Truly great leaders have the self-confidence and humility to take a chance and embrace new ideas, even if – especially if – it means repudiating past canons. They know that their skills transcend any particular organisation, industry or business model. They ‘know’ they know how to navigate a maze. The others. The majority. They sleep nervously at night wondering, fearing that they only solved the maze they’re in by accident and that they would be lost, shorn of powers if a new maze would be presented.

As such we should not be surprised if cultural and organisational inertia slows the adoption of new ideas and paradigms. It is inevitable. Statistical. And so not worth being frustrated about. On the contrary, those who do dare to ‘look around corners’, to deviate, to take risks with the goal of finding a better way, have many many more opportunities to succeed and a less crowded playing field. Imagine if everyone was like that. It would be damn hard to make a difference! ;)

Incidentally, Chris Locke insisted to me recently that we met when he was on his BBC trip some years go back. I think he’s mistaken and that I was called away before you showed up.

Now, with issues related to the internet, identity and authentication and permissioning, intellectual property rights and digital rights management, opensource and democratised innovation, social software just to name a few, I think different.

Issues around anchoring and framing and labelling and typecasting were always well understood by social scientists. And a few others.

And they were used by government and media.

Very successfully.

This time it’s personal, as the saying goes. And the internet has become a huge gulf separating the old from the new, exacerbated by the boom and crash at the turn of the century. More business models are under strain than ever before, and we need to equip everyone to understand the issues.

This will not happen unless we play the term game.

Just my thoughts.

Whenever we select words to describe a phenomenon that has no precedent, we fall back on past experience so we can contextualise. In the same way, those who would control the actions of others use specific constructs to convey meaning. This is one of the critical underpinnings for racism which was debated in the 1980s by Paul Gilroy and others but which has its roots in Becker’s ideas around labelling from the 1960s.

Anyone who wishes to promote a specific position selects language designed to convey thought with the maximum of impact. Heck – I’m doing it right now! It is why we need labels or rather tags.

To your point about deviance, I’ll throw it back to you. Why not use ‘deviant?’ After all, deviance is socially constructed. Kazaa only became deviant when it was ruled to operate outside accepted norms. In some societies, polygamy is seen as a norm. And that’s the point. Accepted norms, which conveys the idea of majority and a subconscious understanding of what is acceptable.

What your proposing is the classic dilemma of the change agent. Shifting the context of deviance to normalcy (or vice versa). And as usual the most ‘dangerous deviants’ are always the ones who ask ‘Why?’