Limits of perception
In 1951, there was a notoriously violent college football game between Dartmouth and Princeton. It started out rough and rapidly descended into goonery. The Princeton quarterback, an All-American who was playing his last college game, was forced to bow out in the second quarter with a broken nose and mild concussion. In the third quarter, the Dartmouth quarterback received his comeuppance in the form of a ferocious tackle, then limped to the sidelines with a shattered knee.
A week later, psychologists worked with a group of Dartmouth and Princeton students to get their retrospective take on which team had been most at fault. The fans watched a replay of the full match and were asked to opine on who had initiated the foul play. All of them saw the same video footage, but there was an overwhelming difference of opinion between Dartmouth and Princeton fans.
Reflecting on this absurd contrast, the team of psychologists came to a somber conclusion: "In brief, the data here indicate there is no such 'thing' as a 'game' existing 'out there' in its own right which people merely 'observe.' The game 'exists' for a person and is experienced by him only insofar as certain happenings have significance in terms of his purpose."
Around the same era, the French-American diarist, Anaïs Ninn, made a similar observation but in a slightly more poetic way: "We don't see things as they are; we see them as we are." The human mind is a brilliant hallucination machine because it has to be. We can't possibly process all the information we're exposed to in any given moment. We are forced to rely on predictions, inferences, and rules-of-thumb all the time. In doing so, we are inevitably steered by our emotional priors.
In an internal training session the other day, a seasoned operator was advising a global team of salespeople how to engage with executive stakeholders. He reminded them that effective engagement is not about taking the executive on the salesperson's journey. It's about playing a role in the journey the executive already believes she's on.
The football story illustrates why. We see a different set of 'facts' from what our audience sees. To have any hope of getting through to the audience, we must find a way to participate in their emotional reality. We must figure out how to see things as they, the true protagonist of the story, are.