Snakes ... In A Company
Growing up, many of my friends’ parents were in The Business (movies and television) and I’ve had a few entertainment clients. But if you just live in Southern California or NYC the vocabulary of the industry starts becoming normal.
One key term that’s often used is ‘high concept.’ That means that the basic concept of the movie can be explained in a phrase – like ‘Die Hard on a Cruise Ship’ or, my personal favorite, ‘Snakes on a Plane.’
Snakes. On a plane. With Samuel L. Jackson. And you’ve pretty much got the movie right there. You can save the 105 minutes, be useful, and clean the kitchen.
Speaking of useful, let me introduce my point.
In many areas of work, we try hard to be ‘high concept,’ because high concept ideas land well and people readily engage and digest them. They’re simple, pithy, attractive – and dangerous. In my world, of transformation strategy, we tend to set out attractive models (made worse by our need to communicate via PowerPoint – see Tufte on this) and sell our models into organizations.
But like high concept movie pitches, we risk squeezing the life out of our efforts because we’re working at a level of abstraction that makes no room for the real complexity of the places our organizations really are. We talk about ‘complex adaptive systems’ and then – for a lot of reasons, many of them understandable and legitimate – we act mechanistically.
Hemingway famously said that
“When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people not characters. A character is a caricature.”
I think the first step we need to take in dealing with this is to embrace the notion that what we do impacts and involves living, real, people. People who have mortgages, and children, and anxiety – as well as something to offer in helping us make improvements, if we can enable them and listen to them.
“Oh my gosh. That’s just too complicated.” Yeah, it is complicated - but maybe it’s just complicated enough to work.
It means we need to move our thinking away from the simple and easily understood to the complex. We need to shift from being Isaiah Berlin’s hedgehog – who knows one great thing, to a fox – who knows many small things.
We don’t want to be Robert Moses, operating at a vast scale and abstracting away the life of a city. But we also don’t want to be Jane Jacobs, fighting to preserve the city exactly as it is. We want to be insurgents, guerillas of change who create networks and activate them to drive change in ways we could never have imagined. I talked a while ago about Special Forces soldiers as a model for agile coaches (if only I was younger, fitter, and could grow a beard…) – and I want to turn back to that and suggest that there is a lot we could learn there.
Hey, there’s a movie idea…!