Breaking Cover.
His camouflage is good.
He says the right things. Nods when his boss’s boss says the right things.
Ladies with prams and their mothers whisper as he passes by.
Shrouded in a smokescreen of incense.
Then something happens.
He unwittingly breaks cover.
The matrons gasp and look away while children laugh at the nudity.
Your Most Effective Response Ever.
“I hear where you’re coming from.
I used to think the exact same thing.
But here’s what changed my mind:”
- Your most effective response ever.
A Lesson from the Back Yard.
As 11 year olds go, I was a reasonable cricketer.
A few summers of front and back yard cricket with and against my Dad, older brothers and neighbourhood mates and their siblings had honed me into a decent all rounder who could routinely bowl my brother and his mates out. No quarter was given nor sought. Any flaws in style or technique were quickly and bluntly pointed out and humiliated into self-correction.
It was with this quiet confidence that I found myself bowling to my best friend from school in his back yard while his dad kept wicket behind an upturned bin and his younger brother stood at first slip.
I sent one down without a warm up, and while my action felt a little weird, the tennis ball turned on the uneven grass and my friend swung his bat and missed. His dad gasped. ‘Wow! Did you see that! What a ripper! Did you see how he disguised it out the back of his hand, boys!’ My friend scowled and tapped the ground, ready to make amends with my next ball. ‘Disguised?’ I had no idea what my friend’s dad meant. However, I registered that my ball had been effective, felt affirmed and buoyed by my friend’s dad’s enthusiastic response, and decided to try and replicate it.
I bowled and my friend again missed, and his dad was even more rapturous. ‘Gee whiz! Another beauty! Boys! Did you see that?! Fantastic!’ My friend and his bother exchanged glances, and I sensed they were annoyed that their dad was using my bowling action as a style for them to emulate. So I bowled again, trying even harder to reproduce the action of the two previous balls. Another swing and a miss, and more compliments and applause from behind the wickets. ‘What a googly!’ their dad shouted. ‘Unbelievable! I don’t think that was playable! So good!’
I was feeling a mixture of quiet pride, with sympathy for the two boys that they could not match my brilliant medium pacer skills. I was straining to restrain my smile and keep my face in the intense scowl that I thought all serious cricketers maintained. And then my friend’s younger brother said it - in a loud whisper that children use when they’re caught between politeness and the truth.
‘Dad! What are you saying? Look at his arm! He’s not bowling! He’s chucking!’
My friend’s dad, bless him, quickly responded with claims that I was an ‘unorthodox right hand swing bowler’. But it was no good. I felt my face flush red. I realised that my instinct about my clumsy first ball was correct. I had bent my arm and thrown it. My friend’s dad, having never seen me bowl, mistook my ragged first ball for my best work and sought to encourage me with his ‘attaboy’ response. Instead, he’d affirmed my error, and so I’d repeated it - even trying harder to emphasise my illegal action - meaning I committed the cardinal cricket sin of being a chucker for almost an over.
I remember that day often. The lesson I learned from my friend’s dad’s well-meaning but unhelpful attempts to make me feel good about my lack of ability by lying to me. But for the blunt honesty of a nine-year-old, I would have continued, blissfully unaware of how badly I was bowling, how my style was illegal, how unfair it was on my friend batting, and how much I was embarrassing myself as I fell far short of my capabilities and potential. Whose needs were being met?
I mostly think about that day when I see mediocrity and even incompetence in the workplace being celebrated and rewarded.
Thus, it is so!
We are naturally reluctant to share information that could encourage others to find fault in our decision making.
- Annie Duke
Positional power should only be deployed to adversely affect another when the circumstances do not allow for information leading to the decision to be shared prior to it being made.
Such circumstances are exceptional.
So is good leadership.
Bad leaders invest in insulating themselves from the consequences of their decisions. They see no advantage in sharing their thinking prior to a decision that might reveal any flaws. Indeed, they think doing so shows weakness. They roll the dice or toss a coin and declare: ‘Thus, it is so!’
Leaving their fawning minions to pervert the truth a little more to align it with their boss’s whims.
Stops Working.
What creates the illusion of a changed human mind is a simple pattern what once worked stops working.
- George Saunders
We can wait for each driver on our roads to work out for themselves, either through personal experience, or by word of mouth, or what they read or watch - what speed to drive through suburbia.
We can wait for each driver to hit a pedestrian or lose control on a wet, slippery road, or even have a near miss, and from this one event, calculate for themselves what is the optimum driving speed that balances arriving at their destination with being able to respond to the driving conditions.
Or we can pass a law that limits the speed and erect signs notifying of that speed and occasionally place a police officer to detect, stop, and fine people travelling over that speed.
Most people have patterns of negative behaviour that stop working for them at age five, or fifteen, or twenty-five due to some life experience. We change our minds and adopt new behaviours. Others live selfish or corrupt or fraudulent, or manipulative lives that, but for some minor scratches, continue working for them. In the absence of a force imposed on them - a boss, spouse, friend, tragedy, or the law - they don’t change. And the rest of us suffer because of it.
Some of those people become bosses.
The Courage to Step Back.
‘For those who had the courage to step back.’
- Serhii Plokhy’s dedication in his book ‘Nuclear Folly - A New History of the Cuban Missile Crisis’
Step 1 of the Five Steps to a Good Decision is Step Back.
Stepping back can take nerves of steel.
Stepping back saved the World.
Always. Never.
It’s easy to accuse someone of ‘always’ or ‘never’ behaving a particular way that offends us.
A person we’ve just met, perhaps in a meeting, enthusiastically prosecutes a view we don’t agree with. Or they’re late. Or they make a mistake. Or they are directly critical of a position we’ve taken; perhaps constructively and reasonably, perhaps not.
If you met President Kennedy during the Bay of Pigs fiasco, you would come away thinking he was weak - as did President Khrushchev of the Soviet Union. If you sat with him amidst the Cuban Missile Crisis - you would think him cool under pressure.
Sadly, many of us, often unknowingly, are characterised by others, and characterise them, based on a single experience. We are denied, and deny them, what the Law calls ‘procedural fairness’ - the opportunity to hear and address the adverse case against us. We go through life with both them and us robbed of the opportunity for a relationship, and to learn and mature from our first impressions.
Because of ‘Always’ or ‘Never’.
Name, Rank, and Browser Activity.
During the Second World War, Axis spies scoured local newspapers to glean anything about a serviceman’s life that, if the sailor, soldier, or airman was captured, might be used during interrogation to trick or coerce them into revealing military secrets.
Spying in the next war will be a doddle.
A Lot of Learning.
There’s a lot of learning between ‘It fell’ and ‘I dropped it’.
- Anonymous
There’s a lot of maturing between ‘the car stalled’ and ‘I stalled the car’.
Natural Debriefers.
The group of children drops their stand up paddle boards and runs to the grass to towel off.
Each competes with the other to describe their experience on the water. ‘I was about to stand and then this small wave unbalanced me and I went in!’ ‘I couldn’t stand and hold my paddle!’ ‘I almost stood, but slipped!’ Each is breathless in their excitement to share how their experience was different or the same as the other children in the group. Everyone eagerly listens.
Over the age of two when they’ve overcome their selfish stage, children and young people are natural debriefers. They spontaneously, and eagerly share and compare with their peers and sometimes adults perceptions of what happened to them during an activity.
Until we become adults, and revert to being selfish, petulant toddlers.
The Corporate Gate Crasher.
Reading much of what’s written in most workplaces evokes many emotions. Or worse - none.
One feeling is sadness.
We write our job application. Accept the invitation to contact our potential future boss (or HR if we’re unlucky) and ask more information about it. We research the position and company. We go to the interview. We are introduced to our potential boss. We hit it off. We like them. They like us. We leave feeling hopeful and quietly excited about the potential for us and our boss.
Perhaps another interview as part of the ‘short list’. And then the letter to say we’re offered the job.
Induction. Staff meetings. Some external consultant comes in and we do tests to identify our ‘type’ and the ‘type’ of our boss and what we both need to do to get along and be productive and avoid conflict. We share Birthday cakes and charity runs and dress up for good causes and toss a gold coin in with the boss’s and then maybe Friday drinks after we’ve dressed casually.
All this effort to get to know each other. Perhaps there’s one or two FTE positions whose job descriptions include Wellness and other responsibilities designed to make us more human and authentic and therefore a little vulnerable in our workplace.
Only for a stranger to gate crash and destroy all the carefully crafted relationship building.
The corporate letter.
The written correspondence bearing no resemblance to the banter and small talk as we waited for the kettle to boil or the microwave to ping. Written in a style, tone, and level that we would never recognise and identify in a line up of our bosses. Like the annoying stranger with no emotional intelligence who interrupts your deep and meaningful conversation at a party. The corporate letter, email, policy, memo, Powerpoint deck, meeting script, media release, marketing propaganda, performance review.
Nope. Sorry, officer. None of those verbose, cold, officious, empty, meaningless string of words fits the description of the warm and humorous and chatty human beings I’ve got to know since I applied for the job. Can’t help you.
The way many people in organisations write is why artificial intelligence is quietly thinking: ‘Hold my beer’.
We Need a Story.
That was the moment I gave up on decision analysis. No one ever made a decision because of a number. They need a story.
- Daniel Kahneman, Nobel Prize Winner
When we follow a good decision making process we commission ourselves as authors of a story.
At the end, we are led by our narrative to a decision.
Cast Our Net.
Your chief weapon to improve your decisions is turning some of the stuff you don’t know into stuff you know.
- Annie Duke
The first step to converting unknowns into knowns is creating a decision making process.
Simply by having a process we create a net to cast out into the hidden depths.
With each step in our process we haul it back onboard, feeling it grow heavier with information.
The Dormant Seed of Hope.
In the soil of most lies is a dormant seed of hope, waiting to push into view.
In covering the truth with dirt, we acknowledge there is a truth.
Waiting for sunlight.
Be Sad to One’s Heart’s Content.
When one is sad, one should be sad to one’s heart’s content. It is precisely when one tries to escape the pain and sadness that one gets stuck and ceases to be able to build deep relationships with anyone.
- Ichiro Kishimi
Step 1 of the Five Steps to Good Decision Making is Step Back.
Only after we’ve attended to our own shock, pain, sadness, anger, disappointment - can we begin to authentically give the attention and energy needed to consider the effect on others of our decision making.
Conjunction.
'We become who we are in conjunction with other people becoming who they are.'
- David Brooks, 'The Social Animal'
A good decision is one that advances us towards where we want to be.
Good decision making is a deliberate process of inquiry that advances us towards where we want to be.
Good decision making is a generous act.
We make our work visible.
We show our labour.
We share our thinking with others in each step so that they may benefit from it.
With the exception of Step 1 - Step Back, good decision making faces outwards to the world.
It is a confident, poised, creative process that, while present, gazes ahead to seek a better future.
Step 2 - Define the Issue. We declare ‘Here’s what I understand Reality to be.’
Step 3 - Assess the Information. We declare ‘Tell me what you know.’
Step 4 - Check for Bias. We ask ‘Am I open to be persuaded by a better argument?’
Step 5 - Give a Hearing. We invite ‘Here’s what i’m thinking of doing that might affect you. What do you think?’
We make our decision, leaving breadcrumbs of others to either follow us, or to feed on during their own journey.
In Plain Sight.
“I had been on the Johnny Carson show for nine years. Nobody at NBC - nobody - not one person after nine years of going on Carson three and four times a year and killing - nobody said ‘Why don’t we talk to this kid?’”
‘Nine years of killing on the Carson show should’ve triggered something in them?’
“Nothing. Nothing.”
- Jerry Seinfeld interviewed by Howard Stern.
It took George Shapiro, Seinfeld’s Manager, to call NBC and point out Seinfeld’s talent for NBC to meet and offer a sitcom.
35 years later, Jerry Seinfeld has an estimated net worth of over a billion dollars.
Remember Jerry next time you’re feeling your boss doesn’t notice, let alone appreciate you’ve been killing.
What it Takes.
Notice what it takes for a boss or organisation to hire, promote, or fire people.
More than hype and slogans and marketing - those decisions reveal what the boss values or feels threatened by.
Orderly.
'Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.'
- Gustave Flaubert
No plan survives first contact with the enemy.
Everyone has a plan until they’re punched in the mouth.
This isn’t an argument for not being prepared.
An orderly decision making process, regularly applied, sets us up to be violent and original - even in our response to chaos.