Thought Leader Forum
September 2003
The New Story-Makers: Power, Influence and Authenticity in a Media-Dominated World
The Leadership Lab at The Banff Centre hosted a Thought Leader Forum to explore the use of artistic processes on the topic of leading within a heavily saturated media environment. This three and a half day forum used voice and vocal methods to explore a leader’s ability to influence through story-making and story-telling. The issues of authenticity and the use of power, as they are practiced under heavy media influence and public expectation, were explored.
Media channels provide the conduit for the messages of individual leaders and their regimes, whether political, social, or economic. Due to the nature of any specific medium, messages are carefully crafted to best utilize that medium’s potential for distribution and impact. The specific characteristics of each medium demand close attention. Leaders must adjust their communication to meet the needs of the medium. Television can evoke the emotions, radio the imagination, newspapers the curiosity, books the reflective capacity, and the internet the urge to explore.
The topic of "spin" was one of the highlights of the Forum. Ira Basen, CBC radio producer, is currently researching a new book that traces the development of the Public Relations (PR) industry. He generated a great deal of discussion around the apparent collusion of the media and the PR arms of politics and business. Authenticity often takes a seat in the back of the bus when media savvy executives and politicians are interviewed or when the media choose to take a single narrow perspective on a story. Eric McLuhan discussed the ever-growing "sloganization" of the popular media. The progressive reduction over the past 20 years of sentence length, paragraph length, and vocabulary levels has reduced most messages to slogans that contain little of the complexity of an issue or position. Sloganized language appeals to the media, the public’s attention span, and the spin doctors.
These trends leave the public with sparse stories at a time when we need the complete picture and at a time when we need real authenticity from our leaders. Rich, authentic stories have power and influence and those who can create these stories have the potential to have great impact. The Forum focused on the circumstances in which rich personal stories could emerge and be told. The choice of artistic process was that of voice because our voice is an intensely intimate part of who we are and often the most powerful stories are told through voice. The voice can be supported and it can be suppressed or ignored. Participants discovered that vocal processes draw out the authentic self, create the basis for expression, and provide a foundation for honesty, trust, and influence. Through exercising their own voices, participants explored their own stories and were moved to create and express them.
A number of questions were explored but left unanswered. To what extent does the medium influence the story-making process? How authentic is the story, and the leader, when the influence of the medium is factored into the story-making? How do effective leaders use the media to exercise power and influence when required? To what extent does the leader make the story and to what extent does the medium? Vocal practitioners Brian Tate, composer, pianist, percussionist, and vocalist; Christopher von Baeyer, Ariel Group, actor, educator and consultant; Dale Genge, head of voice, Langara College; Ian Raffel, speech specialist, Langara College, acted as facilitators for the three and a half day experience. They were joined by Ira Basen, executive producer at CBC Radio One; Don Hill, CBC moderator "Wild Rose Country"; and Eric McLuhan, media author as Thought Leaders. Other participants included business executives, artists, faculty, and alumni.
Français
Español
Deutsch
