Hive Health

I came across this title back when I was poking stool samples in a Jo’burg path lab. I have just read it again for the miracle of remade memory. This is one of the offbeat, off-format, cut n’ paste, journal- style little hardbacks that went massive in the 90s, packed with illustrations, doodles, postits from God, concrete poetry and the like.

Gordon Mackenzie was an artist who found himself in middle management at Hallmark Cards Inc. While his role was in products and marketing, he transcended executive approval and production line stupefaction by becoming a self-appointed mentor, a champion of autonomy. He delivered workshops on “responsible creativity”, the space between suicide and total freedom:

“To find Orbit around a corporate Hairball is to find a place of balance where you benefit from the physicial, intellectual and philosophical resources of the organisation without becoming entombed in the bureaucracy of the institution”.

Our own hairballs are our memories, how we learn by rote to replicate a baseline standard of past successes. We learn it from each other too in our hunger for herd wisdom. His prescription is the courage to be genuine and to be led by intuition versus “pallid corporate appropriateness”. First you must find the goals of the organisation that touch your heart and release your passion to follow those goals. Inevitably you will fly off on a tangent, and passion will keep you in orbit, not subsumed by the corporate hole nor spinning away from it.

15 years later, some of the anti-establishment jive feels a little outdated – perhaps this is because I’ve never worked in a place which had 600 creatives on staff. Gordon’s workshops took place in Hallmark and other big companies, and his method was to shock corporates out of their masks with nonlinear tricks. I don’t feel it’s authenticity that strangles meaningful agency work, or even a lack of autonomy. If this century’s work culture is gradually unmasking, it’s perhaps becoming quite hard to focus without distraction.

It’s obvious that personal counterculture can make an employee potently valuable, and that creative energy is the stuff that makes the organisation greater than the sum of its parts. What Gordon teaches is that it doesn’t happen with the silencing of rationality. He tells us to transrationalise – to soar above the rational on the parachute of intuitive reason.  It sounds a little lonely, and it is. Not even Gordon can hold our hand when we fly. But we’ll be OK if we remember that parachute.

Tom Kelley of IDEO talks about Gordon MacKenzie here. 

Buy the book here.

After a good two years of having the best intentions of making it to a lecture at the Science Museums’ Dana Centre, and never quite making it, last night I finally did it! Even on my bike. And in the rain. Double whammy. The lecture was titled “The Psychology of Sport”, which seemed pretty perfect considering the opening ceremony of the Olympics is just 50 days away and I spent three years studying Psychology at University (and playing probably too much sport).

An interesting piece of trivia to start you off with. Considering athletes have claimed that up to 90% of their performance can be down to the psychological side of their game…Out of 20 teams in the Tour de France ’08, how many do you think had access to a Sports Psychologist? All of them? Half of them? No, just one. Crazy, is it the media that makes us think it’s more commonplace?

We had talks from experts on the topics of Home advantage, Positive Psychology and Emotional Intelligence, however for me, the most interesting part of the evening were the discussions. I’ll give you my thoughts on the questions that we were posed.

1.     What effect does Home Advantage have on athletes?

On the one side, there’s the positive impact of familiarity (grass length, time zone, food’s the same etc), there’s the increased support and resulting impact that it can have on morale, there’s more money for training/facilities as the home side is likely to have more investment – BUT there’s the flip side of the intense pressure of succeeding on home soil and the potential distractions around you. Hmmm, perhaps that’s why Henman never won Wimbledon then!

With the media furore surrounding so-called ‘Plastic Brits’ recently, it could be interesting to see a study on the impact of ‘home advantage’ for them. Would it be the same? Would they get the same pros and cons of competing at home & away?

2.     What are the pros & cons of developing ‘Happy Athletes’?

This looked at the field of ‘Positive Psychology’ (which definitely raised my eyebrows, as I’m much more of a psychophysics girl!) Traditionally psychology has focused on the negative end of the mental health spectrum where depression and schizophrenia lie – whereas now, Positive Psychology is starting to look at the opposite end – helping people to ‘flourish’. This is where the link to sports psychology comes in – they believe that getting athletes to focus on “What went well?” instead of the mistakes and keeping a positive diary of training and competitions will keep them on the path to success. We watched Stefano and Natasha, a world-class ballroom dancing couple perform and had first-hand experience of the stress/anxiety that they have to overcome – especially when the music failed to start and then they crashed into a stray chair….! They both believe that their sports psychologist involvement gives them a huge competitive edge over their peers.

However, perhaps I’m slightly too pessimistic. Will a ‘happy athlete’ strive for a PB? Will they constantly strive to improve? Or does ‘Happy Athlete’ just mean that they’re positive, willing to train and keen to improve? And is that enough for Gold?

Carrying on the theme of stretching yourself out of your comfort zone, I reached for the microphone and asked a question to the panel (an evening of ‘firsts’…) I wanted to find out their thoughts on whether the effects of home advantage would mean that we should be watching out for the less-famous members of the GB teams. Would these be the ones that would exceed expectations as they have all the pros of home advantage without so many of the cons? Will our ‘golden girls and boys’ suffer as a result of the pressure we’re putting on them? Will it be like the Champions League final, where Chelsea’s Mata (their regular penalty taker) missed, whereas their defenders Cole and Luiz scored? It may be pessimistic – and I’ll be cheering for Jessica Ennis like the rest of the country – but I may have secretly placed a bet on her teammate to win. What do you think?

This month’s Hive Review looks at an exhibition.

As one of the incurably curious, the Wellcome Collection is my favourite science museum in London. When I found out that the newest exhibition explored “what humans have done to brains in the name of medical intervention, scientific enquiry, cultural meaning and technological change” I popped down as soon as I had a spare moment. As usual the exhibition didn’t disappoint.

With over 150 artefacts including real brains, artworks, manuscripts, videos and photography, ‘Brains’ asks not what brains do to us, but what we have done to brains. The exhibition isolates the brain from the individual and presents it as a purely scientific object: something which can be measured, classified, modelled and mapped, sliced, freeze-dried and pickled.

Presented as a maze of four sections, the exhibition reflects this: ‘Measuring’ defines the relationship between the brain’s function and form, ‘Mapping’ explores anatomy, ‘Cutting’ delves into the gory history of surgical intervention and Victorian quackery, while ‘Giving’ deals with brain harvesting and research.

Alongside a wealth of scientific information, what really make this exhibition unique are the art pieces interwoven throughout.

Curator Marius Kwint selected works by contemporary artists, who responded to the form and physical matter of the brain in various ways. There are abstract offerings in Katharine Dowson’s glass laser render of a her own brain which from afar looks like a delicate puff of silk, Susan Aldworth’s watercolour series and stills from Andrew Carnie’s film ‘Atlas’. There are also some touching works exploring the brain’s physicality, such as photographer Corrine Day’s pictures of herself before brain surgery, and Ania Dabrowska’s portraits of brain donors alongside podcast monologues. Rather than being ghostly these recordings are gentle and reflective making them one of my favourite sections of the exhibition.

All in all ‘Brains: Mind as Matter’ is science communication at its best: complex medicine interwoven with art and beauty (and a little bit of gore). It’s on until the 17th of June and it’s free, so I suggest you take your brain down for a little look.

This week I have been heading a couple of categories of the Communiqué awards. An honour and delight to sit, chair and discuss such talent. Midst one entry discussion we got deep into the different approaches we take on how we view our audience. Are ‘they’ our targets, inert fodder for campaigns and as such need protecting by our paternalism, or  do we feel that they are intelligent enough to spot a ruse, and sit alongside in the quest for better health.

I can’t get into specific on the category or the entry but the room was divided. I feel we could learn a lot from the ad man exceptional; David Ogilvy.  Ogilvy was passionate, to the point of dangerous, when he encountered agency folk who felt that the divide between us (marketers) and them (consumers) was huge. Terms like ‘punter’ were banned and a deep level of respect was insisted upon. In his mind our target audience were people to respect and cherish not dumb down and patronise.  “The consumer is not a moron, she is your wife.” -David Ogilvy, Elements of Advertising. Published in 1983 sums it up for me.

Horst Faas, a two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning war photographer who later was editor of The Associated Press staff in Saigon, died on Thursday in Munich. He was 79. If you are a fan of photography, communication and visual talent this should give cause to pause and reflect on a human being who nailed  audience respect better than anyone. Whether that be New York Times readers havig breakfast or Communist insurgents featured in the haunting photographs of the Vietnam War he never presumed to protect or provide anything but the naked reality of the situations he saw.

If you are unfamiliar with his work, he is responsible so many of the images we have of  the horrors of war. He managed the transition from field to office as Editor if AP without compromising his desire  to educate and inform.  “I don’t think we influenced the war at any time,” he said in 1997. “I don’t think we helped to win it or helped to lose it. We didn’t work on the outcome of the war.” Making photographs about the suffering and horror of war, he said, is simply better than not making them. Such talent balanced with such pragmatism.