Strands of Genius: How You Weigh Risks, Brand is a Strategy, Immunology is Complex
plus: our thoughts on chaos and consequences
WRITING FROM | Ashland City, TN
WORKING ON | New client enquiries, onboarding new consulting client, SoSG module
LOOKING AHEAD
Aug 17-21: Nashville, TN
Aug 21-28: Beersheba Springs, TN
:: WHAT’S NEW & WEEKLY GRATITUDE ::
We bounced through Ashland City to intersect with one of Faris’ oldest friends, who was on a cross country trip [he’s an immigrant too, who is now emigrating elsewhere], and are passing though Nashville to do some life admin, before we head back to the mountains for a week or so. Then - who knows?! We’re scheming about a couple places, but making decisions is hard, y’all!
After the heatwave, come the storms. And so it goes. It can feel like the world trying to clear the atmosphere, literally and metaphorically, but in actuality the heat causes the storms. Everything has trade offs, nothing happens without consequences in a closed system, there are always reactions but they don’t always seem equal or opposite. When that happens, it suggests chaos. More on that in our thoughts below.
This week, we’re especially thankful for:
Changes of scene, Neil&Chelsea, Mel&Chelle, Chuck Klosterman’s HYPERtheticals, discussing art with artists, Nathan For You.
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:: THE LINKS ::
BRAND IS A STRATEGY
Faris’ column this month chews on the idea of brand strategy, since research from Gartner suggests it’s the CMO’s top priority this year. Why that might be depends to a large extent on what they, and we, think brand strategy is. Faris tracks the emergence and evolution of the discipline, cautioning practitioners and clients to consider closely what the term means to different people, and different budgets. (Warc)
HOW DO YOU PROCESS RISK?
Living through a pandemic, especially in the USA for lots of annoying reasons, is especially fraught with extremely personal and complex risk decisions. However, “risk decision-making isn’t conscious, and it’s not what we would define as rational in the sense of evidence-based” but rather a grab bag of cognitive heuristics and biases, which are in turn a function of your life experience and the environment you grew up in. The hope here is that “knowing how and why people differ in their risk calculations can increase empathy for someone who has made a decision different from your own”. (Elemental Medium)
IMMUNOLOGY ISN’T INTUITIVE
As with any huge cultural event, the pandemic has driven up interest in itself and created a legion of armchair experts in epidemiology, with their own flawed and overly simplistic narratives. [We are lucky that Faris’ brother is an epidemiologist to help us correct ours]. What happens across the population has its analogue inside the operation of every person’s immune system, but that system is so mind boggling complex that armchair experts similarly tend to fall into the “Chaotic Doctor Trap” mentioned in our thoughts below. Hence the idiocy of anti-vaxxers and miracle cure promoting snake oil salesmen, especially ones that happen to be politicians on the side. One of the world’s best science writers here writes an excellent primer of this complex, “beautiful” system. (The Atlantic)
WHAT’S NEW @ THE SCHOOL OF STOLEN GENIUS
NEXT MONTHLY MODULE :: WEBINAR ON COLLABORATION
Our next live event will be Wednesday, August 26th at noon for Apprentices. We’ll share the recording online following for all our members.
INTEGRATIVE BRAND MODELS :: PDF & VIDEO
Featuring a downloadable PDF of the deck and the hour-long presentation with Q&A, you’ll learn about a variety of brand models, the evolution of brand strategy, and how this applies to marketers today. All members may access the bundle for free, alternatively you may also purchase the bundle as a one-off.
EXPERT INTERVIEW :: LAURA JB, CCO @ GREY
Our in depth interview with guest curator Laura JB, Chief Creative Officer at Grey, is now live for members, and includes thoughts on the power of creativity, the role of large agencies, ethics in advertising, and using creativity as your superpower (and how that led to tattoos designed by her son).
:: WHAT WE’RE THINKING ABOUT: CHAOTIC CONSEQUENCES ::
How do we weigh risk? How do we measure a decision? Or a strategy?
When actions have unequal and un-opposite reactions, you might well be in a chaotic system. A chaotic system is a network of interacting actors and factors characterized by non-linear responses - and we spend our lives in them.
Any intervention can and inevitably will spiral out of ‘control’, beyond the boundaries of intended consequence, because chaotic systems become unstable. The stock market, the economy, both weather and climate, traffic jams, pretty much anything that involves groups of people - all exhibit the properties of chaotic systems. This means they look deterministic in some ways, but tend towards unpredictability.
Chaotic systems have underlying patterns, including aperiodic feedback loops, closed systems, repetition and self organization — but they are extremely sensitive to tiny changes in the initial conditions that make them inherently unpredictable in the long term.
One important thing to keep in mind when marveling at the power of emergent systems (and their inherent stochastic nature of reality) is that things are more predictable in the short term than the long. Binaries are naive, we cannot know everything… but we know more than nothing.
For reason almost certainly do to with naive binary thinking, people seem to switch between these different responses to expertise and authority, especially when they involve predictions, or complex assessments of complex situations, which amount to the same thing.
We cannot ‘know’ the weather in ten years or in ten minutes, but the predictions about the next ten minutes will be much more accurate. Doctors are not always right, nor do they always agree (hence the famous ‘second opinion’) because medicine is so mind boggling complex. Systems of systems of systems interacting with other systems of systems of systems. However, that doesn’t mean we don’t know anything and abandoning all of modern medicine based on the humble acknowledgement from science that it is fallible is incredibly bad thinking and, of course, incredibly dangerous. On average, doctors will always be more right than not doctors, when diagnosing illness. Especially for common things they see everyday, but only happen occasionally to you. Experience is super useful, especially when integrating vast amounts of complex signals about a patient, from their appearance, behavior, speech, history, symptoms and test results, into a singular diagnosis.
We can’t know everything, ever, we should always be humble, and humbled, because of that. But that doesn’t mean we can all decide to believe whatever we want, without consequences. Just as we don’t know what the weather will be with any specificity in 2030, we don’t know if or how we will get sick then either. But, as with climate, we can change the odds, ongoing, from here on in.
We don’t know what the weather will be, but we do know that when there is heat, there is high pressure, and then, quite often, there are storms. We don’t know what might have or will infect us, when or how, but we do know some things about infections vectors and contexts and changing the odds of that happening through our own behavior. We cannot know if we will get sick in any way in the future, but we can change the odds in our favor. And so on.
Strategy is making decisions in competitive and chaotic contexts, in order to maximize the odds of achieving goals. However, counter intuitively, strategy also needs to be disassociated from outcomes.
“Rumelt points out in that ‘bad strategy’ occurs when “there is bad doctrine, when hard choices are avoided, and/or when leaders are unwilling or unable to define and explain the nature of the challenge”. Bad strategy mistakes goals, ambition, vision, values and effort for strategy. Note, he does not write that bad outcomes are result of bad strategy, though that might happen – and, indeed, it is more likely.”
There is no correct strategy and there is no way to prove that one had a better or worse outcome than a counter factual one. Thus Rumelt explain strategy as a hypothesis that is being tested and then changed based on the results. Like science. However, that doesn’t mean anything goes, because we do know somethings, even if we can’t reliably predict how they will work and interact in the chaos of the world.
In a way, this brings us back to the Trolley Problem we discussed a while ago. A consequentialist sees the intervention as necessary to save the larger number of people which they see as the inevitable consequence. A deontologist sees the action of killing someone as inherently bad, regardless consequences. A strategist knows they cannot know the consequences and so rather focus on making the best, most informed decisions possible with what can reasonable be known.
And because chaotic systems are so sensitive it initial conditions, it reminds us that a clear diagnosis, of the actor and the system, at the very outset, are crucial and underweighted components when considering how to achieve goals.
Knowing the consequences of anything in advance is impossible, but we can adjust our odds, and that begins with deep, and sometimes painful, introspection, for companies and for people.
:: AND NOW… MEDIA STUDIES 101 ::
If we can ever be of help to you, even outside of a formal engagement, please don’t hesitate to let us know.
rockON,
faris & rosie & ashley | your friends over at geniussteals.co
@faris is always tweeting
@rosieyakob hangs out on instagram
@ashley also writes for deaf, tattooed & employed
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It's called Genius Steals because we believe ideas are new combinations and that nothing can come from nothing. But copying is lazy. We believe the best way to innovate is to look at the best of that which came before and combine those elements into new solutions.
Co-Founders Faris & Rosie are award-winning strategists and creative directors, writers, consultants and public speakers who have been living on the road/runway since March 2013, working with companies all over the world. Our Director of Operations is nomadic like us, our accounting team is based out of Washington, our company is registered in Tennessee, and our collaborators are all over the world. Being nomadic allows us to go wherever clients need us to be, and to be inspired by the world in between.
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