To overcome fear and hatred we must undo the dehumanisation rooted in dogma

It is one of the greatest ironies of our times: we have never had as much access to information as we have right now – and yet, paradoxically, we have never been so misinformed.

Accordingly, the stakes have never been higher for us to separate the wheat from the chaff as different groups skew channels of information to get audiences to drink the Kool-Aid and blindly accept their agendas.

A century ago, we would have called it propaganda. The Soviets then turned it into an artform – disinformation, a word ironically coined from the Russian dezinformatsiya, which was bolstered by agitprop.

The advent of social media with its plethora of platforms merely made this tool available to everyone, from the gullible and gormless to the Machiavellian.

In recent years we’ve seen this play out across the gamut, from conspiracy theories during Covid-19, to the contestation of narratives from Gaza to Ukraine. It’s incumbent upon all of us to make sense of it, but the responsibility on business leaders is even greater because what we believe can have a huge influence on how we act and the decisions we take.

As Steven Covey said, before Rassie Erasmus made it world famous, “we’ve got to let the main thing stay the main thing”.

In business that means understanding what your market needs. To do this you have to get close to the people who buy the products you make or the services you provide. Immerse yourself if you must, to understand the needs and the fears so that you can make sure what you do addresses that.

Once you’ve done that you can check it against the AI data that far too many people are abdicating their responsibility to, rather than delegating it and checking. Calibrate that quantitative, often abstract and third-party data, against your own on-the-ground qualitative research.

The next thing is to develop the ability to read widely. The same algorithms that help us crunch data so easily also have a tendency of telling us what we want to hear – and in the case of social media, showing us what we want to read. It’s a comfortable echo chamber that at best breeds complacency, and at worst blinds us to the reality in front of our unseeing eyes.

The only way to pop that bubble is to read outside of the algorithm, to read articles and books that might make us feel deeply uncomfortable because they challenge our most profound beliefs about ourselves and how we see other people.

A good leader must be sufficiently intellectually resilient and confident of their own sense of rationality to undertake an odyssey of the mind like this without being fearful that they will lose their way by reading things they neither like nor believe in. As F Scott Fitzgerald wrote, “the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function”.

Only by discovering what other people are thinking do we begin to understand the lens through which they see the world. The year 1979 gifted us with what is now considered one of the greatest science fiction (and horror) films: Alien, starring Sigourney Weaver.

The film is about a spacecraft bringing back a face-hugging, chest-bursting alien that kills the crew. As a film watcher it was very difficult to feel anything but horror towards the alien because there was nothing that anyone could relate to.

Today, we have groups of people with very strong beliefs about other people, so much so that each’s logic about the other might be as far removed as the alien from Sigourney Weaver. The end result is the same mutual alienation – with each trying to immolate the other, albeit not necessarily in outer space.

To overcome fear and hatred, we must undo the dehumanisation rooted in dogma. Read opposing views with genuine curiosity – aim to understand them, not just to criticise. It’s a difficult challenge because as human beings our minds crave simple certainties, even when they’re wrong.

You’ve got to understand your clients, you’ve got to understand the different logics around you and, most of all, you really need to understand the alien characteristic of something that might be totally repulsive to you.

One of the things that business schools teach around complexity and systems thinking is that as you get more senior your time horizon extends and your complexity horizon increases informationally, geographically, culturally and technically. Throughout it all the quest for the common ground between all of this remains paramount if you are to survive and thrive.

Business leaders have to sensitise themselves to their environment; it’s not simply about ensuring the right product or service at the right time to the right people, it’s about understanding who they can work with and collaborate to do this.

In an increasingly complex world, it’s no longer a question of the competitive advantage, but rather the collaborative advantage. But how do you collaborate with people who you need, but don’t think or act like you?

Leaders have to understand that because the world has opened up so much, so too have business relationships, and business models become exponentially more complex.

It is a very learnable skill, but it is difficult to teach in the traditional pedagogic paradigm of straight lines, boxes and predictable forecasts. We need to learn to better understand and prepare for apparently random Black Swan events that abductive logic could have helped us with by pulling hidden risks out of the shadows before they exploded.

But to start, we have to be brave enough to lean into the unknown, relish the unexpected and find the truth that is key to everything we do – as very uncomfortable and unsettling as that might be. DM