Sometimes you’re sitting there, minding your own business, reading some articles online, watching YouTube videos, and an analogy pops into mind that won’t go away.  This happened to me over the weekend while watching a video created by Red Bull featuring Ryan Doyle performing and talking about parkour in Mardin, Turkey.

I had never heard of parkour – while I’m sure there are some American traceurs and traceuses (male and female parkour practitioners), I guess in the U.S., Sports Center is more focused on tennis, football and baseball.  In other words, this is not mainstream U.S. sports fare.  After watching one short video, I was intrigued to find out more about this beautiful sport and art.  “Parkour is an international discipline, sport and hobby that is best described as the art of forward motion in spite of obstacles, or to put it simply: the art of movement,” according to How Stuff Works. Wikipedia calls parkour “a method of movement focused on moving around obstacles with speed and efficiency.”

In our industry, we talk to brands about how to do business in a more social way, changing how they market to consumers as well as how they digest, communicate and disseminate information internally.  It becomes clearer with each passing day that resistance to these changes will leave your business behind.  Change is hard. People inside of brands and companies naturally resist it.  But in order to catapult our businesses forward, we must not resist these changes.  We’ve got to roll with the punches, try to not fear the new and unknown.  Traceurs go places they’ve never been before, like Doyle to Mardin, Turkey, and immerse themselves in the landscape all in an attempt to move forward in a fast, efficient and unpredictable way.  Doyle speaks about how he approaches a new landscape: “I have to pretend that I’ve already done it like ten times.” He uses mental strength to convince himself that all is OK, that he knows he can make the jumps and handle the unexpected by telling himself, “it’s alright…I’ve already done this” even when the fact is that he has never seen this particular landscape before.  Doyle’s mental strength is inspiring, and we can take a lesson from it when figuring out how to approach unfamiliar techniques and ever-changing landscapes in social business.

“Parkour’s chief aim is never to move backward but instead to overcome obstacles fluidly, with strength, originality and speed, ” states the How Stuff Works article.

Wouldn’t it be great if we could use those words to describe our forays into the new technologies and techniques of social business? Always move forward. Overcome obstacles fluidly, with strength, originality and speed.  Let’s do it.

Special thanks to Barney Loehnis for turning me on to this incredible Red Bull video via his weekly aggregation of interesting digital / social media articles and creative work from Asia-Pacific.  Find more of his aggregated articles and stories at www.asiadigitalmap.com.