At WebProductive, the turn of the year is always a time to reflect and organise. Sometimes, that reflection goes a bit left-field, and I wanted to share a thought I had about Chameleons.

Changing colour

At first glance, a chameleon looks like a change-friendly character - making sure it's always coloured the same as the stuff around it - quite useful if you always want to fit in.

After I thought some more about it, I realised that being able to change your colours doesn't make you adaptable by default ( I fully accept it's a cool party trick). Change that's only skin deep won't get you very far - and to apply such biological hap-hazardry to the on-line world, making superficial changes to work with on-line tools, apps or solutions won't work very well either (even if you don't end up getting eaten by something).

Be a germ!

If you happen to be looking to nature for inspiration this new year, you could do worse than look to the bacteria - this organism is the king/queen/thing of change. Not only are there a fair few of them around, but they're also pretty impressive change enthused little creatures. They'd be your super-super users if they could log in to and use web tools. They exist at all extremes of temperatures, environments and even in outer space. They're pretty adaptive too - evolving to different types of bacteria all the time - never staying still.

Nature meets the web

So what is my spurious 'key point' about all this? It's simply to say that changing your colour and making skin deep changes isn't going to be that effective for working better on-line. Adopt the bacteria approach and think more fundamentally about your new surroundings on the web, and what you're trying to achieve.