Roses and thorns.
A few weeks ago my wife heard a news clip about the Obama family ritual of talking about their “roses and thorns” at dinner. We thought it was a great idea and have been doing the same thing every night at the Ho dinner table too.
On the surface, it’s an innocent little ritual, but I’ve realised that it has begun to colour how I think about my day, my actions and myself.
- The knowledge that I will need to report both the highs and lows of my day has, on a number of occasions, prompted me to balance out a particularly thorny day by doing something that qualifies as a rose.
- In the process of talking about my day, I realise it’s important as a parent to try to find the hidden roses and to teach my kids to cherish all the good things in their days whether large or small.
- I now actively work to make sure I can present my day as having more roses than thorns. If I can’t affect what happens during the day I can affect my memory of that day which is probably just as important.
- All of the above are tangibly making me more positive and optimistic (although I’m pretty sure my colleagues around the ZJ table will disagree). In fact, I think it’s difficult to participate in this ritual without that happening.
All of this make roses and thorns an incredibly powerful idea for me. It’s not an exaggeration to say that it’s shaping my behaviour and my values. So what’s the learning marketers can take from this?
I’ll leave rituals aside for now as their relvance to brands has been covered at length in wide variety of places. But dissecting roses and thorns leaves me with a small set of dynamics at work in this specific example that might lend themselves to being generalised across other uses.
There may be other ways to model this, but for me roses and thorns has 4 different things at work which all add up to its power.
- It is a simple framework for organising information or data
- I am encouraged to measure my day against this framework
- There is complete transparency to how I’m doing within my family
- There is a reporting event built into every day that makes it always top of mind
It seems to me that these are principles that could be applied to a number of situations or problems. Additionally, many of these are things that technology is great at automating. Anyone got any thoughts or examples of this happening already?