CES: technology, people, culture

I'd like to thank Dan, Karen, Polly and Kirsty for inviting me along to the Consumer Electronics Show, and most of all for the thought-provoking conversations.

I've been reading Greg Urban's 'Metaculture: how culture moves through the world' with a view to understanding how our activities (Online & Informal learning) might be able to affect BP's culture as a whole. It's not an entirely precocious aspiration: culture is the 'residue' of informal learning - something which until recently depended mainly on the interpersonal dynamic among small teams. Online is changing that, of course: now a culture can travel (be 'disseminated' as Urban puts it) electronically. The objects which carry culture can equally be electronic (e.g. A viral video) rather than physical (e.g. a newspaper). Google, Facebook and Twitter have changed our world.

There wasn't anything game-changing at the show. The TVs are bigger, flatter, better. Household appliances will connect to the Internet. Apps will start to appear in cars. There is nothing intrinsically game-changing about technology in any case - in fact if you stare too long at the technology you may be blinded to its significance. Technology merely enables culture change, by acting as an overlay for human behaviour. The emergent patterns of behaviour are what matters - and are difficult to predict. Google were absent - I would hope because they are working on something that is game-changing, such as the post-screen world (and though we met for dinner, they weren't giving anything away!).

It was great to have a chance to wonder what themes  might emerge, and for me the following stood out: 

1. Authenticity: the term 'engagement' has for a while been obscuring some interesting developments. Not long ago 'engaging content' might be used by a broadcaster or publisher to refer to content that contained characteristics that might draw a crowd or hold someone’s attention. And whilst we a still concerned with creating engaging content the nature of 'engaging' is changing - for example, only recently has it become really important whether or not audiences would share a piece of content. What makes someone want to share something is related to, but distinct from what makes someone want to watch it. Though the science is still primitive - large amounts of data will enable us to understand what people share and why. At the same time people are becoming hyper-sensitive to the engagement strategies used to grab their attention - authenticity is the thing which differentiates content you can trust from content you can't - the online correlate of relationships, if you like. Authenticity marks the boundary between untrusted/trusted and to some degree between formal and informal.
   
2. Locus of Control: it seems that almost all companies (and governments) are struggling to understand that they will lose control of things which historically they controlled centrally: information, reputation, brand, employee behaviour, buying behaviour, communications - even how people use their products. Historically people were led, these days they self-organise not unlike like flocks of birds. Looking through the roundup of last years’corporate social media 'fails'  I am reminded of @euan ‘s observation that too often a peer-to-peer network is treated as if it were a broadcast channel. In many areas (perhaps even parenting), the 'Locus of Control' is passing downwards from the positional authority to the consumer/constituent. If organisations wish to continue to make headway, they will either have to rely on some extraordinarily insightful guesswork, or they will need to involve their audiences more closely in how they do things. They will need to open up, and become both authentic and transparent. Employees will talk to customers, and CEOs will listen to employees. It is hard to adapt to a world in which your employees, even your customers, are now both your sales force and your PR machine. How do we equip, incentivise and connect with members of our corporate culture? Many of the exhibitors at the CES clearly have no idea how real people will use their products (like the screen in the car which only pops up when you are at a standstill - seriously!?) and some show little sign of even having considered this. I imagine they will learn the hard way.
   
3. People: there's not much point developing technology or new approaches that utilise that technology without taking time to understand people. Of course, this is nothing new - what is new is our ability to understand people not as a type, but moment by moment. Working with Kahnemann's System1 & System2 approach has taught me that the nature of decision making varies hugely across the course of the day. What you know about someone by virtue of their membership of a certain audience type is near insignificant if you want to know what decision they will make at a precise point in time. Of course the type differences average out over time - but the real leverage is in the detail. You could get someone to buy something if you knew what mental state they were in at that precise moment. And increasingly, we will.

In summary, I’m a little frustrated with the slow pace of change and with the technology at CES. Mostly it feels like looking at the world as it was 15 years ago. The real advances will not come through incremental hardware improvement, but in opening up new frontiers in technology usage.