I have been trying to write something sensible on why it is difficult to start something new and gather enough people around us to make it stick. I have come close, but no cigar. Until I read Danah Boyd's latest blog here. It's been staring us in the face all the time. We create enthusiasm and interest, because what we deliver is a new experience and a new way to experience. It addresses something on an emotional level that has been bothering many people; how can I be valuable, how can I contribute?
We try to constantly move people out of there comfort zone; discuss what motivates them together with others with different backgrounds and viewpoints. By stimulating a discussion/conflict on a topic approached from each individual's different viewpoint, new insights are created. This is a very stimulating experience that you long remember as invigorating. Based on these new insights, people become creative and innovate. To support the latter we provide the means to do this in a structured way, and in a sense provide a comfort zone for realisation of their new idea. There is your added value!
What struck me in the article - the challenge we face - is that as soon as we gather a significant number of people around us, we start to think the same and slowly become homogenous and start preaching to the choir. We strife to become one when our strength lies in our diversity., and there goes our advantage. How about that for a contradiction! In order to keep sharp, we need to constantly meet and discuss with diverse and new groups of people. We need to constantly diversify! Our own private version of the red queen syndrome.
This is a serious dilemma. Why? Because it is very hard to sell something that needs to change in order to stay valuable. We need to address the short term financial value of what we do in order to sell, but since the added value is based on human, creative and social values as a catalyst for change and creating financial value; we are having difficulty in providing a stable product and a consistent market approach.
Mathijs' piece on pennies from heaven, provides the basis for our grounding. I am looking forward to constantly moving us out of our own comfort zone.
1 comment:
Indeed, learning how to celebrate diversity is key and difficult. Because it lies in our nature to look for the overlap and form a group.
Usually we look for overlap in the most visible aspects of our lives. Lives in the same neighbourhood, same lifestyle, enjoys same entertainment etc. Maybe we can keep the diversity if we pin that overlap down somewhere else. We need that overlap or otherwise we have no relationships.
Can the overlap be in more abstract spaces like our core values (and from that start recognizing our different ways of expressing them), or even in something more abstract like the shared curiousity about eachothers core values (and from that start recognizing our different core values).
In short, where to put the point of stability, and are we able to put it outside the scope of where we want to leverage our diversity.
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