DestiCorp 2.0

It's Not Social Media, It's Social Business - Do you care?

The five biggest drivers of business change right now can be summarised thus:

1. Customers now have the power to talk back, to talk with each other; and to attract enormous attention simply through the power of their own creativity. The value of a company is now directly related to the subject and quality of the conversations that take take place about it and determine a reputation. Between 60-80% of all market capitalisation of companies is tied up in intangibles such as brand equity, reputation, human capital,and  intellectual property. Never has it been so important, or, for that matter, so easy to LISTEN.

2. There's finally a recognition that companies aren't things - corporate entities only with legal rights and no responsibilities - but collections of human beings keeping company with each other and working to a common purpose. As Simon Sinek has said: 100% of employees are people; 100% of customers are people; 100% of investors are people; 100% of supliers are people etc. So it's not surprising to see that companies behave like the people who work in them.

Some companies seem to be super cheerful, energetic, happy, passionate and devoted to serve; others are rigid, buraucratic, stiff, slow, and affect a bored disinterest. We still talk about them as "brands" but what we mean is personality.

This trend, by the way, is sometimes described as "the humanisation of business" - as if there ever was a time when companies were run by robots. (That's in the future not in the past). So instead of companies fretting about transactions; we have collections of people focused on relationships. It's all soft & fuzzy; about feelings not product atttributes; and behaviours are harder to measure; highy subjective and utterly intrinsically SOCIAL. Hence the title of the post. So congrats if you have a Facebook page, a twitter account and your company President blogs. But that won't be enough. Unless you've opened up every business process (in human terms - every human task; item of communication; element of service) and looked at ways it WOWs the customer; while enabling the employee who are doing the wowing to feel that they are growing and developing too. 

 3. Because companies are human and because humans are in such a fix right now, there's a growing desire on the part of both employees to want to find meaning in their work and for customers to find fulfullment or feel good about their relationship with it. No longer can companies afford to be nothing but lean and mean transaction machines focussed on quarterly profits. Edeleman's Good Purpose 2010 report found that 86% of global consumers believe that companies should place at least equal weight on societies interest as in business' interest. 

In fact, there's now growing evidence that companies whose culture expresses a "higher purpose" are significantly more profitable than those that place return on investment as highest priority. If you want proof, read Firms of Endearment, a more inspiring book than Jim Collins' Good to Great, that highlights the spectacular results achieved by 30 companies run by CEOs who are happy to call themselves Conscious Capitalists. There's even an institute that is promoting an alternative to the kind of capitalism that has got western economies into the trouble we're in now. So when you think ROI, remember that it stands for Return on Involvement (see Interaction Associates) and, as importantly, start to think of who is involved.

4. Customers are changing too. The recession accelerated a change that emerged in the late 90s when a growing proportion began to tire of the endless cycle of consumption, obsolescence and waste. As boomers aged, it was inevitable that they would be driven less by Maslow's deficiency needs (security, belonging, esteem) and more by a need to develop, to serve, to find meaning and purpose. Perhaps as a result of watching their parents and deciding that they didn't want to be like them, we find that GenY and the Millennials want more than a pay check. Some 61% of GenY employees say they feel personally responsible for making a difference in the world.

There's a huge body of research that has been conducted since the recession that suggests anywhere from a low of 30% to a high of just over 50% of consumers could now be described as "conscious" - awake, alert and aware. They are taking more responsibility for their own decisions as their trust in traditional, authoritative "command and control" style organisations like Government, the Church, big companies is at an all time low. At DestiCorp we're so convinced that this trend will provide a means for tourism to get off the mass, industrialised bandwagon that we think is so destructive, that we'll be focussing all our work on ushering in a Conscious Travel movement. 

5. The role of women. Women have already shown their proclivity for use of social media. See an earlier post The Web is Female. We simply love communicating. But it's not all talk. Women also have the financial clout. According to Businessweek, American women make more than 80% of buying decisions in all homes.Their buying power  has soared 63% over past three decades. Some 30% of working women now outearn their husbands

While they are still hitting their head against the glass ceiling of senior management, it's women who undertake the majority of tasks that involve face to face or voice to voice contact with employees and, thereby, are directly reponsible for a firm's reputation. 

In summary. the decade beginning 2010 will be one in which companies thrive or wane on their ability to show they care; to create working environments in which human beings flourish and are active contributors to the healing, well-being and prosperity of their communities. 

Examples of travel-related Companies that Care include the Roger Smith Hotel in New York, where social media is derived from an inherent belief of its CEO and President, James Knowles. He believes in and encourages “the miracle of human growth.” The hotel’s connection to a community of people is based on story telling, off-line connections, and relationships built on passion, says the company. The team is always interested in telling stories that engage people while building relationships and relevant communities. The hotel says it is selling hotel rooms and events via the strength of its networking and content. To find out how Kimpton Hotels and the Joie de Vivre Group are showing they care, review this summary on the new Conscious Travel web site here.

So How Do You become a Social Business?

Becoming a truly social business requires some form of transformative shift in mindset at the top of an organization. First it means appreciating that a company, like a community, is a dynamic, living breathing system made up of living breathing systems who happen to be human beings. The distinctions between what is internal and external are artificial - the boundaries are highly permeable. And in these systems, the intelligence does not lie in the nucleus, the brain or the HQ of an organization but is distributed throughout with highest concentrations on the edges (or in the case of tourism, on the frontline where customers interacts with hosts). 

A conscious business acknowledges that all value resides in the nature of the relationship between supplier and buyer and the quality of those relationships is determined by the amount of self respect and mutual respect that exists in those relationships. Employees that are kept in the dark, not trusted by management, treated as children not adults, required to adhere to rigid "inhumane" policies and procedures etc. will pass on this antisocial culture to customers with disastrous consequences. The business might have a very active social strategy but implementation will fail if it hasn't addressed what it means to be a social business. 

Sadly most businesses are jumping on the social media bandwagon by trying to master the tools without any consideration of the deeper change in mindset that's required. This is where I find Simon Sinek's observations helpful - treat the business as if it were a person not a thing because every interaction with customers, suppliers, other employees and other stakeholders will always be personal.

Here's Simon Sinek speaking plain common sense about Social Business. Pour yourself a coffee and take 25 minutes to remind yourself how the world really works!

 

Why I Love January - the time to reflect on the advantages of a swivel neck!

There's that delicious period between Christmas that invokes inactivity, not-doing; reflection. The kind of activity people associated with our elders...Surprising then that our calendar starts (doesn't end)  with a month named after the God Janus (Ianus)  or Goddess Diana (Iana) - the god and goddess of doors, gateways, and endings. 

Why isn't January the last month of the year? Well, clearly the sun has something to do with it. The days are now getting longer in the northern hemisphere where the calendar was invented (sorry about that folks down under) suggesting something new emerging. But the moon plays its role too. There's no point doing if you don't know what you've done - so we need a period of reflection and dreaming (night time) in order to be effectively active (during the day). 

So what's my advice in the first half of the first week of the second decade of the 21st Century? Develop a swivel neck - learn from the past as you rush towards the future. One of the key sins committed by my generation has to be the sin of undue haste. My generation has experienced more change in 60 years than occurred in previous eras or epochs. We take little time to reflect on what we have had to adjust to before facing something new. Perhaps, that's why New Year's predictions are more popular than resolutions....

If you want some sense of how huge and bewildering is the change we've experienced since 1950 alone, then simply view   My-changing-world that I prepared back in 2006.  Yes, it could do with some refining and much of the last "column/chapter" is still emerging. But the columns are still highly relevant. Many countries and regions are actually experiencing all economies simultaneously!

So before I contribute my personal predictions for 2010 - as anyone with futurist in her resume is compelled to do - have a quick look at where we've come from and, more importantly, where your organization might be stuck. 

In Response to George Monbiot - The New Dividing Line

On Dec 14th George Monbiot wrote a cutting but insightful piece on the new politics. While he has titled the post “It’s About All of Us”, the content ends up focusing on "them" and "us". It was reproduced in the Guardian under a more militaristic heading: This is bigger than climate change. It is a battle to redefine humanity. 

He argues that the new dividing line in politics is not between right or left but between expanders and restrainers: those who believe that there should be no impediments, and those who believe that we must live within limits. He goes onto to say:

The vicious battles we have seen so far between greens and climate change deniers, road safety campaigners and speed freaks, real grassroots groups and corporate-sponsored astroturfers  are just the beginning. This war will become much uglier as people kick against the limits that decency demands.

While I dislike the language of wars and battles, I do agree with the fact the the divide exists, is growing and will widen before it shrinks.  

Fear is the force that is driving a wedge between these two groups. The expanders fear loss of control, position, power, wealth, comfort, familiar stuff (the list goes on).  Restrainers miss loss of access to cultural diversity, to well-being, biodiversity, health, community, security and happiness. 

It seems always to be about fear. Fear will trump ambition every time. But even fear runs out of steam when people have lost all – as Victor Frankl showed in Auschwitz. The human search for meaning stays alight among some amidst the darkest darkness. It’s that sputtering flame we must each kindle…

I wish I could write as eloquently as Monbiot – he can be convincing, except that there’s flaw in his thinking that comes from a flaw of perception. There are colours in our world. He has identified two modes of thought but not seen the connections that link and unify. 

I don't know about you, but there are  also colours in my personality – at various times I am an expander and a restrainer. Some degree of expansion is necessary, or entropy would take over and we’d all end up in a useless heap under our duvets. Some form of restraint is necessary or we’d all burst from satiation. George rightly alludes to the fact that each of us harbours a capacity for great acts of selflessness and goodness and horrific acts of selfishness and evil. I am “all of us” but so are "you" too – and from where you’re standing, the view is different. Before WW2, Carl Jung warned of the shadow that exists within each and the dangers of denying it. 

If humanity needs anything right now it’s to develop a universal capacity to grasp and feel comfortable with complexity, ambiguity even paradox.  It’s the ability to say “yes and” not just “yes but”. But in the same way our psychology has difficulty handling gradual threats and responds best to immediate danger, the media we have created (and especially the new, digital  social media) values the brief, the new, the instant, the “real-time”. Our thought processes are constantly interrupted, distracted and divided and our capacity to mull over an idea or article is reduced. Never was there such a need for our leaders to take time out to think (God forbid) but, when they do, we describe them as indecisive. 

Another new and promising writer, Jane Young of The Resonance Blog, has tried to capture this need to handle complexity in a slide deck that should enjoy wide distribution. Her blog is well worth a read too. 

Complexity & Humanity 2.0

View more presentations from ResonanceBlog.

I include it here not just because I enjoyed it but because it supports my last point – the dividing line (if there is such a thing) is not between people but modes of perception.  People can shift back and forth between different modes of perception relatively easily.  (In the illustration to the right, most of you can see an image of both a young  lady in a fine hat, and an old crone clad in scarf). 

One mode of perception views the planet as a living organism, a complex system continuously self-regulating and all forms of matter and energy as agents within that system, connected to and influencing all other agents. This paradigm necessitates a healthy respect for all other agents and an intrinsic, pervasive humility -  the complexity of the interconnections means that we never know how they might impact each other.

The other model sees the planet as a storehouse of resources that any set of agents (any tribe) can exploit ad infinitum for its own personal benefit. This mode of perception has developed its knowledge based on a paradigm that divides subject from object; that underplays the deep connections that constantly link the two;  and that assumes that agents can be neatly labeled, grouped, un-grouped and manipulated like the pixels on your screen. For as long as this paradigm “worked” (and it has for over 350 years) practicing humility was disadvantageous. What was needed was daring, courage, and boldness to break through barriers of ignorance and build new edifices that proved my tribe's superior intelligence and strength. 

After 350 years or so, it’s not just the physical resources that have been plundered and are running low, but a healthy sense of wonder; a willingness to realize that there is far more we don’t know about our amazing universe than what we could ever know. As students of nature we are all in kindergarten where a bit more hand holding would serve us well.  The old expansionist paradigm is losing its ability to describe our world accurately and predict the future - everywhere we read of systemic flaws, meltdowns and crises. 

So, methinks a real paradigm shift is finally afoot. 

If that's the case, then George, while  I respect your passion, eloquence,  intelligence, and wit, I reject your analysis of a new form of class struggle - even though I will fess up and state that I'm a moderate restrainer. If as you suggest, there are two mountains of thought separated by a chasm of misunderstanding, we need bridge builders and integrators not polarizers. Without such, it's gonna get a lot uglier….Let's not be responsible for that...It's not time for barricades but bridges......

Postscript

My tourism readers might be thinking - what has this to do with tourism?  Well everything. For starters,  I believe the tourism community can and should act as bridge builders. But I also see evidence for the perception division growing within our ranks as evidenced by recent press releases issued by the WTTC, the Ecumenical Council on Tourism and the UNWTO. More in next post!!

Vail's Gutsy Leader Turns Marketing Strategy Upside Down

Here’s a superb example of tourism leaders re-thinking marketing in response to the down-turn and the emergence of social and rich media. CEO Rob Katz explains via video, of course, how Vail has completely re-thought its marketing strategy and relationships with skiers. 

The full story is available from Advertising Age link here

The recession significantly shortened the planning time  for the purchase and sale of ski experiences - decreasing from 4-6 months to 2-3 weeks.  Vail also recognized the volatility in the marketplace and realized that print media restricted their ability to respond to short-term, even real-time demand. 

Last year Vail had spent 80% of its budget before the vacation period so couldn’t respond to last minute demand.  So they took the brave decision to pull 50% of their ad spend out of print and put in reserve. Vail now uses social media and operates like a political campaign to communicate in real time response to local market conditions.

It’s a brave call – their competitors are still present in the big ski publications with the conventional rich brand messaging but Vail has a war chest with which to strike as demand rises closer to the holidays. No wonder Katz likens himself to Braveheart!

If it works and the gamble pays off, you can bet others will follow – hopefully the print community possesses similar gutsy leadership within its ranks. They’re going to need it.

PhocusWright Innovation Adds Value to an already highly valuable event

Just back from Phocuswright's three day conference - worth every penny! Congratulations Philip and all the Phocuswright team not just for attracting a brilliant cross section of the travel & technology community; creating an incredibly rich program; superb organization but also for a really USEFUL innovation.

The decision to make online participation available for those who couldn't make the trek to Orlando was brave - so many traditionalists think that online meetings will diminish or cannibalize markets. 132 people participated this way from all parts of the world. I believe it just increased exposure and increased the appetite for the real thing. The very fact that it was a sell out in very difficult economic times further attests to the value associated with attendance. 

Live streaming the event was expensive but was of HUGE benefit to the participants. All major sessions were available in real time during the conference and will be available for review for the next 60 days. There was so much content to absorb and this innovation allows everyone the chance to review a second time and, more importantly, REFLECT on what was said; see linkages and connections that would not have been immediately apparent at the time; and share this knowledge with peers. Knowing that the live presentations are now "in the cloud" relieved the anxiety associated with many events when you want to chat with a colleague but also don't want to miss hearing the speaker...

Through use of event specific hashtags, real time commentary was enabled and can be aggregated to get a birds eye view of the content. Here's one participants experience before and during....

It'll take me a few weeks to complete that process of review and reflection and I will share what I think are the strategic implications over the days ahead. In the meantime, the travel bloggers at TNOOZ will be able to provide a faster review of specific technologies and useful insights on how to implement..

Finally, just to show I had a great time, here's a picture of me, Patrick Payne, CEO of QuickMobile, who created a brilliant i-phone application for the event; and Leslie Anne Palamar of Building Tourism Excellence who's organizing Canada's next e-connect event in Montreal in January. 

Picture courtesy and copyright of Phocuswright - see their stream on Flickr.

Social Media - déjà vue?

An overwhelming sense of déjà vue is the emotion most often aroused in response to the tidal wave of enthusiasm for the marvels of “social media.” The current hype reminds me of George Santayana’s warning, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."

First I want to thank Tim Malbon (@malbon) of Made By Many for his blog post drawing my attention to a recent article by David Armano in the Havard Business Review and available here. 

David is a brilliant designer who has proven able to illustrate graphically and potently some of the major changes in how we see our world, and our relations with each other. I use his images, slides and quotes frequently and with gratitude as well as attribution! See below left.

David and Tim both make the valid point that the term “social media’ is being trivialized by marketers and promoters who see the emergence of such communication tools as Facebook and Twitter as nothing more than another set of distribution channels that can be used to reach and influence a customer. 

Even McKinsey, the epitome of mainstream consulting, is in on the act – triumphantly and proudly claiming in a recent article, The Consumer Decision Journey, that they have  (just?)discovered that “a more sophisticated approach to marketing is required – one that enables marketers to move aggressively beyond purely push-style communication, to influence consumer-driven touch points along what they have decided to call “a consumer decision journey.”  

Their research with some 20,000 companies provides further proof of the cyclical, dynamic nature of the customer buying process – as opposed to the linear, funnel model that has dominated marketing thinking. Their interactive exhibit shows how the number of brands in a consideration set can vary according to the attitudes and experience of the customer (are they passive or loyal), stage in the cycle, and effects of events that trigger purchases. It’s a good article and worth a serious read. 

But perhaps it is a sign of my age or a need for some summer sunshine, but I feel I have seen it all before. Around the time of the dot com bust, the corporate world was also fixating on Customer Relationship Management – spending millions on software that would enable them to personalize their messages and “manage” customer relations. Authors of the  McKinsey article mentioned earlier speak about “managing word-of-mouth.”

CRM Has Only Had Limited Results - will Social Media Fare Better?

Many felt back in 2002 that CRM was not delivering on its promise and there was much soul searching as to the reasons why. In 2002, I wrote a paper on the subject called  Dancing With the Customer in an attempt to dig beneath the surface and examine why CRM was unlikely to succeed despite the millions spent on it. The premises and arguments made 7 years ago could be applied with very little change to an analysis of why use of “social media” will, in general, generate the same mixed and often unsatisfactory results for those who have not really understood what's going on beneath the surface.  

Back in the late 90s and early 00s we asked whether bad software design was the issue. Was the problem a technical one or was it structural? Was it the way companies are organized into functional silos that was the source of the problem? Nearly a decade later, McKinsey concludes their essay with the suggestion that organizational structure does indeed present the major impediment and that the customer-facing activities of web sites, PR, loyalty programs need to be integrated and given appropriate leadership. 

Where I disagree with McKinsey

But I am sure, as I was in 2002, that the problem goes much deeper than the need for functional integration. Siloed structures reflect a culture, a shared understanding of “the ways things are or work around here.” 

The reality is that most corporations view marketing as a battle or power struggle and the language used to describe marketing gives this attitude away.  Customers are targeted in order that markets are captured, competitors are slaughtered and consumers are persuaded to do something of direct benefit to the marketer. In 2009, with no tongue in cheek, McKinsey personnel can write: “If marketing has one goal, it’s to reach customers at the moments that most influence their decisions – to seek those moments when consumers are open to influence.” In a culture that considers the company as predator and the customer the prey, then the term “open to influence” likely equates to “at their weakest and most vulnerable” (my words).  Is this not why second glazing salesmen and debt collectors always call at dinner time?

Again McKinsey reveals the power of implicit culture in the concluding sentence of their essay when they write “marketers need to view the change not as a loss of power over their customers but as an opportunity to be in the right place at the right time, giving them the information and support they need to make the right decisions.” 

So it's not structure but culture and a deeply ingrained mindset that's the problem.If you don't fix that, no amount of tweets, followers or fans are going to make a sustained difference. 

Today’s consumers don’t need to be persuaded to consume – they spend their entire day having to consume – but they can and do need to be supported. As any aid agency will tell you, people cannot be supported unless they are treated respectfully as equals and until there is a fundamental shift in mindset that sees donor and recipient,  company and customer as engaged in a mutually beneficial conversation, transaction or, as I have suggested, a dance. 

Social Media Is Not a Fashion but a Symptom

Social media is not a fashion or even a trend but a symptom and sign of a much deeper shift in the relationship between producer and consumer; employee and customer. It’s a fundamental mindset shift that is both enabling and being enabled by the availability of interactive, digitized media and tools.

It is, as early architects of web 1.0 and 2.0 discerned at the turn of the Millennium, about a fundamental shift in both power and perception. As Armano writes: 

 

It never used to be called “social media”. eBay and Amazon never talked of “social media” - they talked about “service” and “community”. They spoke of the potency of The Web to smash old business models, flatten out-dated hierarchies and wrench power away from the centre and towards the edges to create new types of value exchange. Communications is but a tiny fragment of this revolution - albeit massively interesting and important - and yet it’s the campaign-flavoured, comms-focused stuff that defines - and limits - “social media” for most businesses.

In the Dancing with the Customer paper, I also focus on service and community: 

So winning enterprises are those that conceive of themselves as inter-connected business webs or trading communities held together by a common customer. The customer sits at the centre of an orbit not at the end of a chain. Winning enterprises are those with the most “intelligence” – i.e. are able to sense and respond to visitor needs in real time. They are able to exchange and circulate this intelligence to all members of the community so that the visitor’s whole experience is a positive one. 

So if you want to really ensure that your company or destination stays ahead of this revolution, you’ll spend less time wondering about your Facebook strategy, measuring the number of followers or even checking your Twitter grade and spend more time thinking through how you work collaboratively with others to design a profitable ecosystem that provides the deep support customers seek and deserve. For industries like tourism that are suffering the ravages of commodification, such a systems  approach is the only one that will save us from self-destruction. It's also an approach that requires an unparalleled level of collaboration.

So for summer reading that is guaranteed to “change your mind”, don’t read "Twitter for Dummies" or "100 Ways to Succeed with Social Media" but revisit The Cluetrain Manifesto, or pick up Rushkoff’s prescient analysis, Life Inc., Tapscott’s Wikinomics;  Clay Shirky's Here Comes Everybody or,  perhaps,  dip into the prescient, profound but much under appreciated The Support Economy by Shuboff and Maxmin to discover the scope, scale and pace of deep change that's  happening out there. 

Alternatively, enjoy the kids, the beach or the ice cream and come back here and pick up the Reader's Digest versions of the above and have a great summer vacation!

And remember – you are not at war; life’s a dance. 

Enjoy the summer.

The Power of Storytelling

Steve Denning is a master at story telling. Today I received one of his emails that began like this and, of course, I had to continue the story......

" At the age of twenty-one, a man called Henry Curmantle became the head of a large and troubled organization. He was a stocky man with a round head like a lion, a fiery freckled face and red hair. His grey eyes glowed fiercely and grew bloodshot in anger. His voice was rough, allegedly because he spent so much time out of doors. 

 It was a cold, wintry day, when Henry took control of the organization. He had got the position partly through inheritance from his mother, and partly because he had boldly seized it on his own initiative.

In the course of administering the organization, Henry came up with a brilliant management innovation that was to affect every country in the world. To find out more, go here.

It's well worth the click through and highly relevant to my previous post on "Reboot Britain." I can't say more because,  if I did,  I'd spoil the story.

In a period of deep, transformative and evolutionary change, there's virtually no aspect of human life that will remain unaffected. Leadership will take on different forms in the 21st Century - but, then as storyteller Denning suggests,  is there really anything totally new? 

Reflections on Reboot Britain

Thanks to SwitchNewMedia I was able to avoid 8 hours of train travel yesterday and participate in Reboot Britain from the heart of rural Britain.

Faced with economic meltdown,  dismally low levels of public trust in political leadership, growing concerns about the ability of big government to succeed let alone sustain itself, there's an urgent need to "re-imagine, re-invest, and re-invigorate our economy and society." These words of Diane Coyle, editor and facilitator, apply beyond the shores of the little island that formed the focus of yesterday's event...

To provoke debate, the organizers (NESTA) commissioned a series of essays that are well worth reading. I also recommend you  bookmark the site as all the presentations will be available shortly and check out #rebootbritain to sense the Twitter pulse.

While the focus was on the public economy, there was plenty of interest to the private sector and associations in all facets of life and business in the UK and elsewhere.

Kudos to Stephen Moore(@stevemoore4good), NESTA and the organizing team for initiating the conversation - even though the format (mostly in the main lecture hall) was surprisingly conventional with limited opportunities for audience participation. Next time, a split screen would enable online participants to see what the speaker was referring to and it would be great if moderators could accept questions from tweeters/bloggers regardless of their location......

It was a rich experience - even from a distance and without the benefit of F2F buzz. Howard Rheingold provided an insightful conclusion suggesting that we needed to develop five literacies to thrive in a connected world of instant information: Attention, Participation, Collaboration, Awareness, and Critical Evaluation. Plenty of food for thought even thought the title made me feel uneasy.

While eye and ear catching in its modernity, the concept of  ReBoot, is on reflection merely a 2.0 version of "kickstart." It implies an assumption that a traditional economy, which has gone into nosedive, can be brought back to life with a reset button and all will be well. Remember, it comes after the messages: "Abort", "Retry", and "Fail"! But the intent of the conference suggested that it isn't a reboot that's needed but an entirely new operating system, based on a fundamentally different set of operating assumptions and guiding principles - far greater even than a switch from PC to Mac! I notice that some other bloggers came to similar conclusions separately.

The term ReBoot also implies that a new economy (networked, open, lightweight, environmentally responsible, socially just, creative, agile and resilient...) will come about as a result of external intervention when, in fact, it's already emerging because the conditions are right.

Truth is, we're being carried forward by a host of change forces that have generated sufficient pent up energy to cause a tectonic shift in perception regarding who we are as human beings on a finite planet and how we should behave...

Talking about 2.0 versions of government, marketing, journalism, healthcare, leadership, HR and manufacturing is really healthy but will only move beyond talk to action when we can sustain our attention spans long enough to understand these deeper forces and harness their dynamics. It's ironic that here we are a pivotal point in human history when we could become conscious of our own evolution and the technology that binds also shatters our attention into tiny fragments such that we seem to be viewing reality through a kaleidescope rather than a microscope.

One agent of change never shy to use the term Paradigm appropriately and forcefully is Don Tapscott (@dtapscott) who, like David Weinerger and crew (Cluetrain authors), and Tim O' Reilly cut his intellectual teeth on IT problems but has just gets wiser and more insightful with age.  For those of us whose time is limited between meetings, tweets, emails, the following 2 minute video clip reminds  us that it'll take more than a reBoot to move Britain forward.

Another agent of change, Paul Hawken, recently author of Blessed Unrest also affirms that the ground is already shaking beneath the feet of traditional institutions. Every time I watch the following clip from the Bioneers conference a few years ago, I am reminded why we're living in such an exciting time, so full of opportunity, so filled with consequence.

Calling on Tourism CEOs to Dig Deeper

It is a cliché to identify our world as one in which change is the only constant. Overuse of this concept has minimized its meaning and power and misuse has lead to confusion and miscalculation.

In our opinion there are three types of change as illustrated in the familiar image of the iceberg.

• Surface change which takes the form of trends in fashion, modes of speech, popular technology, management fads etc. They are easily visible - representing 1/8th of the iceberg - with new trends quickly attracting attention and possessing a relatively short life span. Their length of influence is determined to the extent that they are rooted in stronger change forces.

• Systemic change which reflect a deeper set of dynamics associated with the economy (eg., the rise of the middle class), demographics, changing consumer and personal values, big technological developments (e. g., the arrival of the phone or car), emergence of new political ideologies. They take longer to emerge and be recognized; last longer, and, if significant enough in strength and power, can be taken as reflecting the norm by any given population.
  
  The dominance of the automobile in American society and the pervasive belief that every American has the right to own and use a car whenever and wherever is a societal force totally integrated with the rise of the middle class, the beliefs and aspirations of the Founding Fathers, the growth in prosperity, the cheapness of raw materials, energy and credit. But it goes deeper than that. The western obsession with the automobile reflects a much deeper set of beliefs and unexamined assumptions and beliefs about how humans view the world, and their relation with it and each other. These are paradigms, mindsets or worldviews.

• Paradigm change occurs much less frequently and results not in the modification of something familiar but a fundamental transformation - in everything. The last big paradigm shift occurred over a 200-250 year time period starting with people like Copernicus and Galileo who began to trust their powers of observation and measurement over the prevailing orthodoxy of a powerful institution - the Holy Catholic Church.

Paradigms are sets of beliefs and assumptions about how the world works or mental maps that we use to make sense of our world. They are agreements that, as they are used over and over again, have become invisible - it's the way things are - simply because they are used to filter out information that might be contradictory.They affect what we choose to see and what sense we make of the world. See some examples here.

We are living in a period of paradigm change as great as that which transformed medieval society into the Age of Enlightenment and saw science rise to predominance over religion. The challenge is that this transformative switch is not taking 250 years to emerge but is occurring over a period less than a century. Everything and everyone will be affected by it - the travel and tourism sector being no exception. Yet most tourism leaders remain either oblivious or unwilling to contemplate the implications.

We can be forgiven for our reluctance to venture into this space of "deep change" for a number of reasons:

1. The time horizons of leaders in tourism are inevitably short. They sell a time and located based service that is highly perishable.
2. Their investors and or political masters are interested in short term results not long term strategic planning, as they expect whatever issues arise to be on "someone else's watch".
3. Furthermore, there's no precedent. In the past paradigmatic change occurred gradually and almost imperceptibly over several generations. Life at the time might have been both confusing and exciting, but it was still manageable simply because the scale and depth of the change was not clear. If you have never seen or heard about an elephant before, it's hard to get frightened about the prospect of one charging out of the forest in a rage. It's also common for very enlightened folks to move easily between two paradigms. Newton the founder of mechanical physics and responsible for the rise of scientific inquiry and rationalism was a committed Alchemist (he tried to turn dross into gold in his spare time). I suspect several quantum physicists may play the lottery.

At DestiCorp we are convinced that it is both possible and vital that tourism leaders, especially those heading up destinations, national and international associations and agencies, and heads of multi-nationals start investing their time and intellect in understanding that nature and implications of paradigmatic change on their sector and the future livelihoods of the communities they serve. Unless they do, they will be ill equipped to understand let alone deal with the gale force winds of change gathering on the horizon and make the decisions TODAY that will create options for decision-makers tomorrow.

Subsequent posts will provide examples from tourism life that show these deeper forces at work - they'll be tagged with the category "deep change."

WOW! That's pretty heavy for tourism marketers, we know. But if you are interested in what happens after "your watch" as a result of your leadership today; if you have any interest in leaving a positive legacy, then you could do no better than start to understand what all this means.....

This web site is just a start of an exciting journey that will develop over time and hopefully lead to some very fruitful discussions.... Please join us here as we develop more material.

Over the next few days and months, we'll be adding thoughts on

• Tourism Trends and Fashions (2009 - 2010)
• Systemic Change Drivers
• Tourism Growth Forces - the Following Winds
• Tourism Growth Threats - the Head Winds