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?

To be more precise, all things are best left unsaid – because they cannot be said. Or, at least, cannot be said with any accuracy.

It quite possible that already you have no idea what I’m on about, and are still scratching your head over the paradox in the title of this post.

Bear with me; while this is about to get a little more conceptual it will, eventually, end up in the real world and daily life. Indeed, it is about the very stuff of daily life: words.

That’s how we manage to connect with our fellow human beings. Common sense, right? As plain as the nose on your face. (Why is he going on about this? And why doesn’t he get to the point?).

Well, in truth, I’m putting off using the next word, which was supposed to be  the next word at the beginning of the previous paragraph, but I got cold feet. It’s too intimidating.  And I don’t want you to think I’m pretentious. Because the next word was to have been…

Wittgenstein.

See? That’s completely shifted the tone, hasn’t it? It’s gone all philosophical now. I don’t want you to think that I’m underestimating people, but 50% of those who made it this far have now clicked to another website.

Or maybe they haven’t, because I challenged them not to by saying that they would in that previous sentence. (But now I’ve pointed that out, they’ve rumbled me, seen that they’re being manipulated, and have moved on. Or not).

All this will make sense. I promise.

In 1921, Ludwig Wittgenstein published his magnum opus, Tractacus Logico-Philosophicus and then spent the next 30 years trying to explain  it’s seven core propositions, such as: The general form of a truth-function is [p, ξ, N(ξ)]

That’s why University professors have tenure. Explaining that previous sentence is a lifetime’s work. Think of it as a philosophical annuity stream.

He died (in 1951) before his next book was published (“Philosophical Investigations”1953). In that book, he came out with an extraordinary premise, which philosophers have been arguing about ever since. The reason why Tractacus – indeed, all modern philosophy – was so hard  to understand was due to a fundamental flaw in the tools of the job; namely, language.

Language, he postulates, is context dependent. The words we use accumulate meaning, forming concepts which he likens to ropes, woven together from multiple strands. Some of those stands may be of different colour, texture, content than the majority, but they can still be gathered under a single linguisitic umbrella.

Take these concepts out of context, and they become meaningless.

Philosophers are supposed to solve problems like ‘truth’. But is this legal truth, ethical truth, mathematical truth or religious truth? Philosophy then finds itself reduced to a series of word games that play with terms like ‘meaning’, while, in turn, rendering them meaningless.

“Ah-ha!” says Wittgenstein. “This is the wrong type of game. It’s not word games we should be focusing on, but a higher order of game. Language games.”

These are games in which individual meanings of words, phrases or propositions are a set of informal rules – a consensus – adopted in and by certain players who enter the game. That may be an elite group or it may be everyone.

To give a simple example: ‘memory’. Take a moment to think of that concept and what it means for you.

Now consider what you have just been thinking about in the context of the following related concepts: psychology; computer; funeral. Different language games, different set of associations, different meaning.

The difficulty comes when the game changes, and you don’t know that it’s been changed.

Try these terms: ‘compliance”, “discipline”, “tradition”, “childhood”. Pretty straightforward to define. Except, in educational circles they carry very specific, technical meaning. So you can listen to a conversation on the Today programme that you think you understand, but actually you are completely detached because you don’t know the rules of the game being played.

More to the point, neither does the interviewer.

Fred Inglis, Emeritus Professor of Cultural Studies at Sheffield University, highlights this in his new book ‘Key Concepts in Education“. For example, “Skill” may sound like a good, positive term:  for a while the DoE was the Department of Education and Skills, before being split into the Department for Children, Schools and Families and the Department for Innovation, University and Skills.

(Already, you can see the language game being shifted just by changing the scope of the departments).

But, Inglis argues, in this particular language game ‘Skills’ focuses on the acquisition of techniques, rather than the development of craft or the outcome of achievement. It omits the length of time it takes to learn, apply and master those techniques. So two people can have a debate about Skills – ‘up-skilling’, ‘re-skilling’ – and actually be talking about very different problems and solutions.

Why does this matter? I think it matters for two reasons:

First – as I have mentioned on previous Blogs -  we are becoming increasingly lazy in our use of language, surrendering much of public discourse to commercial agendas (different language games), and devaluing the currency of communication;

Secondly, because the greater our awareness of language games, the more sensitive we will be about the agenda of a conversation, and the fact that there is an agenda at all. In all conversations, no matter how innocuous.

And the greater the awareness, the greater the understanding of the dissonance between what ‘they’ mean and what we hear.