Enabling Better Decisions Through Emotion-Rich Stories
“I am shocked to see how compelled I was by projects leveraging rich emotional language.”
We’re debriefing the final portfolio review in last week’s “Design Thinking Bootcamp” at Stanford, and one of our illustrious executive-cum-students has just noticed how much the presence of emotional language impacted her evaluation of the other teams’ work. “I’m generally more scientific in my approach, but I found myself less compelled by the problem statements that were less emotionally charged.”
It’s a common realization. In conventional business settings, logic is king. All decisions are stripped of any seemingly unnecessary information (including emotion) just like a hospital is sterilized of germs. Only the facts. Reason must prevail. And yet, all too often, data-rich but emotion-poor meetings end in the same outcome: a resolution to have another meeting. Our perspective at the d.school is, by eliminating emotional information from the conversation, organizations are making decisions much harder to make, not easier.
USC neuroscientist Antonio Damasio, author of the fabulous “Descartes’ Error,” tends to agree. Because of the genuine human intrigue at the core of his research, his studies are some of my favorite examples: otherwise capable, smart individuals, whose lives are inexplicably unraveled by the inability to process emotion. One might think that life would be more straightforward without the pesky distraction of emotion, but Damasio’s research indicates exactly the opposite. Speaking of a particular patient whose emotional centers had been damaged by a brain tumor:
“Before a brain tumor wounded the frontal lobe tissue in his brain, Elliot had a good job at a business firm, was a role model to his colleagues and younger siblings, and a dutiful husband. Then he started getting headaches, and eventually had to get the tumor removed. When he met Damasio, Elliot was still pleasant, charming, and well-aware of the day’s news and the area of business that he worked in; he also still had a fantastic memory for his life story. But at the same time, his life had fallen apart. Any projects he did on the job were either left incomplete or had to be corrected, eventually leading to the loss of his job. He got involved in a moneymaking scheme with a “shady character” that ended up in bankruptcy. He got divorced, then married again to someone his family strongly disapproved of, and divorced again…
“He tested well when given an IQ test and other measures of intelligence; Elliot’s long-term memory, short-term memory, language skills, perception, and handiness with math were all still present. He was not stupid. He was not ignorant. But he acted like he was both. He couldn’t make plans for a few hours in advance, let alone months or years. And it had led his life to ruin…
“Damasio discovered (that) when emotion was impaired, so was decision-making.
“Therein lies the problem of the high-reason view: without the filtering provided by emotions and their somatic markers, the data sets for any given decision — whether it’s what to get for lunch or whom to marry — would be overwhelming. The working memory can only juggle so many objects at once. To make the right call, you need to feel your way — or at least part of your way — there.”
(from the excellent short read, “How Only Being Able to Use Logic to Make Decisions Destroyed a Man’s Life,” at The Cut)
My admittedly non-technical, layman’s understanding is that Damasio’s subsequent fMRI studies have demonstrated something like this: when subjects make a decision, the first area of the brain to light up is actually the emotion centers. It’s only after this that the rational brain starts processing. As my exceptionally talented colleague Baba Shiv (a perennial favorite professor at Stanford Business School) has quipped, “It turns out that the rational brain is especially good at rationalizing decisions that have already been made in the area of the brain that handles emotion.” Without an emotional trigger firing first, folks like Elliot essentially have no raw material for their rational brain to rationalize.
Hence the phenomenon so many have observed in a conventional company’s perfectly logical meetings. When the decks are cleared of emotion, decisions don’t get easier; they get harder; unable to make a decision, folks agree that the best thing to do is to have another meeting. It’s their only recourse in the face of the dearth of emotional stimulus. And so we teach, just as the executive in training realized last week, the importance of preserving emotional content through telling human-centered stories: it actually helps our audience make a decision they can describe later as rational! When we position the human being whose life we are trying to improve as the hero of a story, and describe the pain we are seeking to address in advocating a particular solution, our solutions are encoded with the proper emotional context that audiences need to decide in the direction of change.
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