Activate your social, emotional and aesthetic intelligence

One of the greatest Australian films of all time took just five weeks to make, from idea to final edit. The Castle became an instant cult classic, grossing over $10 million at the box office and cementing its place within the Australian cultural landscape.

Set in the early 1990s, in an outer suburb of Melbourne, it tells the story of a working-class family (the Kerrigans) in a battle with big business. In a David and Goliath–style tale, the patriarch and lead protagonist, Darryl Kerrigan, fights his way to the Supreme Court to keep his family home from being bulldozed for a proposed airport development.

In one infamous scene, Darryl’s small-time-lawyer friend, Dennis Denuto (played by Tiriel Mora), is making their case in the first of many court appearances. Struggling his way through much of his appeal, Denuto’s closing statements have become the stuff of legend:

In summing up. It’s the constitution. It’s Mabo. It’s justice. It’s law. It’s … it’s the vibe.

I’m sure you’ve had moments like that at work. Struggling to express how you feel and why it matters. Fumbling and bumbling with the limits of language. Contorting your face, shrugging your shoulders, gesturing wildly with your hands, all in a failed attempt to articulate ‘the vibe’.

That misunderstood magic that is so palpable yet so intangible. So obvious yet so easy to overlook. So meaningful and yet so hard to measure.

But as difficult as it is, and foolish as it sometimes feels, learning to decipher, define and design ‘the vibe’ is an essential skill for the modern workplace, and the secret weapon of an Everyday Creative. Why? Because …

Feeling is the new thinking

Like it or not, believe it or not, the new era of business is as much about feeling as it is about thinking. As much about ‘the vibe’ as an indicator of value as it is about data, metrics and analysis.

How you feel about yourself, your colleagues and clients, the work you do and the company you work for, greatly influences the quality, quantity and consistency of your output.

How your customers and colleagues feel about you defines the value, length and profitability of those relationships. Heck, the way you feel about this sentence, chapter and book will determine whether you choose to keep reading it, get value from it or share it.

How we feel affects what we buy and where we choose to work. It influences team performance and interpersonal relationships. It even shapes our identity and professional success.

IMHO, feeling is the most underrated aspect of business today. It makes your ideas more sticky, your relationships more meaningful, and the impact of your output more potent and long-lasting. And it’s the second essential practice for an Everyday Creative.

Feeling is:

• the strongest driver of human behaviour
• the fastest way to build meaningful connections (between people, projects and products)
• the source of a business’s competitive advantage.

But don’t just take my word for it.

Experience is everything

Although we like to believe we’re all rational, reasonable beings making logical, pragmatic choices, research tells us otherwise. Studies have shown that up to 95 per cent of our decisions are driven by our subconscious. And emotion, not reason, is the language of our subconscious mind.

Add to that the rise of the ‘experience economy’,¹ the proliferation of companies focusing on redefining their employee experience and the increasing demand for more emotional intelligence in the workplace, and the case for feeling begins to carry a whole lot more weight.

According to Expedia, a staggering 74 per cent of people are prioritising experiences over products when it comes to their spending habits. People young and old are opting out of accumulating more stuff and are instead investing their hard-earned cash into moments that become meaningful memories. And for good reason. Studies have shown that investing in experiences brings more long-lasting joy than spending money on things.

Look at some of the most iconic brands of the last decade. It’s obvious how instrumental ‘the experience’ was in amplifying their success. From Apple to Nike to Tesla, they don’t just invest in what a product does or what problem it solves. They focus intently on how it feels to use and how it feels to be seen to use it.

Although I had hoped to get through an entire book without using them as an example, look at Uber. They didn’t just transform the transportation experience; they changed they way we experience time. While waiting for our ride, we can watch the little cartoon car snake its way through the side streets on a digital map. Even when my ride takes longer to arrive than a taxi, watching my driver snake their way through the suburbs is surprisingly satisfying.

Some companies have even built their entire business model on the power of experience. Secret Cinema have redefined the way we experience film by building life-sized replicas of the sets of critically acclaimed movies, complete with hundreds of actors as characters from each film. For hours before actually watching the film, patrons exist in the film.

Or then there is the UK company Black Tomato, who have an offering called ‘Get Lost’. Starting at £22 000, clients work with a personalised consultant to determine what is missing from their life. Then, on a particular time on a particular day, they are whisked from their home to the airport, put on X number of flights, Y number of taxis and possibly a helicopter ride, then dropped in the Atacama Desert of North Chile, or on a glacier in the fjords of Iceland, or some other remote location, with a just a backpack, a GPS and the instruction ‘We’ll see you in a week’.

This appetite for experience doesn’t stop with consumers. It has infiltrated what we now desire and demand from our work. Websites such as LinkedIn and Glassdoor make it easier for prospective employees to assess the atmosphere of a company they’re considering.

No longer can companies hide behind sexy employer branding campaigns or rely on savvy recruiters to position themselves among recruits. They need to back it up, follow through and invest in a whole lot more than a ping pong table and a case of craft beer.²

Yup, it’s a radical time to be in business. And for those brave enough to look deeper into feeling, emotion and experience, like us Everyday Creatives, the opportunities are unparalleled.

So if feeling is so essential to our lives and so impactful at work, why do we see so much resistance to it in the office?

Barriers to feeling

Let’s be honest: to speak earnestly about ‘feeling’ in most boardrooms today would leave us open to ridicule and regret. Despite our best intentions for a more human-centric workplace — one that allows, encourages and champions the entire spectrum of the human emotion — we’re not all there just yet. 

We’ve been told for years to ‘keep our feelings under control’ or ‘not get too carried away’. We’ve been undermined for ‘being too emotional’, shamed for ‘oversharing’, laughed at for sounding ‘a bit touchy-feely’.

If we start harping on about the ‘vibe’ of our latest offering or the ‘feel’ of the next leadership offsite, we can so easily end up sounding fluffy and esoteric. Lightweight and inconsequential.

And when you consider how clinical and impersonal most workplaces are, is it any wonder we slip on a sanitised suit of amour when we step into the office? It should come as no surprise that we willingly dull our senses and distance ourselves from the emotional impact of our work.

All of this avoidance to feeling is underlined by a general consensus that feeling is too hard to measure, too difficult to control, too uncomfortable to articulate and too inconvenient to scale. And some of those concerns are somewhat legitimate.

Feeling is intangible, inconsistent and idiosyncratic. It won’t always fit within a formula and rarely submits to a standardised system. And in a world that worships quantitative data and analysis it’s no surprise we struggle to fit qualitative sensibilities into the spreadsheet.

The problem with our fixation on the figures is that the information we gather is almost always decontextualised. In order to measure something, we must reduce its totality to squeeze it into a simple set of numbers.

I’ll give you an example. We can count the number of people in a room, make a pie chart to illustrate the gender balance and build a 3D model of who sits next to whom. But all that data tells us nothing of the atmosphere of the room or the quality of interactions between people.

Is it upbeat or flat? Optimistic or cynical? Euphoric or melancholy?

If you’re looking to motivate, influence or inspire, which do you think is more effective: showing them stats or sharing a story? Demanding they think differently or making them feel deeply?

As education scholar Elliot Eisner pointed out, ‘Not all that matters can be measured, and not everything that can be measured, matters’.

Feeling can be hard to work with, but work with it we must. Because despite the perks or the pay packet, we work harder and smarter when we feel something. And our customers stay longer, engage more deeply and share louder when they feel something.

And putting more feeling in our work doesn’t require vast amounts of time and resources. It could be as simple as a well-placed question. No more than seven simple words. Like what Shane McCurry did with his voicemail.

Harness the feels

This is a critical factor to being an Everyday Creative. To see every moment, every task, every challenge or interaction with another as an opportunity to move them emotionally. To surprise and delight, and snap them out of business as usual. To invite them into a world of beauty, intimacy, serendipity, mystery or gratitude.

Where can you infuse a little more of your personality? Where can you break your unconscious routines, protocols and processes to invite and inspire a little more creativity? Not just in yourself but in the world around you? The benefits extend well beyond your own experience. You might just change the day-to-day experience for someone who really needs it.

So how do we become better at seeing and sensing opportunities to embed more feeling at work? What skills do we need to become an award-winning atmospheric architect and master of vibe design? Where should we look to give ourselves an edge in the esoteric realm of experience?

Aesthetic intelligence

If you are to be effective as an Everyday Creative, and infuse your work with more feeling, meaning and experience, you must become masterful at these three intelligences:

1. Emotional Intelligence. The ability to be aware of, control and express your emotions. To handle interpersonal relationships judiciously and empathetically. To know your boundaries and respect the boundaries of others.
2. Social Intelligence. The ability to successfully build relationships and navigate social environments. To carry conversations with a wide variety of people, know how to play different roles at different times and be effective in understanding and acting on social cues.
3. Aesthetic Intelligence. The ability to understand, interpret and articulate feelings that are elicited by a particular object, environment or experience.

You’re probably familiar with the first two but I’d like to focus on the third as I believe it’ll give you an unparalleled edge in your work.

Aesthetic intelligence is all about your senses. It’s about feeling your way through a situation or circumstance. By accessing your sensory awareness and becoming emotionally attuned to your environment, you develop an ability for deciphering what is meaningful and discerning what matters. You can then use that information when defining and designing your own product, service or experience.

Said another way, it’s about tuning in to the vibe, noticing how it makes you feel, deciding which parts light you up, then injecting that magic into whatever you’re working on.

Pauline Brown is an adviser to the world’s leading luxury brands, a Harvard professor and author of a book appropriately titled Aesthetic Intelligence. I met her while speaking at an event in Portugal and I think she’s on the cusp of the new wave of business strategy.

In her words,

In a world in which people have cheap and easy access to most goods and services, yet crave richer and more meaningful experiences, aesthetics has become a key differentiator for most companies and a critical factor of their success.

She continues, ‘Aesthetic Intelligence provides a crucial roadmap to help business leaders build their business in their own authentic and distinctive way.’

When considering the application of aesthetics in business and life, it’s like walking into a new world of possibilities. It gives you a unique way of seeing and perceiving the world so that you can shape a product, environment or interaction to be more beautiful, more meaningful and, ultimately, more influential.

When you apply aesthetic intelligence at work, your emails and spreadsheets, meetings and events, pitch decks and performance reviews all become rich opportunities for engineering a deep, visceral and sensorial experience.

To become more aesthetically intelligent Pauline outlines a four-step process:

1. Begin with attunement. You must develop a higher consciousness and deeper awareness of your environment and its affect on you, both emotionally and sensorially. (That is, tune in to how you feel.)
2. Move to interpretation. You must translate your emotional reactions (both positive and negative) into ideas that form the basis of an aesthetic position, preference or expression. (That is, express to how you feel.)
3. Then onto articulation. Using the sensory data you’ve received you then define the aesthetic ideals for your brand, product, or service and communicate it to your team so that they not only grasp the vision but can execute on it with precision.
4. And finally, curation. You organise, integrate and edit a wide variety of inputs and ideals to achieve maximum impact. 

I’ll give you an example of when social, emotional and aesthetic intelligences are combined and put in action.

You have a meeting coming up. First, get clear on what you want to achieve from the gathering. Then reflect on what kind of experience you believe would influence that outcome.

Then you consider the people you need to invite. What is the context they exist in? What context will they be in before your meeting? Who are they, what are the factors that shape how they show up and can you influence them in some way?

Then consider the space you’re meeting in. Does it align with your intent? Will it elevate and enhance the kind of atmosphere you believe will evoke the kind of conversations you desire? Are you having a blue-sky strategy session in a claustrophobic meeting room with grey walls, a low ceiling and no natural light? Maybe not …

Consider these questions:

• How will they feel when they first walk in?
• Where will they sit?
• Where do you want them to sit?
• Do you even want them to sit?
• How will you open your meeting?
• How will you establish an agreed-upon set of behaviours for the meeting to be effective?
• And how do you plan to shape and sculpt the atmosphere as you move through space and time?

Now you’re in the meeting. You’re fully present to the moment, while remaining subtly detached from it. You’re nudging and prodding the energy of the room, while accepting wherever it goes is where it needs to go.

You’re holding your intent with soft hands, remaining gently focused on your agenda while responding appropriately to whatever emerges by leveraging your senses and trusting your instincts.

If this sounds like a lot of work, you’re right! But it’s a different kind of work. It’s complex and creative. It requires that you crystallise your intent, empathise with your audience and synthesise the emotional data as it emerges.

You can go even further, and I really hope you do. For example, how do you prepare people for your meetings? How do you invite them?

• With a Google calendar link?
• With a text?
• With a hastily written message on the whiteboard in the lunchroom?
• Or with handwritten note you left on their laptops? (Yes!)
• Or a digital map that tells them where the treasure (a.k.a. meeting) is, complete with sea monsters and pirates? (Yes, yes!)
• Or a line of jelly beans from their desk to the meeting room? (Wow!)

If that all sounds a little too kindergarten for you, I get it. You don’t have to go so arts and crafts. But consider how you’d feel if you unexpectedly discovered a glittery gold envelope in your handbag. Inside was a small card that said:

11am. Front Door. SOS

Or how about:

You have been approved for membership.

Meet us at 2.57 pm in the storage room on the 28th floor.

Tell no-one.

Would you be intrigued? Would you feel special? Would you do everything you could to shift your other 3 pm meeting to make that one? I think you would.

An Everyday Creative has a PhD in vibe design. They are atmospheric architects, energetic alchemists and social artisans. They tune in to the world around them, and use their senses and their experiences to create beautiful, visceral and meaningful moments.

Feel like a DJ

DJs, chefs, interior designers — they work with their senses to shift and shape the atmosphere of a rave, restaurant or room. They have a deep desire to move and affect people in a particular way. They take great care in considering:

• who their audience is
• where they’re coming from
• what their unmet expectations were or unconscious aspirations are.

That’s what you need to do.

I’m not telling you to write up a bunch of psychographic profiles on the people you share an office with. This is about ripping open your heart and letting the raw power of people affect you. It’s about tuning in to the hidden secrets of the products, services and experiences that you touch. This is more than mere marketing.

When you start shaping the vibe of your office in emotional, sensory and aesthetic ways, they won’t know what hit ’em. They might even start to see you as some kind of witch doctor working with the dark arts. It’s powerful. You’ll soon discover how influential you can be in any situation or environment.

So how do we begin to unlock the murky, misunderstood realm of feeling? From where should you launch your newfound focus on deciphering and designing meaningful experiences?

Start with how you feel

Let yourself be moved by your experience. Listen with your body and learn to trust your gut. No-one else has to know. It’s between you and yourself. But give yourself permission to go there. To play with your senses and fully experience what is emerging in you, in the conversation or in the atmosphere around it.

To be truly effective as an Everyday Creative, you must rebuild the dialogue between your thoughts and your feelings. They need to work in tandem, like shift workers, high-fiving as they go. Imagine the possibilities for your career, if you could draw on the entirety of your human experience, dropping in and out of thinking and feeling whenever it serves. 

It’s as easy as asking yourself a few simple questions before you make a call, start your next project or design a program:

• How does this make me feel?
• How do I want this to feel?
• How do I want them (clients, colleagues, audience) to feel?
• Where else have I felt that?
• What was it about that other experience that made me feel that?
• What can I take from that experience and infuse into this one?

For example, before sending an email ask yourself:

• How do I want them to feel when they receive this?
• What would it take for me to make them feel like that?
• Where else have I felt like that and can I use it in this context?

After you’ve written your email, read it through and ask yourself:

• How would it make me feel if I received this?
• How would it make them (the recipient) feel if they received this?

If it’s not aligned, keep going. Sink deeper into your senses and experiment.

You can apply this line of thinking–feeling to every aspect of your job. Every interaction with your customers or colleagues. Every touchpoint of your project or pitch.

Making time to consider how you make others feel, how you want them to feel and how to close that gap is crucial to your work as an Everyday Creative.

A few figures to consider

Just before we get to the activities, here are a couple of interesting facts about feeling that you can use to have more impact at work.

Researchers have discovered that 50 per cent of the most enjoyable elements of an experience are down to anticipation. The other 50 per cent? It’s how we remember it.

In a related concept, Daniel Kahneman and Barbara Frederick came up with the Peak/End rule, which refers to the fact that, when reflecting on any experience, our brain will always remember the peak moment and the ending. This is why singing teachers always place great emphasis on how you finish a note or phrase. You can sing the whole song beautifully, but if your finish was sloppy, that’s what the audience will remember.

How can you apply this insight to your work? Are you leveraging the power of anticipation? Are you sowing seeds in the days or weeks prior to your meeting or project? Building momentum with a series of carefully curated activations to elicit positive feelings of anticipation and enthusiasm?

Have you determined what your peak moment will be? You can’t always know ahead of time, but you can plan for it or stay open to it.

A final consideration

If you’re still sitting on the fence about whether you should leap head-first into the wild, wonderful world of feeling, answer me this.

Who would you prefer to work with? Someone who is attuned to your emotional state, who is willing to work with you, and shift their style or approach to meet or match your needs … or someone who just ploughs though, unaware or unconcerned about the impact their behaviour might have on you or what emotional state you might be in due to other forces?

Who would you rather be led by? Someone who shares their vulnerabilities and makes it safe for you to share yours, someone who encourages you to articulate how you feel without judgement or expectation … or someone who tries to keep emotion out of it, prefers to keep things ‘professional’ and never reveals how they feel about anything?