Nicola Snarey & Jenny Aceles - peaceful protesters making a stand against polarisation, hate and violence
A couple of months ago I focused my Responsible Business Intelligence (RBI) Newsletter on "Who Says?" on the basis that it is easy to state that RBI is the responsible application of BI and AI by responsible businesses, organisations and individuals, but it is less easy to state who defines what is "responsible"?
As individuals we can be sure of one truth - our own - and hence what we consider to be "responsible". We can also be relatively sure of what "responsible" means to the people, businesses and organisations we work for, or otherwise interact with closely....whether we all agree or not.
But what about the majority of people, businesses and organisations that we don't directly interact with within our defined community or market? What about those outside our sphere of focus and outside our echo chamber?
We all define what is "acceptable"
In the 1990s, Joseph Overton and Joe Lehman, from the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, defined the 'Overton Window' framing the range of policies that a politician can recommend without appearing too extreme. In 2006, Joshua S. Treviño, MBA further updated the Overton Window to define six degrees of acceptance of public ideas.
Credit: Hydrargyrum - Overton Window
The most common misconception about the Overton Window that it is manipulated and shifted by lawmakers, politicians, lobbyists and large corporates. In reality, they are just detecting where the window is - based on what we, as society, deem to be acceptable - and then adjusting their stance to be in accordance with it.
We all define what is "acceptable" and there are probably as many exact definitions of what acceptable is as there are people on the planet.
Some of us are "disconnected"
In a recent article in The Conversation, Steve Taylor, senior lecturer in psychology at Leeds Beckett University, describes "human nature in terms of a continuum of connection, where a small proportion of people are severely disconnected. They exist in a state of psychological isolation, cut off from other people and the world around them. They don’t feel empathy for anyone beyond a narrow circle of family and friends and others who share their ideology and ethnicity. Because of their intense separateness, disconnected people feel a strong sense of frustration, which sometimes manifests itself in aggression and destruction."
Credit: Watkins Bookshop - Disconnected - by Steve Taylor
Those of us who are severely disconnected are more likely to be influenced by "unacceptable" perspectives that sit outside the Overton Window - the "radical" and "unthinkable".
Steve argues that the majority of us do feel connected to some degree and, consequently, human beings on the whole are remarkably altruistic. Rather than feeling destructive impulses, most of us feel a natural impulse to help others, to nurture their development and alleviate suffering.
Positive Action
The altruism, innate within all of us, probably explains why so many people have been appalled by the cruelty and brutality of the recent hate-based riots in the UK and have felt the impulse to counter it with positive and inclusive action.
The more we can understand the breadth of perspectives of what is "acceptable" - often there is more commonality between opposing perspectives than we realise - the more positive and inclusive our resulting actions can be. It's not about them against us. The pursuit of polarisation risks more disconnected people, in more disconnected echo chambers, nurturing "unacceptable" perspectives until those perspectives become the norm.
Taken with an open mind, Responsible Business Intelligence enables individuals, businesses and organisations to understand the breadth of what society is thinking about over any given timeframe - what's dominating, what's emerging and what's declining.
As individuals, we can't possibly agree with everything that society presents, but we can aim to understand the degrees of acceptance that the mainstream population might have for any given principle at any given time - as well as the emerging dangers of the radical and unthinkable principles that will never be acceptable to a responsible society.
Comments