Cecilia Weckström

Someone asked me a while ago about how we can control the LEGO brand given that it has such a vibrant community? I tried not to laugh, because the person had a very straight look on their face and besides, laughing would be rude – it is actually a serious question that many brands battle with. My spontaneous desire to laugh was not one bourne out of arrogance or the sense that I know better, it is more to do with the word ‘control’.

Controlling is by nature hard. If you control things too much, you stifle creativity, participation, serendipity – things happening that you couldn’t have imagined. Simultaneously the word ‘control’ is in vogue. We have to control banks from lending to people who can’t pay back, bankers from gambling on the stock market, planes from taking off lest some ash might bring them down, youth drinking too much, not excercising enough.. the list goes on and on. In fact, sometimes the very act of growing up to me feels like we internalise the lie that we can actually completely control things around us – our careers, relationships, earnings and we are shocked when events prove us wrong.

Similarly with brands. They are composed by a trademark that we can control to some extent. Lawyers make a good killing doing just that. The other bit is what we can’t – it is what people emotionally associate with a brand and that’s what brings brands to life – the hearts and minds of those who love you for what you are and stand for. In the olden days it was possible to influence this with advertising. The fancier and more compelling campaign, the better. Somehow the world has changed.

We trust each other more than we trust companies. What a community does with the products associated with a brand is more authentic than what the company behind it tells us we should do. We like people who walk the talk. Better still we like them if they are like us. So control? The horse has already bolted as some would say. Below is a great visual of the ‘conversation prism’. This shows the diversity of platform where conversations about a brand can take place. It is bewildering in its complexity. To try to control it would be futile. The best we can do is to participate as equals in the conversation if we are invited. Brands, just like community members are ultimately trust agents – and you only become one if you repeatedly prove that you are an individual who is deserving of others’ time as demonstrated through actions and words. Control? Forget it.

The Conversation Prism by Brian Solis and Jesse Thomas

What does Google’s Pagerank, the scientific citation index and the taxonomy of plants, animals and insects have in common with LEGO bricks? They are all systems. A post over at the MIT Technology review examines the history of the Pagerank algorithm and shows that in fact, this thinking had been around for quite a while until it was so successfully exploited by Larry Page and Sergei Brin of Google. They of course have a strong bond with LEGO bricks too, Larry claiming that the bricks taught him to be a scientist – to think digitally, in systems, networks and to iterate. Quoting from the article:

The PageRank algorithm is a key part of Google’s method of ranking web pages in search results. It uses the network of links between web pages to determine their value and, famously, judges a page to be important if it is linked to by other important pages.

One crucial feature of this idea is that it requires an iterative approach to constantly re-evaluate the value of a page as the importance of others varies. Iterative ranking algorithms have since become an important part of network theory.

Increasingly, this way of understanding the world – not as a set of static known constructs, but a series of relationships which can either combine and influence one another or not, is at the heart of some of the biggest innovation in the late 20th and early 21st century.

The world is not static, our knowledge or even perceptions of the world are not static – instead we need to understand systems, whether it be eco-systems in nature or increasingly, eco-systems of value creation that spell the future of business models, of enterprise and of innovation.

To be able to experiment with such abstract concepts, while simultaneously engaged hands-on is an invaluable gift to give a child, or indeed anyone, because we learn by experience and we store our learning in terms of experiences of what worked and what didn’t work.

Systems thinking is complex, it’s potentially vast in scope and also abstract in nature so being able to understand relationships by manipulating bricks, which have endless opportunities to be combined with other bricks, yet follow a distinct, intelligible system, whereby you don’t need to know every brick by heart to know how to combine it with another one. You learn that by understanding the system and you understand the potential of a new brick by understanding the system. That is the power of LEGO bricks, but also the kind of thinking we need to master in more and more domains as globalisation and digitisation blaze the trail of connecting the world through supply and demand, finance, security, communication and environmental responsibility.

Was browsing latest tweets and came across this gem from Hugh at Gapinvoid, simply can’t wait for his next book. Chapter 2 is a stroke of genius  in that it puts words around this feeling that drives me, and I’m sure not only me, but creatives the world over – and makes us vacillate between utter highs and deep lows, when we feel things are coming together and life at last has a purpose, only to be thrown into the doldrums the next moment when all the hard work seems in vain.

The Hun­ger to do something crea­tive.

The Hun­ger to do something ama­zing.

The Hun­ger to change the world.

The Hun­ger to make a dif­fe­rence.

The Hun­ger to enjoy one’s work.

The Hun­ger to be able to look back and say, Yeah, cool, I did that.

The Hun­ger to make the most of this utterly brief blip of time Crea­tion has given us.

The Hun­ger to dream the good dreams.

The Hun­ger to have ama­zing peo­ple in our lives.

The Hun­ger to have the synap­ses con­ti­nually fired up on over­drive.

The Hun­ger to expe­rience beauty.

The Hun­ger to tell the truth.

The Hun­ger to be part of something big­ger than your­self.

The Hun­ger to have good sto­ries to tell.

The Hun­ger to stay the course, des­pite of the odds.

The Hun­ger to feel pas­sion.

The Hun­ger to know and express Love.

The Hun­ger to know and express Joy.

The Hun­ger to chan­nel The Divine.

The Hun­ger to actually feel alive.

The Hun­ger will give you everything. And it will take from you, everything. It will cost you your life, and there’s not a damn thing you can do about it.

But kno­wing this, of course, is what ulti­ma­tely sets you free.

I apologize in advance to Hugh for quoting this in its entirety – it’s simply so well written, like a poem – that cutting it off in the middle would be a travesty to the meaning and significance it conveys.

It also made me think of the conflict I have felt part of myself since more or less forever, the two worlds that are at times hard to reconcile and when opportunities arise to do it, the pleasure is veritable. At the heart of is the curious combination of an artist and sculptor whose driving passion is to change the world, remind us of the meaning and beauty (my dad) and the ballet dancer – turned entrepreneur, who built up the business around my dad’s jewellery design (my mum). A curious combination of extremes in one sense and the pursuit of beauty, purpose and meaning on the other and the background to my own relentless pursuit of growth through play, learning, creativity and innovation. All driven by the Hunger that arises from the conflict between those two worlds.

On the plane back from Billund on Wednesday night I was browsing the Harvard Business Review and came across an excellent article by Alex Pentland, from the MIT Media Lab, who has figured out how to measure the power of charisma. The finding is that apparently it is not what you say, it is how you say it. According to Pentland it is possible to predict which executives will win a business competition solely on the basis of the social signals they send.

Apparently more successful people are more energetic. They talk more, but they also listen more. They spend more face-to-face time with others and pick up cues from them, draw people out, and get them to be more outgoing. According to Pentland, it is not just what they project that makes them charismatic; it’s what they elicit. The more of these energetic, positive people you put on a team, the better the team’s performance. More details in his book Honest Signals (MIT Press 2008).

Anoher piece of interesting writing I came across just now. A debate is going on over at Clay Shirky’s blog about the fact that women are rubbish at promoting themselves like men normally do. We hate making self-aggrandising comments, or telling people we are brilliant – instead we hope others will recommend our work rather than promoting it ourselves. This apparently, is one reason why we women are less successful in business.

Reading the blog post, I cannot help but agree. Bragging about myself makes me cringe, it sounds wrong and somehow as I’m pretty energetic as it is, makes me feel entirely fake and horrible. Coming from my native Finland the idea of this kind of bull**** just makes me cringe. Surely Pentland’s research proves that in actual fact we can be successful and not have to be egos on sticks?

Is there a sound to the moment when you get the best ideas? Is it the proverbial ‘PING’, which to me sounds like a microwave oven just finished it’s defrosting cycle..so maybe something else?? Perhaps it is the sound of two bricks clicking together? This just made me smile so have to share it with you

Oh.. it’s so exciting, but the wait is painstaking! Seeing the game grow before my very eyes through all the great hard work by fans and folks at LEGO alike –  it’s time to start counting down the days until this baby launches to the world! In the meantime – have a look at this brand new trailer of the game – should be something to wet your appetite!

Tired of endless lists of the biggest trends in this and that? Me too – then I saw this, which is not a list, but a great animation of the biggest things that happened with social media last year and it made me laugh -  so here it is: enjoy!

After many attempts at rationalising my life and thus my blogging exploits- I have finally managed to merge the blog posts from my other blog Digitaldigressions.net into this one.

Hopefully simplicity will reign and convergence provide the necessary kick for me to post more often. Am experimenting with an Iphone app just now that may make even the computer redundant in my online blogging life.

Wonderful things are afoot, exciting developments at work – these days I’m heading up a new area where consumer insight and experience design are joined together, so not only can we identify and co-create new LEGO experiences in partnership with LEGO fans around the world, but better still – make sure we follow up on all those experiences via the Net Promoter Score and other research and dialogue to ensure we deliver the promise consistently and continuously to the standard our fans expect. So a fantastic team and very exciting remit we have, and which means that I’m traveling even more than usual.

Blogging has fallen a little to the wayside as a result and in a way it is a shame. I used to feel very bad about it actually, until I wrapped my head around Twitter. I love the fact that you can tweet while on the move – solves all sorts of issues for me as I’m forever running out of battery power on the laptop, or struggling to get a reliable wireless signal that I don’t have to enter my credit card details to use. Twitter is the ultimate compromise – on the one hand it is extremely flexible in that you can tweet from anywhere, at the same time it is extremely constrained in that you only have 140 or so characters. And with tools like tinyurl etc you can still post links if you don’t whittle on about it.

So I guess best way to keep track of me these days is through twitter – and yes, I will make an effort to post a blog entry every once in a while, but granted – it could be more often, so bear with me.

Some weeks ago I had the pleasure of attending the Grid09 conference organised by Bonnier, the Swedish media empire. This event brought together authors, journalists, publishers, tv-people – you name it, from near and far to think about the big ideas for the future. A superbly inspiring bunch of speakers, of whom I was privileged to be one of and tons of interesting topics – my only regret was that I wish I could have stayed for longer. Fortunately the expert producers of the event, well versed with technology – have managed to capture the presentations and make them available online for all to see!

Go to www.bonnier.com/gridmeeting to see the presentations – I particularly recommend the one from Steven Berlin Johnson on the ecosystems of news, which is a nice preamble to my own talk about eco-systems involving users – and to not forget what is really important in life: meet Abraham Verghese and his stories of life and death. A truly memorable event – well done to Stefan Mehr and co for putting it all together!