The unfamiliar truth.
Looking Outside Exploration
Your comfort determines your world view. In the quest to expand my exposure to different perspectives, it seems impossible not to talk about getting uncomfortable. In the latest episode of Looking Outside, I speak with Zak Dychtwald about his expanded view of the world via his exploration of China; its lower tier cities, its young, misunderstood, people, its over-simplified gadget-obsessed stereotypes from Westerners. Zak did something not many of us have done; in his quest to understand, he picked his life up from the United States and moved to China. Not for a holiday, or extended work trip, but to live. So you might think he’s like a lot of expats who settle into high rise apartments in Hong Kong or Shanghai, but that’s not actually the case. When I say he got uncomfortable, I mean Zak was determined to expand his world view.
Your view of the world is shaped by a variety of things - your lived experiences, the culture you were born into, nature/nurture. And one other surprising little factor: self-reflection. Sure, we think about things after we experience them, but how often do we take a long pause to reflect on how those things shape our personality. Your personality is pretty important. It’s not just what you like and don’t like, it’s your inherent and distinct character. Unlike something like identity, personality can be shaped. So self reflection is a pretty important part of shaping your personality, and guiding towards expanding your world view. That’s what Looking Outside is all about, expanding your world view by giving you another perspective.
If I were to say, ‘We’re going to talk about China because it’s often misunderstood, over-simplified into stereotypes, and we focus too much on the big cities when we’re trying to grasp what that market is all about’. You’d probably say, ‘No, shit’. (Stereotypes and over-simplification is everywhere, after all.)
But have you considered how much of the onus on that understanding lies with YOU, personally, and how you reflect on your world view? Let’s start with nurture, and your direct network.
Those who sits in your circle of trust, your go-to network to learn, the friends who share your opinions, they form a big part of how you build your world view. I have a very close friend who recently publicly expressed his opinion about something that was contrary to mine. In fact, recently I’m noticing this friend’s opinions are diverging further away from mine. Or it’s that he is finding his voice and the way it’s expressed doesn’t leave much room for dialogue. That’s precisely the issue we ran into when he publicly wrote about something I felt at the time was quite objective as a topic and voiced a counter to. It didn’t go down well. The key problem was he felt it wasn’t an objective topic to discuss but a personal feeling.
How do you disagree with someone’s feeling? We landed in a good place with a fairly honest conversation. But it made me think, what if I had just said nothing? What if he was describing something I was less familiar with and I took his ‘feeling’ of what was happening as objective criticism? What if that was how I had built my entire perception of something outside of what was familiar to me. I mean, after all we agree on everything else, so he’s probably right. Right?
That’s in part what Zak speaks about when he says we take a view of parts of the world that are different to our own, that are more “opaque”, in a very simple way and at face value, as drawn by whether it be journalists or business consultants. It’s an interesting observation of China, in comparison to for example the US. When I got to the US one of the first things that people said to me was, ‘Get out of New York because you are not in an area that is representative of America’. But we still design products and solutions largely around these big, growing, urban cities in America. When was the last time you heard about innovation pilots in New York versus Montana. Even though rural areas in the United States make up ~97% of the United States' land area. We go where the people are. Is a nation its people, or its land?
It’s the same for China. We don’t really look hard at Tier 2 or 3 cities in China, we focus on the booming metropolis’ of Shanghai or Hangzhou. Even though places like Suzhou, a Tier 3 city, are growing economically and house 10 million people.
Our understanding of these places foreign to us is painted through the eyes of people like us (or at best transcribed through someone like us), and we gravitate towards those place that are more familiar to us. We look to Shanghai perhaps because it can be seen as an Eastern city becoming Western. The situation Zak explains on the show, of a Western executive visiting Shanghai and only going to the typical Western-like places, is almost identical to the experience I had traveling to Shanghai for work about ten years ago. In Shanghai, I stayed in the most opulent hotel I’ve ever stayed at, throughout all my personal and work travels. It was also in Shanghai where I had the most jarring experiences in life outside my comfortable world view. Not when I walked down back streets of Thailand, not in the poor areas I visited in rural Vietnam, it was in the side streets of Shanghai, behind beautiful restaurants and shops, where the truth was seeping in. And it was the most jarring perhaps because I had vision of a Western dream painted for me, a dream I was maybe looking for and wanting more than the truth.
We see what’s familiar as better, more important and more ‘true’. That’s not surprising as it’s a fairly known human behavior. But I do wonder if in business it’s more intentional than that. It’s not that we are just too busy to venture into it, or it’s too expensive to research, or it’s too complex to understand … it’s that we don’t want to. Because we don’t really care. We believe it’s less important because it’s less familiar.
It’s a rare type of person, like Zak, to want to immerse himself in those foreign, costly, complex parts of the world. And to come back out of that and say ‘I saw the differences, I am better for it, and I want others to be as well’. And sure, he’s got a business out of it so it’s not all altruistic. But just as easily he could have written a book called ‘The Cheat and Cheap way to market in Hangzhou,’ no? As he delicately touches on at the end of our conversation, through his search for truth – the prosperous and the uncomfortable – he is working to paint more positive future possibilities. Because they begin with a real starting point. Perhaps if business leaders can explore new parts of growth markets, new not because they are so, but because they are new to our level of familiarity and comfort, we can co-create solutions that are better. Better for the people we want to sell to. Better reflecting the truth of the situation.
It was science fiction that drew Zak into the world of China. He said at the time he picked up a brochure for Hong Kong and it looked like Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, the sci-fi (noir) novel that inspired Blade Runner from Philip K Dick. It’s a fascinating analogy, because while the movie paints this world as being foreign, exciting, mysterious, the book gives you a feeling like this world is riddled with normality, banality, with filth and glamour. Very ‘normal’ in other words. So from the cover through to the journey into China, Zak experienced the magnificence of the promise of excitement, the promise of touching a mystery, right through to living its normalcy. To familiarity.
It was his desire to explore the unknown, to experience the uncomfortable, to feel the unfamiliar that got him closer to truth. If we’re not exploring, if we’re not that open, then we continue to cycle through the same agreeable conversations with our friends. Sure that also sounds nice, life is hard enough as it is. You don’t always want to have to go to poverty stricken, eye-opening places when you holiday. Sometimes you want to stay in a clean, familiar resort and put your feet up. You want to feel safe in a little bubble oasis. And that’s ok.
But as business leaders, as future leaders, we have a responsibility not to live in that bubble when it comes to our corporations, our strategies, our investments. Because that bubble isn’t growing us, it isn’t growing our businesses, and ultimately it isn’t true.
Listen to the Exploration episode with Zak Dytchwald:
