Taking Stock of Empathy

Today I am thinking about empathy, the ability to see the world through the eyes of another person, to understand the world as they understand it and to feel what they feel. 

Each of us differs in our basic ability to empathise with others, and once again

it comes back to the way our brains are wired.  Recent findings in neuropsychology have found particular brain cells called mirror neurons which fire when we see reactions in others, so that we experience what we think they are experiencing.  We share their experience.  We empathise.

When we get caught up in a story, our mirror neurons are firing as we share the plights and joys of fictional characters.  We reach out to our loved ones in need because we understand their distress and want to lend them comfort.  We feel joy when we celebrate our loved ones’ successes.  We do this to a greater or lesser extent dependent upon our biology.

To whatever level is available to us, we tend to focus our empathy on those who touch our lives most closely, our nearest and dearest.

When people are distant from our own lives it is harder to empathise.  When we hear stories about people en masse it is much harder. We may or may not be moved by stories of individual hardship, courage or joy.  But when a population are involved it is harder to see the humanity involved.  It is too big for us to feel.  We fear being overwhelmed.

At some point we switch between seeing people as people, as individuals, and start to see people as a mass of humanity and our empathy switches off, our mirror neurons cease firing.  Our perception flips between seeing two faces and seeing the vase. When do we flip into objectivising people?  When we see others as a ‘them’? When we label people by their nationality, religion, when we describe our customers as ‘the market’, then we find it difficult to summon up empathy, to tune into their humanity, to feel their lives.

Are we fixed and limited in our empathy?  Is it possible/desirable to extend the boundaries of our compassion?  Or do we feel that we will be diminished in some way, that if we give more we will have less ourselves? 

Or is it entirely the opposite?  In the words of the Dalai Lama, ‘The more we care for the happiness of others, the greater our own sense of well-being becomes’.

Is it in fact a win-win after all?

Dear Business ...

Dear Business

I think you need to understand a few things about me.

I want to be acknowledged.  I don’t want to be ignored.

I want to be treated with respect because I am a person too. 

I might be having a bad day, when a smile and a friendly word might make a difference.

I don’t want people to look over my shoulder when they are talking to me.

I never again want to hear that patronizing tone of voice that so clearly indicates that the person I am talking to really doesn’t give a damn.

After all, I am the reason that you exist.

You might know my name but you don’t know anything about who I am.   Ask me.  Spend time getting to know me and find out what I like and what I want.

I will tell my friends about you.  Good or bad.  I have lots of friends.

If you think your products are good enough.  They aren’t. 

If you think churning out the same old marketing does the job, it shows me that you lack imagination and passion.

If you don’t care, I don’t.

If you think about me simply as a target, you will never be able to convince me that you give a damn. 

Look at me.

I’m all you’ve got.

I am not alone.

Yours,

Consumer

Curiosity and Agility

Curiosity and agility are precisely the qualities that ensure the survival of an individual, species or organization.

As a process, I have broken this down into the following 4 stages:

1    to explore

2    to accurately appraise a situation

3    to select an appropriate response

4    to take the appropriate, timely action. 

A failure in this process ensures the untimely demise of a squirrelmunk or a blue chip company.  In large companies there are often difficulties at each stage

1. Curiosity is a state of mind to be cultivated against an all too frequent backdrop of expectations that ‘we are already supposed to know’.  Managers and executives are under a lot of pressure to already have the answers, so it can be risky at a personal level to ask questions. 

In today’s fast-moving market environment we need to cultivate curiosity, to be more open-minded and nurture an outside-in culture where everyone is allowed to learn and people are not expected to know all the answers.

2. Accurately appraising a situation is difficult because we are biased. Many biases serve to protect the ego of the individual for example, an unwillingness to admit that mistakes have been made and that a change of course is required.  Or there may be a bias towards playing safe, following the rules and norms, which prevent a new, more profitable course of action. Or only seeing part of the truth – the part that we already know. 

Successful team-working, where individual points of view are respected, can help to mitigate against personal bias.  Diversity should be embraced to encourage different ways of seeing a situation.

3. We might fail to choose the appropriate response because of the effort of the response required, the change of direction required, or we might simply not know the best cause of action.  The decision-making process to effect a response might be lengthy and convoluted so that they impetus has waned before a decision can be taken.

Decentralising the organisation, its processes and decision-making, allows for decisions to be taken closer to the coalface, where people involved can take responsibility.  Trust needs to be invested and demonstrated in personnel with just enough process, checks and balances to ensure due diligence.

4. Even if we accurately appraise the situation and select an appropriate response might be hindered in executing the response because of the lack of agility in our organization.  Processes and procedures are in place to ensure that budgets are properly planned in advance, tracked, activities are planned and monitored and ‘err’ efficient.

Layers upon layers of beaurocracy can grow in large organizations that hinder agility.  Stripping away as much of this as possible results in a more streamlined, efficient and responsive company, more fit for purpose in today’s fast moving market.

The Burning Platform

The purpose of companies, their very raison d’etre, is to make money for their shareholders.  This is their legal obligation. The key focus of many companies is to maximize shareholder return in the short term, earning their executives a tidy bonus for a job well done. So isn't a bit naïve to talk about putting customers first?

But we can all see that it is not working.  The economy is screwed, companies are going under at a rate of knots.

What do we need to do differently?

Peter Drucker gave us the answer 50 years ago:

"To know what a business is we have to start with its purpose.  Its purpose must be outside of the business itself.  In fact, it must lie in society since business enterprise is an organ of society.  There is only one value definition of business purpose: to create a customer ..."

To change from a focus on shareholders to a focus on customers involves a fundamentally different way of thinking and being.

From a managerial perspective it means becoming humble.  To shift away from insulated, centralised, ego-boosting control to developing an outside-in organisation:

• where information flows from the market to the decision-makers who then base their decisions on this information.
• where the organization is curious and agile so that it seeks out and responds to change in consumer opinions, values and behaviours.
• where business targets are set on real world, sustainable improvements in consumer value.

No small challenge.  Is it worth it?

Yes, because companies that are acting in this way are the ones that are developing the curiosity and agility, and therefore resilience to survive the fast pace and vigorous competition of today's marketplace.  The old-style companies, focused on shareholder value and governed by legacy and hierarchy are going out of business.

So, there isn’t really much of a choice.  

What if?

We learnt in the last post that our brains are not optimized, but rather a hotch potch of bolt-ons that developed through evolutionary circumstance, that the brain doesn’t function as a seamless whole but through an imperfect set of connections with a sometimes rudimentary set of information channels.  What does this mean for humankind surviving in today’s world? 

Our primitive brain is still concerned with only one thing – our survival.  And survival today, for those of us lucky enough to live in relative economic prosperity means social survival.  We depend on the society in which we live.  This means that the threats and opportunities to our survival depend upon our relationships and our ability to navigate complex and subtle rules for success.  If we don’t succeed the penalty is marginalization or exclusion from society, which equates to a threat to our very existence.

Our primitive brain struggles to cope with this complexity and yet is forever on guard.  Most of us experience this as a constant state of anxiety.  Our executive brain concerns itself for the most part with our relationships and our status, while our primitive brain worries.

The role of marketing has made a major contribution to this state of anxiety by portraying a vision of what it is to be successful in society, by associating this blissful state with the acquisition of wealth, goods and services that are needed to achieve a level of status that will mitigate the threat of exclusion.

What if marketing turned on its head and took on responsibility for alleviating the anxiety it has helped to create in people’s lives?

What if marketing helped people to feel validated and supported?  What if products were developed with genuine compassion for their customers and their anxiety filled lives?  What if companies and brands leveled with consumers and spoke to them honestly?  What if companies held their hands up and admitted their failings giving customers permission to be flawed too? 

What then?

Single-minded?

We learnt in the last post that our behaviour is driven by brain structures that were built for simpler times.  These simpler brains are superbly designed to ensure our survival.  To do this they focus on two things only, is this thing a potential threat to or a potential opportunity for my survival. If so, act.

There are two major flaws with this system. Our homo sapiens brain, let’s call it our executive brain, developed language and self-awareness, so that we can spend our entire lives in internal dialogue about the complex issues of ourselves being in our world.  The problem is that our primitive brain has no language to communicate specifically what concerns it.  It can only send messages to the executive brain in the form of emotions.

This is a very simplistic way to orient the person towards or away from something. In fact, according to the work of Paul Eckman, there are only 6 emotions - fear, anger, surprise, disgust, sadness, happiness which make for a very rudimentary communication.

Our primitive brain is constantly on guard, scanning the environment for potential threats or opportunities for our survival.  It is our automatic pilot, taking care of us, while we ponder more lofty thoughts.  This is how we can arrive at work with little recollection of the journey, and yet still react in an instant if something untoward occurs, because the primitive brain has sent an urgent emotional message for us to pay attention.

If we want to gain attention then we need to understand how our message will draw the attention of the primitive brain, what implications does it have for the individual.  Could it evoke fear of threat and turn people away or attract by implying opportunities for survival?

In the next post I will look at how this system functions in today’s complex world where survival depends on social survival.

Since Time Began ...

Today I want to take a step out and away from the day-to day-stuff of life.  In fact I want to go to the other extreme and take in a huge perspective – the history of life on earth.  No less!

Since we stumbled out of the primordial swamp (no apologies to creationists – I think you’re wrong) we human beings have been 400 million (ish) years in the making.  We have had 100 million years of being reptiles and another 300 million years of being mammals.  We – homo sapiens – only arrived on the planet 200 thousand years ago.

Let’s zoom back in. It is clear that we were built by forces of evolution to face very different survival pressures than we face in today’s world.  What then is our genetic legacy?

As reptiles we had a simple brain to instinctively deal with immediate threats to survival and opportunities to stay alive and procreate.  As mammals we developed a more sophisticated brain that allowed us further intelligence to deal with not only our individual survival but also that of our offspring, to provide shelter, to care and nurture. 

When we evolved into a homo species then our brains started to rapidly evolve intelligence that ultimately allowed us to transcend our day-to-day existence, to plan, to dream and hope; to imagine how we can achieve greater wellbeing for ourselves, our loved ones and our planet; to develop arts, science, technology and progress the human condition to a place and at a pace unimaginable even 100 years ago.

We are only aware of our human brain because this is where we have consciousness, this is where we think. The problem is that these earlier stages of our evolution are still present in the structure of our brains, functioning below our 
conscious awareness and driving our behaviour. 

We have three brains but we only think we think with one.

I will be looking at the implications of this in the next blog or two.

For more on this subject read ‘The Triune Brain in Evolution’ by Paul D. McLean.

Business By Numbers

Today I am drawing a comparison between the ‘art’ of painting by numbers and the ‘art’ of running a business by numbers.What do the numbers that drive your business tell you?  Which channel is bringing in most traffic, which promotion has resulted in most sales, how much the brand uplift, or God forbid, downturn has been as a result of the latest campaign.  As a mechanistic view of levers and pulleys the numbers can tell you which lever to press to uplift sales, share, brand or whatever in the next measurement period.  This is worthwhile and yet it worries me because it’s all too simple, and too near-sighted.

And I think that is both the appeal and the trap.  It makes things too easy and really the world ain’t like that.  We human beings are as complicated as it gets.  And that’s all businesses are in the end, a bunch of people selling something to another bunch of people.  To embrace the richness and complexity of what it means to be human, to deeply understand and to bring that understanding to a unique expression of what you can give the world through your business is to produce a masterpiece.

Do we want to produce a painting by numbers or a work of art?

Joining the Dots

I have spent much of my career working in consumer research while developing a love-hate relationship with the research industry and functions.  Love of the people, their passion and integrity (usually) and hate for the lack of respect shown to them and their own ineptitude in demanding respect, along with some entrenchment in out-of-date styles of research and communication.

My academic background which has underpinned my career is psychology.  I passionately believe that there is a wealth of untapped knowledge in psychology that is of huge value to businesses if a communication bridge can be built between academia and business.


Currently I am studying for a Masters in Coaching Psychology which is taking me back to my roots and rediscovering, and discovering afresh, so much insight into the nature of human beings.  

I am finding that so much of what I read, whether text books or marketing magazines, discussion groups or blogs, fires up a series of thoughts and connections between the different worlds.  Hence the title of this first post.

With so many new discoveries and so much to say on the matter I am starting this blog, at the very least it will be a way for me to capture and clarify my thoughts.  At best it might be interesting and useful for others too.

Welcome