Lessons, Frameworks, Power and Sex (a look back at Season 1)
I once had the considerable pleasure of working with Steve Hayden, the US copywriter and creative director who co-wrote the famous Apple 1984 commercial, which for years was voted by the advertising industry the best commercial ever made. Look, Hayden said, engaging people is not complicated. There are four great themes that make the world go round: sex, money, power and death. If I can combine the promise of sex and the fear of death in a single 30 second commercial, I can sell pretty much anything to anybody. He was only half joking.
Carl Jung talked about how each of us is governed by two spirits, the Spirit of the Times – the zeitgeist, what's current in the world around us – and the Spirit of the Depths - the deeper psyche, the animal us. And perhaps Hayden is onto something. Maybe if we want to be really compelling, we could just speak to the spirit of the depths. Could we, in fact, have done this whole podcast in one 30-second episode? Look, perhaps I should have said at the beginning, if you really want to grab someone's attention it's all about sex, money, power or death. Pick one. Oh, and if you can combine two, you're golden.
And those topics would certainly make for more interesting dinner party conversations for most of us.
But after 12 guests in this first season, sharing their experience on everything from how to win an Oscar, to the Slovenian primary school curriculum, by way of the joy of working with the Muppets, Confidence Gremlins, and why you shouldn't have a radio voice, it seems to me that there may perhaps be a little more to being more interesting than that. So, this is deliberately a different kind of episode to the other episodes. There is no interview. It's simply me trying to pull together most of what struck me into a few key chunks, taking that idea of Addison's, our science teacher. The idea is to make it easier for this to be useful and used by all of us.
Why? What do I want out of this? I want all of us to have the ability to be more engaging and more stimulating when we can't afford to bore our audience. To be much clearer and more intentional about how we're going to do that. And I'd like this to be a useful part of changing that.
So, there are going to be five chunks, as Addison would say, five chapters to summarize the previous 12 episodes.
Chapter One will look at the cost of dull and the value of interesting.
Chapter Two is about knowing your enemy; dimensionalizing dull.
Chapter Three will reflect on how there's no one type of interesting person, and we'll all want to choose what works best for us.
Chapter Four will then pull together an overview of the common themes and different models on how to be more interesting that we have heard.
And finally, Chapter Five will offer some pointers on what to do next.
Chapter One: The cost of dull and the value of interesting
Let's start with the prevalence of dull. Because once you start to notice it, not only is dull everywhere, but actually the conversation about dull is everywhere. At the same time as this podcast started, for instance, the designer and architect Thomas Heatherwick, launched his own broadside at what he called the blandemic of minimalist modern architecture, citing research that showed how dull buildings were actually bad for our health.
The wind tunnel effect (Source: Alex Murrell / Adrian Hanft, User Zero)
And at the same time, a friend pointed me in the direction of a wonderful collection of examples of increasing blindness, pulled together by the strategy director, Alex Murrell, in an article called The Age of Average. He explores how a variety of influences are making so many aspects of the world around us more homogeneous, more vanilla, and less differentiated. From the paint color of cars, to the design, look and feel of our Airbnb or local coffee shop, the names of the books we read, the designs of the logos on the brands we buy, even the visual appearance of the people we follow – just Google the Instagram face and see what you get. The journalist Derek Thompson has noted that the smarter a category gets (in terms of knowing what works best or what you like), the duller it gets.
And dull is certainly everywhere in terms of brands and ads.
Dull is everywhere, but at what cost?
One of the reasons we should be much more frustrated about this than we seem to be at the moment is that dull is a lot more expensive than we might think. And it's more expensive than we think in various currencies. So first, it's more expensive in hard currency, in pounds, in dollars, in yen. Through the work of Peter Field, System One and other emerging collaborators, we're starting to be able to be clear and explicit on what that cost is, and how to price it in. So if you want to be duller, you can be, but then make sure you understand exactly the extra media money you'll need to find to be effective.
The second kind of expense is that, in choosing to be dull as a brand or a business, you lose control of the external narrative around you. John Yorke's book Into the Woods talked about how in a vacuum, people will naturally put unconnected facts together to make up their own story about you, if you don't give them an engaging enough story of your own. We discussed how dull was exclusionary. It excludes people, customers, or colleagues from participating fully in what you offer.
And we heard from Professor Holmes-Henderson, about a different kind of exclusion, social exclusion, and how giving a generation of school leavers the ability to engage was fundamental to a more socially just society.
The Value of Interesting
If those are the costs of dull, conversely, we also heard about the different kinds of value in being more interesting. And first and foremost, of course, there is the commercial value of gaining and maintaining attention - Maz Farrelly, the reality TV show producer, talked very clearly and compellingly about the absolute imperative of maintaining your audience in order to maintain that commercial value. We also heard from Gemma at Moet Hennessy about a different kind of commercial value, the commercial value in building and deepening a relationship, and the premium that they were able to develop around that with Ardbeg.
In terms of value, we learnt from Addison how fundamental being interesting is to most people learning anything, and indeed remembering what they need to remember over a long period of time. We heard from Sarah and Helen from Squiggly Careers, how it unlocks energy, and creates a different kind of interaction with all the benefits about learning and community that come from that. And we also heard, as I was saying, about the transformative social value that being more interesting can unlock. Yes, from Arlene, but also from Norman at Sesame Street.
And we noted with Norman that what they achieved at Sesame Street by making numbers, letters and simple concepts more interesting and engaging to preschoolers was not something experts had even thought possible that preschoolers could learn before. Being more interesting can elevate anything, it seems, to perhaps transformative levels of engagement. And finally, we noted that while we started looking at it as a technique for moments when we can't afford to bore the audience, a number of our guests saw it as much more than that: it was a key source of their pleasure in life. Nick Reed, for example.
Chapter Two: Know Your Enemy - Dimensionalizing Dull.
So if dull is prevalent and unexpectedly expensive let's get much clearer on what dull actually looks like. Let's know our enemy. And while we heard that dull can be highly contextual - we heard from Ross for instance, about the radio cliche of listeners being asked ‘what’s the best biscuit?’ - we did also hear some commonalities. And those commonalities began with the four ways our interviewees felt one can be dull. Definitions of dull simply equating it with bland or vanilla aren't quite right, it seems - there were more ways that we heard about being dull than that. And, by the same token, pat antidotes to dull like ‘story’, while very powerful if used against the right kind of dull, are not the automatic solution to every kind.
So let’s review the four different kinds of dull we heard our guests talking about.
Dull #1. A subject that our audience don't think they care about
The first kind of dull is where the audience don’t care about the subject we want to discuss. They don’t care because we haven't made a connection with the audience about it, or we're forcing them to experience it on our terms rather than on theirs, or simply because our audience has already decided they aren’t interested. Remember Addison, the science teacher, teaching the subject of ‘forces’ to a class of whom maybe only 30% were actually interested in science:
“I mean, I've got a dog and I use my dog regularly in my lessons, his pictures come up quite a lot. And we were doing forces. And if I've got a picture of my dog with his head out the window, and its tongue going, why does this happen? Might not be for everybody's taste, but there'll be a lot more kids in there who are thinking, Oh, what's this about?” Addison Brown, episode 5
So the antidote to this is to meet our audience where they care and speak to them in their language, not ours.
Dull #2. A subject that our audience think they already know.
We introduced this second kind of dull in episode eight, in the work of Murray S Davis. Dull, Davis said, is what people already know. Interesting perspectives are those that deny certain key assumptions of the audience, but uninteresting ones are those that confirm key assumptions to the audience. So, if you want to overcome this kind of dullness, you have to know what your audience think, and subvert their expectations. Deny their assumptions. Surprise them.
Dull #3. It’s presented in the same way as everything else
The third kind of dull is when you say something in the same way as everyone else. Remember, Maz the reality TV show producer and the notes she stuck up for people who are about to audition. ‘If you say these kinds of things’, she says, ‘which is what everybody else in an audition always says, you're not going to pass the audition. You need to say something different’.
“We would have signs everywhere saying, ‘Do not say these things because you will be instantly forgettable’, and we'd have them written on the wall. Don't say ‘I'm a people person, I really want to win this. I gotta give it 110%. It's not my time to go, this is the most important day of my life. I really just want to meet people’. Because everyone says that, and when you do, you sound like everyone else. You know, when people say ‘I’m a real people person’, I will say… what does that mean? Does that mean that you won't kill us? Or what does it mean? Because it's a thing that people say all the time. And when you say it, I cannot remember you. And I've got to remember you.” Maz Farrelly, episode 2
The antidote here is distinctiveness and character. Remember Ardbeg, and that wonderful description of it as ‘like biting into a spiky ball’. That is distinction and character for you.
Dull #4. It’s presented in an unengaging way
The fourth kind of dull we heard about is when you communicate something in too rational a manner. So let's go straight to John Yorke here talking about how, if you want to be engaging, you need an antagonist that arouses strong feelings of fear and awe.
“Story relies on an emotional response. What a good antagonist does is incite fear or antipathy, or awe. Those are the emotions you want to create, because then you will want that thing defeated. And you want to make that battle as hard as possible. So, you want to make the villain as devious and ingenious as possible. Yeah, the classic way of articulating the antagonist is they are, they are an embodiment of the protagonist's worst fear.” John Yorke, episode 9
So, the antidote here to rationality is obviously storytelling, emotion and drama.
And let's use this dimensionalisation of these four types of dull actively. I was speaking about the Cost of Dull recently, and somebody asked me how would they know if they were being dull. Well, it's not complicated. Let's look at these four ways of being dull and treat it as a simple diagnostic.
How are we doing at the moment across those four dimensions?
Chapter Three: There is more than one way to be interesting
I had an email from a friend after she'd listened to the third episode with Ross Buchanan. She'd particularly liked it, she said, because it showed that you don't have to be an extrovert to make something more interesting, or be yourself more interesting. And I thought that was such a good point. It was striking, wasn't it, that we spoke over the 12 episodes to both introverts and extroverts, and there was no one kind of person who was interesting, and no one way to do it. In fact, sometimes there were two completely different ways to be interesting around the same topic.
So, let's look at PowerPoint, that poster child of dull, as a very good example of these differences. We saw two entirely different approaches amongst our guests. One approach was from Sarah and Helen at Squiggly Careers, who very early on decided that PowerPoint was fundamentally dull, and they were never going to use it again. And instead, by banning themselves from using, it forced them to create a very different, engaging, drawing-led approach to presentations. And at the other end, we saw Russell, who actually felt that PowerPoint was an art form, and therefore should be given a higher level of thought, care, and artistry. Two completely different ways to take the same subject and make it more interesting.
Everything I Know about Life I Learned from PowerPoint, by Russell Davies (episodes 10 and 11)
Equally, we heard, you don't always have to try to be interesting everywhere and shouldn't always try to be interesting everywhere. Ross made the point before he was presenting a radio show, you can't be riveting all the time - and that's not actually what the listener would want anyway.
“When I'm on the radio, I don't demand 100% of your attention in the way that television or new mediums like TikTok or YouTube demand 100% of the viewer or the listener's attention. And I think that's something that's generally quite interesting about radio is that there is that removal, and you're almost just that extra person in the room softening whatever they're up to.” Ross Buchanan, episode 3
Gemma from Moet Hennessy talked about knowing where and when it was right to elevate the drama, and what she does, and when not to.
@thejordanagrace The magical middle aisles of Aldi! #aldi #fyp #foryoupage #comedy #shopping #magic #australia #british #humour #icandothis #willpower ♬ original sound - That British Girl
And I like the analogy of the Aldi shopping experience here. How Aldi looks to be very interesting in their centre aisle, but much more simple and useful in other parts of the store. Perhaps we all just need to be clear about what our really engaging centre aisle is and when we want people to look at it.
But even if we don't have to or want to be interesting everywhere, I liked Russell's point about managing our audience's interest, telling them when they need to pay attention and dialling up the interest for them when they do. Because surely it remains truer than ever that we do have to be interesting, somewhere, when it matters, if we want to increase our agency. And the chances are that we already are interesting as individuals underneath, but it's too often hidden or dusty. I was really taken by the film director Jim Jarmusch's observation. He said, "All people are interesting. You just don't know it. You don't know if your bus driver might be a painter. Never judge what people are. The world has infinite mysteries and strange things. Be open to them".
Hemingway supposedly remarked that he drank to make other people more interesting. But on this evidence, he was just being a lazy producer. He wasn't scratching hard enough for the other person to reveal what was really interesting about them. And I really liked that idea that there's a lot more interesting in the world than we are currently seeing. We just need to look harder at it, as Russell encouraged us to do. So, for instance, I was reading about a study the other day that showed that dogs use the Earth's magnetic field when they're relieving themselves, preferably aligning around a north-south axis.
And, the study said, we have no idea at all why they're doing that.
Chapter Four: common themes and different models
I really felt that the people we spoke to in this very wide variety of disciplines, who were in their different ways making dull subjects more interesting, had a huge amount to teach us, both as business people and as individuals. And that what we heard through them is that ,in fact, there are both some common themes and also some very different models about how to make something dull, interesting.
Start with what’s interesting
One of the most striking commonalities, to me anyway, is the thought that finding the interesting idea should precede the message that you want to use it to communicate. We heard this from Norman, from Russell, from Nick. It's so difficult to really get and keep attention that it's paramount you first have something that is really interesting that will engage the audience’s attention. And then work out how to make that relevant to what you want to communicate, or sell, in a way that's relevant to the audience, in their language.
This way of approaching it runs completely counter to how I had thought and worked for all of the first 17 years of my life in advertising, for instance. And I've found it very hard to accept over the last few months. But actually, the more I think about it, the more it entirely makes sense in a world where attention and engagement is now so hard won.
The importance of emotion
Other common themes that we heard and should note included, most obviously, the primacy of emotional connection. We heard Arlene talking about how in Aristotle's concept of rhetoric, one of the three key principles is pathos: emotional connection. And we heard in episode one Peter talking about the importance of emotion and communication effectiveness. We heard Nick Reed talking about emotional connection as well. And it's striking, isn't it, how this is a constant theme across 2500 years of human knowledge. It almost makes you think there must be something in it. And while we're talking about chronological kind of consistency, remember, too, Arlene's rhetorical principle of big beginnings and beginnings being echoed by Russell in his advice about PowerPoint today. Don't fizzle out.
“Think carefully about introductions and conclusions. It's really important in these key sections to grab people's attention - fizzling out is the worst thing you can do. There has to be a punchy ending.” Dr Arlene Holmes-Henderson, episode 7
What’s your headline?
Staying with emotion for the moment, we heard that you have to have a headline that really engages quickly. And that this is a difficult, but essential part of engaging and retaining attention. Remember, Maz talking about how one should write a headline about yourself and what makes you different, and how writing it was harder than writing your wedding vows. Think of Addison, the physics teacher, engaging his mostly reluctant class about the potentially dull topic, to them at least, of covalent bonding. "I tell my pupils” he said, "that on Saturn it's raining diamonds… and I have their attention". And remember, Nick Reed, master of Hollywood: if you don't have a headline, he said, you don't have a story.
“Give value. And the only way you can give value is to have a headline, a concise headline that is going to explain to me why I’m going to give you 30 seconds or 60 seconds? What's the value in it for me? So, give me a great headline.” Nick Reed, episode 12
What do you want?
Then, in terms of commonalities, we heard that to make a situation interesting you have to be very clear, and sometimes declarative and explicit, about what the central character really wants. Norman and John spoke about how, if you don't know as the audience what the central character really wants, you just have people standing around talking. And there's absolutely no engagement with that at all. And indeed, Russell talked about that moment when we ourselves are actually the central character in our own drama, in business, and making a key presentation, and how at the beginning of that presentation we ourselves should be very transparent and clear about what we want: Here's what I want you to think and feel coming out of this; here's what we want this presentation to achieve.
Know yourself and show yourself
If we stay with us as individuals for the moment, rather than the words we’re saying, we heard a key underlying foundation here is the idea of ‘knowing yourself and showing yourself’. Sarah, Helen and Ross all talked about this, as did Gemma. And authenticity is a word, a thought, that I've always been really cautious about in the past. It's a word used so often by brands and businesses about themselves, as an empty proxy for genuinely saying anything interesting that I'd become skeptical about whether it had any real power at all for us. That was wrong. We heard from our guests that it clearly does here. So, show yourself, who you really are beyond your business carapace, as part of both respecting your audience and creating a more emotional form of engagement. And remember that Ross spoke about how that's not just powerful, but has become increasingly expected by your audience. We're hoping to come back to that in an episode in Season 2
What do we mean by showing yourself? Well, Helen and Sarah from Squiggly Careers, talked about sharing the non-professional bit of you, the more personal side, and Gemma spoke about being confident enough to share her vulnerability. “When I'm nervous”, she said, “on stage in front of a very senior audience, I will say that I can feel my heart beat”. Which first means that you have to know yourself, you have to know who you are, and what it is that you're going to share.
And all that's not quite as simple as it sounds. Think back to Ross talking about how he meets a lot of musicians who get to the end of their careers, frustrated, because they don't think people have really understood who they really are. And why is that? Because they haven't been able to give themselves a clear headline; they haven't been able to talk about who they are and show who they really are.
And you can't fake this. I loved Maz's point about a person's ‘leakage’ in the Big Brother house: If you try to be something you're not, you can only keep it up for a week or so before you begin to ‘leak’, to give yourself away.
Embrace (and impose) constraints
A further commonality across the interviewees was the beneficial effect of self-imposed constraints, even when the approaches to be more interesting were apparently very different. As we noted earlier, Russell used a very different approach to Sarah and Helen from Squiggly Careers to make PowerPoint more interesting. But what they had in common was that they both imposed quite radical constraints to force themselves to elevate their presentation and what they were doing. And Gemma, for instance, was very interesting about how she and the Ardbeg team used their constraints to make themselves more interesting, turning Ardbeg's apparent negatives into engaging sources of strength.
“I think it's quite a bold decision to do that (turn negatives into strengths), because brands want to create a perfect version of themselves, and you don't want negativity. It's frightening to go there: you want to hide away some of the features of your brand that you maybe wish you didn't have. And I think especially now, when we have very curious consumers that want to dig below the surface and scratch it to really understand this product that they love or that they're interested in, it has to walk the walk as well as talk the talk. And I think Ardbeg has really owned its narrative and done it with a sense of charm and self-awareness. It’s really quite a self-deprecating brand.” Gemma Parkinson, episode 6
Along the way, there are also some key thoughts about techniques we should keep in our back pocket. We heard about some great toolboxes, useful groups of frameworks and tools in rhetoric and PowerPoint and storytelling and teaching. And I'm not going to repeat all those here. They are in the episodes, and I'd love you to go back to them.
But alongside those there are also three very sticky ideas that I for one will be taking forward. First Maz's idea that everything is a production. I am much more intentional now in thinking about ‘how do I produce this situation?’ And this does link to Gemma's sense of elevation, and the role of curating everything around what she called ‘the arena’ of the experience.
We heard that ‘little dramas’ form the heart of every Sesame Street scene.
Then I love Norman Styles of Sesame Street's idea that ‘little dramas’ are the heart of everything interesting. Little dramas - a character who wants something, really wants something, an obstacle in their way, and the little drama that ensues. And John's principles about great storytelling are clearly a way of playing that out much further, more deeply, more engagingly if we want to.
And the last idea I loved here was the thought of giving the audience value. There's a danger of simply correlating being interesting to ‘being more entertaining’, and sometimes it clearly is, in terms of holding attention. But Nick Reed was really good at reframing this. The task is actually to be giving our audience something of value; if we give something of value to them, they will always find that interesting
Chapter five: what to do next?
Let's close by reflecting on what we individually might want to do with this. And the first thing I really hope is that the cost of dull is enough to make us more conscious in asking ourselves the question: ‘Is this a situation where I can afford to bore my audience?’ Because we heard from everyone, I think, that being more interesting is not simply nature. It always takes work and preparation. Even the most accomplished practitioners put the preparation in, and some make their lives a process of making the world more interesting, and them within it.
So what would motivate us to put the work and the preparation in? Well, as I say, being clear about when it was a matter of life and death, when we couldn't afford to bore our audience, was where we started in the first episode. What emerged through the season was actually a more profound reason, wasn't it? One about the current relationship between us and our audience, and the desire to perhaps move to a more respectful one.
Our different interviewees talked about this in different ways. Ross said that he'd realized that he wanted to take his listeners more seriously. Russell talked about honouring the audience. Addison just recognized that he wanted these pupils, who weren't terribly interested in science for the most part, to grow up and be curious about the world around them. Maz talked about how this is an hour of your audience's life: you owe it to them to make it worthwhile. And for her, if everything is a production, it assumes that it's not just going to happen on its own. You have to produce it, and you have to build in the time.
And we can note here, of course, the difference between occasional and habitual preparation. For some of us, preparation we heard was constant. Russell says he spends a few minutes every day - it's a daily practice around it. Sarah and Helen at Squiggly Careers say they are always moving away from dull; they review meetings they have saying was that dull? How can we make it less dull?
“If something doesn't feel like it has energy, that kind of sense of momentum- you know, I'd say the opposite to energy is dull. And sometimes we do things and we think ‘that was a bit dull’. We actually listened to something yesterday, an idea that we've got, and Helen's feedback to me was ‘it gets a bit dull, a bit boring’. And we said, Okay, well, that is the exact opposite of everything we're trying to do. So, we know that. We know that's not right. It doesn't mean the idea is wrong, but certainly, the execution of that is not right.” Sarah Ellis, episode 8
But for others, it was about more specifically preparing for a particular meeting or interaction. Think about how Arlene structured her rhetoric to help her with specific audiences and specific situations. We have to see what works best for us as individuals. But common to them all, is a sense that whatever dull ways of thinking and doing you decide not to do are as important as which interesting ways of thinking and doing you decide to do. And perhaps the very first thing we should do, even if it's the only thing we do, is write down what those dull ways of thinking and doing are, that we are not going to do. And just be clear, and perhaps stick it up above our desks, that in itself surely would be an enormous stimulus to better and more interesting.
Sarah Ellis & Hellen Tupper, guests from episode 8, eschewing PowerPoint at TEDxLondonWomen, 2021
And for those of us in business, we also heard about how to help others be less dull, our company, perhaps. Sarah and Helen talk to us about how to be a helpful rebel, in their words: how to start to move your team, your boss, your organisation on from being dull by making ‘being a learner’ part of the value you bring to the organisation. By getting people to understand that actually being a learner is one of the ways you are bringing value to the team in your business, and bringing that learning to them. And then through the power of the right kinds of questions, start to get the group to rethink how they've been approaching what they do. ‘What if we thought about it this way’, one might say, ‘rather than the way we've always done it.’
So it will take work. It will take reprioritising, much greater intentionality, and resetting the bar. But let's just remind ourselves that while we went looking for techniques for making moments and occasions more interesting, what we actually found was people who got so much more out of life by making every aspect of life more interesting. Who saw no fun in simply ‘dialling it in’.
One final experiment
So, in conclusion, dull is everywhere. It’s multifaceted, it’s much more expensive than we think, and dull is a choice. If we learned just one thing from all of this, is that dull is a choice. Nothing is intrinsically dull except that we make it that way, or allow it to stay that way. And dull is a choice that more of us than we care to admit are unconsciously allowing in too many meetings, too many encounters that we have.
So the question is what are we going to do about it?
I'll leave you with one final experiment you might like to try. In Ann Bridge's novel Peking Picnic set in 1930s China, the central character keeps a book which is a record of the dinners and entertainment she has given and received. And she calls this book ‘The profit and loss account’. And the person in the novel who discovers this as the title for what should, essentially, just be a record of a social life, is rather shocked. But I really like it as an idea. What if we ran an emotional profit and loss account around our key interactions at the end of every week? At least try it for a month. Keep a very simple note about each of those encounters and see whether by producing the key business and social encounters that matter to us, by producing them using some of the ideas we've just been reviewing, we could increase the profit and decrease the loss.
Try it for a month. I'm pretty sure it won't be dull.
I'll see you in season two.