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06 Oct 09

Are you thinking, or "quorum sensing?"

Daniel Conover compares the way newspaper managers and staffers think to the way groups of bacteria will communicate via quorum sensing. In other words, it's only after enough individuals in your environment sense the same stimulus that the group will act -- all at once.

conovermedia.blogspot.com/...hinking-or-quorum-sensing.html - Preview

quorum sensing Daniel Conover journalism newspaper business models newspapers business change resistance to change competition

We practice journalism today in the transitional period between an old equilibrium that has ended and a new equilibrium that has yet to take shape. The outcome cannot yet be reliably predicted, and the notion that the best, most productive ideas will naturally rise to the top is far from proven.
Many executives are just sitting around, receiving signals from their environment, waiting for the signal that a "quorum" has coalesced around a new direction.
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- In other words, their actions will not be determined by an independent, forward-thinking assessment of individual ideas, but by their perceptions of where everyone else is going.
- You'd think that an entity that produces something new every day would be adapted to rapid change. The opposite is true. A newspaper is a physical object that is printed and delivered at the same time, every day. Only what goes into it changes. and so long as what goes in doesn't upset the production process or change the physical object, content barely matters.
  
  But try to change any of those variables -- deadlines, workflows, meeting schedules, the relationships between our print products and our electronic products -- and watch all hell break loose. A newspaper is a machine honed to perfection by time. It can't adapt easily to new things because it's become so efficient at doing the same thing, over and over.
- Print journalists want to talk about saving newspapers, and that's the wrong topic. The real issue is how we'll change journalism to function with 21st century tools.
- print journalists by and large still discuss new-media journalism based not on experience or study, but on their quorum-sensing perception of their peers' attitudes. New media tools like database/map mashups represent wonderful new opportunities for advancing the original goals of journalism, yet print journalists still tend to frame their internal discussions of new media as a narrative about civilized people besieged by barbarians. These men and women are not thinking about the future, they are conforming to their perception of the present.
- In other words, seeing the future isn't enough. We have to communicate that future over and over, spreading our good ideas and winnowing out our bad ideas. We have to understand that our decision-makers will have to see our ideas crop up in many places before they'll see them as valid.