“Only Connect”

E.M.Forster

The science is unequivocal: The simplest, most effective way to create sustainable change – in either yourself, your team, or the enterprise you run – is to create and maintain a sense of meaningful progress. People moving in the right direction stay moving in the right direction.

The problem is this. We only know we’re making progress by measuring something, and measuring the meaningful stuff is really difficult. The large majority of change initiatives fail because someone, somewhere made a decision to measure what was easy rather than what was important. So-called ‘Big Data’ is just a massively amplified version of the same issue. Computer technology has meant we’re able to measure more and more of the wrong things, adding more and more hay to the haystack, and as a consequence making the needles even more difficult to find.

We’ve spent the last twenty years working with clients across every walk of life to build reliable ways of measuring things we know are important. How much does my customer trust me? How engaged are my staff? Will people go out and buy my stunning new product? You name it, we’ve found a way to measure it. In an attempt to spread the word, we’ve published a host of papers and articles on how we’ve done it, and case studies showing the benefits we’ve been delivering for our brave, early-adopter clients.

Then we hit a new problem. There’s always a new problem. That’s one of the reasons a ‘sense of progress’ is so vital. Our new problem became, how to describe our ability to measure just about any of the important things in life, to people that are overwhelmingly busy? And how to do it in less than 1500 words?

So, we said, let’s try and find a scenario that we can all connect to and see if that helps. Think, for example, about the last time you had to write something important. A proposal for a customer, or weekly report to your boss, or a complaining letter to the local council, or a big thank-you to the local hospital for looking after you so well.

It’s an important piece of communication and you want to get it right, so you do the best job you can writing the words you think will achieve what you want to do. Get the contract, get a tick in the box towards your annual KPIs (even if they’re an archetypal example of a terrible, terrible measurement instrument!), get the council to fix the problem, or maybe just bring a smile to the lips of the ward sister.

What’s the process you’re going to go through to achieve your aim? Make a first draft? Check it? Get someone else to check it? Maybe – radical thought – picking up the phone and having a conversation with your intended recipient to try and gauge where their mind is at? Or – more likely – go and look at one you did earlier to see if it has any clues to offer. Pretty soon when you think about this question, you realize you’re essentially flying blind. You have no idea whether the words you’ve just spent your precious time laboring over are anywhere close to what’s needed to get the outcome you’re after.

So maybe, you think to yourself, the phone conversation option is the thing to try. Or possibly even a face to face meeting. I think we know you’re probably not going to do either unless it’s a really, really important job because there’s another million and one things on the catalogue of jobs that also need attending to, but let’s imagine we did. Now we have a new problem. To para-phrase J.P. Morgan, the new problem is that people say things for two reasons, a good reason and a real reason. So during our conversation, what we hear, and what the person’s actually thinking – the stuff that in reality is going to drive their behavior – are potentially two very different things.

Capturing the good reason stuff is easy. It’s all the quantifiable stuff that has come from our conscious mind. My poor old friend Nick, for example, drives a Porsche. If you ask Nick why he drives a Porsche, he’ll spend as many minutes as you’ll allow him extolling all the virtues of the finest automotive design skills on the planet, the acceleration rates, the horsepower, the latest exotic piston ring coating materials, you name it. What he’ll find much more difficult to describe are the real reasons he bought the car. His increased ability to attract members of the opposite sex for example, when he parks conveniently next to them in a car park. The ‘real reason’ stuff is really difficult to capture because it’s cheesy or embarrassing or sounds trite, or – most commonly of all – it happens so automatically we’ve ‘never thought about it’ or realized before.

So does this mean we should give up? Usually, yes. But from a PanSensics point of view we’ve now found the beginnings of what we mean when we talk about measuring what’s important. What’s important in this case is all the ‘real reason’ stuff that’s happening between the lines of all of the (largely irrelevant) ‘good reason’ content.

Think about this for a second. Every second around 11 million bits of information flows in to the average human brain from our various senses. About 40 of those bits go to our conscious brain, the other 10,999,960 go to our pre-conscious. The vast majority of the decisions we make get made in this pre-conscious part of the brain, before the trickle of data entering our pre-frontal cortex has had any chance to be interpreted and acted upon. By the time we decide to do something or say something, for the most part our pre-conscious mind has already done the heavy lifting and has decided for us. All the ‘good reason’ words we use when we’re arguing our case or exercising our social skills are the ones that come from our conscious brain. All the ‘real reason’ stuff has been decided in our pre-conscious, before our conscious brain has even got its shoes and socks on.

If that’s the important stuff, we can’t afford to ignore it just because we can’t measure it on a Likert scale (Public Enemy Number One when it comes to meaningless measurements). The pre-conscious stuff is the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. We need to be able to interpret what’s happening before our prefrontal cortexes have had a chance to mangle and distort it. That was the starting premise of the PanSensic capability: build a science of pre-conscious brain ‘reading between the lines’.

So now step back a second. Assume that PanSensics is able to do that ‘between the lines’ job. It’s a big assumption right now, but go with it for a few seconds. If it was possible, what would you really like to be able to measure in order to give yourself the best possible chance of achieving your desired aim when you press that Send button that will release your words out across the ether?

The mood of the recipient maybe? Are they happy? Angry? Stressed?

What are their ‘hot buttons’?

What should I avoid saying?

Are they open to change right now?

Do they like me?

How genuine are they?

Are they a morning person? When would be the best moment for my mail to arrive?

Ultimately, per the E.M.Forster quotation, it all boils down to what do we need to say and what tone should we use to ensure we really connect?

Now contemplate the possibility that all these things, and any other ones that might have flashed in front of your mind just now, are not just measurable, but measurable in a repeatable, verifiable, validate-able, meaningful fashion. Really.

Like I said earlier, we don’t expect anyone to believe whatever claims we might be making for the PanSensic capability. The only thing that will – or should – convince anyone is tangible (measurable!) proof that it works for them in their context. Which then gets us back to the ‘we’re all really busy’ problem. So here’s how we get to kill two birds with one stone. The next time you have that important email or proposal to send out, just before you press ‘Send’, you paste a couple of things into the PanSensic ‘Empathy Sensor’ at … https://akumenapp.com/k2o/compareemails.php

… and see what it has to say.

No cost, almost no time (the PanSensic engine is doing some pretty sophisticated calculations so it might take a few seconds, especially if you’ve pasted a lot of text into it, sorry), no registering your contact details, we promise we will not save or look at any of the text that you paste, and ‘no salesman will ever call’. If we’ve done our job right, there’s only up-side, and that is you receiving a unique insight into how well your important email is going to connect. Oh, and, what you might like to do about it if you’re missing the mark in some way.

End of crash course.

Except maybe this final thought. One for the real skeptics out there. Think back again. Think this time to a correspondence you had in the past that didn’t have the effect you wanted. The car-crash email. Paste that into the PanSensic tool demo (https://akumenapp.com/k2o/compareemails.php) and see if the results help you to see – for the first time – why things ended the way they did. We think you’ll be impressed.