Lessons beyond the speed limit

When bubbles collide

The room was a glorious jumble. There was a young mum caught speeding on the school run, a retired tradesman with mildly offensive opinions, a student in London, a woman from Ghana with little English. And me, a marketer, working at a central London consumer research agency.

We had accidentally become what felt like a perfect randomly assigned audience focus group. Although nobody had opted in to be there.

Over the course of a few hours spent with these people, two things stood out to me. Firstly, it was clear how many people in the room had a much greater distrust of power than I did. Questioning why they were there. Replaying their speeding incident time and time again. Shaking their head at the instructor’s response. This surprised me as, when I received my speeding letter, I was annoyed at myself, but I didn’t feel hard done by. I quickly and thankfully booked the course, wanting to get it out the way as soon as possible.

Secondly, the underlying cause of these varied reactions became apparent. For someone like me, a car was a luxury. Living in London, my car was rarely used, apart from occasions where I was leaving the city. The impact on me of losing my licence would have been negligible compared with others in the room. For them, their usual life would shut down without their ability to drive. Who would take the kids to school? Would they need to move house? Would they lose their job?

Without the speed awareness course, I would have struggled to recognise and empathise with these differing opinions and feelings from outside my bubble.

I’m certain I would have assumed that more people felt like I did.

Living in bubbles: the comfort and the cost

That’s because, most of the time, we live in bubbles. Work bubbles, family bubbles, social bubbles. We gravitate towards people who look, think, and act like we do. It’s comfortable, for sure, but it’s limiting and restrictive. And it’s hard to foster social cohesion and empathy when our various life paths never cross.

Marketing: one of the hardest bubbles to burst

And professionally, we’re in one of the toughest bubbles to burst. Marketing is a notorious bubble of homogeneity.

Compared with the rest of the UK, people working in marketing are more likely to be younger, educated and urban. And they’re more than twice as likely to have been brought up in an affluent household. So, in our formative years, which shape who we are and what we believe, many of us had very different experiences from most of the people we now spend our workdays marketing to.

To compound this issue, we’re all susceptible to something called false consensus bias – the tendency to assume that others think like us. For example, in surveys, less than a third of the UK population say they want to “be unique and stand out from the crowd”. But people in marketing predicted that this number would be almost double (57%). That’s a major problem for an industry whose primary goal is to persuade these people.

Final thoughts: lean into the collision

Five years after my speed awareness course, I moved out of my London-agency bubble to live and work in my new Midlands-agency bubble. From my desk now, I look out at MOT centres, light industrial sheds, car dealerships and a big Tesco. It’s certainly closer geographically and culturally to the heartland of the UK. But I’m acutely aware I’ve swapped my bubble in the capital to a similar-if-different regional variant.

So how do we break out from our bubbles and see the world more clearly?

Professionally, it means looking to work with people who don’t fit in the box of “people like me”. It means a consistent and healthy questioning of whether we’re dealing with a personal hunch or truth. It means striving, however difficult that is, to ensure diversity of voices in everything we do.

And personally, it’s about constantly recognising and challenging my own beliefs. And looking for opportunities to challenge them, just as I did on the course. It’s something we should all do.

I’m not suggesting you drive above the speed limit to find these experiences. But I am suggesting you recognise your own bubbles and the limitations they bring. And, where possible, look for chances to burst them. Step into rooms you wouldn’t normally enter. Talk to people you would normally pass by.

Listen to voices you rarely hear.