Here in New Jersey, scientists grow on trees and work in laboratories, developing and testing molecules for bio-tech and pharmaceutical companies.
Every day, they leave the known world to explore microscopic molecular places and witness scenes that quite possibly no human being has seen before. They are the Lewises and Clarks of medicine.
Like grizzled pioneers, they take their daily journey into the unknown for granted, and don’t express much awe and wonder about what they see. Many are like airline pilots, whose aeronautical culture demands a steady tone of voice, even when tumbling toward the ground at 600 miles per hour.
But when scientists speak to senior business people, who are unfamiliar with these journeys into the center of cellular life, the wrong approach to communication can cause significant business problems, chief among them lost business opportunity.
George Bernard Shaw said it best, “The biggest problem with communication is the illusion that it has been accomplished.” This holds true for science and business.
For example, I read a story sometime in the 1980s about a large consumer products company and a team of research scientists that created something they called a “mousse.” Unable to convince their colleagues on the business side of the operation that there was a need for this new foamy gel, they filed it away. Five years later, they found it in their files and launched it as the fourth product in a new category of hairstyling products. After years of struggle, they managed to reach only a 15% market share.
Had they launched their invention five years earlier, they would have been the first to market, and probably would have owned the lion’s share of the spoils. But they delayed because, according to one executive, the leaders of R&D were simply unable to present the concept cogently to the rest of the company.
What happened? Was the idea of a foamy hair gel so new that anyone outside R&D couldn’t grasp it? Or was there something about the way the researchers communicated that left the rest of the company scratching its head?
The causes for such a rupture between departments are often hard to define, but experience reveals that communication could be the culprit. One of the reasons is that the ranks of business are filled with people from different tribes. For the purposes of this short article, let’s call the sales and marketing functions the Tribe of Belief, and the R&D functions the Tribe of Skepticism.
In training, aptitude, psychology, predisposition, language and thinking, Skeptics have special tendencies and approaches. So do the Believers.
On the one hand, those in sales and marketing are paid, like professional actors, to act “as if” they believe whole-heartedly in the value of their products. Their job is to induce belief, and raise belief to the level of action.
Believers are expected to invent arguments to support their point of view, to be persuasive, to take sides, to draw inferences from fact in order to drive home a point, (exaggeration is a staple of advertising) to appeal to their listeners’ psychological and emotional needs, and to demonstrate the truth of their ideas through the force of their conviction. (Some Skeptics would call this “proof by violent assertion.”)
The Skeptics seldom use language rhetorically. Their faith is in the unalterable power of fact. The truth of fact is more important to them than the truth of belief, the detail more important than the dubious “claim,” the content more important than the context.
For them, nothing is truth if it hasn’t been tested, measured, and proven. They distrust generalizations and “benefit statements.” The notion of selling ideas troubles them; it seems manipulative and, well, unscientific.
Business has tried to narrow the gap between these two tribes, and in some companies, such as 3M, the divide seems to have been erased. But, without good communication between tribes, ideas and initiatives will not get the buy-in they deserve, individual leaders will lack credibility and influence, and research and development may go for naught. Just ask the me-too mousse maker.
This is a complex issue, but the easiest way to close this gap is to build a structured communication process that enables trust and understanding to bloom in the no-man’s-land between the two tribes. Each side needs to learn to speak the language of the other to ensure that intellectual output can leap across the gap. And each side needs to learn how to listen and ask beautiful questions.
Trust, understanding, and startling innovation may all come down to cross-cultural chemistry.