I watched the film A Few Good Men recently.
[GenZplainer: it’s a 1980’s Tom Cruise film in which he plays Daniel Kaffee, a military lawyer tasked with convicting the head of the US Marine Corps, played by an exceptionally angry Jack Nicholson.]It’s famous for the moment at the end of the film where Cruise successfully winds Colonel Nathan R. Jessup into his epic speech beginning “You can’t handle the truth.”
This speech was actually the reason we watched the film because my 13 year old son was given it as a piece to perform in a drama exam.
It’s punchy.
But it’s not the thing which I noticed watching it this time round.
This time, I noticed the scene where Cruise has lost his “thinking bat.”
(Sub-plot, he likes baseball, and is often seen with bat in hand, wandering around swinging-and-thinking to help him decipher problems.)
Anyway, he’s lost his bat, and as soon as he finds it he stops. Inspired. And rushes out saying “I’m going to the office.”
He really does think better with that bat.
We cut to Cruise in the office, pawing through paper coming off a printer, looking for the crucial bit of evidence he’s trying to find.
In the film, the cut from Kaffee’s flat to the office and the printer takes a nano-second.
But in real life he’d have had to go to the office to use the printer.
And that’s what struck me.
We’d never need to do that today. We’d just open up a laptop and start browsing. Googling. ChatGPTing. Whatever.
Zero pause. Just straight to it.
But Cruise had to go to the office to use the printer.
He had to get in the car.
He had to drive, say, 20 minutes.
He had to walk from the parking lot to the office, turn on the lights, fire up the printer.
And then he could begin.
What happened in that time, between his flat and the office and the printer?
What was he thinking about on that car journey?
How much clarity he got from being forced into slowing down and thinking?
Maybe in that moment he came up with the formula to wrap Colonel Jessup into admitting that he had ordered the Code Red, which he was in the witness stand for… “You’re God damn right I did!”
Maybe he just stuck the radio on and ended up singing “Free Falling” like he does in Jerry Maguire.
In any case, he did what we wouldn’t be able to do today.
He was forced to slow down. He wouldn’t have stopped thinking, but he would have been forced into a more contemplative mode and less actively thumping on the keyboard.
Today, he would have swept aside the cold pizza on the table, opened up his laptop on the table, and started pounding.
Why did this random moment in an otherwise epic film strike a chord?
Because it’s a great example of why we need to be in better control of the impact our revolutionary surroundings and technology is having on our evolutionary brains.
The world, information, entertainment, messages, notifications… they all move so fast today, and we’re all forced into trying to keep up.
And in trying to keep up, we’re overloading our brains with forced-action rather than forced-pause.
The emails, the meetings, the actions, the status, the KPIS… they’re all important but they’re also all consuming.
For Brand Strategy this is especially important because it just can’t be done as fast as the world would like it to be done.
Understanding how you’re going to use customer insight to build your brand in such a way that it deliver competitive advantage?
That’s just too big a job to do “quick and dirty.”
It takes absorption in information about customer’s lives and distillation into insight.
It means making difficult choices about where businesses need to focus time and resources.
It involves sacrificing superfluous initiatives, energy and distractions in favour of clarity.
And none of that happens fast.
You can’t just open your laptop and find it, you need to go to the office and turn on the printer.
It takes debate and disagreement and resolution.
It takes face to face action and long pregnant pauses.
It happens in front of screens as well as behind the eyelids.
And yes, AI and technology help. A bit.
But there’s a whole load of Human Intelligence – and interaction – which is actually more important and it takes time to do it properly.
When we talk about how we “Slow The F**k Down” with down, that’s what we mean.
That we apply the right sort of thinking at the right pace to do vital work brilliantly.
Because that’s what your brand needs. Indeed, it’s what it deserves.
That’s the truth.
If you can handle it.
