Listening - the Gift of Attention

In all my walks of life, but particularly in my coaching, listening is fundamental.  It is the basic platform on which to build collaborative relationships with clients, colleagues, friends and family.  So I am considering what it means to listen and to listen well.

The essential act of listening is to take in information from another person.  We have to allow space in our mind to allow that information to enter and this is the main challenge.  With our busy lives and busy minds we often only have a small amount of space to accommodate another person’s version of reality.

Here are two scenarios for comparison.

Often when someone is talking to us we are:

•       judging the usefulness of the conversation
•       judging the person speaking
•       looking at the clock
•       planning what we will say next
•       planning what we will do next
•       working out how to get what we want
•       busy not forgetting
•       working out how to demonstrate that we are clever and attractive

With so much going on in our minds already there is very little space left to listen so we practice skimming the surface of the words being said, just enough to respond appropriately and conventionally.

Occasionally, when we really, actively listen we:

•       quiet our minds of its internal chatter
•       focus our attention on the other person
•       pay attention to what they say and how they say
•       tune into the emotions that go along with the words
•       enter their world
•       respond authentically

To listen we have to purposefully gain control of our usual mental processes and let them fade into the background. We have to let go of our need to know so that we can make space to learn.  We have to control our urges to judge and to jump to conclusions.  We have to surrender our own agenda and ego for a little while to let the other person take centre stage in the theatre of our mind. 

To listen like this is a gift of care and generosity.  We have to give up something of ourselves, to honour and validate another person, which is why it is both difficult and worth doing.

Mechanical Man

Time was when economies flourished, business was booming and Leaders of Business didn’t have to worry about messy things that they didn’t understand, like people and all their irrationalities.  The rational world of behaviourism worked wonderfully well on the basis of what you put in predicts what you get out.  Of course it did.  Bonuses were dangled and people performed.

Then things started to get a bit shaky.  Heads were scratched.  The Leaders of Business kind of knew they were missing something but they didn’t want to admit it nor get their hands dirty.  But the day was saved by the heroic likes of Messrs Ariely, Kahneman and Thaler.  It was a little bit messy they told us, but not to worry because they had it all worked out so that although it wasn’t as simple as it was before, here are all the rules that you need to know.  Basically you can still have a system that predicts what you get out based on what you put in.  And in a stroke of marketing brilliance they called it Behavioural Economics, using two favourite words in one neat phrase.  No wonder the Leaders of Business loved it.  They could now go about their business with the confidence that they Understand People.

But the real understanding remains untouched by the Leaders of Business, who have MBA’s and who ‘invest in people’.  If they did they would understand and deal with the culture that exists in most organizations where employees have to succeed, so cannot take risks, who have to know, so cannot learn, who have to perform so cannot try a new way.  They would understand the excruciating anxiety that this culture induces and the inhibition of creativity and potential that results.  They would take steps to model a new way of being that celebrates trying with its associated failures, that supports not knowing and learning, that accepts flaws in the face of the impossibility of perfection.  Even in themselves. 

And then, maybe, the Leaders in Business could start to open up to understanding the real messy world of people with their anxieties and defenses, emotions, hopes and irrationalities that exist beyond the doors of their corporate headquarters and the sanitized world of Behavioural Economics.

Coaching meets Marketing

Today I am going to collide my two worlds – coaching and marketing.  I have talked before about the importance of empathy in business, focusing on getting to know and understanding your customers.  Now I would like to draw more deeply on my experience of coaching and how we can bring these learnings into the customer interface. 

1. Relax and be human.  Stop believing in and supporting the myth that everyone is happy and shiny.  This puts debilitating pressure on yourself, your business and your customers as we all judge ourselves against an unrealistic ideal and we all fall short.  Instead by admitting to your failings you allow yourself and others to relax and be human.
2. Embrace the flaws we all have.  Bring them out into the open and in doing so relieve the pressure on being perfect.  Watch as customers relax and feel understood.  Use humour to create a safe expression of taboos.  Let people laugh at the foibles we all share.
3. Listen with your heart and mind.  Be genuinely curious and caring.  Constantly ask how you can help your customers both practically and emotionally.  Keep seeking that knowledge and when you have an answer, keep asking because it will keep changing.
4. Accept that you can't possibly know.  Since everything is always changing, our only successful strategy is to keep learning, keep trying and learn from our successes and our inevitable mistakes. 

By taking a learning approach, the work will still get done, but you will be more engaged, open, relaxed and more realistic.  The less you focus on the perfect outcome, the more likely you are to get it right. 

Busy-ness is bad for business

There is a belief that has infiltrated our society – that to be busy is to be virtuous or good.  We admire people who are living very busy lives and we boast about how busy we are in order to appear virtuous in the eyes of others.

Being busy creates anxiety as the tasks pile up, but we learn to like it that way, because the payoff is in knowing that we are good.  We don’t have to question ourselves, our beliefs, our ethics – we don’t have time to develop ourselves.  We allow ourselves to react in a knee-jerk manner because we don’t have time to do anything else.

We particularly need to be seen to be busy at work to prove that we are making a valuable contribution.  Consider for a moment whether the 80:20 rule applies.  It often does.  Consider whether 20 per cent of your time is creating 80 per cent of your valuable contribution. 

The real value of what you bring to your work improves the efficiency and effectiveness of your company and improves the lives of its customers.  Value comes when you pause to reflect on your work and streamline your activities to align with these goals.

A lot of the rest is padding - emails that could be ignored, meetings that achieve little, flights that could be replaced with video calls.  Stuff that detracts from your value.   

Pausing to contemplate gives our intuitive brain a chance to work.  When do your best ideas come?  When does that flash of inspiration come as if from nowhere?  Usually this is in a period of calm, in the shower, on holiday, at the weekend.  Creating unhurried time for contemplation pays dividends in terms of the quality of our thinking and the value of our contribution.

And here is something vital to contemplate. We understand the payoff, but what is the cost of your busy life?  

Three Ways to Keep a Cool Head

A large number of people come to coaching hoping to lose the gnaw of anxiety that they feel most of the time.  I am coming to the opinion that it is unrealistic to expect to lose all sense of anxiety.  This is an attendant part of being human; we succeeded in the evolutionary stakes because we scan our environment for possible threats.  We are constantly on guard.  It’s how we are made.

Now armed with a more realistic (and less stressful) expectation, the question becomes how can we live more comfortably with our anxiety, how can we feel less distress?

1. Underneath your anxiety there is a little nagging voice  Listen carefully and you will hear it.  You can recognize it by the ‘should’ implied in every nag.  You should be spending more time with the kids, you should be higher up the corporate ladder, this goes on endlessly for many of us.  Recognise the voice and challenge it, reassure it and ultimately turn a blind ear (sic).

2. Having made some more space in your mind, fill it with more useful, less stressful thoughts.  It may sound odd, but put yourself back in the centre of your life.  Ask yourself, what is it that you want, you believe, you think, you value?  Spend time rediscovering what is important to you.  Armed with greater self-knowledge, and a stronger sense of who you are, it gradually becomes easier to resist the auto-stress reaction when others try to crowd you with their shoulds.

3. I know, I know, everyone is talking about the value of meditation.  It seems that modern science is backing up ancient wisdom.  Clearing the mind, calming the system for a few minutes a day has profound beneficial effects on reducing automatic stress reactions, and bringing them under your control.  Sounds like it’s worth the time doesn’t it?

Let me know your stress-busting techniques.  And get in touch if you think coaching might be worth investigating.

Have a peaceful weekend.

“The greatest weapon against stress is our ability to choose one thought over another.“

William James

Swimming with the Data Tidal Wave

As more of us spend more of our lives interacting with technology, the value of the data garnered from this behaviour becomes more and more valuable to businesses.  In principle, every click generates a data point, every comment given a valence, and every sequence of clicks can be tracked.

Multiply this by the number of actual and potential customers, across all of a company’s touch points and very soon you can be generating exabytes of data, constantly updated in real time.

Combine this with the pressure on companies to utilize this data for its competitive value to the business and the race is on to input, store, analyse and output data, data, data …

The temptation is to solve this problem as a matter of urgency; all the while the data keeps coming in a deluge.  It is easy to get immersed in the details and the difficulties, when it is actually time to step back and out of it to see the bigger picture, to find the value and to realize the limitations. So get a cup of tea, find a quiet corner and ask the important questions such as:

-                who are my most valuable customers and what do they value?

-                What are my ambassadors and detractors talking about? In other words what are my competitive strengths and weaknesses?

-                What are the significant changes in consumers’ behaviour (using a timescale that the business can respond to)?

-                What is important to my customers, using micro, meso and macro lenses (i.e. individual touchpoint experience, the acquisition and usage of my product in their life, and the bigger picture of their lives in context)?

-                What are they doing now vs what would they like to be doing (again using micro, meso and macro lenses)?

Now, how can you organize your data around answering these important questions?  Understand where data can and can’t help and where other sources of information are needed.  And get the team with the right technical, strategic and practical skills working together to achieve this common goal.

Keep focused on the big questions your business asks, not on what detailed analysis your data can provide.

Further Reading

Visiting the Real World

Unless you visit the real world of your customers, you have little or no idea if your data, or map, is correct and complete.  This is especially true if your customers are not like you.  Without visiting your customers you have little appreciation for the richness, the variety and the context of their world and their lives.  You can’t feel their emotions and empathise with them.  You will find it difficult to care.

So let’s get practical.  How are you supposed to visit the real world of your customers?

1.    First of all, as far as possible, be a consumer of your own products. 

       I acknowledge that this is not always possible, for example …

       … I have a long-standing niggle with the packaging on Lil-lets tampons and let’s face it, this is not a product that you want to be fiddling with to open. Even if the product manager is male, they could have easily realized this irritation by attempting to open the product. I can only speculate on whether this has contributed to the company’s book value of £-26M.   

2.    Watch how people shop for your products or services online and offline and go and buy your product yourself.  See what the process is like.  Do the research and find the highlights and pain points in the consumer journey. 

3.    Hang out where your customers hang out.  Watch what they do and get talking.  If that’s too scary, call up your market research agency and ask them to pre-recruit willing participants.  Or give me a call and I will come with you.  At the very least spend time hanging out in social media. 

4.    Best of all, with the support of your research agency, visit your customers in their homes or any environment where your products or services are consumed.  Seeing them in their context will give you insight that you will never get through the one-way mirror of a viewing facility.  

5.    Invite your customers into your company. Aim to understand their lives and what is important to them, not just what they think of your stuff. 

Let them tell you their story.  Hear it properly with your heart and mind and go back to your work with real care for your customers and renewed passion in what you can do for them.

 

The Map is not the Territory

Running a business is of course a complicated business.  To deal with the complexity, most businesses set up systems to generate feedback so that decision makers can see at a glance, which parts of the business are performing well, or poorly, and overall how well the profit-generating system is working.  They have a map. 

The map, or scorecard, may be subdivided for different teams so that sales get their map, brand managers get theirs, category and product teams see their performance and finance see the overall impact on costs and profits.

In the eyes of business owners and employees, their map becomes the focus of their work and the map drives strategic and day-to-day decisions.

But the map is not the territory.

This map of Kerala in India gives no feel for the beauty and sensory richness of this part of the world, and how people there live their lives.  Just as a business scorecard, no matter how beautifully thought out and detailed can give a businessperson an insight into the lives of the people who buy their products.  

No numbers in spreadsheets can relay how it feels to hit the sweet spot on the golf club, how frustrating it is when you can’t open the packaging on the milk carton or the rush of pleasure from seeing your kids’ faces light up on Christmas morning.  When you gain this level of insight and connection with your customers, the context and emotional richness of their lives, then you know what needs to be done.

The map is a poor abstraction of real life and the danger is that businesses that only focus on the map will lose touch with the reality of their customers’ lives.

And then it is very easy to get lost.

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?