Working Wisdom

“The reasonable person adapts to the world. The unreasonable person persists in trying to adapt the world to his ideals. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable one.”      –George Bernard Shaw

“You’ve got to go out on a limb sometimes because that’s where the fruit is.” –Will Rogers

Teaching principles, without first changing mindset, is useless. We read books and articles about innovation but the harder step is to step back and look at how we fail to think fully. Before we simply add tools to the mix, before we teach how we develop new ideas, we need to examine the biggest hindrance to innovation, which is conformity.

Conformity has an immediate power over our minds and actions. It can be a positive force, of course. We need compliance, identification with a team, and socialisation skills. We also need to be able to have pre-set, simplified procedures. This is how we work together. It is how we build individual ideas into big concepts. Please follow your traffic laws, for instance, when driving home. It is simply arrogance, as well, not to read, or cultivate the wisdom of those who are experts in our fields.

The paradox is that conformity can also mean the loss of innovation, original thinking, and can result in terrible judgements. We find unconscious conformity at the heart of our how we think when we fall into fundamentalism, or the fascism of masses of people. You may think of footage of the Nazi Nuremberg Rally. More personally, when a celebrity commits suicide the rate of suicide in the populations as a whole goes up by ten percent for the next two weeks.

You may be less aware, though, of how the instinct to believe others saps our ability to think clearly. Howard Gardner, at Harvard University, has studied how we use our intelligences. He introduced the idea of ‘multiple intelligences’ into our vocabulary, and he also looked at how our intelligence changes over our lifespan.

Gardner found that young children were very powerful in their ability to take in information, organise it and use it. About 99% of children, between the ages of 0 and 4 years, were ‘geniuses’ in their ability to use their intelligence, he found.

When he continued up the age levels, though, he found that only 70% of children between ages 5 and 10 were still operating at this same ‘genius’ level. Further on, only 20% of young people between the ages of 11 and 20 used their intelligence potential to this level. After age 20 only 2% still had highly integrated intelligence.

At first the researchers could find no explanation. Then Gardner and others noticed that these rates of decline followed exactly the rate at which we give up faith in our own judgement in favour of our peers. Conformity, in other words, steals our genius. It swallows our ability to think to our potential.

We see this in business, too, where studies show that trained, experienced professionals, again and again, will give up their point of view to defer to the opinions of their superiors.

As we say in our training, we don’t want bloody revolutions, but we do want to encourage robust discussion. Our work cannot afford less than full potential thinking.

You may recall the 1986 Challenger Space Shuttle explosion. Before the launch the engineers warned the project managers that the O-rings might fail in the cold predicted for that day. This is not what the managers wanted to hear.

“Are you sure,” they said, “that you can prove this is a problem?”

When pressed, the engineers backed down, and seven astronauts died in the explosion from the failed O-rings.

It can be a painful process to go beyond our normal thinking, in a team or as individuals. The French painter, Matisse, described his creative process as extremely violent. To sit down and paint each day felt the same as if he was sitting down to punch someone in the face. ‘It is like lancing an abscess,’ he said.

The drive to see one’s work in fresh or innovative ways is often difficult in professional situations if innovative thinking is not encouraged. We have a biological drive to fit in, to not risk ostracism from our ‘pack.’

Nevertheless some people do go beyond conformity, individually and in teams. The qualities of curiousity, and passion for the work at hand, are at the core of these thinkers, but we can be more explicit.

Cynthia Rabe, in her book, “The Innovation Killers,’ describes some qualities of those who break through conformity, and who help organisations break through conformist thinking. She notes how important it is that organisations seek out, and cultivate these qualities in employees.

She describes the quality of being a “Renaissance Thinker,” for instance, as being wide-ranging in your interests. Renaissance Thinkers enjoy exploring connections where connections don’t normally occur. They read widely, and explore outside their main disciplines.

Another quality is “Psychological Distance,” which is the ability to not get caught in the expert mode. A temporary addition to a team will often add this quality, or a relative newcomer to a field can bring this quality. Paired with some basic training in a field we can bring what I call an “informed-naiveté” to the situation. “We didn’t know enough to know it couldn’t be done,” said one member of a ground-breaking education team.

Similarly, Edward DeBono suggests that we look at increasing our alternatives for any given decision. If you are choosing from any less than 12 ideas you are not choosing, he suggests. You are merely reacting.

Try this: choose a problem you are facing and force yourself to come up with 20 solutions. Often it is hard to go past 4 or 5 possibilities, comfortably. Then we see how our criticising mind begins to hold us back when we go beyond the easy answers.

“Oh that couldn’t work,” we say. “That’s ridiculous!”

That’s where innovations lie.

I have heard a story about when DeBono was hired to solve a problem for a builder of a skyscraper. No one wanted to rent the upper floors of the building because the elevators they had installed were too slow. The cost of installing a new system in the finished building would be too much, they said, but neither could they afford to rent the lower floors only.

DeBono came into the building and sat in the lobby for a day, studying the lifts. At the end of the day he came to the owner and told him to install a bank of mirrors around the entrance to all the lifts.

“How will that speed up the lifts?” he was asked.

“It won’t,” he said, “but people love to look at themselves, and they won’t mind the wait as much.”

Making a commitment to go beyond conformity is a commitment to questioning assumptions, and stretching beyond the standard answers. The commitment great leaders have to listening to new ideas takes humility and courage. Think of the difference between the investors in early phones and the British diplomat, who at the first demonstration of a long-distance phone call said: “Well that is well and good for Americans, but we won’t need phones in England. We have many boys to use as messengers.”

What are the new opportunities that we are missing today? What are the types of conformity that will benefit our work? To go further, as leaders we must develop our ability to choose between what is conscious conformity, and aids us in working efficiently, and unconscious conformity, which steals our genius. Conformity, positive or negative, is not a conscious choice for most people. We don’t see how it happens, and so we don’t develop the perspective to judge.

We recognise that ideas are power in today’s marketplace, and so we must look at what stops ideas from being born, and what stops them from being acted upon. We must first understand conformity, develop our ability to go beyond it, and then develop this ability in our teams. The commitment we all must have is to look at what narrows our view, and what narrows our ability to choose.

When we are talking about change of any kind it is often helpful to start with conditioning.

There’s a story that came out of the University of Melbourne several years ago. Researchers put 10 monkeys in a room, and put a ladder in the room, too, with some food on top of the ladder. Monkeys looked at the food and, of course, tried to climb the ladder to get to the food.

The researchers, though, had rigged the ladder. As soon as the monkeys touched the ladder the sprinkler system went on, and the monkeys all got wet.

Monkeys hate getting wet, so they quickly learned: ‘Don’t Touch the Ladder.’ Pretty soon, no monkeys would touch the ladder. They didn’t even need the sprinkler system.

They wouldn’t touch the ladder, themselves, but also, if they saw another monkey touch the ladder they would grab their fellow, beat him or her up, and in effect tell them: ‘Don’t Touch the Ladder.’

Then the researchers did something interesting. They took one of the monkeys out, and put in a new monkey–who’d never seen the ladder, never had the sprinkler system.

First thing it did? Went for the food on top of the ladder. But all the monkeys grabbed the new guy, beat him up, and said, again: ‘Don’t Touch the Ladder.’

Then the researchers started replacing the monkeys, one by one, until they were left with 10 monkeys who had never touched the ladder, never seen the sprinklers go on, but still, if one of them went near it, they’d all beat him up: ‘Don’t Touch the Ladder.’

That happens with monkeys, but it also happens in groups. Something happens, we respond, and we continue to respond in the same way every time after that, whether we know it’s right or not.

What can we do about it? In my previous post, ‘Choose Your Attitude,’ I mention how we think 40,000 to 60,000 thoughts each day. Most of these are redundant and fearful. So we can see that relying on just a good set of values and positive thinking won’t help us. If we are just going to give it our spontaneous best efforts we will be heading backwards.

One of the best things a group can decide is to develop a strategy around behaviours. If we have a strategy, and landmarks set up along the way, we will know what we need to do in order to move forward, and we will know if we are actually moving forward.

We have to understand that it is extremely difficult to make changes happen. Most change efforts are annoying and ineffective because they don’t take this into account. Our conditioning is powerful, and it takes a top-down, bottom-up, inside and outside effort to get beyond it.

“Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper or your self-confidence.”

—Robert Frost

Our ability to choose our attitude at any given moment is key to our ability to lead. The ability to control our response is a fundamental aspect of our emotional health and our workplace competency. When you drive you want to have control over your car. Imagine driving down the highway and suddenly you start to swerve. That would be a problem. In the workplace we sometimes lose control in the same way. We lose our thinking and emotional ability to steer and react.

Our attitude is our ability to see a situation and respond to it. When there’s a problem with our attitude our attention narrows, we become reactive, fall into a negative mood, or we have a limited perspective on our situation. Dr Victor Frankl wrote: “Everything can be taken from us but the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”

Frankl came to this conclusion after an experience with the extremes of human survival. During World War II Frankl lost everything. An Austrian Jew, and a psychologist, he was captured by the Nazis and brought to Auschwitz. There he lost his wife, his parents, his writings…and nearly his life. He survived, almost impossibly, and from this experience he came to see the importance of making meaning, and choice.

There were some in the camps, he said, who seemed to remain alive in their hearts, despite the horrors. There were those who could be starving, but still decide that someone else needed their potato more. Some who could still hear a bird song on a frozen morning and smile. These were the ones who chose their response, and found their meaning despite the outward conditions beyond their control. With nothing left to them but their choice of attitude they retained this last freedom—to choose who they would be.

How do we respond to our situation? At a more mundane level, how might you react if some unjustly accuses you of incompetence? Poor attitudes are common in some workplaces—how much has your attitude become negative towards your work, your colleagues or your self? We don’t have to be taken into the extremes of a concentration camp to be tested. As Frankl suggested, our choice of attitude is the last of human freedoms, but often the first to go, as well.

Imagine walking to a meeting with your boss, ready to present a proposal. As you walk, negative thoughts may come up. You might tell yourself: “She’ll never like it. This will make me look flaky, or aggressive.” You start to doubt yourself and look back at old failures or fears.

We have a huge stream of thought-moments that flow throughout our day. Psychologists tell us that we have between 40,000 and 60,000 thoughts a day. Most of these thoughts, they tell us, are automatic, unconscious, and largely negative. Most of our thinking, in other words, relives our fears and failures. We can contract into these automatic thoughts, because they are comforting, they are known. We are largely conditioned to relive our history.

So how can we expect to create new ideas, and live positively in the present when most of our energy is spent reliving our failures from the past? As leaders, how can we help our team or department to turn this around, and look at our present situation with more focus? How can we turn towards the future with a sense of potential?

The key is to catch your thinking. We form our attitudes based on our conditioning. Our conditioned attitudes might be helpful, or they might not. Our unhelpful attitudes are like giving false directions when someone asks you how to get somewhere. We will have the wrong map. If I were to land in Perth, and I wanted to go to Victoria Avenue, I could look at my map. I am on Princes Street now, and so I take out my map and see that the two roads run together. I start walking and walking and soon realise there is nothing that meets up with Princes Street that resembles a Victoria Avenue. Then I look at my map and I realise I am using a Melbourne map, not a Perth map.

Here’s how this can happen with children. As I write this it is around 6:30 on a Friday night. My youngest daughter is hungry, tired and cranky. She sees we have some freshly baked muffins out on the counter and she wants one. I can tell her that dinner is already cooked, and I’ll serve it in about ten minutes, but I just want to finish this article. That doesn’t even register for her. She wants a muffin now! She might start begging and whining, over and over…or worse!

Of course, I’ll stop writing at this point and attend to my children, but the question is: if I give in, give her the muffin—who wins? She certainly doesn’t, because she has now learned a false set of directions for getting what she wants: whinge and make a pest of yourself to get what you want. This might work once, or twice, but if you grow up like this you can get yourself in some serious difficulties in the work place.

We can learn to anticipate our map structures, and learn the grammar of how we make choices. If we can see them in the formation stage we can become active choosers. We will always have some false or unrealistic maps and beliefs of reality because life is always changing. The layout of our life is in flow, as is our maturity and understanding.

We can learn, and like weightlifters we can practice our attitudinal muscle. The late psychologist Albert Ellis suggests we learn to work with our ABC’s:

A = Activating Event

B = Belief

C = Consequent Reaction

It works this way: Picture that you are stuck in traffic during peak hour. You are late for your meeting and if you go now, you’ll get through the intersection and save yourself two minutes. All of a sudden, without signal, a car zooms into your lane ahead of you. You slam on the brakes, avoiding an accident and you are cut off from going through the intersection.

This is your Activating Event. The Consequent Reaction is the attitude you form. You might become enraged, frustrated, or even drive erratically to try to get through the intersection after the lights change. Maybe you fall into road rage, and make the problem worse.

The question is, what caused your Consequent Reaction? Was it the Activating Event of being caught in traffic, or your Belief? In this case your Belief could be that you can drive through traffic at all times and not ever have to share the road with other drivers. Or that getting angry with this other driver will cause the problem to be fixed.

We can take the route of innocence. “I am completely not responsible for my attitude in this situation. It is the other driver, the traffic, the people who built the roads, the makers of automobiles…” This is very seductive, but it leaves us powerless. And we can’t change the traffic, or the behaviour of other drivers, so we are innocent.

What we can take responsibility for, in this situation, is our belief. We must become detectives, and get to know the beliefs that determine our attitude.

For our wedding, my wife met with the florist. “I don’t mind the exact mix of flowers,” she told them. “You can choose how they work together. But the one thing I hate is peachy-apricot flowers. None of those please.”

When she arrived at the florists to pick up the flowers they opened the box, and guess what? All of them were peachy-apricot.

My wife just laughed. She described a sudden revelation she had at this moment: “This will only be terrible if I make it so.” Her belief had been that she hated these flowers, but in that moment she spontaneously saw that this belief wasn’t quite so firm, and that her enjoyment of her wedding day would not change by the colour of the flowers she saw on the altar.

This is what it is like to move into the unknown, and to embrace change in our workplace. It takes courage. It takes heart. This situation we are in now is different in its history than situations we encountered in the past. There is new potential here, and we can choose to see this.

Choose your attitude. Choose a new belief that is more realistic and your attitude will follow. In my car, I can choose to make this a miserable experience, yes. I can also play the radio, or wave back at the bored children ahead of me who are gesturing and laughing. I can plan my next project in my mind. I can roll down the window and enjoy the breeze. Life is happening right now.

Here’s an exercise: Think about someone you admire. It could be your father, a friend, someone at work, or maybe a famous figure. Think about this person for a moment, and consider what you admire about them.

In our workshops I ask people to tell the group a couple of words that describe what they admire about this person. I hear words like “honest,” “passionate,” “conviction,” “integrity,” and so on. What we most admire about these people is the attitude they bring to their work, to their relationships, to their lives.

We have two sides to our work. One is to get results, to solve problems, to serve, and to create. We set up means to an end, a goal. Choosing our attitude is important for this. One business study demonstrated that for every 1% shift in positive attitude there is a 2% shift in revenue. Competency skills in customer service, team building, emotional intelligence and communication all link directly with our mastery of our attitude.

There is another side to our work, though. We bring our own success with us when we choose our attitude. We are the ends, as well as the means. We often quote Ghandi: “You must be the change you want to see.” We are not only a means to an end. Put yourself into the picture. Our attitude determines our ability to be the person we want to be. We are also the end to our means.