Unless you hate sweets, most people think chocolate is delicious. If you have a chocolate bar sitting on the kitchen counter, while you’re in the living room; it’s going to attract your attention, where ultimately you’re going to get up and grab it. It hasn’t moved, it can’t play mind games with you or put up banners saying, “Come here and have a bite!” Yet, chocolate can lure anyone’s attention between the ages of 6 to 86.  

 

Say you want to analyze how chocolate could be so delicious. In other words, use objective tools to understand subjective truths. You could take a chocolate bar, put it into a processing machine, have millions of sensors, meters, microchips and gadgets measure all of its molecular components before attempting to determine the sweet derivatives. However, the result is either black or white – you like chocolate or you don’t. Everything boils down to what are your tastes and every person will be different.  

 

So what does that tell us? When we try to analyze a subjective truth by breaking it down objectively, we erase what we’re trying to understand. Therefore, instead of an objective approach, you must take a subjective one.  

 

In business, you never want to use objective, rational thinking to tackle subjective problems, but that’s a common mistake that most business owners make. Objective tools introduce a terrible “lead-into-gold” alchemy into subjective issues. Let’s say we use root-cause analysis to translate a subjective issue like trust. We end up performing the blame game on others that only exacerbates things instead of improving them.  

 

Using objective tools sabotages our ability to see and handle subjective problems and opportunities in every business organization; while subjective tools force you to understand how the concept of objective and subjective are different from each other.  

 

You can achieve trust better with a story about how you made a mistake one day than with a resumé of past achievements.  

 

Everyone wants faith that you know what you’re talking about and mean what you say in business instead of just more information. Faith is a subjective judgment that’s based on personal experience. Since most people can’t experience every aspect of the organization personally, you need to give them a story that inspires faith.

 

Instant mental routines that rely too much on objective criteria often cause us to ignore our natural-born wisdom such as faith. Even in a business meeting, we are all human beings that have loved and lost, trusted and been betrayed. When you share stories that reveal your humanity, you connect with people at the level of human experience – the messy, confusing and emotional reality of people living their lives.