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When the TV series “24″ premiered in November 2001, it gave us something no television drama had dared to do before: events unfolding in real time. If the main character, Jack Bauer, was stuck at a traffic light, all we saw Jack Bauer do for the next 70 seconds is wait for the light to change, while other plot stuff happened to other people. (Presumably having things happen to other people was what the viewer was focusing on when Jack was going to the bathroom, as well.) When we were watching three minutes of commercials, three minutes’ worth of events had taken place in the story.
It was revolutionary because we’ve all become so used to getting the highlights.
In entertainment, we TiVo shows and watch them later; sports networks take a 4-hour baseball game and condense it to a 30-minute highlight package that runs at midnight; on the weekend, radio stations run pre-recorded “best of” shows that consist of the morning show’s brightest moments from the past week.
In our daily lives, we sit down to dinner with our spouses and children and ask, “How was your day?”
In business, it’s common for upper management to come in from head office for a quarterly review, where they sit down with spreadsheets and reports and hand down policy from on high.
Trouble is, the world doesn’t work that way.
Jack Bauer reminded us that stuff takes time.
When I was in radio, I would walk into one particular boss’ office and ask if they had heard a particular thing we had done. More often than not, they would say “I must have missed that one, let me go listen to it on the logger tape.” (The logger is a government-mandated recording of what a station airs, 24/7, so that there’s ‘smoking gun’ of any potentially offensive content.)
But that’s not how it works.
I’d even sit down with a consultant who went through a version of the logger that had all the music and commercials edited out, and who could listen to all the talking in a 4-hour show in less than half an hour, then make comments and criticisms.
A nice luxury, to be sure, and a great time-saver. Except that it destroys any semblance of flow or context, completely removes the person from the actual experience of listening to a show, and guarantees that the person listening will offer perspective as a critic instead of as a listener.
Let me quickly paint you one of the great dramatic sports matchups: Bottom of the 9th, game tied, bases loaded, two out, the pitcher has two strikes on the guy at the plate. Then the hitter keeps hitting foul ball after foul ball into the stands, extending his life in this particular at-bat (any serious baseball fan has seen a similar scenario about a hundred times). Once I saw a matchup like this last 19 pitches, and took a good ten minutes or so to complete. I don’t remember a more dramatic ten minutes in all the time I’ve watched baseball. You were literally holding your breath with every pitch for ten straight minutes, and when it was all over you were as emotionally exhausted as if you’d been on the field yourself.
A highlight-based approach would take that ten minutes of gripping drama and get it down to “it took him 19 pitches to strike the guy out.”
If you take away the real-time element of “24″, it’s just another TV show. The genius of the show was that it forced us to live every second of every hour of Jack Bauer’s day, and gave us 24 hours to get emotionally invested in the events we were watching on the screen; this is why you might have heard people say, “I feel like missing one episode means you miss too much of the story.” That speaks volumes. If you miss out on all the “mundane” stuff that happens between the highlights, you also miss out on all the context.
Context matters.
Same thing in other businesses as well. If I parachute in from head office and I see that your sales were down last week because I’m looking at a spreadsheet that says so, I don’t see the bit that tells me the power was out in the plaza for half the day on Tuesday, and that it rained like cats and dogs all week and there’s no parking close to the store, so no one wanted to walk that far. I see down sales. I don’t get to see the sales staff in action, and get to offer ideas and inspiration that might improve things. I see down sales, and someone’s head might roll over it.
And if Jack Bauer was the boss, it would likely roll after being hacked off with a butter knife (which takes time, you know…).
