The 9 block grid is Jack Welch’s famous method for evaluating staff.  There are two criteria : Potential and Performance.  Those who excel at both are in the top right hand corner.  Those who fail at both are in the bottom left hand.  If you’re one of the three best blocks then you will be prepared for greater things and new roles.  If you’re in the bottom three then you’re on your way to intense training, or you’re on your way out the door.

It’s a widespread and revered way of assessing staff. 

I’m uncomfortable with it.

One reason that I have been long uncomfortable with it is that it’s a natural and common tendency to rate people who are like you.  It is a rare boss that promotes people who are really different from him.  (Rare but not unknown, of course).  We all have some narcissistic leanings, perhaps more so in our trade.  We naturally tend to reward and admire people that remind us a little bit of ourselves and this can lead to a lack of diversity in the workplace, which can hamper change and growth.  In “Weird ideas that work” Robert Sutton advocates hiring and promoting people you don’t like.  For obvious reason this remains an experimental activity for most organisations. 

I now have a second reason to be wary of the 9 block system.  It is to do with chickens, and it is the basis of an interesting experiment in animal breeding by William Muir of Purdue University, recorded by David Sloan Wilson.  Muir bred chickens, with the objective of improving egg laying, in two ways.  The first involved selecting the most productive hens to breed from.  The second involved selecting the most productive cages of hens and breeding from those.  The results were surprising.  The first method actually caused egg production to decline after a few generations, even though the best egg layers were selected.  The second resulted in 160% improvement in egg laying, despite the individuals within the teams of hens not all being that productive.

Now clearly employees aren’t laying eggs.  But if we want teams of people who can work well together and partner with clients and with media owners and content creators to produce brilliant work then we must question whether the 9 block system is the best way to select our future stars.

Recent trailers for The Apprentice show the candidates organising corporate awaydays for “major clients”.  I’ve been to my fair share of awaydays over the years, several of which certainly had elements at least that might have been organised by people with similar levels of ambition and professionalism to those currently competing to go into business with Lord S. 

I still remember my first away day of course (don’t you always?).  It was in fact an away weekend where the participants were put into teams to compete in a role reversal contest.  We had a superb team leader, who did absolutely no work at all, but broke up fights amongst the very opinionated team members.  He also bonded us from the start.  The teams were announced at dinner on the opening evening.  Dave was announced as team leader, and then the names of the rest of us were read out.  None of us knew each other, but Dave went round, found us all, and tied a blue napkin round our arms. “We’re the Blue team,” he told us, “And we’re going to win.”

Which we did, but only after breaking the rules.

The role reversal in question was for us media chaps and suits to be creatives for the weekend.  The brief, was for the fictional (but surely much needed) Sausage Marketing Board*.  We duly set about coming up with a strategy and then executing it for the pitch.  We were working through the night, then, suddenly the team leader, Dave, was called to a meeting with all the other team leaders and given an important message.  He was told that a story had just broken, the night before the pitch, that sausages had been proven to contain poisonous substances by a research lab in the US.  The idea was to throw the teams into confusion and see how professionally they would handle the news on meeting the client with little time to prepare.

My team were furious at the news.  We felt pretty unanimously that the senior managers who were running the away weekend had in some way cheated us.  We were all ready with a smooth pitch and in our view mould breaking creative work, and then they’d thrown this spanner in the works.  Clearly all the teams had had the same spanner, but that didn’t lessen our anger.  This of course was exactly what the management team had anticipated;  they wanted to see how we’d handle it. 

This is how we handled it.  We created a split in the team.  One sub team carried on with the pitch preparation work exactly as we’d planned.  The second sub team spent all night creating replacement front pages of newspapers that we substituted in the morning for all the newspapers at the venue (a hotel just outside the M25).  The front page headlines : “Sausage research proved fake!” with follow up stories explaining that a renegade piece of research had caused momentary concern but luckily the fraudulent nature of it had been uncovered before it had time to do any damage.

We simply opened the pitch with the pleasing reassurance that the stories were fake, then we went on to tackle the brief.

We were the only team that reacted in this way.  We reckoned that if the people that briefed us could change reality, then we could change it back.

There was a massive split in the judges.  Most wanted us to win, we had after all nailed the best sausage advertising, but a couple of the judges wanted us disqualified.  Fortunately for us the people who admired our initiative outnumbered the more disciplinarian judges.  This was after all only advertising. 

So my first, most resonant, lesson from an awayday.  Break the rules. 

*Sausage Marketing Board : Yes I know there is a FB page, of course there is.

One cold dark night, in the closing years of the last century, I and a few brave colleagues (including Matt Mee, then an outdoor expert, now our Global CSO) took an unconventional approach to the marketing of the Converse All Star.  We projected the advertising,  guerrilla style, on to the exterior walls of major indie clubs across London.  It was a first, it was a great talking point, and it delivered good sales on a tiny budget.  We also had to switch venues quite quickly when the owner of the Forum came out and told us off – someone having neglected to obtain permission for the show.

I see that Kanye West has at last followed our lead.  The debut of his new single was on the walls of city buildings worldwide.  And it was announced on Twitter.  Where Kanye has roughly nine and a half million followers.  The single tweet received nineteen thousand plus retweets, and it was one of these that I picked up, although I will admit to missing the premiere at Stables Market Camden, less than a mile from our All Star projection all those years ago.  (Kanye’s projection also ran at other venues in London including Royal Opera House, on Brick Lane, in China Town, as well as in Paris, Berlin and of course all over the US).

To quote one of my colleagues, an expert in entertainment comms, “the Twitter reaction has been phenomenal”.

A successful example of the Artist’s, or indeed the Brand’s voice as the main communication channel.  The idea that we used in a small way for Converse is now a real actionable and accountable communication route for Kanye to enlist his fans as advocates and use them as a media channel.

Here’s another example from singer Demi Lovato.

On May 6, 2013, Lovato asked her Twitter followers to “unlock” the entire album by putting song titles in hashtags.   A special website lovaticsspeeduptime.com was launched, displaying all the songs next to a clock that would turn as tweets would be sent. Once a song became a trending topic, its YouTube video was made available on VEVO. All the songs were unlocked within a couple of hours.

Once again the brand speaks directly to its audience. In fact, the audience and the brand couldn’t be closer in these two cases. 

The point isn’t that Kanye and Demi’ s marketing campaigns got them “earned” or “shared” media. The point is that they were absolutely honest and open with their audiences about what they wanted from them and why.

Kanye invites everyone to his premiere.  Demi asks fans to promote her songs.  The objectives of the campaigns are completely transparent to the audience. As are the benefits of getting involved.

No subtlety, it’s all out in the open -  and it has amazing impact..

Britain’s Eurovision dreams have been dashed again.  No great surprise that Bonnie’s song came 19th out of 26.  That won’t have caused a total eclipse of the national heart.

What is a surprise is that academic research from a noted music college has conclusively proved that this is a perfectly fair and just result.  Denmark triumphed on merit alone.  European politics had no part in it. According to this recent research, there is no truth at all in the idea (widely believed over here) that the voting essentially involves friendly countries doing each other favours, while countries who may have thrown their military or diplomatic weight around in the past get treated less generously.

Are you convinced ?  Or are you betting it’s a music college based in Scandinavia?  Are you thinking that it’s probably the kind of so-called research that Michael Gove got slated for last week ?

In the interests of fair play I should point out that another piece of research came out the same week offering a very different explanation.  This survey of former Eurovision officials suggests that the UK is indeed unfairly treated due to long-standing grudges and historic discord -  and achieves well below the level of success it deserves on purely musical merits.  

Are you feeling more trusting of this source ?

If you’re any kind of patriot, you should be. 

I’ll come clean. None of that research exists. I just wanted to carry out a small experiment in the phenomenon of “confirmation bias”.

Confirmation bias was named by Peter Wason, a cognitive psychologist in 1960. .  It describes the tendency to seek out and interpret evidence in ways that confirm what you already think.  Author Jonathan Haidt describes this in his latest book “The Righteous Mind“. 

He says “Psychologists now have file cabinets full of findings on “motivated reasoning” showing the many tricks people use to reach the conclusions they want to reach.  When subjects are told that an intelligence test gave them a low score, they choose to read articles criticising the validity of IQ tests”.  Haidt points out that “now that we all have access to search engines on our cell phones, we can call up a team of supportive scientists for almost any conclusion 24 hours a day. Whatever you want to believe…. just Google your belief.. and Google will guide you to the study that’s right for you.”

Haidt is making a big point here.  Search and personalised search both encourage and reinforce confirmation bias.  The better the Search engine knows you, the more likely you are to find the answer you most like to hear.  Facebook Search and Twitter Search will surely make this even stronger, as you’ll get answers from those you care about and admire. 

Gradually we can expect people to shut their eyes and ears and reasoning even further to ideas and indeed facts that don’t suit what they don’t want to believe. 

There are all kinds of ways in which this matters.  Major political and spiritual conflicts are not going to be helped by less open mindedness. 

There is also I think a major irony in this for digital media in general.  One of the ways confirmation bias works in our industry is that traditional media tend to come out more strongly than digital media time and again from traditional industry research.  We’re used to seeing traditional channels deliver good reach and returns.  We are not used to seeing this from less traditional channels and so many people don’t expect to see it.  This should be no great surprise as without the evidence, brands are nervous about spending large sums on unproved media channels.  Some speculate that the tests that are carried out may not have the weight of spend that’s required to make them a success.  Of course, as well, traditional media research was designed to measure traditional media channels, and has been slow and measured in adapting to newer media.

This may mean that the very media (Google and Facebook) that are exacerbating confirmation bias and motivated reasoning are suffering from them in media rationale presentations every day.  Are brands reluctant to try something that is unproven and therefore seek out the research that justifies sticking to traditional routes?  What should we do about this?  We need to watch out for confirmation bias. It may be eclipsing a fair showing for social and digital media in media rationales.  Maybe we should have a CB factor to help us.  If only we could find a way to research what that should be.  Oh the confirmation bias irony.

So one of football’s managerial greats has gone.  Ferguson’s era is finally over. 

The BBC’s chief football writer Phil McNulty sums him up in three words here “Charismatic, explosive, contrary”.   It is the latter that explains his brilliance for me.  Sir Alex has never acted as he was “supposed to”.  When Wayne Rooney first threatened to quit, back in 2010, Ferguson created a reality-changing “Truth Turning Point” (a pivotal moment in communications that “defies every convention .. and gets the audience to the truth quickly and easily”), which I examined in detail in my book.  McNulty goes on: “Love him or hate him, football in general and Man United in particular will be poorer for his departure.”  Of course he is hated as well as loved.  Which is characteristic for non-conformists and explains why there isn’t a richer pool of non-conformists out there. 

This matters.

According to Professor Costis Markides, speaking at a Deloitte breakfast in early May, non-conformity is the key ingredient to innovation and creativity.  Yet learning to conform is almost unavoidable.  Markides cited the landmark survey developed by George Land as a test of creativity.  Land ran his test with a set of kids over their childhood and adolescence.  Aged five 98% of the kids qualified as “creative geniuses”.  When those same kids were tested at age ten 30% were at genius level.  Aged fifteen : 12%.  That longitudinal test then ended (Land quips “because everyone got depressed..”).  But when over 1m adults were given the same test the result was 2%.

Land concluded that “non-creative behaviour is learned”.  Or, put it another way, we learn to conform.  Most of us like to conform.  Resisting conformity can be a lonely road.  Most people don’t manage it – even when conforming clearly doesn’t make any sense, as this famous Candid Camera  sketch clip shows clearly.

So here’s to the non-conformists.  To those who reject conformity, because they don’t think it’s right for them.  (Not the ones who are outside the law, that’s not what this is about). To the people who zig when everyone else zags.  Who stay mute when everyone else is singing along.  Who won’t take part in communal games and who absent themselves just as the drinking is gaining momentum. The owners of the banged up Citroen in a carpark full of BMWs.  The ones with the unusual dress sense and unpopular tastes in music.   Who don’t automatically do as they are told, and yet have a good reason.  They should be cherished and they should be encouraged.  If you can make room for them within your organisation – and research shows that they’re few and far between – they may be the ones that make the real difference in sustained innovation, creativity and competitive advantage.