Seth Godin's Blog, page 127

Coercion

"You are with me or against me."

"Being against me is the same as being against us."

"If I determine that you are against us, you deserve all the problems that you brought on yourself by your actions. Don't make me hurt you again."

We are fortunate to live in a civil society that is governed by ideas, ideals and laws. Lincoln correctly warned us about the mob and the bullying leader who eggs them on.

Coercion can make change happen (in the short run). Coercion can look like leadership. But it doesn't scale and it doesn't last, because ultimately, it burns down the very institution it sought to change by mob force. 

We can encounter bullies at work, coaching teams and even working in law enforcement. Wherever people organize, they show up.

Coercion gets its start because well-meaning people believe that the short-run cost of the mob mentality is worth it. It almost never is. Coercion uses force and blames the victim. And coercion is impossible to live with.

Real change happens because of enrollment, because it invites people in, it doesn't use fear. Real leadership patiently changes the culture, engaging people in shared effort. It's more difficult, but it's change we can live with.

            

Survey questions

Is this a survey or a census? A survey is statistically based, extracting insight from a few and being able to assert its truth across a wider population. A census involves asking everyone, and usually, matching up the answers with the person so you can take further action. 

If it's a survey, you probably don't need to reach as many people as you think you do. And if it's a survey, you are almost certainly going to get skewed answers, because surveying the people who answer surveys is truly different from surveying a statistically valid sample of your audience. SurveyMonkey doesn't actually run surveys of your total audience. It runs a poll of people who are willing to answer the questions.

It's pretty easy to survey everyone, ask every customer a question on checkout. In fact, online, it's easier to run something more like a census than a survey, because you merely turn it on and let it run. This is not a smart way to get a statistically accurate insight, but worse, if you run a census, you're wasting an opportunity if you treat it like a survey. If you ask every customer a question, you better be prepared to follow up on every customer who's not happy.

Are you looking for correlations? Causation is almost impossible to find in a survey. But if you're smart, you can learn a lot if you're able to determine that people who said "B" in answer to question 3 are also likely to believe "E" in answer to question 6. This is a huge step in your ability to determine worldviews and to ultimately treat different people differently.

It doesn't matter if 40% of your customers believe something about price and 39% believe something about features, but if you discover that 98% of the customers who believe this about price also believe that about quality, you just found something useful.

Is this worth my customer's time? It's super easy to commission a survey. Pay your money and you're done. But then what? Fedex sent Ipsos after me and thousands of other people by phone, wasted more than ten minutes of my time with a survey that never ended, and then they never followed up. Those ten minutes cost Fedex a huge amount of trust and goodwill.

Asking someone to answer a survey has a very real cost. Is the survey worth it?

Are you asking questions capable of making change happen? After the survey is over, can you say to the bosses, "83% of our customer base agrees with answer A, which means we should change our policy on this issue."

It feels like it's cheap to add one more question, easy to make the question a bit banal, simple to cover one more issue. But, if the answers aren't going to make a difference internally, what is the question for?

Are you push polling? The questions you ask actually end up changing the person who is responding. Ask me if I'm unhappy and I'm a lot more likely to become unhappy. Ask me who my favorite customer service person is and I'm more likely to look for good customer service people.

This is a challenge that most census-structured customer service surveys have to deal with. If you ask someone if they're satisfied and then don't follow up later, you've just made the problem a lot worse. If you ask your best customers for insight and then ignore it, you've not only wasted the insight, you've wasted goodwill as well.

Here's a simple test I do, something that has never once led to action: In the last question of a sloppy, census-style customer service survey, when they ask, "anything else?" I put my name and phone number and ask them to call me. They haven't, never once, not in more than fifty brand experiences.

If you're not going to read the answers and take action, why are you asking?

Best question to ask about a survey: Do we actually have to run this?

            

No choice

That's an easy mistake to make and a tempting trap to fall into.

It's unlikely you have no choice. More likely: There's no easy choice. No safe choice that also embraces your potential. No choice you can make that doesn't cause short-term misery in exchange for a long-term benefit.

When we say we have no choice, we feel trapped and we are powerless. That's no way to do our work every day.

Do it or don't do it. It's up to you.

            

Would you rather...

Spend an hour with a good friend in intimate conversation,

spend an hour engaging with your team on the next significant leap in your strategy,

or spend an hour with your smart phone, grooming your social media presence and your inbox?

Good news, you can.

            

Show your work

It's tempting to sit in the corner and then, voila, to amaze us all with your perfect answer.

But of course, that's not what ever works.

What works is evolving in public, with the team. Showing your work. Thinking out loud. Failing on the way to succeeding, imperfecting on your way to better than good enough.

Do people want to be stuck with the first version of the iPhone, the Ford, the Chanel dress? Do they want to read the first draft of that novel, see the rough cut of that film? Of course not.

Ship before you're ready, because you will never be ready. Ready implies you know it's going to work, and you can't know that. You should ship when you're prepared, when it's time to show your work, but not a minute later.

The purpose isn't to please the critics. The purpose is to make your work better.

Polish with your peers, your true fans, the market. Because when we polish together, we make better work.

            

Hot: A theory of propulsion

Words are dead.

To be more clear: Words on a page or on a screen are asleep, inert, doing nothing at all until they interact with you, the reader.

That takes effort.

An audiobook, on the other hand, propels itself. The words are spoken, whether you listen or not, so you better listen.

And a video is just as alive. 

The next level up is new. As in news. Or previously unknown. When it's breaking, it propels itself even harder, because we know that we're about to hear something previously unheard.

And beyond that? When humans are involved. Not just news, but news from a friend. News that our peers are about to be talking about. Not just propelled, but amplified by our cohort and our culture.

Social media is built on the idea of propulsion. It's not history, it's now. The smartphone isn't smart, it's merely hot. Pulsing with the next thing.

[I know, you just got a text. Go check it, I'll be here when you get back.]

This, I think, is one of the giant chasms of our new generation, always seen, not often noticed. That we're moving from the considered words of a book or even a Wikipedia article to the urgent, connected ideas that propel themselves.

Words are a noun, attention is a verb.

The motion of an idea actually creates its own physics. Ideas in motion not only touch more people, they have more impact as well.

Slack is engineered for motion, the Kindle is a silent repository you have to press.

The cliche was that the author used to live for the solitary moments of considered thought and solo writing. "Leave me alone and let me write." The publisher paid the bills with the backlist, the old books that sold and sold. Today, without propulsion, most people aren't making the time or the focus to pursue inert wisdom. Without motion, the words get moldy.

Book publishing (and the making of movies, or songs, or articles) has always had an element of promotion associated with it, the act of introducing an idea to someone who needed it. What's shifted is that the promotion has transcended most of the process, because the idea itself becomes the promotion.

It used to be that nothing was more urgent than getting punched in the face. Instant, immediate, personal. Today, we're getting virtual punches, from every direction, all self-propelled, many of them amplified. The ideas that propel themselves on the tailwinds of culture will dominate, opposed only by the people who care enough to propel ideas that matter instead.

Maybe you.

            

The slippery slope

Make it a little more boring

Make it more fun

Make it cheaper

Onboard just about anyone

Don't speak up

Be less selective

Offer more variety

Make it shorter

Let it be

Dumb it down

Polish less

Polish more

Average it out

Respect the status quo

Wait

Don't even bother

...Gone with a whimper.

            

Links, shared

Iconic cartoonist Hugh Macleod is launching a series this week inspired by some of my work. Thanks, Hugh!

On Being's Krista Tippett has a new book ready for pre-order.

Doug Rushkoff's new book is out this month.  

Also, a new book from Gary Vaynerchuk.

And one from Adam Grant.

Faith Salie's new book comes out in a few weeks.  

Clay Shirky has a short book about a massive transformation you might not be noticing.

Also, I'm trying a new column in a new audio magazine online.

I'll be speaking in Dallas in May.

Chicago in June.

And Helsinki in October.

Thanks for making something.

            

While waiting for perfect

You've permitted magical to walk on by. Not to mention good enough, amazing and wonderful.

Waiting for the thing that cannot be improved (and cannot be criticized) keeps us from beginning.

Merely begin.

            

The difference between confidence and arrogance

Confidence is arrogance if the market doesn't believe the story.

When we show up with something great, something generous, well-executed and new, some people will be suspicious. "Is this everything it's cracked up to be?" The skeptic wonders if we have the standing to back it up.

You're not going to be able to persuade those skeptics. In fact, when you try, you end up dressing up your confident presentation with too many claims and you risk being seen as merely arrogant.

The classic 1984 Apple commercial was beautifully confident. It pulled no punches, it was perfectly crafted and it described a product that some people believed would change their lives.

The 1985 commercial, though, was perceived as arrogant. Without enough to back it up, the skeptic in us said, "I don't want this change*, it's not real." (*the bulk of the market doesn't ever truly want change, because change brings risk and risk brings fear. Give people a chance to avoid change, and they'll likely take it).

The market needs the hubris of high expectations, it's the only thing that seduces some people to embrace change. But the provider (that's us) has to tell a coherent, resonant, true story that touches the right people the right way.