THAT BUSINESS OF MEANING Podcast

Carissa Justice on Voice & Craft

Carissa Justice [https://www.linkedin.com/in/carissa-justice-24928658/] is a copywriter, creative director in Atlanta. She is the founder of Nimble Creative [https://nimblebrand.co/], a brand studio focused on voice, naming, and storytelling. Her clients have included Google, Strava, Figma, and ThirdLove. She previously served as Verbal Lead at CharacterSF. In 2023 she founded The Subtext [https://thesubtextnewsletter.substack.com/], an online publication and community dedicated to elevating the craft of brand language. So I start all these conversations with the same question. You may or may not know this, but it’s a question I borrowed from a friend of mine who helps people tell their story. And it’s a big, beautiful question, which is why I ask it, but because it’s big and beautiful, I kind of over-explain it like I am doing right now. And so before I ask it, I really want you to know that you’re in total control and you can answer or not answer any way that you want to. And the question is, where do you come from? All right, I think I can start off with the more literal interpretation of that, which is born in Vermont, raised in Massachusetts, have lived all over South Carolina, Atlanta, California for 11 years, and then back to the South. But I think maybe the more emotional response or that might tell you a little bit more is I’m the youngest of three raised by divorced parents. My dad was like a conservative, Republican pharmaceutical salesman, and my mom’s like a super hippie, liberal animal lover, social worker. So I feel like I got raised by two different worlds, both people that I love dearly. And I think when I think about that question, it’s fun to think back on it, because I think when I grew up being the youngest, I had a brilliant older sister who was so smart, and then I had a really athletic older brother. So I feel like they had their things and I never really had my thing. So I did a lot of things and tried to blend in and be the peacemaker and be the kind of easy, and I don’t want to say easy kid, but always was like, I don’t know what I’m doing. I don’t know what I’m good at. So I’ll have fun along the way. And I think that that’s been a bit of a backdrop of my whole life. It’s doing different things and seeing what sticks and seeing what I like about it and not ever really knowing where I’m going, but trying to enjoy the ride as I go. Yeah, so much I want to ask about, I guess the first is really Vermont. What does it mean to you to be from Vermont? And are there moments when you feel particularly like a Vermonter? Yes, I feel like I love being a Vermonter. I only lived there until I was about five, but then my mom moved back up when I went to college. And so that’s always been like home base now for many, many years. It’s the most beautiful state. It’s so peaceful. I feel like there’s, you could zip me down the middle and half of me belongs like off-grid in the country riding horses and wandering in tall grass. And the other half belongs deep in a city in the grit and the grime with that rougher kind of hustle edge. And I feel like both feel right at the same time. Yeah. Yeah, where in Vermont were you when you were there? I was born in Brattleboro, but my mom has a farm up in Northeast Kingdom outside St. Johnsbury. That’s a beautiful place. She’s a 72 years old and still a competitive horseback rider. She has horses and cows and chickens and sheep and whole menagerie. Yeah. What did young Carissa want to be when she grew up? I wanted to be an in living color fly girl for a little bit. I wanted to be on SNL. I wanted to be, I don’t know. I think I was very influenced by whatever I was watching on TV. I think the only thing I knew in school that I was decent at was writing. So I think I always followed that because I was so, so tragically bad at math. Dumb, dumb at math. And science was really hard. So I was like, I guess it’s English for this girl all the way. But I don’t think I knew what I wanted at all. Can you tell a story about that? About, I guess the way writing showed up early for you? Yeah. Well, I think my mom was doing, went back to school when I was young. And got her master’s in social work. And so I feel like she was always writing papers and clacking away at the computer. So I think I saw her, she was very, I think she was quite the writer. Even, I think she really enjoyed that part of her studies. And so I think that infiltrated me a little bit. And then I was not the best test taker. I was really bad at memorization. And so I would revel at a paper project because I’d be able to do it in my own time. And so I think that was my only source of feeling like I was okay at school. So I think that, I remember writing papers and being like, oh, okay, I’ll at least get a B because I know I can nail this. And then if I mess everything else up, that’ll be my saving grace. So I think I found comfort in being pretty good with words. Yeah. I really identify with that, how painful, impossible math and science, they didn’t seem to enter my consciousness in any meaningful way at all. But words were very easy. Yeah. And I think, I didn’t know it at the time, but my grandfather was a copywriter and I didn’t even for a good part of his career. And my grandmother was like an editor and also a writer. And I think, I didn’t know, when you’re a kid, you don’t really dig into your lineage as much. But as I got older, I was like, oh, that’s so interesting. Because I always thought they were artists. My whole mom’s side, they’re so creative, so artistic, and there’s art everywhere. And it’s all done by people in the family. And so I always like, oh, they were artists, but they were actually writers. And they also happened to be really good at art. Wow. And so I think I’m probably lucky for what I was maybe given a bit naturally on that front. How did you come to discover that they were copywriters? Given what you’re doing now, that’s pretty beautiful. I think when I was in college, I was trying to figure out my major. I think my mom, I went to see my grandmother and cause I did all my internships in New York and I went and visited her. She lived outside of Westport, Connecticut. So I would take the train out to go see her and my mom met up with us and then I got to, they just started talking to me a lot more about her life. And I remember just being like, oh, wow. That’s so cool. But yeah, even in college though, I don’t think I knew, I didn’t know that copywriting was a thing. So- What were they doing? What kind of copywriting were they doing? So my grandfather did, he was the copywriter to the art director in advertising. So we worked for a local advertising firm and just pitched ideas to local companies. It’s funny, I just completely randomly ended up watching just because of the queue happened that way, watching the premiere of Mad Men. And so that whatever you’re bringing into this conversation, you just got all this imagery from that show. Have you watched it, the whole thing yet? Yeah, I watched it when it was- Yeah. So I hadn’t revisited it in a while and it was amazed at how good it felt to watch. I was a long time ago. I don’t even know when that premiered, but it’s beautiful. That first episode is amazing. They’re all so young, of course, but it’s amazing. It’s amazing show. I’ve watched it twice and the second time was even better because I think you have such a, I don’t know, you’re not waiting to see what happens, but you just get to see how good they play it out and the different storylines and the references. I don’t know. It’s such a genius show and Jon Hamm is my forever number one. Yeah. Yeah, he’s something else. Yeah, and it’s funny, even in that first episode, not to get to derail a little bit, but they have a researcher, it’d be selfishly, there’s a researcher that comes in and they’re trying to pitch the tobacco client and they have this woman with a German accent come and represent Freudian insights into the behavior. And Don Draper is like, “What the f**k?” They’re all like, “What are you talking about? That’s insane.” They ridicule her for bringing this psychological insight into the conversation. That’s pretty funny. That is funny. Did you feel a little bit hurt in that moment? No, I think I’ve been around long enough to know that everything’s true all at once. You know what I mean? We all hold different things with a different level of need or attachment, I think. And so, he’s as right as she is in a way. And the solution he comes up with, toasted. You know what I mean? It’s the Lucky Strike thing where he sort of, he avoids, the creative solution is avoiding the psychological conversation entirely and coming up with something brilliant. Yeah. It’s cool. It’s really cool. Anyway, so now, where are you now? Catch us up. Where do you live? What are you doing? What are you up to? I live in Atlanta, Georgia. I moved here in 2021 and it’s wonderful. I run my own branding studio and I’ve had it for about nine years. I have a business partner who’s wonderful and a small team and we do strategic branding. So, the crux of the type of work we do is around articulation. And so, clients come to us when the biggest need is articulating value or particular technology or challenge. So, while we do full-scale branding design strategy and even executions around websites or packaging or whatever, I think what our sweet spot is is around finding the right words, finding the right language to articulate something that’s tough to explain. So, because of that, we work with a lot of emerging tech or work with bigger companies navigating, whether it’s a pivot or a change in their business or an expanded set of customers, it’s like, okay, how do we get from here to there and make it make sense and understandable to people? So, that work is very custom fit for the things I like to do and the challenges I like. And then on the other side, I started a publication called The Subtext, which is about elevating the craft of writing and strategy within the branding and marketing world. And that was started selfishly because I was sort of feeling down and disillusioned about the state of the industry and how many awards and publications were talking about logos and design and advertising and no one was showcasing and talking about the other brilliant people that are in the work. And so, our community is mostly made up of strategists, namers, writers, researchers, but also designers and marketers and business folks that believe in the power of language and its role. So, those are sort of my two avenues. And then personally, I have two boys, 10 and six, and that’s also a big part of my life. I wanna talk about, well, two things, the word, articulate. You seem like the right person to ask about that word. You’ve used it a bunch of times. And I remember when I was coming up, my mentor, our project objective was always to explore, understand and articulate the thing. And it was always very clear what that was. But the way you were using it made me curious about what that means to you. What does it mean to articulate something? So, to me, it means, I think you can’t articulate something until you understand it. And so, I think a big part of the work that we do is trying to get our arms wrapped around our clients’ challenge. And that’s through a lot of conversation, research, diving deep into their world. And then, I always think it’s like untying a tangled up knot of, because there’s so many things you can say, but articulation is about finding the things that hold the most value and understanding. So, to me, I think articulation is a process of crafting, you know? I love that you were talking about the subtext as coming out of maybe a little bit of frustration with how, and I think this is a fair assessment, how verbal creativity is maybe undervalued as opposed to visual creativity in the world of brand and marketing. Is that a fair description? Yes, yes. So, what is the role? How might we properly respect verbal creativity in the role of brand building? Pay us. No, I’m just kidding. Pay us, hire us. No, I think it’s not about, to me, it’s about getting a seat at the table with the other disciplines. So, it’s not about one being more important than the other, but I think to talk about a rebrand project, for example, and go into every detail of their identity around motion, logo, typography, color, and to then not discuss all the words and ideas that underpin that brand, it feels like a one-sided conversation that didn’t encompass so much of the work. And so, that’s where my frustration started, which is even as a studio owner, I’d be well, I wanna submit work, but I don’t wanna talk about the logo. And honestly, the hardest part of what we did was figuring out the positioning of this company. And so, I think there is a challenge that I do understand about elevating the other side of the work, which is strategy is often feeling quite proprietary or secret or something that a lot of companies don’t necessarily want to externally promote or show. But I think when you’re talking about the language that shows up within brands, whether that’s not in ads, but on your website or even internally, the types of the way that you articulate what you do, I think is as important within your brand presence as a logo or a color palette. So, I think it’s about finding parody and game recognizing game on both sides. And I feel like we started to, I don’t know, I feel like there’s been a bit of a change within the industry where I think people are realizing how important strategy and writing is, especially in the dawn of, or I guess the hyper cycle of AI that we’re in. So many disciplines, a lot of things that people have been precious about are sort of changing a bit. And I think what comes out of it is what is the idea? What is the real story that we wanna tell? And then how do we do that in the best possible way? I think has started to rise to the top, at least in my mind. I don’t think that the subtext is responsible for that, but I think that it’s a good way for us to ride. Yeah. Yeah, well, how has that changed the role of, or the need for more verbal clarity? I mean, I guess you’re taught there’s two things too. There’s this idea that strategy is words, right? It’s being very clear and disciplined about the language you use and positioning. It’s all pretty much a linguistic exercise. Totally. And then there’s also, then there’s the verbal, there’s the creative side of the language on the creative side. How has the role of that changed? And I’m totally naive on this, in the different media environments we’re in, is it more important to have a clear verbal identity and how do you help clients understand what it can do for them? I think what’s changed is that there was such a focus for so long on, I think what happened was brand became obvious, the way that your company looks can impact the success of it, right? The Nike, the Airbnbs, the big businesses that showed that high design, high craft, high intention can move the market in your favor. But then I think what happened was, everyone went through a design exercise and a brand exercise, and then it wasn’t there wasn’t all these brands that hadn’t been touched or they looked outdated. It was sort of everybody got to a similar aesthetic level, even in B2B now. I mean, the rules are so different. So I think when you think about branding, it’s not it needs to look cool or it’s an aesthetic exercise, but it’s the market is so noisy. There’s so much competition. AI makes it so much easier to start companies, to compete quicker, that understand, crafting a clear and compelling story that people wanna choose you over somebody else. I think is the thing that’s changed. That I think the value of that, I think has gone up. Yeah. What do you love about the work? Where’s the joy in it for you? I think it starts with people. I love working with clients and I love working with my team and collaborators. I think the start of a project, it has so much energy. I love that feeling of being terrified, being oh God, what did I say I would do? I don’t know if I could do it. Yeah, this is the high of winning a project and then the low of being okay, now I gotta do all this stuff that I said I would do. But I think the working with people is always my favorite part. And then I think that over the years it’s changed. I used to love writing, I would love a manifesto or I’d love to give people goosebumps in a meeting or try to crack the perfect sort of line that would rally everybody and get them excited. And now I feel like my joy comes from the wayfinding through it. I think the positioning part is, it used to make me too nervous to enjoy it. And now I think I’ve done it. I’ve gotten my reps in enough to where I think the strategy is more fun because it is, it feels like the most rewarding once you get to the other side. Yeah. How do you think or talk about, was sort of kept, caught by what you just described, the wayfinding until you get to the right place. How do you think or talk about what a good brand needs to be or a good positioning needs to be? I think it’s different depending on industries, but I think in my view, I think we are moving away. I don’t think it’s about finding white space or finding what somebody else isn’t doing. I think it’s about looking deeply at what you’re doing and what you have and what makes it special and trying to pull that out in the most compelling way. Because you can find white space or do all this research and say, this is what customers want. But if that’s not the business you have, that’s not that helpful. Because I don’t, there’s definitely been times where we, our strategy influences business significantly, but there’s only so much businesses can do, right? They have to build off their strengths. So I think that to me is the wayfinding is where are the strengths and how can we make sure that those are amplified and the business can then prop those up. And then how can we build the story around that, that makes it feel like the most desirable thing that people want. What’s the role, if any, that sort of qualitative plays or research plays? Let’s say research plays and then if it plays a role qualitative within it. I think it, ideally I wish it played a role always. I think the hard part about research is that it takes time and money and increasingly clients don’t wanna wait. I feel like branding is one of those things where after they’ve exhausted every other business conversation or sales solution or whatever, they’re finally okay, I guess we do need to think about this from a brand lens. And then they’re at that point behind the eight ball it often feels like. And they’re we needed this yesterday. And it frustrates me to no end because I think, well, you’ve already waited this long, you’ve already waited too long and now you wanna rush through it. But I think with that aside, I think research can do a lot. I think if you have an active customer base, if you have more of a mature product, I think research comes in from figuring out how people are using something or engaging with something, or what are they loving or what are their hate about it or why they didn’t want it to change. So I think research can be helpful on that end. And then on a newer business, I think research is important on the cultural side of things. What is this business, what gap is this business gonna fill or what need are we trying to serve or what moment are we building on in culture or in the country or the economy? How can we do our work in terms of research and sort of figuring out the context of the business? But it depends on whether it’s new or mature, I guess. Yeah, and how would you describe the way that you learn culturally or you’ve got a project or a client, you have a, maybe you don’t have a way, but I’m curious, how do you feel like you learn? That’s a great question. I don’t know if I’ve thought about this that much. I’m very your classic ADD brain where I have a million tabs open. Usually when I start a project, I read as much as I can haphazardly. I don’t stick to, I don’t have a well-oiled machine brain where it’s I do this and then I do this and then I do this. But I think I try to get, I try to read what I can about the business from what they’re saying. And we often get a lot of documents and then I try to zoom out and be okay, what is everybody else saying about this? And does it feel incongruent with what they’re saying? So I think so much of my days is reading and wandering around the internet for information. Now I do a good amount of research and wayfinding with certain AI tools like Notebook LLM or Clod, but I can only get you so far. Cause I don’t, I can’t, a synthesis is helpful, but you have to get it in your brain first. So it makes the tidy recaps easier, but I still need to look at all this stuff. Can we say more about that. You drew a distinction between getting a synthesis from Clod or Notebook LLM, I guess, versus getting it in your brain is what you said. What are you pointing at? Well, I think that there’s a misconception that if you can do research through AI and it just accelerates the process, I think it accelerates the synthesis of it in some ways, because you can do, I need to still read the things. I can’t just get a recap of all the things. Because then I, especially as somebody who’s taking more of maybe a heightened approach to language, I need to see what they’re saying in their docs. I can’t get a recap of it. I need to see the language they’re using. Why? So I, because that’s often a big part of our mandate is to be intentional with the language and see what’s working and what’s not and how we would shift it. So if I get a truncated output from an AI, I won’t actually, that’s not actually that helpful to me. Again, I think when I synthesize my findings, if I agree with what some of the things that I’m using, then I’m great. Yeah, I agree with that. But other things I feel like I have to work through on my own. Yeah. I mean, I didn’t, I was very curious about that. I mean, because I feel like this line between what we ask or allow AI to do for us and what we do for ourselves is, we’ve been thrown in this very weird situation where we can allow it to do quite a bit and it will do whatever we ask it to do very easily. So it’s not gonna defend those boundaries. So I’m gonna have to defend the boundaries between what I do. Have you found that to be the case or what broadly, how do you feel about, or I guess what’s your experience been incorporating these AI tools into your process? I think it’s been a mixed bag. I think from a research standpoint, I find it incredibly helpful because I don’t find that I have the most organized brain when it comes to, I feel like I’m often overwhelmed by the amount of documentation that we’re given. So because I can house it in something like a notebook LLM, which is essentially like a closed portal, you can add certain things to a project and then it only, you can query it. And it only takes from the documents within this portal, which is nice. Because then it’s not like it’s taking from all of the internet and you’re what, where did you get that? And I like to be able to search within the information I’ve been given for answers, especially when I want to find something specific or get a specific quote. In some ways, I think it’s definitely made parts of the process more efficient and gives you easier ways of accessing the material. In other ways, I feel like I really like it when you get more to the execution standpoint, you always have to feed it your idea. I think if you want it to give you an idea, I don’t think it’s good. I’m thinking more about ChatGPT or even Claude. It’s I feel like I have to have a point of view. And then once I have it, I think it’s helpful. Sometimes it’s helpful in the sense where I’ll be give it a rough draft and then it gives me something back and I have even deeper conviction over it not being right. And then I’m okay, why? Now I know what more of, I feel more convicted now that I see somebody else try to play this out. And then other times I’m sweet. I like some of that. I can build off that. And I don’t feel like it’s ever a linear thing. It either fight with it or it feels like it’s giving the work a boost. I dug around a little bit in stuff you’ve written before. And I wanted to maybe shift. Oh, I guess I’m curious about, before I get into that, when did you first discover that you could make a living doing this? Do you have a recollection of really encountering this as a jobby job? A jobby job. Yeah. I mean, I had a very circuitous path. I was an assistant sports editor, my college paper. So I made a little bit of money doing that. I only knew journalism was a thing. I didn’t really know you could be a copywriter. I knew you could do advertising, but I didn’t know there was another side of being a copywriter, which is more like a brand writer. So when I got out of college, I did wanted to be a sports writer. And then that was weird. And then I wanted to be a music writer. Anyways, I wrote about a lot of different things that I was interested in, made a little bit of money, but not much. I was actually convinced for a while that I wouldn’t make money at it. So I became a massage therapist. So I had a different, a day job. So I could take on all these really poorly paid writing jobs. And that’s how I got my first job. That’s how I ended up moving to San Francisco. I made money, more money doing that for a few years and took on really crappy writing jobs, but they got me a foot in the door. And eventually I got my first big gig at Shutterfly as a full-time in-house copywriter. And I made so much money at the time. I mean, it wasn’t so much money, but to me it was so much money. And that was my big aha moment that it was oh, this is made for me. Nice. And you talk about voice and some of your, how do you talk to clients about voice and what makes a good voice, what it means? I think my opinion has changed over the years on voice. I definitely think voice is important. I think it, but I think what it used to be was having it feel unique and ownable and consistent so that people could understand, see something and know it was you because you had created this vibe and a way of articulating what you do that felt recognizable. To me, that’s what voice used to be and still is in a large part. But I think to me, voice comes all back to strategy. And to me, I think more about what is your point of view? What do you believe that others don’t? And what is your unique take on your industry or the value you deliver? I think once you have that, which is to me the harder nut to crack, how you then express it should feel a little bit more obvious. And I used to really beat the drum of consistency around voice, but I think it’s such a different world. Brands have to constantly be evolving and moving. So I focus a little bit less on consistency as opposed to trying to really focus on what you do best and what your point of view is and making sure that’s coming through as opposed to cleverness or pithiness. Yeah. What are the examples of brands that have done this really, really well? And I’m thinking for whatever reason, maybe when we were talking about the visual branding versus verbal branding of the great blandification of visual identities. And maybe you were talking about a little bit of the consistency that there’s been a homogenization on some level of brand identity. I think we’ve come out of that quite strongly, but what examples are there of brands using voice really powerfully and strategically? Well, there’s so many. I think, I mean, I think people love to talk about the big ones because they were what started, I think, the drive towards having a really ownable voice. People still imitate Apple all the time for good reason. They really birth the crisp and clever headline. They use punctuation with such impact that I think that still reverberates today. And then you have the really chest beating, feel it in your heart, Nike anthematic kind of voice that can flex in so many different ways for all their different product lines, but you still feel it’s Nike. And then you have Volkswagen just always has this pulls at your heartstrings, reminds you why safety matters. It’s this really engaging, but emotional storytelling that I think has really been consistent and really well done over the years. So this is the big ones that come to mind, but then there’s really cool, even brands like Twitch, right? They speak in the language of gaming, right? And they get their user. And so they’re not polished lines or it doesn’t feel as much like marketing as it feels more like something you would read within a Discord channel or something. So I think, and WhatsApp does a pretty good job of that too, speaking within the vernacular of their product and within their customer base. Or there’s really beautiful, Alison, who’s in exposure therapy to this beautiful brand with her studio, Forner, where she works. It was called Uma and it was mushrooms or something, but it was so drippy and sexy and every sentence just felt seductive and you wanted to try it. And it just, I don’t know, there was something so beautiful about it. I always think when I see stuff, my first litmus test is if I feel a pang of jealousy that I didn’t write it. So stuff like that, I just think there’s so many, there’s so many great voices. And then people love Duolingo because mostly because their social voice, which is actually quite different than what you see in their product, which is quite functional actually. But they have this sort of caricature and this mascot that has permission to do things their own way. And I think it just adds a bit of a fun foil to that brand that builds on the storytelling and the voice in cool ways. Anyways, I could probably go way too long. I could do a whole hour on just talking about examples, but there’s so many. And I think it shows that I think people understand it. And it’s, I just talked to a writer named Nick Parker for the subtext, who’s a sage when it comes to voice. And we were both agreeing that it used to be that we’d have to try to convince clients that voice mattered. And we’re post that. I think clients get it because you see it out in the world. If you don’t have something, if you’re not saying something in an interesting way and you’re not getting attention, it’s such a waste of money. And it’s such a waste of money and airspace to be boring or bland. So it’s sort of, the problem isn’t trying to sell it now. It’s more, oh, there’s a lot of good stuff out there. So yeah. Well, that’s great. I was gonna ask that question about how, I guess selling it into clients. What do you think explains or how do you, yeah, how do you explain that shift? Is it just hyper-competition? Is it a very banal explanation like that? Or what changed? I think it’s, now it’s, I think it’s about reminding clients, you have to explain what you do. So you might as well do it well, right? You might as well have, really understand what you do. And it’s amazing how many projects I get where they really don’t know how to talk about what they do. And they’re not even really sure what’s most important. They have a list of features. They have a list of things that their service or product does, but they don’t actually know why or what it’s helping. And so I think to me, it’s really about reminding clients and doing a bit of that therapy around, nobody needs this feature. What do they need? What, why, or why would they need that feature? Or what does that help them do? And I think what you get is a lot of what you see today, which is to give you more time back in your day so you can get back to doing what you love. So you can, AI powered blank, so you can do more of this other thing. And it’s such a bizarre argument or more seamless, blah, blah, blah. And it’s really, it’s a lot of words to say nothing. And so getting clients to cut that s**t and be, we have a few words here. Can we say something that actually gets us somewhere without saying nothing? And I think it’s really around the inability to commit. They don’t wanna commit. They wanna be, they don’t wanna pick a lane cause they’re all in one. They do everything. Oh yes, yes. That’s the biggest issue. I have two quotes that I always, I’ve probably bored you with before and I’m sure you have counted them just that you’ve brought up that make me think of. One is that the biggest problem with communication is the illusion that it has occurred. Have you ever heard that? Yeah, I love that. That’s so great. That one and then what you’re talking about too is this woman, Fiona McNae, who ran, I think it was called Space Doctors, a semiotics outfit in the UK. And she has a TED Talk. And the title is taking responsibility for being understood. And I quote that line all the time because we never, we so rarely do it. Do you know what I mean? We so rarely actually do take responsibility for making sure that things that we say are actually understood by whoever’s on the other side of it. A hundred percent. I mean, I haven’t heard either of those and they’re amazing. I should pocket them and use them myself because I think it does, it’s shocking how little is communicated in all of these communications. It’s more about obfuscation and not taking responsibility or not promising too much, but also promising way too much. The willingness to promise that you’re bettering the world, but not promise that you’re gonna do something X times faster or it’s pretty interesting to see. And I think that that’s part of the legal landscape that we find ourselves in. It’s part of the marketing landscape we find ourselves in. I think also the hardest part is what gets somebody’s attention is often not what helps people understand something. And so I think we often have to think about those in different ways. So an advertising moment deserves a bit of a different brief, right? As it should, which is, there’s so much coming at people. What’s gonna make somebody be, what? What’s that? And then click on it. But then the responsibility really does need to be there around, this is what we do. And this is what you’re buying. That I feel is the part that, yeah, that I think it’s nuanced. And I think a lot of people wanna simplify it because they are just, no, just, this is what we say. And that’s what we do. But it needs to be a lot more layered than that. This last question, cause we’ve sort of coming into the end of time. And it reminds me of a conversation I had here with Grant McCracken, who’s a cultural anthropologist guy. And he makes this really, I mean, all of his arguments are very compelling but enthusiastic. But this idea that brands, he talks about multiplicity. That we came up, I came up in a time when brand was consistency was the thing, and it was a pattern and just all this stuff. And we’re just in a totally different landscape now. And brands can be a whole host of different things in different contexts. And there’s so much freedom in terms of how brands can show up in the world. And you talked about social voice versus product voice. And I’m just wondering, how do you think about the idea of multiplicity as it relates to brand and brand voice? Yeah, I mean, I think I agree with him in the sense that, yeah, I don’t think it’s about consistency. I don’t think it’s about following your brand guidelines. I don’t think it’s about saying the same thing over and over again until the market understands it. I think it’s about multiple things. So it’s what is true? What is unique to you? What is your very specific point of view? And then what’s contextual, right? So what is happening that you can speak to? And I think that’s the part that deserves that sort of ongoing negotiation around language. There are things that shouldn’t change a lot around that, what we do and why we do it and what we believe, they can be deepened over time, they can be expanded over time, but there should be some sort of core thing to hold on to, but everything else needs to be very much willing to react and excite in new ways. And I think it just depends on what you need it to be. Do you need it to be something that somebody can’t live without or do you need it to be something that somebody desires? Depending on the industry, those two things are different. And so they require different ways of showing up. And then I think if you’re not responding to the world and what’s happening and whether that’s in your market or within your industry or within culture, you’re just missing such an important layer of communications. Multiplicity. Layered, nuanced. More words. Any other buzzwords we can get in? Synthesis. Teresa, thank you so much. This has been a lot of fun. I really appreciate it. Yeah, thank you for having me. Get full access to THAT BUSINESS OF MEANING at thatbusinessofmeaning.substack.com/subscribe [https://thatbusinessofmeaning.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]

Nazy Farkondeh on Identity & Antithesis

Nazy Farkhondeh [https://www.linkedin.com/in/nazy-farkhondeh-84074033/] is a Brooklyn-based writer and brand strategist working freelance. She previously held positions at Reed Words, Trollbäck+Company, and VICE Media, where her work earned two Clio Awards. She has also worked with Interbrand, served as a D&AD Writing for Design judge, and holds a BA in Communications from the University of Michigan. So I start all these conversations, and I’m not sure if you know this or not, but I start all the conversations with the same question, which is a question that I borrowed from a friend of mine. She’s a neighbor too. She helps people tell their story. And I stole this question from her because it’s big and beautiful. It’s a great way to enter into a conversation. But it’s really big, so I over-explain it the way that I am right now. So before I ask it, I want you to know that you’re in total control and you can answer or not answer any way that you want to. This is probably the biggest lead-up to a question ever. But the question is, where do you come from? And again, you’re in total control. Okay, cool. Yeah, that was a big lead-up because I already know this question and have thought about how I’m going to answer it. But thought a little bit about how I’m going to answer it, because I do love this question, and I think it can be digested in so many different ways. But yeah, I think I have two answers. The first is, I say I’m from Los Angeles, and I really mean that in the from and to sense. I feel like where I am now is the result of growing up in LA and trying to be the antithesis of that. I always felt so restless there. Everything felt so artificial to me, like the weather, the people. And I don’t know if it was home, but I had this feeling of entrapment growing up there. And my family moved around a lot because my dad was an architect for LA Unified School District. So we moved around based off of what project he was working on. And I never felt happy there. I always felt bored. I always felt stuck. Everything felt really monotonous. And it was supposed to be this really exciting place that everybody wanted to be. And I didn’t feel that. And I moved back there after college because I wanted to work in the film industry. And I did work in the film industry for a little, and that quickly made me realize, wow, I really don’t want to work in this industry. And so coming to New York, I live in New York City now, and I’ve been here for almost 10 years. And it feels like a huge breath of fresh air. I really feel like an East Coast person. And I don’t know why. I think it’s the seasons. And there’s more texture that you experience on the East Coast, I feel like, you don’t get on the West Coast. And so, yeah, I really, in terms of where I’m from, I really think of that as like, that’s where I’m from. And that was a before. And then I think the second answer to the question obviously is, my family’s, I’m first generation, but my family’s from Iran. And that’s something that as I get older, I feel more and more removed from because the relatives that I have there have all passed. And I haven’t been there since I was 17, and it’s not really safe to go there right now. So hopefully it is one day. And so I think I like to acknowledge that because the older I get, the more removed I feel from it, and especially what’s happening in the country right now. It’s, I, as I get older, I feel more compelled to honor that. What is that? How do you notice that, the remove? I thought that’s an interesting way of talking about it. You feel yourself removed, feel at a remove from this thing, even as you’re sort of acknowledging it. Is there something, can you tell me a story about that? Like, how does that happen? Yeah, I think, honestly, I think it really hit me in the face when I got married, and me and my husband started talking about family planning, it, I really realized, I was like, oh, wow, this is gonna die with me if I don’t try to carry it forward. And, and I think being first generation, or being born here, and I think my, my family was, my mom and dad were born in Iran, and came here when everybody else came here during the early 80s during the revolution. It was such a stark departure. And only being one generation removed from it, I feel so removed from it. And I think getting married is the thing that made me realize how removed from it I feel. And I have one aunt that still, I have some aunts and uncles that are still around and not being able to carry a conversation with them in Farsi, when I was able to do that as a kid, was very jarring. So I started taking Farsi lessons again as an adult. So I’m trying to figure out ways to incorporate and honor that more as I get older. And I feel like a responsibility and also this intense desire to do that because it’s so much a part of where I’m from. It’s not like my family was from there generations ago. It was literally the generation before. Yeah. To what degree did it play a part in your childhood? I think as a child, I was trying to get away from it as much as possible. I grew up wanting to blend in and be white. If that, and I still don’t even know if I’m like the, whether or not Middle Eastern people are white is something that’s very unclear. I’m still very unclear about it. But yeah. But again, growing up in LA, I wanted to blend in and I wanted to not stand out. And I was a little bit, and I hate admitting this, but I guess ashamed of my background and wanted to be as American as possible. And now that time has gone on and I’m like, Ooh, America is not that great. I’m like, why did I do that? So I think, yeah, I think it’s a combination of age, maturity, and political circumstances, obviously seeing my people get continuously, for lack of a better word, massacred by their own government and their tenacity and drive and grit and courage and all of that makes me really proud the older I get. And so I feel more compelled to be in touch with that side of myself because I think it’s really important. You mentioned it a little bit, but I always ask this question of what did you want to be when you grew up? I’m thinking of a Nazli in monotonous California, artificial California weather. What did you want to be when she grew up? Yeah. I wanted to be an archaeologist really bad. I think I saw Jurassic Park and talk about novelty. I think that was the ultimate form of novelty. And then, and I was always interested in animals and nature and other worldly things. And I think that’s something that faded as I got older. And I think I’m rediscovering now as an adult, we mentioned before we started this call that my honeymoon was back country snowboarding in the French Alps with my husband. So looking for out of this world experiences. And then when I got a little older, I wanted to be a screenwriter. I was always a writer and growing up in LA that seemed like a natural extension of writing, being surrounded by the film industry and then working in the film industry for a year after college. I quickly realized, this was pre Harvey Weinstein as well. So it ruined the magic of movies for me. And I was in an environment where I was working for an independent producer and I was like, okay, I can be this person’s slave for 10 years making $20,000 a year only to become this person. I don’t want to be this person. And so that dream died, and then also seeing the level of disregard and the lack of consideration, all these screenwriters put so much time and love and effort and sacrifice, sacrifice everything to write these stories. And they, before they even go to anybody important, they go across an intern’s desk. And depending on how the intern is feeling that day and may or may not go up to their boss. And, and honestly, anybody can read a script, but seeing the interns and the people that I was with, it’s like, some people were there. It’s like, they weren’t that passionate about film. And I was like, wow, these scripts are being read by unqualified people. The people writing these scripts know way more about movies and good writing than the people reading on them and passing judgment on them. And so I think that quickly shook any desire I had to be in that world. Yeah. I love what you said about, I thought it was interesting that the, oh, an archeologist. So who was an archeologist in your mind? No one. I think I saw it. I watched Jurassic Park and I was like, that looks really cool. I want to be somewhere that feels so removed from the world, finding something extraordinary. I think there was literally no model. I think watching Discovery Channel and that was it. I was like, I want to be there doing that. So catch us up. Where are you now? And what are you doing? I am a freelance strategist and writer. I hate using the word copywriter cause I feel like it’s so reductive. And especially now with AI, it’s like, people think of copywriter as headlines or web copy or the executional stuff. And I never wanted to fit myself in that box because I think of language a lot more holistically. And I think of language a lot more strategically. And so I always say that I’m in this middle area between writer and strategist. I’m not a full blown ethnographer. I’m not a business strategist. And then I do copyright, but that’s the last stage of the work that I’m doing. I always, I don’t know. I think good thinking is good writing and good writing is good thinking. You can’t really separate the two. And so so yeah, so my work has been at the intersection of where these two disciplines live. Sometimes I do brand positioning work, research and positioning work. And then sometimes I’m developing a tone of voice for a brand and then executing that across platforms. So my work lies in that spectrum. When did you first discover you could make a living doing this? It was really by accident. My career was so windy and it felt so nonlinear at the time. But now looking back, I think it does make sense. I told you I wanted to work in film. And at the time it was 2013. So it was the new golden age of television where other cable networks outside of HBO and Showtime were creating very premium and prestige shows. So television was having this revival. And I was, and I was working in film development and I was like, well, let me go to a TV network. There’s, it’s going to be a little bit more corporate. There’s going to be more fluidity and ascension in terms of how you move about the company. There’s going to be more of a ladder up to growth. And so I randomly found this program through this organization called Pro Max. I think they’re still around, but it’s basically an organization within the entertainment marketing space. And it’s a space that people normally fall into when you think of the 30 second promo spot, the trailer for the trailer for a TV show that’s playing within linear TV airtime. And that’s not a career that people seek out. It’s something that people fall into. And so this program was designed to help people become, the term at the time was predator. It’s producer, writer, editor. So the people that write those, yeah, I know it’s so specific. And so I found this program and I was like, well, I’ve always been interested in advertising. And this seems like a great way to get into a TV network because the program, it was a certificate program. And the teachers were people that were executives at the Fox’s and the ABCs and the Disney’s. And so I was like, I don’t even remember how I stumbled across it. I think my older sister was dating the guy who was the president of this company at the time. Random and I just needed a change. I was fine, I’ll do it. I did this program and got great exposure to all of these heads of marketing at brand at these big, big networks. I got a job while I was in that program at the small TV network called Pivot. It was participant media. It was their TV network. I got a job in the creative services department, logging footage for on-air promos, writing scripts, doing treatments for branded content and interstitials when advertisers wanted to come and advertise on the TV channel. Then it was the rise of streaming was happening simultaneously. I freaked out and I was oh, well on-air promos are going to die because TV channels aren’t going to exist anymore. I freaked out and I was I just need to go into marketing, larger marketing. I want to be a marketing executive. I transitioned into just the marketing department there for the TV channel. Then that the TV network went under and I got a job opportunity. That was a dream job opportunity, the opportunity at the time to go help launch Viceland, the Vices TV channel in New York. I was 25 and it was just a dream job opportunity, moved to New York and go launch this really cool thing. I think that was my first big exposure to the power of brand. I don’t know if you remember what OG Viceland was like, but the entire viewing experience on the channel was branded. Most of their, I think 50% of their commercial time was filled with their own interstitial content. Watching Viceland felt like you were transported into this whole other universe. It really didn’t feel like a traditional linear TV channel. It felt like this whole other branded viewing experience. I was there for a while working on the consumer brand side of things, doing a lot of program and marketing strategy for the individual shows and the channel as well. It was a lot of events. Traveling to Art Basel and South by Southwest and Comic-Con and throwing these really insane parties. This was at peak Vice time, I think before it started going downhill. Anyways, it was my first big exposure to the power of brand and how powerful a brand really could be. I mean, everybody was trying to emulate Vice at the time. Over time and vice had a really big creative department. The TV channel had a really big creative department. I think it was a 50 person creative team doing stuff exclusively for the TV channel, not revenue generating content, but just branded content that lived on the channel that created the Viceland experience. I was very intrigued by that. I also just, having gone through the producer, writer, editor career trajectory, I was oh, it would be cool to be on the creative services team here. But I was in, but I had already transitioned into marketing. I was on the marketing team. But then as you know, they started doing cuts and restructuring and it was just five constant years of that. I got to make my job what I wanted it to be. I became close to the creative director there and he let me write and produce some spots for the channel. Then I started doing a lot of RFP work for advertisers. I just slowly started building up a creative portfolio. I knew at that point, I was I don’t want to work on in media anymore. I want to go to the agency side. I think at that point, people were usually doing the opposite. They were working at an agency and then going to the brand side. But I wanted to go work at an ad agency and explore the quote unquote creative route. After a while at vice, I landed at a branding studio called troll back and company, which was my first quote unquote agency job, although they didn’t call themselves an agency. They specialized in entertainment rebrands. Because I had an entertainment background, it aligned quite well. That’s when I realized, oh, writing and strategy is a thing. Brand strategy and brand writing is a discipline. Then, grew from there. I just got, I was there for a while and then got another job at this company called breed words, which was exclusively brand strategy and copywriting. Then from there started freelancing and yeah, that was a very long winded way. We got the whole, we got the whole arc, the whole arc of your professional journey. I wanted to, I was really tempted to interrupt, but this encounter you had with the Viceland where you just said, you know, why you just, it was your first encounter with brand. I was really curious about that. What did that mean to you? What did you see or what, I guess, what did you learn about brand in that move into Viceland? It was such a special time and a special entity, right? What is brand or what did you discover about brand in that moment? I think, I wish you did interrupt me so I didn’t go on such a long tangent, but I don’t know. I think it was something that felt really intangible. It was just this visceral feeling, the brand just had this je ne sais quoi. And it’s you didn’t know where it came from, but everybody was trying to emulate it. Everybody wanted to work there and it didn’t really. I think at the time, because there was nothing like vice before in terms of the journalism that was coming out of there, the brand was an organic extension of that. I hate to use the word authentic, but it felt very authentic to, they didn’t have to articulate who they were because they were just out there and they were doing it and they were creating all these shows and doing all this journalism about stuff on the fringes of society that nobody else was covering. Then I think as the brand evolved and nothing was articulated on a foundational level, it started falling apart. Instead of being relevant was trying to chase relevance or rest on their laurels of the things that they had done in the past. I think it was just a lesson in branding one-on-one of what makes a brand tick and what makes them authentic. Then I think a crash course and whatnot to do if you want to scale that brand over time. Yeah. What do you love about the work that you do? Where’s the joy in it for you? That’s a good question. I think about this a lot because I don’t know if I’m not, I think I’m passionate about the work, the work itself when it comes to the output and what I’m putting out in the world. I don’t care about it that much. I don’t think it’s that important. I mean, I hate to say that, but it’s true, but I think the process of the work and the things that it requires the curiosity and the thinking and the discovery and the simplification of complexity, all of that is just very intellectually stimulating for me. And it feels very gratifying. I think as somebody who always wanted to write and failed miserably to complete my own writing projects, whether it was a work of fiction or a short story or whatever, I struggled with that. I feel for some reason doing that process at work, I just find it much easier. I think it tickles the same parts of my brain that want to be activated when I seek out to do a personal project. But for some reason, the personal projects or torture the work projects or not. I always wished I could wish I could be that person. That’s oh, I have to create for myself. It’s my therapy, but I’ve never been able to be that person. I loved how you talked about language early on, and you’re very clear about living in between in this world, between writing and strategy and how words are related to the ideas and brand, I guess. I’d love to hear you talk more about your process in terms of the role that language plays. If that’s a too broad a question, I can narrow in. No, I mean, I think I’ll try to answer that. One of the first studio that I worked at had this mantra of discard everything that means nothing. I always appreciated that when it came to language. I think it’s the process of simplification is something that I constantly go back to. With language, it’s I just constantly asked myself, is this expression making things more complicated or less complicated? If I have to add some modifiers to get the point across, then the idea is probably not right. I think that I use the process of simplification in my writing a lot. I think that’s the thing that I enjoy about it is how do you capture the true essence of something, whether it’s a strategy or a voice persona or a campaign idea, if, how do you make it robust and rich in as few words as possible? I think that’s the challenge that’s the challenge that I live for. Yeah. What’s your, what do you, what do people come to you for? I feel like everybody’s got a little bit, at least in our minds, sort of the red phone. I mean, that’s an old, it’s an old Batman reference, but what’s the red phone for the work that you want to do? When do you want people calling you? What are the problems you love to solve? I mean, honestly, I’m still figuring that out. It’s been ongoing for me. I think only having done the freelance thing for a little bit over a year and just with the time that we’re in, it’s scary with all these agencies imploding and shutting down and the freelancer market getting more and more saturated and everybody wanting things done faster, cheaper, quality that you can’t have all three. Now people expect all three. It’s been hard to me to, it’s been hard for me to trust that I can be in a space where I can start to say no and cultivate the body of work that I want to do. I don’t know, I guess to answer your question, this is kind of sad to admit, I haven’t let, I haven’t allowed myself to get to that spot just because I don’t feel liberated enough to do that. I mean, I hopefully that changes. But I mean, I think right now it’s less about the type of work that I to do. It’s more about the stage in which a client is in when they need help that interests me the most. It’s usually when I’m a bigger fan of coming in, not necessarily when something is being built from scratch, and they’re trying to, and a brand is trying to be defined from scratch. I to come in at the moments where there’s a bunch of different factors. It’s okay, we have this foundation, but then we have this variable that’s happening in the background business wise. Then this is happening out in the world contextually and culture wise and we need to, but we also need to move this direction. It’s what is the answer? I think that that kind of work fulfills me more is the juggling of different variables to reach a certain outcome versus building something from scratch. I think it’s mostly just because when you’re building a brand from scratch, I did this recently and it’s, there’s many unknowns and usually you’re working with a founder that’s in a very early stage and they have a lot of anxiety. I find that, I find that the sky’s the limit can be kind of limiting. I think, I think the more, I think I think the more variables you’re playing with, the more creative that you can be and the more satisfying the work is. Yeah, I usually to come in at a point where a brand is trying to shift perception or change their personality a little bit, figure out how to be edgier, figure out how to be more playful, more whatever. Figuring out how to strategically implement that. That’s the work that I find most interesting. Yeah. What’s your process for learning? We all have our own sort of way of learning and what, how do you, how do you learn about, let’s say you get invited on a project in that condition, how do you begin to learn? Do you have a discovery process? What are the tools you use? I’m just always curious how people orient themselves within culture and within the brand in order to be, to do that kind of work. Yeah. I mean, I think I’m just patient with the materials. I know that sounds boring, but I spend a long time on discovery, just sitting with any relevant documents or research. You and I are both in exposure therapy. I’ll go back through that slack and see if there’s any relevant thinking or conversations within that, that industry or that discipline that I’ll go back to. I usually always start with, I think the first instincts that come to mind, I think the work we do is very instinctual and it’s this work is about the process is what leads you to the answer. It’s not you’re making a calculation and ending at point Z. It’s the, the insight is in the discovery and in the process. I’ll always write down some initial thoughts on, if let’s say I’m doing a strategy exercise, what is if I’m, and I need to write positioning, okay, what do I think the purpose of this brand is right now? And just kind of, as I’m going through discovery, just write simple articulations of that at various points in the discovery phase, and then kind of look back and see how it’s evolved. Usually I can, from the way the articulation is evolving, I can kind of gain an insight as to okay, in how the discovery is evolving. It’s if it’s trending a certain way, then I can kind of gauge okay, this, this path is telling me something about where, where it needs to end up. Yeah. What do you, or what role, if any, does, I’m always interested in getting into a conversation about qualitative and face-to-face discovery and if it plays a role for you or not, and what role does it play in your work and what value does it bring? I mean, I think it’s the most valuable thing. I mean, you can only gain much from looking at old positioning documents and messaging A-B testing and things like that. That’s great. But I don’t know. I find that mostly when people are on the client side of this work, they’re just, they’re managing many different factors and variables. They’re just trying, they’re just looking for somebody to make sense of the things that they’re thinking. Qualitative plays a huge role because the answers are usually already there and what they’re, and what they’re, when, what they’re talking about. I, and I want to get, it’s something that I’m always trying to get better at is how do I design the most insightful questions. It’s something that I’m always trying to get better at rather than just regular stakeholder questions. Just I’m trying to always get better at how to architect those questions. I’d love to learn from you too, because I know that that’s the core, the core of what you do. But I always do, I find the best work always comes when there’s at least some interview sessions being done with the client. Otherwise it’s just, you’re just, otherwise, I don’t know, the work feels, can feel a little soulless and I always to be reminded that I’m helping a human out. It just makes the work more gratifying. I think I, I to be oriented in that this work is helping out a human, not just a business. I think qualitative plays a huge role in that. Yeah. Yeah. That’s a beautiful, I mean, yes. Questions. Let’s talk about questions. What’s, when you’re thinking about better questions or having better questions, what are you thinking about? Yeah. I mean, I don’t know. I’d love to ask you that because you have more experience with it than I do. But yeah, I think I’m always trying to find, going back to a branding exercise, let’s say we need to articulate what a certain brand is in a traditional positioning sense. I think trying to uncover the spirit of the brand beyond general adjectives. I think a lot of times, trying to uncover the nuances that actually make it different. I feel like a lot of times in positioning work or honestly in voice work, especially tone of voice work, always go back to the same adjectives. We want to sound human. We want to sound authoritative. We want to be clear. And it’s like, that’s not a unique brand. That’s a good brand and that’s good copywriting. So I’m always trying to figure out, okay, what makes a, what’s the difference between, let’s go to copywriting for a second. What makes, what’s good copywriting and what’s distinct copywriting. And I think trying to figure out, trying to uncover the nuances that get to that distinction. That’s what I’m always trying to uncover in my questions. And I find it, I always find it very challenging. So I’d love to hear from you about how you get there. Well, I mean, I identify completely and I feel like that’s the whole thing, isn’t it? You know what I mean? Both the idea that there’s some perfect question that’s going to unlock something and the hunger to get into a space where you’re discovering something. I mean, I feel like that’s the whole attraction to the work, right? So I’m identifying with you that that’s, I feel the exact same thing. I think a lot about questions of course, but it lands right on top of what you said about the process, that the strategy is in the process. You don’t calculate your way through. You get lost, you have to get lost in something that’s not you in order to find, discover whatever is going to be discovered. And I think that, I think of that at the level of conversation is true too. And I remember somebody correcting me on this. I remember being like, what are your questions that you love? And they were like, well, I don’t know. I mean, it’s not really the question. It’s whatever’s happening, you know, between me and the person I’m talking to. Maybe it’s not the question. Maybe it’s my facial expression. Maybe it’s, right. Maybe it’s the weather. I don’t, you know what I mean? It’s stuff there that we have no idea about. Yeah. That’s why I love being in an interview. When someone goes on a tangent, I love it. I’m like, keep going. Keep talking. I think that’s, I mean, unless they’re going completely off the rails, obviously you have to direct them back a little bit, but I find the most insightful insights when people start talking about something and then they can’t stop talking about it. And going back to the process, I think this is what my biggest gripe with AI is. It’s like, it makes us more efficient at the process, but it also shortens the process. And so that’s something that I have to constantly balance in doing the work. It’s like, how do I make myself more efficient without shortcutting my way out of the thing that’s the most important thing. And I think that’s been my biggest issue with these tools that are supposed to make you better at your job. Yeah, that’s right. What’s the most important thing you said? You said it’s, you said, I want to do the, I want to use these tools to make me better at my job without losing the most important thing. What were you thinking about? Yeah. I think going back to what we were talking about in terms of the insight being in the process of discovery. And I think that sometimes the idea or for lack of a better word, the answer comes in the most unexpected places in the research process. And so it’s the biggest contradiction in the work because we’re always, we’re in the work itself. I feel like in the process of discovery, we’re searching, we’re sense-making, we’re trying to find patterns, we’re logic-ing in a way, but the best insights don’t really come from logic. They come from instinct and they sort of appear. And so it’s, and that’s what AI is. It recognizes patterns and it’s, and logic and that’s what it’s good at. And so I constantly, it’s really underscored a huge contradiction in the work that we do. It’s like, we’re signing, we’re simplifying, we’re sense-making, we’re identifying patterns, we’re making sense out of complexity, things that feel very logic-oriented and almost mathematical, but the output itself and the core idea that is the idea usually comes out, usually appears out of thin air from some point in the process. And I find that part of the work, I think the most interesting is that it seems so methodical and logic-based and it is to many degrees, but that’s not, but usually the answer doesn’t come that way. No, I really love what you said. And I mean, I feel like the AI, working with AI has really been a challenge in that it’s trying to find that line and protect those boundaries between what I’m doing and what it’s doing. And somebody articulated, and I want to hear you respond to this, that what AI is really good at is it takes the patterns, it identifies patterns, and it can scale these patterns. It’s basically scaling patterns in any direction you want unbelievably fast, but it’s always working with an existing pattern. So if you, and what we do, I guess, is we identify things that break the pattern or that somehow, or that somehow aren’t, don’t fit. But somebody articulated that in a way that made, it made sense to me that it seemed to make the limitations of AI really visceral, but how have you been using it and what, and I have a broad sort of idea. I mean, how do we, how do you work as a strategist in discovery now with all the, you know what I mean? The time constraints, these new tools, what have you, what have you found that works for you? Yeah, I mean, I think it’s, I think the most helpful thing that it’s done is that it’s removed the fear of a blank page. I think before these tools existed, initiating the starting point, I think was always the biggest challenge. So much time for me, at least personally, was spent in mustering up the momentum to initiate. And I think that AI has allowed for very easy access to a starting point. And I think that, yeah, I mean, it’s so much easier to, you know, let’s say you have a transcription of an interview, it’s so much easier to put that into Claude or chat GPT. And they’re like, what are some key themes that keep coming up, you know? And I think it’s helpful to do that, though. And then again, you said, break the pattern, go back through the actual transcription with these patterns and be like, okay, how can I push this theme even further? How can I break this theme and make it, you know, and make it more interesting? And so if anything, for me, it’s been a really great starting point.\ And I mean, I hope, hopefully, I can keep it that way. Hopefully, it stays that way. What about you? Well, yeah, I mean, I’m with you on everything you’ve said, and what occurred to me as you were talking is, and what I think I’m learning is that with the time constraints, it’s very easy to offload a lot of that work early to Claude and have it do a whole bunch of different sort of analyses on transcripts and all these other things. And what I’m learning is that I need to, and I think as I grew older, I realized, my mentor told me in the beginning, he’s like, listen, you need to discover what you’re curious about. Your curiosity is your guide through this process. I really came as a young person feeling like there was a right answer out there I needed to find. Yeah. So sometimes, I think I’m not giving myself enough time to really understand what I think or feel about, and in quality, about what these people have been telling me. You know what I mean? I have the language, and I can treat the transcript as the data set, but I have a giant piece of, I’m a, I am a data set that I haven’t fully processed in the time constraints that I’ve been given. Yeah, I love that framing so much. It’s, you don’t realize that you’re an entire, you’re an entire qualitative entity, and your reactions are part of the data as well. Yeah, yeah. And this is the thing I feel like I’m always really fighting for in a way, and it’s sort of, you know, I mean, it’s probably revealing at a psychological level. I’m always wondering, does this matter? Does this, does this matter? You know what I mean? Does this work matter? And so AI is an interesting challenge. I’m curious, because I mentioned my mentor. Do you have any mentors or people, I always ask this question, I don’t know why they’re together, but what mentors have you had that really shaped you? And then are there touchstones, ideas, or frameworks that you keep returning to as a, in your work? Yeah. I think mentorship wise, I mean, there is definitely a lot more when I was much younger, I think. And, you know, the bosses that believed in me and commented on the quality of my work or my drive or whatever. And I don’t know, I wish I had, sorry, I wish I had more mentors now. Working independently, it was something that I fell into very quickly. And I wish I had more mentors in terms of, you know, and guidance in terms of seeing where my future in this lies and then how I want to, I guess, I don’t even want to say achieve my personal ambitions, but it’s like, how do I discover what those ambitions are? I feel like I need a mentor that can help me. I feel so uncertain in terms of what I see for myself long term. And I the variables that we’re living in, but sorry, were you going to interject? No, no, no. I’m so curious. What would you ask the mentor? What’s the, what would it look like? Yeah, no, that’s a great question. I think I would, I mean, in a simplest sense, I would want to completely dump where I’m at in my life and be like, this is where I’m at. This has been my trajectory. This is what’s going well. This is what’s going bad. Tell me what to do. Yeah. Yeah. That’s right. I think that’s right. Yeah. Tell me what to do. I can never resist every time the word mentor gets brought up, because I didn’t know this until I was, I was old. And that somebody told me that mentor, I’d been using this word a lot was, is the name of a character in the Iliad. And the mentor was the man that Ulysses, Odysseus left his son with when he went on his journey. And so mentor is, was, that’s why. And then I think the French ended up making it a role. So mentor has a real grounding in that idea of bringing somebody up in that way. So, and yeah, I feel fortunate that I’ve had mentors. So I’m, I’m touched by your, your awareness of an absence of mentors. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I definitely, and I think right now, I mean, my biggest mentors have been, again, cause I fell into freelancing not by choice, but it ended up being one of the best things that have happened to me. It’s my biggest mentors right now have been the clients that have trusted me and been like, you know, and have facilitated, have given me their trust and sort of facilitated me going off and doing the work. I think the trust in and of itself has been maybe not the most direct definition of mentorship, but I don’t know. I find that clients trusting me and taking on their work and going on the process of discovery has been, has been good guidance for me and good affirmations that, you know that, that I am on the right path and that there’s more to be discovered, but yes, I would love more traditional mentors. Sort of help guide. Yeah. And then the second question, I don’t know that it ever lands really, but this idea of touchstones, I feel like I returned those ideas that I’m sort of, and I’ll be endlessly fascinated with metaphor. You know what I mean? I can never stop thinking about this. Are there touchstones that you return, keep returning to ideas? Yeah. I mean, I think about identity a lot and I think my perception of that as an idea comes from being an identical twin. And so growing up as an identical twin, I’ve always been fixated on the idea of identity and how do I create an identity that’s differentiated from this person that other people constantly associate me with. And so, it comes through a lot in my work as well, because I think identity can be, I mean, there’s two variables to it. It’s who you are and also who you’re not. And I think you can, and the, who you’re not part is the thing that’s been Oh, a lot of times. And I think back about my childhood or growing up, the sense of identity that I was creating for myself was done to intentionally foil somebody else’s. And so, I always think, you know, try to think of okay, what is this not? And that usually helps me figure out what something is, because that was the way that I’ve for better or worse cultivated my sense of self. So yeah. So I mean, that’s usually something that I, that’s usually an easy process for me to go back to is if I can’t articulate what something is yet, what is it not? Yeah. Yeah. Amazing. I didn’t know that about you. Yeah. Yeah. It’s a huge thing. People don’t talk about, people don’t talk about, I feel like identical twins are totally sensationalized. It’s like they’re either in media and entertainment and documentaries and stuff. It’s they’re either attached by the hip and best friends, or they’re estranged and it’s very unfortunate and there’s no in the middle. And so, I’ve always been looking for somebody else who is an identical twin, as part of an identical twin ship that relates to identical twin ship in the same way that I do. What was it like growing up as an identical twin? When did you realize you were an identical twin? What did it mean to be an identical twin? Yeah. Oh my gosh. We can have a whole other conversation. We got five minutes. Yeah. We can get, well, I’ll get to what I can get to in five minutes. Yeah. I think it was growing up, especially growing up as a child of immigrants and feeling othered. I found a lot of comfort in my identical twin because it was nice to have a buddy and a companion throughout that hardship and somebody that I could relate to. It’s like that person that I was relating to was almost a reflection back of who I was. So it was comforting, but it was also reinforcement of these things that I was struggling with because this other person who is a copy, a carbon copy of me is also struggling with them. And now me and my identical twin have lived in separate continents for the past five years. And I think it took us being geographically separated for a while to cultivate our own sense of selves and really lean into our differences and our idiosyncrasies. And now I’m like, okay, we’re very similar in a lot of ways, but we’re also very different in a lot of ways. I also recently figured out that me and my identical twin of completely different blood types. So it’s like somewhere along the way, there was some sort of mutation that led to that. And so yeah, I think I’m learning more and more every day the ways in which we’re different. And yeah, I think that comes with time and maturity and establishment of a sense of self. And I think that comes with time, but when you’re young and you’re constantly being associated with somebody else and this person is obviously you love this person. They’re very important to you. It’s like, but at the same time they’re indirectly causing you some strife. It’s a very challenging relationship to navigate. It’s like being born into a marriage. You’re literally being born into a marriage and you don’t have the tools to be in a healthy marriage. I had this sense, and I could be totally wrong when you were talking of really wanting to have a clear view of the world that wasn’t attached to where you came from. And then having this sort of mirror in front of you, having this abstract view of somebody that was like you, that wouldn’t let you forget where you were from. Yeah. Yeah, totally. You articulated it perfectly. Yeah. Let’s see. So, and that there’s a cliche about the superhero stories that these, the origin stories that our biggest wounds are our vulnerabilities become our superpower. Is there something about that experience that you think gives you, what does that do for you today? How does that help? Yeah, no, that’s, I love that question. I think it’s given me a very extreme sense of empathy because I’ve had to, it’s really hard to view this, to have empathy for somebody who you’re trying to other yourself from, but that person is also you. And it’s like, they’re your worst enemy and they’re your best friend. And so it’s like, it’s really hard to have empathy for somebody that feels, and in the same way, it’s really hard to have empathy for yourself. I think that it’s really hard, it was difficult for me to have empathy for her and vice versa. It’s like, I had to get through this emotional block of letting go of my ego and all this stuff in order to find true empathy for this person I love very much. And I think she would say the same thing. And it’s weird because at times it’s like, there’s like, it’s extreme empathy and codependency or it’s completely muted. And so finding a healthy level of empathy for this other human being who’s a part of me has allowed me to be really empathetic towards other people, even when I don’t want to be. Yeah. Beautiful. I want to thank you so much. This has been a real joy. I appreciate it. Yeah, of course. Thank you. Get full access to THAT BUSINESS OF MEANING at thatbusinessofmeaning.substack.com/subscribe [https://thatbusinessofmeaning.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]

Lucy Neiland on Invisibility & Ethnography

Lucy Neiland [https://www.linkedin.com/in/lucy-neiland-5842a611/] is a Business Anthropologist at Ipsos UK and a founding member of the Ipsos Ethnography Centre of Excellence. She previously led ethnographic research at Serco ExperienceLab and worked at Ethnographic Research, Inc. in Kansas City. She holds an MA in Visual Anthropology from the University of Manchester. Her published work includes "Hysterical Health: Unpicking the cultural belief's that shape women's healthcare [https://www.ipsos.com/en-uk/hysterical-health-unpicking-cultural-beliefs-that-shape-womens-healthcare]" and "From Purity to Power: The wellness cultural operating system [https://www.frontlinebesci.com/p/from-purity-to-power]." And I think you know this, but I start all these conversations with the same question, which I borrowed from a friend of mine, who’s also a neighbor, who helps people tell their story. And it’s such a beautiful question, I borrow it, but it’s so big, I over explain it the way that I’m doing right now. So before I ask it, I want you to know that you’re in total control, and you can answer or not answer really any way that you want to. And the question is, where do you come from? It’s a really nice question, it is, and I’m not sure I the being in total control. I’ll give it a go. Because I am used to asking the questions and not answering them. So bear with me. So I feel the question is two parts. For me, really, there’s people and there’s place. And I think, in terms of people, I’m from, I don’t know, I’ve always felt my family were a little bit crazy. So there’s, my mum is, she’s Polish Jewish heritage. So second generation, I think her family, through, they flew in contraband during the Second World War. And we’re sort of East End Jewish gangsters, as far as I can tell. And then on the other side, my dad is Irish Catholic. And they weren’t parented well. My mum, I think she was, she had to leave home and live with her relatives, because she was too much, her mum said. And then my dad, he was put into a home and then taken out again. And as a long roundabout way of saying, my parents are really nice. They’re both still alive, I’m lucky. But they are, they never knew how to parent. And so I always felt a bit feral. And a bit, yeah, I think, and also on top of that, they’re both artists. So they take up a lot of space with their worldviews and their noise. And, and it’s made me quite an observer of people, I think, watching their, their craziness. Yeah. And where were you? Where was this all? So I grew up in South London, in Clapham. So 70s and 80s is really multicultural, nice, lots of nice things about it. But when I was there, at that time, there was no national curriculum at school. And it adds to my sense, I had really feral childhood, but, maybe in my mind, but sometimes my boss says, I’m not trying hard enough with spreadsheets or numbers. And I don’t think he understands that I probably did maths, for half an hour, once every two weeks, there wasn’t, it’s not, it’s no joke. But it was also there was a lot of good things about it. But it was also a really violent place back then. And it felt very polarised in that sense. And I was mugged and attacked a few times, as was my dad and my sister. And it just felt, it felt a bit of a, I don’t know, a rough era in London. And I’m now I’m in Tooting, which I really, but I’m hoping we don’t slide back into 80s London, but I don’t think we will. And do you have a recollection of what you wanted to be when you grew up? I don’t know, not really. I do. I do remember saying to my mum, I’ve got to work outside, I can’t sit still. I can’t, I need to be moving around. I might have to make my desk into a standing desk in a minute, because I will need to stand up. I’m not very good at staying still for a long period of time. But yeah, I remember my, my mum, we had a school play at primary school, and it was the Pied Piper of Hamelin. Do you know that one? And I had to be a rat. And I had these brown itchy tights. And my parents were watching. And they were saying to each other, who is that kid on stage that just can’t sit still, jumping around? Really glad it’s not our kid. That’s really embarrassing. And then realised it was me. And I feel that’s been the story of my life a bit. But I feel, it’s, I really have always been a people watcher, and really fascinated by rules and rule breaking and notions of authority and, and people who are so certain about things trying to unpick why? How can people be so sure of things? But yeah, no, not, not really. I applied to art college, and I got a place in a really good London art school. But then I thought, oh, that’s my parents career. So I shouldn’t, I shouldn’t do that. I should try something new, they’ll interfere too much. So I mixed art with anthropology and did a master’s degree in visual anthropology. Yeah. I love, I mean, I was just about to ask about, you had talked about how growing up in the house, you grew up and turned you into an observer of people. And then you use that phrase people watcher. And I feel I say often that I’m a people, people watching, it’s my favorite pastime. Can you say more about people being a people watcher? Is that if I’m just even the phrase itself? Do you have a record where that comes from? It’s so nice, isn’t it? It’s, it is such a nice thing to do, even a bus stop, or I think it was Mike Agar, the anthropologist said, you can do, ethnography, a bus stop with one person. And I think that’s really true. You don’t need to be anywhere exotic, or it doesn’t have to be too complex, you can find patterns and norms and change and just by, your local superstore or wherever, it’s, I can’t help it. I’m a real watcher, starer. And I’ve also always felt I’ve been, I’m invisible. So I took a, I took this cup of tea to an exercise class the other day. And I had a china cup. And I drank it. And I was just standing there with my cup. And everyone was, why have you got a cup? And I just, I thought no one would be able to see me, it wouldn’t have made any difference. But yeah, just from a young age, I remember when, when my parents, when we all live together, there would always be people over and they’d always be, drinking and gambling. And they’d be, smoke in the living room. Everyone was smoky in that era. And I just love to watch them all argue and try and work out what the hell was going on with them all. Yeah, I feel that continued into my life today. Definitely. It’s my favorite part of my job. Yeah. And so catch us up. Tell us where are you now? And what’s the work that you do? So now I work at Ipsos. And I work in business anthropology or ethnography and run all sorts of projects on everything on, what’s it being a patient with a certain illness or, looking at financial services and interactions with products or what’s missing in people’s lives. So a bit of everything. I think some of my favorite projects have been around things like weight stigma and obesity and masculinity and things that you really feel like social silences or stigma or that aren’t well explored or maybe society isn’t thinking about in a complex way. What have you been working on? What’s the most recent social silence that you’ve been really fixated on or spending time thinking about? I think wellness is one I’m really interested in the kind of rise of wellness culture and how it’s become a kind of total operating system almost in how it shapes how people think and eat and what they buy. And I guess that’s tied in with misinformation is one strand of it. But also this idea I’m really interested across all the projects I see in that your health is your responsibility as an individual and that you need to take control of it. And it’s almost like this gentle gaslighting of people to that they’ve caused weight gain. They’ve caused themselves to be sick. Therefore, they need to fix it. And I feel like these are the narratives that we’re hearing in health in finances, when you think about things like pensions, you didn’t save enough, you made some bad decisions, and not taking into account where you’re born, what you’re born with your family circumstances, life choices, pressures, this idea that we’re these autonomous individuals who should be able to navigate things almost like a rich white man. And that you’re ultimately accountable, or you’re responsible for your outcomes. But I guess more interestingly, that the society isn’t what you’re saying. Yeah, that society isn’t. And that, I’m seeing more chatter. I mean, I don’t on in the social media I’m looking at in terms of the growth of community, community support. I’m working with a great group of people on this idea for community pension. So just things like that are really giving me hope for the future that people want to be together and draw from each other. When did you first discover that you could make a living doing this kind of thing? So during my master’s, I remember I was working with this company called Ethnographic Research Incorporated. I think they were the first company to do business anthropology. They were based in Kansas City and run by Melinda Ray Holloway, really great ethnographer and Ken Erickson. And they, so I was freelancing for them, whilst I was doing my master’s degree. And I remember going back to my colleagues on my master’s who were saying, how can you, how can you work for these car companies or these, what are you doing? It should be for social good. Why are you doing business anthropology? And really getting it in the neck. Because I felt like it was interesting because they, a lot of the course were, it was this idea that you should be looking for something exotic or, to put it bluntly, study people that are poorer than you, go to communities where you can, I think, could be more extractive. And I was always interested in power, where power is or those dynamics. But yeah, that was in my 20s. I started doing this type of work and I didn’t know it would be more of my career. So I started out doing this part time, but also trying to make documentary films or making documentary films and doing those two things at the same time. And what kind of film, what were the films you were making? They were weirdly a lot about the American military. I’m not really sure what was going on. So one of the films we made was about this motel where Timothy McVeigh stayed before he carried out the Oklahoma bombing. It was in the middle of America, right there. If you put a pin in America, it was there. And I wanted to make a film about middle America. It was at the time of the Iraq war and what was going on. It was right by a military base with soldiers shipping out to Iraq. And I guess it was how middle America was feeling at the time about domestic terrorism and foreign terrorism and how they were conceptualizing these things differently or the same or othering people or yeah. Yeah. And other films I’ve followed a military family from Oklahoma over to the UK to understand life, an American life in the UK on an American Air Force base. So in Britain, we still have American Air Force bases, which I find so bizarre. And they are like small American towns in the UK with American dollars, food, culture, high school. And it was meant to be a film about the culture of the UK and US, but they didn’t leave the base. The American fact, they were very scared of the UK. So it became much more about that, about fear and containment. Yeah. That’s amazing. How would you how do you describe the way that you work? I mean, everybody develops their own maybe method or approach or way of doing ethnography. How do you think about what you do? And how do you how would you describe the way that you learn? I feel like I really love working in a team. And I really thrive from trying to work out what we’re seeing as a team. So coming up with, we’ll go and do our research. And it might be on things like health influences in different countries, what, what I like your dog, what what informs people’s health decisions in say, a global study on who influences health, and we’ll go to these countries. And we’ll talk to people spend time with people. But for me, the really exciting part is working out what we’re seeing, and often arguing about it. I love that. And it was like, spending a couple of days really analyzing and unpicking and working out a story and a narrative that makes sense. And I feel like if you’re not arguing or coming at it with a different view, and then working out together, then what that that gray area is, then I don’t know, that’s the bit that gets me out of bed is that bit? I really love that. Yeah. And what makes it so important, like the case, I was in these conversations, I always feel like I want to get to some foundational thing of what is the value of this kind of ethnographic work? And we can always talk about AI and all that stuff. But what do you think makes this stuff so important? What’s the value that it brings and the role, the proper role it should play in the way organizations go about doing their business? It really, it really helps understand what’s happening in the world. I know that’s just really cheesy. But I remember making channel four in the UK years ago said, Can you make a film about a future predictor? I think her name was faith popcorn. I can’t remember. I have a funny Faith Popcorn story. And I said, No, I can’t. But I could make a film about how anthropology or sociology or understanding cultural patterns can help you prepare for what’s coming. If you work with people’s social and cultural norms, you can, you have to work with people for things like, during COVID, you’ve got to work with these norms, you can’t dictate from above, and make people comply, you need to understand people’s beliefs and everyday lives and care networks and ecosystems to work with those. And that’s really important for brands and for medical professionals and institutions to do is to get behind the counter with these with people and work with them rather than impose from above, I think. I really want to hear your faith popcorn story. It was not directly with her, but I interviewed at the it was Faith Popcorns Brain Reserve, I think was the name of her company. Yeah, and I got into the second interview, I think it was the same interview, but they brought me into some room that was like a war room for we’re doing something for, I think this woman came in and she asked me this is where this is about the future of carbonation. And so she was she asked me point blank, what do you think is the future of bubbles? And I think, sincerely, one of my proudest moments, without meeting a missing a beat, I said, no bubbles. I love it. Very good. Yeah, my entire higher education prepared me for that. That’s really good. No bubbles. I did not hear back. No. I wonder what someone else said, who got that job? Yeah. How do you what is the answer? What’s the answer? Yeah, the bubbles have still stayed the same as far as I can see. I think there’s been experiment with smaller bubbles. I think there’s probably there is light and low carbonation. I feel like we’ve Oh, yeah. I haven’t thought deeply about bubbles, clearly. And I didn’t intend for us to get overwhelmed. I overflow with my fave popcorn story. I do. I bubble over. That’s right. Well, very well done. So the visual anthropology bit and the business anthropology bit. I’m just curious what how has the practice changed over your career to I feel like, I’m sorry, I’m bumbling questions on top of each other. I love that description you described of being challenged by the anthropologists around you for applying this into the corporate world. And I’ve often been the brand guy with not for profit people. And that that boundary is very well protected on one side. You know what I mean? Where people really feel you can’t go over there and do that thing. I’m just wondering, what’s what was your experience? If you could say more about that experience. I would love to hear it. About the experience that Yeah, I guess that anthropology is not something that should be participating in corporate culture or commercial culture. Maybe I’m projecting. No, I feel it’s an interesting one, isn’t it? Because we all need products and services that work and that are good and that talk to us. So. So to understand people is key to getting these things. And I don’t think it’s as simple as good guys and bad guys, you know, so you might do work in public affairs or for government. But if you don’t particularly the government or, you know, you know, then you benefit structure. Why? Why? In a way, that’s not any better or any worse than working for, you know, a particular corporation. Obviously, there’s not nice corporations out there to obviously lots of them. But but I think it’s it’s not as black and white as public sector, good private sector, evil. I think it’s it’s more complicated, isn’t it? And I feel especially for things health systems, or I don’t know, things financial institutions, I do a lot of financial services, a lot of healthcare ethnography. And I feel those are really important because your health finances need, you know, you need those things to be to be working for you to, you know, get into order age in good Nick. I don’t think I answered your question at all. Sorry. No. You did. I think it says the follow up was really was how has the role of anthropology changed over your career? I feel it was maybe fringe in the beginning. Do you feel it’s changed in terms of? Yeah, definitely. It’s definitely changed. One of the things I was gonna say, yeah, I went for this job ages ago, it was I really did want it was working for a mental health team in London Hospital. And it was basically because there was a lot of, I think it was a lot more black men being sectioned than anyone else in in this area of London and probably elsewhere. But it was focusing on this area. And the job was to really understand the cultural beliefs of the, you know, clinical team and the police and to work in that community and understand why the rates of sectioning were higher and, you know, and how to reduce them. And I’ve sat on this table with other anthropologists there. And we had a group discussion. And it was it was really great. And somebody who had a PhD got the job, they wanted someone with a PhD, I didn’t have one and don’t have one. And, but I remember talking about, you know, even doing ethnography for the military, you know, not that I’ve ever done that, or, but, you know, you can be an anthropology, anthropologist for the police, or for, you know, these health services to really help liaise with the community. And I remember somebody in on that table saying, you know, anthropologists can’t work with the military, that’s really awful, you know, how could you do that? And it’s sort of, to me, that blew my mind, because these places and institutions are the ones that often need those cultural bridges to communities, I think. Yeah, yeah, yeah, more, more than ever, actually, more, not more than ever, but they need that intelligence and understanding more than other institutions, it would seem. Yeah. And as long as you’re doing it in the right way, I did apply for a job with secret services in the UK to be an anthropologist, and it was looking into the rise of terrorism. And I didn’t get a second interview. And I was quite pleased about that, because I, I wondered if that would be going undercover. And, you know, and I wouldn’t, I’m not, I wouldn’t want to do anything, you know, that, unethical. What is it that anthropologist does that other people don’t do? It seems it’s a sort of a weird, it’s, you know, for some people, it’s very strange. You know, you say, people watching what God’s name, does that have to do with the how the world works? Or how adding that, I mean, maybe I’m being being provocative, of course, but what is it that anthropology does that others don’t do? I think it’s really trying to understand others, the set of rules and identities and behaviours that other people have that make sense of things. So how other people and groups and subgroups are making sense of things. And I think that’s maybe the difference is really, yeah, trying and no, it’s so boring to say, but walking in other people’s shoes, I can’t believe I said that, but really trying to understand these and not dismiss different views. So I’m really, I’ve got on when I did this work on masculinity, a couple of years ago, I started a social media account, as a young man, and I wanted to see, I don’t post anything, I just receive, I just have an algorithm now that feeds me stuff. And some of it is, it’s just really blows my mind, it’s stuff that I would not be following, but I want to understand different movements. And, you know, and some of them are quite far right, quite extreme. And I think, but I want to understand the mindset of people rather than dismiss, and not lean into the end of history and liberalism, but to really walk in the shoes of views that I might not necessarily agree with to, to try and, yeah, work out what’s going on and how gaps can be bridged. And I think I was feeling quite despondent recently thinking about how it feels like an era where I think we used to say as anthropologists, at least on our team, it was about empathy creation for different groups. So for your consumer, for your patient, really empathizing with them as a brand or as an institution to work with them. And I feel like that’s not enough anymore, just empathizing. And I’ve been really thinking about what’s going on, and why isn’t that enough? And I was reading about empathy. And I was wondering if it’s about people are now almost over empathizing with a with their own in group. And it’s, I was reading about that analogy of, you’re almost shining a spotlight on your in group. And so everybody else outside that group is in the dark, rather than drawing back and having sunlight on everybody. It’s like, wow, do you know what I mean? Yeah. That’s beautiful. Where did that analogy come from? Is that your own analogy? I can’t remember. I was reading this. A guy who’s who’s written about it. I just can’t remember his name. This observation started with the work around masculinity and you exposing yourself to the social media feed of a young man, presumably. What’s that? What can you say more about what that experience has been has been like? Yeah, it’s been really weird. So it started with my daughter during COVID times. And when everybody went back to school in the UK, she became a bit of a school refuser. She didn’t want to go back. And she did go back. But, you know, it was much lower attendance. And I talked to her and her sister, who are younger teenagers at the time, and they just were reporting just the rise of misogyny in the classroom. And, and I think the schools really didn’t know what to do at that time. You know, they had templates for not necessarily the best ones, but for racism or for, you know, other issues, but this was something that they hadn’t that they hadn’t seen before. And so I interviewed lots of teachers, other students, and, you know, my kids, other people’s kids and started a whole project with my colleague Diana on looking into what was going on and did a lot of expert interviews to build up a picture of, of what was going on, because it really blew my mind. And so, yeah, I put together a documentary, combining different voices. So, you know, young men, young women, experts, teachers. Yeah, and it was a really interesting process. And a part of that was creating this social media algorithm to see what these young men were exposed to and, and, and was what was coming at them hard and fast, just from searching things like gym or football or vitamins, you know, how, how extreme things would go, you know, straight on to choking or, you know, Andrew Tate back then, or, you know, how to get your girl to do what you want her to do, and just so much worse. It’s obviously so much worse out there. But I think what blew my mind about this project, and is still blowing my mind is the fact that we’re spending so much time looking at young men and boys, and we are still only unpicking what’s going on with the, you know, with Epstein. And, and you think about these older musicians and politicians and the social silence around almost, around what’s happened with these older men, you know, that have set a template, sure, without social media. But this culture has been well established. It’s not new news. It’s just now we have little reels explaining it. So we shouldn’t be pointing at the young boys, you know, to be accountable here, I feel. Yeah, that seems to be, I mean, that, of course, is the Epstein files, the promise of the Epstein file, what makes them so powerful, right? Yeah, what they seem to promise about, about what we’re going to learn. I mean, we just, there’s a college nearby, the president of the local college was, you know, just revealed to have been in 2500 emails or something like that. That’s amazing. So don’t you think, don’t you think with the, what is a silence here that is interesting is how we other the men involved. And slowly, we can’t do that anymore, because it’s so many. And so it’s surely then it’s a cultural norm that we need to talk about rather than say, look how unusual it is, the French case. I can’t remember her name, but that really brave lady who turned up to court and said she wouldn’t be ashamed. But it’s like, you know, there was a whole narrative about how unusual these things are. And actually, they’re not, are they? But they’re so well covered up. Yeah. Yeah. Well, it’s just so, it’s all part of some, some just general way of being, you know what I mean? You say, the power is all, there’s somehow acceptable aspects of what one does if one is in pursuit of power. The president said, I was looking, you know, I’m looking for money for the college. That’s it? That’s it. Yeah. Okay, then. Strange, very strange. I want to return to you that you’re, that I have so much identification with the, your insight into the idea that, that is true, that we used to be advocates for empathy and empathy was this thing, but we’ve entered into an era where empathy doesn’t even feel like it’s, it doesn’t, it’s just not up to purpose, I guess is the way I came along with the cliche I’m looking for is, but so what do you do now? Is there a way that you’re rethinking approach or rethinking practice to, in an acknowledgement of this? I love that we’re all, there’s, I’m going to add a little detail here. There’s a guy, I live in a very small town. I’ve thought a lot about community engagement and how divided we are and what social media did to all that. And there’s a guy from University of Berkeley, California, Berkeley, John A. Powell, who wrote a book called Belonging Without Othering. And it’s this framework about bonding and bridging and breaking. It’s all this whole way of talking about how communities can come together to repair injustices of the past, but not do it. Often we do it, we end up just what is, what’s the line, you know, meet the new boss, same as the old boss. We just switch power positions and just perform the same injustice in a different direction. And it just pushes the resentment down the road. And so anyway, he has this way of talking about bridging behaviors, which is, we don’t have them anymore, really. We’ve forgotten here in the States. But that bonding is, you’re talking about we’re so, maybe social media has got us, we’re bonding all the time. We’re celebrating the in-group all the time. That flashlight image you gave was really so powerful. So enough of my rambling. What are the implications for how you work, if that’s the case? So one project I’ve really enjoyed working on is one about kidney disease recently. And it’s been really moving. And we’ve spent time with patients, people, you know, going through kidney disease and treatment for it. And how we’ve brought this to our clients is we’ve done our ethnography. So we’ve gone out, we spent time with them, we’ve understood their lives and the patterns, the influences, the journey. And what we then did is we brought them into a co-creation session with the client and the client, you know, comprised of designers, product designers, scientists, doctors, and some of them hadn’t met patients before. Some of them work, you know, are patient facing, but they hadn’t spent time with patients as an equal. Do you know what I mean? You’re always, as a doctor, you have a role to do. And it’s a different hierarchy, you know, even if you’re a great doctor, you’ve still got a role. So here we had, I think it was a two hour workshop, where we didn’t call patients patients, they were people, they were guests. And then our clients, we mix people up. And we designed a workshop where it was really about co-creating together, everybody was equal, everybody learned from each other’s experience. And we just got such great feedback that that was a really moving session. And for us, we just finished a project to on elitism. And for that project, we really would like to get our clients in the room with some of our participants as well. And also in that project, we’ve got participants with very different political views. And I don’t know, I don’t think co-creation is always the way or necessarily always the answer. But it’s quite nice to see where people do converge. And what are those things where people have the same worries and fears and interests and where they can come together, rather than trying to get somebody to empathize with his whole other person, maybe it’s just with some aspects that they can relate to. So maybe it’s more dissected, I’m still thinking on it. Do you have an answer? I don’t have an answer. Lots of other things come back to me. Actually, I was just remembering, I guess I’m a bit of an Anglophile. But do you know, Roy Langmaid? Does that name ring a bell? So he’s a, there’s a couple, I think, threads in my own career, I think he was the, they call him a father of qualitative research in the UK, Roy Langmaid. And what was her name? Wendy Gordon? Does that name ring a bell? No, we’re gonna have to look them up. But they’re in the conventional qualitative space. And I think there’s a way that qualitative and ethnography are two totally different cultures, even though they’re addressing the same problem, of course. And of course, that makes sense. But he would do these breakthrough sessions, the same thing, this idea of co-creation. So yeah, I think stuff like that, that there’s a need. And I remember, yeah, just getting people in the same room. I feel echoing what you said before, that somehow the answer to what’s the role of qualitative, you said, you said these, you said these things that felt you were apologizing for how simple they were. But this idea that just getting people in the same room and treating each other as human beings, and just having some interaction about the facts of the matter or the experience of the matter is a lot, it seems. It’s a lot, isn’t it? And trying to remove power dynamics when you do that, I think is really important, isn’t it? So working hard to, we did think long and hard about what to call patients, how to introduce them, and that thing to really try and empower people to bring their whole self, if they can. Yeah. It’s interesting. Yeah, to create the appropriate conditions for people to actually meet each other. Yeah, yeah. And I feel like for the most part, people want to, don’t they? It’s, it’s all the other things that I think I’ve got a very positive view about humans in general. But people want to do good and have agency. And I don’t believe in the concept of laziness, people. Wait, wait, wait, what do you mean? Who’s, who are the advocates for laziness that we’re, we’re up against? Don’t you in the tabloids, lazy benefit, whatever, or just people should eat less and move more or, and I, I just don’t believe anybody is lazy. There’s a reason people don’t do things. Not that people should be eating less or moving more. It’s not what I’m saying, but there’s a people, there’s a reason why there’s always a reason nobody is, everybody wants to be appreciated. Everyone’s agency, everybody wants to find fulfillment. But stuff gets in the way and circumstances out of your control. Is it, yeah, I don’t know. I remember having a very strong reaction when somebody would ask for creative respondents, we need creative respondents. And I’d just be like, it just pissed the hell, it just pissed me off because I felt like it just diminished the idea that, I feel like in a way, we’re all creative and imaginative all the time. The whole project of trying to get through a day is this imaginative act. Right. And, and we’re now we’re going to have to find somebody who’s what, there’s some people that aren’t creative. I just think it’s not the job. Yeah. I think that’s really, really annoying. I would hate that because we’re, might have a project going ahead that is looking at how men engage in the arts and not the arts as in opera, painting or whatever, but to look at some of the barriers that men might have in, it’s for this company that does these festivals for women and how women come to, and they understand well how women come together, and appreciate different things, but they, they want to understand the barriers for men engaging in these things. And what I really like about this brief, it’s not a creativity as in high culture or, it’s actually, maybe how someone relates to music or a podcast or, dancing on their own or, being a creative builder or, or, dressing up as a knight or, or whatever you might do. So yeah, people are creative in, in every way, aren’t they? Right. Right. Yeah. Yeah. You begin by not pretending what it means to be creative. And also to be part of creative industries, I think is if you look at the history of art and music, most of these people are probably really rich, aren’t they? Because they’re the people that could afford to, be part of it. So you’re already excluding so many creative people. Yes. Which leads to another rant I have about the use of the word of taste, but I want to, I want to, well, it’s not so much of a rant as I feel like it’s just used as shorthand for this, for this thing. Let’s, let’s just treat this as a, something that we can’t really explain, but that explains my superiority is the, the application of it. As opposed to maybe just doing the research and being rigorous about it, but I’m, I’m being a bit of a prick, but I want, I’m curious, what’s the, when people call you guys, what are the, what kinds of problems do they come to you with? Like, what’s the, yeah, what do you, what do people come to you for? And what do you say? Oh, don’t ask me that one, but what do they come for? What they come for all different issues, really so we’re a team of, 15, I think. And we all have different skill sets. So, I do a lot of healthcare and financial services, ethnography, but also other types, but different team members specialize in different things. And that’s why it’s so nice. Different people bring a different expertise together. So one of our colleagues, Gigi really focuses on beauty care, and it’s so interesting listening to her talk because that’s not, my area. So it could be anything, about new trends in, in drinks or, just anything and everything, but really with an eye on, on the future, the rise of, low alcohol, you’ve got a whole lot of companies worried there, haven’t you about, what, what’s going to be happening in the future if, if you’re, somebody making beer or, or, yeah, I said, I do a lot of the looking at, patients, healthcare companies with new medications or thinking about how better to communicate to patients, the, how to get patients engaged with, with their products. I’m just trying to think of what I’ve been working on recently, just, just everything. We’re running near the end of time. And I’m curious about, I have the question that usually comes early. It’s where the joy is in it for you. And in particular, I’m wondering about the actual ethnography itself, the time you spend with people, what’s that experience like for you and how do you feel, I think we’re, it’s a strange bunch that spends this much time people watching and, and how do you feel it’s changed you? What do you, what do you appreciate about all the time you’ve been able to spend with people trying to understand them? I feel like I’m not, I, I, still feel like I can just stare and watch and no one will ever see me. And I feel you just feel really lucky. Don’t you doing this type of work that you’ve been up and down the country and to different countries, not that I travel that much with kids, but, but, in, in the UK, just all the different households you’ve been in and the people that have given you their time and what you’ve learned from them and, maybe what they’ve learned from you. I remember with my colleague, Hela, we went to a participant’s household a few years ago. And at first they were, it was her, she had COPD and her son and her son had quite severe epilepsy and she was the carer of him. And they were, their lives were really tricky and they were quite suspicious of us at first. And we sat there and we weren’t getting anywhere. And then I just start to talk about my, my daughter had epilepsy. She’s grown out of it, but it was a childhood form of epilepsy. And as soon as I shared something of myself and my lovely colleague share something of herself, our participants shared their whole lives with us. And that was just so nice, making sure that you, you give something, you, you’re not just taking, and I feel like our best ethnographers do that. You’re not, you’re not just a sponge, you’re there in a relationship and you, you have to give. And I think that stays there, doesn’t it? You, you’ve, you impact people’s lives. I remember doing field work in, when I graduated, I worked with an anthropologist, in, I went to make a film about his field work in India and, in South India and him and his wife. So we dressed in local clothes and, and him and his wife were quite strict about, not answering questions when people asked you questions. And I remember really arguing with them about this. So they were white. I think he was from Belgium. She was from England and we were in a community in Tamil Nadu in South India. And some of the people there had hadn’t left that village. And, and I didn’t like the idea of not, they’d ask, so would you wear these clothes at home? What was it like, are you married, like really sharing a world outside, this is the time, people didn’t have the internet then at home. Well, I certainly didn’t, and so you, you have to really share your life, don’t you too. And it’s not all about you, not everything about you, but something. Yeah. That’s beautiful. I mean, so much of it. Yeah. That’s beautiful. I feel like, I don’t think I have anything to add. I was going to say, I feel like as a young man, I always say that I was feel really grateful that I was put in across the table from, from somebody and told to try to understand them. And you know what I mean? I don’t know that I would have gone out of my way to learn that if it hadn’t ended up my job. Certainly that way of being in the conversation is, I think something I learned just as getting older to your point. And I think it’s made me better, but it’s changed everything. Yeah. And I think there’s a, maybe, I dunno, maybe as well, there’s a way to challenge views sometimes that you learn, don’t you too, to, especially when you’re with more powerful people to sort of throw the tiny bombs in, in slightly in the nicest way. So whilst you’re listening and giving, but you’re sort of also just sometimes staring slightly, probably not meant to say that, but I do like that. There’s drama in there. You’re not just, it’s not this there’s drama in there. There’s conflict in there. And to your point about what, what do you like about it? What gets you up in the morning? I think it’s, it’s those things, isn’t it? It’s like the tension and the conflict and picking this puzzle of like human weirdness and try to find out what those patterns and stories are. Cause they’re really complicated, aren’t they? Oh my gosh. Yes. Awesome. Lucy, thank you so much. This has been such a pleasure. I really appreciate you accepting the invitation and sharing your time. Thank you. Oh. Thank you for talking. It’s been really nice. I hope it’s made some sense. Thank you. Get full access to THAT BUSINESS OF MEANING at thatbusinessofmeaning.substack.com/subscribe [https://thatbusinessofmeaning.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]

Katie Dreke on Humanity & Time

Katie Dreke [https://www.linkedin.com/in/katiedreke/] is founder of DRKE [https://drke.co/], a Portland-based strategy consultancy. At Nike (2014-2021), she relocated to Tokyo to launch the company's first membership program outside North America, led concept development for Nike Women including the maternity collection launch, and designed global media strategy for the 2016 Rio Olympics. Previously, she led strategy at Wieden+Kennedy Amsterdam, Droga5 Sydney, and 180 Amsterdam, with clients including Honda, Adidas, Coca-Cola, and the United Nations across four continents. I start all these conversations, you may or may not know this, but the same question which I borrow from a friend of mine, she helps, she’s an oral historian, she helps people tell their story. And she has this big, beautiful question, which I stole from her, because it’s so big and beautiful. But it’s so big and beautiful, I kind of over explain it, I’m doing now. So before I ask it, I want you to know that you’re in total control, and you can answer or not answer any way that you want to. And yes, this is probably the biggest lead up to a question ever. But the question is, where do you come from? And again, you’re in total control of and can answer or not answer any way that you want to. That’s a great question. I think I’ll answer it in a couple different ways, more like a conceptual way. And then like a literal way. I would say I’ll start with the literal, I’m from the Pacific Northwest. And I think that really means something. It means something to me anyway. It’s upper left, it’s West Coast, best coast, as I like to think of it. It’s Cascadia, which is kind of a collection of ideas that sit near and on the west side of the Cascadian, Cascade Mountains. But I think just culturally, I’m really proud of where I’m from. I feel like having studied people in the United States, and then comparatively across other different regions of the world. The things that I like about where I’m from, the United States was obviously inhabited by plenty of incredible people before the West arrived, before Europeans arrived. But that movement, at any rate, started on the east and moved out west. And so the people who took those big gambles early on, Oregon Trail, etc., pioneers, people who enjoyed that idea of going into the unknown, I feel like their DNA stock is still alive and well out here on the West Coast, which I think lends to a certain affection and affinity to nature, to a certain sort of casualness. We don’t have time for the frivolities and the frailties and the gilded nature of things that come from Europe or from the East Coast and silver spoonage, family lineages and VIP back rooms with cigars. Not to say those things don’t exist today on the West Coast, but they’re just not part of our origin story. It’s a lot less about who you are and what your family name is, but what can you do? Can you fish? Can you trap? Can you build something with your hands? What do you do when things break? Can you fix them? And there’s a little bit of a collaboration that is involved in that, because no one exists on an island when you’re up against the realities of nature and an environment that didn’t have infrastructure. So you needed to know what the guy and gal next door knew how to do, and you needed to care about each other. So there’s, I think, some nice things, and I could be completely authoring a worldview that is self-serving right here, but I feel like in the people that I’ve met, even some of the brands that spring out of the ground from this side of the nation, I feel a lot of pleasure and pride. So I come from this, and I acknowledge that, and I feel like I bring it with me when I go other places. But the conceptual response to that question is that I’m from the future, meaning my brain spends an inordinate amount of time in the future. Sometimes for work, it’s like what’s happening next quarter, next year, or where do we think this trend is going to play out in the next decade? But again, selfishly, when I get free time, I throw my brain into the deep future. I’m reading a story right now that takes place 300 years in the future. I read an inordinate amount of science fiction, largely because it is a thought experiment that is just so enjoyable, and given the type of authors that I like, I really go deep on authors that are spending a s**t ton of time on the world-building aspect. All the details, the nuances, the future mundane, as Julian Bleeker would put it, the wallpaper, those things that really give you that lived-in sense of this is a very viable and authentic sort of space to occupy. The characters are very well built, and I feel like it’s not that dissimilar to being a strategist. A science fiction author really tries to understand the human nature of the people that they are trying to inhabit, and then they extrapolate. The most respectful ways that that’s been done, Ursula K. Le Guin here, her portrait on my wall, she’s one of my mother muses. Kim Stanley, Neil Stevenson, these guys, they really, all of them, N.K. Jemisin, Octavia Butler, they create these very tactile, very tangible, viable thought experiments. So that’s where I’m from. I’m from the Pacific Northwest, but I’m also from the future. Yeah, so I’m gonna ask a follow-up for each of those. The Pacific Northwest, do you have a recollection of what you wanted to be as a girl? What did you want to be when you grew up? I wanted to be Indiana Jones when I was little. I think in a way that’s kind of stayed with me. I wanted to study the artifacts and the record. I even named part of my company about the deep record. My company is DRKE, which is my last name minus one vowel. It’s an exercise in editing, which I think strategy is an exercise in good editing. But if I take each of those letters and turn it into an acronym, which I have, it’s a deep record knowledge exchange. So I am really fixated on what came before and left a mark on the record. If you do your little CSI experiment, what lasts? Which then when you look forward, what can we create that lasts? What will be in the deep record of the future? And of course the knowledge exchange bit is like, it’s going to take a village to really understand all these things and put them into action. So it’s about radical generosity and no gatekeeping and mixing it up with a lot of disciplines. So who did I want to be when I was little? I saw Indiana Jones and was like, I want to go into the unknown. I want to be in those hard to reach places. I want to understand the artifacts of peoples that have come before, covet them, teach people about them. And also be cavalier and cool. I thought that was really awesome. For a while, I thought I wanted to be an anthropologist. When I was in university for a while, I took courses around etymology and language. I ended up getting a degree in speech communications, which was the study of how you create written form speech writing. Also incorporated a lot of, it was, I remember taking this incredible course about cultured communication, but not culture like national culture, but like Vietnam veterans, deadheads, sorority girls, subcultures, and studying their styles of communication, verbal, nonverbal, semiotics, and so on. I was drawn to it because it was drawn to it like a moth to a flame. I had no idea that there was a world within a creative industry where these things could be put into practice for business. I had no understanding of this. My dad was like, what are you going to do with this? What’s going to be your job? And I’m like, I don’t know. I’m just going to follow what I like and see where it takes me. It wasn’t until I graduated from college and was in an interview and they said, what did you study? What classes did you like? That I suddenly was like, ding, ding, ding. The thing that I was drawn to is really useful to me in the creative world. Advertising, I was a quote unquote planner at the time, connections planning was a big thing at the time, which was all about that. So life makes sense in the rear view mirror, not often through the windscreen in front of you. But yeah, that’s what I wanted to be. I wanted to be Indiana Jones. And catch us up, where are you now and what’s the work that you’re doing now? Yeah, well, it’s not quite Indiana Jones, but I like to play Indiana Jones on television. I run my own consultancy, like I mentioned, I started in the end of 2020, early 2021. So it’s been about five years. I’m a strategist. I learned early on that I’m the person who likes to try to understand the landscape and the lay of the land, trying to figure out the connectivity that either exists or could exist there, that creates either sometimes a practical efficiency or a cleaner line through to the consumer, or not even the consumer, it could be any sort of invested party on the outside of the organization. And then also a lot about, again, going back to that sort of projection mapping that science fiction trains me to do all the time. It’s like, what else could it be? Where else could it go? Why is it not there already? What’s holding us back? Is it us? Is it something else in the industry or in the culture? And why not us? Could it be us that takes this to a new place? Creates the next white space. When did you, I’m curious about the moth, when did the moth meet the flame? What’s the, when was the first moment you really realized that you can make a living doing this kind of thing? Let’s see. I think like a lot of young people, and I want to make an assumption, but I feel like I’ve heard this from other younger people. I didn’t realize that the things that I love to do, I couldn’t do for a job. I guess you hear people say, find what you love and never work a day in your life. And it’s so cliche and transparent. It’s like nobody does, people who say that already have a bajillion dollars, that’s not real. A lot of people have to make compromises. And so I assumed I was going to need to make compromises. I also learned that from my parents. They told me about the compromises they had to make about life, lives, and you’ve got to deal with it. So I love, like I said, being Indiana Jones about culture and people and digging and questioning and thinking about where it could go. If you give it 50 years, if you give it 500 years, I love that stuff. I never thought that I could actually apply that to anything practical where I get paid until I found the creative space, which is where storytelling comes in. And you really need to understand who are people, why are people? The why is really important. And then where do we think that’s going? And all of those things that I really like to do naturally for funsies on the weekend or when I’m on holiday, I suddenly was like, I could get paid. This is great. And so it took a while to find my way there. I had a couple kickstarter jobs. I was a receptionist. I worked in HR and ran a college recruiting program for a software company, which gave me a great 101 course on how to talk about technology to people who don’t speak technology. I was like a translator, which was also a fun aspect of pretending to be Indiana Jones is you are having to translate one sort of world and language into people who don’t travel in that world and speak that language. Technology is a great example of a world where we all have a lot more ability to speak that today. But back in the early 90s, when I was working in an enterprise software company and you had to hire college recruiters and, or sorry, college students, and I was the recruiting person getting out there, you have to learn to speak the language real quick. Otherwise they won’t want to talk to you. You can’t hire them if they don’t think you understand what they’re doing. And so I think it was kind of, it wasn’t until the creative part snapped into play. I started working at an agency that had all tech clients. This was in the early 90s before the tech bubble burst. And it was in Seattle. So yeah, it was very active. I went to the University of Washington. I graduated, worked first at a software company with that recruiting job, and then got hired at a creative agency downtown Pioneer Square. And all of our clients were tech companies. A lot of them were startups. And we had a full suite of services, everything from naming that brand, marking that brand with like a logo and like a visual identity. But then also there was a PR arm that would help them with talking points and get them out on their press tour. We had a digital studio where we’d create their first website and get them ahead of that game. And then there was an advertising arm that would start to help them get sorted about where they should show up and what they should say. So it was a really cool 360 integrated approach to tech. And it was a very rapid on ramp into how do you creatively connect these dots? And it was there when it started to kind of, okay, wait a minute, I need to get closer and closer to this work. And for a hot minute, I thought maybe I was going to be a creative, but I took some courses and realized, no, no, no, no, I don’t want to be that close to the work. I don’t. And particularly around, I thought maybe I wanted to be a graphic designer. And I don’t have the patience. I don’t really have the focus to move the pixels around and look at the kerning. Like that just, it’s a bridge too far for me. And I had to know, I had to take a class and know that in my bones to know for sure, because I was attracted to the beauty of it and the aesthetic of it. And I could felt like I had the ability to know when it was working or when it wasn’t working, but I don’t know how to make it work. And that is somebody else’s wheelhouse, not mine. And so I like, okay, I need to zoom out a little bit. And strategy ended up being the right zoom out layer where it’s like, I know how to direct and I know how to maybe nudge, but I’m going to leave it to the pros to really bring me the solutions that they understand far better than I do. So I feel like I was coming up, I was in San Francisco around that time. And sometimes I always, sometimes I say that when I started, it felt like brand was the new technology, at least that was sort of my experience. Was that your experience that brand was sort of a new idea or what was, what was, when did you encounter brand as a thing? Yeah. I mean, brands like Big B brand. The first time I encountered that was when I worked for a really small, very VIP, pristine, precious boutique graphic design firm. Yeah. And there, it was about going into the legend and the lore of this organization and the origin story. And what was the first speech that this person gave at the first all hands and what are the artifacts we can dredge up that are still true today. And we can reanimate them and we can reanimate them in the packaging and we can reanimate it in the store design and we can reanimate it in the investor speech that’s being given next quarter. And so it wasn’t about the photo shoot. It was really looking at all of the other elements, the whole music, et cetera, et cetera. That was the first time that brand as a non-visual design system concept was introduced to me. And it was really beautiful to be introduced to that idea in a very analog way with a graphic designer who was using very little technical tools and we created physical artifacts of what we were doing. I think, yeah, that’s the first time. What was that sign? What kind of happened after that is I started working in digital agencies because that’s what was on fire at the moment. And it was, I was in the midst of the maelstrom of making sense of this new tool in the toolkit. And I’m in reflection now, I’m seeing how that’s how a lot of the analog got stripped out of the world of brand. Not everybody has stripped it out completely, but I think some of it, some of that texture never came back in once everybody finally eventually had a web address for their company. But that steamroller, that tsunami of activity, I joke, but I think I was invited to talk to a class, a university class recently. And they were asking me about the big differences between when I started and now. And I was like, guys, this is going to sound really ridiculous. But I was working at a design agency that was digital. We had server farms in the basement. I was making, I was having conversations with companies who were getting their very first website. I felt a little bit like a car salesman. I’m like, what’s it going to take to get you into a website today? But they had no concept of like, I’m in the yellow pages, I’m listed in the Better Business Bureau. I’m, people, I do advertising and there’s a phone number on the bottom. They hadn’t conceived of the idea. Nobody had. It was a completely new idea that there’s a worldwide web that people will very soon do all of their first queries on. So we were building like Starbucks first website. We were building an intranet for Starbucks. We were building Flash websites, one-offs for Nintendo for every game that they were releasing. We’d get the game six months in advance. We’d play it. Then we’d figure out the narrative. We’d create a Flash website that would give you a simulation of that experience on a marketing site, get you excited about Legends of Zelda 47, and then you’d go buy it for Christmas. But we would build those websites and then we would host those websites. And then we had quote unquote webmasters who would do quarterly updates. And so we’d be talking to the marketing and the comms people who would send over, oh, one of our CEO people left. We need you to make an immediate update to the website. Oh, well, there’s going to be a rush fee on that. And we’re going to do that. It was a really weird time, but in the rush to making everything readable on the web, I think sometimes we forgot the tactile for a hot minute. Although I do feel like it is starting to come back. I think we’ve officially as a mass consumer of the world in digital formats, I think we’re starting to get, okay, enough of this, enough of the saccharine and the sugar. I am overstimulated. I don’t, I need a nap. I need things to show up in the real world when I’m ready for them. I need some of these things to be calm. And it’s nice to see the appetite shifting. Probably not fast enough for my liking, but still it’s shifting. It’s certainly out there. How do you think about where we are right now? When clients come to me, how do you start a conversation with somebody, with a client? What are they asking you?And how do you frame the conversation for today? Given the cattywampus tumultuous nature of everything, everything, everywhere, all at once right now, a lot of the briefs that come to me or phone calls that I have with people do tend to be pretty closer in than I think is probably prudent, or even just that personally, I’m always pushing my clients to think longer out. And sometimes I realize, okay, I’ve hit a ceiling here. I just can’t push them any further. We need to play in closer to the vest. But things tend to be really myopic at the moment. The future is unpredictable, extra unpredictable. We can’t really use the past as a measuring device the way we used to. Even last quarter, last year, or even looking at the last five years is becoming less and less dependable as a measuring stick. So that’s become true, really true. There’s some piece of this, it feels like this is a cliche we always talk about, but it also feels like it’s more than ever before. Well, I’m biased, I guess, probably based on my particular demographic. I’m 52 now. I remember in 2014, I started at Nike, and I was brought in on a strategy assignment. It was probably one of the most juiciest and enjoyable pieces of work I ever got a chance to do. It was for every year at Nike at that time, I think it’s shifted since. They had a strategic cycle that started with something called SPKO, which was the strategic priorities kickoff. And at the time, Mark Parker was the CEO, so he would take his leadership team off site every year at this time. They’d actually go up in the Rwandan country, they go to this place called the Allison Inn, and they’d spend a week together. In preparation for that week, each of those leaders would reach down into their orgs and say, I need some of the biggest thinking on certain topics. There was always a theme going into that. This particular theme of this year, because it was 2014, they were looking ahead to 2020, which was only six years. But still, it was good that they were looking ahead six years. Oftentimes, it was closer in than that. And so this was actually a bit of attention and an opportunity for this. I was in brand at the time, and we were coordinating between brand, product, and the GMs of the different verticals. And we were given the task of trying to imagine what consumer engagement would look like in six years. And ironically, it’s the year 2020. We didn’t know yet that Tokyo, or maybe we did know already that Tokyo was going to be the Olympics. I’m not sure if that was announced yet. We certainly didn’t know COVID was coming. So we were doing this big projection into the future. Part of that argument, or not argument, but kind of teeing up that headspace for that room, which was the C-suite of Nike was to say, you are asking us to look forward six years. Well, let’s start by looking back six. Or even better, let’s look back 12. And what do we see? And when you do that, the acceleration that we were experiencing was incredibly obvious. And this was that moment of, quote, unquote, disruption across everything. There was Uber disrupting the taxi industry. Airbnb was disrupting what it means to be a hotelier or to have lodging. We started looking that Google was experimenting in automotive and cars and self-driving. Everyone has so much more power. These tech companies have so much power over data. Do we understand our own consumers well enough? Are we going to be disintermediated or intermediated? So these really strong, divisive ideas landed in that room pretty strongly. And I’m so proud of the team that I was working with on this, because actually we contacted Bruce Sterling, who is a science fiction author. And he notoriously gives the closing keynote, or it’s an unofficial closing keynote at the end of every South by Southwest. And we said to him, we want to create a film, something that kind of visualizes where this whole thing is going. And so he and I went back and forth over email, putting a script together that turned into about an eight-minute edit. And I was told as a new person at Nike, you can’t show people something that’s eight minutes. Nobody has the attention span to consume something eight minutes. You got to make it maximum a minute, a minute and a half. And I was like, we can’t do that. We can’t get it there. I think I got it down from 11 to eight, and that was the best possible. So we had it in our back pocket. We weren’t even sure if the executives that we were writing the presentation for would have an appetite for it. But it happened that the CMO wasn’t available to actually be there on the presentation day. So it was going to be the CFO and the GM who needed to give this presentation about the future of consumer engagement, and this is not their wheelhouse. And so they had a little anxiety about it. So we created this deck. We were going through the deck at 11:30 the night before. And we said, hey, we got to show you one more thing that we created for this. We think it’s going to, you’ll play it after slide three, and then it will open the floodgates for the rest of the presentation. And we pressed play on the film, and they were high-fiving. I’m so comfortable now. This really, okay, I can do my part now that Bruce Sterling has done his part, and he’s kind of articulated the worldview. So I don’t know if I’ve answered your question. I kind of ranted there for a minute. No, it wasn’t a rant. Well, you were doing something with your hands about to describe what Bruce Sterling had done for everybody, and ultimately what you had done for the team. What did you feel like you had done for them? I think what we enabled them to do is quickly, and without a lot of labor, see the opportunity to be a part of the future that was already well on its way, and to not sit it out. The data points that we put in there were unassailable. They were large. We talked about how tech companies are akin to the railroads of the previous era. This is like massive amounts of infrastructure is what is being developed by Google, by Amazon. This is like the power company, the railroad industry. If you think about what was developed in that era, this is what’s being developed for this era, and this is what it means for everyone. This is why it’s changing the floor under our feet, and if you’re choosing to not participate and ignore that, you’re going to be superseded by it. So, we need to thread the needle here. We need, as an athletic brand, what do we do? How much do we owe it to our consumers and constituents, people who are the passion point of sport, to be masters of our realm? Which means we need to get savvier about data and understand our own technology. And then, where do we also need to keep people in their bodies? When we’re moving into a deeper digital relationship with the world, you can’t go for a run in your mind. I suppose you can, but you’re not going to get the physical benefits. You do need to put on the shoes and go. So, we got to keep people in the real world. Part of that story, I think, was triggered by, you had made the observation, you can’t really, the past isn’t a good predictor of the future anymore, and I pushed back on that. So, you told that story of 2014 of having had the benefit of going back six years and 12 years to deliver all that, but what’s the current, how do you operate now? How would you do, how do you deliver that same kind of insight or about the opportunity to a team now, if we’re operating in a different, in a more volatile culture? Yeah. My first thing that I always do is understand the center and the history of the brand that I’m working on. They may or may not be a brand that I have my own experience with. They may or may not be a brand that’s even existed very long in the world. And so, sometimes you’re dealing with a shallow ocean of how deep can we go on what this brand has established already in the world? But regardless of how deep the ocean goes on that brand, the sky’s the limit in terms of where they would like to take themselves next. And so, a little bit is what’s the ambition? How reasonable is that ambition? And most importantly to me is who are our true believers? Who are the consumers that we need to serve? And serve by knowing them better than anybody else knows them. And serve by anticipating their needs, but also understanding their needs better than anybody else. And so, whether that is a financial product, or whether that is a physical product that you put on your body, or even a medical product that medicines or supplements that you put in your body. Things that you do to create the sanctity of the home. Things that you do to stay in contact with family and maintain connections, or to raise children, mobility. There’s so many different angles where it’s what are you trying to do for people? I feel like it’s not enough to be another thing in this world where we are overrun by consumerism, and we are overrun by options. It’s ridiculous going in a grocery store these days. It’s not the cereal aisle anymore. Go into the beer aisle, go into the beverage aisle. Everything is proliferating to an extent that it is comical. Well, it would be comical if it wasn’t a catastrophe. Many, if not most of these things shouldn’t exist. There isn’t a need. Yes. I also feel there’s something really unbelievably, what am I trying to say? The comical and the catastrophic are right next to each other all the time. And this seems to be a particularly contemporary phenomenon. Yes. They’re holding hands and skipping down the road. Yes. A hundred percent. Yeah. And it’s a little weird. And in some ways without the comedy, the catastrophe would just send everybody over the edge. So maybe that’s a coping mechanism. But I also saw an incredible talk a few weeks ago in San Francisco at the Long Now Foundation. I’m not sure if you’ve heard of them, but they’re an organization that thinks about time in an incredibly deep way, founded by Stuart Brand and Brian Eno. Actually, Kevin Kelly was there at the event. So I had a moment of swooning and geeking out. I just really adore the way he thinks. I read a lot of his writing. And the speaker was Indy Johar, which I’m not sure if you’ve heard of him, but if not, look him up. He also runs Dark Matter Labs. He’s involved in a ton of different areas. But after that, I went to a dinner the night before, before the talk, and we talked about if capitalism could just do a proper job of accounting, we would weed out most of the players that are in the game. Because if you look at the accounting for capitalism, where they are taking either from nature or from society in ways that are not reckoned with and captured as value on the books, those companies would be hardcore in the red. They are not a good investment. They wouldn’t be in the stock market. They’d be underwater. They’d be out. So one of his, I mean, a-ha points for me that was really heartening, because you’re thinking, how do you fight against capitalism? I was thinking, well, you make capitalism do its job better. You don’t try to kill it. You don’t try to drown it. You actually challenge it to do its job properly. Your accounting is not working. There are businesses and business that shouldn’t be in business. And that’s why we’ve got all this crap in the landfill. So can we knock the losers out of the game, please, and get them out? Because there’s so much waste in this system that it is actually causing more harm than we can even reckon with. And I feel that reminds me of, is it Natural Capitalism? This is the argument that Paul Hawken made all the way back in the 90s, that we were treating the environment and natural resources as just free. But are you also saying that this, and I feel there’s a, that on some level, there’s a, so natural capitalism takes and creates the natural resources as an asset that needs to be accounted for. But we also have this social capitalism too, where the cost that we’re experiencing at the social realm is devastating. We have no way of talking about what has been lost. Totally. Yeah. You think about, I mean, just take a measure of everybody’s general nervous system right now, who’s working nine to five, and then they bring that home and it gets spread around the family. And we get this one precious life to live. And we call it priceless. We say that it’s precious, but then we abuse the hell out of it. And it’s pretty rough. It’s pretty rough when you realize people can’t pay their healthcare bill, their bills, that we’ve allowed that the haves and have-nots to be such a split, that groceries have become a conversation in the last Olympics or election. It is, these are strange days. Yeah. And I simultaneously feel tension and anxiety everyone does. But I also am one of those people that gets excited when things start to break a little bit, because I do feel a break, breakdown is an opportunity. There’s beauty in the breakdown. There’s also editing in the breakdown. And Lord knows we could do with a little bit of editing right now. And I know it won’t be clean and easy. And I know that not everyone will escape unscathed, but it’s time for a bit of a revolution. Hopefully not the kind that we take up arms for, but where, what is leadership actually? Whether you’re talking about political or whether you’re talking about brand or business or even the civic. And why have we allowed that bar to get so low? The bar for leadership. Do we really feel we’re being led to anywhere good right now? I would hasten a bet. The answer is no. I think people have forgotten how much power they have. And once reminded, there will be a different story on the other side. And I’ve been really thinking a lot about, well, what would be on the other side? What does that work look like? How do we imagine it for business, for civics, for social, society, for politics? All on a planet whose weather is getting demonstrably worse. Where do you see the kinds of practices that we need to develop happening? I mean, I guess on some level it’s a, we need new storytelling practices. I feel we’ve demonstrated that we’re not very good at telling the kinds of stories we need to do the kinds of things that we need. And some of this feels it’s because we’re not very good at imagining the future. And maybe this is why you think about the future. And maybe I don’t know the question I’m asking, but I’m wondering where are the, where are the, maybe before the call, we talked about bonfire? Where’s the, where are the funds that we want people to come together? How does that, because I feel like, and I’m going to rant a little bit too, where I feel like there was a shift where everybody was a strategist. And then all of a sudden now everybody’s talking about the future and everybody’s talking about the imagination. And my first boss was a guru. And he would say that we consume the thing that we’re afraid we’re losing. I hear so many people advocating for the imagination and we’re trying to talk about the future, but we just can’t do it in some way. We just find it so hard to come together and do it. So Katie, what do we do? Well, this is where I’m hopeful that those of us who have spent so much of our lives involved in storytelling of various formats and forms can really offer something because here’s some of the rubs I feel. What is happening? Let’s use the planet, for example, what’s happening in climate shift and change and transformation. It’s hard to get your brain around. The numbers are really big. Geological time is hard to grok with our tiny little brains that are thinking about what’s for dinner tonight. So there is some hack. And I think it’s a storytelling hack that needs to help people understand where we sit in the story of this planet and of the universe, dare I say, and that this is a moment for our, really for our species and the others that live on this planet with us. There’s as well, but the planet doesn’t need us. The planet’s going to be fine. The planet’s been here before. There’s been proliferations and shrinking of speciation on the planet for billions of years. So we don’t have to worry about saving her. She’s fine. We have to worry about saving ourselves and hopefully a planet that’s worth inhabiting, meaning that it’s got beautiful diversity of flora and fauna and air and water that’s enough and clean for us to thrive on. Otherwise the kind of environment that we can imagine in the future is really not worth inheriting. So I don’t know. That’s one of the things is just the time thing is hard for people to understand. The scale is hard for people to understand. I’ve also been a little bummed out to see other parties really killing it in the semiotics and symbolism. I would say the extreme, I mean, I grew up in a conservative family. My parents were Republicans. I grew out West in a rural place. My cousin had a wedding at the gun range. I understand conservative people. The red is not bad, but I do think their leadership is suspect right now and has taken them to an extreme place. Not all of them, but a large party voted for something that is extreme and they have done an incredible job of creating symbolism, semiotics, language, story, belief, underpinning and undergirding that makes it easy for people to quickly, without having to sweat at all, grasp and fall behind and then retell and retell and retell. And on the other side, the more liberal version, not the extreme liberal version, but just hopefully more of more, is there a normal, normal, is there a mainstream? I don’t know, but someone more towards the center on the bluish side, we’ve just been fumbling around. So I think story is, and the creation of story. Someone joked the other day, we need to create a new religion. I don’t think we need a new religion. I’d prefer not to have a religion per se, but you start to hear about, we certainly don’t need another Messiah or anything like that. But if you look at the concept of solar punk, for example, which is a playoff of steam pump, it creates a world building for the future in which it is green energy. It is energy that’s not stealing from nature and trashing nature. It could be solar, it could be wind, it could be any other methods, even nuclear exists in the solar punk future. It’s about a healthy relationship with the planet and agriculture. It’s about a lot of diverse voices, older voices, female voices, colored voices, disabled voices, all participating in equal measure. It’s really more about a shared mindset as opposed to, well, you’re this type of person, so you do this type of thing. It’s everybody, we need everybody’s skin in the game. And it’s also thinking about the future with a much more indigenous lens of we are responsible for it. We need to be good ancestors. We need to be thinking about multiple generations to the best of our ability, which goes back to that hard thing about the brain not being naturally good at that and that storytelling helping. The indigenous cultures have tons of legends and lore and verbal histories, oral histories that teach those folks at a very nuclear level to understand their relationship to the earth and their responsibility for it deep into the future. And we’ve just failed in our modern expression of ourselves as humans to keep that practice alive in a meaningful way. So the solar punk world, if you haven’t touched on it at all, if you haven’t heard of it, go Google it. There’s a lot of fun AI imagery, people trying to imagine on a macro mass level. Chibani did a great ad a number of years ago called Dear Alice. It was an animated ad done in a style similar to Ghibli films. It’s the best example of a mainstream brand that I’ve bumped up against recently who embraced that vision of we don’t just make yogurt here. We have a vision for the future and it looks like this. It was beautiful. And I often use that as an example with clients when I try to say to them, you think you only just make pencils or you just sell whatever, dishware, whatever, tires. But look what this yogurt company, they have a bigger vision. You too can have a bigger vision. It doesn’t mean you have to bring it all to life tomorrow, but it’s your North Star and it’s your story that you’re telling together with your consumer that makes them feel like they’re seen and that you’re on their side. And then sometimes you can even give them the ability to have their own skin in the game. What excites you about that work, about the possibility of brands reaching? I do have reservations about that too, let’s be clear. I have read some science fiction books, most notably Margaret Stewart and Oryx and Crake. She has a trilogy, the Mad Adam trilogy, in which corporations take over. And then there’s these enclaves where you have a job somewhere and you only live in that controlled environment. And it’s like these corporates are almost more like nations. And so she took just that concept to an extreme. And you could see that when it’s pushed to extremes, it’s also not healthy. So you don’t want to get anywhere near that. As a mind experiment, you see where things can go wrong. But I do feel that if you’re going to go ahead and employ a whole bunch of people who are citizens of a place and put them to work doing something for other people, you have some responsibility to incorporate the needs of the workers and also the customers into the work that you’re doing. And I guess there’s some good examples of that. Ben & Jerry’s isn’t always a nice one. There’s other brands that have accentuated their sense of place. I don’t know. I’m not sure if I’m answering your question very well. I don’t know. I don’t know. It’s impossible to make a mistake. I guess on some level, a vague question about the role of brand today? Maybe it’s more just designing a brand in the past was more about locking it in. Designing a logo, making sure it’s used universally in the same way everywhere. Digital arised and everything was suddenly dynamic. And so then you needed to be a little more nimble. You needed to be a little more elastic. Now with AI, quote unquote, vibe coding, all that stuff, we’re getting into this place where it’s like your brand has never landed. It’s alive. It’s messy. It’s organic. You got people that work there. People are messy. You’re working in a world that is in hyperflux. And you’re trying to communicate and connect with people who are under duress and trying to also navigate this wild world. So create an emotional linkage that means something that matters. It’s true. There’s a I don’t want to say purpose because purpose has gotten a bad rap lately, but maybe mission. There’s a reason to why we exist. I often say with my clients, what’s the dent you’re making in the universe? How will we know that you’ve even been here? If we shut you down tomorrow, would anybody notice? If you’re just making stuff, that’s just not good enough. It’s just not. And I think as frankly, as a consumer myself, I’m not going to buy something that’s not good enough. I need to know what you’re about. I need to believe in you. And the product, frankly, just needs to have been intentional. Even if it’s five bucks, I still want to know that you have some sweat equity in this thing and that you believe in it. So last question, I would love to. I’m a qualitative researcher and ethnographer. I’m always probably selfishly looking for arguments for face to face, good old fashioned face to face qualitative research. What’s your position on qualitative? How do you have a way of how do you talk about the role of qualitative in work? And what’s the value that it brings? Yeah, well, even just to reiterate, people are messy. So they do whatever they do. But it’s almost impossible to understand it unless you get in their face about it and get in their shoes and in their face like a confrontation. But like you get eyeball to eyeball, person to person. I have utilized tools to make virtual ethnography possible when it wouldn’t otherwise be possible. COVID obviously meant that you couldn’t get on a plane and you couldn’t get focus groups together. And so I think some new tricks of the trade were introduced during that time. I’ve kept a couple of them going. When a client doesn’t have the budget or the patience to do proper in-person dives, I’ll do asynchronous interviews. I found a really fun platform where I load it with questions. And then the person on the other end, if I were to send it to you, you could press a button and you hear me say, oh, hey, thanks for participating. This is what we’re talking about today. And then one by one, you could see me, you could see my face, hear the expressiveness in my voice, watch my hands move around as I’m explaining to you the question I want you to think about. And then you get a minute to sit there and think about it. And then you press a button and you record your response back to me. And so if you stitch it together, it can look like an in-person interview or it can be presented to a client as like a full conversation. But it’s an asynchronous device, which has given me a lot of great talking heads and good quotes. And because people, as you know, respond differently when they’re on, off the cuff, as opposed to in written form. I worry about AI. Oh, say again. What do you feel like you’re after in those exercises? What are you after? It’s the invisible stuff. I can observe everyone being anxious to answer that question or everyone searched for the right word. They didn’t have it off the tip of their tongue. They didn’t want to answer that question. That’s interesting. What’s that about? And then also if you get a nice swath, did men or women answer it differently? Did people of different ages answer it differently? Did people of different economic positions answer it differently? Like the classic what do we see? What do we think we’re witnessing here? And then part of it is witness, bearing witness. Oh, wow. I did a series of these interviews right after COVID. So this was the tool needed for the job for a rock climbing company. And they were trying, they were witnessing what was happening with yoga and then what happened with running. And they weren’t seeing it happening in climbing. And they weren’t even sure if they wanted it to happen in climbing, because climbing is a little bit, if you know, you know, it’s a special culture. But as a business, they wanted to know more about like, are we missing a beat here? Should we be trying to participate? Or even creating a culture around rock climbing? Particularly bottom of mountain rock climbing, bouldering, and also gym climbing. That could be compelling. And so I spoke to a lot of young people because they wanted to know what are the young kids think, as most brands are thinking. But I also sprinkled in some of the OGs because they are noticing change. And they needed to be witnessed, they needed to have somebody listen to them talk about how their favorite thing got from then to now. And also they were very valuable in terms of what needs, what must be protected? What must be remained true? The kids don’t know that they have a sense, kids, excuse me, the younger people, they have an older sibling who did it, they thought it was cool, they picked it up. They can start to softly articulate what they think they love about it. But the OGs know what it is. They know it, they can talk about it, they can demonstrate it, they can tell you how it’s flexed and flexed over time, they can tell you when they almost lost it. So I think bearing witness, again, to time, as you can see, time is one of my friends when I do a lot of my work, I use time a lot, but as a device, but that’s always interesting. Yeah. Can you say more about that? Because you mentioned a few times, I know The Long Now, and you talked about pushing clients to think more long term, what’s the role of time? Time, it’s so funny, because I think we suck as humans, as feeling time pass, we use clocks because we can’t sense it very well. So I need, what time is it again? Are we, like that thing? Am I going to be late? I don’t know. Time is an emotional thing for us too. Time flies when you’re having fun, all that stuff, or the way different people of different age groups sense time. When you get over 80, time feels different than if you’re a kid, you’re in a rush to get places, when you’re older, you’re, hey, hey, let’s take it easy. This is, let’s savor this. So there’s, you put that into business context, and you’re like, if we had all the time in the world, what would we want to solve for people? These are great workshop questions. Oh, well, in that case, all the time, I would want to, then ambition comes out, desire, and also what they feel they have a sense of responsibility for, or a passion around. If we had no time, if we only had one product that we could, that we had to release, but before the end of this year, where would we focus? Reduce, take time away, crunch it. I took the Chicago Bulls through a world building exercise, or sorry, a cathedral building exercise, which is just saying cathedrals take a long time to build, and often the architects of those cathedrals don’t live long enough to walk in them. I remember the first time I learned that, when I was a teenager, we went to London, and I went into the cathedral, and they’re like, this guy designed it, and then he died, and then another guy finished it, and I was like, what? You didn’t get to see the end of his project? And of course, the Sagrada Familia in Barcelona, it’s still not done. It’s like hundreds of years old, and they’re still working on it. So to say to the Chicago Bulls, you guys are the executive team right now. This is an icon. You’ve had great names, Pippen and Jordan, but we are who we are right now. What does this mean? So what does the Chicago Bulls mean to the game of basketball, to the city of Chicago, to every player or coach or fan that walks into this cathedral, the stadium here? What does it mean? But we need to think about what we’re passing on, not to next season, but to the person who has your job after you, and then to the person who is a kid who will become a father and pass it down to his son here in the city of Chicago. And so we took them out of the game that was going to be in the stadium that night, and they were checking their phones on every break to see if they had sold out, and if the strike that the concession stand employees, that it had resolved, if it had stayed resolved, they had real near-term things going on. But we talked a lot about all the things that we could do in the business and in the city, and also with the NBA, to make sure that the game, that the city, and that the team were better than they’d ever been, and it was something like an heirloom object that could be passed into the future. So part of that was getting them to see time differently, examples of different projects in both the art world and in the science world. I think, innately, people enjoy being taken out of the day-to-day. They just don’t get a chance to do it very often, and that was the way I teed it up with that room too. I was like, I’m taking all your phones away because you may not realize it until about 30 minutes from now, but this is actually a rare thing that you get to do today, and hopefully you feel that way at the end of the day too. But you get to do the thing you want to do right now on your phone all day, every day. Let’s put that aside and do something you don’t get to do every day, because it will change the way that you look at your work, and it will change the way that you look at the other people that you see in the stadium who come in to spend time with you and your property and your team that you’ve put together. It’s just funny, the gifts that time can give you if you just distort it. When I think about The Long Now, I met with the new director. I’ve been helping them out with a couple things recently, and we had a meeting a couple days ago. She’s like, why do you like The Long Now so much? What drew you to us? I was like, honestly, when I think about long time, really, really big, big time, I’m not afraid. All the fear and anxiety that I feel about more near and present dangers, it goes away, because I’m so small. I’m just minutiae. I’m just a little gnat in the history of the universe. I can just look at it for what it is. It’s comforting. I also think it’s really important that people take comfort from the fact that we have our finite moment. At the heart of it, that’s our humanity, our one little precious snowflake life. Time helps us realize that. One last question, which I didn’t ask earlier, which is what do you love about the work? Where’s the joy in it for you? I think some of it is about finding the humanity in there. Some of it is about anything and everything can be interesting if you’re interested. I sometimes see clients come to me and be like, oh, maybe this isn’t the most interesting thing. I was like, tell me about it. I like proving them wrong. We can get interested about that. That can be super interesting. I like finding the cracks. I think sometimes the cracks are often wallpapered over and people don’t even realize it’s happened, or the cracks are seen as a flaw. When you look at it more closely, it can become your strong attribute. One of my clients is a ski resort. They are one of three ski only ski resorts in North America. They were really shy about it. We don’t want to be seen as exclusive. We just really love skiing. We don’t want the snowboarders mad at us and all this stuff. We just don’t know how to talk about it. I was like, that’s how their current campaign came to be. It’s called Dear Skiers. Your whole resort is a love letter to skiing and ski culture. You see skiers inside of everyone, inside of the people who haven’t yet skied, inside of the people who are snowboarding today. You’re like, hey, that’s cool that you’re snowboarding. If you want to ski, come over here. By the way, we love it more than anybody else. We’ve designed this whole place for the ski experience. It’s tip top, man. Don’t be shy. I think that’s fun when the light bulb comes on. The thing that they were really worried about as being like an Achilles heel or a problem or a weakness is their differentiator that they can come out swinging with and be really proud of. That’s fun. Then, of course, I just really love when I get a sparring partner at a client who is really willing to play with time with me and to really think big about it. We’ll always have to play the short game, but when I can get someone to play short game and long game with me, then we’re cooking. Then we’re cooking with gas. I think we come up with some really compelling artifacts for senior leaders, too, that let them know that when you do both at the same time, your strategies are tighter because not only are they relevant for the contextual moment, but they’re taking you someplace new and distinctive. They have a vision. Awesome. Thank you so much. I really appreciate you accepting my invitation. Thank you so much. It’s been great. This was super fun. Get full access to THAT BUSINESS OF MEANING at thatbusinessofmeaning.substack.com/subscribe [https://thatbusinessofmeaning.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]

Darrel Rhea on Judgment & Coherence

Darrel Rhea [https://www.linkedin.com/in/darrelrhea/] is a design strategist and innovation leader who served as CEO of Cheskin, where he expanded its global research and innovation practice. He is coauthor of Making Meaning, a foundational book on meaning-driven innovation, and founder of Rhea Insight, advising Fortune 1000 leaders on strategy, design, and customer-led innovation. So, as you may or may not know, I start all these conversations with the same question, which I borrowed from a friend of mine who helps people tell their stories. I love it because it’s a big question—but because it’s really big, I tend to over-explain it, like I’m doing now. Before I ask it, I want you to know that you’re in total control. You can answer or not answer in any way you want, and it’s impossible to make a mistake. And the question is: Where do you come from? So, first, let me just acknowledge the kind of the brilliance of that question, right? Which is to say that you’re modeling great qualitative research technique by starting there, right? Because it automatically flips the power in the conversation to the subject and makes them an author rather than just the subject of the interview. So, I just, I love that. And it’s a great way to segue into identity and meaning. So, where do I come from? I grew up in Southern California in the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s. And that was a really dynamic point in time—kind of a historical anomaly in a lot of ways. And when I was growing up in that period from the ’50s to 1970, the population of California doubled. And that’s really significant. And I was in Southern California, and that even grew even at a greater rate there. So, people were arriving from everywhere. Almost nobody was from California. My family was actually a couple of generations there, but that was kind of rare. So, you had people leaving their old cultures behind, and they’re busy inventing new ones. And so, identity was this kind of DIY thing that was happening. You had this explosive post-war prosperity that was happening in Southern California. You had Hollywood, and you had movies and the music industry exploding. You had defense-driven technology and the University of California research influence on that. So you had this strange mix of abundance and innovation and social mobility and permission that other places in the world, I don’t think, had that at the same time. So, the message was come to California, you can be whoever you want to be. So, it attracted a whole lot of people who wanted to be something different. And that was the soup the cultural waters that I was growing up in. And it created an explosion of subcultures that were created while I was young. And I participated in that. One of those was the surf culture. So I lived close to the beach, and the surfing culture kind of emerged and was invented in my neighborhood. Not surfing itself, but surfing culture. I knew—friends of mine went to school with the Beach Boys. And it was like, this was an essential kind of rite of passage. I spent my youth chasing waves, going up and down the coast. And so the savoring the sublime of beauty and protecting the environment and that was very much a subculture that I felt like I was not just part of, but helping invent, which is, I think, kind of a different thing. Also, in Southern California—well, in California at that time—the countercultural movement was in some ways centered there. It was certainly a center of the countercultural movement of the sixties. And it wasn’t something I read about. It was not something I experienced on TV. It was on our streets. And where were you? What town were you in? I was in Fullerton and Newport Beach, and in Orange County—basically just south of Los Angeles. But hippie culture the Summer of Love, the Age of Aquarius, the anti-war movement—I mean, that was what I was just immersed in. And that that sense of oneness and harmony and community and enlightenment—those were all kind of meanings and values that were embedded in that countercultural movement that were something I experienced kind of deeply. And at the same time, I went to an experimental liberal arts college. So we were reinventing education, or what college education was, and seeking meaning in new ways. So, that was another subculture that was emerging there. When you were young, what did you—did you have an idea of what you wanted to be when you grew up? Well, I wandering around, I had a sense of wanting to be a designer. So, another subculture that I can speak of kind of on a personal level was Southern California was the epicenter of the global car culture. And so the most important marker of identity in Southern California—where cars are everything, and you drove everywhere—was: what car did you drive? Not just what car did you drive, but what brand did you choose, and how did you personalize it, and how did you customize it? And so that was a marker of identity. And my family’s business was at the epicenter of that. So, we were part of the hot rod culture. We were part of the performance car culture. And, so I grew up from the age of seven working in my dad’s business in that. What was the business? It was basically car customization—interior design. Cars, boats. We were doing cars for Hollywood, and we were doing automotive restorations for the museums. And, my uncle started the Hot Rod Association, National Hot Rod Association. Wow. So it’s like—right. Yeah. Doing land speed—trying for land speed records in the salt flats. And this was car culture. Right? And so I was in that, and not just as a participant, but as a designer. Right? So, I was designing cars and interiors. So, I had that—I think I had that sensitivity to industrial design as an expression of identity. And that was really important to me. And I knew I wanted to take that somewhere. Pursuing design was one of those things. And where are you now, and what are you up to? What’s your sort of catch-up in terms of where you are now and the work that you’re doing now? So, yeah, after 30 years with Cheskin—the company that I helped build; didn’t start, but helped build and scale—sold that to WPP. And for the last decade, I’ve been an independent consultant, kind of committed to not having employees and not doing another performance review in my life, after having a large organization. And yeah, I’ve mostly been doing strategy consulting, working with senior executives on those issues, and also doing a lot of AI implementation work to say, how do we bring technology and make it actually useful to how organizations operate? Yeah. And how did you go from all those subcultures to Cheskin? What was that journey? How did you get into—your CEO of Cheskin, and you built that business—how did you get into that position? Yeah, so I kind of went from designer to— I tried working in the field of design and found that not very satisfying. I didn’t have really good mentors. I wanted to participate in design at a higher level than craft, but I didn’t have access to that. And I didn’t know enough that I should just go down the street and hang out with Charles and Ray Eames, like a friend of mine did, and understand systems design. And that was, like, over my head. I didn’t have access to that. So, I kind of dropped out of design. I’d gotten a degree in psychology because I was really interested in how people learn and evolve and grow. And that didn’t hold a lot of promise for me either, because I didn’t want to get a Ph.D., and I didn’t want to work with sick people. So, bottom line was, I wasn’t just a surfer or hippie or gearhead. my parents had grown up in—that part of that economic expansion was—they went from poverty to wealth by being entrepreneurs and starting their own businesses. And, the dinner table reality was it’s all about value creation. And you’re going to grow up to be a business leader and an innovator and an entrepreneur. So, what did I do? I started a company with a college roommate of mine. And part of that was introducing 20 new products—happened to be in the agriculture or cut-flower industry—introducing 20 new products into the domestic market that hadn’t seen a new product for 20 years. And I needed to brand them. I needed to call them something. And the only person I knew in marketing was a father of a friend of mine who happened to be Louis Cheskin. And through introductions and through another friend, I connected. And when I decided I wasn’t a farmer, and the floriculture industry was interesting but it wasn’t where I wanted to— I got hired by Louis Cheskin in Chicago. And I thought I’d be there for a year and ended up there being CEO, owning it, and running it for 31 years. Amazing. I encountered Cheskin, I think, through Added Value, maybe later in its lifetime, and I’m aware of its reputation. But how do you place Louis Cheskin in the broader legacy of research and strategy? Yeah, well, he was a seminal figure and pioneer in the field of consumer research. And it’s—I think in today’s world, very few people in the industry tend to know much about Lewis Cheskin. But he made design something that was—from and took it from subjective taste to science, basically. So, he was a Ph.D. psychologist trained in University of Chicago in the ’30s, at a time that was this really interesting, revolutionary time where physics and statistics and psychology and the social sciences were actually becoming first truly empirical. And he moved in these circles. He hung out with Einstein and Fermi and kind of the scientific elite back in those early days. And he told—Cheskin, he told Einstein, “I want to define what the science of art is,” which was a really kind of avant-garde, really ambitious kind of aspiration—and controversial at the time, because art—the applied arts—were subjective and could not be quantified. So, he had that aspiration. During the Depression, he ran the Works Project Administration arts programs in the state of Illinois. So, he had hundreds of artists on his payroll—really good artists, great artists. And what did he do with it? He said, well, I’ll start doing research on color perception, because I really am interested in this. And he did some of the foundational and first color research—research on color—deploying quantitative research techniques. Taking a room and painting it—painting everything in the room red, and having an identical room painted with everything in that blue, and another room with everything green. And didn’t ask people if they liked the room. He just—he looked at productivity. He looked at physiological measurements, psychological measurements, and determined in an indirect way what the impact of color was on the human being. And that’s—that’s where he started his work. And that launched a whole career. He founded the Color Research Institute of America. He ended up doing consulting work with Disney on Fantasia, and with the military on camouflage. And, he created color systems—basically, the precursor to Pantone was the Cheskin color system. He invented four-color printing methodologies. So, Cheskin kind of emerged as this scientific color guy. And, that’s—that’s where he started. And then he expanded that to understanding about shapes and symbols and materials and imagery, and how they affect perception and behavior in products and brands. Which was a totally this is the ’40s and ’50s. So, this is at a time where that’s just a crazy idea. Yeah. So, he was this real kind of anomaly. And the context for that was what was happening in the ’40s and ’50s. Well, we first had a national road system or highway system. We first had national retail for the first time. We had national and broad media for the first time with radio and then television. And so, you had businesses stepping in to address that scale and risk management, and the desire to make decisions not just subjectively, but with some kind of grounding. There was a market for that. And he stepped into that—making that case. And, he was, I think, one of the first people, first researchers, that really kind of bumped up against, the struggle and conflict with the more creative agency world. He was working with David Ogilvy and all these big names. Yeah. I want to come back to this question of this bumping up—this collision you’re talking about now. But I’m dying to know—do you have any, I mean, insight into—it’s sort of obvious that one could be curious about color. But do you have any insight into what it was about color? Why did he start there? So, at age 18, this guy from Chicago was doing one-man art shows in New York as a watercolorist. So, he was an artist who was also a Ph.D. psychologist. So, he had a strong affinity to art and design. And that’s why he was running the WPA arts programs—because he understood art. And so, I think that was the locus that, yeah, that pulled him into that. Interestingly, until I met him, it never occurred to me that I could combine my interest in design and art with interest in psychology. So that was kind of a natural— Talk to me about him bumping up against the creative agencies and the relationships. The conflict that happens there when you have a research agency with insights on creative implications, or the implications of creative decisions, right? Yeah. So, this is the time when Madison Avenue was at its highlight. It was the Mad Men era. Literally, if you watched Mad Men, that was Cheskin’s world. And, they basically wanted control, very much like a McKinsey or whatever—they’re going to be very jealous about determining their recommendations and subjective decision-making around that. And Cheskin was able to quantify in very precise empirical detail the effectiveness of various design assets. And you can’t underestimate the impact that this guy had in those—that era. Because, he worked on the development of Marlboro cigarettes. The rebranding from a woman’s cigarette to a male cigarette came out of research. The package—the Marlboro package—came directly out of his playbook for looking at that. So, the advertisements that Madison Avenue, for example, would want—They’d want to have people smoking Marlboro cigarettes in their advertisements in an Eames chair, a suit, reading The Wall Street Journal, because that’s what they aspired to. And Cheskin was saying, no, it’s about a cowboy. And cowboys in the ’40s were bums. You know? So this whole—his filter view into the world definitely challenged both the creative independence and also brought some very, very objective evaluation of the utility of marketing assets in a way that nobody had ever done before. And that made him very much a public intellectual. He wrote 16 books, was quoted on the front page of newspapers regularly. And he influenced hundreds and hundreds of the biggest brands of the day. It was the equivalent—he was working on Apple and Nike and Tesla of those days. Yeah. And what was your—you were there for a very long time. What was your tenure there like? What were the challenges that you faced? And what—I guess maybe the big question is, I want to get us to present day—how has research changed, or how has the environment changed? Yeah, well, it’s changed fairly dramatically. There’s kind of two questions—how did I get where did I—how did I evolve there? And I’d say I obviously started as a designer, then became a design researcher. I’d been working at Cheskin in my early days—this is my early 20s—I was working on—I worked on literally thousands of packages, thousands of brands. I worked on 100 major corporate identity programs that were, like, multinational-level, and pulled me into all different kinds of categories—from automotive to financial services, healthcare, furnishings, architecture. And so it was just this great place to learn as a researcher—to research the effectiveness of marketing tools and marketing assets to communicate brand. So that was—that was a place that I kind of started. And then, after years of doing that, I moved into design management, which is what are the processes and the systems to manage design across large organizations? And how do you deploy all the disciplines of design and communications in a coherent way to support the brand? So, if you’re HP and you have 90 billion dollars’ worth of product around the world—literally tens of thousands of people working on everything from handheld items to rack-mount servers and software—what’s the coherent architecture for managing all that? And that was that practice through the Design Management Institute that I was involved in, and others. That was a big focus. And then I think we evolved more to marketing insights and business analytics as we kind of moved up the food chain. And finally we became an innovation consultancy, and I kind of moved into strategy. So that’s kind of the arc of my career—going from design, design research, design management, innovation, and then strategy is where it kind of ended up. What do you love—oh, go ahead. I was going to say, you were saying, well, how has research changed? Well, it’s changed dramatically. I mean, when I started, research was mostly around kind of arbitration research or validation research of solutions that people had in design or in communications. Right. Which was kind of applied research, kind of after-the-fact of creation. And then, we basically moved upstream from that—helping and participating in the creation process itself—and then started becoming specifiers of what that creative should do. So we started writing the specifications for communications, for packaging, for industrial design. And we moved further up. And then research moved even further upstream to really kind of get at those design strategies. So, what’s the framework or process that we’re going to execute to produce a financial or economic output? And then it moved even further upstream to say, okay, well, what’s the strategic intent of the organization? What makes this category or this set of products appropriate, worthwhile, and on strategy? So, I think that the bigger arc of how I participated in the research—and what I saw in my set of practices—was going from very kind of tactical research, moving all the way up to really strategic research. Where I was looking at, okay, what’s the context for the market? What’s happening in the organization itself? And how do we define a path and navigate development and scaling of business opportunities in a world where there’s change? You have to be somewhat agile to do that. Yeah. So you’ve been working on your own for the last ten years, mostly with leadership, right? What would you say are the biggest challenges leaders are facing right now—especially when it comes to the role of research? What are your thoughts on that, and how are you helping people navigate it? Maybe the real question is this: when people reach out to you today, what are they actually asking you to do? How are you helping organizations now, and what are the biggest problems they’re facing? So, I think one of the biggest problems that every organization—and probably soon every human being in our country—is going to be dealing with is the shift in context, the shift in the environment that we’re operating in. Specifically as it relates to your audience of brand people and designers and researchers and social scientists, which have been great—All those practices that we’ve developed over the last half-century were really predicated on an environment that was fairly stable. Yes, we had change, but change happened in an almost predictable way. You could see technology changes coming. So our methodologies, our approach, our mental models have all been developed on that basis—to support decision-making, clarity and coherence, and risk management in a stable market. Now, what we’re all experiencing is: hey, the market is not stable anymore. Culture is not stable. Meaning is not stable. Technology is going absolutely crazy with the advent of AI. So, we’ve gone from the stability of an environment to persistent change. And we’re about to go through radical change. So, we’re going to go through a change that’s at 10x what we have for the last decade. And no one is really prepared for that. And everyone agrees that they’re not prepared for that. But how do you—so you still need to make decisions. So, I think what I’m frustrated with is a lot of people in the research world are tending to, rather than try to reinvent themselves to be relevant in the context of all this change and the new realities, they— Look, clients don’t have the tolerance for rigor and clarity of insight now. I used to do big, ethnographic research projects that would take 17 weeks, and then we’d do multiple phases. We’d do a six-month or a year insight program. And now you have people in business just running scared, thinking, well, we’ve got to run fast and break things, right? We just need a minimum viable product. We have to be agile. We’ll fix it in a software update. Don’t worry. Let’s not overthink this. It’s more important to move fast and get in the market than it is to be smart. And research and insights—and our craft—has largely been around bringing that sophistication and nuance of insight. That’s just not, I don’t think, going to be demanded. So, I think that’s a big problem. So, when people reach out, I think it’s that context of, okay, we need to figure out how to act. And, how do we make decisions in a coherent way? So, I’ve kind of gone from - I can say what gets me in the door, from a business standpoint, is my background in design, in innovation, teaching innovation, and understanding brand, and, the toolset that you and I have developed over decades. That gets me in the door. It gives me some credibility because I’ve worked on so many thousands of projects and hundreds of companies around the world. That gets me in the door. But really, the value comes from helping leaders lead. And what I mean by that is they need to build clarity of purpose, they need to build alignment within their teams, and they need to mobilize action and make decisions. And then research is great for producing lots of options, but not a lot of researchers have the comfort or experience or confidence to realize that strategy is about eliminating options now. It’s about eliminating them and committing and accepting accountability. And that’s what management cares about. That’s their world—making decisions and having to be accountable. So, if we can help them have a process to think about that and to have them facilitated through that process, that’s very, very valuable. And that’s basically what I’ve been more known for, especially in the last maybe 15 years, is helping groups and teams and management address that. Yeah, I feel like you’ve been—and I’ve encountered you as—someone who’s not exactly critical of strategy itself, but of the way strategy is often practiced or confused with planning. How would you describe the state of strategy as you encounter it today? And how do you help organizations actually do it well? Yeah, well, strategy—so I teach strategy. I won’t do a lecture here, but what strategy is has evolved really dramatically every decade for the last century. And so our notion of what strategy is is very different. It’s conflated with strategic planning, which is kind of an oxymoron. Strategy is largely delegated to people who are strategists. You hire McKinsey, and for two million dollars, they’ll give you a binder and, take away your responsibility for creating a strategy. But strategy is not a document. It’s not an event. It’s not a workshop. It’s not a PowerPoint. Strategy is an evolving story that lives in the conversations and the commitments of people—of a group of people. And making that clear and vital and actionable is what strategy is. And it was defined two thousand years ago by Aristotle. There’s four chapters in the story that strategy is. They’re always the same four chapters. They’re always told, and it should be developed in the same order. And this is just not understood. It’s not understood by business, including people who sell strategy and scale businesses. And it’s certainly not understood in the design world. So that’s why I’ve been critical about it. When people jump to strategic planning, they’re making a whole lot of assumptions. And they’re not really going to: what’s the problem that we’re trying to solve? What are the boundaries of that problem? What are we authorized to solve and not authorized to solve? How can we be very clear about what we’re trying to do? And then: what is a great solution, right? What does a great solution look like? Aside from the executional side of that, what’s the purpose? What are the principles that we should deploy to create that? What are the metrics that would assure us and the rest of the world that we’re making progress on that commitment to that purpose? What’s the path that we need to go through—that we’re going to navigate? What are the phases to that path? And then: what are the commitments that people need to make or are willing to make? Who’s going to do what, by when, and with what resources? That needs coherence. And the practices of strategy that are broadly used don’t address that and don’t really bring coherence. They bring a point of view, but they don’t bring coherence. And I think also what’s critical about strategy is that it lives in the conversation and commitment of a group of people, which means it needs to be co-generated. It needs to be co-designed with a group of people, so they own it. So it’s not just this document that comes in or an authoritative leader that says, “This is what we’re doing.” It’s something that they embrace, so the whole culture gets behind it, and you can execute it at scale. You’re using that word coherent very intentionally, I imagine. What makes something coherent? And does it have to do—I’m curious to hear—you sort of glided over the Aristotle and the four parts. Are these things related? That which makes something coherent and the source in Aristotle? Yeah. So, there’s lots of ways that coherence plays into it. I think coherence has to come from the logical needs that you have. It also needs to come from the emotional needs that you have and the ethical needs that you have. So you have… This is rhetoric? Yes. Aristotle invented rhetoric. Rhetoric is an argument for change. Strategy is an argument for change. So it makes sense that what a good argument—what a coherent argument—is, is based in rhetoric. And people like Dick Buchanan, who was one of my mentors, and Tony Goldsby-Smith and others, have been really—decades ago—very much on that path of introducing rhetoric into the design practice. That’s beautiful. What do you love about your work? Like, where’s the joy in it for you? The joy of it is in helping groups be empowered to express and act out their commitments in the world. I don’t—you spend a lot of time around corporate America. I’ve spent 40 years working at all levels, and especially the higher levels of multinationals. They’re soulless places. They tend to be operated based on incentives that are financial and don’t have a whole lot to do with ethics or human purpose. And to be able to enable people and empower people to express and integrate their sense of values and their sense of meaning to a declaration of purpose—whether it’s on a project in the middle of an organization or whether it’s the strategic intent of a whole organization—bringing that human authorship is really, really satisfying. You’re knocking it out of the park with a team when you do a strategy and everyone wants to have it blown up on a poster. They want to sign it, and they want to have their picture taken next to it, because it says so much about who they are and their collective group. So, I just love that. I also love that I’m able to help them keep the focus on value creation and actually serving human beings. Design is about serving human beings. It raises the question: what human? What humans? What serves them? That’s what research does a great job of uncovering, right? But at the end of the day, it’s: how do you help organizations take their assets, their capabilities, and focus it on serving—not just reducing the pain of ineffectiveness and inefficiencies, right? Because I think, people do experience design—kind of the first level is you’ve got to remove the blindness. Oh, by the way, you have customers. They matter, and they care. Because there are a lot of organizations that don’t even know that, right? Customers have rights. They have expectations. Wait—hold on. There’s something about this joke I want to explore. What do you mean when you say there are organizations that don’t know they have customers? Well, they think they have—they have checks coming in, right? And they don’t necessarily acknowledge that they’re in the business of actually serving human beings. You know? So, what can I—what example can I use without getting in trouble? Qantas Airlines. Qantas Airlines was an organization that had 15 years of labor and management strife. And labor basically made its decisions, and their service design was based on what their contract said. So, if their contract said, this is what you do, and you’re a customer and you need to have your bag moved four feet—if it’s not in the labor agreement, they’re not going to move it. So they’re not even seeing the customer. They’re seeing, in that example, their internal systems and viewpoints and agreements. So there’s this blindness that I think a lot of organizations have. You ask, “Who are your customers?” and they’ll talk about their distributor, the distribution—the people who buy from them, right? And that’s not their customer. It’s like, who’s going to use this thing? Yeah, and deploy it. So, you have to—I love it, to take people like that, or that kind of organization, who want to produce more meaning, and have them evolve from this kind of focus on stopping the pain and removing breakdowns, to creating satisfaction and engineering efficiencies, which is a whole other level. And then taking from that to creating delight, right? Which is not just kind of meeting the requirements; it’s exceeding the requirements and creating pathways. And then if we can take that and go through actually creating meaning, which is a focus around building relationships with customers, then that’s really my goal—to move them up that chain so that they’re reinforcing the values of the company that’s selling and addressing the values of the consumer or users and integrating all their touchpoints to be able to have those values addressed in a meaningful experience. So how do you see the practice of strategy in that environment? What does it mean to do strategy over the next ten years? What ideas are you exploring, and what kinds of experiments have you been playing with? I’m really curious about how the shift in the broader environment is going to change the practice of strategy itself? I’m really curious about how the shift in the broader environment is going to change the practice of strategy itself, and whether we can spend some time thinking that through. Yeah. So, specifically for the research world and design world, to whatever extent that you’re currently providing value with inputs to strategy, you will be—I promise you—you are about to be replaced. Because anything that is not judgment—anything that can be digitized—is about to go away and be automated. So, anything that can’t be automated will be automated in inputs—including pattern recognition, mental models, insights. AI is fabulous at it, and it’s getting dramatically better, and it’ll be 10x better by the end of this year. Yeah. So, I just want to call out the urgency of redefining it, because what we have done historically as researchers and consultants is about to disappear. Yeah. Knowledge work is toast, because the value of knowledge is quickly going down to zero. Right? So, that’s the challenge, right? And the reckoning here. So, the future is, for me, is really about—the future of research isn’t about finding insights. The future of research is helping organizations see, decide, and act under conditions of instability. We have persistent and constant change now, and we have to design what we do to address that. And so, I think what we can do is ask ourselves, how do we help organizations develop learning as a core organizational capability, more than how do we generate insights? What do we do with those insights? We have to create new mental models and assume that we’re going to have to recreate those mental models, because in six months they probably won’t be again. So, I think that’s what our practice needs to evolve into. And for me, that’s why I am a proponent of moving it into the domain of strategy. Because strategy deals with that, right? It’s about declaration of purpose. It’s about judgment. It’s about trade-offs. It’s about accountability. If you’re not doing something with those things, you’re going to be out of work. Right? And we’re not trained—we’re not trained as researchers and designers to do that. So the challenge will be: how do we get into that game? Yeah. Tell me about that game. What were the things you mentioned? A declaration of purpose, right? Using human judgment, discernment, right? Creating an understanding and making choices around trade-offs, right? Because people have to still decide. The AI is not going to decide for you. You’ll still have to make those decisions. And accountability—sticking your neck out and owning those decisions. That’s what humans are going to do, I think, in this coming world where AI is just taking over the functions that we have previously built our careers on. Yeah. What has your experience been? We have talked a couple of times before, and I know you are knee-deep, if that’s the appropriate expression—you’re sort of playing with it and deeply engaged with it. What are you learning? What’s the experience been like for you? Well, it’s been quite a ride, especially in the last two years. With the—kind of the ChatGPT explosion has kind of been a seminal time that things tended to shift for a lot of us. And I was working on generative design a decade before that with clients—developing intelligent design systems and even the notion and kind of the first instance of generative design. So, this is not a new area. But things have dramatically changed. And the question is, okay—I think my experience is that we’re trying to take AI tools and apply them to the existing frameworks and construction of organizations and the processes of organizations. So, what we’re doing right now in this particular phase is that we’re trying to use—we’re trying to bring efficiencies with this AI tool, but we’re not challenging and realizing that structurally, a lot of the stuff we’re doing doesn’t even make sense anymore. And so we’re optimizing these old legacy systems, which is kind of the first level. The next level is really going to be focused on, well, how do we eliminate human beings in that process? And I think ultimately—and I’m seeing huge opportunities for that, unfortunately—and in implementation, that yes, you actually can reduce a headcount dramatically because you don’t really need people to do those things that we used to do. And the question—where we’re evolving, where I’m most excited about looking—is when we don’t try to eliminate the humans, but we try to augment our humanity and use AI to give us powers that we don’t currently have now. That accentuate our judgment, accentuate our discernment and help us be better at being human beings. And a lot of that’s through learning. So, I’ve been focused a great deal on that. Yeah. Yeah. What examples are there out there, either your own or elsewhere, that represent what you’re talking about—this sort of AI as augmentation? Yeah. So, one of my pet peeves in my own personal experience was in deploying AI. So, we all get on—we all get on our chatbot, and we start prompting, and we start asking it questions to solve specific problems. And we do that. It’s very easy to do. And we do it in this kind of quick, recursive, fast-paced way. And AI is fabulous about giving us volumes of text that sound fluent and intelligent and—oh, okay. It gives us an answer in seconds. And so, there’s this natural behavior that we have to take that, cut and paste it, plop it into our document, and say, hey, we’re done. And if you take that and multiply it, what happens is we’re offloading our cognitive capabilities to AI. And in doing that, I’ve found that it’s expedient, but it’s making us dumb. It’s making us stupid, because we’re not having to think, because we’re delegating the thinking to AI. And so, that’s a really bad way to use AI. So, the question is, well, what is a good way to use AI? It’s developing AI into systems that actually help you learn and slow down your thinking—to make you really accountable for what your questions are, what the boundary conditions of those questions are—and really, really pull out of you some clarity about: what’s the concern that you have? What does the computer not know that you know about your question? Yeah. Right? We don’t give it that. We give it a one-sentence prompt, and today you can give it a three-word prompt, and it does fine. I’m amazed too. Everything you said resonated with me—I kept finding myself nodding along. Especially that idea of “atrophying,” if that’s the right word for it. It honestly feels like I’ve forgotten how to start thinking. One thing I’ve noticed is that I don’t even care whether I spell things correctly anymore. You know what I mean? All sense of discipline feels like it’s gone out the window. You can write something full of typos, with no real grammatical structure, and as long as it’s somewhere near a concept, it just takes off anyway. It’s kind of astounding. Yes. And on top of that—I mean, I don’t even bother to write anymore, because I can just turn it on, and I can just speak to it. And I was like—before, I was spending hours on these two-page-long text prompts to architect exactly what I want. And what I learned was, hey, I can just talk to it. And I can ramble for five or ten minutes, and it will create that kind of prompt that does exactly what I want. So, yeah, we get sloppy, and we get atrophied. So, what’s the answer to that? You have to have AI systems that produce some kind of cognitive friction—that slow us down, that have us be more thoughtful, and that challenge our mental models. So, in learning, we have mental models. We don’t learn anything until we see what that mental model is and see that there are alternatives. And so, we have to be challenged by AI to see alternative mental models so that we can learn. And that’s—that is less the expedient, ripping off a prompt and getting a quick answer, and it’s more an in-depth conversation. It’s more Socratic learning and that model. And so, I’ve developed a theory and a system and a practice for how we can learn with AI. And I’ve been deploying that. This it the GPT you sent me - Guided Learning? That’s what I’m talking about. So, that—I don’t know if you’ve used it yet. I did. Yeah, I did. It’s why—I mean, I don’t have a ton of time to talk about it, but I played with it this morning, and it’s awesome. It’s really great. And in a particularly meta kind of way, I asked it about interviewing you, which is sort of funny. And it said—I was trying to find one of the quotes in here. One of the first things it said—”Darrel has been consistent for decades on a few core ideas. One, meaning is the unit of value, not data. And then, so you can frame the discussion as: AI finds patterns, humans discover meaning. Okay. “And a very Darrel way to phrase it on air would be: AI is extraordinary at scaling signals, but meaning doesn’t scale the same way signals do. That sentence alone will unlock him.” Anyway, this is more of a novelty kind of application of this. But what I appreciate about what it did is that it did everything you said. And I felt that as a distinct benefit from my sort of unsupervised ramblings, meanderings, roamings through the chat interface. And it was really great to be supervised—to be led through a process of making one decision after another and identifying the appropriate question. So, it’s really great what you’ve done. With your permission, I’ll keep using it. Yeah, no, absolutely. I’m sharing. It’s fairly new, but I’ve got—every day I get an email with people raving about how it’s almost virtually changed their life. So, people are experiencing learning at this deep level. When I use it deeply, it makes me feel like I’m back in college—in a good way. I’m being really challenged and growing. And that’s the experience that I’m really interested in, because it’s not about AI eliminating that. It’s how to make AI—how to make us smarter, more capable, more discerning, more thoughtful, more ethical, more principled human beings. Yes. And do you find—last question here—do you find that when you interact with people around AI, I feel like there’s this binary—we get trapped in this frame of boomers versus doomers—but that all the actual activity and possibility and threat really is in this middle space, where it’s not even middle, but just trying to chart a path of—I mean, to your point about how radical this change is—it just feels like I’m overwhelmed by how different things are, with an awareness of what this can, might do. Yes. Think about how quickly this has come upon us, right? We still have—most of our country hasn’t even experienced, at a basic level, AI. And as someone who follows it on a daily basis, I’m continually blown away—continually blown away—at the rate of change. So, what I’m concerned about is, most of the conversations around AI happen at the level of technology. Is it good technology? Is it bad technology? What’s the next part of the technology? What kind of capabilities are we getting? And no one is kind of leading the conversation of: how do we integrate this? What do we do with this? What’s the cultural impact of this? Everyone’s saying, “This is going to have a huge cultural impact. We’re going to lose 30 or 40% of the jobs. What happens when we have more robots than human beings on the planet?” That’s going to happen, right? And if your job is moving atoms or moving bits, you better have a different thing to do. But we’re not designing the human interaction and the human environment. We’re focused on, oh my God—sitting around and we’re in wonder about the technology. And so I think what I’m seeing is missing is that human side. And by the way, that’s what social scientists, that’s what researchers, that’s what designers should be able to bring to that conversation. And I hope to God that somebody out there is listening, going, oh yeah, I’m going to participate in that, and I’m going to help start creating solutions for the breakdowns that are going to happen really dramatically—especially over the next two, five, seven years—until we actually figure out what to do with this stuff. The breakdowns are going to be huge. Yes. Well, Darrel, thank you so much for your time. It’s been fun. I really appreciate you sharing your time with me, and I’ll share a link to the Guided Learning GPT in the post. But thank you so much. Yeah. Thank you, Peter. It’s a really fun conversation. Get full access to THAT BUSINESS OF MEANING at thatbusinessofmeaning.substack.com/subscribe [https://thatbusinessofmeaning.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]