The Making of a Spatial Shift Curve

starts when you have a black swan moment like COVID-19. What you once knew to be true and considered a comfort zone is now all in question. The prevailing narrative is now disrupted. The idea of business, as usual, is now an unknown. Today’s OKR is no longer on point. The metric du jour is irrelevant.

“In economic life and history more generally, just about everything of consequence comes from black swans; ordinary events have paltry effects in the long term.” ~Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable.

As noted by many, our primitive brain is geared to a flight or fright cognition. Our displacement is disorienting. Our quarantine is forcing us to revisit Maslow’s hierarchy back to its fundamental basic needs of food, warmth, water, rest, safety and security.

How do we make sense of this moment? How do we reconcile that we are in a massive shift, now all at once? Is this a blip or a trigger for change? Will we come out of the other side fully intact or altered from our previous state of mind?

I have been thinking about this moment for a long time. Like everyone else, I did not see our lives being disrupted by an invisible enemy. An enemy that defies race, creed, color, sex, title, gender, politics, wealth and or stature as well as borders. This pandemic has forced me to become a student again. I see corollaries between tech, connectivity and a virus. A new topography has arrived.

I have become fascinated by contagion and its mathematical patterns. By behavior economics and how we are reacting or responding as a society, corporation, organization, government, and individual. Like an out of body experience or a movie scene in slow motion. Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six pops into my head. Sci-fi movies are being recalled from deeper memory files.

I see the making of a new S curve that I am calling a Spatial Shift Curve.

The New Spatial Shift Curve

I see things in narrative thinking. Narratives help us to make sense of things. Narratives are powerful shapers of how people think, behave and act. In a moment of complete disruption, one can either react or respond to the situation.

I believe we are fundamentally in a reset. The actions taken by governments and leaders across the globe are literally unprecedented. Even by world war standards. We are, rather we agree or not, interconnected by a common thread.

The current thread is what I call “being essential”. Our temporary boundaries are now set by the definition of being essential. If you are not essential, you are scrambling to become essential or to remain essential. Everything you did prior to COVID 19 is now open for a new decision.

How you show up in the moment of being essential may shape the curve you now find yourself surfing. How you respond to this Spatial Shift over the next several months may begin your next curve or see you migrate towards oblivion.

The New Spatial Shift Curve

I have jumped into global virtual conferences with a fury. Mostly to accelerate my learning and to see how others are responding to the moment. It is messy, experimental. But, I also see the evolution of tremendous human qualities rising to the surface — we are being allowed to be vulnerable. We are all on a similar learning curve — all at once. We are creating on the fly. We are pulling together to solve a common problem.

Several companies are resetting their agenda and setting aside their primary business practices to contribute to the greater good. New companies that were on the fringe or edge of adoption are now acting as “accelerants” of change. Many more companies will show up on the “being essential” portion of the Spatial Curve.

Some organizations will react and show their true colors in a manner that will not be acceptable to the emergent narrative of the Spatial Shift. The individuals impacted by these reactions will recover and remember. And, those who are watching, who also fear for their own wellbeing will also remember.

The transactional mindset of business today is paused for doing the right thing in the moment of need. Are your values, typically deemed as corporate wallpaper and nice posters, showing up in your actions? What is your purpose, if your employees, culture, and customers don’t align with your actions? The cliche of actions speaks louder than words is now front and center.

How will you show up? Are you essential?

A Soundbite From the Age of Paradox

I am deep into a Future of Work project that fuses automation and humans together in the workforce.

As part of my approach, I always dig into the classics and history — as current life is usually a recycled version from another point in time. The process and the framework may change, but the human part not so much. I dug these beauties out today from The Age of Paradox, by Charles Handy (1994). Seemed relevant for a hump day post.

“We all need something to do. It is hard to see why there should be a shortage of it, yet enforced idleness seems to be the price we pay for improved efficiency….The result is that some people have work and money but too little leisure time, while others have all the leisure time but no work and no money. Those who are idle do not see it as a privilege but as a curse because they tend to be at the bottom of the heap.”

“Work is society’s chosen way of distributing income. We will do even boring work for the money it brings.”

“Our organizations want the most work for the least money while individuals typically want the most money for the least work.”

This 15 year old paradox was surfaced last night by John Hagel at a DisruptHR event in the Bay Area discussing Future of Work and disruption, he asked, “ What should work be?”

The fear of automation is just that. Fear. Fear of the unknown. Fear of uncertainty. Fear of losing our jobs. That is aided and abated by CEO’s who ask, “How quickly can I automate?” and “How quickly can I cut costs?”.

This points to motivation. The why behind the questions and the fear. If we only see through lens of Wall Street and shareholder value (cloak for profit and margins) and not the bigger picture of stakeholder value as espoused by 181 CEO’s from the Business Roundtable, then were are we heading and for what purpose?

What narrative lens do you bring this topic?

Spatial Narrative Era

We are wired to be spatial thinkers. We exist in a multi-dimensional experience when you consider your five senses - the faculties of sight, smell, hearing, taste, and touch. As I have begun a deeper journey into the wine world, I have become more aware of the senses. The connections between your cognitive and emotional brain and how those entwine as well as collide when information or stimulus is presented.

The same is true in narrative. As we become a culture driven by screens and immediate gratification, our senses are becoming even more relevant to the experience again. The idea of expressing a narrative in only words, means we have merely touched one piece of the multi-dimensional equation. When viewing narrative as a meta layer to a brand experience, it requires us to see a bigger picture. A picture that when captured right, provides a rich context to the overall experience intended. A guiding or north star for what a company aspires to be. A way to make sense of things.

When I step back and open my senses beyond just looking at my screen, I remember the impact of a new car smell. The sound of the door closing on a luxury vehicle vs. an entry model. The white noise injected into a loud restaurant so you can actually carry on a conversation vs. shouting to be heard. The mouth watering senses triggered by the wafting smell of Garret’s popcorn being released across the Chicago cityscape. The smell of a freshly decanted bottle of cabernet or pinot noir and the provenance associated with that moment. The ribs cooking in front of a church parking lot growing up. The awe of seeing Cirque du Soleil for the first time and trying to explain it to someone who has yet to witness the experience. That moment when a singer gave you goosebumps.

Exponential technologies are accelerating our capacity to realize these spatial experiences in either a virtual or real world and or combination of both. I remember the distinct feeling I had when I watched Brainstorm right after graduating from college. Brainstorm is more known as Natalie Wood’s last movie (she passed shortly after its release in a boating accident), then the mind altering experiences achieved in the film. The ability to see, taste and feel the other persons senses really stuck with me all of these years.

The time has come for what I call the Spatial Narrative Era. We have pieces of Spatial Narrative scattered about. We have brilliant transmedia experiences that have been pushing on this subject for years. A project by BradField Narrative called Inanimate Alice was introduced to me 10 years ago when building a start up called Everloop. BradField continues to tell the story of Alice in an amazing use of transmedia as part of their life’s work to impact the imagination of school age children/teens.

My work in the connected car space at Aha Radio brought new dimensions to the combinations of audio + space + speed + place + connectivity to a whole new set of possibilities. As the connected car morphs into Level 4 and 5 autonomy, the idea of spatial takes on yet another narrative context. Perhaps we are now ready to add to the number of senses. We already have the notion of a 6th sense and a recent book by Joshua Cooper Ramo, entitled The Seventh Sense suggested a new Enlightenment in the age of networks. It seems as “things” are now able to tell stories thanks to the emergence of IoT (internet of things), we are now gaining a new sense - modality. Proximity tied to geo-spatial and ambient messaging have become common trigger points in designing for the spatial narrative era.

Is your organization ready for Spatial Narrative? Executing it is one thing, but being in alignment with it is where the real truth lies.