This week I wanted to start with a thought experiment.
Imagine you are a primitive stone-age hunter, walking into the ruins of a library. You have never heard of reading and writing so the shapes and symbols in the books have no meaning to you.
In fact, you have never come across anything that looks like a book, so these fine leaves have one useful purpose for you: to make a good fire.
They burn really well and there are so many of them stacked around. For your needs and purposes, they are doing an excellent service in keeping the cold at bay. You, the hunter, are captivated by what a book does (burns), not what it means (cultural repository)
As someone who started his career in marketing, the concept of origin stories has often fascinated me. The mythology around Ben & Jerry’s. The fake origin of Häagen-Dazs. We put a lot of stock in where we think something comes from. Over the last 20 years, as global supply chains have become more complex and everything has essentially been produced by a faceless army of drones in grey box factory, the mythology around origins has taken center stage in marketing brands.
And with this flood of origin fluff the true originals keep cutting the line others will follow.
Why is it that to this day, adidas Super Stars and Stan Smiths still outsell their younger siblings who have the benefit of massive budgets and sophisticated marketing. The same holds true for Nike’s Air Max. Why is it that Queen is still one of the biggest bands on spotify?
Could it be that the way in which something is conceived can have a lasting influence on the impact it has in the world? Or does the system into which it is fed make all the difference in the sustained resonance it finds in cultural currency?
During the time I was at adidas the raging new new idea was “feet you wear” – a clunky and awkward marketing idea that shoes are like feet. The marketing budgets were enormous and millions of posters, ads and events were created to burn the image into the collective retina.
What I found really odd was that there was no real patience or persistence in building the concept. Every retailer wanted to be different from the others, so they demanded a “special make up” – a colour combination or feature that could only be found in Foot Locker or Decathlon or wherever. And then everything had to change every three months… later everything had to change every month.
The reason we were given by the retailers was that consumers needed a reason to visit the store on a more regular basis. By having a new colourway or detail launched every month there would be “excitement” around the brand.
This is the same trap that led Nokia into a drowning pit of complexity. Every phone carrier wanted some detail to be different or slightly unique from the phones everyone else was selling.
Hidden Cost of Novelty
The craziest conversation I had with a Nokia product logistics manager was about how AT&T forced them to hide the camera in their phone.
AT&T demanded a certain form factor at a specific price point. It was cheaper for Nokia to just change the back cover to hide the camera hardware, than to remove the camera hardware from the phone circuitry. Thousands of American consumers had a far more advanced phone in their pockets that they knew, and the Nokia brand was driven to destruction through a thousand cuts of compromise.
The phone users like the stone-age hunter oblivious to the precious gift in their hands.
This week I heard a shocking German statistic. 40% of all clothing that gets made never gets sold. Of all the clothes that do get sold, another 40% is either not worn or worn once.
In an attempt to provide consumers with the “pile it high and sell it cheap” experience, retailers like H&M, primark and others are creating massive piles of non-recyclable waste. Intentionally.
And why? Just to ultimately sell another Stan Smith, Levi’s 501 or classic design that was invented 50 years ago.
The paradox we clutch on to is that there is a constant demand for “novelty” that ultimately just reenforces the known. Anything that challenges the paradigm is not recognized or rewarded.
Disruption by Design
This week we had some interesting feedback from a venture capital broker. He pointed out that their funds were looking to achieve hyper scalability, and that manufacturing hardware was a “barrier.”
This is a fascinating insight into the paradigm in which these funds are operating. Keep in mind that they plan on the fact that 8-9/10 investments will fail or fail to return a significant return. So that one investment has to deliver the magical 10+X to cover the losses and earn a return for the fund.
They are looking for the next Google or Facebook without understanding that the next Google or Facebook will not look anything like them at all.
They focus on what the company does (or in this case looks like), not what it means.
In “Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned,” Kenneth Stanley presents the data on how pattern recognizing/generating AI fails to deliver innovation if you set the objective of innovation.
If every step in the iteration process is measured against the ultimate outcome it is supposed to deliver (does it look like meta) it takes much longer to achieve that objective.
Quite simply, a butterfly does not look like a butterfly until it breaks out of the cocoon. It actually has to dissolve the entire caterpillar into a soup of genetic potential before the new body can be built. In the same way, the design process has to incubate and incorporate randomness to evolve.
In the same way that you can’t hunt for disruptive business models by judging them by the standards of old patterns, you cannot create new sustainable fashion successes by replicating the old.
You need a system that incubates a reconfiguration of the innovation DNA, not simply a superficial copy and paste.
Second Sight
Now, imagine a highly advanced civilization lived on earth 1 000 000 years ago. In their wisdom they created a back-up of their knowledge, technology, and culture. But where would you place such a treasure trove to be secured against asteroid impact and solar flares. You can’t store it electronically because just one magnetic field shift and it will all be wiped. So, a scientist comes up with a dense substance that can store terabytes of information in one drop. A liquid interface that can be used in multiple systems without a rigid data frame. Where do you place this massive ocean of information.
The cultural researchers and ethics philosophers have years of debate and finally decide, we need to store it deep inside the earth. Only a civilization that is advanced enough to probe the core of the earth will have the technology to decode the data we have stored there.
Then modern humans discover oil and burn it for our base needs. We know what it does (creates almost everything we touch), but not what it means (we are living on dinosaur blood).
To this day we do not fully understand how it was formed, what it tells us about civilization and the mass extinctions before us. Yet we burn it like the primitive in a library.
How might we take the shift in our understanding. How might we see the one pair of jeans in our hands in its entirety, as it relates to the 3 or four other shoes that will be burnt for this one sale? How might we refocus on the meaning of origins to align our value chains accordingly?
Let’s take that leap.
Three key take-outs:
1. PointingIs your origin a source of orientation? Are you pointing towards or away from its meaning? Is that a conscious choice?
2. ProcessHave you established or engaged with rituals, processes and relationships that support the development of meaning? Is your process purely functional or can it be revelatory?
3. PricelessCan you understand the value of a true original? Are you focussed on what it does (excite, engage, enrich) or what it means?
P.S, the audio on this newsletter tells a totally different story (:
