Limited Vision
28 Jan 09
LIMITED VISION
David Walker
Let us think about the archetypal middle-of-the-road New Zealand company for a few minutes- before it disappears. Let us call it NZ Limited.
This company has been doing quite well and has some traditional virtues. It makes good use of some natural materials, is pretty good at making things, understands technology pretty well. Even more than that, NZ Ltd is up to date in manufacturing processes, quality control, and even has an eye on sustainability.
But recently sales have started to slip because foreign competition has sneaked in and stolen away a big slice of both the home market and the export market. The realisation has dawned over a few years that all companies are competing in the global arena. We are all in the Olympic stadium now.
So NZ Ltd products are just not selling, and the company is slipping slowly, and inevitably down the gurgle. The top executives don't know what is happening. They are very puzzled by the turn of events.
To their minds, they are doing everything right. They work hard. The conventional criteria are met. Their products function. They have utility, they compare not too badly with the performance, price and features of competitors. Yet they are victims of a surge of imports. They do not know where to turn for the answer .
But the answer is simple. Sales are declining, because people don't like their products. They don't like their products because they're ugly. Plug ugly.
But that is half an explanation - you might ask “why are these products ugly?’
Again the answer is simple. They are ugly because the people at the top of the company are visual illiterates. They are financial wizards with fingers in the till, scientists with their noses in test tubes, chief executives in gumboots, geeks into microchips and second life, MDs in boilersuits, farmers with straw in their hair. Yes, there is a lot to be said for their practicality, skills, realism, and their willingness to get down in the numbers, microchips, or the local equivalent of pig-poo and sawdust. But they are all, I am afraid, rustic philistines who are out of their depth. Their businesses are impaired by their lack of visual capability.
This is part of a wider cultural problem in New Zealand. This is a young pioneering country. Your history goes back to breakfast time. If you have just got off the boat then you don’t care that much about what things look like. You put the animals behind a wire fence, whack up your farms and your shebangs as quickly as you can, from the nearest trees, and cheapest bits of flotsam lying on the beach. Why not ? What else is possible? Why have higher aspirations…like civilisation?
So the cultural legacy of the scavenger lives on. The towns and cities are gimcrack shantytowns pretending to be sophisticated. The extraordinary beauty of the countryside is ruined by a nasty little brick farmlets, corrugated sheds, shiny silos, and telegraph wires. Everything that nature gave you is wonderful ,while everything that follows on as human constructions is just as astonishing- in its brutality and in its unthinking ugliness - raw, naïve, cheap and counterfeit .
Because visual quality is not very well understood, then we seem to be quite content to put people at the tops of organisations, who have their eyes tight shut from birth. Visual illiterates rule OK.
Like nurses running our design schools , I am not kidding, like penny whistle players running a school of architecture or like a bricklayer running the orchestra.
Visual sensibility and musical ability are quite close together. They are similar in their type.But music is better understood than design. We know that the conductor of the orchestra has to be a musician of major capabilities. We know it would be a disaster ,an unthinkable conjunction, if the conductor was tone deaf.
Because visual quality does not register very much in the public arena at large, then this is seen as just fine, if not so dandy. We have an alignment of attitude. The blind leading the blind.
Does this matter much? Well, it matters a lot. It looks like a matter of economic life and death.
Look around the Olympic stadium at your competitors. There they all are with their gold medals- and OECD performance ranking. We have secured a place as near the bottom. Number 8 wire has taken us to number 19.
Look at those countries which are small and resource rich. They are totally visually literate- the medal winners par excellence. Norway Finland, Sweden even Ireland. Think of larger countries like the UK and Japan Italy. This is not just a matter of flags and logos and strong national identities but of rich understandings, skills in architecture, industrial products, design, packaging, branding, graphics, fashion- all those disciplines that we now put in the portmanteau basket of the creative industries.
How can we change? How can we raise our game to the level of other countries?
The starting in point is recognising the deficiency
This is difficult. Say you are colour blind. But you would not really know that. Your green, you assume, is just like the green of everyone else. But it is not.
If you are in a culture which half blind, by which I mean not unseeing but visually illiterate in many dimensions, then the likelihood is that you will not know. You can not see it!
This means you operate in a world of shadows, black, white, grey, blurred, dark and hazy, just like everyone else around you. Unfortunately New Zealand ,despite its show of natural beauties, is a monochromatic culture- the anodyne ‘Pleasantville’ of global stop overs.
So in the business arena, we do not seem to care much if the chief executives are half-blind, blinkered Philistines. They seem proud of it.
You know the problem. It is a matter of belief and the will to change. There are none so blind as those that WILL not see
Thankfully we're not all blind in NZ. And as you know in the kingdom of the blind a one eyed man is king
Can a CEO and his managers be trained up to some basic visual capability? Can an organisation be made visually literate?
Yes, we can change this . But it is a long hard process.
What we do here in the next few months is important. Yes This is an evangelical agenda for changing the culture from the ( visually) illiterate to the ( visually) adroit and subtle – from stupidity to sensitivity. The starting point is to accept that the visual is much more important than the verbal: synthesis is more important than analysis; and the whole unity is much more than the sum of the parts.
We can be optimistic if we look into deep history and into other domains, raise our sights, and extend our knowledge. See more. See further.
dw
