During a week-long uneraining session with one of our Fortune 25 clients last month, I was reminded of my White Castle job as a teenager. On any given weekend day, dressed in my light blue polyester uniform, I steamed entire griddles of onions, with 64 burgers at a time, for up to 8 hours. On first entering the kitchen each day, the smell of onions nearly knocked me down. But after flipping a burger or two, I hardly noticed the onions. Of course, when my mother picked me up at the end of a shift, she immediately opened all four windows of her Ford Taurus station wagon. Even on 32-degree winter days, those windows would be all the way down as Sue bitched about the stench of onions and grease the entire, freezing, 10-minute ride home. I thought she was nuts; I smelled nothing.
During day two of the Agile Transformation session, I finally learned the term for my ability to tune out the smell of White Castle onions, way back when. A woman in the session addressed the room about how the group had “lost touch with the customer.” She stood up and wrote the words, “reticular activation” on the whiteboard, explaining that reticular activation happens when someone is exposed to something so often that their brain begins to filter it out as white noise. Her point was that perhaps the group had not so much “lost touch” with the customer as learned to filter them out. I’d explain the rest, but, ironically, the woman who addressed the room was carrying a small “service animal” dog in a pouch-type front carrier. As she spoke, she swayed gently from side to side, causing the dog’s head to whip left and right like a pendulum. Reticular activation kicked in, causing me to tune out.
In business, the reticular activation concept applies to things we no longer hear. In some cases, there is a lot of good that can come from drowning out something to which your brain has become over-exposed. The sales guy making cold calls, for instance, will hopefully become numb to the annoyed, hurried voices on the other end of the line and keep plowing through his calls. But desensitization can have negative consequences. The moment you stop listening to your customer, you begin to disengage. As soon as you start disengaging, the rift forms. You might even blame your disengagement on monotony or lack of interest. But perhaps the client who keeps saying the “same old thing” is the client who most needs you to pay attention and respond.
I’m certainly not suggesting you start fixating on your own coworkers’ body odor. Please, in the name of all things holy, let your brain’s response to reticular activation protect you from things you can’t control. Instead, take a few conscious moments each day to look up and be mindful of the white noise. See if you are missing an opportunity to engage before simply tuning it all out.
