The Superpower of Stickiness to Grow Believers for Your Organization - Dr. Pamela Divinsky

11:46PM Feb 6, 2022

Speakers:

Becky Endicott

Jonathan McCoy

Dr. Pamela Divinsky

Keywords:

people

respect

audiences

conversation

stickiness

organization

matters

create

notion

nonprofit

build

listening

challenging

important

world

pam

research

social

questions

issue

Hey, I'm John. And I'm Becky.

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So let's get started. Hey, Becky,

welcome everybody, we're so glad you're here, we're about to introduce you to one of my favorite people.

That's gonna say I remember you telling me just like, so effusively how much you love this guest when you get to know her a little bit before we booked her. So I'm so excited for today.

Last fall, I met our guest, through good friend, Tom Vosper. And I just kind of sat in her way, and I just you ever meet somebody, and they have such good energy. And they have such light. And I just kind of remember resting my hand on my chin and listening to her. And I just think we don't do enough and nonprofit to lean into research experts, and what we do with research, and then how do we translate research into really important narratives. And so I love the way that Pam does that with her company, Invisible Hand company. And the thing that we're going to talk about today is how to create stickiness, you know, that captures attention has resonance creates action. And Pam, you guys, she is the queen of this. She has a PhD in economic history from the University of Chicago. And she has worked with all of these incredible social purpose CSR divisions, that internationally huge companies, and she set up this wonderful company because she just loved this concept of respect. And I hope you're gonna dive into that pan, and the way that we can earn the respect of our audience. And I think this has just a place right now in nonprofit, it's always had a place but never more, I think than right now has been really just such an imperative. And so we're excited to learn from her. It's just a great human great storytelling. Welcome to the show. Pam,

thank you so much for having me, it's incredibly generous of all of you to have coordinated this. And to have sent through these questions for me to consider that required some really deep personal and professional probing. So I really, really appreciate this opportunity.

Oh, gosh, it's our joy to be able to do that. And you love it, when something kind of hits you right between the eyes and makes you go inside, you start to do the hard work. But yeah, you can really discover some incredible things there. So I just want people to get to know you. Tell us about growing up how you kind of went in. I mean, the PhD and economic history is very specific and very impressive. And I want to know how you came over to the social good space and why I have such a passion for it.

So I grew up in a West Coast Canadian family that was all about challenging ideas and arguing. And that's what we did every dinner, every dinner, table, lunch and breakfast as well. And it was enormously fun and exciting. And there was one primary questions that captured our interests in most of the debates. And that was, how does this competitive market world that we live in? How can it serve all of us equitably? That was sort of the dominant primary question. And when I started to have to reflect on the questions that you sent through, I actually look backwards. And I realized that my entire career has been on a quest to answer that one fundamental question, how can this competitive market system be humane and just because we while we love the theory that the competitive marketplace is the best thing, there's an enormous amount of evidence of intractable social issues that will reveal that it's actually not necessarily working? Well, for all of us. Indeed, the laws of the market aren't necessarily serving us all in the same kind of way. So the first thing that I did growing up in this kind of arguing intellectually tough, rigorous family is I went to grad school. And I went to the best grad school in America at the time, the University of Chicago, and I studied the history of capitalism, because I wanted to understand its origins. And so I played academic role for quite a number of years. And then I joined one of the world's large corporate consulting teams, because I wanted to actually get in at how corporations actually worked and what strategy meant and how did they define process. suitability and humanity together or did they at all. And then from there, I moved into an international ad agency, where I set up its corporate responsibility environmental, social governance, division. And we worked with both corporations as well as not for profits and charities on how do you actually capture in an enduring way audiences. Now, obviously, for the corporations, attracting audiences was about purchase and investment. And for charities, the stickiness that they wanted from their audiences were about donations and corporate involvement. So in across the board, it was about how do you capture audience's attention in an enduring kind of way.

And what I kept landing on was, success is all about earning the respect of your audiences. Because respect is what translates into loyalty, purchase donation, investment, partnerships, sponsorships, whatever you want your audience to do with you or for you, is grounded on respect. And so cutting through all of this corporate responsibility, social purpose, responsible investment, ESG is the idea of respect, because whatever you want your audience to do, they will do it, if they feel respected, that respectfulness earns respect. So we really built this business on how do you cultivate respect, because respect is what can galvanize competing interests, right, it can actually set a course that even if I disagree with you, even if I have a different perspective, from you, I see I feel seen and heard and respected. So I'll be on board as a supportive advocate for whatever the plan is, or whatever the idea is, even if I disagree. So this notion of respectfulness and respect is a way to also minimize that kind of disruptive disagreement or criticism, and galvanize people onto the same page. And as you mentioned at the outset, in your opening, it's a particularly tough time, not only for charities, but also for corporations of any kind of model, the range of interests that they need to answer and satisfy the intensity of the watching and the criticism, the minor mistakes that now get blown up into huge, monumental, life altering error. It's a really tough, delicate road to be on. And what's a way to be on it, is to actually manage how respectful you are, so that you earn the respect. And indeed, I think given particularly the United States is a qualitatively different culture from Canada. But the idea that respect can take you through dangerous, treacherous, unknown territory, and particularly bifurcated territory is more powerful than ever before. So that's sort of a long story from being in an argumentative challenging families that argued of economics all the way through to how do you create an economic market system that works for everyone? It's grounded on this notion of respect.

I mean, the thread of your story runs deep, you know, I just picture your dinner table. And the way that that works is if there's respect for each other, and you're cultivating that at such a young age, like how that's like informed your life and in the relationships that you've been able to build as a result in the way that you can engage in hard questions. I'd love to know, in your words, what is respect? Like, what does that really mean, from a standpoint of how you're using it in this sense,

I think I just want to say at the outset, respect doesn't necessarily mean I need to like you. And it certainly doesn't mean I need to agree with you. But it does mean that I will hear you, I will listen to you. I will work with you, not at you. Because I think there are three important ingredients in all of this. The first is that there's no singular truth. There are multiple truths and understanding that there are multiple choose. That's the first step of respect. Right? So how many meetings have we ever been in? Where it's clear that one, maybe two voices are the commanding voices of the table? Right? Every meeting that right now, okay. Okay. So the first the first layer of respect of the first step of respect is to acknowledge that every truth is equally important. And there are multiple truths. That's one. The second layer of respect is we really need conversation. And conversation is about not only hearing the words, but understanding the motivation And the intentions and the fears, and the apprehensions and the ambitions and creating a safe, non hierarchical space. So that people can make mistakes. They can say inappropriate things, that they have the room to apologize, and that there's forgiveness, so that FBI use a bad word or you say something inappropriate, there's space to work this out. So that's sort of the second layer. And the third layer, is how we do business matters as much as why we do it. I think we all fell in love with Simon Sinek. You know, why you do business is really what matters. It's not that that I disagree with that. But there's something additional to the why. And that's about the how the how we do business really, really matters, not only in terms of long term, stickiness, or profitability. But it really matters because that's how you get people as advocates, whether they're employees, or their clients or their customers. There are so many stories about deception, deceit, cheating, like outright cheating. And that has a huge impact on how we trust an organization, how we don't trust an organization, whether we're an internal audience or an extra audience. So the how we do business is really, really matters. And if it can be informed by this respectful notion that there's no singular truth, we definitely need a conversation, then that starts to change how an organization can actually do its business. So I guess I if I were in a conversation with Simon Sinek, I would say yes, yes, yes. And and, and the Y needs to go with the how they need to be sort of interlock like a really beautiful tongue and groove joint.

I love this notion of respect, being almost the pinnacle of the how and the why. And when you create space to build trust, I love that you brought this up, and you allow failure to come in and forgiveness, the environment becomes so safe. And you feel emboldened to say the thing you're a little trepidatious to say or speak up and something that maybe feels countered to you or even pitch an idea because we want to chase innovation. These are the organizations and companies that are thriving. But the thing I love about you, Pam is this word stickiness, and it came up the first time we were ever chatting, and I love this notion that you have about trying to make something you're doing stick, and you don't stop there, you connected the stickiness to the action, which I think is so smart. And I would just love to know, what is your research saying about we've got so many nonprofit listeners in this space. And they're all wondering, how can we get scroll, stopping content? How can we get somebody to act to buy into the values and the mission we're trying to perpetuate talk to us about stickiness and where these nonprofits can start.

We've worked a lot with not for profit organizations or social purpose organizations, and they have fallen in love with their social issue, which is magnificent and beautiful and incredibly invaluable and important. But in falling in love with the issue. What gets lost or becomes a bit opaque is most of the world is not in love with your issue. So the first step is to see it from the perspective of I don't care at all about your issue. The second important first step is What's your theory of social change. And the typical theory of social change is awareness. Right? more awareness, more awareness, and then maybe you can ask somebody to do something, okay? Because awareness gets people comfortable with the topic with the issue with the condition with the challenge the opportunity, and then maybe you can ask them to do something which is typically give us money, we have a completely opposite theory of social change. And in large part because we are so bombarded with awareness, awareness, talk, talk, talk, talk, if you lead with action, that changes the nature of the relationship completely and totally. So instead of talking at people and saying, This is our issue, and let's explain to you the nature of this health condition, I'm just using that as an example. Give me something to do. Just give me something to do. When you think about for example, the history of recycling, and I'll use Canada is an example. Recycling in Canada started about 55 years ago, and it started because one of the largest aluminum companies or aluminium companies was running out of aluminum. So they said, Oh gee, what if we could collect used cans, let's give people a blue box and tell them to put their leftover cans in the blue box. And we'll just come and take the blue box contents away. So it's no different from taking out the garbage, right? We don't have to indoctrinate you about environmental sustainability, or losing ice polar ice caps, or the destruction of forests, right? We just want your cans. And here we're making it super, super easy. So really easy action. It fits into how you live your life. Anyway, 50 years later, recycling has become how we live. It's a beautiful story of they lead with an action they did not lead with awareness campaign, or talking about the issue. Just they gave people something easy to do. If you think about the battle that Apple ultimately won, why did Apple win the war is because they made mailing really easy. Oh, there's an envelope. Oh, I know what that is, I'll just click on the envelopes. Oh, there's a trash bucket. Oh, that's empty my trash. They didn't need to give you seminars on how to use the screen. So the important thing that we always really want to say is lead with an action, make it easy for people to act, because then as they act, then it becomes a habit. And then you can ask them to do even more. Without indoctrinating them. All of this starts with listening to your audiences. And what we mean by listening to your audiences is we've stolen a notion from the medical world. And that notion, or it's not a notion, it's actually a practice is called Narrative Medicine. And the premise of Narrative Medicine is your patients will tell you absolutely everything you need to know to make the right diagnosis. You just need to actually really listen to what they're telling you. We transplanted that notion. And we call it narrative research. And it is really simple. It's one on one, confidential private conversations with members of your audience. And you don't walk into these conversations with a list of 16 questions that you want to answer, you begin with what really matters to you. And you create a space of deep attentiveness is only you and them. So it's one on one, it's completely confidential. And over an hour as and I'm sure you guys see this every time you do a podcast. People are like Rhododendron buds, they will reveal themselves. And they will tell you, their fears, their hopes, their dreams, their frustrations, what they're afraid of what their ambitions are. And that starts to give you a map of what the trust nodes are, what the trust gaps are, what the emotional mapping is, what the values mapping is, and what's not there. And with that kind of mapping that comes out of these conversations, any kind of organization, whether I'm a social issue organization, or whether I'm a major high tech entity, will be able to understand what really matters to your audiences, and what's not there, and then be able to design the right services, products, tools, actions, conversations, that will cultivate that stickiness. That's sort of the first set of things I would say. And the second layer is shift from creating things that you throw out at your audiences and build with your audiences. And it sounds so trite, you know, shift from talking at your audiences to building with your audiences. But it actually really works. Because your audiences have insights and knowledge about what really matters that you don't. And when you build with them, you shift them from, whether it's a client or a customer or a donor, you shift them to being an insider, to being respected and heard to being a creator, to being a supporter and an advocate. So you not only expand your audience, but you shift the relationship with them. So they then become your actors. And it's a power shift. Because typically organizations like the power of we've defined this, we've created this campaign, we have this social service, and we're going to offer it to you and at you sounds really, really lovely. I'm not sure that that works anymore. You need to build it with your audiences and I, during the pandemic, I started to watch a lot of American TV shows that I didn't before watch. And one of them that I completely have fallen in love with is a medical drama called New Amsterdam.

Yes. And they actually had someone who was a character on that show that is a developer, a director of development from the foundation. So Right.

out the end of one episode, that CEO is having a conversation with that character. And she says to him see, success came because you built it with them, not at them. And I thought, oh, okay, so now this idea is mainstream, because it's on New Amsterdam. It's in the writing circles. So it's amazing. But that's the second layer of all of this is that building with your audiences, changes your relationship with them and transforms them into your creators and your actors. So you have in some interesting way shifted the power dynamic. And you've created a network, as opposed to organization to audience. So those are some some of the working steps and approach to cultivating stickiness, through being respectful of your audiences and earning their respect.

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I love researchers.

So incredibly brilliant. I just think there's a lot of of ways that we could follow up with this, but I can't help but just see. So clearly, that approach is also saying that you deeply respect the people that you're trying to connect with. Because you want to know them, you want to like understand them, and what motivates them. And what the what the how that comes around. I think it turns into less risk. I mean, you know, we talk about this, like, the more you understand, the more curious you can be, you start to eliminate risk because you're moving in the direction that you need to move as you're in touch with your community. And they become the central figure and I just love what you're putting.

It's so interesting that you said that, John, cuz I don't know if you noticed in the New York Times today, there was a piece about Larry Fink, the CEO of Blackrock and he writes this letter to CEOs every year. Right. And so you sort of being hammered on quote, now, Larry, thank you just woke, because you're taking this ESG social purpose stuff really seriously. And thanks response this year was exactly as you said, this is about minimizing risk and maximizing opportunity. The more you get in at what really matters to people and the impact that you're having on people in the earth, the more you can minimize your risk and maximize opportunities. So you should phone Larry Fink and say we need to do business together.

And I also like the challenge it gives, which is going to be really hard for corporations and really hard for nonprofits, is you got to let go of the control. And if you let go of trying to control the message, control, the response control, the audience control, we can't control it. I don't think you understand if you are trying to take out the negative conversations because that's the color and that's the voice of your consumer telling you whether you're hitting the mark or not.

Right. And it's scary. People are really afraid of that. And until as you point out until they experience the magic that comes from power sharing. They might not really believe you. And it's fascinating because if you go back to the 18th century, where they really struggled with figuring out how this capitalist market economy could work. Alongside that was 100 year conversation about what's the right power structure for our political system. And this conversation was how do we share power with self interest? individual's and so there were an array of different kinds of models of political power shared, of course, the century and with, I would say, the primacy of the democratic model. But even within that there were variations. So this notion of what's the best way to share power to actually serve audiences the best is now conversation, the 20%, she has to have again,

so okay, there's there's a lot of people listening. And I would include us as an organization to listening and trying to really think through how this implements where's a good place to start, you know, how do we turn this kind of conversation into some actionable I would say conversations to take forward around the table and say, what does this look like in our organization?

Easy, start having private confidential one on one conversations with people without an agenda without a list of questions and say, We want to get to know you. What really matters to you. And as you have as the conversation progresses, you will feel it at the right point, able to say, what are you afraid of? What are your ambitions? What are your desires, right? Because people warm up in a conversation as as you both know, right? You need to block out at least an hour for these conversations, they absolutely need to be completely confidential and one on one. And not to sound self serving in any way whatsoever. It's often extremely valuable to have external individual posts, or conduct these one on one conversations, it just creates a different kind and depth of safety and honesty, when it's not the head of HR, or the head of people posting these conversations. So it's often very helpful to have external individuals do these conversations. So that's one and it takes time. Then obviously, do the analysis of these conversations what's what's the emotional map? What are the values? What are the trust nodes, whether the trust gaps, and as I said earlier, what's not being said, put that analysis together, and then come back with those individuals in different groups, and CO build with them. And this is a combination of people inside your organization, and outside your organization. So for example, if I'm health, not for profit, you all we always have an inner circle, and then another rung in another rung of people who are directly or indirectly connected to that disease state or that health issue. Great, terrific. Finally, human beings who have no connection to that disease issue at all right? None whatsoever, and bring them into this conversation. It take a page out of all of that great design, learning, design thinking, you know, get an engineer and a musician, people that you would think What the How are they possibly going to contribute in any valuable way they will. And again, the CO building will take time. And it's tough negotiation, and you have to help people learn how to respect each other through that process. Those are the two grand and easy steps. Have one on one conversations, and then cobuild.

I just love this conversation. I love the way it's kind of challenging us. And it's, and it also is pushing us to do two things that we talked about on this podcast that are so important, creating, listening as a culture within your organization systemically within everyone. And it's also seeing all people in lifting voices a community. And so I just think this is a beautiful exercise. You're the first person I've ever talked to about just this concept of narrative research. And everyone is probably sitting there thinking Dr. Divinsky, she's so smart. She went to the University of Chicago, she's had all these years of research, but I want you to tell them, when you had an awakening was narrative research and where it came from.

So I come from a family of three daughters, and I'm the baby. And my middle sister was the physician here in Canada. And towards the end of her career, she got really interested in narrative research. She was what we call in Canada general practitioner GP. And in the Canadian system that really you are the front line and you navigate your patients through the Canadian healthcare system. And she came to believe in the power and efficacy of Narrative Medicine, because she would spend two hours talking to her patients or her clients. And she believed that she had come to listen extremely well, cuz she spent that kind of time with them. Unfortunately, my sister got sick with a really horrible cancer, multiple myeloma. And during her final years, she wanted to make sure she left some kind of legacy of what she had learned. Through Narrative Medicine, and so asked me to help work with her on editing a few of the papers that she was writing, that were published posthumously here in Canada. So it was, it was a great Sister to Sister bonding process for the two of us, which was so important to me because it was at the end of her life, to have that connection with her. And it was intellectually enormously interesting for me, given my career doing different kinds of quantitative research and historical research, to see and intellectually understand the power of personal stories. Again, I completely stole the idea from the medicine worlds. And thank you to my sister for opening up that, that door to all of this,

and we honor her in that space. And I think about the legacy that she wanted to perpetuate, and look at your work now. And I love that it's so translatable from medicine, I mean, cross sectors, it's just really beautiful. And I also love that you listened at the closest part of your life, which was the personal part, and it was able to translate to your profession, which is just extraordinary. Well, how

many times have you gone to a doctor's appointment, and they're sitting on whatever kind of screen and they're typing and looking at the screen, while they're listening to you talk, and you feel completely disconnected, you're limited experiences, they're really not paying any attention to me. And similarly, with respect to the kind of research so many organizations do, which is really built on looking at data patterns, data patterns are completely interesting and valuable. But they don't capture at least not yet. They don't capture those emotional truth, most deep values and drivers of human being. So this narrative research is not meant to replace all of that sophisticated data analysis that organizations may be doing. But it's an invaluable add. Because it really takes you to what we often call an H two h approach which we mean human to human. And that notwithstanding the brilliance of algorithms, and AI and data analysis, that h two h components continues to be really, really important, and we ought not to forget about it.

I mean, all this points to just the power of story. And I think in our own personal lives, we, you know, just really believe in the power of philanthropy, and it just confirmed, you know, with every guest that we meet to, is there a story of when philanthropy has really moved you that stuck with you in your life.

So I have a really provocative initial response. And then a more solid response, I'm not even sure that not for profit versus for profit is particularly helpful anymore. And I say that from two perspectives. The first is from the perspective of a social issue, not for profit organization, it ought to be able to use the full array of tactics in order to create audience stickiness. And just because it's a not for profit, not to be handcuffed in any way from the point tactics, that quote, for profit organizations might be using concomitantly, corporations have often F philanthropic sponsorship partnerships, CSR division, which to be quite truthful is always marginalized. And what one wants to say is, again, if you want to be respectful of your audience's and earn their respect, right, one ought to integrate in a real way, this ESG, CSR social issues directly into your business. And if we look at some of the amazing successful businesses, I'll just pick one Patagonia as an example. It was built on this notion of let's manage the real impact we make on the world. So I want to say that this binary divide, I'm not sure it's helpful in terms of managing the impact we have on people and on the earth. I think we need to dismantle it and conflate it. So that's my provocative response. My more personal responses when I was studying the history of capitalism. And Adam Smith is considered the father of capitalist thought. He talks about self interest and he's very worried about how you could create the public good, some a community of self interested human beings. That's the problem he wants to solve. And one of the ways that he solves it is by saying, the essence of self interest is our needs to be loved by other people. So he can there's self interest to mutuality and care. And so then he can say self interested individuals can create The public good. And that was his answer in the 18th century. And it's a beautiful answer. In the 21st century, that answer doesn't work so well anymore. Because self interest is not tethered to any notion of mutuality or care. It's like a freedom from I get to do what I want, when I want how I want. And so for me, it's still a quest of how do we tether or cultivate self interest to it matters, the impact that we have on others and on the planet, it really matters, how we do what we do really matters. And that's what's taken us to this notion of respect. If we can't at least respect our differences, respect each other, respect the planet, we have way better chance of improving the impact we have on others and on the earth. Pam, you

need a TED talk? Yes. Do so I hate to ask this question, because it means that we're about done. But we want to know what your one good thing is. We ask all our guests to give us at whether it's a mantra, how are you going to distill this down? Pam, I can't wait to hear it.

So my father loved granny smith apples was his favorite food item. He is to say, it's always really important to find the one thing no matter how small that brings you joy, regardless of the circumstances. And for my father, it was a Granny Smith apple. So my granny smith apple that what's the one thing that always brings me joy, irrespective of what's going on, is challenging. And probing and being attentive, in order to hear other perspectives in order to get to better thinking. And that that kind of attentiveness is the way we can get in at what really matters, because getting in at what really matters is almost always the hardest thing to see. So in order to get to the hardest thing to see is find the one thing that always brings you joy. I know that sounds a bit odd, but it you know, find your point of joy, because that's what will help you get into what really matters. And then how can you actually have an impact on that. So find your granny smith, Apple,

you have threaded this conversation so beautifully. And I just see how it all fits and builds together and even is how you show up and want to be you know, seen in recognizing your own self too. I think this conversation has just been so delightful. How can people listening today connect with you? How can they get connected to your amazing company?

We're Invisible Hand dot company. And I'm Pamela at Invisible Hand dot company. But it is just been such a delight chatting with you. And thank you for being so generous and supportive in opening the door. For me to be able to share our thinking about respect. It's really been a delight and an honor. So thank you,

well, I need to reciprocate that joy. And I just think it's a gift to the world to have somebody like you in it that continues to challenge from a place of empathy and equity, and we need more like you.

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thanks friends