Unlocking Leadership Mindtraps Read online

  You see, our experience isn’t always the helpful compass it once was. In the past, when things were changing more slowly and we were less interconnected, we could rely on our experience to tell us what would probably happen next. If you were an accountant in your town in the 1950s, you’d know that there were a certain number of changes you could expect—shifts in your client list, fiddles with the tax code, the way the economy of your town was reliant on the price of corn or cars or whatever people produced around you. You would know that no matter what happened, people would require your work, even if the particulars varied from year to year. You’d recognize the patterns from what you already knew, and you’d be able to see a narrow set of fairly predictable future possibilities; you’d have a pretty good guess what five years from now would look like. Today there are so many things we deal with on a daily basis that are unpredictable, and there’s no way of telling how these unpredictable pieces will interact.

  It’s the interactions of all these unpredictable things that create complexity. The more interconnected we are, and the faster things are changing, the more complex our world is. This shifts formerly straightforward professions into confusing complex ones. Accountants today wonder whether their entire profession is going away, whether they will be 90 percent replaced by computers (and when?), and what business they should bet on next to keep their firms alive. They have no idea what five years from now looks like. Their old leadership tools—to help them control, predict, plan—fail them. And worse, their ways of thinking and feeling about the issues at hand fail them too.

  Frustratingly, the fact that our reflexes lead us astray in complex and uncertain times doesn’t seem to make us less likely to use them. The cognitive and emotional shortcuts honed over the course of tens of thousands of years of evolution are so automatic that we use them without even noticing whether they’re helpful or not. Part cognitive bias, part neurological quirk, part adaptive response to a simple world that doesn’t exist anymore, they are “mindtraps.”

  Perhaps the trickiest thing about these mindtraps is the way they combine to mislead us about the fact that we’re in traps at all. Unwittingly stuck in a trap, we tend to believe we should simply try harder rather than try something else. We need help to find the traps and then escape from them.

  In my research into leadership and complexity, I’ve found five of the most pernicious and pervasive of these mindtraps. They answer the question I am often asked: What is the most important shift I need to make if I am going to lead well in complexity? In this book, we will identify the mindtraps, look at the ways they’ve served us so far, and consider why they don’t work so well anymore. We’ll also learn some powerful keys to unlock the traps and escape to new possibilities. You’ll see that

  • We are trapped by simple stories.

  • We are trapped by rightness.

  • We are trapped by agreement.

  • We are trapped by control.

  • We are trapped by our ego.

  Understanding new ways to notice and escape these mindtraps turns out to be a kind of super power that allows you to see new opportunities, create new solutions, and move forward with more finesse and less angst. And these ideas will help you at work or at home—anywhere your life has gotten more complex. Which, if you’re like Mark, is probably everywhere.

  “Hey, sweetie, how’s your day going?”

  Mark straightened his headset and smiled at his wife’s voice. “Hi, Ali. Insane. Unbearable. Regular. I was actually thinking of running away to join the circus.”

  “Sounds excellent,” she said, distractedly. He heard her take a bite of something. “Hey, I know it’s my turn to deal with dinner tonight,” Alison said with her mouth full, “but I just got a call from the nanny and she says Naomi has some extra rehearsal tonight and she can’t stay, so I have to swing by and get her from dance class. Which means you have to get dinner started first or else the kids will be cranky and unmanageable.”

  “Extra rehearsal? She’s seven. This is not the Nutcracker at Lincoln Center. This is little kids in peapod costumes spinning around until they fall over.”

  Alison laughed. “We are aligned, my friend. But I have to get back to the board meeting in two minutes and then I have to race out to pick up our peapod and her little sprout of a brother. And then, I need to get home to a hot meal—handled by you—on the table at 7:13. Deal?”

  Mark, not understanding the myriad complex forces that just went into play for him to be handed dinner duty, just sighed gently. “Never fear. I’ll have DoorDash at the ready.”

  It’s not just that we are facing more complexity at work. There is more complexity in our lives outside work too. A hundred years ago, most leaders went to work knowing their wives were at home taking care of things, and the divide between work and home was significant. Now leaders are pumping breast milk on their lunch breaks and singing their kids to sleep before a video conference with team members on the other side of the world. That trend toward an unprecedented intersection of change, uncertainty, and ambiguity shows up at home too. There are more choices to make about how we live our lives, and thus fewer ready-made paths to follow. More of us spend more of our time making things up than ever before.

  This means that we need support coping with the mounting complexity at home as well as work. The bad news is that these mindtraps catch us at home too. The good news is that the ideas about how to escape them hold steady at home or at work, and whether you’re leading a company or a family or a choir.

  Alison clicked her phone off and slipped it back on Silent. She ran her fingers through her hair quickly, ran her tongue over her teeth to check for any sandwich that might be lodged there, and walked back into the boardroom. The (mostly) men who sat around the table half stood as she entered; she didn’t know whether they’d do that for any CEO or whether it was her gender that caused the half rise that seemed to mark her entrance. Coming from a casual startup to this position was still jarring, even after four months on the job. And now, talking to the board about the changes she wanted to make was even more nerve-racking.

  “Alison, we have been talking about these reorganization plans while you had to step out,” Bill, the chair, began. “You know they’re the biggest changes ever in the life of this venerable firm. We know that we hired you in order to shake things up and, well, this will surely do that.”

  Alison’s palms began to sweat. She tried to give herself a quick and silent pep talk. Bill was in many ways a dream chair. He had been at Anderson, Nicholson, and Mitchell for thirty years now and had the depth of experience with the industry she obviously lacked. And yet he also absolutely saw the need for innovation—had led the company’s rebranding as the more modern-sounding AN&M and had worked to appeal to the start-ups that were taking over the business world in San Francisco. All along, he had fought against being bought by one of the big accounting firms; he knew it was time to innovate or die.

  A trained accountant herself, Alison was the innovator. Most of her experience was in financial tech firms—including IrRational, which she started herself. It was totally unexpected when the board asked her to not just pocket the cash when AN&M purchased IrRational, but also pocket the keys to the CEO’s office.

  By the time Alison arrived, the firm had shrunk down to half of its former size. It was nearly impossible to stave off competition that came in both directions—from the big accounting firms that were outsourcing to Bangladesh, and from little software packages like the one her start-up had created.

  With these desperate times in mind, Bill continued. “So you have our somewhat apprehensive approval. But you’ll have to be very certain of the success of these changes—we’re betting the whole farm here.”

  “That makes sense, Bill,” Alison said, rubbing her sweaty palms on her skirt. “And believe me, I wouldn’t make this move unless I was sure it was the only way to go.”

  Like many of us, Alison is called on to do things she’d never imagined—in her cas
e, blending start-up and professional services cultures to create a brand-new kind of firm. But we are making these moves into totally new terrain with yesterday’s equipment. As the science and research improves, we learn more about ourselves and what humans do really well—and what we don’t. There’s this funny paradox, though, because much of what our sophisticated science—augmented by computers and machines that peer into our bodies and brains—tells us is about what we cannot change about ourselves, what we just get with the package of being human. “What’s the point of that?” you might be thinking. “How could knowing that we cannot control something be a help to us? Doesn’t that mean we should just give up?”

  Okay, admittedly, when I first started learning about the ways our biases and reflexes and irrationalities were unfixable, I wanted to go take a nap. After all, I was wanting to polish us all up, make us shiny and new and ready to face all the complexities life has to offer, and what I discovered is that we’re just not built that way. The complexity of the world requires that we understand the grays, that we resist black-and-white solutions, that we ask different questions about unexpected and tangential options. But alas, we humans are built to simplify and segment, and it goes against all of our natural pulls to take another person’s perspective or to see a system in action. I would read cheerful books about uncovering and following your intuition, and inwardly I’d be screaming, “Noooooo! Do not follow your intuition—it is broken beyond belief!” But, of course, that was simplistic too (because, as you see, I am as irrational and biased and simple-making as the rest of the human race).

  Yet, as the behavioral economist Dan Ariely says, we humans know about our limitations in the physical realm, and we find ways—using machines and medicine and other supports—to overcome them. If we knew about our limitations in the way we make sense of the world and therefore act, we could figure out ways to overcome those limitations too. Behavioral economists know we need to understand what traps we might fall into as we make tricky financial decisions like saving for retirement or figuring out how much to pay for our dream house. It’s just as important to understand our leadership mindtraps and why they are not helpful to us as we lead in a complex world. So let’s take the lessons we’re learning from fields across the study of human thinking and action, and let’s see how to identify the most common mindtraps—and sidestep around them.

  Alison unbuckled Tate and grabbed Naomi’s ballet bag, balancing it perilously with her own laptop case and Tate’s lunch box. “Okay, everybody out!” she called to the kids, trying to make her exhaustion sound more like good cheer.

  “What is that spectacular smell, Mark?” she asked as she dumped the bags on the table by the door and the kids ran inside, suddenly squealing in delight at some unexpected surprise. “You’ve found an app that delivers home-cooked smells along with packaged meals?”

  “Nah—even better,” Mark answered, putting down his beer and picking up the assorted lunch boxes and school bags that were about to collapse on the floor. “I ran into Leroy on the way home, and I must have looked so distressed that he waved his magic wand and became our dinner fairy tonight.”

  “That is perfect in so many ways! Dinner, happy kids, and free consulting too!” Alison noted, taking a swig of Mark’s beer. Leroy was not only Mark’s HR business partner extraordinaire but also their neighbor and one of their best friends. A widower for the past two years, Leroy had kids the same age as Naomi and Tate, and so it was the noise of all four kids playing that streamed up from the family room downstairs. “Leroy,” Alison called, “What did we ever do without you?”

  Leroy popped his head out from the kitchen. “Women everywhere have asked themselves that question,” he said, smiling. “Want to tell the kids to wash hands for dinner?”

  Forty-five raucous minutes later, Alison sighed in contentment as she sat with a glass of Merlot while Mark put all four kids to bed upstairs. They had decided on a weekday sleepover since the kids went to the same school, and the grownups could get a little time alone. She wanted to ask Leroy his opinion about the challenge Bill had set for her. She trusted his depth of knowledge and experience and knew his judgment was sound.

  As she laid out her challenge, Leroy nodded intently and listened well, occasionally checking in to be sure he had understood. Mark joined for the last part of the conversation and sat down next to Alison, rubbing her feet as she talked about the plans she had for AN&M and the cautious support from Bill and the board. “Watch out,” Mark said, “Leroy’s hot on a fancy new set of ideas about how we’re all wrong all the time. He might try to get you to listen to him since I’ve escaped his clutches.”

  Leroy rolled his eyes and tossed a pillow in Mark’s general direction. “Nah, you’ve convinced me that you’re not ready for my fancy new ideas.” Leroy turned to Alison. “Perhaps there is space in our remedial listening class for Mark while you and I meet for coffee, Alison, and talk about how what I’m learning can make your life better.”

  Alison raised her glass, smiling. “I will drink to both of those suggestions! Let’s schedule some time together while Mark learns to listen!”

  None of the mindtraps catch us when the world is predictably marching along. In fact, they’ve probably been adaptive for most of our time on the planet—that’s why they exist in the first place. Once useful shortcuts, now they turn out to be a problem when your world seems to be changing faster and becoming more interconnected and complex than it has been in the past. See if any of these sound familiar:

  Trapped by simple stories. Your desire for a simple story blinds you to a real one. One of the things that defines us as humans is our propensity for stories. We love to tell them, to hear them. They carry the answers to some of our most important and bewildering questions. They have bound together tribes, religions, societies. We love them so much that we string together stories with a sort of once-upon-a-time feel, with one thing leading naturally to the next. Looking back at something, we can tell a coherent story about it that makes it sound inevitable and neat, and therein lies the rub. We don’t notice how simple the story is that we are telling ourselves, and we don’t notice the ways the story itself shapes what we notice. The problem is twofold: first, that past story wasn’t so clean or inevitable while it was happening; and second, we try to use that same skill looking forward, which in fast-changing times you can’t, because you can’t tell which of the many, many possibilities will emerge. We made the past story simple in our memory, looking back, and now we imagine an equally simple plot line going forward. In both cases we’re probably wrong. Leaders who put too much faith in their heroic tales of the past and project simplistic versions of the future can be alluring—and ruinous. To escape we need to find our way out of our simple stories and back into our complex real ones.

  Trapped by rightness. Just because it feels right doesn’t mean it is right. We each look at the world and believe we see it as it is. In truth, we see it as we are, a gap that is as large as it is invisible. And because we believe in what we see, and we don’t notice those things we don’t see, we have a sense of our being right about most things most of the time. Sure, sometimes we are uncertain, and we notice that feeling, often with discomfort. It’s when we are not uncomfortably uncertain that we tend to assume we’re right. “Wrongology” expert Kathryn Shultz calls this “error blindness” and writes, “As with dying, we recognize erring as something that happens to everyone, without feeling that it is either plausible or desirable that it will happen to us.”1 When we are uncertain, we search around for understanding and we learn; when we know we’re right, we are closed to new possibilities. When leaders believe they are right in a complex world, they become dangerous, because they ignore data that might show them they are wrong; they don’t listen well to those around them; and they get trapped in a world they have created rather than the one that exists.

  Trapped by agreement. Longing for alignment robs you of good ideas. For much of human history, we have needed to make snap judgmen
ts about our tribe. Are you with me or against me? If you’re in my tribe, we need to be in relatively easy agreement in order to survive. In fact, connection is so important that our brains have developed so that we experience social pain and physical pain as nearly the same thing. This has been a significant gift; our ability to agree and together create communal outcomes has enabled much of what is great about us. Meanwhile, conflict has often had pretty dire and disruptive consequences. Disagreement that leads to polarization has led to significant us-versus-them conflicts. In times that are uncertain and changing fast, though, too much agreement, like too much polarization, is a problem. Too much agreement, while pleasant, makes us follow a narrow path rather than expanding our solution space. It makes it harder to create and pursue the wide span of options that will leave us prepared for whatever the uncertain future demands. With complexity, we need diversity of experience, approach, and ideas, and we need to learn how to harness conflict rather than push it away.

  Trapped by control. Trying to take charge strips you of influence. Humans are made happy by being in control. Leaders seek to keep their hands on budgets and outcomes and behaviors and are often rewarded for doing so (or seeming to do so). In fact, it’s the feeling of being (and looking like) you’re in control and that you’ve planned for all the contingencies that has long defined our image of leadership. This means that if we don’t look or feel in control, we fear we aren’t in fact leading anything—we’re just letting life happen to us. In complex times, though, we cannot control what will happen next; there are too many interrelated parts. And because complex outcomes are hard to produce (or measure), people often exchange simplistic targets for the larger goals they are seeking. When we care about big, complex, intertwined issues, leadership requires the counterintuitive move of letting go of control in order to focus on creating the conditions for good things to happen—often with outcomes better than we had originally imagined.