A little over a year ago, I posted an update about the dangers of ICT leading to superiority complexes if people only interacted with people like themselves.

I found a similarly interesting article today about the dangers of mass customization. Patchen Barss writes:

"Business leaders describe mass customization as creating "a market of one." Surely the ideal market size, though, lies somewhere between the mass and the individual. After all, traditional markets are about more than selling and buying – they're also centres of community, hotbeds of exotic experience, and places where people mix and meet in the most unexpected ways.

It's great that manufacturers are embracing individuality, but whether it's a marketplace of music, manicures or mates, it makes it all the more crucial that people continue to step outside themselves and stay engaged in a thriving and challenging community."

Here's to stepping outside ourselves!

Very interesting insights on PSAs targetted at youth audiences in terms of what works and doesn't work...

It's two pages long, so don't forget to click "next" at the bottom for the rest of the article.

Every now and then, something from Fast Company hits me with a different way of looking at things... Today it was an article on the "Strategy of Fighter Pilots" and its application to business competition.

At the end of the article is a side-bar on "How to Isolate Your Enemy." Fine and good if you're trying to win against someone else... but what if you are trying to win collectively? It occurs to me that maybe building systems to REDUCE the isolation of others may be a strategy in that case. Which leads me to thinking about how TIG and YCDO efforts can reduce isolation as a conflict prevention strategy.

The scariest and biggest challenge presented is the concept of mental isolation, which the article claims can be achieved by "operating at a tempo or rhythm they can neither make out nor keep up with". I identify with that. I feel like over the last 8 months my brain has completed imploded due to a pace of activity that I can't seem to keep up with. I suspect I'm not alone.

I've reprinted the side-bar below for people's reference...

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"Colonel John R. Boyd saw isolation as a critical strategic device -- in effect, the opposite of the information-rich environment that pilots (or companies) need in order to operate effectively. In isolation, he argued, a competitor had no hope of observing and adapting to a changing environment. Isolating your enemy, Boyd saw, could become a powerful tool to make his OODA loop inoperable, cutting off the flow of information both in and out of the organization. In his 14-hour briefing, "A Discourse on Winning and Losing," Boyd described three strategies for isolation.

"Physically we can isolate our adversaries by severing their communications with [the] outside world as well as by severing their internal communications to one another. We can accomplish [the former] ... via diplomatic, psychological, and other efforts. To cut them off from one another, we should penetrate their system by being unpredictable.

"Mentally we can isolate our adversaries by presenting them with ambiguous, deceptive, or novel situations, as well as by operating at a tempo or rhythm they can neither make out nor keep up with. Operating inside their OODA loops will accomplish just this by disorienting or twisting their mental images so that they can neither appreciate nor cope with what's really going on.

"Morally our adversaries isolate themselves when they visibly improve their well-being to the detriment of others ... by violating codes of conduct or behavior patterns that they profess to uphold or others expect them to uphold."