I’m suffering from a bad case of FOMO. The Falling Walls Lab pitch competition recently came to Halifax, Nova Scotia—just three hours from where I live—and I wasn’t there.
Falling Walls is an international organization that gives students and early-career researchers the opportunity to pitch their groundbreaking research in front of a public audience. I’m disappointed to have missed the Halifax event because pushing down walls is exactly what we do at Clarity Connect.
We enable people with advanced knowledge to clarify their ideas and communicate them in ways that connect across various kinds of barriers. Sometimes those barriers are institutional, as in the walls of the Ivory Tower that make research a black-box activity for most people. Other times, they’re hurdles created by cultural diversity, industry segmentation, or competing priorities of different organizations or systems.
Most of the clients we work with are well aware of the walls that need to come down. They talk about how difficult it is to bridge the gap between themselves and an unfamiliar audience, such as policymakers or industry leaders. They also describe how frustrating it is to try to mobilize knowledge across silos within an organization, a system, or a set of interconnected systems.
As I’ve been pouting about missing the Falling Walls Lab, I’ve been reflecting on this human tendency to focus on barriers instead of bridges.
While it’s important to recognize obstacles to communication and relationship-building, spending too much time thinking about walls can be counterproductive. It can lead to what I call Fortress Mentality, an attitude that subtly undermines your ability to connect with the people you want to reach.
An Extreme Example of Fortress Mentality in Action
I’m what researchers call a “boundary spanner,” someone who easily moves between different worlds. This may sound like a great trait to have, unless you find yourself in an institution with a command-and-control structure and rigid boundaries between departments.
I once found myself in this situation and learned a hard lesson in how Fortress Mentality works and the damage it can do. I’d just been hired into a newly created role, and my job description listed one of my responsibilities as building collaborative relationships outside the department.
I took this duty seriously and started setting up coffee chats and informal meetings across the organization. At one of these meetings, the group meandered from the official agenda and started brainstorming some new ways to work together. This seemed to me an innocent activity, and I was careful to let the group know that I didn’t have the authority to commit to any ideas. I’d have to take them back to my boss for their consideration.
Still flushed with enthusiasm from the brainstorm, I shared the list of possible projects with my boss, who flew into a rage. How dare I engage in a discussion with another department without them in the room!
I took a step back to collect myself and explained how the brainstorm had emerged organically from the discussion. “Should I have stopped the discussion by refusing to participate?” I asked.
Apparently so. If my boss wasn’t in the room, I wasn’t permitted to have any discussions about possible collaborations with anyone outside the department. Not in a meeting, not in a hallway conversation, not at an organizational event.
That’s what Fortress Mentality looks like in the extreme, and it’s more common than you might think.
In cases like the scenario I’ve just described, the costs can be significant. As a result of that conversation, and others like it, my department missed several promising opportunities to advance our mission. The department also lost a high-performing employee. Prevented from doing the job I’d signed up for, I left my role before my contract expired.
In other situations, Fortress Mentality is more subtle, and if we take a hard look in the mirror, most of us fall into shades of it from time to time. Each time we start focusing on the walls, rather than on what we can do to dismantle them, we compromise our ability to move innovative ideas forward.
Four Everyday Examples You May Recognize
Here are four ways I’ve seen Fortress Mentality show up among researchers and other innovators, and in my own mind when I’m not vigilant. Recognize any of them?
- Using “Us” versus “Them” language. How you talk to yourself about your audience matters. Do you think about them as an enemy or obstacle you have to conquer, or do you see yourself as playing with them on the same team?
I caught onto the difference between these two perspectives early in my career as a university professor. When I spent time in the faculty lounge, I noticed that the most cheerful colleagues stayed out of the disparaging chitchat about students. Instead, they talked about learning along with their students, and they seemed to appreciate the privilege of getting to know the individuals in each of their classes.
Rather than thinking of your audience as your “target,” as marketers do, try thinking of them as your collaborators. That will go a long way to immunizing you against Fortress Mentality, and it will make your communication tasks more enjoyable too.
- Defending academic rigour or technical accuracy. We become attached to what we create. That’s human nature. And people who create knowledge tend to become attached to it in its entirety. They naturally want to prevent it from being oversimplified or represented only partially.
This instinct to safeguard complex ideas and data can come across as stonewalling, but if you proceed with care, it is possible to take a more flexible approach.
Intellectual integrity must be non-negotiable, but how you achieve that can be negotiated in many different ways. Rather than fixating on what you have to lose in terms of complexity and accuracy, focus on what you want to win. Why are you sharing your innovative ideas with your audience? What do you want to achieve?
Starting with your purpose in mind allows you to let go of some of the intricacies of theory and data analysis so you can share your discoveries in ways that make sense to your audience.
- Insisting on technical language. One of the perks of being an expert is that you have at your disposal an incredibly specialized vocabulary. You’re never at a loss for words because if the exact word you need to describe a novel discovery doesn’t exist, you can always invent it.
Outside your circle of expertise, however, people don’t have access to your rich cache of technical terms, and you won’t get far by insisting on using language your audience doesn’t get. It’s true that some technical terms are irreplaceable, but in my experience working with researchers and technical experts across a wide array of disciplines, those are very few.
One of the exercises I often recommend to clients is to go through a document or slide deck with a highlighter and mark each technical term they use. Then we review each of these in light of their audience’s profile, translating geek-speak into everyday English wherever possible. Usually, we’re left with less than a handful of terms that can’t be translated and need to be defined instead.
- Ignoring the audience’s expertise. When experts consider a lay audience, they tend to make one of two common mistakes: they either assume the audience is made up of experts similar to them, or they assume the audience knows nothing at all.
The first assumption leads to some of the issues we’ve already addressed. The second makes you equally vulnerable to Fortress Mentality because it positions you as a lone guardian of knowledge.
Your audience may not know much about thermodynamics or social finance, but it’s critical to recognize how much they do know in other domains. They are experts in their own right in areas where your knowledge may be at a novice level.
I’m reminded of this each time I speak with a new or prospective client. I bring to the conversation expertise in communication and learning, and at the same time, I am a rookie in their subject area. Just yesterday, for instance, I spoke with a founder in “wellness tech,” a field I wasn’t even aware of before we met. During our conversation, I wrote down 10 different technical terms I need to Google before our next chat as well as two terms describing their audience.
The number one strategy for avoiding Fortress Mentality is to consciously practise adopting what Buddhists call Beginner’s Mind. Approach your audience with humility and openness, and you will easily unlock the trust you need to transform your ideas into tangible impact.
One Question to Shift Your Mindset
To shift your focus from barriers to bridges, try asking yourself this question: “Where is there common ground?”
Fortress Mentality tricks experts into believing they occupy an island of knowledge, moated about by deep waters of misunderstanding and distrust. But what if that weren’t so?
What if you and the audiences you want to interest in your innovative ideas share common interests and values? What if, at the end of the day, you want to help the same people, solve the same problems, achieve a similar vision?
If you’re addressing the right audience, the people who are ready and able to help further your mission, you’ll absolutely be able to identify shared vision and values. In this case, the bridges you need will become so obvious they’ll almost build themselves.
On the other hand, if you can’t find common ground between you and your audience, then it’s not even worth trying to build a bridge. Remember the parable about the house built on rock and the house built on sand? Communication developed for an audience that’s not fundamentally aligned with your values and your goals is built on quicksand. Time to reassess your strategy and perhaps consider approaching a different audience.
Either way, your first responsibility as a communicator is to search for common ground. To do that requires the humility and openness I’ve mentioned, a willingness to leave Fort Knowledge without your expert armour, explore new territory, and build new relationships. When you intentionally avoid Fortress Mentality, you embark on a discovery journey that could be the highlight of your career!
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