Appreciating subtlety.
As a companion piece to my post on a new era of pragmatism, it feels that we are moving from a period of big, dramatic statements towards an era of modulated or qualified statements. We are moving to an era where subtlety rather than statements are in vogue.
An example is the debate that’s taken place around the validity of bottom-up versus top-down approaches. These two philosophies were first famously framed in a 1997 paper titled The cathedral and the bazaar by Eric Raymond. This paper described two different methods to software development, top-down, centralised (the traditional model) and bottom up (open-source).
In 2004 a social (non-software) version of the bottom-up concept was presented in James Surowiecki’s book: The wisdom of the crowds. For a while, this theory was everyone’s darling but then a few years ago we started to hear more dissent – most notably from Andrew Keen in his book The cult of the amateur.
Lately, however, people like Kevin Kelly have been talking about a hybrid approach: a mixture of bottom-up and top-down approaches.
It feels to me that I am seeing this type of pragmatism find favour over the drama of black or white statements more and more often. I am struck by this most vividly in the way Barack Obama presents himself. Having listened to him speak and having watched his campaign closely over the past few months, the word that keeps coming up for me is “reasoned.”
Clearly he’s incredibly inspiring, but it’s not because he’s making huge promises or making dramatic statements or flourishes. I think his ability to inspire comes more from the confidence he instills. He’s got a good head on his shoulders, he’s calm and collected under fire and he says things in a straight way that make sense. In a theatre of hyperbole and rhetoric, he stands out because he’s got more subtlety.
I think this is a lesson most marketing could learn a thing or two from.