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Tag Archives: Adaptive Governance

Brands, old-school Diplomacy & the New Humanities

26 Thursday Mar 2015

Posted by Thin Air Factory in Uncategorized

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7 Revolutions, Adaptive Governance, Al-Indirsi, Back to the future, Brand Diplomats, brand futures, brand Influence, Business Schools, Castlereagh, Consumerism, corporate leadership, Cosmography, CSIS, DAVOS, Diplomacy, ecosystems, geopolitical leadership, Human resilience, Humanities, Napoleon, resilience, WEF

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We’re up to our ‘proverbials’ in Brand Advocates, Influencers & Champions. The social shock troops have to no little degree saved a lot of the big consumer multinationals from themselves. They have proved themselves both central in driving relevance and a vastly improved and far more respectful model of customer service. They are to that end critical in securing the survival of relevance in many multinational brands who until quite recently had acted with old school impunity and arrogance when called to account.

But the blunt grass roots tool for creating better is just one of two required to secure an improved human existence in the face of our stratospheric levels of consumption and the brands who feed it.

The other (just as important as its grass roots cousin in shaping what better looks like) is though of a more nuanced and rarified nature. It is subtler, sharper; multi-faceted, fluid; intricate.

To build the more resilient and adaptive form of governance and influence that multinational businesses are increasingly going to require will take more than just a an MBA upgrade on the usual business school thinking and doing.

It will demand a new creature.

“The effective leader will jettison vertical integration information hoarding and dogma in favour of optimization, recalibration and negotiation.” (CSIS 7 Revolutions).

To navigate the ever-greater complexity and turbulence of our accelerating world, Leadership must be augmented by a new kind of executive corps.

The cats-cradle of interdependencies, interrelatedness and infra-connectedness of global business and the ascension of global brand potency in regards to global acts of responsibility demands more than a just ‘a faster executive horse’.

“A well-run business that applies its vast resources expertise and management talent to problems that it understands and in which it has a stake can have a greater impact on social good than any other institution or philanthropic organization” (CSIS 7 Revolutions).

Execs are increasingly finding themselves participants in and the conveners of dynamic and diverse conventions of actors and agents within the sphere of their commercial and social interests.

This new and more fluid model of engagement in the scale challenges that face both their businesses operationally and systemically and the communities in which they seek to thrive will become the norm.

Strategic coalitions consisting of governments, corporations, NGOs, and academic institutions will be necessary in mounting effective responses and capitalizing on important opportunities (CSIS 7 Revolutions).

The brutal truth is that they will be ill-prepared and increasingly incapable of managing and orientating these groups to any great degree.

This is because they simply do not have the skills and the training to do so.

To be brutally frank, the Davos & Done school of global stewardship needs a hearty and well placed kick up the arse.

Watching the currently fitful and flawed nature of a new world brand conversation should be all the proof we desire.

Current 21st Century Brand dynamics demand that Brand Leaders be capable of meaningfully engaging in a conversation that often spans a staggering breadth and depth of subject matter:

  • operational and systemic excellence, innovation and advancement
  • geopolitical sources of volatility and influence
  • the impact of global and local financial governance & volatility
  • the evolving nature and mandate of labour rights & the social contract
  • enlightened and reasonable understanding of adaptive governance models
  • the impact of technology both systemically and socially on global Value Chains
  • clarity and influence on relevant local, national and transnational regulation
  • a clear understanding of the value of enlightened sustainability practice and value
  • resilient growth modelling that embraces both quantitative short term and qualitative long term objectives

Add to these the escalating nature of responsibility and the multinational businesses ability (and more importantly its obligation) to focus all of its skills on improving both its own systemic nature and ecosystems as well as that of the societies, cultures and environment in which they are rooted and the need for a master-class in Brand Diplomacy quickly becomes critical to the successful evolution of our human existence.

The new leader and those that advise them will not only require an audacious breadth and depth of understanding but also, even more importantly, the artistry to navigate the nuances, multiple agendas and cultures of the multiple actors and agents operating within their realm.

This is what leads me to believe that this is the dawning of what I like to call The Age of Global Brand Diplomacy – and the rise of The Brand Diplomat.

Real diplomacy is a rare gift of the few that exists usually only by accident, quirk or happenstance. It requires a very particular education: a highly diverse immersive and passionate pursuit of breadth over fashion, depth over trend. It demands a real investment of purpose and person – a commitment of measurable integrity.

Given the scale and importance of the challenges they will be faced with and in which they will need to have a profound impact, the new breed of leader will at best be schooled in both the arts and discipline of geopolitics, anthropology, civilisation & culture, the Arts, the history of diplomacy and the intuitive Social Sciences.

So the question for me is not whether a Business School of global merit and stature should do this; but which School? Which business school is going to rise to this challenge and embrace the task of shaping this new creature more formally?

Which school can credibly host the Master-class in Brand Diplomacy?

It requires access to and the benefit of an environment that enjoys an effortless multi-cultural aspect. It requires exceptional immersion in a dynamic accelerating ‘living’ throng, not splendid isolation. It requires an audacious fabric of skills and disciplines to be stitched together into one compelling proposition.

But mostly of all it requires people steeped both in the commercial marketed and applied world and that of the NGO the government think-tank and the venerable institution.

It will also I sense require a new trajectory and term of influence and engagement: a longer and greater arc of nurture and devwlopment coupled and a more interdependent quality of rolling assessment and dispositional measurement from a far earlier point in the shaping of a mind.

It will also demand a clarity of purpose sparked and elevated at an early age – in much the same way that the British Public Schools of old shaped the disposition and the ascent to position of boys from their prep school years – through the study of War Craft, the Classics – a living, breathing understanding of how one fits into and then, if in your interest, how one starts to run and lead a ‘mini me’ hierarchical society; through the use and leverage of various tools at ons disposal – the pride and allegiance of the House system, Corps duty, prefecture and eventually the position of Head of School.

The only difference now is that having stepped through that system – the rest was quite straight forwards – based upon an assumption of position underwritten by an impenetrable right of entitlement.

The modern world has different demands. The fierce competitive nature of it cannot be dissuaded simply by an accent and a tie anymore. Quite the opposite. The brutally mercantile nature of it allows no easy options of rides. resilience and adaptability are critical in the survival of the Brand Diplomat.

In shaping the curriculum of the new Brand Diplomacy we also have the benefit of hindsight and the sensibility of foresight

We have the advantage of knowing that setting foot in the real world beyond the hypothesis and the theory is what ultimately shapes an exceptional leader so we are already one step head of the old model; the raw talent pouring into the world is more connected, engaged, Worldly and far more rounded. We also have the welcome addition of living in a time of the female competitive advantage is in its ascent (something the British Public Schools could have done well to embrace a lot earlier than they did).

The Business School that chose to accept the challenge of Brand Diplomacy would need to very clearly set their sights on those at a school age with the potential to fulfill their potential in this rare space where global politics, commerce, finance and cultural anthropology collide.

I believe that a course in Brand Diplomacy would need to be designed to be the culmination of a journey to enlightenment. And enlightenment is the word here.

No posturing blue-tooth slide show talker will be able to busk or bluff this. We already see in the sustainability and social purpose ‘game’ the limitations of the stage walker: too many rooms: too may panels: too little progress: their ceiling all too apparent to everyone but themselves.

This will demand true leadership skills from enlightened and measured minds.

A meaningful course in Brand Diplomacy should plumb not only the usual texts and case studies to hand but also look beyond the 20th Century scholars and Students of Diplomacy to the Birth of it in the Italian City States of the Quattro Cento and amongst the Bourbon Courts of the Southern Mediterranean. It should look to the life work of the likes of Castlereagh (the subject of Henry Kissinger’s thesis I believe), the much maligned but now redeemed British Foreign Minister from the era of the Napoleonic Wars: a master statesman who shaped much of the best of the interrelated and more stable nature of European politics – but only by virtue of combining foresight and the subtlest of diplomatic arts to everyone from Tsar Alexander and his own Regent to the masterful Austrian, Prince Metternich et al.

To shape the a more resilient future the business world needs to look past the lazy interrogation of the same old business school tenets and brand pillar thinking to the expansive landscapes of the Humanities and the depths of Geopolitics – to look beyond the One Size Fits All model and embrace the diversity of an Renaissance perspective.

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Brand maps and models should begin to resemble more the cosmographic maps of the middle ages and the early powers – where character, tribe, geo-centrism, chronology and purpose exist on one plane seen as a whole.

This would be respectful of the new broader more complex and dynamic world that superbrands exist in and in which they have enormous influence on.

And to be frank, I sense it would be a damn fun course to attend.

So my original question stands: which business school?

Complexity, simplicity & the craft of resilient brand story making

30 Sunday Nov 2014

Posted by Thin Air Factory in Uncategorized

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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.

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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.

Tech, Social networks and & the rise of Inconvenient Desire

19 Sunday Oct 2014

Posted by Thin Air Factory in Uncategorized

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21st Century Consumer, Adaptive Governance, Apple, Caring about what people care about, Communications, Consumer Activist, desire, ecosystems, Foxconn, Human Rights, Identity, Incandescent Identity, Institutional Investors, Labour Conflicts, NPS, reputation Studies, resilience, social networks, Supply Chains, technology, Value Chains

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You’d be hard pushed to find a more powerful source of human incandescence than that of Desire.

Most humans once seized upon by a fierce Desire, (quenchable, drenchable or otherwise) would struggle to not glow like embers or light up like a Christmas Tree.

But equally, incandescence is a volatile and unstable thing in its base form. It is as likely to illuminate a life as it is to burn down a house, so must always be treated with the greatest caution and respect.

A powerful and singular Desire, initially so exquisitely turned out: seductive, rich, complex and compelling, can quickly lose its form, focus and potency, becoming fleeting, deceptive, destabilising, and in some ways almost manipulative – one moment all consuming, profound substantial and irresistible: a twisted echo or hollow memory the next, whispering in our ear.

It is one of the cruel polarities of life that Desire, especially when ignored, demeaned, spoiled or thwarted, can become a very destructive force –  one of the most turbulent, psyche-ripping, heart-trouncing, confidence-destroying, life-diminishing experiences in our human condition.

We do not take it well! And it makes us act in irrational, random and unexpected ways.

So Desire. Powerful, yes; BUT its got form. Tricky. Volatile. Fluid. Uncontrollable. Fragile.

A singular Desire is of course not the only model. Desire has many forms, natures and universes. Not all Desire is so singular, egocentric, unfettered and prone to flip-flopping and flailing all over the place, at the drop of a rather existential hat. Some Desires are quiet; considered; evolving over expansive periods of time and frames of context. Others are a dynamic shifting mass: loose ecosystems of smaller desires, likes, preferences, needs and wants; splintered, fractured, fractual. A brilliant constellation with fluid and adaptive qualities.

But for now let’s concentrate on one very particular nature of Desire and the context in which it exists: that of human consumption and the systems and organisations that meet its rapacious and accelerating demands.

Desire in its 20th Century Consumer form was well served by multiple businesses and the brands they created. Most importantly the Desire was one dimensional: of a linear and modal kind. A singular Desire, in the form of an unmet consumer demand for a particular product or service, was either revealed or identified through intuition, experience, market research or in the absence of anything else, confected out of thin air in a marketing consumer insight department and then seeded in the mind of the unsuspecting consumer.

Once identified, every atom of the business was put in service to meet the needs of that one Desire. The whole operational infrastructure and systemic nature and capability of the brand and business was set into motion to against it. The sentiment and sensibility of every other person in the chain other than that of the Consumer – the font of all revenue opportunity – was set aside, ignored, or suppressed; viewed as at best, secondary, or at worst, irrelevant.

The Desires (and disappointments) of any individual or group dwelling in the Supply Chain that provided the material, resource, operational systems and manufacturing tools were also secondary – and someone else’s problem.

The Value Chains that developed around the Supply Chain to extract clear measures of additional value in every link in the chain, were focused wholly on controlling and securing in absolute terms the direct cost of resources (human and material), the executive overhead, operational running costs, the logistics of distribution and the indirect fixed contracting of supplier partners, especially when operating across multiple sites and geographies across myriad countries and cultures.

The ability to secure the base cost of delivering increasing value in every link of the chain was the way by which a company both improved its productivity and profitability. And it did it by controlling everything. Even the desires and the voices of those that worked within it.

The insular unconnected and disparate nature of the old world was highly convenient for those who wished to quash any form of desire that might destabilise that link in the chain’s ability to deliver itself at a projected and secured cost amenable to the larger commercial target and deliverable margin.

The very fact that these various sites and sources of production were localised, isolated and unconnected to every other stakeholder in the chain by anything other than their place in that chain meant that the desires of the workforce and the local communities in which they lived could be considered incidental. They remained for the most part invisible, unheard and often unmet. It is fairly telling that the managerial department allocated solely to ensuring and upholding the wellbeing of people required to populate and sustain any Value Chain were identified as a Support Activity in Value Chain models.

But those Desires cannot be ignored anymore. In the 21st century, the consumer’s Desire is not the only one that must be respected, elevated and pored over.

Technology and the social networks have unchained the value chain, giving voice and a podium to every Desire of every person (or stakeholder if you prefer) along the chain, Supply, Value or Otherwise. And they cannot be simply ignored anymore.

Now, Desire has got a smart phone, 6 email accounts, a facebook page, a twitter, instagram and youtube account. And Desire is getting busy.

Desires, individual and collective, in every corner of the globe are now connected. They’ve got access. They’ve got volume. And they are using the social networks to act with fierce purpose against brands and businesses they feel demonstrate an arrogant lack of respect for the human rights and dignities of their customers, employees, suppliers or partners. Once fired up, these consumer activists will harry and pursue the perpetrators regardless of emollient PR releases and promises – as the likes of Apple and Foxconn found out in no uncertain terms. These massed, noisy and high profile actions are now proven to have a direct impact on the measures of integrity held in high esteem by brands and businesses – NPS, The Reputation Study – and more importantly by the investors who fund their ambitions.

So the volatility, flux and turbulence of kaleidoscopic Desire is now at work in the world along very link of the Chain. And they are testing the resilience of those chains, and buffeting the previously tightly controlled and secured value and margin each link in the chain delivers. Adaptive governance must now include the ability to absorb the turbulence these points of social flux and volatility present.

In this way, the 21st Century world of accessible, affordable tech and the social networks they fuel are giving rise to a new chain – the Desire Chain – a value chain populated by individuals with dreams, expectations and rights as important and potent and ultimately as capable of creating value and growth as the old singular desire of the Consumer in the 20th Century.

So here’s to brands embracing a new chain model – the Desire Chain – one that is made incandescent and more resilient by respecting and elevating the desires of every stakeholder in its chain, to mutual benefit and a more secure future for all.

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The essay upon which this blog is based, ‘The Value Chained Unchained‘, explores the nature and impact of technology and the social networks on the old Value Chain models and sets out the need for a new model based upon ever-evolving highly adaptive points of Mutual Desire and Shared Resilience.

The Value Chain Unchained by J Borra is to be published by Shared Value Chain Consultancy as part of a compendium of essays on Sustainable Value Chains. Editor: Michael D’heur

www.sharedvaluechain.com

Resilient Storytelling© & the pursuit of a smarter more secure communications train-set

03 Monday Feb 2014

Posted by Thin Air Factory in Uncategorized

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Adaptive Governance, Advocacy, Communications, HR, leadership, Mutual Desire, resilience, Social Dynamics, storytelling, Value Chain Modelling & management

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Having recently been on the receiving end of the questions – “what exactly do you believe?” and ‘what do you do all day?” I thought that I should set out my Thin Air Factory stall a little more clearly.
A Storyteller’s Manifesto
AKA what I get to do and love to do when someone asks:
I believe that one of the greatest factors in securing the exceptional resilience of a company lies in identifying and creating the most resilient nature and model of its storytelling.
I call this Resilient Storytelling©
Resilient Storytelling© is storytelling that can inspire every stakeholder to more resilient actions that are beneficial to the nature and performance of the company without danger of that storytelling being set aside, dismissed as an excuse for inaction or evasion or seen as excluding: storytelling that cannot be called ‘thin’, inappropriate, inauthentic, irrelevant; dismissed as gloss or icing, or simply seen as faddy, fluffy, short-term and short-sighted.
By its very nature Resilient Storytelling© must:
  • be resilient in itself – able to take the knocks, whether they come from an investigative or riled NGO on the one hand or a disgruntled consumer activist agitating in the social networks on the other.
  • inspire greater resilience in others: every audience being moving by even the slightest degree towards greater advocacy and engagement with every telling 
To do that it must be fit for purpose, forged from a whole picture of the company – not just its individual functions and layers.  To create storytelling that can absorb the turbulence and flux of the ever-changing, ever-evolving world a company seeks to thrive in, that storytelling must embrace the 4 corners of the company; from the top of its brand to the bottom of its business supply chain, and from one end of its value chain and stakeholder group to the other.
Resilient Storytelling© creates a clear sense of unified purpose beyond profit, a clear central tenet of adaptive governance to shape, manage and distribute the mutual endeavour that purpose demands, and the shared benefits it offers: it engenders greater and more cogent social collectivism and engagement across every stakeholder group.
Resilient Storytelling© is inclusive, inspiring and as adaptive as the company. It frames the integrity of every relationship the company generates and engages in, and shapes every piece of communication the company produces in undertaking and maintaining those relationships. Resilient Storytelling is storytelling that can relentlessly inspire and drive advocacy in every stakeholder.
Resilient Storytelling© is one that reconciles and reframes the most compelling, differentiated and most valuable points of systemic, operational and material resilience (the sustainability and CSR aspects and traits in the company) to the greatest number of shareholders with meaning and effect – allowing these truths of shared resilience to be drawn up into the storytelling in a way that is accessible to all (not just the brilliant scientists, engineers and strategists who define, design and deploy the drivers of those sustainability truths).
Resilient Storytelling© must be founded on exploring, understanding and respecting the relationship between the different shades of desire enshrined in every stakeholder across its Value Chain, including which points of resilience are most compelling and authentic to every one of them.
(There is little point focusing on points of resilience, and then storytelling around them in isolation – they are and must be seen as just one evidential part of a wider and more coherent value system at work and have been reconciled inside it.)
Resilient Storytelling© is both the VOICE of MUTUAL DESIRE in the company: and the reflection of the strongest and most compelling points of SHARED RESILIENCE, and a primary source of increasing resilience in itself.
A slightly weird diagram to prove a point:
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Most storytelling operates in very distinct vertical or horizontal blocks – for example, broadcast and bought media delivering desire generating materials with little reference to points of systemic material or social resilience of the company – a bit too much y and not enough x.

Equally, most resilience-focused storytelling focuses too much on its detail and integrity with little sense of how that might fit into the desire model of the audience it’s aimed at or resonate across the broader stakeholder group. A lot of x but y bother?

To truly engineer Top Of The Brand to Bottom of the Supply Chain storytelling that resonates across the whole Value Chain stakeholder group, you need to have generated the most mutual desire around the most compelling points of shared resilience across the greatest percentage of your communications touch-points. (Get to the top right corner and you will feel the love!)

To do this, Resilient Storytelling© must not only be completely representative and respectful of every dimension of the company but also be authenticated by being true to the everyday language and vernaculars of the everyday people who drive the company, its partners and suppliers. Too much Consultant and Business School speak becomes impenetrable and impossible for everyday people to act upon; too much slang and brand puffery lacks the substance to sustain engagement or fend off every detractor that might turn up.
The simplest and most human storytelling is what will take the smartest, most enduring and most innovative ideas from thinking to doing.
The human nature and openness of the storytelling is in itself a large part of what creates a state of shared resilience. The focus, scale and application of actions a Value Chain needs to both embrace and inspire to maintain its integrity and endure demands storytelling that can communicate the financial, commercial, operational and social benefits of doing so to best effect.
A resistor to Resilience?
Clients at the moment are enjoying the queue of agencies, consultants and advisors clamouring at their door. Myriad thinking and IP is being poured in one side and zero hours and zero waste relationships pouring out the other. It is simply not in any one agency or consultant’s interests, business model (or skills & capabilities to be fair) to create a singular and cohesive narrative that truly delivers Resilient Storytelling©. Their differentiated interests usually direct a client towards the most lucrative end point and outcome which they can reasonably protect.
Clients in their rush to seem smart, shrewd and masters of integrated thinking court these clashing and conflicting agendas to best results for themselves. This is only partly to be true to their own commercial needs and ambitions and the budgetary and structural limitations that come with them.
There is also a top note of presenting oneself as ‘nobody’s fool’ – especially when every other C Suite heavy hitter sees the (quote unquote Cost Plus Cowboy) Marcomms ‘professionals’ as worthy of a strategy of ‘Approach With Extreme Caution’. The legendary mickey-taking profiteering Ad Agencies of old, the overblown promises and myopia of the Marketing Emperor’s New Clothes – from Sales Promotion, to Direct Marketing and now the new nirvana of Digital – and their accompanying (and often spurious) fees and mark ups has left a very bad taste in mouths old and new.
So my plea is this – view Resilient Storytelling© not as a Communications Upgrade but as an Act of Adaptive Governance.
Its value stretches far beyond the remit of Sales & Marketing. It is as likely to optimise more enduring HR strategies and more focused innovation and R&D funnels as it is to create greater social advocacy across the stakeholder group, engage peripheral partners and suppliers and generate the ground work for qualitative growth.
But there needs to be an owner: and perhaps Brand should or could be that Stakeholder.
WHY? because it will undoubtedly take collaboration between agencies, consultants and advisors to deliver this kind of Storytelling. Only the Brand owner can enable this – only you can set the terms of Play Nice.
If you do, your advisors and touchstones will then see the commercial benefit of not rug pulling, dissing and discarding each other or treading on each other’s commercial toes and perhaps seek a better model of engagement and collaboration to a more efficient and economical effect. And please don’t say that the likes of the existing Loop Meeting models are an example of this in practice.They are fundamentally an exercise in leadership and agenda grab taking up torturous hours of politicking and pre prepping and post controlling.
Create and compel a truly collaborative, holistic and complimentary structure that uses opposing dynamics and forces to their best effect and you have the beginnings of a value centre in the company: one of greater use across the C Suite need set – and not just a continuation of a cost centre.
But that means that Brand needs to be fit for purpose: with an innate understanding of the previously impenetrable concepts of supply chain and value chain modelling and management, CSR strategies and impacts, R&D dynamics and the complexities of decent HR frameworks, communities, behaviours and rewards. To upgrade these traits and reflexes in the Brand function of a company is to make the first move towards a more resilient company and set the stage for a more inclusive innately collaborative and open leadership model. Then the landscape becomes rich with possibility.
Imagine if you put Resilient Storytelling© at the centre of your stakeholder constellations informed by every function and then mapped every communications touchpoint against it, with a weather eye on managing the overlap and the duplication: that would be exhilarating.
As Jack Nicholson’s Joker quips as he enters the art museum “Gentlemen!..let’s broaden our minds”
Resilient Storytelling©ThinAirFactoryLtd2014

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