What Makes People Tick: The Three Hidden Worlds of Settlers, Prospectors and Pioneers

Author’s Introduction

Other People

This book is about a remarkable system for uncovering human motivations, not just at the level of the individual but amongst groups, even at the level of nation states. It is about how ‘people tick’ not in one but in three different ways.

‘Values Modes’ is not my system, it belongs to a couple of researchers behind a small company called CDSM - Cultural Dynamics Strategy and Marketing. It has been used by organisations from Greenpeace to Shell, from the US Marines to ice cream manufacturers. The reason you probably haven’t heard of it is that it doesn’t get taught in schools or colleges (it’s not academic), it’s proprietary (that is, the inner workings are a commercial secret) and until now, there’s never been a book about it.

The ‘other people’ question has pre-occupied philosophers and writers for generations. Nothing, said Mark Twain, so needs reforming as other people’s habits. Hell, said Jean Paul-Sartre, is other people. Much of the time ‘other people’ are simply frustrating. ‘People’ aren’t rational, ‘people’ seem to want things that we don’t think they should, and they change, for no apparent reason. As anyone who has dealt with them will tell you, ‘the public’ in particular, can seem unreliable and illogical and inconsistent.

Whether it involves friends or family, colleagues at work, customers or the proverbial ‘man on the street’, we all have problems with ‘other people’. If only they had an ounce of common sense, if only they were as rational as we are, then life would be so much easier, better, more sensible, more enjoyable.

Even so, in daily life, most of us can get along with other people by adopting simple rules of thumb. We must, we may tell our children, make allowances; or we may try to put ourselves in other’s shoes, or, we need to remember, that there’s nowt so queer as folk. This works in daily life, and we tend to gravitate to those who think like us, and act most like us: they are ‘our kind of people’.

If however, like a public health official, you are trying to persuade a nation to change its smoking habits, or like a politician or campaigner, you are trying to generate consensus to tackle a threat like climate change, or you need to resolve that neighbour dispute, or sell an idea to your boss, or even organise a great day out with ‘something for everyone’, then it really matters that you can persuade people. What makes different people tick then becomes vitally important.

I was once a natural scientist but for thirty years, my business has been getting ‘other people’ to do things. I make my living from devising campaigns, mainly for environment, human rights or other ‘good causes’ but for all practical purposes, doing much the same things as those employed in marketing, PR and ‘politics’, even advertising. I’ve provided communications techniques and campaign planning for UN agencies like UNICEF, NGOs like WWF, Friends of the Earth, Amnesty International, Greenpeace, Wildlife Trusts, the National Trust; organisations supporting fathers, and people with drugs problems, and those pursuing freedom of speech. I’ve devised consultations and communications for public bodies like the Environment Agency, the Home Office and Natural England, and trained staff from groups like the Open Society Foundations, the Pew Foundation and the chief executives of numerous charities, to the police; have contributed to university courses and had clients ranging from the Law Society to community action groups.

Over time, I’ve combed the ‘dark arts’ of communications, the crafts and sciences of the world of persuasion, and politics and activism, to try and give myself, my causes and my clients the maximum chance of success. Campaigners have learnt the hard way that you need to get things in the right order to motivate people - with no problem for example, a solution is not a solution to anything. And unless people recognize the problem and solution as fitting hand in glove or like two jigsaw pieces, as you do, then no matter how ‘aware’ you make them, how loud you shout or even how many inducements you offer, they are unlikely to buy your ‘message’.

The disciplines of creating advertising propositions, the tracking of ‘issues’ by sociologists, the field studies of anthropologists, the examination of cultural differences about things like respect for authority, the techniques of political pollsters, systems of personality analysis like MBTI, the honing of behavioural communications models like NLP for sales or even hypnotherapy, the segmentations by lifestyle used by marketers, the understanding of how to use signs, symbols, even colour combinations, to send unwritten signals, and the findings of cognitive scientists about how our brains unconsciously construct ‘reality’ before we consciously relate to it, all these have important things to offer communications.

So I’ve spent half a lifetime accumulating tips and tricks and systems for campaigns and persuasion, mostly gleaned from people cleverer than me. I published some of them in a book, How To Win Campaigns - which one reviewer described as ‘Pandora’s Book’: a double-edged compliment. But of all the things I’ve come across, none is more powerful, more widely applicable and fundamental, than being able to recognize people as different by what makes them tick.

Which is why I hope you’ll find this book interesting: it lifts the lid on human motivations in a practical way, which also chimes with theory, and which you will recognize everywhere from ‘issues’ and disputes to parties and past-times and family activities, work, shopping, politics and the rest of day to day life. Once you can do this, you won’t ever see the world in the same way again. Unconscious values do not explain everything that makes any individual ‘tick’ - our culture, our genetics, our personality, our experiences all help shape ‘us’. I make no claim that values ‘explain everything’ - but if you need to communicate for a job, motivation is the key. It’s the gold dust of communications, whether you’re looking at relationships, or sales, or global politics. Seeing what people do is relatively easy. Understanding why is much more useful - but the problem is, most of the time we don’t even know ourselves why we do something, we just do it because we feel we must, because we ‘have to’.

Of course if this ‘system’ meant that there were as many different ‘types’ as there are people, then it would be useless but Values Modes puts people into a manageable number of groups, which, once you get to know them, are almost as distinct as twelve nationalities. One day, I hope to write a book about those twelve motivational languages but this book introduces the three big Values Worlds which all those groups live in: Settler World, Prospector World and Pioneer World. When viewed from another World, ‘other people’ may look strange; their behaviours or attitudes may make no sense.

The Wizard Of Romford

I need to say few words about Pat Dade. Had he been born in another age, I’m sure Pat would have been a wizard rather than a company director. Together with his main business partner Les Higgins, Pat runs Cultural Dynamics, the company behind the ‘Value Modes’ system (www.cultdyn.co.uk).

Pat is an effusive rather larger-than-life Oregonian from the West Coast of the United States. As I describe in Chapter One, I first met Pat in 1991 when I worked at Greenpeace. Back then he struck me as a dapper ex-hippy with a ready smile and a twinkle in his eye which suggested that he might be about to pull off an extraordinary conjuring trick - and for us, he did. Although the terms Settlers, Prospectors and Pioneers hadn’t been invented at the time, he showed us that because the world had changed, our ‘issue’, concern at the global environmental crisis, had moved from the recesses of Pioneer World, towards the shores of Prospector World, and even Settler World. So it was that the good ship Greenpeace found itself in strange and until then, uncharted waters, and so attracting the attention of new and different types of people.

That insight felt a bit like magic, although in truth the magic behind it is complex statistics. But as the astronomer Arthur C Clarke said, any sufficiently advanced technology appears to be magic. Then once we’re used to something - electricity, the phone, Values Worlds - we take it for granted.

Pat’s role is hard to pin down but I suppose ‘market researcher’ comes closest. Unlike me, Pat loves finding patterns in data. He developed his analytical skills working with the US military during the Cold War and went on to work in a metals factory in Essex and discovered an interest in industrial psychology. From there he progressed into the study of values: the needs that make us do things. Pat should have written a book about this long ago but the linear format is not his thing. A conversation with Pat Dade is often like an interview with Baloo the Bear crossed with Yoda from Star Wars (these days he is larger and white haired - less dapper, more wizardish). Ask him about getting people to recycle and the answer may well range over the divergence of Indo-European languages, Timothy Leary and burgers before turning to developments in neuroscience. Discovering new patterns is his mojo, not explanations.

And the Romford bit? When I met Pat he had, incongruously, lived for years in Romford. The English town of Romford on the edge of London, is thoroughly feet-on-the-ground territory, and about as unlikely a place for social sorcery as you can get. Still, it must have something about it¹.

I lost touch with Pat for over a decade but since 2003 I’ve run dozens of projects using values and CDSM’s system, and introduced it to researchers who were sceptical at first (thinking they already ‘knew all about Maslow’), and to organisations who were reluctant to try a ‘new’ way of looking at things to start with but who have since become enthusiastic converts. Some of them have changed their whole organisational strategy because of it.

As a result I’ve found myself an unofficial advocate of using values, and people keep saying to me there ought to be a book about this. So here it is. I hope it helps shed a bit of light on things in your world.

Acknowledgements

I am very grateful for all the help I’ve had in this and other projects, from Les Higgins at CDSM. Les is the number cruncher behind the Values Modes system, an electronics engineer and a serious amateur astronomer with a fixed observatory in his garden, who has found the interior world of human beings as fascinating as the stars and planets. He and Pat have developed the CDSM system.

Lindsay Dade, Pat’s wife, has worked hard to make this book happen: without her, it would still be setting new records for literary gestation periods. And thanks to Pat himself, who is unstintingly generous with his time, not just to me but to many students and others interested in values. Thanks as well, to Natural England, the RSPB, Action Aid and others have generously allowed us to use some of their examples.

I’d also like to acknowledge John Scott and his colleagues at KSBR (www.ksbr.co.uk), brilliant researchers who have collaborated with me on many of the projects referred to in the book, and most of all, to say thank you to Sarah Wise my partner, and my children Amazon and Willow, for their support, inspiration and tolerance.

Lastly I’d like to thank my father, Victor Rose, who when I was at school, first got me to realise that what seemed real, or what seemed to have been my own conclusions, might actually have been the result of someone else’s communications plan, when he gave me books to read such as Vance Packard’s The Hidden Persuaders², and The Shocking History of Advertising by E S Turner³.

1 www.romford.org records that Romford was once famous for the making of leather breeches, hence the Essex proverb: Go to Rumford to have your backsides new bottomed. The comic actor William Kemp stayed at Romford during his Morris dance from London to Norwich in 1599, and the Beatles played there twice in 1963, once in the Odeon, once at the ABC cinema.

² The Hidden Persuaders, Vance Packard (first pub 1957) Ig Publishing; Reissue edition (2007)

³ The Shocking History of Advertising, E S Turner, Penguin in association with Joseph; Revised ed edition (1965)

Chapter 1

The Three Worlds of Prospectors, Settlers and Pioneers

Our senses tell us that we all live in one world, and – true enough – we share one planet. But our senses mislead us if we conclude that we all experience the same reality, and that fundamentally, we all see the world in the same way. If we did, then ‘what worked’ for one could work for all, and we’d just need to provide enough facts or education, or the same type of inducements to resolve any argument, or end any conflict.

In reality, as far as communication and motivation are concerned, we have not one world but three. These three worlds are hidden from us because they are not physical but psychological: yet what divides them are our most deeply held beliefs about what is ‘really important’. For Settlers, the deep forces draw people to seek out safety, security, identity and belonging. For Prospectors, it is the yearning for success, the search for esteem of others, and self-esteem, while for Pioneers, the constant drive is for new ideas, the quest for connections waiting to be made, and living a life based on ethics.

We can all recognize these forces as ideas, but people in the three worlds feel them very differently, and so deeply that we are rarely conscious of them ourselves. Once upon a time these worlds were known only as theories but today it is possible to lay them bare, thanks to a host of measurements which cut through the confused fog of opinions and attitudes and reveal a hidden template which underlies human behaviours, from the level of the individual, through clubs and communities, up to the dynamics of nation states.

The journey this book takes you on will make those worlds visible. If you want to run a business or a campaign, engage in politics or understand current affairs, be ‘persuasive’, influence people, win friends or simply understand what is going on in the world, it will help to understand these three very different worlds, and what makes them tick.

This book is about what shapes these worlds, and how, although we look out through them, we don’t normally see them. The different motivational forces of these worlds exert consistent pulls on our behaviour, and the choices that we make. These forces may pull people from different worlds apart, leading to some activities dominated by just one world, be it Settler, Prospector, or Pioneer. When politicised and polarised, such ‘values clashes’ can become very nasty.

In other cases, people from two or three worlds may do the same thing, yet for fundamentally different reasons. Because we tend to adjust our opinions to fit with our behaviours, this can lead to disagreement about why something should be done, even when there is agreement that it should be done.

Either way, when the forces underlying the worlds of Prospectors, Settlers or Pioneers lead them to clash, or to disagree over ‘the reasons why’, it can cause a lot of misunderstanding, puzzlement and frustration, even conflict. This happens at any scale from the individual, through to groups, right up to countries.

When an offer or activity or idea is in tune with the underlying forces, it not only ‘makes sense’ but it ‘feels right’. When these deep-seated drivers collide, we can see that others are fundamentally wrong, on the basis of ‘common sense’. That is, on our version of ‘common sense’.

Are we really prey to invisible unconscious forces over which we have no control? What an awful thought. Isn’t this the opposite of what we were taught at school, when we are told about the importance of forming political views, and growing up making sensible choices, about weighing up options, gathering the facts and deciding for ourselves what to do as rational independent human beings in everything from sex to social issues and shopping?

Yes, it is pretty much the opposite – and there’s a very good case for saying we should all be educated about how human minds really work because if we remain blind to such influences we can be more easily exploited by others, more prone to frustration, and less happy.

Professor George Lakoff made just such a call – for a ‘New Enlightenment’ – in his book The Political Mindi. Lakoff studies how ‘framing’ influences the way we perceive options, and how ‘frames’ act as unconscious mental boxes or metaphors which can easily be used to manipulate the outcomes of media or political debates. It is called ‘reflexive’ thinking because, like a knee-jerk reflex, it happens but we only consciously think about it after it’s happened. ‘Reflective’ thinking, which concerns analysis and synthesis, philosophy and weighing up facts and figures and arguments, is what we are told from school onwards is the ‘right’ and ‘objective’ way to think, superior to ‘mindless emotion’.

In the best-selling Influence – The Psychology of Persuasionii, Robert Cialdini explored another area of reflexive thinking – the ‘rules of thumb’ that influence behaviour, known as ‘heuristics’. The Consistency Effect is one of these – the way we adjust our opinions to fit with what we actually do. We do this because it would be uncomfortable to have an opinion at odds with our actions. It’s why you mostly can’t change behaviours by changing opinions, and why you can’t understand motivation from opinion polling.

Another heuristic is ‘Liking’, the well known effect in which if we like someone, for example if they are made to look more attractive, we are more likely to treat them well, whether it means rewarding them with our vote, giving them better treatment or service, or agreeing with them after hearing a debate.

Other heuristics include Effort, Exchange and Social Proof. These are used regularly in sales and marketing and, increasingly, by social marketers, political strategists and campaigners. The Effort heuristic simply says that we value something more if we have invested effort in it, than if the same thing was acquired with no effort. This may be seen as ‘common sense’ but is clearly not ‘rational’ in a utilitarian economic sense. There is no rational reason why the £5 you found in the street is less valuable than £5 for which you worked hard but there are of course emotional reasons. ‘Exchange’ is the reason why some charities make you a small gift, such as an unsolicited free pen in a direct mail envelope, when asking for your money. The reflex of ‘giving if you receive’ is deeply embedded.

Social Proof pops up all over the place. It can be a major problem with emergency planning. When a siren or fire alarm goes off, people tend not to respond immediately but first to check to see if it is a real alarm, if it is an immediate threat and if it applies to them personally. The trouble is they do this not by following rationally set rules but by looking to see what others are doing. If everyone is doing the same thing, they may wrongly conclude that there is no threat and ignore the alarm. Similarly, when hearing there may be a flood, people often go to the riverbank or floodwall to assess the risk, copying others. So when the levee breaks, they may all be standing in the worst possible place. We could go on – there are many more ‘heuristics’.

So many unconscious reflexive influences such as framing and heuristics dominate our lives that we hardly make any ‘reflective’ thought-through decisions free from their influence.

Yet each frame is a one-off and heuristics are just rules of thumb, and are right ‘on average’, that is, right more often than they are wrong. If you assume all people are the same, then using heuristics is likely to help get you what you want. But in reality people are not all the same, and although every person is unique, we