Facts vs Feelings – It’s Important to Frame Change in Both Ways

In the summer of 2009, Dan Ariely wrote a widely-read article for the Harvard Business Review entitled – The End of Rational Economics. He argued that the all-enveloping financial crisis had finally put paid to the idea that humans generally make rational decisions and that markets and institutions, when left to their own devices, will self-regulate and remain healthy. “Irrationality” he wrote “is the real hand that drives human decision-making”.

But can it be that as humans, we are more often irrational than rational in what we do?

Help in explaining this concept of ‘irrationality’ comes from the French/American cultural anthropologist, Dr Clotaire Rapaille. A few years earlier, he simplified our decision-making processes by making reference to three brain areas:

The so-called reptilian brain, the oldest most primitive part, found at the base of our brain, which governs our instincts of attraction and survival.

The limbic brain which governs emotions such as love and hate.

The newest part (in evolutionary terms) known as the cortex, which looks after intelligent thought patterns, and rationalization such as with pricing and economics.

Dr Rapaille’s theory, as he puts it, is very simple: “The reptilian brain always wins. I don’t care what you’re going to tell me intellectually. I don’t care. Give me the reptilian. Why? Because the reptilian always wins.”

From my own experience, I learned an important ‘reptilian’ business lesson in 2006 when helping a San-Francisco based software company close a big deal. It was to do with replacing an increasingly unreliable legacy system and although the positive rational arguments spoke for us, we knew that we represented a riskier choice compared to our larger competitors. We could demonstrate, again rationally, that our solution had been tried and tested successfully in smaller installations, but what swung things in our favour was a side comment from the head of our prospective customer’s IT department, who mentioned that he was fed up with being called in ‘evenings and some weekends’ to reboot the system. It was through emphasizing our reliability connected to this personal convenience factor (emotional benefits, such as fewer intrusions on his free time) that finally won us his vote.

OK – that was a sales situation, but it was a moment of decisive change for the customer. By first detailing the change in purely rational terms and then re-framing it in terms of personal benefit, we could demonstrate different sides of the same coin.

Two tribes

Deep in our psyche, dating back to renowned thinkers such as Descartes and even earlier, we have learned that rationality, order and evidence are what gets us to the better place. It was Carl Jung who first juxtaposed the desire for harmony, against what he referred to as ‘thinking’ (rational thought), suggesting that we act as if we were members of two distinct tribes: those that value feelings above objective facts, and those that value rational and logical thought above emotion, feelings and even sometimes, personal well being. In a similar way to being born left or right-handed, Jung believed that we are all hard-wired to have a natural preference for one or the other driving force.

Admittedly, our life experiences have their impact too and psychologists today see things balancing out at roughly 50:50 between the hard-wiring of ‘nature’ and the life experiences of ‘nurture’. There is of course a large range of individual ratings, typical of what you observe on a normal distribution curve.

But what this means in practical terms is that whenever you are introducing new procedures or replacing a software application or moving offices or… you will need to prepare yourself for both tribes. The truth of a situation does not exist in a single frame, so to help win people over to new approaches we must frame change initiatives from both points of view. When initiating change, if we take the opportunity to involve our communities in assessing the current situation and expressing their needs, we have a better chance of a smooth process. But if we want to help both tribes, it is not just a matter of collecting the practical details, but also of discovering those valuable people-related issues that may be bubbling just under the surface.

From a technological perspective, you may be pushing for a solution which ensures more accuracy, with less re-entry of data from one system to another. It may seem like an obvious win-win situation, but people often have more affection for cranky and dated systems than they should – at least rationally. That’s why, when involving constituents in the process of change, your questions need to elicit how the time currently spent in data entry could be used more pro-actively elsewhere, in identifying team benefits and matters of well-being for example. Perhaps an important part of our job as change managers is to consider how relatively dry concepts such as greater data accuracy can add emotional as well as rational benefits. After all, if you agree with Dr Rapaille, then you know that the more emotional reptilian brain is the true decision-maker.