The myopia of modern business…

When businesses target consumers they recognise the emotional rationale is far more powerful to change behaviour than the purely rational, why does that change when they walk into an office each morning?

Have you ever seen anything like this from an internal comms team:

We all well know that System One responses are instinctive, effortless and fast, and that by contrast System Two responses are deliberate, considered and slow.

Most of our feeling and decision-making is done in an instant: via our ‘implicit’, System One brain.  As a result our spontaneous first impressions are a much more valuable currency than our more thought-through rationalisations.

Practical application of this insight, popularised by Daniel Kahneman, can be found across leading consumer businesses, at least in their marketing departments.  We’re yet to see it get widely used by Internal Comms teams.

Can it be true that these consumers morph into logical and rational agents once they pass through the office doors each morning?  That we’re solely governed by our "System Two” brain at our desk each day?

The standard way of working maybe fine for the day to day.   When you’re going through the post-deal tumult and uncertainty arising from a merger or acquisition however, greater efforts will pay greater dividends.

Engaging and aligning employees is the key to realising value from M&A to justify the acquisition premium paid. Why not use the latest and best thinking for how people work? Sharing the insights used by our marketing departments with the rest of our organisations will improve our ability to engage people and drive change.

Sincerely,