Nature or nurture? (*conditions apply)

One of the eternal struggles in our society is the tug of war between nature and nurture. It's the fundamental question of human behaviour, and the extent to which we are the product of our innate qualities from birth or our personal experiences as we develop.

It's a hotly debated topic – and one that is yet to be conclusively argued one way or the other – but there can be no doubt that our behaviour is shaped over time by the world around us.

You only need to take a quick flick through Jane Fulton Suri's book Thoughtless Acts to see all those intuitive ways we adapt, exploit, and react to things in our environment; things we do without really thinking – the result of her work as a partner at groundbreaking design and innovation firm, IDEO.

And so it is that we act instinctively (nature) or we are conditioned over time (nurture) to respond to our environment in intuitive ways.

One of the ways in which we have been more aggressively conditioned is the concept of fine print, a perennial bane of the modern world that allows businesses to make grand offers in ways that attract you, while at the same time limiting these offers in ways that suit them. We're used to having to read the fine print wherever we see the ubiquitous *conditions apply, and to ignore them is often perilous to say the least.

But last week, the tables were turned when Grill'd, the burger chain, seemingly forgot to include the fine print on this ad promoting 2-for-1 burgers for university students.

As it turns out, what they had intended to include was a disclaimer that limited the offer to the readership of the Uni Times publication in which it appeared. However, it wasn't long before consumers took advantage of the great deal on offer and starting making their way to their local Grill'd.

And that's when the real problems started.

Grill'd realised their error and naively tried to pass it off as a simple oversight. They wrote on their blog that they hoped all of our customers can appreciate the good faith in which the offer was released. But as you can read for yourself in the comments that follow, their customers held them fully accountable.

As it turned out, Nando's then dived in to exploit their competitor's error of judgment by offering to accept the vouchers at their own restaurants.

And only then did Grill'd apologise (finally! – with a message from the founder on their homepage), and agree to accept the 2-for-1 vouchers.

Ultimately, Grill'd failed in their bid to have customers overlook their error. Not simply because they refused to take responsibility and apologise, but more so as a result of the years of conditioning by corporations that have nurtured us to read the fine print.

*Because when any society is exposed to such a sustained effort to nurture our response in a particular way, it isn't too long before it switches from nurture to become second nature.

The dizzy heights of failure (and other stories)

When it comes to social commentary, I have often found music much more insightful than the latest trend report. The Clash, Dylan, The Jam, Nirvana. Poetry, not PowerPoint.

Whatever your personal preferences, Britpop, for example, neatly summed up the attitude of a generation in the UK. So much so that it's only fitting the last word should have gone to Jarvis Cocker of Pulp fame. His first solo release delivered a great one-liner on the state of the nation post Labour's resurgence under Prime Minister Tony Blair.

"The cream cannot help but always rise up to the top. Well, I say: Shit floats."

And, to be perfectly blunt, I think the same is true of many management teams.

David Maister, the renowned professional services thinker, has always said that at any one time, 10% of your workforce are underperforming and should be managed out of the business. Whenever people hear this view (or is it a statistic?), most automatically assume that means 10% of the rank and file, but that would be a gross oversight given the impact of the decisions made by an organisation's top echelon. And, as Jarvis so graphically explained, the cream isn't necessarily the only thing that rises to the top.

The economic crisis has caused a raft of issues. Few more worrying for your top executive than the unwanted exposure brought on by the fact that many of the so-called cream have received hefty bonuses, seemingly as a reward for failure.

Careers have been killed, but at the same time I have also seen countless underperformers actually promoted through failure. No doubt promoted into a position from where they could presumably do less harm, but hardly the right signal for those surging through the ranks on the wave of success. Jarvis would feel vindicated.

It would be easy to see where this is all heading, if it weren't for the fact that failure is often viewed as a good thing.

In short, if you're not failing, you're simply not trying hard enough. And according to many, this recent failure of our economic systems was inevitable. They say it was the recession that had to happen. We had to fail in order to reset the balance.

So it seems our fate was more in the hands of the gods and fickle fortune than the chief executives and their chairmen. It wasn't their fault, just plain old bad luck.

Not quite.

If we were to take Jarvis at face value, things simply rise and fall. But that isn't quite true, actually they go around in cycles. Which conveniently brings me back to the point where I started. The Britpop revolution of the 1990s (Blur, Oasis, Pulp) took many of its cues from the British Invasion of the 1960s (The Who, The Rolling Stones, The Kinks). Similar trends, similar times. And it won't be long before the 1960s come to life again in another age.

The same can be said for our current economic situation, only none of our financial leaders saw it coming with the same vision or insight as those record executives. History will say that we failed, so let's hope we change our tune in time for the encore. If not, then Kevin Rudd – the cream of Canberra – will be back shouting from the very top of the steaming pile about "the usual political shitstorm". Jarvis would be proud.