The fact is safe to say that most people think chocolate is delicious – not counting those that dislike sweets completely. Imagine for a moment that you have a lovely bar of chocolate that’s lying on the kitchen counter of your house as you sit in the living room. It can’t move, it can’t play mind tricks with you nor can it put up a banner that says, “Eat Me!” And yet chocolate can lure the attention of anyone ages 6 to 86.
Now, suppose you want to analyze how chocolate could be so delicious – using objective tools to understand subjective truths? You could take a bar of chocolate and put it into a processing machine; have millions of sensors, meters, and gadgets measure all of its molecular components before attempting to determine where the sweet derives. However, the result is pretty simple: either you like chocolate or you don’t. It comes down to what your tastes are, and that differs from person to person.
What does this tell us? When we try to analyze subjective truths by breaking them down objectively, we erase what we were trying to understand. Therefore, a different approach must be taken – a subjective one.
Subjective Solutions to Subjective Problems
In business, you never want to use objective, rational thinking to tackle subjective problems, but that’s a common mistake most owners make. Objective tools introduce a terrible “lead-into-gold” alchemy into subjective issues. For example, when we use root-cause analysis to translate a subjective issue such as trust, we end up performing the blame game on others and making the problem worse, not better.
Rather than helping the situation, the increased application of objective tools sabotages our ability to see and handle subjective problems/opportunities in a business organization. Thus, you need to understand how objective and subjective are different.
Counter-intuitively, trust is better achieved with a story about how you made a mistake one day than it is with a resumé of past achievements.
Importance of Using Personal Experience in Business
People want faith that you know what you’re talking about and mean what you say in business as opposed just receiving more information. Faith is a subjective judgment that’s based on personal experience. Since most people can’t experience every aspect of the organization personally, you need to give them a story that inspires faith.
Lightning-fast mental routines that rely too much on objective criteria often cause us to ignore our natural-born wisdom such as faith. Even in a business meeting, we are all human beings that have loved and lost, trusted and been betrayed. When you share stories that reveal your humanity, you connect with people at the level of human experience – the mess, confusing and emotional reality of people living their lives.