Enjoy this Featured Foto Friday treat!

Warning: plot spoilers ahead!

The final episode takes place shortly after JFK's assassination. Shortly after the killing, Don Draper, Mad Men's deeply flawed protagonist, learns that Sterling Cooper, the ad agency at the show's center, has been bought by burgeoning giant McCann Erickson. Don convinces Roger Sterling and Bert Cooper, the firm's owners (who have already sold their firm once this season to a British conglomerate) that they need to strike out on their own. They set out to convince their top talent to join them.

Don knows that one key to their success will be the company's sole female executive, Peggy Olson. Peggy has risen from bright secretary to top creative by virtue of her incisiveness, evident in her ideas for Tab, Aqua Net and Western Union campaigns. Don, her boss, treats her ambivalently, (like he treats all women), alternating between brusque, almost abusive, possessive dismissiveness, and repentance.

All of that is background for this scene.

In it, Don visits Peggy's apartment in a (repentant) attempt to convince her to join the new firm, after (brusquely) practically demanding that she do so earlier. Peggy'd refused. 

After a few niceties, (Peggy - "Do you want anything?" Don - "Yes, I do."), he gets down to an apology, and to the business at hand. 

Here's that key snippet of dialogue again:

Don - Do you know why I don't want to go to McCann?

Peggy - Because you can't work for anyone else.

Don - No. Because there are people out there—people who buy things—people like you and me—and something happened; something terrible. And the way that they saw themselves is gone. And nobody understands that. But you do. And that's very valuable.

Peggy - Is it?

Something happened that changed the way people saw themselves; the old way they saw themselves is gone.

Now, it's clear that, on one level, the "something terrible" that Draper is referring to is the assassination. The Kennedy assassination and its aftermath marked a tremendous shift in American consciousness.

But, I think there's more. 

Peggy, he says, understands this "something" in a way that nobody else does. Throughout the season, we've seen Peggy propose creative ideas that indicate her awareness of the impending social cataclysm that we now call "the sixties."

Just as 9/11 was the real line of demarcation for "the new millennium," so too was the Kennedy assassination for the 60s. Movies like American Graffiti ("where were you in '62?") and Tin Men (with its ending focusing on McDonald's golden arches looming over Baltimore) and more have pointed out this before-and-after tipping point. 

What Don is referring to when he acknowledges Peggy's value is his own realization that advertising—speaking to "people who buy things"—was about to undergo a titanic shift.

He knows that Peggy is plugged in to these cultural changes and knows how to create ads that will resonate deeply with the new ways that we would be seeing ourselves; ads that would become identity-focused, self-referential, ironic, liberated.

And that got me thinking about our current cultural circumstances. In a fundamental sense, Draper's insight is equally pertinent now:

Because there are people out there—people who buy things—people like you and me—and something happened; something terrible. And the way that they saw themselves is gone. And nobody understands that.

In our day, that "something terrible" is agitated exhaustion with push-marketing, information hoarding, lies and corporate-speak, crystallized a decade ago by The Cluetrain Manifesto, now expressing itself in the great wave of written, audio and video material created by people everywhere and in nascent movements like Vendor Relationship Management.

The way people like us—people who buy things—saw ourselves is gone.

The question is, where are the Peggy Olsons and Don Drapers? Where are the advertising and marketing pros who understand that the way we see ourselves has fundamentally changed, and who are ready to speak with us in a manner that recognizes and embraces this new way?

Anyway, this has been a particularly beautiful fall here in Connecticut and I thought I'd give all of you a glimpse of what makes Autumn my favorite season.

Enjoy!

That's because the kind of "knowing" that forms the basis for most of our daily lives—most of what we "know"—is not the kind of knowing that we can easily articulate.

Not to mention, measure.

So we go about our day-to-day lives, knowing lots of things—how to determine where to walk on the sidewalk, how to tell if someone is going to cut in front of us on the highway, if our boss is telling us the truth when she says we're doing a good job—without the foggiest idea of how we came to that knowledge.

We just know.

This kind of knowledge, what psychologists call implicit, or "tacit knowledge," is crucial to everyday life.

By contrast, "explicit knowledge"—the capital of Arkansas, the number of feet in a mile, Derek Jeter's batting average—is most often what we mean when we say we "know" something. 

When I was in graduate school, we talked about this as the difference between "the lived and the known."

Daily lived experience is steeped in tacit knowledge, a deep understanding of the way the world, in general, and the ways in which the situations in which we find ourselves most often, in particular, work.

This lived knowledge operates as assumptions, the unspoken "rules" that govern social interactions; a kind of operating system for daily life.

We all "know the rules" of polite society ("you can't stare at that girl for more that three seconds without becoming creepy"); relationships (the appropriate gestures to be used when greeting spouses, siblings, friends, strangers), and groups (how to create and stand in a line at Starbucks). But stating them in simple declarative sentences is very difficult.

So, we are all embedded in a complex fabric of tacit, implicit, assumption-rich knowledge which keeps the wheels of social interaction turning.

It is only when these implicitly assumed rules break down that we become aware of them.

For instance, walking in London brings to awareness all the lived knowledge about city-walking that urban Americans take for granted every day. The familiar rules no longer apply. We "know" that we cannot trust our usual assumptions or else we're liable to be picked off by a double-decker bus.

We might say that this fabric—this network of assumed structures—is the "social architecture" of our lives. 

Social architecture is an odd phrase.

Is it apt?

When we walk London's streets, and the familiar becomes strange, it's as if the superstructure of the social world—the girders, pipes and wires that usually remain hidden by walls, floors and ceilings—has suddenly been exposed.

And, that's when we get just a glimpse of the power of shared beliefs.

It's no surprise, then, to realize that organizations, too, are living expressions of social architecture. 

Using architectural metaphors to think about organizations can help us to appreciate the degree to which organizations share common social features (just as buildings share "walls," "ceilings," "plumbing"), exhibiting stylistic similarities (like "Victorian," "Art Deco," or "Modernist" buildings do), and quirky idiosyncrasies ("that door's just a false front.")

These metaphors can also help us appreciate the source of the significant challenges we face when we seek to "renovate" them (engage in "change management.")

Just as we do in our homes or offices, we become quite comfortable after living within particular social architecture over time. We "know" them well: their features are familiar and comfortable; we can navigate them at night, blindfolded, and never once even bump our knees.

But, move just one chair two feet to the left and the whole place feels different; and most of us aren't all that comfortable with "different."

So, no wonder most change management programs fail.

Questions:

1. How can we become aware of the social architecture that underlies our organization? Are the original schematics still around or are they lost to antiquity?
2. How can we evaluate the efficacy of that social architecture to our current organizational challenges? In other words, are we trying to house a high-tech start-up in a house with Victorian-era wiring?
3. How can we make the right kinds of social architectural modifications to make our organization fit for its current use? How do we prioritize those changes? And, Is this an afternoon's do-it-yourself handyman project or are we looking at a season's worth of This Old House episodes?