And yet when I returned to the office the next day I was energised by what I’d learnt and quickly shared my chimp anecdotes with the rest of the team. They thought I’d gone ape...
The discussion of chimps came up during the World Class sports psychiatry session, where athlete case studies including Ronnie O’Sullivan, Sir Chris Hoy and Victoria Pendleton were used to discuss the theory of Steve Peter’s Chimp Paradox. That is that the brain has a rational ‘human’ part and an emotional rash ‘chimp’ part (plus another part which stores all our information and experiences).
Managing the chimp, it appears, is key to success. The riders discussed how their unruly chimps could impact on their competition results, with mine in particular seeming to run riot ahead of the dressage phase – to the extent that he seems to spur my horse’s chimp into devastating action too (I’m not quite sure why I’ve referred to my chimp as a male...)
Sir Martin Sorrell has also taken note of Peter’s theory claiming that people in advertising could benefit from disengaging the emotional side of their brain and not being chimps. But I’m not sure that PR professionals would benefit from quite such dramatic action.
Yes, while we don’t want our chimp to run riot to the detriment of our thought processes, presentations, internal communications or crisis handling (and ultimately the success of our businesses), we do still need to retain that emotive insight, which our chimps provide, as it’s so important in our communications industry.
Understanding our clients, target audiences and competitors requires humanity and emotional intelligence – and we need our chimps, albeit carefully under control, to do this.
Director
