Generally speaking, there are three types of communication. The first two are:

1. That which contains important content

2. That which is presented in an engaging way

Most of the time, we seem to be on the receiving end of 1 or 2 – which means either worthy-but-dull or entertaining-but-empty.

VENN COMMS

Occasionally, these two circles overlap in a Venn diagram of communication, and bingo! Number 3 – something worthwhile meets time enjoyably spent.

Like supporters of a struggling football club, we attend conferences and meetings expecting #1 or #2, and hoping for the rare chance of #3. It’s like an away win for Lincoln City – to be savoured and remembered for a long time to come.

That’s just what Morgan Spurlock has achieved with his newly-posted TED talk.

TO PLUG OR NOT TO PLUG?

For those who don’t know, Spurlock is the Supersize Me campaigner / documentary maker  who tried living on McDonald’s for 30 days. At face value, this TED video is just an indy film maker plugging his new project – and duping people like me into helping him.

I sit, gullible as charged.

Alternatively, it’s 20 minutes of inspired brilliance,that works on so many levels, with lessons for anyone who’s in marketing, in business, needs to communicate, needs to take a risk, has a left-field idea or, indeed,  has a pulse:

HOW TO ENGAGE

• it’s a MASTER CLASS  in presenting. Talk, text, graphics, video, humour, audience participation – an orchestra of techniques all working together, with Spurlock as soloist and conductor.

• it’s BEAUTIFULLY STRUCTURED. After a brief credentials intro, he sets up a question, then only resolves it in the final minute. And while he plays out the other subplots in between, it’s the opening teaser that holds us in. And the pay-off… well, that would be telling.

HOW TO GIVE VALUE

• it’s CONTENT-RICH. Look – I don’t care if his ultimate motive is to plug his film. He does it by giving me lots to think about. He doesn’t insult the viewer’s intelligence; he flatters it.

• it’s SELF-CONTAINED  and valuable in-and-of-itself. We don’t have to watch his film when it’s released; he’s giving us the gist of the work in a short seminar. For free

HOW TO CHALLENGE

• it’s a CREATIVE DEMONSTRATION of his central premise: like the Masked Magician showing us how tricks are done, Spurlock also shows us how he prepared to show us. “This is how my movie got made – with or without the help of the corporate sorcerer’s and their apprentices.”

• it’s PARTICIPATIVE: unlike the Masked Magician, he eventually enlists the help of some fellow illusionists (his sponsors) to help him pull the curtain back – and in doing so, they come out with full credit. It might not win them many friends in the rest of the Magic Circle – especially their marketing agencies – but I bet it generates huge credibility with their customers (Might this be a Corporate Social Responsibility project in disguise?).

• it’s a CASE STUDY on the difficulty of genuinely thinking ‘outside of the box’. Creative agencies can be as hamstrung by their existing mental models as the rest of us. Spurlock offers them an opportunity to be involved in something different – and they hide! After you’ve finished laughing, consider what client-and- self-imposed boundaries kept them from taking the risk

SAVVY IS, AS SAVVY DOES

And that’s the most important point – we might talk about barriers coming down, social media blurring the dividing lines, new media presenting new ways to engage… but much of what’s practiced is still old wine in new bottles.

Here, I think Spurlock – by accident or design – is rewriting the rules. While there’s no doubt that some of his targets are there for ridicule ( 21st-century Wizards of Oz), there is a challenge in here which needs a business/marketing response:

As consumers grow increasingly savvy, is it better to be more transparent or more controlling? To show how the trick is done, or to find more sophisticated sleights of hand?

Or is the greatest play of all – to do both at the same time?

A previous boss (I’ll spare his blushes) once said to me:  ”To do things differently, you have to see things differently”.

Since then, life has been a constant search for new ways of looking: You can find alternative lenses in the most unexpected places.

Indeed, the less expected, the fresher the view.

In recent weeks, it’s been a book of photographs that has challenged and inspired in equal measure: Iranian Photography Now, a portfolio collated by writer and curator Rose Issa.

And it shows that however stuck you appear to be, there’s always a solution.

LIFE THROUGH A DIFFERENT LENS

You don’t have to be a cultural commentator or an expert on Middle Eastern affairs to know that Iranian artists work under a very strict set of rules. And that’s especially true of women photographers.

In fact, at first pass the terms’woman’, ‘photographer’ and ‘Iranian’ seem highly unlikely to occur in the same sentence.

Yet their field is burgeoning and they have become a loud voice in an oppressed world, making statements about themselves, their position in society and the restrictions placed on them.

Take the role of the hejab (scarf), and the expectation of covering one’s head and face in public. Boy, that must make for interesting portraiture?

Shadi Ghadirian has taken it to its logical conclusion; portraits without faces at all. She replaces them with domestic appliances which, as well as creating rather eerie images, makes a statement about many women in Iran who subjugate their individuality, and dedicate themselves to their household duties.

It’s a brilliant solution to a seemingly impossible problem. The no-face portrait.

HOLDING UP A MIRROR

The hejab is the expected attire of women in public; in private, they dress differently. However, there are still expectations about behaviour at home, and the mixing of the sexes. Despite this, it’s an open secret that people hold ‘Western’ parties behind closed doors, often with alcohol.

It’s a part of Iranian reality that’s unshowable.

Yet Amirali Ghasemi has done just that in her photography. Which might sound potentially dangerous – would you want to be photographed in such compromising circumstances?

Her solution is to whiten out the faces and arms (bare arms are forbidden) of her subjects. They are now negative spaces, around whom the party happens.

The extraordinary thing about this solution is that rather than de-humanising the image, her pictures become more universal, no longer a particular group of friends, but of an entire people.

Mehraneh Atashi takes a different approach to the segregation of the sexes. She has created a series of images taken at a zoorkhaneh, a traditional Iranian gymnasium. She used flattery and the power of photography to gain access – dressed in her hejab.

What she didn’t tell her subjects was that by using the mirrors in the rooms, she’d include herself in the pictures.

There are many ways of reading this; her relative size to the men, the fact that she in completely enshrouded, the modernity of her camera technology and the timelessness of the exercise regime. I’ll leave the meaning to you. What’s important here is that she worked within very strict rules to solve a problem and challenge the status quo.

PART OF THE SOLUTION

All three of these artists are making political statements (national, religious and gender). They are brave women doing something important that’s beyond my experience.

What is clear to me is the sheer creativity these photographers have brought to their work. They operate in a world where the permissible is rigidly defined, the forbidden made obvious at every juncture.

Yet they have looked at the rules through different eyes, and found new ways of creating WITH rather than IN SPITE of them.

(These images are not ‘black market’ insurrection; all have been publicly exhibited in Iran.)

All of us in business are faced with seemingly insurmountable obstacles: legislative, competitive, budgetary. But is any of this as apparently restrictive as the Iranian fundamentalist regime?

Next time you’re faced with a problem, remember these photographers and the fact that they use barriers to their advantage – making them part of a creative solution, not an excuse for inaction.

“To do things differently, you have to see things differently.”

This posting starts with a double declaration of love.

I love TED. A TED video is an 18-minute workout in the best mental gym in town.

What marks it out is the practicality of the thinking on display. TED is a virtual venue for genuine innovation – the solving of problems, rather than the stylising of presentation or the academic examination of angels on pinheads.

If the worldwide web only had one site, it would have to be TED.

Second declaration: I love Rory Sutherland.

Let me be clear – this is unrequited, Platonic love from afar. We don’t exchange notes or cards or flowers. But his two TED pitches make my heart skip a beat.

Sutherland looks at the world with a fresh pair of eyes, notices spaces for new solutions, and asks “why not?”

SWEAT THE SMALL STUFF

In the more recent of his talks, he focuses on the inverse relationship between money and effectiveness, his basic thesis being that it’s the small stuff that can make the greatest difference.

Like the example of a World Health Organization inoculation program, and the ‘reward’ of a kilo of lentils for mothers who participated.

As Sutherland says: ‘in a business or government context, a solution so trivial as to be embarrassing.’

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dkLcwHmnPV4

At 10min30sec he sets out a simple graph (even creative thinkers need a 2-by-2 matrix to sell an idea), charting the relationship between money and effect:

• Big Money / Big Effect = Strategy

• Big Money / Little Effect = Consultancy (a cheap gag, but funny nevertheless)

• Little Money / Little Effect = Trivia

• Little Money / Big Effect = ?

He then sets a challenge: what should we call the activity he’s talking about?

IT’S ALL IN A NAME

Sutherland suggests that an organization needs a Chief Detail Officer to lead the charge on this, to “sweat the small stuff” and to be champion of inverse proportionality.

But what’s the label for their practice? What’s the verb? What’s the banner under which it gets focus?

What’s the question the rest of the organization can ask to check on performance?

The responses posted on YouTube are a list of current words, such as ingenuity, inspiration, tactics, common sense.

Which rather miss the point.

If the deliberate search for this type of solution is going to be formally established, it needs a new label.

(Like Quality or Business Process Engineering or Six Sigma.)

So I noodled this over a cup of coffee at lunchtime, in search of a new term.

A ROSE IS A ROSE IS A ROSE

The core principle is the relationship between input and output.

An obvious image is the lever, a simple machine that multiplies force. A little bit of pressure here, a huge amount of force there.

Nope. Can’t use that. Wall Street’s Masters of the Universe hijacked ‘leverage’ a long time ago. And in light of recent events, it really doesn’t carry the most positive connotations.

Then again,a lever needs a pivot point. But so does a dancer, and that’s too artsy for the business world in tough times.

How about a ‘fulcrum’?

That’s better! Good engineering word, ‘fulcrum’. Sounds scientific. Sounds technical. Sounds practical.

But put it into Google, and it turns out to be an energy company and an Evangelican forum.

So how about using it as the root of a hybrid term, one that links with business and finance:

Fulcrunomics? Fulcrumomics??

(Hey, listen: Entire publishing phenomena have been built on flimsier notions.  Stay with me here.)

The trouble with both words is that they are: a) ugly to look at; b) impossible to say.

Back to the coffee cup.

FOLLOW THE MONEY

The thought of linking to the finance function set another group of mental cogs grinding, and I remember sundry grillings from CFOs and FDs and VCs wanting to know the payback on proposed spend.

Return on Investment.

(We might be on to something here.)

The difference is that Sutherland is directing attention not just to money, but to the quality of thinking, the effectiveness of true creativity.

Return on Idea. R-o-Idea.

THAT’S the question the organization should ask itself everyday:

“What’s our R-o-Idea?’

Language evolves, and R-o-Idea easily morphs into Roidea,  which a good phonetic partner to ‘Trivia’ in Sutherland’s grid (like the ‘Strategy’ and ‘Consultancy’ pairing in the other quadrants).

Roidea: n: a collection of high-return actions and programs, initially dismissed as being too simple

Roideal: n: a single low-cost-high-efficacy solution

Roideate: v: to actively seek and promote low-cost answers to potentially costly problems

Roidish: adj :  deceptively straightforward, easy to underestimate, more effective than expected

And with that, I pass the baton back to Mr Sutherland, in appreciation for challenging some of my perceptions and showing me the world in a slightly different way.