The drug works. End of story

Of late I've witnessed plenty of angst amongst pharma marketers trying to discern the 'narrative' behind the product they sell.  

I've sat in too many workshops, the purpose of each is to apply The Hero's Journey to the fact that Drug A has an effect on Tumour Type B.  Invariably, inevitably the analogy collapses under the weight of the exercise.  Is it the drug that's the hero or is it the doctor?  If the drug is the hero then doesn't that relegate the doctor to the role of squire to some tumour-fighting knight-errant? Easier to agree that the doctor is hero, which makes our drug Excalibur.  But what about the competition?  Aren't they the ones we're really fighting against, even though it's poor form to describe them as the enemy?  Or is it the patient?  People with cancer can be pretty damn heroic y'know.  After a while the only thing that we can agree upon is that the tumour is the bad guy.

It's around this time that someone jokes that this exact exercise is probably being attempted by a dozen groups somewhere around the world at this exact moment.  So we take lunch.

Afterwards we agree that The Hero's Journey is a bit cliché and we cast around for other narratives and so arrive at Journey From Darkness to Light.  But the medical team shuts that one down immediately because it implies a promise that our trial data won't support.  We are talking about cancer after all.

There is only one successful narrative for pharma products: it works.  If you're lucky you might be able to say it works in a surprising way.  Say this in the right way and let the doctor see for himself (in the right patient).  After which we pretty much lose control of the situation.  The doctor either believes that it works or she doesn't.

Energy spent trying to reframe the customer's relationship with the disease in question is energy wasted.  Doctors know the condition better than we ever will because they live with it every day.  The more poetic amongst them will describe their jobs in terms of warfare ('battle') or travel ('journey') or vigilance ('watch'n'wait') or strategy ('chess game') or problem solving ('cracking the code', 'solving the puzzle') but that's them using metaphor to describe their world to us.  Medicine is all those things and many more and we do well to listen to the words used by the individual.

But it is a mistake for us to gather around a flipchart to concoct some grand narrative that suits our purpose.  In the sales situation it will add a layer of complexity, as metaphor often does, or oversimplify or distort our message in some other way.  Instead, speak plainly and let the facts do the rest.

Life changing experience

One Sunday night in late 1989 my girlfriend took me to see Theatresports at Belvoir Street Theatre in Surry Hills, Sydney.  I can point to exactly where I was sitting that night because the show changed my life.

I was 22 years old and working as a Trade Marketing Associate for Unilever.  It was my first ‘real’ job after graduating with a Bachelor of Business (BBus) and my life consisted of a week working for people I neither liked nor respected and weekends getting drunk with a gang of friends who had also gone to expensive Sydney private schools.  My girlfriend wasn’t part of that gang.  She didn’t really like any of my friends and she hated the drinking.  I'm still hazy as to why she liked me at all.

I’d resisted seeing the show for months.  Not out of any objection to the theatre but becauseSunday night was when The Eddies played the Woolloomooloo Bay Hotel.  They were a terrifically fun cover band with a tight horn section that was doing happy, danceable versions of Blues staples years before The Commitments repopularised that style of music.  When you’re 22 and hate your day job a massive drunken Sunday night party full of people as desperate as you are to squeeze the last drops of fun from the weekend is an irresistible offer.  Monday morning consequences be damned.

One Sunday she prevailed.  She booked (and presumably paid for both) tickets to see a heat of the Cranston Cup,which remains Australia’s pre-eminent improv comedy competition.  Her friend Julia Zemiro was in the Sydney University team that night with Daniel Cordeaux.  Also on stage that night were Marko Mustac, Ewan Campbell and Andrew Denton.  It was intoxicating.  The audience cheered the teams and booed the judges just as Keith Johnston intended.  It was funny, witty, unashamedly Australian, raw and generous.  It was a million miles from The Eddies’ contrived white boy renditions of 1960’s black American music.  By the time we stood to reprise the deliberately cheesy Theatresports National Anthem I was high.  We hung out in the bar afterwards with Julia and Daniel and it dawned on me: -

These people are my age.  If they can do this wonderful thing then why not me?

I had never before questioned my role as an uncomplicated  consumer of cultural production.  Straight away I enrolled in workshops that started in January. I performed on the Belvoir Street stage for the first time in February.  In March I founded Instant Theatre,the theatre company that strangely morphed into the consulting business I run today.  I left full-time employment in June 1991.  In the following years Instant Theatre performed for the general public in stinking student union bars, grotty pubs and tired little theatres and for corporate types at shining resorts across the world.  I told myself that we only took the corporate gigs to fund the general public shows.  I dreamed of a career in television and wrote some bad scripts for otherpeople’s shows and pitched worse ideas for shows of my own.  After a few years the corporate theatre briefs got more specific and I drew more and more on my BBus.  By 1995 I was calling myself a sales/marketing consultant and I date my current business, Dramatic Change, from then.

Ever since I've fought a persistent drift away from producing content and back towards simply consuming it. I’m in my mid-40’s and ‘why not me?’ is no longer enough reason to monopolise a stage, column inches or even bandwidth. Last year I quit stand-up comedy and the improv that I love may well follow.  I've decided that having the capacity, and even the ability to command an audience’s attention is a necessary but not sufficient reason to produce stuff if I have nothing that to say that needs saying.

A contributor to the Economist’s online blog known as W.W. wrote apiece in early November that argued against the need for more American students to study engineering and the ‘hard sciences’ as market forces have determined that America has enough of these for now. Rather W.W. argues in favour of the humanities: -

I spent last evening reading a fine Pulitzer prize-winning novel by a graduate of a state-university creative-writing program. I appreciate everything math majors do for us. I really do. But, as far as I know, a math major has never made me cry.

The argument that we need producers of Art as much as we need builders of bridges and factories and inventors of machines to mitigate the effects of climate change is an old one and always well stated.  As my second degree is in English and Australian Literature I’m hardly unsympathetic to studying the humanities.  One of the few defensible rationales for studying Literature at university is that it makes for a more discerning and perhaps better consumer of Art provided sufficient intellectual rigour is required to pass the course.  Art is the key word here. Anyone can bash out a sentence on a keyboard (viz. this blog).  The only cost of entry to getting on stage ata stand-up comedy open mic night in London is proximity to London.  But it is unlikely it will be Art.  At best it is someone learning a craft and finding a voice and we can only really guess at that person’s motivations.  The early stages of an artist’s career involve remaining interesting to enough of the right people for a long enough time to get the skills to properly articulate an idea in a manner that is both compelling and intellectually rigorous.

Neither Theatresports nor The Eddies pass this test.  Both shows were hugely compelling but as there was no intellectual rigour, no message whatsoever, both were entirely disposable.  With improv comedy, the one form where I have at least a modicum of talent, meaning will always be absent.  For all the skill it takes to do it well, the engagement with an audience, the quick-witted cultural referencing and very occasional moments of sincerity, I doubt that improv will ever change a single opinion.  How can it? It is calibrated to automatically give an audience what it wants already.  As Keith says: -

Don’t be original be obvious.

Could there be a more blatant directive away from Art?  It is as fatuous and limiting a statement as, “The customer is always right.” Yet it is the driving principal behind the thing that drugged me in 1991and has me waking up on the far side of the world twenty years later wondering what I've done with my life.  The writers’ block that chased me out of stand-up comedy pursues me still.  I've hated the last few improv shows I've done.  It’s no longer enough for someone to marvel at my ability to extemporise a film noir opening to a made-up faerie tale.  If I have nothing to say then why am I demanding an audience’s attention?

I will continue to write and perform whenever I have something to say.  The rest of the time I will stop apologising for being a consumer of Art rather than a producer of tat.

Ideas obvious but unrealised

Yesterday I listened to a podcast about Helsinki, which Monocle magazine named as its 'World's Most Livable City'. 

One of the many great things about Helsinki is its small size.  The entire population of Finland is only 5.5 million and I was especially taken with an interview with a young Finnish architect named Tuomas Toivonen* who expressed a very specific sentiment that you only get from small countries: -

If you don't do it probably no one else will

This is such a change from the breathless urgency with which most of the world approaches a project: -

Do it now before someone beats you to it

I've long been plagued by this sense that life is a kind of zero-sum gold rush.  The sense that whilst there's certainly success to be had, there isn't enough to go around.  More than that, if I don't capitalise immediately on that cool idea I had this morning then it'll just float back into the ether and settle on some more deserving soul.

The idea that the muses are both jealous and capricious is as old as literature.  The trouble these days is that thanks to the internet I get to watch in real time as Calliope favours some other creative type who followed through on the very same concept I had six months ago but parked on a To Do List.  As the modern marketplace of ideas only really rewards the first, then the best, of any sort of offering it's easy to beat myself up over dropped opportunities.  It feels very much like plagiarism but of course I'm the victim of nothing more than my own inertia.

There's no solution to this.  You can't follow through on every idle thought that occurs in the morning shower, that way madness lies.  The best anyone can do is choose the project that interests you the most and execute it in a way that only you can.  Then it becomes the thing that only you can do; if you don't do it no one else will.

The best ideas are obvious but unrealised.  The ones sitting right on the cusp of the adjacent possible.  What they crave is time, money and (especially) attention and they're just going to keep floating around out there until someone gives them what they want.

* And there's nothing Tyler Brûlé's team loves more than a young Nordic architect / designer...

Judgement

No one is more judged in civilised society than the stand-up comedian.  Every twelve seconds you're rated.

Jerry Seinfeld

Jerry Seinfeld is fantastic in this, as is Louis CK.  Chris Rock is wonderfully gracious but Ricky Gervais just comes across as an interloper.

(part 1 of 4 on YouTube)

How IP goes AWOL

Twice in the last seven years my intellectual property has been appropriated without my permission.   I'm not sure if two incidents of blatant theft since 2004 is a lot but it's certainly more than I want to deal with.

Both times the culprit was an overambitious yet cost-conscious training manager who had invited me in to make a credentials presentation.  In both the rip-off was based on introductory slides from that first meeting and despite the intrinsic simplicity of my ideas each end product of it all was rudimentary to the point of being completely useless, yet still vaguely linked to my brand.  The worst of all worlds.

I'm told that in each cases like this the plagiarists' thinking would have followed a progression such as this: -

1. That's such a simple idea!  I wish I'd thought of it.
2. That's such a simple idea!  I've often thought something similar myself.
3. Ideas like that are pretty commonplace.  It's really all about delivery
4. That idea has been around forever.  Much of the delivery techniques are probably already in the public domain
5. Why would I pay this guy to deliver ideas that are no better than my own and which he probably lifted from someone else anyway?

In other words, a pernicious internal monologue that begins with admiration and ends in defiance.  Left uninterrupted it costs me stupid amounts of time and emotional energy to arrive at a financial settlement that will 'make things right'.  Even worse, it also sets back my relationship with that company by years.  The sort of people who pass off others' work as their own usually have a highly attuned political sense and are going to do everything in their power to stop me ever getting back in the building.

This phenomenon, albeit rare, is why I have to out so much stock in my personal brand: my ability to convey my own ideas better than anyone else can is the reason why I make credentials presentations instead of watching them.

The business world's often cavalier attitude to plagiarism ('getting caught is the real crime') is also one of the differences between B2B and B2C.  When you're selling direct to the public at large the progression is likely to be: -

1. I wish I'd thought of that
2. I wish that I could do that
3. I wish I was doing that
4. I don't have time / energy / talent to be doing that but I'm so happy that someone out there is doing it and I get to enjoy it

Commerce isn't anywhere near as squeamish as Art on matters of originality.  You have to call the foul because it's unlikely that anyone else is going to do it for you.

The adjacent possible

Steven Johnson is one of my favourite authors.  He thinks deeply over a gamut of topics ranging from the impact of new technologies to urban planning and collaborates with the likes of Brian Eno, which is just a little bit sexy.  His latest book is Where Good Ideas Come From, (cool YouTube summary here.)

The idea that intrigued me the most was the 'adjacent possible'.  The term was coined by an evolutionary biologist named Stuart Kauffman to describe how the building blocks of life can only have emerged in a certain sequence: -

In the case of the prebiotic chemistry, the adjacent possible defines all those molecular reactions that were directly achievable in the primordial soup.  Sunflowers and mosquitoes and brains exist outside of that circle of possibility.  The adjacent possible is a kind of shadow future, hovering on the edges of the present state of things, a map of all the ways in which the present can reinvent itself.

p. 31

The idea speaks directly to many aspects of life but especially to the human impulse for storytelling.  In a good story events unfold in a sequence.  The building blocks of character and incident get combined and recombined in an order that the listener finds inherently pleasing.  The same goes for a great symphony or pop song or play or joke.  It's the logic that underpins the mildly addictive iPhone game Doodle God.  It's presumably why a rule of thumb states that no new characters can appear in a film script after page 50.

I think it's especially good way to distinguish between good improvisers and average ones.  Once you master the basics improv is a great platform for wacky ideas.  For a while every improviser goes through a the-wackier-the-idea-the-better phase but at its heart improv is a storytelling discipline, which is where the idea of the adjacent possible hits home: -

The weaker, wackier improviser will jump from establishing premise to zany-crazy outcome in a heartbeat then wonder why his (admittedly very funny) ideas leave the audience cold.  The stronger improviser will take us to exactly the same place but slowly.  She'll combine and recombine ideas and so usher us into that wonderful shadow future

This is why weaker improvisers prefer 'time warp' formats that rely on the viewer mentally joining up the deliberate gaps left in the narrative.  Audiences will happily participate in this game (and they are genuinely participating) but this is very different from the satisfaction of watching events unfold in the manner of 'proper' storytelling.

Stand-up comics must have an innate understanding of the adjacent possible; if you don't take the audience with you then you're on your own, which is an extremely lonely place to be with a mic in your hand.  A great routine will make leaps in logic that are precisely calibrated to reward the audience for keeping up.  The rest of us do well to remember the great Logan Murray's definition of a good joke: -

All information necessary for the punchline is present in the set-up

It took me ages to see just how wonderful this definition is.  And a perfect example of the adjacent possible.

Blindingly obvious (when you think about it)

Last night I caught up with a few performer types for some year-end pints.  I was introduced to a guy who described himself as a film maker.  He'd recently set up a production company and we had a very interesting discussion about the challenge of getting stuff to screen, in particular the difference between film and television.  He shared an insight that had never occurred to me before: - 

To make a film all you need is money.  After that it all comes down to the quality of the work

To make TV you usually need a programming slot before you begin

Whereas film production companies focus on making films, TV production companies devote all their energy to the pitch before the creative process can even begin.

A fool and his time are easily parted

Over 50% of all American teens see themselves as 'content providers'.  Seth Godin exhorts his acolytes to above all else 'ship' (i.e. focus on the act of completing a project rather than its quality).  500 shows at the Edinburgh were free.  Prosumer technology abounds.  This August Twitter had 96 million unique users.

We are all producers now.  The financial cost of entry to a vast array of creative endeavours is approaching zero which means every moment we're not at work we're on the horns of a dilemma: -

Do I spend the next hour consuming someone else's creativity or producing my own?

But if you're serious about being self-employed in a creative field then this zero sum game should haunt your every waking moment.

Unless you're actively working on a sitcom script then watching Arrested Development reruns isn't 'research' its 'leisure'.  This is fine provided you label it as such.  Same with reading your favourite Blogs instead of writing your own or slipping into the back of a gig when you told yourself you'd be writing new material.  A stand-up comic on the UK circuit can even convince himself that time spent on Facebook is a bit like work.  Time spent reading this Blog is time you're not creating something worthwhile.

Likewise time spent writing it.  There's a hierarchy of creative activities:-

- a Tweet is not that Blog post
- a Blog post is not that new joke
- a new joke is not that sitcom pitch
- a sitcom pitch is not that novel or short story or screenplay or business plan

A fool and his time, etc.

TVland

Apropos of Friday's lament about the TV pitching process: I came across the wonderfully named In the Meeja, Darling.

In the linked post the writer describes a networking event where Jay Hunt, Controller of BBC One (and thus the most powerful woman in British television according the Guardian) spoke about pitching: -

Slightly depressingly, this boiled down to "BBC One aren't going to commission anything that doesn't have a celebrity attached to it already". The example of Richard Hammond's Invisible Worlds was used as an example of a TV format that had been kicking around for ages, but apparently "only worked" once it was tested with someone with Hammond's enthusiasm.

Experiences

Improvisers are taught that there is a moment in every scene when the 'routine' that has worked so far must be broken so that the narrative can progress. Timing is everything; do this too soon (before you've properly established the routine) and you confuse the audience. Leave it too late and you bore them.

'Breaking the routine' is a useful way to think about larger things like business, career and life. In life if you're trying to break a routine you really only have two options: -

1. Repeat an experience that had the desired effect in the past, or,
2. Try something for the first time.

It amazes me the lengths to which we'll go to avoid 'option 2'.  I'm in the process of pitching a TV show at the moment and the hardest task so far has been writing the 'X meets Y' paragraph of the proposal*.  The network has said that they want something genuinely new and different and we reckon that our idea is that.  Experience has taught my creative partner that because we don't have an existing relationship with them the pitch must be framed in the context of a repeat experience.

As much as they say they're looking for 'something new', most people (in televisionland at least) don't want these new experiences to come from new people.  Which is presumably why we see old faces in new formats; we've already been asked if the idea can be altered to make it 'a bit of a celebrity vehicle'.

I feel dirty and all I've done is written three pages of A4.

* The most famous (and best) of these being of course Ridley Scott's three line pitch: 'Jaws in Space', aka Alien

Writing is a team sport

It may be that The Wire's David Simon doesn't have a funny bone in his body but...