Maybe

chrysalis small-scale-capitalism

Michael Nielsen, who I enjoy and respect, said this recently:

He’s right in one sense, and in a different sense he reminded me of a problem, one related to systems and uncertainty, that I’ve dealt with and suffered from personally.

Michael’s talking about how the debate that led to Biden quitting the race and Kamala being coronated as the successor has ended up with a lot more enthusiasm being expressed among the Democratic Party.

Here’s what I’ve learned: in such phenomena, time matters. A lot. Enthusiasm now may or may not be enthusiasm at a future data, say on election day. 😃 And where matters. In a large group where some members are vocal and expressive and others are silent, where the enthusiasm is distributed among group members also matters. It also matters a lot.

Maybe it’s just me, but at least I feel a strong desire to simplify situations involving groups. In other words, to model the situation. My preferred model is a single room with bench seating, arranged such that I’m standing above the group and can see all of them from my vantage point. I then map all the experiences and interactions I’ve had with the group I’m trying to understand onto this mental model of the entire group being assembled simultaneously in this room where I can see them all.

This is a terrible way to go about understanding a group. Or, it can lead to a badly distorted understanding of the group. An improved use of the same model would be this: I map all the experiences and interactions I’ve had with the group I’m trying to understand onto maybe 10% of the seats in the room. These people are wearing the clothes and facial expressions and articulating the ideas of my real-life interactions with group members. The other 90% of the seats in the room are also filled, but those people are wearing beige jumpsuits and cloth flour sacks over their heads. They’re present, but illegible. What are their intentions and ideas and needs? If they act as a bloc, they for sure have phenomenally more voting power!

Where this has come to bear on my life in a painful way is this. In the previous, “thought leader” phase of my business, I cooked up some pretty bizarre offers for the market. Not completely unprecedented stuff, but stuff with highly niche appeal. The Expertise Incubator was one such offer. A 9-month program with a lot of challenging elements and only a modest amount of structure and support. I’ve created other offers with similar dynamics.

In every case, I would promote these offers to the email list I had at the time, which was generally in the range of 2,000 contacts. And every time, I would make the same mistake. I would get an enthusiastic response to the offer from some people, and I would then map their response into 100% of my mental model of the room full of people instead of more correctly mapping the enthusiastic response onto at most 10% of the imagined room of people and leaving the other 90% neutral, faceless, and unknown.

Then, based on this distorted understanding of reality, I would make flawed decisions. By the second or third time I’d run one of those offers, demand would start dropping off sharply.

In reality, all that was actually happening is I was satisfying the demand from that 10% of the audience – and these offers weren’t things anybody would want to buy more than once – so of course demand declined. But inside my head, looking at that flawed mental model, it was perplexing that the invisible 90% of the audience, which I wrongly assumed shared a similar level of enthusiasm to the visible 10%, wasn’t buying.

I don’t think the trap I got myself into is inevitable and universal. But if Byron Sharp is to be believed – and I don’t really see why not – then much more big-time marketers/teams make this same category error when they confuse the preferences or behavior of heavy buyers of a brand or product with that of light buyers. They are motivated to see light buyers as a group of people who are almost ready to become heavy buyers with just the right simple incentive, like a loyalty program for example. In reality, light buyers are just not that into you. Or your competitors. Or your category, really.

The only argument I have in this post is: don’t make the mistake I did and use a sort of “AI generative fill” to extend your understanding of the visible members of an audience to the invisible members. Try to come from this place instead?

MAYBE

Once upon the time there was an old farmer who had worked his crops for many years.

One day his horse ran away. Upon hearing the news, his neighbors came to visit. “Such bad luck,” they said sympathetically.
“Maybe,” the farmer replied.

The next morning the horse returned, bringing with it three other wild horses. “How wonderful,” the neighbors exclaimed.
“Maybe,” replied the old man.

The following day, his son tried to ride one of the untamed horses, was thrown, and broke his leg. The neighbors again came to offer their sympathy on his misfortune.
“Maybe,” answered the farmer.

The day after, military officials came to the village to draft young men into the army. Seeing that the son’s leg was broken, they passed him by. The neighbors congratulated the farmer on how well things had turned out.
“Maybe,” said the farmer.