Take Time to Talk to Strangers

I recently completed Malcolm Gladwell’s Talking to Strangers, a challenging but timely book I highly suggest you take the time to read. Gladwell highlights several interesting examples of people, professions, agencies, and institutions - ones we as a society often look to as standard-bearers of ethics and for doing what is “right” - that very often don’t get things right. As a society, we generally believe:

·        judges are charged with making quick decisions during arraignments;

·        the Central Intelligence Agency is charged with finding the truth behind veils of lies and secrecy of our adversaries;

·        the Securities and Exchange Commission is charged with regulating securities and protecting investors; and,

·        Police departments are charged with keeping citizens safe.

But Gladwell walks through the data to show our beliefs may be misplaced: judges may not be the best to make those quick arraignment decisions; the CIA sometimes falls for traps of enemy nations; the SEC missed all the warning signs of the world’s greatest Ponzi scheme; and, police departments can lose sight of their charges by adapting methods they likely should not use for their communities.  Through the data and stories, Gladwell shows us how different cultures associate different facial expressions with different emotions. How people can fake what they mean in face-to-face interactions and then go out and do the exact opposite of what they said they would in those interactions - a lesson Neville Chamberlain learned from his multiple in-person meetings with Adolf Hitler. We so often default to the truths that make the most sense to us – our biases. Assumptions where we apply our own beliefs and experiences onto others in moments of judgement or action. Not understanding each other has profound impacts on our lives and our world – something we see play out everyday in our own communities.

 There are always bad apples and bad actors in communities. And, particularly in these trying days and in the age of social media, those bad apples get more attention from our society - but oftentimes they are the outliers and not the norm. The vast majority of our world is filled with good people that want to do the right thing, it is just that we default to stigmas, blind spots that are the result of the societies in which we are raised.  Gladwell challenges us to stop playing to the worst of our society, to “no longer penaliz[e] one another for defaulting to truth.” Instead, we should work to learn more about the strangers we interact with, the strangers we as society charge to lead and make key decisions, and take those learnings to understand their actions. As we learn more about each other we can then learn how best to work together. And it’s in working together that we can make real, substantive, positive change in our communities.

 I love how simple this idea is, but often we need these reminders to dive deeper into the story. I know this happens with me professionally where we need to dive deeper into why processes were created in a certain way, or we dig deeper in an investigation to find the root cause, or we dig deeper to understand more about our teammates. But in order to have lasting impacts from those instances, we have to attempt to prevent our biases from keeping us from talking to strangers in the first place.