THAT BUSINESS OF MEANING Podcast
Annie Auerbach & Adam Chmielowski on Rifts & Futurelessness
Beskrivelse
Annie Auerbach [https://www.linkedin.com/in/annieauerbach/] & Adam Chmielowski [https://www.linkedin.com/in/adam-chmielowski-ba7736a2/] are co-founders of Starling Strategy [https://starlingstrategy.co.uk/], a cultural insight and futures consultancy now in its tenth year. They help brands step outside category conventions by mapping the cultural and historical forces that shape how people feel and why. Annie is a trained historian, journalist, and author of several books including a forthcoming one on collaboration. Adam is a trained historian with a background in international qualitative research. Both previously worked at Flamingo, where they created the Cultural Intelligence unit before founding Starling in 2015. Their pro bono project The Rift is amazing: The Rift One: [https://www.research-live.com/article/featuress/healing-the-rift-understanding-the-growing-divide-between-men-and-women-/id/5135613] Understanding the growing divide between men and women. [https://www.research-live.com/article/featuress/healing-the-rift-understanding-the-growing-divide-between-men-and-women-/id/5135613]The Rift Two: [https://www.research-live.com/article/opinion/living-in-a-culture-of-futurelessness/id/5146793] Living in a culture of futurelessness [https://www.research-live.com/article/opinion/living-in-a-culture-of-futurelessness/id/5146793]. Mentioned in the conversation is > Richard Huntington “The Mediocrity of Middle Distance in the Insight [https://www.adliterate.com/2019/05/the-mediocrity-of-middle-distance-insight/]”> Ella Saltmarshe [https://www.ellasaltmarshe.com/] on Sociological Stories So, as you likely know, I start all these conversations with the same question, which is a question I borrowed from a friend of mine, who is also a neighbor, who helps people tell their stories. And I use it because it’s a big question, but because it’s so big, I over explain it before I ask. And I’m going to ask each of you to answer this in turn. And then I’m curious to hear what Starling, your partnership, how that would answer the question too. But the question is, where do you come from? And again, you’re in total control, and you can answer or not answer any way that you want to. And Annie, I’ll start with you. Annie: Okay, so there’s probably two ways to think about where I come from. The first one is family and heritage. And so my dad’s grandfather came over from Austria to London in about the 1900s, 1910s, and immediately set up shop in the East End of London, in Jewish community, and he was in the schmutter business or he made clothes. And so my heritage comes on my dad’s side, from this immigrant background and making your way in the world. And big, strong communities, lots of family dinners and jokes. And this core of working hard and trying to better yourself. And a slightly outsider’s perspective, I think, as well, which I think I have in common with Adam, and I think very much tries to inform our work. So that’s one side, which is this heritage point. And then the second one is academics and where I’ve come from educationally. And it’s another thing that Adam and I have in common, but we both studied history. And so trained historians and thinking about the past and trajectories, and then I became a journalist, I became a writer. And so very much thinking about what moment are we in, it was a features journalist, I was always thinking about the moment we’re in the present. And now, of course, Adam and I do cultural futures. So it’s this past, present, future vibe that’s gone with my education and career trajectory. What was the business, the word that you said for your family? Oh, the schmutter business. Yeah, what is the schmutter business? Clothes, can’t you tell? I don’t, that’s not a, that’s a, what is that? That’s not a word I’ve heard before. It’s Yiddish. And it just means in the clothes business. Yeah. Beautiful. Adam. Adam: Well, in echoes of what Annie just talked you through, I can’t pull all the strings or the threads together in such a neat way that says something about how we think and what we do. But maybe they’ll come out as I speak. The older I get, where I come from, gets further back in the past. So most prosaically and more immediately, I come from a really boring, and when I say boring, I mean, the archetypically boring suburb, south of London in the county called Surrey. Nothing happens there. And it’s a place called Carshalton. I’m hoping I’m the only person from Carshalton that’s probably ever been on a podcast at all. And it’s the sort of place that has a wool shop. It had a wool shop when I was there 40 odd years ago. It’s still got a wool shop there, amazingly. And I’ve got no idea who buys the stuff from there. It’s probably surrounded by more chain coffee shops now. But it’s still pretty much the same. And it has that eerie familiarity whenever I go back there. Anyway, that’s the boring British or English, very middle class suburbia is where I’m from, on one level. Further back, but not that further back. So my parents were Polish. And they escaped Poland. Well, I say escaped, they were forced out of Poland during the war, the World War Two. So my dad was, his story was, he was ushered out. Ushered is such a light, ushered, please, sir, could you please leave your dwelling and come to us to our gulag? But that’s effectively what happened. So the Russians came to their door and told them to leave. They had an hour to leave their home, which I never saw again. So him and his two sisters, and their mother, their father, my great grandfather was, sorry, my grandfather was fighting in the war. So they were taken to Siberia. And eventually, I won’t tell you the story because it will take the whole hour. They found their way via India to London in around 1947, I think, eventually got there. And my mother, she was forced out by the Nazis. Same story, different enemy. She, through use of fake passports, got to the UK and also London, different part, to my dad, they met. And then they lived the English middle-class suburban dream. And many immigrants, assimilated into that world seamlessly at the time. And yeah, a few decades later, which sounds a long time, but honestly, it boggles my mind that it’s only what, three decades after that I was born in that really, really boring place called Carshalton. And actually, that’s where I’m from. And that whole story, I keep wishing to know it a bit more. Because as I say, the older I get, the more interested I am in it. It’s probably something to do with wanting my kids to understand it more. And historically, we’re just in a time of forgetting that period. And that has its consequences. So yeah, sorry, slightly long winded. I don’t have any connection to what we do. Maybe we’ll get there at the end of this. I don’t know. But that’s, yeah. So we talk about being ancestors of immigrants quite a lot, actually, funnily enough. It might be part of our connection of what we’re doing and why we’re still doing it. That’s so interesting. Yeah, well, then the next question, the third party in the conversation is Starling is your partnership. So where does your partnership come from? Annie: So we met, funnily enough, we both studied history at the same time at the same place, but never met each other. But we met each other in an agency called Flamingo, which was an international qualitative research agency. And Adam and I found each other. And we set up a wing of Flamingo, which was called Cultural Intelligence. So specifically around sociocultural trends and futures. And we did that together and we worked really well together. And then I badgered Adam to leave and set up Starling and eventually he agreed. But yes, we chose the name Starling quite specifically, didn’t we? Adam: Yeah, well, you said it’s because you were living in Brighton. Annie: Yeah, so I used to live in Brighton and there’s beautiful murmurations that happen, Starling murmurations that happen over the pier at dusk. And when Adam and I were talking about culture, it just felt like a really good metaphor in the sense that obviously you have these very dynamic choreographed movements of birds all happening at once. It’s incredibly beautiful and awe-inspiring. So something about culture moving constantly, but also the more we learn about murmurations, the reason for the movement happens because of threats and opportunity of the birds at the edges. So they might see a predator or they might see a food source or a place to rest and they can create these critical transitions of movements to push the entire flock of birds towards or away from something. We think that’s really interesting when you’re thinking about people and how change happens and how change often comes from the margins and how intersected it is. So that’s why we loved the metaphor. That’s so powerful. I feel like I had just listening to you describe it, that what it must be like to be a Starling in one of those murmurations. You’re so attuned to all the Starlings around you and somehow turning into something really moving, something that big, so beautiful. So there’s one question that we, so what did you want to be when you were a kid? Do you remember as a child what you wanted to be when you grew up? Adam: Oh my God. I really don’t, I genuinely don’t, but that just could be a result of a bad memory. Honestly, because I graduated from university and I still didn’t know and I had the luxury, frankly, and again, this paints a picture of a very different time. This is what, late nineties, that I didn’t feel like I felt like I had time to work out what I wanted to do. And as a lot of people who do this sort of work, I think stumbled into doing research and strategy type work. And that was based a lot around traveling a lot. And I also had a language, German, which got me into doing that. But honestly, I really didn’t think ahead. And it was a bit of a privilege and luxury because, you know, we’ve been doing some work around how young people look at the future now. And I looked, I saw it as something that was just going to offer me some possibilities and opportunities, honestly. And partly that was through, you know, my education and that’s what is instilled or was instilled in you, you know, for better or worse. So honestly, no, I don’t have an answer for you what I want to speak when I grew up. Annie: I wanted to be a vet. Is that right? Annie: Yes. I really loved animals. And I think that there was something quite, I don’t know, unadventurous or unimaginative that if you loved animals, you had to be a vet. You couldn’t just get a dog. But now I have two dogs and I’m not a vet. So it’s worked out really well. Yes. And so tell us now, where are you and what’s the work that you guys do? Adam: So where are the, where is the, where are you as an existential is your first question? Was that literally where I was? Annie: In London. Adam: In London. Yeah. So, okay. More tangibly. We are, so we’re 10 years in, specifically, we are, this is our 10th. We’re completing our 10th year as Starling in May, which is a real landmark. Congratulations. Adam: We think. And we haven’t fallen out and… Annie: Not once. Adam: Not once. And we’ve, you know, we’ve stayed Starling as the two of us. Everyone asks about growth or assumes growth comes from head count and all the usual metrics of what a growing business does. But I think we’ve managed to evolve and keep interested in each other and the way we think and work, but as much also in the work that we do for clients. It’s always been cultural insight, futures, Annie talked about her background in journalism and she also writes books, I’m sure, and she can talk to you about that as well. But a big part of what we do is trying to articulate and write well in ways that move people. But back to the murmurations, I don’t claim that we are writing and our outputs quite have the same emotional effect as they do, but we’re really big believers in the idea that the ideas that we try and convey should make people feel something, not just cognitively, but genuinely feel excited and want to do something with them. It’s harder as we do it through screens, right, I suppose. So that’s the work we do, and we can maybe talk about some examples, but yeah, it’s the, I don’t know if it’s grey areas, but I wouldn’t say we’re just one or the other, you know, Annie said we started in this, we created a unit called Culture Intelligence, which was essentially about in a qualitative group. And we were just interested, both of us, just in the forces that sit around people and between people that we don’t typically spend enough time thinking about. And I mean that societally, as well as in the industry or brands. And we were just fascinated by that, really, of all the different ways in which culture operates. How do you talk about what culture is? Sorry to interrupt you this, I’m getting excited about it. I always tell this story, poor Grant McCracken, he wrote that book, Chief Culture Officer, and I always reference him talking about that the chief culture officer for him meant you have to let the culture in, in order to breathe it out. And he had this really beautiful idea. But he said that the whole corporate sort of world, just when they see the word culture, they think of themselves, they think of internal culture. There’s a narcissism inherent. And so how do you, number one, how do you define culture? And how do you get people to care about it? Annie: Yeah, so there’s the culture in here, and then there’s the culture out there, right? So one of the most interesting ways that you’ve talked about it is around sociological stories, rather than psychological stories. I really like that. Adam: Yeah, because you know, what I was thinking, I was trying to remember who it was, I came across that distinction. And typically, the media, or most stories that you’ll see out there are psychological stories, they have interviews with individuals, they’ll tell that story for connection and intimacy, and empathy, you know. But what that tends to miss out, and I always found this really interesting is the ability to tell a sociological story, which talks about all the power dynamics around people, or all the contexts and trends and influences that surround them. And actually, it’s those stories, and I think they’ll talk about this in a environmental context, those stories are the ones that tend to affect social and cultural change. So they might be harder to tell, and there might be less frequent in terms of how we’re exposed to, but there is another way. And we just, we just seem to obviously, there’s enough people that are interested in us telling those stories. Back to your original question about how we define culture, I reckon sometimes we don’t, we don’t define it too much, we don’t have a one liner, in all honesty, your Anadolu Grant, who is brilliant, I know Grant, and even if someone as clever and smart as Grant cannot, can have a go at it through a book, and it might not necessarily work with all people, it just shows you how hard it can be. The space between people, I always come back to a very simple thing, which is thinking about the spaces between people, which can be filled with stories, literal, physical geography, and the spaces, structures, the material stuff, that to me is where we’re talking, typically, and filling in lots of gaps. Annie: And I always think about it as the deeper why behind some of the things that we can observe. So in quality ethnography, you can get really close to understanding what people are doing, and how they’re talking about it. And sometimes you need that bird’s eye view, or that historical trajectory, to step back and understand those connections and systems that are swirling around people to understand why they feel the way they do, which is a bit of unlock sometimes with our clients as well. Because we can get to some deep attentions that then can help them understand how they can be helpful as brands and move things forward. Adam: It makes me think of one thing, Ella Saltmarsh was the woman I was thinking about, sociological stories. Anyway, sorry, what you just said reminds me of one of the best things I read about insight. I bet you’re probably familiar with by Richard Huntington, the strategist in the UK. And he talked about, he was talking about how too much insight lives in the middle distance, which is neither proximate and close and intimate and truly empathetic, either very up close stuff, which qual and other research methods are great at or good qual. And then at the other end of the spectrum, I don’t know if you call it perspective, but I always remember the phrase, understanding the turns of culture, and just really understanding that landscape that people are embedded in and surrounded by. And I guess we operate at that end of things, often working with the proximity on a project or with the client clearly will be doing lots of good work on that end. So yeah, I remember that piece. I will include a link to it as well. When did you first discover each of you that you could make a living doing this thing? Annie: That’s a really good question. I was a journalist. And I ended up being the editor of a teenage girls website. And this is showing my age, but it was pre-Facebook. And this was a community of teenage girls who, and I’d only worked on magazines before. So there’d be a monthly postbag with 10 letters in it. And with this teenage girls website, we were getting hundreds of emails every single day. And I was suddenly immersed very deeply in their problems and their hopes and their dreams. And I really wanted to, I was writing for them, but I wanted to write about them. And that’s when I realized that research was a thing. Because it’s not like you grow up and go, hey, I want to be a market researcher when I’m older. Or maybe you do. But so I realized research was a thing. And then more when Adam and I met each other and started talking about ideally what we were bored by and what we wanted to elevate to, I think we realized that there is a space for being able to bring a specific cultural and future lens to something, which at the time, there wasn’t much of was there? I don’t think anyone was really cultural intelligence. I know, it’s such an overused term. I don’t think anyone was really talking about it then. Not much. Which was how many years ago, probably 20, 15 years ago. Adam: Yeah, that’s at least 15 years. So it’s five years, we’re running that unit within Flamingo. And there would be more, typically, you’d have a semiotic, there was a semiotic group, but we weren’t semioticians. Yeah, we’re interested in other aspects of how societies work, organise, change, other aspects that felt complementary to that. Annie: Did we have a client who suddenly was like, yes, this is the thing. And I’m trying to think of them as that moment of definitely when we left and started Starling, we had a foundational client who was like, absolutely, we want this thinking. And we’re like, okay, I think this is going to work, touch wood. And what do you love about the work for each of you? Where’s the joy in it of all the different pieces of the thing? Where’s the joy in it for each of you in the work that you do? Adam: There’s loads of joys. I mean, honestly, mostly working with Annie. I’m not just saying that, because, through work, I mean, there’s loads of ambitions or goals you might have through work, finding your people is, for me, probably the biggest one, as long as everything else is equal, and you’re earning a living and all the rest of it. The most important thing is that you’ve got someone who you can, not just, sorry, go on. Annie: I was going to say riff with, get to a better place. Adam: Yeah. And also just all the other things that, support each other and know that we’re in this together and feel supported and feel safe in voicing our ideas. Someone said to us the other day, it’s a vulnerable thing to do our job, any insight person, I think, but to pitch your ideas constantly to people, often through a screen. And you’re putting yourself out there. There’s a bit of a myth, I think, about insight being some objective practice. I don’t, I’m not entirely sure I buy into that entirely, because you can say anything, and you’re effectively trying to marshal an argument and put it out there. And it’s got a lot of you in it. So it’s never really quite that. It’s got a lot of us in it, I should say. And having Annie next to me to do that is everything, really. I think so. And so that’s the people side of it. Honestly, that’s the biggest answer to your question. Annie: I like the alchemy of an idea coming together. So I find that super exciting when we’re throwing and by the way, by the way, I’m writing a book about collaboration. And I think I wouldn’t necessarily have written that book if I hadn’t had such a great collaboration with Adam for so many years. But it’s the there’s something around sharing half formed ideas. And we’ll WhatsApp them to each other, we’ll talk about it when we’re walking from A to B, we’ll write something down, we’ll have this way of doing it, where we write 10 things down in the email, and then swap 10 things. And often, three of them will be pretty much the same. And then the others will push our thinking. And there’s something about the growth of getting towards to a really hopefully great, creative, and interesting, and different, genuinely different, because we’ve seen so much of the same. So high standards, is this interesting? Is this different? And I think there’s something very cool about that. And our clients have clustered us with some really interesting, high level, difficult questions, haven’t they? Yeah, so we get, go ahead. No, I was going to ask what’s an example of the kinds of questions that come to you, I want to talk about Rift, but I’m curious to, and I know that came out of you guys, but I’m curious, what are the problems that clients come to you? Adam: So there’s two answers to that. One is, the problems are everyday business and brand problems. So there’s a new positioning, and they want to make sure it’s really future facing and plugged into culture, or it might be a comms campaign that they want to ensure it feels like it’s going to be nourished, or feel of a piece with the broader cultural stories out there, not just category stories. So whether it be positioning stuff, comms, innovation, thinking about how to re, how to think about how they could push a category, all those are the questions, or where it goes to. But what’s probably more interesting is the topics or the questions, and they’re often one worders, honestly, there’ll be a one word brief, which is around tell us about joy, tell us about the outdoors, because these are the outside in questions, if you like, that will help get away from the norms of the category, and just reframe it and just take it in a different direction, or brand, these might be brand equities that they’re trying to say something fresh in. Can you say more about the need to escape the category conventions and the role that even just the framing of the exploration plays just to be really explicit about how important that is and what that does for a brand? Adam: Yeah, I think some of it comes from a lot of the brands we work for are big businesses, big global brands who do a ton of research, and their competitors will do a ton of research. And these waters are potentially overfished. I know I mixed my metaphors now. Because you ask enough people enough of the same questions, you’re going to get to the same answers and the same responses in terms of what the brands end up saying. And there needs to be a deliberate reframing of that or making the familiar feel a bit strange as the academic speak, which just helped people imagine what they can do differently. One of our favorite clients, one of our favorite quotes that they gave us, in terms of what they felt, and they allowed them to do was to imagine new possibilities. So they didn’t say that gave us better insights or deeper truths, or understand culture, but all those things that people do say and they’re great. But it was this imagining new possibilities. And it’s this idea that you have to deliberately step out of the conventional way of seeing something to find new language for something to have an alternative references to say don’t compare yourself to other Chris brands or sneakers or whatever, but to other cultural products or movements or ideas. And so that’s the thinking that we bring that people find valuable. What would you add to that? Annie: Hey, so that’s the business answer. There’s another answer, which is, people sometimes have said the nicest thing to us, clients have sometimes said the nicest things to us, which is, this was the best thing in my day, or, this has inspired me to do. And I think there’s something about bringing fresh thinking and challenging ourselves very hard before we get to that moment where we share it with clients, that allows for a quite expansive meeting. And even if it’s happening over zoom, and it’s electronic or whatever, you are bringing unusual references, you’re colliding, you’re deliberately colliding high and low culture together, you are looking in strange places. So for example, in my collaboration book, I’m looking at how people collaborate in the world of accident and emergency, in the world of polyamory, in the world of writers rooms in America, and how you develop, so looking in strange extreme places in order to bring different fresh thinking that hopefully opens up possibilities opens up minds, gives them something to talk about, not only within the business, but also is it something that they might go home and chat about? Maybe? I don’t know. But this is the aspiration for us. And yeah, that’s what I would say. Yeah. And what are your practices? Because it feels like you’re pointing at there’s some practices, there’s some layer of stress testing around the ideas that you have to make sure. And I’ve done a bunch of these interviews, and the best people I talked to, they have this final analysis of is this actually something? Is this something that the client’s ever known before? So I’m just curious, what is your practice for making sure the thing that you have is something that is actually going to have an impact? And what’s that process like for you guys? Annie: Yeah, it’s a great question. I think the big, what we really love at the beginning is that they’re boringly called stakeholder interviews, but actually, what they are is conversations in order to understand where people’s heads are at. And I think the language that they use are clues to existing ways of thinking, existing models, existing familiar stuff to them. So if they overuse a phrase, or if they overuse particular words to describe something that’s really helpful to understand of where they’re at, and also understanding what they’re frustrated by and where they need to get to. So that bit at the beginning is this incredible map of what’s known and what’s not known and where there’s frustrations and appetites. And then the whole thing is a stress test between us, Adam often says, he’ll say something. And if I’m shrug, then he’s okay, no to that. And the same goes, if there’s no electricity, if there’s no movement, if there’s no, that’s the thing. And sometimes as well, I feel like Adam will say something, and it just is absolutely the thing. It’s that is the thing in all of this, that is the thing. And so there is that constant to and fro of what lands, what doesn’t, and what feels like it’s got some heat behind it. Adam: Yeah, you were talking earlier about whether it has a pulse, which I quite like the language of. Does it make you feel something? Does it feel alive with something? And these are all hard to describe, really, they’re a bit ineffable. But we’ve worked long enough together to have a bit of shorthand to feel that in different ways. And we’re equally humble enough to go, okay, I thought it was the best idea I’ve ever had. Right, we’ll move on now. The other thing is, we’re talking about the two of us, the clients we’re working with will give us a very strong steer in the sense of, so we’ll, the way we work in terms of practices, an awful lot of Google Docs. And so before we get to any formal situation and presentation, we’ll be riffing through Google Docs, improvising, maybe you might call it, as we go, and invite them in to participate in that. And honestly, one of the most, for me, useful exercises is go, well, before we write the final thing, let’s just work out where we’ve engaged their minds. Because that’s going to be our best guide to work out, you could tell a million stories here, usually, with these big questions, what is joy? What is the outdoors? I mean, where do you want to take that? But we’ve, you’ve got to be, it’s a collaborative exercise in the sense, I always talk about ideas emerge between people. And ideally, that’s, there’s a third part to the two of us, which is the client team or person. And I was listening to Adam Morgan do his podcast series on interestingness, which we use the word interesting a lot, when I genuinely mean excitement, for most people, interesting sounds like a euphemism for boring. Genuinely, it’s most things are not interesting, right? So I liked his series. And one of the things he said was, most interesting ideas are ones that people feel invited into, and that they can participate in. And I’m such a big believer in that in terms of effective work. Because, look, you can say, you can assert the most interesting story at someone, they’re not feeling it for whatever reason, or the timing is wrong. Or they happen to be talking about something entirely different, and they quite like it. But there’s so many reasons why it won’t work. So I love that word invitation to it’s such a, it’s so true, but it’s also so complicated, the idea of what makes something inviting, or what has what kinds of things have an invitation for some people. But I love that language described to describe it. So we I want to be respectful of time. And there’s two, there’s one question I want to ask before, and I’m really excited to hear about the rift, this project that you’ve been doing. But I wanted to ask about the role of qualitative, I’m always interested in how people learn, and the role that qualitative plays and how it’s changed. So what, how, what is the proper role of qualitative? And how do you use it to find that thing that has a pulse that has invitation? Adam: So one answer is, so we most most of and I’d say what 98% of our work doesn’t have a qualitative component in the sense of, I mean, you could call us work qualitative, in the broader sense. But typically, we don’t speak to in a commission primary work with consumers. Having said that, we did on our recent Rift work around young people’s relationship, failing relationship with the future. And obviously, that brought to life those intimate bits of language that really helped land our story and get people engaged. Our work with clients will often be woven together with qualitative, and usually deliberately not qualitative. So this is the hence the complicated answer to your simple question. But ultimately, they’re going to have to tell a story internally. And usually, I think, increasingly, now it has to be one story, people don’t have the appetite for time or budgets, potentially to do all those complicated things and leave leave it unwoven together. So we work as hard as we can to understand what’s there on the table and how we tell a story that sits alongside it. But I mean, what else would you say about qualitative, Annie? Annie: Well, just that we’re very, we’re interweaved with it. And we’re very adjacent to it. And yeah, I think it’s a really good complementary methodology for what we do. We might put a story in a longer time trajectory, past, present, future, and qual might tell brilliantly the story of and make people feel deeply the story of the present, perhaps. And so I think that’s how I can work together at its best. Adam: I mean, I think it’s actually probably quite rare. So Grant McCracken, he’s a great cultural thinker, he does a lot of deep ethnographic work. And he’s an anthropologist. Doug Holt, similarly, he’s got loads of worlds that collide together that make his work brilliant. And but equally does a lot of deep interviewing. I think it’s actually quite rare for people to be doing cultural work, which, for loads of reasons doesn’t do that. Because frankly, there’s enough to be exploring that sits around people and all the other, the history side of things. A lot of our work will have a story, part of the story, part of the argument, which is looking back in time to tell a historical arc of where have we been? Where are we now? Where might we go to? And again, just to have the resources and time to reflect and do all that analysis. Yeah, it just means that’s where we spend our time. Tell me if I'm wrong, but you're in the business of sociological stories — structural stories. Which is fantastic. So I'm curious: what does qualitative research actually bring to those stories? When does it show up, and what does it do when it gets there? Annie: No, no, I think it’s this kind of, it can be an emotional gut punch. And so we can tell a story, which is this intersecting forces that surrounds this emotion at the beginning in the middle. And if somebody is looking into your eyes and telling you how you feel, and this is exactly what happened on the roof, to be honest, there was one very poignant quote, which was almost from a young guy in the UK, which almost got to the absolute heart of why we wanted to look at this particular topic. And the way he phrased it, we told our story around it. But that was something I think that people will go home with and feel deeply, because, and what he said, by the way, was, we asked a question, how do you feel about the future? Because our topic of the rift this time around, we’ve done two, this is rift two, and it was the rift between young people and their futures. And he said, when I was younger, he’s only 23. When I was younger, I grew up and I imagined this amazing utopian future of flying cars and diversity and everything at our fingertips. And now what I feel now, the word is dystopian. And I’m just trying to live through that. And I think that way of phrasing things was okay, well, we need to work hard here, because this is just not good enough. To leave young people with that sentiment about how they feel about progress, ambition, the future, it’s not good enough, we need to help. So that’s what really spurred us to do this project. Yeah, what was the origin of The Rift? You said, there’s two, there’s two phases. The first was on gender, right? And the futurelessness is the first time I encountered that word. And I’m not, it’s just so sad. So what’s the origin of the project? Where did it come from? And what did you discover? Annie: So The Rift is a pro bono project that Adam and I do in collaboration with other agencies, including Tapestry, which is one agency. And we wanted to put some energy and time into the big questions and sociological stories that we felt were being neglected or untold. And we started doing The Rift One, which was the rift between young men and young women. And back in it would have been 2024. And so we’d seen various signals around voting patterns, and young women and young women, young men voting very differently, young men towards the right, young women towards the left globally. And we wanted to understand what was happening ideologically and culturally to get to this situation, because we knew that this was an anomaly. And this wasn’t normally how young people behave politically. And we did our work. And we launched the project in 2025, in February on Valentine’s Day. And a month or so later, Adolescence came out on Netflix. And it felt suddenly there was a topic here that was something that we’d obviously researched quite deeply, but then it was propelled into mainstream media, and suddenly was a very big topic on the cultural conversation. And the same, I think, is true of the rift too. So this time, the signals that we were picking up were a bit more existential, in the sense of, you used the word futurelessness, that’s how we described it, a culture of futurelessness that young people were living through, whether that be deep existential anxiety about the impact of AI, whether that be the job apocalypse, and the lack of faith in education to propel you into a career, whether that be a broken social contract, whereby the things that your parents’ generation could achieve are now out of reach for you. And we’ve always looked to young people as a counterculture, a sense of energy and innovation and critique, and rebellion and to move society onwards. And if that is being drained away in terms of energy, power, resource and belief, it’s profoundly difficult, not only for them, but for all of us. And so that’s why we landed on that topic. We have a friend in common with you, Preeti Varma, and she conducted the rift interviews in the US and the UK. And that’s where that amazing quote came from, that was super powerful, testament to her brilliant interviewing skills as well. So yeah, that’s the background to it all. Adam: And all of that, I actually can’t remember whether we had a moment where we go, okay, this is all about the future, or futurelessness. There may have been that moment, one of us would have said it or... But to use them back to that murmuration image, I think it was all those things that Annie just described and more, just were swirling. And through some form of whatever, created a pattern, all these things that pointed to, I think, the rift, thinking through this language of rifts and ruptures, is it with the future? And then the more we thought about that, and the word the future seemed to be discussed, not necessarily in the public consciousness or popular culture, but just places that you’d see online or the things we read and the things we’re into, just discussions of the future, what is the future? How do people think about the future? How did they used to think about the future? And all these built together to go, yeah, that’s it. And let’s do it. And then Tapestry, as Annie mentioned, did a lovely piece of research into it, asked loads of different questions and ways in on getting people to talk about their future, as opposed to the future or the nation’s future and pulling that apart a bit in ways that fast forward to where we are now, I think people have found it is totally sad, and it is depressing. But there’s been a resonance in what we’ve named with this idea of this concept of culture of futurelessness, which paints a picture again, back to what we do, of the reasons that people may be feeling in a certain thing, that it’s not because of some failing in them, or some anti aspiration or vibe that’s going on with young people these days. It’s a structural, systemic, historical, environmental, economic, technological, total system breakdown. And that’s a hard story to tell. Annie: No one, it should be liberating for individuals, because they think it’s not my fault. It is liberating for Yeah. What did you actually discover? And now that you have it — what can be done, and how is it being received? And I just want to say — it’s powerful that you’re applying these tools to social problems. I don’t know that it happens enough. We’re lucky to have people doing this work. Annie: And so what we did with The Rift One around young men and young women is we identified why we felt this had arisen. And it was to do with the geographical and online spaces that they were occupying and the erosion of third spaces and the rise of pro-solitude culture and the echo chambers that exist online and that have segregated young people to live completely different worldviews. Did you say pro-solitude? That’s beautiful. Annie: Yeah, basically, I think a culture which has arisen, which has deified a very solo existence, whether that be routines and rituals and get ready with me and presenting the home as a retreat from a scary space out there. These are very good reasons we were living through COVID. And so a lot of this happened during that period, the rise of boundary culture, I don’t, I want to make sure I have strong boundaries. And so my, I’m not being trauma dumped on by my friends, etc, etc. All of this stuff became common parlance, but that also allowed for silos to remain. And that was one thing that you graph, the geography of spaces, the mood music was important. Adam: Yeah, the zero sum we talked about zero sum culture and philosophies that surround young people, or all of us really in the West, but young people have grown up with so it becomes part of their makeup in some ways, and culture again, reinforces it. And that thread has continued in the current work, the thinking about the future, where both the pro solitude or individualized existence, and then you add zero sum, compete your way through life and into the future. That’s been one of the biggest themes I think people have picked up on, what is the problem we have with how we think about the future, and what we leave people to do, which is effectively DIY their way to the future or compete their way competitively to get there. And that is not a healthy place for a society to be in or individuals, because there’s winners and losers in that battle, most losers. And so the outcome of both of those was conversations and discussions about how do we create those communal spaces or intergenerational connections to help young people or bridge those divides? How do we, on the gender side, how do we get women and men, boys and girls, just sharing the same space for a start, because so much of it is separated back to historical parallels, just now in the digital world. So there’s a very simple need to mingle casually more. And we discussed what that might mean and how the brands get involved. So that communal and collective thread, honestly, it recurs in a lot of work and in I do. Back to the, are we objective? Is that an ideology? I don’t know. Maybe it is. What would the ideology be? Adam: Well, the ideology is the world doesn’t rest on an individual’s shoulders and can only be understood as a solo battle through life where you just make some choices and life seems to progress. That’s the world we’re in. And typically in lots of dimensions, it doesn’t go that well. So maybe whatever the third Rift is, here’s my prediction. But there will be a dimension to say, well, I think we’re not the zero sum context or what would you call it? Mindset. We’ve seen it rear its head twice through this rift. It’s such a pernicious force in society that I’d love to work on that a bit more. And how do you really counter that? Because that’s a big effort. That’s a big society wide effort. The rift — that word. How did you choose it? Because I have my own experience here in Hudson, watching what social media has done to us — the fracturing, all of it. We're only now waking up to what we've done to ourselves. And then AI — I always say we're just pouring gasoline on a dumpster fire. We just keep finding new ways to alienate ourselves from each other. So how did you land on that name — the rift? Annie: How did we come to the name? Adam: Well, it felt a natural way to describe the gender divide or the cultural divide, the political divides that we were seeing. The rift, again, that’s a language, relationships, rifts in relationships. We launched on Valentine’s Day. So it made sense in a specific way to relationships between men and women. Annie: But also, I think that the rift was a bigger idea. And it feels so much of what’s difficult for people today is to do with polarization, to do with a lack of a common future or collective future that we’re working towards, the sense of loneliness and atomization. If Adam says there’s an ideology in how we work, it would be to think about collective solutions rather than individualized responsibility. And it lands with people. People have rifts in their own families politically. They have rifts in their neighborhoods. I think exactly what you’re saying. I’d love to hear what you think about the rift in AI, because I think the next rift we have to do will be about AI and humanity. But it is pouring petrol on it. Tell me what you mean by that. Social media promised connection and delivered disconnection. It created pro-solitude — I love that word, I hadn’t heard it before. Now there’s aspiration around not connecting. And that’s going to be cumulative. AI feels the same way to me. Equally seductive, equally charismatic — promising intelligence, but really just intervening in moments you might have had with another human being. Another way of choosing solitude over connection. And my experience in the States is that every response to new technology is the same: skill up, adapt, you’ll be fine. But we’re completely outmatched. What’s required now is a collective capacity that we’ve let atrophy. While pro-solitude culture was rising, all the muscles we had for coming together just — wasted away. Nobody has any embodied memory of what it means to gather as a community. The bowling alone stuff, the fellowship organizations — those are stories we’ve heard, not things we’ve lived. The social infrastructure isn’t there at exactly the moment we need it most. And we’re doing it to ourselves. We’re just letting the technology do whatever it wants. And it’s devastating. And I think we’re just in the reckoning with social media here in the States. And I imagine, I think this is playing out everywhere. And the awareness on AI broadly is so shallow. And the implications are, I feel are going to come fast and furious. And it’s going to be hurtful. It’s going to hurt. Annie: Yeah. I agree with you. And I think the bowling, bowling alone, scrolling alone, and the way that we collaborate with AI is usually alone. So you produce work and you iterate, you prompt, you get suggestions, all of that stuff that Adam and I described at the beginning, which was starting a question being having a vulnerable idea, the magic when it would have that that’s not happening. Because you’re creating something solo and polished, which doesn’t have cracks in it, which doesn’t have vulnerabilities, which doesn’t have unfinishedness to it, which that invitational world word you picked up on Peter, it doesn’t, it’s not an invitation, particularly to get, tell me, how does that land with you? What does it mean to you? How do you feel it? And I feel, again, to your word atrophy, we’re just surrendering the stuff, which is the joy of work, of ideas of humanity, and we are surrendering that so that we become more atomized. And I worry about it a lot. There you go. What's the story about the artist that falls in love with his statue? So I've had this experience — I'm playing around with Claude Code, trying to figure out how it can work, and I'm alienating myself and having the benefit of playing with this tool, and it's real play, and it's really exciting. But my experience is that when I feel I've done something pretty awesome and I go share that with another person, they have their own experience creating something magical, and my magical thing is not interesting to them. It doesn't cross the border in a way. It's a private thing that has no context for anybody else, and when I try to share it, it doesn't seem to land in the way — with the value that it seems to have when I'm with it on my own. Does that make any sense? Annie: Yeah, it does, but why? Because they have their own relationship with something else — they don't know, they weren't there for it. It's just something that happened somewhere else. I'm not entirely sure. I can just see this — oh, that’s, yeah. What feels magical to me is only magical because it was generated in isolation, I think, and if you’re not there for the process — it’s funny that AI really does threaten the thing that you guys said you have created and that you really treasure, the space between two people in a partnership. It seems absolutely the thing that AI threatens the most. That’s what Dave and Helen talk about — the intimacy economy — it just invites us. This is the danger, right? It is an invitation for us to give of ourselves to the machine as opposed to another human being. Adam: Yeah, and I’ve only touched, I’ve only dipped my toe into their work, but I just love how they on one level just pull apart all the different roles you can think about to be with AI or AI is with you, just to give people more options about how does this fit in rather than how does this replace? And I loved what you said about embodied. That’s my favorite word currently, embodied. And for obvious reasons, I think it’s not just come from anywhere. And we talk about AI in the context of intelligence and human intelligence, and immediately that’s a disembodied idea. We reduce people and ideas actually to cognitive tasks or skills or how quickly could you come up with some idea? These aren’t the measures of what a good idea is, or they’re not the only ones, because the embodied aspect of them is a huge part, if not the dominant part. And if we take that away unthinkingly, what are we left? I don’t know what we’re left with. Good enough ideas, coming back to the world of insights and producing, they’re probably good enough, but the collective outcome of that, we’ll have to wait and see to see what is produced from that, because it was still very early days. And yeah, how do you get people excited and feeling something through generating ideas with AI or delivering them through AI? Yeah, that’s a fascinating new frontier, put it that way. Beautiful. Well, we’ve reached the end of time. I want to thank you both so much. I feel like you have been a part of my LinkedIn world for a very, very long time. I congratulate you on 10 years, and I really appreciate you showing up and making the time to talk with me. Annie: Oh, it’s been such a pleasure. Thank you so much for having us. Big admirer of everything that you do as well. Adam: Yeah. Really enjoyed it. Great. 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]
Prøv gratis i 14 dager
99 kr / Måned etter prøveperioden. · Avslutt når som helst.
- Eksklusive podkaster
- 20 timer lydbøker i måneden
- Gratis podkaster
Alle episoder
115 Episoder
Kommentarer
0Vær den første til å kommentere
Registrer deg nå og bli medlem av THAT BUSINESS OF MEANING Podcast sitt community!