Unlocking Leadership Mindtraps: How to Thrive in Complexity - by Jennifer Garvey Berger
Date read: 2019-02-01How strongly I recommend it: 8/10
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A quick read that helps you identify the several mind traps that we all have and what leaders can do to notice and mitigate them. Recommended for leaders who are struggling with motivating and communicating to a team.
Contents:
My Notes
We are trapped by simple stories. We are trapped by rightness. We are trapped by agreement. We are trapped by control. We are trapped by our ego.
The complexity of the world requires that we understand the grays, that we resist black-and-white solutions, that we ask different questions about unexpected and tangential options. But alas, we humans are built to simplify and segment, and it goes against all of our natural pulls to take another person’s perspective or to see a system in action.
Your desire for a simple story blinds you to a real one.
We made the past story simple in our memory, looking back, and now we imagine an equally simple plot line going forward. In both cases we’re probably wrong.
We believe stories have a beginning, middle, and end and we connect causes and effects.
We project forward from the past into the future and fill in missing pieces so it all makes sense.
We are constantly projecting from the things we have seen in the past to what the future will be like.
We create simple characters and select data to support our beliefs.
People who are closest to you are usually harder to describe, but people at a slight distance become somehow easier to “understand.”
It turns out we have a hard time recognizing the complexity of the situation or the person across from us, particularly if we’re on opposite sides. It is easy to cast the person across from you as the villain in your story without remembering that she is the hero in her own story.
Key question: How is this person a hero?
When you realize that you’re carrying a simple story about a person or a group of people, it can be useful to name the role you think they’re playing and then intentionally switch the role and see what that allows.
Key habit: Carry three different stories.
Notice your story and then create another one. And then another. And another.
You’re using the fact that you can come up with different possibilities to increase the likelihood that you’ll be ready for any of them, or for another one you can’t yet imagine. If you’re sure one thing will happen, you’ll close down to evidence that points at another thing.
Trapped by rightness. Just because it feels right doesn’t mean it is right.
We each look at the world and believe we see it as it is. In truth, we see it as we are, a gap that is as large as it is invisible.
When we are uncertain, we search around for understanding and we learn; when we know we’re right, we are closed to new possibilities. When leaders believe they are right in a complex world, they become dangerous, because they ignore data that might show them they are wrong; they don’t listen well to those around them; and they get trapped in a world they have created rather than the one that exists.
Your sense of being right about something, the sparkling clarity of certainty, is not a thought process, not a reasoning process, but an emotion that has nothing to do with whether you are right or not.
Our experience of rightness kills curiosity and openness to data that proves us wrong.
Key questions: What do I believe and how could I be wrong?
Listening to learn requires that we watch our assumption that we are right (and we can either make the problem go away by winning or make it go away by fixing) and instead believe that the other person has something to say that we don’t understand and therefore can’t immediately help or make the problem go away.
Longing for alignment robs you of good ideas.
With complexity, we need diversity of experience, approach, and ideas, and we need to learn how to harness conflict rather than push it away.
So while compromise might feel fair, in complex situations it’s often the wrong way to go because compromise tends to merge two options into one. In complexity, having more options is always better, because you can’t possibly know beforehand which options will actually pay off.
Key question: Could this conflict serve to deepen a relationship?
It is a challenge to make conflict about resolution rather than winning. Resolution is about understanding one another more deeply so that you can come to a third way together, a way neither of you had considered before. A conflict that you truly want to resolve is a force for good in relationships.
Trying to take charge strips you of influence.
When we care about big, complex, intertwined issues, leadership requires the counterintuitive move of letting go of control in order to focus on creating the conditions for good things to happen—often with outcomes better than we had originally imagined.
Sometimes the more senior a person’s leadership position is, the less likely she is to feel in control.
Instead of craving control, in complexity we have to shift to thinking about influence. We will not be able to make things happen, but we can be thoughtful about how we support the emergence of the things we want.
Asking what you can help enable shifts your thinking and expands your view. What sorts of things are inside your control that might enable your team to work together more collaboratively?
Key question: What can I help enable? What could enable me?
Shackled to who you are now, you can’t reach for who you’ll be next.
We need to notice the patterns that are creating the circumstances we dislike and then experiment at the edges to change those patterns (and of course we can notice patterns we do like and experiment to amplify those patterns). Then we will find ourselves learning about the system and also influencing it in ways that might just move us in directions that turn out to be better than the destinations we had in mind in the first place.
We invest our energy into protecting the person we have become rather than growing into the person we might become next.
We protect and defend the identity we have rather than open to new possibilities
Notice the difference between “I’m just not that person who is inspiring at the front of the room” and “Up until now, I just haven’t been that person who is inspiring at the front of the room.” The first one means you can just go home. The second means that you’re headed toward another possibility and that perhaps someday, in the not-so-distant future, you’ll be that person who is inspiring at the front of the room.
As you notice a strong emotion, imagine that it is braided together by many different colors of emotions. See if you can begin to just unpick the braid, laying out the colors alongside one another. Anger over negative feedback might unbraid into shame, indignation, gratitude, and the seeds of connection and change. It will help you deal better with each of your emotions (particularly the darker ones) if you can see all the shades that have created it. Unbraiding these emotions and allowing them to simply be will let you climb out of the simple stories, let go of your need for control, and generally find your way out of the mindtraps.