, by Robert Boice
This one I am reading slowly, on purpose. It is densely set with challenging ideas and advice about writing. But like so much advice about writing it applies to all kinds of work.
The message I picked up this week was: don’t rush things.
[impatience causes rushing]
1. Rushing interferes with the calm and happiness essential to optimal problem solving (and, after all, finding imagination is a task in problem solving).
2. Writing without careful planning imposes the extra strain in composing of having to discover what can be said while saying it.
3. Trying to write before having established an involvement in ideas limits motivation for writing.
4. Richness of imagination, and of its relative creativity, depends on delays in closure that are best filled with patient searches for ideas and plans.
5. Rushing is fatiguing and wasteful.
The Anomaly, by Herve Tellier
This strange book was a massive hit in France, and we’ve had to wait a while for its translation. It’s a clever, twisting thriller that plays with big ideas but doesn’t lose its sense of fun along the way. The premise: a transatlantic flight arrives in New York after going through a major storm. A few months later, the same plane with the same passengers and crew lands again.
AI and creativity
NYT | A.I. Is Mastering Language. Should We Trust What It Says
A deep dive into the state of artificial intelligence (AI) and language. You may have heard of GPT-3, an AO which pulls off an amazing trick of being able to sound like a human by essentially being a very good autocomplete. I’ve worked with a writing tool based on this technology and had fun asking it to re-write a client’s website in the style of different authors (Jeremy Clarkson was the most eerily imitated). GPT is known as a “large language model” AI:
The most heated debate about large language models does not revolve around the question of whether they can be trained to understand the world. Instead, it revolves around whether they can be trusted at all. To begin with, L.L.M.s have a disturbing propensity to just make things up out of nowhere. (The technical term for this, among deep-learning experts, is ‘‘hallucinating.’’) I once asked GPT-3 to write an essay about a fictitious ‘‘Belgian chemist and political philosopher Antoine De Machelet’’; without hesitating, the software replied with a cogent, well-organized bio populated entirely with imaginary facts: ‘‘Antoine De Machelet was born on October 2, 1798, in the city of Ghent, Belgium. Machelet was a chemist and philosopher, and is best known for his work on the theory of the conservation of energy. . . . ’’
This kind of deep-faking with original content is unsettling but also, the thinking goes, if an AI like this became self-aware, would we know? A point brought vividly to life by a Dartmouth economics professor 's conversation with an instance of GPT-3:
There’s also an image generating version of GPT-3 called DALL-E (geddit), which can create incredible illustrations of complex concepts. Beckie, one of my design colleagues shared this TikTok video video of someone trying out DALL-E which gives a sense of its potential:
Watching
Aptly in the week that Netflix's share price stumbled, my viewing was 66% Apple TV and 33% Amazon Prime. Sorry Netflix, I still love you.
WeCrashed (Apple TV+) starts well and then drags you deeper into the madness of the WeWork story. Jared Leto suits the role of Adam Neuman, but Anne Hathaway as Rebecca Neuman made it for me — the personification of what Scott Galloway (who features in the story) calls "yogababble" in business.
Slow Horses (Apple TV+). The Mick Herron books are a delight but not so precious that a good TV adaptation by Will Smith (not that one) can't make its own kind of fun.
Open Range (Prime): Imagine Dark from Netflix set in Wyoming with a bigger budget and Josh Brolin. I'm not sure what's going on, or if I ever will, but it has been a surprise hit for Mrs M and myself.
Natural Light (rent/buy): Kind of The Thin Red Line without the sunshine and redemption. Haunting probably not a cheery way to spend an evening – but the mood and the photography is stunning.
Writing in progress
Metaverse. Web3. Hype. I'm writing about all three, for an article but also for a presentation for young marketers in June. David Jones’s presentation at WFA Athens was excellent – fun, informative and not too heavy on the hype.
Global-local marketing operations. Yeah – the sexy stuff. The amount of waste in marketing content is incredible and a big opportunity for savings of the carbon and money. Brilliant Noise has done a lot for clients in this area over the last few years and I'm helping our marketing team pull together some things worth sharing.
Uncertainty. This is the big essay that keeps morphing into new shapes. Once I've finished the marketing paper this one is getting written. Yes, it is.
Last quote
I have adopted a definition of leadership from my colleagues Frances Frei and Anne Morriss: Leadership is empowering other people as a result of your presence—and making sure that impact continues in your absence. Leaders must create the conditions for people to realize their own capacity and power. — Remote Work Revolution
That’s it for this week. I enjoyed writing it and I hope you found something you liked here too.
Antony
What Rumelt actually says is (my emphasis):
The first natural advantage of good strategy arises because other organizations often don’t have one. And because they don’t expect you to have one, either. A good strategy has coherence, coordinating actions, policies, and resources so as to accomplish an important end. Many organizations, most of the time, don’t have this. Instead, they have multiple goals and initiatives that symbolize progress, but no coherent approach to accomplishing that progress other than “spend more and try harder.” — Richard Rumelt, Good Strategy/Bad Strategy