Once again I have Wired UK to thank for some great new
ideas.
The June issue’s “How to spot the
future” feature has sage advice from a host of tech success stories about
spotting trends.
My favourites are:
- Look
for cross-pollinators: ideas which have been
taken from one area and used in another. And people who integrate ideas from
different fields.
- Demand
deep design: where it’s a core part of the simplicity of something,
the way Apple and Facebook, for example, do it.
- Favour
the liberators: those who liberate something for consumers and users
(like iTunes pricing policy did) and those who allow liberate underutilized
resources by giving easier access to them, making them more liquid in the
financial sense.
Go read the rest of the article for the rest and some
inspiring examples.
Not for the first time, Wired
magazine has been responsible for exposing me to an exciting new idea with a
range of possible applications beyond its original use.
In this case it’s the notion of A-B
testing featured in the June 2012 issue of Wired UK.
Put simply, instead of deciding which of all the proposed
website designs are best, some firms or organisations simply put both or all of
them live, split the website traffic to go evenly between them and wait for the
resulting sales/conversion/hits data to tell them which the users/customers say
is best. Once that’s clear, the winner runs solus. Simples!
It’s a neat idea which could be applied in lots of other
areas, such as direct mail (one or more test postcodes could receive different
versions of a mailing and response rates compared), TV and radio advertising or
even newspaper page design (different geographical editions could have
different versions of a limited number of pages).
But there are some areas you wouldn’t want to use this
approach. Principally, those where the audience isn’t homogenous (of equal
value to you or your client) or is a group of high value, such as key accounts,
who you can’t risk being exposed to anything other than the best possible
representation of your organization or client as a bad impression from receiving
the ‘losing’ design could cost you/them a lot of money.
Doubtless, there are lots more areas where this would work
really well. But think carefully before using it.
Out of the furore and fuss over Barclays’ under-reporting
of its borrowing rates in its LIBOR submission and Bob Diamond’s management of
the bank has come a loud and frequent call for the culture of banking to
change.
On the face of it, it seems a fair, reasonable and probably
necessary step. But how can it be done?
The answer is not quickly or easily, but it has to be done
if the banks are to repair the reputational damage their behaviour over “pay
for failure”, bonuses, misselling and the risk-taking that led to the global
financial crisis over the last few years has done.
The problem is that changing in an individual organization
is hard enough, let alone changing that of a whole industry.
The reason is how organizational and industry cultures are
formed. Geert Hofstede’s
work looking at the different cultures within the national subsidiaries of
international organisations showed that an organisation’s culture comes only partly from the
corporate culture (espoused values and behaviours) promoted from the top — the
rest is derived from the beliefs and practices people bring with them from
their upbringing and local culture, as well as the industry culture elsewhere.
So Barclays management alone can’t fairly take the blame
for all of the flaws in its culture which led to the mispractices as some of
them will have come with staff who joined from elsewhere or came in thinking
cheating was ok.
The other complicating factor is that the industry culture
is partially derived from the nature of the work, as Deal
& Kennedy have shown. Their model shows that places with different
levels of risk (uncertainty) and feedback (praise, bonuses, promotions) create
different cultures and that the high risk, quick feedback situation encountered
in trading in the City creates a “tough guy, macho” culture. Which is why those
who enjoy managing risk, competing with others and receiving very tangible
rewards fit in well with that kind of environment.
So what can be done? Whether or not you believe that the
City’s leopards can change their spots, the least the banks can do is be seen
to be making efforts to change their behaviour with culture change programmes both at each organisation and industry-wide through accredited training programmes.
Each needs to be seen to reward those who live the new
espoused organisational values as well as reward (rather than attack or sack)
the whistleblowers who report misdeeds. By rewarding and praising those who
behave in the new way required, they can be seen to be pushing for positive
change and encourage at least compliance, if not belief change, in the rest.
Whether or not individuals’ actual beliefs about what is
and isn’t acceptable will be changed, compliance with the new way of behaving
is what everyone wants to see. And only once behaviour is seen to have changed
will the rest of society be happy and prepared to improve their view of the
banks.
