What We Say & How We Truly Feel - Why Are These So Different?

“The ability to be able to measure between what someone says and how they really feel is really very interesting... the question is, why is there that cognitive dissonance?"

Simon Stapleton, Co-Founder Truthsayers® and Paul Anderson Walsh, CEO and Co-Founder, The Centre for Inclusive Leadership, discuss some of the eye-opening outcomes that have been gathered for clients, and look at the impact this is then potentially having on employee turnover and retention.

The implicit methodology behind Truthsayers® Neurotech® platform has enabled The Centre to go deeper than ever before. Neurotech® gets right to the heart of how people really feel, capturing their gut responses, before conscious thoughts and biases kick in. By measuring both implicit and explicit responses, The Centre for Inclusive Leadership, powered by Truthsayers® Neurotech®, has been able to surface organisational truths that have traditionally been inaccessible to decision-makers.

Series 6 from Truthsayers® Neurocast™ - the final episode in this 3 part conversation.

Paul Anderson Walsh is a Learning & Development Practitioner, Author, Broadcaster, Inspirational Speaker and Life Coach. Paul is ITN Productions' resident leadership expert for their Amazon Audible series 'How to OutPerform', he is also a BBC contributor and has a regular show on Premier Radio. Former CEO of The Stephen Lawrence Charitable Trust, Paul continues to work with various social justice projects and is the founder and director of The Grace Project.

The key driver in Paul's work is to communicate people’s self-worth and expand their horizons, working with business leaders to help them truly understand the motivation and drivers of themselves and their people. We're delighted to have him on the show to impart some pearls of wisdom to our viewers.

✅  Find out more about the partnership between Truthsayers® and The Centre for Inclusive Leadership

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Transcript

00:02
The NeurocastTM, from Truthsayers®.

00:04
Simon Stapleton and Paul Anderson Walsh discuss how bias can lead to a marked dissonance between what people say explicitly and what people do implicitly.

Simon Stapleton 00:15
Hi. I’m Simon Stapleton. I’m one of the co-founders of Truthsayers and today I am delighted to welcome Paul Anderson Walsh, CEO and co-founder of the Centre for Inclusive Leadership, one of our partner organisations. The Centre uses our Neurotech® platform to help business leaders really understand their people better. 

The thing that sets Neurotech® apart from other people analytics tools is that we don’t just measure what people say – we measure how they actually feel as well. Traditional surveys just ask people to tell you, how they feel about something which results in considered, moderated answers – that’s what we call a person’s explicit response. But our Neurotech® goes one step further because we use neuroscience and psychology to capture not onlya person’s explicit response, but also their implicit response. Now Implicit responses happen in the nonconscious part of the brain; these are our gut reactions - our realfeelings about a subject - and by measuring the speed of a person’s response, we gather data on people’s true, implicit feelings. Now, overlaying the explicit and the implicit responses often reveals a marked dissonance, pointing to the fact that people quite often don’t tell us how they are actually truly feeling. I’m keen to get Paul’s views on why there is this dissonance between what people say and what people do. 

Simon Stapleton 01:50
Paul, so we've worked together on a number of projects now and we've got quite a repertoire of data to draw upon and what that's telling us. Like all these projects we see in clients that there's some things where there's total authenticity between what people will say, and how they really feel. And then there's some things that are, where the gap's quite significant and which points to inauthenticity. It points to when you ask people a question, and how they choose to answer that there's a conscious bias process that's been applied, because, I don’t know, they want to be seen that way, or they feel they should feel that way. Interestingly, we're finding that the delta between what people say and what they feel between co-workers being actually more than the delta between people and their managers. What do you think's happening? Why the co-worker relationships are less authentic than that between manager and subordinate?

Paul Anderson Walsh 02:56
Well, it's a very interesting question, and by the way, I must say, one of the reasons I love partnering with your organisation is because I think the way that you test is so innovative. The ability to be able to measure between what someone says and how they really feel is really very interesting. I was just thinking about an example, Simon, that was a piece of work that you and I did together earlier in the year. So, the question was asked, 'my peers contribute to me feeling good about myself' and explicitly, this score was 67%, but the implicit score was 4%.

SS 03:36
Rock bottom, yeah – 

PAW 03:37
And you say, how can there possibly be a dissonance of 63% in something like that? There was another one that I was reminded of, I mean, that particular survey that we did that audit on, we did, and it was a really interesting one, it says, 'my peers allow me to take risks without fear of failure'. The explicit score in that in that particular survey was 66%. And the implicit score was 17%. And we talk about the idea, don’t we, of what we call organisational or indeed, in this way, peer to peer cognitive dissonance. So, the question is, why is there that cognitive dissonance? I think what this goes to is, it goes to the issue of what we call 'belonging cues' - and I think it's a proximity point, right? - so if I work with day to day with my peers, I'm scanning for belonging cues: "Do I feel safe? Do I feel as though I can be myself here? Do I feel connection? Do I feel we have a future together?" And in environments, where the culture is competitive, and the culture is individualistic, it could well be that the belonging cues that are being sent out across that organisation- the frequency - doesn't lend itself to feeling trusted, feeling safe, and so what I might do, Simon, is I might end up feeling on guard when I'm with you, as opposed to happy to be guided by you. It could be that, because in those cultures I have less contact with my manager, I might have less level of risk around that, because I'm managing more localised risk with my peer. I think it might be something to do with proximity and exposure and experience. And also, by the way, bear in mind, in a pandemic.

SS 05:24
Right, exactly.  Well, you know what, Paul, I think, if you read the news, we're potentially going to go through a mass exodus of workers from one place to another because of the pandemic and employees are being forced back to the workplace. I think people voting with their feet will be a strong indicator. I think only time's going to tell with that, but we've certainly got the tools and the know-how, and the solutions that you provide ongoing post an assessment - a diagnostic - to help organisations navigate through that and not just help retain staff, but also attract the kind of talent that organisations are going to need going forward from this, what could be, a really broad talent pool to pick from.

PAW 06:17
Yeah, I agree. I think that one of the things that you're going to see post pandemic, in the hybrid space, and with the new entrants into the environment, I think what you're going to see is the winners are going to be collaborative communities, not hierarchical corporations. And I think that, you know, we've gone from the world in which 'the big eat the small', to a world in which 'the swift eat the slow', but I think what we're going to find out now is 'the collaborators eat the competitors'.

SS 06:51
Beautiful phrase, I love it. Well, Paul, it's been an absolute pleasure talking to you as usual.

PAW 06:57
Thank you

SS 06:58
It's been a really interesting to hear your viewpoints in this. So, thank you very much 

PAW 07:04

Thank you, Simon. 

SS 07:05
We'll see you soon, no doubt.

PAW 07:06
Thank you for inviting me.