Building a Trojan Horse

This is a challenging blog to write. The topic itself isn’t difficult, for I have tackled it severally before. However, the approach is what makes it demanding.

That is because via this story, I will try to convince, you, the reader, that a metaphor with negative connotations can be flipped to have a positive one. It is a thought experiment, flow with me.

 At the beginning of this month, Kings Agricultural Services (KAS) was invited to a Youth in Agribusiness Co-creation workshop organized by the USAID-funded Kenya Crops and Dairy Market Systems (KCDMS) Activity.

KCDMS intends to, through appropriate messaging targeting the youth, increase awareness on the available opportunities in the dairy and horticulture value chains as alternative employment opportunities.

Over the course of 3 days, a cross-section of young farmers from the 12 counties KCDMS operates in and stakeholders including KAS worked together in formulating an integrated communication strategy.

This included coming up with suitable messages as well as identifying how to disseminate them. After further refinement by experts, the plan will be implemented, with the intention of encouraging more young people to go into agribusiness.

Towards the end of final day of the exercise, Hillary Proctor reached into her bag of wonders. After fishing for a minute, she revealed her latest surprise.

She walked across the hall, issuing a set of 9 dices to each round table. She had expertly facilitated the exercise, and this final item was the icing on the cake.

These dices were new to my eyes. They possessed not the black polka dots I am used to, but instead had drawings in pink, depicting a variety of things.

There was a worker bee, busy at work. The goddess Medusa. An empty baby cot. An old lady. A Trojan horse. A spiked club, ready for war. There was even a ship at sea, its mast fully powered.

This picture of a ship at sea, it made my mind veer off into the distant memory an exercise similar to this one from a year ago. I sailed across the sea of that past, with the old man of the sea. 

Hillary’s voice pulled me back to the present:

“I’d like you to…” she was back at the front, and raised a dice, “…roll one of these!”

She illustrated it, by rolling one on the table beside her. Once it stopped moving, she picked it up once more, and raised it above her head. She moved her right hand from side to side, to ensure that all participants in the hall could see the dice she was holding.

Satisfied that everyone had seen it, she gave the last set of instructions:

“Whichever dice you roll, use it as a metaphor…”

Instantaneously, the shrill voice belonging to a male fodder farmer from Kakamega County asked:

“A metaphor of what?”

Hillary lowered her hand, as she gave the response:

 “Use it to explain the outcomes of this exercise.”

 With that, she set the stage for the second chapter of this thought experiment.

I live a sort of professional double-life.

I work at two organizations in different fields, splitting my time between them. At Kings Agricultural Services, I do a variety of things as project manager, in the field I am trained in. At Exclamation Marketing, I largely do development writing and PR, in a field that I accidentally found myself in.

On some occasions, work in one field demands that I draw experience from the other one.

 For instance, At Exclamation Marketing, my agricultural background in my favor when handling tasks such as handling PR and events management for agro-centric projects like the recently-concluded African Cheetahs Roundtable.

At Kings Agricultural Services, taking part in activities such as the KCDMS co-creation workshop is made possible by my experience in developing integrated communication plans. It is a healthy synergy, this jumping from one field to another.

I picked a dice. I whispered to it, like we did as kids when gambling with with four cowrie shells. Having blessed it with that childhood prayer, I threw it on the table.The people around it held their breaths, as did I.

For an eternity, the dice rolled and rolled and rolled, on the table. Till it stopped. A Trojan horse was the one on top. It wasn’t what I had hoped for, yet there it was. “God damn it!” I sent it to hell, under my breath.

Yet, there it stood still, like a centurion. Just like it did in front of the gates of Troy, all those centuries ago.

Now I had to explain the 3-day workshop to my audience using the Trojan horse as a metaphor. This was a tough task, because all references I knew regarding the phrase have a negative connotation.

I checked out an online dictionary, with hopes of getting something positive, but was met with this response:

“Metaphorically, a "Trojan Horse" has come to mean any trick or stratagem that causes a target to invite a foe into a securely protected bastion or place...”

I went and re-read the story, which says that:

A long, long, time ago, Greeks were frustrated after 10 years a fruitless siege against the city of Troy. At last, they built a giant wooden horse as a gift to Troy, with 40 of its best soldiers hidden within it.

The Trojans, unaware of its contents, rolled the hollowed statue into their city. At night, the Greek soldiers, led by Odysseus, sneaked out of the horse. They launched an attack from within the city, and opened the gates to more of their men.

This trick, gave Greece the victory.

The definition and a re-reading of the story reinforced my unwillingness to use that metaphor, for this event had been anything but a Trojan Horse. I did not see any connection between the two.

The co-creation workshop had sparked discussions on how Kenyan youth view agribusiness. We came up with messages that would reinforce positive perceptions, while suppressing the negative ones.

It was a successful event, for which the metaphor I had landed on was unsuitable. There was simply no way, I thought, that these two could be linked. Despite this, the individuals in my round table were waiting for an explanation.

I understood that the reason why Hillary had asked us to roll those dices was to spark non-linear thinking to overcome those limitations. There were no clear connections between the metaphors and the event, and hence creating them demands a more creative, less restrictive way of viewing things.

That is what I did.

I started by asking myself two rhetorical questions:

1.      What if, the Trojan Horse is a positive metaphor?

2.      What if this communication plan we have just come up with is the Trojan Horse?”

With these two things in mind, started thinking of how the messages were designed to work. They were meant to yield desired objectives in a subtle way, just like the soldiers penetrating a city.

I concluded that, therefore, the process of developing any sort of communication plan amounts to building a Trojan horse.

The KCDMS co-creation workshop was not the first time I was helping develop a communication plan of this nature. I had done it before at Exclamation Marketing, experience which came in handy during the workshop.

Throughout most of December 2019 and January 2020, we developed one for the Ministry of Energy’s Mwananchi Gas Project. We utilized a series of household surveys and energy sector reports to develop an integrated communication plan which will encourage uptake of LPG.

These included items on the messages to promote, as well as the myths to burst. After several long meetings and consultations with multiple energy stakeholders, we came up with a detailed plan- all the way down to a 3-year budget.

The integrated marketing plan involves utilization of all manner of media channels. Radio, TV, social media, billboards, online ads, road shows, it is all there. And a few more. On the last week of January, we presented it at the Ministry of Energy.

They liked it, so we smiled.

Thinking of the Mwananchi Gas project in relation to the KCDMS one revealed to me the parallels in the approach taken to develop them. I also concluded that, if the metaphor did have a positive meaning, then both projects were Trojan Horses.

In this respect, I decided to define anew, what a Trojan Horse is. I set out that it is any communication plan which leads the target audience to behave in certain ways by, subtly, planting a targeted message in their minds.

It is just like the ancient assault, only that instead of an actual horse we have communication strategy, including the overall goal and mediums to be used. Instead of elite soldiers, we have the highly targeted messages.

These messages launch what might be called an attack on the mind. They seek to introduce new ideas, while destroying some along the way. When the target audience changes behavior as intended, then that must be a victory.

For the Gas project, victory will be an increase in the number of people utilizing LPG instead of kerosene and biomass as a primary cooking fuel. Other than reducing household pollution and respiratory diseases, such a change would counter deforestation.

For the KCDMS project, what victory means is more youth going into agribusiness. They would do so by taking up available market-oriented opportunities in the dairy and horticulture value chains as alternative employment opportunities.

None of these horses has been deployed, yet.

When they are, I hope they both smell victory.When that happens, you and I may remember that I spent a whole blog talking about nothing more than what to build a Trojan Horse looks like. I don’t know, whether I was able to effectively flip the meaning of that metaphor.

Or, I have just written a whole lot of aimless nonsense.

“I’ll go next!”

Said an excited female participant standing across the table. With a smile on her face, she held up her left hand. I wondered how he will execute would interpret her metaphor.

Hers was the one depicting Medusa, with a head full of vicious snakes.I did no dare look into its eyes, lest I be turned into stone. I took my seat, and leaned back.

 ‘That’s quite a tough one’, someone from the nearby table said.