The Conversation Group

If I was a CEO or leader of a significant organisation, my response to claims that my company is threatened by, say Chinese competitors or climate change or indeed recession, would be, no: it is either safeguarded or threatened by my ability or inability to understand the changing patterns and dynamics of social interaction.

Everyone around me is equally affected by how people’s intentions change and what that says about their shared thought processes – the mutual future we are always building. Not understanding the speed with which people now recreate futures is why politicians are failing.

There is good harmless fun trend projecting and a couple of years back pure blogging listed a bunch of sites that do it well.

You can review those sites here. And we will review them all here soon.

My apoplectic response to apocalyptic trend spotting and critique goes something like this. Here is a dead easy futures portfolio.

1. The recession will last for a hundred years and you are all going to die. Pessimism sells well – in fact the author of Buyology Martin Lindstrom has shown the science of buying and selling is at one with fear. There is no shortage of futurology that tells folks it is all getting worse and will continue to do so until you listen to me.

2. The second version of futurology goes like this – Gen A (it could be x, y or z) is the ultimate slacker generation and determined to prove its slackiness is purer than the slackers who came before them (the mathematical formula is Gen = n [tusg]p where p = the present and tusg = the ultimate slacker generation.

3. The third category of doom apocalypse thinking is a combination of arguments that all say the condition of the world spells a sticky end soon. Climate, ascent of China, population growth, health care spending.

Behind each of these arguments lies a formulaic response which goes something like – if we get smarter, if we rely become more creative, adaptable, flexible, innovative (innovation is the new progress) then we can just overcome these problems.

When Chris and I started thinking abut metatrends one of the first things we noticed however is how well, how quickly and how imaginatively people are adapting to new circumstances. The brain and behaviour are the things we can change very quickly – curious fact, people continually talk about having attitudes and/or new ways of doing things in their DNA – my understanding is that genetic change takes about 40,000 years to work through in humans. Very little changes in our DNA – other than it becoming damaged or mutates.

It stands to a little bit of reason that change is therefore mostly social and interactive between people and the web is the place a lot of that interaction now takes place.

Here is a case in point During the recession the number of money saving blogs has been increasing as have their readers. This comes at a time when, the FT recently pointed out, old fashioned mutualism is dying out rapidly enough that Governments are trying to save it. American thrifts have had their day and European mutual societies got the high risk, high reward bug. Read all about it here.

By way of contrast we see a different mutualism growing. It is based around using the web as a source of mutual support and the primary weapon is not money but information.

Having said that, money is a focus of a new generation of peering systems, led of course by the ZOPA model. Even here in money, to date, information rules and includes the likes of wesabe and many more on that model.

In other words the adaptation of social DNA (the information repository for persistence) is well under way. We have written about it recently but only in private client papers. Hopefully we can approach the issue publicly soon. Understanding these trends and what they mean, before the opposition do is more important than the thought apocalypse.

We reported below that the end of July brought about a potential reversal in web fortunes for the iPhone. A little digging around and we found non-US experts looking to short sell Apple shares already in June, because of poor performance and poor strategy over the iPhone (and a feeling that June price discounts were going to become the strategy).

Why does it matter to fiveideasthatmatter? Because we are trying to understand:

• The web sentiment stream
• How it works
• And how it affects the wider world of brands, governments and ‘life’.

Apple is a great example of a company that seems to have a true market-like presence on line, in other words if we can find the right way to put this – Apple, especially the iPhone, seems to illustrate a new type of sentiment market, peculiar to stock markets, commodity markets and the web. In this type of market, sentiment rather than fact prevails, or rather sentiment becomes fact.

Understanding the iPhone’s sentiment history is part of our project. Some US commentators were getting testy about the iPhone recently.

Here’s the bull stuff.

Here by the way is a post from 2007 that illustrates how vulnerable Apple’s shares are to bubble thinking.

A reminder here also from 2007 that positive iPhone sentiment was not a foregone conclusion.

Our argument is simply that a bear market may have begun in iPhone sentiment. Let’s see.

The Financial Times took a swipe at the auto industry last week. At least twice. When the business paper is so challenging of an industry with such a dominant role in the industrial economy, it’s a sign that in the post industrial economy, autos will not continue to dominate.

Is there a big idea that might save the auto-industry or is there a big idea that might change it?

Clearly the most significant feature of the auto-industry in the past decade is the inability of people there to make a big idea stick. Our experience of most companies we talk to is that people with big ideas generally cannot get champions. It is symptomatic of corporate life that we accept that champions are necessary – an alternative is to redesign the idea application environment so that good ideas stick more often. Companies with good open management policies indeed are doing that.

So meantime Tesla all electric supercar was built elsewhere, in fact backed by people from the IT industry who are familiar with disruptive thinking. And the TATA Nano is not a GM, Ford or Chrysler product and it costs not a lot more than a high end gaming computer does.

Even without a new big idea the auto industry will have to change, so much we know. But hasn’t this all been known for a long time? Yes, but people with big ideas have not been able to find champions….

What will replace the auto industry as an expression of consumer aspirations and identify? It may bs something like the personal energy identity that UK company AMEE is pursuing. Where does that leave autos?

Here is one view:

• Seek ways to make cars longer-life and up-datable in hardware and software
• Integrate more of the values that also attach to the home
• Adopt open source design
• Adopt open management techniques to co-define the future role of the auto
• Rescaling design and production around local fabrication, making it my car, made in my backyard

and here is the open source car: