Managing Change

Then we may complain about the very changes that our complaining brought upon us.

None of this is new.

What is new is how fast change is overcoming us, and we have no way of controlling it so as to slow it down to an easy pace. Why is that?

First, it is because power has always been centralized and today is no different. If those in power want to do things that cause changes in how we get through our lives, we can’t stop them.

Second, we now have technology that is so advanced it can write its own code to improve itself. That is certainly not going to slow things down.

Third, the people in power control that technology.

It was decades ago that I started to use the term Acceleritis. I remember reading an IBM ad that talked about Information Overload, and it led me to thinking and the word “Acceleritis” popped into my head.

My definition of Acceleritis is the tendency for the amount of information the average human being needs to process per day to increase at an ever-increasing rate.

I predicted that the normative way we use our minds was not going to be able to keep up with it, and instead, we would be oversimplifying as much as possible by adopting popular views among our own tribes. Instead of thinking for ourselves. The only better alternative I saw was for methods of thinking that would adapt to the new, overwhelming environment. That was when I wrote my first book, Mind Magic. The book is in fact a manual of methods which conquer Acceleritis without giving in to Emergency Oversimplification Procedure (EOP).

Little did I know how much the acceleration would accelerate in my lifetime. EOP continues to be the normative way of using our minds.

So we are all learning how to deal with change in our own ways. For many of us, it is all too much, and we are collapsing in one way or another. Some of us are soldiering on but are becoming brusque with other people. Politeness is declining, rudeness is on the rise. The degree to which members of political parties have grown to loathe the members of the other party has reached epic proportions. Some of us are going with the flow and adapting. As Darwin and Wallace both observed, the ability to adapt to changing conditions is why certain species survived and evolved. The same is true for individuals within a species.

At the recent CIMM EAST conference, FOX Senior Vice President Kym Frank on a panel, opined that what we really need in the marketing media industries right now are new and innovative ways to manage change. She said that we need to review the procedures and protocols we have grown so used to that it never occurs to us that they might need an overhaul. She gave us an example of what she means: all the measurement currencies as they adapt to changing media realities should make those changes at no more than two pre-agreed dates each year, dates that are set based on avoiding havoc with recurring industry activities such as the Upfronts.

(Transparency: FOX and Kym are clients of Bill Harvey Consulting. That has nothing to do with the point of this article, however.)

At the same conference, agency executives explained the ways that they are adapting to change. WPP’s Nicolas Grand, Omnicom’s Ben Hovaness, Publicis’ Kate Sirkin, and Megan Halscheid counseled that inevitable and appropriate evolution was all that was happening, and that everyone needed to control their tempers and accept it as a given. Expect mistakes and frustrations, and leave room in planning to accommodate those. Yes, you will need to use many more different sets of data. Each agency must have its own tech stack and theory of how to make advertising produce brand growth, and although the audience measurements will always be needed, so will the business outcome measurements.

I never expected to hear or read criticism of MRC. I was astonished a couple of years back when I saw that happening for the first time in my experience. At the time, it was usually coming from smaller, newer research companies. I could empathize with them. When I was at TRA, we were planning to be MRC audited, but TiVo acquired us before that happened, and I soon left to found RMT. We never could afford MRC and were always planning for the day we could afford it.

The criticisms I am hearing most recently are different. Some people (not the rating services) are unhappy with the way that voting has more control over accreditation than auditing does. The process of the discussions leading to the voting is frustrating to some. There are second thoughts about whether the voting to cause Nielsen to make rapid changes was a good idea or not. Nicolas Grand observed sympathetically that the same companies that voted to make Nielsen make rapid changes are now blaming Nielsen for the additional work they must do before the impending upfront.

I have great confidence in George Ivie and the MRC. The one direction my mind goes in trying to apply Kym’s principle of focusing on innovation in change management to this subject, is that the advertisers should be on the TV Committee too. All of it is their money originally as it moves through the pipeline to the sell side, agencies, and research companies. They have all of the original skin in the game. To protect their own interests, they should be in on the voting about what to force the measurement companies to do.

I have been playing with Kym’s idea about innovations in change management, and it keeps giving me ideas. I hope it works for you that way, too.

Posted at MediaVillage through the Thought Leadership self-publishing platform.

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The opinions expressed here are the author's views and do not necessarily represent the views of MediaVillage.org/MyersBizNet.