Last week the interesting and interested of UK planning came together for our 33rd Google Firestarters event for planners and strategists. We'd taken 'Thinking Differently' as a broad theme but really this was about the (perhaps under-recognised) value of perspectives from outside the industry and more specifically what planners can learn from the way that lawyers construct arguments, comedians understand human behaviour, politicians communicate, and meteorologists understand the weather. And we had four amazing speakers and talks.
Amelia Torode is one of the select few people that have now spoken at Firestarters more than once. Back in 2015 when she spoke as part of our Magnificent Seven event she began with something that legendary planner Jon Steel had once said to her – you're not a planner, you're a lawyer. His point was that when selling in the work and doing pitches planners needed to 'read the jury' and bring them on a journey. It's not about being right or being the best, he said, it's about winning. Amelia built on these themes in her talk with four key insights around how lawyers argue their cases (drawn from interviews with Barristers, and she even went to the Old Bailey to watch them at work). Beyond this she framed a wider context for how planners can learn from techniques deployed in other professions:
- Think like a detective: keep everything, use walls, make connections, photograph everything, keep asking yourself why, use your hunches, follow up leads.
- Story like a journalist: find an angle, make it topical, think about what makes the story interesting, use direct quotes and anecdotes, find the scoop, write the headline
- Persuade like a lawyer: use memorable soundbites, build the argument, think about the people you need to convince, lay the breadcrumbs to the answer.
There were three things she highlighted in particular from how lawyers work:
- Mooting and drafting: the former is the specialised application of the art of persuasive advocacy (like debating but more formal). The latter is the idea of learning to create compelling arguments through writing – 'the more clearly you can write, the more powerfully you can persuade'.
- Pupil Masters: lawyers learning through observation (by shadowing 'pupil masters') and by doing (they spend time working solo in the lower magistrate courts.
- Socials and Inns of courts: these give lawyers access to a network of professional mentors, advice, networks and advocacy training (more mooting) for life.
Amelia talked about how each Barrister does persuasion in their own way, but how the whole thing is a performance, improved by continuous practice (you only make money if you are in court). From her time observing Barristers in the Old Bailey she noted how it was the stories and anecdotes that stuck, how they used questioning in an artful way to make a point real to the the jury, and how getting people to doubt works as well as getting people to believe. It was a well researched, fascinating talk.
Justin Lines has spent a year studying comedians to understand how they create and deliver material and set out how they can help marketers to reveal insights in a captivating talk. He began with a story from King Lear to articulate how nobody can speak truth to power except the fool, the jester, the comedian. His suggestion was that we should no longer position ourselves as the wise ('haha is far closer to aha than you think'). For a long time, he said, the dominant theory of humour was around incongruity, how odd things make us laugh. Yet there are things that are odd that still don't violate expectations and generate humour ('give a monster a baby’s voice and it is funny. Give a baby a monster’s voice and it is scary'). Justin referenced Peter McGraw (Psychology professor in Boulder) who called this a benign violation – something that is odd, but simultaneously okay, and it doesn't pose a threat. If that is the 'ha,ha', the 'aha' of insight comes from acceptable oppositions (Liam Fahey called an insight 'a new marketplace understanding that makes a difference'), an understanding which is perhaps opposed to the old one. The link is that both insights (acceptable oppositions) and the funny (benign violations) are incongruous combinations:
'Things going together that don’t usually go together. Humans can tell both how things are, and how they should be. Incongruous combinations show that how things are, is not how they should be. They provide the spark of recognition that interests an audience. Incongruous combinations are interesting.'
Justin made the point that many insights are non-oppositional, bland and uninspired so if we can understand benign violations in the way that comedians do we can reveal better acceptable oppositions and better insights. He went on to talk about how comedians go about making the odd okay and okay odd in order to create humour, how they create exaggerated characters, reframe truths, test material, make the uninteresting interesting, and focus on how the joke is delivered. It was an inspired talk full of rich insights – it's really worth reading the full text which he's generously put up on his blog.
Rob Blackie then went on to give an excellent talk on how strategists can learn from how Donald Trump communicates (without celebrating his beliefs, attitude or policies of-course). He talked about the power of simplicity and repetition in language, with some insightful research on Trump's speeches, making the point about how this makes key points much more memorable. And he also described how good Trump is at grabbing attention and courting controversy but doing it continuously, every day, and how this results in a disproportionate amount of free media and impacts the policy areas that people feel are important. Trump likes a good fight on social media, and Rob talked about how this created the perfect signals that play well to platform algorithms, and helps to seize the agenda every day. The net effect being amplification and little space for anyone else. Techniques like using social proof (if you want people to do something show other people doing it) in simple ways help encourage more interaction and more amplification. Trump's relentless self-promotion and ability to position himself alongside big celebrities help develop his positioning. It was a really insightful look at the power of language, amplification and simplicity.
Our last talk came from Bogdana Butnar who spoke about meterologists and how weather systems are a great metaphor for the internet, building on her excellent post that won Post of the Month a while back. Bogdana's point was that how planners and strategists think about the internet affects how they work with it. She used several examples of how some prescient people had talked about the impact of the internet including David Bowie (in 1999 believe it or not), the Pirate Bay founder who coined the phrase 'away from keyboard', the Cluetrain Manifesto. But she drew a parallel with how meteorologists view weather systems as constantly evolving, unpredictable, only minimally man-made, and fundamentally inequitable, as a metaphor for the modern internet. It is one thing, but not a separate thing. Weather fronts are like patches of information that move within a set space, defined by various coordinates (like a community online, or a forum). Occasionally small but intense storms, like dust devils and tornados rise up like memes and trends, starting small but then becoming big. Then there are bigger shifts that implicate on many other systems, like jetstreams – data practices, privacy, adblocking, passwords and security. The opportunity is for planners to think of the internetas connected systems that can only be influenced:
'If you embrace the idea of the Internet as something less directional and more networked and entropic, you can start thinking about your role as less of a provider of direction and more of a provider of hierarchies of influence.'
Bogadana's talk was fun, smart, and a good way to round out the session.
At the end of the event my head was spinning somewhat, but it felt as though we had heard four very different but somehow complementary perspectives and provocations. And it also felt as though there was an opportunity in the future to take more external perspectives and really think about how other professions learn and solve problems and what planners can take from that. My thanks to Google for hosting, to our brilliant speakers, and to all those that came on the night. As always, Scriberia did an excellent job of visualising the talks, and you can see the full visualisation here. Our next Google Firestarters will be in Q1 2020. I can't wait.
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