A lean look at… the media
Roberto Priolo: In the last few decades, the media has changed a lot – a transformation that became even more evident with the arrival of social media. With news appearing 24 hours a day, it is becoming increasingly difficult to tell news from entertainment. When it comes to information, have we lost our True North? What is value for customers in this context?
Michael Ballé: Sensationalism is nothing new. Murder, mayhem and defamation were the bread and butter of the 19th-century press, and scandal fueled much of its development. Some might say that jingoistic newspapers pushed European nations into the First World War. Similarly, radio was an enabler for Hitler and Mussolini in the 1930s – at the same time as it allowed de Gaulle to lead France from exile or Franklin Delano Roosevelt to hold his “fireside chats”. TV spread the American middle-class dream to the world during the Cold War. Now we have social networks, and whenever humans invent a new means of mass communication, things happen. The dust has not yet settled on this new one, so it is too early to know what its real impact will be.
People have always liked to feel stimulated (who can resist looking at the “personal life” section in Wikipedia articles?). People also want true information (even if it is hard to swallow when it goes against preconceived beliefs) and, to some extent, a deeper understanding of the issues in the world around them. It is true that social media seems to favor unfounded opinions over deep thought, but people have always wanted that.
The vision of lean is to turn everyone into problem solvers, fostering deeper thinking and asking “why?” until the mechanisms behind events emerge. It is not surprising that the clickbait aspect of social media may seem to many like a step in the wrong direction. Quick conclusions, memes and even Medium articles are not very useful for deepening thinking – you have to read a book and follow the author's logic to really absorb it and form your own opinions.
As is often the case, value for customers is hard to define because it is contextual: the same person will enjoy being entertained by gossip at one moment, being informed with real facts the next, and then spending some time reflecting on issues they are interested in by reading in-depth publications, such as trade magazines or books. Yes, social media is currently geared toward quick, superficial communication rather than deep, verified communication, but it is still early days, and we don't know what the younger, internet-native generations will do with the tools they are given.
RP: Personally, despite the abundance of news channels we can choose from, I don't think the general public is necessarily better informed than before. Covid-19 is the most recent example: we have been bombarded with numbers and information for months, but really understanding what is going on is harder than you might think. Is there too much information? We know there is in companies. Lean teaches us that it is important to provide the right information to people at the right time. Thoughts on this?
MB: I suspect that the 24-hour news cycle is the problem here. To capture the public's attention, broadcasters must 1) say something every day and 2) differentiate themselves from the rest of what is said that day – without having the time or resources to do in-depth research or groundwork. It seems that old-school reporters, with sources and interview notes, are being replaced by web crawlers.
Social media has shifted the media from content to connections. This makes it more captivating because of its relentless pull, but the downside is information bubbles – all the media in one category tend to converge very quickly on a consensus view and then change it just as quickly. That is why, as users, we find it confusing. It's not that they all say something different (very few people read a broad spectrum of opinions); it's that they all say one thing one day and another thing the next.
In cybernetic terms, this creates a phenomenon called thrashing: information arrives faster than the system can change. As a result, we feel overwhelmed and, instead of analyzing the underlying mechanisms, we try our luck with one action or the next, just to do something. Increased connection should have opened up an area of diverse intelligible points of view, but so far the opposite seems to be happening: we protect ourselves from constant change by holding tight to our opinions and finding facts or ideas on the web that justify them.
The lean lesson of looking at information flows is even more vital: what information do you need to decide things concretely? Where does it come from? How do you structure your information flows? Personally, I try to look for professional articles that I don't fully understand, but that give me a better idea of where to look for reliable information.
In my mind, to counterbalance the addictive, nonstop nature of social media, we need to deliberately design our information flows. For example, most of the successful lean leaders I know are big readers (and sharers) of books – anything that gives your mind a break and allows you to consider things more deeply.
RP: Another fairly recent phenomenon is that of “citizen journalism”. While it is great to empower individuals and encourage them to document what is happening and develop critical thinking, there is a question about the role of experts in all this. Lean gives everyone a voice, but does that mean everyone can or should be an expert?
MB: Giving a voice to the voiceless was a big step. One of the great struggles of lean is making organizations customer-centered instead of institution-centered (doing everything we can to preserve the organization as it currently is). In very practical terms, large companies have woken up to the power of a negative review on Google or Twitter and are now paying much more attention to what customers actually say. Social movements such as “Occupy Wall Street”, “Me Too”, “Climate Strike” or “Black Lives Matter” exist because people can document what they see firsthand and share it easily. Anyone has the opportunity to form an opinion and comment – what you think of what they say is up to you.
Very quickly, powerful organizations or groups found out that it was easier to manage the message than to actually respond to criticism by fixing the problem (to be fair, they already had a good marketing practice), which favored narratives over fact-checking. Oddly, empowering individuals has also allowed large companies to muddy everything in the hope that detailed reports will get lost in the confusion – which often happens. This will go on until (completely unpredictable) tipping-point events shift the debate one way or another.
The second unexpected downside of opening media platforms to individual opinions is the surprising extent to which human beings are fascinated by the rich and powerful. Instead of looking for facts or explanations, it is human nature to look to high-visibility personalities and listen to what they have to say about it, regardless of whether they are competent in the subject. This has turned politicians with the strongman ideal into media stars – which is manifestly bad news. The truth is that many people actively seek authoritarian leaders, suffer the consequences, but rarely connect the one with the other. Clearly, some painful lessons of World War 2 are being forgotten.
The thing with experts is that they tend to be very good at explaining the current situation and rather bad at predicting what happens next. Groups of well-informed curious people are noticeably better at predicting developments. In this sense, lean is very useful because it teaches you to focus on a consensus about the problem – not on solutions. This simple reframing lets you listen to various opinions with curiosity, without trying to draw definitive conclusions. Understanding situations as problems moves you away from habitual thinking and enables you to think for yourself and to build your own understanding of confusing, changing messes. It's a lean trick you learn through practice, and it is very useful in the current environment.
RP: Every industry runs the risk of being disrupted. The media too has been disrupted, as you said, by social media platforms, which arrived in full force. Not only have newspapers and magazines often had to accelerate their shift to digital, but the content they now provide increasingly caters to social media users, who have (so they say) a short attention span. However, the media has a vital role to play in society and a clear responsibility. What needs to change in the world of mass media? Can lean help?
MB: I was reading the other day about how old Hollywood is being disrupted by streaming and how movie moguls are being replaced by Silicon Valley executives. Clearly, this is far from over. And yes, new content providers like Quibi are going faster and shorter. But I'm not sure people's attention span is really shorter – this is precisely the kind of idea that floats around the web because it makes intuitive sense; however, there is little empirical evidence. What has certainly happened is a huge increase in attention-grabbing content. People are quicker to judge whether news is interesting or not.
Much of the content now offered barely deserves more than a glance. The evolution is very clear in books. Price pressure has led publishers to get rid of their editing staff and of all the various professions that made a book a good book – and not a collection of LinkedIn posts. Many books I read now are made to be skimmed – I'm happy to read a long, difficult and interesting book, but I don't find that many.
From a lean point of view, the issue here is alignment. Toyota drove GM into bankruptcy because GM kept moving away from difficult segments, such as small cars, toward more attractive segments, such as SUVs. Toyota did not rationalize its line, but extended it (and had the flexibility not to bear the accumulated inventory penalty borne by most mass manufacturers). People want different things. More specifically, the same person will want different things at different times.
Some publications, such as The New Yorker, have held readers' attention with long, researched and thoughtful articles, just as others have become meme machines. You certainly do a great job of keeping Planet Lean informative and inspiring. I believe the current danger lies more in assuming that one model is winning over another – this is far from true, but snap decision-making is back in fashion along with the rest of the impact of social media (caused mainly, in my opinion, not by a variety of channels, but by conflicting messages on the same channels).
The real challenge for the media is the same as for any other industry: dealing with an acceleration in current thinking. In the 1990s, what was fashionable in management lasted four to six years. Nowadays, ideas come and go every quarter, so fast that it is hard to keep up. A new feature born of the internet is that everything that is printed is still available all the time. So instead of moving from one approach to another, all methods are available in parallel. This, combined with the rapid and contradictory changes of opinion in the 24-hour news cycle, makes orientation very difficult. In this context, what lean offers is to go back to the gemba, see firsthand and think for yourself, instead of getting stuck in the apparent consensus about this or that.
Yes, well-researched content is competing with gossip. But, again, it has always been that way, although perhaps not so close to each other in our minds. My Twitter feed, for example, may show me a detailed article and then a silly cat video – side by side, which makes everything very confusing. Yes, articles with content will have to work at being more fascinating. But, ultimately, I believe our main problem is learning to better manage our own information feed. Most of us grew up with established channels telling us what to think – now we have to deal with real freedom and the need to choose whom to listen to. We have the opportunity to get the news we want, and we should make the most of it! You can imagine drawing your own value stream map of what news you need instead of idly browsing your usual social networks.
There is no doubt that surprise and obscenity are part of the appeal of social media, and a person can easily go from one tweet to the next, from one post to another, having fun and without purpose. But if we take our information needs seriously, this is a very bad strategy. With a little smart media-source engineering, we can quickly improve our information flows.
However, a deeper problem is that facts without theory do not provide understanding. Our challenge is to teach our children to think for themselves, moving back and forth between facts, context and theory. Facts need to be contextualized to be meaningful, and context needs to be analyzed with a theory to make sense. Then theory and context can be confronted again with more facts – true understanding arises from the interplay of facts, theory and context – and, for adults, firsthand experimentation. This is what good teachers do in the classroom: they mix facts, context and theory at various moments. Social media avoids this hard mental work because it provides ready-to-consume conclusions (advice, opinions, statements, etc.). The mind works like a muscle – you need to exercise it for it to work perfectly. Reasoning needs daily practice, and social media is an excuse to escape, giving your mind the illusion that it is learning things when in fact it is just watching. I fear we have a real learning challenge – not learning new facts, but the disciplined process of intentional learning and deep understanding. In this sense, the lean approach to problem solving and learning is incredibly useful. Asking “why?” a second and a third time to look for root causes is never spontaneous – it has to be learned.
