Introduction to The Rules That Make Us
Melina Palmer: Welcome to episode 585 of the Brainy Business: Understanding the Psychology of Why People Buy. In today’s episode, I’m excited to introduce you to Oliver Sweet, author of The Rules That Make Us. Ready? Let’s get started.
Announcer: You are listening to the Brainy Business podcast, where we dig into the psychology of why people buy and help you incorporate behavioral economics into your business, making it more brain-friendly. Now, here’s your host, Melina Palmer.
Melina Palmer: Hello.
Melina Palmer: Hello, everyone. My name is Melina Palmer, and I want to welcome you to the Brainy Business Podcast. Have you ever had a product or message you were sure was going to land and it didn’t? Or something that worked really well and you couldn’t quite figure out why or how to repeat it? Most of us want to chalk those moments up to timing or luck or a bad campaign.
Melina Palmer: Just a fluke.
Melina Palmer: But what if the answer was sitting in plain sight the whole time, hiding in the everyday behaviors and unspoken rules of the people you were trying to reach? As you might have guessed, that is exactly what we’re going to be discussing in today’s episode.
Introducing Oliver Sweet and Business Anthropology
Melina Palmer: My guest today is Oliver Sweet. Oliver is a business anthropologist at Ipsos, where he leads a team doing cultural insight work. That means he goes into the field, and that can include going into people’s homes with them, observing their routines and lives to understand what’s truly influencing decisions. He’s worked with companies like Pedigree and Ikea in markets all over the world, and he’s going to share some fascinating stories from both of those brands in today’s conversation—just a few of those that are featured in his new book, The Rules That Make Us. As you listen today, I encourage you to think about your own customers or your own team and the assumptions you may be making about their motivations and behaviors that aren’t necessarily true. Really quickly before we get into the conversation, I want to be sure you know that there are links in the show notes for my top related past episodes and books, ways to get in touch, and more. It’s all within the app you’re listening to and at thebrainybusiness.com/585. Now let’s jump right in. Oliver Sweet, welcome to the Brainy Business podcast.
Oliver Sweet: Thank you very much, Melina. I’m really excited to have a chat with you.
Melina Palmer: Same. Very excited for you to be here today and for us to chat about all things anthropology, business, and good brainy cultural stuff. Before we jump into our conversation, can you share a little bit about yourself and the work you do for everybody who doesn’t yet know you?
Oliver Sweet: Sure. I’m a business anthropologist. I work at a company called Ipsos. We’re a research consultancy and we do surveys and focus groups and other things like that. But as we spin off to do other sort of interesting bits of work, my team leads a cultural insight department and research that really tries to look at why people do the things that they do from a cultural level. I think there’s a lot of research that goes into motivations and why people think certain ways. But actually a lot of our behavior does come from us and how we think, but it also comes from the people around us, the culture we live in, and the way that we’ve grown up. So what I’m trying to do sort of with the book and at work is try to shift the conversation a little bit away from “we are masters of our own destiny and we think something, therefore we do it” through to more cultural reasons why we do the things that we do.
Melina Palmer: Absolutely. And so for people who aren’t that familiar—I know we’ve had anthropologists on the show, we’ve had ethnographers on the show before, and of course those in behavioral science, behavioral economics, and all sorts of areas—what is business anthropology like? What does it mean to be a business anthropologist?
Oliver Sweet: So we’re there to advise a business about culture. Now, most of the time it means that we go and do fieldwork, and that fieldwork practice is ethnography. It’s a very difficult word to pronounce and it’s a very awkward word. And to be honest, I don’t use the word a single time in the book because I think it’s quite a strange word that people get sort of hung up on. But essentially being an anthropologist or being an ethnographer means we go and hang out with people in their place—where they go with their friends, with their family—and we try and see what goes on around them. Because we make decisions all the time based on the context of our lives, who we’re with, where we’re going. And all of these things are hugely important if we want to understand people a bit better. So that’s the practice of it. We go and hang out with people for extended amounts of time. And it really is insightful if we’re trying to figure out why people do stuff.
Melina Palmer: Mmhmm. And toward the very, very, very end of the book, you mention ethnography when talking about the difference and the reason that anthropology kind of came about, right? For the researcher who got stuck and had to be part of the group.
The Birth of Fieldwork and Ethnography
Oliver Sweet: Yes, there is. I mean, I think it’s a fascinating sort of birth, if you like, of a research technique. So, Bronislaw Malinowski was a Polish-born academic studying at the LSE in London. And he was an anthropologist, but working at LSE, it was framed by economics a lot of the time. He went out to the Trobriand Islands to do a piece of research there. At that time, World War I broke out and he was stuck there. He could not get back; there were no boats to come back. So he therefore just stayed longer and longer and longer, which meant that he started to get to know all the people on the island much, much better. He started to map their behaviors and he started to understand the world from their point of view.
What he realized was there were a lot of practices there that he didn’t really understand at first. If he was looking at an economic model, he was trying to figure out how people exchanged things. He initially assumed that it was just through barter: “I have some stuff that you might want, you’ve got some stuff that I want, we can do an exchange. Some of that corn is less valuable than this meat that I have, so I get more corn”—that kind of stuff.
Then he realized after a while that people were also starting to trade in shells. He was a bit confused by this and he thought, “Why are they trading in shells? What value do shells bring?” Then he started to realize that people were actually going on small canoes across all the different islands trading in shells, and he started to realize there was a hierarchy in shells. He was basically seeing the world from their point of view. Because he was stuck there for—I think it was probably about a year and a half or two years, a long time—he’d written all sorts of stuff about the islanders and what was going on in the Trobriand Islands.
This process of documentation was something that he did again and again, and he built up the practice of anthropological fieldwork, now known as ethnography. That was really seen as the birth of the fieldwork practice of anthropology. Since then, we have become less imperialistic—less studying “tribes.” Anthropology does have a little bit of a problem with its past, as it was always following sort of different people from different tribes. Now, we’ve turned these techniques on ourselves a lot more, and it’s now about understanding how our culture is today. What does popular culture look like for teenage boys and girls? Or what does it look like for different groups of people? Those initial ideas of what he called participant observation—participating in someone’s life while still observing it, so you need to feel it yourself—those principles still hold strong today in commercial ethnography as well.
Melina Palmer: I love it. And yeah, it’s kind of that being part of it unlocks where people become comfortable and are willing to share a little bit more. You get to see what’s really going on versus coming in with my context and what I think you should be doing, or why, or what I would ascribe as value to things. Where it’s like, “Those shells are garbage. They just had something in them that you ate, and now it’s gone. It’s not worth anything anymore.” So there’s no purpose in keeping or trading those sorts of things. But then you get to see they could be used in art or jewelry or, you know, maybe it is just a form of currency, right? As you have the different things that people kind of agree upon, you learn that you can turn it into something else when you’re in it. They’re willing to open up in a way that outsiders just don’t get to see and understand often.
The Japanese Concept of Gemba
Oliver Sweet: Yeah. There’s a fantastic Japanese phrase that anyone working for a Japanese company may well have come across, which is called gemba. And gemba is one of these untranslatable words that is out there, but it kind of means going to the place where value is created. If you’re thinking from a business context that you have a product that people use or a brand that people experience, where is the value created?
For instance, the value of a bottle of whiskey is how much you pay for it at the shelf. But that’s not gemba. Gemba is where that bottle of whiskey really matters most. Is it the point at which you give someone a gift? Is it the point at which you sit in a bar and a barman recommends you a certain drink? Is it the point at which two people sit together at the end of the night and someone has an honest, frank conversation? Where is the value created?
I think it’s a wonderful principle—as are many different Japanese principles—to think about when we are thinking about business. A lot of the time we value value, if you like, in an economic sense, and actually that’s not where the greatest level of value is created. It’s created in different places. As an ethnographer, I really want to go to those places to see how that value is created. It means I’ve hung out in lots of bars and stayed up late with people to see what it’s like to drink and see how a story unravels, because these are the things that we really want to see.
Melina Palmer: Yeah, I am somebody who observes the world too—not to the same level, I am sure—but I’m always taking a picture of something and thinking, “I wonder why they did this thing this way.”
Melina Palmer: Right.
Melina Palmer: I like to kind of understand things, and I love that you’re able to go be part of a lot of that to help understand how we create value for businesses. In this, you have a few great examples in your book. You’re welcome to choose one of those or something else, but I think for people to be able to understand, like, “Hey, we want to go into a new market,” or “We’re not seeing the growth that we thought we would have in this area,” how do we keep going? Do we just do more of the same ads? The things people may think they should do don’t always cross into new areas. Can you share maybe some business examples, including some of those questions or problems people thought they had and what you were able to discover in that work?
Redefining Pet Care with Pedigree
Oliver Sweet: I think when you do good cultural insight, you’re revealing something about a group of people that you kind of vaguely understood, but you could never put your finger on. So you’re often reframing something in a way that makes sense to people. One of the—well, it was a great study that I actually really enjoyed, and it’s a fun story for anyone who’s a pet owner—was when we worked with Pedigree for a number of years, actually.
They first came to us and said loads of people in the West feed their pets really well. They offer them a good nutritional diet, they feed regularly, and that’s done really well. Within most food companies’ offerings, you’ve got something premium, which is often known as a wet pouch, which is kind of moist food that’s sort of quite meaty, but you don’t give them too much of that. To be honest, kibble—the basic biscuits that most dogs and cats tend to get—is actually nutritionally really, really good for animals, and it’s good value for money.
But in a lot of the developing markets—so we went to places like Mexico, Brazil, Russia, Thailand, Vietnam—a lot of these markets hadn’t really bought into the idea of manufactured pet food. Actually, what they do is they give them a lot of human food, kind of leftovers from the table. The thing is with pets is that they need a different diet to humans. If you give them too much of one thing, they can have a bad stomach—which is bad at the back end as well—or they get smelly breath, or they get greasy fur. Actually, the pet doesn’t like it; it’s not good for them, and it’s not good for anyone. So they really wanted to go out to these countries and educate people about what it was to give pets a good nutritional diet.
We said, “Well, what are they doing?” They said, “Well, we don’t entirely know what they’re doing, but we know they’re giving them human food.” So we went out to all of those markets. The first one was Brazil, and we started to understand what it was like to have a pet. One of the things everyone told us is, “Oh, yeah, yeah, we really love our pets.” I was like, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, everyone loves their pets.”
But when you walk into someone’s house with them, and the first person they greet with love and joy and excitement is the little dog that’s coming yapping towards them, and they spend about two minutes saying hello to this wonderful dog, and then they sort of grudgingly acknowledge their son as they walk in, you’re like, “Oh, I see.” And when the pet gets to sleep on the bed on the pillow, and then the partners are sort of separated by the animal because they don’t want to move the animal, they really, really love their pets.
If you really, really love your pets and you open a bag of kibble and you smell it and you look at it, or a wet pouch, you’re like, “Oh, that’s disgusting.” What was going on is that a lot of people in these markets just thought that manufactured pet food was gross. It was just disgusting. When we looked at how they were feeding their pets, they weren’t giving them leftovers. They were cooking often a proper meal for them. They would go out to the butcher and buy some meat, maybe some mince or some chicken. They’d chop it up, fry it up with onions and garlic—onions and garlic are really bad for dogs, by the way, you really shouldn’t do that—but they would fry it up with onions and garlic, then they would mix it with rice and a bit of sauce, and then they would lovingly hand over this dish of fried meat with sauce and rice to their pets.
We showed this back to Pedigree, and they were like, “Oh God, we didn’t know that was happening.” By the way, at the time, we gave them a free bag of kibble and said, “Well, how about you try this?” A couple of weeks later, we went back to those people going, “Hey, how is the kibble?” They’re like, “Yeah, we didn’t use it. Why would you?”
We need to understand what people are doing. We need to understand that essentially, if you love your pet and you’re in a culture that really loves food, you’re going to give them food that is freshly prepared because that’s what you do. Something like kibble is not freshly prepared, and it doesn’t represent love—which is what food is. It’s an offering of love and care and connection and consideration. If we understand that giving food is about that rather than just nutrition, then we’re dealing with something quite different.
Designing the Right Cultural Interventions
Oliver Sweet: Anyway, we worked with Pedigree for quite a lot longer because, as it happened, they were a very creative, open bunch of people. They said, “Right, let’s not force anything upon them. Let’s not try and ram nutritional goodness down their throat, but let’s try and improve their pet’s diet.” So why don’t we actually promote the wet pouches of food that look a bit like meat? If you put that on top of the rice, it looks a little bit like a nice meal, you know, and you can have a bit of sauce if you want. But we would suggest that instead of buying meat from the butcher, which is quite expensive, they use this.
What they did—I think this is the genius part—is they put these wet pouches in the fresh fruit and veg aisle of the supermarket. That’s because they understand what a pet owner is doing. They go into the supermarket and they’re not just thinking about their meal tonight; they’re thinking about the meal for their pet as well. So they’re starting to position themselves where value is created, because that’s the place in which they’re starting to think about food. They would grab a wet pouch, they would make it with some rice, and sales of wet pouches went absolutely through the roof.
In the first year in Brazil alone, it led to an increase of $10 million just for wet pouches, and it wasn’t cannibalizing any of the other portfolio as well. It was essentially just replacing meat with meat, which is exactly it. From a behavioral standpoint, from a behavioral economics point of view, this makes total sense. We don’t want to disrupt people’s rhythms too much. We want to get people doing the things that they’re used to doing, and we just kind of do a quick and easy replacement.
That one led to a whole load of other work in different markets. We went to Mexico next, and the Mexican team created a cookbook for dog owners. They were like, “Hey, you can get creative with us.” A Pedigree Cookbook! It was slightly different for different markets because the meaning of food and the meaning behind giving food to a loved one shifts ever so slightly in different countries. That’s what cultural insight does: it tells you what the difference is in each country. So there are slightly different interventions for different markets, and it worked like an absolute treat.
Melina Palmer: Yeah. Amazing.
Oliver Sweet: And it’s hilarious for anyone who owns a dog.
Melina Palmer: I know. Well, I love too, when you share the example in the book, saying that the humans didn’t eat meat every day, but the dogs did, right? So it’s like, “We’re having to go without so that Fluffy can have her delicious beef or whatever.”
Oliver Sweet: That’s what love’s about, isn’t it? Sacrifice.
Melina Palmer: Indeed, right? When you see that and say, “No, no, this is a real thing,” it’s very, very different. It’s this balance for businesses, right? Of being able to see that, ideally, sure, for economies of scale and whatever, you can do the same thing in as many places as possible. But those variations by the different cultures—whether that is broken up by countries or by regions or by cities or little groupings within even specific neighborhoods—can be different from one to the next.
Understanding, I guess—where do you recommend knowing? This is a very sweeping suggestion, and I know that “it depends” is the answer. But in this balance of full customization to being fully the same thing everywhere, how do you think a business would go about deciding which cultural points they would want to diversify on, and how to sort of figure that out in an area? Because you could say it’s about something like love and giving food, which for the Pedigree thing makes sense, but they weren’t really thinking that was the problem, right?
Navigating Cultural Fragmentation and Mass Personalization
Melina Palmer: And so how do you uncover what’s happening underneath to determine which aspects of culture matter for your brand and what it is that you’re offering?
Oliver Sweet: Yeah, so this is, I’d say, one of the thorniest questions that I deal with at the moment with my clients. A tiny little backstory on how I think culture looks at the moment: over the last 15-plus years, I think there have been some small but incremental changes to the way that we operate as groups, the way that we share information, and the way that we learn, which are big cultural drivers of behavior. I think there have been so many small incremental changes over the past 15 years that we’re actually in quite a different place than we were 15 years ago. That feels quite seismic if you add them all up together.
One of those changes is that it has led to a place of enormous cultural fragmentation. Arguably, mainstream culture has gone into retreat, and we’ve got lots of different subcultures emerging in opposite directions all the time. If you imagine it, it’s a bit like the Big Bang Theory, right? It’s exploding and it’s going ever further out and further out. As it goes further out, each of those bits becomes slightly smaller and slightly more niche. This is a huge problem for many of the companies I work with who want to have a mainstream brand and a mass offer, because they’re like, “Hang on. These people on the left are very different to the people up here, who are very different to the people over on the right. So how do we manage this?”
One of the things that has been driving some of those changes and fragmentation is that there are a lot of belief systems out there right now that showcase how we’re different. That’s not just the world of politics; that’s the world of gender, that’s the world of influencers, that’s a world of absolute mass personalization. All of these things showcase how we’re different.
Now, what I think brands need to be doing now is showcasing how we are similar. To come back to your question: what do mealtimes mean to people? Is it about connection? What does going for after-work drinks mean to people? Is it about uplift? Is it about sort of elevation or stimulation or something like that? If you can figure out what it is that people believe in within your category or in your brand, then you can start to market it in many, many different places. You can cater to all of this sort of mass fragmentation that the Big Bang has created; you can cater to lots of people.
The Three Elements of Culture: Beliefs, Communities, and Identity
Oliver Sweet: Just to sort of make that a little bit more concrete, I often talk about three important elements of culture that you have: belief systems, communities, and identity. Now, for you and me and anyone sort of going around in life, all three of those are very, very important at the same time. The interaction between those three makes us who we are within the context that we live in. What we believe infiltrates our communities, which means that we are who we are, which means we’re not part of other communities and other belief systems.
But if you’re a brand or company, the place to start is with a belief system. If you can tell people what your brand and your product stands for—like Red Bull telling people that they are all about adrenaline, excitement, or fun, right? Because they have that belief system they stick to time and time again, they can appeal to the fragmentation because they can appear in different communities.
They can appear in extreme mountain biking, downhill stuff that I’ve been watching lately—and I love it, really exciting—so Red Bull sponsors all of that and they elevate that. But at the same time, Red Bull can appear in a nightclub because that’s also stimulation and elevation. At the same time, they can appear at 9:00 AM before a big day at work when you stayed up too late the night before. They can appear in many different places because they stand for the same thing. That’s what I think a lot of brands are struggling with: “How do we deal with this huge divergence?” That’s what good cultural insight around a particular category and a brand can really help you sort of find your place, if you like.
Melina Palmer: Right. And in that way, it’s helping to understand that you’re about more than the product itself, right? It’s there to do something like getting back to where the value is created, what that means, and how you can line up with the habits and things that people are already doing and what it is that they’re trying to achieve, right? Getting at those questions.
I really love the example—well, I was going to say one, but I’m going to say this other thing first. Okay, so you talk about in some work with Ikea—it might have been just observational for you versus actually as a client—the difference between storing things versus organizing things, and knowing that it’s easy to just throw words around like, “Oh, we’re just storing that.” But digging a little bit deeper gets to the root of, “Well, is this storage or organization?” because they’re two different things. What I thought was so interesting—can you share a little bit about uncovering something as simple as that?
Storage vs. Organization: Lessons from Ikea
Oliver Sweet: Yeah. So I’ve done several bits of work for IKEA over the years. They’ve always sort of stayed with IKEA for a number of years, and then they come back sort of six years later and go, “We need to update this.” One of these was this idea around “store and organize,” because IKEA is incredibly good at helping you store and organize stuff. But actually, that phrase belies what really goes on.
IKEA’s products need to be used in so many different countries, and the way that we live at home is so culturally determined and so culturally different. We went to Japan, where they have notoriously small homes, and all of their homes and their living rooms are adaptable because by day it might be a sitting room and by night it might be a bedroom. What we found is that they don’t necessarily need everything stored away and out of sight. They can lay things out on a counter, but it must be organized. Everybody must know where things are and where things go.
We did the same thing in China, and they also live in similarly small apartments—or at least the target audience did. You had three generations living in the same apartment. If those things weren’t stored in the same place every time, then the harmony of the home gets completely disrupted. You go into the kitchen, you need to know where all the various condiments and flavors are. You need to know what is stored in the fridge and on what layer, because then you know the kind of food that you can make. It’s not just you or your partner dictating these things; it’s happening at three generational levels. Harmony in the home really dictated a lot of these rules. Every country had their own house rules and everyone had to live by them.
By contrast, you go to a place like Poland, where people also have very adaptable rooms, but those countries are very sociable. In Poland, you can drop around anyone’s house at any time, and you need to be guest-ready. Same in India: you need to be guest-ready. So if someone’s guest-ready, you need to have somewhere where you can store stuff out of sight. All the stuff that might be in the living room, you almost push it into a cupboard really quickly, slam the door shut so that nobody can see it. That’s just stored away. That’s fine. They don’t really care about the organization nearly so much, actually; it’s about preserving a facade of being welcoming, right? If you welcome someone into your home in a place like Poland or India and it’s not tidied up, frankly, that’s a bit rude, and they want to avoid being rude. This is how they deal with things: you open the cupboard door, and things literally fall out. That happens.
All these countries have their different house rules attached to them. How people store things is very different from how people organize things. Once you start to unpick these words, you start to think differently. If you can think differently and you’ve got some wonderful creative designers like IKEA has, you suddenly start spiraling into new product ideas very quickly. They were able to redesign ranges and think about new product designs based on simply pulling these two things apart and starting to think about what the cultural house rules were for different countries.
Melina Palmer: Yeah. I was reminded, as you were talking, of my best friend growing up. She was one of four kids, so there were lots of people in the house, shuffling people’s things and getting out the door for school and stuff. I was there every morning before school, and I had my own chores that I would do at their house, you know? Part of the thing through the week was that you had to straighten your room, and cleaning your room was a different thing. Over the weekend is a “clean,” and during the week is a “straighten.”
I remember once being like, “What is the difference? What are we talking about?” Like those are the same thing! But it’s like, straighten is “I can shove all this in the closet,” but then when I have to actually clean, it’s a much worse deal over the weekend. My parents want to look and see that my room doesn’t look like a nightmare, but I have to actually get in there and clean it on Sunday, and that can be a really long day. So, you know, I’m reminded that they actually had specific rules around it.
Oliver Sweet: All of these things are about harmony, you know? I think another fascinating thing about harmony in the home is that, obviously, I was brought up in the UK in the West, and you have some quite individualistic values in the West. God, my bedroom was a tip when I was younger. It was so messy, and I remember my stepdad would look in and go, “I can’t go in there,” and he just closed the door again. But he let me do it. He let me get away with it. That was okay; I was allowed to do that.
You go to a place like China, and your room is not necessarily your room. Everybody’s room is everybody’s room. Nobody has locks on the doors. They still have a lock on the bathroom door, but you don’t have these locks on the doors elsewhere, or any signs saying “Keep Out” or “Adults Keep Out.” That’s not a thing in China. By the way, you need to keep your door open most of the time for a sense of flow and energy across the home. How we establish ownership in the home is a kind of proxy for how we behave in the rest of the world.
Melina Palmer: I think you’re absolutely right. And we don’t need that stinky teenage boy energy going through the whole house.
Oliver Sweet: It just makes me think about how I bring up my girls.
Melina Palmer: I have a 13-year-old boy in this house, so we know what’s up. I’m feeling your stepdad’s pain.
Oliver Sweet: I’m a couple of years behind you, and I’ve just been starting to think ahead. Two girls, 12 and 8, and I’m like, “What are they going to turn into? How’s this going to work?”
Melina Palmer: It’s a thing, you know? We’ll commiserate later, and we can find the anthropological aspects that are important over time for that later.
Well, I have a couple of ways I could ask this. Of course, I know I had told you I was maybe going to ask about how corporate cultures work or maybe different insights for teams, but we could also talk about that research aspect. If you were going to give advice to a company that’s saying, “Yeah, we want to be better at this,” you have a really great closing chapter in the book that lists your 10 insights or tips from a business anthropologist. Maybe there’s something you want to glean or pick from there. I’d say this is sort of the “choose your own adventure” moment of the episode.
Oliver Sweet: I love it.
Unwritten Rules and Corporate Culture
Oliver Sweet: Well, let’s combine those two things together, because I think that many of us—me included—work in a corporate culture. These are cultures that are very important, and they set a number of rules. When you arrive in an organization, the time that you arrive is kind of an unwritten rule. Whether you all abide by that rule or not is also one of these important unwritten rules.
How you conduct meetings within those cultures is very important. Do you turn up in a very timely manner? Do you have an agenda? Are you waiting to be asked questions? Can you interrupt and jump in on other people? All of these things are unwritten rules that you learn from. We learn through mimicry; human beings mimic all the time.
In this last chapter, I talk about how we need to look at people’s behaviors because then we’re seeing how people learn from other people. If we feel that you get value from a junior person speaking up in a meeting and potentially challenging some of the ideas that someone of authority has put out there—if that’s valued, then people learn to do that. That’s obviously a value set which is very entrepreneurial and very individualistic. You might have KPIs (key performance indicators) on how much you are contributing.
In other cultures—I mean, God forbid you do that in a place like Japan, where you need to earn your place to be able to speak there. You need to take orders and understand them incredibly well so that the corporate machine can continue in its most efficient way. They run some incredibly efficient businesses and they are incredibly productive because there is a hierarchy through which things move. Again, if we look at the behaviors, we can see the values.
When we’re asking some of the “stupid questions,” if you like, they tell us so much about what’s going on in the world. I went to a meeting in the US just last week, and there were six or seven of us sitting down for dinner. This was going to be an expensive dinner, let’s face it—in New York, it was going to be an expensive dinner. Someone right at the beginning, who was new to the company, said, “I’ve just got to ask: who’s paying for this dinner?”
I thought that was absolutely brilliant. It made me go, “Oh, really? We have to do that?” But when I stopped for a second, I was like, “No, we do need to know this, actually.” This level of ambiguity is just going to eat people up. Then someone said, “Oh no, don’t worry, we’re expensing it.” I said, “Oh, okay, great. Whose expense account is it going on?” Again, he just needed to know these things. Actually, what it came down to is like, “Well, we kind of make that stuff up at the end,” and that’s not actually a very good way to do it, in fact. He was just pointing out some of the stuff that was being left unsaid.
When you’re trying to understand a corporate culture, it’s great to do these things. It can feel a bit awkward sometimes, but these awkward situations produce insight for us. Getting a little bit awkward sometimes is really helpful in terms of understanding what’s going on in the world. So again, in the last chapter, I sort of say: ask why, and why again, and ask why again, and ask why again, and be a little bit awkward, because actually the responses aren’t as obvious as you might think.
Melina Palmer: Yeah. Often the thing that everybody sort of just does, they don’t if necessarily know why they do that thing or how that goes. The thing that seems obvious isn’t necessarily. I always used to tell new employees, “You’re going to be in meetings. You’re going to hear terms, or I might talk about a word, and if you don’t know what I’m talking about—which can be like the name of a client, or a vendor partner—please stop us.” I’ll tell everybody else in the meeting that they’ll know you’re new, but I will tell them that I’ve given you the green light to ask, “Who is that? What do they do?” sort of deal. If you need to know right now, we’ll stop and I’ll explain it. If not, we’ll make a note and I’ll get back and tell you later. But write down anything that you hear that you don’t know what I’m talking about or someone else is talking about, and we’ll sit down and go over all of it. Please ask all the questions that you have; don’t just let it wash over you and hope you’ll figure it out. What a terrible way to bring in employees otherwise!
The Power of Exposing Social Silences
Oliver Sweet: There’s a great concept in anthropology called “social silences.” Gillian Tett, the Financial Times editor in the US, used a lot of her anthropological skills—particularly around this idea of social silences—and actually saw the 2008 financial crash happen about a year or 18 months prior. The reason she did that is because she could see that there was a boom in credit derivatives, and she was constantly going, “Well, why is that the case?” They were going, “Wow, you know, because they’re these AAA-rated credit derivatives, they’re so good, and we can just trade them, and blah, blah, blah.” I’m not an economist, but blah, blah, blah.
Melina Palmer: I mean, basically, it was. No, no—in this case, it was a lot of blah, blah, blah, right? Exactly.
Oliver Sweet: This is exactly what she exposed, right? She’s like, “So what’s inside the credit derivatives?” “Oh, some mortgages.” “What kind of mortgages?” “They’re great. Don’t you worry, don’t you worry, they’re great.” She kept on asking why, and she basically realized that no one could describe what was inside these credit derivatives. There was a collective social silence. These social silences often have massive social consequences.
I think that looking at what people aren’t saying within a workplace, within a corporate setting, or absolutely anywhere in the world, is really important. Because if we’re not having real conversations, we’re not having a rational assessment of what’s next, what’s next, what’s next. Being able to talk about things helps us process and think through the consequences a lot better than if we’re just doing it on our own. I feel that’s a big issue out there—these ideas of social silences and what we can’t say.
Melina Palmer: Right, yeah. So important to ask good questions. You know, there’s a reason I end every episode of the show with “be thoughtful,” right? It’s sort of the theming around here. For everyone who wants some tips on how to start doing this and see more about why it matters, they can, of course, get your book, The Rules That Make Us. If they want to follow you and all the things, what’s their best path to do those things?
Oliver Sweet: Well, the book launched in the US on Tuesday, which I was delighted about. It launched a month earlier in the UK, so it’s at all good booksellers, online retailers, and places like that. I’m actually quite active on LinkedIn. If you find me under Oliver Sweet on LinkedIn, I quite like just chatting to people that I don’t know. I try and make it a thing that I do each week: whenever someone sends a friend request, I’ll try and write something back and say, “Hello, who are you? This is what I do. What do you do?” It leads to some great conversations, I think, because a lot of us end up in echo chambers. I know that LinkedIn is definitely an echo chamber, but the more you can have of these sort of small conversations, the more inspired you get by people. So I’m very, very open to being contacted on LinkedIn and having a chat with people.
Melina Palmer: Amazing. Well, we will put links in the show notes to make it easy for everyone. And thank you again, Oliver, for joining me on the show. It was delightful to chat with you today.
Oliver Sweet: Thank you so much, Melina. It’s been really fun.
Closing Thoughts: Get Curious and Notice
Melina Palmer: Thank you again to Oliver Sweet for joining me on the show today. What got your brain buzzing in today’s conversation? For me, longtime listeners will know that I always love digging in on examples where something small, that feels like it shouldn’t matter, can change everything once it’s understood and unlocked. A word choice like “store” versus “organize,” that bag of kibble that’s sitting unused on a counter, or all the questions a new employee may have—including stress over who’s paying the bill at dinner.
These small moments and assumptions that feel almost too simple to be worth examining, which I often refer to as “known truths” with my clients, are often where the real understanding and opportunity lives. Taking the time to investigate and get curious about those moments, instead of ignoring or explaining them away, is really at the heart of behavioral science. Whether you’re trying to understand your customers, your team, or a market you want to enter, the insight is often already there if you take the time to get curious, consider the context, and notice.
So here’s what I want to leave you with: what’s one thing happening around you right now in your business, with your customers, or with your team that you’ve been explaining away or taking for granted? What would change if you got genuinely curious about it instead? Whatever it is, come share it with me on social media. You’re going to find me as @thebrainybiz pretty much everywhere and as Melina Palmer on LinkedIn. There are links in the show notes to make it easy, as well as links to my top related past episodes and books, including The Rules That Make Us, ways to get in touch, and more. It’s all waiting for you in the app you’re listening to and at thebrainybusiness.com/585.
And thank you again to Oliver Sweet for joining me on the show today. It was a delight to chat with and learn from you. Join me next time for another brainy episode of the Brainy Business podcast. It’s going to be a lot of fun; you don’t want to miss it. Until then, thanks again for listening and learning with me—and remember to be thoughtful.
Announcer: Thank you for listening to the Brainy Business podcast. Melina offers virtual strategy sessions, workshops, and other services to help businesses be more brain-friendly. For more free resources, visit thebrainybusiness.com.
