The Strategic Storyteller by Alexander Jutkowitz

Author:Alexander Jutkowitz
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781119345091
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2017-08-28T16:11:53+00:00

Velocity Is Transformational

As Eric Ries, author of The Lean Startup, puts it, there is a persistent belief, endemic either to U.S. capitalism or possibly human nature, that by spending just a bit more time and a bit more money, it is possible to protect our endeavors and by extension ourselves from future harm.

This belief, Ries says, is not only blind but promotes blindness. It is only through the process of trial and error, or, on a grander scale, failure, that we are capable of learning.11

The perennial slowdown that comes from wanting certainty is what eventually leads to the cementing of hierarchies and bureaucracies, the overgrowth of formal communications within a company, and the slow overspecialization of individual jobs.

The process of violent revolution or institutional collapse is the intrusion into this state of affairs of urgent, unmet needs. In our accelerated age, we don't have time for either. And velocity is an engine for avoiding these twin upsets.

Velocity, when applied to content marketing, can be an engine for continuous renewal, because maintaining velocity forces us to move forward without all the answers.

In Ries' philosophy, which is designed to accelerate the creation and launch of digital and physical products, that engine is called the MVP, or minimum viable product. It is the simplest form of your product that successfully meets the needs of the market. It is both effective and necessarily imperfect, and how consumers respond to it shapes the future of your business and your product. The MVP is designed to get you moving and learning at the same time.

SJR takes a similar approach to the creation of content. We believe that if you're not releasing your product with a few bugs, you're almost certainly waiting too long.

For large, legacy companies, this can be a serious challenge but also an incredible opportunity to change.

Scratch the surface of the most imposing, iconic corporate brand, and you are quite likely to find a culture that demands approval and buy in from every disparate part of the organization and every link in the chain of command before it is deemed ready for public consumption.

But by the time this has happened, your product—the piece of content—is not only drained of all coherence and originality, it has been rendered irrelevant by the passing on of attention, from both the public and your own employees, to other issues.

This is not a hypothetical scenario I am building up just to take down. At SJR, we've seen communications as short as a single tweet travel through multiple layers of approval before arriving on the web hours, days, or even weeks after the event it refers to. Scenarios like that represent a misunderstanding of the centrality of speed in a digital world, and also a missed opportunity to shape the conversation sooner, possibly first.

In a news cycle that can be measured in a number of hours, such a failure to move can actually be catastrophic. As the great psychologist Carl Jung said, “The world will ask who you are, and if you do not respond, it will tell you.

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