25 | Practising Empathetic & Introspective Leadership

Welcome to Face Forward, the Inspiring Change podcast on all things internal communications, engagement, leadership, and change. Hello there and welcome to this episode of the Inspiring Change podcast. I was really lucky to be able to attend an interesting seminar a couple of weeks ago which Nick Morgan, author, coach, and communications speaker Scott McInnes, the speaker, launched his new book, Can You Hear Me? How to Connect with People in a Virtual World. And as I often do when I've been to seminars like this, I went off and I bought the book. But rather than putting the book onto the shelf, which I believe is known as shelf development as opposed to self-development, I actually read it. I actually read the book. I was on a trip and I brought it with me on the plane, and there were a couple of paragraphs that really struck me, and I'm going to read them out to you. First one was, as we've made room for virtual communication in our lives, our workplaces, and in all the ways we connect with one another, we haven't fully realized how emotionally empty virtual communications are. Every form of virtual communication strips out the emotional subtext of our communications to a greater or a lesser extent. And there was another one that struck me as well about virtual relationships, that they're more fragile and easily disrupted. Because they lack the unconscious connections our face-to-face interactions automatically convey— the lift of an eyebrow, the tone of a voice, a quick smile. And of course, this got me thinking in the context of internal communications and engagement, the impact of this new obsession of communicating digitally. You know, we're very quick to turn to email and video communication and telephone conferences, but what impact must that be really having on levels of employee engagement and your ability as people that work as internal communicators in organizations to really communicate with your people. So it's great and very slightly ironic, given the conversation is about the lack of communication in electronic communications, it's a little ironic to have Nick on the show today from Boston via Zoom to talk to me about his book, and particularly around the 5 problems with digital communications and how as communicators people like you, the listeners, can start to overcome those issues. And we might talk to Nick briefly about nomophobia too, which was a new one on me. We'll come to that in a while. Nick, good morning, how are you?

I'm great, Scott. Thanks for having me on your podcast. I'm looking forward to the conversation.

You're more than welcome. Thanks a million for coming on, and particularly as you just moved house, I'm sure you're up to your neck in packing cases, so thanks for taking the time. Let's kick off with a really simple one. Maybe give us a bit about you and your background, where you've come from, first of all.

Well, I first leapt into the public speaking world and the communications world when I got a call from the State Secretary of Education in Virginia. And he said to me, he was an old friend of mine, Morgan, how would you like to put that academic, I was in the, at the University of Virginia teaching, how would you like to put that academic BS, that was the phrase he used, to the test in the real world, writing speeches for the governor of Virginia. And he knew I couldn't resist a challenge like that. What I should have asked was, well, why has the previous speechwriter quit? And it turned out he'd had a nervous breakdown from overwork. And I proceeded to spend the next 2 years writing 5 speeches a day for 7 days a week for 2 years. So it was a great introduction. And that's how I really got involved in thinking about practical communications. I got pulled out of the academic world where I'd been happily teaching Shakespeare and rhetoric and got brought into the the hurly-burly of real-life communications, trying to create speeches that connect with people, trying to understand your constituencies and all those sort of issues. So that's how I got started. I did crawl back into the academic world briefly after that for a little rest and relaxation, but the allure of the of the public communication world called me back. And, and, um, 20 years ago I founded my own consulting business and I'm still running it.

Okay. Very good. Who are some of the people, who are some of the companies that you'd have written for and worked with?

Well, virtually all the Fortune 50, um, a number of heads of state, um, most of which I'm not allowed to mention. Um, the, I've worked for various governors and senators in the United States. Haven't worked for the president, not the current president. And I've worked for a number of professional speakers. That's a world which your viewers may or may, or listeners may or may not be familiar with, but those folks that when you go to a conference, somebody gives the keynote speech. And you think, I could have done that just as well as they did. Well, I'm the guy that coached them to get that speech and get paid the huge sum of money they got to do that.

Okay, so like Keith Ferrazzi and those kind of people?

Exactly. Do you know Keith?

Yeah.

Well, you should know Keith. He's the world's greatest networker, right?

Absolutely. Yeah, he knows everyone and everyone knows him. Yes. So tell me, listen, we're going to talk a little bit about your new book, Can You Hear Me? How to Connect with People in a Virtual World. Why, why did you write it? Why did you feel the need to put pen to paper on this one?

The immediate practical reason was that as I went around the world talking about body language, which was the favorite subject that people asked me about, more and more in the last few years, people started to ask the question, well, this body language stuff is really interesting, Nick, thanks for that. But I lead a team of people in my business, and we're all virtual, we don't see each other face to face. And so as a result, how do I communicate with those people? How do I handle the body language information that isn't apparently getting through? So it was an issue that kept coming up and I thought, you know, there's enough interest here, I better write a book about it.

This isn't your first book, obviously.

No, I've written, I think that was the fourth. Yes, that's the fourth. My first one was Give Your Speech, Change the World, which was about the practical considerations of how to construct a speech, how to put one together, the content. And then more recently, Power Cues, which was about the neuroscience of giving a speech and how to show up with intent. And now this one. I'm skipping over a couple in the middle there that needn't trouble us now.

Okay, okay. So let's cut back to 'Can you hear me?' I mean, I went to the seminar down in Masonhaven, Carron, there a couple of weeks back, and you spoke through the 5 challenges. In the context of internal communications and engagement and leadership particularly, maybe bring us through what those 5 challenges are one at a time, and perhaps give us a bit of insight into how the listeners can mitigate against them.

Yeah, absolutely. So the first problem that I ran into as I began the research, and it's the one that really drives all the others, that causes all the others, and that's the lack of feedback. So as you alluded to, in the virtual world, the way we're speaking now, for example, Uh, but the way most people interact now in their business lives, at least half the time. And when I ask audiences about this face-to-face audiences, um, everybody raises their hand. Everybody, for example, has a weekly audio conference with their team. Um, and it's typically replaced a face-to-face meeting. Um, and so when you think about it, the basic nuts and bolts, the glue that holds a team together is now communicated virtually. Well, That leads to the first big problem, which is the lack of feedback. Each one of the virtual communication substitutes for face-to-face communication lacks that immediate feedback that we would normally get easily and simply and without even having to think about it consciously through body language. And so when we send each other text-based communications, and we type in what we think is a witty joke and for some reason the other person, maybe they were stupid that day, doesn't get the joke and is instead offended and then we have to spend 5 or 6 emails untangling the mess we've created, then we live there the annoyance and the frustration of that lack of feedback. The same thing happens on an audio conference, you can hear people's voices but for reasons which are fairly technical, we could get into if you like, The emotions are not conveyed well through audio conferences. And as a result, there's less feedback, which is why, by the way, they're so boring, those audio conferences. And when I ask people, what do you do on audio conferences? And when they're being honest, 100% of people put their phone on mute and they go off and take care of email. And that's when— those are the things they're willing to talk about, what they're doing.

Not all the other ones.

Right. And I found some, I did research on that and got some hilarious responses on, on what people actually do when they should be on audio conferences. But my favorite one, if I can just indulge your listeners for a moment, was two teams in Brazil. Brazil is a very big country and these two teams were, were hundreds of miles apart and they were on a joint audio conference. And one of the, one of the teams, their locale experienced an earthquake. The other team did not know. So the audio conference survived the earthquake. It went on unscathed. The people on the audio conference, of course, on the one half of the audio conference were long gone. They'd run out of the building into the street. And nobody noticed on the other end. So that gives you a sense of just how vital and well-connected audio conferences are. And then the final one, video conferencing, is a great improvement over audio conferencing because you can see people's faces, but there are still technical issues with that that make it less than satisfactory. So that's the first big problem, is the lack of feedback. And really what we have to do to start to build that feedback back in is to start to become more clear in our language about our intent. And how we're reacting to what we're hearing. And it feels a little strange and clumsy at first, but you have to ask yourself the question, how did what I just say make the other person feel? And if you don't know the answer to that question, then you should ask them out loud. Because if you were talking face to face, you would know immediately. You could tell by the wince if you said something harsh or the smile if you said something nice. Humans are hardwired to be able to tell how the other person and the other people around them are reacting to what they're saying and vice versa. And that's what we lose in all these virtual forms of communication. So starting to build that back in is the, is the first step.

Yeah. And when I look at, when I look at something you wrote here in the book that, you know, people need to understand that the brain processes meaning before it processes detail. So, you know, we want to know why first and then how or what, and we're missing out on the why. We're missing out on maybe a bit of the depth.

Right, and that's a great way to put it, if I do say so, because if we don't have the answer to the why, then we're not ready to listen to anything else. And that kind of traps, trips us up, and we're hung up until we get the answer to that why question. It's always there bugging us. And as a result, we don't listen well to whatever comes next.

And how much onus should there be on the recipient of a message to perhaps verbalize, "I'm offended by that comment," or "That makes me sad," or "I'm really happy you said that," or whatever it might be? Again, it might feel a bit clunky and difficult to start with, but it strikes me that we need to give that feedback somehow. We need to give what we're previously kind of physical cues, we need to give them verbally.

That's right. And we, we, we are still communicating as if we were communicating the old way. So, and so when I say something clever to you and you don't laugh, um, because it hurts your feelings, let's say, then it's your job rather than just wincing and expecting me to get that through extrasensory perception. Um, It's your job to say to me, that hurt my feelings. And that is awkward at first. That's hard to do. It takes great trust. And so part of the way forward, as I talk about in the book, is for managers and leaders to start to make it possible to create workplaces where people are allowed to talk about these things in the virtual space because they're not naturally coming through as they would face-to-face.

One final question before we move on, Nick. As far as I see, and you had a great example there of the team meeting just moving to virtual, but it probably covers the same stuff and lasts for about the same amount of time. For me, that doesn't work, and I wonder, did your research cover any or come up with anything around how long the best amount of time is to have an audio call? Because an hour and a half strikes me as being mental.

That's right. It's an excellent point because we tend to fight the last war, as they say of generals, and rather than rethinking what the next war should be, and this is a perfect example. Virtual meetings are just inherently less interesting because we're getting less emotional and information about other people's intent. And so we have to do the work of putting that back in, but also, We just have to make them shorter. And so for example, the standard, as you say, is a 90-minute or an hour-long meeting. The research shows that our attention spans need to be renewed about every 10 minutes or so in the virtual world. Wow. And yeah. And so that suggests a real wholesale changing of the way we think about meetings and what they can accomplish and how we should schedule them. I mean, if you look at schedulers, virtually all are our online kind of scheduling thing schedules in hour and half-hour increments. So it's still the case of it just makes it that much harder to do it. Try to set up a Google Calendar meeting for 10 minutes and all that you have to work against all the defaults. It's just crazy.

And very, very tiny writing.

Right, exactly.

So tell me a little bit about the second problem, empathy.

Yeah, so when you take away the feedback, then what happens is we rely on that feedback to know how the other person is feeling. And when we don't know how the other person is feeling, instead of asking, we just don't care. And so we lose empathy. And of course there are exceptions and there are nice sensitive people who do worry about that sort of thing. But on the whole, most of us are moving very fast in the business world. We need to retrain ourselves because when we don't get any information, we tend to assume that there's none coming through. And of course people are reacting. We just don't know what that is. Now there's a very interesting and dangerous result from this that comes from the way the brain is constructed. It's incredibly important for your listeners to understand is when we don't get information about how the other person is feeling, we, we, We tend to assume a very specific thing. And that comes from the way we're hardwired. So imagine our ancestors wandering through the jungle or the, or the veldt. And the ones who survived were the ones who were anxious and assumed the worst, assumed that there was a saber-toothed tiger lurking around the next corner. And so as a result, we've evolved to assume that when we don't get specific information to the contrary, that there's danger present or that the other people are angry or that there's something going wrong. And so we tend to assume that silences mean something negative, not just neutral or even positive, but something negative. And that's why this second problem is such a, is such a real issue. So when you take away the empathy, then what we get is trolling. And that's a new online phenomenon that people decry and they say, where does it come from? And how is it the world has turned so ugly? But it's really not that. It's really just the brain mechanism. You take away our ability to understand how you're feeling. And what I assume is that you're angry at me and I'm angry at you. Um, and the result is, uh, is hostility and a great increase in the number of ways in which people find fault and, break trust and do all the things that come with an assumption of negativity. And so that's the second big problem with the virtual world, because our brains are biased toward detecting danger. We imagine hostility.

And how do we get around that?

It's very difficult, but it involves the same issue of, of expressing our intent. First of all, not assuming— let's go back to that team audio conference. First of all, not assuming that silence implies people are disinterested or angry, or angry, but then also not letting the silence just go by, because in that silence then, and the lack of response from you, what happens is the listeners also assume danger or or hostility. Um, and so the, the, what happens in a series of weekly team meetings in which there are a lot of silences and people don't express how they're feeling is that gradually this, this sort of low-level hostility and assumption of ill intent starts to build up. And so you need to actively work to combat that. Um, and, and that's really the first thing you have to do to, uh, to make that better is to start building back in positive intent.

And it strikes me that this one and the previous one, and I suspect it's maybe a pattern that we'll see through the rest as well, what they're doing is they're actually putting— if you're trying to convey a message, you're trying to get something across to a team or people in an organization, that actually you're almost— with all this, you're starting off in in a negative place. So you've got to do a whole load of work to get to almost point zero before you can actually start to build a positive message out to your teams. You've got to do double the work.

That's exactly right. And you have to build in these new behaviors right from the start because otherwise, to your point, things will very quickly go south, as we say in the United States. Do you say the same thing in Ireland?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Meaning not go well.

Yeah, yeah.

So, and the other piece of this, first of all, there's the hostile intent assumption, but the second piece is we hold ourselves to a different standard in the virtual world. And by which I mean, we hold other people to a different standard in the virtual world. Let me explain what I mean by that. In the face-to-face world, If you have an old friend, if the old friend has an off day, you'll excuse them. You'll forgive them. You'll, you'll understand because you can see the next time you see them that the person is apologetic or obviously hungover or whatever happened. And as a result, we're, we're reasonably tolerant with, with people that we trust in the face-to-face world. In the online world, We break— the trust is very fragile. And at the first sign of inconsistency, as soon as somebody does something untoward, we'll break off the connection. And so the onus is on the communicator. The onus is on you to be consistent in the virtual world. And that means consistent in the way you communicate, in the style of communication, in the ethics of your communication. As soon as you slip up, the other person is going to cut you off. And a very simple way to think about this is, is to think about the Amazon versus everybody else problem when you're doing retail online shopping. Amazon is, by virtue of pouring tons and tons of money in it over many years, has made a very successful, uh, retail online shopping experience. Almost any other website, if it, when you go to shop there, if you have an experience that's just a little worse than Amazon, what are you going to do? You're going to go to Amazon and try to find it there.

Yeah, definitely.

That's what people do. They don't think, oh, well, maybe that other website was having a bad day. I should go give them a second chance. Maybe, maybe it'll be faster this time, or maybe the payment part won't get hung up like it did the first time. No, we don't do that. We just cut them loose. And then we go to Amazon. And so that's how the online world works. We're looking for consistency, and if we don't find it, we'll cut off the communication.

And for me as well, it's about speed. I think, you know, we are so focused now on getting things done and getting them done as quickly as possible that if something goes wrong— and I'm the same, you know, if I'm looking up something on my phone, if I click on a link in an article or I do something, if it literally doesn't load in 5 seconds, I stop looking. And I want to go to the next thing because I'm looking for that almost immediate gratification. I need things to happen quicker. And I think that's shared by a lot of people now.

Yeah, that's absolutely right. That's another thing that I discovered in the research that I talk about in the book, that the promises of the virtual world were, anybody who's old enough to remember this will resonate with this, that they promised us friction-free, communication, and they delivered on that, but there was an unintended consequence. Um, and then they promised us what was called asynchronous communication, and that was supposed to be a great benefit too, but something else happened instead. And so friction-free means it's just cheap and easy to send. And so contrast the, the, the snail mail, uh, letter that you had to write out by hand or type out and then put it in an envelope and put a stamp on it and take it to the post. And it's just a huge production right now. Email, it's instant. But the unintended consequence was, is now we're being completely overwhelmed with information. Um, and the asynchronous part is even subtler and more insidious in a way. They promised us that we could send somebody an email in the evening, just as we were knocking off work, and they could read it at their convenience, 10 o'clock the next morning when they checked in or when they'd had their morning coffee and and got through their first round of work and were ready to think about things. That was the way it was supposed to work. Instead, what we get is 24/7 communication. And now you'll notice that, to your point, if we don't hear from people right away, we'll send them a second email, that lovely passive-aggressive email which says, "Did perhaps my email got stuck in your spam folder? Would you mind checking your spam folder?" I mean, the logic of that is hilarious because if the first one got stuck in the spam folder, chances are the second one will too, but never mind. That's what we do because we're, we're in such a hurry. We've all become expert skimmers just because we've had to because of this enormous increase in, in just the sheer amount of communication. And the problem with skimming, of course, is that it increases inaccuracies, increases misreading, and increases once again potential hostility.

Yeah, it's interesting on the whole immediacy thing. I have a 13-year-old daughter who'll send me a WhatsApp message, and if I don't respond literally within about 8 seconds, I get a question mark. If I don't respond to that question mark in 8 seconds, I get 100 question marks. So I know exactly how that feels. I know exactly how that feels. A third problem in the book was a lack of control over your own persona. You told an interesting story about a CEO who wants to get rid of his reviews on Glassdoor.

Yes, and this is a little different from the other problems, but it's a very real one that turned up as I was doing my research in the virtual world. And that is, everybody's familiar with the Facebook problem, that is, especially everybody under, say, 50. If you had a wild party as a college student and then went and applied for your first job and and you'd be horrified to discover that those pictures that you posted on Facebook, which seemed so clever at the time, are now, are now part of your job application because the interviewer had the insight to type into Facebook to see if your name came up. All right, so everybody's Googling you, everybody's checking you out online, and it's very hard to control what's out there about you because everything you've ever said, everything you've ever were put out there online is there. Machines never forget. People do. And that's why the internet really isn't good for people. It's good for machines. It's not good for people. Um, and so you, to control that, uh, is very difficult. And you alluded to the CEO I was, I was talking about. Um, he is a very tough individual, very passionate, driven to succeed. Um, and, and he drives his people very hard. Um, and he also cuts them loose when he doesn't think they're, they're, uh, making the grade. And, um, he did that to a whole team within his organization. Um, and so when, when they were fired, they went out and wrote nasty things about him on Glassdoor, which is a, if your listeners haven't heard of it, is a, is a website devoted to people talking about confidentially about, or anonymously about organizations that they've worked at or that they continue to work at. Um, and so he called me up and he said, uh, Nick, how do you get this stuff off Glassdoor? I said, you can't, it's there forever. The only thing you can do is drown out the bad news with the good. And, and so when I talk about taking control of your persona in the book, that's the first thing you have to do. You have to take active measures to present to the world the way you would like to be presented and ensure that that drowns out the potential negative things that have got out there. And if you know there's something negative out there about you, then you have to work twice as hard. So that's the nature of playing in the digital sandbox.

There was a lovely analogy used about footprints in cement. Which I think matched that really nicely.

Yeah, if, imagine if every footstep you ever took walking around the town you live in, cement was wet. And so every step you took was memorialized forever. As soon as you lifted your foot up, then the cement dried. That's the way it is online. Everything is remembered forever. And that's terrible for human beings. We are inconsistent. We are imperfect. We need to be able to forgive each other. And the problem with the online world is it's not set up that way. It's set up to remember everything. Yeah. And people can Google you. What's going to show up is what's of interest.

And of course machines don't drink beer, which is the one thing that we do, which makes us cause many of these mistakes that come back to bite us on the bum later in life.

Exactly.

Yeah. Talk to me a little bit about the fourth problem then, lack of emotion.

Yeah, so when you take out the feedback and the resulting lack of empathy, what's happening there is the emotional subtext of a conversation that you have, say with, back to that audio conference, your regular weekly team meeting, the emotional subtext, which is so easily there when you're face-to-face, isn't coming through naturally and simply. The unexpected consequence of this and the unintended consequence of this is that it's hard to make good decisions. When I, when I tell people about this, they're really surprised because most of us have this model of decision-making in our head that it's like Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock. And Mr. Spock is the logical one from Star Trek, for those of you who remember. And he was supposed to be the one who could make good decisions because he didn't make them based on emotion. But it actually turns out that the way humans make decisions is with emotion. And that's the way our brains are constructed. And if you take away the emotion, we can't make decisions. There's a famous medical patient who's identified by his initials, H.M. He had a stroke which incapacitated the emotional part, the amygdala, the part of his brain, um, and the hippocampus. Um, and as a result, he didn't have a, he couldn't apply emotions to the things that were going on around him. And as a further result, he became unable to decide anything. And you ask, why would this be the case? It's because we use emotions to tell us how important things are to ourselves. A very simple example. And this will make it trivial for your audience to understand. Um, imagine you're 2 years old, you wander into the kitchen and there's this lovely glowing orange ring just about the level of a stove. And you go out and you put your finger on it because you're curious. And at that age you touch everything you're curious about. Well, what happens? Your finger gets horribly burned. You react with rage and pain and grief and anger and tears and You scream and you yell and you learn never to put your finger on a hot stove again. The reason you remember that is because you attach an enormous amount of emotion to that, negative emotion in this case, to that little incident. And that is basically our model for decision-making. That's how we decide whether to buy things, to fall in love, to take a job, to quit a job. To vote for a candidate or not, we attach emotion to all the little vignettes and stories and experiences that we've had. And we rank them according to the amount of emotion we attach to them. And the more important it is, the more emotional it is for us. And so we decide on those criteria.

I remember being at an event a little while ago and one of the main, one of the keynote speakers whose speech you probably wrote, I guess, said, you know, we think that we're making rational decisions. We tell ourselves we're making a decision from our head, but actually we're making decisions emotionally all the time. And actually what we're doing, the rational brain is simply post-rationalizing the purchase. In the case of this example they gave at the conference, it was a lady who bought a pair of boots in Milan for €1,200. She bought them, it was gut feel, but then she post-rationalized the whole thing thing in a very rational manner. These boots will go with these outfits. They're outfits I haven't worn for ages. That'll save me having to buy new outfits. They're very good quality. I'll be able to wear them for a long time. So that whole idea that we're making decisions rationally is just nonsense. I think to support your point, it's all about emotion.

Yes, I wish it were otherwise. And people will resist that. This is hard for people to accept. And they really argue with me about it. But the neuroscience is clear. We decide things in our unconscious minds. We decide them based on emotions. And then to your point, when they rise to the level of the conscious mind and we become aware of them, then what we do is we rationalize the decisions. We say, well, I decided that because, yeah, it was a good value, or these, these boots will last a long time, or whatever the particular need is. And it's, it's easier to— your example is a good one because it's easier to say, yeah, sure, I get that with, with buying a pair of shoes. Um, but we resist when it, when it comes to bigger, deeper, more important things. We still want to say, no, those, those have good reasons for them. And I thought through the reasons and I've made a rational decision. No, sorry. In every example, uh, the neuroscience is absolutely clear. Uh, we make decisions based on emotion. And so the point is in the, in the virtual world, when you take out the emotions, two things happen. First of all, They become boring. We don't care because it doesn't rate on our scale of interest, right? It's not as interesting as putting your finger on a hot stove. That's interesting. Um, because the results are so extraordinary, right? The virtual communications doesn't hurt. Also doesn't feel good. So, um, you take out the emotional subtext. First of all, we don't care. And then second of all, in a context in which we don't care as much and which we don't have good emotional valences for knowing how important something is, we actually make poor decisions. And so the, that online team meeting is a, is a setup, is a way to establish that team to start making a series of bad decisions. And that's very hard for, for businesses to accept because of course we're stuck with the virtual world, but we have to learn a new language of intent. We have to start getting clear about sharing our intent with people in the business world so that we can put the emotional subtext back in and start making better decisions virtually.

And as we discussed earlier on, is it a case of simply having to verbalize the version of— verbalize the emotional impact of someone who's just had on you on a call, or verbalizing the emotion of how Is it about having to say, you know, literally, you know, I'm rolling my eyes at what you just said. Yes.

That's exactly right.

Do we have to verbalize our emotions now? Is that the way forward?

That's the way forward. I call it the language of intent, which may be a little easier to accept. We have to make clear our intent. And it's not always just about negative emotions. Of course, we focus on those because those are the fun ones. But it's about being clear about intent. My intent is to in discussing this proposal with you is that I think this will happen, which will be good for the business. Here are the possible downsides, but overall I think it's a net positive. This is why I think we should do that. It's about getting very clear about what our intent is in each situation, because otherwise people will assume, back to our first problem, people will assume negative intent.

Okay, interesting. So the very last one here, and I'm actually gonna pull, I pulled a paragraph from the book just by way of a little introduction to the last problem. The last big problem is the lack of connection and commitment. Humans crave connection, and the virtual world seems endlessly social, but real connection, like decision-making, is based on emotions. Take the emotions out and we feel alone more often than makes sense. As somebody that works in internal communications and as somebody that consults with organizations on communications, the whole idea of taking communications out for me is terrifying because what I'm telling them is put more emotions in, make it more emotional, talk about your feelings, talk about how that made you feel, put more in. And what's happening here is that the virtual world seems to be sucking it out. That lack of connection is going.

That's exactly right. And as I said earlier, it— as a result, The connections are much more fragile and easily broken, and that's terrifying too. And the first solution to that— let's get to the solutions because I know by now, having talked about this with a number of people, that your listeners are getting anxious and they're saying, how do we fix this? Yeah, the first and most important thing, and this will not surprise surprise you, is that we have to become better storytellers. And stories, as you know, good stories have emotion and conflict and interest in them in a way that just talking data or just talking facts doesn't. And the way to engage people online is to tell better stories. And we see this over and over again in the United States. As some of your listeners may be aware, we're already launching the next presidential campaign season, and perhaps sensing opportunity, we have more Democrats running for president, we believe, than ever in history. A little hard to be sure about that, but there's this huge number of Democratic opponents, potential opponents to current President Trump. They're all fascinating people and they've all had their official launches and I'm sure there's more to come. But the one that got the most play was our fellow who ran for Senate and lost, Mr. Beto. And what he does is he involves his listeners in the story of him deciding and then committing to run for president in a way that the others haven't done as strongly. And as a result, he set a record for first 24 hours of after you announce for president fundraising. He raised more money in the first 24 hours than anybody has ever raised in history. And he has the knack, maybe because he's just younger and he gets living in the virtual world, but he has the knack for, for involving people in his story. And, and he he does something which is really extraordinary for presidential candidates too, which is he talks about his doubts and his indecisions, and he admits that he makes mistakes and he changes his mind. And of course, these are the things that make good stories and make us fascinating to each other, but something very foreign for a presidential candidate. They want to come out of the box as if they were perfect, never made a bad decision in their lives, and they're ready to be the leader of of the free world and so on and so forth. And so this is a new kind of storytelling for a presidential candidate, and yet it's already working.

And vulnerability is a very powerful thing.

Vulnerability is huge in the online world because it's the essence, the beginning of a story. You have to be vulnerable to tell a story. Invulnerable people don't make for very interesting stories. And so this potential candidate, Beto, has figured this out. The others will see whether they catch up or not.

Interesting. What else? What are some of the other ways that people can combat these things in the online world?

Well, I start, as I say, with asking yourself the question, how did what I just say make you feel? And of course, the inverse of that, which is how does what you just say make me feel? One simple way you can begin to put that into these audio conferences that we've repeatedly alluded to, for example, is to use a simple code at the beginning and end to allow people to say how they are. And it's up to the leader to pick whatever code they like. I suggest using the stoplight analogy. So red means you're having a terrible, awful, disastrous day and you probably shouldn't be on the call. Yellow means just sort of normal stress at this god-awful place that I work in. Just kidding. And green, green Green means things are good and great. Um, and so let's get, get on with it. And that allows people in a fairly safe way to say how you are at the beginning of the call and then how you are at the end of the call. And, um, there are a couple of companies that are developing this kind of audio and video software that helps with this, and they will keep track of those kinds of things. And so you can actually keep track of that over time. Time, which is a really interesting bit of data to find out how is your team doing over 6 months or a year if you do that check-in regularly. Because it might lurk in the back of your mind, hey, Jimmy over there in, in, in Dubai, it seems like he's always yellow, maybe I should check in with him. But this will give you the actual facts to know whether, whether that's accurate or that's just your skewed perception of So, so some kind of simple code like that. You can use some numbers. How do you feel on a scale of 5, where 1 is excellent and 5 is poor? Whatever works for you. But the idea is to start building in simple ways for people to check in because it's hard to do that. And, and most of us have experienced on those audio conferences, the first 5 minutes of an audio conference goes something like this. You hear the beep. You go, oh, somebody just checked in. Who's that? Oh, it's Jim from Dubai. Jim, how you doing? Jim starts to say, well, I'm actually beep. Oh, who's that? Oh, that's Jane from Singapore. Jane, how you doing? Well, it's pretty good here. It's hot in Singapore.

Beep.

Who's that? And you get this sort of idiotic, half-broken conversations that go on for 5 to 7 minutes as people beep in onto the call, right? So this does away with all that. You wait till everybody's on and then you say quickly, give us your check-in. And so that's just a simple practical thing to make that better. Another thing I urge people to do, and this is much easier for the millennials to do than older people, and that is to start using emojis and emoticons in your written text. We haven't talked about the written text as much. But that's a huge area, as we all know, for misunderstandings and for mistaking of tone. And especially as we have to handle more and more email, the research shows our emails get shorter and shorter. And of course, the shorter they are, the more likely they are to be misunderstood. And I've asked this of leaders as I started to talk about the book. I've asked— I'll ask people, how many of you are in charge of a team? They'll raise their hand and I'll say, have you ever sent out an email, the following email, two words, great job. And what's interesting is virtually 100% of leaders have sent out that email at one time or another. Great job. And I say to them, what did you mean by that? And they look at me like I'm crazy. They said, well, I meant they did a great job, whoever it was. And I say, how do you imagine your recipient read that? And they'll say, well, I, I would assume that they read it as I thought they'd done a good job. It turns out that if you send as a leader, the two-word email to your, uh, to one of your teammates, great job. The assumption is that you're being sarcastic and it throws that recipient into an hours-long self-doubt, recrimination, anger, brain spin about What happened here? What do I need to do to fix this? I mean, and I tell this to leaders, the research shows this clearly. I tell this, they just look at me, they have no idea. But that's the result of, uh, of the increased speed and the increased number, um, and the result of having to handle more and more email. And so putting in emojis or emoticons is a quick way to, uh, to start to untangle that and just get over your squeamishness about them and your feelings that they're kind of trivial or childish or something. If you say great job and put a smiley face on, there's no doubt that you mean that you thought the guy did a great job. If you put a great job and a frowny face, then they're going to assume that you meant it sarcastically. So it's just a way of straightening that out.

Yes. What people think is a game or a toy or for children can actually be extremely powerful in the online world.

Yeah. We're putting in there the body language. At least in the emotion, in the emoticon of the face, let's say. We're putting in the body language that the virtual world takes out. It's as simple as that.

Very interesting. Very, very interesting. Listen, conscious of time, Mick, very last question. And this is one that I ask everyone that comes on the podcast, and I will at some point, I think we're 25 episodes in now, I will at some point do a compendium of these answers in a podcast episode itself. What's the one piece of advice you'd have given your 20-year-old self knowing what you know now? What would you have done differently?

Uh, it's a great question. And I would say, um, when you're 20, you're worried very much about the immediate. You're worried about finding a job and getting a job and getting established and making a name for yourself and all those things. I'm thinking in business terms. And I would have said, I would say to my 20-year-old self, worry less about that, um, and more about, um, finding the work that's worth doing for you. Um, and by that, I mean, uh, uh, finding the work that really, um, that you can do well and that the world needs, but also floats your boat. Um, and we tend to, uh, and I talked to many people who do this, they, we tend to go in a way that feels appropriate or right. Um, because there's a tried and true job path there. Um, and, uh, I think the more interesting jobs are to, they're harder to establish, but they're to be found in, uh, in the, not in the traditional paths, but in, in, paths that haven't been made yet.

As Robert Frost said, take the path less trodden.

Exactly.

Very good. Nick, it's been a real pleasure talking to you. I'm conscious that you're probably standing there surrounded by packing crates that you're yet to unpack, having just moved house, but I really, really appreciate you having taken the time today. Really interesting. The book is available, I know, on Amazon. I got it on the Kindle. I'm sure it's available in bookstores as well. Really interesting read and well worth picking up for people that work, work in communications, or in fact have to communicate as part of the role, which I guess is all of us in many ways. So thank you, really appreciate it. I've enjoyed the chat, and it's been, it's been good talking to you, Scott.

It's a great pleasure. And yes, let's all keep getting more clear about our intent and our emotions. It can only be good.

Have a great day.

Thank you.

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