We Are Team Rubber

Andy included The Structure of Magic on his list of books for us to read and review because he understood it to be about neuro-linguistic programming (NLP), a near-fabled communication technique apparently used by everyone from Agatha Christie to high-flying salesmen that supposedly helps one compel an audience’s attention and ordain the focus of their thoughts — sounds handy, hey?

Unfortunately, The Structure of Magic is specifically about NLP in the context of the work of a pyscotherapist and, whilst it’s interesting, it is pretty fixedly a book about psychotherapy.  Now, I’m not claiming that Team Rubber’s a place entirely free from emotional and metaphysical issues or that we aren’t concerned with making people’s lives happy, rich and fulfilled but I think it’s fair to say that therapy is quite a long way from our stock in trade.

The not-especially-transferrable lessons in The Structure of Magic are all about carefully listening to a client’s answers in a therapy session and using equally carefully chosen prompt questions in response to get them to express (and I’m putting this very simply) what they really mean.

The technique is based on the theory of transformational grammar which, very basically, goes something like this:

• we each have a tangible experience of the world.  This is unique to all of us and cannot be directly shared with anybody else.
• We translate this experience into a logical, storable *something* in our minds.  This translation is subject to our interpretive model of the world (so two people might understand the exact same experience in very different ways — I guess it’s similar to the ‘glass half full’ idea).  This results in a logical understanding that is your best rendition of the tangible experience — this is referred to as the ‘Deep Structure’.
• We translate this well-formed Deep Structure into an actual sentence that we express to try and communicate the experience to another person.  This is called the ‘Surface Structure’.  The thing is, just as something gets lost in translation from the actual experience to our understanding of it, so something gets lost in translation from that understanding of an experience to our communication of it (a phenomenon of which I’m keenly aware as I type this).

The thinking goes that the flaws in these expressed sentences mirror flaws in clients’ models — classed as generalisations, deletions and distortions, if you must know — and so by helping the client to ‘repair’ these sentences, to make them ‘well-formed in therapy’, they can also start repairing (’enriching’) their model of the world.

The thing is, I found the book’s premise and therapeutic applications convincing enough and it was obviously put together by people who had theorised, researched, tested and refined the idea (which makes it hard to argue with) but I found the style and language rather hamfisted, inelegant, confusing even.  The book seems unsure as to whether it’s a description of a philosophical theory, a sort of textbook overview of/introduction to a psychotherapeutic concept or a practical handbook of applied technique.  It felt to me almost like it had been written in a hurry, as if the authors (sincere apologies to all my English tutors for bringing the dreaded authorial intention into this) knew they were on to something and knew all the answers in their own minds but had to get it all down on paper before someone else beat them to it.  I guess I mean there’s an emphasis on content and progression over precision, continuity and completeness.

Anyway, I don’t think the point of having us review business books was to critique their literary merit and Andy’s question for me/this book was ‘is NLP rubbish?’.

My answer is that it’s not rubbish in the sense of hokum or myth: it’s a cogent argument backed up by research and applied experience (although the ’sales’ version might be snake oil as I’m not quite sure how the aforementioned salesmen turn this into a proactive rather than reactive technique, or whether doing so involves a massive compromise of the idea’s essential integrity).  Nor is it rubbish in the sense of being poor or low-grade; I don’t think it’s Einsteinian-level breakthrough thinking but it is tested and true and by all accounts adds value to the world of therapy.  It might, however, be rubbish in the sense of being waste — it’s far from useless to everybody but I’d suggest that it is a very long way down the list of ‘things useful to Team Rubber in the here and now’ and probably there are better things that could be done with our time.

In conclusion and in short, ‘get back to work!’.

This is a story about a kind of advertising that we like a lot: about what Claude Hopkins called service, what Aesop allegorised as the sun, what Neil Perkin recently referred to as ‘goodness and happiness’. It’s a story about advertising that entertains and helps its audience, rather than bullying, brow-beating or bombarding them. It’s even a love story, a tale of an irresistible match of message and content.

And don’t worry: it’s also a short story.

greatplaces2work is a charity that enables those looking for a career or change in career to match their strengths and skills within the hospitality, leisure and travel industries. They wanted to take a message of ‘careers you’ll thrive in’ to their target audience in a way that reflected their desire to help people ‘make the most of [their] skills and personality’.

Dudecorp is a darkly funny animated miniseries about office life (and death) that we made a couple of years ago because we had some scripts that made us laugh.

greatplaces2work saw in Dudecorp the opportunity to reach their audience and provide them with entertainment - all the while, articulating the thought that perhaps the corporate machine is, er, not the ideal working environment for everyone. We were not going to be the wall to this Pyramus and Thisbe and so were delighted to take on the work.

We’ve gently repurposed the existing Dudecorp site and assets to work with the greatplaces2work proposition (’get yourself a career you’ll thrive — not die — in’) and have been able to develop some great new Dudecorp content as well.

We’re launching the campaign this week with a panoply of targeted seeding, clever embeddable content units, videos, games and, of course, the original Dudecorp microsite.

Now, we’re watching and waiting for the happily-ever-after of people finding a career they love because they were entertained by content that advertised a service that was useful to them.

Maybe it’ll set a whole new paradigm and put an end to the incessant, aggressive calls from recruitment consultants. Sorry, scratch that last bit, this isn’t a fairy story.

I allude to this a lot.  Here it is for those of you who don’t know what I’m on about (I think the pertinent bit is a minute or two in):

(Thanks, YouTube!).

Ignoring the specific political view being put forward (it’s not a helpful debate to have here), here’s two questions to ponder:

1. How good is Aaron Sorkin’s almost completely metered writing?
2. Would Toby be a good system designer/consultant?  How about an account manager?

Okay, so that’s probably three questions.  Sorry.

I allude to this a lot.  Here it is for those of you who don’t know what I’m on about:

THE WIND and the Sun were disputing which was the stronger. Suddenly they saw a traveller coming down the road, and the Sun said: “I see a way to decide our dispute. Whichever of us can cause that traveller to take off his cloak shall be regarded as the stronger. You begin.” So the Sun retired behind a cloud, and the Wind began to blow as hard as it could upon the traveller. But the harder he blew the more closely did the traveller wrap his cloak round him, till at last the Wind had to give up in despair. Then the Sun came out and shone in all his glory upon the traveller, who soon found it too hot to walk with his cloak on.

“KINDNESS EFFECTS MORE THAN SEVERITY.”

(Thanks, Bartleby!).

2 (rhetorical) questions:

1.  How good an example of pithy story-telling is that?

2.  Was Aesop an ad man?

Rory and I have been having a stimulating and gently-warmed email debate about the value of ’strategy’ (props to Iain Tait for reporting the quote that kicked it all off), following our recent efforts to codify our research principles.  This pub argument is now spilling out into a full street brawl as we invite you (Team Rubber and the world) to throw in your thoughts.  Here’s the story so far, warts’n'all (take a deep breath!):

It’s a dirty secret that much of what we admire in the design world is a byproduct not of “strategy” but of common sense, taste and luck.  Some clients are too unnerved by ambiguity to accept this, and create gargantuan superstructures of bullshit to provide a sense of security.

Subject: Re: What do you make of this?

I disagree.  I’m split on any further opinion…

Being generous: that’s written by someone who’s fortunate to have the kind of mind that is continually creating strategy but in such an instinctive/well-rehearsed way that they’ve never noticed it or stopped noticing it and assume that it’s just coming naturally to them/is being self-effacing about it.  If they were objectively critiqued, they’d probably have to give themselves a lot more credit.

Being cynical: that’s written by someone who’s sure that they’ve got the best taste in the world and are bitter about continually losing to other people who ‘write pages and pages of stuff to cover up their rubbish central idea’.  They’re not willing to concede that actually people who make a lot of money doing this stuff aren’t messing around and know that knowing what they’re talking about is the best way to have a successful business.

Also, in either case, clients should be unnerved by ambiguity and should hold you to account for your idea.  If you can’t explain in an articulate and arguable (and, ideally, evidenced) way why your idea is good then either you need to find someone to help you deconstruct your own ideas, you need to stop being so lazy or you need to have a better idea.

Interesting.

Because I quite liked it.

Strategy is undeniably a very useful (if not essential) thing to have in place at the start of a project but I would argue not to the exclusion of intuition/ inspiration/ serendipity etc.

Most agencies and clients will say that some of their best work has occurred by going off-brief because invariably you will start thinking differently to your competition (who’ll all swear by their strategy).

Where briefs and strategy are essential are to agree a common goal - we need to sell XXXX products, we need to be the most front of mind brand etc.

Research will focus you to know everything you need to know about your product/ market/ audience but it’s an unquantifiable creative ingredient that will give you the magic to make something truly engaging. Good research usually means you can then discount the obvious product claims because they’ve either been made already or the competition can claim the same/better.

I saw a Colgate ad on last night and it made me think of our conversation yesterday because although it promised a USP and clearly tied into something research had proved was the most compelling benefit of that particular toothpaste it was eminently forgettable. By the same stroke is Mentos profile/ upward sales curve since the Coke fountains phenomenon any less valid.

I guess my POV is strategy is definitely good discipline but it is not always the only way to get a great piece of communication. And it is more often than not the justification for rather mediocre communication so I’m wary of how reverential one should be to it.

Backatcha!

I think some of this is just semantics: as I was trying, clumsily, to explain in my last email, a good piece of communication will always have a strategy, it’s just that sometimes it won’t have been made explicit, written down anywhere or even necessarily made it into the consciousness of the person devising it.  To my mind, inspiration, having an idea dawn on you and going through a laborious, deliberate process of research and reasoning are all just strategising happening at different speeds.  The ‘inspired’ creative idea will also be discoverable by a slow and steady process and will still have all the connections between product, idea, message and media asset, it’s just that the person coming up with it made a leap in logic, fast-forwarding them to the idea.

It’s like Beckett: if you had someone describe his fragmented, non-sequitirial, broken writing style to you, you’d assume it was terrible communication.  However, he understood that the human consciousness is fragmented and non-sequitirial and broken and imperfectly translates stuff from the subconscious/the internal.  By acknowledging that process and sending an accordingly scrambled signal, he kind of hotwired the ideas to hit straight in at that subconscious level — incredibly brilliant communication.  And that’s a strategy.

This makes time a key element; I’m certain that you could, by careful and reasoned progress, write the same lines that Beckett did, but you’d probably only manage one or two in a lifetime.  Once he’d figured out this kind of ‘aporia’ strategy, he was able to jump straight in and out of it like a character and write it ‘naturally’.  C.S. Lewis talks about doing the same kind of thing when writing as his demon character in The Screwtape Letters, and Johnson was on to a similar sort of thing when he said of Gulliver’s Travels ‘once you have little people and big people, the rest writes itself’.  They’re like shortcuts to an incredibly strong strategy.  That’s why I think Matt’s on to something when he talks about finding a ‘through line’ for viral film ideas — if you can package all the strategy into an easy-to-extrapolate concept, you make it possible to get a lot more done quickly.  I still insist that there isn’t a good piece of communication out there that functions on some different plane of rationality, that is completely disconnected from reason and logic and that a ‘eureka’ moment can magically transport you to.

That’s why a key thing for me is being able to deconstruct, understand, reverse engineer and recreate these high-speed strategic processes.  It’s what lets you become a Tiger Woods-esque consistent, fearsome champion, rather than ’skating around on the uncertain surface of brilliance’.  Anyone can fluke a hole in one or stumble some incredible ice-skating manouevre.  The point is, if you managed it once, it must be, somehow, within your capacity to do it again.  The skill is in understanding it, practicing it, fine-tuning it until you can do it every single time.  If you show someone your amazing idea but aren’t able to explain the strategy, it might not necessarily weaken that idea but it does show that it was a fluke and that you won’t be coming up with another one any time soon.

Phew.  I like debates.

‘Marketing guru’ Seth Godin (who, as Andy insightfully points out, is ‘annoying but accurate’) posted today about workaholics. He says:

A new class of jobs (and workers) is creating a different sort of worker, though. This is the person who works out of passion and curiosity, not fear.

Now I might be about to, er, expose myself here (as an odd individual stepping out of the safety of the unspoken social understanding between us all), although I suspect not, but I think I’m one of those people and have one of those jobs. I’m sure my wife would say I am… and actually, you, my colleagues, ‘caught’ me the other day, logging into the School Councils site from home at 10:30pm :s

So what about the rest of yas? Who else will ‘fess up to being quite caught up with all the stuff we do? And will anyone admit to just being here to do a job, take a wage and go home? It’d be interesting to see what the prevailing accepted standard is here, as in most jobs it’s cooler to be the latter…