Everything Starts with Hello
Distance can create proximity. Coincidences can be meaningful. I have proof. Her name is Jennifer.
This text is more personal than I am really comfortable with. But I feel a need to share it. It’s a tale of spreading ripples, and the important act of throwing a stone into the water, just for some movement to occur. It’s the story of two people who back in 2005 unsuspectingly listened to the world at the same digital frequency. By a curious twist of fate, we established a personal and professional contact that exaggerated all the background noise.
During the last 13 years I have had a range of important conversations with a stranger on another continent. Over time, this someone turned into an ally and professional mentor. The story ends, or more precisely turns, with a meeting in real life, as if it were a postmodern adventure.
The moral? What seems at first to be coincidental can turn out to be important. The internet actually works. Ideas can cross large seas and contribute to change on the other side. Jennifer is one random person of seven billion opportunities. Still, to me, she has made an important difference.
Hello.
This was probably the first word I wrote. The year was 2005, two years before Facebook. I wasn’t looking for new friends, I was merely doing some research. Along with a web developer, I designed the online portal for the Fri Flyt magazine, a printed publication for freeride skiing that I founded with friends seven years earlier. We aimed to challenge the traditional concept of journalism. Our business model was not to sell a paper-and-ink product, but to build a community of shared lifestyle aspirations, with our magazine being the key gravitational reference point. Internet was becoming increasingly important. We wanted to use digital technology to make our readers interact, share their own stories, reinforce a real-life network. We wanted to create a tribal-like culture.
To find inspiration, I looked to the social forum at salon.com, an interesting magazine for progressive political thinking, which at the time had a thriving online community.
I needed to contact someone, whoever, to test messaging and understand more of the design features that stimulated reader interaction. For some reason, probably because of what she wrote on her profile page, I contacted Jennifer. What she answered, I can’t recall. One of us asked a question. A conversation developed, hesitantly at the start. It generally revolved around who we were, what we did, what we dreamed about, and how we experienced the world.
My research project took a back seat that evening. Instead, I became fascinated by a human riddle in Chicago, a stranger on the other edge of transatlantic fiber optic cables.
Jennifer gradually became my first and only digital pen-pal. The Salon forum closed, we continued our correspondence sporadically by email, and later on Facebook. It felt like sending messages in digital bottles that floated back and forth. Time zone difference made the dialogue slightly asynchronous. Our relationship was an early, slow prototype of today’s snapchat dialogues. Abstract artistic pictures, weird observations, questions, comforting words, links to interesting articles. We did not talk often but we had established a channel of communication and I knew that there was both wisdom and an articulated voice at the other end.
It was liberating to have this opportunity of therapeutic conversation out of the blue with someone who lacked all prejudices, background information, and all Norwegian references. This clean slate made me discover a new, somewhat poetic tone in myself. The person behind the keyboard so far away found sense in some of my strangest, most complex ideas, which hardly anyone else understood, something which had admittedly created a feeling of intellectual loneliness and a hunger for resonance. Jennifer gave me feedback. We developed a sort of empathic curiosity, with thoughtful questions or empowering comments, which I think both of us needed and appreciated at the time.
These were seminal times in the social media age. The friendship and the thoughts waving back and forth between two related souls on two different continents manifested itself through the hypertext protocol — still a relatively new invention. I remember thinking of Jennifer as a gift from the internet. A person who saw the world from the same point of view as myself, even though she lived another life, unknown to me, on the other side of an ocean.
The digital dialogue sometimes went dormant, but resumed in sudden bursts of interest. We both had great relationships, we were both busy initiators and our professional lives kept evolving. The digital skiing platform turned out to be successful, and we sold the company. I started a consulting business working with business clusters in Western Norway. I subsequently went on to start an agency for digital design and user research in Bergen, my hometown.
Jennifer followed another, somewhat similar path. She moved from film to journalism and began exploring models for user involvement in editorial processes. At the time I started my consulting business, she started the company Hearken, which would change the way traditional media interacts with its own readers. At one point I became CEO in the media cluster in Bergen, with a mandate to “stimulate digital innovation” in newsrooms.
We both experienced struggles during this phase. We were challenged by conventional ideas and what we considered lack of curiosity about what the term digital could become in media. Our motives and solutions were questioned. The hill felt steep.
Courage is not the absence of fear but the distance between the fear you feel and what you choose to do anyway. In my eyes, Jennifer’s project, to give readers the opportunity to contribute with ideas and questions to the editorial staff, was self-explanatory and important. As a former journalist, I had learned how arrogant some media leaders managed their power of definition. The culture of telling was strong, but very few editors had (or have) developed the ability to listen to all the interesting questions that circulate among the wider audience.
I admired her drive. I could follow the project from the outside, but I also knew from our dialogue that it came with a cost on a personal level. My distance from Jennifer made it easier for me to express this admiration in plain text. The fight she fought on the other side of the Atlantic was one I could strongly identify with, like a metaphorical mirror from the real world. Our dialogue was also a self-reflection. The binary filter that separated us created a different kind of proximity. “Rising to new heights sometimes feels like falling”, I once wrote in a chat, probably when I was enduring some darker moments in my own career. It still feels wise but it does not feel like something I have written. Jennifer has this feature: she evokes interesting thoughts in the minds of others.
We have had discussions about strategy, about crossroads in life and the struggles of entrepreneurship. Neither of us believed in ideas of mechanical causality and linear development that seems to dominate management theory. It was as if we both considered the fabric of reality to be more organic, vivid, responsive and complex. Development is not something you decide in a board meeting, but something you need to cultivate. Ideas evolve from tiny seeds. Given the right soil, they can develop roots and grow into reality. The existence is a complex jungle where solutions melt together, where (often unquestioned) narratives exercise invisible power, where each new change opens a door to a new room with new doors, and new combinatorial possibilities. As creatives and entrepreneurs in this environment we are gardeners enabling cascading effects, not excavators. In a time where everyone seems to be beset by the idea of technological disruption, we both thought of digitisation as a means, not an end in itself.
At the beginning of 2017, our transatlantic channel went silent for several months, but one day the twitter feed served me an interesting blog post, titled Zebras fix what unicorns break. Startled, I realised that the text was written by Jennifer. With her entrepreneurial friend Mara, CEO at Switchboard, she challenged the American startup culture. Where scalability wins over meaning. Where white, rich men reinforce the power of other white, rich men. Where diversity and human touch are being replaced by monoculture and algorithms. Jennifer had spent a long time trying to get a profitable company funded. She was frustrated.
And she took a stand.
I loved the Zebra metaphor and began to realise that these ideas could also impact positively on the Nordic startup scene. She was ready and able to share them with a larger audience. After 13 years we started talking about a meeting in real life for the first time. Could I find an excuse to invite her over to Europe?
My new company, Myldring, was co-organising the Samvirk conference, where our aim was to explore collaboration-based organisational models. Who should we invite to talk? The partners in the programme committee shared a link to an article they had read — Zebras fix what unicorns break. They wanted to invite a woman called Jennifer Brandel to Oslo. A new meaningful coincidence, and finally, a pretext to meet up.
Last week, I was waiting at Oslo Central Station, looking for Jennifer, her husband (filmmaker Aaron Wickenden), Zebra partner Mara and another friend from Berlin.
“I’ll be the nervous-looking guy with a blue shirt”, I wrote on WhatsApp.
“Ha! I will be the one with sweaty hands”, she answered.
And so finally:
Hello.
The real Jennifer is smiling, relaxed, a bit philosophical, funny. Pretty much exactly the way she is on the internet. At the conference, she inspired the participants in a shared presentation with her fellow partner Mara. After the keynote, several people said they would help the Zebra idea get a foothold in the Nordic region.
We spent two evenings with long conversations on a terrace looking out over the sunset in Oslo. These real-life conversations brought our friendship to a new phase. We have linked our projects closer together. At least one Norwegian media company will explore the Hearken methodology. The plans for a nordic Dazzle-conference, a gathering of zebra-companies, is currently evolving.
Through our random relationship, networks have interconnected. The ideas have begun to flow. What change can they cause?
I am sharing this story because it fills me with optimism. Jennifer is my personal proof that digital interaction can enrich and not just flatter our short lives. The web is an extension of social and physical reality, not another universe. Social media can, at its best, create room for important, beautiful coincidences. Curiosity on a personal level can bridge the many boundaries between us, which are too often defined by geopolitical conflict or targeted marketing. The loose ties between individuals are potentially a powerful infrastructure. Without noticing it, we live in an information environment that pushes us into segments. We are being cultivated into predictable behaviour which often ends up nurturing the networks and relationships that are already established. Predictability is profitable.
To break this dynamic, we need to expand the circles and jump the fences. We need design for serendipity. We need platform that stimulates curiosity and openness, and venues where we can connect based on shared ideas, questions, experiences and aspirations.
Life is short and sometimes gray. The magic often occurs when you discover something more important than what you were initially looking for, or when the long detour turns out to lead to an interesting place you did not know existed. Our social reality occurs in microscale, but the effects play out like broad patterns. If we build networks that are diverse, inclusive and curious, a random thought can be rooted in many and become shared ideas that may one day change the world.
It all starts with someone saying this one important word:
Hello.
Is that someone you?
PS: Want to meet new people? Why not become a part of the online Zebra-community? Thanks to my australian friend Paul Holden for improving my norwegian-english. Another proof, another story.
