BAU as WTF

The acceleration of change ignited by the digital revolution just twenty-five years ago is incomparable to any other historical epoch. Everything just wasn’t supposed to move this fast. For the businesses and organizations who have weathered and survived, so far at least, the challenges have increased relentlessly.

Some categories – retail, publishing, performance, education – have been gutted by the disruption of platforms.

In the non-profit sector, the traditional forms of supporter acquisition and member development have evaporated.

Together, the world of business, brands and causes all face the same clarifying truth: business as usual has been permanently replaced by an existential sense of ‘wtf?!’.

Change Sucks 

There’s only ever a single question to ask ourselves – what is to be done?

Some organizations have built internal teams and talent pools with the smarts and creativity to make nimble decisions about business direction, product design, customer or member acquisition and retention. Others turn to agencies and consultancies to assist with core strategies and their implementation.

Still – every quarter the nagging dread of a need to “change” persists, even as we often remain stuck staring into the strategic headlights. Too often, even when our own people, agencies or consultants suggest new directions, course pivots or alternative strategies our appetite for doing things meaningfully different remains depressed.

Why?… Because organizations are like people. We hate change. Change hurts, change confuses, change debilitates, change is scary. Change sucks. Until it doesn’t.

Insight: The Thing Itself

The diverse and seasoned business people of Free Radicals will not tell you change is good, or embrace change, or (worse) make you feel better and last longer during your intransigent resistance to it.

In this and many key regards, we differ in nature, kind and degree from the Accentures, McKinseys and ad holding company execs you might be seeking counsel with and from.

Perhaps controversially, we believe change itself has nothing to do with the business critical question of what is to be done. Change is an artifact, a leave-behind of newly invigorated strategy. Strategy informed – if it’s worth executing – by fresh insight.

If there’s one thing we’re cocky enough to brag about as a group it is our demonstrated capability to mine and articulate fresh insight. The hardest thing, we’d argue, in any business or category.

The Nature of Value

Insight’s job is as singular as it is critical. In our world, and probably yours, deep insight is the igniter of value creation. We’re not talking about bottom-line value or even topline. Yet.  We’re talking about human value, the nature of which has changed more than anything else in these past twenty-five years of radical commercial disruption.

Notwithstanding the value land-grab by the reigning digital advertising platforms, and the surrender of personal data and privacy their false claim to it was built upon, we’re witnessing a profound evolution in the nature of human value. The human-centered culture of access, choice and control manifest by the billions of broadband-connected smartphones in almost every hand on the planet has changed the nature of value for all of us.

In many ways, this is an extraordinary exchange for humans. But for the businesses, brands and organizations who are faced with driving real value to their own bottom lines, reconciling this emerging imperative for human value creation with existing business structures, strategies, products and services has become prolematic.

Rhizomes and Market-Making

Our inspiration for how organizations can exploit instead of suffer the emergent conditions of market chaos comes from an unlikely source – philosophy. Specifically, one of our favorite (if sometimes impenetrable!) writers, Gilles Deleuze and his concept of the rhizome.

Rather than imagining value, or power, being created and expressed in traditional hierarchical modes (think how your organization is structured, your supply chain designed) the rhizome is a better model for how things actually work. How real value, when unleashed, doesn’t just move into markets – it makes them.

Value, if imagined right, is irrepressibly seeking its limit, its ultimate reach and expression. The once unimaginable network effect of value creation, distribution – and recognition. Rhizome thinking is the new butterfly wings.

If you’re in the getting-and-keeping-customers, -supporters, -voters or -clients business, understanding how to apply this theory of value creation isn’t a nice-to-have. It’s become business-critical. The enterprises in every category, who get this first, will get there first.

The beautiful thing is this – you don’t need to figure out what there looks like to start. It’s all about that first brave step in an insightful series of next-best following steps that gets your group there faster than everybody else. That’s what market making looks like.

Status Quo is Death

The organizations with the best shot at transforming from hierarchies to rhizomes share a single epiphany: the only moment of ‘change’ that really matters, is the first one. A uniquely clarifying decision to challenge strategy as usual. A sobering recognition that status quo is death, slow or fast, but ultimately certain.

Yet, for many organizations this entails more risk than the hopeful return promises. The bet remains: our current thinking and direction have gotten us this far, let’s stay the course with incremental adjustments. Status quo, plus.

But our experience in every category in almost every market on the planet suggests that whistling past the graveyard is not a viable business strategy.

Strategy as Creative Act

We assembled our global team of strategic domain leaders to offer an alternative path to those organizations interested in, at the very least, asking themselves a single question: would we do things differently armed with fresher insights?

It’s not about bravery, or risk management, or change culture, or even just the frisson of kicking the stalls of status quo. It’s about a simple act of creation. Value creation from a different strategic direction and its potentially rhizomatic expression. A strategy – big, small or medium-sized – grounded in the startling power of fresh insight.

If you’re intrigued to learn how we might do this together, please keep reading here.

Or, if you’re ready for a chat, we invite you to reach out here briefing@freeradicals.marketing