Everything Is Very Personal

While it's important to be able to rise above the noise, I wonder how many senior decision makers and policy makers have lost touch with the fact that everything is incredibly personal for each of us. Especially things we tend to regard as utilities or commodities - water, groceries, garbage, money, airports, train schedules, road repairs.

Everything.

Think about it when you next run the tap to make coffee, or you take from your own kitchen cupboard a jar of something you bought at a supermarket from a row of apparently identical jars, or when you hear the binman collecting rubbish from your own bins, or you log-in to your online bank account, or you join the queue at airport security, or you sprint to catch a train that is later delayed or when you sit in a traffic jam beside an abandoned trench that mysteriously appeared in the road a week ago.

All these personal experiences are shaped by someone else, but they're yours.

In every person's reality, there is no 'bell curve', no 'average', no 'normal'. Sure, these are useful fudges we make to move things along. But how many people hold these fudges as their dominant perspective, rather than the idea that everything is very personal?

How much of a difference would it make if your dominant perspective in every business meeting was personal? None? Okay, do you think that would make a difference to politics? Banking? What would that difference look like?

Now do you think it would make a difference to what you do?

Just a thought.