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Monthly Archives: November 2014

Complexity, simplicity & the craft of resilient brand story making

30 Sunday Nov 2014

Posted by Thin Air Factory in Uncategorized

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Tags

Adaptive Governance, brand futures, Brand Identities, Brand people, brand Stories, Complexity, Corporate PR, Economies & Efficiencies, Identity, rare air, resilience, Rigour, Risk Mitigation, Shared Value, Simplicity, social brand, Story Ladders & Arcs, Substance, Sustainability, Ugly face of Beauty, Unilever

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The story goes that in a recent conversation with a large multinational client, yet again, at the mention of the S word, the brand people did everything from polite wincing to effectively spitting their coffee across the room.

Now to be fair, it was mentioned not in splendid isolation, elevated as some false god, the hero of the day, but in context to Shared Value and Social Brand, seen as a set of three pillars on which to build a more resilient, inclusive and adaptive Brand Story.

So, no Sustainable evangelism: just an eye to rigour and a wish to build something of substance; built to absorb whatever turbulence and volatility our fluid and accelerating world might throw at it without losing its shape.

Even though there is no intention to use the S word in the everyday brand world, we do have to use the S word in some rooms and in some circumstances – and hope that the brand people will not respond like someone just broke wind in the halls of the Brand Almighty.

Because, whether brand people like it (or understand it) or not, currently Sustainability is the corporate, operational and consulting nom de jour to describe a set of operational, systemic and social actions, processes and behaviours which deliver positive impacts, economies and efficiencies which in turn create enormous sources of value.

They construct the proofs of quality and responsibility that any self respecting brand story should leap to embrace.

It’s these very actions that will keep a brand still punting its wares long into the future.

They are what underwrite a brand’s ability to exist with integrity and confidence in a world of heavy and public scrutiny.

The scrutiny is not something to be ignored – the turbulence and volatility generated by the average angry consumer or activist is a sight to behold.

The problem for the average brand person still is the language that comes with these initiatives and actions.

For example, I don’t think the idea of creating a Sustainable Living Plan is going to have anyone in the pub punching the air, popping on some ‘lippy’, kicking up their heels and rushing into the street to evangelise to the kids at the bus stop drinking offer-price WKD.

Unliever have done extraordinary things to move the sustainability agenda forwards and the courage of the Exec and their leading light is both staggering and audacious.

But the Sustainability community is still speaking in tongues as far as most people’s grannie is concerned.

The complexity of detail and systemic language – what the engineers and scientists might call the language of sustainability truths – is not exactly the kind that makes for a breezy chat with a mate over some Big D nuts and a pint of lager top.

So a huge amount of every day people powered interpretation is needed. But it must be based upon the full picture, which means we have to dive into the choppy seas of complexity before we can possibly pop up the other side, gasping for breath sporting a stupendous thong of Simplicity ready for the brand beach.

Just setting Sustainability aside as ‘inappropriate’ or ‘irrelevant’ is at best lazy and at worst just cowardice.

When considering what makes a resilient brand story, we can’t honestly say that it’s ever acceptable to just shelve all of this stuff because we don’t like the way it speaks.

If we remove, ignore or ‘duck’ anything to do with S word, the danger is that we remove the need to account for its value at all in the architecture and truths of the brand story.

For my own part, I have stated very clearly that I never want to hear S language used in everyday parlance – especially that designed to try and convince any normal human being to embrace a more enduring lifestyle.

But it must be woven into the foundational layers of the story we tell them; or we’re just spoofing the conversation.

The Brand Story must capture the value the operational and systemic innovations and improvements the Sustainability initiatives create.

So were to start? At the bottom is as good a place as any.

Every story of any substance and meaning has a ladder of detail, information, meaning and context: actors and agents woven together with threads of insight and converging lines of circumstance, action, feeling and consequence.

The bottom rung creates the dense, immutable foundation of the story, the top rung its clearest and most uncluttered vantage point.

That most people tend to read from the vantage point of the top rung isn’t a reason to bin the rest of them though.

If you did, the ladder would weaken and eventually fall apart. It would also prove impossible to climb.

We’ve all read a story where we become aware at some point of the absence of some of the lower rungs – the character feels a little ‘thin’, some of the detail feels over stated or under represented: the story loses energy at some points: it is confused or its reasoning fails or falters, or simply that the narrative thread runs out of steam.

The Complexity invested in those bottom rungs is what allows the top rung to remain both so strong and so effortlessly simple.

We simply cannot get to the simple vantage point of the top rung without them.

Setting aside all the slightly uncomfortable detail and complexity of the sustainable world when considering writing our shiny brand story is simply foolish.

So my issue with the brand people (whom I understand entirely, as I am one myself) is not with their dislike of anything that cannot be said in a simple everyday language.

My concern is this: in their rush to remove any explicit trace of strategic and systemic Sustainability thinking & doing and its accompanying language from their narrative world, they inadvertently remove the need to account for any of it at all.

And that is bad.

Because in trying to shape a brand story, its truths, reasons to believe and its dynamic rhythm, everything must be considered. This is the juncture when the chinks in its armour, its weak points and its fragile links over time are exposed.

If you are supposedly building a resilient brand story that can account for them; that can reengineer the weak spots, inspire every stakeholder and innovate around the real differences, you need to uncover the ugly first.

A critical part of developing a more resilient brand story lies in rigorously interrogating the brand’s resilient nature – its systemic, cultural and social integrity, inclusiveness and adaptability.

Without this, simplicity is an illusion and potentially an expensive one.

While everything’s dandy in your brand world and there are no NGOs, competitors or horror of horrors, customer’s or consumers taking pot shots at you, you’re laughing.

Life is simple. Create great campaigns. Don’t sweat the ugly stuff. No ones interested.

Until they suddenly get interested.

Your supply chain messes up. A Labour Rights issue. Another dead orangutan. Your pre-packed beef meat lasagna turns out the be horse-shit.

Usually at this point, you call Corporate Affairs, drop off the file, and hope it’ll be OK in the end.

The one thing that the brand people seem not to have noticed is that they are in a rare position – and if they chose to plumb the complexity of all that ‘S’ stuff, they could create a far more resilient brand story and generate value for the business far far beyond the usual horizons of the CMO and Brand Director.

The gift: that they view the world through brand eyes and sensibilities. If they view the operational and systemic nature of the business through the same lens, they may well highlight a flaw in the model of the business that may not have occurred to anyone else – one that could cause expensive or irreparable damage to the brand.

There is an economic benefit to this: if you account for the sustainability truths and ambitions of the business that delivers the brand, you are far more likely to have spotted the trip wires.

Given that the reflex position currently seems to be “why would I invest brand budgets in making this stuff a priority when it isn’t for my consumer? – it is sometimes worth doing a quick sum for fun. Try assessing how much money a business or brand has invested in Corporate PR reactions hastily and expensively constructed to mitigate damage to reputation because they missed something that hindsight cruelly points to a quite glaringly obvious.

Two examples – Foxconn & Apple. Palm Oil & Dove.

If the architects of the both the Apple and the Dove brand stories had been compelled to include, scrutinize and account for every operational, systemic and social dimension of the brand, they would have realized that, in Apple’s case, Labour Abuses (however distant) don’t sit well on the consciences of the Millennials and Gen Xers you are inspiring to Go Create. Nothing dries up the creative juices faster than feeling that you are pouring them into a machine that sanctions labour tyrannies and tries to cover them up when they’re busted.

They would also have notices that The Real Beauty Campaign was carrying an ugly secret – that it takes a shed load of Palm oil to grease the wheels of the Ugly World of beauty. And that sadly all to often means depleting forests and dead orangutans. Nothing pretty about that. And if you’re spouting Real as your mantra, the first person to get real should really be you.

This is not to say that both companies haven’t made enormous amends and changed the operational world of sourcing both human labour and palm oil in the process.

The point is they could have saved themselves a lot of Corporate PR money if they had just lifted up a few inconvenient stones and rummaged under some complex bushes.

The Solution?

There are many solutions and methods to help and enable Brand People to shape a simple top rung brand story without simply shelving the detail.

In the process of developing an approach designed originally to simplify the complex world of the circular economy and used more recently on a project I am undertaking to socialize the Genome, I have created a simple laddering model.

The example shows how one can create a simple and everyday mantra to represent a deep and impenetrably complex topic – in this case the Circular Economy – in 4 simple steps from Complexity To Simplicity.

Screen Shot 2014-11-30 at 14.49.00

It demonstrates that, as you climb the ladder, the simple use of human insight and a more creative strategic approach to populist territories and topics enables you to shift from the complexity of the Circular Economy towards a more general embracing life style framing in 4 simple steps.

Complexity. Insight. Territory. Simplicity

There is no reason why a model designed to mine and shape simple yet inclusive story telling from even the most complex subjects such as Sustainability and Genomic Science should and could not be applied to the average brand out there.

As the average consumer’s ability to scratch the shiny brand surface and plumb the depths of what happens beneath it increases, along with their ability to act against or delist at the click of button or the swipe of a touchscreen, its worth more than light consideration.

Be sure that your brand story isn’t pretending to be something it isn’t.

Hell hath no fury like a consumer scorned.

Punks, Wonks & Breakout strategies for sustainability innovation.

21 Friday Nov 2014

Posted by Thin Air Factory in Uncategorized

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Tags

A.I., Bowie, breakouts, couples counselling, Eno, innovation, Oblique Stratgies, Peter Schmidt, punks, purpose, society, strategy, Sustainability, sustainable brands, venus & mars, wonks

Screen Shot 2014-11-21 at 16.37.18

Innovation. We love it!

Especially in the trending world of sustainability.

And rightly so: the potential impact and influence of sustainability innovation in the shaping of a more positive human existence is immutable and immeasurable.

Innovation’s role in reinventing and reimagining the way the domestic, private and public sectors use, reuse and replenish the limited resources we have at our disposal is critical to our survival as a race.

So anything that inspires us to escalate our ability to innovate, whether that might be of the incremental, process or radical kind, deserves all the help it can get.

We cannot really afford for sustainability innovation to stall or fail – but it does so, all too often.

Failure is of course an occupational hazard in the innovation department: an almost welcome metric.

If you’re not failing you are most probably not trying hard enough to create meaningful breakthroughs in unchartered territory.

But often the reason for innovation faltering is not quite so grand. An all too human: stakeholder conflict; lack of communication or collaboration: or simply personal agendas and self interested gerrymandering.

So the question recently raised was this: how do we make Sustainability innovation more, well, sustainable?

One enormously powerful influence we identified at these axial moments are the behaviours and attitudes of the different actors and agents in the room.

The first step was to try and create a really simple framework and a lens through which to view those actors and agents: and in such a way as to be able to inspire and help them marshal the innovation through.

The people involved seemed to fall into two broad camps of behaviour and attitude.

It was this simple observation that formed the basis of a recent plenary and workshop on Sustainability Innovation that Thomas Kolster of Goodvertising and I hosted at Sustainable Brands in London

Entitled A Game of Two Halves; the plenary and workshop endeavoured to use the two attitudinal behavior types we observed to set up a simple playful framework in which we might help re-inspire and reenergize the process of sustainability innovation: most pointedly in regards to human behaviour and modes of thinking.

The inspiration for these two types and they game of two halves they ended up playing was drawn from anecdotal evidence, conversation and a little light stakeholder research.

The world of Sustainability seems to be populated by a kaleidoscopic constituency of vital minds

  • the green activist agitators, ice breakers & policy shakers of the likes of the Sierra Club and Greenpeace
  • the scientists, conservationists and behaviouralists from the myriad NGOs advising and supporting communities across the globe
  • the sustainability policy and regulatory advisors, architects and engineers who operate at the point where the private sector and the public sector collide
  • the particular and labyrinthine coder programmer and systems minds of IT and rock n roll tech geekdom
  • the lateral and populist storytellers and communications professionals who advise both corporates and government on sustainability communication strategies and campaigning
  • the HR professionals who are increasingly being placed at the heart of burgeoining Social programmes being designed to evolve from the inside out and the ground up of large corporates and public sector organisations
  • the corporate actors driving sustainability agendas to improve performance, mitigate risk, attract investent or embrace social responsibility.

Many of these actors and agents are rarely advocates of an over simplified Either/Or picture of the world, and most have traces of both polarities in them.

But it did seem that as things start to go wrong or seize up there is a human tendency to fall into one or other of the camps – and revert to the type closest to ones own nature.

2 halves

Thomas and I chose to identify and explore these Either/Or moments and the attitudes and behaviours that accompany them in a couple of ways

The first was that of Venus & Mars, with Thomas viewing the two types through the lens of couples counselling, viewing the barriers to innovative sustainability thinking and doing as requiring the navigational and brokering skills usually deployed by professionals trying to help Couples climb out of the morass of familiarity and astonishing contempt – someone adept and experienced at showing warring and stagnating couples how to embrace the best of each other.

With this in mind we asked people a simple question; what is the greatest barrier to sustainability innovation?

We collected some answers from the people in the room. We then asked them to define what they felt might be the best solution to those problems. We collected these.

We then had the pleasure of Sarah Greenway from B&Q who spoke eloquently and in heartfelt terms about some of her own challenges and feelings (un-surprisingly one of those people with both aspects ascendant in her).

And then we rolled in a rainbow grenade to see if we could unlock people’s minds further.

Taking the view that in fact as well as the innate issues of intimate self-realisation that Thomas had alluded were some more extant behavioural traits that we might explore and play with to help the innovation on its way.

And I chose to label those traits as Punk & Wonk – another simple playful way of creating a tension and point counter point framework in which to exercise the innovation process to create breakouts and breakthroughs in stagnating thinking.

Punk celebrates the liberation of explosive dynamism and chaotic fluidity: Wonk that of incremental revelation and structured illumination.

I believe that somewhere between their poles: between the anxiety-inducing anarchy of blowing stuff up and the pointillist particularity or relentless rigour lies a resilience strategy for those embarking on a process of sustainability innovation. A potential answer to sustaining Sustainability Innovation.

I used the genius of Bowie and Eno as an example of how even the most complementary and inventive minds need help – need to be compelled to take a different view to break through blocks and walls in their own and others heads.

Bowie, the master of relentless reinvention – the punk dude of many lives personas and faces – and Eno, the musical scientist, and king or algorithmic cadence utilized the inspiration of Oblique Strategies – a set of obtuse cards devised by Eno and Peter Schmidt – to break their own creative deadlocks in the studio.

I asked people to envisage that we might create our own set of Breakout Strategies for Sustainability Innovation in much the same way, using the dualities of either Venus & Mars or Punks & Wonks to aid that inspiration.

We then asked the participants in the room to take one of the solutions we had identified and one of the traits = preferably the one least like themselves – and see if the application of a Punk or a Wonk mindset had helped them see anything differently.

I will leave the rest to David Harding-Brown in his write up of the session – far more complete and objective as an observer than either Thomas or I would be.

What we have left is a charming and playful set of inspirations rooted both in punk and wonk perspectives and some hybrids to help people in the fire storm of sustainability innovation.

Everyone needs to break out of their hole and reignite the minds we need to re-inspire the innovation that just might stop us all going up in a plume of consumption smoke!

Discuss.

See the links below to the event from the SB site including david Harding-Brown’s piece

http://www.sustainablebrands.com/news_and_views/organizational_change/david_harding-brown/sb14london_innovating_sustainability_-_game

http://www.sustainablebrands.com/digital_learning/event_video/collaboration/innovating_sustainability_game_two_halves

 

 

Palls – Put your political pen away for one day – because every one was some mother’s son.

09 Sunday Nov 2014

Posted by Thin Air Factory in Uncategorized

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Tags

death, final moments view from a new century, Forgotten soldier, Last Post, rememberance, Respect, Someone's Son, somme, the poppy, Trenches, WW1, ypres

article-2494023-194B10CF00000578-711_634x494

Dance laddie dance

In your machine gun trance

As your jigger body flits

Among wired gore and bits.

Scream laddie scream

In your steel ripped dream

As clamouring shells

Ring out Death’s bells

Turn laddie turn

As the phosphorous burns

‘gainst your young boy face

In this melting place

Stare laddie stare

Through the milk white glare

Of your unseeing eye

Turned dead to the sky

Tick laddie tock

Goes the beating clock

As your body bag drops

Spilling human slops

Shush laddie Shush

In the final push

Where beauty falls

As leaves through Palls

London. 2003

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