Intimacy at scale

Charles Leadbeater’s end-of-day keynote provided plenty of food for thought to chew over at the Research 2011 party last night.

He’s writing a book, or at least wanting to right a book, that explores the idea of intimacy at scale, and whether it’s possible for things that are highly systematic to also be highly empathetic.

He’s drawn a diagram that plots the world and everything in it – cities, governments, companies, brands, services, etc. – in the quadrants formed between two axes. On the Y-axis you have high systems and low systems; on the X-axis you have high empathy and low empathy.

For simplicity’s sake, he used film and television to explain the concept. The critically acclaimed HBO series The Wire was placed in the bottom left quadrant – set in a rundown, corrupt Baltimore, Leadbeater used it as the perfect example of a low system/low empathy environment. Moving up to the top left, he placed ‘The Lives of Others’, a film about a Stasi agent in East Germany, exemplifying an efficient system, but a soulless one.

Down in the bottom right were the Waltons – bags of empathy, but very little system to speak of. In that quadrant, he also placed Starbucks, certainly as it was in its early formative years.

As the coffee chain has grown, Leadbeater says it’s moved horizontally into the top left quadrant, a path forged by many other companies that start out small and intimate but find it hard to retain that same level of intimacy as they scale up.

It’s arguably a route well trodden by research agencies themselves as modest, manager-owned and run business have merged or been subsumed into bigger groups, creating efficient global beasts, but ones that are often accused of lacking a personal touch.

So, asked Leadbeater: can any company hope to occupy the top right quadrant?

Facebook maybe, though Leadbeater argues that it’s a system designed to build relationships between people. The relationship between Facebook and its users is tetchy at best, and its attempts at personalisation can backfire. Leadbeater recounted how Facebook recently told him that he needed to reconnect with one of his friends as the two had lost touch. The friend in question was his wife.

Apple was another suggestion put forward, but the empathy people feel for its products is not often reciprocated. Witness the restrictions placed on iTunes content and the closed nature of its most popular platforms, the iPhone, iPod and iPad.

Indeed, what separates a high system/high empathy company from a high system/low empathy one is that the latter is more interested in their “own systems of survival”.

But how much intimacy do we really want with systems, Leadbeater asked. Truly personalised services might require us to share so much information that we lose too much privacy. And when a company knows what we want before we do, or always has an offer to meet our needs, might this also restrict our freedoms as consumers to choose our suppliers – we become locked in, as it were, by convenience.

The row over online tracking may serve as a good indicator of whether people truly want high systems with high empathy. People say they want personalised online content, but that requires web companies and advertisers to know more about a person’s interests. To date much anger has been directed at a lack of transparency over what data is collected and how it’s used. Perhaps that’s all that is needed: transparency. When a persons knows as much about the system as the system does of them then real intimacy is in reach.