Category: Culture

Five defining moments of the World Cup so far

Posted on by Daniel Castro

If journalism is the practice of picking up on the threads of existing stories, exploring how events of today impact those narratives, and exploring where the future could take us, then this year’s World Cup has already been a journalist’s dream.

So far the tournament has been full of twists, turns, and ‘defining moments’ – what we at The Storytellers call the meaningful and memorable moments in a long-term narrative, and that point to big change.

At The Storytellers, we know that ‘defining moments’ are essential towards how companies and organisations shift culture and mindsets – and at the World Cup, we have seen five ‘defining moments’ that have shifted five very different narratives:

Russia: in terms of hosting the World Cup, it is widely acknowledged that Russia has delivered above and beyond what was expected. Prior to the tournament, fears over the country’s problem with hooliganism and clashes with rival fans loomed large – and of course, the West’s frosty relationship with Putin soured the prospect of the tournament for many. What has happened thus far has actually been a carefully staged and violence-free carnival of football. As an event, Russia has gone a long way towards challenging the existing narrative about what kind of a country they are – this really could be a defining moment in the country’s history.

Germany: it’s pretty clear what poor Germany’s defining moment has been: this is the first time that Die Mannschaft have exited the tournament at the group stage, ever. As a team, the next four years will undoubtedly be a process of resetting the journey that they are on. In storytelling terms, they are certainly ready for the ‘Next Episode’ of how they achieve success on the global stage – and most likely, a new leader to give new meaning to those old objectives that once seemed so straightforward.

England: the fascinating thing about England’s campaign so far is the quietly shifting nature of how the public interact with the national team. There is the palpable sense of a nation finally reaching the final stages of grief after years of agonising losses and crushed optimism. Of course, as you read this, England may have already exited the tournament – but there is a sense of belief that under Gareth Southgate’s leadership, English football has quietly begun a new kind of journey towards success.

Messi and Ronaldo: after years of two players dominating the world of football, we have most likely seen the last of the mercurial Ronaldo and magical Messi at a World Cup. Tantalisingly, we might have seen a very different kind of defining moment, as the match between Portugal and Argentina – and a chance for one final showdown – was narrowly missed. So instead the story is that of a glorious era coming to an end – and just as they shared their years of success, how fitting that they both bowed out of the tournament on the same day. Truly a defining moment for these two giants of football.

VAR: after mixed successes at the domestic level, one gets the sense that this is a defining moment for how football uses technology to enhance the actual game itself. After years of controversial refereeing decisions, VAR (Video Assistant Referee) has put the thousands of different camera angles at the disposal of the referee and their team, to more accurately judge what has happened. The human touch remains of course – and while this is certainly a defining moment in that VAR is probably here to stay, the wider narrative of how humans interact and make best use of technology continues.

 

Daniel Castro
Producer

Volkswagen – brand authenticity blown out of the water

Posted on by Nailia Tasseel

The Volkswagen emissions scandal is a total and utter disaster for the German automotive industry. For a nation so proud of its heritage and cutting edge technology, design and performance, it couldn’t get much worse. Vorsprung Durch Technik? Hmmm, we’ll have to have a think about that one now.

Two of Volkswagen’s ‘Basic Principles’ are ‘Leading by Example’ and ‘Social Responsibility.’ Well those have been blown out of the water for a start. Years of building the brand, represented by some of the classiest, most well-respected and best-loved names in the world’s car industry (Bentley, Porsche, Audi, Bugati, Skania and Lamborghini to name just a few – even if the majority of them are not affected) have ended in what will be a tarnished reputation of epic proportions. Not to mention a hefty recovery bill and the wiping of $25 billion off its market value. To say the company has to clean up its act is ironic, given the circumstances. A cleaner, greener, more environmentally-friendly diesel vehicle won’t be sold – at least for the moment – with any sense of authenticity and pride.

It’s not only the company’s shareholders and customers who will be affected by this. VW dealers all over the world will take a hit. Suppliers will take a hit. And 592,500 employees all over the world will question how they can trust their leaders. How can their people believe in those at the top – leaders whose emission – sorry, admission – to ‘screwing up’ and acting with deliberate dishonesty? The nirvana of any brand is to be the source of unwavering pride and loyalty from both its customers and its employees. Performance in any organisation is dependent on trust and belief in the people who lead it. It’s hard to see how those who have admitted culpability can possibly stay.

After one of the saddest moments in Germany’s corporate history, VW has got a long, uphill climb ahead of it. Recovery will take a long time. And once it has, its leaders will need to reset its values and behaviours, and go overboard in walking the talk. Or, as they say in Germany, Lass Worten Taten Folgen.

Same, same but different

Posted on by Nailia Tasseel

I recently returned from a trip to Vietnam and a comment by a guide to me at the beginning of my trip still resonates with me today.

Vu, my guide, was native Vietnamese, born and raised in Ho Chi Minh city. The difference between him and many of his fellow countrymen was that he was married to an Australian and spent many years of his life living and working overseas. He had experienced a more liberal and autonomist culture. What he said was, “Many people in Vietnam don’t think independently. Generally people follow the lead of others, rarely breaking the mould.” Although this was a very sweeping comment and by no means envelopes everybody in Vietnam, over and over again I saw it in practice throughout my travels. There were streets of shops all selling the same things … entire districts devoted to one product. Case after case where one person would find a successful line of business and others followed suit.  None of these shopkeepers were making their fortunes: there was too much competition in their line of business. They were surviving but not thriving.

Every now and then there was someone that stood out, finding a niche that was different to everyone else. These people were small jewels. They were one step ahead of everyone else and they had dared to be different – running a business that was selling products nobody else was selling. Their success was evident. They ran bustling independent stores, to which tourists flocked. They had risen in the ranks of review sites and were the first green shoots of change in a growing economy. In Vietnam and Asia business is booming.

Vietnam is the world’s biggest coffee producer but they are held back by producing poor quality Robustas Coffee for the freeze dried coffee market rather than the more lucrative Arabica Espresso trade. Mia, a small-scale coffee roaster, is bucking the trend, roasting high quality Vietnamese beans for espresso. It’s a business that’s doing something different, and thriving. Surprised?

Ode to the Bird of Courage

Posted on by Nailia Tasseel

Today is Thanksgiving, and as an American in London, I’ve had lots of people saying “Happy Thanksgiving!”, followed by “Is that what I’m supposed to say?”

Yes, that’ll do fine. And I’m pleased people are at least vaguely aware of the holiday, because it’s one of my favourites. It conjures lots of great memories of food and family, from the times as a young child when I thought it was a good idea to stoke family arguments about President Clinton, to the last couple of years when I’ve made massive feasts in tiny London flats for friends who’ve never experienced Thanksgiving before but seemed to ‘get it’ immediately.

All holidays are, to some extent, stories – the story of Jesus being born, the story of a guy who tried to blow up Parliament, the story of rebirth and renewal. But Thanksgiving offers two more selling points. First, it’s completely secular, and open to absolutely anyone. And second, as someone who likes stories, I find that it particularly encourages storytelling.

Lots of cultures have some kind of holiday based on the harvest feast. In America, legend has it that 150 pilgrims and Native Americans celebrated the harvest of 1621 by sitting down together for a feast. The historical accuracy of this is highly dubious, not least because of the unneighbourly way early settlers began to treat Native Americans shortly afterwards.

But in the modern version of Thanksgiving, which originates with Abraham Lincoln’s 1863 proclamation of a day of “Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father”, it’s not uncommon to go around the table before diving into the meal, each person mentioning what they’re thankful for. It’s a natural invitation to tell a story, invariably one with a happy ending.

Then, there’s the turkey, which – dry, bland, and beige as it is – is certainly the least exciting part of the meal. Hence the glorious side dishes: Brussels sprouts, sweet potatoes, stuffing, gravy, carrots, mashed potatoes, cornbread, biscuits, pumpkin pie, pecan pie… You get the idea.

But the turkey has had at least one prominent supporter. In a letter to his daughter, Benjamin Franklin bemoaned the choice of the bald eagle as the national bird of the US. “He is a Bird of bad moral Character”, he wrote. “He does not get his Living honestly”.

“The turkey, by contrast, is in Comparison a much more respectable Bird, and withal a true original Native of America… He is besides, though a little vain & silly, a Bird of Courage, and would not hesitate to attack a Grenadier of the British Guards who should presume to invade his Farm Yard with a red Coat on.”

Now, let’s go watch some football.

Who wants a vacation?

Posted on by Nailia Tasseel

You may have heard Richard Branson’s announcement that employees at Virgin will no longer face any restrictions on the amount of holiday time they take each year. As long as the work is being done, employees there can now decide for themselves when, how, and for how long they’d like to spend on the beach sipping piña coladas.

Virgin isn’t quite the first to do something like this; IBM, for example, allows employees to buy and sell their holiday allotments in an internal marketplace. But it sounds, at least at first, like a dream holiday policy. And it sounds like a rational response to the changing ways we work in the 21st century.

First of all, employees demand more and more sense of meaning at work; they want to want to be there. In the older perspective, that of workers as wage-earners and clock-watchers, annually allotted holiday time feels like something akin to prison furlough. If work is something we enjoy doing, there’s no reason to think anyone would abuse the freedom to step away for a bit.

Secondly, there’s a growing trend, of course, towards flexible working. Approaches such as working from home, job sharing, flexible hours, etc. – together with constant connectivity – blur the line between ‘working’ and ‘not working’. Vacation, then, could be seen as just another method by which employees figure out for themselves the best combination of approaches to getting stuff done. Employees would determine just how much time away from work they need to keep themselves from burning out.

That said, things could go wrong. My guess would be that most Virgin employees will probably hew to the 25 or so days per year that most UK office workers get* – simply because that’s what they’re used to, and what they probably feel is expected. I recently returned from two weeks away; it was a great way to recharge my energy and sense of perspective, and when I got back, I found that projects I’d been working on had been perfectly well looked after by my colleagues. Employees help cover for vacationing office-mates because they do the same for them; there’s rarely a sense of being put upon to do a bunch of extra work. But this only works because everyone knows it’s fair at the end of the year, that no one’s slagging off any more than anyone else.

This kind of trust could easily break down if the length and frequency of holidays taken by team members begins to vary greatly. Employees could grow to resent covering for their colleagues, which would result in a toxic atmosphere of passive aggression and mistrust. Or, perhaps worst of all, the policy could result in taking significantly fewer holidays, not more; the supposed badges of honour will go to those who take the fewest holidays, not the most. In working cultures under constant threat of workaholism, the open vacation policy could end up having adverse effects on productivity and morale.

As revolutionary as the open vacation policy may sound, I wouldn’t bet on it having much effect on the total time employees take annually. But it could end up being the next big ‘perk’ that forward-looking employers begin to advertise – hollow as it may be.

* In my first job, in the US, I got 10 days of holiday per year, which wasn’t out of the ordinary. This fact strikes my UK colleagues as wondrously nightmarish.

If it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck… it may well be outsourced

Posted on by Nailia Tasseel

A recent US court ruling in favour of FedEx drivers in California has highlighted a trend in modern business that has been growing for a long time, but now seems to manifest itself in more and more surprising ways: outsourcing.

Not so long ago, the word conjured images of factories in the far East churning out fast-moving consumer products. But more and more core aspects of business, particularly in customer-facing roles, are handled by other companies on contract, either in the same city or on the other side of the world.

In the FedEx case, the drivers in question had been considered independent contractors by FedEx, even as they wore FedEx uniforms, drove FedEx trucks, and delivered FedEx packages all day long. A judge found that under California law, due to the extent to which the drivers’ actions were directed by FedEx, they were effectively FedEx employees, and were therefore entitled to wages and benefit claims going back several years.

This kind of issue has cropped up with some of our clients, because occasionally the employees in closest contact with customers are actually employees of another company altogether. The person checking you into your flight at the Virgin or BA or United counter, for example, may actually draw a paycheque from Swissport. The person writing this blog might work for one of many marketing agencies peddling content generation and SEO. (Happily, I do in fact work for The Storytellers)

Most of the time, these practices probably make business sense, but can pose a challenge when it comes to cultivating a sense of brand identity for those people who perform core services for the company but are kept, in some sense, at an arm’s length from the business. It’s one thing to get customer service agents to wear the company uniform and use all the right taglines, but it’s quite another thing for them to feel a genuine connection to the culture and fortunes of the business.

The first thing businesses who use outsourced services should do is simply to remember the importance of those roles, and therefore of those people, to the product or service on offer. Make sure corporate communications and events aren’t limited just to those with a company badge or email address. And make sure to approach provider relationships as genuine partnerships, not just service delivery contracts. We’re all scattered enough as it is; maintaining as much organisational cohesiveness as possible will pay dividends for everyone – no matter who they’re working for.

Panglossian hyperadaptationism — or, why jaws are made for punching

Posted on by Nailia Tasseel

Hyperadaptationism.

That’s the view that jaws were made for punching, noses were made to support eyeglasses, and acne was made to scare off potential mates until they’re more mature.

A fascinating recent BBC Inside Science show explored a tendency to ascribe an evolutionary purpose to anything and everything related to human behaviour and physical characteristics. As Professor Alice Roberts pointed out, this tendency is decidedly Panglossian. According to Roberts (paraphrasing Voltaire): “Legs were clearly intended for breeches, and we wear them. Things cannot be other than they are. Everything is made for its best purpose.”

This logic, as psychologist David Canter argued, becomes circular: “Something occurs, and because it occurs it must have a function, and therefore it occurs because it has that function.”

But, he says, “human behaviour is much more subtle and complex than that.”

This Panglossian thinking may be more widespread than we think. It occurs not just among evolutionary theorists, who come up with compelling stories that seem to explain everything. But these stories make it difficult to consider alternative explanations.

A very similar idea comes up when thinking about institutional and culture change. Many of us seem to have a default mode, a sense of equilibrium that is defined by the status quo. Whenever there are changes to the status quo, we demand an explanation for the change, however small it may be. Small changes, the assumption goes, always signify bigger changes in the pipeline. But unlike Voltaire’s Dr Pangloss character, and his absurd, satirised optimism, our reaction to change is quite often not at all optimistic. We see these small changes as proof points in some broader narrative in which we’re the victim.

A client once told us the story of a call centre in Liverpool whose parent company was acquired by another company. When the new owners visited the centre, the mood was despondent. Eventually they learned that everyone in the centre thought they were about to lose their jobs – even though they weren’t, and there was no indication that they might. There was simply a story within the organisational culture that whenever there was a change in management, their jobs were on the line.

The point is, there is always a narrative – whether it be an evolutionary narrative or a business one. We’re never content to accept a small change as isolated, or a certain fact as random. There’s always a story, and if we don’t know it is, we’ll make one up. That’s why telling facts as stories can influence behaviour so powerfully, because the fact itself is rarely the most influential aspect of change. What matters is how it’s interpreted.