Must. Be. AWESOME!!!

A couple months ago, I told y’all about submitting a proposal to the Gov 2.0 Expo occurring in May. It is with glad jazz hands that I can tell you my proposal, “Instituting a Culture of AWESOME in Government,” was accepted by the Expo committee! I’m now listed as a speaker alongside some pretty frickin’ AWESOME company (like Gary V!).

As promised, I’m going to blog about this experience. It’s really the first time I’ve ever had the chance to analyze and put forth a case that’s totally unique (at least in my opinion), so I’m really excited about the opportunity. I am deep into collecting data for the case study, and one method I’m using to do this has been reaching out to former members of the IED Task Force Tech Team for stories, pictures, and other info that may help my analysis. It’s been a BLAST reconnecting with these guys. We had a lot of fun back in the Tech Team days, which is one cornerstone of that experience’s AWESOMEness.

I have gotten a crap-ton of fun stuff so far, a lot of which I hope makes it into the final preso. But to give you a tease, here is the first logo one of our Tech Team brethren, Shane Gilmore, cooked up back when we first went joint.

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I recently spoke at TWTRCON DC about how inserting a little AWESOME into your daily activities will reap large rewards in your life, be it personal or professional. I posit that by adhering to the tried and true K.I.S.S. Principle – “Keep It Simple, Stupid” – you’re actually defeating a creative, innovative urge that leads to all things AWESOME. Worse, by continually sticking to the K.I.S.S. Principle, you may actually do long term damage to your inherent ability to recognize and generate awesomeness on your own. This is the first chat in what I hope is a long conversation about raising everyone’s game in modern communication.

A classic case of AWESOME simplicity.

I am not by any means arguing that simplicity is a bad thing and should be shunned. Simplicity in communication is critical to the imparting of ideas and concepts to audiences small and large. However, I want you to think about this in terms of how keeping it simple can be dangerous if you’re a creative type (or want to be). For that, let me draw upon a sad example from my time working in the Pentagon.

One of the first things you get told when you go to work for any Defense Department organization – be it military or civilian service or contractor – is that you need to learn how to communicate briefly and succinctly. This is important because the Pentagon, like all military bases and commands, runs on a steady stream of documentation, policy, and other “paper” that constitutes the general “work” of the Department. General officers are often required to make several decisions a day, requiring extensive coordination with multiple offices.

So the “staff memo” has become something of a regular item seen in the hands of many poor staff officers running about the Byzantine five-walled maze. While these memos often contain the complete policy or document that requires coordination and decision, the important piece to each one is its cover sheet or executive summary. “EXSUMs” are no more than one page and summarize the content of the documents in bulletized form and clearly note what action is required of the recipient.

Because of these summaries, the main documents they summarize often never get read. So staff officers value the skill of being able to boil the component information down to a few bullets one one sheet of paper. (You all see this a lot on government PowerPoint slides, which constitute absolute abortions of the presentation medium.)

Sounds reasonable, right? Why shouldn’t we communicate so concisely between all these hundreds of thousands of government employees?

Here’s why: Ask any one of those staff officers to author a white paper on their own on any topic of interest, and you will see how massively boring their compositions are.

After a fraction of a career of having the K.I.S.S. Principle drilled into your head, it’s a mammoth task to indulge in original thinking much less creative communication. This causes a state of document fatigue where everything you produce looks similar, sounds similar, adheres to the same style, ad infinitum. The more you do it, the harder a habit it is to break.

This vicious circle destroys the creative impetus to deliver AWESOME content. Even the very word “keep” restricts one to certain, specific actions. While this may help in homogenizing a Defense Department and a government that depends on brevity to survive, I submit to you that it also prevents those same organizations from improving their methods of work and evolving to a modern, 21st century degree of communication and interaction.

Instead of keeping it simple, I invite you to make it AWESOME.

Here are a couple suggestions on doing just that:

• Next time you see a tweet from someone in your network referring to any publication longer than an article or blog post, print it out and read it away from the computer.
• For every business or nonfiction book you read, commit to reading two works of fiction. A book of short stories by your favorite author is a great way to start.
• Instead of writing a summary for someone, go talk to them in person about it. Extra points: bring a couple of photos of the subject with you for visualization.
• Do something risky with your work. Insert a LOLcat pic into that white paper you’re producing. Draw a cartoon, even if you’re not an artist. Tell a joke. Fart.

Simple and AWESOME do not have to be mutually exclusive. Some of the best examples of AWESOME are pretty short and sweet (see the “Dick in the Box” T-shirt design above). Brevity will naturally enable your content to be absorbed more quickly by more people, especially when disseminating via social media tools. As you can see from the examples above, being creative can be as easy as regurgitating someone else’s content from the Web (thanks, socialism!). The tricky part to that is enabling your creativity in such a way that its awesomeness flows out and has the same effect when it’s edited, summarized, abrogated, or otherwise cut down.

I believe that by keeping it simple, you’re making it harder to absorb and produce AWESOME content, no matter the source. I understand that this idea of mine may seem controversial or even mad in this travel-sized world that social media has enabled around us. The authors of Made to Stick, one of my favorite books on creativity, even argue that simplicity is paramount to the permanence of great ideas. I also recognize that I’ve applied some sweeping generalizations using specific examples in this post.

So tell me what YOU think. What are some examples of this that YOU’VE experienced? Where have I gone wrong? Do you have some better ideas to share?

Light up the comments section on this one, folks. I will give out a special prize to the most passionate response to this post I see.

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Monday, October 5th, I attended an event at George Washington University billed as “New Approaches to U.S. Global Outreach: Smart Power on the Front Lines of Public Diplomacy (PD) and Strategic Communication (SC).” A mouthful of whaaaaaat?

The point of said “event” was to purportedly discuss strategic and tactical issues involved in U.S. government communication. Quite a few familiar and some new faces were on the panels, to include Rosa Brooks from DOD’s Policy shop, Daniel Sreebny from the State Department’s Global Strategic Engagement Center (GSEC), public diplomacy scholar Kristin Lord, some old guy from SOCOM’s Strategic Communication Directorate, and a Congressional lawyer that made me want to commit seppuku on the spot.

A bunch of other PD bloggers are going to scholarly and academically get into the nuts and bolts of this discussion, and the conversation will turn back to how sorry we all are that there’s no strategic leadership for PD/SC, how no one can agree on who owns what, how no one cares, blah blah blah.

I, on the other hand, want to know why this community is purposely avoiding AWESOME.

We’ve been having this debate about the delineations and roles/responsibilities of PD, SC, military information support, and all the other information disciplines for years. Like all good alcoholics, we know we have a problem… we just aren’t going to stop drinking because we’re such assholes. We always end up asking the same questions, arriving at a bunch of solutions, but then drop the ball at implementation. Oh sure, there are reams of reports out there analyzing specific problems with the USG’s communication apparatus… but to paraphrase Dr. Bruce Gregory, no one seems to want to actually LEAD this community and establish a SOLID BUSINESS PLAN for implementing reform.

I'm here for yer publik diplomasees.

So what ends happening? Everybody putters about like a mass of retarded lemmings, hanging on the charity of others, hoping someone else will figure things out and give their lives meaning. Meanwhile, it’s Clown Shoes Day every day on the world stage, and the United States is Ronald McDonald.

The tragedy is that this is not even LAME. It’s just… mediocre. None of these people is purposely LAME. Some are weak, some assholish or crapulous. But ultimately, the community is just… meh.

It’s just a community that shows up. Do they care? Sure. Will they do anything about it? Not… really.

Well, wait, doesn’t it count that we’re talking about the issue? Sure. But we’ve been talking for YEARS. People have been railing against the State Department’s mistreatment of the public diplomacy field since the U.S. Information Agency was forcibly integrated into the department in 1999.

The point is, NO ONE’S DOING SHIT ABOUT IT.

The lawyer at the panel basically defended Congress’ abdication of responsibility for fixing the interagency legislation, oversight and budgetary authority. The SOCOM guy complained about antiquated laws. Sreebny said he was new on the job. The refrain was the same: “It’s too HARD.”

Well, you know what, taxpayer-paid-for govvies? THAT SUCKS.

We do not need more administrators managing the status quo. We do not need more lawyers to find new loopholes in the problems. We do not need more apologists for this bullshittery.

We need LEADERSHIP. Moreso, we need AWESOME LEADERSHIP. If this administration is truly about change, then get off your goddamn asses and FIX IT.

Stop the complaining. Stop the beauracratizing. Stop the crack-addled fantasies that this will all be taken care of by someone else.

If you claim to be a public diplomat, a strategic communicator, a PSYOPper, a Foreign Service officer, a counselor, a scholar, a believer… if you call yourself anything that tracks back to this venerable profession then get involved. I, and many of my fellow taxpayers, are tired of you bitching about how screwed up the communication disciplines are. FIX IT!

Defy mediocrity. BE AWESOME.

[Joker pic H/T to Ben @ LikeCool.com.]

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