What are you choosing?

At the start of this week, my Twitter feed was a mix of schisms and self-affirmations. Some people were clearly starting 2021 with a long exhale. Others were...kind of starting out in a torrent. As the week progressed, or perhaps more aptly, devolved, those Twitter schims had me thinking.

There’s so much we can learn from each other. But we have to choose.

Choose to engage or to stoke outrage.

Choose to sink into self-righteous indignation or to stay open in conversation. 

The former is driven by assumptions, leads to alienation, and brings almost incalculable costs. The latter avoids assumptions, connects, allows for lived experiences, and costs only our time.

And, as we have seen in recent years, those costs snowball.

We choose who to hear. But if you don’t hear someone, that doesn’t mean they aren’t there.

It seems that we’ve created a world that not only elevates the most extreme points of view, but one where the people who hold the most extreme views are primarily the ones engaging in the public square. And so many people, whether or not they agree with what they see, don’t dare to step in to voice their views publicly. It’s too risky.

We’re choosing who to hear, but from a very skewed and limited assortment. We don’t even know who we don’t hear. But that doesn’t mean they aren’t there.

I know plenty of very smart, measured, informed, thoughtful people who are not wading into the public square. They watch the Twitter schisms escalate and don’t dare engage. Sometimes, myself included. Rather than join a thread, I text my friend to share my thoughts directly and privately. While they take the heat in the arena. It’s not that I think my views are controversial. It’s the phenomenon of rapid firefights and endless escalation that keeps me from engaging further or more openly.

What is this phenomenon doing to us? How is it changing our mindsets, who we hear, how we think? Are we doomed, in life and in work, to believe and behave as though the squeakiest wheels are all that exist? That they represent the whole of our society, our community, or even our customer base?

I don’t think so. But we have to choose.

Let’s look at it from a much less existential-crisis-of-humanity kind of view.

What happens if you organize your company around the customers who are the squeakiest wheels? You make product, sales, marketing, even structure and hiring decisions, based on what it seems certain people need. Because they’re the loudest, the most insistent, or the most passionate.

But, it can turn out that these people you’re arranging your universe around are really few and far between. So they can’t scale. Or that they’re not your best-fit customers. Or even good-fit. They’re the opposite. So they’re taking you in the wrong direction. And you can’t hear the good-fit customers. Because they don’t see a need to reach out, a need to wade into a conversation. Or because they’re happily humming along. Or because you aren’t connecting with them.

You don’t hear them, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t there. To hear more of them, we need to adopt a more open stance. That takes two things.

You aren’t right. Accept and appreciate it.

The quickest way to shut down a conversation is to insist that you’re right. And, implicitly, they are not and cannot be. This negates the other person’s views out of hand. They adopt a fight stance. Instead of a let’s explore this together stance.

It’s also the best way to make sure you miss out on hearing…anyone. When you approach a conversation from the point of view of already knowing you are absolutely right, you hear everyone else’s contributions as wrong words to be disproven.

You can choose to be open to the possibility that you aren’t right.

We are all irrational. It’s not just them, and it definitely includes you.

We all believe in the myth of our own experiences, root ourselves in deeply held beliefs, then perceive information that conflicts with those experiences and beliefs to be a threat. Literally. Our brains go into protection mode.

So when presenting new ideas, especially ones that challenge the status quo or conventional wisdom or popular points of the day, you and the ideas are perceived as a threat. 

But what if you get curious, if you see and accept the life experiences that formed their beliefs and worldview and the emotions they’re feeling (that’s empathy — cognitive and emotional)? (Accepting doesn’t mean agreeing.)

You meet people where they are. You present your new ideas within a framework that fits with their beliefs and worldview, but nudges just a little. You’re not necessarily perceived as a threat. You can defuse the schism. You can lay the path of tiny steps from where they are to where you’d like to guide them.

Bottom line: To move people, you have to meet them where they are. And to meet them where they are, you have to hear them. And to hear them, you have to accept and convey that you might not be right, and that we are all irrational, you and me included.

Whether you’re wading into the public square, or trying to find more ways to hear your customers or your coworkers or your favorite people better, it’s all about the same things.