A Collective Contribution Evolution

Everything is always evolving. Markets. Industries. Businesses. And people.

It is, as they say, the natural way of things.

Which means, conversations should evolve too.

For the last 120 or so weeks (that's more than 2 years for those of you who are counting), I've been having Crazy, STUPID Marketing conversations. Because I believe there is always something we can learn from eachother.

But if anything has become more and more obvious through these conversations, it's that insights and learnings are not only relevant to a single department.

They are relevant cross-department. At different points in time. For different people; when they are ready. And if that is true, how do we work with that complexity?

The Crazy, STUPID Marketing show never felt complete because it was missing a dimension. Now it's time to add it.

Welcome to: Collective Contribution

It's no secret that I'm pretty much always thinking about ecosystems. And one of the challenges I tend to run into is how to visually SHOW those ecosystems; because the tools we have today are mostly 2-dimensional.

But a single human (even outside an ecosystem) is 3-dimensional. We have height. Width. Depth. As so the things around us. Our brains are smart enough to understand that even something that SEEMS 2-dimensional—like a piece of paper—has three dimensions; we just can't necessarily perceive it with the naked eye.

So, we start as 3-dimensional. But we are also not STATIC in those three dimensions.

We move. We grow. We learn. We interact. We change our minds. We discover things we didn't know before—and maybe even become different people along the way. If we're lucky, we become capable of contributing things we weren't capable of contributing yesterday.

We are always growing in multiple dimensions. And everyone in an ecosystem is doing the same.

Growing in multiple planes. Towards specific things.

Let's call those things "Goals" for ease of understanding.

Now, let's imagine two people, each growing towards a specific goal. On that growth trajectory, perhaps they meet each other. That intersection is enabled by the fourth dimension:

Time.

Something humans have absolutely NO ability to control—no matter how hard we might try 😉 But what if that dimension is a critical component of reaching the goal?

How can we plan WITH that complexity, instead of attempting to flatten the system to remove it? Well, first of all, we need to understand why we keep trying to precisely that.

Why we keep trying to flatten the system

Somewhere along the way, we (society) moved from verbal story-telling to written. And with that, came pictures—the representation of an experience in the 2-dimensional plane.

It was, and continues to be, a way to show one thing to many people. But if you've ever seen a cave drawing, and interpreted it a different way than someone else who saw the same thing, you know there's components get missed.

The dimensionality gets missed.

So more people can consume it. But they are consuming only PARTS of it.

Organizations love a good 2-dimensional representation. Just take a look around, and in no time you'll find an org, chart, a customer journey, a process map, a funnel, a presentation deck, a SWOT analysis, even ecosystem maps.

Now, my #1 Clifton Strength is Strategic, so I love these things too. And I won't say they don't have their place.

They can help us see part of the picture; which is a great place to START.

It's just not the END when it comes to true understanding.

The moment we put a collection of people, organizations, capabilities and relationships onto a page, we have already removed one of the most important dimensions: Time.

Person/Organization A has a capability that Person/Organization B needs.

Simple enough.

Except B might not need it yet. Or A might not understand that their capability could solve B's problem. Or they haven't met. Or they have met, but there isn't enough trust yet. Or B is focused on something completely different right now. Or six months from now, an experience changes what A knows, which changes what they can contribute, which changes what becomes possible for B.

The connection exists as potential.

The activation of that potential? That's the thing that's 4-dimensional.

Adding dimension back into the conversation

I've spent a lot of my career trying to create momentum. Marketing momentum. Business momentum. Partnership momentum. Community momentum.

And for a long time, I approached momentum as something that could be created primarily through alignment. Just get the right people focused on the right thing and move. But now I'm starting to believe that collective momentum is more dimensional than alignment alone can account for.

Every person entering a system arrives with their own height, width and depth, metaphorically speaking. Their experiences. Their knowledge. Their capabilities. Their relationships. Their motivations. Their questions. Their goals. Their unique contribution (as they see it today).

And then we introduce time.

Suddenly, the system isn't a collection of dots that need connecting.

It's a collection of moving dots.

And that changes everything.

Working with the complexity of dimensionality

This may be one of the biggest shifts in my thinking over the past year (thanks Crazy, STUPID Marketing conversations and The Collaborative Entrepreneurship Incubator research).

We've been trained to believe complexity is a problem to solve. But perhaps there is a difference between making complexity visible and trying to make complexity disappear.

When we flatten an ecosystem too much, we risk removing the very things that make it capable of creating something powerful. Then we wonder why the system doesn't behave the way the diagram said it would.

It was never actually supposed to be contained that way.

Because it's ALIVE.

Creating Conditions for Alive-ness in Ecosystems

Huh, seems like the short stint that Josephine Tite and I did on the Aliveness Show has influenced my thinking as well (another demonstration of the fourth dimension).

When it comes to Collective Contribution, the objective isn't to design a perfect ecosystem where every person has a predefined place and every interaction has a predetermined outcome. The objective is to create the conditions where meaningful contribution can find somewhere useful to go.

And yes, that requires some structure (or infrastructure). We need:

✅ Enough visibility to see each other.

✅ Enough clarity to understand what we have to contribute.

✅ Enough belonging to choose to bring that contribution forward.

✅ Enough investment in the collective to give something before we know exactly what we'll get back; and

✅ Enough movement for contribution to create contribution.

We also need space.

💫 Space for someone to not be ready yet.

💫 Space for an unexpected connection.

💫 Space for an experiment that doesn't work.

💫 Space for new information to change the direction.

💫 Space for people themselves to evolve.

Because the people who enter an ecosystem today aren't necessarily the same people who will be participating in it a year from now. Even when they're literally the same people.

Managing for the Time Dimension

What if one of the most important capabilities in an ecosystem isn't predicting exactly what will happen? What if, inseatd, it's being able to recognize what is possible now?

A has something meaningful to contribute. B is ready to receive it. P (the Problem) has become important enough to act on. R (the relationship) has developed enough trust to try something. E (the Experiment) has generated information that changes what we thought we knew. And C (the Contribution) has created a new possibility that didn't exist before.

And suddenly: Movement.

Not because we forced the entire ecosystem toward one perfectly coordinated destination. But because the right contributions could move at the right time.

Forward. Faster. Together.

That's the working definition of momentum I've been playing with.

Not everyone moving toward the exact same individual goal. Not everyone moving at the exact same speed. And certainly not everyone doing the exact same thing. Instead, people owning what is uniquely theirs to contribute and investing it into shared forward movement.

Sometimes I contribute something that helps you move.

Sometimes you contribute something that changes what I can see.

Sometimes two contributions collide and create a third possibility neither of us could have designed independently.

And sometimes something sits quietly in the ecosystem until time changes its relevance.

That's Collective Contribution.

At least, that's the hypothesis for today 💖

When ideas evolve, so must content

Marketing was the place where this conversation started. It taught me to question the things we do simply because we've always done them. To challenge the things we copy because someone else told us they work. To look for patterns. To experiment. To ask better questions. And, perhaps most importantly, to pay attention to what actually creates meaningful movement.

I'm not leaving those questions behind.

I'm expanding them.

Collective Contribution will explore what happens when we stop looking at departments, organizations, communities and ecosystems as separate two-dimensional structures and start exploring the people, contributions and relationships moving through them over time.

Some of those field notes will still be about marketing.

Some will be about partnerships.

Some will be about leadership, community, innovation, entrepreneurship, ecosystems, belonging or collaboration.

And I suspect some won't fit neatly into a category at all.

That's kind of the point.

Because neither do we 😉

Welcome to Collective Contribution.

Let's see what emerges.