Mike Lehr's Blog

The research behind behavioral economics is full of emotional solutions to everyday problems. By tapping into the emotional biases behind our decisions, we can expand the range of limited solutions offered by rational thought models. The exploring of emotional solutions has gone big time as the article, “Nudge Nudge, Think Think” explains in the March 24, 2012 edition of The Economist by focusing on the amount of investments governments are making in this area.

Said simply, “How we phrase things matter.” I’ve written how this can change the taste of food and even change the reactions to a bonus plan. As the article explains, nudging “shows it is possible to steer people towards better decisions by presenting choices in different ways.”

For example:

• People were three times more likely to pay an outstanding vehicular tax when the letter was simplified and included a picture of the automobile.
• Boys did better than girls did when a technical drawing class was called “geometry,” and girls did equally well or better when it was called “drawing.”
• People were more inclined to use less energy when their consumption was compared to their neighbors.

Not only does this help us solve problems, it also helps us avoid them by being aware of what we say so we don’t sabotage our well-intentioned plans. Choosing the right words for a personality can go a long way in helping us to effect the change we desire by tapping the right emotions.

For example, my wife won a bet at a party by talking a friend’s six-year-old daughter into selecting a vegetable over chocolate to eat. Understanding and appreciating the power behind words’ connotations helps us immensely here, and Roget’s Thesaurus is invaluable in our efforts.

Remember, people eat escargot not snails.

Businesses spend much money on developing their visions, strategies and processes; however, they spend relatively little on culture, which trumps all of the others. Megan McArdle discusses her observations of General Motors and others in “Why Companies Fail,” appearing in the March 2012 issue of The Atlantic.

When we talk about vision, strategy and process, they are very much head concepts as opposed to heart ones. For example, they don’t concern themselves much with the relationships that employees have between one another or even the relationships that the management team has with employees. The simplest relational techniques are rarely connected to these heady concepts when, in fact, it’s relationships that drive the cohesion and morale of any organization.

Unless we touch our employees on their emotional foundation, vision, strategy and process will fall far short of their intended success. This perspective transforms leadership into more of an emotional function from a rational one.  This perspective also helps us understand why common business tools such as incentives and processes can retard our efforts to build relationships and effect change.

Using a farming analogy, it doesn’t matter what vision, strategy and processes we use; if the soil isn’t good, we will struggle. In business, the soil is the relationship between the management team and employees. It forms the foundation of a company’s culture. If that team can’t develop effect relationships or isn’t motivated to even use simple relationship building techniques, then how can we expect it to implement great visions, strategies and processes?

Related post: Great Strategy? Don’t Neglect Culture

Words have power, not only in their definitions but also, more importantly, in their connotations. The article, “Making Murder Respectable,” from the December 17, 2011 edition of The Economist talks about an example of this power, euphemisms: “a mixture of abstraction, metaphor, slang and understatement that offers protection against the offensive, harsh or blunt.” They’re used across cultures.

In other words, euphemisms sugar coat reality and confirm in many cases the powerful scene from the movie A Few Good Men in which Jack Nicholson, playing Colonel Nathan Jessup, tells Lieutenant Daniel Kaffee, played by Tom Cruise, “You can’t handle the truth.” As the article concludes, “A culture without euphemism would be more honest, but rougher.”

Often, we desire to believe our illusions because they allow us a convenient excuse to avoid action. For example, knowing a condition is undesirable forces us to address the question: Why don’t we take action to correct (cognitive dissonance)? This is a downside of believing our glass is half full.

Additionally, knowing our preference to live with our illusions, we expose ourselves to manipulation as George Orwell conveyed in his book, 1984. In it, the Ministry of Truth was responsible for fabricating history for public consumption; the Ministry of Love tortured criminals. In 1949 the United States renamed its War Department to the Defense Department. In business, we see the extension of euphemisms in the form of vanilla words, names of food, compensation plans and labels.

However, many times euphemisms permit sensitivities. For example, we say “passed” rather than “dead.” So, perhaps our illusions are reality because the reality is we cannot live without them.

Don’t believe it? See what happens when you strip people of their illusions.

If you have a son and a daughter both under college age, odds are greater that she will become CEO of a Fortune 500 company. As I was writing my book, The Feminine Influence in Business (more), in 2003 and 2004, I made this prediction to friends:

Within the next generation or two, more women will be Fortune 500 CEO’s than men.

After eight years, I’m only concerned that I was too conservative. The recent appointment of Virginia Rometty as new CEO of IBM has prompted me to revisit this prediction. However, despite what articles such as “The End of Men” and “The Rise of Women in the Creative Class” say, I believe deeper, more fundamental forces are at work:

The nature of work that is remaining for humans to do falls more within the talents, attributes and skills of women than of men.

That is because technological advancements more easily replace the logical, rational functions of humans than the intuitive, relational ones. Since men tend to be more dominant in the former and women the latter, computers will more easily replace men than women.

In this blog, we already explored the need for more relational skills to manage a more creative, innovative and adaptive workforce. Moreover, as much as we try to systematize and quantify creativity and innovation, that only takes us so far. Many times we need intuition to fill in the gaps. There is a reason why we say, “woman’s intuition” rather than “man’s intuition.”

Yes, many other forces are at work such as more women receiving advanced degrees, more diverse family options and more women in the workforce. But, underneath it all is this current: technology is producing a workplace more favorable to women than to men.

For many of us, we feel good when we help others. What we are even learning is that many of us, especially women, will tend to feel what others feel. Thus, we not only feel good about helping others, but we feel their happiness from our help.

In the July-August 2011 issue of the Harvard Business Review Yochai Benkler’s cites in his article “The Unselfish Gene” the work of neurophysiologist, Giacomo Rizzolatti, who originally “found that our brains mirror not only pain and motor movements but pure emotions as well.”

It’s important to emphasize empathy as an emotion, not merely an understanding as I also indicated in the difference between emotional intelligence and intuition. It’s one thing to see someone smiling and know they are happy and quite another to feel they are happy because if someone can feel good about the happiness of another person, he is more likely to cooperate.

What Rizzolatti’s research, advanced by Tania Singer’s use of brain scans, indicates is that people can actually feel what others feel in the emotional areas of their brains not just the rational ones. Moreover, the intensity of empathy will vary by person with some not feeling much at all.

This has tremendous implications for leadership development because it shows the importance of sensitivity in team intelligence. Whereas Part II of this series dealt with context, this post implies a cooperative business culture is also a function of personalities: some people will just feel better about cooperating than others will. Thus, this implies that highly sensitive people, who also tend to be very empathetic, might be better leaders and employees in a cooperative environment.

Thus, cooperation is not only about creating the right environment but also about having the right personalities, personalities that are empathetic.

Other posts in this series:

• Cooperation vs. Self-interest: Which Reigns Supreme?
• Cooperation vs. Self-interest (Pt 2): Context – The Great Influencer

One aspect of sensitivity that I find challenging to explain to sensitive people is their natural intimidation of other people.

As we saw in Part II about the unconscious, emotions are churning outside of our unawareness. This includes emotions related to our defense mechanisms that are frequently triggered when we meet people very different from us. However, on the surface we will often just rationalize these feelings as, “I don’t like that person because . . .”

Emotions, especially intense emotions, trigger defense mechanisms because they are very unpredictable. These emotions are the source of strong passions that move us to tackle situations when the odds are against us.

Since sensitive people often have many emotions, especially intense ones, flowing through them, it can be intimidating or, at minimum, frustrating to work with them. It’s intimidating because they are likely aware of something that we aren’t. It’s frustrating because simple man-made creations like logic, numbers, rationale and reasons can’t alter the innate nature of emotions.

For sensitive people, this means working covertly with the rest of us. Sharing some of their emotions with us can be awkward, humiliating and even dangerous because often they can’t be quantified, reasoned, proven or even verbalized. Since we aren’t aware of the emotions running through all of us on an unconscious level like they are, sensitive people will find working with us similar to a sighted person working with blind folks. How do they explain what they see to us? Moreover, once we even sense they can see things we can’t, our defense mechanism kicks in.

Thus, sensitive people need to be aware of their intimidating nature and of the fact that they are talking to very blind people from a situational awareness perspective.

Other posts in this series:

• Emotional Self Defense for Sensitive People (Pt I): Awareness
• Emotional Self Defense for Sensitive People (Pt II): The Unconscious
• Emotional Self Defense for Sensitive People (Pt III): Self-Awareness
• Emotional Self Defense for Sensitive People (Pt IV): Talent
• Emotional Self-defense for Sensitive People (Pt. VI): Defeatism & Courage

Previously, I listed some unconscious biases we have in decision-making. What I witness is that people just don’t believe that known wrong information has any affect on them.

For example, research in “Before You Make That Big Decision” by Daniel Kahneman, Dan Lovallo and Olivier Sibony* which appeared in the June 2011 Harvard Business Review showed that dice rolls “suggesting” sentencing decisions to judges did in fact influence their final decision even though they knew these decisions were made by dice.

Cognitively and psychologically, we call this “planting of a seed” in our minds as anchoring. We experience its negative side when someone is locked on a thought based on incorrect information that we tried to expose for them. As with the judges, this erroneous information assumes a frame of reference for their decision on a subconscious level.

As the writers indicate, anchoring’s real danger is “that people always believe they can disregard them” because the information is incorrect. They don’t believe it. However, it affects them in the same way that intuition affects our thought processes. However, since people don’t realize it, they will shop for rationales to attribute elsewhere this influence on their decisions.

Anchoring also affects our views of people and contributes to the unconscious pigeonholing of people. This can tremendously affect our ability to assess and develop talent. This is why the gossip and unfounded opinions of others will still influence us even though we “ignore” them to form our own opinion.

We need to raise our awareness concerning the influence this has on others, and more importantly to us. We can’t believe we are immune; we need to make conscious adjustments or else we will fall prey to the influence of known wrong information too.

*Olivier Sibony is a director in McKinsey’s Brussels office.

It’s difficult to defend yourself emotionally as a sensitive person without understanding the unconscious. People interpret their worlds on two levels: conscious and unconscious; however, the boundary between the two varies individually.

A purely conscious version of this is situational awareness. At any point in time for any given situation, any two people will vary in the degree to which they are aware of their surroundings especially when they must focus on something. It’s a crucial quality for fighter pilots who must focus on a target while maintaining awareness of their surroundings.

Thus, if people can have varying degrees of conscious awareness, it follows that the interplay between the unconscious and conscious will vary too. The diagram accompanying this post shows the difference between a certain emotion affecting an average person and a sensitive person.

In this situation, the average person isn’t consciously aware of the emotion; however, the sensitive person is. Now, this doesn’t necessarily mean the sensitive person will know why the emotion is there, but he will feel something. On the other hand, just because the average person isn’t aware of the emotion doesn’t mean he won’t be affected by it. It will appear as a rationale for thinking, doing or saying something and tell us much about his emotional state and personality. This holds true regardless of whether he’s aware of this.

Consequently, sensitive people are more in tune with people and situations’ emotional aspects. That’s why many of them can quickly assess the mood of a group without even talking to anyone. The problem is that they often let themselves be convinced their feelings are nonsense. Unfortunately, this is analogous to a group of blind people convincing a seer that he’s hallucinating when he sees colors.

Other links in this series:

• Emotional Self Defense for Sensitive People (Pt I): Awareness
• Emotional Self Defense for Sensitive People (Pt III): Self-Awareness
• Emotional Self-defense for Sensitive People (Pt IV): Talent
• Emotional Self-defense for Sensitive People (Pt. V): Intimidation
• Emotional Self-defense for Sensitive People (Pt. VI): Defeatism & Courage

After watching PBS NewsHour’s analysis, “What’s Next for U.S. Military in Fight Against Al-Qaida?” which aired on Monday, May 2, 2011, I recalled an adage from a childhood story, “Sometimes the best place to hide something is in plain sight.”

In the story, someone hid an incriminating letter in his apartment. Rather than a secret place, he kept it with his routine correspondence. The authorities never found it because they didn’t believe he would keep it there.

Bin Laden’s death highlights that we are prejudiced toward three types of solutions: logical, technological and consistent. As a result, we are prejudiced against solutions that are emotional, human and deviant.

For example, we could not emotionally believe that bin Laden would hide in plain sight and in the midst of military forces that could destroy him. Furthermore, it took the consolidation of intelligence personnel (not technology) from Iraq before we saw dynamic progress. Finally, we did not expect Pakistani real estate, zoning and building protocols to be so deviant from ours.

Here are some questions that can help overcome these three prejudices:

Emotion

• What are the emotions behind the situation and our thinking?
• What solutions are we not considering because they are “unreasonable”?
• How likely will people behave as they told us?

Human

• What vulnerabilities and limitations do our technological solutions have?
• How can human intervention help?
• What assessments can humans do better?

Deviation

• How closely are we expecting others to behave the way we do?
• How much of this is because we’ve made them behave as we do?
• What would someone with an opposing perspective think and do?

It took ten years because bin Laden wasn’t rational, our technology wasn’t omnipresent and Pakistan’s zoning protocols weren’t like ours.

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Here are some related links if you’d like elaboration on these points. These two further explore how people can behave much differently than they say they will:

• “Who We Are” is Different From “Who We Think We Are”
• What the Failures of Online Dating Can Teach Us

This one gives an example of a low-tech solution besting a high-tech one: When Best Technology Isn’t Best

This one takes a “universal good” and demonstrates how it changes under the challenge of a different perspective: Is Freedom for Everybody?

We often hear, “People will believe what they want to believe,” the Henry Louis Mencken quote. We also find that people will tend to hold onto their perceptions once knowing the facts. A Special Report about Democracy in California by The Economist in its April 23, 2011 edition contained the article, “What Do You Know?” It seemed to confirm Mencken’s view.

The article mentioned, Kimberly Nalder, a professor at California State University, Sacramento. She studied the degree to which citizens were misinformed about Proposition 13. Often we assume less educated or younger people are the ones misinformed. However, Ms. Nalder found, older, more educated citizens who had lived in California the longest were.

The problem is how do we work with these people? Most of the time, we tend to leave them alone. However, if you need to change someone’s perspective, there are four approaches to remember:

1. Do not argue facts; any kind of rationale is inferior to the power behind the emotions holding a person’s perspective in place
2. Do not believe more education will solve the problem; it can help but not alone
3. Most importantly, focus on strengthening your relationship with the person
4. Learn to understand the emotions behind a person’s perspective no matter how wrong you think it is
5. Accept that you will need to alter the person’s perception over time

As we saw in the post, People Follow Leaders Not Facts, people will tend to believe a credible leader over a fact even if the leader is incorrect. As we also saw in Change Management – Tactic #2, relationships are the primer for the paint of change. Thus, when it comes to changing perceptions, it’s not about facts, logic, education or statistics; it’s about leveraging relationships.