The Business Anthropologist

The HaHa Moment

2009-08-30T14:18:00.000-07:00

When I started using improv comedy as a brainstorming tool, I had a hunch: that behind every laugh there’s an insight. It turned out to be true. A six-minute comedy game can spark off two hours of idea generation before people start frowning and sighing, which is the cue for the next game.

I wanted to know exactly why a laugh signals an insight, and often masks it as well. And it turned out that the reason why a laugh signals an insight is precisely the same reason why it also masks the insight: because laughter comes from having a scary truth made safe.

Physiologically, a laugh is exactly halfway between a scream of alarm and a sigh of relief. The harder we laugh, the more scary the thing is, and the more relief we’re expressing.

When a mum plays peek-a-boo with her baby, she’s alternately scaring and reassuring it. “Aaargh! Mum’s disappeared! Aah, there she is.” Dads play a similar game, although it tends to be a bit more physical – they throw the poor creature up into the air and (usually) catch it again. It’s a bit more scary than peek-a-boo, and being caught safely is slightly more reassuring, so the baby laughs harder.

When we get a bit older, we stop laughing at the release of physical fears and start laughing at the release of emotional fears. If we’re standing at the edge of a cliff and then we take a step back, it's not suddenly hilarious; but when a comedian reminds us that the things we thought were uniquely bad about us are actually shared by everyone else, then we laugh hard.

It’s no coincidence that the court jester – the fool - was the only one in the medieval court who could tell the truth without getting his head chopped off, because comedy makes the truth safe. There’s nothing funnier than the truth, so truth is always a good subject for comedy. Meanwhile, there’s no point in being unnecessarily traumatised by the truth, if you can laugh at it instead.

It’s a shame, then, that modern parents tell their kids to stop being foolish, and to stop acting like a fool. Being laughed at is one of the most traumatic things that can happen to an educated adult, which is absurd, because when you make people laugh you’re releasing their emotional fears, and this is a very cool and groovy thing to do. And yet we associate being laughed at with social death, with the loss of our social identity. We even have a phrase for it: “I died a death.”

Babies don’t equate laughter with death. We have to be taught to do that.

This idea of the fool fascinates me because the first card in the Tarot deck is The Fool. He’s not like the village idiot, though; there’s nothing stupid about this Fool.

The Fool is the only one of the major cards which has no number. Its qualities live outside and apart from those of the other cards, and it operates through them. It often reverses the meanings or interpretations of other cards, which is what comedians do, too. The same role is performed by the Joker in a pack of playing cards. And because this quality is the same as lila, the Sanskrit concept of divine play, it changes the rules. It shakes up your snow globe.

Life is a shadow of what happens in the mind, and the mind is the stubborn, brutish obstacle between reality and what we see. This obstacle is symbolised by the Fool, which is a humbling thought, but probably fair. And a well-shaped, well-timed funny line has the power to strip away the external structure of something and show us its inner nature instead, by silencing our own Fool, and giving us the guidance of a higher Fool.

When a joke disrupts our surface perceptions, we’re letting in a brief glimpse of the world from another Fool’s point of view. A new angle. The more angles we have, the more accurately our intuition can triangulate the truth of a situation.

It’s a tiny spurt of personal evolution, and we often ignore it, because fun and laughter are just... well, silly, aren’t they? As Churchill said, “Man will occasionally stumble across the truth, but most times he’ll pick himself up and carry on.”

Inner truth is often uncomfortable, and so we protect ourselves by veiling it. This is what masks do; by concealing the outer reality of the actor’s face and replacing it with something more elemental, it not only obliges a deeper response but also permits it. The actor’s personal Fool is temporarily dissolved, and an archetypal Fool takes its place. And because the archetypal Fool takes the responsibility away from the performer, the performer can really let go and let the mask take over.

When we witness this, we laugh our heads off, because we’re seeing universal behaviour performed by the archetypal Fool, through the actor. By playing through the actor, the archetypal Fool is made specific, personal and alive. Its behaviour is dangerous – emotionally dangerous – and it scares us because it holds up a mirror to us. At the same time it’s safe, very safe, because it’s Saturday morning and we’re in a rehearsal studio in London and we’re just... playing.

This is why laughter is so important. It dissolves the limitations of our own personal Fool – our own way of seeing the world – and lets us see just a small bit of what lies beyond. When you make someone laugh, you expand their perceptions, and relieve some of their fears. They don’t even know you’re doing this; it goes under the radar.

You can even tell what aspects of itself a culture is scared of, collectively, by looking at what they laugh at. In England, we’re terrified of losing our social status or getting the unspoken rules of social etiquette wrong, so a lot of our comedy is about people’s status in jeopardy. In France, they laugh at silent mimes – perhaps they’re scared of not being able to talk. Actually, to be fair to them, I think it’s more than that: most mimes’ performances involve extremes of human experience, often finding the laws of physics to be at odds with the laws of human nature. Maybe their laughter is a way of accepting that we don’t live in a predictable, controllable, Cartesian world after all.

Next time you laugh at something, consider what it taught you. Don’t do this whilst you’re laughing, obviously – you don’t want to pull the horse back while it's jumping. Think about it afterwards, because you’ll always find something useful, and you’ll always be ready for it. If you weren’t, you wouldn’t have laughed.

I Wanna Hold Your Hand

2009-08-27T07:37:00.000-07:00

Ten years ago, I was working in advertising, launching the mobile internet for BT. It was so new that we called it the "mobile internet" instead of the mobile internet, protecting its context with speech-marks so the cynics wouldn't scoff. Boy, did we make some overclaims. We dreamed big, ate a couple of paradigm shifts for breakfast each morning, and inflated the dot-com bubble like a party balloon.

Ten years later, our promises are only just starting to come true, which is why I'm only just starting to be interested in technology again.

Newspapers have always given us the ability to patrol our extended territory from the breakfast table. The internet magnifies this benefit. And whilst magnifying it, it introduces a big drawback. For me, anyway.

You see, newspapers aren't personal. I mean, they are, especially in London, where we use them as an excuse to avoid eye contact. I'm not talking about the format, though - I'm talking about the content. Newspapers are definitely not personal.

The internet is personal because it enables us to patrol our personal tribal territory, not just patrol the public territory that the newspaper editors choose to show us.

And by making what was inaccessible accessible, by reconnecting us virtually with our scattered tribe, it makes us hungry for more. Hungry for more what, exactly? Hungry for more contact. Newspapers make us want more knowledge, and social media make us want more contact.

Yes, I know it's also a useful source for information, but let's be honest - nobody ever lay on their deathbed and said, "I wish I'd read more articles."

The history of communications technology is the story of trying to reduce distance, and replicate the physical presence of the other person. It started with smoke signals, then pictographs, then writing; when we had telephones, we could hear each other's voices; with videoconferencing we can see each other. It's all one big march towards reproducing the person physically, reducing the physical distance between the two people. Electronic telepathy.

I have a love-hate relationship with Twitter, although it's very early days yet. Why do I love it? Because through Twitter I've discovered fascinating new things and people, and I get a constant stream of inspiring stuff to dwell on. I like dwelling on inspiring stuff.

And why do I hate it? Because it makes me hungry for more contact with the people I like. Twitter is a big electronic grapevine, the tribal watering-hole for the whole world. Once you're on it, your social instincts compel you to stay, because you feel abandoned if you don't. And don't even get me started on Facebook.

Wait, it gets worse. Whilst I'm hungry to meet the people who interest me, I'm even hungrier to see the people who I know for real. When I see a real-life friend on Twitter or Facebook, it makes me tear my hair out - I want to climb inside the computer and hug them, and I can't. When I see an update posted by a friend and I can hear his or her voice through the 140 characters, then all I can do, in the words of old Shakey, is feed upon the shadow of perfection. Damn you, Twitter!

It's slightly perverse that I enjoy the tweets from people I don't know more than I enjoy the tweets from people I know, because I don't get frustrated by the fact that I can't spend time with strangers.

You know what I find really ironic? All this technology, all these clever people, all these ideas and software codes and business plans and... what are they all doing? They're all helping us to enjoy each other. They're helping us groom, helping us to do the things we've all done for millions of years, and which we can't do because the modern industrial world has increased the physical distance between us and the people we like to be with.

At the end of the day, all of this clever technology is just taking us back to our natural tribal state, as closely as it can. And I find that fascinating, and beautiful. We have amazing technologies available to us, which all come from thousands of years of trying to reject our tribal nature, and trying to be something bigger, something more. And what do we do with this technology? Inevitably, addictively, we repeat the social patterns of our ancestors.

We do this because technology is about people, not things. And people are about each other.

All we do on our screens is try to be with each other, with clumsy limitations. If you spend all day at a screen, go and see a real person tonight. And don't tweet about it.

So when is a startup going to come along and offer us holograms of each other? I don't want to see 140 characters in a micro-blog post. I want to see my friends in my living room, and open a bottle of wine with them. Even if they're in America, or Sweden, or Israel, or round the corner, staying in because they're hungover - they could sit in my house and I could sit in theirs. We could chat to each other's holograms in real time.

But then I'd really want to give them a hug, and that would drive me crazy.

Political Correctness 2: Lemmings!

2009-08-26T07:55:00.000-07:00

In nature, there's a simple principle which states that taking survival risks, and surviving, is a signal of strength. It attracts mating partners, and raises the individual's status among their peers. Why? Because if you can take a survival risk and survive, then it shows you have good survival skills, and implicitly shows that you can protect your companions in their hour of need.

These survival risks take different forms. Young human males try everything from driving too fast to picking fights with groups of strangers. Gazelles jump about when a lion chases them, revving up like cartoon characters before taking off. This is a signal that tells the lion, "If I can afford to do this instead of just legging it straight away, then you really don't want to bother chasing me, because I'm one speedy little pup." Peacocks grow ridiculously big plumages which are, franky, a pure hindrance; an actual disability. They're proving that even with all this baggage, they can still survive, fight and dominate.

The baggage then becomes a signal of dominance, and a desirable status symbol in its own right.

Societies do this, too. Leaders do it. In the West, the survival risk that our society takes is to sanctify the notion of the society's obligations towards the individual. We uphold these rights in ridiculous ways, shafting our own collective good for the emotional satisfaction of feeling strong and worthy as a society. Political correctness becomes a desirable status symbol in its own right, like the peacock's plumage, and becomes divorced from its true purpose. The PC brigade are the standard-bearers for self-destructive posturing. They're political and social lemmings, and they're trying to chase the rest of us straight over the cliff.

We tell each other that we're such a secure and dominant society that we can afford to pay £1 million of public money for the legal defence of two people who killed their baby son horrifically. We can afford to spend untold millions defending terrorists who've fessed up. The more vile they are, and the more they admit to being vile, the more gently we treat them, as a way of displaying our strength as a society.

Excessive political correctness and litigiousness go hand in hand, obliging us all to look at each other through narrow, suspicious eyes, detecting wrongdoing wherever we can, inflating our sensitivities. It sends out a very toxic signal: that there is no safety in togetherness, or in giving - only in selfishness, and in taking. JFK would spin in his grave.

This is lethal, because we're in a situation where Western nations' default policy is to take a small national survival risk in every possible situation. And small risks add up. This is what rampant politcal correctness does. A nation is simply a group of people, and if they collectively decide that they're each, individually, more important than the group, well, they're going to have problems. And their first problem is a grotesque misunderstanding of social mathematics.

It's also lethal psychologically, for the individual. The mentality of selfishness states that we ourselves have nothing of value intrinsically, nothing to give; the only worthwhile things in life are external to us, somewhere over our shoulder. We become convinced that if we have nothing to give, then we are nothing, and can only be defined by accumulating shiny objects.

So political correctness has a lot to answer for. At the end of the day, it separates us from ourselves by encouraging us to treat society as one big sugar daddy. And where does this sugar daddy get his money from? From us. You see why the maths doesn't work?

I know, that's a pretty long rap-sheet for something most of us think of as just a minor irritation, but I stand by the charge. Political correctness, left unchecked, is as dangerous as terrorism. We're leaving the back door to our common sense wide open, and a lot of lunatics have taken up residence.

If political correctness has any excuse for existing at all, then surely it's to uphold the idea that the group shouldn't persecute the individual for being different. That's not the same thing as deliberately sacrificing the group's interests in favour of the individual.

What is the logical conclusion of this? Am I the only one who thinks we're all going to sink into the quicksand of our own moral vanity? If we carry on like this, we're going to tear ourselves apart with a gigantic tug of war, pulling in millions of different directions, each chasing our own imaginary Eden.

The winner, of course, will get to display a magnificent plumage; but he'd better bring a mirror, because there'll be no-one left to impress.

Mistakes In Branding, Part 3: Attitude vs Behaviour

2009-08-25T04:06:00.001-07:00

When I was working on an air-freshener brand, we discovered that sales go up in winter, and down in summer. The reason is beautifully simple: in the summer, people open the windows. In the winter, they don't. So our main competition was not a rival brand, or a faulty consumer attitude; the real competition was an incompatible behaviour. We weren't going to change people's air-freshening behaviour by changing their "attitudes" towards summer.

The big myth about advertising is that it changes consumer behaviour by changing attitudes.

Like Indiana Jones, I can't help thinking that they're digging in the wrong place.

I used to chase silly things like Brand Awareness Uplift and Preference Uplift. This came from the belief that the way to achieve our marketing objectives was to "change attitudes". In fact, it was worse than that: changing attitudes was our marketing objective, most of the time. We never bothered questioning the religious authority of this mantra.

Occasionally, some rebel would say, "What are we actually trying to achieve here? What do we want the consumer to do?"

And the answer was always, "Buy the product."

I'd often try to pin them down more. "Buy it more often? buy more of it on each occasion? Use it differently? for new things? what's the behavioural target?" And they all looked at me blankly and said, "The behavioural target is to buy the product, you moron. Stop making problems." And then the conversation would go back to the subject of attitude change.

There's no evidence that changing someone's "attitude" can change their behaviour, not when it comes to buying one brand of canned soup over another. I think this is a symptom of the fact that in modern civilisation, everything is centred around the head - the brain - or at least, the left brain, the intellectual calculating part. We all live in our heads, not in our bodies. So advertising people are convinced that you just need to work on the head.

I only really became aware of how stupid this illusion was when I started working on the British Government's Road Safety advertising. We weren't selling anything, or trying to raise awareness of a brand or a logo - we were trying to change behaviour.

Our objective was to stop people from driving badly. Now, I learned from an animal behaviour expert that the non-performance of a behaviour is not actually a behaviour per se, and so it's a pointless objective to aim for. What do you want them to do instead of the bad behaviour?

"I want them to stop doing it." Yes, I know. And what do you want them to do instead? "I don't care." Way to go, Einstein.

In the case of Road Safety, the behavioural objective was to get the driver behaving like a traffic cop: policing themselves and their passengers. We weren't going to do this by changing attitudes - we could only do it by focusing on the behaviours themselves. So we targeted each behaviour, one at a time, one behaviour per ad, ranging from telling your passengers to put their seat belts on, to slowing down in built-up areas. That was eight years ago, and the campaign is still running.

You can't see an attitude, and you can't perform an attitude. So why the hell do we fixate on trying to change attitudes? You can see behaviour, you can perform behaviour, and you can change behaviour. The ball is in your court.

Mistakes In Branding, Part 2: Status Displays

2009-08-25T03:06:00.000-07:00

Hands up who's flown British Airways recently? Right, hands up who hates them?

BA is a high-status brand. They try to be superior to you, and to the other airlines. They take themselves way too seriously, in the belief that being snooty is somehow aspirational. This is reflected in the language they use, and in the behaviour of their staff - on the ground and in the air.

When I asked a BA stewardess for a whisky, she said, "Take it easy." (It was my first drink of the flight.) A few hours later, when she rather imperiously ordered me to close my tray, I said, "take it easy", and gave her a little smile to show I was bantering. She looked at me like she was about to shackle me and have me arrested on landing.

She was not a unique case - in my experience, which on BA is more extensive than I'd like it to be, she was typical of the company, the brand, and its opinion of the world.

On Virgin Atlantic, the Upper Class section has lovely little salt and pepper shakers that are shaped like teardrops - they wobble and they don't fall down. Everyone steals them. On the bottom, there's a sticker saying, "Stolen From Virgin Atlantic Upper Class."

People pay Virgin £4,500 to be insulted by a salt shaker, and they love it. Why? Because Virgin is their friend.

The difference between friends and acquintances is simple: friends are playfully mean to each other, making fun of each other affectionately, and it's taken as an invitation to play - a grooming signal. Acquaintances are rigidly formal, usually defaulting to high-status dominance displays. So there's no sense of play, no spontaneous authenticity in acquaintance relationships. Acquaintances don't know how to banter. At least, they do - but not with each other.

And when you make a status display, the other person's instincts drive them to make a status display of their own, a counter-display to keep up with you or put you down. If you're lucky, they'll make an appeasement display, and then what have you got? A slightly intimidated person who doesn't like you. Well done there.

Banter is a serious social survival skill. By bantering, we not only affirm our friendships - we also play-fight, preparing ourselves for when we're really need the skills in the future, like two martial artists sparring in the dojo. it's an innate instinct in males, and a learned instinct in females. It's basically a mock status display, pretending to lower the other person;s status.

The BA stewardess was insulting me for real; I was bantering with her. Ironically, I could handle being insulted, but she couldn't handle being bantered with. But the real irony is that if you asked her why she went into a service industry, she'd probably say, "Because I like people." (Yeah, so do cannibals.)

Most brands are terrified of looking anything other than incredibly serious and solid, because they believe that they must be high-status all the time; they think that this is where their value and desirability comes from. This makes people ignore them. Some brands, like Virgin, know how to banter and they know that the audience wants to be bantered with.

Pot Noodle got it right, acknowledging that it's really a rather gopping product, and so they reminded us, "It's dirty and you want it." Diet Tango teased us, "You need it because you're weak." And we bought the product. (Maybe you didn't, but I did.)

Virgin, Pot Noodle and Tango were obeying a natural law that's older than money: people trade with friends. Money was only invented when people started trading with strangers.

This begs the question, if money is the root of all evil, then what's the root of all money?

In a word: strangers.

If you can banter with your audience, then you can short-circuit 4,000 years of economic history and have a customer base who feel like you're their friend.

My chances of getting any work out of BA will probably go sub-zero if they read this, and that's fine - I don't really want them as clients. And no, I'm not going to banter with them, because they can't take it.

Mistakes In Branding, Part 1: Adjectives

2009-08-25T02:36:00.001-07:00

Marketing people love adjectives. Adjectives are the de facto currency of creative thinking in the marketing and branding field, and that's why nothing ever happens. As an adman, I used to sit in conference rooms, order expensive sandwiches and shout big power words at flipcharts, like "innovative!" and "dynamic!", which had the fabulous benefit of making me feel innovative and dynamic, but which were useless to anyone else.

We all tried desperately hard to be clever, and we thought that comparing adjectives was the height of sophistication. (The obsession with cleverness even extended to the sandwich chef - I could never eat the damn things, because they were full of stuff like brie with caviar. Very innovative and dynamic, of course, but really rather vile.)

What we were doing was simple, and it had nothing to do with producing the best strategy: we were trying to declare that our personal, subjective, poorly-articulated impression of something was The Absolute Truth and everyone else was blaspheming. So when I said to a colleague, "It's dynamic", and she said, "no, it's innovative", we spent about four months locked in mortal combat over the relative definitions of "innovative" and "dynamic". I won, at least in my mind, and she won, at least in hers. Big winners, both of us; big stars.

So what's wrong with adjectives, exactly? Well, I found out what the problem was as soon as I started doing improv. You can't perform an adjective. You can only perform an action. A verb. It's as simple as that.

Hamlet doesn't walk onstage and say, "Ladies and gentlemen, before we start tonight's performance I should like to inform you that I am angry, confused and paranoid. I do hope you enjoy the play."

Instead, he performs a series of actions. And it's by witnessing his actions that the audience draw their conclusions. This is why actors are called actors, not describers, and it's why directors call, "Action!" instead of "Description!"

There are only two things we'll look at onstage, two things that the eye will be drawn to: emotional movement, and physical movement. Without these things, the audience may as well go and read a book. Physical movement, obviously, involves actions; and so does emotional movement. In order to produce an emotional shift, you have to do something to someone - perform an action.

So if you're running a brand, then I'd invite you to turbo-charge your creative thinking by banning adjectives. Ban them completely, and replace them with actions. You want your brand to be Cool? Then you have to find cool things to do, and do them. Do you want your brand to be Friendly? Then identify what friends do, and do it.

Do you want to be Shallow? Then shout adjectives at flipcharts.

A Marriage Made In Hell

2009-08-25T02:04:00.000-07:00

I was writing a proposal, sitting in a hotel room with two of my best friends and their young kids waiting for them to get ready to go out, and an analogy struck me about the human side of an organisation versus the mechanistic side. It seemed to work at the time, and when I was sober the next morning, it still looked OK, so here it is.

Imagine that the logistical side of the organisation is the husband in a marriage. The human aspect of an organisation is the wife in the marriage. They’re having problems and can’t seem to work it out. The kids are developing all sorts of issues and are going to run away from home if things don’t change. (Actually, in the case of my friends, they have a great marriage - but go with it...)

The couple has two choices for trying to improve: either they can each go to a separate therapist, or they can go to a marriage guidance counsellor together.

Well, traditionally, the husband in this analogy goes to a special man-therapist (called a business process reengineering consultant), bitches about his wife, and then goes home and does whatever the therapist recommended would be best for his happiness, expecting the wife to adapt and obey without question. He sends his wife a memo declaring what his new rules are, and assumes instant compliance.

Sometimes, the wife goes to her own therapist – called an organisational psychologist – and bitches about her husband to a very sympathetic pair of ears, and then goes home determined not to take any more crap from the husband. Meanwhile, the husband has redesigned the kitchen because he and his therapist concluded that that was the whole problem, and is offended when the wife throws a hissy fit.

He concludes that his clever, cowboy-booted man-therapist was right: the damn woman is just a nightmare, full stop. She, meanwhile, concludes that her sensitive, touchy-feely therapist was right: the guy is an emotionally-retarded hooligan. They label each other as being The Problem in the marriage.

Meanwhile, they barely even have time to argue about it because they’re so busy running around after their increasingly hyperactive and delinquent kids, who by now are developing more problems than Sigmund Freud's bookshelf.

How many consultancies can honestly say that they unite the human and mechanistic sides of an organisation, addressing them equally, giving them equal respect? I haven't found any yet.

Bunch of hooligans.

Tribal Denial: The Trance of Mechanistic Management

2009-08-25T01:46:00.000-07:00

It amazes me how many intelligent people are stuck in the trance of thinking that businesses are machines. They drive their teams like jeeps, and wonder why they break down.

It's nice and safe to think that a business can be managed like a vending machine - press a button and get the result. Unfortunately, the kind of results we try to manage are not the kind of results that really can be managed. Nobody goes to work to do double-digit growth.

It's very hard to manage numbers, when what you're really managing is behaviours. You may as well chase ghosts, and chasing ghosts is a dumb thing to do because they can go through walls and you can't.

This comes from the refusal to recognise that we're tribal animals, and that we live, work and operate in tribal groups.

I frequently get verbally lynched when I tell people this. "Nonsense!" they scoff, "my organisation isn't a tribe - what a load of hippy crap. MY organisation is a quango/ministry/startup/prison/whatever. It's not a real tribe."

That's a bit like saying "My people aren't real people". If you have a group of people, you have a tribe. You can take a pride of lions and call it a knitting circle, but they're not going to suddenly take up knitting. They're going to behave like lions, and a tribe will behave like a tribe.

Recently a couple of government ministries said to me, "We've got to stop behaving like a government bureaucracy, and start behaving like a commercial enterprise." This is trance thinking. It's like a pride of lions saying, "we've got to stop behaving like a herd of zebra, and start behaving like a flock of geese." They'd be no better off copying the world's most successful geese than the least successful ones.

Why, then, do business tribes call in expensive consultancies and ask them to implement best practice from the world's leading geese? (Leading geese, mind you. The absolute best.)

It's far more useful to say, "we've got to start behaving like a tribe, because that's what we are."

Political Correctness Exposed

2008-10-21T10:02:00.000-07:00

People use political correctness as an excuse to make status displays and to create some importance for themselves. It is almost always the self-important people who hit you with the PC stick, which means you can have some fun with it. It's a status game, so play the game.

When somebody says, “that was offensive”, they almost always mean that whilst they weren’t personally bothered by it, they recognise the possibility that somebody, somewhere, might see reason to take offence. And that’s enough for them to start blowing the political-correctness whistle. It’s an effortless and freely-available source of status, requiring no personal qualities or achievements.

This is why the PC whistle is almost always blown by people who have no other way of asserting their authority, because they have nothing to offer that would earn them respect or recognition for any other reason.

So what's the solution? Don't argue, because that will give them more to push against. And don't apologise, either, because that will inflate their moral authority and encourage them to continue.

The way to respond without apologising or arguing is to ask concerned questions. Two in particular.

If a status bandit starts hitting you with the PC stick, simply ask them if they felt personally threatened or assaulted. Don’t ask if they felt “offended” or “insulted”, since these things are, rather conveniently, defined by the victim. They are very broad terms. Stick to did you feel threatened? And did you feel assaulted?

It’s harder to substantiate a claim that they felt “threatened” if they really didn’t, and harder still to substantiate a claim that they felt “assaulted”.

And if they didn’t feel threatened or assaulted, then they simply felt annoyed, which is their problem, and they need to deal with it through the medium of normal social behaviour. Otherwise it's like complaining to the teacher when another kid smashes your conker in a fair fight.

You can ban racial and sexual harassment, but you can't ban status displays, which is why people seek elaborate excuses for lodging complaints when all they really mean is, "That guy's better at playing dominance games than I am, and I want to shaft him for it."

If they come back with “I felt harassed”, you can simply ask them to clarify: In what way did you feel harassed? In the sense that you felt threatened? No? In the sense that you felt assaulted?

If they can’t answer either of these things convincingly, then the chances are that their “harassment” claim of being “offended” was simply a cheap status shot.

Predatory Creativity: Get Over Yourself

2008-10-17T14:44:00.000-07:00

I was running a course for a big law firm with Benni Bronsky, my business partner. At one point he held the whole room mesmerised with an amazing insight. He said, "The mind is like water. When it's calm, you can see clearly. But when it's churned up, you can't see anything."

He was talking in the specific context of what happens when you're trying to solve a creative problem and you get stuck and frustrated.

I was amazed. It was brilliant. Exactly the right insight, at exactly the right moment, and so artfully expressed. The lawyers loved it.

We were in the car afterwards and I said, "Mate, that mind-is-like-water thing was fantastic! What a beautiful insight! Where did you get that?"

"Er... Kung Fu Panda."

Now, let's be honest. Ideas can come from anywhere. Inspiration can come from anywhere. And when you see something you like - even if it's in a Disney movie - think about it, chew it over, internalise it, find examples for yourself, and then you can use it.

It's not theft, or plagiarism - it's cross-fertilisation. I call it Predatory Creativity. You don't need to steal ideas, and you don't need to force yourself to have your own, stunningly original ideas. Either extreme is unhelpful. You just have to be open to being inspired. And when you're open to being inspired, you'll find yourself taking, combining and reworking ideas from all over the place.

Don't be ashamed of getting your inspiration from places outside of your own brain. It's not like Constable was the first guy to think of painting landscapes. "Aw, come on, John... landscapes? It's been done, mate."

Take old ideas, old insights, from anywhere at all, live with them, make them mean something personal to you, and then your individuality will stamp itself on the end result. Don't be ashamed of Predatory Creativity.

The only thing stopping you is Status. Status is a term that describes levels of social dominance between people, and as primates, humans are utterly obsessed with their personal social status. We don't realise it, but we spend most of our waking hours trying to raise our status over others. One of the ways we try to do this, especially at work, is to prove how clever and original we are.

If you can overcome your need for status, you'll become more creative and more effective. When you're irritated because somebody made a spontaneous status display that challenged your dominance, then your mind becomes like churning water and you can't see anything except the need to make a counter-display.

You can't be at your most creative until you recognise status for what it is - a grubby little whore that doesn't care who it attaches itself to. Then your mind can be clear, like calm water, and you can see for miles.

Making Decisions

2008-10-16T19:21:00.001-07:00

I discovered something very interesting about how a particular intelligence agency - one of the world's best - goes about its decision-making. It quite freaked me at the time, actually.

When they're planning operations, in which the stakes are even higher than the mere life or death of the individual operative because they're about national security, they recognise that the reason why people can't make decisions is very simple. Every time you make a decision, you must automatically sacrifice all the other options on the table. And nobody likes to lose options, which is why nobody likes to make decisions.

If you ask yourself which option is the best, then you're on a hiding to nothing. You might as well write a letter to Santa, because you're in wish-land.

Instead, ask yourself, "Which of these options can we live without? Can we live without this? Can we live without this?"

Whatever is left, you can't live without - and there's your decision. It's brutally simple, which is why it works.

Go on, try it.

How Do You Know If You Suck?

2008-10-16T18:52:00.000-07:00

You don't. (I mean you don't know, I don't mean you don't suck. It's possible that you do suck.)

I was having a beer this evening with a friend of mine whom I trained to perform improvisational comedy. He and a bunch of his colleagues performed a kick-ass show at Jongleurs in Battersea a couple of months ago. Tonight, he said, "Well, we all know the second half sucked, and the guys were speculating - how come you made us perform that particular format? How come you made us do a sucky show when there's so much other stuff you could have got us doing instead?"

I was astonished. The second half didn't suck. The throat-mikes gave too much feedback so we had to turn them down, but the performance was superb. It was their first show, although you wouldn't know it. And the performers think they sucked.

I asked him if he had any feedback from the audience - you know, of the "you sucked" variety - and he said, "Oh, no, they all loved it, I still get people coming up to me and congratulating me, they think we're all geniuses and heroes and they can't figure out how we pulled it off."

The agonising truth is that you simply don't know if you suck or not, if your ideas suck or not. You just don't know. So the next time you have an idea about something and want to express it, don't censor yourself. Get the idea out there, and let your audience tell you if it sucks. If it does, change it! What's the problem? And if it doesn't suck, what's the problem?

Positive Thinking

2008-10-16T18:11:00.000-07:00

When I was learning to ski, I hit every obstacle you could imagine. Skiers, trees, pylons - I could probably hit a helicopter overhead if I was having a bad day. As we skied through some trees (or rather, as my instructor skied around the trees and I skied into them), she asked me why I kept hitting them.

"I don't know", I said, "you're the instructor. You tell me."

She asked me, "Well, where are you focusing your attention?"

"On the trees!"

"Why?"

She had me there. "So I can avoid them, I guess..."

"Uh-huh. And how's that working out for you?"

Sarky cow.

From that moment on, I started to focus on the gaps between the trees. And I never hit another tree again. She was teaching me positive thinking, although I didn't realise it at the time.

It now amazes me how many of us go around focusing on the "trees". We become experts on the damn things, and blind ourselves to the gaps.

When you book a holiday, do you tell the travel agent all the places you don't want to go?

"Well, I definitely don't want to go to Kiev."

"OK sir, no problem, where do you want to go?"

"You see, they don't speak English, and the hotels are all grotty, and..."

"So where would you like to go, sir?"

"And the food sucks."

"Sir, could I ask you to wait to one side while I deal with the next customer? Thank you so much. Hello madam, where would you like to go?"

"Not Kiev, that's for sure..."

If we've got more common sense than to do this when we book holidays, why do we do it in business meetings? We all sit around saying "Yes, BUT" to the things we don't like, sniping away at each other, killing each other's ideas, blunting each other's imagination - and then we go home and ask the kids, "did you play nice with the other kids today?"

Tomorrow, see what happens when you say "Yes, and" to somebody's idea, instead of "Yes, but". And let us know how it goes.

PS. Kiev is actually very nice.