How Systems Thinking is helping to develop a decentralized & distributed system for marketing, replacing the traditional model

A book that I come back to consistently is “Thinking In Systems” by Donella H. Meadows. It is a wellspring of thought provoking, challenging ideas presented in an incredibly accessible way. As a strategist, I need to be constantly analyzing and reviewing the effectiveness of systems (“A set of elements or parts that is coherently organized and interconnected in a pattern or structure that produces a characteristic set of behaviours, often classified as its “function” or “purpose”” — Donella H. Meadows) for myself and my clients. That means I have to understand how many complex systems work. It can be a daunting task, and it’s something I struggled with early in my career, but “Thinking In Systems” helped me build the skills to break down complex systems into simple parts for the purpose of analysis and improvement. (This is not a sponsored article even though this intro sounds super #ad. I just really like this book).

For the past several months, I’ve been working with MehowBrains to develop a new approach to the entire marketing system for the THORChain protocol that reflects one of its core tenets: Decentralization. If you have any experience with marketing you’ll know that it is built to be very centralized. There is a clear hierarchy and linear breakdown of responsibilities from beginning to end.

This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, it makes sense for how the relationship between most clients and communications agencies works. The client sets goals, recognizes challenges and opportunities, then crafts that into a brief that gets shared with the agency, who then works to develop the most effective strategy and creative to achieve those goals. There are more steps but that’s the main function of that system, and for the most part it works, and has worked for 50+ years. The problem that I and many of my colleagues have recognized is how rigid that system is, and often how ineffective that system can be. “Working” is a relative metric, working for whom? And working 100%, or only 65%? While this approach may be fine enough for general use, holding it to any kind of scrutiny illuminates many areas that can (and should) be improved upon. That is why in most major agencies you’ll see what is called a “flat structure”, an attempt to do away with the hierarchy to allow for the possibility that anyone in the process could come up with a brilliant idea. Sounds like a good way to do it, right? Unfortunately it doesn’t often work like that and people fall back on the traditional linear approach. Partly because that’s how we’re all taught to do it, and partly (read: mostly) because of ego. If the junior accounts person comes up with a better idea than the creative director, that doesn’t look very good on the CD, and in turn, the agency — that’s the mentality at least. Ego and optics are very powerful and very dangerous things in this industry.

Now, enter cryptocurrency. Crypto is anything but traditional, it’s raison d’être is to disrupt traditional systems, which is great, big banks suck and are incredibly corrupt. But, often I see marketing for crypto projects being handled in the same traditional way as it would for any other client. There is a dissonance in objective and approach here that needs to be rectified. That’s why when I first connected with Mehow and he told me he was working on how to decentralize the marketing system I jumped at the opportunity. And, now this is my ego talking, who wouldn’t want to work for a protocol called THORChain? It’s bad ass.

Below I’m going to reference 3 passages from “Thinking In Systems” that have been crucial to my work with Mehow, and I’ll explain how these ideas came to life in my work on the SKALD program. This will in no way be a complete picture of the work we’ve been doing, I have a lot more writing planned to outline it all as best I can.

Subsystems

“In hierarchical systems relationships within each subsystem are denser and stronger than relationships between subsystems. Everything is still connected to everything else, but not equally strongly…If these differential information links within and between each level of the hierarchy are designed right, feedback delays are minimized. No level is overwhelmed with information. The system works with efficiency and resilience.” — “Thinking In Systems” by Donella H. Meadows

We’ll start with this section on subsystem relationships, as this is one of the higher level concepts. While our work on SKALD is aimed at building a decentralized and distributed marketing system, there will of course be hold-overs from the traditional hierarchical model, and those hold-overs will be more prevalent in the beginning of our program. This is an unavoidable necessity, in that we don’t yet have enough members to contribute to the programs growth, so Mehow and myself have to do the initial leg work, taking charge of the program, while also designing in our own obsolescence down the line. Our goal isn’t to be the highest authority in the program, rather to give it enough of a push, and set up enough resources based on our combined professional experience, so that more talented and innovative team members can get involved, build on our foundation, and get SKALD to a point where it is self sustaining. That starts with understanding how all of our subsystems will work together.

Thinking about the strength of relationships within and between subsystems isn’t that complicated, people work better with members of their own department than other departments because there’s a shared experience and lexicon to draw from, but just because it isn’t complicated doesn’t mean it’s easy to sort out. One of the ways we’re working to close the gap between subsystems is by providing documentation and standardization across all subsystems to begin to build a shared lexicon to draw from. The more standardized we can make the inflexible parts of the work, the more we can open up the potential for cross-departmental collaboration leading to new and innovative work. An example of this is how we’ve simplified the content funnel structure. A content funnel is essentially the path a consumer takes from first seeing a piece of branded communication, to the end point of the funnel which is a purchase (there are other end points but for the sake of not overcomplicating we’ll keep it at purchase). I tried to make our funnels as ‘plug-and-play’ as possible, almost like content legos. There are 5 main blocks of content that fit together, and all the work produced under SKALD will fit into one of the 5 blocks. Now, whenever anyone references the funnel structure, there will be no confusion as to what they are talking about. Everyone starts on the same page, which makes the whole process smoother.

Bent Pipes

“The only way to fix a system that is laid out poorly is to rebuild it, if you can. Amory Lovins and his team at Rocky Mountain Institute have done wonders on energy conservation by simply straightening out bent pipes and enlarging ones that are too small” — “Thinking In Systems” by Donella H. Meadows

The concept of straightening bent pipes and enlarging ones that are too small is a great way to analyze the system of a marketing plan and use those parameters to identify areas where the system can be improved. Laying out a marketing team, marketing plan, and strategic structure as a series of interconnected pipes can A: give you a visual representation of how the decentralized and distributed mandate is succeeding or falling short, and B: identify specific links or sections that need to be upgraded. It is a simple approach that provides visibility for both the macro and micro performance of a complex system. The prerequisite for success in this approach is a robust understanding of how each element in the traditional and decentralized marketing system works. To identify bent or small pipes, you need to know where to find them first. This comes back to something I’ve Tweeted about: “to know where you’re going you have to know where you come from”, a recurring axiom in our approach with SKALD.

This is not to say that the goal should be to “straighten” or “embiggen” all of the pipes, that would have an equally detrimental effect. It’s important to remember this is simply a good metaphor for identifying areas that can be made more efficient, sticking points that can be made….less sticky. The goal is to build a network where the flow of information and work, the input and output, is encumbered as little as possible from beginning to end. This manifests in areas where team members can be trusted to complete tasks without oversight, removing rounds of revisions saving time and money. Additionally, by setting up resources in the proper way at the beginning of the pipeline, it can help make project scoping easier, which in turn leads to quicker more efficient production timelines.

We’re bringing this to life in our GitLab organizational structure. We’ve taken each department that you would find in a marketing or ad agency and turned them into what we call “campfires”, destinations that have their own population (the team members whose expertise best fits that discipline), but are also open to anyone to explore or look for resources in. We’re working on including documentation, templates, and a host of other resources for each campfire that allow for self-managed work to be completed more easily and with fewer bends in the pipe. The goal is to eventually have a totally self-sustaining ecosystem that is managed by the members in a form of communal governance, leading to better work that meets the protocols needs.

Delays

“A delay in a feedback process is critical relative to rates of change in the stocks that the feedback loop is trying to control. Delays that are too short cause overreaction. “Chasing your tail”, oscillations amplified by the jumpiness of the response. Delays that are too long cause famed, sustained, or exploding oscillations depending on ho much too long. Overlong delays in a system with a threshold, a danger point a range past which irreversible damage can occur, cause overshoot and collapse.” — “Thinking In Systems” by Donella H. Meadows

One of the biggest problems that needs to be fixed with the traditional system is an unhealthy focus on putting out little fires, while losing sight of the big ones. It’s too easy when looking at work day to day to get caught up in fixing small problems that pop up, with the good intention of believing these are important tasks to complete, while losing momentum on completing larger more important tasks. Meetings-for-the-sake-of-meetings is probably my biggest professional pet peeve. There are only so many hours in a day, and too often we as marketing professionals spend those hours talking about how we can talk to other people about doing work, rather than figuring out how to do the work. While it’s important to have a strong plan that can take you forward on a campaign (I’m a strategist literally 90% of my job is planning out how to do work) it quickly becomes performative, especially when there are too many people involved in the process that needn’t be; they all want to speak in the meeting so you know they’re involved, then the conversation gets sidetracked, and its a half hour or hour wasted. Sit through two or three of those a day, then the hours (billable hours!) rack up with nothing to show for it.

This brings us to a sort of strategic triage, a system within the larger system that allows us to gauge a tasks importance based on a series of factors. Where the bent pipes section focuses on the input and output flow of information, which we can see as being internal, the triage system helps in determining the response to external factors that can impede the input/output flow. They’re similar, and very much connected, but distinct enough to warrant their own approach. The trick here is designing this system to be efficient enough to not become an additional time waster. A very tricky line to walk indeed. We’re working on designing a tool that lets the individual forecast the potential fall out of a problem or task as it relates to the groups goals and timelines. “If I let this email sit because I’m working on writing copy for a post, will it negatively impact me or my team down the line?”. The way this comes to life is still in development, but visualizing a bulletin board that is broken out into sections determining importance where tasks and problems can be placed will help you as the reader visualize how we’re developing it. As one of my professors used to say, “it’s an iterative process”.

As I said before, this is in no way an exhaustive look at the work being put into the SKALD program. I wanted to use the passages from “Thinking In Systems” to help me articulate some of the bigger thinking we’ve been doing while developing this program. While much has been done, much is still ahead of us, and the support we’ve seen on Twitter has been a huge source of inspiration. We’re really trying to develop a better way to do this work, and while nothing is ever done in a vacuum, we’re standing on the shoulders of people who came before us, we believe in what we’re doing and think it is a needed addition to the conversation around marketing in cryptocurrency. Thanks for taking the time to read this piece, and if you have any questions, feel free to reach out to me on Twitter.