US Sends Planeload of African and Asian Illegal Immigrants to Panama

Incident creates story, story creates mindset, mindset determines action

In Unreasonable Hospitality: The Remarkable Power of Giving People More than They Expect, restaurateur Will Guidara espouses the 95-5 principle, people remember the extraordinary 5%. A business must keep their costs lower than their revenues to stay in business. As a leader, he was ruthless about efficiency and cost-cutting for 95% of operations. But to be extraordinary, a business must also create memories, and an unreasonable extravagance in that other 5% would create those stories that people remember.

A cafeteria/take-out restaurant serves ice cream cups with a plastic spoon. But what if, instead of a half cent plain plastic spoon, the ice cream came with a 25 cent spoon that was a work of art? People would remember that. The rest of their eating experience could have been mundane, the food might have been a bit overpriced, the service might have been adequate, but people will remember that restaurant as extraordinary because their closing experience was such a memorable moment.

Chip Heath and Dan Heath describe building memorable moments in The Power of Moments: Why Certain experiences Have Extraordinary Impact.

“When we assess our experiences, we don’t average our minute-by-minute sensations. Rather, we tend to remember flagship moments: the peaks, the pits, and the transitions. We should be engineering what we do, not for the whole experience, but to give the peak experiences that people will remember.”

Donald Trump is the par excellence of creating memorable moments. Sending a planeload of people to Panama monopolizes media. The story has everything: illegal immigrants, Panama bending to Trump after he threatened them, airplanes, military, international relations.

If you are anti-Trump, sending a planeload of African and Asian people in shackles and locking them in a jail with no access to anyone resources, maybe even starving them, separating them from their families, while they wait for some next indignity or death grabs your attention and fans your disgust, anger, and anxiety.

If you are pro-Trump, you see all over the media how he is dealing with immigration, which reinforces your view that he is solving the problems of violence and job-stealing by purging the country of their causes.

Each side is captivated by the incident and creates a story that bolsters their beliefs.

Our brains create stories as shortcuts so that we can rapidly make sense of situations. Those stories are just shortcuts. They are not truth, but we treat them as truth and we act on them.

Remember, this is a made for media, made for outrage event. It’s one event. It’s like evaluating a whole restaurant experience on the basis of a plastic spoon. Even if the stakes are bigger.