Tracing the Red Thread®: Tamsen Webster on how to bring about a pivotal idea.
Brand strategist and keynote speaker Tamsen Webster, also known as the Idea Whisperer, helps brands all over the world amplify their ideas. To get where she is today required shifting her role — from being the one who developed messages to showing TEDx speakers how to do it themselves. The outcome became her methodology: The Red Thread®, a storyline for tracing a goal through to the actions required to achieve it.
Leading up to her workshop at Startupfest, we asked Tamsen to unpack her methodology.
Q: How did you come up with the Red Thread® methodology?
TW: There’s an accidental way and then there’s an on purpose way. The accidental way happened when I defined a way to reverse engineer how my brain worked. Specifically, when I was the executive producer for TEDx Cambridge.
I had spent 20 years in brand and message strategy and as CMO of an organization or two where my job was to come up with messages. I could look at a situation and go: “Here’s what the message should be, here’s how we should say it.” I never had to explain how I actually came up with it. That’s just how my brain worked. But at TEDx Cambridge I couldn’t just tell them how. These needed to be their own TEDx talks. I couldn’t just say: “You need to say it like this” because a) that would not necessarily be their idea, and b) it would get in the way of them connecting to the material and the audience. So I had to figure out a way to do that.
So I said, “How do I think about these things?” The on-purpose way was really understanding how we as humans come to an idea. A lot of times we think an idea comes out of the blue, like Archimedes in his bathtub, “Eureka!” or Newton with the apple falling on his head. We think of ideas often times as the moment we get that big “ah-ha!”
I discovered from my research that what actually happens is this: while that ah-ha is real, it’s actually the moment when your brain fills in all the pieces of an argument that it’s creating for itself that you didn’t even know it was. The way our brains are looking for information all the time is essentially an attempt to slot these pieces into a puzzle. The moment that you come up with an idea that feels right is the moment that last piece, whatever it might be, falls into place.
The Red Thread® methodology came from figuring out what those pieces were and then finding as simple a way as I could to help people identify those pieces for themselves, fill them in, and turn them into a way to express that idea.
Think about it as our own operating system. Our brains are trying to run a set of commands all the time. What are we trying to do? What’s the problem? How is everybody else looking at it? Why is that the right way to go? The minute you can get all those pieces into place, that’s when the idea snaps in.
Q: How did you come up with the name?
TW: I had the methodology and I had the concept of the red thread commonly used in Germanic and Scandinavian countries. There are red threads in almost every major religion and philosophy. The red thread is used most often in Sweden to describe the through line of something — the thing that helps it make sense and connects it to other things.
I love that as a concept. I went looking for why it was called the red thread. They believe it’s named after the red thread of Ariadne — the red thread Theseus, son of the king of Athens, was given by Ariadne as a tool to help him navigate his way through the minotaur’s labyrinth. If he didn’t have that, it wouldn’t have mattered whether he killed the minotaur or not. If he didn’t get out of the maze then Athens would fall. The idea of laying something down that allows you to retrace your steps — that’s what my methodology does. It allows someone to retrace the steps that their own brain took to come to the conclusion of an idea.
Q: What does a Red Thread® look like?
TW: In the context that I use it, the Red Thread® is the connection between a question and your answer. If I’m talking about the Red Thread® of an idea, it’s going to be a statement that’s a combination of something people want via a means they didn’t expect: a question and answer, all in one phrase.
For instance, if I were to use a Red Thread® on the Red Thread®, I would say: the best way to transfer an idea is to recreate in your audience’s mind the argument that created the idea in the first place.
Q: Can you unpack your methodology? What’s your process for identifying an individual or company’s Red Thread®?
TW: There are three steps to the methodology. First: What do you want? What are the outcomes both externally facing and internally facing? Two: Who are you talking to? What’s the mindset? What are they looking for? What do they value? What do they struggle with? By understanding this you understand the third piece — the message around the idea itself: What do you need to tell that audience in order to achieve that outcome?
More often than not, people come to me because they want to know: What do I say to those people to get that thing to happen? That’s where we really dive into the Red Thread® method, the first stage of which of which is to identify the goal of your audience. I define that as being: What is a question they are currently asking that your idea is an answer to? It can be: How can I increase our productivity? I find it’s useful if we phrase it as a question the audience is asking that you your idea is the answer to. That’s the first piece.
Because we’re essentially building an argument in our heads, these pieces follow the path of a story — that’s the framework all human brains use in order to make sense. We’re following the major turning points, the major plot points of a story.
Q: What are the plot points in that story?
TW: The quest
First is a goal: What’s the quest? All great stories have something that somebody wants, a question that they’re asking.
The problem
The second component of any great story is the introduction of a problem that wasn’t present at the beginning of the story. I describe it as a problem of perspective — that’s how we make sure it’s something the audience doesn’t already know about. If it’s a problem that they already know about, it should be their goal. If it’s a problem they don’t know about, it’s a problem of perspective.
The moment of truth
The third major turning point in any great story is a moment of truth. It’s the moment when the main character comes to a realization that makes it impossible, ideally, for them to ignore the new information they have just been given. It makes it mentally impossible to pretend that they can go on as before. So what we’re looking for here is a self-evident piece of information, something that the audience can agree is true elsewhere and will therefore will agree is true here.
The change
Which leads to a fourth piece of the Red Thread®, which is the change. This is what happens in stories as well: we have a goal, a problem is introduced, there’s a moment of truth. As a result of the moment of truth the character either makes a change or doesn’t. And if they don’t make a change and don’t achieve their goal, it’s a tragedy and a sad ending. If they make the change and achieve their goal, it’s a happy ending. We need to identify the high level shift in thinking or behaviour that your change that your idea actually represents.
The actions
The goal, problem, truth and change are the four most important pieces. The fifth piece I call the action. What’s necessary to create the change? With a company the change is often the main difference that company represents in the marketplace as far as approach. And the actions can be the very specific products and services that put that change into place.
So: goal, problem, truth, change, action — those are the pieces of the Red Thread® from which we extract something people want via means they don’t expect.
You can see Tamsen Webster speaking at Startupfest this summer, July 9–12, 2019. Learn more here.
