the texture of our performance may have more impact than measures of success
Transcript of this video:
I was reading an article this morning about “deliverism,”
a term that’s been coined to describe the way
that politicians often focus on the delivery
of measurable outcomes in the hope of winning more votes.
And the tendency that even when they do deliver measurable
goals,
it doesn’t always result in positive
electoral returns for them.
And it cites a piece of research from the last century,
a rather cruel piece of research, done
by a guy called Harry Harlow with young Rhesus monkeys,
where he replaced their real mother with one
or other of two physical mockups.
One was made of wire
and had a means for delivering milk to the baby.
And the other didn’t have that means of delivery of milk,
but it was made of cloth so it had more texture.
And the babies essentially were far more attached
to the cloth mother that didn’t deliver milk than the wire
one that did.
It makes a lot of sense to me
because working with people on challenges of leadership
or having difficult conversations, we often try
to repeat again and again
and again, two lines of dialogue, from working
with people, so
that we can explore the subtle ways in which you can say the
same thing in subtly different ways
that sometimes have much more impact.
And one of the themes of the practice groups I’m running is
that we wanna take the opportunity to look at the texture
of our stories and our performances,
because it’s in the texture that you actually create
satisfying human relationships, the kind
that aren’t necessarily satisfied
by our always-on, highly technological world.
Photo by Ave Calvar on Unsplash
