Unlocking Leadership Mindtraps

by Jennifer Garvey Berger

  Trapped by ego. Shackled to who you are now, you can’t reach for who you’ll be next. Though we rarely admit it to ourselves or others, we also spend quite a lot of our energy protecting our seemingly fragile egos. While humans have a natural drive toward change, we tend to believe that we have changed in the past and won’t change so much in the future. This leads us to a strong and compelling reactive response to protect the person we think we are—in our eyes and in the eyes of others. Bob Kegan and Lisa Lahey call this protection “the single biggest cause of wasted resources in nearly every company today.” They explain that it comes from the natural tendency people have of “preserving their reputations, putting their best selves forward, and hiding their inadequacies from others and themselves.”2 When we try to defend our egos rather than grow and change, we end up perfectly designed for a world that happened already, instead of growing better able to handle the world that is coming next.

  In each case, the first move to escaping the trap is to notice that the trap exists. The second, trickier move is to realize that you are in one. The next move? Finding the key to freedom.

  2

  TRAPPED BY SIMPLE STORIES

  Your desire for a simple story blinds you to a real one

  “I asked for us to eat in this cafeteria because I wanted to talk to you about something weird happening with my team.” Mark glanced around, voice hushed as Leroy leaned in to listen.

  “Weird how?” Leroy asked.

  “Weird weird. I’ll give you a couple of examples, but there is tons of evidence. Kelly invited me to a Google Doc and then uninvited me before I could read it. Marcus has been meeting regularly with my boss, which is obviously unusual, and his name was also on that doc invitation, and so I’m wondering whether there was something in the document or in Marcus’s meetings about me and my performance. Bubbly Kendra always has a smile for everyone and right now she hardly meets my eye at all; she seems incredibly unhappy with me. And twice last week when I asked if they wanted to have drinks together after work, they all sort of glanced around at each other and then said no. And there’s other stuff too—all in the same basic neighborhood. Something is definitely up.”

  “What do you think is going on?” Leroy asked, arranging soy sauce and wasabi on his plate of sushi.

  “I figure they’re mad at me,” Mark said, his mouth full of salad. “I’ve been wracking my brains to figure out exactly which thing might have made them pull back like this, but in truth there are lots of candidates. I told Kendra that her funding had been cut for the conference she was so excited about. And Marcus has always wanted my job, and now that I’m doing it so badly he must be circling like a shark. The truth is I’ve been losing my temper and snapping, which I know is terrible behavior, but I am just at my wits’ end . . .” Mark trailed off. “So I kind of don’t blame them for being mad, but I don’t like it.”

  “Wow, so you’re worried you’re in the wrong here. Have you asked any of them about it?” Leroy asked.

  “Nah, I’m not sure which one to ask or what to say exactly.” Mark glanced around again and lowered his voice. “That’s why I was wondering whether you could kind of hang out with them and casually ask what they’re mad about and then maybe put in a good word for me.”

  “To be honest, Mark, it sort of sounds like it could be something, but it could also be nothing. You seem to have constructed a pretty tight story about this.”

  “That’s why I need you to go nose around.”

  Leroy waved his chopsticks in the air. “Maybe you should investigate a bigger set of possibilities,” he mumbled with his mouth full of sushi.

  Mark rolled his eyes. “Maybe you should just be my HR guy and go do some HR stuff with my team!” His teasing tone had an edge of anxiety.

  “Okay, how’s this for a deal? I’ll talk to a few people on your team and if you’re right, I’ll help you figure out what to do next.”

  “Excellent! That’s my helpful HR guy!” Mark leaned back in his chair and stabbed a wayward cherry tomato that had rolled away from his salad.

  “I’m not finished yet,” Leroy said. “If you’re wrong about what’s going on because you’ve created some big story about it, I’m going to try out my thinking about those things I was talking to you about last week. And I’m going to test them with Alison too because I have the sense she’s a more diligent student than you. But you’ll have to promise to give me at least thirty minutes of your undivided attention.”

  Mark popped a piece of Leroy’s sushi into his mouth. “I don’t have thirty minutes, my friend, but anyway that’s an easy deal—I’m not wrong. Talk to them and tell me what you find out.”

  THE SEDUCTION AND DANGER OF A SIMPLE STORY

  Humans have been elevated and connected by stories; our stories have been a source of meaning and solace for us at least from the times our ancestors drew pictures on the walls of caves. Stories about our creation, about our path in life, about our gods—all of these have brought us comfort and purpose. They have freed us from anxiety and from the existential questions about the larger meanings in our short lives. They may even be a core part of how we made it to the top of the food chain in the first place.1 The good news is that we are now perfectly wired for stories; the bad news is that our automatic stories are probably too simple for a complex world.

  As we tell ourselves a story, we begin to believe we have a sense of character, of cause and effect, of what is coming next. Our brains provide that sense, which is reinforced by the well-worn plot elements in movies and novels that have quietly contributed strength to the jaws of this particular trap. It’s not that simple stories are always unhelpful; like all of the mindtraps, this one is a trap because we do not see that we are falling into it.

  We see what Mark does with story fragments, and we hear Leroy’s caution. Here’s another example. Once upon a time there was a little boy whose high school principal said he would never amount to anything in school and so he shouldn’t even bother graduating. He loved flags. He lived for a time in Nicaragua and for longer in New Zealand. He walked his two dogs through the hills. He got a PhD. He worked in an appliance factory.

  In the background, your mind is working to put these ideas together and create a narrative without your noticing—it’s what we do to make sense of odd piles of data. You probably have a picture of the man that you don’t remember trying to make: he has a skin color, an accent (American? Spanish? Kiwi?), a height. You probably are putting together the little bits you know about him; maybe he loves to travel because he lived in Nicaragua and New Zealand and that’s why he loves flags? Something about the PhD led him to work in the appliance factory? To make better appliances? You’re not trying to do this, but if you’ve paid attention to the story at all, you’re probably turning these disjointed bits of his life into a story that makes sense. We don’t create stories on purpose most of the time; they are created in the background as we seek to make sense of the often-senseless parts of our lives. And without your noticing it, you’re likely falling into a simple story trap in at least three ways: looking for a beginning, middle, and end; filling in the missing pieces; and assigning roles to the characters.

  We believe stories have a beginning, middle, and end and we connect causes and effects

  Our brains have developed to create patterns of beginning, middle, and end for us, and when those patterns are not satisfied (as with a postmodern play, for example), we experience it in our bodies as stress and confusion. This is fine when we are in a theater (and the author is taking care of the narrative arc for us), but it becomes a problem in real life where there are rarely full beginnings or endings to anything. In the story above, you might be wanting to rearrange the pieces (did he live in Nicaragua first or New Zealand? Did he get his PhD first or work in the appliance factory?) to make a narrative with an order that makes sense.

  In the story of the flag-loving man, I have given you so little data that while you’re ordering it, you’re probably not creating
a boundary about where it begins and ends. But in our lives we’re always looking for when something begins and ends. When did my realization that I was in a dead-end job begin? When did my delight in my new car end? Mark is falling into this trap as he gathers evidence. His idea that this pattern has begun recently leads him into drawing a boundary around the time where he’s searching for evidence and then stringing together chosen pieces from inside that boundary. This leads him to connect pieces in a way that makes narrative sense and also builds toward a particular simple story.

  Mark, like the rest of us, is also looking for the causes and effects of that evidence. What made people act this way? What will happen next? One of the great achievements of humans is that we understand cause-and-effect relationships; but we overuse that skill by creating fairly simple connections between cause and effect and then believing in those connections. We are even likely to create causal thinking in the story of the flag-loving man. Perhaps he loves flags because he travels. Or maybe he worked at an appliance factory because his high school principal said he wasn’t academic?2

  We see this deep desire for causal thinking as we make sense of tragedies or big surprises. The difference between the way the three nuclear plants near the epicenter of the 2011 earthquake and tsunami in Japan fared has been a source of deep inquiry from scholars, policy-makers, researchers, and activists. The three nuclear plants close to the epicenter had totally different outcomes. There was the famous meltdown of Fukushima Daiichi, sending clouds of nuclear gas across Japan and the Pacific Ocean. Less talked about was the much better outcome at the Fukushima Daini plant, which averted a meltdown even though it had fairly similar external circumstances. And the reactor that never made the papers was the Onagawa nuclear plant, which was so safe during the crisis that the townspeople actually sheltered in the nuclear plant rather than fleeing from it after the devastating 9.0 earthquake.

  To make sense of these differences, researchers search for causality. Depending on which researcher you read (and what part of the disaster they looked at), they might point to the difference in the way the plants were built, the leadership of the plants, the culture of safety, or the particular moves made by particular people in the moments following the disaster.3 Each of these is surely important; deciding which caused the actual outcomes is probably impossible. Did the moves made by the leader of the Fukushima Daini create a better outcome, or did the fact that there was some power at Fukushima Daini create those leadership moves? Was the fact that the Onagawa plant was on much higher land a cause or an effect of the safety culture? In such a complex situation, picking apart the causes from the effects is so tempting, and probably impossible. Even researchers are drawn to create a story—generally a simple one—that focuses on one chain of cause and effects. Once we have a simple story in place, we try to use that to reward the heroes and punish the villains and ensure this never happens again.

  This desire for beginnings and endings, for connecting cause and effect, doesn’t just shape the way we draw boundaries and gather evidence and decide on guilt and innocence; it also shapes how we think about our actions in the future. When we look backward and decide that “a safety culture” kept one plant safe while the others fell apart, we look to create a safety culture at new nuclear plants. When we see that leadership and the relationships the leader had with workers made a difference at another plant, we look to create excellent leaders with close relationships. When we see that Onagawa was on higher ground than the others, we look to build on higher ground. Don’t get me wrong; these are all great things. But in looking to rely on any one of them, we’re missing the point of the interconnections. And if we try to do all of them simultaneously, we might overwhelm the system, and we’ll almost certainly miss out on something else that will shape the outcome next time.

  We project forward from the past into the future and fill in missing pieces so it all makes sense

  This leads me to the second aspect of the simple story trap. We take what we’ve learned from the past and project it forward into the future. Because we crave these simple stories, our brains fill in the missing pieces. And like the rest of the mindtraps, this happens without our even noticing.

  We are constantly projecting from the things we have seen in the past to what the future will be like. This is the reason for much great literature and art, and it’s also the reason for our conspiracy theories. If there are random dots scattered somewhere, we’ll create patterns, name them, and create stories about them. We call them constellations if they’re in the sky, and these days that feels like mythology. We call them evidence if they’re in our lives, and these days that feels a lot like the truth. It leads us to a kind of “Oh, I’ve seen this before” feeling, when we absolutely haven’t seen this exact situation before. And because we believe in cause and effect, we also fall into thinking that the same causes will have the same effects this time. Imagining the order that comes with the story line, we see signs everywhere we look. (“When he cleared his throat before saying he’d get right back to me about the job, I think that was him saying that he wasn’t going to get back to me at all. My last boss always cleared his throat before saying something soothing but untrue.”)

  People wrestled to make sense of Donald Trump’s surprise win of the US presidency in 2016. They constantly connected the past to the future, explaining that this was “exactly like” Nixon’s rise to power, or Reagan’s rise to power, or even Hitler’s rise to power. They plucked out particular pieces of history to make their points, sometimes enraging historians whose work they used. One of those historians, Rick Perlstein, wrote about his frustration at the “wave after wave of tweets, Facebook mentions, and appreciative emails thanking me for helping them see how this presidential election is ‘just like’ 1968. Or 1972. Or 1964. Or 1976. . . . No, not the Same Thing. History does not repeat itself.”4

  To create our simple stories, we pick and choose the data we remember, and we add in little bits of data if it makes for a better case. This has been shown in everything from the research lab to the police station.5 And once again, we don’t do this on purpose—it happens in the background, and then we can’t tell the difference between what we’ve made up and what we saw; it all feels like a memory to us.

  Now I don’t know if you’re paying real attention here, but this is kind of wacky. You look for patterns from the past that you project into the future; if you can’t find enough data, you make it up; and then you believe that you know what’s going to happen next in your story! And then (if you’re like me) you can start getting anxious about it and whipping yourself into a froth. Not good. In fact, as Nobel Prize-winning economist Daniel Kahneman tells us: “It is the consistency of the information that matters for a good story, not its completeness. Indeed, you will often find that knowing little makes it easier to fit everything you know into a coherent pattern.”6

  We create simple characters and select data to support our beliefs

  Just as fictional stories have clear protagonists and antagonists and archetypal characters (the irritating mother-in-law, the misunderstood genius, the dumb but loveable friend), so too do we create what are basically stick-figure drawings of the people in our lives and then believe in them. You can hear it in your own language as you describe people in your life with a phrase. People who are closest to you are usually harder to describe (as Kahneman points out), but people at a slight distance become somehow easier to “understand.” Kahneman found a “halo effect” around the way we think about the people in our lives. We form an opinion about them on one or two things—and fast—and then extend that opinion to cover the rest of them. For example, Kahneman offers descriptions of two men. See which one you’d rather have dinner with:

  Alan is intelligent, industrious, impulsive, critical, stubborn, and envious

  Ben is envious, stubborn, critical, impulsive, industrious, and intelligent7

  Most people in Kahneman’s studies found Alan a more likeable man, but even five more secon
ds with the data will make you worry about that. Our judgment about these men is formed not only from what we know of them, but from the actual order in which these features appear. If someone annoys you at your first meeting, you might well think of that person as “annoying” in subsequent meetings, no matter what that person is actually like. This “halo” will extend into other aspects of your thinking about the person, so a first impression that’s negative will spread to other aspects of their character you know nothing about; a first impression that’s positive spreads too. We claim that we hate obvious stereotypical characters in movies, but we create them constantly in our own lives.

  Worse, once a hypothesis is made about someone, we select data that supports our hypothesis. The famous and dangerous “confirmation bias” jumps onto our snap judgment to make our first impressions stick. This means that once a person has been identified with a simple story, we look only for the data that confirms our assumptions. We don’t do this on purpose. We simply don’t notice the ways we toss out data that disagrees with our hypothesis. I worked with a CEO once who was struggling with a board member. “He always tries to derail my ideas and find fault with them,” the CEO told me. I watched them together and saw the way they talked, and it was true that they had a more growly relationship than what the CEO had with other members of the board. Yet while disagreeing with some of the CEO’s ideas, the board member seemed to strongly advocate others. When I asked my client about that later, the CEO couldn’t remember a single thing the board member had agreed with. As I listed them, she brushed off the data. She was totally convinced the things I reported hadn’t happened at all.