The Power of Why

I’m buzzing from a) Doug McLennan’s FANTASTIC talk at our final Dynamic Adaptability session in Seattle  b) free in flight wireless Internet c)  Seattle coffee.

We’ll be posting Doug’s slides and the video of the session up here as soon as possible, but I wanted to share a few takeaways.  Doug spoke about the way that the Internet is changing how we communicate and consume culture, and what that means for cultural institutions. One of his key points was that technology enables us to more easily do things that we do anyway–communicate, connect, talk to one another, share things, make things. His main point was deceptively simple:  you need to know why you do what you do in order to know how best to do it, and what technology can help you.  Some other points:

• We’ve shifted from a mass culture model to a niche culture model. The mass culture model wants to find what is least offensive to the most people. In a niche culture model, the audience doesn’t have tolerance for the “mushy middle”, they want what they want…or they’ll get it somewhere else.
• Assessments of your audience by demographic characteristics are nice, but they still leave a lot of questions unanswered. Its not just who the audience is, but what they do, why and how. Ask them.
• Whereas content is becoming niche, infrastructure is moving toward open source.
• We are moving from the “attention economy,” where sellers have to compete for the attention of the potential buyer to the “intention economy,” where buyers claim their intent to buy and sellers create a relationship with them to get their business. Behaving like we’re in a mass market economy is a recipe for failure.
• There is plenty of content, don’t add to the noise unless you add something your consumers specifically value.
• Its all about creating a strong community around why you exist. Many in the arts are experiencing a “crisis of constituency” because they haven’t clearly defined the “why” in terms that matter to people.
• There is not one online strategy that will work for all generations.
• Rather than a producer of content, arts institutions should rethink themselves as a provider of infrastructure for the cultural experience to occur
• How to motivate people to do something once they visit you online? Motivate the desire for social capital (e.g. Guardian MP investigation).
• To get people engaged you need their attention, a reputation, and a community (eg. TED conference is now an online community of ideas as well as a network of advocates in the “real” world)

These are just notes, more later when I post up the video and slides.

Games to save the world

There has been a lot of pro and con talk in recent years about the amount of time (three billion hours a week!)  people are spending on video games.  Con side arguments include that excessive gaming leads to distraction or disassociation (both challenged by recent scientific studies) and that time playing games is diverted from more productive “real-world” activities. In this TED talk game designer Jane McGonigal convincingly argues the other side:  that multi-player games actually cultivate skills and attitudes that are critical for solving complex real world problems, and that their potential is currently WAY under-exploited.  Gamers exhibit:

• A desire to act immediately to solve problems combined with the belief that they will succeed
• The ability to weave a tight social fabric and work with large communities towards a common goal
• A willingness to work tirelessly until the goal is accomplished
• A desire to accomplish awe-inspiring missions

She calls gamers “a virtually unprecedented human resource”–the only problem is that their attention is focused on virtual worlds.  I love that McGonigal’s idea is based around inspiring people to solve hard problems for fun and meaning, rather than terrifying them about what will happen to them if they don’t (triggering escapism and denial).

McGonigal has made it her life’s work at the Institute for the Future to redirect gamer energy toward solving real-world problems. One of these games, Superstruct, poses several scenarios of doom that will lead to the end of the human race and pulls together the energy of thousands of players (10883 currently) to come up with innovative ways to adapt and overcome.  Several scenarios specifically explore the role of museums in various futures, the results of which the Center for the Future of Museums used to generate the background material for the visioning session Marcy attended.

I can see a game framework being really fruitful for the cultural sector, which is often paralyzed by the high stakes problems it currently faces. Many leaders of cultural institutions and foundations fear investing in solutions that don’t work and risking embarrassing failure. But games force you to take risks and expect you to fail many times before you succeed–that’s why you have multiple lives.  The most successful companies know that failure is the price of innovation. Pixar, with nine blockbusters under its belt, makes failure an explicit company policy and seeks to “screw up as fast as possible.” What could we come up with for ideas if we developed a problem-solving approach that integrated failure as a critical step?

I have yet to play around thoroughly with the museum scenarios from Superstruct. If you do, please let us know what you think.

OMG WTF Haiti…texting for a cause

The Stanford Social Innovation Review has an article this month about donations via mobile phone.  The $32.5 million raised by the Red Cross for the Haiti earthquake through text donations revealed the potential of this tool, and piqued the attention of fundraisers everywhere who were skeptical about the potential of text donations.  Some worry that this will result in smaller donations (text donations are limited to $10) and that people will give in response to urgent appeals, but not for long-term operational needs. And of course, there are the overhead costs to organizations for using the service.

I think these are kinks that will be worked out as this fundraising method becomes more mainstream, which it will. The more important point is that this money was raised through $5 and $10 donations, and much of it from 18-29 year olds, a population that does not typically give in large amounts anyway.  Text donations shows that the impulse buying  mentality can be mobilized for social good, as well as personal consumption.  In fact, research on why people give suggests that making a spur of the moment donation to a global crisis might give us the same satisfaction as that impulse buy at the checkout counter. So let’s stop letting the corporations have all the fun and mobilize psychology and technology for good.

Click here for just released research by Helicon and Wolf Brown on donor motivations.

Continuing on the “21st century is the new 16th Century” theme…

Clay Shirky compares the havoc wreaked by the invention of the printing press to what is happening now as a result of new technology and the Internet. He points out that the intermediate time between old and new (what anthropologists call “liminal”) was chaotic, as old institutions didn’t make sense anymore but new things were not quite trustworthy enough. His example is journalism, but it could just as easily be the arts. He says:

When someone demands to know how we are going to replace newspapers, they are really demanding to be told that we are not living through a revolution. They are demanding to be told that old systems won’t break before new systems are in place… Society doesn’t need newspapers. What we need is journalism…. When we shift our attention from ’save newspapers’ to ’save society’, the imperative changes from ‘preserve the current institutions’ to ‘do whatever works.’