Free the love

In 2014 Virgin Airlines launched a public campaign to win access to Dallas Airport, challenging the stranglehold of a competitor airline. The ‘Free Love Field’ public petition was a strong example of a company leveraging grassroots mechanisms to destabilise monopoly, while at the same time heralding consumer benefit and healthy competition.

Without a doubt, Virgin is an airline seeking to build infrastructure and reach through a power play for market share, but its authentic alignment of customer demand, high-quality product, economic drivers, and overall transparency of commercial objectives attribute to its ongoing success.

Similarly, companies such as Uber, Airbnb, Etsy and Kickstarter leverage grassroots mechanisms and co-creation to mobilise the power of their ecosystems, and to grow. Unashamedly for-profit, the success of these brands is largely due to their empathy as they meet public demand for individualisation and communication by cleverly modelling ‘new power’ values.

As I’ve touched on in chapters 1 and 7, in my 20 years’ experience working alongside organisations to help them develop strong culture and more authentic connection with stakeholders I’ve discovered a powerful correlation between narcissism, empathy and brands.

At their peril, brands that display narcissistic behaviour by persisting to push messages into the consumer ether without context, and with greater emphasis on selling, will never experience the benefit of innovating with customers and community. Instead they need to display empathy and connect more deeply with consumers and society.

As said in chapter 1, people don’t care how much data or insight you have about their behaviour, but they become ardent when a brand goes out of its way to walk a mile in their shoes. Empathy inspires identification and alliance with a brand and, ultimately, determines whether it fails or thrives.

Celebrate failure

As evidence of what the future holds, brands that build around empathising customer feeling will become beacons of inspiration in the truest sense. While data and technology play a crucial role, people don’t love brands because of data and scripted engagement; rather, they love the brand’s commitment to co-designing experiences and values.

Abandoning fixed format thinking and outmoded models for change and innovation in place of a continuously iterative system is an essential prerequisite to survival — and this system must celebrate failure in equal measure to how it celebrates success. In other words, failure has to be an accepted element of culture in order to free up people to take risks and release their innate innovation potential. This acceptance starts by embracing mess, complexity and variation.

The isolation that is prevalent in a siloed culture is often the single biggest threat to its evolution, with some of the most extraordinary innovations never seeing light of day. This is typically due to hierarchy and lack of connectivity, where vital transformational assets and information are held by a small group of individuals. In a potent conversation with a senior director of one of Australia’s largest banks, I was told, ‘Experimentation and exploration is not the challenge — it is sharing innovation across our organisation so that all stakeholders can benefit.’

Again, this challenge reinforces the need for radical transparency and systems that enable contribution and interdependence to flourish. Hence, as business leaders venture beyond what is familiar and safe and learn to innovate within their own paradox of protecting intellectual assets and their bottom line, their relationship with what they perceive as chaos and loss of control is transformed from ‘threat of existence’ and ‘loss of power’ to that of endless possibility.

The ‘magic 4’ of innovation

As you let go of control and move towards more innovative relationships and co-creation, keep these ‘magic 4’ points in mind:

1. Failure is inevitable, so don’t hide it: Celebrating failure in equal measure to your successes drives a culture of transparency and helps foster openness. Success is about speed and innovation. You win some, you lose some, and that’s all part of the game.
2. Ideas can come from anybody (and anywhere): A contributing factor of institutional demise is the command-and-control nature of change. With more and more businesses embracing the concept that ideas can come from anywhere, an egalitarian view of ideation ensures power is dispersed and that no one person decides on what is best. By implementing ‘feedback loops’ to capture ideas and help ‘outside-in’ innovation flourish, an organisation can gain critical insight into the product and service innovations that actually matter to customers and stakeholders.
3. Don’t be afraid to retest and mix things up: They say ‘curiosity killed the cat’ but, in this instance, it is likely to save it. Nurturing curiosity and embracing uncertainty are essential traits of innovation culture. Continuously mash up and mix ideas, then test, mix and test again. It isn’t mad science. Some of the most pioneering innovations are the result of happy accidents.
4. Iteration is inherent in innovation: Nothing is set in stone. Innovation is an ongoing cycle of iteration and optimisation. In order to craft design strategies that result in truly compelling products, and customer experiences that address real human needs, organisations must retire traditional innovation methods. Test/fail/learn/adapt. Repeat.