Influence in Action

by Craig Weber

  • What’s in this for me?

  • This is not my fault.

  • Who can I blame for this?

  • I can’t be bothered. Let some other chump deal with this problem.

  • How can I turn this mess to my advantage?

  • What can I do to cause some trouble?

  • Who is out to get me?

  • Things are “FUBAR” and someone needs to pay for it.

  • Why is everyone out to get me?

  Where Are You on This Continuum?

  All your choices and actions—about what to eat, with whom to associate, what to read, whether or not to exercise, whether or not to bring up an issue or suggest a solution, what ideas will occupy your mind—fall somewhere on the continuum between constructive and destructive. It’s the patterns that count. A constructive decision every so often probably won’t do you much good. And a destructive reaction every once in a while might not do much harm. As with diet or exercise, it’s the trend over time that matters. If your goal is to take action, wield influence, and make a difference, you must consciously adopt a responsibly constructive orientation, and then align your behavior with that worldview.

  What are the dominant patterns in your life choices? Are they mostly responsible and constructive with the occasional slip into victim and destructive? Or are they the opposite? Perhaps you’re somewhere in the middle, bouncing back and forth, depending on the day? These are important questions to consider, for the choices you make lead to the character you cultivate:

  An old Cherokee is teaching his grandson about life. “A fight is going on inside me,” he said to the boy. “It is a terrible fight and it is between two wolves. One is evil—he is anger, envy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority, and ego.” He continued, “The other is good—he is joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion, and faith. The same fight is going on inside you—and inside every other person, too.”

  The grandson thought about it for a minute and then asked his grandfather, “Which wolf will win?”

  The old Cherokee simply replied, “The one you feed.”10

  I encourage you to get far more intentional about the characteristics you feed day-to-day. Get engaged and strive to make a meaningful difference in the world.

  My primary goal with this book, after all, is to provoke you to spark adaptive learning around issues that really matter, all while building your conversational capacity and cultivating your better angels. That’s right. I’m saying that if you’re willing to put in the effort, you can do meaningful work, inspire productive change, and become a more grounded, balanced, and fulfilled person in the process. That’s not a bad deal.

  * For a more rigorous perspective on the destructive orientation, explore the research on what psychologists refer to as the “dark triad” of personality: narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy.

  † Schindler’s List provides another cinematic experience. Compare the actions of Oskar Schindler (Liam Neeson) with the actions of Amon Goeth (Ralph Fiennes).

  STRATEGIES FOR EMBRACING AND STRENGTHENING YOUR MINDSET

  Building Your Ability to Place Learning Over Ego

  Learning

  Ego

  As I said earlier, awareness and skills are important, but what really separates a person who can stay in the sweet spot from a person who can’t is how they’re thinking. At its core, conversational capacity is a mindset in action.

  In this part of the book you learned how to use your mind like a workshop in which sharper thinking and smarter choices are the product. When you’re in your mental workshop your behavior isn’t driven by fear, anger, resentment, vengeance, or a desire to be comfortable or liked; it’s driven by a desire for learning. The big challenge, therefore, is cultivating your ability to stay mindset forward even in circumstances that conspire against it.

  Cultivating this mindset is the hardest work you’ll do as you acquire this discipline. It’s also the most important. Your mindset affects your tactics, tone of voice, body language, and facial expressions. And unless your mindset has shifted, what difference does high awareness make? Sure, the skills or balancing candor and curiosity are practical, but unless your mindset is different, why bother using them?

  So, the question becomes this: How do you build your conversational capacity mindset? The answer to the question is the same as the answer to: “How do you become a runner?” You don’t read yourself into being a runner; you lace up and run yourself into being a runner. In a similar way, to build your conversational capacity you don’t read yourself into this mindset; you think and act yourself into it. In this chapter, I’ll provide ways to strengthen your mindset and keep it in your behavioral driver’s seat under pressure.

  It infuriates me to be wrong when I know I’m right.

  —MOLIÈRE

  Keep an “Indianapolis Journal”

  A few years ago, I flew to Indianapolis to deliver a keynote address at a conference. I landed at the airport, hopped in my rental car, and prepared to drive to my hotel. I’d traveled to Indianapolis a couple of times in the recent past, so I remembered how to get to the location. If you’d been with me and asked: “Craig, do you need directions?” I’d have confidently declared: “No thanks. I’ve been here before. I know where I’m going. It’s an easy drive.” Had you persisted I might have even gotten snarky. “Look, I travel for a living. I’m good at this. Thanks for your concern, but I’ll say it again: I know where I’m going. I don’t need directions.” I was that certain my mental map was correct. Then, armed with this supreme confidence, I zipped out of the airport and promptly got lost.

  I later realized why I got lost. It turns out that the hotel in my head, the one I thought I was driving to, is in Wichita. That’s right. I had my cities confused. So, I was driving to an illusion—the hotel in my head does not exist in Indianapolis—yet I was absolutely certain that I knew where I was going. I was totally convinced I was right, but I was absolutely wrong. That’s funny. (It’s funny now, anyway. It wasn’t funny while it was happening.)

  There is no way you can use the word “reality” without quotation marks around it.

  —JOSEPH CAMPBELL

  My Indianapolis experience was a powerful learning moment that continues to influence how I hold my views of “reality.” A central idea in my work, after all, is that you can dramatically improve your conversational capacity by learning to hold your perceptions of “reality” like hypotheses rather than truths. But this is easier said than done. Your brain doesn’t present to you with a view of “reality” that seems hypothetical. Like a friend all too eager to please you, it often hands you a flawed interpretation of an issue or situation, saying, in essence: “Trust me. This is how things really are.” No wonder the psychologist Cordelia Fine says you should “never trust your brain.”1

  I now routinely ask myself a simple question: “Am I having another ‘Indianapolis moment’ here?” That’s a powerful question and I suggest you start using it too. These cognitive disconnects are sacred learning moments if you’re open to them. Better still, keep an “Indianapolis Journal” and document your own Indianapolis moments, and those of friends, or even examples you see in the news, on film, or in literature. This simple practice reinforces bedrock aspects of the mindset: curiosity; humility; holding your views of reality as formulations rather than facts; thinking critically; and mental agility— thereby increasing the likelihood you’ll pool perspectives, lean into difference, think more critically, and test your views.

  As Kathryn Schulz points out: “Most of us don’t have a mental category called ‘Mistakes I Have Made.’” 2 An Indianapolis Journal is a way to remedy that. You’re creating, very deliberately, a “Mistakes I Have Made” file. You’re not just noticing when you’re wrong—or when you’ve been wrong—you’re writing it down. You’re leaning into your wrongness!

  Whe
n you get into the habit of recognizing your Indianapolis moments, you’ll quickly realize that when it comes to acting on faulty maps of “reality,” you and I are not alone. You’ll regularly see and hear examples in the stories of friends, colleagues, family, and even in the news. Pilots of a Delta Air Lines flight, for example, mistakenly landed their Airbus A320, with 130 passengers on board, at Ellsworth Air Force Base in South Dakota when they thought they were landing at their real destination, the airport in Rapid City, seven miles away. Oops.

  I keep my Indianapolis Journal on my desktop right below my “Trigger Journal,” and I make new entries several times a week. Sometimes I record my own errors; sometimes I record the stories of others. (This is made easier because in my workshops I often conduct an activity to see who can come up with the funniest Indianapolis story, which gives me access to a wide range of examples. If you’d like to share a story, please send it my way.)

  Your mindset matters. It affects everything—from the business and investment decisions you make, to the way you raise your children, to your stress levels and overall well-being.

  —PETER DIAMANDIS

  Ask Three Big Questions

  There are three simple, but powerful, questions that help you build the mindset and keep it in the driver’s seat of your behavior. A number of people I’ve coached found that simply keeping these three questions in front of them during a meeting helps them stay grounded and learning-focused under pressure. (One executive even emailed me to say: “These questions work so well in helping me control my “win” tendency I thought about getting them tattooed on the back of my hand!”) Teams also report that reviewing these three questions before a meeting, or even writing them on the board, has a positive impact on team behavior. What are the questions?

  1. What am I seeing that others are missing? (Do they have a blind spot? I need to speak up because others may have blind spots that my perspective could illuminate.)

  2. What are others seeing that I’m missing? (Do I have a blind spot?)

  3. What are we all missing? (Do we have a collective blind spot?)

  Increase Your SysQ

  Boosting your ability to think systemically is another high-leverage activity that enhances multiple aspects of your workshop mindset, from pooling and integrating perspectives, to critical thinking and making smart decisions. It also boosts your situational awareness, an important skill we explored in the last section.

  A person with high systemic intelligence—or what my close friend and colleague Chris Soderquist refers to as SysQ—is better at recognizing long-term trends, seeing how issues play out across organizational or community boundaries, framing problems in a more actionable way, and finding the most high-leverage places to take action. Here are specific ways that cultivating your systemic intelligence reinforces aspects of the conversational capacity mindset:

  • Pooling and Integrating perspectives. Boosting your systemic intelligence increases your ability to pool perspectives in a way that helps you pinpoint high-leverage solutions that aren’t immediately visible or obvious—the essence of integrative thinking.

  • Critical thinking. Building your SysQ also improves your situational awareness and your critical thinking by helping you identify causal relationships, weigh variables in a more useful way, catch and adjust your assumptions (and those of others), and learn where you need more information if you’re to make the best decision. It allows you to make more useful sense of a situation you’re facing so you can zero in on interventions that will have the greatest impact with the fewest unintended consequences.

  A suite of powerful tools is available to help you increase your SysQ (and that of your team or organization), ranging from basic systems thinking questions and behavior-over-time graphs, to causal loop maps and stock-and-flow diagrams. If you’d like to learn more, Chris Soderquist—who I refer to as the “Carl Sagan of systems thinking”—has a great website with a host of tools and information at findinghighleverage.com.

  Employ Integrative Thinking

  When you’re in your mental workshop, the operative question isn’t: “What should we do to solve this problem?” The question is: “What should we think to solve this problem?”3 The best way to answer this question is to mine divergent viewpoints for insight and then integrate the best of each perspective to engineer a superior solution. You can do that by following these steps:

  1. Explore the varying notions about how to address this issue. Delve into difference; seek out alternative views; lean into contrarian perspectives.

  2. What is useful about each view? What isn’t?

  3. What assumptions constrain how you and others are making sense of the problem? About yourselves? About your organization? About your market or community? About your customers or clients or the people you’re trying to serve?

  4. To enhance your decision-making, adopt a different kind of thinking: Rising above “this-or-that thinking,” indulge in “this-and-that thinking.” Treat the choices you’re facing as building blocks for creating a more elegant, higher-order solution. To do this, ask questions such as these: As we look at each list, how can we integrate the ideas so that we achieve what we like and jettison what we don’t? How can we find a better path forward than the limited options we’re currently facing?

  5. Then make short presentations and discuss what you’re learning. What new opportunities or ideas emerged? Repeat the process if need be.

  To learn more about integrative thinking, I’d suggest two books:

  • Creating Great Choices: A Leader’s Guide to Integrative Thinking by Jennifer Riel and Roger Martin

  • The Opposable Mind: Winning Through Integrative Thinking by Roger Martin4

  Cultivate an Anti-Confirmation Bias

  Left to its own devices, your mind naturally seeks out confirming ideas and information. It likes to think in a rut. But you can force it out of its comfort zone and dramatically increase your mental agility by exploring opposing ideas. To do this, establish the habit of delving into ideas, research, perspectives, and information that contrast with your current take on things. Lean into difference. Talk to people with whom you disagree. You’re not doing this to agree with every perspective you explore; you’re doing it to learn.

  Madeleine Van Hecke makes a compelling case for doing this:

  Becoming more aware of our blind spots, as individuals, and as groups—organizations, businesses, ethnic and religious communities, political parties, states, and nations—deepens our understanding of the issues we grapple with and often points to the way toward their resolution. The most direct path to discovering our blind spots is to intentionally bring perspectives other than our own to the table. This means that we absolutely need other people, people who are unlike ourselves, to help us see what we cannot see on our own . . . From this perspective other people and their differing viewpoints—however blind they may be in some ways—truly have something priceless to offer. From this point of view, our own perspective—however blind it may be in some ways—always has something to contribute as well.5

  Mental agility is closely related to curiosity, so a simple practice is to entertain the opposite assumption. If you love a decision, for example, get curious about how people who hate it are looking at the issue. Do they have different evidence? How are they interpreting the situation differently? What concerns them most?

  Make sure your worst enemy doesn’t live between your own two ears.

  —LAIRD HAMILTON

  Learning to do this well helps you learn to hold your views more carefully. When it comes to the value of holding your perspectives as hypotheses, Dean Williams frames it as well as anyone:

  . . . one must hold onto one’s doubts. Excessive certainty about the rightness or righteousness of one’s cause, as with a crusader, might diminish one’s curiosity, questioning, open-mindedness, and experimentation. Without curiosity, questioning, open-mindedness, and experimentation, real solutions to complex problems will be elusive.6

>   Skepticism toward your own way of looking at the problem or challenge is not only healthy, it’s rational. As human beings, our finite cognitive capacity guarantees that no one person enjoys a complete view or perspective about any issue or problem. The more complex the issue, the less your view will accurately represent it. In the process, you’ll build patience, stamina, and the discipline to hold steady even when listening to a belligerent blowhole who is advocating a repugnant idea.

  Treating Listening as a Discipline

  Learning to listen with intense focus is another high-leverage practice. Listening well requires mental strength, mindful awareness, curiosity, and even humility. It’s also the gateway to learning. It does no good, after all, to test your views, or to inquire into the views of others, if you don’t listen to the responses you get.

  But when people say they’re listening, they’re often doing little more than waiting for their turn to talk, formulating their response, or thinking about something else entirely. “Did I turn off the lights before I left the house this morning?”

  Here are four simple ways to use listening as a practice:

  1. Practice mindful listening. Be in the present. Focus your beam of attention on other people—on both what they’re saying and how they’re saying it.

  2. Practice engaged listening. Pay careful attention to the people you’re listening to while resisting the temptation to guess what they’re trying to say or to make rash judgments. Actively seek to understand their view and the underlying logic that informs it.

  3. Listen for something new. Turn a conversation into an Easter-egg hunt for learning. Listen intently for fresh insight or information. It may be something about the issue you’ve not considered, or perhaps something about the people with whom you’re talking.