Business potential lying about

The Australian Financial Review Tuesday, 13 May 2008

Some people are alarmed when they sit across the table from David Matsumoto and discover that he is an expert at reading people's expressions and detecting their hidden emotions. But most are fascinated with the idea that someone can detect their inner feelings, and their lies, just by catching the fleeting expressions that flicker across their faces.

These momentary grimaces, nose wrinkles, frowns and winces are called micro-expressions and are the involuntary signals that something else is going on under the surface.

Matsumoto is a founding partner of the Paul Ekman Group, which consults mostly to the US security services on how to detect people who may be threats. Until now the Ekman group's research and training has been focused almost exclusively on the security services but now, an Australian consultancy with a similar profile of clients has decided to bring these techniques to the corporate sector.

Matsumoto was in Australia last week to finalise plans to partner with Canberra-based New Intelligence consultancy.

New Intelligence managing director Steve Longford has seen the potential to expand his security-related services into the corporate sector.

Longford says the Ekman training courses will aim to help business people improve their ability to “read” others, build a rapport, be more persuasive and make better decisions.

Matsumoto says clients come with different missions: "Some want to build rapport. Others want to know if someone is lying to them. Some of the people have a 30 second interaction with somebody and they just need to know whether there is something suspicious or not. Some people are in long-term interviews."

Matsumoto says the greatest benefits from the research for business is that it will help people get a better handle on their own emotions, as well as helping them with their ability to get along with other by reading people and their non-verbal behaviours. "People want to understand why others behave in a certain way, but if you want to understand motivation, you have to understand emotion."

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