Back in August 2006 I speculated if we’d ever see bards in business class to entertain airline passengers with poetry and epic stories on long-haul flights.

I was pleased to read in Tuesday’s FT that Yorkshire-born poet David Whyte is helping stir imagination in the workplace. He has made it his mission, through corporate speaking tours and seminars, to help businesses harness the insights and metaphors that poetry can offer to broaden their language, improve interaction within the workplace and stir imaginations.

He’s worked with blue chip companies like AT&T, Microsoft, NASA, Boeing and Kaiser. Thus his muse has helped people reach out and touch someone; know where they want to go today; reach for the stars, line their dreams and thrive.

Of interest to corporate communications staff and speechwriters, Whyte stands for precision in language “listening and talking to a group until he is able to articulate an uncomfortable and unspoken truth.”

As I noted in my article on The Medieval Speechwriter, aspects of modern corporate life recall life at Court. Whyte agrees:

“All these organizations are like Shakespearean plays writ large, with the nobles telling their truths from the podium while the gravediggers are telling it like it really is in the bathroom. And every epoch ends with a lot of blood on the floor”.

He sees real value in poetry as a tool to help managers make sense of their work. It enables novice managers, overwhelmed, desperate, hungry for some ground in a world gone mad, to analyze things:

“The idea is to get deeply into experiences where they have different images and metaphors to use out of the poetry. A lot of the images will have to do with being lost, with not having the usual bearings, and therefore looking at the world in a different way.”

Whyte has a new book, The Three Marriages: Reimagining Work, Self and Relationship. In it, he explores three commitments we have in life: to our partner; our work; our self. He calls for perspective to keep grounded in oneself.

Thanks to a posting by Chris, I’ve just enjoyed watching an excellent speech delivered by Sir Ken Robinson at the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA) called Changing Paradigms.

Sir Ken Robinson is an internationally recognized leader in the development of creativity, innovation and human resources.

His speech (almost an hour long) has a quirky, academic quality to it, but without the dry-as-dust content many insecure PhD’s include when trying to impress with their command of the facts.

He uses self-depreciating humor to win over the British audience. Some of the humor sounds weird to those of us who live in the US. He gets appreciative chuckles when he tells them “I live in California, and you don’t…”. He speaks with sincerity and passion about challenges in education and the mis-diagnosis of kids today as ADHD.

I especially like the graphics he uses around 43:00 minutes into the talk showing the relative size of the Earth to the vastness of interstellar space. A great way to represent statistical data in a presentation.

A speech worth watching as an example of an informative and persuasive argument supported by data.

There’s just one thing I can’t get over – it looks like he & Michael Cain were separated at birth. I’m sure no-one has ever told him that…

Adi Da Samraj Passes from the Body

Naitauba, Fiji – November 29, 2008

Adi Da Samraj, a spiritual master, writer, and artist of international renown, passed away in his hermitage in Fiji, on November 27, of natural causes. He was 69 years old. He founded an entirely new way of spiritual practice, to which he gave the name “Adidam”.

Adi Da was a prolific writer and artist with over sixty published books and hundreds of thousands of works of art. The book that Adi Da designated as his most important work is The Aletheon, which he worked on intensively for the last two years, bringing all of his most essential spiritual and philosophical communications into a final form. He completed his work on The Aletheon on the morning of his passing. The Aletheon is scheduled for publication in 2009.

Spiritual Teacher

In the early 1970s, Alan Watts, writer of numerous books on religion and philosophy, acknowledged Adi Da as “a rare being,” adding, “It is obvious, from all sorts of subtle details, that he knows what IT’s all about.”

In the 1980s, Wittgenstein scholar Henry Leroy Finch wrote: “If there is a man today who is God-illumined, that man is Avatar Adi Da Samraj. There exists nowhere in the world, among Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, or any other groups, anyone who has so much to teach. Avatar Adi Da is a force to be reckoned with, a Pole around which the world can get its bearings.”

From his birth (on Long Island, New York, in 1939), Adi Da manifested unique signs of spiritual illumination. He described his early years as being focused in two fundamental activities. His first focus was to discover the process by which any human being can realize the Truth of “Reality Itself”. His second focus was to develop his own ability to communicate the Truth of “Reality Itself”–through verbal means and also through artistic means.

Adi Da graduated from Columbia University in 1961, with a BA in philosophy, and from Stanford University in 1966, with an MA in English literature.

In 1964, Adi Da began a period of intensive practice under a succession of spiritual masters in the United States and India. Eventually, in 1970, after a final period of intense spiritual endeavor, Adi Da spontaneously became re-established in the continuous state of illumination that was his unique condition at birth.

Author

Adi Da’s literary, philosophical, and practical writings consist of over sixty published books. These include many masterpieces of spiritual illumination, including The Knee of Listening, his spiritual autobiography, and The Dawn Horse Testament, his magisterial revelation of the entire Spiritual process from beginning to end.

Over a period of many decades, Adi Da undertook a massive examination of the world’s religious traditions, culminating in an annotated bibliography of approximately 10,000 items, entitled The Basket of Tolerance. A briefer “epitome” version of The Basket of Tolerance is scheduled for publication in 2009.

Adi Da also created original translations of traditional spiritual texts, translations which bring out the deepest meaning of the original texts. The recent publication Reality Is All the God There Is presents his translations of texts from the traditions of Buddhism and Advaita Vedanta.

Adi Da’s writings on fundamental practical areas of human life, examined from the spiritual perspective, include Green Gorilla (relative to raw diet) and The Complete Yoga of Emotional-Sexual Life.

Adi Da’s principal literary work is his trilogy entitled The Orpheum. In the late 1990s, poet Robert Lax said of The Mummery Book (the opening volume of the Orpheum trilogy), “Living and working as a writer for many decades, I have not encountered a book like this, that mysteriously and unselfconsciously conveys so much of the Unspeakable Reality.” The Orpheum is also presented in theatrical form—as shown online at www.mummerybook.org.

Artist

Adi Da was an extraordinarily prolific artist, producing over 100,000 works, primarily in the years since 2000. He was invited to show his work in a solo exhibition at the 2007 Venice Biennale, and also as part of the 2008 Winter in Florence Festival. Noted art critic Donald Kuspit has written, “It is Adi Da Samraj’s imaginative triumph to have conveyed the illusions created by discrepant points of view and the emotionally liberating effect when they aesthetically unite . . .” Among the publications of Adi Da’s art are The World As Light, Transcendental Realism, and The Spectra Suites. His artistic work can be viewed online at www.adidabiennale.org and www.daplastique.com.

Call for World Peace

Another dimension to his far-reaching legacy is his contemporary social wisdom embodied in the book Not-Two Is Peace. In it he calls for the establishment of a Global Cooperative Forum that mobilizes “everybody-all-at-once” on the basis of recognizing the inherent unity of the entire human family. He proposes that such a forum is the necessary and effective means for addressing the world’s most pressing issues. Information about this initiative is available online at www.globalcooperationproject.org.

Spiritual Way

Adidam, the spiritual way founded by Adi Da, is practiced by thousands of individuals worldwide, with centers in many parts of the world. Information about Adi Da and Adidam is available online at www.adidam.org.
# # #

At the end of January I spent a day with a remarkable Aussie, Malcolm Cohen. As I wrote at the time, his Rocket Ship workshop helps people get clear about whatever is their life’s true purpose, their quest. Using simple Internet ‘Web 2.0′ technology you can craft a Vision Statement that is, for many of us, a 21st century mirror to the soul. Easy to say, not so easy to do.

Two weeks and countless hours of searching for the right mix of text, music and images later, I have just published my ‘brave statement’ on YouTube. Thanks are due to everyone who helped make this possible: Malcolm and my fellow voyagers on the Rocket Ship at Ft. Mason and the Sandbox Suites; Patricia, Brady and the invisible lovers; James, Richard, Dan and the men in the corner; my Mum & Dad (who paid the photographer in Derby back in 1952 to take the first picture); my Spiritual Master, Adi Da Samraj for the last picture; Emily & Neil who smiled at the camera in Laos and Limerick; Bob Geldof for Thinking Voyager 2 Type Things; and most of all for Sandra, for walking beside me. And you, of course, if you choose to click on the video and spend 2 minutes carrying a vision for me.

Signed, Maverick

Few can doubt we’re at a crossroads in history – serious attempts must be made to steer humanity toward a new and sustainable civilization. The World-Friend and Spiritual Master Adi Da Samraj has written that:

…things are deteriorating more and more profoundly in areas that are not being addresses directly and effectively: the overall condition of the Earth, environmental pollution, global warming, climate change, the abuse of power by corporations and governments, the necessity for new technologies and new methods in every area of human life, the scarcity of fuel resources and of natural and human resources altogether, disease, famine, poverty, overpopulation, urbanization, globalization, human migration, territorial disputes, violent crime, the pervasive accumulation of excessively destructive weapons, the tendency of nation-states to avoid cooperation and mutual accommodation, the tendency of nation-states to use war as a method for achiving the goals of national and otherwise culturally idealized policies, and so on – and on.

- Not Two Is Peace, p. 148.

Bummer.

Any wonder that the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity? Between the despair which comes from clearly seeing the pickle we’re in and the denial of a problem is a sweet spot where real direct action can be taken to help resolve this environmental crisis – the coming crisis of life on Earth. We must require world leaders to make things right:

No merely virtuous voice of calling, advice, and educational effort is capable of enforcing that requirement. Only a demand made by what cannot be subordinated to the usual political power-games is capable of obliging the situation to change. The entire collective of the six billion of everybody-all-at-once is the only power in the world that can change the current chaos.

- Not Two Is Peace, p. 162.

I would encourage anyone interested in a planet-wide solution to these issues to support the Global Cooperation Project launched in response to Adi Da Samraj’s call.

Despair is not an option. Our fate is not sealed. There is still time work on resolving the crisis in a radically new way.

Speechwriters in high technology companies often face the challenge of communicating complexities in a simple manner which audiences can understand. The universe is a complex machine which no-one really understands. Books have been written on the ways we interpret the evidence of our senses. None of them are easy to understand. Are they?

Then along comes a short video which can take you further down the path of understanding how we perceive reality in five minutes than a dozen philosophy books would in a month.

I found it easy to envisage the techniques employed by this video being used by a technology company wishing to communicate complexity in profoundly simple, even provocative, ways.

Take five minutes to check it out and let me know if you think I’m smoking something or if you agree.

Ready? Steady? Go!

Ethnomethodology is concerned with the methods (the “people-methods”) by which that social order is produced and shared in different settings.

It seeks to describe the practices individuals use in their descriptions of different settings. It examines in minute detail the ways in which people participate in a taken-for-granted world and raises questions about how this is accomplished.

This might strike some people as asking questions about the bleedin’ obvious. But wasn’t it asking questions about the “obvious” that got Newton, Galileo, Copernicus and others started? Their insights came as a result of asking questions about the very things others took for granted.

Ethnomethodology claims we are all constantly making use of unstated “methodsâ€? in our daily lives to create a “taken-for-granted” world which we feel we “know” and can be “at home” in. We perceive our social world through a series of patterns we have built up for making sense of and coping with the variety of situations that we encounter everyday.

These patterns are often repetitive, confining even.

We use patterns to define ourselves in contrast to another: the presenter vs. the audience; the speaker vs. the listener; the same-old same-old conversation between husbands and wives, parents and children, executives and staff. Some call this their “comfort zone”. People new to public speaking feel discomfort and fear when they step out of their comfort zone and stand on the podium. It’s not part of their pattern.

As Adi Da Samraj writes in his poetic parable The Mummery Book:

(c) 2007 The Avataric Samrajya of Adidam Pty Ltd

The Mummery of life-and-world-and-death is a constant Melodrama—made of opposites and contraries. And life is always “self-and-”otherâ€?—in a Growling! pit.

There is only a pattern. Patterning, in Clicks! and Clacks! Appearance, Shift, and Change. Always repetitions—and, yet, never the same.

The countless pairs are not Recognized, As Is, by the always ego-”I”—in its waking, dreaming, and sleeping, here. The oblivious little play of twos—never exactly Founders, in their One. Forever—there is only “she” or “he” or “it” or “thatâ€?, and the always-remaining “I”. The “I” and the “other”—forever waiting, for the One-and-Only One. The One That Always Already Is—Infinitely Expanded, Beyond the persistent point of ego- “I”. Beyond the egg of attention, and its Klik-Klak visions of eternal “differenceâ€?.

– Adi Da Samraj, The Mummery Book

The creation of social order by a group of benighted egos minimizes the chaos of random human interaction and the confusion which would be experienced if we saw everything as if it were the first time. When that order breaks down you get the social interaction typical of the insane asylum. There’s value in the comfort zone, but also limitation.

Executive Communications Lessons:

By examining how a stable social order is created out of the independent actions of individuals Ethnomethodology has value for someone creating a presentation that’ll be given to a group of individuals assembled into an audience.

Knowing more about the glue that holds everything together provides insight for the savvy speaker.

The question is what level of understanding we want. Is it enough to know the big picture rules (when to kiss, bow or shake hands) or do we need a more detailed grasp the the minutia of social order.

Yes, we do, say the Ethnomethodologists.

By conducting a microscopic analysis of the ‘technology of interaction’ – the structures that underlie conversations – we have a framework to understand:

1. The setting of a talk (which could be a face-to-face discussion between two people or a presentation to a large audience by an executive) and how that “affects the shape, form, trajectory, content or character of the interaction�.
2. The form of the institution where the talk is delivered and how that dictates the type of presentation delivered and the ‘turn-taking’ mechanisms enjoyed by presenter and audience member. (Think about the unstated assumptions that dictate when it’s “OK to ask a question” and when it’s “rude to interrupt”. Realize that this differs between, say, a small group of C-level executives meeting in the Boardroom and a mass of techies in the audience at a Conference.)
3. The ways in which the participants ‘conspire’ to create the context and constantly reaffirm the fact that they are participating as an audience member at a public presentation (This might sound weird at first, but think of all the unstated assumptions that a good grade school teacher, or seminar leader, leverages to ‘impact’ their audience.)

One limitation: In taking a relativist stance ethnomethodology cannot make moral judgments about meanings. Therefore it cannot address problems such as inequality and power. But, realistically, this isn’t a big problem. There’s not a lot of mileage in revealing how centers of power and inequality affect communications within corporations. Everyone is pretty clear on who has the chops by Grade Level and Title when it comes to communicating. It’s obvious that people pander more the CEO’s sense of humor and are willing to laugh at his jokes than they are with people of lesser status in the organization. Dictators go mad because everyone agrees with them. Get over it.

Next time I’ll consider some specific lessons from ethnomethodology around what is called situated actions. Being aware of this will sharpen your capability as a public speaker to think on your feet — to anticipate alternative courses of action and their consequences while in the middle of a presentation.

Shakespeare wrote his plays for the ear, not the eye. His punctuation is sloppy, the stage directions minimal.

It’s much more difficult to understand one of his plays if you just read the text silently. It’s only when you read aloud, or, better yet, see the play performed, that the power of the words is evident.

Example: Read the text of Henry V’s inspiring speech to his men before they go into battle against the French:

WESTMORELAND

O that we now had here
But one ten thousand of those men in England
That do no work to-day!

KING HENRY V

What’s he that wishes so?
My cousin Westmoreland? No, my fair cousin:
If we are mark’d to die, we are enow
To do our country loss; and if to live,
The fewer men, the greater share of honour.
God’s will! I pray thee, wish not one man more
.
.
.
Rather proclaim it, Westmoreland, through my host,
That he which hath no stomach to this fight,
Let him depart; his passport shall be made
And crowns for convoy put into his purse:
We would not die in that man’s company
That fears his fellowship to die with us.
This day is called the feast of Crispian:
He that outlives this day, and comes safe home,
Will stand a tip-toe when the day is named,
And rouse him at the name of Crispian.
He that shall live this day, and see old age,
Will yearly on the vigil feast his neighbours,
And say ‘To-morrow is Saint Crispian’
Then will he strip his sleeve and show his scars.
And say ‘These wounds I had on Crispin’s day.’
Old men forget: yet all shall be forgot,
But he’ll remember with advantages
What feats he did that day: then shall our names.
Familiar in his mouth as household words
Harry the king, Bedford and Exeter,
Warwick and Talbot, Salisbury and Gloucester,
Be in their flowing cups freshly remember’d.
This story shall the good man teach his son;
And Crispin Crispian shall ne’er go by,
From this day to the ending of the world,
But we in it shall be remember’d;
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he to-day that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne’er so vile,
This day shall gentle his condition:
And gentlemen in England now a-bed
Shall think themselves accursed they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
That fought with us upon Saint Crispin’s day.

(Act IV, Scene iii)

Now hear the speech as delivered by Kenneth Branagh.

Branagh’s voice brings out the nuance, subtlety and power of the speech that we miss when we just read the words.

The King literally brings his audience toward him from among the trees with a fine display of ethos – building a bond with the “band of brothers”. The bond is strengthened by contrasting their role with those “now a-bed”. He inspires them by painting in words a glorious future: their part in a story that will be told from “this day to the ending of the world”.

Very little of the power of the speech relies on gesture. Branagh is restrained. His fist is rigid, gloved and powerful. He relies instead on his voice, moderated at first, rising to a crescendo with the “ending of the world”. Then, seconds later, cracking to a whisper for “we few, we happy few” in preparation for the final lines delivered first with restrained humor, then mocking indictment and the final rousing claim which cues the troops to cheer.

Executive Communications Lesson

Find a corner of the office, or a space outside (perhaps in the woods like Henry), where you can read every speech you write out loud. Try reading it at different speeds. With different emphasis. Then, when you are happy with it, take it to your executive and make them do the same. You’ll probably have to insist, most speakers would rather skim the text in the back of the car on the way to the event.

But then, they never had to ask their audience to go fight the French.

My first major series of Deep End topics is an assessment of a sociological theory known as Ethnomethodolgy to see if it’s got anything useful to say for those of us involved in public speaking, presentation skills coaching, speechwriting and executive communications.

Ethnomethodology is an obscure branch of sociology. It’s concerned with the ways in which social order is maintained. It describes the practices (the methods) people use to describe social settings.

Ethnomethodology was all the rage in the mid-1970’s when I was a graduate sociology student. It attracted those of us who were looking for an alternative to structural-functionalism (Talcott Parsons seemed such a boring old fart) and were tired of mainstream Marxist sociology (Karl Marx was another boring old fart).

It was a ‘hip’ social theory. It promised the excitement of Street Theater and Happenings. It didn’t take the fact of social order for granted (Yeah! Anarchy Rules, OK!) It encouraged people to see things around them as if for the first time. This resonated for students who’d experimented with hallucinogenic drugs. It was an intellectual cleansing of the doors of perception. It appealed to anyone enthralled by the afterglow of the sixties that bathed the student population of Europe in the early 1970’s.

It was cool. Obscure. Angular. Immediate. Some went on to build careers out of theories like this. The rest of us got $20 haircuts, entry-level jobs in corporations and conveniently developed amnesia for these angry critiques of our late adolescence.

So it’s with a sense of deja-vu I return to Ethnomethodology to see if it has any value for my life, thirty-five years after I first studied it. Are there any useful nuggets I can find to help my work in executive communications in the 21st Century? Will I see speechwriting as if for the first time?

My search, inspired, as I have said, by Roy H. Williams, is a deep dive into and report on the core elements of the theory that are relevant. I’ll strip out the academic jargon. And, frankly, plagiarize the academic sources without the usual attribution, but I will include a full set of references for sources I use.

My next posting in the series will examine what the heck Ethnomethodology is all about and why should speechwriters bother examining what everyone else takes for granted?

My inspiration for a ‘deep dive’ into science and philosophy as it affects executive communications (which I’m classifying as ‘Deep End’ postings) is ad-man extraordinary Roy H. Williams.

Before I launch into the first deep dive of my own, I’ll try and show how useful Roy’s insights derived from ‘complicated stuff’ can be.

Apart from his books, be sure to check out his archives of Monday Morning Memos – fascinating and instructive notes he emails every week.

Take as an example Chapter 21 of his book Secret Formulas of the Wizard of Ads.

In four brief pages Roy clarifies the visual and auditory processing power of the brain and how two key areas are involved when people hear and see advertising messages: Wernicke’s area where the visual and auditory associations meet and we assign names to objects and comprehend spoken language; and Broca’s area where language processing, speech production and comprehension occurs.

Roy concludes the chapter by saying:

Describe what you want the listener to see, and she will see it. Cause her to imagine taking the action you’d like her to take, and you’ve brought her much closer to taking the action. The secret of persuasion lies in our skillful use of action words. The magic of advertising is in the verbs. Just ask Broca.

Having set this up, Williams then explains, in subsequent chapters, how to write compelling ads by ‘surprising Broca’.

Williams is not afraid to risk losing some readers in his detours into ‘advanced’ theories of neuroscience and medicine. The reward for those of us who stick with him is an incredible insight into the ways that communication works in the world of advertising.

My goal, in future Deep End postings, is to explore detours of my own and see what lessons can be learned.

Stay tuned.