When Stereotypes Work

Who would be so stupid to suggest stereotypes are useful? After all, stereotypes limit people. They compartmentalise, discriminate, and are derived from old and outdated social shackles. Bad, bad, bad.

But let’s take a step up, three steps back, spin around and look at it again.

With Brains This Big You Need A Few Shortcuts

Our brains are huge with around 100 billion neurons and millions of different ways that the brain can wire itself up. The slowest speed information passes around your brain is approximately 260 mph and we have around 70,000 thoughts a day. Our brains are truly amazing and not going to be recreated by 3D printers anytime soon. Is it any wonder something that powerful needs a few shortcuts.

Stereotypes are one such cognitive shortcut: a way to group and categorise. Psychologists love to study and discuss stereotypes and how our brain uses them. There are many experiments that can show just how much we rely on them to make many of our quick decisions.

Speedy Communication Takes Serious Time

I’m always in favour of saving time. I’m also in favour of quick and easy communication; a picture that says a thousand words, and a one-pager rather than a thesis. Easy and quick communication, however, is incredibly hard and time-consuming to craft. As the famous quote goes:

“If I Had More Time, I Would Have Written a Shorter Letter.”

Stereotypes come with loads of shared meanings and categorisations which mean you need fewer words. People leap to a shared set of assumptions. Of course, social group stereotyping isn’t a good thing; I’m not in favour of people being marginalised, victimised or held back because of stereotypes. However, I am interested in the ways we can make use of the process part of stereotypes: that cognitive shortcut that aids speedy communication.

Think of this. What if that shortcut process can use less harmful stereotypes that don’t marginalise social groups?

How to Remember When It’s All a Bit the Same

On a previous client project I worked on, we were going through a tender process with a number of suppliers. They presented over two long days back to back (I know, I know, don’t ask me why we did this to ourselves). We had around ten suppliers presenting with only a 15-minute break between each. We’d produced our score sheets, we knew how we were rating them, and we had a process. A very dull sausage factory procurement process.

Unsurprisingly the supplier summaries we were producing failed to connect us with the mix of supplier presentations we’d seen. Without a hook (or cognitive shortcut) they all very quickly started to merge in our memory banks. We couldn’t remember if it was supplier 1 or 5 who we got ‘that feeling of security’ with or which one we thought ‘might break the status quo in a good way’.

Each supplier started to turn in to each other. And when we looked at the paper scorecards that’s all we had, nothing was sticking in our long-term memory other than a jumble of mixed up and confused memories. Oh and a score, we had a score but when it came down to it that didn’t seem to actually help. Luckily though we had a life jacket thrown at us.

A Comfy Pair of Shoes

Somewhere along the way one of the team described a supplier’s offering as ‘a comfy pair of shoes’. It worked; we had an assessment term we could all relate to and it helped us pinpoint that supplier, attaching all the pros and cons to that ‘comfy set of shoes’. That statement replaced 15 minutes of trying to find the right words we all agreed on.

The shoe categorisation process stuck with us and became our informal assessment process. This shoe analogy was more specific and consistently reliable than the empty words and ratings we’d been using. The stereotype required far less brainpower and was significantly more efficient than the procurement rating score. Nearly five years after those presentations I can still remember the shoes we used.

Here is what is nice about shoes when discussed with a diverse group of people: you find there isn’t really an in-group and as such, there also isn’t the discrimination or prejudice you get with actual people-related stereotypes. In the workplace, there is natural diversity in the shoes people wear. Now it’s not perfect but there is much less racial or gender bias (to an extent) with a shoe than a person. So there is no socially incorrect conflict but you do keep the quick categorisation and the attributed values which means you are making use of the shortcut part of stereotypes.

Talking Cultures

There is another reason I really like this cognitive shortcut. Use of object-based stereotypes (shoes, cars, food, weather, sweets etc) is a great tool when analysing anything to do with corporate culture. The reason is that culture is such a complex system with so many parameters at play that you will always struggle to describe it using only words.

Culture has a feel, it has a language, it has emotions and behaviours, it has artefacts, power dynamics and it has a way of doing things that is hard to describe. And in the procurement example above cultural fit was really important. So what happened with the supplier selection example we talked about earlier?

The chosen supplier was selected because they were so different from the status quo. This was an airline so the shoe of choice we decided that best represented the culture was a ‘navy heeled court shoe’ as worn by cabin crew. The previous supplier would have probably also been a ‘court shoe’ and it was felt that it was time for a change.

Although many suppliers chose to present themselves as ‘court shoes with a close cultural fit’, the chosen supplier was a ‘Birkenstock’ with the very intention to provide something fresh and different. A wise choice and happily also one now we’re looking back with the supplier still in situ.

You Can Never Have Too Many Shoes

Let me use one last shoe example from a very different context to illustrate just how much information stereotypes can communicate with a few words.

There was a dilemma when invited to a friends 40th birthday party in Whitechapel, London. The challenge was that dress codes differ massively across London with local ‘tribes’ dressing very differently from one tube station to the next. So how do you work out what to wear? Is it high-end cool, Shoreditch low key, high street casual or art gallery professional after-work drinks? How to solve this quickly? A text message to a friend:

‘Dress code? Talk shoes.’

‘Heels with trendy socks.’

Dress code communicated and understood. Outfit fitted in perfectly. Stereotypes are great when shoes are involved.

If you are ready to start thinking about your teams as shoes (or you want to find out more about how this can create diverse thinking and innovation) then have a look at our Psychological Safety course here.