Ogilvy as Philosopher
Design, and organisational design
A piece of doggerel from David Ogilvy’s autobiography
When the client moans and sighs
Make his logo twice the size
If he should still prove refractory
Show a picture of the factory
Only in the gravest cases
Should you show the clients’ faces
Ogilvy glosses this by saying “Making the logo twice the size is often a good thing to do, because most advertisements are deficient in brand identification. Showing the clients’ faces is also a better stratagem than it may sound, because the public is more interested in personalities than in corporations […] But it is never wise to show a picture of the factory – unless the factory is for sale”.
His book, “Confessions of an Advertising Man” is actually very good. There’s a lot of very general advice in there about business and leadership, as well as technical stuff about advertising, some of it quite dated and some less so.
I was jogged to remember this section by seeing a lot of British political advertising this week, for which the phrase “deficient in brand identification” seemed very apt. It’s quite noticeable that there are some themes where all political parties love to cover everything with national flags, and others where not only is there hardly a flag in sight, but the actual colour scheme goes all different and even the party logo disappears. It’s not hard to surmise that at some level the graphic design is expressing the subconscious mind; these are the policies that nobody really feels proud of.
Without wanting to get all “graphic design is my passion”, I always think it’s important to take designers seriously, and there’s one big reason for that. Graphic designers are more or less the only people left in the modern industrial economy who ask questions like “What’s the purpose of this organisation? What’s the identity of this brand? What’s the meaning of what you’re doing? What are your values?” and expect to get answers.
By which I mean specific answers. You can’t say things like “maximise shareholder value” or “promote excellence in an inclusive environment” to the person with the coloured pencils and expect to get something good back – you have to actually sit down with them and communicate what you’re actually trying to do.
Which matters. One of the key insights – for me, the single most important thing – in the work of Stafford Beer (the “father of management cybernetics”, the application of information theory to human organisations) is that the highest-level function of a decision making system is the one he occasionally called the function of “philosophy”.
In the technical language of management cybernetics, this is meant to keep a lot of its ordinary language meaning of “purpose and value system”. But the role of this function in his model of a self organising system is that of balancing future and present.
Basically, the idea is that the day-to-day operations of any organisation have a certain amount of chaos to deal with arising from things going on here and now, and a certain amount of capability to adapt to them. Simultaneously, the management function of the organisation has a certain amount of ability to perceive how the environment is changing, and a certain amount of ability to plan responses to it.
Through some process or other, these things have to be brought into balance; the system needs to decide how much it is going to adapt itself and how much external information it is going to react to. (This can be an actual process, or an implicit one; Stafford Beer refers to ignorance as “the information processing system of last resort”).
If you have a system that determines how you change what you do in response to your environment, and how you make plans for the future, then that system is your “philosophy” or “values”, whatever it says on your website.
If there was never any real articulation of how the system was going to make those high-level choices, then either the system will lose the ability to manage information from the environment (and fall apart, as a system), or it will evolve some sort of implicit balancing mechanism as a bargain between its parts.
And that bargain might be very different from what any individual working in the system might want.
Consequently, the questions asked by the graphic designers aren’t just about getting a logo and some adverts that don’t look like shit. The ability to give truthful answers to the questions they ask is absolutely fundamental to organisational viability.