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Lego Batman, Man Crushes & the original Sustainability Vigilante.

01 Monday Apr 2019

Posted by Thin Air Factory in Uncategorized

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Ben Affleck, BFG, Censoriousness, Chauvinism, Christian Bale, Crossing the Chasm, Dark Night, George Clooney, Global Sustainability Goals, Good & Evil, Human Friction, Humour, Irony, Lego Batman, Lobster Claws, Man Crush, matilde, Michael Keaton, Piety, Pilgrims, Plastic Caped Crusader, Political Correctness, Roald Dahl, Social Impact, Sustainability, Sustainability Vigilante, sustainable brands, Thomas the Tank Engine, Tim Burton, Willy Wonka

Screen Shot 2019-04-01 at 12.30.33.png

Ok, I admit it. I have a huge Man Crush on Lego Batman.

Yes, Lego Batman.

Nope. Not Batman. Or the Dark Knight. This is not a homo-erotic entreat to the wiry, muscular Christian Bale, or a slightly sloppy hug for big bad Ben [pre or post cocktail].

And though I feel that Keaton’s socio-psychopathic gift to the Burton Batmans was remarkable [is it me or do the Burton-Batmans sound like a rather smart family from Cape Cod?), and gorgeous George is always worth a mention, it is the small plasticky, modular superhero who has my heart.

Lego Batman is petulant, childish, misguided, isolated, narcissistic to the level of a clinical pathology BUT he’s still fundamentally a good and fun guy – and the ultimate role model, both literally [he’s modelled out of plastic pieces] ethically [he’s aways trying to shut down or thwart some toxic shocker or other] and symbolically [the Bat Sign is a beacon in the world that says bad awful things will always get their just and plastic desserts in the end].

Unlike the Dark Knight – he who broods in an enormous bat-winged cape on various V tall buildings – Lego Batman’s super-power resides in his all round, kinda clumsy unfunny dork-like coolness – or as a social strategist might say, his social reach. He is simply a lot more attractive and palatable to a far wider range of type and age-groups of people.

Lets face it, the highly cinematic and terribly troubled Bruce Wayne can get a little ‘BORING’ – but as soon as he is rendered in very shiny black plastic, has ‘Nope nope nope no no nope no Nope’ tantrums  and crunches his way through microwaved Lobster claws, shell on, whats not to like?

Lego Batman’s love of industrial metal & grind core, and working with black, black, black and very dark grey, though broody and nihilistic in some ways, is really quite chirpy and redeeming.

And sure, he has a tendency to pop off with his Star Wars buddies just at the moment when he’s meant to be helping his Lego Movie buddy Emmet save everyone – and he struggles to maintain a text-book balanced and mutually beneficial relationship – but who wouldn’t; and doesn’t sometimes.

But my main love for characters like Lego Batman is rooted in their ability to be transcendent – to be able to be dark and light and left and right and rare and middle and base and grubby and funny and sad and inspiring; all at once.

It is an ability that the realm of Sustainability, Social Impact and those who’ve tasked themselves with rebalancing society could do with embracing far more.

The sustainability agenda needs all the transcendence it can get in the human department.

Though enormous steps forwards have been made [even getting it on the agenda of some corporations took decades of work and the relentless commitment of some very professionally brave people], there is still a deep division between the engineered integrity of the organisational, systemic and material change being undertaken at scale in large organisations and corporations and the insight and subtlety of the communicating voice and tone of the messaging that announces and celebrates these transformations for all the world to see.

It is the lightness of touch and the ability of characters like Lego Batman to appeal to all age groups in a very human and funny way that I find the most powerful. Especially in this space. The chiaroscuro of human nature, including the more childish and incorrect aspects of who we are as creatures needs to be front and centre to engage people.

But there seems to be a view amongst those trying to do something serious in the world that levity and playfulness diminishes or infantilises otherwise serious issues or points to be made. And that even when something childlike is to be used, it has to be ‘corrected’ in a trough of vanilla moralising and social engineering to make it finally palatable to a pungently consensual audience of rare intelligence. 

The recent Thomas The Tank work around the Global Sustainability Goals, though wholly admirable, still ended up quite prim, was overly gender engineered, and in doing so ended up lacking humanity for me. 

Friction is a human truth – friction tension and raw energy are essential in characterisations – even in children’s characters. The Homogenisation and cultural symmetry being inflicted on a lot of characterisations in pursuit of correctness these days seems inhuman to me. Humanity is imbalanced in so many highly nuanced and inextricable ways that to remove all imbalance between good and bad seems a fruitless pursuit.

Roald Dahl was the master of exploring dissonant and highly complex narratives inside beautiful whimsical and ultimately charming storytelling. The unvarnished nature and grimness of some of his characters made the stories all the more compelling.

Is Lego Batman on a par with the conflicted beauty of BFG or the moral ambivalence of Willy Wonka, the staggering and mystical precocity of Matilde and the creature narcissism of the Fantastic Mr Fox? Probably not.

But I’d still like to put Lego Batman forwards as the new prince [or princess; croissant or cork wedge shoe, depending on what gender he is identifying with at any given time] of sustainable communications.

I would rather have the 17 UN Global Sustainability Goals unpacked by the schlocky, childish, self-obsessed and mostly black plastic Lego Batman to a soundtrack by Ensturzende Neubauten than be cudgelled quietly by the imperious correctness of the reengineered Thomas The Tank Engine.

The Sustainability Vigilante picking on poor unsuspecting people with utterly inappropriate levels of vigilantism, weaponry and violent attrition for even the smallest infringement of a Global Sustainability Goal objective could be VERY funny. 

Commissioner Gordon’s wife bins three perfectly recyclable containers…dun dun dahhhhhhh…without rinsing them!!!……arrggghhhh …cue trip hammer drum riff and crunching guitars…the roof ripped off the apartment block, a salvo of bat rockets pummelling the front room, followed by bat-swooping beatings metered out to her and everyone else in the block for good measure.

Lego Batman stringing up the old man from the Soda Shop as a highly sexually-suspect chauvinist and patroniser of women [how can I help you this fine sunny morning little lady?] or battering three men to a pulp with Bat hammers because they were found to be using face Scrub with Micro-beads could make for highly entertaining mini episodes of a whole series of ‘GSG themed’ Lego Batman content. We’d still get the point. But we’d also manage it with a little bumpiness and some conflicted humanity.  

Doing good things and being a force for good in the world is not predicated on being insufferably GOOD. Goodness needs a foil to be real to the majority of people. People can learn immeasurably good things from bad or flawed people. And good people can only find their edges when confronted by bad things and people. The friction is essential.  Adopting a Pilgrim approach to communicating good things is not the answer. But we are still doing it.

Perhaps the pilgrim piety that is still shaping sustainability communications is the same malaise that is rendering out safe space thinking in universities so that children and young people grow up believing that it is also possible to get through life without ever having to listen to something we disagree with or find unpalatable – simply by forcibly exorcising it from our immediate society – and see that as a ‘good’ thing. Dunno. But, as history has shown us, both the ‘Crusader’ thing and seemingly benign regimes where control is increasingly applied to blot out dissenting voices, when done with little or no humour and a highly tuned sense of irony, tend to end badly most of the time. 

So blah blah blah. We must learn to speak of sustainability in human terms without homogenising and cleansing it of all human flaw and friction.

If we are to cross the chasm and move to engaging a far, far broader church of people and inspiring them to happily act upon more sustainable lifestyles it has to feel less goody goody and less pious.

We need to ‘lighten up’ and be prepared to be messy – because being human is messy. And we’re humans first and foremost.

Now where’s that Lobster Claw?

Punks, Wonks & Breakout strategies for sustainability innovation.

21 Friday Nov 2014

Posted by Thin Air Factory in Uncategorized

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A.I., Bowie, breakouts, couples counselling, Eno, innovation, Oblique Stratgies, Peter Schmidt, punks, purpose, society, strategy, Sustainability, sustainable brands, venus & mars, wonks

Screen Shot 2014-11-21 at 16.37.18

Innovation. We love it!

Especially in the trending world of sustainability.

And rightly so: the potential impact and influence of sustainability innovation in the shaping of a more positive human existence is immutable and immeasurable.

Innovation’s role in reinventing and reimagining the way the domestic, private and public sectors use, reuse and replenish the limited resources we have at our disposal is critical to our survival as a race.

So anything that inspires us to escalate our ability to innovate, whether that might be of the incremental, process or radical kind, deserves all the help it can get.

We cannot really afford for sustainability innovation to stall or fail – but it does so, all too often.

Failure is of course an occupational hazard in the innovation department: an almost welcome metric.

If you’re not failing you are most probably not trying hard enough to create meaningful breakthroughs in unchartered territory.

But often the reason for innovation faltering is not quite so grand. An all too human: stakeholder conflict; lack of communication or collaboration: or simply personal agendas and self interested gerrymandering.

So the question recently raised was this: how do we make Sustainability innovation more, well, sustainable?

One enormously powerful influence we identified at these axial moments are the behaviours and attitudes of the different actors and agents in the room.

The first step was to try and create a really simple framework and a lens through which to view those actors and agents: and in such a way as to be able to inspire and help them marshal the innovation through.

The people involved seemed to fall into two broad camps of behaviour and attitude.

It was this simple observation that formed the basis of a recent plenary and workshop on Sustainability Innovation that Thomas Kolster of Goodvertising and I hosted at Sustainable Brands in London

Entitled A Game of Two Halves; the plenary and workshop endeavoured to use the two attitudinal behavior types we observed to set up a simple playful framework in which we might help re-inspire and reenergize the process of sustainability innovation: most pointedly in regards to human behaviour and modes of thinking.

The inspiration for these two types and they game of two halves they ended up playing was drawn from anecdotal evidence, conversation and a little light stakeholder research.

The world of Sustainability seems to be populated by a kaleidoscopic constituency of vital minds

  • the green activist agitators, ice breakers & policy shakers of the likes of the Sierra Club and Greenpeace
  • the scientists, conservationists and behaviouralists from the myriad NGOs advising and supporting communities across the globe
  • the sustainability policy and regulatory advisors, architects and engineers who operate at the point where the private sector and the public sector collide
  • the particular and labyrinthine coder programmer and systems minds of IT and rock n roll tech geekdom
  • the lateral and populist storytellers and communications professionals who advise both corporates and government on sustainability communication strategies and campaigning
  • the HR professionals who are increasingly being placed at the heart of burgeoining Social programmes being designed to evolve from the inside out and the ground up of large corporates and public sector organisations
  • the corporate actors driving sustainability agendas to improve performance, mitigate risk, attract investent or embrace social responsibility.

Many of these actors and agents are rarely advocates of an over simplified Either/Or picture of the world, and most have traces of both polarities in them.

But it did seem that as things start to go wrong or seize up there is a human tendency to fall into one or other of the camps – and revert to the type closest to ones own nature.

2 halves

Thomas and I chose to identify and explore these Either/Or moments and the attitudes and behaviours that accompany them in a couple of ways

The first was that of Venus & Mars, with Thomas viewing the two types through the lens of couples counselling, viewing the barriers to innovative sustainability thinking and doing as requiring the navigational and brokering skills usually deployed by professionals trying to help Couples climb out of the morass of familiarity and astonishing contempt – someone adept and experienced at showing warring and stagnating couples how to embrace the best of each other.

With this in mind we asked people a simple question; what is the greatest barrier to sustainability innovation?

We collected some answers from the people in the room. We then asked them to define what they felt might be the best solution to those problems. We collected these.

We then had the pleasure of Sarah Greenway from B&Q who spoke eloquently and in heartfelt terms about some of her own challenges and feelings (un-surprisingly one of those people with both aspects ascendant in her).

And then we rolled in a rainbow grenade to see if we could unlock people’s minds further.

Taking the view that in fact as well as the innate issues of intimate self-realisation that Thomas had alluded were some more extant behavioural traits that we might explore and play with to help the innovation on its way.

And I chose to label those traits as Punk & Wonk – another simple playful way of creating a tension and point counter point framework in which to exercise the innovation process to create breakouts and breakthroughs in stagnating thinking.

Punk celebrates the liberation of explosive dynamism and chaotic fluidity: Wonk that of incremental revelation and structured illumination.

I believe that somewhere between their poles: between the anxiety-inducing anarchy of blowing stuff up and the pointillist particularity or relentless rigour lies a resilience strategy for those embarking on a process of sustainability innovation. A potential answer to sustaining Sustainability Innovation.

I used the genius of Bowie and Eno as an example of how even the most complementary and inventive minds need help – need to be compelled to take a different view to break through blocks and walls in their own and others heads.

Bowie, the master of relentless reinvention – the punk dude of many lives personas and faces – and Eno, the musical scientist, and king or algorithmic cadence utilized the inspiration of Oblique Strategies – a set of obtuse cards devised by Eno and Peter Schmidt – to break their own creative deadlocks in the studio.

I asked people to envisage that we might create our own set of Breakout Strategies for Sustainability Innovation in much the same way, using the dualities of either Venus & Mars or Punks & Wonks to aid that inspiration.

We then asked the participants in the room to take one of the solutions we had identified and one of the traits = preferably the one least like themselves – and see if the application of a Punk or a Wonk mindset had helped them see anything differently.

I will leave the rest to David Harding-Brown in his write up of the session – far more complete and objective as an observer than either Thomas or I would be.

What we have left is a charming and playful set of inspirations rooted both in punk and wonk perspectives and some hybrids to help people in the fire storm of sustainability innovation.

Everyone needs to break out of their hole and reignite the minds we need to re-inspire the innovation that just might stop us all going up in a plume of consumption smoke!

Discuss.

See the links below to the event from the SB site including david Harding-Brown’s piece

http://www.sustainablebrands.com/news_and_views/organizational_change/david_harding-brown/sb14london_innovating_sustainability_-_game

http://www.sustainablebrands.com/digital_learning/event_video/collaboration/innovating_sustainability_game_two_halves

 

 

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