Agile Business Change Blog Thoughts on Agile Strategic Business Change and Agile Delivery

Clay Shirky launched his new book “Cognitive Surplus” at the LSE yesterday evening. The “Cognitive Surplus” comes from a combination of the increase in free time since the mid 1900s and the recently developed medium for coordinated action.

This follows “Here Comes Everybody: How Change Happens when People Come Together” which is one of the seminal texts for the impact of social media on society.

As well as presenting some excellent material from his book, I found him a very engaging speaker. His main theme (amongst a fair few) was that digital communications and social media is providing opportunities for previously unmet social/psychological needs. So, it has provided opportunities for example, to counter attacks on Indian women considered by right-wing activists to be behaving inappropriately.

He suggested categories of opportunities:

• Communal - there are numerous examples of communities of people with common interests sharing photos, jokes, etc.
• Public, such as Wikipedia.
• Civic - where there could be significant impact on our culture, such as political opposition and moves to much more openness in medical records.

Among his examples, conclusions and suggestions were:

• It has taken 100 million hours of effort so far to create Wikipedia. This may seem large, but the US population consumes more hours of TV commercials than this in a weekend.
• The power of brands will decline significantly.
• Marketing and communications professionals need to switch from their current approach of either being in broadcast mode (advertising) or receiving mode (research), to a far more conversational approach.
• In the third world, mobile is far more important than PCs, so incorporating SMS into solutions needs serious consideration.