You don't know what you don't know

“?There are known knowns; there are things we know we know. ... But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don't know we don't know.”

?Donald Rumsfeld

“Labels are a substitute for doing any actual thinking yourself. They give the illusion that you mean something specific but in fact you don’t at all.?Similarly, just because we say “mums”, or “teens” or “millennials” or “LDA+” or “C2D” or “middle class” or “rural” or “elite” or “Tier 1” or “metropolitan media elite” or “opinion formers” or “car buyers”, or even “blokes” does not mean we ipso facto understand them. It just means we know what some people call other people. No more.”

Martin Weigel[1]

In many ways 4 months has felt like such a short amount of time, as though nothing has changed.?I still remembered how to switch my laptop on, keynote was still there, that cursed Teams alert still haunts us all.

?I guess like everyone’s experience of parenthood, the world goes on, it’s you that changes.?I am now also ‘mother’, and as Donald says ‘you don’t know what you don’t know.’?My daughter Lola is 3months old, I think in the first few weeks of having her, I literally wanted to phone my own mother to apologise.

?“I’m sorry I put you through all this” was kind of the vibe I was going for. For all the giddy joy, euphoric love and gorgeous chubby thighs there are also the crushing realities of being a mum.

-??????The hours are really unsociable

The tiredness levels would be classed as unsafe to operate heavy machinery. Quite frankly I felt a danger to myself and others just walking down the street. Every new phase of development seems to come with it a reason for your baby to not sleep. Sleep in general is a constant source of tension. Like water in the Sahara Desert, you will crave it, never have enough of it and at points it feels like it might be the death of you.

?-??????Babies don’t’ give you any feedback

Babies give you no validation whatsoever. We are used to monthly appraisals, we obsess over how to improve ourselves and manage our careers, we place huge demands on ourselves to focus on personal development.?Welcome to a brave new world of communication blackout.?You will work tirelessly and you will never, I repeat never know if you are doing ok.

-??????Your chat is rubbish

You might have had a fascinating life beforehand and been able to regale everyone with your sparkling wit and hilarious anecdotes but be prepared to become a terminal bore.?Poo and wee and how much sleep you’ve had are your new topics of conversation.

?-??????Your values become disposable?

I really wanted to be eco. I bought all the reusable nappies. Then I got shat on 10 times.?Sometimes it was at home, quite often it was in public.?Once it was walking around a grand country house used for the set of Bridgerton and The Crown.?You can see me holding Lola in this picture and it all looks lovely, what you can’t see is that I’m holding a blanket round her to stop the rapidly spreading poo stain all up her back and over me. You just can’t be expected to view not getting regularly shat on as a treat, you just can’t.

But enough of poo and wee. Now I am returning to work, and also, I’m a mother so have a whole new label to navigate.?I am lucky. I have a job I love; I am the business owner, I work with my business partner Gemma who is literally amazing, and my lovely husband is at home with the baby doing shared parental leave right now. This entitles me to a level of freedom that not many have access to.

If I compare this to friends’ experiences, it is a shit show out there.?Business didn’t work for them. It made them feel like garbage.?Expressing milk in the toilet, overlooked for promotions, crap maternity policies, paying as much to childcare as they made in their wages every month, always feeling compromised, always feeling guilty.?

?To be honest I didn’t really understand what the big deal was until I had a baby.

But that’s the point, isn’t it? ?It isn’t surprising that people aren’t really considered if the people doing the considering don’t know what they don’t know and this continues today as an ongoing and present threat.

The most recent MRS study to monitor progress in diversity and inclusion within the research industry still lays bare the scale of the challenge.

?-??????Only 32% people felt that ‘their company attracts a workforce that represents the diversity of the whole community’

-??????Only 9% of ethnic minority researchers believe they are treated fairly and have the same opportunities as other colleagues

-??????Women who work full time report earnings of ￡15,000 a year less than their male colleagues, the pay gap is the widest among those with the most years of experience

-??????Roughly a quarter of all employees who are not older, white, straight and able-bodied men have considered leaving or left their company because of concerns linked to DI&E[2]

?And this is research. An industry which is paid to represent people. ?It doesn’t get any better if you widen the net beyond research to marketing and advertising:

• In creative and non-media agencies with fewer than 200 employees, women account for 36% of those in C-suite roles
• In agencies with more than 200 employees, women account for 30% of those in C-suite roles
• The average age of employees in the industry is 34 years, while 6% are aged 50 years and over.
• Among agencies able to supply ethnic diversity data for their employees, 86% of employees were identified as being from a white background, and 14% from an ethnic minority[3]

Age, gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation. It doesn’t matter what your label the conclusion is that you are not represented enough. You aren’t visible enough. You aren’t decision making enough. You aren’t policy making enough. ??The result is homogeneity.?Basically, everyone thinks the same way.?And when you think the same way, nothing changes because you don’t know what you don’t know.

?BBH have done some work on this as well.?After looking at TGI data they concluded that the lives and opinions of marketers in general operate in a bubble.?As you can see from this chart:

Harry Guild says:

“This is advertising’s biggest problem in a single chart. This is the monoculture. How can we possibly understand, represent and sell to an entire country when we exist in such a bubble? We like to style ourselves as free thinkers, mavericks and crazies, but the grim truth is that we’re a more insular profession than farming and boast more conformists than the military.”[4]

To me the problematic mono-culture of business that Harry Guild talks of isn’t just problematic for representation and diversity, it is also problematic when it comes to commercial business challenges.

?It may be the crushingly tired mother in me, but my patience for doing the same shit over and over and expecting to see different results is wearing a little thin.

The greatest risk to us all in the world of work right now is cohesion. ?It is wrapping ourselves in process and jargon that makes us feel like we really achieved something, when all we achieved was the same as last time.

“Insighting. God help us. Perhaps if we simply called it ‘understanding' we’d might un-bunch our underwear.?Certainly, I think we’d spend less time policing what may and not may not be granted permission to be an insight. We night stop us treating it as some kind of sacred object or magical material that can be ‘mined’ (the deeper the better, of course), or unearthed from the recesses of people’s sub-conscious brains. And it might remind us that insight is neither a guarantee of marketing greatness or indeed the only path to it.”[5]

?It is important that we acknowledge that marketing, research and advertising have all continued in failing to represent or understand the lived realities of a lot of people in society and as a result we aren’t really bringing any new ideas to the party.?

?My own experience returning to work has taught me that while it may well not be wilful neglect, if we can’t at least recognise our own blind spot then nothing changes and I hope that by the time my daughter reaches the work place things are significantly improved.

At The Mix, we get to make things better when we see something that bothers us, that’s why 4day week was so important to us. It’s the joy of running your own business - you get to make changes when you want to.????

The next question we will be wrestling with is this:

How do more diverse voices in our business and in our research, inform more diverse and successful business solutions?

So that’s what we will be doing this Autumn, I’ll keep you posted on what those changes look like. ?I’d appreciate any thoughts you have.?

[1] https://www.martinweigel.org/blog/thelivesofothers

[2] https://www.mrs.org.uk/pdf/CEO-Pledge-Progress-Report.pdf

[3] https://www.martinweigel.org/blog/thelivesofothers

[4] https://www.bbh-labs.com/puncturing-the-paradox-group-cohesion-and-the-generational-myth

[5] [5] https://www.martinweigel.org/blog/thelivesofothers