Thunderlab

Captain Birdseye.

Look at him.

So confident in the supermarket freezer, on his little box.

Behind that box lies a world of fishing quotas, satellite navigation, factory trawlers, food scientists, freezer plants, microbiologists, packaging designers, quality inspectors, forklift drivers, container ships, insurance underwriters, customs officials, supermarkets, typography, copyright law, barcode standards, and enough refrigerated logistics to make NASA quietly nod in approval.

One of the greatest logistical achievements in modern civilisation, and yet Captain Birdseye has absolutely no interest in talking about it. He just looks at this astonishing feat of global cooperation and says…

“Fish fingers.”

Two little words. Yet somehow reassuring. That’s branding.

Nescafé. Persil. Pepsi. Quorn. Bovril. Lurpak. Spam. Oxo cubes. Seven Up. Jaffa Cakes. Skips. Cocopops. Mini Rolls. Ritz. Typhoo Tea. Wall’s Ice Cream. Jelly tots. Sugar Puffs. Surf.

Every packet is complexity distilled.

Each one stands in for an impossibly complicated network of farms, factories, chemists, shipping routes, regulations, marketing departments, and people you’ll never meet.

It’s compression.

Good language does it. You ask tablemates to pass you the ‘salt’, not the ‘Sodium Chloride’.

Good branding compresses complexity into recognition. You simply see the familiar face, name, or colour, from the other end of a supermarket aisle. 

It’s intelligent compression. And civilisation is built on exactly the same trick.

Money. Contracts. Flags. Companies. Qualifications. Laws. Currencies. Diagnoses. Road signs. Fish fingers. 

The coordination of millions of strangers is made possible by our agreement on, and effective use of, abstract symbols.

Reality is exhausting. Handles are quicker and cheaper. And everyone loves a bargain. 

It’s basic leverage at this point. The alternative would be madness. We’d have to physically hold up and/or point to the thing we wanted our audience to acknowledge. That’s doable with your knee, or a spoon, but less so with a bank, or a system of currency. 

And therein lies some problems. Each unit becomes easier to handle, but also easier to mishandle, to get wrong, or to misunderstand. And the higher the leverage, the bigger the problem can be.

Fish fingers. Is it? Probably.
Brand. Is it? Do we like that word?
Teacher. Are they? Of what?
Nation. Is it? What does the flag mean to you?
Intelligence. Is it? By what metric?
AI. Is it? Yes, look, an em dash!—but em dashes were around before AI.

Packets all. And each one made of mere words. But words are powerful, right? I suppose, problems come when the contents of the packets vary.

That’s the danger of abstraction, and mistaking our representations for reality is something that philosophers have been worrying about for centuries.

Plato pondered it.

Kant argued we only experience the world through the structures our minds impose upon it.

Magritte told us the pipe is not the pipe.

Korzybski said the map is not the territory.

But perhaps my favourite philosopher is Twain, Shania.  

‘Rocket scientist?’ Let’s see about that.

She audits the packet because labels don’t impress her much. And because she knows that real territories of sense experience exist beneath the map. ‘You’ve got the brains, but have you got the touch? Now, don’t get me wrong, yeah, I think you’re alright. But that won’t keep me warm in the middle of the night.’ 

Her brutal audit of these high-status archetypes made us briefly reconsider the value behind them. And that is brilliant, but if she thinks she can move the needle when it comes to the public’s perception and consumption of brands, Twain is mistaken. 

She’s no match for Captain Birdseye. Sure, you may question the title, but the Captain becomes the packet. He’s the smile that tells you not to worry about the complexities behind the curtain. He knows his audience doesn’t want to see the plumbing. They just want to turn on the tap and get water. 

We judge brands in less than a hundred milliseconds. That’s not enough time to read a single ingredient, let alone a sustainability report. And in those first few ‘thin slices’, your brain is just looking for a sign of reassurance. The Captain, with his white beard, quasi-naval uniform, and assuring face, is a walking, talking safety signal. And that is incredibly valuable, and something the marketing department seemingly forgot was important in the late nineties when they tried to ‘sex up’ the Captain with a younger, rugged version. They even gave him a miniature submarine. 

Which he could have used to see the subsequent sales figures that plunged through the floor like a cartoon anchor.

People didn’t want a ‘cool’ captain; they wanted the grandfatherly figure who represented stability. So Birdseye quietly, ahem, brought the old Captain back. When they tried to make him contemporary, they actually added cognitive load because they were asking the consumer to re-evaluate who this person was. The original Captain succeeds because he has absolutely no interest in nuance. His function is to guarantee the quality of the fish fingers. That’s the power of the archetype. Of representation. It’s cultural shorthand.

Every packet throws information away. And most of the time that’s a feature, but occasionally it’s a bug.

Compression saves us from complexity, but it also creates room for drift, distortion or misunderstanding. We think we’ve communicated one thing; someone else confidently reconstructs another. Strip away enough nuance and people don’t merely lose detail; they begin supplying their own.

Which brings us to the other Twain, Mark.

‘It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure, that just ain’t so.’

Reality is astonishingly complicated but nobody asks us to carry it around all day.

Instead, civilisation hands us packets. Little handles.

Merciful compressions of a world too complicated to hold in your head.

Most of the time, they’re wonderful.

Sometimes they’re dangerous. Because reality doesn’t care what we call it. Because the packet can quietly replace the thing inside it. And because yesterday’s handles have a habit of becoming today’s handcuffs.

The trick isn’t to stop using them. The trick is to compress complexity without destroying truth.

And the ability we have to do this remains one of civilisation’s greatest achievements.

So, next time you’re standing in front of the frozen food cabinet, take another look at Captain Birdseye. 

He isn’t trying to teach you about international maritime law.

Or cognitive psychology.

Or global logistics.

He simply stands there, calmly compressing an astonishing amount of reality into two ordinary words.

Fish fingers.

Civilisation depends on people who can do that.

It also depends on people remembering that the packet is never the whole story.

The sandwich has always been there for me.

In good times and bad. On my first day of school, it rode shotgun in my lunchbox like a little friend in a foil jacket. Between meetings, I grab one. On my lunchbreaks it waits in my bag. Or if I’ve been caught short, I can just nip across the road and find one in a chiller cabinet, waiting to be hand-picked, ‘Choose me, I  am delicious and suitable for vegetarians.’ It’s always the prawn mayo, sure, but sometimes I fantasize choosing the all-day breakfast doorstep and falling off the pork wagon, which was not a sentence I foresaw using today.

But whether you plump for the cheese and pickle, the ham salad, or the spicy chicken tikka, you know where you are with a sandwich. It’s a snack you can hold in your hand, and it’s a snack you can trust.

I know that pulse-based salads are disrupting more and more of the market but sandwiches remain the go-to lunch option in the Western world, and certainly serve as the central pillar of most Meal Deals. So it was with some surprise that I only did recently discover the origin story of this ubiquitous snack and how it was named after its inventor and how it almost never happened.

But happen it did.

And it happened, as many things do, with thanks to the fortuitous meeting of character, opportunity, and circumstance.

Our inventor was an unlikely one. Headstrong. Irascible. Restless. Those observing his younger years would have seen perhaps a difficult man. A stubborn man. A man not especially interested in doing the done thing. Not necessarily a man whose name, or rather, title, would ring down the ages with his gift to the world.

John Montagu was 4th Earl of Sandwich and he loved the gaming table.

So much so, that he rarely left it. In fact, it was this that compelled him to demand beef and bread be brought to him while he played. Not an unusual request for the day. However, where others around this time, in line with the mores and conventions of polite society, would’ve eaten both separately, John, during one auspicious game, slammed his meat between two torn chunks of loaf in a diabolical combo.

You might imagine the gasps and eyebrows this raised.

But John did not give a sweet monkeys what people thought. He simply recognised a slightly better way of doing things.

Was he banished from the gaming club? Did his contemporaries shun him from their social circles? Cast him from their clubs. No, they did not. They just said,

‘He’s onto something here.’

And he was. John could now essentially, as the saying goes, have his lunch and keep one arm free at all times. It made him more productive on his breaks. He was able to do more things. Falconery. Croquet. He could assist reversing vehicles with one hand while he ate, waving in the carriages, ‘Whoa, whoa, stop. Nom nom.’

And pretty soon, this particular style of consuming bread and meat caught on.

His eponymous creation took flight.
It went viral.
Like the ice bucket challenge.
The sandwich became THE, MUST HAVE, dish of the day.
It exploded through Europe.
It captured imaginations.
It enchanted people from every walk of life
All around the world, people from Paris to Papua New Guinea began sandwiching foodstuffs between their bread. ‘Why have we never thought to do this before?’

And one of the wonderful aspects of this new snack was that everyone could put their own spin on it. The three-slice club. The croque moniseur. The grilled panini. The croque madam. Rolls got involved. Baps. Baguettes. Torpedoes. Subs. The 6-inch. 12-inch. Or, of course, Subs 15 and 30 in France due to the metric system.

Some have said that the sandwich has helped humans build the modern world, and I am inclined to agree.

‘When a good idea is ready to happen, it does,’ we think.

But maybe not.

Let us not forget that the sandwich started almost by accident.

Had John been a reasonable fellow, well accustomed to observing the mores of his time, had he not the pluck to envelop his meat, then perhaps we would not know the sandwich today. 

What if this particular gentleman had died in his early twenties? Or been gluten-intolerant? Or simply fancied soup that afternoon.
The sandwich, as we know it, may have never been born.
And what would we be choosing in Tesco today?

Probably a pulse-based salad.

But that’s not the point. The point is that most of us tell history backwards.

We look at the sandwich, the paperclip, the Post-it Note, Velcro, Lego, email, the shipping container, the QR code, powerpoint … and because they exist, we subconsciously assume they were always inevitable, waiting to be invented. As if the universe was somehow nudging humanity towards them.

But that’s hindsight.

The future was, in fact, not so inevitable.

It is contingent. But every invention looks inevitable after it’s been invented.

We like to imagine that civilisation unfolds according to some grand masterplan. As though somebody, somewhere, was eventually destined to invent the sandwich. But history is considerably messier than that.

And when a thing does catch on, what then?

Something else happens.

Economists call it Path Dependence.

Once society adopts a solution … everything starts building around it. Picnics. Tupperware. Subway. Pret. Napkins. Logistics. Supply chains.

Suddenly, removing sandwiches becomes impossible. The path reinforces itself.

The sandwich isn’t remarkable because somebody put food between two pieces of bread. The sandwich wasn’t revolutionary because it was brand new.

It was revolutionary because somebody showed everyone else they could.

I know that some historians dispute parts of this story, but whether every detail is true hardly matters. The legend itself illustrates the point. Once a story catches on, it acquires a remarkable resistance to being replaced.

And besides, this is not just about sandwiches.

QWERTY keyboards were actually designed to slow typists down, but they became ubiquitous anyway because the world learnt to type on them. Early filmmakers set up in Southern California because it had good light and varied scenery—and this led to HOLLYWOOD. The humble PDF was just another file type until we realised everyone could use it, and so now, everybody does. Most UK suburbs built up around extensions of the rail network. Cities grow around rivers for a reason. 

Once you notice this, you see it everywhere. When a path forms, things start building around it. In software. Cities. Systems of measurement. In organisations. Governments. Brands.

History doesn’t always reward the best ideas.

But it has a habit of normalising workable ones.

Tomorrow lunchtime, someone somewhere will pick up a sandwich from a supermarket chiller.

They won’t think about John Montagu.

Or path dependence.

They’ll just think, ’That’ll do.’

And perhaps that’s the greatest compliment an invention can receive.

Not that we remember who created it.

But that it becomes so ordinary that we just feel like it’s always been there.

I have become convinced that every successful project is a power ballad.

I appreciate that sounds absurd, but bear with me.

On paper, power ballads are terrible ideas. And not only terrible ideas but overlong, melodramatic, terrible ideas with guitar solos, wind machines, and passionate drama queens wearing too much mascara, and that’s just the men. By all available metrics, the power ballad should have died out sometime before 1992, along with naf naf jeans and shell suits.

And yet it did not.

It remains.

Why?

Because the power ballad has something of great value. It’s not style. It’s not intellect. And it’s not word-of-mouth popularity. It’s popular in a strangely private way. I know at least fifty people who claim to have never liked Bon Jovi, and yet, can lip sync ‘Johnny used to work on the docks’ as if they genuinely knew the bloke.

Power ballads remain. In our hearts. As anthems.

‘Yes,’ you say, ‘because they are music, duh.’

But no, because not all music remains. I know it’s a subjective subject but much music has simply been consigned to the great Charity Shop in The Sky. Acid Jazz. Big Beat. Lo-fi indie jazz funk. These genres never made it. Well, not in the way power ballads did. 

The power ballad retains a special place. And it serves a special purpose. 

Driving home after a break-up? You know what to do. You know the only medicine worth taking is two tablespoons of Bonnie Tyler on an empty stomach. That, my friend, will hit the spot. You go from a bleary-eyed weepmonster sniffing back tears in the staff car park to world-beating demigod, commanding the clouds, ‘Once upon a time…’

They are strong medicine, so be careful with your daily dosage.

I have sometimes made the mistake of playing one while doing a tax return. Big mistake. Early Meat Loaf was not designed for Excel sheets. Some stronger hearts out there may be able to accommodate ‘Two Out Of Three Ain’t Bad’ while summing up columns, but not this writer. 

Power ballads are not background music for airport lounging. They are emotional equipment.

But why? And how? And what are the secrets they hold? And could they unlock how we do business?

Because let’s be honest, business is where we spend most of our time these days. In discussion. In planning. In project work. Everyone is in project work on some level, whether they realise it or not.

And many projects, despite the best of intentions, simply do not work. Unlike the power ballad, they do not stay with us. They get consigned to the bin, to the shared drive, to the archive folder, or that forgotten Trello board no one speaks about. Our projects rarely become the medicine we need.

We sigh with some dismay and look back to see where things went wrong. Why did that project fail? Why did no one buy? Why did Alan leave? What did we miss?

We assess the failures, misfortunes, and misconceptions for anything that could help.

People look everywhere for answers. For solutions. For models of success and, let’s be honest, successful persuasion. And in human affairs, success is almost always about persuasion. And yet, despite this incessant vigilance and desire for improvement, we often repeat the same mistakes, time and time again.

Completely unaware that, despite our diligence, we are overlooking the greatest model of successful persuasion ever invented. The humble power ballad. 

Hear me out.

Every power ballad is a model of successful persuasion because it…

1.
Never begins at full volume

The clever power ballad starts with restraint. 

Few people remember the opening eight seconds of Total Eclipse of the Heart. And that’s precisely why they matter. What we actually hear are those sixteen notes of forlorn piano that sound like the kind of doorbell my Grandma’s next-door neighbour might have had in the 1980s. A little pretentious but not overdone.

Then the calm instruction, ‘Turn around.’ It is restrained and metered just so, and offset with a slightly passive-aggressive accusation about how we’re never coming round. Tyler never explains why it might be necessary to turn around, but we do not question her. And just at the point where someone could perhaps politely ask why, she declares the fact that every now and then she falls apart, and that she needs us more than ever, and so it would then be insensitive to question her initial request. Her mastery of releasing restraint into full throttle mode is almost beyond comprehension but on closer inspection the trick is simple: start quiet and confident, before BECOMING LOUD, when you’ve earned the right to. And add maracas if you can.

2.
Promises the impossible

The best ballads are built around a promise of something that no rational person should believe, or ask for.

‘Forever’s Gonna Start Tonight’. ‘Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now’. ‘Don’t Stop Believin’’. ‘Take My Breath Away’.
You won’t find any called ‘Let’s Circle Back After Lunch.’

3.
Never wastes a note.

Despite the grandeur, pomp, and overblown music videos, most power ballads are actually eloquent examples of economy. Each note earns its place. Every instrument has its job. And everything executes when necessary. The drummer. The guitarist. The backing singers.

And more importantly, they know when they are not needed. A good song is comprised of more strategic silence than you might imagine. Intentional pausing. Held breaths. Dropped instruments. Masters know when to hold back. When to keep schtum. When to wait. Projects rarely do. Humans equate action with success. It’s called Action Bias.

We often mistake business for busyness. Trying so hard to look busy. ‘Let’s create a working group.’ ‘Build a dashboard!’ ‘Circulate another survey that nobody reads.’ ‘Produce a 94-slide PowerPoint explaining why we’re agile.’ ‘Create a task force to investigate why the task force isn’t progressing.’

Stop. Take a breath. Sometimes the pause is the persuasion.

4.
Repeats more than it innovates

This one surprised me because I always assumed the power ballad was an unfolding kaleidoscope of novelty but they’re actually not. Most contain around three good ideas, which repeat in wonderful ways.

They’re full of repetition, repetition, and more repetition, with just enough variation to make it all work. The chorus comes back. Again. Again. And again. 

This is more effective and valuable than you might realise. The human mind evolved to forget new data unless it’s pertinent. No matter how marvellous the information, if it’s not repeated, the mind will often tag it as ‘irrelevant to survival’ and bin the thing off. We must work with this psychological feature in our good works. Repetition is focus. It keeps the main things the main things while giving us room to explore everything else. We must employ it as it is employed in effective teaching. In successful projects. In brilliant branding.

5.
Earns the key change

We all know that moment at the start of the song’s third act, when we just can’t see how the experience can get any better. And then the boy band stands up from the stools on the key change. Half the country briefly ascends to another plane of existence. Teenagers find God. Otherwise responsible mothers start scratching their thighs.

But had the band done their ‘stand up for key change’ in the opening bars, those fans would’ve just scratched their heads.

Businesses often reveal their “big idea” in the opening paragraph. But that’s like opening with the key change. It feels unearned. Sit down.

6.
Makes the audience sing

No matter how many meme gifs you stack in your slide deck, you can’t instruct a team to enjoy something.

A power ballad is not a powerpoint. ‘All Out Of Love’ would not work as a pie chart. Nobody falls in love with a song by nodding at it with earnest frowns. 

They become part of it. They sing it, and they remember singing it. That’s the difference between an audience and a movement. Successful projects don’t create spectators. They create participants. And when people participate properly, the best ideas rise to the top.

7.
Risks ridicule

Power ballads are vulnerable. They risk looking ridiculous. That’s why they work. The opposite of sincerity isn’t irony. It’s safety. And that is where 90% of today’s professionals like to live: The Safe Zone. Aka The Land Where Good Stuff Rarely Happens. Which is fine, if you like that kind of thing. But projects that spend their lives trying not to look foolish rarely become extraordinary. Every power ballad walks right to the edge of absurdity. And successful projects must do the same.

8.
Is emotionally generous. And leaves people larger than it found them.

Nobody finishes a great power ballad feeling exactly as they did three minutes earlier.

Your emotional state changes. The same should be said of any worthwhile meeting, product, presentation, or brand interaction. No one ever accused Meat Loaf of holding back. After all, he would do anything for love (well, almost anything). You can say what you like about him, but don’t say he’s not generous.

And projects should be generous too. With explanation. With praise. With ideas. With delight.

We transform through movement, experience, and participation. Generosity makes this happen.

9.
Knows it’s not about the wind machine. And it never was.

And it’s not about the leather trousers. Or the guitar solo. Or the mascara.

Everyone thinks that’s why power ballads work.

It isn’t.

Those are just the visible parts of the ship. But the invisible emotional engine below the waterline carries all the power.

People obsess over logos, colours, websites, and slogans.

But good branding goes deeper. As do good presentations. And good teachers. And designers.

Wind machines can add drama,
but drama needs a good plot.

Many spend fortunes on stage effects and purple smoke and laser shows but almost nobody asks why twenty thousand people started singing in the first place.

Perhaps that’s why so many projects fail. They mistake spectacle for structure. They launch as choruses. They promise before they’ve earned belief. Everyone starts talking immediately. Every feature launches simultaneously. They shout before they’ve given us a reason to listen. They get excited about widgets and gimmicks. Buzzwords and hashtags. Features and funnels and functions and frameworks. For frameworks’ sake.

In other words, they pull out the wind machine but they never build the song. And so they never become anthems.

Every successful project is a power ballad. Not because it contains guitar solos. Not because it wears leather trousers. But because it starts with restraint. It earns belief before making promises. Repeats what matters. Knows when to pause. Saves its biggest moments until they’ve been earned. Invites people to take part. And leaves them feeling larger than before.

And because, long before it asks us to sing, it gives us a reason to.

And that’s the part most people forget to build.