by Craig Weber
Staying “Mindset Forward”
In a conversation about something important, rather than let your reactions be driven by arrogance, anger, fear, cowardice, resentment, vengeance—or any other self-centered motives—you rise above yourself and focus on learning. It is from this learning-focused mindset that your balanced behaviors flow. Your actions are guided by purpose rather than defensiveness because you’re more interested in thinking clearly and being effective than in inflating your ego.
But this mindset presents a challenge. In my experience, and in teaching this discipline to thousands of other people, maintaining this mindset under pressure is extremely difficult. Why? In challenging circumstances your defensive reactions shove your mindset into the backseat and seize the wheel. To stay in the sweet spot, therefore, a huge challenge is to remain mindset forward.
Your Mental Workshop
To help you deal with this challenge, I’m going to share with you a way to keep learning in the driver’s seat. When you’re facing a tough problem, big decision, or important issue, rather than letting your mind be sidetracked by your defensive reactions, you should stay mindset forward by turning your mind into a workshop. Rather than treat your mind like a temple to sanctify or a fort to protect, treat it like a workshop to use.
Rather than treat your mind like a temple to sanctify or a fort to protect, treat it like a workshop to use.
I mean workshop in the traditional sense, as a place you actually build something. When you’re facing a tough conversation or a challenging meeting, I suggest you mindfully step into your mental workshop and take the ideas, issues, decisions, problems, or challenges that you’re facing and “work” them. To do this, you concentrate on two things: the product you’re creating (the what) and the process by which you create it (the how).
Your Workshop Product
The product of your mental workshop is more rigorous, intelligent decision-making. You’re working hard to create the clearest view of the situation, problem, or decision that you’re facing because what’s most important to you—what drives your behavior—is the desire to think more intelligently about the issues you are up against so that you and others make the smartest choices and take the most effective action. (And when you think about it, what else should it be? Mollycoddling your ego? Reinforcing your ideological framework? Feeling warm and fuzzy? Looking smart? Manipulating others to see things your way and to do what you want?)
This may seem obvious, but vigorous, clear-headed thinking doesn’t happen automatically. The psychologist Cordelia Fine explains the basic problem:
A brain with a mind of its own belies our strong sense that the world is just as it seems to us, and our misguided belief that our vision of “out there” is sharp and true. In fact, it appears that our attitudes are the muddled outcome of many struggling factors, she says. Tussling against our desire to know the truth about the world are powerful drives to protect our self-esteem, sense of security, and pre-existing point of view. Set against our undeniably impressive powers of cognition are a multitude of irrationalities, biases, and quirks that surreptitiously undermine the accuracy of our beliefs.1
In her book, Blind Spots, Madeleine L. Van Hecke reinforces the precariousness of our perceptions:
. . . we all have blind spots, blind spots that are built into the ways that we naturally think, just as blind spots are part and parcel of a car’s mirrors. Our mental blind spots can account for much of what people ordinarily label stupidity.
She then points out how these blind spots affect our everyday experience:
When we feel dim-witted, whatever it is that we should have known, or should have realized, or should have thought about, seems so obvious in retrospect. How could we have missed it? When others seem dense to us, whatever we grasp seems so clear that we cannot fathom how they could have missed it.2
Concerned about such cognitive distortions, you work hard to compensate for the inevitable biases, blind spots, and bullshit that so readily infect your perceptions. (Clearly recognizing that your mind twists reality in secretive and self-serving ways, by the way, is a great way to stay curious because you’re always wondering: “What am I missing? How is my view off-kilter?”) Vigorous, clear-headed thinking doesn’t happen automatically. It takes hard work. You have to craft it.
Vigorous, clear-headed thinking doesn’t happen automatically. It takes hard work. You have to craft it.
In short, when you’re in your workshop, you’re engaged in the process of learning. Rather than clinging to your current perspective like it’s a sacred relic, treat it as a “work in process,” something still in development. Passionately refocused on thinking sharp and acting smart, you’re not protecting your point of view; instead you’re sharpening it. Your picture of reality is just an instrument you use to make sense of the world. With this in mind, you’re not just aware of your habitual min-“win” reactions, you’re kicking them to the curb so that you can focus on getting smarter.
You’re not naïve. You’re not seeking a perfect view of “reality.”* You’re just doing your best to make the smartest choices possible, given constraints such as time and information. To paraphrase Nate Silver, you’re trying to be more and more right and less and less wrong.3 To do this, you’re saying to yourself, in essence:
• If working with others to make the smartest choice means I’ll be less comfortable than I prefer to be, so be it. That’s a price I’m willing to pay.
• If working with others to make the smartest choice means I’ll be less certain than I prefer to feel, so be it. That’s a price I’m willing to pay.
Your Workshop Process
. . . it’s not always the people who start out the smartest who end up the smartest.”
—CAROL DWECK
What is the process you employ to produce this learning? There are four main activities:
1. Pooling perspectives
2. Leaning into difference
3. Integrating perspectives
4. Critical thinking
Pooling Perspectives
Given that your mental models of “reality” tend to be skewed, incomplete, and self-servingly biased in a disturbing number of ways, you work hard to improve them. But how do you catch an erroneous assumption? How do you better identify biases and blind spots? How do you know where you’re missing information? How do you learn to spot the inevitable gaps in your maps?
One powerful way to detect and correct such mental flaws is to engage people who see the world through a different lens. An essential part of the process in your workshop, therefore, is the pooling of perspectives to expand and improve your thinking. You recognize that your view on any issue is limited and the best way to expand and improve it is to pull in perspectives that highlight or emphasize aspects of the issue you tend to overlook. You’re seeking to view the issue through other lenses. (A decision might make perfect sense from a finance perspective, but it might look very different when you expand your view by looking at it through a legal lens.)
In his book, The Opposable Mind, Roger Martin explains the value of engaging people with dissimilar mental models: “There’s much to be gained from the recognition that no model has a lock on reality, but that all models reflect reality from a particular angle,” he says. “It becomes possible to assemble a fuller, though probably not complete, model of reality by incorporating a variety of other models.”4
The raw materials in your mental process, you could say, are varied ways of thinking about an issue or a challenge. With this in mind, you mine the perspectives of others for insight and knowledge.
Leaning into Difference
In your mental workshop you’re not just working to increase viewpoint diversity; you’re doing it with a particular bias. To expand and improve your thinking, you’re leaning into difference. By “leaning in” I mean you’re not just tolerating difference, you’re placing a premium on it. You’re not just casually interested in different points of view; you’re pursuing
them because they turbocharge learning. You actively seek out and explore dissimilar ideas, interpretations, and information because they provide the greatest probability of sparking an insight. You know that the best way to guard against your confirmation bias, and to sharpen and strengthen your thinking, is to engage with people who see the world differently. They’re more likely to spur those aha moments when a blind spot in your mental map of reality is unexpectedly illuminated. “Oh, I never thought of it that way before.”
Strength lies in differences, not in similarities.
—STEPHEN COVEY
While pooling perspectives places an emphasis on expanding your thinking, leaning into difference places the emphasis on improving it. “Opposing models,” says Roger Martin, “are the richest source of new insight into a problem. We learn nothing from someone who sees the problem exactly as we do.”5 You know that to overcome your confirmation bias you must question your kneejerk perceptions by actively seeking out contrasting points of view.
With this mindset, you’re always looking for the cop to your architect.* If you have a human resources background, for example, you’re wondering what the issue looks like from the perspective of the sales team, engineering, or production. If you’re a conservative politician, you’re wondering how the issue looks from a progressive point of view, or vice-versa. With a disciplined focus on producing insight, solid judgment, and wise choices, you’re not doing all this in a quest for comfort confirmation or agreement. You’re doing it to learn. If pooling perspectives leads to greater knowledge, leaning into difference is the path to greater wisdom.
If pooling perspectives leads to greater knowledge, leaning into difference is the path to greater wisdom.
Placing a premium on different points of view magnifies your ability to make informed choices because it facilitates more double-loop learning.† After all, the best way to understand and see your assumptions, beliefs, and filters is to contrast them with alternative ways of thinking and perceiving reality. It’s like international travel. You experience your own culture more clearly after living in another culture because the contrast helps you see your own culture, something that used to be largely invisible, by pulling it into the light.
As I pointed out in my first book, Abraham Lincoln understood this. Facing an adaptive challenge of historic proportions—a civil war and the utter failure of the American experiment—he did something unusual. He pulled people into his cabinet with political agendas that clashed not only with his own views but with each other’s. He didn’t create this hornets’ nest of conflicting perspectives because he yearned for comfortable cabinet meetings, nor did he do it because he wanted to get his way all the time. He did it because he knew a room full of contrasting points of view would help him make wiser, more informed decisions about the adaptive realities he was facing. The diversity of Lincoln’s cabinet—and his ability to leverage it—helped him to see and think more clearly.
It’s no different in your team, organization, or community. When you’re up against big decisions, conflicts, changes, and challenges, the potential for profound learning isn’t in the sameness around the table—it’s in the difference. If you can orchestrate balanced dialogue that fosters open-minded exposure to the varied and conflicting perspectives, you gain a huge advantage that is unavailable to less capable people and teams. You gain the ability to think in a more expansive and integrative way about your most pressing problems. You have a greater field of vision and clearer set of choices in an adaptive situation because, as author Margaret Heffernan puts it, you have “thinking partners who aren’t echo chambers.”6
Pooling perspectives with a bias toward difference is important for two main reasons. It increases your capacity for integrative thinking and it reduces your risk of intellectual inbreeding.
Integrating Perspectives
So, you’re in your workshop pooling perspectives and placing a strong emphasis on different points of view. Now what? Well, here’s where it gets interesting. Rather than getting mired in a pool of conflicting assessments, you elevate the problem-solving process by rising above the conflict. You do this by treating contrasting viewpoints as a creative opportunity, not a frustrating conundrum. Instead of feeling trapped between one view or the other, or between one choice or the other, you leverage varying perspectives to create a more integrated, higher-order solution.
To do this you employ integrative thinking, the ability to combine varying and contrasting perspectives to craft a more sophisticated understanding of an issue. In his book on the subject, The Opposable Mind, Roger Martin says that people who can think this way have the “ability to face constructively the tension of opposing ideas and, instead of choosing one at the expense of the other, generate a creative resolution of the tension in the form of a new idea that contains elements of the opposing ideas but is superior to each.”7
When faced with seemingly contradictory ways of making sense of something, conventional thinking tends to focus on this or that. Integrative thinking, by contrast, opens the door to fresh ideas and novel solutions by focusing on this and that.8 “Integrative thinking shows us a way past the binary limits of either/or,” says Martin. “It shows us that there’s a way to integrate the advantages of one solution without canceling out the advantages of an alternative solution.” Remembering the cop and the architect example, you know that leaning into conflicting “ladders” allows you to see and think more, and to find solutions that are invisible, or only partly visible, when viewed from just one perspective or another. You’re able, as Martin puts it, “to produce a synthesis that is superior to either opposing idea.”9
The problem faced by Steve and Phil provides a perfect example of what this looks like in action. At first, each party framed the other as the source of the trouble. “Phil needs to dial it down,” thought the team. “The team needs to toughen up,” thought Phil. But to solve the problem both the team and Phil had to make adjustments. The eventual solution was an elevated hybrid of these conflicting mental models. It integrated both ways of making sense of the problem into a more elegant and effective way forward.
This integrative approach transforms how you react to people with different perspectives and information because your bias for learning leads you to see the different perspectives and information as opportunities to expand and elevate your own thinking, not as petty nuisances to avoid or attack. Rather than cave in or argue when someone shares a contrasting point of view, you get curious: “What can this person’s perspective teach me about how I’m looking at this issue?”
Viewing alternative perspectives as something to leverage for learning moves a conversation to a higher plane. It shifts the exchange from “Your view versus my view,” to “You and I with our differing views versus the problem we’re facing.” It transforms people whose ideas conflict with your own from asses to assets. (I stress this point in my work with state legislators around the United States by asking them to reframe how they react to people with different political views—as valuable partners, rather than obstacles—in making more intelligent policy decisions.)
Viewing alternative perspectives as something to leverage for learning moves a conversation to a higher plane.
INTELLECTUAL INBREEDING
It’s important to recognize that whenever you’re up against a tough problem or an important decision you always face a monumental choice between strong and smart thinking, or weak and sloppy thinking; between moving forward with an intelligent choice, or fumbling around with a dumb one. It’s hard to overemphasize how pivotal this is. If you surround yourself with people who see things the way you do, or only listen to people with similar views, you trap yourself in an ego-enhancing echo chamber. You remain an ignorant slave to your insular thinking and the confirmation bias that gives it safe haven.
To avoid this trap, enlarge and enrich your worldview by valuing learning over ego-enhancement. You should do this because you’re keenly aware that failing to consider other perspectives
puts you at serious risk of a noxious malady: intellectual inbreeding. Reducing the number of new perspectives coming in from outside sources has the same impact as reducing the number of new genes coming into a population; pretty soon your view of the world is as messed up as the banjo-playing kid on the porch in the film Deliverance.
Think about it. If you’re convinced that your narrow view of “reality” is reality, you’re doomed to suffer from ridiculous and unnecessary levels of self-inflicted stupidity. Few things are as off-putting as arrogant, closed-minded people who are so shut off to learning that they’re impervious to the views of others. They go through life catering to their confirmation bias, a sad and depressing tactic that puts them increasingly out of touch with the world around them because they routinely sacrifice learning on the altar of ignorance.* I’m sure you’ve worked with people like this.
Progress is impossible without change, and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.
—GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
Few things are more refreshing and engaging, on the other hand, than open-minded people who are interested in new ideas and eager to improve how they see the world around them. But being open like this takes discipline. Leaning into difference to expand and improve your thinking will inevitably put you up against your min-“win” tendencies. It inevitably leads to being wrong, uncomfortable, or both. So, this mindset confronts you with pivotal choices: Do I want to avoid emotional discomfort or do I want to get smarter? Do I want to “feel right” and get my way or do I want to become more informed?
Critical Thinking
