Beware Strategic Myopia: An Incident in Romford Town Centre

Paul Cezanne - Sorrow. 1867

One Saturday afternoon I found myself in Romford Town Centre in floods of tears.  

It was somewhere between Downtown Records and the municipal fountain. I was rubbing my eyes, dabbing my nose, sobbing and snivelling.

Standing nearby, Andy declared in a loud voice: 

‘I’ve told you: it’s over. Why can’t you deal with it?‘

 I could sense that we two teenagers were attracting attention from passers-by. I was hot and bothered and embarrassed.

I continued to weep.

‘Just pull yourself together, Jim. We can’t go on like this. It’s over!’

This story is not as it seems.  

I had recently acquired my first set of gas-permeable contact lenses, and was struggling to get used to them. The slightest speck of dust caused intense irritation.

 It was Andy’s idea of a joke. And to be fair it was quite funny.

It’s no surprise perhaps that research by ophthalmologists shows that our constant screen time is radically changing our eyes. (Adam Popescu, The Guardian, 14 Nov 2021)
 
The human eye is supposed to stop growing after our teens, just like the rest of our bodies. But our endless messaging, speaking on conference calls, reading and writing emails - what experts call ‘near work’ - strains our optic organs. We blink less and our lenses shift, and in time this leads to the elongation of our eyeballs. We then suffer myopia and the gradual loss of the eyes’ ability to focus.

‘The shape of the eye is round like a basketball. When an eye becomes near-sighted, myopic, the eye is longer, like a grape or olive.’
Dr Eric Chow, Miami optometrist

Near-sightedness affects half of young adults in the US, twice as many as 50 years ago, and over 40% of the population.

To address this depressing phenomenon, we are encouraged to take breaks, blink and lubricate; to spend more time outdoors; to embrace the 20-20-20 model.

‘Every 20 minutes, look at a distance 20 feet away, for 20 seconds.’
Dr Luxme Hariharan, Nicklaus Children’s Hospital, Miami

Some experts have observed that our ancestors spent more time staring at the horizon, scanning the distant panorama for potential risks and rewards. This induced a state of calm when there was nothing going on; and a state of intense focus when there was a threat or opportunity. They suggest that expanding our peripheral vision – ‘horizon gazing’ - may equip us to better concentrate and cope with stress.   

You could argue that excessive screen time does not just cause physical short-sightedness and mental stress. For Planners it also produces Strategic Myopia: reliance on the same widely published data; concentration on the same narrow particulars of the problem; convergence on the same conventional solutions.

'Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people.'
Eleanor Roosevelt (after Henry Thomas Buckle)

We should get out more. We need to breathe fresh strategic air; to take in new cultural stimulus; to observe contextual social change. We need to think more broadly; to plan more deeply; to raise our eyes to the horizon. Because the story is not always as it seems.

As the artist Vee Talbott suggests in Tennessee Williams' ‘Orpheus Descending’:

'Appearances are misleading, nothing is what it looks like to the eyes. You got to have vision to see!’


'It's over.
It's over.
It's over.
Summer came and passed away,
Hardly seemed to last a day.
But it's over, and what can I do?
Music playing in the air,
Silence on a darkened stair
'Cause it's over, and what can I do?’
ELO, ‘It’s Over’ (J Lynne)

No. 488

‘You Got to Have Vision to See’: Tennessee Williams and The Fugitive Kind

‘This country used to be wild, the men and women were wild and there was a wild sort of sweetness in their hearts, for each other. But now it’s sick with neon, it’s broken out sick with neon, like most other places.’
Carol Cutrere, ‘Orpheus Descending’

I recently saw a fine production of Tennessee Williams’ ‘Orpheus Descending’ (The Menier Chocolate Factory, London). This 1957 play meant a good deal to Williams. It was a re-write of his 1940 piece, ‘Battle of Angels,’ which was his first work to be given a professional production. He also adapted it into the 1959 movie ‘The Fugitive Kind’, starring Marlon Brando, Anna Magnani and Joanne Woodward. (Brando’s performance earned him the first million-dollar contract for a single film.)

‘Orpheus Descending’ is a hot Southern stew of ‘memories and the loneliness of them’; of isolated strangers yearning for intimacy in a world of prejudice and bigotry. 

’Nobody ever gets to know no body! We’re all of us sentenced to solitary confinement inside our own skins, for life!’

Lady Torrance runs a small-town dry goods store and she busies herself attending to her narrow-minded, gossiping customers. Her tyrannical husband lies upstairs, unloved and dying. The local free-spirit, Carol Cutrere, who ‘has an odd, fugitive beauty,’ arrives to ruffle some feathers.

‘I’m an exhibitionist! I want to be noticed, seen, heard, felt! I want them to know I’m alive!’

Carol takes a shine to Val Xavier, a drifter who has recently arrived in town with little more than a snakeskin jacket and a guitar to his name.

‘I’d love to hold something the way you hold your guitar, that’s how I’d love to hold something, with such - tender protection!’

But Val has other things on his mind. Vowing to put the troubadour life behind him, he pitches for a job as Lady’s store clerk. Lady is initially sceptical.

Val: ‘I got nowhere to go.’
Lady: ‘Well, everyone’s got a problem and that’s yours.’

Gradually, however, Val charms Lady into giving him a chance. He’s a talkative, sensitive, self-assured young man, with a philosophical nature.

‘You know they’s a kind of bird that don’t have legs so it can’t light on nothing, but has to stay all its life on its wings in the sky?... They sleep on the wind and never light on this earth but one time when they die… I’d like to be one of those birds; they’s lots of people would like to be one of those birds and never be – corrupted!’

‘Orpheus Descending’ is a celebration of birds that can’t settle, that stay on the wing, cherishing their freedom; a celebration of misfits and malcontents, oddballs and outsiders; of artists and activists, musicians and immigrants; of ‘the ‘fugitive kind’.

In one scene, eccentric local artist, Vee Talbott, a woman of a nervous disposition, endeavors to explain to Val her impressionistic style of painting.

‘I paint a thing how I feel it instead of always the way it actually is. Appearances are misleading, nothing is what it looks like to the eyes. You got to have – vision – to see!’

This thought resonated with me. 

Professionally I was raised to follow the discipline of Vision, Strategy and Tactics: we should always set out with a clear, compelling Vision; Vision drives Strategy; Strategy drives Tactics; and everything else is just a distraction.

However, there’s something about the contemporary discourse that works against this approach. Whether one considers the field of politics or commerce, one cannot help noticing the absence of guiding Visions. Of course, a Vision Statement may exist on a website somewhere, in a Manifesto or Company Report perhaps, or in an arcane deck of charts. But rarely nowadays do you see clear evidence of Vision driving everyday behaviour and beliefs. 

We spend most of our time reacting to events and responding to circumstance. We duck and dive, nip and tuck. We get caught up in the petty and prosaic, the incidental and insignificant. The competitive storm, the relentless media scrutiny, the headlong tilt towards change; the urgency of now, the pressing need for immediate opinion and instant action – they all combine to drag the debate ineluctably down into Tactics. 

We may feel as though we’re actively engaged and urgently busy, as we expertly navigate our daily trials and tribulations. But as Vee Talbott knew, if we have no Vision, we just can’t see.

In the course of ‘Orpheus Descending’ the forces of small-town conservatism close in on Val. Inevitable really. And at the end of the play a mournful Carol is left in possession of his snakeskin jacket.

‘Wild things leave skins behind them, they leave clean skins and teeth and white bones behind them, and these are the tokens passed from one to another, so that the fugitive kind can always follow their kind.’

'But what I'd like to know
Is could a place like this exist so beautiful,
Or do we have to find our wings and fly away
To the vision in our mind?’

Stevie Wonder, ‘Visions’ (M Graves / L J Fiagbe)

No. 245

‘Truth In the Pleasant Disguise of Illusion’: Do We Properly Appreciate the Power of the Media at Our Disposal?

‘Time is the longest distance between two places.’

There’s a splendid production of Tennessee Williams’ The Glass Menagerie currently running at the Duke of York’s Theatre in London (until 29 April).

We’re in a Depression-era Saint Louis tenement. Amanda Wingfield, a former ‘southern belle,’ is struggling to pay the rent and worried what will become of her angst-ridden, artistic son, and her shy, solitary daughter.

‘The future becomes the present, the present the past, and the past turns into everlasting regret if you don’t plan for it.’

Wingfield pleads with her son to bring a ‘gentleman caller’ back to the house – someone who might possibly represent a suitor for his sister. The fragile girl meanwhile seeks solace in a world of decorative figurines, the glass menagerie of the play’s title.

‘How beautiful it is and how easily it can be broken.’

The Glass Menagerie is a delicate, sensitive meditation on the challenges facing the awkward and the outside; the responsibilities, deceptions and regrets of family life; the yearning to break free.

In his production notes, Williams describes the work as ‘a memory play’ and at the beginning of Scene One the artistic son explains to the audience that what we are about to see is a distillation of his own recollection of events.

‘Yes, I have tricks in my pocket, I have things up my sleeve. But I am the opposite of a stage magician. He gives you illusion that has the appearance of truth. I give you truth in the pleasant disguise of illusion. To begin with I turn back time…’

Williams seems to be declaring that he is more than just a storyteller - he is a master of the theatrical medium, a manipulator of time, a truthful illusionist. This confident, context-setting sequence reminded me of the Prologue of Henry V, in which Shakespeare invites the audience to conjure up, on the simple stage before them, the muddy battlefields of France.

‘Can this cockpit hold
The vasty fields of France? Or may we cram
Within this wooden O the very casques
That did affright the air at Agincourt?’

I’m sure the most talented writers and artists are well aware of the imaginative leaps that their audience can bring to a creative encounter. And they’re conscious of the special powers of their chosen medium to ignite that imagination.

It has often been observed, for example, that the best directors treat film as a time machine – a means of compressing and extending time; of reordering and replaying it. Think of 2001: A Space Odyssey and how Kubrik takes us from the first man to the space age in one matchless match-cut; or consider the elegant synchronicity of the baptism scene in Coppola’s The Godfather. Film directors also consciously manipulate our understanding of space. With close-ups and long-shots, different points of view and perspectives, they expand and contract our perception of things. In the 1920s the women of the world fell in love with Rudolph Valentino because of the dramatic impact, in magnified close-up on the big screen, of those elegant lips, those sensitive eyes, that pomaded hair.

I wonder, do we in the field of marketing and communication too often treat media like an everyday commodity? Do we just think of it as a space to be filled, content to be generated, ratings to be registered? Do we properly appreciate the power of the tools at our disposal? Do we understand that the moving image can be a time machine; the fixed image can explore space and perspective; the printed and spoken text can conjure up hopes, dreams, recollections and regrets?

Shouldn’t we, like Williams, be seeking to deliver ‘truth in the pleasant disguise of illusion?’ For if we have no passion for the medium, how can we expect to inspire passion in our audience?

 No. 120