Details in the Fabric

Details in the Fabric

CORE is on a mission to push the asset management industry forward, especially in terms of communication. We believe asset managers can firmly set themselves apart from their competitor by employing strong narratives, impactful visualisation, thoughtful design, clear communication and holistic strategic alignment. This post is an introduction to a series of articles, covering our thoughts on these topics. We’ll tap into the knowledge of scientists, philosophers and our own experiences to uncover clear actionable takeaways. This first article serves as a teaser of what’s to come.

“Details matter, it’s worth waiting to get it right.” — Steve Jobs

You may be familiar with Jobs’ quote above. But why exactly did he think details matter? And how much attention do we typically pay to details?

The Raisin

Scene: It’s a rainy Wednesday afternoon (as most tend to be here in Amsterdam), and I’m attending a mindfulness workshop. My legs are contorted in a slightly uncomfortable position, folded over each other, and in my hand rests a raisin. One. The assignment: mindfully eat the raisin. Now, that’s actually harder than you might think. Imagine the last time you spent ten minutes eating something as small as a raisin. If ever.

Yup, a raisin.

Here’s what happened: First, I spent time looking at the raisin as it laid there in the palm of my hand. Taking in all the details; I saw the cracks that looked like mountains and valleys. I saw how the sunlight made its dark colour slowly flash gold. Next came squeezing it, noticing how its texture gently resisted my fingers. Holding it next to my ear to hear the sound it made. Afterwards, it was time to smell it deeply. It was a little sweet, with tones that I might have been able to identify, had I paid more attention to wine-tastings in the past. Then came placing the raisin in my mouth to taste it, placing it on the tongue without biting. And finally we were allowed to, slowly, mindfully, swallow it.

You were probably bored reading that. And you’re right, to most of us, raisins are not that exciting. But why not? How do we make the distinction between what’s interesting and what’s not?

Your second thought could be “if reading that was already boring, doing it for ten minutes must have been way worse!”, and, you’re right again. However, I realised that I had never looked at a raisin in so much detail. Or any object for that matter. But why not?

Tigers in the dark

It dawned on me, right then and there, on that rainy Wednesday afternoon. From an evolutionary perspective, we are wired to avoid seeing detail at all times. Our brains are champions at over-simplifying the world around us, and they do this constantly. Because the world around us is so complex, seeing all the details all the time would drive us crazy.

So, we learned to categorise objects and people around us. Instead of seeing them objectively, in all their detail, we just see their contextual meaning. It’s the classic ‘fight-or-flight’ response. We are hard-wired to instantly see if something is a potential threat or if it could be beneficial for us instead. And in the time of our ancient ancestors, when a shadow in a dark forest could either be a bush or a hungry tiger, that makes a lot of sense.

Nothing to be scared of, right?

And while in our day to day lives we don’t have to fear encounters with tigers anymore, we still have these mechanisms of meaning. We use them subconsciously to evaluate everyone we meet, and to assess the objects around us. Take the stove in your kitchen. You don’t usually pay attention to its details. You don’t typically see how it releases hot air around it, how the metal is slightly scratched, nor do you notice the fact that some of the leftovers from last night’s meal are still in there. You just associate it either with danger, “I could burn myself”, or with the potential benefits it can bring you “I could cook my food in here”. We don’t see details; we see meaning.

Falcon-wing doors

Back to our questions. We don’t focus on the details of the raisin because they usually don’t matter. It suffices to know what the raisin means, what it potentially brings us or how it potentially threatens us.

Now it requires more than just knowing an object’s meaning for it to be interesting to us. It should also be novel in some way. It should surprise us. As we go about life, identifying meaning around us, we create patterns of expectations.

For example, I have experienced all my life that car doors open outward. I hardly pay attention when I open one. I always try to open them outwards, this action goes on ‘auto-pilot’, and basically that’s my brain making sure I am not spending any extra energy when I don’t need to. However, when I suddenly encounter a car door that doesn’t open outward, I am surprised (looking at you, Model X doors…).

Apart from feeling embarrassed that the door doesn’t open in one go, and that people around me are highly amused, I’m now also fully paying attention to this moment and this particular door. Compare that to the hundreds, if not thousands, of doors that I’ve opened without any second thought.

It is in moments like these, when our expectations are not met, that we are surprised and thus our interest is awakened. After we are interested, we pay more attention to what follows.

There are different mental models that describe the psychology behind attention (from AIDA to Daniel Kahneman’s System I and System II), which we will dive into in later posts. What is of interest for now, is how we can use that knowledge.

Meaning and surprises

We have now learned the basics on how to get our audience interested, how to grab their attention and then later ‘harvest’ this attention and turn it into a conversion. Simply put, we need to know the audience’s expectations and surprise them by not meeting these expectations. We should show our audiences what a product/service could mean to them. And then make sure we leave them surprised.

We can do this by telling captivating stories in novel ways. We can leverage surprising, impactful visuals. We can communicate more clearly and in a more human-centric fashion than ever before.

At CDS we have been doing all these things for our clients for quite some time. In the upcoming articles, we will share more of our knowledge, experience, and case studies on these topics. Stay tuned for more!