Campaign

This is not a post about Facebook, you'll be glad to hear. It is, instead, a post about how the world works. About how we can inadvertently make it slightly better. And about how, in their endless, dogged pursuit of a false efficiency, organisations can be rendered slightly useless. And stupid. (Remember that the word 'dogged' is derived from the word 'dog' meaning 'energetic and stupid' – there should also be a word 'catted' meaning lazy and devious; I would love to be described as exhibiting 'catted determination').

Anyhow, this deterministic belief in false efficiency is very simple; it comes from the belief that improvement comes from the elimination of apparent waste.

There is a problem with this approach. It fails to pay any tribute to luck. If you dedicate your life to eliminating waste, you will undoubtedly succeed in a grubby kind of way. But, along with waste, you will be eliminating perhaps 90% of something far more important – your chances of getting really lucky. If you clamp down on frog-kissing, you don't have much chance of finding a prince. This may explain why actuaries very rarely become rock stars.

The point is simple. If you look at all the really important breakthroughs made in any field, what you will find is that the unplanned, unintended or fortuitous connection plays just as great a role as the planned, the processed and the organised. This is why, fairly early on, Microsoft placed white-boards along the corridors on the Redmond campus; for they found that the accidental meetings which took place in hallways were in fact more productive than the scheduled ones which happened in meeting rooms.

It raises a question. Why do we spend ages trying to perfect our processes and to refine our formal ways of working while spending almost no effort at all asking how we could get luckier. Or asking what we are doing that may be killing our luck.

There is a whole scientific literature on this subject. One book, called Serendipity, makes the point that most scientific advance comes not through the dogged and meticulous pursuit of a solution, but through a kind of inspired opportunism in response to a lucky connection. Another, called A Perfect Mess details how a messy desk and the accidental juxtaposition of two apparently unrelated papers led to a Nobel prize.

At a more mundane level, this explains why agencies produce better work faster when working on a pitch than in the real world – the very disorder of the process allows for more lucky breaks. This is why, in all honesty, great advertising is almost as likely to come from a creative factory tour as from a creative brief (sorry planners, but you know it's true).

Where does Facebook come into all this? Russell Davies complains that there is no shared purpose in Facebook. I agree. Yet I think that's exactly the point. Facebook is about nothing if it is not about serendipity, coincidence, the happy accident, the shared admission – quite simply it's all about increasing one's chances of becoming the lucky victim of a happy accident.

The Theory of Weak Ties, a landmark sociology paper of the 1970s provides backing for this. What this suggests (and it is largely borne out by experience) is that one's peripheral contacts and vague acquaintances are more likely to be the agents of the major events in one's life than one's closest friends. It is your wider circle of friends who supply you with your luck. One's close friends, being more similar, are relatively irrelevant to one's fortunes.

Professor Richard Wiseman inadvertently demonstrated this when he sought to replicate the famous six-degrees-of-separation experiment in which volunteers were asked to forward a letter to a named, addressed individual otherwise unknown to them. Twenty of his hundred or so volunteers were unable to participate as “they simply did not know anyone who could help them in this task”. Fascinatingly almost all of these people had, on a prior questionnaire, stated that they believed themselves to be exceptionally unlucky in life. The degree to which you are open to the possibilities of random connections, he believes, disproportionately effects your real and perceived fortunes.

In other words your openness to the possibilities of random and apparently purposeless connections in many ways determines your success. Life really is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans.

So what does this mean for us?

First, don't ban access to anything. You simply never know. Interestingly, Goldman Sachs, the one Investment Bank which seems to have a clue as to what it's doing, does not ban Facebook access. Since its alumni network is perhaps the world's most powerful entity, this may not be altogether silly.

(I adopt a similar approach to conference attendance and speaking. A few times a year, diceman-style, I attend a seemingly random and semi-relevant event not specifically connected to what I do. These are invariably the best ones, and from them come the most interesting chance meetings.)

But there are a few more serious points here. Are we trying too hard to mimic our clients obsession with efficiency (not effectiveness, which is something different) when we should be making the case for chance? Is payment by the hour making us too focussed? Too dogged when we should be catted? How healthy is it to allocate people 100% to one client? Should we share briefs or problems more widely than we do? And should we make a bit more time for nothing in particular.

This last point reminds me of Henry Ford's reaction to a consultant who questioned why he paid $50,000 a year to someone who spent most of his time with his feet on his desk. “Because a few years ago that man came up with something that saved me $2,000,000,” he replied. “And when he had that idea his feet were exactly where they are now.” A man so obsessed with efficiency that he purposely weakened car-parts that never broke nonetheless understood that some wasted time isn't wasted at all.