Never mind the technology, where’s the learning?

Now I don’t know a lot about many things, but as a consultant, I’m often asked about them. Seth Godin is a marketing ‘guru’, and I have a feed to his blog, as I’m often called to think about how to market our company, Advisory Matters. What strikes me about his business and my business, is there are close similarities. We both deal in trying to persuade people to do things, buy into a ‘dream’, a concept or an idea.

One of his latest posts, called Nobody knows Anything, says there are but two sorts of market analysis - ‘Analysing tomorrow’:

Analyzing tomorrow is a sort of analysis is filled with superstition, unsupported opinion, half-truths and most of all, fear. Fear of being wrong, fear of challenging the status quo, fear of going out on a limb. Fear of wasting money, fear of criticism and fear of the market.

and ‘Analysing yesterday’:

Analyzing yesterday is 20/20 hindsight. It involves finding threads of‘tomorrow’ analysis and hooking them up to things that appear to have worked. Using yesterday analysis, I can easily explain the success of Starbucks and Apple and Nike and Google, and of course make it really clear why Friendster didn’t become Myspace.

His conclusions are often obvious and interesting:

The idea, though, that you can accurately analyze tomorrow just because some marketer did a good {job} of describing yesterday is nonsense. … A nice side effect of the gurucomplex is that sometimes reading a marketing tract can give you the confidence to do what you knew was the right thing anyway. … Here’s the really good news: in addition to analysis, marketing today offers something that actually works: a process.

The successful marketing process will always get you better results than the alternatives. The successful marketing process is not dependent on an historical analysis of what your competition did that worked, but is a truly powerful way to figure out what to do next.

This is also true in almost everything we do in education. Isn’t it always the process that is important, not necessarily repeating methods that have worked elsewhere or in the past. Teachers, of course, need to explore and learn from the method, but it’s the process they need to go through that is all important in finding their personal route to change.

Image credit: Ollie Palmer

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