Unlocking Leadership Mindtraps

by Jennifer Garvey Berger

  It turns out we have a hard time recognizing the complexity of the situation or the person across from us, particularly if we’re on opposite sides. It is easy to cast the person across from you as the villain in your story without remembering that she is the hero in her own story.

  “Okay, Mark, I’ve got the real scoop,” Leroy said, poking his head into Mark’s office. “You have time for this or shall I come back later?”

  Suddenly Mark was full of attention. “I always have time for you, my friend, you know that! Sit anywhere you like.” He grabbed an armful of assorted papers, food wrappers, and clothing items off of the single chair next to his desk, swept them onto the floor, and then stealthily closed the door.

  Leroy smiled and sat down. “Okay,” he said in hushed tones. “Look, I’ve talked to a bunch of folks, and I think I have an understanding of what’s going on. I particularly noted the data you gave me—Kelly’s Google Doc thing, Marcus’s meeting with your boss, Kendra’s lack of eye contact.” His voice dropped lower. “It turns out you do have a big problem.”

  Mark blanched. “Oh geez! I knew it was bad. They’re mad at me because I’ve been so distracted, right? Or is it Kendra’s conference—they’re all mad at me about that? Or was it the time when I yelled because I was blindsided after missing a deadline. I knew I shouldn’t have yelled. Give it to me straight, Leroy.”

  “Oooh, I heard about that. And about the way your face gets all red when you yell, and about the way you ordered everyone Thai food afterwards as an apology. They thought the Thai food was a particularly Mark-ish touch.”

  “Damn, I knew it should have been pizza! Or chocolate. Who apologizes with Thai food?”

  “And I heard about Kendra’s conference—she is bummed, by the way—and about Marcus and your boss. And here’s the thing. Mark,” he said, leaning closer in and dropping his voice, “your problem is you’re full of shit.”

  Mark cocked his head, trying to take in this message. “Come again?”

  “They’re not mad. There’s no grand conspiracy theory. Kendra’s cat died and she has been sad about it but feels silly making a big deal about it. Marcus is meeting with your boss to help her plan the yearly all-hands meeting—you must have forgotten you put him on that committee. No one remembers the Google Doc thing—it’s a non-issue, one of those mistakes we make all the time that we don’t even remember making. And nobody wants your job right now, that’s for sure. It’s true they don’t want to go out for drinks with you. It’s not because they’re mad at you because you yelled, but because they really are stressed and worried about missing deadlines. And one of the reasons they care so much isn’t because you’re a screw-up, but because you work so hard and have high standards—and because they care about you and they hate disappointing you. They see how busy you are and they’re worried about you and want to do the best possible job so that you can get a little break.”

  Mark sighed. “So they wouldn’t tell you the truth? I knew I shouldn’t have sent my best friend in to do this job. I should have sent a stranger. Who do you think could get the real deal out of them?”

  “No, Mark! I’m not wrong.” Leroy didn’t mind the level of his voice now. “You’re wrong. They’re not lying—they’re telling me the truth. The truth is that there is no problem. Or, there are problems but there are millions of little ones. Bubbly Kendra is just sad these days. She loved the cat, she wanted to go to the conference, and she hates her roommate. Marcus is feeling really stretched with the various projects he’s put his hand up for. You’re right that he’s ambitious, and he stresses himself out terribly looking to not only do everything right but to be seen as doing everything right. But the thing that rings out is that even with the stress and the sadness, all of them are delighted to be on this team working for you, although there were many, many mentions of how stressed you seem, how totally out of control the work is.” Leroy sat back in the chair only to pull forward again—why was a feather boa tickling his neck? “And now, on to our deal.”

  “What deal?” Mark fiddled with his phone. “Leroy, how can you be sure they’re not just feeding you a line because they know you’re my friend?”

  “I am telling you that I gathered data and people were straight with me; you have strung together a story on weak thread. You plucked pieces of evidence to highlight the story you were anxious about, and ignored the rest. You have shorthand for people in your life: Bubbly Kendra. Ambitious Marcus. And you’ve made it all about you. I’m telling you, Mark, this one isn’t about you. It’s about the work and the volume and the volatility and complexity of it all. It’s true that you’re not making it any easier on them with your behavior toward them and now your paranoia. All of this is why our deal is so important. This is the first of those traps your mind sets for you—the mindtraps I’ve been seeing in you and everyone else around me. This belief in simple stories is holding you back. You, my friend, need to escape this trap, or else you’ll just circle around in it forever.”

  KEYS TO UNLOCK OUR SIMPLE STORIES

  The bad news is that there is no way to stop experiencing the biological pulls toward simple stories. Because this all happens without your noticing it, you cannot stop it from happening. You’ll make simple stories and believe in them; you’ll project the past forward onto the present; you’ll create character roles that are based on very little; and you’ll select data to reinforce the simple stories and characters you already have. This is all going to happen hundreds of times every day.

  Like all of the mindtraps, these happen because they mostly work for us. They probably used to be even more effective in a simple world with fewer possibilities and interconnections. So you don’t need to stop using these stories; you just need to interrupt yourself when you start to believe in them and they constrain your world. Here are two keys to help open the trap.

  Key question: How is this person a hero?

  When you realize that you’re carrying a simple story about a person or a group of people, it can be useful to name the role you think they’re playing and then intentionally switch the role and see what that allows. Do you believe that your colleague is always undermining you and trying to make you look bad in front of the boss? See if you can reframe her actions as the hero in her story rather than the villain in yours. She doesn’t go home at night and cackle over her cauldron about the ways she screwed you today. She tells herself she is doing things for the greater good and that she is acting in a heroic way. See if you can take her perspective, even for a moment. Perhaps she sees you undermining her and she’s trying to show your boss her hard work. Or perhaps what you call undermining she calls critically examining, or whatever.

  This can be equally hard but also helpful for other roles. Think your little brother is playing the role of the drifter and not taking responsibility for things? I’m guessing your little brother doesn’t get off the phone with you, put his feet up on the furniture, and feel delighted that he can drift some more, responsibility-free. What other roles could a character have in a story that would make him more heroic? Perhaps the adventurer or explorer would be another way of framing the same set of data. Or the one who is lost and searching. Or just the one who cares less about the things you care about, but who still cares deeply about many things.

  This is not to say that there aren’t those in your life who are villainous, who aren’t mishandling responsibility. It’s just to say that you can’t trust what your brain automatically tells you about those people without really exploring alternatives. In complex settings, your simple stories will dramatically limit the range of thinking and feeling about what’s possible. Using this question as a key will unlock your simplistic framing of others and help you live more into the world of bigger possibility.

  Key habit: Carry three different stories

  As you find yourself asking about the characters of others, you can begin to branch out and muse about the whole story you’re telling yourself. To disrupt the simple stories you tell, you can dev
elop the habit of carrying multiple stories about the events in your life. The best way I’ve found to do that is to notice your story and then create another one. And then another. And another. When you know that if this initiative wins it will be disastrous, see if you can create another story that turns out differently. When you hear yourself saying, “I’ve seen this before and I know just how it goes,” remind yourself that if the situation is truly complex, you haven’t seen something quite like it before and you have no idea where it goes. Think of these as the opportunities to do a kind of mental yoga and stretch yourself into a new place. As with real yoga, the practice of doing this over time will make you more flexible, and allow you to act more effectively in complexity.

  This is a little different from scenario planning, which asks you to imagine a variety of different futures so that you can pick one to work toward—and be prepared in case the chosen one doesn’t happen. Here you’re not wanting to settle on a few possibilities to work toward. Instead, you’re using the fact that you can come up with different possibilities to increase the likelihood that you’ll be ready for any of them, or for another one you can’t yet imagine. If you’re sure one thing will happen, you’ll close down to evidence that points at another thing. If you’re aiming at a single story you like best, you won’t notice a better one that you might not have thought about. As complexity theorist Peter Coleman writes, “Life, so full of contradictions and surprises, rarely ever makes complete sense. The pieces of the puzzle seldom fit together perfectly. When they do—beware.”8

  The point isn’t to avoid telling stories. You can’t. The point isn’t even to avoid telling simple stories. I think that’s too hard as well. The point is to notice your simple stories, remember they’re simple, believe in them less, and use this habit to multiply the options you are considering. The point is to understand that in a complex world a simple story is just about always wrong, and will just about always lead us to an emaciated, impoverished set of choices. Escape the simple stories trap for a cornucopia of possibilities in a complex world.

  3

  TRAPPED BY RIGHTNESS

  Just because it feels right doesn’t mean it is right

  “So Leroy has this crazy idea that I need to be asking new questions about my simple stories, but it seems like pretty useless advice,” Mark told Alison over Saturday morning coffee at the park, as Naomi and Tate raced around the playground. “Seriously, I get that it would be nice for me to have all that time so I could come up with multiple stories and seek for the hero perspective and all, but I think I’ll have to be retired to even begin to add one of those practices into my already outrageously packed day.”

  “Are you kidding?” Alison asked. “You tortured yourself for hours with that simple story about how everyone hated you and they were out to get you. You wasted a ton of time ruminating over this and gathering evidence that you were right! If you had that as just one story among many, you’d have saved yourself heaps of time—and more importantly, heaps of misery.”

  “But all the evidence pointed in the same direction!” Mark stammered, spilling some of his coffee in his exuberance. “It all just seemed so obvious and logical.”

  “You’re still doing it!” Alison laughed, popping the last of the pumpkin spice muffin in her mouth. “Didn’t Leroy say that in a complex situation, having something seem obvious and logical is itself a danger sign?”

  “Argh! There’s another stupid idea of his! Are you telling me that every time something seems obvious and logical I have to question it? This is impossible! Let’s focus on your job for a while and see what you think when we try to use Leroy’s mindtraps to help you.”

  Alison finished her cappuccino as she recounted the story of the organizational change she was making and the reaction of the board so far. She concluded: “So everyone gets that this is the only way to go. The question is how to implement it. It’s sure to be a massive shock to the organization and the partners are going to have to start doing wholly different things that they are not going to be that confident about—or, quite frankly, that they’re very good at right now. I somehow need to convince them that the only way forward is to change. A lot.”

  Mark smiled. “Wow. There were a lot of words in that statement that looked certain to me. ‘Only way to go.’ ‘Start doing wholly different things.’ ‘Only way forward.’ You might be trapped too.”

  Alison blinked. “But that’s why they hired me. Because they know they can’t keep on like this and they’re counting on me to help them change.”

  “I get it!” Mark said, and then laughed. “But Leroy has been yammering on and on about how certainty is one of the mindtraps. He said that when I know I’m right, it cuts off good stuff like learning and exploration. I notice that you sound just as certain as me, so maybe you’re just as trapped as I am!”

  “Are you telling me that seeming clear about something is a problem?” Alison asked slowly. “I mean, are you saying it’s better leadership to not have any idea what to do?”

  “Hmm. That can’t be right either. I’m just telling you what Leroy told me. After all that annoying simple-story crap, he told me that certainty is just as big a problem.”

  “Okay, okay, maybe you’re right,” Alison said with a smile. “I’m beginning to get what you were saying before. These mindtraps are totally annoying. Maybe we should tell Leroy we’re certain he’s wrong.”

  THE SEDUCTION AND DANGER OF RIGHTNESS

  One of the great differences between human beings and all other creatures on the planet, we have been told, is our capacity for rational thought, for weighing possibilities and carefully crafting our opinions, beliefs, and decisions. We can generally take any opinion we have and explain very logically why the opinion is the right one, gathering evidence thoughtfully to show why we are certain. The only problem with this notion is that the feeling of certainty is less like a Platonic decision and more like an emotion that arises, regardless of evidence one way or another. In fact, neurologist Robert Burton writes: “Despite how certainty feels, it is neither a conscious choice nor even a thought process. Certainty and similar states of ‘knowing what we know’ arise out of involuntary brain mechanisms that, like love or anger, function independently of reason.”1

  Just take that in for a moment. Your sense of being right about something, the sparkling clarity of certainty, is not a thought process, not a reasoning process, but an emotion that has nothing to do with whether you are right or not. Our brain has evolved to trick us about this. When we feel right about something, and someone asks us why, we’ll be quick to offer a reason explaining our actions. What psychologists find time after time, though, is that those explanations are mostly postdecision justifications rather than a considered decision-making process beforehand. Why? Because we didn’t need to make a decision; we just felt we knew what to do.

  In the United States right now, in the age of Trump, there is a whole lot of rightness on both sides of the highly polarized political spectrum and each side is baffled and horrified at the capacity of the other side to believe they’re right about anything. But when you see that the sense of rightness is an emotion rather than a logic, suddenly it all makes sense. In the face of what looks like weak evidence to one side, the sense that other people believe it and think it’s right seems bewildering. But the fact that people might be angry or frightened in the face of a changing world seems totally understandable. Rightness is just an emotional cousin of these other reactions.

  You might be arguing with me in your head right now. “I make thoughtful decisions!” you might be saying. “I really weigh my options and sometimes I even have a hard time knowing what to do and I’ll go and research what’s best.” I get it. In truth, I feel that way about myself too. I read Consumer Reports before I buy a microwave, and I read all the different platform positions before I head to the voting booth. In fact, I could offer you a handful of examples just from today where I really deliberated hard and researched before coming to a c
onclusion. I have had to read many, many research studies and books to come to believe that you and I deliberate thoughtfully on only a tiny percentage of the decisions we make each day. The rest of them we just make because it feels right. By now I’ve read and researched enough to believe that perhaps feeling right isn’t the best approach. It turns out that we can’t tell the difference between our opinion and the truth, and that shapes what we notice—and how we treat other people.

  Our felt experience of our opinion is that it’s right

  When I ask people around the world “What does it feel like to be wrong?” they give me descriptions of woe. It’s embarrassing. It’s distressing. You feel stupid and uncomfortable. When I point out that that’s what it feels like to learn you are wrong and ask them the question again about what it feels like to be wrong, I generally get long silences as people try to figure out what that feeling is. “Um, I don’t think it feels like anything,” people will say sometimes, haltingly. And I think that’s almost right. Perhaps a more exact answer is that what it feels like to be wrong—before we find out that we’re wrong—is the same as what it feels like to be right.2

  So, what does it feel like to be right? I ask people this question too. And now they struggle from the outset. It feels comfortable. Confident. In one large conference hall, after a moment, a voice piped up from the middle of the room: “It feels normal!” The whole room laughed—he was the CEO and had a reputation for believing he was right.

  But he was actually naming something we don’t tend to think about. We tend to think we’re right most of the time. Daniel Kahneman summed up one of his core findings from his work as “our excessive confidence in what we believe we know, and our apparent inability to acknowledge the full extent of our ignorance and the uncertainty of the world we live in.”3 For it to be so widespread, such a tendency was probably adaptive and helpful and good. If we thought we were wrong most of the time, we’d be paralyzed. You can imagine two of our forebears, wandering through the jungle and hearing a crackling noise. One thinks, “That sounds like a big dangerous animal—I should run!” and she runs. The other thinks, “That sounds like a big dangerous animal, but it could be just about anything, really. I don’t know, I’m never sure about these things and don’t want to leap to conclusions,” and she might be lunch.