Reboot

Recognizing that success was not defined by a shiny new web product, we set about creating the organizational pre-conditions for successful innovation. Utilizing a position at the head of a key internal think-tank, we sought cross-organizational buy-in for the concepts of audience engagement, silo-less content and increased emphasis on user needs. This led to development of a new community driven content portal the reflected new models for audience participation and editorial creation.

The organizational culture we helped create placed a new emphasis on internal collaboration and participatory media. Management incentives were put into place to encourage cross-divisional cooperation, and a variety of new content products were developed to allow for audience participation. Likewise, vertical content from individual sub-brands was folded into the main National Geographic web portal, reflecting a greater appreciation for user needs.

The role of consumers, users, constituents and readers has changed dramatically in the modern age. Today, external stakeholders have the capacity for and increasingly demand greater participation in the business processes that drive the products and services that they consume. Delivering this increased participation, however, isn’t simply the result of new innovations in products or distribution platforms. It demands a fundamental, ground-up change in the systems that create the products and services.

Yet there are at least three structural challenges that impede the development and adoption of innovative new modes of product and service design:

Complicating Factors

First and perhaps most common, is an overemphasis on technology and innovation at the expense of people, process and culture. The best tools will only go as far as the people that use them.

Second, financing profound systems change is incredibly hard in all organizations, particularly those that facing cash-flow problems from the change already occurring in the marketplace. This presents a chicken-and-egg problem: these organizations are struggling largely due to massive societal shifts underfoot, yet due to these struggles, it is difficult to find the resources to explore and develop new approaches.

Finally, deep cultural biases creates significant resistance to change among the internal decision-makers responsible for implementing it. Many of those heading large organizations are perfectly comfortable with the ways things have always been done. Unless masterfully orchestrated, creating ownership of change among these stakeholders will be an impossible battle.

Designing this type of change, and deploying the appropriate methodologies to change culture, process and people, is what we do at Reboot.

National Geographic’s Problem

The National Geographic Society stands as one of the most recognized and celebrated media brands in the world. Yet bound by more than a century of legacy processes and consisting of a complex and at times balkanized organizational structure the Society has repeatedly struggled to adapt to the changing media landscape. By 2007, NGS management was particularly frustrated by their inability to succeed in the digital world. Repeated content overhauls and advertising strategies failed to increase traffic or revenue.

The renowned brand had struggled to capture a consistent and engaged online audience. This wasn’t the result of poor decision-making, but rather a reflection of the complex and silo driven structure of the organization itself. Over 120 years, the Society had grown to include several dozen internal divisions and sub-brands. While many of the offshoots and sub-divisions had seemed logical offshoots at their inception, they held little relevance to a digital audience who cared only about the “Yellow Border” and not what division had produced an individual piece of content. For example, editorial content produced for one of National Geographic’s magazine properties was often kept segregated from content published on the organization’s primary website. XXX

Recognizing the need to create new content models, with an emphasis on the demands of the National Geographic audience we set out on a multi-year effort to change how the organization created and presented content. This would require the development of a radically different end-product as well as profound changes to the Society’s core editorial and business processes.

Our Approach

Recognizing that lasting change wouldn’t come on the back of a flash-bang new product, but rather through seismic shifts in the culture of the organization, our approach was based on a systematic methodology based on research and stakeholder buy-in.

In any organization, particularly large ones with significant institutional memory and structure, attempts at substantive change must have the support of senior leadership and key operational players. But how to go about it?

In an effort to foster institutional innovation, National Geographic’s Chief Financial Officer sponsored an internal think-tank focused on developing new approaches to attract a younger demographic. Group membership consisted of innovators from a diverse cross-section of departments and hailing from all levels of the organization.

Taking over chairmanship of this important community of practice allowed us to gain the support of the CFO and provided opportunities to gain buy-in from a variety of influential organizational stakeholders. Using the think-tank as a platform, we had the initial, critical green light to pursue broader change initiatives.

Research

Organizational innovation happens because people feel the support to experiment and fail. Innovation that leads to significant change across an organization benefits from a diverse array of input and buy-in from a variety of stakeholders. Through the think-tank we had access to these conditions. Support from the CFO gave us legitimacy and allowed us access to all parts of the organization. It gave us a platform to bring in expert speakers from outside the organization, helping to change attitudes and provide 3rd party legitimization of our efforts. All of this was bolstered by a rigorous research agenda that resulted in several published reports.

The reports, delivered to C-suite level executives, examined the changing nature and economics of the media landscape, and the corresponding impacts on consumer behavior. Widely read by management teams across the organization, these reports fertilized the soil by changing attitudes among managers about what innovation looks like and how it is created.

Additionally, we conducted workshops to educate stakeholders from every corner of the organization and to collect their input, creating early buy-in from those who might have otherwise resisted such sweeping changes. These were layered with executive training sessions, focused on introducing new concepts and paradigms to senior leadership who might have been otherwise resistant to adopting change.

Development

Because of the collaborative and transparent approach outlined above, the CFO felt confident investing significant resources to develop a new, interactive content platform. With an initial $200,000 in R&D capital, we began work on a novel strategy for National Geographic’s audience to interact with the brand.

The first major challenge was breaking the through the numerous content silos that existed across the organization. Editorial material produced by one division was frequently off-limites or heavily restricted for other divisions. This made some sense from an internal costing perspective, but it frustrated consumers ability to engage with National Geographic’s content in an organic sense. Audience members didn’t want to go to a completely different website to view magazine content, once they were already on the primary website. This finding was supported by earlier research published by the think-tank.

Once we had successfully made the case for the need to offer interactive content to the audience that was freed from silos, we began developing a platform to deliver this experience.

“My NatGeo” would be the organization’s first online, community driven and silo-less content product. It was supported by numerous content divisions who had been convinced that a more participatory and seamless experience was critical in bringing their content to a younger and more connected audience.

The platform brought novel multimedia content to users, allowed for audience driven editorial selection, and provided a number of unique ways to interact with the story-tellers previously hidden behind the pages of the magazine or the screen of the television shows. My NatGeo was wildly popular among beta users and was eventually folded into several major initiatives across the organization.

Results

My NatGeo was the tangible end-product at the end of a long process geared towards changing the way the National Geographic Society thought about it’s audience and the way it produced content for that audience. By the end of the more than 18 month process, there were significant shifts in the perspective of senior management. This resulted in a new commitment to internal collaboration and community driven content. Incentive structures for management were revised to promote cross-divisonal collaboration, and the digital media division started working on several new user-centric content products.

Several content verticals that had previously been maintained as separate online properties were folded into the primary web portal. Correspondingly, web traffic and online audience engagement has been improving ever since.