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The Evil Mdudu, Political Correctness & sustainable storytelling

04 Thursday Apr 2019

Posted by Thin Air Factory in Uncategorized

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Africa, Alphabravos, Children's TV series, Christmas Trees, Despots, Do-gooders, Ethnic & gender Insensitivity, fattism, Gender Fluid, Global Sustainability Goals, Good baddies, Human Imperfection, Monotheistic faiths, Non aggresive, patriarchy, PC Police, Stereotypes, storytelling, Sustainability, Thomas the Tank Engine, Tyrants

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Sustainable storytelling doesn’t really feel very, well, sustainable. Not in the ‘joyous, must watch, slightly addictive, surprised me’ department anyway.

There’s lots of one off pieces that capture people’s attention. But I’ve seen little in the serial, episodic department to thrill and inspire me to consider a slightly more resilient and sustainable existence.

And my last blog reminded me of some of the reasons for why.

I faintly praised the recent alignment of the Thomas The Tank Engine franchise and the 17 Global Sustainability Goals. The reason for the faintness lay in the need of someone to reengineer the narratives and characters to make them more ‘correct’ – balanced, even, fair and ultimately, possibly anodyne?

Re-engineering narratives and characters to remove friction, discomfort, distaste – the inappropriate and the sometimes highly imperfect humanity of them – leaves a massive hole in the realm of sustainable communications.

In the blog I referred to what I see as a fundamental truth. Doing good does not require everyone to be insufferably ‘good’.

Bad is good, especially in storytelling. Bad provides friction. Discomfort and imperfection make for more interesting narratives. Fact. Ask anyone who has to do this for a living.

And ironing out the creases of our imperfect humanity –  our need to swear and cuss, our inappropriate and sometimes sleepwalk stereotyping; our baseness, our old prejudices and new loathings; our lazy referencing; erasing all of that makes no sense to me. 

People love a good baddy. In fact our waking dislike of goody-goodies mostly outweighs our dislike of baddies.

This came to me like a rather late, lazy lightning bolt [ my lightning bolt had obviously chosen the slowest Southern Rail train, two buses and a walk] as opposed to the one that once released from the hands of the gods, scorches through the sky to light up what it strikes like a Christmas Tree [a theologically and culturally specific reference that may exclude some rather arch followers of monotheistic faiths other than the Christian one that bore the cultural ritualism of the Christmas Tree but I’m not changing it – as in this lies half of my point].

The lazy bolt struck me while in the middle of a conversation with Mark Downes, an old colleague and friend of mine. We were discussing how to develop his Alphabravos idea further – develop the story arcs and the characters.

Now the Alphabravos is Mark’s idea for an episodic Children’s film/tv series designed to entertain and educate children about creating a more sustainable world, using 5 key Alphabravo characters and a slew more for good measure.

What struck me was that our focus lay in the purposefully decent, cool and quirky good guys – the Alphabravos themselves. And therein lay a missed trick.

The baddie was our best bit. The mad, bad and dangerous to know Mdudu was the greatest unrealised character in the whole idea. In fact, in true megalomaniac socio-psychopathic fully paid up narcissist fashion, it was all about him. 

Yes, the individual Alphabravo characters would allow various children of various [self identified] genders to choose their favourite character to emulate and through which to learn the behaviours of a more sustainable life, but Mdudu was the flame that the moths would fly to. The deeper, richer, most enduring and attractive human element in the whole thing.

Because thats what we do. We need the baddie to be the best character because in most traditional storytelling, the baddie is usually us at our ugly worst. Our unvarnished heavily flawed now – the perfect arrive starting point – and the heroes are us as we could be. The baddie is the measure by which we mark our hope; our optimism of what could be and the journey to it.

So baddies are the best.

So in Alphabravo world that meant that Mdudu, in all his camp, scratchy, self-obsessed sightly savant, childish, distracted, brutal and nihilistic ugliness was the most beautiful thing that we have.

And he must be developed. But more importantly than that, he must be protected. Because if the PC Police got half a whiff of him, heres how the conversation might go:

So Mdudu, great name. What’s that about?

Mdudu. yeah he’s our big bad baddie. We love the name. Its actually a Swahili name, originally from the Arabic, for a large parasitic insect.

Hmmmn. Well that’s not very cool. A little ethnic stereotyping there perhaps? 

Huh?

The blight on the world comes from Africa and the Middle East. Is that your point? A continent exclusively populated by despots, megalomaniacs,tyrants, environmental spoilers and murderers?  That won’t do. Especially when your baddie is shaped by a western, white hand. Oh no. No No No! Thats just perpetuating ancient prejudices and colonial propoganda. So there’s a real ethnic defamation issue here. Anyway. Let’s keep it positive. Lets see if we can salvage this. Why is he called that?

Because it rhymes with ‘poo’.

Well thats very mature!

Well its not meant to be. This is for 6-8 year olds. Everything is a fart gag and a poo joke.

Is it though? Really?

Yes. And I forgot to include bogies [boogers to our American cousins]. 

But that is so…so, infantile

We can’t go telling a 6 year old that Mdudu is a socio-psychopathic megalomaniacal destroyer of the planet’s natural capital, who lays waste to communities through flood, famine, war, pestilence and environmental degradation. Its far easier to say Mdudu is a big fat poo.

I’m sorry – a what?

A big fat poo.

Well that’s incredibly insensitive.

What is?

Calling someone big and fat? We just don’t appreciate that kind of language. Very negative. Judgemental. That really won’t do.

He’s a giant, animated, vaguely camp, clumsy baddie who’s a bit crap at his job. C’mon!!

No, really! First off, why is he a He? Pretty standard gender stereotyping of human tyranny and venality as being the sole domain of the male if you ask me. Psychopathic elitism. Ergo; Man strong woman weak. Sexism – pure and simple. And its all so SENSATIONALIST! Why can’t it be more, well, relevant. Laying waste to the world? Who does that? And I really don’t appreciate the recidivist cliche of baddies being camp – obviously playing back into some post-WWII caricature of the cruel, lisping Nazi Gauleiter – and making him clumsy to boot – an object of ridicule! Surely we are more advanced than this? 

Nope. And I didn’t mention the speech impediment by the way. You said lisping. Not me. But I like it!

That’s not helping. And ‘big’ and ‘fat’ are clearly, well, fattest and sizist, so they are a No from us.

What?

And ‘poo’? Really. Can;t we do better than Poo?

We? When did my Me idea become a We idea? 

Wisdom of the Crowds is everything – surely you know that? And wheres the redemption in all of this. Surely Mdudu is on a journey to redemption, no? On a journey to, errmmm, a less pooey future?

Not really. His job is to be what we kick against. What we fight. The possibility for bad in all of us. His job is to be BAD!!! What do you want him to be? A giant, humourless, flawless, good natured global gender-fluid mostly misunderstood Being (as we wouldn’t want to offend a species or genus – insect or otherwise – now would we): a Being of no real provenance or roots or ethnic specificity, with redeeming features like attending Mindfulness counselling when he’s not trying lay waste to the world?

You’re doing that sensationalist thing again – but yes, so let’s work with this. Collaborate and co-create it. So Sure. let’s say for example we keep him in the rhyming world. You could call the baddie Being ‘Do’ instead of Mdudu. It’s positive, action orientated, non gender specific. And if you really have to make a poo rhyme you still can. And yes, mindfulness counselling sounds terrific. Positive attributes. Striving for better. Optimistic.

OK so let me get this straight: the baddy is called Do, as in ‘doing’; is a broadly good natured slightly misunderstood gender non specific with no ethnic or genus specificity, whom, between doing vaguely unpleasant non-sensational things, attends self-help groups for mindfulness and anger management. And perhaps runs a Clean Up campaign in his local park?

Perfect.

Wow.

What?

You just sucked the light out of the world. I want to go and hide in a very, very dull, dark room.

Now you’re just being childish.

Yes. That’s the point. Its called aligning with your audience.

Still childish

Fart face

I rest my case.   

 

To find out more about the Alphabravos, go to: https://alphabravos.com

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

22 Tuesday Apr 2014

Posted by Thin Air Factory in Uncategorized

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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

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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.

storytellers, trust & the power of simple sincerities.

02 Wednesday Apr 2014

Posted by Thin Air Factory in Uncategorized

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Caring about what people care about, changing the language of sustainability, Commercial & Civic Alignment, Copenhagen Film Company, Corporate Integrity, Credentials, Emotion vs. Reason, Intellect worn lightly, Mads Ovlisen, Maya Angelou, people Powered Change, Setting the Agenda, Stakeholder power, storytelling, Sustainability Pillars, Tone Of Voice, Trust. Sustainable Strategy, UNGC

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I watched a film today. A discrete film. An understated film. A short film.

No popcorn. No slash cut dash glut editing. No highly confected verite cutaways. No corporate schlock horror probe. No desperately arch atavistic activist paddling in their own propaganda.

The film, by the Copenhagen Film Company, focused all of its attention on one man.

The camera is unwavering. A set up shot. A few discernible cuts. One push in. Otherwise, clean, clinical and respectful of the subject.

Sitting in a sparse elevated office, we see incidentally through the window behind the subject that life relentlessly trammels on behind and below, regardless of us and our elevated conversations.

The man, Mads Ovlisen, a Senior Advisor at the United Nations Global Compact, speaks of running sustainable businesses. He speaks of the UNGC, committed to setting the agenda and aligning policy around sustainability issues – Energy, Water, Agriculture, Renewables, Food, Transportation, Building and Pharmaceuticals: most every pillar and issue one might ever imagine turning up on a company’s sustainability strategy slide.

He speaks of a discrete yet powerful stakeholder group who collectively make astonishing impacts in the world through their brands and businesses. He speaks of how much fortitude it takes to merge civil and corporate interests.

The man speaks of things that still fall far from the ears or the offices of the average Brand Jonny or Jane (and probably far from their frame of reference or, to be blunt, self interest). Though, to be fair, they would I hope understand the emotion that the film evoked in me.

Maya Angelou’s exposition on the transformative power of emotion versus reason – “I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel”-  is a powerful philosophical sound bite for an ad man or woman looking to do more creative and insightful storytelling.

It is one I respect, as I do spend most of my time seeking to make very complex things simple through creative story telling.

But the storytelling here is not some confected theme or hashtag slogan mantra being played out. The storytelling here is in the nature of the Storyteller.

It is not the dry content of his words that I particularly remember: though there is one axial moment in his discourse that did fix itself in my memory.

“This is about how a company makes its money, not about how it spends it”

The scintillating simplicity of the statement enables one to view a company’s resilience strategy with a powerful philosophical clarity.

If a company finds that its focus resides in the first part of the phrase – the pursuit of a more sustainable business becomes seemingly infused with a richer seam of intentions – of purpose beyond profit, ethical perspectives and corporate morality – and it gives a clear measure of the degree of humanity that might be enshrined within that company.

If the focus is on the second part, then the company errs on the side of rational efficiencies and economies and smart procurement – potent and very very necessary but a far less compelling and more importantly far less desirable mantra in attracting the right people towards that company.

The reason why this subtle difference is or should be so important to companies is rooted in the part of their resilience strategy that demands best possible future talent be attracted in to the business.

I sense that the leadership and purpose at play in the first shading is vastly more attractive to Millennials than the second, which suddenly feels quite ’90s Business School in comparison.

Its not about which one is right or wrong. It is about which one is more powerful and compelling: and fit for the purpose. And though the ability to sustain itself financially is paramount and primary to any business’s success, its ability to relentlessly and profitably attract best in class new and enlightened talent has to be the only strategy for purposeful future growth and stability.

As I have said, for me, though powerful, it is not ultimately this axiom that made me ‘feel’ something to remember beyond the words. It was the man that I found more compelling. He was the story. The storyteller as the living embodiment of the story he tells.

It was not what he was saying so much as how he said it: his demeanour in the telling.

Simply put, his easy intelligence held lightly, the fixedness and the quiet purpose of his delivery were what drew me in. His eyes and his voice where in some ways hypnotic. A ruse perhaps the cynics might say. Or is he just another modulated technocrat? Maybe.

But the simple fact for me is that his demeanour, delivery and my sense of the integrity of his intention created license for me to find his arguments both authentic and trustworthy.

I would go and listen to him speak again. I WANT to find out more of what’s in his head and heart. And therein lies the emotional killer insight.

Why is this so compelling to me?

Having spent a large amount of time around the professional cabal of the sustainability world and the consultancies that advise them, I find the thing this man seemed to hold within him all too often surprisingly lacking in the room.

I realize now that the sustainability scene is populated with the same kind of politicking sociopaths and psychopaths as the financial and advertising worlds that the sustainability crowd so often deride. A realisation which to be fair simply throws a sharp light on my naivety.

The messianic fervor of righteousness is never far away. One need only scratch a little to find it. This should at best be a powerful driver towards a success. But all to often it can equally become blinded and corrupted by its own sense of righteousness and lose sight of all that it has consistently fought for

I said once that I was stunned by the amount of self interest I found in what is vaunted as a shared interest space. In the 3 years between that observation and today that feeling has only strengthened. (As someone who has spent near on 30 years in the Ad world that’s starting from a fairly low expectation base and heavily tinged with black, kettles and pots but bear with me.)

BUT the sudden clarity the film gave me around the simple human levers and pulleys: of a voice and eyes that I trust. And the sudden realization that when imparting a world view, it really does matter if the storyteller’s smile seems to barely penetrate past the retina, or simply fixes like a grimace slung under cold eyes. It really does matter whether I find the storyteller sympatico or antipatico because if I don’t trust the messenger or the storyteller, the message is utterly lost to me both rationally and more importantly emotionally.

Playing ones intellect and credentials before you into very carefully prepared rooms like a buttered juggernaut full of Bona Fides to ensure the room is won before it is entered takes us nowhere – other than to the next room.

Does that mean I think we should all grin like an idiot or play the touchy feely ‘down with the people’ card? Or not deploy fierce intellects when they are needed for fear of intellectual bullying?

Not at all. I would be the first to say that the way in which intellect is wielded, whether in arch seriousness or as playful banter is more a matter of style, circumstance and empathy than a measure of integrity.

I am the first to admit that my own flippancy and ‘lightness of touch’ brings the veracity of my deeper values and beliefs in this space into question amongst people who do not see levity as even faintly endearing.

I am certain it annoys the crap out of some of the more esteemed minds of the sector, especially if they feel people such as I are seeking only to trivialize their cause.

BUT I am on a populist agenda: I want us to find the language, the demeanour and the presence that makes more people turn towards us, listen and find what we impart desirable and accommodating of the real life they lead.

So for me there needs to be creative storytelling based upon what people care about to illuminate sustainability truths. And there needs to be humanity. But mostly there needs to be trust. Trust that is human and effortless; not something we demand via an attrition of rationality and polemics.

It’s a simple human mechanism: Do I trust the person imparting the ‘wisdom’ to me. Do they make me feel bad and stupid? Or good and smart? If its good and smart: Great. Thanks. Two of those please.

Who knows. Perhaps I am far too one dimensional for all of this and I miss the complexities and subtleties inherent in the thrust and parry of the polemicists.

All I do know is that the average man or woman trying to get to the end of the month and have a nice life without bankrupting themselves and the planet need some Trust in there to even begin to listen and change tack.

Degrees, conferences, credentialing, linked in profiles or executive steering committee positions are great to set the agenda but not to democratise it. They just don’t cut it with the 85+% of the people out there. That’s your dinner party conversation. Not their life.

So I return to the film. And the man who speaks discretely. Sets out his stall: his beliefs, and the benefits of what he does.

At the end of it he gets my vote. I’d put him in a pub with a load of people I was trying to bring round to the cause.

He might not be their cup of tea. They might even find him boring.

But I think they’d trust him.

The film can be found at http://thisistouch.com/this-is/the-news/

Storytelling, the Circular Economy & uncovering the marks of desirable identity

17 Monday Mar 2014

Posted by Thin Air Factory in Uncategorized

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Authenticity, back to the future brand strategies, Bottle Refunds, Caring about what people care about, Coca Cola, desire, Identity, Integrity, Management Consultancies, Second Hand Stuff. The Profile Bottle., Social Strategy, storytelling, The Circular Economy, The Happiness Factory

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A year of so ago someone at an unnamed Management Consultancy asked my opinion on why a very rigorous and robust case for a premium beer manufactured wholly on a circular economy model might fail to light a consumer’s fire.

All the ingredients for success were there. A more than decent liquid product with a little room for some tweaking. Simple reuse strategy of bottles, a clear distribution network to run a reverse logistics offering across; state of the art cleaning and preparation process of the used bottles; no loss or tainting of liquid content or loss of quality guaranteed.

Furthermore there had been clear segmentation to suggest that there was a well disposed audience waiting in the wings to consume an intelligent beverage as defined by an interest in purpose beers, smart production and the socialisation of exception and personal identity –  the fun stuff like mass customization of the beer brand experience as pioneered by social network fuelled personalized label offerings. “I liked the beer so much they put my name on it”

The ultimate kicker was the maths. Wholly sound. Geared to grow. Great figures. Nice curve. Everything was sweet.

EXCEPT.

Some lunatic had taken the idea into a consumer research space and asked the average beer drinker what they thought; with no thought given to the story of the product and how it tied into the identity of the drinker.

Doh!

I know little, and increasingly less – but the one thing I have realized as a beer drinker and a watcher of consumers for some time is that once the base line need and accessibility issues are overcome and the financial bridge crossed:

I’m thirsty. I need a lift. There’s a bar. I have a fiver.

The last thing is the ‘lip smack moment in the 10 seconds before the order. What label on that shelf or pump head with all of its reserves of delivery, friendliness, cache and identity will hit the spot?

The matters of identity become elevated to near religious proportions especially in the realm of lager lager lager and the race to the middle (or bottom as some would frame the quality of industrial scale lager production and the brands they deliver).

To walk into a room with a load of drinkers and simply take them through the rational functional concept of circulating glassware and refilling, all backed up by a zero water strategy delivered through off setting simply isn’t going to do it.

There is no desire in the spreadsheet and rationality of a production line; even a circular one – only in what it promises, transports or delivers.

I’m feeling the beer and drinking the beer before I’m thinking the beer.

If it was real ale that would be different. If it was micro-brewery panache that would be compulsory. But not in this instance.

All I could do was to respond to the consultant with the simple question: where’s the storytelling? Where’s the everyday human insightful ‘it’ that every stakeholder can seize upon and unify around? from the brewer employee, to the bottle blower, the water strategist, the production engineer, the hop grower, the distribution partners and most importantly the drinker

Where I asked does the storytelling that draws from the circular truth of the product meet the circulating needs of and storytelling of the drinker’s identity?

If I am to drink from a recycled and reused bottle what am I to think of the bottle I hold and the beer that it carries. It’s not a smart beer. I don’t want a smart beer. I want a beer that’s ‘me’. Or a beer that ticks the badge box of the Me I’d like to be; and goes down nicely on the way to the heart of my repertoire.

So we explored a little more the idea of recycled and reused bottles and the storytelling of a ‘goes around comes’ around world.

For me, the reused bottle is etched into my psyche via the memory of the Coca-Cola bottles I used to see racked up by the side of the bars on the continent (Italy France & Spain were my direct experiences).

Their surfaces mottled pitted and misted by thousands of the tiniest scuffs, scratches and scrapes, these bottles merrily wended their way back to the bottler to be washed and refilled and resold to me and the myriad millions of others who happily consumed from them again and again.

Those bottles with their multiple rewards experience – anticipation, grasp of the bottle, the glass to the lips, the taste, the finish and the return and rewards in the shape of a deposit refund pricing system. These were complete little eco systems of joy.

(I still believe to this day that the Happiness Factory traded touching millions of hearts for touching billions of lips in their transition away from glass to the can and PET or now PLA varieties of packaging. Nothing says summer in the heart like grasping the profile bottle. If Coca Cola ever wanted to take a trip back to the future, re engage in what made them great and differentiate themselves once more they could do worse than figure out the circular logistics and shift everything back to glass. Full Stop.)

I digress. So the marking of multiple life cycles like those on those bottles is a rich texture of story telling. And sets the bottles out as something with an innate integrity of multiple existences.

This is something that we already value as human beings. We consciously or subconsciously rate and measure people by the marks life leaves behind and the marks they choose to make on themselves. The marks they carry on the outside are testament to the lives they have lived and the richness of experience therefore that may reside on the inside.

A beer that travels in such a receptacle might be viewed as a richer brew much like the human being with the abstract unexplained scar, the post operative welt, the skateboard injury, the tattoo, the tribal motif.

SO if I were to have to go into a room tomorrow and set out the story telling of a beer founded on a goes around comes around circular production system I would probably tell it thus:

A real beer comes in a bottle that’s lived a little.

It starts to tell me a story into which I the drinker am to be inextricable woven.

But more importantly it compels you the brewer to create a better product: to fill that bottle with a liquid that is defining in some way – differentiated – not a homogenous wash but a picante brew. With some spice and edge. Disquieting and memorable – but ultimately that shines some light on a grey day.

The circular compound nature of the bottle that’s lived a little also compels you to write a more interesting social nature and behaviour into the fabric of it – and to build a ‘reward’ in at every round.

Perhaps there is a trademark mark that is applied every time it goes through. Perhaps there is a diary of life for the bottle – of the lips and lives it has touched.

Crass or unpleasant to some – but to those towards the edges, looking for something with more chutzpah; perhaps a more desirable story.

So scar my glass with a promise that reaches beyond peddling same old same old. Set the spirit and authentic product truth of the product at the heart of the story: a story that elevates the fundamental brilliance of a wholly circular concept in bottled beer.

Then I might be inclined to take up that beer and tattoo it on my heart.

For a while at least.

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

03 Monday Feb 2014

Posted by Thin Air Factory in Uncategorized

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Tags

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

cuffs_and_kevlar_note_book-r71d212403d5f4799b390661f225ad269_ambg4_8byvr_324
Having recently been on the receiving end of the questions – “what exactly do you believe?” and ‘what do you do all day?” I thought that I should set out my Thin Air Factory stall a little more clearly.
A Storyteller’s Manifesto
AKA what I get to do and love to do when someone asks:
I believe that one of the greatest factors in securing the exceptional resilience of a company lies in identifying and creating the most resilient nature and model of its storytelling.
I call this Resilient Storytelling©
Resilient Storytelling© is storytelling that can inspire every stakeholder to more resilient actions that are beneficial to the nature and performance of the company without danger of that storytelling being set aside, dismissed as an excuse for inaction or evasion or seen as excluding: storytelling that cannot be called ‘thin’, inappropriate, inauthentic, irrelevant; dismissed as gloss or icing, or simply seen as faddy, fluffy, short-term and short-sighted.
By its very nature Resilient Storytelling© must:
  • be resilient in itself – able to take the knocks, whether they come from an investigative or riled NGO on the one hand or a disgruntled consumer activist agitating in the social networks on the other.
  • inspire greater resilience in others: every audience being moving by even the slightest degree towards greater advocacy and engagement with every telling 
To do that it must be fit for purpose, forged from a whole picture of the company – not just its individual functions and layers.  To create storytelling that can absorb the turbulence and flux of the ever-changing, ever-evolving world a company seeks to thrive in, that storytelling must embrace the 4 corners of the company; from the top of its brand to the bottom of its business supply chain, and from one end of its value chain and stakeholder group to the other.
Resilient Storytelling© creates a clear sense of unified purpose beyond profit, a clear central tenet of adaptive governance to shape, manage and distribute the mutual endeavour that purpose demands, and the shared benefits it offers: it engenders greater and more cogent social collectivism and engagement across every stakeholder group.
Resilient Storytelling© is inclusive, inspiring and as adaptive as the company. It frames the integrity of every relationship the company generates and engages in, and shapes every piece of communication the company produces in undertaking and maintaining those relationships. Resilient Storytelling is storytelling that can relentlessly inspire and drive advocacy in every stakeholder.
Resilient Storytelling© is one that reconciles and reframes the most compelling, differentiated and most valuable points of systemic, operational and material resilience (the sustainability and CSR aspects and traits in the company) to the greatest number of shareholders with meaning and effect – allowing these truths of shared resilience to be drawn up into the storytelling in a way that is accessible to all (not just the brilliant scientists, engineers and strategists who define, design and deploy the drivers of those sustainability truths).
Resilient Storytelling© must be founded on exploring, understanding and respecting the relationship between the different shades of desire enshrined in every stakeholder across its Value Chain, including which points of resilience are most compelling and authentic to every one of them.
(There is little point focusing on points of resilience, and then storytelling around them in isolation – they are and must be seen as just one evidential part of a wider and more coherent value system at work and have been reconciled inside it.)
Resilient Storytelling© is both the VOICE of MUTUAL DESIRE in the company: and the reflection of the strongest and most compelling points of SHARED RESILIENCE, and a primary source of increasing resilience in itself.
A slightly weird diagram to prove a point:
Image

Most storytelling operates in very distinct vertical or horizontal blocks – for example, broadcast and bought media delivering desire generating materials with little reference to points of systemic material or social resilience of the company – a bit too much y and not enough x.

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

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

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

Trunks, Junk, Science & bees that go BOOM in da room

16 Thursday Jan 2014

Posted by Thin Air Factory in Uncategorized

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Tags

Beyonce. bees, Biodiversity, Cross The Chasm, Lighter Language, macro photography, Playful Science, Polarity of Impact, Pollen, storytelling, Sustainability Storytelling

Image OK. As my preferred space in the world is that of using language and creative storytelling to make very complex or otherwise arcane subjects fun approachable and palatable.

And as I celebrate anyone who has the ability to lighten up to make a serious point, I am currently enamoured with the work of Sam Droege and his team at USGS Bee Inventory and Monitoring lab.

Their bee portraits, featured in the Observer’s Tech monthly article last week, were truly awe inspiring.

But the biggie for me was the lightness of touch involved in how Sam summarised the amazing diarising and macro photography of these beautiful creatures.

“We do select out the supermodel bees”. “We wash them in soapy water and then we blow dry the to make them look good”.

Now, using drop dead photography to make smaller insects, especially those holding the key to keeping the biodiversity tree flourishing and fecund, might be a well trodden path. But the lightness of touch did not end there.

It only got better with the revelation that a bootylicious bee had been named after Beyonce Knowles

It seems that Bryan Lessard, a researcher at Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization, on finding a newly discovered horsefly in Australia with a golden-haired behind, named it Scaptia Beyonceae. That’s Beyonce to you and I. The reasoning is simple enough.

A stroke of Genus genius if you ask me.

That the given name might bring a titan of bio-diversity into the interest framework of an urban 12 year old girl is exactly what every scientist should wish for. The delight of generating Inappropriate degrees of opposite impact; in such a way as to open up the amazing topic of insects to a teenager has to be good.

In the Huffington Post piece Lessard went on to point out “It’s extremely important to name all the un-described species so we can measure our human impact on the environment and hopefully protect it for future generations to enjoy.”

Now if we could get more sustainability practitioners, boffins and innovators to apply the same tack, we might perhaps start with a better communications brief for the brand or communications whizz bangs to start with.

So I’m saying yes to bootylicious bees and the joy-filled triviality of word play and pop culture.

This is the kind of thing that reaches across chasms.

Joy.

PS Is it me or does Anthrophora Bomboides look a little like Orville The Duck, given a little green fur tinting?

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