I love this latest cartoon from Hugh McLeod at Gaping Void …

Hugh writes about it by saying …

“This cartoon was inspired by my friend, Mark Earls’ new book, “I’ll Have What She’s Having”.

Mark (@herdmeister), a former hot-shot London advertising planner, came to the conclusion that advertising needed to worry less about the usual buzzwords swishing around the industry, and more about the hard science of human behavior.

He calls it “Herd Behavior”. People are hyper-social creatures who behave en masse, not individually. And there’s a lot of new science to back it up.

Which renders a lot of old-school, command-and-control ideas about marketing and business rather misinformed at best, completely wrong at worst.

Marketers love to be lazy, love to think that humans beings are predictable… that if you only say the right thing in a sweet-sounding and clever enough voice, people will magically fall into line. Like some magic lever, just waiting to be pulled. Alas.”

If you want to have a conversation with Mark Earls and hear what he has to say about CHANGE (and how stuff spreads through communities), he is coming to Australia very soon! I’ll working alongside Mark and the 3 Pillars Network at their 3rd Annual Behaviour Change 4 Sustainability Congress. You can register here. 

In my own consulting work with clients this “Tyranny of Control” remains a pervasive force and one I find myself challenging constantly. When it comes to my practice of designing for and facilitating group conversations … there is no mechanical lever that sets off a nice, neat set of predictable outcomes. Viv McWaters and Johnnie Moore have written some great stuff on this and they call it the Tyranny of the Explicit. Here’s a little of what Viv has to say …

“Building your commitment muscle takes a leap of faith, often into the unknown. If you need to know what it will be like before you commit (which on the face of it seems reasonable) you will be forever stuck in what Johnnie and I refer to as the Tyranny of the Explicit – needing to know yet more information before acting.

Trailblazers, leaders, innovators all share a willingness to commit without knowing the outcome, without knowing if it will be worth it, without having done a risk analysis. They bust free of the Tyranny of the Explicit.”

So what are you trying to control at the moment? I’ve a got a few thing I need to ‘let-go’ of myself 🙂