This post is an extract of my forthcoming book on business model innovation. The innovation book looks at why business model innovation is needed and how it works. You can read more about it here. These posts are early drafts of planned content and I’m putting them out to get feedback. Please do comment below, or subscribe to these pages to get each new section as it is published. In today’s post, we will be looking at finding opportunities in this new world.
When I was at university in the 90’s I looked at some of the early graph theory and explored how we could use ‘hyperlinks’ to connect knowledge. Imagine Wikipedia on steroids. By looking at how different philosophers connected, different concepts as a group by super-imposing their thought structures would we be able to see some patterns in the knowledge that wasn’t immediately apparent when you read the work of a single philosopher or several ones after another?
Talking about philosophy often loses people.
Imagine if you could map out the beliefs of your wife or partner – a map where you can see them visually rather than a set of statements of “I believe…” this or that.
Let’s take the same visual map of her mother’s beliefs. It is going to be different but probably fairly similar. What happens if we put one map on top of the other? We see areas of commonality, and we see areas where mother and daughter differ. Now, let’s add all my wife’s brothers and sisters. Now her family is in England, Germany, and Turkey. What happens when we later add on her friends, and me and my family and my friends.
You can see how we can go on.
Differences in Cultures
As we add thousands of belief maps on top of each other, you can start to see patterns and differences between different groups and cultures.
We know intuitively that English and Turkish are different from each other. Some of the easy ways that we can say this is true but not desperately useful. Turks speak Turkish and are often Muslim. The English speak English and are traditionally Christian.
This simplified abstraction has lost the set of beliefs that my wife, you, and everyone we know have.
Where are we going with this?
If you imagine these belief graphs as a web that enmeshes and entangles a population, a group, a community, we can see that some beliefs are held by more members. These are core beliefs. It’s hard to change them. Some are common to much of humanity. Others are specific to cultures at particular times.
Others are very time-dependent. For example, in England beliefs about clothing have gone from one extreme where men wore tights to show off their legs and clad their penises in velvet sheaths, presumably to show them off as well. Several times over the next few centuries, we became more prudish than the Taliban, even hiding the legs of our chairs and table, in case they excite impure thoughts among young men (why the sight of a chair leg wasn’t thought to excite young women I don’t know).
These beliefs start with a group and then spread through the culture, slowly changing the way that most people see, or say they see, reality.
Homophobia
When I was at school in the 1980’s homophobia was rampant. Looking back, I don’t think I knew anyone who was gay, knew what gay really was, or cared. Yet it was the generic term of abuse, from the mild rebuke to the cruel and cutting.
By the time I left university, it was accepted and normal. Another ten years, and you were odd if you were slightly homophobic. A decade on and I was mystified by gender issues.
World views had been shifting continuously for the whole of that period, not just for me but millions of other people as we digested films, experiences, marriages, articles, and compassion.
World Views in Business
What created those changes? What drove them. In culture, what seems to happen as Malcolm Gladwell put it is, that there are people who spread ideas and do it very effectively. TED makes this explicitly their goal – Ideas worth spreading.
In a culture when ideas spread, it is because they have some positive impact – whipping my child stunts his development rather than helping him learn, so let’s stop physical punishment; because they give us moral statements. Dying your hair says one thing, wearing Amish clothes says another, and as a culture moves, this virtue signaling can become even more powerful, as it did in Nazi Germany.
In business, however, world views tend to change differently. Despite the quantified life movement, few people look at their lives in terms of numbers and adjust their daily performance based on a spreadsheet.
In the corporate environment, we do. We measure how effective our beliefs are in creating the change that we want. The balance sheet, the profit and loss statement are reckoning of how good our belief system is, how good the nested hypotheses that drive it are. They also tell us how closely we align to the belief systems of the rest of society.
As we go into the next chapters, we start exploring how we construct belief systems and world views, and how these change and impact the business models that we create and can create.
If You Want to Read More
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