Tony Quinlan
Chief Storyteller, Narrate Consulting

T. Quinlan: ‘Mythology, Leaders and Leadership’, The Journal of the Medinge Group, vol. 2, no. 1, 2008.
Microsoft Word version

Leadership. Three syllables—nice, straightforward concept. Right? Wrong. What I perceive as a good leader will be different to what you perceive as a good leader. And different again for the person sitting across from you, down the hall, in the next building, in the regional office, etc.
   But in recent years, many of us have found ourselves getting involved with communicating around ‘leadership’. It’s an area fraught with difficulties and pitfalls—in part because of the simplistic way it gets talked about. With that in mind, this is a short thought-provoker piece, with some tools to start you off.

Myth-perception
Let’s get some of the misperceptions out of the way first.

‘We all know what a leader looks like.’
   Possibly, but we all have very different ideas about it, and it changes anyway depending on the situation—in a storm, a leader might impose control, dictate actions and cut through waffle and discussion. The same behaviour in calmer moments betrays a dictator, not a leader.
   It also varies tremendously by organizational culture. Hard, argumentative styles work in some organizations, while others need softer, more consensual approaches.¹
   And often there is no common factor or principle—other than the fact that people follow (or obey, depending on the style). There are reams of research and popular books on leadership—and all have different takes to greater or lesser degrees. Some of the leaders depicted in them wouldn’t recognize each other in an empty room.

‘Here’s our leadership model.’
   Less a misperception, more a warning bell. In my experience it’s either one flavour (generally male, English-speaking, western, rational, white and aged 40–50) or, on those rare occasions when the idea of diverse leadership styles have been taken into account, it’s been made so abstract that it encompasses all the different styles and hence is so generic it loses its relevance.
   Most leadership models are useful as starting points for debate or as the output for individuals’ thinking—but as communications tools they stink.²
   Too often, the result—after much careful thought—is a list of principles or values. It’s flawed for two reasons. First, these tend to be abstract ideas (usually nouns) where leadership is about actions (verbs). Simply holding those principles to be important isn’t enough, leaders need to act on them.
   Secondly, it’s impossible to force people to take on certain values and act from them. Even persuading them is only a temporary measure. Values and principles are personal choices—voluntarily taken on. And bear in mind that, even when we wholeheartedly hold a value to be important, as human beings we don’t always act accordingly.

‘We want everyone in the organization to be a leader.’
   No you don’t. There are a fair number of people that you want to do their job as set out in the quality processes and do it without arguing. You don’t want them to be leaders, you want them to be efficient and obedient. (Loyal, enthusiastic, etc would also be good, but efficient and obedient are actually the ones many managers want first and foremost.)

   And just because someone exemplifies the organizational values or behaviours doesn’t make them a leader—they may just be following what they perceive as authority. Exemplars are not necessarily leaders, but leaders are always exemplars.
   You want some of your people to be leaders, but talking about its applying universally just devalues it.
   Please note, I’m all in favour of us all being leaders at the personal level—in fact I think that’s one of the ways we best fulfil ourselves as individuals and change the world we live in. One of my most profound learning experiences was on a course in Leadership back in 2000. But personal leadership and organizational leadership are different things.
   If, within the organization, people are adamant that they do want everyone to be leaders, then too often it’s either just devalued lip service alongside “our people are our greatest assets” or their idea of a leader is not ambitious enough, but the classic ‘manager-plus’.³

Leadership and culture
Leadership is defined in many different ways. For a subject to which so many dead trees have been devoted, there’s still a phenomenal diversity of opinion on what it actually entails. It’s less helpful for communications, change and organizational development professionals to be too specific—with one important exception.
   Leaders and culture are strongly intertwined and critical to our work. Culture expert Edgar Schein talks about leaders being one of the three major levers of organizational culture. (If they’re a founder, that makes them two of the three, but that’s an organization-specific situation.)
   Yet leaders are also shaped or rejected by organizational cultures. Outsiders can find that they miss major assumptions and ultimately fail, while insiders may be so inculcated in a mindset that they are unable to grasp the need—or perceive the leverage points—for successful culture change.
   Which still leaves the fact that leaders are one of the most powerful influences of organizational culture—making them crucial to us.

Why leadership is not Manager-plus
One of the most useful and powerful tools in Narrate’s work is the Cynefin framework, created by Dave Snowden, and the concepts behind it. It’s applicable in many different areas, but helps to distinguish key areas within the organization and the recommended approaches to them.

Figure 1
The Cynefin framework

   In a vastly simplified description, culture falls into the Complex domain—where causality is blurred, where many different elements combine to create overall effects and where results will never repeat exactly. In this domain, control is impossible, influence essential. It also requires different actions—trying elements, waiting to perceive the results and then acting to reinforce the emerging patterns or disrupt them if they are negative. It can be about creating boundaries and attractors, by reinforcing desirable behaviours and disrupting undesirable ones.
   By contrast, the Complicated domain does have repeatable cause-and-effect chains, although these may be extended through various stages. Here, we can analyse or get expert help to identify how results are created and impose processes to repeat them. This is the realm of big thinkers, strategic planning departments and theoreticians.
   Given the vagaries of human behaviour and belief, I believe organizational culture sits squarely in the Complex domain. I suggest therefore that management—based in process, measurement and hierarchy—is more inclined to sit in the Complicated domain.
   Managers aim for efficiency—focusing on process. Leaders aim for effectiveness—focusing on results and people.
   
Collaborating on “leadership” programmes
Recent years have seen an increase of programmes rolled out from Human Resources or training and development departments aimed at increasing leadership skills within the organization.
   One of the critical elements Narrate recently worked on in a large government department was establishing common ground between different ideas of “leadership”. In a questionnaire (after the “leadership model” had been published and promoted as the way forward) one of the critical pieces of feedback was, ‘We need pen pictures of examples of leadership.’ Everyone understood the language but not how it translated into action.
   Using a technique from the Cognitive Edge network, Narrate brought key decision-makers together in a facilitated exercise solely to relate and share examples of tough decision-making, positive changes, mistakes made, etc. For participants, it was a powerful social exercise in sense-making—it left them all with a clear, common understanding of what was (and wasn’t) good leadership.
   Having recorded the sessions, we then had audio and video material to feed into various communications vehicles—all giving the requested ‘pen pictures’ of leadership in real, authentic examples that people could recognize, internalize and then act on themselves.
   Similar exercises at lower levels of an organization and among customers and customer-facing staff produce material that, when replayed to executives, can dramatically shift perceptions and highlight major problems—but in ways that are less threatening to the messenger and more likely to bring about a change in executive mindset.
   
Organizational legends and heroes
In every culture, certain events and individuals stand out—becoming legendary in their retelling. And each story will reinforce some value within the organization—but not always the one that we think it’s telling.
   In particular, organizational narratives coalesce around particular leaders and around times of particular significance—moments of threat and risk, examples of great success or, crucially, the point where the old order changed.
   It’s only possible, however, to understand what might be significant by listening and reviewing what stories are already in common usage. New inductees will be told the most crucial stories for their area within the first few weeks of starting—those that indicate how things are really done around here. Recognizing and collecting those stories about past leaders can give you huge insight into what is expected of a leader in your specific organizational culture.
   
Helping leaders to communicate
A crucial role for many communications professionals is helping a leader to communicate—and thus engage, inspire or transform the workforce. I’ve already talked about different leadership styles, each obviously implies different communications styles to match.⁴ Ergo, not all leaders have to be loud, superconfident, alpha-male communicators. Their communications should be natural and fit their personal style.
   One factor that identifies good leaders is that they know what they are good at (and do that) and know what they are not good at (and find someone else to do that). Some leaders are simply not communicators. As soon as we become aware of this, it’s critical to find colleagues that the leader trusts to fill this role. In cases where there are varied environments reporting to a single leader, multiple communications styles may well be needed—a tougher style for masculine departments, intellectual for research, etc.
   The traditional way of communicating for senior managers has been “problem–analysis–solution–let’s go!” Which rarely convinces, far less inspires or engages. A leader seeking to influencing the organization does so in other, more fuzzy ways, including:

• what they choose to measure and pay attention to;
• how they react to incidents and crises;
• role-modelling, teaching and coaching;
• the rituals and habits they create;
• which metaphors they use in communicating;
• what stories they tell of past events and people;
• what they tolerate;
• formal statements of philosophy, creed and values.

   The last item here is the one where, typically, we put the most attention, thought and energy. Yet it’s one of the lesser levers in influencing a culture. If you’re supporting a leader, encourage them first to understand that the culture is better changed by the higher elements.
   
Role-modelling
A leader should, first and foremost, be role-modelling the behaviours expected elsewhere. The greatest sin of a leader is hypocrisy (not fallibility, as is often assumed) and if (s)he is not visibly trying to exemplify the corporate values, the whole thing is doomed. Stories of hypocrisy circulate faster than any other and have a massive impact on staff morale and management credibility.
   Some of the toughest conversations I’ve had with leaders in organizations have, over an hour, moved from the change needed in the organization to the change needed in the staff in the organization. The tough part comes in bringing those comments closer to home.
   ‘So if that’s the change you need them to make, what change do you need to make?’
   ‘No, you don’t understand, they need to change, not me.’
   ‘I understand you want them to change, but they will watch you—if you change, they will. If you don’t, they won’t. So what change are you going to make?’
   Handled properly (something I didn’t always do in the early days), these conversations also become some of the most productive and helpful to the change effort.
   
Personal stories
As communications professionals, we need to support leaders in being more personal, authentic and fallible than they may have been in the past. One of the keys is to talk about personal experiences.
   As part of a major change programme in a merging organization, Narrate associates coached and challenged senior board members to talk about their personal experiences in the organization when they presented or appeared at internal conferences and events. They talked about their early days and perceptions, the difficult times when reorganizations threatened them and the tough (and on occasion wrong) decisions they’d had to make along the way.
   It wasn’t about generating sympathy for them, but building human connections instead—breaking the false image of the imperious, unemotional manager at the top. Crucially, it also gave people context in which to see decisions and behaviours, allowing them to draw lessons from what they heard without having to make them explicit and risk them being rejected as being “command-and-control”.
   
Helping staff to mind-read
One of the pieces of feedback we regularly hear from front-line staff is that they ‘want the chief executive to be more visible.’ They do, but visibility of the leader is not enough. What they are looking for are ways to be see the leader’s thought processes—through open questions, through examples of tough decisions made, through what they comment on and through what stories they tell.
   In a geographically spread organization, this is one of the places that blogs and social media can be very powerful. Some leaders find that blogs are their best communication tools—they may not be expert face-to-face communicators—while others are more natural talking on a podcast.
   Regardless of whether a leader feels able to use such communications vehicles, there is one area of thinking that will have a strong effect on the culture and can be communicated relatively simply through standard channels: what the organization will stop doing.
   At least as important as what the leader decides must be done is what will not—what projects to finish, what markets to come out of and what activities to stop. Typically these are announcements that we make quietly and with as little fuss and information as possible, fearing that the implicit message is that it was wrong to be doing these things. But by providing enough context on the environment and the decisions involved—both at the beginning and now at the end—it will instead give people more insight into leaders’ thinking and, where appropriate, the confidence that decisions can be revisited in the light of new information.
   
Battling old heroes and legends
When leaders want to signal a major shift in the organization, it helps to understand what organizational myths are reinforcing the old behaviours. Then, rather than trying to convince or persuade or even tell a counter-story, it’s usually possible to take some authentic action that devalues the stories and begins the process of creating new ones.

   I worked at an IBM manufacturing facility in the 1990s, where site directors for years only descended to the manufacturing lines on rare occasions, usually accompanied by a cadre of senior managers, and only spoke to line managers. Until a new site director in 1996 turned up alone at the ThinkPad line on his third day to be met by the line manager—more than a little nervous at this unscheduled visit.
   ‘Can I help you?’
   ‘Sure. Have you got a white coat I can borrow?’
   ‘Uh-huh. Can I help?’
   ‘Don’t worry—you get back to what you need to do. I’m going to work on the line.’
   Which he did for the entire shift. The story was round the two-mile site within the hour—and suddenly people knew that here was a different kind of site director.
   It’s essential that these are authentic actions and stem from the individual leader’s own convictions, and that they are not accompanied by photographs or standard internal comms tools—instead they’re done visibly and allowed to circulate around the organization on the informal networks.
   In addition to creating new legends in the organization, they need to pick and choose carefully those stories from the past that they retell and emphasize. Frequently reframing a story slightly can demonstrate that values are not new, but have always been part of the culture. However, a leader’s immersion in the culture may make them myopic to what message the story actually conveys.
   One United States IT services company encouraged its employees to emulate the Sooners—people who were determined to get the good plots of land when Oklahoma was opened up to settlers. The Sooners, however, stopped at nothing—illegally grabbing land ahead of the official start date. The risk (reality in some cases) was that a general “get the results, regardless of costs or means” attitude spread through the organization.
   Immersed within the culture, the story of the Sooners was seen as a powerful motivator and the subtler drawbacks to the message weren’t seen. One role of communicators is to remain sensitive to the nuances of communications and stories and provide valuable feedback to leaders.
   
Mountain-climbers or battle strategists?
Another subtlety of leadership communication is the language and metaphors they use. Metaphors permeate our language and have strong influencing effects—talk about capturing new customers, winning market share, beating the competition sets up a win-lose, us-against-them mindset, which may or may not be appropriate.
   In the early 1990s, PC manufacturer Compaq declared that it intended to be the market leader in PCs worldwide. The language surrounding the subsequent changes in the company were heavily based on military metaphors—staff were ‘troops’; strategies included ‘meeting clones head-on’, ‘capturing imagination’, ‘firing the first salvo in a price war’, ‘pre-emptive cost reduction’ (this was in reality 1,000 employee lay-offs). It worked for Compaq in the short term, but long-term created an environment built on the idea of conflict.
   Once the company was market leader (a goal reached in remarkably short time) there was no clear “enemy” for a workforce embedded in the idea that every action was predicated on conflict. One of the results was greater internal conflict between departments and, ultimately, Compaq’s takeover by Hewlett-Packard.
   Equally, some metaphors that come naturally to leaders may actively deter their audiences. Recent examples we’ve seen include describing a change project as like climbing a mountain, complete with guides, base camps, interim peaks as targets. (Overheard at the back of the room was the aside that ‘It’s cold, wet, uphill all the way and what happens when we get to the top? We’ve got to come all the way back down again.’)
   
Supporting leaders

Leaders can feel lonely and isolated. Recent research has shown that a number can be depressed—too many people looking to them for decisions; being surrounded by colleagues who, depending on the culture, tend to fall into two camps: unchallenging followers or conflicting rivals. There is also a strong risk of becoming so strongly set in one way of seeing the world that warning signs or alternatives viewpoints get screened out.
   Depending on our own leadership and influence skills, we may be able to take on the role of adviser and, to a degree, offer challenges to help clarify thinking. If it’s not a role that we can play, respected outside experts can be used. Many leaders have academic colleagues in whom they confide.
   One critical element of this is to help leaders to view situations with different perceptions—either by direct action ourselves or by introducing external influences to do it for us. This can be done by introducing direct feedback from other stakeholders like customers, partners or legislators.
   Alternatively, there are powerful facilitated exercises, such as the chair game, that create unusual perspectives from which to reflect on personal behaviours and organizational issues. These, often revolving around some form of social sense-making, can be both powerful team-building exercises and valuable perception-shifting tools.

   Leadership is also a matter of consistency. Inconsistent behaviour—or tolerating breeches of values in favour of, for instance, high revenue—will undermine months of work in short order. Yet leaders are often so passionate and so driving that they become immune to such things, not doing them deliberately but simply failing to spot them. And, having cultivated an image of a thoughtful, rational approach to issues, a leader will be perceived to have done so deliberately rather than simply made a mistake.
   Finding tactful but effective means of pointing out such inconsistencies is an essential role in the organization. Close associates of leaders are unlikely to do so—being either blind to the problems themselves or too concerned about organization politics to risk commenting. If this is the case, a quiet word with a trusted external adviser can bolster their value to the leader while addressing the issue.
   Finally a critical factor for any leader is where to draw the line. It’s great to talk about what we aspire to as a way of lifting the culture and people upwards, but one of the things about leadership is also visibly changing what we will no longer tolerate. A great recent example was Mark Thompson, Director-General of the BBC, responding to the recent deceptions in interactive quizzes and phone-ins. Talk about what the BBC aspires to is one thing, but emphasizing that anyone who slips below certain standards will be shown the door is critical—and the same goes for leadership.

Notes
   1. An organization, in this context, could be a company, a division, a department or even a team—essentially just a group of people working together. Each may have different cultures.
   2. The McKinsey Quarterly recently talked about leadership ‘orienting strategy around an organizational model that nurtures knowledge and talent’. There’s more meaning there than in many similar pronouncements, but it still could have come from the mouth of Dilbert’s manager—a sure warning sign. N.B.: nothing about numbers, measurement or results.
   3. ‘Manager-plus’ is the version of leadership that some organizations call for—greater effectiveness (and efficiency) and innovation and customer service, but it implicitly rejects greater risk-taking or dissent. It calls for greater results but still within rigorous processes and quality control. It wants more, but without threatening the status quo or the hierarchy. Not leadership in my book.
   4. It also presupposes that leaders want to engage, inspire or transform the workforce—if they don’t then, again, they’re managing, not leading.

References
   E. Schein: Organizational Culture and Leadership. San Francisco: Jossey–Bass 2004.
   H. Gardner: Changing Minds. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard Business School Press 2006.
   C. Kurtz and D. Snowden: ‘The New Dynamics of Strategy: Sense-making in a Complex and Complicated World’, IBM Systems Journal, vol. 42, no. 3, September 2003, www.research.ibm.com/journal/sj/423/kurtz.html, via www.cognitive-edge.com/articlesbydavesnowden.php.
   G. Klein: Sources of Power. Cambridge: MIT Press 1999.
   D. Rock and J. Schwartz: ‘The Neuroscience of Leadership’, Strategy & Business, no. 43, summer 2006, www.strategy-business.com/media/file/sb43_06207.
   D. Fisher, D. Rooke, and B. Torbert: Personal and Organizational Transformations. Boston: Edge/Work Press 2003.
   D. Taylor: The Naked Leader. New York: Bantam 2002.
   S. Farber: The Radical Leap. Chicago: Dearborn Trade Publishing 2004.
   J. Collins: Good to Great. New York: Random House 2001.
   E. Schein: The Corporate Culture Survival Guide. San Francisco: Jossey–Bass 1999.

Appendix
The core Narrate questions for any leader to answer:

1. What will you personally be doing differently?
2. What similar change have you experienced previously? What happened? How did you feel?
3. What tough decisions have you taken as part of this change? Why did you decide what you did?
4. What will the organization stop doing now?
5. What will you personally stop doing?

Pierre d’Huy
Experts Consulting
p.dhuy@experts-consulting.com

Translated from the French by Stanley Moss
CEO, The Medinge Group
Founder, Diganzi
diganzi@medinge.org

P. d’Huy: ‘PowerPoint: Rhetoric Machine’, tr. S. Moss, The Journal of the Medinge Group, vol. 1, no. 1, August 2007.
Microsoft Word version | Version original

‘With the device of rhetoric, what is offered at the beginning—and appears at the risk of collective aphasia—are the raw materials of reasoning, of facts, of subject; yet what is found at the end is a complete language, structured and armed for persuasion.’—Roland Barthes: ‘L’ancienne rhétorique’, Communications, no. 16, 1970, B.0.4, p. 197.

PowerPoint is a Microsoft program which allows the user to create electronic presentations in the form of a succession of slides, often linked by simple animated visual effects. These slides can contain pictures, text, films, sounds, moving figures and different computer graphics or hyperlinks. This presentation application is used in great numbers internationally by businesspeople and students alike. Microsoft estimates 30 million PowerPoint presentations are made every day all over the world.
   The success of PowerPoint is so considerable that its emergence cannot be explained away solely by the recent fall in the price of computers and projectors. In itself, PowerPoint seems to constitute an emerging medium of societal communication. Such unprecedented success inevitably attracts the eye of the médiologue. Rather than dismiss PowerPoint as a minor event, let us take time to re-examine it.
   Over a long period, the uninterrupted use of PowerPoint as reference support has evolved a particular form of speech. It models a distinct manner of thinking, demonstrating, and persuading. Since its creation twenty years ago, PowerPoint has survived inconspicuously, a hegemonic example of constitution of norm.
   One is tempted to wager that soon the young generation will no longer be able to express themselves orally without help of a tool of presentation. In this respect, note that PowerPoint is reported to be more and more widely used for wedding speeches. Even more troubling, there may come a day when people cannot listen unless a speaker expresses himself in conjunction with PowerPoint. Faced with the “little music” that a rhetorical machine produces, classical speech could become inaudible.
   PowerPoint abets the impression of clear presentations. Steve Jobs made such a demonstration when he launched iPhone at Mac World 2007 in San Francisco.¹ Like a pianist who perfectly controls the independence of left and right hands, he linked a simultaneous projection of text and pictures to illustrate his purpose. Thanks to PowerPoint, the quality of audience reception was maximized, and understanding was made easier.
   PowerPoint also allows the manipulation of audiences by the fundamental use of argumentation founded more on effect than on proof. On February 7, 2003 the American General Colin Powell introduced a PowerPoint document to the Security Council of the United Nations, the intention of which was to demonstrate confirmation of the presence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. (See attached reproductions of certain slides used).
   The perverse effects raised by PowerPoint’s detractors revolve around five major problem points:

• problem of the user: while PowerPoint aids good presenters, it always renders the mediocre ones unbearable. PowerPoint is a complex professional multimedia instrument placed at the disposition of an insufficiently competent general public;
• problem of writing: rare are the PowerPoint presentations which play the game of brevity and are an instrument of the supportive kind. The better part of PowerPoint presentations are talkative and laboured;
• problem of effectiveness with principles of demonstration: the logical fluidity of classical speech is at odds with thoughts broken apart by the succession of PowerPoint slides. PowerPoint often stutters;
• problem of manipulation: the principle of juxtaposition exempts the presenter from the logical necessity of linking reason to effect in written text. To juxtapose is not to show. Often the syllogisms of demonstration found in PowerPoint presentations are weak or contestable. But they are difficult to refute because the presenter can overlook the first parts as he pleases. The mind of the audience is under the control of imposed rhythms and enforced reading in fragments;
• problem of use: explanation is the job of the presenter. PowerPoint is often sent by electronic mail without explanation, as a reference document. This is a bit like giving a person the apparatus of a conjurer and expecting them to competently perform magic tricks on stage. By removing the obligation to support a presentation, PowerPoint corrupts the information which it is intended to carry.

   For all these reasons, doubt is growing over the real pedagogic effectiveness of PowerPoint. Associations of parents of American pupils are seeking a ban on its use in secondary schools and universities in the USA.
   To look in greater detail at the opinion of its detractors, it helps to refer to the very effective work of Edward Tufte² and to articles such as ‘PowerPoint Makes You Dumb’³ in The New York Times^, or ‘Point of View on PowerPoint’⁴ in The Guardian.

PowerPoint: simultaneous speech
PowerPoint comes from the world of Apple Macintosh, that is to say from the world in the ’80s which first allowed the general public access to computer science. The world of Apple is that of the visual, of “creatives” and of graphic designers, the world of those who free themselves from the dictatorship of the parallel horizontal line, the unmoving characters of print. This is the universe of the mouse, of the cursor which drifts freely across the screen and finishes in the blinking vertical line, of letters arrayed on the keyboard. It is the Macintosh brush and mobile characters in opposition to the static Underwood typewriter. The mind freed from drawings can visualize on the electronic screen. One recollects the freedom of the Calligrams of Guillaume Apollinaire and the technical difficulty of their reproduction.
   PowerPoint multiplies the battery of effects at the disposition of the speaker, and in doing so compounds its means. PowerPoint “effects” are the new rhetorical devices of our time. The pictures, schemata, graphs, pop videos, computer graphics, animations, or illustrations are like digital cousins to metaphor or metonymy. This somehow justifies calling the toolbox of its capabilities an ‘auto-content wizard.’ Richard Mayer, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, studied its human features in detail, looking at the system of information, segmented by how it sees itself and those instructions which it agrees to follow. He determined that simultaneous contact to both channels allows the public not only to better understand, but to better persuade. It is the ‘dual channel’⁵ effect, a key element of the mechanics of firm belief in PowerPoint.
   Let us pause for an instant and reflect on an interesting mixture of typologies, since in PowerPoint, the visible splits the legible into two distinct parts. PowerPoint creates a new behaviour here: collective reading onscreen. To reference the three ages of Régis Debray,⁶ someplace new has been created which exists between the graphosphère and the vidéosphère, between appearance and publication, since the text is read and seen, simultaneously and collectively. This perhaps explains its success. PowerPoint plays on thresholds. PowerPoint is a machine to conciliate what is written and what must be seen. Picture redeems itself as behaviour through the counterpoise with written text. As the text gets lighter, it is elevated by pictures.
   PowerPoint automatically formats and gives life to slides consisting of text, pictures, figures, and effects, all at the same time. Here one rediscovers the simultaneity of the Surrealists, which one can find in La Prose du Transsibérien et de la petite Jehanne de France. In 1913 Blaise Cendrars captioned this poem, illustrated by drawings of Sonia Delaunay, as the ‘first simultaneous book’.
   PowerPoint software understands that to communicate definitively and persuade, it is necessary to multiply statements in parallel, all at the same time: see a picture–read a text–hear the voice of a presenter. The rhetorical figures of PowerPoint are built in the gaps between the three dimensions: picture, text and voice. The three statements synchronize, are repeated, or—to the contrary—move, move apart, collide.

PowerPoint: presentation or performance?
First regarded as a simple tool of support, the PowerPoint program is on the way to becoming a universal language used by both professional and academic worlds. These are the places where speech is carefully staged. These worlds seek to prescribe order which successfully coordinates image, movement and writing. Every multinational today has meeting rooms endowed with big screens designed to receive presentations. Any information arrayed there is invariably transformed into presentation. Each presentation repeats, constructs, takes up time, times its interventions. If the medium is the message, then with PowerPoint everything turns into show business. To such an extent, speech becomes more important than the transmitter. To such an extent, the searchlight and the newscaster end up merging.
   More and more press websites offer their visitors slide shows in PowerPoint. The Newspaper of the Net, in partnership with the AFP, offers this type of slide show, for instance, designed to explain the economy in 675 frames. Business Week adds slide shows to many of its online news stories. These presentations automatically activate, and display as a programmed succession of slides. They constitute a kind of intermediary between written articles and that of short video subjects. They show wonderfully that a good PowerPoint can very effectively operate without a newscaster or presenter.
   This explains why the PowerPoint presenter is compelled to deliver theatrics. It is due to the overlap of information and not the synergy, of competition with the PowerPoint presentation. Facing a huge screen, the presenter is encouraged to make more of it than really exists. A simple purpose then becomes a presentation; a hypothesis suddenly becomes a claim. The presenter is compelled, often in his defending arguments, to prove, to demonstrate, even when he has nothing of substance to offer. Bereft of real reasons, presenters get carried away. They display only glittering facets of their case. It is the most serious reproach which can be made about PowerPoint: PowerPoint does not like stories, PowerPoint kills narration. Narrative migrates in an opportunistic scenario, sequencing inappropriately, defended by the language of firm belief.

PowerPoint: ownership of speech
PowerPoint’s response to Barthes’ idea of rhetoric is to offer a description of the machine, defined by Microsoft, as ‘The most prevalent form of persuasion technology’.⁸ This means that the argument (‘fidem facere’ of Probatio) tells and moves at the same time (‘animos impellere’) and thus persuades by what is seen. PowerPoint directs our attention to the art of persuasion. This art has been left fallow since the time of Napoleon III, the epoch of the last important treatises on rhetoric, when it constituted the backbone of the education of all ruling classes since Athens in the fifth century.
   Rhetoric is a contemporary of Democracy, and a language conceived to entice the jury during courtroom trials. It is not by chance that PowerPoint is of American origin, the product of a nation enamoured with litigious business, who first aligned PowerPoint to the principles of computerization. This ‘first rhetoric’ is disparaged by Plato in Gorgias.⁹ Socrates compares the ‘make believe’ of rhetoric, contrasting it to the ‘informing’ of the philosopher. Calliclès answers that ‘rhetoric does not need to know what the things are about which it speaks; it has simply discovered a technique which serves us for persuading.’ PowerPoint has no knowledge as its objective, only firm belief. It lies far from the Socratic maieutics, the search for truth by dialogue and confutation. Rhetoric contents itself with its status as a machine of persuasion. Any likely simplistic assemblage is acceptable, provided that the target is reached.
   Barthes said to us in 1964, in his seminary at the École des Hautes Études, that rhetoric is a social practice, as well as a privileged technology, since it is necessary to pay to acquire it. It allows the ruling classes to gain definite ownership of the word. With PowerPoint, one also definitively gains the ownership of speech. This occurs thanks to a format of content, which is taught and which one learns. It is a pure technology of persuasion, in search of firm advocacy from its audience. This is an art ‘of persuasion, a group of rules, recipes, wherein the implementation intends to persuade the listeners of speech, even if that of which they must be persuaded is wrong.’¹⁰
   PowerPoint is, finally, a tool of education. Occasionally during some university orals, a student might wonder if the oral was more about a financial year, a lesson driven by PowerPoint, first of all. The question is no longer to prepare students for the job, but to create good rhetoreticians. On this point, Gorgias explains to Socrates, ‘And whoever is the man presenting an argument in favour, compared in debate, the speaker will persuade that his argument be chosen, rather than that of his opponent; because there is no subject on which the speaker would speak in a more convincing manner in front of a crowd, so great and appealing is the potency of our art’.
   The contemporary translation of this statement could be that it is better to have a good PowerPoint introduced by an incompetent, than be given a speech by an expert. So, to persuade about the urgency to struggle against global warming, it is better to have the PowerPoint used by Al Gore in the documentary An Inconvenient Truth¹¹ by David Guggenheim than to provide speech of the most erudite climatologists.

PowerPoint: show, to provoke thought
It would be inadequate or inexact to dismiss the success of PowerPoint solely for its triumphant packaging of content. PowerPoint often supports a sophisticated rhetorician, a technician.
   The médiologue can also discern the numerical resumption of a more Aristotelian rhetoric, a rhetoric less subjugated by its own power, a rhetoric more in the service of truth and beauty. There is nothing worse than when PowerPoint renders rhetoric heavy, when it is badly used. Of course, one can see it coming, an annoying aspect of the control of the progression of thought. The presenter is there to persuade, but after all, the firm commitment apparent in the flux of a well-written text is worth the artful juxtaposition of a PowerPoint presentation, if the reason is fair.
   We have seen a Minister of Finance¹² skilfully use a PowerPoint presentation as a kind of supplement. His bright and open speech was simplistically interspersed by dynamic zooms into a slide or swift transitions from one to the other, to the delight of his audience. By recalling the conditions of a dialectical exchange, reinstituting dialogue with his public like a midwife might, he revitalized the foreseeable fixity of his PowerPoint. Pictures came in support of words and provided more evidence that yes, in order to persuade the young generations one needed to divert eyes taught to dart from screen to screen. Such technique was needed, at the very least. It proves that a good visual speech, that is to say a speech which constructs a “point of view”, is a universal speech bearing firm belief, one which transcends national languages. A picture does not require translation.
   PowerPoint is a rhetoric machine adapted for the Doubting Thomases of the world, who believe only what they see. PowerPoint, sits at the peak of the vidéosphère, the worship of appearance. During the first film screened by the Lumière Brothers, the seated audience dropped down under their chairs when they saw an engine entering the railway station of La Ciotat. What sequence of slides could be placed in a row today to produce the same result?
   A century later the young generations have an advanced disposition to the screen. Consequently they understand that the picture of the engine signals no danger. Their enormous experience with an ongoing succession of screens has conferred upon them three new talents.

1. They learned to read pictures, and not only texts.
2. They know how to read several speeches at the same time, from multiple sources, without being unsettled.
3. They demand a connection which enables interaction (i.e. Wikipédia¹², continual interaction with a “living” encyclopædia).

   PowerPoint answers the first two points wonderfully by arranging the reading of picture and writings hierarchically. For the third, let us note that in its 2007 version, PowerPoint’s new connectivity allows collaborative tasks and hyperlinks with the Internet universe. In doing so, Microsoft upgrades PowerPoint in the hypersphère¹³ of Web 2·0, reinforcing the potential to perpetuate its already considerable success.
   PowerPoint is a sign of the times, ardently American, giving everyone the possibility of creating amateur cinema, and of conceiving small illustrated visions of the world. Even when it occurs in a clumsy manner, even if its assertiveness of firm belief is applied for the poorest of reasons, it has its worth. PowerPoint understands that it is necessary to demonstrate in our contemporary world, and thus to compel people to think.

Notes
   1. Steve Jobs, MacWorld 2007, San Francisco, Calif. Video of available speech at http://events.apple.com.edgesuite.net/j47d5200/event.
   2. E. Tufte: The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint, 2nd ed. Cheshire, Conn.: Graphics Press LLC, 2006.
   3. E. Tufte: ‘PowerPoint makes you dumb’, The New York Times, December 17, 2003.
   4. ‘Point of view on PowerPoint’, The Guardian.
   5. R. E. Mayer: Multimedia Learning. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2001.
   6. ‘The most prevalent form of persuasion technology.’ Readers will appreciate the ambiguity of the English word prevalent, which means at the same time spread and predominating.
   7. R. Debray: Cours de Médiologie générale. Paris: Gallimard 1991, reissued folio, Paris: Gallimard 2001.
   8. Plato: Gorgias.
   9. An Inconvenient Truth, film by David Guggenheim, 2006.
   10. R. Barthes: ‘L’ancienne rhétorique’, Communications, n° 16, 1970, p. 197.
   11. This refers to a presentation by Dominique Strauss-Kahn.
   12. Wikipedia is an online-based collaborative encyclopædia, www.wikipedia.com.
   13. L. Merzeau: Cahiers de médiologie, no. 6, 1998. ‘This will not kill that.’

Pierre d’Huy is an international consultant specializing in the Management of Innovation, and a professor affiliated with the Management Institute of Paris. He teaches at CELSA Sorbonne Paris IV. His most recent book is Collective Innovation from Éditions Liaisons Sociales. There is more to come in February 2007 in another book, Collective Imagination.
   Stanley Moss translated this essay from Pierre d’Huy’s original text in French. Mr Moss is CEO of the Medinge Group, a Stockholm-based think-tank on international branding. He is also founder of Diganzi, an international brand consultancy, www.diganzi.com.

Pierre d’Huy
Experts Consulting
Professeur associé, Management Institute of Paris
p.dhuy@experts-consulting.com

D’Huy: ‹PowerPoint, la rhétorique universelle›, The Journal of the Medinge Group, vol. 1, no. 1, August 2007.
Version PDF | English translation by Stanley Moss

Êtes-vous PowerPoint? Il faut du courage pour se lancer aujourd’hui dans une conférence sans la ressource du précieux logiciel de mise en écran des textes et des images (ou de ce qu’il faut en retenir). Mais cette pensée PowerPoint peut faire aussi quelques dégâts.

‹Dans la machine rhétorique, ce que l’on met au début, émergeant à peine d’une aphasie native, ce sont des matériaux bruts de raisonnement, des faits, un «sujet»; ce que l’on trouve à la fin, c’est un discours complet, structuré, tout armé pour la persuasion› – Roland Barthes: ‹L’ancienne rhétorique›, Communications, n° 16, 1970, B.0.4, p. 197.

PowerPoint est un programme de Microsoft qui permet de concevoir des présentations électroniques sous forme de succession de diapositives. Ces diapositives peuvent contenir des images, du texte, des films, des tableaux de chiffres et toutes sortes d’infographies ou d’hyperliens. Cet assistant de présentation est utilisé massivement partout dans le monde par les hommes d’affaires et les étudiants. Microsoft estime à trente millions le nombre de présentations PowerPoint élaborées par jour dans le monde. Le succès du programme PowerPoint est si considérable qu’il ne peut être expliqué uniquement par la baisse récente du prix des projecteurs et des ordinateurs. Il constitue en soi un fait de société qui semble aller de soi. Ce type de succès inaperçu attire immanquablement l’œil du médiologue. Plutôt que de le relativiser, prenons le temps de le revitaliser. L’utilisation continue de PowerPoint, comme support de référence, construit, à la longue, une forme particulière de discours et modélise une certaine façon de penser, de démontrer, de convaincre. Depuis sa création, il y a vingt ans, PowerPoint poursuit discrètement un travail hégémonique de constitution de norme. Il y a fort à parier que bientôt les jeunes générations ne pourront plus envisager de s’exprimer à l’oral sans assistant de présentation. On observe à cet égard que PowerPoint est de plus en plus utilisé pour … les discours de mariage.
   Plus inquiétant, elles pourraient ne plus pouvoir écouter un orateur s’exprimer sans PowerPoint. Face à la petite musique que produit la machine rhétorique, le discours classique pourrait leur devenir inaudible. PowerPoint permet de concevoir des présentations limpides, Steve Jobs en a fait une démonstration lors du lancement de l’Iphone au MacWorld 2007 de San Francisco.¹ À la façon d’un pianiste qui maîtrise parfaitement l’indépendance des aides de sa main gauche et de sa main droite, il associe une projection simultanée de textes et d’images pour illustrer son propos. Grâce à PowerPoint, le confort d’écoute est maximum, et la compréhension est facilitée. PowerPoint permet aussi de manipuler son auditoire par l’utilisation de principe d’argumentation fondé sur l’effet plus que sur la preuve. Ainsi c’est sur la base d’un document PowerPoint que le Général américain Colin Powell présenta, le 7 février 2003, la confirmation de la présence d’armes de destruction massive en Irak au Conseil de Sécurité des Nations Unies (voir reproduction jointe de certaines diapositives utilisées).
   Ainsi des effets pervers, soulevés par ses détracteurs, peuvent se résumer autour de cinq points majeurs:

• problème d’utilisateur: si PowerPoint améliore les bons présentateurs, il rend toujours insupportable les médiocres. PowerPoint est un instrument professionnel multimédia complexe mis à disposition d’un grand public insuffisamment compétent;
• problème de rédaction: rares sont les présentations PowerPoint qui jouent vraiment le jeu de la brièveté d’un instrument de type ‹support›. La plupart des présentations PowerPoint sont bavardes et laborieuses;
• problème d’efficacité du principe de démonstration: à la logique de fluidité du discours classique s’oppose le principe haché de la successivité des diapositives PowerPoint. Souvent PowerPoint ânonne;
• problème de manipulation: le principe de juxtaposition exonère le présentateur de la nécessité logique d’enchaînement de cause à effet du texte rédigé. Juxtaposer n’est pas démontrer. Souvent les syllogismes de démonstration des présentations PowerPoint sont faibles ou contestables. Mais ils sont délicats à réfuter parce que le présentateur peut à sa guise en escamoter les premières étapes. La pensée de son auditoire est sous le contrôle d’un rythme imposé et d’une lecture partielle;
• problème d’utilisation: le support PowerPoint, qui a nécessairement vocation à être porté par un présentateur, est souvent envoyé par courriel, sans explications, comme document de référence. C’est un peu comme si on envoyait les accessoires d’un illusionniste et que l’on charge la personne qui les reçoit de reconstruire le numéro qu’il fait sur scène. Détourné de son statut de support de présentation, PowerPoint corrompt l’information qu’il est censé porter.

   Pour toutes ces raisons, certaines personnes doutent de la réelle efficacité pédagogique de PowerPoint. Des associations américaines de parents d’élèves réclament l’interdiction de son utilisation dans les collèges et les lycées. Pour entrer plus dans le détail sur le point de vue de ses détracteurs, il suffit de se référer au très efficace ouvrage d’Edward Tufte² et à toute une série d’articles comme celui du New York Times intitulé ‹Power Point vous rend idiots›³ ou encore ‹Point de vue sur PowerPoint›⁴ du Guardian.

PowerPoint, discours simultané
PowerPoint provient de l’univers Apple Macintosh, c’est-à-dire d’un monde qui a permis l’accès du grand public à l’informatique dans les années 80. Le monde d’Apple est celui de l’image, celui des créatifs et des graphistes. Le monde de ceux qui s’affranchissent de la tyrannie de la ligne horizontale parallèle des caractères mobiles d’imprimerie. Le monde de la flèche de la souris qui se promène librement sur l’écran et s’additionne à la barre clignotante des lettres du clavier. Le pinceau de Macintosh contre le caractère mobile et la machine Underwood. L’esprit libre du dessin peut s’envisager sur l’écran électronique. On songe à la liberté des Calligrammes de Guillaume Apollinaire et à la difficulté technique de leur reproduction.
   PowerPoint multiplie l’arsenal des effets à disposition de l’orateur et ce faisant, superpose ses moyens. Les ‹effets› PowerPoint sont les nouvelles figures rhétoriques de notre temps. Les insertions d’images, vidéo-clip, schémas, graphiques, infographies, animations, illustrations par des images diverses sont comme les cousins numériques de la métaphore ou de la métonymie. Ce qui justifie qu’on le qualifie d’auto-content wizard, de magicien de contenu automatisé.
   Richard Mayer, professeur de psychologie à l’université de Californie à Santa-Barbara, a étudié dans le détail une particularité humaine: posséder un système d’information séparé pour ce qui se voit et ce qui s’entend. Il a aussi constaté que s’adresser aux deux canaux simultanément, permet au public non seulement de comprendre mieux, mais de convaincre mieux. C’est l’effet ‹Double Canal›,⁵ élément clé de la mécanique de conviction PowerPoint.
   Arrêtons-nous un instant sur un intéressant mélange de genres, puisque en PowerPoint, le visible se dédouble dans le lisible. PowerPoint crée ici un nouveau comportement: la lecture collective sur écran. Quelque chose qui se situe, pour reprendre les trois âges de Régis Debray,⁶ quelque part entre la graphosphère et la vidéosphère. Entre l’apparition et la publication puisque le texte est lu et vu, simultanément et collectivement. Ceci est peut-être une explication de son succès. PowerPoint joue sur les frontières. PowerPoint est une machine à réconcilier ce qui est écrit et ce qui doit être vu. L’image se rachète une conduite par le contrepoids du texte écrit et le texte s’allège, s’élève par l’image.
   PowerPoint met en pages et conçoit des diapositives comprenant du texte, des images, des chiffres, des tableaux, simultanément. Le simultanéisme, propre aux surréalistes, que l’on trouve dans la Prose du Transsibérien et de la petite Jehanne de France en 1913. Ce poème, illustré par des dessins de Sonia Delaunay, fut sous-titré, par Blaise Cendrars, Premier livre simultané. Pour bien communiquer, et convaincre, le logiciel PowerPoint a compris qu’il faut multiplier des dires en parallèle: voir une image-lire un texte-entendre un présentateur, tout cela simultanément. Les figures rhétoriques de PowerPoint s’effectuent dans les écarts entre les trois dimensions: l’image, le texte et la voix. Trois dires qui se synchronisent, se répètent, ou tout au contraire, se décalent, s’éloignent, se percutent.

PowerPoint, présentation ou représentation?
De simple support, le programme PowerPoint est en passe de devenir une langue. Une langue universelle utilisée par le monde professionnel, comme par le monde universitaire. Le discours y est soigneusement mis en scène. Y faire son cinéma, c’est le mot d’ordre. Toutes les salles de réunion de toutes les multinationales du monde sont aujourd’hui dotées d’un grand écran pour l’accueillir. Toute présentation s’y transforme invariablement en représentation. Chacun répète, construit, monte, chronomètre ses interventions. Si le médium c’est le message, alors avec PowerPoint tout est show business. À tel point que le discours devient plus important que l’émetteur et que l’on finit par confondre le projecteur et le présentateur.
  De plus en plus de sites de presse proposent à leurs visiteurs des diaporamas en PowerPoint. Le Journal du Net, en partenariat avec l’AFP, propose ce type de diaporama pour comprendre l’économie en six cent soixante quinze images. Business Week conçoit un ‹Slide Show› sur la plupart de ses thématiques. Ces présentations sont auto-animées, elles se présentent comme une succession de diapositives. Elles constituent un intermédiaire entre la proposition d’articles rédigés et celle de courts sujets vidéo. Elles démontrent admirablement qu’un bon PowerPoint peut, en réalité, très bien se passer de présentateur. Ceci explique pourquoi le présentateur de PowerPoint est contraint à la théâtralisation. C’est parce qu’il se trouve souvent en porte-à-faux, en situation non pas de synergie, mais de compétition avec sa présentation PowerPoint. Face à un écran géant, il est poussé à en faire trop pour exister. Un simple propos devient alors une présentation; une hypothèse, une revendication. Le présentateur est entraîné, souvent à son corps défendant, à montrer, démontrer, même quand il n’y a rien à voir. Sans raison réelle, on s’emballe, on étale, on paillette le propos. C’est le reproche le plus grave que l’on peut faire à PowerPoint. PowerPoint n’aime pas les histoires, il tue la narration et la fait migrer, en la séquençant de façon inopportune, en discours de conviction.

PowerPoint: propriété de la parole
PowerPoint répond point par point à la description de la machine rhétorique de Barthes, il est défini par Microsoft comme ‹la forme de technologie de persuasion la plus aboutie›.⁷ Convaincre (fidem facere, de la Probatio) par ce que l’on dit et simultanément émouvoir (animos impellere) par ce que l’on voit. PowerPoint. C’est le retour d’un art de la persuasion qui n’a été laissé en jachère que depuis Napoléon III, époque des derniers traités rhétoriques d’importance, alors qu’il a constitué la colonne vertébrale de l’enseignement de toutes les classes dirigeantes depuis Athènes au cinquième siècle. La rhétorique est contemporaine de la Démocratie, c’est une langue conçue pour séduire les jurys populaires des procès. Ce n’est peut-être pas le fait du hasard que ce soient des Américains, grands amateurs d’affaires judiciaires, qui imaginent avec PowerPoint le premier principe d’une application informatique. Cette première rhétorique est décriée par Platon dans son Gorgias.⁸ Socrate y oppose le ‹faire croire› du rhéteur au ‹faire savoir› du philosophe. Calliclès lui répond que ‹la rhétorique n’a aucun besoin de savoir ce que sont les choses dont elle parle, simplement elle a découvert un procédé qui sert à convaincre›.
   PowerPoint n’a pas pour objet la connaissance, mais la conviction. Loin de la recherche de la vérité par le dialogue et la réfutation de la maïeutique socratique, la rhétorique se contente de son statut de machine à convaincre. N’importe quel type d’assemblage de simples vraisemblables lui convient, à condition que cet objectif soit atteint. Barthes nous rappelle, dans son séminaire à l’École Pratique des Hautes Études, en 1964, que la rhétorique est aussi une pratique sociale, une technique privilégiée (puisqu’il faut payer pour l’acquérir) qui permet aux classes dirigeantes de s’assurer la propriété de la parole. Avec PowerPoint, c’est bien de cela qu’il s’agit, s’assurer la propriété de la parole. Grâce à une mise en forme de contenu, qui s’enseigne et s’apprend. Une pure technologie de persuasion au service de la conviction d’un auditoire. ‹Un «art» de la persuasion, ensemble de règles, de recettes, dont la mise en œuvre permet de convaincre l’auditeur du discours, même si ce dont on doit le persuader est faux.›⁹
   PowerPoint est enfin un enseignement. Ainsi parfois, lors de certains oraux d’épreuves universitaires, on se demande si l’oral n’est pas, tout d’abord, un exercice, une leçon de PowerPoint. Puisque la question n’est plus tant de faire des étudiants des hommes de métier, mais des bons rhéteurs. Gorgias s’explique à Socrate sur ce point: ‹Et quel que soit l’homme de métier que lui opposerait le débat, l’orateur persuaderait qu’on le choisisse lui plutôt que n’importe qui d’autre; car il n’y a pas de sujet sur lequel l’orateur ne parlerait de façon plus persuasive que n’importe quel homme de métier devant une foule. Tant est grande et belle la puissance de notre art›. La traduction contemporaine de cela pourrait être qu’il vaut mieux un bon PowerPoint présenté par un incompétent, qu’un discours d’expert. Ainsi, pour convaincre de l’urgence à lutter contre le réchauffement climatique, mieux vaut le PowerPoint d’Al Gore dans le documentaire Une vérité qui dérange de David Guggenheim que les discours des plus érudits climatologues.

PowerPoint: donner à voir, pour donner à penser
Ce serait un raccourci inexact de ne considérer le succès de PowerPoint que comme le triomphe d’un contenant sur un contenu. PowerPoint est souvent le support d’une rhétorique sophiste, manipulatrice. Le médiologue peut aussi y voir une reprise numérique d’une rhétorique plus aristotélicienne. Une rhétorique moins subjuguée par son propre pouvoir, une rhétorique plus au service du vrai et du beau. Il n’y a rien de surprenant à ce que la rhétorique PowerPoint soit lourdaude lorsqu’elle est mal utilisée. Bien sûr, on la voit venir, avec le côté irritant du contrôle du cheminement de la pensée de celui qui reste à convaincre … mais après tout la conviction du flux d’un texte bien rédigé vaut bien la persuasion de la juxtaposition adroite d’une présentation PowerPoint, pour peu que la cause soit juste.
   On a vu un ministre des finances¹⁰ utiliser habilement une présentation PowerPoint comme une sorte de stock. Son discours brillant et libre fut simplement émaillé par de brusques zooms sur une diapositive ou une autre, au gré de ses échanges avec son auditoire. En reconvoquant les conditions d’un échange dialectique, en réinstaurant le dialogue avec son public à la façon des maïeuticiens, il revitalisa la fixité prévisible de son PowerPoint. L’image vint en support au verbe et l’on se dit que oui, peut-être, pour convaincre les jeunes générations et détourner leurs yeux habitués à virevolter d’un écran à l’autre, il fallait au moins cela. Un bon discours visuel, c’est-à-dire un discours qui construit un ‹point de vue›, un discours universel de conviction qui transcende les langues nationales. Parce qu’une image ne se traduit pas. PowerPoint est signe de son temps, américain en diable, il offre, à tous, la possibilité de faire son petit cinéma amateur, de concevoir des petites visions du monde illustrées. Et, même si cela se produit la plupart du temps de façon maladroite, même si sa puissance de conviction est parfois utilisée pour de mauvaises causes, il a du moins le mérite d’avoir compris qu’il faut donner à voir à notre monde contemporain, pour lui donner à penser.

Notes
   1. Steve Jobs, à MacWorld 2007, San Francisco. Vidéo du discours disponible sur http://events.apple.com.edgesuite.net/j47d5200/event.
   2. E. Tufte: The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint, 2e édition. Cheshire, Conn.: Graphics Press LLC, 2006.
   3. E. Tufte: ‹PowerPoint makes you dumb›, The New York Times, 17e decembre 2003.
   4. ‹Point of view on PowerPoint›, The Guardian.
   5. ‹Dual channel›, dans R. E. Mayer: Multimedia Learning. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2001.
   6. R. Debray: Cours de Médiologie générale. Paris: Gallimard 1991, rééd. coll. Folio essais. Paris: Gallimard 2001.
   7. Platon: Gorgias.
   8. An Inconvenient Truth, documentaire de David Guggenheim, 2006.
   9. R. Barthes: ‹L’ancienne rhétorique›, Communications, n° 16, 1970, p. 197.
   10. Il s’agit de Dominique Strauss-Kahn.
   11. Wikipedia est un encyclopédie collaborative, www.wikipedia.com.

Pierre d’Huy est consultant International en Management de l’Innovation, Professeur associé au Management Institute of Paris, Enseignant au CELSA Sorbonne Paris IV. Dernier ouvrage paru L’Innovation Collective, Éditions Liaisons Sociales et à paraître en février 2007, L’Imagination Collective, Éditions Liaisons Sociales. Pierre d’Huy est consultant International en Management de l’Innovation, Professeur associé au Management Institute of Paris, Enseignant au CELSA Sorbonne Paris IV. Dernier ouvrage paru L’Innovation Collective, Éditions Liaisons Sociales et à paraître en février 2007, L’Imagination Collective, Éditions Liaisons Sociales.

Nicholas Ind
Equilibrium Consulting, pb 5822 Majorstuen, 0308 Oslo, Norway
nind@equilibriumconsulting.com

N. Ind: ‘Beyond Branding: from Abstraction to Cubism’, The Journal of the Medinge Group, vol. 1, no. 1, August 2007.
PDF version

Abstract
This paper focuses on the limitations of marketing as it is currently practised. It argues that the discipline’s desire for credibility has led theorists and practitioners to base their thinking around quasi-scientific rationality. This has been valuable in creating credence in the board room, but it is not a very good way of understanding the connections between the organization and its customers. Rather the emphasis should be on people and the nature of relationships.

Introduction
There is an adage in marketing—indeed it may be the adage—that it pays to be close to the customer. To become close suggests a communion between the customer and the organization in an almost intimate way with both sides willing to open up to each other. Close indicates transparency and reciprocity. The primary way organizations have tried to do this has been through the vehicle of market research, which has been a key driver in transforming many organizations from being production led to customer focused. However, there are challenges in using traditional research as a means of getting close to customers and also in the way organizations sometimes misuse research to aid decision-making¹. The key problem is that research must abstract and group and categorize customers. If we accept the specific individuality of people, this categorization will inevitably be flawed. Yet such is the widespread faith in measurement and systems² there is a tendency to mistake the abstract for the real: as soon as managers start seeing numbers, they tend to stop seeing people. While market research can be valuable for informing decisions, the argument is we should not over-rely on it nor mistake data for reality. It is at best an approximation based on the present and past and inevitably predicated on assumptions. As the philosophers, Guattari and Deleuze, echoing Spinoza, say, people tend to categorize and universalize the particular: ‘we think the universal explains, whereas it is what must be explained.’³

From abstract to cubist thinking
While numerical analysis is valuable in informing decisions, we should not over-rely on it nor should we universalize behaviour without questioning the intensive processes below the surface (Deleuze 1994). Research is too often used not as an inspiration to understand how people might think and behave, but rather as a judgment on how they will behave. The example of the Volvo Cross-Country car (Ind and Watt) demonstrates the point. This car was developed by the Swedish car maker as a hybrid vehicle, designed to reach a new type of younger customer who might want the practicality of an estate car with the off-road appeal of a sports utility vehicle (SUV). At the time this was a new approach and Volvo felt the need for the reassurance of research. The model of the car was tested in clinics but the consumer response was negative: people had never seen a vehicle like this and couldn’t put into any existing category. As a result of the research, the project was closed down. However, shortly after, Subaru successfully launched a new vehicle, the Outback, directly into this supposingly non-existent sector. Volvo quickly restarted its own project and launched the Cross Country to critical and commercial success. The lesson is that rather than universalizing and abstracting we should see marketing as Cubist; that there are many perspectives of the same thing, where ‘solid apprehensible reality seems to give way to a world of shifting relationships.’

In search of the human
The question we ought to pose is whether there is another, more ‘cubist’ way of building brands? The solution lies in recognizing that the relationship between an organization and its customers is dynamic, non-linear, non-controllable and difficult to predict. This is about putting quantitative analysis and abstraction in its place. And recognizing that it is the customer who has the power to begin, sustain or terminate a relationship. Thus, the organization should look to reconnect with its customers: to break down the borders between the inside and outside. One of the attributes of humans is our ability to recognize in others feelings that we ourselves have and to link the past with the future.⁴ This is much easier if we concentrate on a direct dialogue rather than using mediated information.
   Some organizations are adept at this process: Linux and the whole Open Source movement are based on the principle,⁵ as are the sportswear brands Quiksilver and Patagonia and the online game company, Funcom. The design and innovation consultancy IDEO, uses co-creation methods and “unfocused” groups for the development of services and products in such areas as IT, medical equipment and children’s toys. Volvo uses close customer connectivity in developing new models. Interestingly all of these organizations limit market research primarily to a source of insight and some, such as Quiksilver, Patagonia and IDEO reject the abstraction of research.
   The skate, surf and snowboard company, Quiksilver is a particularly apt example of the ability to break down borders and connect with customers in an intuitive way (Ind and Watt, 2004). Like Patagonia—and the early Nike (Ind, 2001)—it recruits people from the sports it serves; employees who spend their spare time surfing and skating and who are intimately connected with the culture of their sports. From the CEO (a surfer) down, employees attend and take part in sports events. Also Quiksilver encourage interested professionals, such as designers as well as board riders to contribute their ideas. The 240 professional riders and an army of supported amateurs are an extension of the grass roots’ connection Quiksilver enjoyed in its early days when it was run as a hobbyist surf shorts business. Quiksilver knows creativity has to meet with the approval of the enthusiast audience both to ensure it is a trend leader and to maintain its authenticity. Some innnovations are the direct result of input from riders, such as the development of surfing fiction books aimed at girls or the design of a wet suit range and some ideas are the result of dialogue that provides inspiration for designers. Rapid feedback also tells the company when its products aren’t working as they should or its communications aren’t connecting. Quiksilver treats its customers as insiders and the language of the company reflects this. The free-flow of ideas out from the company’s employees and back in from its network creates the opportunity to build relevant value for the customer. However, it is only an opportunity: to sustain a process of continuous creativity, Quiksilver needs to be an active listener. It has to have the humility to recognize good ideas can come from outside the company and the willingness to share ideas within the company across organisational boundaries. This ensures the continued relevance of the brand to its core customer base. As Quiksilver Marketing Director, Randy Hild says, ‘the challenge is to keep an open mind … I look at everything that comes my way. We’re very good listeners.’

Summary: a different future
As organizations grow they move away from the intuitive knowledge derived from a close and evolving relationship with customers and tend to rely more on the abstraction of research. However, abstraction needs to be explained and the intensive processes that lie under the surface explored. This indicates the value of moving to a more human-focused approach that encourages a direct relationship between the organization and its customers; a relationship founded on trust and a willingness to take down the border between inside and outside.
   Organizations have to try to engage customers and to involve them in the process of creating relevant value. This has several implications: the boundaries of the organization need to be challenged, managers need to encourage transparency and work at active listening, employees need to be encouraged to engage with customers and communications need to flow across internal boundaries. Companies will have to rework their organizational structures so that the customer is no longer a box on the outside but a connected part of the organizational machine. Also rather than concentrating on internal departmental units, the flows between them, that enable customer knowledge to be shared, need to be emphasized. By combining structural and attitudinal changes the customer can become an active presence rather than a mere spectre in the organization.

Endnotes
   1. Philip Kotler in Marketing Management: Analysis, Planning and Control, 5th ed., Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall 1988, p. 188 identifies six pertinent complaints about market research, one of which is ‘marketing information is sodispersed throughout the company that it takes a great effort to locate simple facts.’
   2. Dostoyevsky writes in Notes from Underground: ‘But man is so partial to systems and abstract deductionthat in order to justify his logic he is prepared to distort the truth intentionally’. F. Dostoyevsky: Notes from Underground, tr. J. Coulson, London: Penguin 2003, p. 31 (originally published 1864 as Zapiski iz Poolpolya).
   3. G. Deleuze and F. Guattari, What is Philosophy? London: Verso 2003, p. 49. Benedict de Spinoza writes in Ethics (II/135): ‘how easily we are deceived when we confuse universals with singulars,and beings of reason and abstractions with real beings.’
   4. J. Barresi: ‘On Becoming a Person’, Philosophical Psychology, no. 12, 1999, pp. 79–98.
   5. In E. Raymond: The Cathedral and the Bazaar, 1997, the author calls the approach the Bazaar model and contrasts it with the Cathedral model where the source code is a carefully guarded secret. He suggests that the Bazaar model is a more effective way of testing software code than the Cathedral model which has to second-guess customer reactions.

References
   D. Boyle: The Tyranny of Numbers: Why Counting Can’t Make Us Happy. London: Harper Collins 2002.
   G. Deleuze and F. Guattari: What Is Philosophy?, London: Verso 2003.
   G. Deleuze: Difference and Repetition, tr. P. Patton. New York: Columbia University Press 1994 (first published 1968).
   N. Ind: Living the Brand, London: Kogan Page 2001 (rev. ed. 2003).
   N. Ind and C. Watt: Inspiration: Capturing the Creative Potential of Your Organisation. Basingstoke: Palgrave 2004.
   B. de Spinoza: Ethics (1996), tr. E. Curley. London: Penguin 1996 (II/135) (originally published 1677).

A version of this paper appeared in the Journal of Product & Brand Management, vol. 15, no. 2, 2006.