#206: Create Conditions for Consistent Communication
Dear friends
It’s been some time since I shared art, food and wine with you. Let’s go…
I love LA-based ceramicist Jonathan Yamakami’s little walking vase, one of my favourite artists Matthew Hindley’s work now beautifies these magnificent wines and Manyaku Mashilo keeps creating astonishing work. On the food front, if like me you regularly mistake a recipe instruction for one clove of garlic to mean the whole head, you’ll like the boldness of Constantia Uitsig’s Ember and Oak. And, for those of you heading into summer, stock up on a few cases of Constantia Glen’s Two, a fantastic blend of Sauvignon Blanc and Sémillon. Actually, it is big enough for a winter fish stew. Enjoy.
/strategy
Creating conditions conducive for consistent, clear communication is a powerful lever in driving effectiveness and innovation.
This case study in Daniel Pink’s To Sell is Human: The Surprising Truth About Moving Others shows the incredible results that communication can unlock.
Kenya’s taxi drivers, like South Africa’s, are notorious for high-speed, reckless driving leading to high numbers of road accidents, deaths, and injuries. In a brilliant example of social science research with impact, Georgetown University economists, James Habyarimana and William Jack, explored tactics to increase road safety.
They recruited 2,276 taxi drivers for their study, dividing them into the classic control and experiment group.
In the experiment group’s taxis, they placed stickers encouraging passengers to complain when their driver put them at risk – beg him to slow down, protest reckless overtaking and generally object until he drove more safely.
The stickers themselves varied. Some said “Don’t just sit there as he drives dangerously! STAND UP. SPEAK UP. NOW!” Others twinned the message with the image of an accident or even severed body parts, but they all came down to the same thing – speak up!
The results are astounding.
First, passengers in the stickered taxis were three times more likely to demand better driving than in the untouched taxi. Second, ‘total insurance claims for the vehicles with stickers fell by nearly two-thirds from the year before. Claims for serious accidents (involving injury or death) fell by more than 50 percent’.
In business life, to our detriment, we often neglect to create conditions that enable communication. Empowering others to speak about risks and possibilities has a powerful impact on performance.
The taxis where no one spoke were three times more like to be damaged and twice as likely to have a serious mishap. Is your business?
(Stories that Stick, Should or Could and Magic Words will strengthen your communication superpowers).
//self
Robert Waldinger is a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. Marc Schulz is the associate director of the Harvard Study of Adult Development. In 2023, drawing on research from ‘longest in-depth longitudinal study on human life ever done’, the Harvard Study of Adult Development they published The Good Life: Lessons From the World’s Longest Scientific Study of Happiness.
Their work came to the “simple and profound conclusion: Good relationships lead to health and happiness. The trick is that those relationships must be nurtured”.
The effects of loneliness are profound, “It can render people more sensitive to pain, suppress their immune system, diminish brain function, and disrupt sleep, which in turn can make an already lonely person even more tired and irritable”.
We can experience loneliness even when surrounded by people. This can be particularly true at work where focus on delivery can deprioritise social connection.
Organisational psychologist, Constance Hadley’s work shows workplace loneliness creates similar negative effects and conversely, intentionally fostering friendship and connection improves performance. Read more here.
Waldinger and Schulz note that maintaining our connection to others (and ourselves) requires self-reflection, “It requires stepping back from the crush of modern life, taking stock of our relationships, and being honest with ourselves about where we’re devoting our time and whether we are tending to the connections that help us thrive. Finding the time for this type of reflection can be hard, and sometimes it’s uncomfortable. But it can yield enormous benefits”.
Self-reflection can require us to discard the armour of optimism. They comment that it is more useful to acknowledge conditions that aren’t great, rather than be relentlessly positive. If we recognise that we’re feeling disconnected, we can explore ways to reconnect with community. In a sense, to connect with others we must be connected to ourselves.
///soul
Fiction often tells of dictatorships, that in their drive to control and oppress create heroes of ordinary people who come to topple them.
In Celeste Ng’s Our Missing Hearts, Margaret, a poet, becomes a key activist in resistance to the ‘Preserving American Culture and Traditions’ but only after a poem of hers, not written as an act of resistance, is adopted by protestors in turn bringing the state’s attention, which transforms her from writer to rebel.
Hisham Matar’s Friends, tells of students Mustafa and Khaled shot by Libyan officials whilst protesting outside that country’s London embassy. Their injuries force them into exile, knowing that to return home would almost certainly be returning to death. Exile puts Khaled’s life on pause, he struggles to reconnect to the trajectory of his life and other people. Mustafa, in later years, joins the armed rebellion that overthrows Gadaffi’s dictatorship. His teenage injuries fuel adult anger.
In April, life followed art. USC cancelled their main graduation ceremony and valedictorian Asna Tabbasum’s speech citing security concerns emanating from her social media support for the people of Gaza. Overnight, a relatively unknown student became a global symbol for free speech. This week she graduated. Although she was denied addressing her classmates, this video tells you that truth cannot be silenced. Her joy at being seen and celebrated, no doubt after weeks of pain and fear, is something to treasure. Watch it. It will make you happy.
Tabbasum took me back nearly sixty years to acclaimed legal scholar and philosopher, Roger Dworkin’s 1968 On Not Prosecuting Civil Disobedience written in response to the jailing of those refusing, on moral grounds, to be drafted into the United States war in Vietnam.
He starts it, “… there are, at least prima facie, some good reasons for not prosecuting those who disobey the draft laws out of conscience. One is the obvious reason that they act out of better motives than those who break the law out of greed or a desire to subvert government. Another is the practical reason that our society suffers a loss if it punishes a group that includes—as the group of draft dissenters does—some of its most thoughtful and loyal citizens. Jailing such men solidifies their alienation from society, and alienates many like them who are deterred by the threat”.
When Tabassum learnt that her speech was cancelled, she released this statement, in which she said, “I challenge us to respond to ideological discomfort with dialogue and learning, not bigotry and censorship”.
The Kenyan taxi drivers would probably have preferred not being harangued by their passengers. We are all better off because they were.
All the best
Karl
PS: I post this letter on LinkedIn. Please share it and tell me what you enjoyed (or didn’t). I appreciate the support and the feedback.
PPS: I read fiction because it often communicates life’s complexity with more richness than non-fiction can. Not all my reading fits neatly into this letter, so I share it on my Instagram account. These are my thoughts on Matar’s Friends, Nobel prize-winner Olga Tokarczuk’s Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead and David Diop’s Beyond the Door of No Return. Let me know what you think you think.