In this episode Jenni talks about the role of fear in organisations and society, and how to build trust. She shares how fear creates chaos inside organisations and how we need to understand more about how we work as human beings. Find out the five things you need to know about fear and how it can be created in us, as well as five things to help you create trust in leadership.
Things that will help you go from chaos to calm:
The Science of Fear by Dan Gardner
Influential Internal Communication by Jenni Field
To keep the conversation going, connect with Jenni on LinkedIn and Twitter; ask questions and share your thinking!
Transcript from the podcast:
Welcome to this episode of Redefining Comms with Jenni Field.
Today I’m going to be talking about fear and trust inside organisations. So in the next 15 minutes, we will talk about the science behind fear. How we make decisions, how this impacts organisations and how to build trust, reduced fear, and create calm inside organisations.
Now, this is a big topic and one that’s probably more relevant today than it has been in the past. Over the years, the core function of internal communication has evolved from information in the 1940s to mutual understanding in the 1980s and in the 2010s, it was all about transparency and trust. So, while these are the focus areas for internal communication, they are also the focus areas for leaders and organisations as a whole.
So, when it comes to transparency and trust, what role does fear play and what does chaos look like when there isn’t trust?
So, there’s a lot of second guessing from employees about what the leaders are doing. There’s often high scepticism about whether things will really happen. No belief in what is being said will happen so that integrity say do gap. You’ll often find there might be blockers to change, so people deliberately block any kind of change that’s trying to be made. And this just wastes a huge amount of time and effort against the direction that you’re trying to travel in as an organisation. In addition, people will feel threatened, and some people will experience feelings of stress or anxiety. Now, all of this is a distraction from what you are trying to achieve, and all of it can be avoided. So how can we go from chaos to calm? Well, we have to go to science to understand more about how we work as human beings, how we assess risk, and to some degree, the role of the media in driving fear.
Now, if you haven’t read Science of Fear by Dan Gardner, it’s really well worth read. I happen to be reading it in February, 2020, which was very well timed ahead of the Global Pandemic and the national lockdowns that affected many countries. So today we’re going to look at five things you can consider when it comes to fear and trust, and then we’re going to look at five things that we need to know to help us move from chaos to calm.
How our brain works
So, the first is how our brains work. Now, whenever I speak about the power of communication inside organisations, I always start with grounding everyone in some of the fundamentals of understanding people. It’s also a chapter in my book because while there’s a lot to know, there are some basics that we can all understand that will help us know more about understanding the human brain and help us understand why trust and fear play such an important role in how we make decisions. Now, the brain is designed to keep you safe. It wants to make sure that no matter what, you are safe and if you try and do things out of your comfort zone. You can’t predict what’s going to happen your brain will stop you from doing that and it will make something up as a prediction and that thing it’s going to make up is probably something bad because it’s always going to look at something that’s going to harm you more than something that’s going to be positive. It is just how we are wired and no matter how many times people have said to me you have to get comfortable with ambiguity. I now know that that’s something that we’re just not able to do. It’s not part of our brains and how we’re wired as people. Now, this is important to know when it comes to communication because if people don’t know what’s happening, they don’t feel safe, they can’t predict what’s going to happen. They will be in what’s called a state of threat. And for some, this will create fear.
Images and our imagination are powerful things
The second thing for us to know is the power of images and our imagination. Now, we love stories. We’re great with stories. It’s how we are built as social animals. We love telling stories. It’s how we make connections. We are not so good with numbers and our ability to analyse and gather data, and insight continues to grow given the pace of technology and how society has changed but our ability to handle and interpret that doesn’t necessarily grow at the same rate. Now interestingly, when there is no picture involved in a story that we’re told, it means that there’s no real charged emotion. There’s no reason for the brain to increase any need for concern but if you add an image to a story and a closeup one at that of something that evokes an emotional response, the brain will conclude that the risk is higher or real. Now, this has nothing to do with any facts. It’s purely based on the response to the image so once we start to understand how many decisions are based on emotions, when there’s images and stories involved, then we can start to think that there really is a place for emotion in business. Now imagination is really powerful. It’s something that sets us aside from other species, our ability to imagine, create myths and create things that don’t really exist. But for us, there is no just imagining, and that’s important to remember when we ask people to imagine something, it’s not just forgotten and moved on from, it’s something that stays with us and actually it can stay with us so much that we can actually make up some of our memories. In experiments, it showed that 20 to 40% of people believed that their imagined scenarios actually happened. So, we’re not great at differentiating facts and fiction when it comes to our reaction and the emotion of fear.
We have little understanding of risk
The third is that we have little understanding of risk. Now, risks can be classified in two ways, relative and absolute. So relative risk is simply how much bigger or smaller a risk is relative to something else. Absolute risk is the probability of something happening. Now in the book, it talks about a couple of examples. It talks about the example of having a child abducted by a stranger and then having that returned later, and that obviously being an awful experience. But the ultimate nightmare is that child being stolen and then something tragic happening and they disappear forever. Now, that nightmare scenario, according to the data happens to around 50 teens and children a year in the United States. That’s 50 out of 70 million Americans. That means that the annual risk to that actually happening is about one in 1.4 million. So, it’s our ability to understand that risk and understanding how that could interpret our behaviour and what we do that’s something that we still aren’t really great at because of the emotional stories and the images that come with so much of the things that we hear. In addition, the book covers the story around the risk of terrorism and our behaviour. Air travel on the back of 9/11, and it actually says that if there was a terrorist hijacking, a passenger jet every week in the United States, and the person took one flight a month for a year, their chance of being hijacking was one in 135,000 chance, which is trivial compared to the annual one of 6,000 odds of being killed in a car crash. Yet we feel more safe in a car crash and less risk, although it’s not really less risk.
The role of media
So, understanding how we can interpret data, how we can understand risk is really important and a lot of this plays into the fourth point, which is the role of the media. Now, the start of our interest in risk and safety is very closely linked to the growth of the media in the 1970s where there was more reporting in the news and that’s put more examples and more emotions into our brains. So, it means that our concern rises as a result because reporters respond with more stories. More stories, more reporting means there’s this constant loop of content and fear steadily grows, and I think we’ve all witnessed some of that in the last 18 months.
What’s interesting is that when there is a story that comes into the news, even if that is rare, it’s often the case that then the news and the media will look to find other stories of a similar nature to help amplify that story that makes it feel like it’s increasingly more likely for something to happen because they’re focusing in on a particular narrative. What’s interesting when you start to look at the media and science and risk and all of those things together. The language of science is opposite to the definitive statements the media want, and therefore, it means that if you’re looking for really simple certain statements, you’re not going to get that from scientists because that puts a scientist into more of a role of an activist than a scientist. So it’s just very interesting to think about the different languages, the different roles people play, and how that can come through into the media, and then how that can sometimes create fear.
Our need for fairness
The fifth and final point is our need for fairness. So we often demand action on risk without any consideration of the cost of action, or any kind of unintended consequences. Now, we can’t squash people’s fears with facts. That’s really important for us to know that if people are worried about things, giving them loads of factual information doesn’t work. There’s two different parts of the brain, and it’s the part that makes the decision that requires the emotion so trying to just give people facts to help them feel safe is never going to work. It has to be an emotionally led message. You know, we are social animals. We are designed to think about others. We want to make sure that what we’re doing is, is fair and right for everybody. Our need for fairness is really high. There’s this sort of need for justice and punishment that often exists for us, and part of that is because we depend on each other for survival. You know, our ancestors depended on cooperation to stay alive. Cooperation requires rules, and understanding about how and why people break them is therefore crucial to our survival. So, if somebody breaks the rules that we’ve agreed upon for our cooperation, that’s why it triggers that need for fairness and punishment and justice in us.
So what do we need to do to reduce fear and build trust inside organisations?
And what can we learn from understanding just some of those points around ourselves and being human beings and the impacts on our thoughts and our behaviours that comes from some external sources?
Well, the first is that we can share information. We said at the beginning that our brains don’t like it when they can’t predict what’s going to happen. Don’t leave gaps for people to make up stories because it’s just going to be a story that’s not going to be true, and it’s probably going to be a story that’s going to be worse than the real story.
The second is to do what you say you will do. If you can’t do something or something changes, then just explain what that is. Sometimes things do change. Sometimes different priorities come in. Sometimes we miss a deadline. All of those things can be avoided if we just explain what’s happened.
The third is to use stories and emotion to help people move away from fear. We’ve already said that we make decisions based on the emotions and that the decisions are made by that part of our brain rather than the facts. So, we have to use stories to help people make changes. If we need to make decisions, we have to dial that up inside organisations. So let’s be more human, let’s tell more stories, and let’s remember that cooperation, that social connection that we all need.
The fourth is to be curious. You know, check what people are feeling and thinking. But remember that if you are putting messages out across your organisation, then people will have questions to ask. So do that critical thinking. Have people in the room with you to ask questions based on the messages or the information that you want to share, and ask the difficult questions. Let’s be curious. Let’s talk about this. Let’s get underneath some of those messages and find out what we really mean because everybody will have those same questions. If there are gaps in that message, they need to be filled.
The fifth is to be fair. This links to our need for that punishment, that justice but it’s important when it comes to things like hybrid or flexible work where our focus has been very much on the office worker when there are lots of people who are not office-based and deserve equal flexibility as everyone else.
Now in my next episode, I’m going to be talking about mental resilience, why we need it, and how we can all build it. It’s something that I cover in the workshops that I run on how to build mental resilience for teams, but it really helps us go from chaos to calm because it helps us understand how important control is and when it comes to ourselves and how we work.
Thank you for listening. I’d love to continue this conversation on Twitter or LinkedIn, so please connect, ask questions, share your thinking with me. If you’ve read the book, science of Fear, let me know what you thought and the details are in the show notes on how to stay in touch.
