The Odyssey and Layoffs and AI...Oh My!
A decision to tell a story the way you know serves your message best does not alienate. It sanctifies the ones who get it.
If we take sanctify out of its religious context, it simply means to be set apart for a particular purpose.
This is how the best storytellers remember and engage with their audience. They see them as particular, distinguished, even holy.
Christopher Nolan gets it.
He's had my heart like mac and cheese and yams since the Batman trilogy. It's always been clear from his movies that he doesn't play about three things: his art, his people, and his message.
His decision to film The Odyssey in 70MM IMAX has so many lessons in it for communications professionals and brands looking to get serious about talking to their audience, but I'll leave you with one.
When you choose to tell a story in the way you know serves your message best, you're making a strategic decision. And every strategic decision communicates something about who you believe your audience is.
That's where I fear organizations are missing the plot, again.
Visa just laid off 2,600 people, a small reflection of the layoffs that have been happening over the past two years. Some tech companies are reducing human resources to fund the development of AI models and systems, others are cutting jobs because they believe AI can now do what humans have been doing for centuries—like write epic poems that travel across time and space.
Right…anyway…
Organizations keep proving they haven’t learned the lesson.
We saw this once before when the DEI landscape shifted due to government pressure and the cutbacks and language reworks and stripping of titles and programs happened, and we saw where it landed major companies with an audience that was once faithful to them.
Yet, we’re here again.
If your instinct is always to replace, outsource, or invalidate the very people who create your organization's value, don't be surprised. Other humans, the humans who are supposed to be supporting, contributing to, and buying into and from your organization, will notice. And they will retract.
This isn't about AI.
It's about choices.
The choices you allow your organization to make contribute to or hinder its ability to tell its best story for the audience that matters.
That's what strategic communications is—choices with reasoning.
I don't believe the general population knows, knew, or cares that Christopher Nolan didn't use AI to make The Odyssey. They went and sold out IMAX theaters because they trust him, his art, his people, and his message.
But, I can guarantee if he woke up one day and decided to use an AI-generated Matt Damon, there would be outrage.
The Odyssey itself is a perfect example of strategic communication at its best. It was originally told through oral tradition. Oral stories connected communities, provided entertainment, and kept history. They were for, understood by, and shared among a certain group of people. When Homer wrote it down, while it broadened the group of people who accessed it, it still, for centuries, has captured the attention of (whether by force in school or by choice) a specific group of people, an audience, who reads, critiques, loves, supports, and expands on the work.
That's what your audience should be doing for your organization.
Not because you've reached everyone.
Because you've been clear enough, consistent enough, and courageous enough in your choices that the right people continue telling your story, forever.
The Easy Diagnostic shows you which one it is: eleven questions, two minutes, one honest read on whether your story is clear enough for the right people to keep telling it.
