Friendster | Human-Centered Change and Innovation

GUEST POST from Greg Satell

There is a line of thinking that says that the world is built on ideas. It was an idea that launched the American Revolution and created a nation. It was an idea that led Albert Einstein to pursue relativity, Linus Pauling to invent a vaccine and for Steve Jobs to create the iPhone and build the most valuable company in the world.

It is because of the power of ideas that we hold them so dear. We want to protect those we believe are valuable and sometimes become jealous when others think them up first. There’s nothing so rapturous as the moment of epiphany in which an idea forms in our mind and begins to take shape.

Clearly, ideas are important, but not as many believe. America is what it is today, for better or worse, not just because of the principles of its founding, but because of the actions that came after it. We revere people like Einstein, Pauling and Jobs not because of their ideas, but what they did with them. The truth is that although possibilities are infinite, ideas are limited.

The Winklevoss Affair

The muddled story of Facebook’s origin is now well known. Mark Zuckerberg met with the Winklevoss twins and another Harvard classmate to discuss building a social network together. Zuckerberg agreed, but then sandbagged his partners while he built and launched a competing site. He would later pay out a multimillion dollar settlement for his misdeeds.

Zuckerberg and the Winklevoss twins were paired in the news together again recently when Facebook announced that it’s developing a new cryptocurrency called Libra. As it happens, the Winklevoss twins have been high profile investors in Bitcoin for a while now. The irony was too delicious for many in the media to ignore. First he stole their idea for Facebook and now he’s doing the same with cryptocurrencies!

Of course this is ridiculous. Social networks like Friendster and Myspace existed before Facebook and many others came after. Most failed. In much the same way, many people today have ideas about starting cryptocurrency businesses. Most of them will fail too. The value of an initial idea is highly questionable.

Different people have similar ideas all the time. In fact, in a landmark study published in 1922 identified 148 major inventions or discoveries that at least two different people, working independently, arrived at the same time. So the fact that both the Winklevoss twins and Zuckerberg wanted to launch a social network was meaningless.

The truth is that Zuckerberg didn’t have to pay the Winklevoss twins because he stole their idea, but because he used their trust to actively undermine their business to benefit his. His crime wasn’t creation, but destruction.

The Semmelweis Myth

In 1847, a young doctor named Ignaz Semmelweis had a major breakthrough. Working in a maternity ward, he discovered that a regime of hand washing could dramatically lower the incidence of childbed fever. Unfortunately, the medical establishment rejected his idea and the germ theory of disease didn’t take hold until decades later.

The phenomenon is now known as the Semmelweis effect, the tendency for people to reject new knowledge that contradicts established beliefs. We tend to think that a great idea will be immediately obvious to everyone, but the opposite usually happens. Ideas that have the power to change the world always arrive out of context for the simple reason that the world hasn’t changed yet.

However, the Semmelweis effect is misleading. As Sherwin Nuland explains in The Doctor’s Plague, there’s more to the story than resistance to a new idea. Semmelweis didn’t see the value in communicating his work effectively, formatting his publications clearly or even collecting data in a manner that would gain his ideas greater acceptance.

Here again, we see the limits of ideas. Like a newborn infant, they can’t survive alone. They need to be nurtured to grow. They need to make friends, interact with other ideas and mature. The tragedy of Semmelweis is not that the medical establishment did not immediately accept his idea, but that he failed to steward it in such a way that it could spread and make an impact.

Why Blockbuster Video Really Failed

One of the most popular business myths today is that of Blockbuster Video. As the story is usually told, the industry giant failed to recognize the disruptive threat that Netflix represented. The truth is that the company’s leadership not only recognized the problem, but developed a smart strategy and executed it well.

The failure, in fact, had less to do with strategy and tactics than it did with managing stakeholder networks. Blockbuster moved quickly to launch an online business, cut late fees and innovated its business model. However, resistance from franchisees, who were concerned that the changes would kill their business, and from investors and analysts, who balked at the cost of the initiatives, sent the stock price reeling.

From there things spiraled downward. The low stock price attracted the corporate raider Carl Icahn, who got control of the board. His overbearing style led to a compensation dispute with Blockbuster’s CEO, John Antioco. Frustrated, Antioco negotiated his exit and left the company in July of 2007.

His successor, Jim Keyes, was determined to reverse Antioco’s strategy, cut investment in the subscription model, reinstated late fees and shifted focus back to the retail stores in a failed attempt to “leapfrog” the online subscription model. Three years later, in 2010, Blockbuster filed for bankruptcy.

The Fundamental Fallacy Of Ideas

One of the things that amazed me while I was researching my book Cascades was how often movements behind powerful ideas failed. The ones that succeeded weren’t those with different ideas or those of higher quality, but those that were able to align small groups, loosely connected, but united by a shared purpose.

The stories of the Winklevoss twins, Ignaz Semmelweis and Blockbuster Video are all different versions of the same fundamental fallacy, that ideas, if they are powerful enough, can stand on their own. Clearly, that’s not the case. Ideas need to be adopted and then combined with other ideas to make an impact on the world.

The truth is that ideas need ecosystems to support them and that doesn’t happen overnight. To make an idea viable in the real world it needs to continually connect outward, gaining adherents and widening its original context. That takes more than an initial epiphany. It takes the will to make the idea subservient to its purpose.

What we have to learn to accept is that what makes an idea powerful is its ability to solve problems. The ideas embedded in the American Constitution were not new at the time of the country’s founding, but gained power by their application in the real world. In much the same way, we revere Einstein’s relativity, Pauling’s vaccine and Jobs iPhone because of their impact on the world.

As G.H. Hardy once put it, “For any serious purpose, intelligence is a very minor gift.” The same can be said about ideas. They do not and cannot stand alone, but need the actions of people to bring them to life.

— Article courtesy of the Digital Tonto blog
— Image credit: Pexels

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Weak Signals, Strong Insights

GUEST POST from Chateau G Pato

In our hyper-connected world, we are inundated with information. Market data, analyst reports, and competitive intelligence systems all provide a clear picture of the present. But as a human-centered change and innovation thought leader, I argue that the most transformative opportunities don’t emerge from this flood of “strong signals.” They emerge from the subtle, often contradictory, and easily dismissed weak signals on the periphery. These are the whispers of change, the fringe trends, the unarticulated customer frustrations, and the strange technological mashups that hint at a future yet to be built. The ability to detect, interpret, and act on these weak signals is the single most powerful competitive advantage an organization can cultivate. It’s the difference between reacting to disruption and proactively creating it.

Weak signals are, by definition, not obvious. They are often dismissed as anomalies, niche behaviors, or fleeting fads. They can come from anywhere: a casual comment in a user forum, a viral video that defies a category, a surprising scientific breakthrough in an unrelated field, or a quiet startup with a baffling business model. The challenge for leaders is to move beyond the comfort of big data analytics and embrace the messy, qualitative, and deeply human work of foresight. This isn’t about guesswork; it’s about building a systematic, human-centered practice for sensing the future and turning those faint whispers into a clear vision for innovation.

Why Weak Signals are Your Best Innovation GPS

Cultivating a weak-signal detection capability offers profound benefits:

Foresight, Not Just Hindsight: While strong signals confirm what has already happened, weak signals provide clues about what is *about to* happen. This gives you a critical head start in preparing for, or even driving, market shifts.
The Source of True Disruption: Most truly disruptive innovations—from personal computing to smartphones—began as weak signals on the fringe, often dismissed by established players who were focused on optimizing their core business.
Uncovering Unmet Needs: Weak signals are often an early indicator of deep, unarticulated human needs. They are the seeds of a problem that a current market solution isn’t addressing.
Building a Culture of Curiosity: Actively looking for weak signals encourages a culture of curiosity, open-mindedness, and a willingness to challenge assumptions—all essential traits for innovation.

“Strong signals confirm your past. Weak signals whisper your future. The most innovative leaders are the best listeners.”

A Human-Centered Approach to Detecting Weak Signals

Detecting weak signals is not an automated process. It is a deeply human activity that requires a specific mindset and intentional practice:

Go to the Edge: Move beyond your core market and familiar customer base. Talk to fringe users, early adopters, and even those who reject your product. Spend time in adjacent industries and with unconventional thinkers.
Embrace a Beginner’s Mindset: Temporarily suspend your expertise. Look at your industry as if you are seeing it for the first time. Why do customers do what they do? What seems strange or inefficient to an outsider?
Connect the Unconnected Dots: A single weak signal means little. The true insight comes from identifying patterns. Is a new technology in one field combining with a new consumer behavior in another? The unexpected combination of two seemingly unrelated signals is often where the magic happens.
Create “Listening Posts”: Form small, cross-functional teams whose sole purpose is to scan the periphery. Empower them to read obscure journals, follow niche social media communities, and report back on anything that feels “off” or interesting.

Case Study 1: The Rise of Social Media – A Weak Signal Ignored by the Giants

The Challenge:

In the early 2000s, the internet was dominated by large, content-heavy portals like Yahoo! and search engines like Google. Communication was primarily through email and instant messaging. The idea of people building public profiles to share personal updates and connect with friends was seen as a niche, even trivial, activity. It was a weak signal, a seemingly minor behavior on college campuses.

The Weak Signal Ignored:

For established tech giants, the signal was too faint. They were focused on the strong signals of search queries and content monetization. Facebook, MySpace, and Friendster were dismissed as “just for kids” or a “niche social trend.” The idea of a public profile as a primary mode of online identity and communication was too far outside their core business model to be taken seriously. They saw a minor curiosity, not the future of human connection.

The Result:

The companies that paid attention to this weak signal—and understood the human-centered need for connection and self-expression—went on to build a multi-trillion-dollar industry. The giants who ignored it were forced to play a decade-long game of catch-up, and many lost their dominant position. The weak signal of a simple public profile evolved into the foundational architecture of the modern internet and the economy built on it. Their failure to see this wasn’t a failure of technology; it was a failure of imagination and human-centered listening.

Case Study 2: Netflix and the Streaming Revolution – From DVDs to a Weak Signal

The Challenge:

In the early 2000s, Blockbuster was the undisputed king of home entertainment. Their business model was robust, profitable, and built on a physical presence of thousands of stores and a lucrative late-fee system. The internet was a nascent and unreliable platform for video, and streaming was a faint, almost invisible signal on the horizon.

The Weak Signal Detected:

While Blockbuster was focused on optimizing its core business (e.g., store layout, inventory management), Netflix, then a DVD-by-mail service, saw a weak signal. The signal wasn’t just about faster internet; it was about the human frustration with late fees and the inconvenience of physical stores. The company’s leaders started to talk about the concept of “on-demand” content, long before the technology was ready. They were paying attention to the unarticulated desire for convenience and unlimited choice, a desire that was a whisper to Blockbuster but a deafening call to Netflix. They began to invest in streaming technology and content licensing years before it was profitable, effectively cannibalizing their own profitable DVD business.

The Result:

Blockbuster famously dismissed Netflix’s weak signal, seeing it as a minor inconvenience to their existing business model. They believed a physical store experience would always win. Netflix, by acting on the weak signal and a deep understanding of human frustration, was able to pivot from being a DVD service to the global streaming behemoth we know today. Their foresight, driven by a human-centered approach to a technological trend, allowed them to disrupt an entire industry and become a dominant force in the future of entertainment. Blockbuster, unable to see beyond the strong signals of its profitable past, is now a cautionary tale.

Conclusion: The Foresight Imperative

The future is not a surprise that happens to you. It is a collection of weak signals that you either choose to see or ignore. In an era of constant disruption, relying on strong signals alone is a recipe for stagnation. The most resilient and innovative organizations are those that have built a human-centered practice for sensing change on the periphery. They have created a culture where curiosity is a core competency and where questioning the status quo is a daily ritual.

As leaders, our most critical role is to shift our focus from optimizing the past to sensing the future. We must empower our teams to go to the edge, listen to the whispers, and connect the dots in new and creative ways. The future of your industry is already being born, not in the center of the market, but on its fringes. The question is, are you listening?

Extra Extra: Because innovation is all about change, Braden Kelley’s human-centered change methodology and tools are the best way to plan and execute the changes necessary to support your innovation and transformation efforts — all while literally getting everyone all on the same page for change. Find out more about the methodology and tools, including the book Charting Change by following the link. Be sure and download the TEN FREE TOOLS while you’re here.

Image credit: Pexels

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Human-Centered Change and Innovation

Innovation, change and transformation thought leadership, lovingly curated by Braden Kelley

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