Collecting myths

After meeting Graham Galer at the weekend at Gerard Fairtlough's memorial service and the ensuing symposium (which was much more fun than it sounds and of which much more anon) I was thinking about the connection between urban myths and the sort of national and organisational myths that Graham discusses in his book.

Then I read this article about the famous assertion that:

You remember 10% of what you read
You remember 20% of what you hear
You remember 30% of what you see
You remember 90% of what you do

The claim is made a lot by marketing people (I used to use in my previous existence as a consultant teaching publishers to write advertising and direct marketing copy) and by HR and training people. I was always uncomfortable with it and now I find (thanks to a nice piece on Training Zone) that it's totally spurious (though somebody went to a lot of trouble to pretend that it wasn't).

Thinking about it got me here: urban myths work because we want to believe them. We want to believe that Kennedy said he was a doughnut, although he didn't. We wanted to believe those stories that went round after September 11th claiming that Londoners had been given hints by random but considerate IC6s about the date and location of the next terrorist attack.

So there's an immediate connection we can make in organisational and political terms: powerful and charismatic leaders tell us what we want to believe (even if we didn't actually know that we wanted to believe it before). They touch a nerve. And they use myths (as Hitler did about the Jewish financiers, for example) to get their message across.

But, of course, it's also true that great leaders tell us what we don't want to believe (or hear, even) and require us to change in order to accommodate what they are telling us. So, in those cases, new myths have to be developed to bridge the gap between what we believe now and what we 'ought' to believe.