Cooking for Peace. A few years ago I visited Capetown’s infamous, troubled township of Khayelitsha. A local female entrepreneur had just become a bit of an international celebrity and local source of inspiration by promoting her B&B as a place to stay during the 2010 World Championship Football. Tourists staying overnight in townships was pretty much unheard of up to that point. Jumping over to the culinary arena, one of the most celebrated cookbooks of the last years is Jerusalem, written by Israeli pseudo-vegetarian Ottolenghi and his Palestinian counterpart Sami Tamimi. In this blog, I showed how mediators are creating buzzable services around divorce and other personal conflicts.

The Crazy Ones. I am sure there are hundreds of similar examples. But examples of what you ask ? Well, of entrepreneurs providing a positive influence in troubled regions in the world. Of creating constructive action where others persist in battling each other. Of seeing opportunity where others see opposition. I believe the reason entrepreneurs deviate in their behaviour is so simple it is easily overlooked. In conflict, most people tend to harden their stance and focus on preventing further damage or risk. Vulnerability could prove deadly and any action could trigger terrible consequences.

Opportunity knocks. But entrepreneurs look at problems differently. They are utterly, passionately focused on one simple thing: opportunity. The opportunity to create new value. Obviously conflict areas present huge opportunities to create value. The greater the misery, the greater the potential value, improvement in conditions to be created. Read Why Greece is in better shape than Germany for a great example on this phenomenon.

Parachute entrepreneurs into conflict areas ? And ultimately that drive is stronger than all the negative emotions that keep people fighting. Bcause in essence, humans are economic animals. If they see a way to be better off, they will follow it. People do not belong to groups for social purposes. We do that to profit from it. So if a few entrepreneurs can show the way to the opportunity, others will jump on the profit train as well and set their other emotions aside. So how could we use this force of nature to our advantage ? We can’t very well drop an airplane load of entrepreneurs over a conflict area and expect them to bring everyone to their senses by creating great value in everyone’s lives. Or could we ?

The Power of Many. Well, maybe not literally. But we live in a time that is rapidly producing tools that enable the forces of entrepreneurship to flow freely. And they might be used to help resolve international conflict. So let’s dive into the wonderful world of startups. To start new businesses, you need ideas. What better way to get them than to crowdsource them ?

“… the process by which the power of the many can be leveraged to accomplish feats that were once the province of a specialized few.”

Cities and communities have been crowdsourcing solutions for neighborhoods for a decade, so why not get your ideas for new products and services from Palestinians, Israeli, Ukrainians and Russians ? Think about it: in conflict areas you typically miss a lot of stuff you used to have or would love to have.

Hackathons & Lean Startups. During a truce, a Hackathon could be organized with entrepreneurs from both sides. A Bring Your Enemy Get 40% Discount might work better to break the ice than your typical Early Bird. Building on the crowdsourced ideas, mixed teams of entrepreneurs get hacking, rapid prototyping (no weapons please) and validating their concepts using Lean Startup Machine or Value Proposition Canvas tools.

Crowdfunding & X-Prizes. At the end of the two days all concepts are published on a crowdfunding platform. The entire conflict region can now push its favourites, boost the economy, get in on the action and start to shift mindsets to growth and prosperity. Alternatively, an X-Prize kind of incentive could be offered to solve a region’s conflict. X Prize’s founder Diamandis became a celebrity when he offered 10 million dollars to the first non-governmental team in the world that would put a man in space in a reusable vehicle. Three things are remarkable about the approach:

1. More than one team succeeded, in a timeframe that was deemed impossible
2. The teams all combined invested a total of 100 million dollars to get to the 10 million.
3. Diamandis did not have the money when he launched the challenge. That’s entrepreneurship for you.

New solutions, new markets. Whichever way you fund, new products and services will be kickstarted. Security firms that create safe passages for people. Delivery services that ship products from one area to another. Companies that provide access to shared computers and online tutoring. Solar-power solutions and build-your-own-mobile phones. And yes, there will still be risk. But if people have a vested interest in the success of these ventures the pressure will be on to keep the people running them safe.

Incubate Peace. To structurally boost this process, Accelerator, Startup BootCamps and other incubator programs should be setup in conflict areas specifically designed to stimulate cross-border startups teams and products/concepts that bring people together and have them collaborate/share. Entrepreneurship Awards like the GSEA will be given to reward the pioneers and stimulate others.

You might think this to be a highly naieve and romantic view on how humanity works. But without silly dreams nothing of importance would ever be created. Any thoughts on how to make this silly idea better ?

Let’s hack some peace.

The bottomline ? Small changes in our behaviour can bring (significant) benefits. And here’s how understanding the underlying dynamics can help you innovate more succesfully.

Most business success stems from innovation. And innovations always require people to change their behaviour (a little). But we hardly ever adapt those changes to reap the benefits. Or it takes ages, as happens with the shoelace tying technique. I doubt whether 1% of the 3,840,534 viewers of the video has changed their behaviour. So if we understand why we resist changing our behaviour we might find a way to influence that and use it to achieve world/market domination. I think of this as ’creating buzzable behaviour’.

To understand why we find it so hard to change our habits you need not look further than the book ‘Power of Habit’. We are all animals of habit. Caught in ‘habit loops’. Trigger, habit, reward. Quick & dirty summary of the book: as the trigger will still occur and you still crave the reward, you need to replace the habit. With which one ? Yours obviously.

I have come across two ways to actually go about doing this. There is a deeper, more difficult path with greater conversion ratios and sustainability and an easier route which will get you some quicker returns.

Disruptive Fun Therapy. If you watch the Bottle Bank video first you’ll understand intuitively what this approach is all about.

You create a fun, disruptive (deviates from normal patterns) experience which teases people to try a different habit. It shakes up your thinking: Hey, changing my habit to a new one is actually not so hard and could be fun ! It works by boosting the actual benefit (get healthier by taking the stairs) through fun additions such as entertainment, storytelling, games. And by lowering the barrier of trying (the cost for the user).

This is a great tool to use when your product or proposition (habit) that you would like to take the place of an existing habit (product) is not too complex, engrained in culture or otherwise ‘big’. Say change your breakfast from bread to a fluid equivalent with cereals. At Buzzer, we created hundreds of ‘BuzzTools’ with similar mechanics that helped consumers discover products and change their consumption patterns.

Customer Transformation. To understand this route, check out the video first.

This is the big one. You need vision, conviction, business cojones to travel this path. Like Google and/or any seriously ambitious startup wanting to become Google. The aim of this is to change your customer. Literally. Make him/her a different person. And the way to do it is to invest heavily in teaching, coaching, supporting your customer to adapt new behaviour. Ask yourself: what were we before we became Googlers ? We were Yellow Pagers. Time Atlassers.

Michael Schrage convincingly describes how Google and other companies focused on changing their target audience’s behaviour through education, not traditonal marketing. Google took us by the hand and transformed us to expect accurate search results in 0.00012 seconds. It helped us discover and adopt a new habit, routine to replace the old one. And take that as the norm. Reaching the holy grail of marketing: loyalty.

A year ago, I designed a customer transformation path for an international financial institution. After great initial enthusiasm and 6 months of creating the first building blocks, the project halted. The company did not have the longer term vision or stamina to pull it trough. We should have gone for the less ambitious road.

I am currently teaching my youngest daughter Mae to open up bananas the right way. She’s picking it up slowly but held back by all the other people doing it wrong. I estimate that it will take a few generations to get large groups to adapt this. I am thinking about a Fun Therapy technique that will speed this up.

Most companies convince themselves that traditional advertising will do the trick. “Exercise with our Absolute Abdominal Apparat 20 minutes each week and you will have 200% more energy”. This assumes that the lure (promise of the benefit) is sufficient to adapt a new routine (exercise). But the cost (machine, changing your schedule, finding a place for it, exercising, muscle aches etc.) is not addressed.

Of course, people are changing their behaviour all the time without any apparent use of the two methodologies. But then we confuse ‘changing behaviour’ with ‘copying behaviour’. In ‘Herd’ Mark Earls explains how strong our copying tendencies are. But people can only start copying behaviour once others have changed theirs, right ?

To get the benefits from innovations people need to change their behaviour. This is difficult. To speed up the process you can apply at last two different techniques, suitable for smaller innovations and quicker wins or for more radical innovations and greater gains.

If you know of other approaches or good examples, let me know !