2500 years ago, the Greek comedian Aristophanes wrote a bizarre play with a plot that feels like a pre-incarnation of Monty Python. In The Birds, the central character Peisetairos is fed up with his fellow Athenians, makes himself some wings and flies off to live with the birds in the self-declared republic of Cloudcuckooland. Now, before you jump to any conclusions based on the modern meaning of “cloudcuckooland”, pay attention to what happens next, because it’s really quite clever: Peisetairos erects a wall around the cloud, and uses it to force the Athenians to pay the Cloudcuckoolanders fees if they want their sacrifices to get through to the gods. Even more startlingly, he simultaneously forces the gods to pay fees if they want any of the mortals’ sacrifices to reach the heavens. The really bizarre thing is that it actually works – the gods want their food, the humans want their rewards and the play ends with Peisetairos winning the hand of Zeus’s daughter. Not a bad day’s work.
There are so many directions you can take this story as an analogy for the management consulting industry, but here’s how I like to see it: the kingdom of the birds as a client organisation, Peisetairos as a fresh-faced innovation consultant and the wall-in-the-clouds concept as a Powerpoint slide. I imagine myself sat in the room surrounded by post-it notes as Mr P presents his big idea to the client for the first time, moving the little red dot around the screen with his clicker … you can almost see it in these lines from the original text:
Peisetairos: “Look: mortals are there, the gods are there, and the birds are here, right in the middle … no tax, no food. The gods fork out, or starve”
I imagine reading the faces of the other birds (= project team) absorbing the idea: “Is this young whippersnapper for real?” “If this is so obvious why has no one thought of it before?”, “Will our cloud infrastructure really support a wall?”, “Doesn’t Microsoft do this already?” and so on. But underneath all the reactions to these “let’s-build-a-city-in-the-clouds” type presentations is the question: “Does this person appear so confident because they’ve seen something no one else has seen, or because appearing this confident is just their job?”
Making meaningful distinctions
Now the reason I’m setting this up like this is not for comedy value, or because I want to launch into a critique of the management consulting industry, but because I think the story can teach us something profound about the nature of meaning at work: that the ability to make meaning is really the ability to draw distinctions that hadn’t previously been drawn in reality.
I’ll come back to what this means for consulting in a minute – for now let’s just see how it works. When Peisetairos arrives in the sky there are “just” clouds, but what he notices is that if the gods are real and humans are real, then somewhere in the sky there must be an unseen boundary between them. So building a wall formalises a distinction that already exists.
The thing about distinctions is that they give you the ability to get stuff done. To see this more clearly, compare Mr P proposing to build a wall in the sky to an industrialist proposing to build a water mill in a valley: by observing the distinction between the more powerful force of water upstream and the lesser force downstream, they exploit the difference to power their equipment and turn wheat into flour. Or a steam engine: here the distinction is in heat rather than altitude, but again it’s the ability to see and exploit a difference that makes the difference: the steam is pushed into a piston, and the difference of pressure between the hot and cold chambers is enough to turn the drive wheel of a 200-tonne locomotive. Seeing and exploiting distinctions is what yields power.
It was the information theorists of the 20th century who recognised that what is true of physical distinctions is also true of information. Information is a series of distinctions (1s and 0s at the most elementary level) that let us get stuff done, and just as you can measure the potential energy of a physical distinction by its unlikeliness (i.e. the scale of discrepancy between the two sides), you can also measure the amount of information in a message by how surprising it is to the recipient. It’s less surprising to find water at sea level than halfway up a mountain; it’s very surprising to find it compressed as high pressure steam inside a tiny metal chamber, which is why steam trains don’t occur naturally. Similarly with information, the old adage says that “dog bites man” is not a story, whereas “man bites dog” is, but only because the category of dog-biting men is so under-populated. Information is surprise, and surprise is information.
Now take this insight back to Mr P: although at first glance his idea seems completely crazy, he does actually draw out a distinction that no one had previously noticed, which means that he does at least say something interesting, because it has surprise value.
Compare this to the copy and paste slide decks delivered each year by legions of consultants populating organisational change programmes. How many presentations do you sit through, trying to grasp the meaning of all the colourful boxes and arrows and corporate words, and feel like you’re trying to grasp at a cloud? Hebrew has a lovely word for this experience: hevel, which means both “meaningless” and “vapour”, capturing the metaphor of the clouds directly in the sense of the word. This is the word translated as “vanity” in the King James Bible: “Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities; all is vanity,” That sense of futility – of vain-ness – seems to me to be one of the defining characteristics of modern organisational life, certainly at middle to upper management level.
But it’s not just the audience that finds these presentations enervating. For the presenter, there’s nothing more soul-destroying than realising that the sole value of the slide deck they’ve been working on for the past month has been that it will get ticked off as a “deliverable”, never to be looked at again except as contractual evidence that “some work was done”.
Learning from Mr P
The story of Peisetairos has lessons for all of us who live in the corporate world, not just consultants. The realms of upper management often have a “cloud-like” feel for the people who hang out there – definitions are nebulous, accountabilities are unclear, priorities shift over time. The real reason things are the way they are is lost in complexity, but there’s a premium attached to sounding confident, so it’s much safer to just churn out presentations that are as vague as the world around you, because then you can sound confident without getting into trouble. Suggest building a wall in the middle of a cloud though and you will certainly attract attention, because you are then pointing to a distinction in the world and not just on a slide.
If you are a consultant, or even if you’ve just moved into a new role, remember that meaning comes from surprise. When you encounter a situation for the first time, the things that surprise you are gold dust, as they may well be things that the inhabitants of the cloud have just got used to and can no longer see. To point them out and ask questions is your job. But they have to be real things that you see with your own eyes, not the hallucinations of a Powerpoint template. Always re-connect and test your ideas with reality: someone needs to be dipping their fingers in the cloud, and if it’s not you then who will it be? A castle in a cloud will always seem like a castle-in-a-cloud until someone lays the first stone.
But most of all, whoever you are, always remember that shared meaning arises from distinctions that exist in reality (whether actual or potential), not the distinctions that exist in your head. Your value lies not in how impressive or on-trend or pretty your slides are, but in how well they enable people to get stuff done. So when you do make a slide, look at your diagrams and ask yourself what each of the edges corresponds to in reality. This could be the edge of a text box, the outline of an image, the arrows connecting them, the boundaries of the space between them, the edge of the slide itself – for each distinction on the screen, what is the corresponding distinction that exists, or could exist, in the real world? If you can’t answer, or you’re not sure, then the chances are that you are generating hevel.
Try this on one of your own slide decks, and see how you get on. If it makes you feel uncomfortable, then maybe you need to spend more time looking up and seeing the world through the eyes of Peisetairos. The world is full of surprises, and while noticing one for the first time might make others accuse you of living in Cloudcuckooland, it might also be the thing that turns Cloudcuckooland into a kingdom of heaven.
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