Digital Digressions

Think Eco-Systems not just Issues

Take global warming or government regulation as examples - these are all very complex topics, collections of variables where solving the problem cannot be achieved through solving one issue alone, but in fact the solution rests in addressing the eco-system tying together all the inter-linked variables. In fact, seeing things on purely the issue level may in fact be contributing to the problem.

In the book Freakonomics the authors quote numerous examples of cases where seemingly complex phenomena have very simple origins, but often in an entirely different field and the eco-system magnifies the impact through all the inter-related variables and creates an impact on local, sometimes national and international levels. One of the striking examples is their analysis of crime figures in large cities in the US. The numbers were growing at epic proportions year-on year until sometime in the mid-eighties the trend suddenly stopped and began a steady decline. Experts tried to attribute this reversal to anything from an increase in spending on the police, a growth in numbers of staff, prisons, different governments, new laws etc. but the biggest impact came from the legalisation of abortion.

How could this have anything to do with crime figures you may wonder? Here the eco-system comes in: the women most likely to have an abortion back in the 60s where women in low-income households with several children already and who before the legalisation either had to risk their lives to have an abortion by often unqualified people in unsafe conditions and risk prosecution or not have one at all. Many didn't and subsequently struggled to look after their children, who often ended up in crime from a lack of opportunity in life. As abortion became legal in many states, the numbers of these 'unwanted' children dropped and the sheer numbers of disadvantaged youth decreased, thus decreasing the populace likely to commit crime. It's not to say that the other measures had no impact at all, but collectively they helped solve the problem as the eco-system of ideal conditions leading to crime gradually became more untenable.

Biofuels are another example of where eco-system thinking really needs to be applied on a much larger scale than today - touted as the solution to the West's reliance on fossil fuels, the growth of crops destined for biofuels is now accelerating across the world, leading to an increased rate of rain forest destruction (these are our most efficient weapon in clearing CO2 from the atmosphere) as land is being cleared to grow palm oil - a crucial ingredient in biofuels. Much agricultural land previously home to food production is being converted to grow crops for biofuel, putting food production in danger. The biggest irony of all is that the process of producing biofuels has a greater negative impact on global warming than fossil fuel use - proving that there is no simple 'solution' to global warming, in fact simple solutions may in fact be aggravating it further, instead we need to think in eco-systems, not just locally, but nationally and internationally.

Nancy Gibbs of Time, talks in her column about the Vatican reflecting on its mortal sins for the modern age (24th March 2008) of the fact that back in the past sloth, lust, greed, envy and anger accounted for virtually all the crimes of mankind, whereas today the issues that once were the clear culprits behind our follies and misfortunes are far more complex than the 7 deadly sins alone. Causes and consequences come together to form eco-systems, where one problem feeds another and addressing consequences is meaningless without understanding and addressing the causes. Contextualising what was once simple in our now increasingly interlinked world - Quoting Mohandas Gandhi's version of the 7 deadly sins:

• Wealth without work
• Pleasure without conscience
• Science without humanity
• Knowledge without character
• Politics without principle
• Commerce without morality
• Worship without sacrifice

The responsibility rests with the individual, but that includes the duty to take care of others as well as yourself.

Things for sale I will mail you

This little site caught my attention today, because not only is it witty, but fun too. We all knew the next frontier of business development is in providing and designing experiences, but you don't need to be a big business to do it. Perhaps you go and have the experiences and send the proof to people who paid you to go have it - the ultimate archair experience.

Below are some of my favourites, but go to David's site for the full menu:

If you give me $1,626 I will go to the small Okinawan island called Taketomi and send you an envelope filled with star-sand (don't worry, I've been there before, I know where to go). I will send it from there.

For this project, anyone can make a donation until I reach the amount. So, anyone can donate to this, and I will put how much I have raised here. You can donate any amount, but, I will only send you the sand if you donate over $100. Thank You!

If you give me $250 I will read the Little Prince in front of the New York Stock Exchange on Wall Street in the middle of a work day. I will send you photograph documentation of this. (or: if you give me $1000 I will buy as many copies of the Little Prince as I can and give them away to people leaving the New York Stock Exchange after a days work)

If you give me $30 I will walk around New York, and the first homeless person I see I will buy him or her whatever he or she wants to eat (as long as it is less than $30). I will mail you back the exact change (minus the paypal fee and the cost of the postage stamp) with the receipt for the food and the name of the person who ate it.

      

• Kris Efland bought a really big Kentucky Fried Chicken meal and an orange drink from Nedick's for Regional Keith on W 33rd and Broadway on February 24, 2008.
• Joie Mikitson bought a bunch of groceries from Park Avenue Food Court for Francis on E 10th and 4th Ave on February 25, 2008.
• Bart Schouten bought a pizza full of every topping except anchovies from Johns' of Bleeker Street for Marvin who was in the Houston train stop for the 1 on February 28, 2008.

Institutional hubris meets the empowered consumer: The Terminal 5 song

A while ago I treated you to the full transcript of my own experience with British Airways on my return journey, which got delayed a full 28 hours. Back last summer that was an epic delay and worthy of headlines, but it pales in comparison to the debacle known as Terminal 5.

Newspapers here in the UK have been full of articles cataloguing the events that transpired when the new Terminal was finally opened to the public, mass-scale computer failures preventing anyone from logging in to check in passengers, an incomprehensible baggage-handling system that failed as soon as it was turned on, an elaborate and beautiful glass-covered building with inadequate signing and logic to handling vast quantities of people needing to move from one floor to the next, the list is endless.

Outraged consumers have filled columns and airwaves venting their spleen about how this kind of behaviour can be tolerated and how come no one has sued the pants off BA and BAA by now - it surely would happen in the States. The most creative expression of consumer-generated discontent is the Terminal 5 song that captures brilliantly some of the madness that this episode in the history of disasters known as BA/BAA ventures and service - it's even catchy! Bring on the empowered consumer!

Hello world... and a new book: Groundswell

No, contrary to popular belief i have not fallen off the edge of the planet (just yet) although my silence recently could have given you that impression. Things have just been bonkers, I have been travelling too much and at times been so tired I have had absolutely nothing to add, which knowing my ability to talk may actually come as a blessing to my colleagues..

Things are looking up though - for those of you who followed my efforts to use this blog to recruit someone to join me, the news is: it worked! Surprisingly social networks and namely Facebook came to my rescue in that a friend came across the blog post and thought of a friend who would be perfect for the job (and he is!) and told me to get in touch (via Facebook). Sounds serendipitous and it was - but it turned out to be the best bit of sideways recruitment I've ever done. Now we both owe him a beer so Alex, when you do stop twittering and feel the onset of a beer, let us know.

Apart from that many things are afoot, which I need to share with you in the coming weeks, but in the meantime I wanted to build on the topic of communities, social networking and the lot and introduce you to a new book, Groundswell where my colleague, Tormod Askildsen, head of community development at LEGO has been interviewed too. read a little here on the topic of AFOLs or Adult Fans of LEGO:

Groundswell on Social Media Today

Avoiding the 3 pitfalls of Innovation based on Insight

Don't get me wrong - I'm a fierce proponent of innovation based on insight. How else would you be able to frame your innovation and understand whether what you are proposing is even relevant, unless you understand the competitive landscape in which you operate? The purpose of this post is not to question whether you need insights or delve into how innovation works or how to fuel it, but instead, assuming you have a smooth running innovation machine - and you work from solid consumer insight - how come things can still go wrong?

Interestingly, cognitive science can help us here, specifically the work of Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, who three decades ago explored the benefits and risks of heuristics, or shortcuts in thinking. Heuristics help to explain the time we get it wrong even when having been presented with all the reasonable information and insight, which presumably should have led us to make the right conclusions rather than the wrong ones. There are three errors, which are common when this happens:

Anchoring error - This is when you seize on the first bit of information and basically make your mind up before you have heard the whole argument, even when some subsequent findings may be contradicting what you seized on initially.

Availability error - This is when some surprising findings emerge that remind you of a dramatic past case and you mistakenly apply mental models or conclusions from that case to new findings and rationalise them in the same way, again leading you to potentially make the wrong conclusion.

Attribution error - Despite getting a ton of insight, it can sometimes be very tempting to group these findings into stereotypes and grossly generalise, to see information as ways of confirming what you already know, rather than seeing the little inklings that your stereotypes aren't correct. Here again the information may be correct, but your use of it incorrect.

These mistakes are all very human and can easily happen, but research in other fields are showing just how dangerous these mistakes can be. In the engineering field these errors can lead to countless hours spent hunting for a technical problem in the wrong place, in the medical fields the very same mistakes can lead to gross misdiagnosis and potential patient deaths and of course in design, to redundant products and solutions. To err is human, but to err without learning from your mistakes is plain stupid.

Understanding Innovation

Innovation is one of those words that are very hip these days. Granted, even I have it in my title. Interestingly, it is also one of the most misunderstood words in business today, so perhaps it's worth spending a little time understanding exactly where it comes from.

If you look for the definition of creativity on Wikipedia, you'll find over 60 different versions - most will agree on the basic premises below and beyond that, the views are radically different depending on your scientific or cultural background. Summarising:

• At the simplest level, creativity is about bringing into being something that was not there before
• Creativity is a mental process involving the generation of ideas and concepts, or new associations between existing ideas or concepts
• Creativity occurs when a person thinks a thought that is outside the space of thoughts that is even conceivable to that person Margaret A. Boden

Now creativity is not innovation, although the two are frequently confused for one another. Innovation is actually made up of two halves:

• Imagination: No new ideas can be generated without a person’s abilities to ‘ think outside the box’ or envision alternative ways in her mind
• Creativity: No insights, however brilliant, will ever be realised unless they are projected out, i.e given material form

A person’s creative expression is the visible face of imagination at work.

Imagination and creativity are each faces of a coin called innovation

With this in mind, innovation becomes a process of fueling the imagination and using creativity to bring into existence the ideas at imagination gives rise to. The two go hand in hand and innovation becomes very hard if a) your imagination is stifled or b) you lack the creativity to bring to life the ideas that you've had.

Therefore fostering innovation is about a process to ensure that there is enough food and stimuli for individual and collective imaginations to engage and about creating avenues for creative expressions to materialise and be improved iteratively either by individuals or collectively. Some past blog posts to inspire you:

Avoiding Creative Apartheid 

Why Innovation cannot remain in the realm of the few

The 7 Must-Do's of Innovators

How to Encourage Innovation in Business

The Conditions for Thriving Innovation

That is not to say that these traits all need to exist in a single individual, instead they can collectively emerge in a community, in an organisation, a film crew, and so on. Successful organisations, communities or creative groups accommodate both the acquisition of stimuli to inspire the imagination of members as well as individuals with an ability to creatively realise those ideas. Collectively or individually, an essential part of innovation is the social dimension that fuels imagination and creativity as well as the process of iterative improvement. None of us are as smart as all of us.

Avoiding Creative Apartheid

Right, here we are - new year, new challenges and not surprisingly: probably still a lot of the old challenges about too, hopefully with the wisdom (and increased girth) of some time off during Christmas, we will be able to approach those issues afresh.

So my first post of the year is dedicated to a topic capable of arising fury within me, over and over again - despite my (by now) many years within the field of design and most recently innovation. This topic, so aptly named Creative Apartheid by Gary Hamel, captures the problem very well:

Too many executives seem to believe that while few people in the company may be really clever and creative, most folks aren't. Gary Hamel

Just before Christmas in fact, did something happen that reminded me yet again of how widely spread this notion is and how it can easily become a self-fulfilling prophecy - i.e this way of thinking means that those esteemed to be 'creative' become intellectually lazy and stop making an effort to ensure that those not currently deemed to belong to the 'creative class' can make a useful contribution, thus proving that creative output invariably only comes from those already belonging to this group of esteemed individuals. Sound confusing? Let me explain by using an example of something that happened to me recently:

2 external consultants had been hired to revamp the value proposition of a service. Famed for their role in a number of award-winning commercials and one being a well-known author, this pair had the credentials of 'creative genius' written all over them, certainly within the advertising field. Personally I have nothing against the duo and find their work and ideas highly refreshing, but what happened next is what constitutes the problem.

To boost the creative work a series of brainstorms had been called, with a mixture of both individuals from the team involved in providing the service as well as a few select externals, including myself, whose insight and background was relevant to the task at hand. Coming in to the workshops I was taken aback by firstly, how linguistically focused many of the excercises were in the sense that not only did they focus on creating ideas, but also crafting these ideas into the most beautiful prose ever - all at the same time. Secondly, the sessions dived straight in, with no warm-up whatsoever to bring the team together and with a very ambitious agenda of work to achieve by the end of the day.

As you would expect, the sessions floundered and much less was accomplished in the time available than what the organisers hoped for. The two consultants, like everyone else, were completely drained by the days activities and proceeded to question why some of the individuals had been present at the meeting, when they clearnly weren't going to contribute anything. It appeared that lines had got crossed between the leaders of the group and the consultants as to what was the outcome of the session and who should be involved. Some of the comments from the consultants annoyed me hugely and I began to think in detail about what had happened and why I had adjusted to their working methods and some of the others hadn't.

1. Relaxing before innovating - check out some 'non-method' methods of how to get people to drop some of the familiar office-induced tensions and anxieties that are the enemy of any creative brainstorm Running Creative Brainstorms
2. Beware of imposing your own ideal way of working on others - advertising as an industry seems to be extremely word-heavy, rewarding to people with linguistic intelligence and capability, but those who lean more towards visual or spatial intelligence, or indeed are capable technological innovation sometimes struggle expressing their ideas purely in words. Be aware of your own comfort zone in terms of not just working style, but also jargon and lingo pertaining to your own professional field and how that can turn off people who aren't doing the same work as you. What are the things that all of you have in common? Concentrate on that to bring together a diverse team and build on everybody's strengths rather than exposing their weaknesses.
3. Don't divide people into the creative and non-creative, not even implicitly - a Freudian slip earlier in the day from one of the leaders made the rest of the day excruciating to say the least. When discussing how the groups should be split, rather than just talking names, the person emphasised the importance of having at least one 'creative' per group, this way of talking of course again deriving from the advertising industry's way of talking collectively about creatives when in fact meaning art directors and copy writers, yet to non-advertising folk this sounds like dividing people into creative and non-creative people. Again, when this is the perception, it is needless to ask why anyone would bother contributing.
4. Concentrate on one task at a time - Again, break things down into manageable-sized chunks - if you are a team with a track record of previously working together your chunks can be bigger, but your innovation may only be incremental as being familiar with each other means your thinking may already have got stuck in some grooves. To avoid this manifestation of group-think, you could adopt a role-play approach, where each of you champions the cause of a specific group relevant to the problem you are trying to solve, for instance consumers, marketers, designers, programmers etc. If you are a diverse team, the chunks need to be smaller, yet your innovation can potentially be bigger, because fresh pairs of eyes on old problems can help see things from new angles.
5. Plan accordingly - if it is a huge task you are embarking on, and you have a diverse team to help you with it, one brainstorm or workshop may not be enough, but you instead need to plan a sequence of them, progressively narrowing down the scope. Again, the earlier you start your planning the more options you have at your disposal.
6. The facilitator often does the most work, but invisibly so make sure you have one and that they understand what is expected of them and why the others are there - The best facilitators just make things happen and that's how it seems, but the reality is very much that of the swan in the lake, above the water graciously gliding past, making it seem effortless while feet paddle feverishly under water to keep the bird moving. That is the facilitator for you and with a diverse team the facilitator often has to be the one capturing comments, building on people's comments, coaxing input from the more quieter team members, keeping time, the lot. A task not to be underestimated and often the success of any brainstorm is down to how good the facilitation was.
7. If language is an issue, focus on expressing ideas, not composing the most lyrical prose - Capturing ideas and phrasing them for most conceptual impact are two different things and require two very different modes of thinking: ideas need your mind to be in open-mode, thinking freely, broadly and making lateral links as well as conceptual jumps. Finding the best adjectives to describe a product you already know what it is, requires your mind to be in closed mode - analysing, evaluating. Often people stuggle to leap from one mode to the next in the same session, so it's a good idea to split them apart, forcing everyone to be in the same mode all at the same time.
8. Allow contribution and input, even when the official session has ended - particularly if this is your own team you are drawing upon, it's no good if you normally tell them to zip it when they have a suggestion or idea for you and then you ask them when it suits you. Walk the talk and allow people to be part of the beginning as well as the end. Sometimes you can't make amendments anymore despite people coming up with an excellent idea, but grace them with an honest explanation of the situation and if possible, think up a way of using their idea somewhere where it still can make a difference. If you do that, you find people are more willing to help you too.
9. Having the idea is the easy bit, implementing it is often hard - that means making sure the ideas live on beyond the brainstorm and they will, if you have observed the rules above. People you have involved will have a vested interest in making sure the ideas survive and are acted upon, because they were part of creating them, but invariably it will take a lot of hard work, not just from you, but from everyone - so what better than having a team around willing to help!

So creative brainstorms can work - and pooling people's ideas, regardless of background and don't you believe anyone that tells you the opposite. In fact, if the brainstorm didn't come out as planned, rather than blame others, it's worth taking a long, hard look at yourself to see if you indeed committed some of the mistakes catalogued above. Fix the problem and try again. As Gary Hamel puts it:

When you look at companies like Toyota, you see their ability to mobilize the intelligence of the so-called ordinary workers. Going forward, no company will be able to afford to waste a single iota of human imagination and intellectual power.

Deeper Sense of Luxury

In an earlier post I talked about what makes a good toy, contrasting two rival consumer mindsets against one another as partially to blame for the problem with toys imported from China: on one hand the desire (or expectation) for safety and quality at knock-down prices; on the other hand - the (almost) accepted transitory nature of many products and the subsequent unwillingness to spend money on products where safety and quality are taken extremely seriously.

So where the true cost of quality has eluded people, and the effects of low quality not being completely clear (until now), it has been an easy option for many companies caught in this dilemma to go for Chinese-manufactured products as keeping manufacture in Europe or the US would simply have created prices that consumers would not be willing to pay.

However this is beginning to change. First indications of this was the emergent trading up, trading down trend where people deliberately sought to save money through highly thrifty shopping for everyday essentials, yet splashing out on upgrading select items in luxury outlets. Yet, contributing to the warped sense of value is of course the flip-side to all this, where reports and documentaries detailing how many luxury labels charge a premium for the 'perception' of quality they embody, but in actual fact many products are manufactured just the same as ordinary priced items. Luxury items simply command a higher margin, with labels pocketing the change.

What people are beginning to understand is what exactly the elusive term 'quality' means. It appears that Quality functions like a broad stroke term to encompass high expectations on:

•     Material
•     Finishing
•     Design and Usability
•     Functionality, features and compatibility
•     Ethics and sustainability
•     Health and Safety
•     Environmental Impact
•     Service and replace-ability

Many still refuse to pay the premium that this may translate to in the short term, but as we increasingly begin to be able to factor the costs of the long-term impact of such choices - it becomes very hard to sustain the argument. Leading this change is the growing attention paid to corporate social responsibility and initiatives like the Deeper Luxury report by WWF UK where the media response to this could be the tipping point for the Industry as suggested by CSRwire

Media Response to WWF-UK Report on Luxury Brands Could Be Tipping Point for the Industry.

Last week over fifty newspapers and magazines from Britain, Brazil, Australia, New Zealand, Italy and Switzerland reported on the corporate responsibility of the world's largest holding companies of luxury brands. For the first time they had been ranked on their ethical performance in the report Deeper Luxury: Quality and Style When the World Matters, which was published by environmental group WWF-UK. The news went 'viral' through trade journals and blogs on fashion, jewelry, and celebrities.

The report "could herald a huge change in the way global luxury brands operate," states Fashion UK.(1) 'The luxury goods industry looks like it's having its own Nike moment," suggests UN corporate reporting expert Dr Anthony Miller, referring to the mid-90's criticism of labour practices in Nike's supply chain that made the company invest heavily in its corporate responsibility programme. Within days, Just-Style.com reported that "PPR Group commits to improving sustainability" as a result of the publication.(2)

 

Earning the Affinity of Your Consumers

Some years ago I came across an excellent paper by Juan Pablo Valencia and Taryn Westberg at the London Business School, where extensive investigations were conducted into how experiences people have with brands influence their perception of it and how best to generate value from Brands through experiences.

Their paper (Experience and the Brand) discusses this in elaborate detail, which makes for some interesting reading in itself and one of their conclusions is to use a consumer affinity pyramid where you place your consumers based on the level of their affinity for your company. The people who love your brand are at the top and those who hate you are the very bottom. Interestingly people at different levels of the pyramid have specific consumption patterns, thus generating different revenue for the company. Moreover, as they move to higher segments the bring more value in the following ways:

• Higher consumption rate and repeat usage
• More willingness to pay price premiums
• Longer relationship with the brand (decreased churn)
• Word of mouth/brand ambassadorship
• Community Effects

There are alternative models to the one just described. For example, brand impact can be evaluated by calculating the advertising and PR expenditure that would be needed to get the same results in terms of changes in customer behaviour. The concept is simpler, but can only be used for comparative purposes. Alternatively, if customers can be tracked through CRM or other means, then the actual impact on sales can be measured. Sales impact can then be used to determine effectiveness with an ROI model.

So then we get to the interesting part. If this is indeed the case - the big question then becomes: how do you influence people's movement upwards in the pyramid? What creates higher levels of affinity in consumers? Is it a fancy marketing campaign? Is it friendly staff? Is it the ability to customise your own products? Well, as far as I can tell - it is not that simple. Despite the transformative power of experiences (as extolled in the paper), consumer affinity is made up of a range of factors, if one is to consider affinity from a long-term perspective, where it can truly have an impact on the company and its sustainability. Ultimately there is no gimmick solution to this problem, but in fact it is one that demands a profound re-evaluation of the company as a whole, what it is, what it stands for and how it treats its supporters: the consumers.

Broadly speaking we know that higher levels of affinity means people have a deeper emotional bond with a company. Experiences that are meaningful have a capacity to create an emotional bond by virtue of our participation in them, which moves us from objective observers into being active participants. If the experience we participate in is a positive one, or even transformative, our affinity will be higher than it would be if say, we just heard about it from someone else. That means we care more.

We care about the product and the company, we worry when things are not going well, we get more disappointed than average consumers if we are let down and we are also more willing to personally contribute to the company with content, ideas or even help our fellow consumers with advice and ideas. So with this in mind, the responsibility of companies is huge in making sure to respect and value every single last contact with its consumers and not consciously and repeatedly fail its most staunch supporters. That is a radically different approach than merely keeping a bunch of shareholders and investors happy. It's about ensuring every one is happy and consumers first and foremost. So can that even be possible I hear you asking?

Why not? The rate of change in technology, software, CRM and the growing number of online contacts a company receives, it should no longer be impossible to consolidate all these connections into user profiles that can be used, not for endless marketing campaigns and bombarding users with offers, but as a means of going back to basics: of listening and anticipating and respecting, being deserving of that emotional bond people have with you. And for that, you as a company have to behave more like a trusted reliable friend that some faceless bully in the playground that sometimes has a great offer to tempt you with and next minute leaves you in some quagmire of call-centre hell and bad service. The question is as a company: are you worthy of your consumers' affinity?

Why the Era of the Insider is Over

Now this is intentionally a controversial title for a post, but hear me out. I'm not saying that we no longer need people who know stuff, in fact we will need them more than ever before - but what I am saying is that information and expertise is becoming so ubiquitous (through the Internet) that some of the models for profiting from expertise and insider knowledge are rapidly becoming redundant.

So back to the post. Let's start by a poignant example. Here in the UK estate agents have been running amok with property prices of late and been trying their best to prop up property prices all around the country. Why? Because the higher the sale price, the better their fee (as it is often calculated as a percentage of the final sale price). So whether you like it or not, it is in estate agents' interests to get as high a price for a property as possible. [Don't even get me started on whether it is reasonable to pay half a million pounds for some house built over a century ago, where heating mostly benefits the pigeons outside and no angle in the house is 90 degrees, making office chairs on casters spontaneously migrate to one corner of the room.]

Anyway - the game has been that of poker: If we tell you the price is going up and you better get on the property ladder soon, (pandering to the human weakness of dreading to lose out) people invariably believe it and more often than not in recent years, have been extending themselves far more than what could be recommended to just get on that property ladder.

Interestingly this began changing not too long ago, first with Nethouseprices, an on-line facility that keeps track on the actual price for which a property was sold. Certainly this began drawing a lot of interest and curiosity from people, but there was still room for estate agents to jump in the middle and say - 'weeeelll, that was then... this is now and I tell you it is hotting up big time!'. What do I mean? Well, the prices listed on Nethouseprices are lag measures - they only tell you the news AFTER it has happened. It's like saying - I would like to lose weight and tracking your weight only by getting on the scales every morning. The scales will tell you your weight at that precise moment in time, but not whether you are likely to be losing some weight anytime soon.

Well, I hear you ask - how could you measure the likelihood of losing weight? By finding a lead measure instead. So if you measured how often you took some exercise and how many calories you burned every time you exercised, offsetting that against how many calories you took in and going on the theory that if you burn more calories than you eat - you will find that sooner or later you begin losing weight. That's a lead measure. Keeping track of that will tell you before you get on the scales what the scales are likely to tell you. How does this apply to the housing market?

The fact is that the housing market is catching up too and instead of reporting lag measures (i.e the price at which properties were sold and no use to you since the property is no longer on the market so you can't jump in and buy it instead!) we, the consumers are beginning to have a chance to peek into that precious secret folder that only estate agents and individual sellers had access to before - that is, how much the price is coming down WHILE the property is still on the market. Ooops! The emperor no longer has any clothes as PropertySnake, interestingly named to be the opposite of the property ladder, will show. PropertySnake tracks how much prices of properties have fallen over time and by looking up areas by post-codes you get a good sense of the overall trend in that area in addition to what is happening to a particular house. If you then are so intrigued by what you find, you can look up with what estate agent that house/flat is listed with by clicking on the listing.

It is also a step on from traditional price comparison sites, which have mushroomed recently, because again - although those sites compare the prices right now, they seldom give you any indication of where the market is going. The same phenomenon is what happens at Ebay - because everyone can bid whenever they like and only by keeping track of something over time can you see whether the demand for that is heating up or not, it means your powers of detecting broader trends are limited to your own power of observation and whatever little software widget you might have that gives you the bids that are just about to close so you can bid in the last few minutes.

All those are still tactical tools, and up till now the strategy has been left to experts, but as we begin to see with house prices and no doubt with other areas too - the last vestiges for insider knowledge is becoming undone.