I had read that he described his sense of his catwalk shows as ‘filmic’, and asked him what he meant by this – what he has taken from the world of film into the world of fashion. Until then he had been leaning back in his seat- witty, engaging, poised. But now his body language changed, and he leant forward. His voice became rather more urgent, more compelled, less reflective, as if rising to the challenge of that catwalk – and as if the challenge of that temporary theatre, that small catwalk performed to a tiny audience for just one afternoon, was a steeper and more demanding challenge than that of making a film that will be viewable by anyone in the world, and will last forever.

He said:

‘In a fashion show you have 13 minutes to convince a room of 200 people of your vision.’

He repeated the time:

‘13 minutes.’

He continued ‘And this is a very cynical, seen-it-all audience in this room. So you have to have an idea. And then you have to tell a story.

So you need a big start. Boom! Act One. Out it comes. And as you start to tell your story you have to really focus the audience. I turn the lights off and have a spotlight on the stage, otherwise they are all waving to their friends and checking their phones.

You start to tell your story and you move on. Boom! Act Two. On you take them.

I use music very deliberately to try to control the audience’s emotions. To help control the rhythm in the room. And after a while you can hear the breathing of the room (he inhaled and exhaled at this point). ‘You can start to feel them reacting together to your story. It is palpable. Till at the end as you finish they all exhale (and he exhales a big breath at this point) at the same time.’

He was a hugely stimulating speaker (I am going to write about how central having a point of view is to everything he does next month). And I was very struck by a number of things he emphasized in conveying his sense of how to communicate a vision. Struck by how useful they could be for us as owners and drivers of Challenger Brands when it comes to communicating our stories, convincing our own audiences of our vision. When it comes to translating our Saying into Doing.

It’s a little prosaic to spell it out, point by point, but indulge me while I do that anyway, because I think each is worth focusing on.

i) 13 Minutes

He didn’t say ‘you don’t have long’, or ‘you have around a quarter of an hour’. He said ‘13 minutes’. Twice. He knew exactly how long he had to make the impact he needed. And it was the tension between the time he had, the importance of success, and the lurking cynicism of the audience that gave an urgency and drama to how he decided to do everything that followed.

So…Let’s understand exactly how long we have to convince our audience of our vision, how long we have to make the impact we need. And let’s use this fixed time frame to give urgency and drama to everything that follows. Note here that we are not necessarily talking about external audiences. It could be our CEO, our sales team, our R&D scientists. Anyone we need to enlist and excite.

ii) Act One

He is telling a story without words. So he sees each appearance on the catwalk is an Act. Each Act tells a part of the overall story. And these Acts are thus not simply connected, they are sequenced.

So…What are the five key Acts that will together convey our vision? What is the right sequence for them? How does this sequence of Acts build our story?

iii) Boom!

These actions are intended to create a sense of drama, and arresting Ford’s audience at the beginning of each act is critical. So his ambition for each one is to start with ‘Boom!’ A very striking word. If you wanted to have the effect of ‘Boom!’, you’re not talking about getting heads nodding, or quiet agreement. You are talking about really getting them to sit up and take notice.

So…What would it mean to define our ambition for each act as Boom! What kind of response would we be looking for, not just at the end, but at the beginning of each Act? How can we more theatrically engage with our audience right from the start of each element of our storytelling?

iv) The Spotlight

Even in a Tom Ford fashion show, if the audience can get distracted they will. He can’t allow that. Even drama is no guarantee of attention. Tom Ford forces his audience to focus their attention.

What is our equivalent to his spotlight, and where are we going to focus it?

v) Music

In reality, the notion of a viewer of our spectacle is wrong. Ford knows he will not succeed by engaging his group’s eyes alone – he has to engage their emotions. He is going to think about how he can use every sensory trigger at his disposal to do that.

What are the sensory triggers at our disposal? How can we use them to engage every sense to bring our audience along with us?

vi) Exhale

Ford has a whole new metric for emotional engagement. One that is – in his words – ‘palpable’: whether the audience breathe in and out at the same time. If they exhale together at the end, he has succeeded. If they don’t, it hasn’t worked as he intended it to. Hugely demanding, but very simple, very clear, very measurable.

So what is our metric for emotional engagement? That is hugely demanding, but very simple and clear and measurable? That is palpable?

And he has also denied himself something critical, that most of us rely on more than we should: he has denied himself words. I am not suggested that we do this ourselves, but I am intrigued by Pinter’s observations that ‘words are sometimes just a strategy to cover nakedness’ – and that forcing yourself to be less dependent on words requires you to have more substance, as well as more theatre (Rob Poynton talks about this in his short film this month). That if as Challenger Brands, and as owners of Challenger Brands, we thought more in terms of ‘Boom! Act One!’ then actually we would not find ourselves all too often dressing up the insubstantial, but the very opposite – pushing ourselves to greater substance.

Of course, there are also limits to this analogy for many of us. Ford has at one level a captive audience, for instance – they cannot leave the room. And that is certainly not true of our external audiences for us.

But then most of us are not presenting to as tough an audience as Nuclear Wintour, either.

Adam Morgan, Founder, eatbigfish

Recently we’ve been looking to Asia in order to see how the new breed of Challenger brands do things, and one example that we keep coming back to is Li-Ning, a dominant Chinese sportswear brand.

Whilst Li-Ning reached $1 Billion in sales in 2009, the 20-year-old company still faces strong competition from the shoe giants of Nike and Adidas at home. A key component to the success of those rivals is the perception that they are indeed global brands. “We don’t have as strong a brand as Nike and Adidas”, says Abel Wu, Director of Li-Ning’s footwear division.”Our thinking is that as a local brand, we need to have an international image.” Which is an interesting strategy in itself in order to defend their local share. So they are now set to ramp up their global perceptions by turning their sights towards the most lucrative and competitive shoe market in the world, the US.

Successful Asian brands pushing in to new fertile territory is nothing new, but what’s interesting about Li-Ning’s US launch is the passive-aggressive nature in which they are going about doing things.

When it comes to the language they speak Li-Ning are very careful about their intent and are quick to highlight their own relative small size compared to Nike/Adidas. They are very keen to downplay their aspirations of the US launch and quick to articulate that they are not one of the big players, and they are not big enough to be a Challenger to the likes of Nike. “We don’t pose a threat to the big guys. We are simply playing our own game and hoping for some small success in the United States” says Jay Li, the General Manager of Li-Ning.

However, their actions reveal a different, and altogether more aggressive, strategy.

The launch into the US saw Li-Ning open their very first retail location in Portland’s Pearl District, the hometown of the biggest fish of them all – Nike. And not just in the same town, but less than a mile from Nike’s flagship store. Li-Ning’s spoken rationale for the launch was that “Portland is the epicentre of athletic footwear and it is a great testing ground for us to introduce the brand and ease into our international presence and it is ideally suited to be close to our global headquarters in Beijing”… of course it is. Whilst they haven’t issued a statement of intent, they certainly have delivered an ‘action of intent’. Very reminiscent of Diesel launching into the US and putting their very first store across the road from Levi’s flagship store in NY.

It is interesting to watch this passive-aggressive nature play out in terms of the celebrities they choose to partner with in the US. They have avoided the clean cut, aspirational all-American basketballers (are there any left anyway?), and have decided that Shaq O’Neil and more recently Baron Davis are the most appropriate incarnations of their brand. These are two very dominant and confronting players in the NBA who embody aggressive intent on the brand’s behalf. Baron Davis has just recently released the impending sounding ‘Doom Shoe’ for Li-Ning.

This is not the first time that Li-Ning have delivered a declaration of intent through actions and not words -you’ll be familiar with their antics during the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics.

Prior to the opening ceremony the brand was relatively unknown outside of China. That was until Li-Ning, the brands founder, namesake and gold medal-winning gymnast was selected at the 11th hour to be hoisted into the Bird’s Nest stadium to light the Olympic flame. Despite Adidas being the official sponsor of the Olympics, it was of course Li-Ning shoes being carried aloft the Bird’s Nest in front of hundreds of millions of live viewers.

Adidas may have paid the millions of Pounds to be an official sponsor of the games, but it was Li-Ning who reaped the rewards with a 6pc rise in the company’s share price and a clear signal to the world that Li-Ning has arrived. The media commented that whilst “Adidas has Yao Ming and Nike has Yi Jianlian [Chinese basketball stars], Li-Ning has China”.

So I find this tension between words of intent and actions of intent very interesting – the idea that a brand can deliberately use such passive language when outlining its objectives with words, but reveal such an aggressive intent when it comes to actions. When it comes to effective communication we know that talking the talk is not enough, we know it’s important to back up the words with action. But isn’t it important that what a brand says is consistent with what it does? Isn’t it important that actions confirm rather than contradict the spoken intent?

Li-Ning is fighting an epic battle with the giants of the sporting world and clearly recognises that language and action can be used together as equally important and yet very different weapons. The polite, respectful, even humble language acts like a Trogan Horse that allows Li-Ning the Challenger to plan and implement its attack.

Brett Donahay, eatbigfish, London
 

Preethi is the founder of Kiss the Frog, a company who help to bring the art of creativity and stroytelling to organisations.

August 2007, it’s a Monday evening and I’m in a 99 seat theatre in Santa Monica California. The lights go down and the audience becomes silent. The first person takes to the stage, perches on a stool and starts to speak. Over the following seven minutes he tells us a story, a true story, and after he sits down another person takes his place and tells us another. This goes on for the next hour. I have discovered the art of live true storytelling. And I am hooked.

By the end of the night I am on the edge of my seat, the hour has passed in what feels like a moment and I am well and truly sold on personal storytelling. My mind is already thinking about how I could build on what I have experienced. Would people in the UK share their stories so publically? And how could I harness this type of experience and put it to use in the organisations I work with.

Three years later storytelling lies at the heart of my professional practise as an organisational psychologist and the storytelling event I founded in December 2007, Spark London, is a sell-out every month and has been hailed as “Britain’s first true storytelling club” by The Guardian. Several hundred people have shared a true story to packed audiences at the Canal Café Theatre in west London and thousands more have downloaded our free weekly pod cast. There is, it turns out, a huge appetite for telling and hearing true stories.

Why? What are people getting from personal true stories that they aren’t getting elsewhere?

I believe people are getting a much needed dose of real human connection. We all know life is speeding up and family ties are becoming more tenuous. At the same time, Facebook and Twitter and other techno-social networks, tantalise us with the promise to keep us connected to others no matter where we are. A new language of connections has evolved in the form of ‘pokes’, ‘friends’ and ‘tweets,’ but are they really able to satisfy what we are looking for?

For many people these frenzied attempts to connect miss the mark. They are the communication equivalent of eating a packet of Hobnobs. You get the instant hit, but without the substance you are soon left empty and searching for more and ultimately may feel unsatisfied. Sure there are those who know that social networking is a means to an end but there are also people who use modern technology as partial replacements for real human conversations.

How storytelling is getting us connected

Consolidation– carving a story out of our day to day existence involves inspecting our experiences in a way that we rarely have time to do. What happened? What did I do? And did this experience create a change? This process of consolidation is something our storytellers at Spark say is powerful for them. Equally, through listening to others share their experiences, members of the audience also start to appreciate and consolidate their own experiences.

Getting heard – There is a decline in people’s ability and willingness to listen to each other, while the need to be listened to is still very much alive and kicking. Daniel Goleman coined the term ‘Pizzled’ to describe the feeling we get when the person we are speaking to answers their blackberry or replies to an email rather then giving us their full attention. There is something rare and potent about telling a story to a room full of people and having them give you their full attention.

Relating to others – living in a densely populated city we pass people every day that we know nothing about. We get irritated if they walk too slowly or take too long at the check out. Spark London lets people look more deeply into the lives of others, people they might otherwise never meet or speak to. These insights bring people together because they scratch the surface and allow us to glimpse at the humanity we all share.

Storytelling is back and bringing us together just when we need it most. With the opportunity to take a break from the doing and enjoy speaking and sharing.

Joanna Yates is the founder of Spark London. For more information about Spark London shows, to download the free weekly pod cast or to get in contact with Joanna Yates go to www.sparklondon.com

Watch the 2009 talks and find out about Do Lectures 2010 at http://www.dolectures.com/

The way we do things round here
The language you are hearing today provides clues through which you will begin to understand – only semi-consciously, and pretty rapidly if you’re to survive and thrive – the unspoken culture of the organisation. Things like what really matters round here, who our customers are and what we actually think of them, what the role and purpose of the organisation is, what we are really here to do. These unspokens sit beneath everything the organisation does and help keep it recognisably the same organisation, even as people join and leave. The internal discourse or narrative of an organisation is invisible scaffolding holding the culture up and keeping it in shape. This scaffolding is at its most tangible to you today – but this will only last for a while. After a few weeks you will be talking the same way like an old-timer – and will be operating effortlessly within the rules of thumb and taken-for-granted truths embedded within that language.

We help organisations use language strategically by enabling them see and hear their own habits again, just like you can today, on your first day. We might, for example, uncover an all-pervasive organising metaphor, or a hidden narrative, or another distinctive and consistent structure. One of our clients operated constantly in relation to their users with a ‘war’ metaphor. It felt totally normal – they didn’t notice it at all until we showed to them – but they immediately recognised it was deeply unhelpful to the culture change and business objectives they were trying to achieve.

Language is action. Saying IS doing
Saying is not the opposite of doing. Saying IS doing. Saying is constructive; it builds and sustains things – social structures, power relationships, ‘truths’. What your new organisation is doing, collectively, is creating and re-creating an entirely coherent but idiosyncratic conceptual model of the world.

Why should this matter to you? It matters because language makes ephemeral things solid and real – and in organisations it makes things happen, and it stops things from happening. It’s hard to think the unsayable – so innovation can be constrained by existing language. You also can’t hear the unthinkable – you may not really hear what consumers are telling you in research, because it’s hard to fit it in with the implicit frameworks and narratives you are all working with internally. It’s also highly likely (we see this again and again) that your internal language leaks out subtly into your external communications. It’s not a question of letting expert talk or jargon cross into consumer-facing materials; it’s leakage of more subtle, embedded assumptions that matters, often about customers and the way you see your relationship with them.

I have free will. I can say what I want.
‘But’ – you say, not unreasonably – ‘We are all free-thinking and creative people, able to make our own choices about how we think and how we talk. Our language is not constrained by anything’. Yes, but. Shared habitual language acts like a well-trodden path across a grassy hillside. It’s not that you can’t strike out across the long grass and into the woods, but most people don’t. It’s not only easier to go the same familiar way but, if you thought about it, you’d assume that the path must be there for a reason; ten thousand muddy-booted corporate ramblers before you can’t all be wrong. And of course mostly we don’t think about it, because we tend to believe that saying is not the same as doing. We feel that language is a transparent neutral medium through which we express ideas that somehow exist elsewhere. But language IS the ideas and IS action. So – change the language and you open up the space for quite different ideas, and fresh things to do.

Ah – but we have a strategy to think differently. It’s all written down and agreed
You’re a Challenger brand. You know what you’re trying to do – be different, break the rules. You have a clear strategy that’s agreed and written down. Surely that stops us falling into old ways, thinking the same old thoughts? In our experience bad things happen even to nice smart well-prepared people when invisible-but-powerful forces of language are at work. This is especially so when you’re a long-established company or brand. Habitual language, and the thinking that it fossilises, was once useful and adapted to the market conditions of the day. But it hangs around long after it has ceased to provide useful frameworks for thinking. Another organisation we worked with was steeped in a culture in which regulation and authority ruled. We noticed that (amongst many examples of regulation-talk) the place which scanned customer application forms was called the ‘Document Control Unit’. It didn’t control them, it just scanned them – but control was important and high status, and somewhere along the line someone felt that’s what it should be called. On one level this didn’t matter at all – but on another it served to perpetuate a culture once useful and appropriate, but now getting in the way of strategic objectives.

So, a market environment changes, but an organisation’s language doesn’t, because no-one can hear it. Except the new recruits, and they are not about to make a noise; they are too busy working out how to fit in and start being effective in this strange new world.

OK – so what can I do?
If you’re a Challenger brand – or if you’re trying to create a Challenger culture –– you can help yourself to change what you’re doing by looking hard at what you’re saying. The trick is to find a way to notice it again, just like on your first day, then you can make some conscious decisions about what you do with it. They say the fish are the last to notice the ocean; you have to find a way to see, taste and smell your ocean – then you have some choice about where you swim next.

Gill Ereaut is the founder of Linguistic Landscapes
http://www.linguisticlandscapes.co.uk

Rob Poynton from On Your Feet teaches us a method from improvisational theatre to help us to find ways to be what we say.

Follow the campaign here: www.joinmust.org

How a single action taken by Louis XVI finally persuaded the people of Europe that a strange South American vegetable called the potato was not poisonous but precious… and perfectly good to eat.

Fit For a King is one in a series of short films commissioned from the BA(Hons) Graphic Communication course at Bath Spa University. This film was made by William Chestnutt and Poppy Heading.

We’ve had some good debate exploring the power of words vs. actions when it comes to communication, campaigning and inspiring behaviour change and thought we’d kick off this month with a few ‘Action’ highlights from the worlds of fashion, theatre, premier league football and food. Yes the potato story is a bit random, not so glamorous as the other pieces or as hot off the press, but it’s a true story, an action-packed adventure and perfect dinner time trivia.

Throughout the month wise words will start making a comeback as new content goes up …. so get stuck in, have your say, do your do.