I have spent the past few days listening to two groups with much in common working very hard to disarm each other. It is deja vu for me. The two groups are the web analysts and marketers for the same company and the need for these two groups to work together (in any company) was something I wrote about in Matching Marketing and IT Mythologies. These two groups work in the same medium -- the web. They come at the web from different paradigms. The company (and I'm sure other companies) needs these two groups to come closer and closer together, for their paradigms to merge, and even though everybody's polite and courteous in the room, I could tell that the present path would lead to corporate unhappiness.
So I've created some exercises for them. NextStage often creates custom trainings and utilizes our backgrounds in anthropology, sociology, thisology and thatology to develop protocols with highly specific, highly targeted outcomes in mind. One specific natural human trait that we have to gently dissuade participants from is ego defence.
Let me give you an example. One exercise involves using each group's methodologies to reveal relationships between act and outcome, a "we did this and achieved these goals" type of thing, except the moment the term "goal" is used someone begins to trumpet it as if the outcome was some kind of overarching achievement. This behavior usually -- not always, just usually - stems from someone feeling insecure in the exercise. The gentle dissuasion from ego defence is to increase trust (for excellent work on trust in business, see Alex Todd's Trust Enablement site).
One of my tasks to get people to appreciate that any outcome is valid because real ROI and business success comes from several outcomes working together. I'm learning that there's lots of people who are "planning challenged". Any achieved goal is due to a string of successes. A success which happens in isolation is (most likely) unrepeatable and many people I've encountered seem better at thinking in large chunks, a kind of "We can all get together and fix up the barn and put on a show" and not "Good idea. How will we feed ourselves while we're fixing up the barn? Where will we get the materials required? Who will manage this project? Can we be sure the show we know we can put on is something people will come to?".Some real fun occurred when I invited the two groups to analyze each other's action-outcome pairs in their own frames of reference. We actually had some breakthroughs. I asked the marketers "If you could have any kind of data at all -- anything -- what would it be?" I got them to describe what the data would tell them (nice) and also got them to describe in detail what the data looked like (form and function). It was a challenge and it helped them to think critically. Very nice!
I asked the analysts how they would supply data with that form and function. Forget about what it was going to be used for, just provide data in that form and function. That stopped them. They had to think. They could do it (provide the required data, not think. I know they could think) and it took a while and they could do it.
Right now I have to nurture a new paradigm, one that has roots in each of these camps' gardens.
Strange fruit, agreement. The assumption is that consensus involves compromise. I remember one of my mentors working with a patient. The patient said, "You have to believe me" and my mentor replied, "I believe in your belief."
Please contact NextStage for information regarding presentations and trainings on this and other topics.
Upcoming Trainings:
- This is Your Brain on the Internet at Emetrics SF on 8 May 2008
- Know How Someone Is Thinking in 10 Seconds or Less Half-day training at the Fashion Institute of Technology in NYC, 13 June 08
- New Communications Forum 2008, 22-25 April 08 at The Vineyard Creek Inn & Spa, Sonoma County CA
- San Francisco Emetrics Marketing Optimzation Summit, 4-7 May 08
- International Communication Association's Communicating for Social Impact, the 58th Annual Conference of the International Communication Association at Le Centre Sheraton Hotel, Montreal, Quebec, Canada, May 22-26, 2008
- SUNY Marketing Professionals Conference at the Fashion Institute of Technology in NYC, 11-13 June 08
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