The Mood Elevator

by Larry Senn

  Sometimes unhealthy-normal habits develop in an organization as a result of deliberate choices by the company’s leaders.

  One of the most extreme examples is the story of Enron, the energy and commodities trading firm based in Houston, Texas, that back in the 1990s was widely admired as one of the world’s most creative, unconventional—and seemingly profitable—companies. Fortune named Enron “America’s most innovative company” an unparalleled six years in a row.

  In the midst of this remarkable run of success, I was asked to meet with Enron’s top executives, who were interested in exploring ways that Senn Delaney could help them foster an even more successful culture. Our team quickly realized that Enron’s culture was driven entirely by an excessive focus on self-interest. We pointed this out and warned the company’s leaders that, in the long run, this approach to business carried significant dangers and was ultimately unsustainable. But they told us they wanted even more of what they already had—a culture centered on extremely high performance expectations permeated with an every-person-for-themselves, dog-eat-dog, results-at-any-cost mind-set.

  We turned down the engagement. A few years later, in late 2001, the company collapsed, embroiled in one of the most gigantic cases of corporate fraud in history. Subsequent accounts revealed that Enron had pushed—and exceeded—the limits of integrity and ethics in search of ways to maintain its string of increased quarterly earnings. The few people within Enron who understood what was happening and tried to call it out became social outcasts, thanks to the unhealthy-normal behavior pervasive throughout the organization.

  Granted, Enron is an extreme example, but a lack of collaboration coupled with excessive self-interest is perhaps the most common dysfunctional organizational habit. Senn Delaney saw that early on in our work to help transform the culture of the regional Bell telephone companies after the giant AT&T divestiture in 1982.

  Bell Atlantic, composed of state phone companies on the Eastern Seaboard, was our first telecom client. Its CEO, Ray Smith, knew he needed to quickly convert a monopolistic, state-centric company into a collaborative global competitor, and he called on Senn Delaney to help.

  We recognized that we had a challenge on our hands when Bell Atlantic employees told us that it was common for workers in one state phone company division to celebrate if another state phone company lost a rate case with the local regulators, even though this hurt the company’s profits. “When they lose, it makes us look better by comparison!” they explained. A friendly rivalry among members of the same organization may help encourage hard work and creativity, but when it causes people to rejoice at the misfortunates of colleagues and partners, it’s a sign that the culture has gone badly awry.

  Another dysfunctional organizational habit that is all too common is the blame game. We are taught from child-hood—thanks in part to sports and games—that for me to win, you have to lose. That dynamic shows up in organizations as well as in families and couples, where it takes the form of one person needing to be right while making the other wrong. When that becomes an unconscious habit, organizations suffer and marriages can end.

  Early in our work developing Senn Delaney’s culture-shaping model, our retail consulting group was doing some projects for the JL Hudson department stores in Detroit, then part of the Dayton Hudson retail giant and now part of Macy’s. One assignment was to improve the dismal performance of the company’s Warren Distribution Center, where goods were received from vendors, checked, marked, sorted, and then sent off to the stores.

  After a thorough study of the center’s operations, we couldn’t find anything wrong with its layout, equipment, systems, or processes, but our interviews revealed an almost terminal case of lack of accountability. Everyone said there was a problem—but then pointed to someone else as the cause of it. The markers blamed the checkers, the checkers blamed the buyers, the buyers blamed the vendors, and the venders blamed the markers.

  In a leadership session with the distribution team, we surfaced their blame-game mentality and replaced it with a mind-set of accountability. This paved the way for across-the-board improvement in business practices over time. Eventually, the Warren Distribution Center was transformed from the worst to the best performer in the Dayton Hudson group.

  Heeding the Warning Signs

  How can you recognize when dysfunctional attitudes and behaviors have become your unhealthy normal? Check your Mood Elevator and use your feelings as your guide—so long as those feelings haven’t themselves become an unhealthy normal. If that’s the case, you need to relearn to recognize your lower-floor emotions. Start by seeing whether you can identify any unhealthy-normal tendencies you might have:

  Impatience

  Pessimism

  Irritation

  Anger

  Anxiety

  Worry

  Excessive intensity

  A judgmental attitude

  Insecurity

  A sense of unworthiness

  Neediness

  The need to be right

  Argumentativeness

  Self-righteousness

  Disconnection

  Blaming or excuses

  An unwillingness to admit mistakes

  Pay attention to these feelings when you experience them; listen carefully for external cues that can alert you to their presence. If friends, associates, or family members start dropping hints that they have detected in you the attitudes or behaviors associated with these emotions, don’t dismiss them. Take them seriously; they are trying to tell you that your human dashboard is flashing warning lights—signs that you have been overlooking.

  Once you start to recognize the unhealthy patterns of behavior in your life, learning to catch—and respond to—the feelings associated with those patterns can be extremely useful. We explore ways to do that in later chapters.

  5

  Braking Your Mood Elevator: The Power of Curiosity

  The highest form of human intelligence is to observe yourself without judgment.

  —JIDDU KRISHNAMURTI

  Throughout this book we’ve been using the metaphor of the Mood Elevator to describe how our emotions rise and fall. But of course there are countless real elevators in use around the world every day. Experts say that passengers take more than 18 billion elevator trips annually in the United States alone. Why is it that you never hear about elevators plummeting to the basement? That only happens in horror movies and nightmares because, in addition to being safely built and inspected, all modern elevators have a series of automatic brakes that prevent them from falling, even if a cable snaps. Thanks to this ingenious system (invented by Elisha Otis back in 1852), riding in an elevator is actually far safer than taking the stairs.

  In a similar way, you can learn to activate a brake on your Mood Elevator. There’s an automatic system designed by nature to catch you before your emotional state falls too far and too quickly—provided you choose to employ it.

  Look back at the Mood Elevator map in chapter 1. Where would you draw a line between the higher states and the lower states?

  The dividing line is “curious, interested.” It appears right in the middle of the map, and it serves as an ideal braking point before you drop to the lower mood states. Living life with more curiosity is a great way to avoid dropping to the lower floors. Here’s how it works.

  When something happens that threatens to make you plunge to the bottom on the Mood Elevator—for example, when someone says or does something you disagree with or fail to understand—you can choose to be irritated, distressed, or judgmental. You can respond by thinking, What a stupid thing to do! That just ruined my whole day! They must be trying to get my goat! You’ll immediately feel your emotions pulling your Mood Elevator to the basement.

  On the other hand, you can choose to be curious. You can respond by thinking, I wonder why they did that. What an unusual and surprising thing to do. It would be interesting to understand what caused them to act that way.

  When life throws y
ou a curve, you can become angry, depressed, or defensive—or you can put your energy into learning from the situation and developing creative ways to comprehend and respond to it. This requires a curious mind. The ultimate outcome will vary, but you will always be further ahead if you begin with curiosity.

  Resisting Your Emotional Impulses

  To understand why curiosity can serve as a brake on your Mood Elevator, look at the following paragraph. What kinds of thoughts and emotions does it trigger in you?

  Those taht raed tihs hvae a sgtrane mnid. Olny 55 plepoe out of 100 can. I cdnuolt blveiee that I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd what I was rdanieg. The phaonmneal pweor of the hmuan mind. Aoccdrnig to rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it dseno’t mtaetr in what oerdr the ltteres in a word are, the olny iproamtnt tihng is that the frsit and last ltteer be in the rghit pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can still raed it whotuit a pboerlm. This is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter idnidivaluly but the wrod as a wlohe.

  It is certainly an odd-looking paragraph. Did you try to read it? If so, were you able to make sense of it? If the readers of this book are typical, only about half of you will be able to read the paragraph.

  More important, what kinds of thoughts and emotions did you experience? Did you find the paragraph’s jumbled letters confusing and irritating? Did you quickly give up on trying to read it? Did you find yourself thinking, What a stupid exercise! How am I supposed to figure out this nonsense? or This is a big waste of time.

  If you responded like that, you are like many people. Lots of us tend to react to events that are confusing and upsetting by quickly dropping to one of the most popular floors on the Mood Elevator—the one near the bottom: judgmental/blaming.

  Now go back to that odd paragraph and try reading it again. You may find it helpful to start with the last sentence first. Take the paragraph slowly, one sentence at a time. Little by little the words and ideas may gradually fall into place.

  If that doesn’t work, take a look at the same paragraph with the words spelled correctly:

  Those that read this have a strange mind. Only 55 people out of 100 can. I could not believe I could actually understand what I was reading. The phenomenal power of the human mind. According to research at Cambridge University, it doesn’t matter in what order the letters in a word are, the only important thing is that the first and last letter be in the right place. The rest can be a total mess and you can still read it without a problem. This is because the human mind does not read every letter individually but the word as a whole.

  This example is based on a scientific study investigating how the mind works. Our ability to correctly interpret oddly spelled words is an interesting psychological curiosity that may not seem important in itself—but the way you reacted to the exercise has significant implications.

  If you reacted with annoyance and irritation, you’ve vividly experienced how our Mood Elevators often work. When unusual or surprising events happen, thwarting our expectations and posing difficulties we’re unprepared for, we tend to experience uncontrolled emotional responses that quickly carry us to the lower levels.

  On the other hand, you may have responded with curiosity. This could have taken several forms, such as a strong desire to unravel the meaning of the paragraph, wondering about the purpose of the unexpected exercise, or perhaps a sense of humorous puzzlement as you gradually untangled a word here, a word there, and slowly discerned the ideas behind entire sentences.

  If this was your reaction, congratulations! You see how curiosity can help save you from falling to the bottom levels of your Mood Elevator—while also providing you with an attitude that is tremendously valuable for disentangling many of the knotty challenges that life throws our way.

  Here Comes the Judge

  Many people tend to respond to experiences that are new and different by swiftly traveling to the Mood Elevator floor labeled judgmental/blaming.

  It’s important to distinguish “being judgmental” from the simple, necessary act of judgment. Of course, we all make judgments every day—about how we will behave, what we will or will not do, tasks or projects we will undertake, how we will tackle problems, and so on. But being judgmental is another matter; it’s about rushing to judgment by quickly condemning things, ideas, or people that are unfamiliar or challenging, without taking the time to learn about them or even think about them.

  There are a number of reasons why being judgmental can be tempting.

  Being judgmental relieves us of the hard work of trying to understand something that is unfamiliar. It lets us quickly categorize it according to a simplistic, superficial standard, which is much faster and easier—although the results are often incorrect and ultimately unhelpful.

  Being judgmental gives us the pleasurable sensation of being “right” and labeling others as “wrong”—although it often leads to misunderstandings and conflicts that end up causing us more pain than pleasure.

  Being judgmental allows us to retain beliefs, concepts, and images of the world that are familiar and comfort-able—although it also limits our ability to expand our minds, experience new things, and grow in wisdom and understanding.

  Our tendency to judge is why we get into heated arguments with people—including colleagues, friends, and loved ones—about things that really don’t matter. It is why so many people are prone to see what is wrong with anything that is new or different rather than what is right about it—or what can be learned from it. Our tendency to rush to judgment rather than exercise our natural sense of curiosity is the cause of many strained relationships. It’s a major reason why most organizations are not as agile or creative as they could be.

  Practically everyone is capable of falling into the trap of being judgmental in certain situations. Consider these hypothetical ones:

  Your boss announces that the company has chosen a new software system to manage all of your operations at work—and learning how to use it will require two days of training and studying a 100-page manual.

  Over dinner your spouse presents you with plans to travel to a new vacation spot that is completely different from the one you love best.

  A new colleague at work has a background that is very different from yours; perhaps she’s from another country and has a unique education and career path. You’re told, “Meet your new partner!”

  A family member—a child, a sibling, a parent—informs the family that he or she is making a dramatic life change: a new career, a marriage, a move to a distant state.

  Your company announces a merger with a rival firm whose methods, values, and culture are quite different—and you are one of the employees chosen to move to the new operation.

  Can you imagine how you might respond, intellectually and emotionally, to one of these situations? You may even have felt yourself reacting with anxiety, irritation, and fear simply from reading these brief descriptions. If so, you can understand why people tend to respond to new challenges with a judgmental attitude, rather than suspend judgment in favor of a spirit of curiosity, openness, and discovery.

  Even the most inventive, creative people can fall prey to the tendency to make snap judgments rather than keep an open mind. Back in 2007, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer was proudly introducing Vista, a new operating system for personal computers. During an interview with USA Today, Ballmer was asked about a new product being released around the same time by high-tech rival Apple. Ballmer didn’t hesitate to offer a sweeping judgment about the competition’s product: “There’s no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share. No chance.”6

  Of course, Ballmer couldn’t have been more wrong. Vista was a massive flop, while the iPhone quickly dominated the world of smartphones, revolutionizing the industry and making billions of dollars for Apple.

  It’s easy to see why Ballmer chose the path of judgment. He was CEO of one of the world’s largest and most successful corporations, a company that had pioneered many of the greatest breakthroughs in
software; how could his assumptions and beliefs about what customers wanted be wrong? It seemed obvious to Ballmer that no one would want a phone without a keypad—much less that people would use such a phone to surf the Internet, edit videos, listen to music, and play games. The iPhone simply didn’t fit Ballmer’s image of the world, so he rejected it—rather than study it with an attitude of curiosity, interest, and exploration.

  Microsoft’s CEO would have been better off gathering his best engineers, designers, and marketing experts around a table; passing around a few of the new iPhones; and asking, “What’s new and different about this gadget? Why do you think Apple chose to eliminate the keypad? What new possibilities does this design allow? How do you suppose people will use the iPhone for more than calls and texts? Are there new products or services we could offer that would fit into the iPhone strategy? Is there anything we can do to take the iPhone concept and make it even better?”

  The answers to questions like these might have generated a lot of fresh, innovative thinking at Microsoft—and saved the company from having to play catchup to Apple for the next several years.

  Choose Curiosity

  You can choose to view life with curiosity. When life throws you a curveball—when things happen that are unexpected, confusing, unpleasant, disruptive, or painful—you can follow the path of your immediate emotional impulses, become judgmental, and head toward the lower floors on the Mood Elevator. Or you can take a deep breath, step back from your negative emotional responses, and choose to be curious. Ask yourself:

  What’s the underlying cause behind this surprising, disturbing event?

  What is motivating this behavior that I find so difficult to understand?