Being Relevant

Relevance

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Smart organisations talk endlessly about how they can make themselves more relevant to their customers and stakeholders. It’s the right question to ask in a user-centric world.

But what if we look down the telescope the other way? What if we reverse the question? How do we make customers and employees themselves feel more relevant? I’m going to tell you why this is not just a theoretical musing, but instead key to success in the next five years.

Humans are in the middle of a relevancy crisis, everywhere. It is driven by a range of causes – not just one – and technology is accelerating it right now. This changes how your customers are framing the world. At the least, you need to understand this so long as you serve humans or employ them. At the most, you can build your experiences to deliver feelings of personal relevance to humans. That’s a benefit that can drive profit, growth, and – if you care about such things – increased social wellbeing. I will suggest ways to do this. I’m convinced this is an issue we will be talking about for years to come, and is a core product, service, design and marketing issue.

It is possible you may not relate to this lack of relevance notion, if you are very well paid and in a job. If you work on an large language model, you definitely won’t feel it as right now you probably feel terribly relevant. This is about most other people. Who buy ordinary things, try to get by each day and work at places, or in some cases, don't. Customers and employees in other words.

What do we mean by “Relevance”?

The Cambridge Dictionary defines it both as the quality or state of being closely connected or appropriate, and the degree to which something is related or useful to what is happening or being talked about. Wikipedia says “Relevance is the connection between topics that makes one useful for dealing with the other”. It is interesting that definitions of relevance do not tackle the relevance of the human subject to everything else.

Yet personal relevance is at the core of the modern human condition, and my argument is that it is in decline, and that technology poses yet further challenges right now – not tomorrow.

The endless quest for relevance is one of the central and most powerful motivators of human behaviour. If we want to understand how people work, we need to understand their search for relevance.

A lot of work has been done in social science over the last twenty years on what motivates or frustrates human beings. Much of this has been popularised by writers and speakers like Brenee Brown who says connection is what drives people. For example shame is a fear of losing connection. This can lead to extreme vulnerability. Then feeling not worthy of connection is the thing that keeps us disconnected, or at least fearful of connection.

Johann Hari's Lost Connections (2018) makes a compelling and uncomfortable case: depression and anxiety aren't primarily chemical. They're social. Hari identifies nine causes of the modern epidemic of mental issues - from disconnection from meaningful work and other people, to loss of status, values that prioritise the wrong things, and nature itself. The book is a call to arms - not for more pills, but for reconnection. To each other. To purpose. To something that matters.

He draws on longitudinal data showing rates of depression and anxiety climbing steeply recently, particularly in wealthy Western nations - places that, by material measures, should be thriving. That paradox is central to his argument. We got richer, more connected digitally, more medicated - and more miserable. For Hari, that's not a coincidence. It's a consequence of the kind of society we chose to build. Critically our expectations have risen, yet it turns out the systems we have built cannot meet those expectations.

A mix of neuroscience and psychology researchers have also been looking at our deeper motivations. Drive by Daniel Pink (2009) points at work done by Edward Deci and Richard Ryan on “self determination theory” (SDT). “SDT…..begins with a notion of universal human needs.  It argues that we have three innate psychological needs – competence, autonomy, and relatedness. When these needs are satisfied, we’re motivated, productive and happy”.

A more extended model, SCARF, was devised by David Rock, who introduced it in a 2008 paper - published in the NeuroLeadership Journal, a field he largely founded. To be clear Rock is a coach and consultant rather than an academic neuroscientist.

The model proposes five domains that the brain treats as fundamental threats or rewards, driving behaviour in social situations:

Status - where do I stand relative to others?

Certainty - can I predict what happens next?

Autonomy - do I have control over my situation?

Relatedness - am I safe with these people, do I belong?

Fairness - is this just, is this all square?

In other words, we are wired, deep down, to ask five questions about every situation we find ourselves in. Am I respected here? Do I know what comes next? Do I have any say in this? Are these my people? And is this fair? These aren't soft, HR-ish concerns. Your brain treats a threat to any one of them like a threat to your physical survival. Get them wrong and you've lost people - even if they're still sitting in the room.

Hari, Pink, Rock and others have built powerful, well evidenced models of human behaviour and motivation. The deeper and unspoken idea they are all circling around is relevance. The way people feel they are losing it in today's world is what we now need to look at. If we understand its importance, and why people feel their personal experience of relevance is diminishing, various aspects of the shared history we've lived through across the last few years start to make much more sense.

Symptoms of the relevance loss

Dramatic symptoms of this loss of personal relevance have come at us thick and fast since 2016, especially expressed in the political arena, as you might expect. They include the MAGA movement in the US, the Brexit vote in the UK, the Gilets Jaunes in France and the general rise in populist political movements across many countries, especially in Europe.

When people feel irrelevant – personally – those politicians who identify those feelings and offer easy solutions are likely to do well at the polls. One could equally argue that the left (especially in America) identified a different take on Relevance in the 21^st century which prioritised inclusion and diversity as a solution. The gap between this and the MAGA assessment has widened the political divide to a chasm. Arguably it’s a bitter debate about who gets to feel relevant.

Terrorism and mass shootings is another expression of the desire for relevance. There is a lot of evidence that perpetrators, often male and isolated, are prepared to risk personal extinction in return for a twisted payoff of social impact. Jacinda Ahern, Prime Minister of New Zealand did a fine thing when she refused to name the perpetrator of the Christchurch mosque shootings in 2019, choosing to focus on the victims. Interestingly the media in NZ largely followed suit.

The deep causes

Its very important to grasp the why - that is to say, why people feel they are losing relevance. I readily acknowledge I may not be right on all of this - yet I am sure the direction of travel is correct. These are in no special order of importance – the precise weighting of each cause is frankly too hard to measure.

1.     Globalisation

Elegantly, the philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah tells us that "culture represents not only difference but the elimination of difference”. Starbucks is a culture and a successful one. Successful brands expand into new markets – that’s the logic of business. If they work, they can squeeze out local competition that probably provide cultural diversity or different ways of doing things. Of course it’s not that simple, and Starbucks and McDonalds adapt to local likes and dislikes. Still, the pattern is generally one of a drive towards cultural uniformity across the globe. If that erodes local distinctiveness, how do we then identify ourselves?

Football (soccer) fans will tell you that for decades now there has been an uncomfortable tension between the roots of football (urban community) and the relentless drive to globalise the game from organising authorities like FIFA and the richer clubs themselves, leading to a concentration of power in a few “top tier” European clubs that often pay less attention to their community and more to building a lucrative fan base in other continents.

A butterfly flaps it wings and a hurricane happens thousands of miles away. Chaos theory is well known now. We see it play out in trade: tariff decisions made in Beijing or Washington can lose you your job, fast. A ship stuck in the Suez canal inflate prices everywhere. Covid travels around the world in less than forty days and disrupts the next two years. The global nature of the world reminds us how powerless we seem to be, the scale hard to comprehend – the interconnectivity all too apparent.