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For anyone who has never played or seen Angry Birds, it’s a very simple game. You are given a few cartoon birds which you shoot from a slingshot at little green cartoon pigs hiding in various types of forts. There are several types of birds with different powers that make each of them uniquely effective against different types of structures. You earn points for each pig killed and structure destroyed, and the number of points determines your rating for the level, from one to three stars. After playing a while you eventually burn through all of the levels. With all of the levels beaten the only thing left to do is go back and re-beat them as efficiently as possible, earning enough points on each level to receive a three-star rating. So you learn exactly what bird to use, how and in what order. If your first bird doesn’t fly right, then you probably know you’re not going to make your three stars. Fortunately, the game has a reset button that lets you start over, so you don’t have to waste time playing a doomed round, which means you spend more time working on getting it just right. Back in the early Eighties I was on a field trip with my sixth grade class to the Atari offices in San Jose, California. There they had a few rooms crammed full of every video game imaginable at the time. The latest and greatest of everything of the day. This was literally the pinnacle of human video gaming achievement, and they were all free and all ours for three glorious hours. That was a great day. This won’t mean much to someone who grew up on PS4, but in the Eighties playing videos games had real-life consequences. Video games used to cost money. Depending on the game, a quarter bought about three lives, and even if you were pretty good at the game that got you only about five minutes of total playing time. That was it. You either put another quarter in the slot or you went home. Needless to say, a kid on a fixed allowance took those three lives very, very seriously. If your best friend so much as bumped your elbow he’d be wearing his Slurpee. Tourist: “Excuse me, sir. Can you please tell me how to get to Carnegie Hall?” New Yorker: “Practice.” In kid terms, getting really good at a video game used to require significant financial resources, so only the kids with lots of quarters to burn were able to achieve Pac-Man greatness. Today, technology has made video games smaller, more powerful, more realistic (or fantastically unrealistic) and, most importantly, cheap. Now we no longer go to arcades to play because we have the best technology available right at home. And since we own the equipment and the game, all future play is free. So if your guy gets blown up it’s no big deal; there are an infinite number of soldiers ready to take his place without pay on the front line. Technology has removed the financial risk of failure. Or, to phrase it better, it has removed the risk associated with trying new ways to achieve a desired goal. It used to be expensive to get a message out to the public too. You used to have to pay a lot of money to a TV station or a publisher so that they would send your message out to the people who they broadcast to, so only those with lots of money could afford to do it. And those who could afford it had to plan meticulously to make sure they hit their mark exactly. Media was far too expensive to attempt innovation or experimentation. As a result the media landscape was populated by the few and the risk-averse. Digital and social media have leveled the playing field to the point where everyone with a computer and an internet connection has access to the same tools, so there is no longer any barrier to entry for the little guy. A small business owner now has the same media creation and distribution tools available to him as even the biggest corporations. Not only does this put him on the same playing field with the big boys, but now media is so inexpensive to produce and distribute that he can afford to try new ideas and innovate. Now he can afford to make mistakes, because now mistakes are free. If a plan doesn’t work the way you had hoped, then take what you’ve learned from the previous attempt, make a new plan and try again. Terry Hoitz: "Where'd you learn to drive like that?!" Allen Gamble: "Grand Theft Auto!"

The Brizendine Doctrine

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We used to live in a world where access required money. If you wanted to get a message out to a lot of people you had to have a lot of money to pay the people who owned the means to create and distribute your message to the masses. Now anyone with access to a laptop and an internet connection can easily (if they are so inclined) create and distribute a message online. The barriers to entry for the creation and distribution of content are now gone. Now it’s all about who has the most compelling content. If the metaphor for the old media model is a loudspeaker, where messages are created by a few and broadcast to the masses, then this new interconnected digital world is an infinite, electric meadow brimming with ideas and messages and information and entertainment, all sprouting up as flowers. In this metaphor we are the bees, buzzing around, hopping from flower to flower, bumping into and interacting with other bees, collecting, exchanging and disseminating information like bits of pollen; contributing in our own small way to the birth and development of new ideas … new flowers, which then in turn attract other bees. And the process continues. We buzz around online, stopping here and there, sometimes leaving a little something and maybe taking something away. We consume, process, create, repurpose and distribute content. We reply to emails, read our friends’ Facebook statuses, visit websites, share links and watch videos, clicking from here to there to over there and so forth, sometimes ending up hours later in some totally (seemingly) unrelated place doing something totally (it might appear) different than what we had intended to do. The beautiful thing is that where we end up is the result of our acting honestly; doing exactly what we want to do at that moment, reacting exactly as we wish to. We don’t click on a certain link or visit some web page or register for some campaign because someone coerced us to. We do it because we genuinely want to find out more about it. This is nature at work. When you fail to plan you plan to fail, as they say. But if you plan too much you fail to allow for all of those little opportunities and accidental wonders that emerge from the natural interaction of people in an open and free environment. It is the open, collaborative, accidental, random, organic nature of this connected world that enables the exponential growth of new ideas, technologies and ways of thinking which in turn will lead to the creation of things that we cannot yet imagine. It’s time to stop looking for new ways to interrupt the flow of information and instead to become a part of the flow, to facilitate and enable the flow of information and explore new ways to make ourselves relevant and interesting to those we want to reach. Don’t look for new ways to shout your credentials at people … look for new ways to coax them to you. Grow your flowers. Grow flowers that people will buzz about. Invite people to sit on your flower for a bit and get cozy and let’s see what develops.

The Brizendine Doctrine