Tom’s Thoughts

This is not a toy. Only the young or the hopelessly commonsensical dip it into liquid soap, content with bubbles. Curl your fingers around the handle, lift it to your mouth, and flick the switch. Say what you long to say. The fan is small, but its aim is true. You will be heard. This poetical story by Colson Whitehead was the main text in an auction entry on eBay for the bubble blowing gun in the picture. The gun was purchased for 50 cents and achieved a final bid price of $36… Do stories make us value things more?

In this newsletter I’m revisiting a recent project designed to reduce collisions in a bus fleet by influencing behaviour with video drama.

It was back in 2021 when I first entertained the idea of using the Gogglebox format in an L&D setting.

When things change, our world shifts, and we must adapt. Grieving illustrates this process vividly, shaking our emotional landscape and prompting us to reshape our understanding of events. The classic stages of grief – denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance – describe the emotional journey we undergo when facing significant change.

Fill your heart with love today Don’t play the game of time Things that happened in the past Only happened in your Mind You might be familiar with this Biff Rose song from David Bowie’s recording. It’s a beautiful idea. If we can let go of things and move forward, a world of possibility is open to us. But people’s identities are tied up with stories. Stories of past events that are hard to escape.

Our brains perceive a challenge to our belief system in the same way as a physical threat. This is why marketers tend to avoid direct challenges when they want you to change your behaviour.

News story, life story, love story, war story, success story, horror story, origin story, crime story, sob story, true story, fairy story; story is everywhere and our society is held together with stories. “There are no facts, only interpretations.” – Friedrich Nietzsche How do you use story to engage with your colleagues?

Like the character in Talking Heads’ Once in a Lifetime, recently, I’ve been asking myself, “How did I get here?” As we roll out Drama for Change projects, they’re landing really well and having an impact. Our approach is quite novel, so I’m finally close to where I’ve been trying to get to. Of course, I never set out with this destination in mind, so today, I will share a hasty post-rationalisation of my life so far…

After months of reading and writing about the research and theory that Drama for Change is built upon, it’s time to sum it all up. This is Drama for Change!

In a recent post, I reviewed a podcast interview with Professor Frances Frei in which, among other things, she expounded her take on DEI, suggesting we should rename it ‘IED’ because if you get inclusion right, the rest will follow. I vowed to read the book she wrote with Anne Morriss, Move Fast and Fix Things, which details the approach, and to report back with more detail. The result is below. I hope Frances and Anne will forgive me for presenting a mash-up of their text, not always with inverted commas, to help represent their vibe and ideas…

To quote the broadcaster’s blurb, Mr Bates vs The Post Office is a UK TV drama that “has got the nation talking”. In this article, I look at the scandal’s anatomy and the drama’s impact and explore how you can use video drama’s power to impact your organisation significantly.

I’m regularly surprised when encountering people in learning or management unfamiliar with video drama’s incredible strengths.

Christmas is a time for stories. It’s about coming together with family, looking back, looking forward and creating meaning.

The idea of the educative element of storytelling is as old as storytelling itself. We are all likely familiar with Second World War propaganda movies and, in the UK, the longest-running radio soap opera, The Archers, founded to spread information to farmers. Looking right back to the Iliad, a foundation story for a civilisation, had a propagandising and culturally-bonding function. And each of Aesop’s Fables has a moral message. Entertainment-Education, as we know it today, was born in the 1970s, and its founder is the Mexican producer, writer, researcher, and theorist Miguel Sabido.

My 7-year-old son is neurodiverse. He hates talking about school. When I gently ask him what he’s been up to in class, his usual response is, “Go away!” I get it. School is quite stressful for him. Yet it’s a part of his world that remains his domain and not ours. How can we ever understand?

As I’ve repeatedly reported [https://lnkd.in/evvR2DEj], diversity training has generally done worse than failed; it has had a negative effect. The evidence is there. I’m currently working on anti-racism content, so I was brought back to the challenge of what can be done effectively in the sphere. Interestingly, the answer is the same as all other use cases…

Julia knew the culture wasn’t right. As a new HR manager in a legacy male-dominated organisation, she’d already noticed some examples of everyday sexism that made her feel uncomfortable. It’s not that there was a bad attitude at the top, but with what she’d seen, combined with her knowledge of the evidence that formal reporting rarely works to reveal bad behaviour, she knew an intervention was needed…

A few weeks back, I reviewed a book – The Social Brain – by Tracey Camilleri, Samantha Rockey and Robin Dunbar. It takes Dunbar’s academic research and theory about the evolutionary psychology of how human groups work and, focussed on the co-authors’ knowledge of large organisations, applies it to the working world. I love that book, but I’m the kind of guy who really appreciates a VERY high-level distillation of principles to work by. So, I thought I’d return to the book and see how well I could achieve this.

Toxic culture looms large right now. The headlines are full of toxic masculinity and the abusive behaviours it has led to. And of politicians behaving toxically – breaking laws, denying wrongdoing, and promoting policies designed to win headlines rather than improve things. In the meantime, the UK has recently seen the CBI, the Metropolitan Police and the Department for Education all accused of having toxic cultures. The Australia Parliament House is under scrutiny following reports of sexual harassment and assault. In the US, video game company Activation Blizzard is facing accusations of widespread discrimination and harassment against female employees.

In this newsletter, I review an authoritative text that takes an often overlooked body of scientific knowledge of human societies and applies it to the real world of large organisations. In the development of Drama for Change, my method for impacting organisational culture with a campaign based around a pertinent video drama, I studied the work of Robin Dunbar, the Professor of Evolutionary Psychology at Oxford University, in-depth and clung to it almost talisman-like to help me see the wood for the trees. So, I must confess I felt a little jealous when I discovered The Social Brain, in which Dunbar collaborates with business experts to apply theory to practice.

This newsletter focuses on my review of the recently published book The Secret of Culture Change, which is about top-level management’s use of stories in culture change. I was excited to read this book as it is one of the few I’ve found that methodically links organisational culture change with story and storytelling. My ideas about culture change are predominantly bottom-up, while theirs is top-down. But, as you will see, things are never that simple.

In our world of fast-evolving technology, film and television remains a powerful force in shaping culture, sparking conversations, and driving social change. From the early days of cinema to the Netflix era, we have witnessed the profound impact that storytelling on screen can have on people’s thoughts and emotions. Nice Media has taken this to the corporate world with its innovative video drama/ campaign combo Drama for Change, empowering large organisations to address internal cultural challenges.

It’s sometimes a challenge to persuade people that Drama for Change is an effective process when, at this stage, we are still to deliver a complete package and harvest the results. Then a project that is pretty much the Drama for Change method came to my attention but in the public sector.

When we tell someone about Drama for Change, our system for changing organisational culture, the applications that come to mind are usually interpersonal issues such as diversity and inclusion or safeguarding. And while Drama for Change can make an impact there, I’m perhaps more excited by its impact on compliance matters.

Drama for Change pairs video with storytelling and supercharges it with a powerful campaign. The three elements combine to get teams engaged and active in a workplace culture – working together to improve it. Let’s quickly review each element and then look at the synergy…

In my previous article, I explained why story is so important for managers. Story is a tool that has evolved as humans have evolved to bind us together in large groups. Story is one of the key reasons that homo sapiens is the dominant primate. Story is the water in which our thoughts are swimming. It’s the very stuff of human perception.

Storytelling is a skill often boasted by video companies and HR consultants. But do they really know what it means, or are they just flashing around a sexy buzzword? The harder you look at storytelling, the more elusive its meaning. Is it a sensible management tool, or is it about as useful as astrology? I thought I’d take a run at making sense of story in a single short article. I love a bit of high-level abstraction…

This is an important cue for learning and development professionals to further the discussion of how a diversity and inclusion agenda can be properly served in the workplace. The problem is that, as a great deal of research has repeatedly shown, diversity training doesn’t work.

We’ve just produced an advert for TV and social media designed to boost recruitment for Brighton & Hove Buses and Metrobus. I’m pleased to say that job applications have already significantly increased. 

In most large organisations there is a problem that seem impervious to everything you throw at it. Training and mandating, workshops and awareness campaigns don’t make a dent. These problems usually boil down to one thing – behaviour.

I make video for learning and I specialise in drama. When people think of training films, it’s not what they think of when we say “Netflix”. After a lifetime in the sector, during the lockdown, I took a hard look at video drama in learning to work out how we can improve things.

I had the rare opportunity to direct a short promotional film for Fairlight School in Brighton – where my two children attend. It was an unpaid piece of work which was a treat because it took off the usual pressure of corporate deadlines. Also, we aim to do at least one project for a local community organisation in Brighton, where Nice is based, each year.

Drama doesn’t tell people what to do, but it can stimulate them to think deeply about a problem.  If you can create a safe space around that experience, discussion and sometimes solutions can arise.

Pitching for major L&D contracts that are centred around video drama is highly competitive, so there’s always a temptation to include some kind of gimmick in the basic design.  I like a gimmick as much as the next person, but sometimes a gimmick can work against the functionality of the project. 

I’ve been reflecting upon how drama is the most adult of learning materials.  No, not “adult” in that sense, but a medium that only succeeds when we treat our learners as adults and address them as equals. 

There are two main ways that video drama works in learning.  The first is to do with learning theory and the second is to do with anthropology, and they work best when combined. 

Since publishing Watch & Learn I’ve been interviewed several times about its content on a variety of podcasts. Here is a list with the links.

In the summer of 2021 Nice Media produced a series of learning videos about dementia awareness for South Central Ambulance Service (SCAS).   

Most learning video is subject to Ebbinghaus’ famous forgetting curve. We forget 50% of anything we learn within an hour, and it keeps fading away.

One of the most rewarding jobs we worked on in 2019 was the development and production of video drama content for a MOOC about Safeguarding Adults for Health Education England. 

I make drama for learning, so I’ve made a video series taking popular TV drama and looking at it with an analytical eye