Palatable messaging and finicky rats

Photo of cupcakes by Brooke Lark on Unsplash

I read some talking points recently — supplied to a client by their HR business partner — that were engineered to help an executive feel less upset about a decision that did not go in his favor. The comments were clearly designed to butter him up. To continue the metaphor, they were also sugar-coated and had very little nutritional content.

Reading them reminded me of a 1974 study done on 20 rats.

In the study (paywall access only), researchers set out to see if they could fatten up lab rats faster with processed human foods than with the usual approach of providing more lab food, Purina pet chow. The results were remarkable. Provided with a variety of highly processed human foods — including salami, chocolate chip cookies, marshmallows, cheese, milk chocolate, peanut butter — the rats rapidly became obese, far exceeding previous attempts to fatten them.

Okay that doesn’t seem exactly revelatory to us today. But one of the side effects of their processed-food-induced obesity was that the lab rats changed neurologically too. After returning to their regular diet they lost the weight they had gained. But they were now finicky about their food — less motivated to eat anything that wasn’t what they had grown accustomed to. They now craved the more palatable processed foods.

This is what happens with the constant diet of benign talking points that managers use — often encouraged by risk-averse HR leaders — to make facts more palatable for their people. The phrase I often hear as justification is “I don’t want to upset them”, or “I don’t want to make them feel bad”. This seems benign, but the packaged output is the nutritional equivalent in messaging of what those rats got for a diet.

When we seek to engineer what we say to be as palatable as possible, we train ourselves and everyone around us to hear only pleasantries and we reduce everyone’s tolerance of the truth. It would be one thing if in fact what we have to say is purely pleasant. More often the truth is bittersweet. It’s got roughage and texture and weird flavors. Some kernel that you have to digest to get the real value. When we process it highly, we strip out the hard parts and deprive people of doing the work to get real insight.

Remember the scene from A Few Good Men, when Jack Nicholson, playing the scowling general, yells “You can’t handle the truth!” to the courtroom? He could be yelling that to many boardrooms today. If you want a culture that can handle the truth — a culture that can handle the challenges and messiness of real life without getting finicky and dispassionate — how about spending less time processing and packaging messages, and more time creating the conditions for people to hear and speak the truth.

To less finickiness and more truth-telling,

Tom and team

Study referenced: Dietary obesity in adult rats: Similarities to hypothalamic and human obesity syndromes, Anthony Sclafani and Deleri Springer.