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Tag Archives: Human Behaviour

Academic Lag, Advertising Jag & the task of Socialising the Genome

14 Tuesday Jul 2015

Posted by Thin Air Factory in Uncategorized

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Academia, Academic Lag, Acclimatisation, Advertising, Advertising Jag, andy lamb, big data, Brian Cox, conversation, Creative Action Research, Decompression, Demand, desire, DNA, Evolution, Genome, Genomic Science, Guttenberg Press, Hadron Collider, Health, health Screening, Human Behaviour, human essence, Identity, Insight Ladder, Intellectuals, Language, Living The Dream, marketing communications, networks of academic collaboration, NHS, Populists, Sanger Institute, social networks, Socialisation, Syntax, utility, wellbeing

LAG:

A period of time: a noticeable delay between action and reaction –                         Failing to keep up with another or others in movement or development

JAG: 

A short period of overindulgence in an activity: a shopping jag: a crying jag          A stab; an intense and concentrated movement or action

Screen Shot 2015-07-14 at 12.39.29

I increasingly find myself at a very particular and exciting intersection.

I find myself there not by accident but by design: having helped build a methodology that reaps its greatest rewards at the point where applied science and commercial creativity collide.

(The creativity is commercial in that the point of collision is designed to generate pieces of communication to a specific end and utility – functional with tangible benefits – as opposed to a piece of pure art or some material assemblage generated to no end other than to create feeling and effect through its aesthetic – experiential with intangible benefits.)

Over the last year and a half I have been working on a project that seeks simple answers to some quite complex questions rooted in deep science:

  • How do we scale the ‘everyday’ conversation around genome science and DNA beyond the scientists, academics, clinicians and the rare interested civilian party?
  • How do we illuminate the scientific mysteries and wonder of our DNA in such a way that everyone can understand them, embrace them, engage with them, and reap the rewards that come from them?
  • And ultimately how do we help the greatest number of us to enhance the nature, quality and duration of our human tenure through informed choice and enlightened action in regards to our DNA?

This search for a more compelling narrative and conversation at the point where science and everyday humanity meet is not an isolated pursuit.

It is also true of the ‘Living The Dream’ project I am currently helping to steer. The project also seeks to scale the conversation around what constitutes a more enduring model of prosperity and sustainable consumption by finding a more ‘human’ narrative to replace the existing one, rooted as it is in the science, engineering and ‘reason’ of sustainability as opposed to human emotion of it.

In both cases we need to find a way of communicating complex concepts and constructs in the simplest way possible to the largest number of people without destroying the integrity of the scientific truths in the process.

In both cases there are untold rewards for society and humankind both individually and collectively if we can scale these conversations.

So I find myself working at this intersection of multiple collisions: between scientific integrity and human sociability: between depth and structure and lightness and elasticity; between applied science and commercial creativity.

MAKING CONVERSATION

To reap the untold rewards we simply need the communities of science and academia to meet the man and woman in the street and have a good ‘chat’:

And boy do they have some great stuff to talk about: life changing, existence enhancing stuff.

In the case of genomics, simply put, if enough of us embrace the advantages that the advances in the science offer in our everyday lives, using the revelations of DNA in an applied manner both individually and for the common good, we could eventually move ourselves from the old curative model of health care to a new and far more dynamic preventative model: one that will not only just change the way we live but also alter the duration of that living.

Making smarter and easily comprehensible lifestyle choices informed and underwritten by a deeper and more intimate understanding of what makes us who we are can help us to embrace a more positive approach to the lives we lead. Those choices made en masse will equally inform and illuminate how best the health service of the future can better sustain its ability to continue to serve our society both systemically and financially.

Now logic would predict that given the enormous impact and beneficial nature of those potential outcomes, everyone should already be ‘all over that conversation’: chatting away furiously, listening intently, sharing the conversation with friends and reaping the rewards of a better life.

SPEAKING IN TONGUES

The problem is – we’re not.

Why?

The greatest barrier seems to be one of simple comprehension and understanding.

The scientists and academics simply communicate in a different language to the everyday people they are trying to reach. Their particular languages have different vocabularies, inflections, idioms, energies and vernaculars – which is unsurprising given that both parties live in very, very different worlds.

In one world we have the ‘splendid isolation’ of existence required to nurture intense, interrogative and highly rational scientific thought and action – and the codified, particular language and almost impenetrable texts, dissertations and white papers that accompany and support it.

In the other world we find the hyper-connected and hyper-socialised immersion of our emotionally charged everyday existence, fuelled and accelerated by smart devices and sprawling digital platforms of human interaction filled with billions of TXTS, tweets, emojis, memes, slang and banter.

One exists in a mode of hyper dislocation; the other in a mode of hyper socialisation.

And it seems that each speaks in riddles as far as the other is concerned.

A chasm exists between the world of academia and the sciences and that of the everyday person in the street. And as with all worlds of such different ‘atmospheres’, there needs to be a process of acclimatisation when travelling between one and the other.

In the context of Socialising the Genome (and my Living The Dream project) it is the conversational ‘syntax’ – the framing, structure, language and phrasing of these arguments – that needs to ‘acclimatise’ to the atmosphere of everyday needs and desires and the language they speak.

The highly tuned language, intense qualification and proofs of the scientists and academics need to ‘decompress’ on the way up into the ‘real world’ – otherwise they will suffer a bout of the communication ‘bends’ – where they either over compensate and try to hard – become too ‘matey’; the NBF of the person in the street… : ) : )

Or they simply come across like a geek at a fancy dress party – awkward, uncomfortable and so wrong on so many counts.

Putting deep science and academic concepts and truths through a ‘decompression and acclimatisation’ process can of course be undertaken as a one off – but realistically, if our ambition in this instance is to ‘socialise’ the conversation, we have to assume a fluid and escalating dialogue of increasing and expanding value and reach – and for that to happen we realised that we needed to keep the findings, revelations and insights of the academics and scientists constantly ‘in flow’; moving seamlessly and effortlessly between one world and the other: elastic and evolving.

To achieve this they need to be ‘sensitive’ of, keep pace with and be true to the everyday shifts and nuances in the behaviours, attitudes and language of the people whose existence they seek to improve. To be resilient and meaningful they must remain ‘relevant’ at all times.

(There is little point in deep diving for a populist answer only to find that on surfacing with one 2 years later, the question has changed. Herein lurks the danger of the academic lag.)

So, in the process of designing the methodology that would facilitate this we found ourselves with two acute questions to answer:

  • How do we create an offset strategy for the academic lag – one that allows the worlds of academia and the deep sciences to remain ‘present’ – to exist both in the accelerated and socialised Now while still mining in splendid isolation?
  •  How do we design a ‘decompression and acclimatisation’ process that enables a smarter simpler flow of ideas and findings – a ‘conversation’ or dialogue – between one world and the other?

CUE ADVERTISING JAG.

To reap the ultimate rewards that the advances in Genomic science offer us, the screening and storing our DNA as would have to become an everyday part of our health profile: it would have to become second nature to every one of us: a common place behaviour: something that we do without ‘thinking’.

But we’re a long way from a chirpy chat along the lines of:

‘hey Trish. Sorry. Can we say 7.30ish now? Running a bit late at the DNA screening clinic – mines a large glass of DWW! ; ) Jax xxx’

Genomic science tends to only enter our conversation either because we are forced to engage with it or by an accident of revelation.

Even when the more moderated conversations do occur they can quickly tip into ethical minefields around data storage and security, commercial abuses by insurance companies and self interested corporates, elitist tiers and eugenics, socio cultural stratification and the Police Database. There issues around identity privacy and confidentiality are staggering in some of their complexities and contradictions.

The complexities of genomic science are simply not ‘everyday’, not everyone’s ‘cup of tea’ and are at best incomprehensible and at worst quickly controversial.

But Advertising & Communication people spend their whole life not only trying to decipher what someone’s ‘cup of tea’ might be but also how they might get them to drink more of it

The nature of the models and frameworks used by marketing communications specialists to mine and shape insights, propositions and narratives – the intensity, speed and use of both broad stroke universal consumer insight and atomic data modelling – is driven by the voracious desire in corporates to ‘keep up’ with the fluid and ever changing nature of consumer demand and desires. These models have grown ever more agile due to:

  • The direct impact of technology and the social networks across the value chains and markets of the big corporate consumer brands:
  • The age of data big bang: an ever-expanding viral surge of relentlessly dividing and multiplying data on every aspect and dimension of how we live, act, interact and transact.

It is in the intensity, approach and most importantly the creative storytelling aspect of this ‘jag’ of activity that we believe our off set strategy can be found.

ADVERTISING SCHMADVERTISING

One of the greatest tension points in the new methodology we have engineered in Socialising The Genome is the point at which advertising exclamation collides with academic exposition.

There are fundamental and quite combative points of difference between the worlds of the Sciences & Medicine and the Humanities & Arts – in nature, methodology and application; and in their concepts of what constitutes integrity and substance (especially when the latter are of the populist persuader type – the advertising and marketing agencies and their kind).

Many wholly reason-based intellectuals and practitioners harbour a quite fixed (and many would say hugely justifiable) sense of distrust in what they regard as a moral and intellectual vacuum in the marketing communications agencies, institutions and organisations that manipulate and leverage ‘emotion’ and a lazy populism for commercial gain.

To allow the conversation around something as precious and fragile as genomic science to be driven by base desires pumped up on the wisdom of the crowds with no form of enlightened filter or curation, might well be perceived as not only risky but also irresponsible.

“Fine, if you’re just pushing another million or so 6-bladed, swivel-hipped funky junky disposable plastic razors” but matters of this level of human importance are quite a different thing entirely.

Alternately, on the other side of the conversational fence, we have the champions of ‘everyday’ people, the populist movers, shakers, creators and commentators who celebrate them, their language, their culture, their leisure and their past-times, and who shape, shade and distribute the myriad simple pleasures that they enjoy and engage with. For these people, unless science, like technology, is wrapped up in a Brian Cox-like, ‘whoops that’s my Collider’ approachability or celebrity, they are quite disdainful or disinterested in what they see as arcane and impenetrable conversations. They see no point in a dialogue that seems circular and closed in its nature and not of any use to anyone without a PhD.

Their attitude broadly runs along the lines of:

“don’t care – all a bit to serious and arch for me – lighten up, get over yourself – short time living long time dead – if you cant take the banter we’re not listening – and while you’re at it, mine’s a highly-advertised pint of unexceptional lager please!”

Screen Shot 2015-07-14 at 14.45.37

BUT, in a balanced world and all things being even – somewhere between the two polarities lies an answer – midway between the extremities of emotional populism on the one side and high-minded rationalism on the other.

Neither one nor the other can develop the conversation by itself in isolation. Each needs the other to create a full and robust conversation that is both substantial and sociable.

In our particular instance, we needed to go on a journey from the clinical utility of the genome conversation as it is now – closed alienating isolating and impenetrable in large tracts – to a one more rooted in concepts of positive identity and improved existence – open inclusive socialised and empowering.

We realised that to do that we needed to decipher how we could use the tension that exists between the worlds of science and society to most positive effect – to facilitate and accelerate that journey.

MIND THE GAP

To be clear, the absence of accelerated improvement in our human existence through Genomic science is not an issue of supply. (There are a lot of brilliant minds moving the science forwards). This is an issue of demand.

While ‘everyday’ people continue to not understand the real and substantial benefits of that science, they will not demand its benefits as a standard and inextricable part of their everyday lives

Communicating the inspirational, revelatory and highly beneficial impact of embracing our DNA to the greatest number of people in their terms in their world is central to all of this because it will fuel and fire ‘demand’ for better.

TWAS EVER THUS

Demystifying and popularising rare knowledge of a scientific, political, economic or theological nature has always been a critical step in the march of human progress (whether the scientists, politicians, economists and the theologians like it or not).

‘Dumbing down’ as some elevated minds like to think of it is actually humanity’s way of smartening up. And inspiring and wild-firing everyday conversation is a vital lever in that smartening up.

So first things first: we needed to accept that the challenges to easy conversation are substantial – the impenetrable nature of the science; a very human, provincially minded fear of the unknown; the conflicted nature of our feeling towards ‘disease prediction’; a general fear of ‘science going too far & meddling with the cosmos; the primal compulsion to ‘move away from’ any form of human flaw (our own or anyone else’s); either in the form of disability or crippling disease; or those flaws as might potentially be revealed by DNA screening.

We need to accept that none of the ‘conversation’ generated so far has enabled us to move very far beyond our current audiences – and that we have so far failed to present a set of positives that outweigh the existing negatives.

Genomic science and the subject of DNA need to be lightly dealt with or presented in such a way as to find their way into pub banter framed and informed by a ‘did you see? Did you know?’ Intelligence Lite, fuelled by lifestyle magazines, Sunday supplements and the Discovery Channel.

And given that film is the most shared currency in the socially networked world, film needs to be the base currency of our highly socialised cultural economy.

So our key objectives for success were:

  • to create a methodology that enabled us to look up through the emotionally driven human and the everyday insight – not down through the rationally driven science and the clinical language
  • to develop and distribute the seeds of a new and scaled conversation through the power of shareable film.

CREATIVE ACTION RESEARCH

My work over the last year or so with Dr. Anna Middleton of the Sanger Institute focuses solely how we reconcile the perspectives of our two worlds to shape and scale the conversation around DNA and Genomic science to greater human benefit.

And it is in the circular and iterative nature of the interaction between her world – that of the Academic Lag – and mine – that of the Advertising Jag – that we believe will deliver the language and framing for and therefore the scale of conversation that we need to transform the way people see DNA in their lives.

With CAR, we have constructed a methodology where, even when in the midst of the deep dive nature of her qualitative ethical research process, Anna is able to utilize my and my collaborator’s ability to reframe, rephrase and represent science or research fact in more populist social storytelling terms and framings to play beck into and inform the more academic process she is undertaking.

CAR – TESTING THE EDGES OF CONVERSATION

CAR combines traditional qualitative research, rooted in group discussions and in depth interviews and discourse interpretation with quantitative research that introduces fresh  creatively-framed seeds of Genome and DNA conversation into the social networks to provide a simple speedy test of whether those seeds have the ability to inspire and engage people in such a way that they might in turn share it amongst their own social network both real and virtual.

The method we have devised for creating the simple seeds of a new conversation revolves around taking an existing piece of knowledge or scientific fact and creating different types of ‘conversation’ or story telling around it.

We then use these seeds of conversation as foils and flash cards in both a quantitative socialised environment and the more in depth and metered qualitative research groups and in-depths.

To ensure that in the migration from science or clinical insight to creative idea we did and do not fall foul of confecting, manipulating, misrepresenting and ultimately distorting or twisting the knowledge or facts we are using, every creative idea has to be rooted in an insight ladder.

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The Insight Ladder is a simple proprietary tool that I have developed for this project that aims to lock the more creatively framed seed of conversation to the scientific fact truth or insight that inspired it: a sort of plumb line of integrity that runs through each ‘conversation’.

QUALITATIVE RESEARCH

A number of traditional qualitative research group discussions and some in depths will begin to explore some of the everyday language and insights around genome science and DNA.

A dry Discussion Guide takes each participant in the qualitative groups from a condition of lowest point of knowledge – do you know what DNA is? – through a natural arc of expanding conversation – knowledge of DNA – benefits or not to the individual – its role in improved healthcare – moral and ethical issues around the science – data privacy and security – and at its most extreme – and ultimately, the nature of improved DNA and genome science on a thriving UK PLC as a mark of global leadership in the advancement of improved human existence through scientific and social enlightenment and application.

Once the open and freeform discussion has come to a close we will use some of the seed ideas that we have developed from existing insights to see how opening doors to the subject using more creative everyday storytelling potentially changes or alters people’s disposition, perception and appreciation of the subject.

QUANTITATIVE RESEARCH

Once the qualitative groups have been transcribed we will then select the most potent insights and creative storytelling and framings so that they may be turned into simple animated pieces of film storytelling.

We will use an online research tool to see which film inspires the most attention and why with a representative UK sample, as well as sharing them in the social networks to the same purpose.

Both actions will seek simple responses and opinions through both closed and open data capture.

Ultimately we are seeking one or two ideas with the potential to develop into a greater scale of everyday conversation using socially dynamic communications and advocacy strategies to wildfire those conversations.

BONFIRE OF THE HUMANITIES

The creative jag in CAR endeavours to act like a repeated finger tap in the centre of the academic ‘chest’ – a way of bringing the science into the moment, connecting it in visceral emotional and social terms to the everyday Now – an intense injection of populist framing and storytelling for those somewhat consumed in the Academic Lag.

In that way, the advertising Jag acts as a form of ‘Mindfulness’ for the scientist, academic and clinician deep-diving into the world of the genome – providing a ‘Look Up’ orientation strategy for them to use while potholing in the caves between what is know and unknown.

Therefore Creative Action Research aims to use a complimentary fusion of:

Academic Lag – Reason – utility, interrogation & measure – resilience – the individual

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Advertising Jag – Emotion – identity, expression & impact – desire – the crowd

to scale the conversation and socialise the Genome.

CAR accepts that there is no simple black & white answer here. It will take time and the attentions of both the Laggers and the Jaggers to get to the scale of conversation this deserves and needs.

In some ways, as with our DNA, it might just prove that the things that unite us are greater than those that divide us.

In finding a way to socialise the Genome we might just find a way to both educate the populous and socialise academia. And perhaps that is not a bad thing at all.

In the meantime lets pop on our Bordieu T Shirt – and be a great destroyer of Either/Or.

One Man’s Ceiling, Elevated Ideas of existence & the problem with Growing Up

12 Monday May 2014

Posted by Thin Air Factory in Uncategorized

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70s shift dress, Cork Wedges, Creative Workshops, District & Circle Line. Glastonbury Tor, Grassy Knoll, Growing Up, Human Behaviour, Human Ingenuity, Lateral Thought, Lizard Brain, methods of Doing, My Little Pony, Need States, Roswell, sophistry, Tickle Fights

 

Image

As I lay on the sun-warmed grass of the south facing slope of Glastonbury Tor something struck me.

My Little Pony. The yellow-maned one.  On the side of the head to be precise.

“Tickle Fight! Tickle Fight! Tickle Fight!” The shout went up: auguring another limb flailing biff smash crash guffaw squawk celebrity smack-down between myself, my increasingly physical 9 year old boy and his highly rambunctious six year old sister.

Tickle fight is really just an excuse to roll around on the floor. Not that children need much excuse

They had been repeatedly rolling down the slope further around the Tor from where I lay for a good twenty minutes prior to this point.

My son finds any excuse to drop to the floor and roll around. To be fair they both can find themselves sprawling across the floor at the drop of a well-turned hat.

It is not just a percussive physical strike-force strategy: i.e. hit the floor often and repeat as necessary. It is a happy and safe place for them, lying, sitting, sprawled. The more deconstructed the better.

Both can be found at different times Lying inert: staring into the void beneath the bed, by the sofa, in the hall, half-way up the stairs; usually frozen mid play, off in some other universe of being: or they’re sellotaped to the floor setting up various abstract collections of small figures, bits of plastic, random findings and parts of their parent’s more precious items configured into some form of story to be told: a battle, a fairy tale, a horror show, a chance meeting, the end of the world, cosmic catastrophe.

To be part of the invention or story requires the grown up to a) get over them selves and down on their knees, b) fall forwards onto their stomach and c) get their face into the right universe – the miraculous and magical one that has just been created a few millimetres off the ground. A little like spiritual scuba diving, the wonder in their world is a few atmospheres of imagination below us.

Grown ups know this place. Or we should do.

We once spent hours there: whether the ground in question was covered in carpet, straw, wooden boards, grass, earth, pine needles, gravel or even tarmac. (I remember as a child lying on a tarmac road on a hot day and pressing my face to its surface and using a small pen knife to lever out the small lead balls that had been set into it – miniature cannon balls for later use in some fantastic battle scene.)

It was a place of wonder, the ground; where you could still feel the gravity pull you towards the spinning orb. Where you could turn on your back and watch clouds scud above. Where bugs crept up blades of grass. Small pools of dew and rainwater hid. Where the earth smelt real and close: and yours. You knew where you were when you were on the ground.

Anything could take you there. Sometimes it was dramatic: your body suddenly and brutally pulverized by the imaginary film baddie’s automatic pistol/phaser/laser/RPG, at which point, juddering in percussive stunt man slo-mo fashion we would launch off the edge of the bed to land, in continued fake slo-mo, face crunching, on the ground. To then just lie there because it was quite a nice place to be.

Other reasons for being floor or ground bound?

The turning upside-down while sliding off a bed/bench/swing/wall/step like a slithering lizard, lower body still suspended or supported by the thing one has just slid off while the head shoulders, and most importantly, the face, come to a friction-stop, to end up adhered to the floor or ground beneath.

The siren call of a floor-based feast would signal the gathering of twigs leaves, divots of muddy stuff and strands of grass to be confected into a fresh baked pie or meal laid out in the middle of a damp rain flecked piece of grass or in the cork-muffled floor space under the climbing frame. To be sat around and tuned to perfection.

There’s the rolling-down-grassy-knolls reason of course (the non JFK type – though the presence of two small children flailing around on that one might have led history in a different direction!).

Collapsing modes of expressive dance offers many opportunities for floor bound adventure – where a few random balletic moves deconstruct downwards until the small person slumps to the floor like a pile of dropped clothes. Face pressed against the sprung floor of a dance studio or school gym (a nostril of dusty motes and the faint vibration of the boards is one of the happiest places known to man!).

Or at a really base level, you can’t make all of the subterranean tunnels, underpasses, secret doors and undercrofts required to make a killer sand castle until you get your face in the grains and GET IN!

In short, the thing that crossed my mind (just after the small yellow plastic pony) was the thought (one I have had previously and forgotten about) that the main problem with growing up is perhaps that we do exactly that. We grow up and away from the ground, elevating ourselves out of the rare and other worldly atmospheres of the imagination and the visceral experience of the planet on which we exist to take some higher plane of consciousness. We both intellectually and physically start to ‘get above ourselves’.

In growing up we move up and away from our primal connection to the natural landscapes of the imagination and the storytelling nature inherent in all of us.

Our ability, left to our own devices (and closer to the floor) to create or navigate worlds so real that we could attach quite clear cognitive and social principals to them: develop their cultures, languages and rituals: in ever increasing and ever more complicating detail, was and is for those children still doing it quite astounding.

If we weren’t creating floor-sprawling stories from scratch (which takes on a whole new meaning in this earthy atmosphere), we were navigating and revealing to ourselves the ones that already existed there in front of us: between the bugs and the blades, across the mulch under our nose; in wind as it bumped and popped our ears and rolled the blanket of sunlight backwards and forwards across the grass on the common: and in the sky above us in the shapes of the clouds and the velocity of the rain drops that dropped out of the universe to travel through science fiction to arrive as a fact, splat, on our forehead.

And I wondered what robs us of this facility to look in wonder at the simplest things? What interrupts or obscures our ability to see ‘creatively and inventively’, as a rite of human passage to a better existence or a more enlightened and joyful experience? Especially in the context of improving our immediate existence – in our ability to look at our work – is systems its processes its people and its material self.

What diminishes this almost lizard brain mechansim? Of course life sends us tests and brutal realities that knock the ‘stuffing’ out of us and pop our little balloon. Yes, the cynic must play some part in removing the infantile nature of some of the things we explored as a child.  And sticking to a stubbornly naïve and willfully childish perspective (as opposed to child-like one, which we like) only serves to exacerbate the problem with those of us more partial to sharp cornered and wholly reason based perspectives.

But it seems that as some of us become increasingly more ‘grown up’ we become increasingly ‘shut down’ in our liberal creative ‘gut’ abilities – and decreasingly capable of allowing facts and reason and myths and storytelling to exist next to each other without feeling compromised and compelled to ‘choose’.

The rigour of reason and sharp cornered fact is essential in ridding the human race of the kind of voodoo puffery and hocus-pocus to which the more marginalized and frankly dangerous freaks, socio and psychopaths, manipulators, tricksters, megalomaniacs, zealots and fundamentalists flock.

In far more inane terms, frameworks structures and methodologies of Doing are critical to keeping the wheels of human existence turning. But the rote systems that prepare us for participating in their systemic truths are just that.

Systems of Thinking to fit Systems of Doing – manufacturing, trading, building, maintaining, powering, growing, stewarding, managing – allow communities and collectives to be resourceful, resilient, adaptive and endure – a primary imperative

But they are not the source of the wonder of human existence. Human ingenuity, the elevator and slingshot of all we are stems from a curiosity and a wonder of all that exists: both materially, spiritually and inventively: the collision of which creates our sense of What If?

Our frameworks of thriving seem to discount imagination and the storytelling structures it uses to exercise and process cognitive truths as broadly dangerous, fruitless or feckless.

It is as if the cool lucidity of reason can be brutally and eternally extinguished by fairy tales and myths – and anyone partaking of the Kool Aid of lateral creative and deconstructed thinking and any exercises that promote it will be rendered deaf dumb and blind to danger and threat: to risk of any sort; and fail to see the mammoth/meteorite/fight/war/financial-crash/virus coming. Strangely, as I write those out I see that the source and purveyors of most of these bar the mammoth and meteorite are the consequence of wholly sharp cornered reason minded individuals and collectives exercising their needs and desires in the world.

Put some scientists, analysts, mathematicians, engineers in a room with a creative exercise and suddenly we’re all feeling that someone is about to sell us Father Christmas and the Easter Bunny wrapped up in an “I’m a Roswell Believer T Shirt”.

In the hierarchies of need (with which I have been a little loose and free) the engineering mentality of the Surviving With Stickers and Early Thriving stage seems to have overwhelmed our ability to just Be with our most inventive self

BEING – unfettered from burdens – luxury of conscience – What If? – life’s mysteries

Thriving – accruing STUFF, plentiful, stable, secure and expanding life

Surviving With Stickers – stable, secure, comfortable with shiny treats every so often

Surviving – stable secure fixed – a happy grind, power of the collectives

Struggling – unstable, volatile circumstance, financially socially

Flailing & Failing – pick a skip, any skip – includes ‘Scraping’ – the bottom of the barrel – and reaching up to do it: the relegation zone of existence. Struggling to fulfil basic needs – food, warmth, safety.

Sometimes, when running creative exercises in workshops specifically designed to unlock the more lateral out of the ordinary parts of a person’s brain (a part that they most patently have) it is astonishing to find how many supposedly confident and rooted adults are so easily made to feel unsteady and uncertain – and not just as part of the exercise. Even though everyone knows that they will return in a matter of hours to the very narrow channels in which to reapply the relative rigour and specificity they need to do their job successfully, even a small number of hours applied to deconstructing the frameworks they know seems to leave them terrified that the process will render them a useless engine, unfit to ever apply the strictures and applications of the more engineered mind ever again.

If we had dressed grown men in a Floral Shift Dress and 1970s Cork Wedges with Roman sandal ties they would have probably felt more comfortable than they did when asked to undertake the simple act of thinking What If? for 3-4 hours (though that may say more about the latent joy the average professional UK male finds in the ‘cross-dressing up box’ than it does about their ability to unlock their lateral creative gene without a fixed outcome to aim for).

Sadly I sense that it would just be seen as some retrograde hippy exercise but I would love to just once take every super C Suite member of the Private Sector and ask them lie on the ground for an hour (the type of which they can choose of course and face down or up is up to them) and then ask them to write a short ‘ what on earth…?’ piece where they have to relate their time on the ground to some aspect of the business they run.

What on Earth does lying on the bloody floor have to do with my business? Exactly.

I feel that perhaps, in getting closer to the ground is a good thing: not because it allows us to act like a 6 year old (though to be frank I’ve seen some supposedly grown up masters of the universe types or ‘heavy-hitters’ demonstrate behaviour that make my 6 year old daughter look positively sage-like, balanced and calm).

But because it does exactly what the phrase says on the tin: it grounds us. Takes us to a simple point of interrelation, perspective and interpretation. It is hard to maintain the toxic affectations of grandeur and status while lying on the ground. The values and behaviours set alters.

Humility becomes primary: prostrate, genuflective.

Connectedness is mandatory: because more of you is in touch with the living floor of the planet on which we live.

Calm is compulsive: lie down on the floor and see how fast you decompress. It’s measurable – a flashback perhaps to the time at the end of PE at primary school where everyone lay on the floor (long before the ‘stretching’ cool down was fashionable) to just calm down after all that running about.

Consideration becomes reflex: surprising what fills your mind when all the other junk gets pushed out of the way by the smell of grass or the dusty floorboards of an exercise room.

In much the same way that we are apparently far healthier in our minds when undertaking manual constructive and generative tasks – from gardening to DIY to dry-stone walling, I feel we also become far healthier in our minds with a little ‘floor action’.

Getting ground-bound is something I would suggest we all do every now and then, not because it makes us infantile or regress to some ‘creatively compelling’ state of deconstructed dribbling being, but because it reopens some of doors that are of enormous value to our cognitive and effective states of being.

And also a change is as good as a rest.

In the same way that an ascent to stand on a desk to the chant of ‘Captain My Captain’ compelled the schoolboy characters in Dead Poets Society to change their perspective – their way of seeing – by elevating it: I would suggest for Newtonian balance that the same is true for the ground. With stickers.

As unlike its loftier cousin ‘all the way up there’, the ground down here doesn’t just connect us to a different vantage point.

I believe it also connects us to a part of ourselves and our latent social and individual memory that we tend to keep filed away or have perhaps forgotten.

So Double Bubble.

There is something poetic (both spiritually and literally) about how sounds travel through the ground. From the imperceptible nature of the earth turning to bigger things like passing lorries on a motorway, the coming storm of the buffalo, the District & Circle Line.

So lets hear it for the floor, and our connection to it. If it ensures that we ‘get over ourselves’ for ten seconds and catch ‘the elevator down’ from ‘above’ ourselves all power to it.

It might also just be the most powerful HR weapon in the armoury of reinventing C Suite propensities for invention.

Or just be a tickle fight. In which case. Who cares?

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