A city divided

The past ten days have played out like an episode of The Wire. Burnt out cars are being dragged off the high street, shops are being demolished and rebuilt, communities are starting to clean up and the people in power have begun the obligatory sport of scapegoating and finger pointing.

The Tories dug in first. Quick to deflect any blame away from budget cuts and ‘Big Society’ austerity measures they wagged their finger at a subculture of criminality, greed and immorality - blaming the ‘slow-motion moral collapse’ of Britain. The damage limitation continued with an official criticism of the police.

The underfunded and overworked Met – still reeling from the News of the World scandal – played the only card they had, blaming the riots on ‘highly organised’ street gangs, aided and abetted by fluid and unmanageable social networks.

Labour found themselves in an easier position and struck a more conciliatory tone, calling for a national inquiry to address the cause of the riots. They’ve taken a jab here and there, but they’re fully aware that they too presided over the poverty and dysfunction that has only been growing in communities like Tottenham and Hackney. Blaming Cameron’s ‘Big Society’ alone could only backfire.

Unsurprisingly, the debate has being framed solely by the people in power and their opinions reflect the institutions they are committed to. Instead of genuinely engaging with those affected and those involved, the conversation is drowning in a chorus of political posturing.

This is a predictable response to a complex issue that defies simplistic explanations from the right or the left. The riots involved different groups of people with different agendas and different levels of involvement - many of them overlapping. In situations such as these, cause and effect is seldom linear. Getting to the root of these problems takes longer than a four year political term.

Amidst all the complexity and confusion, what is clear is that there are two Britains. One upwardly mobile and optimistic, the other disaffected and disengaged - and these two groups rarely interact. Awkward lineups at your neighborhood Tesco aside, our contact is limited to peering into their world every so often while watching some tragic reality show about the ‘chavs’ of our country - our new Other.

On the other hand, when they see bankers with their millions in underserved bonuses getting away with the biggest grand larceny of the century, what does it say about the values in our society? The class barriers in Britain are real - and they’ve eroded our ability to find a common ground.

We can either choose to start a genuine dialogue and learn from the events of the past week, or we can ignore each other and hope the systemic issues plaguing our society will solve themselves. They won’t.

Our industry should take note.

Now’s the time to climb down from our ivory towers of analysis and actually get out in the real world. Do we really understand the people on the other side of the cash register - no matter who they are or where they are from?

In too many cases the answer is ‘no’. More and more we’ve become obsessed with measuring the success of our efforts with increasingly abstract metrics - likes, followers, retweets, page views - that at best only provide a one dimensional way of comprehending what people think and feel.

The past week has proven how complex a task it is to understand people’s motivations, hopes, fears and ambitions, but it’s up to us as an industry to find the common ground between companies and customers alike.

We’re not going to learn anything about the world and the people in it, if our version of customer understanding starts and finishes with a Powerpoint deck. Just ask anyone on a Hackney housing estate.

Words by Faisal Siddiqui