Victims, journalists, lawyers, and some politicians have struggled for more than 20 years to right the injustice and pain caused to sub-postmasters and sub-postmistresses by the Post Office Horizon scandal. But it took a TV drama to make the Government face up and take urgent action. Why?
The drama, Mr Bates vs The Post Office, was a powerful series created in close collaboration with those involved and acted by some of the country’s best character actors. It did what no purely rational analysis of the events could do: it dramatically engaged the emotions of the audience. It presented them with a clear story about people like them experiencing a baffling, awful, and life-changing injustice, and struggling unsuccessfully for years against an implacable employer who held all the cards. It resonated with the audience's own emotional experience of powerlessness and injustice. They could not but put themselves in the shoes of the victims and feel some of what they felt. The public were angered, and the Government was forced to take urgent action.
All forms of creativity - whether in science, the arts, or the insights we experience in our everyday lives - involve building new models of the world which represent reality in a more coherent and comprehensive way. The arts can communicate these models directly to our unconscious minds via our emotions. The stories they tell distil the essence of an issue, extending our understanding and emotional range. Mr Bates vs The Post Office made the plight of the victims salient in a new way. It is one of a small number of dramas whose impact was such that they radically changed the public conversation and precipitated government action: the BBC's Cathy Come Home did something similar for homelessness in 1966.
Empathy is an extraordinary thing. It’s a form of pattern recognition, an intuitive ability to simulate what another person is thinking and feeling, and to experience it ourselves, albeit in an attenuated way. It’s our emotions, not rational analysis, which impel us to act. These are points of relevance to the workplace too.
To influence people you need to engage their hearts as well as their minds. Most of what we do at work is collaborative, so we really need to be able to tap into the emotions and motivations of our colleagues, clients and stakeholders, if we are to make common cause with them. Yet we invariably resort to rational forms of persuasion alone. If we are to trigger new insights in them, we need to communicate with passion and skill: to show them how much we care and tell them stories which resonate with their experience, not bombard them with facts and logic.
I will return to these issues in later articles about creativity and insight, and influencing and empathy, in the workplace.
This is a persuasive argument, and certainly identifies where some of the power of that dramatic presentation came from. Much was said about the reputation of the PO being sacrosanct, but as someone else argued recently that reputation was built on the trustworthiness of the individual figures in their local communities. I’ll be interested to see where you feel there might be limits to an emotional approach in the workplace.