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Which one feels more natural to you: “Does that make sense?” or “What am I missing?” The first moves things from discussion to decision. It feeds our natural desire to keep things progressing, to obey the clock. I hear it all the time. “What am I missing?” causes delay. It feels like a waste of time. It requires us to be in control of the clock for once.
In Thinking, Fast and Slow, Nobel Prize–winning economist Daniel Kahneman playfully and credibly identifies many such biases. One of these is the anchoring bias, in which we over-rely on an initial
Another system 1 cognitive shortcut manifests as the overconfidence bias. In this bias, the brain tends to believe that we’ll succeed at whatever we attempt to do, nudging us to take risks that may result in significant rewards.
This phenomenon showed that it is almost impossible for people engaged in simple, individual, physical, repeated tasks (picture the assembly line) to be overstressed to the point of interfering with the task. Additional stress might improve performance to a point, then it would plateau, but it would not get worse.
managers also add stress when it is not helpful, which is during bluework. For complex, collective, cognitive challenges, stress can and does have a strong negative impact on performance. Stress impairs the prefrontal cortex. It turns that big, gray, calorie-burning
Key point: self-preservation. In highly stressed environments, we often see individuals become much more self-serving than in relaxed environments.
There are two sides to the performance mindset. We either try to prove competence (I can do the project) or protect ourselves against evidence of incompetence (I don’t want to be discovered as incompetent). I will label these two subsets either a prove or protect mindset. The prove mindset is motivated to demonstrate something positive, the protect mindset is motivated to hide something negative.
Special “innovation brainstorming sessions” are scheduled, implying that innovation and creativity are not part of “normal” work.
This is one of the barriers to speaking up: labeling as “wrong” a pause which is simply asking for a check that turns out to be unnecessary. To call it resilience, verification, or a questioning attitude would be a better label.
statements like these: “So we’ll just have to tough this one out.” “You can’t run [from] every single weather pattern.” Then, mimicking a frantic voice, “Oh my god—oh my god.” A crew member asks, “We’re goin’ into the storm?” The captain responds, “Wouldn’t have it any other way.” These are preemptive statements because they erect barriers to questioning the decision.
Coercion, as I am using it here, means using my influence, power, rank, talking first, talking more, or talking louder to bring people around to my way of thinking.
Here’s what we don’t want as a decision-making model: the boss decides and seeks validation from the group. Those kinds of meetings exist only so that the boss can say later on, “Well, you all were there. You could have said something.”
When I hear bosses say things like “get everyone on board” or “build consensus,” that’s coercion. That’s trying to convince people “I’m right, and you need to change your thinking.”
We don’t need anyone in the group to change their thinking. As long as the group supports whatever decision comes out of the meeting with their behavior, leaders are happy if individuals think differently from them. Otherwise, they’re just in an echo chamber of their own ideas. There is power and resilience in a diversity of ideas.
We judge ourselves by our intentions, but we judge others by their behavior. If we fall short, we come up with external reasons to explain what prevented us from acting in a way that is consistent with how we think of ourselves. When others fall short, we tend to blame them as people and discount the environmental barriers that might have been in the way.
The message was “We are going this way, how can we overcome your objections?” not an honest “Is this the direction we should go?”
If outliers know they will be put on the spot, it will reduce the tendency of people to take outlying positions.
The Seven Sins of Questioning
Ask questions that assume the other person might be right, not you.
Clean Language: Revealing Metaphors and Opening Minds by Wendy Sullivan
A clean question would eliminate those biases and would sound like this: “What do you mean by dead end?” or “What do you want to have happen?” The structure of the clean question is designed to remove your biases and preconceptions.
The point is that we do not want a “harmonious conversation.” What we want is an accurate picture of reality. Harmonious and wrong means out of business or dead people.
The fear is that dissent equals disharmony and is to be avoided. But in organizations that practice dissent, where people are dissenting with the best interests of the organization in mind, and where people respond to the dissenters with curiosity, dissent does not feel disharmonious. Dissent creates a sense of excitement and energy—a leaning forward, a rubbing-the-hands-together feeling of “This could be the start of something interesting and new.”
An absence of dissent is never a guarantee that you’re on the right track. Your confidence in a decision should directly correlate with the amount of divergent thinking that went into it.
When more information, more points of view, more ideas are heard, decisions are better.
Give information, not instructions. Instead of “Park there,” try “I see a parking spot there.” Instead of “Go ahead and submit the proposal,” try “I can’t see anything I would change.”
With coercion, the best we can hope for is compliance. With compliance, we get effort, but not discretionary effort. The output of collaboration, however, is a commitment to move forward. This commitment signals the end of bluework (embracing variability), and the start of redwork (reducing variability).
Here is what the Industrial Age play of CONTINUE looks like: For Mr. Beatty and Ms. Dunaway, continue the awards show. For Kodak and Polaroid, continue producing film. For Blockbuster, continue renting DVDs. For Ford, continue the Model T production run. For the crew of El Faro, continue along the Atlantic route. This desire to continue what we are doing is not confined to workplaces of the past.
To celebrate with, not for: appreciate, don’t evaluate; observe, don’t judge; and prize, don’t praise.
Appreciate, don’t evaluate.
In short, if we are conditioned to think of ourself as “the smart one,” we will avoid challenges that actually test our intelligence and its limits. Of course, taking on such challenges is the only way we can learn and grow. Therefore, the wrong kind of praise becomes stultifying, sapping our willingness to hone our greatest strengths.
To improve performance, celebrate what people can control—their efforts—and not the things they can’t—outcomes.
Decisions are made by individuals, not teams.
The reason for the disparity is simple: punishment runs down the power gradient, not up.
Never underestimate the power of fear to distort common sense in environments with a strong culture of control and compliance.
The point is that they knew there was a problem, but the power of hierarchy suppressed the needed action.
The CONNECT play is the antidote to fear. Connect makes it safe to say what we see and think, even if no one else sees or thinks the way we do, even if we are not 99 percent sure that we’re correct.
Either people fudge the numbers or they fudge the process to reach the numbers. The authors think that “aggressive goal setting within an organization will foster an organizational climate ripe for unethical behavior.”
STRICT GOALS + STEEP HIERARCHIES = UNETHICAL BEHAVIOR
The problem with goals, challenge goals, is that the strategies people use to achieve goals are often at odds with learning. That is, specific goals impede learning and adaptation.
Further, goals that are met give people permission to stop working. Goals serve as a cap on performance.
