No, It’s Not “Touchy-Feely”

Just because something makes you uncomfortable doesn’t mean it’s wrong. It might just be more real and true than what you consider to be acceptable. “Touch-feely” is creepy in a variety of ways. When I even think about it, I make an involuntary cringe face. A significant effort is made on my part not to use these words… and also not to roll my eyes when others do.

Working in Organizational Change Management, it gets tiring to hear people talk about the human-centric work we do as “Kumbaya” or “Touch-Feely.” All I hear is “I don’t want to do the work.” We cover ourselves up in technical skills, a perception of experiential prowess, and a belief that we can navigate business as machines if we just try hard enough. But… what about intuition? What about those spidey-senses that tug at our sleeves? What about the knowing we ignore as a possible new perspective? It is a good trigger for asking critical questions and examining what we tell ourselves is known and true.

For most of my career, I have tried to explain how I know things and how I understand things to try and help people see what I see. When choosing my graduate degree, it was the misguided hope that pursuing an MBA would help me articulate my intuition that finally tipped the scales. You know what? It didn’t work. While I am grateful for the tremendous growth and learning, I’ve realized in the years that followed that my real differentiator is the ability to pay attention to people and understand things at the level of shared humanity. There isn’t sufficient language for that, maybe there isn’t even a sufficient explanation. Business knowledge, strategy, and education help, but incomplete. There has to be allowance made for the parts of our brain we don’t use and to which we remain mostly unconscious.

The experience of my career has taught me that real, meaningful change and capitalizing on the opportunity of transformation has less to do with all of the nuts and bolts than it does with really seeing people and how everything comes together. The lessons come in moments when we help the people around us and ourselves level up and realize potential in new ways. It’s been coming for decades, but the ambiguous environment in which we must operate due to the accelerating pace of change is pushing us all into uncharted territory. And uncharted territory has to be navigated differently. The skillset development and mindset shifts are big, but also return us to things humans left in the dust with our obsession with technology and innovation (like, literally, starting with stone tools).

I know a lot about strategy. I’ve studied the brass tacks of the thing. I understand methodologies for strategic construction and execution. I know a good base process. But, you know what, when I am creating and imagining the realization of a vision, I work really hard to see, hear, and consider people. The core reason my strategies take hold is that they are inextricably human. I love logic, but it is often impractical and unactionable for real-life scenarios. Give me an Excel spreadsheet and some order and I might as well have been gifted a 20-minute meditation. It’s an escape that feels like solutioning, but it’s the easy part. You can define a theoretically “perfect” system, but if it isn’t accessible and aligned to users, the only real use for it is to look pretty and make us feel in control.

It has always been curious to me that we assume human responses, tendencies, psychology, and behaviors defy the pattern-seeking of logical processes. There is a grey matter between our logical brains and the infrastructure that exists in human capability, but our egos sever the two to protect our belief in our own knowing to make thinking easier. It allows us to feel more secure and discard the “touchy-feely” sensory experiences and approaches because they aren’t straightforward and exist in the ambiguity of educated guesses and the unknown.

I would liken it to our exploration of the ocean. We know less about the ocean than we do about outer space. It’s right in front of us, but dangerous and sometimes impossible to even reach the depths of the unknown. Turning inward in understanding both ourselves and others in one way or another is 100% more difficult than observing things we can see, touch, and calculate.

No matter what they say, most people do not make decisions based solely on data, unless you consider qualitative and sensory (and subjective) factors as included data sets. The folks that really do are such a small percentage that it would be comical if we ran that analysis. Don’t believe me? Take a spin with Harvard’s Implicit Bias test. What it tells you might surprise you. Our bias can be sneaky. It is baked in. And other factors like feelings run strong currents as well. At the end of the day, these subconscious factors are threads in our decision-making and judgment. That isn’t inexorably bad, but they should be examined the same way we look at other data. Its job is to inform, ours is to synthesize and draw productive conclusions.

We can make data say whatever we want it to say while remaining completely ignorant that we are shaping the findings. In assessing what is for designing strategy, one of the biggest blunders is to believe your data too hard without asking good questions and validating with others who may have different perspectives. I see this in Executives in terms of strategy and Organizational Development. I see it in hiring. I see it in promotions (and promotability). I see it in our views of one another. I see it in every person I’ve ever worked with. I see it in myself.

Developing awareness around the feelings and gut sensations that drive our decisions could dramatically improve our outcomes. We are complicated creatures and collectively, we need to do a better job of including more aspects of our experiences than those we can easily explain. There is what we know and can ascertain, what we think, and what we don’t know but sense. Perspective-seeking behaviors and active curiosity are the touchstones of that path forward.

We will never be able to eradicate our history and personal constructs from how we move forward. But what if instead of trying to combat this with data, we leaned into understanding why we are responding to information the way we are? There is an intelligence that we ignore far too often. Worse, we refuse to believe it’s real because we have shut down our connections to ourselves and to one another in the pursuit of mechanized perfection. It isn’t woo-woo and it isn’t touchy-feely. It is an allowance for ourselves to be human, an allowance to be curious, and an allowance to wonder and imagine. It is walking into the unknown with the belief there is information that can help us fill the gaps. Critical thinking is still, well, critical, but we would be well served to include more diverse information.

Through the lens of change management… there isn’t any change if people don’t adopt the solution. Everything could possibly go smoothly from a technical perspective (though generally not if people aren’t being considered), but it doesn’t matter if people don’t buy in and use the thing. It’s akin to taking a leaf blower to a pile of money pointed out an open window. Strictly scientific strategies that don’t consider human factors are not approaches that I would ever, in good conscience, recommend.

It is human to create. It is human to feel. It is human to need and form connections. And it matters so much for people to feel seen so they can share their perspective and experience as they experience it. So, while it may prickle your discomfort, perhaps that is just you connecting to a part of yourself that’s hiding; that you have decided to disregard. Reflecting the approach back on yourself… what would happen if someone saw you? Really listened? And… incorporated your experience into what the path forward looks like. All of a sudden, instead of dictating have-tos, push-harder, and more hustle, what if someone asked “does this feel true to you?”

Some of my most powerful conversations begin with those words. But, three steps have to come first:

• Establish enough connection to invest in conversations and observation with care and compassion

• Listen actively with intention and curiosity

• Speak back what you heard. Validate your understanding to see things as the speaker experiences them and make sure you got it right.

Then you can line it up with the source data. Does the experience match up to what its telling you? Delivery your summary or statement and then ask if it feels true. When we bring all of this information into our processing power, the conclusions (and solutions) may surprise you, especially in how much simpler and more logical the approach might be when we cut through the static.

There has been so much talk about Emotional Intelligence and empathy in recent years, that I worry sometimes that folks will disregard it as a fad. Decisions are made better when we know more, and when we include more perspectives. Learning the practice of incorporating all of it to extrapolate insights and synthesize information changes everything in ways that are hard to imagine without personal experience. Grouping all of this into the category of “soft skills” to make it easier to dismiss only shows our discomfort in trusting ourselves and leaning into learning about this frontier. It is illogical to do so if the goal is actionable insights and sustainable results that create transformation for the organizations, that in reality comprised of humans who need to change and take said action.

What I am talking about here is really hard for most of us. It takes years to develop the capability. But when you do, you will realize that it isn’t touch-feely; it is learning to connect the dots between the concrete and the abstract, what we feel and what we know, and understanding that the diversity in data types and sources can only improve outcomes. There is new information to explore if it makes you feel something. And if what it makes you feel is uncomfortable… just remember that discomfort is where growth lives and growth usually puts us on the path of know better, do better. It puts on the path for innovation, evolution, and transformation.

Lately, I’m wondering if the future is not about being the smartest, most educated, or most important person in the room. Maybe it is about being the most perceptive, intuitive, thoughtful, and ultimately human person in the room. It’s time to define what we want that to mean so we can develop a new understanding of possible.

Take a deep breath and a big step forward. Who knows what’s on the other side.

annewinn.com blog | Originally posted on December 5, 2023 | Photo by Vlad Tchompalov on Unsplash

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