William Gibson

Where trajectories of fashion, business, government and technology will someday intersect, William Gibson is already there, reporting back in mindbending detail.  His novels are, for me anyway, like books of code, densely-clued mysteries about the near future, that challenge a present-day intelligence to unravel them.  Here is one clue that gets dropped over and over again in Gibson’s newest novel, Zero History:

In the future, improvisation is a must-do.

Page 135:  “Doing it, as a pickpocket had once advised him, as if it were not only the expected but the only thing to do.”  The improvisation:  When you invest in your scene, the scene makes choices for you.  ‘Doing what’s expected’ is someone else’s script for you, it’s a voice in your head that’s not even your own.  ‘Doing the only thing to do’ is the feeling that you are in tune with everyone and everything around you.  It is acting on the clarity of one’s intuition instead of  obeying the voices stored in the RAM of one’s rational mind.  Just don’t be using your new-found powers to pick pockets.  Not all improvisation is put to work for the good of the team.  Beware the bad game!

Page 171:  “THE ORDER FLOW” (Chapter title.)  Gibson’s characters talk about “the inability to aggregate the order flow”—the sum of everything being bought and sold around the world at any given moment in time—as being the dynamic that keeps markets alive.  “Stability’s the beginning of the end,” says the character of Milgrim, a high-level intuitive, quoting an even more intuitive base jumper named Garreth.  “We only walk by continually beginning to fall forward.”  The improvisation:  Always fall forward, never stand still.  Turn fails immediately into positives.  Embrace flow.  Stasis—a static state—is the enemy.  Harness chaos with structure.  Subvert structure with flow.

Page 202:  Garreth talking about whether a phone call that’s crucial to their fates will happen or not:  “Either way, we’ve moved it forward.”  The improvisation:  ‘Something happening’ and ’something not happening’ are both opportunities to move your scene forward.  Don’t worry about what will or won’t happen, do something with whatever happens.

Page 225:  “You’re just doing this to see what happens,” says Milgrim.  The improvisation:  Do something and see what happens.

Page 234:  “…some kind of London PR hive-mind thing,” says a character named Heidi, a biker chick who uses taser-tipped darts as her weapon of choice.  “Wires are hot but there’s no actual signal.  Kind of subsonic buzz.”  The improvisation:  This is a description of the group mind.  Nothing perceptible is communicated.  What the group needs to know is simply, without ever being consciously transmitted, already there, waiting to be shared.

Page 319:  “Follow the accident.  Fear the set plan,”  says Garreth.  “I thought you loved plans,” says Heidi.  “Love planning.  That’s different.  But the right bit of improv makes the piece.”  The improvisation:  Think of your process as a series of scenes, in Gibson’s lingo, ‘pieces.’  Preparation is more important than planning.  Planning goes out the window in the first few beats of your scene, but preparation will be there for you throughout.

Zero History also has juicy insights into the future of marketing and brand strategy, which I’ll post separately.

Now go do something to see what happens.

Heather Champ and her team at Flickr improvise for a living. A big part of their job, according to the article is deciding whether certain photos belong in Flickr or not. The guidelines are not etched in stone. In fact, aside from a few Flickresque sayings like ‘Don’t forget the children,’ guidelines hardly exist at all. Rulings by Champ and her team arise more from the dialogue they have about an issue than from strict black-and-white policies. Policies are riffs on a theme; the rules of the game can change from scene to scene.

This is a monster distinction between business processes of the Industrial Age, and those suited to business in the Networked World.

Industrial age organizations wrote strict policies designed to codify employee behavior, limit the company’s liability from lawsuits, and ensure fair play between management and labor and between the company and its customers. The policies were written by lawyers to cover every conceivable scenario. When anomalies occurred, policies were amended or new policies written by those same lawyers. Conflicts with policy required interpretation by the lawyers. In other words, when it came to policy you couldn’t make a new move without an opinion from a lawyer.

Rigid policies worked for rigid organizations, but the fluid organizations of the Networked World like Flickr, which hosts billions of images posted by millions of users, call for more fluid processes. Context must be taken into account. Entrepreneurial employees have to make quick and frequent decisions outside the bottleneck and without the added overhead of Legal. This means acting within themed concepts instead of abiding by literal rules. This means improvisation.

“Don’t be creepy,” goes one of Flickr’s guiding concepts. ”You know the guy. Don’t be that guy.”

For some networked organizations, technical infrastructure—what the technology itself will or won’t allow—has become a new kind of policy for rewarding conformity and punishing edge behaviors. Confining interactions to ‘what the software allows’ is just as bad if not worse than ye olde employee handbook. It’s a kind of control that can hinder the continual innovation called for by a networked brand.

The valuable interactions, those that bring new life and wealth to your brand, are human ones. And because they are human ones, they are unpredictable. The improviser welcomes the unpredictable situation as an opportunity to further define reality. An improviser like Champ understands that every interaction holds the potential for transformation. To interact mechanically or by rote is to disregard this potential.

A sense of ‘Flickr, performing’ guides Champ and her team as they discuss and then take action on barrages of unpredictables like barterers in Brazil, vengeful boyfriends from the Bronx and R-rated artists from Belgrade.

“Imprecision is an art here,” writes Colin of Flickr. (An improviser sees it another way: Art resolves imprecision.) Colin writes of the artfulness required for Champ and her team to impose a sense of order on what could otherwise be chaotic, polarized communities.

“I can’t think of any successful online community where the nice, quiet, reasonable voices defeat the loud, angry ones on their own,” Champ says. “The job always comes down to finding the fulcrum in the teeter-totter, the balance that benefits both the individual and the community.”

In other words, not only does Champ’s job call for improvisation, it calls on her and her team to guide and ‘coach’ the ongoing improvisation by the Flickr community.

As I read the article on SFGate, I realized that I know Heather Champ. Her husband, Derek Powazek, founded the pioneering digital storytelling site, Fray in the late 1990s, and he and Heather went on to co-found JPG Magazine. They are among the savviest community builders I’ve met in the young history of the internet. I think the best thing about Heather and Derek is how their work is an expression of what and whom they love, especially each other. Out on the turbulent edge where innovators, explorers and artists play, love is the constant. If you act on love, love will act on you. And that is all the music a human being needs to dance with her destiny.