Researchers of life
I have been thinking about this for a week or so now. Not really sure how to articulate it in a cohesive manner, but then I realized I didn’t care. I’m not attached to it that much. So here it goes.
In my professional life, the past 15 years or more, I have been focused on human behavior research and analytics as it pertains to how we interact with systems. How we shop in a physical space, what makes us purchase more, increase engagement, and use software to accomplish various tasks. Most of my focus was on customer behavior, but as a systems analyst, you learn there is no real separation between the customer and the company’s employees as they are intertwined in a variety of decisions which remove and create friction all the time. And you thought I just reported on NPS scores.
If I broaden the scope to participation in life, and think about each individual as their own company, and all their parts (like the cartoon movie Inside Out from 2015 which followed Riley’s emotions, Joy, Sadness, Anger, Fear, and Disgust, as characters inside her mind.) as employees, it sure changes my perspective on how I perceive them. Have you ever seen one of those memes “What society, my friends, parents, etc. think I do vs. what I really do”? If not I’ve posted this one. Well, it’s accurate. I have never walked into a company that was operating like a well-oiled machine. There’s always a lot of baggage. People are the same.
We all were raised in some way shape or form by someone that had opinions, and those opinions were different than others’ opinions and ideas about how to raise someone and then we grew up and had opinions of our own, and all the while we’re just talking about what we think we know vs. really getting down to brass tacks and deciding if what we think is actually true. This is what people refer to as generational trauma, or generational monsters, or just plain bad programming. In the business world we optimize to remove friction in the system, but… it’s never quite done right because there are always too many cooks in the kitchen and lots of egos, and fear, and well you get the picture, it’s a never ending cycle of looking at and removing friction. I mean, have you ever engaged with a company whose customer service department had absolutely zero problems to handle?
If you’re lost, I promise I’m going somewhere with this.
When I look at someone else with the same curiosity I view a new company I work with, really trying to understand how they arrived in the present, who got them there, why they made the decisions they did, etc. I find I am much less put off by differences between us and more fascinated by the massive amount of similarity. We’ve all made a lot of decisions with information we were given which did not serve us. We all grieve, we all get sad, we all have fear, etc. When looking inward we are all researchers of our own destiny, but no one ever taught us how to be researchers, how to run personal experiments, or how to develop operational validation metrics. This is a metric at the smallest point measurable against a future goal.
So basically what I am getting at, is I learned to stop being so damned judgmental so I could actually learn something about myself by listening more and asking more questions of the people around me. Giving them the benefit of the doubt. Letting them feel their pain. It can be a little more challenging the closer you are to the person, as personal relationships have higher stakes, but a continued return to humility, presence, and empathy always moves the relationship further and deeper. I probably could have said all this more clearly, and with a lot less words, but that would not have been nearly as fun.