“They” are people too
Business decided to do it like this. The Developers are not delivering fast enough. Management doesn’t understand what we do. The Customer asked for this. Testing is taking too long. The Architects decided that. HR wouldn’t allow us to do that. The Customer Segment doesn’t like pink fluffy things. The Consultants designed it like this. The Shareholders don’t want that.
Many of these statements may feel familiar, especially if you’ve worked in a large corporation. The language tells much about the thinking and subconscious mechanisms behind the words. Most people probably consider this kind of language normal and it actually is perfectly natural — when you’re talking about your enemies.
Addressing this issue is key to success in becoming agile, working in any organisation and being human in general.
Ingroup vs Outgroup
The saying “you’re either with us, or against us” is actually not a threat but a statement of fact.
Our brain has evolved over hundreds of millions years in environments where it has been extremely beneficial to assume on an instinctual level that anything may be a threat. The situation started changing when more and more resources became available for social processing, but your brain is still stuck in perpetual a dance between survival instincts and the need to connect. And this has interesting side effects.
When you feel someone belongs in your group through ethnicity, role, hobby or whatever that makes that person relatable to you, your brain will in many ways treat them like they’re a part of you. You will be chemically rewarded if members of your group succeed and feel pain when they fail. When people outside your group fail you will feel better and their success will hurt you.
This mechanism is in its core binary, either someone is your enemy or your friend. In practice everyone’s ingroup/outgroup status with you is in constant flux, but is easily emotionally locked. People who you don’t have strong feelings for or against, small things like what they wear, how they look, how you slept the night before and what you’ve eaten can make the difference between friend and foe.
Stress makes you enemies
Stress and its positive and negative effects are a huge topic worth many books and I won’t go into too much detail here. I’ll share some further reading at the end of the post.
Extreme stress caused by things like fear, anger, anxiety or strong (social) pain causes people to go into fight or flight mode and basically shuts down all social processing. People in this state will do whatever it takes to survive or at least allow their group to survive. I’ve unfortunately been there, done that, more than once. When things escalate this far, it’s very likely that everybody involved will end up suffering from it. The only good thing about this is that it is very visible and therefore it’s easier to start fixing.
A much more subtle and dangerous effect of stress is the amplifying of the negativity bias we already have. Literally everything you sense will have an increased chance of being interpreted as a threat when your stress level rises. Yup. A shadow, an email, a smell and even a smile from a colleague is more likely to register as a threat when you’re stressed out.
There’s a whole another world of problems with stress and creativity, but that’s another story for another time.
Healing the divide
Heal yourself
Sleep well, exercise and take care of your mental well being. Mindfulness is a great way to reduce stress and long term training also improves your ability to connect and be kind to people. Taking care of yourself is a prerequisite for healing your organisation.
Grow your ingroup
While the basic mechanism for placing people in your ingroup is subconscious and out of your direct control, you can greatly influence it.
Thinking and talking about people as people is one habit you can build to counter the tension caused by status differences and tribal borders. Instead of talking about “the Management” you can talk about Jane, Jill and Josephine and their needs, hopes and dreams. Instead of blaming “the Developers”, talk to Judy and ask how you can help her.
Find something you can relate to in the people you work with. If your common humanity feels like too much of a stretch, you can start with common hobbies, both having kids, shared educational history, both liking coffee or a sport you both like. Or if the situation is really bad, you can start with a common enemy and befriend that enemy together later.
Our common humanity
We all do better when we all do better. Conscious and unconscious dehumanisation will continue to plague us as long as we allow it to. Start by healing yourself and you’ve already made the world a better place.
If you’re interested in more stories about seeing people as people and the benefits of that, Leadership and Self-deception by the Argrbringer institute is a great starting point.
If you want to learn more about stress I highly recommend reading Why Don’t Zebras Get Ulcers by Robert M. Sapolsky. Reading it helped me cope with my own anger and anxiety. On the upside of stress and how to make it your friend you can read, well, the Upside of Stress by Kelly McGonical. Kelly’s book it still waiting for me on my bookshelf, but based on her other work and her TED talk on the topic, I have no reservations about recommending it.
