Media Transformation Models #1: Moving through Scales.
More than 20 years ago I bought a little flipbook in the Centre Pompidou in Paris. With the flick of your thumb it lets you travel from the outer edges of the universe to a man sleeping on a picnic blanket in a park, then moving inward into his hand until the journey ends inside his DNA and ultimately a single proton. With every page everything gets magnified 10 times. Only later did I discover that the little flipbook was based on a film by Charles and Ray Eames: Powers of Ten.
The movie is a remarkable piece of art, science and philosophy at the same time, and probably the clearest study of moving through scales. If you have never seen the movie you should check it out now. What follows will make much more sense afterwards.
Powers of Ten expresses a key design approach. The value of looking at things from another frame of reference. By moving up or down one or more levels we start to see things into context. In that sense scale becomes a tool that can help us think through relations. It puts things ‘in perspective’.
Beyond Scale
Let’s admit it. We have lost perspective. The digital age has blown everything out of proportion. What does a trillion dollar look like? How much does a terrabyte weigh? The essence of digital products and companies has evolved beyond what we can imagine.
It was never easier to scale things up, grow followers, go viral, spread misinformation or lose a billion overnight. More than once that scale becomes unmanageable. That’s scary and exhilarating at the same time.
In his book Not to Scale, Jamer Hunt even claims that the biggest challenges we currently face are all combinations of things that we can no longer size up — from the ‘trillion dollar tech firms’ to the endless lines of unknowable code that drive todays algorithms. The near infinity of scale in both directions is what makes the digital age so disruptive and complex. For us, for our organisations and for society at large.
An example: OTT
Let’s make this a bit more concrete, with an example close to media: the world of on demand content. If you enter that topic from a traditional linear channel perspective you will easily get stuck. OTT is not about replicating your TV channel in an on-demand world. The true dynamics in an on-demand world actually play at another level: On-level above and on-level below.
One-level up: In an on-demand reality people no longer engage with channels but with services or platforms. The battle ground has become the home screen of your smart TV or set-top box, where you have one chance to make a first impression. Here the battle is no longer local but global, between platforms, manufacturers, telco’s and broadcasters.
One-level down: Within an on-demand platform people engage at title level on the basis of genre, popularity, recommendations or any other way to bring content together that has no direct connection to the logic of channels. As you can image this has huge implications on what kind of content is commissioned and acquired.
How to move through scale?
The example above shows that we need to learn to look at things in a different way. Understanding scale starts with the basics: understanding what size everything is, how one size relates to another one, and what size matters most in the game you play.
Luckily the Powers of Ten movie offer us some great lessons. Eames Demetrios, the grandson of Charles Eames developed a method that uses the film as starting point to teach how you can start thinking through scales.
1. Establish a scale line.
The first thing to do is to to establish a scale line. This can be for your organisation, a specific service, your work or even your life. For a digital product this might scale from the line of code and design behind a button to the full product, the potential users, their world and the wider trends that guide his behavior.
2. Add data
Once you have that scale line sketched out it’s useful to draw one next to it and think who’s involved at every level and what they are responsible for. Product, marketing, strategy, business development,… The more you move upwards the wider the field of potential collaborators, stakeholders will become.
3. Think outside your scale
Depending on your starting point it’s useful to start looking at the adjacent levels. Imagine you lead a product team. What happens one level up and down? Draw these layers out further. Think of the next scales at depth. What parts of it are you less familiar with? How do things change at these levels?
4. Look how scales influence each other
Now you have a better a sense of adjacent scales it’s worth drawing circles of influence. How does something that happens at a lower level influence a higher level or vice versa? And what new potential collaborators come into view? How can the work of an audience trend analyst help a designer? What does a coder need to know about the prominence discussions the business people are trying to tackle?
5. Formulate new perspectives
At it’s most basic thinking through scales will help you, your team and your organisation to be more aware of the other layers that surround it. This might open up some new perspectives or reveal some of your blind spots and allow you to better act at the scale that maximizes best your capacity.
The example above starts from a digital product perspective and scales to the user and the world around that user. But of course you can also zoom out from a value proposition to a business plan around a product and the broader ecosystem that informs it. The well-know Business Model Canvas actually uses that logic to move one-layer down and up.
Another example closer to home is the new EBU capabilities map that allows you to zoom in and out to discuss capabilities and skills at a more strategical or more tactical level.
Be aware of the complexity trap
When working with this method it’s good to keep in mind what you want to achieve. Before you know it you are trapped in complexity. Scale does that. It pushes back. With every layer perspectives and voices are added that can easily feel overwhelming.
Rather than trying to ignore that complexity you can acknowledge it. Here are some ways to keep focus on what matters.
- Look at the full picture
- Determine the elements/nodes in the layers above and below you that have most impact on what you try to achieve.
- Look at how they are connected to what you do.
- Define those that are actionable and can be influenced by you.
- Simplify your map.
Remember in the end it’s just about changing your perspective:
Inspiring system thinker Donatella Meadow: “Change comes from stepping outside the limited information that can be seen from any single place in the system and getting an overview”
Questions? Drop me a mail and I’m happy to jump on a call or take you through some more examples.
This is the 2nd post in a series that tries to find different lenses and different models to look at the transformation of our organisations in order to be better prepared for the changing media landscape. You can read part 1 here.
The next article zooms in on how aproaching your organisation from the outside to the inside can help you unlock key insights to guide both your content and your product.
