The Scourge of Incomprehension

There is an article on my desk that I tore out of the Economist several months ago. The title is “The shadow of the caliphate”. I’ve been thinking about it since I first read it. As you can guess, it’s about the Islamic State’s pull on so many potential followers and the difficulty countering it.

In the article, the author, Banyan, uses quotes from two prime ministers, Lee Hsien Loong of Singapore and Tony Abbott of Australia, to suggest that “the appeal that IS holds for ‘troubled souls’ is incomprehensible to the leaders of prosperous modern states. And it is hard to marshal good arguments against a point of view you do not begin to understand.”

While Banyan applied this assessment to the scourge of the Islamic State, this conundrum also applies to problems in other realms from politics to business. Perhaps it even explains some of the discord so many marriages face.

In the world of business, the highest level executives are living in a completely different world than the vast majority of the rest of the organization. The daily issues of those they manage are often incomprehensible to them. This lack of understanding leads to an inability to appreciate others’ differing worldwiews and how they color their ideas and interests. This leads to ineffective communication, which leads to potentially perverse consequences. How many times have you asked someone to do something and the result bore no resemblance to what you thought you asked for?

In the political realm this lack of understanding has led young people from the United States and other western countries to fly off to Somalia or Syria to join the terrorists. Obviously, in business the consequences are far less important.

Yet, living in a gated community of million dollar houses surrounded by people just like you is not the best way to build an understanding of the life of someone trying to support their family on minimum wage. Having a company paid premium health plan where the co-pays and other out-of-pocket costs are insignificant to you gives you no understanding of what it means to struggle to pay for the least expensive and not very comprehensive health plan where a medical problem leads to the question “do I eat today or see the doctor?”

Recently I had a problem with my Comcast cable service. It took several visits from service technicians for it to be fixed. During one service call, the technician was accompanied by another fellow who merely stood around watching. I chatted with him and discovered he was an executive from corporate headquarters on his annual observation day, seeing what the technicians faced in a typical work day.

What a great idea, I thought. To get out of the hermetically sealed corporate headquarters and actually see what daily life is like for one of their people lugging a heavy coil of cable and a bulging tool belt around while slogging through the woods, kneeling on the wet ground, and expertly making all the correct connections while the rain falls on their head. All for a fraction of the compensation the executive gets for sitting in a nice dry office every day with a subsidized cafeteria a floor or two away.

How many other executives, I wondered, regularly spend a day right next to those who work for them in difficult and often dirty or dangerous jobs, observing what they actually do. A day talking to them about how they feel about their work, about their concerns, about how they’re doing in life?

Banyan’s article followed by my Comcast experience. The first a problem of incomprehension and unfathomable differences. The second a solution that opens the path to improving both. So simple – walk in the other person’s shoes – and yet so rarely done.