Shooting the messenger

It is extraordinary how so many things in life seem to be either black or white.  Despite the complexity of modern society many seemingly want to view every social, environmental, moral, and economic issue as either being from one political standpoint or another. Parties of the centre, and those who proudly nail their colours firmly to the fence, are cursed with being neither one thing nor the other. Hideous events like the massacre in Connecticut result in both sides of the “argument” reaching a consensus amongst themselves, unable and unwilling to understand or accept the other side’s point of view. On the one hand, people are arguing that a society without guns is a safer society, and on the other people are saying that if only the teachers been armed then this horrible disaster could have been averted (Just watch how sales of guns in the US increase as people react to a very human desire that it shouldn’t happen to them.)

So how is it that normal, decent human beings can be so bitterly divided over an issue like this?  How can two people look at the same event and come to radically different positions?  Two recently published books have helped me understand this issue (The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt and The Social Animal by David Brooks both cover this issue.) The point is that specialists are beginning to understand that we are products of our intuitive and emotional self to a far greater extent than we think.  Our rational self is often there to make post hoc rationalisations of decisions that we’ve already made.  It seeks out corroboration and dismisses any contrary ideas.  What we feel and think is almost entirely the product of our socialisation: the culture and the familial environment in which we were nurtured.  This includes a need to belong which in turn leads to seeking out tribes, us and them, be they political parties or football teams, a need that is buried deep within our subconscious.       

What all this means is that the one thing guaranteed to not affect the debate are facts. It is a fact that more Americans are killed by guns every six months than in the all terrorist attacks and Iraq/Afghanistan conflicts in the last 25 years.  It is a fact that the US has the highest per capita ownership of privately held firearms with an average of nine guns for every ten Americans (the next highest is Yemen). America also has the second highest incidence of gun-related murder (after Mexico).  Using standard techniques of correlation it would appear to most people that the fewer guns around the safer you are and the more guns available then the greater chance you have of getting harmed.  But they are only facts, and our tribal, emotional self has already subconsciously determined our position so that we seek out supporting facts and ignore those that don’t fit.

All of this has profound implications for communicators and for those seeking to influence social change.  Rational argument rarely impacts attitudes to smoking, drinking, eating, and exercise or even towards political leaders. Telling, preaching, and directing is not the way to create sustainable social change.  But if top-down rational communications can’t change attitudes what can?  The answer is that there is no one answer.  In the same way that money is rarely the long-term answer to solving poverty, behavioural and attitudinal change is the product of a complex web inter-connecting ideas and issues none of which, on their own, provide the solution.  The trick is probably to try and create the environment in which people feel comfortable; comfortable with themselves and their position and unthreatened by material or social pressures.  Self-supporting and self-sustaining communities are more likely to produce feelings of security and therefore more likely to support positive behaviours.  It’s not simple, and it’s certainly not a short-term fix.  But if we continue to try and change the world with facts then we will, like Dicken’s fact-obsessed character Mr Gadgrind, remain living in Hard Times.

Too big to fail

Size, as they say, isn’t everything.  Almost 50 years after the publication of Schumacher’s seminal work Small is Beautiful the debate about appropriate size is beginning to take root.  Actually, as with many debates about size, that statement is itself a bit of an exaggeration.   In reality, the current debate is more about whether capitalism has erred in allowing banks, and other institutions, to become too big to fail.  Whereas Darwinian economics allows for, say, Tesco to go to the wall, received wisdom was that the nature of our dependency on large banks was such that only by bailing them out with taxpayers’ (aka our grandchildrens’) money could a financial crisis be avoided. 

Similarly, the debate is also about the size of government.  The debt crisis in the UK and the problems in the Eurozone bring into sharp focus the merits of scale.  For some the solution to Europe’s problems is to increase the powers of the commission and the European Parliament over fiscal and social issues.  Only by becoming bigger, they say, can we become better. In the US the recent election could be characterised as a battle between the proponents of large and small government.  Here, behind the bluster of Autumn Statements and “events” there is a quiet ideological battle being whispered about whether the role of central government is to direct social change or to enable it.

Recently I went to hear the great Nassim Taleb (author of Black Swan) talk about his latest work Antifragile.  His central point is that the world is volatile and that if we are flexible then we can survive; but that if, as is mainly the case, we crave certainty then we will not survive the crisis that volatility will invariably present.  And to make matters worse, scale simply makes things worse: the bigger things are then the greater their exposure to risk.  That includes banks, businesses and buildings (perhaps economies of scale is yet another oxymoron, providing further reasons why so few M&As ever succeed).

It occurred to me that the problems of both craving certainty and too big to fail also apply to people.  I frequently encounter people who crave certainty in their lives.  The need for “security” of income, based on a complex formula incorporating the size of mortgage, school fees, fine wine, Arsenal season tickets, etc, mean that they have allowed themselves to become institutionalised and inflexible and, therefore, vulnerable to change.  Some have purposefully decided to postpone their real life until they have achieved a degree of financial security (remember the, probably apocryphal, merchant bank recruitment slogan: “you won’t know your children, but you’ll get to know your grandchildren really well”). Unfortunately these people often fail to be themselves; rather, they define themselves by what it says on their business cards. At the other end of the scale, many organisations find themselves with a too big to fail leader.  The celebrity CEO (Chief Entertainment Officer) whose self-created ego drives them to seemingly greater levels of super hero performance would be a good example.  However, their drive for growth often leads their organisation merely to become exposed to greater levels of risk.

Certainty and the desire for scale seem strange bedfellows but actually they are part of the same issue.  Many do seem to believe that there’s safety in numbers.  Our craving for certainty means that we often see being bigger and better as the way to achieve it.  But certainty is merely an illusion. To embrace risk and uncertainty is to embrace life.  And we should be aware of the lure of scale in our private lives, and watch out for the desire to become so big that we lose contact with both our true selves and with reality.  Hubris reminds us that no-one is too big to fail and ignore the words of the eminent psychiatrist, Dr Frasier Crane, who said: “Faust was a moron.  I’m going to become a star.”