5 things I learned at Silicon Beach.
There is more to Silicon Beach than learning. And I learned more than five things while I was there. So “five things I learned” would be a small subset of a single subset of all the things that make the event special.
I’ve written up a list which draws from several subsets instead. These are five things that were learned, observed, experienced and reaffirmed.
The conference auteur.
The meeting of minds.
It’s the way they tell ‘em.
Big data isn’t fair.
Two new dirty words.
All photography is by kind permission of Paul Clarke, who covered the event from every angle and who edited and posted his shots to Flickr in near real time. He is an interesting and easy man to talk to.
- The conference auteur.
French film making makes a clear distinction between the metteur en scene, the director who just “stages” a story, and the auteur, the director for whom every aspect of the production is a function of his or her personal vision.
Matt Desmier is a conference auteur.
He unashamedly described Silicon Beach as an entirely selfish conference. He invites people to speak whom he admires, whom he would like to meet and have dinner with, and with whom he would like to become chums. He figures (correctly) that what works for him will most likely work for several hundred others.
We speakers are given an open brief. There was no unifying theme and there were no draconian rules. We were given a length to work to. We were encouraged to be interesting and entertaining. We were forbidden from hawking our employers’ wares.
Matt’s approach had a profound effect on us. As we talked to each other over two and half days it became apparent that we had all felt compelled to commit to the point of over-committing to our presentations. Marcus John Henry Brown had made a point of quantifying his preparation time — 180 hours all in.
Things are even less structured from the audience’s point of view. The list of speakers is on the website, but there is no published running order, no advance indication of subject matter, and no fixed times for coffee breaks or lunch. So every talk is a surprise as well as a delight. And everything appears to run to time because you have no way of knowing otherwise. The result is a lovely vibe which Matt pretends is organised chaos. It isn’t. It is a tried and tested formula which is the conference equivalent of those Scandinavian towns where all traffic lights have been removed. It sounds like a recipe for a disaster, but accidents go down and the sense of community and civility and respect for others goes up.
2. The meeting of minds.
What happens between the talks is every bit as important as the talks themselves. I detest networking, but I adore spending time with smart people who exceed the high expectations set by their writing and their Twitter persona when you meet them in the flesh, when you discover that their humanity is as impressive as their intellect.
This happened a lot at Silicon Beach, to the point of being intoxicating.
Fish and chips with Mark Earls, Marcus Brown, Chris Thorpe et al on Thursday night was a conference highlight for me. I got to hear the back story to Marcus’s Snapchat paintings. And Chris, whose series of posts on scanning and printing a train I had long admired, was utterly fascinating on the cutting edge of additive manufacturing and its environmental, commercial and even political implications.
It was a privilege to discuss Pete Trainor’s big data passion projects at some length. And it was fun to hear about designing content for parliament over dinner with Carrie Barclay.
And so and so forth many times over.
3. It’s the way they tell ‘em.
I go to conferences with my magpie hat on. What shiny intellectual loot can I artfully purloin for re-use or re-purpose at a later date?
Some of that loot is content. As often as not most of that loot pertains to style. Silicon Beach was long on styles. I learned as much about story telling and presentation technique as I did about the sharing economy, bundling/unbundling/aggregation cycles, intrapreneurs, Pottermore et al.
Marcus didn’t give a talk, a speech or a presentation. It was a performance. It was interactive theatre.
Camilla shared her thoughts on how organisations need to adapt to an increasingly adventurous workforce through the medium of Sylvanian Families.
Pete took audience participation to a new level in that we didn’t know we had participated until after the event. It was a lesson in how to product demo an AI to a captivated audience of very interested parties.
Glynn showed how to package a piece of planning theory so as to give it a compelling narrative structure. I bet he is dynamite in pitches.
It was a privilege to witness and learn from these presentation craft skills. One day I will make Mark Earls proud by copying some of these techniques with just the right amount of error to give them an original twist.
4. Big data isn’t fair.
Internet connectivity is not evenly distributed across the globe. Thea Hamrén laid bare some damning statistics about Internet inequality in developing countries and exposed some of the vested political interests that are hampering progress.
And it’s ok to use your data to target ads at you, but not to give early warning of potentially suicidal mental health issues.
Pete Trainor exposed us to the surprising level of “usage and diagnostics” data that is collected every 24 hours by an iPhone. Roughly a third of the audience were automatically sending that data to Apple every day. And, whereas Tim Cook et al can use that knowledge to sell you new kit, committed people like Pete are restricted in how they use it to potentially save lives.
In other words big data isn’t fair. At least not yet. There are some political and ethical minefields to be negotiated for sure. But there are dedicated, passionate, eloquent people who are raging against the machinery of the establishment to make a positive difference.
5. Two new dirty words.
When things get messed up it’s usually because a few idiots have spoiled it for the rest of us. The reverse is true of business language. Most of us spoil everything for the few that actually know what they are talking about.
This industry is brilliant at devaluing language through high frequency misuse. We take profound, valid concepts and propel them, via the shortest possible route, into the trough of linguistic disillusionment. Marketing language has its very own hype cycle.
Hot on the heels of innovation, disruption and transformation are the latest concepts to find themselves skidding down the scree from the peak of inflated verbal expectations. Disruption and transformation have both made that lightning transition from hot topic to dirty word.
Silicon Beach attracts a knowing audience and there were knowing sniggers and significant sideways glances whenever these words were spoken. Several speakers sniggered pre-emptively in a meta-knowing way.
It’s a shame. In the right hands these words still have precise, appropriate meaning. Now the right hands feel obliged to apologise for using them.
In this context it was refreshing, and not a little uplifting, to hear Damian Farrar effectively clean both words up again, at least temporarily, with some precise thinking and an interesting worldview, wrapped in a clear, logical framework. I took lots of notes.
It was memorable and meaningful, but you had to be there.
That pretty much goes for the whole event.
