From Jill Bolte Taylor’s four-character brain map to the timeless emotional archetypes of Charlie Brown and Snoopy, this episode reveals why your best business decisions start with knowing which part of your brain is currently running the meeting.
Jill Bolte Taylor survived a catastrophic stroke at 36 and came out the other side with something most neurologists never get: a lived understanding of what happens when half your brain goes offline. Steve and David unpack her “Whole Brain Living” framework and ask what it means for the small business owner who operates mostly from one or two of their four mental characters.
The Principles segment brings the same framework into the boardroom, with a practical four-question Brain Huddle that helps teams make decisions with the full weight of their neurology behind them, not just the loudest character in the room.
The Problems segment takes a pleasing turn. Instead of a complaint, Steve offers praise for the banks doing something quietly clever to protect customers from scammers, and notices that Jill Bolte Taylor’s ideas are already built into the experience.
And in Perspicacity, Melissa Menta of Peanuts Worldwide makes a compelling case for why Charlie Brown, Snoopy, Lucy, and Linus have captivated audiences across cultures for generations. Spoiler: the Peanuts gang maps almost perfectly onto Jill’s four brain characters, and nobody had to plan it that way.
Get ready to take notes.
Talking About Marketing podcast episode notes with timecodes
02:00 Person This segment focusses on you, the person, because we believe business is personal.
Jill Bolte Taylor and the Four Characters Running Your Business (Whether You Know It or Not)
Jill Bolte Taylor is a Harvard neuroanatomist who woke up one morning in 1996 to find a blood vessel had exploded in the left hemisphere of her brain. Over the next four hours, she experienced her cognitive world disassembling in real time. It took eight years and major surgery to recover. What she gained in the process was a rare, first-hand map of how our four distinct brain characters operate, and how life improves when they work together rather than taking turns dominating.
Steve and David walk through each character as outlined in her book, Whole Brain Living:
Character One is the left-thinking planner, logic-driven, deadline-focused, and the source of all language.
Character Two is the left-emotional protector, anxious, vigilant, and prone to catastrophising.
Character Three is the right-emotional explorer, joy-seeking, present-moment, easily distracted by weeds growing through pavement cracks.
Character Four is the right-thinking integrator, calm, values-led, and able to see how all the pieces connect.
Most of us have a default character or two. The question Jill poses is whether we know which one is in charge right now.
The practical tool she offers is the BRAIN Huddle:
Breathe (90 seconds to calm the circuitry)
Recognise (which character is driving)
Appreciate (don’t bully any part of your brain into silence)
Inquire (what would the other characters suggest?)
Negotiate (bring them to an agreed path)
David adds the sharp observation that two people locked in Character Two at the same time produces only one outcome, and it is not a good one. Steve notes he now catches himself mid-reaction and thinks, “That was a bit Character Two of me just then.” It is, as he says, hard to unsee once you know it.
19:15 Principles This segment focusses principles you can apply in your business today.
A Brain Huddle for Your Business: How to Make Decisions with Your Whole Team’s Neurology
The Principles segment keeps the focus on Jill Bolte Taylor’s framework, this time applying it directly to business decision-making. Steve acknowledges the book is not always an easy listen, particularly when the content drifts toward spirituality in a way that may not land for every reader. But both hosts agree the core framework is worth the patience.
David clarifies that Character Four’s sense of awe and connection is not exclusively spiritual. Neurologist Andrew Newberg’s research shows that whether you are a meditating monk or a free-solo climber perched above a cliff, the same part of the brain lights up. Awe and spiritual experience are neurologically close neighbours. Character Four simply asks us to consider the bigger picture, whatever form that takes for each person.
The practical application for business arrives in a four-question sequence Steve lays out, each question serving a different character.
Character One: what are the facts, costs, and timelines?
Character Two: what could go wrong, and how do we minimise it?
Character Three: how will this feel for the team, and is there a way to make it more engaging?
Character Four: does this decision align with our values and long-term vision?
Running a meeting, a planning session, or even a solo decision through these four lenses is not a gimmick. It is working with the neurology everyone in the room already has. You’ll also experience us referencing it when running our Strategic Clarity Sessions with you or your organisation.
30:30 Problems This segment answers questions we've received from clients or listeners.
A Round of Applause for the Banks (Yes, Really)
Steve comes to the Problems segment with something unexpected: genuine praise. While making a business payment through Bendigo Bank, he encountered two thoughtful friction points. First, the bank verified that the BSB, account number, and business name matched records from other transactions. Second, once the transfer exceeded a certain amount, a screen appeared asking: who are you paying, is it too good to be true, and are you feeling pressured?
Steve spots immediately that this is Jill Bolte Taylor’s PAUSE principle built directly into a banking interface. Rather than letting Character Three’s enthusiasm or Character One’s efficiency push the payment through without a moment’s reflection, the bank is quietly inviting Character Two to do its job in a structured way. David notes the welcome broader trend: the Ausco system working better for everyone.
Steve also flags a practical warning for businesses handling large transactions, particularly with conveyancers. Scammers intercept emails, recreate invoices with altered bank details, and the money disappears. The fix is simple: always ring the business directly before transferring significant sums. Verify with a human. It takes two minutes and has saved many people from a very bad day.
35:00 Perspicacity This segment is designed to sharpen our thinking by reflecting on a case study from the past.
Good Grief, Charlie Brown: Why Peanuts Still Works and What It Tells Us About Marketing
Melissa Menta, senior vice president of global brand and communications at Peanuts Worldwide, appeared recently on the Marketing Over Coffee podcast with a disarmingly simple explanation for why Snoopy crosses every cultural boundary: all you need to like Peanuts is to be a human. The characters carry human emotions, not American ones. They are not culturally specific. They are universally recognisable.
Steve and David take this further by mapping the Peanuts cast onto Jill Bolte Taylor’s four brain characters. Lucy is Character One: linear, planning, comparative, ego-driven, always pulling the football away. Charlie Brown is Character Two: the anxious protector, certain that something is about to go wrong, and usually right. Snoopy is Character Three: playful, daydreaming, risk-taking, living in the joy of the moment. And Linus is Character Four: the sage, values-based, gentle, telling everyone to take care of each other. The mapping is almost suspiciously accurate.
The commercial proof arrives in a 2023 Red Cross campaign that used Snoopy T-shirts as a donor incentive. It generated 14,000 first-time blood donors, a 40 per cent spike in appointments, and three-quarters of those new donors were under 34. David lands the broader lesson with characteristic economy: whatever works at the fundamental human level makes evergreen product. Charles Schulz, it turns out, was building with the same raw material as every great storyteller before and after him.
Transcript This transcript was generated using Descript.
A Machine-Generated Transcript – Beware Errors
TAMP S08E06
Caitlin Davis: [00:00:00] Talking About Marketing is a podcast for business owners and leaders, produced by Steve Davis and David Olney of Talked About Marketing. More than 8,000 conversations have taught them something. You can’t read the label from inside the bottle. Everyone needs external perspective. Through their four Ps, person, principles, problems, and perspicacity, yes, you heard that correctly, they explore marketing with curiosity, generosity, and the occasional gentle eye roll.
They hope this becomes a trusted companion on your journey in business.
Steve Davis: [00:01:00] David, can I ask you a personal question?
David Olney: Of course you can.
Steve Davis: When you are here in the studio and, uh, we’re recording the podcast or, or doing work for clients, do you use all of your brain?
David Olney: I would’ve said historically the answer to that is no, until I started studying neurology and realized that actually our brain does want to use different bits and get involved, and that over the time it takes to record an episode, I hopefully am using my whole
Steve Davis: brain.
Hmm. I disagree. Well, actually, let me correct that. I, I actually think you are using characters one, four, and three primarily. Would you agree with that? I’ll
David Olney: agree with that. Yep.
Steve Davis: Yeah. And we’ll explain what the heck that means in just a moment.[00:02:00]
Caitlin Davis: Our four Ps. Number one, person. These are insights for the whole person, not just the business operator. Oscar Wilde put it this way, “The aim of life is self-development, to realize one’s nature perfectly. That’s what each of us is here for.”
Steve Davis: We have a fascinating person segment to get into today, and again, just like last episode, we found a book that warrants two bites of the cherry, uh, in both the person and the principle segment. So we’ll, we’ll keep it as limited to each of those fields as possible to extract as much goodness. So it’s a book called Whole Brain Living by Jill Bolte Taylor.
And, uh, perhaps- David, before I look at the, the characters, would you like to describe Jill as you did to me to bait the hook to get me to read? [00:03:00]
David Olney: Absolutely. Jill Bolte Taylor is an amazing lady. Uh, she has one of the most famous and popular TED Talks in history. At the time of publishing of the book we’re talking about, her TED Talk had already had 25 million views.
And her TED Talk is called My Stroke of Insight, which was all about the fact that as a 36-year-old university professor in neurology, she had a monumental stroke.
Jill Bolte Taylor: I grew up to study the brain because I have a brother who has been diagnosed with a brain disorder, schizophrenia. And as a sister, and later as a scientist, I wanted to understand why is it that I can take my dreams, I can connect them to my reality, and I can make my dreams come true. What is it about my brother’s brain and his schizophrenia that he [00:04:00] cannot connect his dreams to a common and shared reality so they instead become delusion?
So I dedicated my career to research into the severe mental illnesses, and I moved from my home state of Indiana to Boston, where I was working in the lab of Dr. Francine Benes in the Harvard Department of Psychiatry. And in the lab, we were asking the question, what are the biological differences between the brains of individuals who would be diagnosed as normal control, as compared with the brains of individuals diagnosed with schizophrenia, schizoaffective, or bipolar disorder?
So we were essentially mapping the micro circuitry of the brain, which cells are communicating with which cells, with which chemicals, and then in what quantities of those chemicals. But on the morning of December 10, 1996, I woke up to discover that I had a brain disorder of my own. A blood [00:05:00] vessel exploded in the left half of my brain.
And in the course of four hours, I watched my brain completely deteriorate in its ability to process all information. On the morning of the hemorrhage, I could not walk, talk, read, write, or recall any of my life. I essentially became an infant in a woman’s body.
David Olney: The left side of her brain was basically offline for 35 days They did major surgery on day eight after her stroke, not really knowing how much she could recover, and it took her eight years to recover. And in the process of recovering, it gave her a whole new deep insight into how the brain works and into how we can help our own brain work better.
And she’s just a marvel that she’s been through so much [00:06:00] and come out of it utterly inquisitive about the part of her that went wrong, and I think she would argue, in a lot of ways, has come out working better after everything she’s been through than it was before.
Steve Davis: Yeah, and that was enough to make me very curious.
And what she’s done in this book is in reflecting on the way the brain has evolved over time, where the early bits in the more, the base central parts were first, and then other bits have evolved onto it later. And you step in if you think I’ve gone down the, the rocky road, David.
David Olney: Well, the easiest way to define that for everyone- Okay
is all animals, whatever they are, have a brain stem.
Steve Davis: Yeah.
David Olney: So it wouldn’t matter if you’re a tiny little lizard or us, you’ve got a brain stem. More advanced animals have emotional centers like the limbic system, and this is why she can make the book or make the comment throughout the book, [00:07:00] you know, we’re a feeling creature who sometimes thinks.
Steve Davis: That’s
David Olney: right. And then for humans, we’ve got the neocortex, the new cortex, on top of everything, which is where we think and we know we’re thinking.
Steve Davis: The way she maps it is this. We have four main characters in our brain, which as David mentioned, when half her brain shut down, that’s when she noticed the difference.
With her background, she could interpret it correctly. So let me have a stab at describing this to you. We all have these four characters, and in some of us, one, two, or more of them are more dominant than the others. But at any time, they can swap roles, and what she’ll argue shortly is we can facilitate the shifting of who’s in a dominant position, who being one of the characters.
So the first one is on the left side of the brain. It’s the thinking side, the left thinking side. So this is your [00:08:00] planner. This is the logic-driven part of you that sets goals, that is on time, that uses a calendar, uh, and so a very type A side. And a- a- after each of these, David, have you got a footnote
David Olney: to add?
Very important one, and that is that left thinking is where language comes from.
Steve Davis: Mm-hmm.
David Olney: So whatever any other part of the brain- Is thinking about. It’s left thinking that turns that input into language that allows us to sit here and record a podcast and interact with each other
Steve Davis: Which is fascinating for a totally different con- um- Yes
conversation, because there’s a fantastic seminal book called The Master and His Emissary-
David Olney: Yep …
Steve Davis: uh, on this field, and it explains it in more detail, but that’s for another day.
David Olney: Yes.
Steve Davis: So character one, left thinking. So you’ve got language, you’ve got logic, all that happening there. Also on the left side, there’s an emotional quadrant.
So the cells here, um, are the ones [00:09:00] responsible for sending us the signals of anxiety. They are really focused on protecting us. So they’ve got that hair trigger of, oh, no, oh, no, oh, no, oh, no. You know, that, that is right there. They also look for blame, and they hold on to grudges as well. They remember those things, and their constant voice is, what if I fail?
What if I fail? What if I fail? What would you add, David?
David Olney: Catastrophe on the way. Catastrophe on the way.
Steve Davis: Yeah. Henny penny, the sky is falling.
David Olney: Yes.
Steve Davis: That’s, uh, another character we all have, the left emotion side. We then have character three, the right emotional side. This is the one that seeks joy, that really lives in the present moment, um, has great curiosity.
It doesn’t just walk past a little weed on the crack in the pavement. It goes, “Oh, look at that. I wonder how that grew there,” et cetera. It’s easily distracted as well, possibly by little weeds growing out of cracks in pavements. [00:10:00] And its constant question is, what’s next? What’s next? What’s next? What would you add?
David Olney: And it has no sense of time. It just wants fun.
Steve Davis: Mm.
David Olney: So for me, the most likely thing that will get me into character three, right emotional, is picking up a guitar, and I will then lose all track of time-
Steve Davis: Oh …
David Olney: and just have fun and get completely lost in it.
Steve Davis: I was hoping you were gonna say spending time with me, but, uh-
David Olney: Yeah, but we’re talking, so w- I’m trying to limit it to one bit of my brain.
Steve Davis: Okay. And the last one, character four, is our right thinking side of the brain. So this is where we get calm. Uh, things get integrated. We can see how things connect, which as a point, by the way, number one was how things are different. It’s always comparing what separates this from that, whereas character four is looking at what we’ve got in common.
It has the visions. It looks at the big picture. It loves having a core set of values to [00:11:00] operate from. What would you add?
David Olney: Parallel processing. It can see all the pieces and understand how they relate to each other, whereas left thinking will have- An idea of one piece of something, and it will logically extrapolate that if I’ve got this bit and I’m correct because I’m character one, that the next thing has to be this
Steve Davis: My word of caution, but it’s not a serious caution, is that once you read this book and you think about these things, it’s hard to unsee them.
I have caught myself in different states of emotion, and I am developing this little habit of going, “Oh, hang on a minute. That’s a bit chara-” I said it today over lunch, “That was a bit character two of me just then.” Mm. Um, and that’s what we come up with. So in the person segment, how we make the rubber hit the road here, what does this mean for us?
Jill has this practice, it’s called the BRAIN Huddle. Uh, I forget what all the letters in-
David Olney: I remember what they stand for. Oh. So when you want me to, I can go through [00:12:00] that.
Steve Davis: Okay, David. Go, let your character one go for it and tell us what BRAIN stands for in the BRAIN Huddle.
David Olney: So what Jill is asking us to do really is to recognize which character’s in charge, question if that’s the path we wanna go down, and work out what other things we could do if we got the other characters in our brain involved.
So BRAIN breaks down to five steps. B is breathe. What she’s found is if you take 90 seconds of breathing slowly and deeply, you can calm yourself to the point where any major emotional thing that was going on will calm down to the point where you can use whatever bit of your brain you want. R is for recognize.
Recognize which character was in charge. So your comment at lunch of, “Ooh, that was a bit character two.” Well, something was tending a little bit towards anxiety, negativity, something could go wrong, and you wanted to question that. And recognizing who was in charge is really [00:13:00] important. For Jill, the next step is A, which is appreciate.
What she found from her own recovery is you can’t bully any part of your brain into being quiet and letting another bit have a go. You’ve got to appreciate that they’re trying to look after you. So she’ll make the point that regularly when character two, left emotional, goes off with a potential catastrophe, she’ll say, “Thank you, character two.
Really appreciate how much you were trying to protect us. I think we’re okay at the moment to at least explore whether there are other options other than catastrophizing.” So I in BRAIN is for inquire, which is, “Okay, other characters, what would you be interested in trying to do in this situation?” And once you’ve got some other ideas, N is for negotiate, and this is that in her recovery, she found that any time she tried to bulldoze behaving with one character over others, [00:14:00] it just created a swirling mess of exhaustion.
But that through negotiation, going, “Look, we could try a right-thinking brain character four based plan-” With left emotional character two paying attention if it sees the catastrophe coming. How does everyone feel about that? And she found by approaching it that way, it sped up her recovery and allowed her to function in a way she enjoyed a lot more and that was more productive.
Steve Davis: I think that really does ground what this brings to the table. Um, so in day-to-day life, in particular, I think it’s fair to say the one she’s most sensitive about is character two.
David Olney: Mm. ‘
Steve Davis: Cause that’s the one with the big attention-grabbing emotional flourishes that tend, not always, even though they might be well-meaning, they do tend to be at the negative end of the spectrum- Mm
doing us damage, making us look worse, [00:15:00] impacting our relationships worse. She said if two people meet and they’re both in a state of character two-
David Olney: It only ends poorly …
Steve Davis: it ends poor- one of them has to change. And I think the, the beautiful gift that this book reminds us to do is, you know what? At a very physical, uh, biological level, this rush of those feelings of potential anger or dread or whatever take about 90 seconds to work their way through the circuits.
So if you are aware of that, and we can take a step outside to the room, go– I don’t know if you’ve heard people say, “Go for a little walk around the park.” Now we know- Why it works … now why. Um, it, it’s different. It’s less dramatic. It’s got less dominant grip if we can do this. I, I hope we could all earnestly apply this extra bit of spatial, uh, approach, uh, uh, to, to anything we encounter, to be aware of who’s dominant in our head, [00:16:00] and that is the major part of the pedal.
David Olney: Mm. And I think the two things I’ve seen in so many small business people that is worth adding to this is someone who spends a lot of time in character one doing linear ego-based planning with a sense of going, “This is different to this. This is different to this,” where their linear plan makes sense in and of its narrow context.
But their narrow plan can’t stand meeting the reality of the bigger, broader context of the world. So the linear plan seems fine to character one left thinking. But if character four, right thinking, had a chance to look at the plan in terms of all the other things going on, the context wouldn’t hold up.
And the other thing I’ve seen a lot in small business is people who, when they’re really excited about a new product or a new activity, [00:17:00] they’re in the moment of character three, in right brain emotional, and they’re enjoying something and all they wanna do is share it with other people. But that bit of our brain doesn’t plan.
It just does things in the moment. You know, like a summer storm, it happens and then it’s gone. There’s no structure to that that can be used to bake it into a business, bake it into a business offer, do the calculation of is this going to increase sales? Is this going to increase profit? You know, a brilliant idea is only brilliant in the moment if we can then transfer it to systematized planning in a structured way we can keep doing day in, day out.
Steve Davis: So the key point here to round off our person segment is we’ve got four characters. We might like some more than the others, but we have a better life if we can have all four of them playing nicely with each other.
David Olney: Absolutely. And back to Steve’s comment [00:18:00] at the start, if he neglected to say, you know, I use character two and, you know, he was right on the money with that and it’s important for probably me to quickly explain why.
I walk around the world every day using a piece of aluminium to find my way in the world, a white cane. If I gave in to character two’s desire to catastrophize, I probably wouldn’t leave the house. So I have to be really careful, one, that I don’t give in to character two, but also I have a tendency to accept high risk because I don’t listen to character two.
So I also have to be careful of that by shutting it down. So everything in your brain comes with a plus and a minus and balance is always better than not balance.
Steve Davis: Good. Well, to celebrate the change of leadership in Hungary, I’ve got an old bottle of something that’s 18 years old. It’s almost finished. A little [00:19:00] bit of mold on the side.
We’ll have a little try afterwards. Let’s test your appetite for risk.
David Olney: Only a bit of risk. It’ll be fine.
Caitlin Davis: Our four Ps. Number two, principles. These are ideas worth building on. As Oscar Wilde reminded us, you can never be overdressed or overeducated.
Steve Davis: In the principle segment, I want to keep us getting as much as we can from this book because I will say, David, if anyone does choose to listen to it, and it might also happen if you read it too I ran hot and cold with this book. Uh, it wasn’t just Jill’s manner of speaking, it was the content. Mm. The opening bit where she laid down quite frankly how amazing she, she is with this, [00:20:00] a superb TED Talk that’s the best ever in the world.
I, re- everything in me just wanted to stop listening. And then when she gets into talking to character four, she will often really switch over into deep spiritual language in a way that jarred- Mm … with me. And I don’t think it needed it, but it panders to a certain audience in particular. Mm. And so I really struggled to keep on task with this, but I think you’ll agree, David, it is worth putting up with this because there is gold in what she’s, um, pulled together.
David Olney: Absolutely, and in particular with character four. You know, character four can make you really feel, you know, religious faith strongly. But it can also make you feel awe for nature strongly. So character four is all about the enormity of the world, and you are an intrinsic and well-connected part of it.
And she [00:21:00] recommends, you know, reading work by Andrew Newberg, another neurologist, and I’ve, you know, read a lot of Andrew’s work. And I love his work because he said, in reality, you put a Buddhist monk or nun, you know, in an MRI, or you put a rock climber who’s climbed without ropes to the top of a crazy high peak-
Steve Davis: Ooh
David Olney: and you have both of them remember praying or remember climbing that, you know, that rock face, same bit of the brain lights up. Awe and spirituality are very similar in our brain, and it really comes down to how you personally live out being in character four. And yeah, there’s bits of the book where if I hadn’t known about Newberg, I would’ve found it very frustrating to have such a big emphasis on spirituality when that’s just one way character four can manifest.
Steve Davis: So this is the business focus for principles, so I’m just gonna very lightly recap how those characters apply to the business world. But then David, I want us to ground it into what this might mean for us.[00:22:00]
Jill Bolte Taylor: Who are we? We are the life force power of the universe with manual dexterity and two cognitive minds. And we have the power to choose moment by moment who and how we wanna be in the world. Right here, right now, I can step into the consciousness of my right hemisphere, where we are, I am the life force power of the universe.
I am the life force power of the 50 trillion beautiful molecular geniuses that make up my form, at one with all that is. Or I can choose to step into the consciousness of my left hemisphere. Where I become a single individual, a solid, separate from the flow, separate from you. I am Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor, intellectual, neuroanatomist.
These are the [00:23:00] we inside of me. Which would you choose? Which do you choose, and when?
Steve Davis: So character one is the plan-driven, I guess we’d say here. Many owners are like this. They’re looking for efficiency. They’ve got deadlines to meet. They’ve got spreadsheets where their world is contained. That’s character one at work. Character two at work is where they have this protective side, the anxious side to protect their business.
This comes up when you hear yourself saying, “Oh, we can’t afford this,” or, “Oh, what if this fails?” Or, “Who was responsible for this?” That’s your character two in the workplace. Character three is where we’ve got the experiential side, the playful side. The– If you find yourself in a creative zone, you wanna improvise, uh, you’re conceding the value of connecting relationship-wise with other people, either internally or with, uh, other suppliers or whatever.[00:24:00]
This is that at play. And number four here is the visionary side, and even the calming side. So this is when you’re finding yourself drawn towards thinking about your values, thinking about the culture you, you, you are creating, and thinking about what your ethos is long term. I think that’s a pretty decent summary in how characters map to common business scenarios.
David Olney: Absolutely. You know, we could add a lot more detail, but it will make more sense if you read the book, and then we can add more detail. But that’s plenty to give people a reason-
Steve Davis: Yeah …
David Olney: to think about how am I gonna look at every big decision and every new situation from a broader perspective? If you can look at them from all four of these, your depth of insight is gonna be greater, and you’re not gonna be blindsided by things you didn’t notice.
Steve Davis: So here’s how the rubber hits the road. We talked about doing a brain [00:25:00] huddle with ourselves when we catch ourselves out in a state that surprises us or is not optimal. Um, but in, in business, how does this work? Well, a couple of interesting thoughts before we talk about a business brain huddle, is that it might sound like this.
There’s a bit of argy-bargy going on at work, and someone says, “You know what? Is this conversation mostly about safety and risk,” which is character two, “or is it about numbers and deadlines,” which is more character one, “or is it feelings and relationships,” which is more three and four? One of the things that’s interesting here is that if you and your close team Are aware of this character framework.
Having that moment to reflect on, oh, which character is this, plays a really important role because it depersonalizes the situation, and it gives everyone, I guess, that [00:26:00] psychological and physical breathing space to not be in battle mode, but go, “Oh, yes.” It’s a fresh take. Would you agree?
David Olney: Absolutely. Like we’ve all been on a team, you know, in a team with a very strong character two who catastrophizes, sees the worst in everything.
But being able to say in a meeting, “Okay, let’s question safety and risk now, all of us together.” Give that person the floor, listen to them, come up with sensible responses to all the risks, work out all the ways to maintain the safety. So if they can be calmer, you know things are gonna go better if your whole team is on board.
And you know you don’t want your obvious character three person going, “It’s all gonna be fine. We just need to do it,” because they’ve not done any planning. So we really do want to get each person on a team who has a different default position to at least hear everyone else’s default position and be part of the inquiry and [00:27:00] negotiation of coming up with a much better unified plan.
Steve Davis: And if we’re doing it on behalf of characters, I notice this when I do my stand-up comedy. It’s fascinating. I used to do stand-up comedy as me, then I developed my Professor Sebastian Longsword, and I can go anywhere as him. I don’t have a moment’s self-doubt because any barbs or criticisms that I might get are not me.
They’re directed at my character.
David Olney: Mm.
Steve Davis: And so I– it’s like water off a duck’s back.
David Olney: Mm.
Steve Davis: And in fact, it just makes the professor double down and go deeper into his character. And I’ve– that’s a fantastic way. If ever you’re gonna do comedy, do a character because it gives you that extra bit of resilience. But here in the workplace, how good is that?
It’s your characters in to play. No one gets worried if their little horse on the Monopoly board gets knocked over because it’s just a token. Mm. Uh, but it gives us an insight. Now, [00:28:00] David, I think what the best thing we can do here is, uh, in running a brain huddle, uh, here I’ve got, I’ve got four questions.
Each one aligns to this. So the process that Jill would be recommending is if you’re coming around to make some decisions at work, try doing it in this process. Ask first, right, with character one in mind, what are the facts? What are the costs? What’s the timelines? What systems do we need for this thing we’re talking about?
How will it impact those things? Facts, costs, timelines, et cetera. And once you’ve answered that, then think about your character two questions. So what could go wrong and how could we minimize it? Gee, David, this links so much to our planning days- Yeah … and our planning sessions that we run. Yes. Um, character three would then ask, or we would ask on behalf of character three, fantastic.
Now, how would this feel for the team? Is anyone gonna be scared? Is it [00:29:00] excited? What is the story here? Are there ways to make it more enjoyable and engaging? And then to honor character four, we need to finish off by asking, does this decision align with our values, our long-term vision, our brand, dare I say, uh, for the business and the family?
There is a very simple prototype for bringing extra depth to a decision that you’re contemplating within your business, exercising the different masses of, uh, neurons that we’ve got in different parts of our brain.
David Olney: It’s a very nice way to go because rather than something apparently being this arbitrary system imposed by a business guru, here we’re saying is work with your neurology because we’ve all got similar neurology.
Steve Davis: Yes.
David Olney: We’ve all got the capacity to do things in these four ways, which means we can all understand each other if we take the time, and that’s gonna lead to much better [00:30:00] outcomes.
Steve Davis: I now call this meeting closed, and that’s my character one who is noticing the time.
David Olney: My character two is glad there wasn’t a catastrophe.
Steve Davis: My character three is curious to know what our next segment’s gonna be about.
David Olney: Character four’s already thinking about the next series.
Caitlin Davis: Our four Ps. Number three, problems. These are the marketing challenges keeping you up at night. As Oscar said, we ask questions for the best reason possible. Simple curiosity, no hidden agenda, just genuine interest in what’s actually happening.
Steve Davis: In the problem segment now, I’m gonna shock you, David. Are you ready to be shocked?
David Olney: I’m ready to be shocked. I’ve got my foot on the floor. I’m touching a timber table. I am probably [00:31:00] electrocution-proof.
Steve Davis: You know how in this segment I often thump the, my sermon notes and I spew poison out into the world because there are so many bad things impacting my people?
Yes. I’m gonna turn the day and actually give praise. Good. I was needing to, uh, spend some money today on, uh, using Bendigo Bank and pay a Oh, for the hire, for the, um, the, uh, Mercury Cinema where I’m … I’ll do a plug-in here. I’m doing a history month show with Keith Connan called History Hit Parade, which I hope you buy tickets to.
I’ll put the link in the show notes. Um, May 11 and May 17, so move fast. Is that okay, David, that I snuck that in?
David Olney: I think it’s absolutely fine.
Steve Davis: You’re coming on May 17, aren’t you?
David Olney: 17th, Sunday afternoon. Perfect. If I remember correctly, 5:00 PM to
Steve Davis: six- 4:00 PM. 4:00
David Olney: PM. 4:00 PM. Okay. I knew it was Sunday afternoon.
Steve Davis: Anyway, link in show notes. And it was a new, uh, provider, [00:32:00] and so I pumped in the BSB number and the account number and their name. And a number of banks are doing this now, and I take my hat off to them, but I’m using Bendigo as an example. It runs a check and says, “Yes, other people have used these credentials lined up with this business in the past.”
Tick one in our fight against scams. Why wasn’t it done sooner, I want to ask, but that’s a point for another day. Gotta stay positive, David, I promised.
David Olney: We like the Ausco system working better.
Steve Davis: Yeah, it’s fantastic. So others do that. That’s good. Um, also, having just been using a conveyancer, uh, there is a, quite a scam where people intercept emails from businesses like conveyancers and recreate the invoice, uh, and change the bank details.
So you should always ring a lawyer, a conveyancer g- when you’re doing big sums of money [00:33:00] because you wanna make sure and check with a human that you’re sending it to the right people. However, this little step the banks do goes a big way to protecting us.
David Olney: Mm.
Steve Davis: That wasn’t it, David. I then went to the next screen and up come a big message.
I think it’s because it was over $1,000. I don’t know. “Protect yourself from scams,” it says. “Who are you paying? Is it too good to be true? Are you feeling pressured?” This is building in Jill Bolte Taylor’s PAUSE. Isn’t that clever?
David Olney: Very.
Steve Davis: And then I have to tick a box saying, “I understand, and I’m confident this payment’s safe to send.”
Now, at the moment, my character s- one and three love the logic, emotionally very satisfied. Or it [00:34:00] might be character one and two are now feeling, “Hang on a minute.” This is the bank getting plausible deniability if I am sending money to a scammer That I went in all eyes open. Oh, there’s an underbelly, David.
David Olney: Yeah, but that’s what character two does. It takes a good situation- … and makes sure that we’ve acknowledged the worst possible variable.
Steve Davis: And then I was able to send it, and then it sent a two-factor check from the bank app to make sure it was all good. So I just wanna say hats off to Bendigo Bank and any other banks doing this, because for whatever reason, it’s something to help support people and businesses from losing money i- in a terrible way.
Caitlin Davis: Our four Ps. Number four, perspicacity. Let’s examine a campaign from the [00:35:00] past and ask, would it work today? As Oscar Wilde believed, our one duty to history is to rewrite it. So let’s see what we can learn.
Steve Davis: David, you seem to know a lot.
David Olney: About what? I’m
Steve Davis: gonna ask you ge- in general things. Who is Melissa
David Olney: Menter? Uh, until we were talking about this over lunch, I wouldn’t have known, so I am gonna pretend I don’t know and plead ignorance.
Steve Davis: She’s the senior vice president, global brand and communication at Peanuts Worldwide.
Peanuts, featuring good old Charlie Brown. Do you have any memories from P- of Peanuts from your very early years, or listening to cartoons later, or anything like that? How, h- how does Snoopy and co., how do they loom in your imagination?
David Olney: My uncle loved Peanuts, and he used to [00:36:00] describe the drawn cartoons to me.
So all my memories of Peanuts are hearing about the cartoons in his voices.
Steve Davis: Well, the reason we’re bringing it in the perspicacity segment is it’s been going for a long time now, and we like to reflect on whether it still has relevancy in our current age. And you might be surprised, the answer here is yes.
Does that surprise you?
David Olney: It doesn’t, because anything that can cross cultural and time boundaries so effectively is working at a very fundamental human level
Steve Davis: And there was something, before we look at this in more depth, that she said on the Marketing Over Coffee podcast not long ago as to why she thinks Snoopy cuts through in many different cultures too.
Let’s have a listen to what she said.
Melissa Menta: And the other thing that I think is unique about Peanuts is that all you have to do to like Peanuts is you have to be a human. So [00:37:00] everybody around the world can relate to Peanuts because they’re mess- they’re human messages. Whereas if you’re living in a different country, and you don’t relate to something American, or you don’t relate to something in Europe, it’s harder to relate.
But with Peanuts, it’s like everybody can relate to Charlie Brown not kicking the football or feeling little crabby like Lucy or needing some security like Linus. It’s just human emotion, and I think that’s why on social media we find such success.
Steve Davis: Now I think about it, David, I think what she’s touched on, the emotional aspect or archetypes that the characters in the Peanuts world embody, made them ready-made to live in relevance forever.
And in fact, I think that would apply to all literature, where the characters are clearly embodying things [00:38:00] we can relate to within ourselves. They hold up a mirror to parts of ourselves. I think there’s the success.
David Olney: Yeah, it doesn’t matter if it’s Peanuts or Tolstoy, you’ve still got this thing of core characters.
You know, 100 years ago, we would’ve looked at this in Jungian terms, of which archetype. Uh, but if we relate it to sort of Jill Bolte’s four characters, I find it even more persuasive why great characters and why great gr- groups of characters continue to captivate audiences.
Steve Davis: Well, in fact, I’m glad you mentioned Jill here.
Let’s have a look. If we actually… ‘Cause she talks about the brain having four characters. There are four main characters in Peanuts. Mm-hmm. Did Charles Schulz know this consciously or subconsciously? Who knows? Character one is, who is the planner, uh, we agree is Lucy. Mm-hmm. She’s adult-oriented. She is role- or she, she is the serious one.
David Olney: Yep, it’s all time-bound. It’s got [00:39:00] ego. It’s linear planning. She compares and contrasts things, not to see if they’re similar, but to see if they’re different, to pick what’s best. Yeah, she’s so character one, it’s not funny.
Steve Davis: Character two is Charlie Brown himself. He has this I’m-gonna-mess-this-up kind of voice.
David Olney: Mm.
Steve Davis: That’s the anxious protector side of, uh, a character.
David Olney: Mm.
Steve Davis: Number three, which is the explorer or playful side, is- Snoopy, uh, he’s daydreaming, he’s music-loving, he’s risk-taking. He’s got the joke cool. He’s got different characters of himself. That’s Snoopy in that sweet zone, character three, which I think is my favorite character.
And then character four, which is the sage, um, integrator, that’s Linus. Very gentle, values-based. He takes a moral tone, you know, take care of each other. How shocked are you that they map so accurately?
David Olney: I’m not really shocked, and I wish [00:40:00] we could more easily get access to the equivalent cultural icons from other cultures that we’re less familiar with ’cause I think it wouldn’t matter where we looked, we’d keep finding versions of this that could easily be shared and that people would understand.
Steve Davis: So the reason we have it in this segment is would it work today? Well, I think we’ve got a great example of, of the enduring value. April 2023, the Red Cross went to the Peanuts Corporation. They were struggling to get people to donate blood, and you would understand that with, in the times of- Mm … COVID. So what they did is they had a campaign where if you donated blood in a certain month, you would get a Snoopy T-shirt.
I forget what the saying was that it had on it, but it was something, I give blood, or giving blood is cool, or something like that. Mm. They got 14,000 first-time donors with a 40% spike in appointments, with three-quarters of those [00:41:00] donors being l- uh, younger than 34 years of age. That says longevity. That says relevance.
The fact that such a young s- skew just shows you this has cut through at different levels. Mm. It’s an amazing story.
David Olney: And the ultimate lesson in marketing, and that is what’s going on at the human level? What do we wanna connect with at the human level? ‘Cause if we get it right, then we’re making evergreen product.
Steve Davis: So there we go. Next time you see a Snoopy cartoon, there are Snoopy movies and all sorts of things that happen. Charles Schulz, sadly no longer with us, but, uh, his gift of Peanuts lingers, and I think that’s a nice note to end on. We’re like, we’re topping this episode with nuts, Dave. Oh,
Peanuts: Charlie Brown. I’ll hold the football, and you kick
it.
You say you’ll hold it, but what you really mean is you’ll pull it away, and I’ll land on my back, and I’ll kill [00:42:00] myself.
Caitlin Davis: Thanks for listening to Talking About Marketing. If you found this helpful, please share it with someone who might benefit And if you’re so inclined, leave a rating in your podcast app. Both help more than you think. Steve and David welcome your thoughts, which you can send to [email protected].
That’s [email protected]. Want to continue the conversation beyond the podcast? You can book 20 minutes with Steve at talkedaboutmarketing.com. No cost, no obligation. And we’ll leave the last word to Oscar Wilde. There’s only one thing worse than being talked about, and that’s not being talked [00:43:00] about.