Living memory, resilience & the art of not forgetting

02 Monday May 2016

Posted by Thin Air Factory in Uncategorized

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Alzheimer's, ard drives, Arts, company culture, data points, degenerative disease, desire, drama, Elegy, Evolution, Gladiator, Identity, Language, literature, Living memory, Maximus, Nock Payne, resilience, self expression, smart phones, Social Memory, technologies, telecomms, The Book Of Life, Virgin Accelerator

Funny thing memory

We tend to pay little attention to it; until it starts to fail us.

Sometimes its reason for failing us is a conspiracy of genes + environment – creating a disposition to Alzheimer’s and other forms of degenerative disease – the desperate creeping extinction of everything that made us one the whole beautiful living breathing loving human being we are.

At other times it’s disappearance is to do with the impact of new technologies. Recent technologies tempt us to dispense with our need to ‘remember’. Or they diffuse or diminish our natural ability to remember those things most important and valuable to us. In his book the shallows, Nicholas Carr points to how excessive immersion in the internet and the digital world disturbs our ability to transfer and store working memory into our deeper long term memory, reshaping our neural pathways.

Unlike language, art or drama – older human technologies designed to mine, explore, capture, elevate and replay memory and the experience and impact of living – our most recent technologies sometimes seem to seek to simply mathematically atomise our lives and the memory of them until human feeling is viewed as nothing more than a data point – something to be measured calibrated and engineered.

The idea that consciousness, identity and the precious value of memory is a form or condition of existence that can simply be dissected, measured, data pointed, and reengineered by science is a theme explored in Nick Payne’s play Elegy. A woman raddled by a degenerative disease that will eventually kill her is told her condition can be halted by ‘life saving’ surgery – the miracle of science – but only at the cost of catastrophic loss of memory. At which point one has to ask: ‘What life are you saving if not the recollected one; the one filled with precious riches and experiences?’

In some ways the diaspora of memories and recollections once housed in picture frames diaries sketchbooks letters and albums into the lost vaults of smart phone devices and hard drives is robbing us of tangible tactile living memory. This functional un-remembering allow us to abdicate the responsibility for maintaining those experiences, memories or recollections and synthesizing them. The machine nature of calling up data is very different to the human nature of recollecting memory – the former is perfect, linear, modal and cached, the second, imperfect, linear, messy and overlapping, every journey into it opening up the possibilities of new revelation – as opposed to the same data cache relentlessly replayed like the locked loop in a stored file.

One of the most powerful drivers of our progress and evolution and of our astonishing resilience as a species is personal and shared recollection. Perhaps memory is a just a simple evolutionary trait mythologised – of collected wisdoms and experiences of fear pain survival and joy, regurgitated in fire side stories, tales, mementoes, symbols artefacts and dramas.

But to connect memory or remembering to some higher order of existence – to have created the thread between what is, what has been and what will be via the technology of memory is some proof of our ability to transcend the claw and scratch of base existence.

That the memory of us and what we do may well be a vanity particular to our species – a desperate need for our life to be more than some nihilistic little blip on a cosmic scale.

Nonetheless, our need to try and reach beyond the brackets of birth and death and seize immortality; whether it be through our beliefs, by our actions, the legacies we leave, the children we bear or the blunt tool of extending our physical and conscious existence, is a defining trait in us.

Gladiator’s Maximus demonstrates our need to be remembered as an inspiration of improvement and achievement when he states: “What we do in life echoes in eternity”

To be forgotten is a terrible thing. Immortality, until some scientific trickster or data consciousness A.I. guru makes it otherwise , is mostly an exercise in seeding a process of relentless remembering.

We have a number of simple systems already in place, some rooted in thousands of years of repeated doing and some rooted in immoveable belief systems, and some developed through more recent technologies.

Some forms or remembering have until recently been seen as the sign of mental distress or illness. Take Nostalgia. Sneaking off for a quick youtube binge of TV theme tunes from childhood or rummaging through pictures of old Y Front adverts (love Retronaut!!) and a desperate yearning to watch the infamous Ziggy Stardust Top of the Pops is usually seen by the up-tight ‘its all abut the Now man’ zealots as some mawkish sentimentality BUT recent developments in psychoanalysis have shown that nostalgia is a powerful human tool – and can actually strengthen our sense of self and centre our identity, enabling us to weather greater shifts, turbulence and transition.

Look Back In Joy, a recent Guardian article looking at the power of Nostalgia, focuses on an Greek Born American academic, Constantine Sedikides, who had left the University of North Carolina to become Professor of Social & Personality Psychology at the University of Southampton. He realised that he was using nostalgia to manage the turbulence and dislocation of changing continents. This led him to exploring in far more robust academic terms the role and facility that nostalgia provides us with. His findings are liberating. Sedikides talks of nostalgia as the “perfect internal politician, connecting the past with the present, pointing optimistically to the future” and a mental state “absolutely central to human experience”.

For me this quick blog journey through the Art of Remembering was bough on by a recent collision of banal choices, a profound realisation and professional curiosity.

First up.

The banal. Sky movie choice time with my children. “What about The Book of Life?” – a simple, beautiful whimsical story with a simple point by the master Guillermo Del Toro. Yes, its about greatness. Yes, its about the illusion of courage. Yes, its about true love. yes, its about belonging – but really, it id a film about not forgetting. Relentlessly Remembering is about Not Forgetting. Memory and the act of remembering are the most powerful tools that we have at our disposal. We are all kept alive in the hearts and minds eyes and memories of those who love us and have lived out some part of their lives in around and about us.

Second up.

The profound. In a simple exchange between my brother and I, we reminded ourselves that the effects of my beautiful but now dead mother will eventually need to be shared out between my he and I – the next step in the atomisation of her living memory into our lives and eventually the lives of my children and so on. Each effect vibrates with associated memory – sodden with the context which arrives like a steam train every time they are recalled into being – expressions, sounds, smells, feelings, times and experiences. The atomic truth that an atom never dies – and that the world vibrates with the atomic echoes of every one who has ever lived needs to include the more ephemeral but still equally powerful atomic nature of the vibrations of memory that run through the effects of those we have loved. Their atomic nature is indirectly imbued by their having been part of a life. They are rendered ‘animate’ by those vibrations. This belief in this form of conscious osmosis doesn’t stop at the effects and belongings of those who have passed out of sight. We also apply it to sites and buildings – from Stone Henge and battle fields to the blue plaques on buildings. We make pilgrimages to the hallowed halls of here and there, wishing for the conscious greatness and wellhead of wisdom and learning steeped in their walls to pour out into us.

Third up.

The professional. This curiosity arose while exploring the purpose of one of the Virgin Accelerator businesses I have had the pleasure of working with. In a world of zero hours and the death of the social contract between large corporations and their employees, their idea of a platform that links previous, present and future employees creates a simple and compelling way for rebuilding a powerful and precious social memory into a company.

Social or Living Memory in a corporation or business is increasingly left to chance and the random foray into face-book pages, LinkedIn and the odd Instagram surge. Fully connecting with a company’s Now – amongst its employees, the communities it touches, its customers, its partners and suppliers – is only part of true socialisation

Socialising a company requires more than just acting in the Now. But few companies actively connect their past with their present and even fewer attach it to their future. The anti-socialising of a company – the active dislocation and rupture the social threads that run through it – the ties that bind it from its past to its future – are not just an oversight on the part of the social strategy or HR.

It is not just economic pressures or the trend for zero hours that destroy the social contract and living memory of a business. Many ambitious and venal execs actively dispense with the ‘dead wood’ and not always for the right reasons. This forest fire approach is often simply a way of removing those with a greater living memory of the business than the ‘new’ order now prevailing and controlling it .

Agreed, often the human nature of getting stuck in our ways: fixing things: securing them and subsequently seeing all change to them as alien or dangerous can kill a business; sucking the light and life out of it. But the baby & bathwater approach to removing people who’ve been around too long can rob corporations of a vital cornerstone of their resilience. When done wilfully this kind of action should be seen as an aggression against the business and in turn the shareholder – because it is purposefully eviscerating a source of memory and knowledge that though in its linear and previous form may be obsolete, could be re-tasked and transformed into a new and more powerful resource to greater long term value.

All of these impacts, however great or small, can create a form of Corporate Alzheimer’s – the degeneration of the social memory of the company, and with it the very thing that made the company burn so brilliantly for so long.

In a conversation with a large American telecomm business about how they might help High School kids resist dropping out, I was surprised to find that they struggled to see the value in connecting their ex employees – a truly universal and multitudinous cohort of living memory and life experience – with the young high school crowd via a weekly skype roulette. The idea was simple – for a massive telecoms and connectivity provider to create a showcase of meaningful connections by using social platforms to randomly connect high school kids and oldies to share moments of life and experience to mutual benefit. I realised that to grasp the value of this and institute this type of initiative requires an innate understanding of the power and value of being remembered for ex employees and of memory to those just staring on their journey.

Regardless of what a company gets wrong, and many get much wrong in regards to how they treat their employees over time – the truth is those companies still invest an enormous amount of time and money into training up and expanding the capabilities of their workforce (self interestedly granted but in that mutual self interest lies the truth of the social contract between an employee and an employer).Why let it all walk out the door when the employee leaves? Because sometimes their tenure was bumpy or you didn’t act in the best manner towards them?

At the close of the Theory of Everything , when Steven and his ex wife Jane watch their children playing in the garden, their exchange summarises the value and potency of connected imperfections perfectly.

“Look what we made”.

For all the mistakes. For all the disappointments. For all the pain. Would you have it any other way? Memory can hurt. But is can also heal. Forgetting is a cop out.

Some people and the companies they run would be all the better for taking this view – and in doing so commit to rebuild their ability to relentlessly remember – drawing a long line from their past to their future. Social or Living memory is not only one of the most powerful human facilities. It could also be the cornerstone of a companies greatest resilience in our accelerating atomizing world.

Purpose, the north star of any company, is one of its tools for Relentless Remembering – and it becomes meaningless if it is only socialised in the Now.

A purpose must be part of a continuum that reaches from the beginning of a company to its end. And to do that it must exist inside a structure that values and facilitates everyone’s ability to relentlessly remember and be improved and enlightened by that remembering.

Mutual desire, shared resilience & A Stairway to Heaven

24 Monday Aug 2015

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7 heavens, Akanisththa, Baggies, Bhutan, Bridget Jone's Diary, Consumerism, cosmic fizz, Druid's Oak, funkadelic, heaven, hogwarts, Korea, led zeppelin, Like a Virgin, Madonna, molecular truths, music, Mutual Desire, resilience, rockcorps, Science v. faith, Shared Benefits, Shared Value, Singing in the shower, Song Remains The Same, Stairway to heaven, stakeholder models, stephen greene, The Black Country, The Economist, Titian, venal, West Bromich Albion, Wonkavator

There are many perfect things in the world – but some would venture that the most precious of them are those perfect things that can directly affect the nature of our human resilience.

Luckily, there seem to be lots more people fixated on creating good things we can all share in.

With the advent of a more Shared Value, stakeholder-centric view of the world, we find increasing numbers of enlightened CEOs and MDs, social activists, enterprisers and entrepreneurs, sustainability practitioners, CSR and Human resources directors spending increasingly large amounts of time ‘designing’ new collective, swarm-like, crowd-fuelled platforms, communities and initiatives in which we can all benefit.

Which is good.

The only small thing to bear in mind while applying all of that highly tuned brain power to great collective ends is this: most of those perfect things that compel multitudes of people towards a shared moment or community of like minds and hearts are of the ‘accidental’ variety – rarely originated, planned or conceived for the direct purpose of shaping a good thing. Mostly they begin as very particular and individual acts of self.

Music for example.

Much of music is created as an externalisation, amplification and expansion and of our highly individual inner human ‘voice’ in the world.

Our internal cadences and the rhythms of our conscious self are released through a sonorous fabric of sounds, notes, and chords strummed, struck, fingered, rubbed, pressed, plucked, picked and blown to resonate and reverberate through and across the myriad materials tribes and cultures have found to hand.

Abstracted human ‘feelings’ are moulded into personal protestations of human existence – of love, wonder, sadness, joy, recrimination, premonition, politic and destruction.

But none the less, music has given us many ‘perfect things’ that have directly affected our ability to collectively create better lives– clarion calls for better and moments of shared joy that transcend cultural generational and social barriers and definitions.

Music is both universal and particular in the ‘perfect things’ department – and one of the greatest levers for galvanising collective good stuff (as the guys and girls at Rockcorps have demonstrated to both local and global effect).

As a singular ‘universal’ concept, music is one of the most transcendent and primal forces that can be put to work in and on our human condition: a rhythmic syncopated celebration of the ‘vibration of life’ itself – shaped by the hands and instruments of our ever-evolving species.

It also delivers many highly particular ‘perfect things’. Things rooted in highly specific local and cultural mores and rituals and the social idioms that underwrite them.

I was reminded of this while overhearing three people of quite different cultural, generational and social background discuss the Led Zeppelin song, A Stairway to Heaven.

(One, I believe, was a musician, one a chef and the other a DJ.)

To many, Led Zeppelin’s Stairway to Heaven is one of those ‘perfect things’ – a jewel of absolute, inviolable synchronicity; between a medium (music), talents, era, emotion, social comment, context, culture, politic and the human condition: a jewel that sparkles with a quite resilient beauty.

It’s fair to say that it’s definitely got something pretty big going on there: some potency or mysticism that has made it globally famous – a piece of music loved the world over.

But does that make it universal? Does that make a song like this a prized tool in the super powered socio-cultural toolbox of rubbing along better in the global village?

What seems to reveal itself on closer inspection is that sometimes the universally transcendent only become so because they are so particular in their nature: so fiercely authentic to and of themselves.

This seemed a philosophical paradox worthy of a rummage at least.

At face value the song is based upon a startlingly simple narrative structure: a combination of a Stairway, a Lady ‘who’s sure…’, and Heaven.

Now, in semiotic and cultural referencing terms, the first two can be rustled up pretty easily in most every culture the the world over.

We all know where we are with a Stairway or some form of step system. And as for ‘a Lady who’s sure…’, greed, avarice and the machinations of the venal are indeed universal.

Both easily make the transition from a British rock culture rooted in the industrial Midlands or Black Country of the late 1960s and 70s to a broader waiting white western culture (of Christian foundation) and ever outwards along the lay lines of the old imperial and colonial powers.

But Heaven. Mmmnnn. Tricky.

In the world in which we currently exist, you need to ‘mind your language’ when it comes to the H word.

You can’t just go bandying words like heaven about willy-nilly without expecting some flack.

There are many different (and fiercely held) ideas of what constitutes a higher existence or plane of being – either spiritual or intellectual. In some, heaven doesn’t feature at all. They are in fact quite anti-heaven.

And if it isn’t God v. Science, it’s ‘my heaven’s better than your heaven ‘cos my Book says so’.

Three steps sideways and suddenly you’re up to your proverbials in pro-life protests, making love through sheets, fundamentalist settlers, abuse cover ups in the clergy, pogroms, public stoning; a light sprinkling of intifada, flag burning and explosive jihadi polemics.

But we can’t just bin the H word. Heaven is not a negotiable element in this song – the song must have it. Pardon the lateral Zeppelin referencing here BUT for the song to remain the same, Heaven is vitally important.

Without it, we’re grounded in a material and physical world focused on structural models and frameworks of habitation and modes of access and ascent, either of internal or external application and construction.

With the addition of Heaven, the ascendant become transcendent. Tick. Heaven endeavours to expand and elevate the spiritual spatial perspective and vista of the listener.

It is also there precisely because it offsets the materialism of the Lady who’s sure…

(Though far more aligned with the avarice of her materialistic certainty, Stairway to Mammon would make for a dreadful reprise and entreat.)

So; Heaven. How does that travel as a universal concept?

Let’s start by gently exploring and dissecting the types and versions clattering about in the global consciousness.

We have of course Heaven as a place adored and yearned for in the theologies of the universal Christian church.

If that’s all we’re worried about, Hosanna! Cue the works of Titian et al and begin the hearty daubing of seraphim, cherubim, chapel ceilings, lush clouds, spirited holiness, bearded men, the startling brilliance of the sun’s rays – and a lot (and I mean A LOT) of heavenly thronging.

But what of the broader version instituted across all the Abrahamic faiths?

And while we’re contemplating whose heaven in whose book, we must also take into consideration that it’s not just the cultural and theological shape or type of heaven: the number is also in question.

It is singular in our song title but in the realms of the eastern faiths that a lot of western rock stars were becoming advocates of in the late 60s and 70s, the single Heaven is replaced by heavens, the plural: or even as far as to count them – 7 Heavens.

And then there’s the issue of the nature of the Heaven or Heavens you are alluding to.

Heaven or its multiples is theologically and literally all over the place.

Dipping even the smallest toe into the subject of Heaven reveals every good reason to keep it wooly in the specificity department

In some teachings, Heaven is framed as being a plane or realm of actual existence that has physical properties and ‘exists’ in a complex intra-related and mostly interdependent set of dimensions in which ours is but one transient floor, corridor, elevator or pipe.

At its most particular, we find either the Seven Heavens of Jewish Mysticism where the seventh is the ultimate realm in which God dwells, or the 5 major types of Heaven in Tibetan Buddhism with the Akanisththa

For others Heaven is a state of being: one shaped and influenced by one’s proximity to one’s god or gods, their teachings and their ‘way’.

Heaven is in this instance therefore both relative and proximal: the closer to god you are the closer your heaven becomes. And therefore the further from god you are the more equally and appositely hellish your state becomes.

And then of course we have Heaven simply as an atomic abstraction – an expansive sub-atomic particular state of otherness – a place and state of existence other than the one we are in but still ‘of it’.

This is the realm of the Cosmic Fizz.

(see https://thinairfactoryblog.com/2014/08/09/celebrating-our-human-existence-the-big-beautiful-boomerang-of-science-and-faith/)

This is a ‘heaven’ that has not been ‘captured’ or appropriated – geo-located or physiologically and physically rendered in any artistic representation or personification – and therefore is the most ‘other’ of them.

The Cosmic Fizz is predicated on the basis that if an atom never dies, then we will continue to exist materially in some particular form after our immediate death – and exist expansively and potentially eternally. In this realm, Heaven as a state of otherness, becomes closer in its nature to the abstraction of the soul than the construction of the body.

This ‘heaven’ is also perhaps closer to the more scientific view of particularity, multiple dimensions of time space, and an infinite number of expanding, contracting and colliding universes. A world of (to punk another prog rock band of the 60s and 70s) quarks strangeness and charm.

(An article in the Economist recently pointed to the fabulous fact that in the realm of the multiverse, we’ve barely a clue as to the construct of the single one we’re currently reading this blog in – given, they tell us, that 96% of matter in our universe passes unseen through the 4% of matter that we can see. So. Is that heaven? The 96%?)

Right. All getting a bit complicated. So let’s go back to practicalities.

What kind of stairway? And where do you want it?

Umm, good question.

Well, if we’re going for heaven as an actual plane or realm from the culture of the band that wrote the song, let’s have a spiralling stairway hewn from the ancient oak wreathed in bluebells, and etched with runic symbolism, looping up and into a West Country sunset.

As for the Where? – pop it over there, on that cowslip-covered Tor: the one with the Druid’s Oak on top. Yup. There. To the left of the winsome, flaxen-haired girl playing tenor recorder.

Great. But, what if we’re in the proximal state-of-being version of heaven? The heaven as defined by the distance between us and god. Does that mean the Stairway is further away from us and, ergo, closer to god; or is it closer to us? This can surely only be answered by first defining whether the particular heavenly theology in question defines you as innately pure at birth or as born with taint (cue original sin) – and then assessing whether you’ve done anything of any substance betwixt birth and death as to shift yourself towards or away from said stairway.

Knowing what form of heaven we’re building a stairway to is key in regards to not only making structural, material and design decisions for our stairway; but more importantly in deciding whether we need a stairway at all

A stairway that ascends to a singular place makes complete sense; but in a realm of multiple heavens we must assume that multiple stairways are required (unless some form of multiple directional Hogwarts stairway can be popped in there). A heaven of multiple realms and destinations would potentially require more of a wonkavator than a stairway.

And heaven as a state of multiple interwoven planes and particularities might preferably require more a beam me up Scotty form of transportation device for ascension.

If you’re clear on where you’ve netted out on this there hopefully is just one other small hurdle. Is your universal concept of a cosmic metaphysical plane within or without?

As the funk prog-rock band Funkadeic and its master blaster George Clinton opined – “Free your ass and your mind will follow – the kingdom of heaven is within”.

If the Kingdom Of Heaven is indeed within, some form of internal stairway is in order. But then, to be punctilious for a moment, wouldn’t that be more likely to be a stair-well? One where we could peer over the edge of the balustrade up or down and spot some other traveller ascending towards a higher existence.

So, ermmm, where was I? Yes.

The question of whether Stairway To Heaven; a very socio-culturally particular piece of music, has transcended all barriers and idioms to be one of those cultural assets that can be put in the big, sharing, feel-good box of our most resilient humanity?

Dunno. Heavens apart, we can only answer that through the witnessing of its application and effect in the world at scale across myriad cultures.

Do they play it on the radio in The Gaza Strip and Damascus? (My assumption would be that at least one of the settlers from the U.S. will have bought some of their college radio loves with them!)

How does it roll in the Far-East?. I am certain that there are many bars in Korea and Vietnam that feature this on their juke-box. And given the tsunami of Australians surging through from the other direction, I cant imagine that even the distant hills of Tibet and the northern Chinese provinces are immune to its charms.

In terms of its authenticity and integrity, would a lover of the song in Bhutan just be ‘pretending’ to know its meaning and sub-text just because they’re not from West Bromich and have absolutely no clue as to who the ‘Baggies’ are?

Bridget Jones Diary and the women’s prison in Bangkok comes to mind. The original lyrics of Like A Virgin swapped out for something that just sounds more ‘right’ to the singer in their own cultural opinion.

There’s a lady whose nose only tickles if cold.

In the end it doesn’t really matter. If the feeling is right, does anyone care how it thinks or reads?

All that matters is that there is a piece of music in the world, one of tens of thousands of them, that can bring the most diverse groups of people together in the bat of an eye with no need for social engineering, complex structures, trending language or roundtable debates.

A piece of music that can collectively lift peoples hearts and spirits to expect and demand better. Created for joy and expression. Not utility.

When shaping narratives of collectivism and shared value we should remember the joy part of that. The lightness it brings with it. Because we make a lot of these collectivist and shared initiatives far too serious and far less human because of it.

As Robert Plant asks us directly:

“Do you remember laughter?”

I’ll sing badly in the shower to that.

Now, where’s that ABBA album?

Brands, old-school Diplomacy & the New Humanities

26 Thursday Mar 2015

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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

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 21^st 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 20^th 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.

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

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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

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.

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

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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

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.

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

Invisible Telecoms, the looking glass & the Hidden Art of IT Qi

14 Thursday Aug 2014

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competitive advantage, create and capture value, customer centricity, Digital, hyper speed, Invisible Telecoms, IT, Martial Art, operational innovation, opportunities, Qi, qualitative growth, resilience, Social, Solutions provision, systemic excellence, Tech, tech reflex, telecoms, Zen

I have become an adherent to the new martial art of business. I can now see the entrepreneurial wood for the IT trees.

And in true zen stylie, what I see is all about what is unseen.

A statement of the bleeding obvious perhaps BUT in the realm of your tech and IT systems and solutions partner who enabled them, out of sight is truly out of mind.

We should not only embrace the invisible Matrix nature of IT and tech deployment. We should grow to love it. And for good reason.

The Now you see it Now you don’t approach to best in class tech and IT – apparent only by its absence denotes a win for the business.

Invisibility is success.

Because Visibility usually means you’ve a little way to go yet.

Like the word Digital. Or the word Social. IT and tech, while still top of the conversational pile and being touted as the next best C Suite thang, are patently still under-performing.

While we still say them out loud, put them on presentations, flag them, budget for them, mention them loudly in lifts it simply means they are not yet embedded properly. They are not optimally integrated. If they were we would not need to point at them.

In certain areas of business the idea of anything becoming invisible is a measure of its success. Sustainability is a very good example also of this phenomena. While there is still a CSO, and Sustainability has not migrated up into the Marketing or Operational functions, Sustainability cannot be said to be truly integrated into the nature and fabric of the business.

Much like Sustainability, Tech and IT should, in its explicit and visible form, seek to become invisible – working towards a strategy of divine obsolescence.

Moving from an explicit visible tangible to becoming internalized, implicit, invisible: transforming into a discrete reflex or innate ability within the business: when something becomes second nature, it means that the fluid, synchronised nature of it is seamlessly connecting and connected with the ‘flow’.

IT & Tech, much like HR, is no longer a support activity as it was in the old model of Value Chains, an administrative prop to paperwork systems and communications in an analogue world. Through intra and extra nets, digital and social service improvements and propositions, operational innovations and the new world order of hyper speed intelligence and data as a primary driver of most businesses competitive advantage, IT & tech is now woven through every dimension of a business.

So to set out to deliver Invisible Telecoms – to make the measure of success the degree of visibility of IT & tech dimensions of the business is compelling.

If you are a solutions provider in the area and your goal is to work with clients to embed IT and telecoms to such a degree that they become invisible – transforming into the company’s systemic operational reflex, the synaptic system controlling the optimal operational ‘flow’, then your goal has exceptional commercial value.

The ambition to take it to the nth degree until it becomes the company’s ‘second nature’ if you will presets a business for greater flexibility agility and focus.

Invisibility also becomes a very clear metric of customer centricity.

If you’re in the business of selling IT and tech, in the real world of value, you need to move from pushing buttons boxes and fibre to selling the space to think and act on building a more resilient business through tech.

You need to be in the business of selling Mind-width not bandwidth: free your mind and your ass will follow as Funkadelic sang. Unlocking the entrepreneurial reflex in the business by liberating the customers mind of Tech & IT distractions – leaving them free to concentrate on creating exceptional ‘flow’.

To a customer Invisibility is about the goal of making IT & Tech less and less present in my eye-line: less of a priority: less visible in my inbox everyday, dropping away to being something that just ‘is’. The concept of turning IT & tech into a truly ethereal concept for a business is brave and powerful.

Creating the Qi model for smart businesses, changing the whole way we thing about IT, moving it from rational and engineered to being truly systemic, flow orientated and about cultural and social vitality and wellbeing – wellbeing from the inside out.

Qualitative growth is hard to see or imagine let alone define and capture through a complex maze of surface connectivity, functionality and capability. The ability to mine qualitative growth opportunity needs to be a reflex in the business facilitated by invisible technology and hyper speed connectivity. The systemic fabric and infrastructure needs to be able to act at the speed of the human mind and work well in advance of it.

Time to remove the IT bandages and unsee what is beneath. The degree of how much is left unseen will be down to the mastery of the CTO and their digital partners in crime.

This truly is the looking glass and the wormhole rolled into one. A world of infinite possibility only recognisable in each successful step towards a wholly more resilient and differentiated business – one focused on unleashing minds to do what they should be doing. Walking the talk is not an app that you buy; its a disposition that you live.

White rabbit anyone?

The Dimensions of Desire & The Human Ghost in the Value Chain Machine

22 Tuesday Apr 2014

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Consumption, corporate efficiency, Employee activation, Employee rewards & recognition, Green Ips, Hobbes, i-phones, Identity, mammoths, McMansion, Philosophy, prosperity, psychoanalytical motivators, resilience, samsung TV, sonos sound systems, storytelling, Tai-Bo, the American Dream, thriving, Value Chains

I mentioned recently that I felt that the resiliency of a company’s storytelling: its ability to tell a singular differentiated, robust and authentic story through its value chain, across its social reach and around its stakeholder constituency, is one of the greatest factors in defining that company’s resilience.

The ability to tell a story that fuses the nature of Mutual Desire and Shared Resilience in the company – one that ignites and feeds the Desire of every stakeholder embraced within its parameters – not just some precious few – is critical to capturing and securing value in every link in the chain.

So, having said that, I thought I might just unpack the Satchel of Desire so to speak. Then I shall follow up with a like-minded piece on Resilience.

Now when I talk about desire at its basest level. I am talking about the ‘core motivator of all human action’ version: the psychoanalytical one, where desires are fundamental to human existence because they are directly attributable to bodily organs and their needs.

Belly empty. Gonads full. Get club. Hit Mammoth. Mammoth dead. Woman eat mammoth. Man eat mammoth. Woman like man. Man like woman. Belly Full. Gonads empty. Repeat as necessary.

This seems terrifying bleak and basic to our terribly self-aggrandising and civilised selves. Thankfully, things have moved on a little (ish – a night out in your average Harvester or TGIFridays might say otherwise!)

There is also the philosophical nature of the word desire. Hobbes (1588–1679) proposed the concept of psychological hedonism, which asserts that the “fundamental motivation of all human action is actually the desire for pleasure’.

(Some might go further and say that desire at its most basic physiological level is an addiction to the dopamine surges that we interpret as ‘pleasure’ or a pleasurable feeling.)

But dopamine addiction aside – somewhere between the psychoanalytical, physiological and the philosophical lies the basic nature of desire. My particular interest is in regards to the consequence of it on us individually, collectively and communally: especially in context to what motivates out working personas and culture and our concepts of recognition and reward.

As we get further up the civilizing ladder – and the increasing skills/increasing value axis of measurement – the relationship between desire and motivation and emotion and action increase in their levels of sophistication and complexity.

I stated in the previous piece that I had chosen the word DESIRE because it carried within it two profound and powerful dimensions, notably those of IDENTITY and UTILITY.

I believe that developing compound indices around IDENTITY and UTILTY could allow us to set DESIRE up as a rich yet defined enclave within which to further calibrate far more nuanced degrees of relationship between the functional nature of something being desirable and the aspirational nature of its desirability.

I also ventured that to qualify these dimensions with any authenticity we would need to appreciate that there are positive and negative versions of both.

The positive and negative dimensions would help stop us being too over simplistic in our assumptions.

They would allow us to make (and measure) the point that it is possible to choose a Desirable lifestyle that is very heavy on IDENTITY but suffer none or perhaps very few of the negative aspects that we have come to associate with ‘shiny living’ as an assertion of IDENTITY

The usual suspects in our current version of ‘a shiny life’ are traditionally based upon a toxic rendition of the old ‘American Dream’ – a dream of having infinite everything.

The positive/negative axis would allow us to view IDENTITY not only in the terms of the old aspirational underwriters of what constitutes a ‘thriving life’: McMansions, disposable fashion, gas guzzler vehicles, industrial food consumption, endless consumables, palm oil rich beauty regimes, and the accompanying incontinence and profligacy of water and energy use that accompany them.

(This is where we see Desire as motivator run riot – too many mammoths, overstretched belly, shrunken gonads & Viagra – a delivery system for negative impacts on individuals and society.)

It allows us to see and recognise that a life of IDENTITY includes positive choices – one constituting a state-of-the-art neutral footprint apartment in a carbon savvy city, punked-up electric super-bike, up-cycled fashions, Tai-Bo regime, smart ‘block’ phone, green IP run on renewables, smart meters, and a diet of locally grown and raised foods and stay-cations. DESIRE, if you are that way inclined, can be rendered wholly positive and regenerative.

Equally you could view UTILITY, through an explicitly negative filter. Utility as a word which, whether it is associated with basic infrastructure supply stuff like water and power or alternately in product and lifestyle terms, delivers an ‘aspirational’ state of Amish-like dour and sparse ‘being and doing’, rooted in plain unadorned functionality.

This stripped down approach to aspiration is very fashionable, especially amongst those who celebrate a caustic weathered and slightly cynical view of the world. Everything other than a withered utility is simply hyperbole, sophistry and myth-making.

UTILITY can be a magnet for those quietly terrified that someone is hiding something from them, and a terror of not being taken seriously – people who prefer a candour sparse and stripped down in manner, emotion and function.

This economy of mysteries is the Naturists Camp of Aspiration. Naked. Unfettered by slogans promises and abstract benefits. Does what it says on the tin. Boxy and ugly but safe. It’s big. It’s red. And it eats rocks.

BUT even in this stripped down space the positive nature of your stripped down, no-bullshit utilitarian view of the world can lead you into the ‘negative’ corners of Desire.

Even if you’re being terribly smug about NOT a having a android friendly Sonos system, Samsung TV, i-phone, Primark bag or Walmart carton in sight, you could still sink the whole carbon offset global metric calculation in one small drive from A-B in your 50 year old breaker-salvaged pick up Bronco truck; especially if A runs on an oil fired generator, and B is an abattoir!

ULTILITY can still house a world of ills to both society and the environment. Some would argue that ‘lowest price’ itself is the purest form of negative UTILITY

A lot of stuff that supplies a need – for greatest functionality/delivery matched with cheapest price – is the greatest blight on society.

Take the humble fast food franchise burger with its industrial and environmentally punitive beef farming and logistics distribution supply chain – or those slinky brightly coloured Primark stretch pants shot with petrodollar synthetics for ten bucks a pop – shipped from Pakistan across increasingly emphysemic oceans by the mega tonne.

So, suffice to say, DESIRE framed by the dimensions of IDENTITY and UTILITY qualified by positive or negative impact seems a reasonably simple yet sympathetic baseline framing to start us off.

It creates a simple tool within which to look at the tasks, roles or stakeholder groups with a direct ability to impact on the performance of a Value Chain through a more finely calibrated social lenses – the employees of a company for example – to explore any socially or culturally shaded differences, dissonances or hidden similarities between those who might work in payroll and those in IT and on the production line.

Desire Testing the Links in the Value Chain

It allows us to look at the essential and inextricable Stakeholder Groups – the links of people whose compound performance defines and directs the whole – Supplier Company and Employees, Local Regulatory Bodies, Distribution Partners, market audiences – to see if we can reveal exceptional points of integration and disintegration.

Which all sounds kind of fancy but the journey across the marshlands of consumption as its make-up re-calibrates from a purely functional need to one that is more coloured by more nuanced social and cultural measures of wealth and status comes down to some reasonably simple stuff.

People need stuff to live. That stuff is either still viewed at a basic functional level – and they live a utilitarian life in utilitarian housing with utilitarian diets and jobs. Or they have started to ascend the ladder from Surviving into Thriving – and suddenly the degree of cache around the stuff increases.

Take food: it moves in a circular manner – starting with a move from the sparsely populated bowl or plate to stable consistent access to it, then to the volume of it, then to the quality of it, the badge of it, then the diversity of it, then the provenance of it until everything falls away at the ‘Being’ stage – at which point food deconstructs back to three bean shoots, a mung bean and some agedashi tofu washed down with delicious h2o.

So being able to measure the nature and effect of Desire at a mutual level, across a group of stakeholders along a Value Chain might be quite illustrative. It may reveal flaws in the culture of the Value Chain one would otherwise not have noticed. It may reveal that especially in multi national structures that the subtle shifts in socio cultural concepts of prosperity DO impact on the stability and of the company and its ability to ‘rally the ranks’ around a unified strategy for the business

But more importantly it may well reveal some commonalities inherent in that desire that point to a hidden mutual strength or sense of purpose.

And there the real resilience lies: because it is rooted in something more profound and far beyond the analysts strategists and planners segment frameworks.

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.

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:

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”

Old heads, Young Hearts & The Foot soldiers of resilient humanity.

25 Saturday Jan 2014

Posted by Thin Air Factory in Uncategorized

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anaglypta, bi-generational living, broadband providers, collectivism, enduring aspirations, innovation, millennials, old people's homes, resilience, resilient societies and communities, skype wisdom, telecoms, Wisdom Of Age, within our means, youth

If we had to choose two lead stakeholders in building a more resilient society, my money’s on the under 20s and the over 60s: and here’s for why.

Allow yourself the luxury of the observer for a short while at least and there’s one thing you may notice: teenagers and oldies are very, very similar in many ways – especially when they are grumpy. They re in fact made for each other.

Both sleep at weird times of the day. Both are prone to radical mood swings. Both err on the side of the heavily medicated (prescription or non prescription). Both sport injuries and conditions as a form of life signature: some inflicted by challenging the nature of their own mortality and existence (the irresponsibility of youth): others purely by having existed for so long (the immutability of age). Both enjoy wheeled modes of transport other than cars. Both tend to suffer either a crisis of or a surfeit of identity.

Both view the wheezing middle (those of us between 20 and 60) as an uptight, over wound self obsessed lost tribe. We are trapped in the lost years, having left the age of wonder, explore and create behind, we are trapped in the secure protect and defend stage – fiercely ring fencing the things we have accrued and are accruing – and as yet far short of the time when we are finally confident and secure enough in ourselves that we can begin to discard and disassemble stuff and liberate our crippling concepts of a thriving life and just be.

Unlike the Lost Middle, they have ‘nothing to lose’ in spiritual or material terms. At one end the young, prior to being owned or owning, are still free to explore possibilities randomly, inspiring themselves and each other as they flow. They are at the least compromised stage of their lives. No strings have been attached: no mortgage overlord; no food and energy bills to speak of (even if they have got as far as renting); no fixed pathway measured in decades from which they cannot deviate; and little in the way of allegiance to the sensitivities of others, speaking out loudly and relentlessly at those things they find unfair, irresponsible or destructive. They both have a penchant for saying inappropriate things in public.

Equally, many of the elderly are also in the position of liberty and regeneration, being reasonably capitalised without the stricture of a working day or people to answer to. Both also enjoy a strong sense of community that seems bleakly lacking in the striving grinding scratching generations that separate them (unless of course you think the togetherness of mutual Lexii ownership or collective apple upgrades represent communities of any real worth.)

It is these similarities in nature and self that lead me to believe that they are the two primary stakeholders in building a more resilient model of humanity and the architects of a more enduring aspirational life.

And I believe wholeheartedly that it will take both of them. There is too much pressure being put on the shoulders of the excited young to use their seamlessly connected collectivism to compel companies to act more responsibly, to shape a kinder less tyrannical form of consumption, and ultimately to be more capable of finding meaning within their own means. They simply lack one thing: the kind of resilience and adaptability that is only ever learnt through multiple sustained and not always pleasant experiences being endured over time; and a clear sense of the inevitability of consequence come what may.

Young people need the easy, reflex and second nature wisdoms of thrift and financial integrity of the older generations. They need mentors to help them build a more integrated, inclusive and supportive society; the benefit of which they will come to reap eventually.

Oldies need to be brought in from the cold for a number of reasons not only just to supplement and compliment the young in the shaping of a more enduring model aspiration. Their return to a central role in society would be a salve to the fractured communities and families we increasingly exist within, with parents and grandparents increasingly isolated as younger families move further afield.

There is a dreadful lack of economy, efficiency and foresight in the speed with which we dispense those slightly worn generations into some inert anaglypta hell with a name drawn from the lexicon of calming rolling rural pastures or idyllic flora & fauna. (Even the best of God’s waiting rooms still suffer a dreadful absence of young people in their halls as reminders of the living.)

Thankfully, the brittle brutal truths of austerity, the death of cheap money and the comedy of house prices are making people reconsider bi and tri generational living again. Not to say that will be rose scented from the off. It will reignite some of the old issues of proximity certainly amongst generations with radically different perceptions of what is good right and fair.

Part of the original dislocation was due to the fact that the oldies of yore remained quite attached to some of their more suspect beliefs even as the world turned. Their casually voiced views and derogatory referencing to foreigners broadly and specifically people of a different ethnicity marked out by colour and homosexuality to name the two biggies didn’t roll too well with the newly liberal uber-youth. This only served to exacerbate the social and familial ruptures.

The unacceptable nature of these traits rightly needed rebalancing but it became a reasonable much cited excuse for us to condone abandonment and simply eject them from the framework of what constituted a decent functioning liberal society.

In doing so we threw the wrinkly baby out with the bathwater. Because with them went all of the old wisdoms of making ends meet, make do and mend, waste not want not, the economies of leftovers, smart buying and existing and still finding meaning within ones means. And it is the nature of those wisdoms that will secure young people’s futures.

For all of the old jokes – Quick, Get teenagers to run the world while they still know it all – the immutable emphatic heart, energy and passion of youth is fragile. They need the irrepressible mettle of oldies and the life wisdoms that come with them. The combination would be amazing.

Brands, especially ones that have been around a while, could find amazing ways to harness this power duo – starting from the inside out and the ground up. Formally connecting the young graduates, interns and apprentices with the retirees and wise owls would recalibrate how a company develops its service propositions and extant purpose in a far more holistic manner.

Telecoms and Broadband providers with an interest in building cohesive societies could fill the gaps that tech progress leaves behind. They could allow fractured or distant families to utilise skype culture to reconnect old and young as part of a Family Broadband Offering.

Educational groups could help children on the verge of dropping out of school by giving them access to the perspectives of a generation of old people who can speak from a lifetime of knowing about the decisions we all make in haste – some with regret some with joy – but all without the hectoring proximity and intensity of a parent made fractious and intransigent because they are both scratching out the bills as well as steering their brood.

But where it really gets exciting is through the introduction of the question ‘Why?’ When we sit around and hack new technologies, create new products, most looking a pale shade of difference to the ones we’ve already got. To raise the question Why? Why spend the money on a tiny upgrade? Why make a 5 bladed version of a 4 bladed razor? Why triple pack food you’ll waste some or all of? Why burn money you don’t have? Why?

The energy and passion of youth with the calm caution and questioning nature of age would create the killer innovations department in most any business.

So here’s to the hard-core stakeholders and architects of better, the oldies and the youngies: old wisdoms and young hearts reshaping a more measured and enduring future.

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Tag Archives: resilience

Mutual desire, shared resilience & A Stairway to Heaven

Brands, old-school Diplomacy & the New Humanities

The Dimensions of Desire & The Human Ghost in the Value Chain Machine

Old heads, Young Hearts & The Foot soldiers of resilient humanity.