Ali G, 25 years later: a lesson in relevance

Believe it or not, the return of Ali G tells us something really useful about relevance.

More than two decades after Sacha Baron Cohen created a white suburban teenager whose identity was built through an exaggerated performance of Black British and Jamaican culture, the character has returned to a very different cultural landscape. Some see racial caricature and cultural appropriation, others see satire: a misguided white man borrowing an identity he barely understands and exposing himself in the process.

The disagreement is familiar, but the context around it has changed considerably.

The Overton Window is a useful way of understanding why. Originally developed as a political theory, it describes the range of ideas considered acceptable within mainstream discourse at a particular moment. Those boundaries move as values, language and expectations change, and culture behaves in much the same way.

Ali G has remained remarkably recognisable but the framework through which we interpret him has shifted.

Over the past 25 years, conversations around race, representation and cultural appropriation have moved much further into public consciousness. The Black Lives Matter movement accelerated that shift, alongside a wider interrogation of who gets represented, who gets to do the representing and how power shapes meaning. At the same time, there has been growing resistance to what some see as increasingly restrictive cultural rules around comedy, language and creative expression.

The result is a more fragmented cultural landscape. The same joke can be seen as sharp satire, offensive caricature or something that simply belongs to another era, depending on who is watching.

That has a direct parallel in business.

Every organisation is built around assumptions about people: what they value, how they live, what they aspire to and what they expect from the companies they buy from or work for. When those assumptions prove successful, they tend to become embedded. A campaign becomes a brand truth, a policy becomes precedent and a way of working becomes culture.

The problem is that the world continues to move around them.

A proposition built around one idea of success can lose resonance as aspirations change. A workplace policy designed around one model of family life can become disconnected from employees. Language once associated with progress can acquire different meanings. Customer groups that once appeared relatively coherent can develop increasingly different expectations.

Ali G offers an exaggerated example of this dynamic. The thing itself can remain almost unchanged while its meaning changes because the audience and context around it have moved.

That is why relevance is relational. It exists between an organisation and the people it hopes to employ, serve and influence. It cannot be maintained simply by repeating what worked before, nor by responding to every cultural reaction as though it represents permanent change.

Organisations need to understand which shifts have depth, which are temporary, where audiences are moving together and where they are moving apart. They also need to examine the assumptions that have become so embedded internally that nobody thinks to question them anymore.

This is where organisational lag begins. Businesses naturally institutionalise what has worked before, while the social conditions that made those decisions successful continue to evolve. Over time, an organisation can remain completely consistent with itself while becoming progressively less relevant to everyone else.

The debate around Ali G will continue, most probably noisily. The useful question for business is what it reveals about the way meaning changes over time.

Which assumptions are you carrying forward from a world that has already changed, and how confident are you that you would notice?

Is your organisation still relevant?

Take The Unmistakables’ Relevance Audit to find out.