Humans

To understand organisations, we first have to understand the extraordinary and contradictory creatures who inhabit them…

The Assumption

A strange caricature of human nature pervades organisations.

We’ve come to imagine ourselves as human calculators, walking computers. We believe our senses work like camcorders, recording 24/7 high definition footage of the world around us, and storing it on hard drives in our heads.

We imagine our brains as ruthlessly efficient information processors, taking in every word we read or hear, interpreting it just as the writer or speaker intended. We think of ourselves as impartial judges, dispassionately putting aside emotion and weighing each and every decision with cold economic logic.

These assumptions, obviously absurd when stated explicitly, underpin much that we take for granted about organisations.

The Reality

Real humans are very different from the caricature.

The human brain is the most complex object in the known universe, 85 billion neurons connected by more than 100 trillion synapses, an ever-changing system of systems, all marinading in a complex cocktail of hormones.

Despite the marvels of human ingenuity and intellect that shape our world, the brain evolved not for thinking, but simply to keep us alive and to help us procreate. And far from a wet computer in our heads, our brains are deeply embedded within our bodies, the physical and the mental inextricably intertwined. 

We make most decisions without conscious thought, often using rules of thumb inherited from Palaeolithic hunter gatherers: what do I normally do, what’s the easiest thing to do, what’s everyone else doing, what feels good?

“We are not thinking machines that feel, we are feeling machines that think.”

Antonio Damasio

We don’t experience reality as it is, rather our brains continually and seamlessly construct it by comparing sensory inputs against internally generated predictions. Even our memories are illusory, malleable “just so” stories we constantly rewrite to fit our latest narrative about ourselves and the world. 

The human condition is beautiful and tragic. Alone in the blackness of our skulls and the enormity of the universe, our brains constantly reach out across the void for connection, desperately seeking validation and belonging. 

We make sense of existence through binary categories: us and them, black and white, good and evil. We each inhabit dozens of imagined social identities, sometimes overlapping, sometimes contradictory. We’re fiercely loyal to imaginary groups – teams, companies, countries – our ancestors’ tribal past never far below the surface.

We wildly underestimate the world’s complexity and wildly overestimate our understanding and control, desperate to believe our own simplistic stories of heroes and villains, triumphs and disasters, easy-to-understand narratives.

We predict more than we know, feel more than we think, and imagine more than we remember. 

We are, above all, social, emotional, tribal, storytelling animals.

The Impact

The gap between the caricature of human nature and the reality explains much that goes wrong in organisational life:

• Communication doesn’t land.
• Training doesn’t lead to behaviour change.
• Policies and procedures don’t translate to reality.
• People fail to adopt new technology effectively.
• Strategy doesn’t translate into action.

What kind of organisations would we build if we truly accepted what humans are really like…?

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