Many organizations are wrestling with what to do with the increasing moves to automation and to outsourcing some of their responsibilities to other, less expensive countries. Those in favor of building (or buying) computer systems argue their point, and others in favor of moving call centers or data centers overseas argue their point, each with the other, using piles of data and fancy graphs and charts. Each of these moves has dramatic implications in terms of expense and morale in a business, and senior teams can wrestle with this choice time and again, very often leaving the meetings more entrenched in their previous position.
When one of these teams—the executive committee from a professional services firm—began to think about disagreeing to expand, they saw that pushing forward in two or three or five directions simultaneously—in small ways—would be better than putting all their chips on one bet and hoping that one worked. The team decided that instead of trying to figure out which one was the best answer, they’d turn their attention to figuring out what the range of possible answers was, and how to experiment in small ways or in small corners of the business using one approach or another. The team that had been arguing for outsourcing some of their needs could figure out a way to partner with another group in a small project. The group that had been arguing for automation could experiment with automating a small part of the business or giving one team or department (particularly the one that wanted it most) the chance to invest in automation in a small way. As they pushed forward to come up with smaller, faster ways to experiment in these various directions, they also realized there were areas they hadn’t been thinking about at all because they had been so polarized. They ended the meeting with three or four small experiments that they could report back on in four months.
The point is that in complex, fast-changing situations, we will not ever be able to agree on the one best thing, because that simply doesn’t exist. But we also don’t want to polarize around conflict and become ever more entrenched in our original perspectives. Instead, we need to work to remember that complex situations have so many pieces and perspectives that each one of us might see a slightly different set of possibilities. And even those with bewilderingly different (and seemingly wrong) perspectives are giving voice to something in the complex system that we probably need to pay attention to. Only in this way can we escape from the trap of simple agreement and use the conflict and disagreement as a way to deepen our relationships and expand our possibilities.
5
TRAPPED BY CONTROL
Trying to take charge strips you of influence
It wasn’t funny in the moment, but happily it was funny the next day when Alison met up with Leroy and Mark for their now-weekly session. Alison was early; Mark was late, as usual, so when he walked in, she was explaining to Leroy the scene at dinner the night before. “So Naomi says, ‘Mommy, can you please put your phone away at the table and be present for the family?’ in an uncanny copy of the voice I use when I ask Mark that question at least twice every dinnertime. I tell her I have to get this one thing out before the Asian markets close, and when I go to look at her apologetically, my thumb brushes the wrong space and I hear the sound of the message sending—and it is a delicate message that should definitely not be sent before its time!
“At that moment, Tate, who had been rocking back and forth in his chair, suddenly rocks too hard and falls over. In his mad clutch to save himself, he grabs the ‘Fifty Fun Facts about Ancient Greece’ placemat and takes that with him. ‘I’m okay!’ he calls from the floor, his spaghetti bolognaise draped over him like a modern art installation. Mark and Naomi burst out laughing, and Tate begins to ham it up, slurping the spaghetti that his tongue can reach, eating it right off his chest, which of course makes the other two hysterical. And truly, if it had been on YouTube it would have gotten a million hits by morning.” Alison laughed recounting it.
“But me,” she said, suddenly serious, “I was so freaked out and overwhelmed I just yelled at everyone—at Naomi for telling me to put my phone away, at Tate for rocking, at Mark for not cleaning it up. There was no harm done, but the whole thing felt so overwhelming and horrible that I could hardly stand to stay at the table!”
Leroy smiled. “I’m trying to imagine yet another stain on that poor carpet. Tragic!”
“What’s really tragic is that I seem totally out of control at home as well as at work! I’m sorry I missed the last session with you guys. I was just too busy to be able to squeeze out the time. Did you have any pointers for getting my complex and out-of-control life back in control?”
“Ha! Gotcha!” Mark said. “Last time you all were laughing at me because I hit my team with the old listen-to-learn one-two punch. But my beloved wife is just as bad with wanting to get everything under control—from the flying spaghetti at the table to the immovable partners at the firm!”
“Gotcha?” Alison asked, confused.
“Control is one of the mindtraps!” Mark told her delightedly. “You’re falling into it all over the place—at home and at work. That’s a real problem in complexity, you know, because you cannot make things happen in complex situations—you have to do, er, something else.”
“Hmm. Do something else? Other than make things happen? How does one explain that to one’s board? ‘Sorry, I wasn’t able to make things happen in complexity so I just did something else!’ Is that the new wisdom of the day?”
Leroy smiled at them both. “Perhaps I should take control here,” he said.
THE SEDUCTION AND DANGER OF CONTROL
Jonathan was meeting with a coach about the overwhelming complexity of his work. As he talked about wanting to learn about complexity, he told his coach that he knew he needed to let go of control, but that maybe the coach could help him learn how to have control in letting go of control. “I want to let go of whatever control I absolutely have to, but still be in enough control of the important stuff to sleep through the night.”
This is what we all want, right? We know that it’s the right thing to say that we need to let go of control, but could we please, please just let go of the control that we don’t mind giving up, and keep control over those things that seem really central and important to us?
Um, no, we can’t.
Control is one of the mindtraps because, like the others, it leads us in exactly the wrong direction in complex and fast-moving times. Of course, in a predictable world it’s important for leaders to be able to control their work as well as they can. Imagine a manager in a hotel saying to a guest trying to check in: “I am so sorry, Madame, that you made your booking and now I can’t find it! It is an unpredictable world, you know, so there’s simply no way to control this! Sometimes the guests can check in and we can give them their rooms, and sometimes even though they have made a booking, we cannot find it or cannot give them their rooms after all. It is such a shame, but in this fast-moving and complex world what is a manager to do?” In this predictable sort of problem, what the manager should do is tighten the systems so that this error never happens again.
In unpredictable arenas, however, trying to control everything is futile. And unfortunately, it isn’t that we can hold on to control for the really important things and release control for the unimportant things; it is often the most important things in our lives that are the most impossible to control.
Take parenting, for example, one of the most complex endeavors any of us is likely to ever be involved in. It would be fabulous if we could give up control of the less important things, like whether our kids brush their teeth for exactly three minutes as dentists recommend, in exchange for controlling the more important things, like whom they hang out with at lunch and whether they smoke pot behind the toolshed after school. And of course some parents try to control as much as possible in their children’s lives, mandating their social groups and even giving them drug tests. This, like so much controlling behavior in complex situations, often has perverse and unpleasant unexpected consequences when the children of these parents lie
to them more often as they squirm their way out of that strong grasp.
Leadership is much the same way. The hotel manager can in fact learn to manage most things about the check-in process, which is mostly predictable. But she cannot control whether a Twitter-famous guest, furious about a fight with his girlfriend, takes to social media to unfairly savage the hotel where the fight took place, thus damaging the hotel’s reputation. In complex and emergent outcomes like reputation, we often futilely wish to keep our hands on as many factors as we can so as to be able to dictate the outcome. Unfortunately, our trying to control those factors (“Smile harder at the guests!”) might make things worse (“Hey Mom, why do all the hotel workers have that creepy smile?”).
There’s a way we know this already. We know that holding too tightly when we cannot be in control actually makes things worse. And yet our bodies are wired to encourage our desire for control. In fact, our happiness itself is connected to being in control of our lives.1 Our desire for control is unlikely to ever change, but we can shape how we make sense of what it means to have control in the first place. We also don’t notice the ways we swap a minor (and sometimes really unhelpful) proxy for the major but uncontrollable outcome we want. Finally, our reflex is to blame people when things look out of control, or when the outcome was not what we wished for. All of these controlling mindtraps ironically decrease our ability to shape things in a complex and unpredictable world.
We believe that being in control is critical to our success and happiness
We are right when we believe we are more happy being in control than out of control. Our own belief that we have power to control the circumstances of our lives, sometimes called “self-efficacy,” has been widely linked to happiness. Stanford professor Albert Bandura, who has made much of his life’s work the study of our connection with control, writes, “The capacity to exercise control over the nature and quality of one’s life is the essence of humanness.”2 Like so many of the mindtraps, however, we have a simple story about what that means. We often think it should mean that we can have direct control over all the outcomes that are important to us—we should be able to control when we meet our future partner, when we have our children, how our career unfolds, and so on. And as leaders, we believe we should be able to control the culture, or the focus on customers, or the quality of the safety culture. These are all emergent outcomes of a complex system, though, and our belief that we can control them leads to perverse consequences.
Perhaps one of the most perverse consequences is that in the quest for the control that will make us happy, we become unhappy because we are questing for the wrong sort of control. Having a more nuanced set of ideas about which things we can control, and how, helps us create a more robust kind of happiness that has less blame and more effectiveness at creating the conditions we most want, while learning to shape our own responses—even when the world gives us conditions we hate.
When we can’t control big things, we substitute smaller ones
Our brains are fantastic at the bait and switch, as we have seen so far. Think you’re considering all the facts? Probably you’ve got a simple story. Think you’re really considering the emerging facts about something you’ve been certain about? Probably you’re falling into the mindtrap of rightness. Think you’re really looking to control a whole complex system? Probably you’re paying attention to what can be measured in that system and using that as a proxy for the whole issue.
Readers of my previous books will see that I tend to be profoundly opposed to targets in a complex world. Our desire to control uncontrollable outcomes often leads us toward perverse and unhelpful moves as we substitute one element that can be measured for the larger thing we care about that can’t be measured. Here the trap is that we get seduced into controlling that piece of the system that seems to us to be controllable. We see that patients aren’t getting good enough care in hospitals, so we create a target for the time from entrance to admission, treatment, or discharge. We see that the roads are dangerous after a particularly violent winter, so we create a target for how quickly the potholes get fixed. The problem with these things is that people begin to solve for the small proxy rather than the larger goal. They take shortcuts on patient care to get folks through on time; they fix potholes quickly and temporarily so that they can meet their targets. As they meet their targets, they organize away from the larger goals and toward these smaller ones.3
We do this in small ways too. We believe that we can control our path to happiness by buying a particular car or apartment. We believe we can control our kids’ success if they maintain a particular grade point average. Think back to the last time you wanted a complex goal—like success or happiness or well-being. Now see if you substituted a smaller target as a proxy. Did you think about a promotion? A new house, partner, or holiday? Losing fifteen pounds, or giving up bread and butter? We focus on these small targets of success and lose the larger perspective of what we really want in our work and our lives.
If things seem out of control, we blame ourselves or others
“I remember the day when I came to the startling realization that managers have significantly less control than I had always thought they did throughout my entire career,” Tamara recounted. “It was about the second month of my career as a manager. I had sauntered in, expected that I could fix all the pieces that had seemed broken for so long, and finally take charge! But once I tried to put my hands on the things I wanted to change, they just slipped away. And where I thought people would relish someone really making things happen, it turned out that my efforts just made everyone mad at me for a different reason!” These stories are so common: the belief that the person a rung or two above you on the organizational ladder has the control you lack. Most of us feel like we don’t have enough control over those things that are important to us, so we figure that we’re either doing it wrong or that someone else has the real power around here.4
It’s funny, but sometimes the more senior a person’s leadership position is, the less likely she is to feel in control. New CEOs are often the most surprised by this. They have been waiting all their careers to have the ultimate control, and they discover, often much to their shock, that they feel less in control than they did in other positions. It’s almost as if when we get to the top there is nowhere we can look for someone more powerful who can actually control the thing. These CEOs finally have to stop believing in the myth that someone, somewhere is fully in charge and begin to believe in the myriad forces that combine to create the future.
Most of us, though, don’t ever climb to the CEO’s corner office and have that vantage point. We fall into the trap of blaming people for outcomes that we couldn’t logically expect them to have much direct control over, if we thought hard enough. CEOs are often held accountable for profits; parents are held accountable (by society) for whether their kids turn out well; and movie stars are held responsible for whether their movies are majestic or mocked. But while each of these people has influence over the outcomes we seek, none of them can control those outcomes. Sure, the star of the film has a lot to do with some of what makes a movie great, but hundreds of people are involved in making a film whom she has little to do with, and there is the market the movie is released into and the power of the earliest reviews that sway our minds, things which are totally out of anyone’s hands. There are simply too many intersecting factors to believe that the force of a single person, no matter how effective, can control it all.
Alison sat down in James’s office as he looked at her, puzzled. “To what do I owe this honor?” he asked.
She smiled at his formality. Even after their productive lunch (once she had started listening), she still stumbled into thinking of him as a dinosaur when she wasn’t paying attention. She’d have to fix that.
“James, I’ve been thinking about our lunch a couple of weeks ago, and I’ve been really focused on your frustration that so much of this change seems to be out of your control.”
“Can I be frank, Alison?” James asked, seriously.
“Please.”
“You younger people seem to believe that there’s nothing innovative about those of us who have been in this business a long time. I know you must think of us as dinosaurs and you are waiting for us to retire.” Alison hoped her face wasn’t flushing in response to James’s accurate assessment.
“But actually, I love this place, and I really believe in bringing it into this modern age. I loved your irRational software and what it enabled, and I’m enjoying the conversations I’m having with my clients, which are different—and more personal—than the conversations I used to have.”
“So that sounds great!” Alison said. “What’s the problem?”
“A couple of problems. First of all, you’ve given us this target for how many clients we’re supposed to be having these conversations with, and that target is just not achievable. I am converting clients over, but slowly, and no way can I just barge in and change everything about our relationship in the time you’ve suggested—it would frighten and confuse our clients unnecessarily. We have to put their needs first, don’t you think?”
“Hmm, okay, I can see what you mean, I guess,” Alison said. “Although I would really want to see some progress and I don’t know how else to track it.”
“I can give you progress, and I can promise I’m committed and moving as fast as I can, but these targets are a bad idea,” James said.
“Okay. No targets but meaningful progress. Got it. Next?”
“I actually know quite a few things about how to shift these conversations over time that might be helpful to the others. They’re little shifts—where we hold our meetings, what time of day seems most helpful for these first conversations, etc.—but they might be important. But you’d have to give up on your Gantt charts and your desire to script the moves we’re making, and I can’t guarantee they’d work for everyone.”
Unlocking Leadership Mindtraps Page 7
