Gritty detail can be more engaging than the merely spectacular
Transcript of this video:
As I said in another of my videos, one of my guilty pleasures is Star Wars movies and TV shows, which admittedly are of very varying quality. Some are great and others definitely not so much.
But a new series “Andor” has really caught my attention. Quite a lot of the fans don’t seem to like it. They say it’s boring and moves far too slowly, but I’m really enjoying it because it’s kind of unhurried Star Wars.
So far, at least, there have been no lightsabres and no uses of the force. The characters are not painted in the grand good or evil terms of many conventional Star Wars things, they’re much more shades of gray.
And the empire is shown as this gritty, often rather petty, bureaucracy where many of its characters are really fixated on whether they’re gonna get a minor promotion or whether they’re keeping up with the Joneses, not with a kind of feigned servitude to a great emperor.
In fact, the idea of the emperor has barely made an appearance. And what I notice is that the dialogue, it catches my attention and it’s interesting, and little tiny interactions are very satisfying.
In a recent episode, one of the characters is fussing over his radio and says to his assistant something like, “Have you checked the such and such pack?” And she says back, “I don’t like seeing you nervous”, which I found really satisfying.
And it’s a little hard to say why, but I’ve said it to a few, I’ve said that line to a few people. And they’ve also had that same reaction of, “Oh, that’s a little unexpected.”
That kind of speaks to a subtext between the characters, it fleshes out both characters in a moment. And that kind of character building isn’t going on so much in conventional “Star Wars”.
And I think this is kind of a metaphor for, you know, my work in organizations where I think a lot of management writing is kind of lightsabre “Star Wars”.
It paints the world in terms of several simple steps and of alignment and a kind of a good versus evil, where we’re seeking power and leverage, you know, big lightsabre sweeps.
Whereas I think the real world is more like “Andor”, it’s made up of these minute rather characterful interactions with people, where the scenes are created moment by moment by the smaller gestures in interactions.
And it’s actually increasingly, in my work, I’m more and more fascinated by these small signals that people are giving each other. And I think it’s in those that organisations’ cultures are actually growing and developing.
And so when I talk about unhurried, I’m talking about a capacity to pay much more attention to the full richness of what’s going on in the moment, and seeing that as more of a key to the future development of a plan or an organisation, than grandiose lightsabre-wielding good-versus-evil speechmaking.
Photo by Michael Marais on Unsplash
