29-04-2025
Rules Of Client Engagement, According To Pragmatism
BERLIN, GERMANY - AUGUST 07: Zwei Maenner in Anzuegen geben sich die Hand on August 07, 2014 in ... More Berlin, Germany. (Photo by Thomas Trutschel/Photothek via Getty Images)
For most businesses, referring to clients as numbers or alphanumeric codes is standard. Small and large companies alike benefit from the standardization and efficiency of the practice, while customers can benefit from a privacy perspective. But it also strips the clients of their humanity.
This tension is inevitable, especially for more client-facing roles and customer service occupations such as hospitality, sales, and healthcare, which need to balance personal connection with some detachment to perform best.
In the Apple TV series Severance, the employees in the data refinement department at Luman Industries are completely removed from any knowledge of what the data they work with represents. While this is an extreme example, the degree to which we connect and disassociate at work is a general dilemma.
The philosophical origin story of pragmatism can be a guide here. When Immanuel Kant published his Critique of Pure Reason in 1781, the doctrine he laid out became the basis for philosophical thought thereafter. Kant advocates for rationalism, which establishes a limit on the scope of what we can know. We will never be able to empirically grasp the world beyond our senses, but the key for Kant is that this transcendental world is still real.
With reason alone, we can access the transcendental. According to Kant, reason is, 'the faculty of the unity of the rules of understanding…it is the origin of certain concepts and principles.' Reason allows us to pick up patterns and generalize the world, establishing physically unreachable ideals of religion, morality, and knowledge. It is a freeing thought, giving human beings the ultimate power to determine the world's principles without the need to empirically confirm them.
Then in the early 20th century, a paradigm shift. With the many major post-industrial revolution technological and scientific advances, philosophers were looking for an alternative to Kant and his rationalist philosophy, where the theoretical rules. Maybe, just maybe, the totality of knowledge really can be exposed empirically. Thus came pragmatism, the hot new wave in American philosophy. William James, Charles Sanders Peirce, and John Dewey are generally seen as the movement's founding fathers.
In broadest terms, pragmatism assesses ideas and actions based on their actual usefulness. For Pragmatics, knowledge is simply an instrument for adapting to and controlling the world. In a stark break from Kant, idealistic principles are of no concern to Pragmatics as there are no metaphysics involved.
Likewise, pragmatic morality is not some higher ideal we are continuously striving towards. John Dewey, along with James H. Tufts, put forth this moral groundwork in their 1929 book Ethics. They define ethics not as some transcendental concept but as 'a science.' According to Dewey, an action is morally right if it successfully solves a problem without damaging side effects. Moral progress comes from adapting our habits based on previous consequences.
How can this theory help with determining the degree of distance necessary between yourself and your clients? A Pragmatist would use her previous client exchanges as proof of what works as what doesn't. If getting to know a client to a very personal level negatively impacted her work, then the next exchange would be less personal. If too much distance drives the client away, dial up the connection.
This might seem obvious, but it is not necessarily the norm. Following Kant and striving towards general guidelines is a popular method for dictating client interactions. Instead, try being pragmatic and use your past thoughts and actions as a tool for future success.
