The stories we tell

For the last five years I've served on the board of trustees for a West London charity. We offer adult education in the form of Numeracy & Literacy and Information Communication Technology (ICT, aka 'computer skills') to unemployed and otherwise excluded people in North Kensington. The charity has been in operation for 28 years and the chief function of the board is to support our inspirational (and formidable) CEO.

As with all charities everywhere, attracting adequate funding is a constant battle. Our geography counts against us we are located in one of the most deprived wards in London (Golbourne) but that ward is in the richest borough in Britain (Kensington & Chelsea). This incongruence means that we attract less funding than similar organisations in the east of the city even though our students, many of whom are refugees and asylum seekers from places like Ethiopia, Somalia, the Sudan and Iraq, are equally deserving.

Lately I've been making a renewed effort to get friends and acquaintances to help us out financially; my strange, schizophrenic social circle includes quite a number of City Types who, at first glance, would be ideal benefactors to an organisation that is doing good work in their own back yard.

Not so much.

This is not to say that my friends aren't generous but rather that as you'd expect your typical City Type finds himself constantly targeted by a bewildering selection of charities representing good causes ranging from small theatres to the Guide Dogs to the local school to disabled kids to the alma mater. With wealth comes the right to pick and choose where you bestow your munificence.

In marketing terms this amounts to: -

Whose story moves me the most?

What I've learned is that even people with even moderately right wing views are not moved by the origin tales of foreigners. An entreaty that highlights a benighted past can result in a shrug of the shoulders or even something uglier. I've learned to save the stories of famine and refugee camps and even the obscene oppression of women for my lefty mates.

The narrative that motivates the right wingers is not where the beneficiary is from but where she's going. They are no less generous but words like 'motivation', 'integration' and 'aspiration' resonate where 'deserving', 'justified' and even 'humanity' fail.

As with any sales pitch it's all about the story; I've learned to distinguish what has already happened from what is yet to come.

What you don't want to hear is...

Yesterday the T2 section of The Times ran a terrific interview with Reginald D Hunter, who is one of my favourite stand-ups.  The article was another exercise in Reg cultivating his persona as the thoughtful guy who tells you the things you don't want to hear, albeit in as charming and funny a manner as possible.

His latest show, Even the Devil Sometimes Tells the Truth, is apparently an exploration of what he calls 'institutionalised female privilege', a topic which will undoubtedly leave him open to accusations of misogyny.  Given that Reg is a black man raised in Georgia whose award-winning 2006 show was called Pride and Prejudice and Niggas it's fair to say he's made a career out of courting uninformed charges of prejudice.

Like all great comics he sets out to make his audience laugh then think; in that order.  He knows he's got to tread a line to do this well and in the interview he describes part of his rehearsal routine: -

OK, today I'm going to look in the mirror and work on saying these things without them being misogynist

Reg's only way to the funny is over some very thin PC ice so he's going to have to muster all of his considerable skill, craft and charisma to get his audience where he wants to go without anyone taking offense along the way.  He wants to challenge but not offend us.  Reg Hunter is a master of the dying art of telling someone what he doesn't want to hear without him hating you when you're done.

Few politicians even bother with it.  Consider the centre-right politicians the world over who are happy to be portrayed relishing the fiscal pain they're about to inflict on their economies.  Even the most naive lefty accepts that Britain has to reduce it's public spending but George Osborne still succeeds in giving offense by not looking unhappy enough.  Or at all.  A spin doctor would argue that he's 'energising his base'; which is the most immature, counterproductive and ultimately damaging political habit to come out of America in the last twenty years.  Right now Australian political discourse is being destroyed by this puerile game playing.  The death of civility and all that.

There are plenty of unpalatable things that each of us needs to hear in various aspects of our lives.  As an external consultant I'm sometimes brought into workplaces as a messenger of sorts*.   Part of my job is to communicate to people that they need to do their job differently.  Either because times have changed or because they just weren't all that good to begin with, their current performance is no longer regarded as up to scratch.

Which is a shitty thing to have to hear.

But if I offend my audience then they'll immediately stop listening to my proposed solutions and focus on reasons why I'm wrong.  In the past I've been wrong in so, so, many ways: my analysis of the problem, my suggested solution, my personal background, my accent, my dress sense, even the colour, layout and, on one memorable day, my choice of font on my slides.  Who knew Times New Roman could vex so much?

This balance between truth-telling without giving offense sits at the heart of so many jobs.  Teachers, coaches, salepeople all have to get it right.  The discipline standing in front of a (real or metaphorical) mirror and practicing how to verbalise a fault without it being received as an attack is always worth the effort.

* At least I'm a strategist-cum-trainer so I don't get involved in the outplacement work brought to life in the film Up in the Air.  Although I suppose that if you're going to get sacked then a chat with George Clooney, a man more charming than even Reg Hunter, would possibly sweeten the pill

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.