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Mutual desire, shared resilience & A Stairway to Heaven

24 Monday Aug 2015

Posted by Thin Air Factory in Uncategorized

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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

2014-08-13-Stairway_TO_Heaven_by_InToXiCaTeD__StOcK

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?

Complexity, simplicity & the craft of resilient brand story making

30 Sunday Nov 2014

Posted by Thin Air Factory in Uncategorized

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And that is bad.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Until they suddenly get interested.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Solution?

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

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

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

Screen Shot 2014-11-30 at 14.49.00

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

Complexity. Insight. Territory. Simplicity

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

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

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

Hell hath no fury like a consumer scorned.

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