Stewart McCure

Writer, performer, management consultant

An Australian living in London.  A self-employed training consultant to the global health care industry.  A producer, director and performer of improv comedy.  A trustee of an adult education charity in West London.  A writer and occaisional blogger

 

 

Filtering by Tag: Status

How much is cool worth?

In the past fortnight I've performed in four improv shows; three in California and last Saturday an eight-hour shift in London's 50-Hour Improvathon. The most commercially successful of these was also unabashedly the least cool.

Tradition dictated that after that show came down we sprinted to the foyer to line up and high-five every audience member as they left the theatre. This was done smilingly without a hint of condescension. As my castmates happily chatted about the show, the cast and life in general it was clear that many, if not most of the punters were returnees. We'd played to a full house so this process took a good fifteen minutes before we could head back upstairs to pack up and change.

This is how you get your 1,000 Fans. By converting monologues into dialogue. By smiling and letting people touch you. By answering questions and asking a couple of your own. By not worrying about being cool.

Cool is the opposite of friendly. Cool is aloof. It's black-windowed limousines, velvet ropes, private rooms and everything else that limits interaction. At a commercial level cool operates on the old one-way producer-to-consumer relationship.

But cool only pays if you've got 100,000 fans each paying $1 for the monologue. This puts you at the traditional end of the Long Tail and good luck to you if you get there. In the book of the same name, Chris Anderson warns that when shooting for 100,000 it's all or nothing. A fanless rock star is just a guy in dark glasses with a day job.

I kick myself for keeping the Scenes from Communal Living cast back for production notes instead of sending them out to chat with strangers who'd come to see the show. By the time we got downstairs only our friends were still hanging around and they were fans already.

Cool doesn't pay as many bills as you'd think.

Supporting from afar

Although the London run of Scenes from Communal Living has another five Sundays to run already it feels a little valedictory. Whilst the shows themselves are as strong as ever the houses are painfully small and I feel for my cast. Any dreams of breaking even financially are long gone.

At such times my thoughts get a little poisonous where my 'non-arty' friends are concerned. All of them love the idea of what I do but very few make the actual effort to support a show.

There's a passage in the novel Past Imperfect by Julian Fellowes, who also wrote Snobs and the screenplay for Gosford Park, that captures this beautifully: -

As if one is likely to sit down and send off three thousand postcards when a personal appearance is scheduled. Obviously, they understand this will never happen. The message is really: 'We are not sufficiently interested in what you do to be aware of it if you don't make us aware. You understand that it does not impinge on our world, so you will please forgive us in future for missing whatever you are involved in.'

Status 3 (facilitation)

This is my third post on the idea of 'status' as explored by Keith Johnstone in his book Impro.

As well as high and low status 'players', Keith also identifies 'status experts' who raise and lower their status at will.  Why do this?  Because low status is better for gaining information efficiently whereas high status is better for giving commands.

I remember an account by one of Margaret Thatcher's aides that sums this up perfectly.  When she wanted to know something of you, you felt like the most important person in the room.  The information was simply sucked from you.  Then in a heartbeat she would reassert her authority and issue you with orders to be followed without further debate.  This ability to alter status at will is a trait of all good leaders.  Some do it instinctively but many more have learnt it over time.

I think that facilitation requires something similar.  My definition for facilitation is as follows: - 
"Facilitation is the art of helping experienced people articulate intelligent conclusions"
I am not paid to simply tell people what to think and do in a high status manner but rather to usher them towards the 'correct' conclusion.  This requires me to: -
  • Provide the group with new stimulus (requiring me to be high status)
  • Get them to articulate an assessment of that stimulus in the light of what they know already (I have to be low status)
  • Then insist that certain activities and exercises are undertaken so as to enact behavioral change (high status again)
  • Finally I need them to voluntarily commit to applying what they've learned in my session in 'the real world' (low)
As an external consultant I don't have the luxury of demanding a commitment to change.  Instead I have to earn that commitment.  Yet even when people recognise that I'm deliberately altering my status to achieve this goal they're usually happy to go along with it.

Status isn't a 'trick' to be pulled so much as an insight into human interactions to be understood.

Status 2 (salesmanship)

This is my second post on Keith Johnstone's idea of 'status'.


Let's think further about the difference between 'rank' (where you fit in a formal power structure) and 'status' (your relative importance in a social setting).  This post is about what happens in face-to-face selling situations.

Usually rank and status are in synch: the more powerful person is also more important.  Sometimes this is formally imposed and history is filled with examples of social structures wherein the King is consistently treated as the smartest, strongest, bravest, funniest and best looking person in the room irrespective of the truth.  As illustrated by the story The Emperor's New Clothes the problem of 'speaking truth to power' is an out and out status issue.
Let's move on to selling and consider the problem that the following statement creates for a consultant: -
The seller will always outrank the buyer but the person with 'knowledge' has higher status
If I am selling to you then you outrank me; you don't have to buy what I'm offering* so I should always appear thankful should ever you hire me.  However, the only motivation that you'd ever have for so doing is that in some way I'm 'more knowledgeable' than you; I bring a skill, an insight or a process that you don't have in-house.

Every consultant is familiar with this balancing act: how do I establish myself as a worthwhile expert without making the client feel stupid?  If I underplay my 'knowledge' to make the client feel comfortable I run the risk of looking like I bring nothing new to the table.  Conversely, if I overplay my hand and come across as a know-it-all I'm turning off the client in a different yet equally fatal manner.

Isn't salesmanship fun?  Let's apply this idea to three selling scenarios: -


Repeat Business

The client knows what I do and wants more of the same.  Because I don't have to sell my 'knowledge' I don't have to adopt a high status position at all.  I can remain lower in status and simply thank the client for any additional work.


3rd-Party Referral Business (Word-of-Mouth)

The reason that 3rd-party referral is an easy sell is that someone that the client trusts has established my 'knowledge' credentials for me.  I can go into the pitch meeting and treat the client as someone who outranks me; I talk modestly about previous successes (not being too high status) but concentrate on giving the impression that I'd be honored to get the work.


Cold Calling

Cold calling is far harder because I'm forced to start with a high status position so that its clear that I'm not wasting anyone's time.  Then I have to drop that status to indicate that I'd be grateful for any project that might come of the meeting.  In a successful cold call you can feel the point at which the conversation pivots away from what you're offering and towards what will or won't be happening next.

This is why cold calling is never easy and I am convinced that it's the reason why repeat and word-of-mouth is the mainstay of most consulting businesses.


* There are some obvious exceptions to this statement that actually prove the point I'm making.  I'll deal with them later.


Status 1 (introduction)

As promised, this is the first of several posts on Keith Johnstone's idea of 'status' and how it might relate to the world of a freelance consultant.


As Keith is mainly interested in on-stage drama we'll start there.  He uses the term 'status' to mean one character's relative importance in a social setting.  In a two-person situation its necessarily binary: 'high status' and 'low status'.

Three observations: -
  1. Status is not the same as 'rank'; the master will always outrank the servant but he can certainly be lower in status
  2. Status is fluid; a character's (relative) importance will fluctuate depending on circumstance; sometimes being the 'wealthiest' grants a character top status but at other times it might go to the 'smartest', 'bravest', 'strongest' or whatever
  3. On stage (as in life) characters have a preferred status; just as some people are instinctively 'high status' others are instinctively 'low status'
Much fun can be had using these three ideas to analyse the character relationships in pretty much any play, film or TV show you care to name: -
  • Hugh Laurie's eponymous character in House is not the top-ranking doctor in his hospital but is the high status player in pretty much every situation
  • The ensemble of characters in Friends are forever fluctuating in status depending on what's important at the time.  For example, Ross being 'smart' doesn't automatically grant him high status over Joey who is 'sexy'
  • In The Sopranos Tony is an instinctive high status character and reacts violently whenever this is challenged
A more complex example might be the relationship between the characters played by Russell Crowe and Joaquin Phoenix in Gladiator.

(Do I really need a 'spoiler alert' for a film released in 2000?)

The plot is driven by the fact that Maximus (Crowe) is outranked by the emperor Commodus (Phoenix) but is the higher status character, something that causes Commodus to react evermore viciously.  By the film's end Commodus' status is eroded until he is left dead in the dust whilst Maximus' corpse is carried aloft from the Collosseum.

In the next post I want to take these same ideas and apply them to my world.

Impro by Keith Johnstone

The book that changed my life was Impro by Keith Johnstone.


Keith is the grand old man of performance improvisation.  If you've ever laughed at Whose Line is it Anyway? then you have Keith to thank.  He worked at the Royal Court Theatre in London in the 1960's, founded the Theatre Machine improv group and created the global phenomenon that is  Theatresports.  Keith has influenced thousands of writers and performers around the world and I've been lucky enough to work with him on three separate occasions over the last twenty years.

In 1989 a new girlfriend took (dragged) me along to Belvoir St Theatre in Surry Hills, Sydney to see Theatresports.  It was a genuinely stellar cast that night that included Daniel Cordeaux, Ewan Campbell, Marko Mustac and Andrew Denton with Lynn Pierse as her strange uber-nun character Sister Mary Leonard.  I left the theatre thinking, "I must do that."

Within a week I'd enrolled in a course and on Lynn's recommendation I bought Impro.  Six weeks later I performed on the Belvoir Street stage for the first time.  A few months after that I started my own theatre company (Instant Theatre) with two partners.

As I was still working for Unilever we decided to concentrate on the conference and seminar market with a specific focus on what Keith describes as 'status issues'.  Instant Theatre successfully packaged up the lessons of Impro for the Australian corporate scene and my current business (Dramatic Change) is a direct evolution of that work.

Dramatic Change only exists because I was taken to the theatre then given a book to read.

I recommend Impro to anyone interested in creativity, narrative or especially Keith's very specific idea of 'status'.  Over the next few posts I'm going to unpack that idea and apply it to the world of the freelance consultant.