Can You Use Anti-Davos Solution Framing?
“It feels like I’m at a firefighters’ conference and no one’s allowed to speak about water”
These words were spoken by a Dutch historian of The Left.
His frustration apparently borne of blank responses from the WEF elite gathered at Davos last month to his pleas for less aggressive and huge tax avoidance by them.
Let’s get a thing or two straight. Yes, billionaires cannot be entrusted to tell us all how to live. Yet whilst governments are largely inept at spending our taxes, no, Universal Basic Income is definitely not an answer either.
Normally far removed from any natural bedfellow of mine, here this phrase strikes a Sales chord.
During the sometimes fraught, sometimes cagey, sometimes treacherous time when seeking to discuss a prospect ‘problem’ with them in detail, this kind of metaphor appears most helpful.
First, in the direct sense.
Who here really wants to get to grips with the actual solutions? Often, the inertians of status quoland will be firmly enrooting themselves in the famed denial or resistance initial two (of four) stages of change. Other instances will see people more fixated on scapegoating culprits for the mess in which they now find themselves rather than actively cracking on with readily actionable remedy.
Then there’s adaptations of the construct.
If you’re all there pertaining to be firefighters, then is water your only weapon?
That industry has countless alternatives; fire blankets, CO2, foam, inert gas.
Then there’s the methods through which they can be deployed. Do you need people running into a building with a long powerful hose? Or stood atop cherry pickers higher up, sideways on? Or even choppers hovering above without their blades fanning the flames but dropping from huge buckets directly onto the jumping heat?
There is always the danger that to refer to anyone as a ‘firefighter’ raises the shackles associated with the business use of the term. Yet in the right place, you might just find a toxic accelerant is smothered, extinguishing can begin, and the nasty issue of the resultant smoke and smouldering cinders can also be addressed.