Preaching To The Choir…..

I was confronted with a really discomforting thought today. As I listened to a brilliant webcast hosted by Aaron Evans, with Todd Caponi, Matt Dixon, and Anthony Iannarino. It was a brilliant discussion. The comments from the 300 plus participants showed the wild agreement from the audience.

But then, I realized, while interesting, informative and, sometimes, entertaining (Matt, I get such great joy in laughing at you….), I realized the audience weren’t the people that needed to hear this. They had all bought in, we each picked up something new and learned, but the people that need to think about this the most are not the people signing up and listening to these.

As I reflect on both this blog, the webcasts/podcasts I conduct and participate in, I recognize the same issues. Probably the people that might get the most value are not paying attention.

We are preaching to the choir, when what we need to do is reach the people that aren’t going to church.

It’s human nature, we associate with people that share parts of our identities and values, we belong to tribes paying attention to people in our tribes, ignoring those outside the tribes. We get comfort and affirmation in those groups. We cheer each other on with likes, happy faces, and other emoji’s

But are we growing?

We probably learn more if we, periodically, venture to different places. If we consider different experiences, different point of view, different ideas.

These experiences can help us grow, learn, expand our views of things, and help us improve. They, sometimes, may reconfirm some of our own thinking, after looking at different perspectives.

It’s uncomfortable, we may feel threatened, there are people we may disagree with, that we don’t like, perhaps don’t respect (though we need to be careful about differentiating between ideas and the person). But they force us to inspect our own views, our own perspectives, our own experiences.

From a business point of view, we know that more diverse groups have better quality decisions—intuitively, it makes sense. But, counterintuitively, the time to decision is shorter.

We’ve been doing a lot of work on innovation. One of the keys we’ve discovered in innovation is the importance learning from very different groups. We will struggle to innovate if we look at our competitors and people in our industry. But if we look in very different industries, and markets, we can discover new ideas that we can adapt to our businesses (I’ve written about artful plagiarism.)

Unfortunately, our social tools don’t help us with this. They tend to reinforce our tribes and groups, showing us content that reinforces what we want to believe, not helping us look at different points of view. It’s difficult to get around that–I’m not sure I’ve figured that out yet. But we have to look at hanging out in different places.

I try to be diverse in my reading–looking at very different points of view, looking outside of selling and business reading; mixing biographies, history, social commentary, philosophy, economics, and fiction. I try this as I watch and read the news, looking for differing views (as much as it sometimes makes my stomach churn). I do business globally, learning from different cultures, and business practices. I hang out with product developers, finance people, manufacturing people–not just sellers (I’m struggling to hang out with lawyers–but that may be a step too far).

What are you doing to hang out with different people? Particularly, how do you do this in social channels? What are you doing to learn different things from different people? Would love your ideas, I’m struggling a little with this.