Arugula Wars

“In terms of who’s an elitist, I think people have made a judgment that John McCain is not an arugula-eating, pointy-headed-professor type based on his life story.”
- McCain spokesperson Brian Rogers

Brian Rogers is on a crisis PR rollercoaster, but anytime you use the term “friggin” (as in yesterday’s quip, “[Obama] lives in a friggin mansion!”) you’re probably not at the top of your game. Yesterday Rogers also accused Obama of eating arugula, a lettuce that apparently McCain does not endorse. The reference dates back to a comment Obama made at the Rural Issues Forum in Iowa, “Anybody gone into Whole Foods lately and see what they charge for arugula?” Granted, Obama was off his game when he implied that people worried about the price of food were shopping at Whole Foods. But turning the Whole Foods gaffe into an arugula war I’m certain came not from carefully polled analysis but rather from a gut feeling about middle America’s disdain for fancy salad.

Crisis public relations is a lot about following a few simple rules. But great crisis management is about intuition.

There are massive scientific advances attributed to intuition, including discoveries related to sickle cell anemia and the polio vaccine. Some leading intuition scholars predicted in the early 1990’s that “intuition” would define the business climate of the 90’s, proving in retrospect that efforts at intuition aren’t always, well, intuitive. Although a crop of business writers explored the potential of intuition with headlines like the Guardian’s, “In your guts doesn’t mean it’s nut’s,” the packaging of intuition for business purposes hasn’t really take hold in the United States.

Last month the New Yorker took up the subject in an exploration of the science of intuition. A cognitive neuroscientist named Mark Jung-Beeman has tested his hypothesis that intuition occurs in the mysterious right hemisphere of the brain. The New Yorker explains the relevance of his findings this way: “If the left hemisphere excelled at denotation – storing the primary meaning of a word – Jung-Beeman suspected that the right hemisphere dealt with connotation, everything that gets left out of the dictionary definition, such as the emotional charge in a sentence or a metaphor.” In Jung-Beeman’s words, “Language is so complex that the brain has to process it in two different ways at the same time. It needs to see the forest and the trees.”

In difficult public relations moments, most people are focused on the trees. What happened? Why? What does it mean? The trees are important, but the trees are only building blocks of the big picture, the forest.

My resume will always be awkward because some of my best public relations advocacy resulted in news stories that never happened, which of course cannot be revealed in my bio. I examined each case in detail in an attempt to isolate the key that led to the successful confidential outcome. While a few cases have similar circumstances, the single most glaring strategy for success was intuition.

One of the most crystal moments of intuition for me was on a day that my young daughter became very ill. I was walking toward the building that housed her day care center when an ambulance crossed in front of me, sirens blaring. The ambulance could have been heading anywhere, but I knew. I didn’t suspect, I didn’t fear, I just knew and I immediately began to run at full speed. Intuition experts would tell you that some pieces of data in my brain had picked up signals that the left hemisphere didn’t make sense of but that the right hemisphere resolved. Most intuition is absolutely certain and often sudden.

Scientists who study intuition know that turning it on and off is a complex endeavor. What distinguishes true insight from bad guessing or just plain luck? Jung-Berman’s studies show that a specific subset of the cortical areas of the brain must be activated for insight to kick in. In reality, that part of the brain is working on a solving a problem secretly, while the left hemisphere is working consciously. That’s why insight sometimes seems to appear mysteriously or suddenly.

Intuition is linked to concrete things, like experience, confidence, creativity, open-minded attitudes and the like. It’s also linked to relaxation of the cortex, which the New Yorker describes as the “more remote association with the right hemisphere, which will provide the insight”. Moments of relaxation, like in the first moments of wakefulness or in the shower, can facilitate insight. Insight is a tricky business – letting the mind wander can sometimes spark insight, but staying clenched and overly focused on a problem can sometimes block the creative breakthrough.

Years ago an employee of mine complained that he had become so overloaded with tasks that his brain didn’t have time to think creatively. He was right about the value of fostering creative thought in the workplace. This happens in places like ad agencies but not often in places where jobs are not specifically tied to artistic expression.

In the Camino PR offices we’ve got exercise equipment and a lounge and a guitar and a collection of poetry, but I’m thinking we may need to make even more investments in right hemisphere stimulation. I’m thinking of a ping-pong table that can double as a conference table, or an ipod speaker. We’ll see if Loretta agrees at our next staff meeting, given that it would be nice to instead buy office equipment like file cabinets. While I know that time spent playing ping pong is not billable, I bet our most recent client, who has legitimate and important reasons for internal organizational information to not be aired worldwide by the Associated Press, is fully appreciative of our investments in intuition.