[Of course, this post isn’t actually about airports].
I realized that I don’t dislike flying–I dislike airports. There are so many things we can learn from what they do wrong:
- No one is in charge. The airport doesn’t appear to have a CEO, and if it does, you never see her, hear about her or interact with her in any way. When the person at the top doesn’t care, it filters down.
- Problems persist because organizations defend their turf instead of embrace the problem. The TSA blames the facilities people, who blame someone else, and around and around. Only when the user’s problem is the driver of behavior (as opposed to maintaining power or the status quo) things change.
- The food is aimed squarely at the (disappearing) middle of the market. People who like steamed meat and bags of chips never have a problem finding something to eat at an airport. Apparently, profit-maximizing vendors haven’t realized that we’re all a lot weirder than we used to be.
- Like colleges, airports see customers as powerless transients. Hey, you’re going to be gone tomorrow, but they’ll still be here.
- By removing slack, airlines create failure. In order to increase profit, airlines work hard to get the maximum number of flights out of each plane, each day. As a result, there are no spares, no downtime and no resilience. By assuming that their customer base prefers to save money, not anxiety, they create an anxiety-filled system.
- The TSA is ruled by superstition, not fact. They act without data and put on a quite serious but ultimately useless bit of theater. Ten years later, the theater is now becoming an entrenched status quo, one that gets ever worse.
- The ad hoc is forbidden. Imagine an airplane employee bringing in an extension cord and a power strip to deal with the daily occurrence of travelers hunched in the corner around a single outlet. Impossible. There is a bias toward permanent and improved, not quick and effective.
- Everyone is treated the same. Effective organizations treat different people differently. While there’s some window dressing at the edges (I’m thinking of slightly faster first class lines and slightly more convenient motorized cars for seniors), in general, airports insist that the one size they’ve chosen to offer fit all.
- There are plenty of potential bad surprises, but no good ones. You can have a flight be cancelled, be strip searched or even go to the wrong airport. But all possibility for delight has been removed. It wouldn’t take much to completely transform the experience from a chore to a delight.
- They are sterile. Everyone who passes through leaves no trace, every morning starts anew. There are no connections between people, either fellow passengers or the staff. No one says, “welcome back,” and that’s honest, because no one feels particularly welcome.
- No one is having any fun. Most people who work at airports have precisely the same demeanor as people who work at a cemetery. The system has become so industrialized that personal expression is apparently forbidden.
As we see at many organizations that end up like this, the airport mistakes its market domination for a you-have-no-choice monopoly (we do have a choice, we stay home). And in pursuit of reliable, predictable outcomes, these organizations dehumanize everything, pretending it will increase profits, when it actually does exactly the opposite.
January 27, 2013
In the long run, we're all dead, sure that's still true.
But the other long run effects–in the long run, you get caught, in the long run, kindness wins out, in the long run, we learn about who you really are–all of those are happening faster than they used to.
The short run has always been short (and it's getting shorter still). The real change, though, is how short the long run is getting.
January 26, 2013
Slow media is patient. It's not on a deadline. It isn't measured in column inches. It can be calm instead of sensational, deep instead of superficial.
In the age of "Breaking news, Emmy nominations announced!" and 140 characters, it's sort of surprising to realize that we are also living in the golden age of slow media.
For years, on Sunday mornings, you could find me sitting in my driveway, recently arrived home from one errand or another, listening to Krista Tippett's extraordinary interviews on the radio. Thanks to the web, there's no need to sit in your car any longer, and Krista's groundbreaking approach is spreading. Spending 90 minutes in the studio with her to create this week's show was, for me, one of the highlights of my career. (download).
When there's unlimited shelf space allowing unlimited podcasts, which can be of unlimited length, the goal isn't to get the show on the air faster or to make it noisier. Instead, the goal, like the goal of a good book, is to say something worth saying, and to do it in a way that's worth waiting for.
The challenge used to be to promote your idea enough to get on the radio or get into the newspaper. Of course, along the way your idea was truncated, edited, misconstrued, amped up and dumbed down, because scarce media space often demanded this.
Today, the challenge is, as Krista has shown, to be insightful enough and patient enough to use the (unlimited) time to create slow media that people actually want to listen to. Not all people, of course, but enough. Not media for the masses, but media for the weird, for people who care. It might not be obvious media, or easy to understand media, or easily digested media, but that's okay, because slow media is not mass media. Slow media is not for the distracted masses, it's for the focused few.
One of the greatest privileges of publishing The Icarus Deception and V is for Vulnerable is that I've had the chance to talk with some amazing podcasters. And to do it slowly. With focus.
Go ahead and subscribe to a few. Slow media is good for us.
January 25, 2013
Generalizations are the heart of marketing decision-making. When we look at an audience–customers, prospects, constituents–we make decisions on the whole based on our assumptions about the individuals within the group.
But are we basing those generalizations on our vision of the ideal member of the tribe, the average member or the outlier who got our attention?
It's easy, for example, to defend high-priced famous colleges if you focus on the ideal situation. The ideal student, getting instruction from the ideal professor and making ideal progress. No one can argue with this.
On the other hand, when we see the outlier (the person who is manipulating the system, or the one who is being harmed by it) it's easy to generalize in precisely the other direction, deciding that the entire system isn't worth saving.
And finally, it's tempting to rely on the average, to boil down populations of people into simple numbers. The problem with this, of course, is that if one foot is in a bucket of ice water and the other is being scalded, on average, you should be comfortable.
Before we start making decisions about markets, tribes and policy, we need to get clear about which signals we're using and what we're trying to focus on or improve.
January 24, 2013
Yes, it's okay to ship your work.
Yes, you're capable of making a difference.
Yes, it's important.
Yes, you can ignore that critic.
Yes, your bravery is worth it.
Yes, we believe in you.
Yes, you can do even better.
Yes.
Yes is an opportunity and yes is an obligation. The closer we get to people who are confronting the resistance on their way to making a ruckus, the more they let us in, the greater our obligation is to focus on the yes.
There will always be a surplus of people eager to criticize, nitpick or recommend caution. Your job, at least right now, is to reinforce the power of the yes.
January 23, 2013
Everyone lives with self mythology.
The more important a memory is to the story we tell ourselves about ourselves, the more often we rehearse the memory. And the more often we relive those memories, the less likely it is that they are true.
Despite our shared conception that we are rational actors making intelligent decisions based on an accurate view of the world and ourselves, precisely the opposite is true. Your customers, your workers, you and I, we are all figments of our imaginations.
Understanding the mythology of your partner, your customer and your audience is far more important than watching the instant replay of what actually happened.
January 22, 2013
You will almost never find a case study or lesson that precisely fits the problem you're aiming to solve. You won't find a book that shows you what someone precisely like you did to solve a problem precisely like this one.
The search for the exact case study or the exact prescription is the work of the resistance, a clever way to stay safe, to protect yourself from your boss or your self-talk. If you wait for the perfect map before departing on your journey, you'll never have to leave.
It's also true, though, that you have never once had to solve a problem that is exactly different from what's gone down before. We'd like to romanticize our problems as unique, as the one and only perfectly difficult situation that is the result of a confluence of unrepeatable, unique causes.
Your problem is your problem, and it is like no other. But it's close enough to those that came before, close enough to the ones you've studied, that it probably pays to stop stalling and take the leap.
January 21, 2013
Is it interesting because it happened…
or because it happened to you?
If George Clooney sits next to you at a restaurant, that's interesting to you, no doubt, but only interesting to your friends because you're so excited. I mean, he had to sit next to someone!
Should we read your press release or come to your gallery opening or take a sales meeting because it's important, or because it's important to you?
Marketing is the art of seeing (and then creating) what might be interesting to more than our friends.
There's a circle of friends in our lives that care a lot about what we care about. The rest of the world? They mostly don't.
[Feel free to insert "important" and "urgent" as well. ]
January 20, 2013
It's actually not that easy to give something substantial away. That's because accepting it means a change (in lifestyle, responsibility or worldview) of the person receiving it. It's stressful.
Far more stressful, though, is taking something away. Once a person or an organization comes to believe that, "this is mine," they erect a worldview around their possession of it. Taking it away instantly becomes personal, an act far greater than living without a privilege or object in the first place would be.
We care more about the change than the object or privilege itself.
January 19, 2013
It's possible that Peter Parker was uninformed.
Organizations tend to view "responsiblity" as doing the safe, proven and traditional tasks, because to do anything else is too risky. The more successful they become, the less inclined they are to explore the edges.
In fact, organizations with reach and leverage ought to be taking more risks, doing more generous work and creating bolder art. That's the most responsible thing they can do.
January 18, 2013
