This morning CIPR Inside and Luminous hosted an Ask the Guru event all about the shift from informing to engaging audiences inside organisations.
As the Chair of CIPR Inside I was there to open the event and facilitate any questions. The event was designed to explore the role of internal communication in driving engaging and authentic leadership communication. With guest speaker Graham Cox, Director of Learning and Development at Boundaries Edge and Mark Litchfield, Executive Creative Director at Luminous they took us on a journey of authenticity, decision making, perception, creativity and measurement.
Understanding how we make decisions
As we set the scene to understand the role of authenticity it was helpful to better understand how we make decisions and where the logic and emotion come in. I’m already a big fan of Simon Sinek and his golden circle theory so it was great to kick off with a reminder about the mammalian brain (feelings) and neocortex (logic) and how 86% of decisions are based on feelings.
What was equally interesting was the fact that as we evolve we should become more logical in our decision-making but with the introduction of AI the need for us to make logical decisions is diminishing.
The six rules of perception
- Initial impression resists change, and perception resets every 10/15 seconds
- We have confirmation bias, we self-validate – if there is more investment the individual is less likely to change their mind
- We cannot hold two precepts in the mind at one time
- Perception is directly related to context, so we have to remind people about context all the time. This is linked to the fact that we don’t know how to calculate value
- We perceive losses three times more that we do gains. It is this focus on losses and therefore fear of them that leads us to stay in jobs we don’t enjoy or relationships that don’t work
- People perceive the past, present and future – and different groups of people will have a tendency to focus on one element more than the other
Engage audiences through creativity and measure how you do it
- To help with creativity look around you. Benchmark with peers and be inspired by things outside of your everyday
- Consistency is important
- Create a central bank of assets to support both the consistency and to help with efficiencies in the team
- Create a two-way conversation with relevance and measurement; define the metrics upfront, be clear about the audience and who to target, and get qualitative and quantitative feedback
As we finished the morning I shared the Making it Count research with the attendees as this is all about understanding the value and effectiveness of internal communication – and if we find it difficult to calculate value and our perception is directly related to context, I hope this helps us move forwards into more engaging conversations.
