by Jane Perdue | Bias, Leadership, Paradox & Polarity
“You can’t do that. It’s not in the plan.”
How many times have you heard that line or one like it spoken at work?
Planning is important. Business plans, contingency plans, succession plans, project plans, etc. are all good—until they aren’t.
Plans bring order and continuity. However, they can also become obstacles to innovation, inclusion, and creativity.
Think about the colleague who has a detailed plan for everything and refuses to deviate from it, no matter how compelling new information may be. Think about the company that fails to recognize the institutional bias that’s been embedded in its long-time succession and promotion plans.
It’s easy to come up with new ideas; the hard part is letting go of what worked for you two years ago, but will soon be out of date. ~Roger von Oech
A few years ago, I served on the inaugural steering committee for a new community conference intent on becoming an annual event. The first conference was a roaring success; the second even better. The third not so much.
One of original steering committee members who had stayed the course shared her diagnosis as to why the third event was unsuccessful. “The plan had worked well, so we relied on it too much. Because we stuck to the plan, we missed out on including some excellent panelists and speakers. No one wanted to step outside the lines and do something different.”
Ever been in that spot?
Through social conditioning, training, preference, or the desire for convenience, people fall into one of two mental traps about planning and get stuck in their thinking.
One camp frets that chaos will result if there’s inadequate planning and control. The other believes too much planning and control will stifle creativity. The concerns of both camps are valid.
If both concerns are valid, then what’s the problem?
The problem is either/or thinking—accepting the notion that planning is either about control or chaos.
Planning for and achieving successful outcomes require both chaos and control, both disorder and boundaries.
These paradoxes are equally important but essentially different management requirements according to the late management consultant Peter Drucker. Regardless of how contradictory dealing with both disorder and boundaries sounds, they’re interdependent. Like it or not, both are necessary for success. Either/or doesn’t work.
The Wright brother flew right through the smoke screen of impossibility. ~Charles Kettering
The natural tension between the disorder that improvisors thrive on and the boundaries that control freaks adore can be managed provided people are willing to be curious and flexible.
3 ways to find the sweet spot for planning
Doing three things aids us in keeping curiosity, flexibility, and success front and center as we first create and then execute our plans.
1) Have a general game plan.
Know what you want to accomplish. Have a timeline. Define roles, responsibilities, and measures of success. Think about what could go wrong and how to deal with problems. Identify resources and stakeholders. Be willing to flex or scrap it all and re-invent when circumstances shift.
2) Get comfortable being slightly uncomfortable.
Recognize that always sticking to the plan provides a false sense of security that obscures new opportunities. Learn to be flexible with “how” the “what” of the plan is implemented. Be willing to challenge the end goal. Embrace and reward purposeful discomfort. Be willing to be vulnerable and sometimes not be certain of the next step.
3) Leave room for serendipity.
Whether that interaction with an unintended outcome or moment of “aha!” realization is engineered by an app or a spontaneous stroke of fate, be open and receptive to the mad genius possibilities it presents. Don’t let existing plans become a straitjacket. Roll with the punches.
Serendipity. Look for something, find something else, and realize that what you’ve found is more suited to your needs than what you thought you were looking for. ~Lawrence Block
Finding the sweet spot between too much and “just right” planning takes time and patience, but it can be done.
Have how you learned to manage the tension between chaos and control?
Image credit before quote added: Pixabay
by Jane Perdue | Be your best you, Bias, Inspiration
A colleague and I were at a publishing conference. We were attending a session on how to be a more effective writer.
“Schedule time every week for serendipity,” advised one of the session panelists. “If you schedule time for serendipity, you’ll make it happen. If you don’t, it won’t; and your skills won’t improve.”
“Did she say to schedule serendipity?” I whispered to my colleague.
“Sure did.”
How ridiculous, I thought even though I’ve been the beneficiary of accidently tripping into discoveries. Despite my past good fortune, the speaker’s counsel troubled me. From my perspective, there was absolutely no way to schedule a fortunate accidental discovery—serendipity just happened. Right?
Curious about maybe having missed a nuance in the definition of serendipity, I did some research. I hadn’t missed anything.
Author Horace Walpole invented the word serendipity in 1754. A Persian fairy tale, The Princes of Serendip, had been his inspiration. In the fairy tale, three princes “were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things which they were not in quest of.”
That confirmed my belief the speaker had it all wrong. Sadly, I mocked her advice on several occasions.
Shame on me.
And for that, I got my comeuppance.
I was doing online research about dogmatism for my book. I’d just read the definition of dogmatism, a viewpoint or system of ideas based on insufficiently examined premises, when the aha zap happened.
My reaction to the speaker’s words about scheduling serendipity leapt into mind.
Ewww. It hurt to see it and to say it, but I’d been dogmatic. I’d been that person; the narrow-minded one I criticize when I see people acting the same way I had.
I’d blindly accepted as fact that my belief that it was impossible to schedule serendipity without examining her meaning. I had heard her words, interpreted them with my dogmatic filters, and outright rejected her position.
Shame on me again. Her advice wasn’t wrong, it was flat out brilliant.
In a time-starved world where there’s a plan and time slot for everything, it’s pure genius to leave time open for spontaneity. Time to think, daydream, be. Time for accidental discoveries to happen.
Of course, you can’t will the eureka moment to happen in those moments. However, making time to reflect increases the odds of creativity, inspiration, and innovation happening.
That’s what the speaker had meant. She was telling us to avoid the tunnel vision that comes from having an over-packed schedule and too much to do. She was telling us to make room for unpredictability and possibility.
*big sigh* How could I have been so dogmatic, so obtuse, so blind?
Psychologist Daniel Kahneman has an answer for us.
He says it’s incredibly difficult for us to see our own biases. We can easily point to them in other people, but not so much for ourselves.
Fortunately for me, a research aha moment rescued me from my blindness.
I both love and abhor my personal teachable moments. Love them because new paths are revealed, abhor them because I need them in the first place.
Perhaps I’d better start scheduling time for teachable moments in my calendar.
Image credit before quote added: Pixabay
by Jane Perdue | Be your best you, Bias
Hubby was peeved with me.
I couldn’t answer his question about whether or not our yard waste that was piled by the curb had been picked up.
“You went out to get the paper,” he said. “How could you not notice?”
Not noticing had been easy.
The early morning air was fresh. The sky full of sun and frothy clouds. The fushia crepe myrtle blossoms luscious. An egret was looking for breakfast in the pond across the street. A writing assignment was due in two days. There was that choppy section of content in my leadership workshop that needed smoothing out. I needed to rework the overview section of my book proposal. I wanted another cup of coffee. Yard waste wasn’t anywhere near my radar screen.
There was the day when I would have fired off a snarky retort, Come on, yard waste? I have more important things on my mind. But that was before I learned about confirmation bias, the power of curiosity, and the magic of patience and acceptance.
Growing to the point where I could calmly and nondefensively answer, “Sorry, lovey. I wasn’t paying attention,” had taken a long time and lots of work. Too many gumdrops, too.
A few years earlier, I felt defensive a lot and puzzled, too, that people weren’t see events as clearly as I believed I was seeing them. Differences of thought, opinion, and perspective were causing friction in relationships.
The final straw came after reconnecting with someone from my past whom I respected. We were exchanging views on current events when he commented that he was surprised that I’d let my mind get small.
Ooh, that stung.
Our best hope for finding invisible flaws in what we can’t see in our own thinking is to enter into different ideas or points of view—ideas that carry different assumptions. Only after we’ve managed to inhabit a different way of thinking will our currently invisible assumptions become visible to us. ~Peter Elbow, professor
That I had let my mind close was something I hadn’t considered. More importantly, I didn’t want to be as closed-minded as I believed those with whom I was debating were. Yet I was. Oh. My. Goodness.
There’s nothing good about being small-minded. Too much judgment, too many expectations, too much rigidity and conflict. Ick. I was seeing only what I looked for. That narrow perspective needed to change, and taking five actions helped me do that.
Nan-in, a Japanese master during the Meiji era (1868-1912), received a university professor who came to inquire about Zen. Nan-in served tea. He poured his visitor’s cup full, and then kept on pouring. The professor watched the overflow until he could no longer restrain himself.
“It is overfull. No more will go in!”
“Like this cup,” Nan-in said, “you are full of your own opinions and speculations. How can I show you Zen unless you first empty your cup?” ~ Nyogen Senzaki
5 ways to fuel acceptance and personal growth
Give up on being right. Various institutions and conventions reward us for viewing the world through a right versus wrong lens. Learn to let go of always looking for what’s “right” or “wrong.” Gift the “my way or the highway” mindset bullies. Life, love, and leadership are more fun and rewarding when we let go of right/wrong judgments and learn to live with different opinions. Ambiguity exercises our minds and expands our hearts.
Let go of certainty. The opposite isn’t uncertainty. It’s openness, curiosity and a willingness to embrace paradox, rather than choose up sides. The ultimate challenge is to accept ourselves exactly as we are, but never stop trying to learn and grow. ~Tony Schwartz
Pick your battles. Not every issue is worthy of falling on your sword. Learn to gracefully, tactfully, and constructively push back on issues that really move the needle.
Be curious and look for the big picture. Don’t ignore all the good apples in the basket because of the single bad one on top. Take Dr. Elbow’s advice and get outside yourself and see from the perspective of someone else. Diversity of thought, opinion, and perspective brings the big picture fully into view. Helps with having humility, too.
Give people the benefit of the doubt. If you believe you can always tell a book by its cover, you’re biased and missing out. Enough said.
Tolerance isn’t enough. Tolerance, i.e., I can live with xx, is a virtue. It’s just not enough, though, in these days in which scientists say the range in degrees of separation is from two to ten people. That’s a lot of connectedness and difference to contend with. I can live with xx is best replaced with xx is OK. Through curiosity, acceptance and personal growth, we learn to respect people’s right to believe differently. Lead with love, not judgment.
Sometimes letting things go is an act of far greater power than defending or hanging on. ~Eckhart Tolle
Letting go of certainty brings peace. It begets openness, understanding, and connection, too. Expectations and social constructs become less constraining; conformity more boring. We are free to experience and grow.
And be patient when someone expects us to see the yard waste.
Image source before quote added: Pixabay
by Jane Perdue | Bias
Once upon a time there was boss who was an extrovert and who preferred working with extroverts. He liked people jockeying to make themselves heard and found the quiet, reflective ones annoying. Over time, he quit adding introverts to his team and weeded out those who had joined the team before he took over.
He was shocked when a class action discrimination charge was filed against him.
It’s estimated that somewhere between 50 and 74 percent of the population are extroverts. This boss preferred working with talkative, high-energy, action-oriented people. He loved having a team of outgoing individuals who didn’t hesitate to share their opinions, even if they had to talk over each other to do so. This boss believed reflective and thoughtful individuals who weren’t johnnie-on-the-spot with a loud opinion weren’t qualified to work in his department.
This boss let his preference—his bias—morph into prejudice, which resulted in discrimination.
Let’s take a look at how this hierarchy of harm unfolds:
Bias: a tendency to favor or disfavor that prevents neutral consideration.
Prejudice: a preconceived opinion, prejudgment, or attitude that negatively impact one’s thoughts, feelings, and actions about a group or individual.
Discrimination: unfair, inappropriate, unjustifiable, and negative behavior toward a group or its members.
Having a bias for extroverts didn’t make this boss a bad person. What made him a poor leader though, was that he failed to control for his bias.
He’s not alone. Even though people like to think they’re unbiased, they’re not!
Our brains facilitate biased thinking:
-
- Psychologist Daniel Kahneman calls it “System 1” thinking, an “effortless, often unconscious process that infers and invents causes and intentions, neglects ambiguity, suppresses doubt, and uses similarity rather than probability.”
- Author Malcolm Gladwell calls it “the power of thinking without thinking.”
We all occasionally go on autopilot, especially when under pressure or experiencing something new, and rely on the mental pairings we make when we fold things into our memory. Being an effective leader. though, depends on whether or not we tame our biases or let them control what we do.
5 common workplace cognitive biases
Biases are everywhere.
“Cultural biases are like smog in the air,” says Jennifer Richeson, a Yale psychologist. “To live and grow up in our culture, then, is to ‘take in’ these cultural messages and biases and do so largely unconsciously.”
Some biases bubble up more frequently than others. Think about where you work. Have you seen any of following common biases happening there?
Anchoring: the tendency to rely too heavily on the first piece of information offered when making decisions.
Confirmation bias: the tendency to interpret new evidence as confirmation of one’s existing beliefs or theories.
Groupthink: the psychological phenomenon for alignment that occurs within a group of people because of the desire for, and/or pressure to, have harmony or conformity.
Halo effect: the tendency for someone’s overall impression of a person, either good or bad, to be influenced by how they feel and think about the other person’s character.
Overconfidence effect: the tendency for someone to believe subjectively that his or her judgement is better or more reliable than it objectively is.
Bias is tricky to manage. Why? Because it’s difficult for us to see our own biases.
We bump into the introspection illusion, “the assumption that our own golden rule of objectivity works well for ourselves—but others’ rules don’t work for them. The result is a blind spot that can lead otherwise careful people to exempt themselves from rules of behavior they would rigorously apply to others.”
5 ways to tame bias
So, how do leaders avoid the thinking without thinking trap that the extrovert-preferring boss fell victim to?
Leaders can five things to minimize the impact of biased thinking. They can:
- Be mindful of always listening to their gut. Quick decisions and first impressions can unconsciously be shaped by bias. Be curious and fact check before acting.
- Involve more people in the policy- and decision-making process. The trade-off in time involved is balanced by the emergence of fuller, deeper, richer, and more inclusive outcomes because we’re considering a broader spectrum of thoughts, opinions, and perspectives.
- Stop relying exclusively on memory—it isn’t as infallible, accurate, or impartial as most people think it is. Memory plays tricks on everyone. Biased impressions are folded into our memories.
- Recognize that not every decision is best served by using narrow either/or thinking. Sometimes, the right answer is both/and. Biased thinking is often at the core of polarization.
- Include contrarians on every team and listen to what they have to say. Their contributions in helping people see things from a different perspective are invaluable. They force us to inhabit a different way of thinking.
The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are so certain of themselves and wiser people so full of doubts. ~Bertrand Russell
What methods have worked for you in managing bias?
Image credit before quote added: Pixabay
by Andie and Al | Bias, Stereotypes
In Silicon Valley’s bro-culture, women face gender stereotypes that prevent recognition of their actual abilities and gender biases that obstruct their career advancement. Nevertheless, without waiting for their companies’ cultures to change, women can utilize effective communication techniques to avoid or overcome these career-limiting biases.
The trick is to present themselves – using verbal and nonverbal behavior – so they are perceived as competent, confident, committed to their careers, and capable of leadership, without being perceived as pushy, bossy, abrasive, or unpleasant.
Managing the Goldilocks Dilemma
We call this sort of impression management, attuned gender communication. In seeking advancement, women face the Goldilocks Dilemma.
That is, they are often seen either as too soft (likable but not competent and confident) or too hard (competent but not likable), and rarely just right. This double bind results from the pervasive nature of traditional gender stereotypes: women are (and are expected to be) kind, caring, pleasant, modest, supportive, and sensitive; men are (and are expected to be) independent, competitive, decisive, aggressive, strong, action-oriented, and unemotional.
When a member of either sex deviates from these expected behavioral patterns there is backlash.
Pressure to conform
Because of the possibility of backlash, women (often unconsciously) tend to conform to these gender stereotypes.
They often speak and write about themselves tentatively and with diffidence; they often downplay their personal contributions; recount their successes hesitantly; and understate their career goals.
By conforming to these traditional gender stereotypes, a woman is viewed as pleasant and likable but without the drive, competence, and ambition of her male counterparts. But when a woman ignores this expected gendered-communication script and explicitly displays the characteristics of an effective, competent, confident leader, she is likely to be seen as unpleasant, abrasive, and unlikable.
Hence the Goldilocks Dilemma: conform to traditional gender stereotypes and be dismissed as lacking leadership potential; violate these traditional stereotypes and be socially isolated, professionally penalized, and viewed as unlikable.
Whether you work in Silicon Valley or another male-dominated field, attuned gender communication can help you overcome the Goldilocks Dilemma.
Once you understand the gender stereotypes and how they operate to hold you back, you are in a position to take control of your career—even in today’s gender-biased workplaces.
It’s a balancing act
By managing the impressions other people have of you, you can come across as confident and warm, competent and collaborative, tough-minded and likeable. Different communication techniques are needed for different situations; sometimes you will need to dial up your forcefulness, and sometimes you will need to dial it down. But in all situations, you should be able to communicate in an articulate, engaging, and confident manner without coming across as shrill, aggressive, or unpleasant.
It may take some practice, but by balancing the soft with the hard, you can avoid the Goldilocks Dilemma and get ahead in your career – even in Silicon Valley.
—————————————————————————-
Today’s LeadBIG guest contributors are Andrea S. Kramer and Alton B. Harris, authors of Breaking Through Bias: Communication Techniques for Women to Succeed at Work, (Bibliomotion, Brookline, Mass. 2016). Join the conversation at www.AndieandAl.com.
Image credit before quote added: Pixabay
by Jane Perdue | Bias
I almost couldn’t believe my eyes as I read the following core passage in a book a local businessman had written. He’d asked me to help him promote it. This is the sentence that blew me away: “Remove people from your life whose beliefs, ideas, and values aren’t aligned with yours. Make no compromises here.”
Holy smokes!
To me, that wasn’t how I wanted to live my life. I don’t always succeed, but I try to keep an open heart and mind toward those who see the world differently than I do.
I asked the writer if we could meet and talk, saying I wanted to understand why he felt that way. He agreed to meet. When I asked him to give me the backstory as to how he’d come to think that way, he said he was surprised by my question.
“You struck me as being smart,” he said. “I thought you’d understand that position. To me, that sentence says it all. No further elaboration needed. Why clutter up your life with people who are wrong? Do you agree with me or not?”
“I don’t agree.”
“Then we have nothing to discuss now. Or ever.”
True to his beliefs, he removed me from his life. Got to hand it to him—he walked his talk.
These days including only those people who agree with us and excluding others is a common practice. To my way of thinking, that’s scary, limiting, and unnecessarily hurtful.
The human capacity to injure other people is very great precisely because our capacity to imagine other people is very small. ~Elaine Scarry, Teaching for a Tolerant World
Seeing sameness as both good and bad
Uniformity and conformity are comforting. When things are same, we know what to expect, how to react. We know where the boundaries are.
The word homophily was created by sociologists in the 1950s to describe the human tendency to “love the same,” that is, our preference to seek out those who share similar characteristics and beliefs. This preference creates the unintended consequence of forming ingroups that have the “right” views and outgroups that have the “wrong” ones. The “us versus them” stuff.
From our periodic chats, the writer/businessman had deduced that I shared his view. We all make these snap judgments about people or situations based on our perceptions, definition of reality, and way of sense-making. From those data points, we draw boundaries—the who’s in, who’s out, who’s right, who’s wrong, who’s the same, who’s not stuff.
What if there’s no need for boundaries?
In a highly connected, interdependent world that’s overflowing with diversity, isn’t demanding sameness unfeasible and fuel unnecessary discord? Why can’t difference broaden our lives rather than narrow them and help us keep an open heart and mind?
4 categories of beliefs
Curious about the ways in which beliefs can vary, I did some research and discovered four groupings of beliefs that contribute to us seeing the world differently from those around us. These four groups represent vast arenas for varying views and approaches:
- Moral beliefs, which are our code of conduct for welfare and justice in how we treat one another.
- Conventional beliefs, which are our expectations for appropriate behavior.
- Psychological beliefs, which is our understanding of ourselves and others.
- Metaphysical beliefs, which is our faith and spiritual views.
In our empty nest household, hubby and I bring yin and yang to most everything we do. While there’s the occasional conflict, we’ve come to love the serendipity and growth associated with our differing thoughts, opinions, perspectives, and preferences. Our lives have been made richer by the exposure to what’s different.
In a world populated with over 7 billion people and as many opinions, expecting sameness and alignment seems unrealistic. When faced with the smorgasbord of differences, what I’d love to see happen is people replacing intolerance for differences with respect, acknowledgment, and inclusion.
Accepting that what we believe to be true might not be the only truth is a big shift in thinking. Making that mental and emotional shift to keep our minds and hearts open requires a boatload of courage, determination, resilience, and grace. Two tools can help us with that shift .
2 tools to keep an open heart and mind
One tool is reflective thinking, a concept introduced in 1910 by educator John Dewey.
Dewey defined reflective thinking as the “active, persistent, and careful consideration of any belief or supposed form of knowledge in the light of the grounds that support it and the further conclusion to which it tends.”
Reflective thinking is critical thinking in which we think about our thinking. We mindfully evaluate our thought processes to see if we’ve made the unexamined examined. That is, we thoughtfully assess whether or not assumptions, pre-conceived beliefs, or stereotypes have unconsciously colored our decisions.
Without reflective thinking, we can fancy ourselves being tolerant while still being prejudiced.
The other tool is building tolerance for ambiguity.
Confirmation bias, which is us seeing what we unconsciously choose to see and ignoring facts to the contrary, sucks us in all the time. When we do that, we inadvertently let confirmation bias negatively impact how we assess people and situations.
We escape confirmation bias by nurturing our capacity to accept deviation and uncertainty in what we define as being the truth. We let go of rigid boundaries, like the writer’s assertion to “Remove people from your life whose beliefs, ideas, and values aren’t aligned with yours.” We resolve to keep an open heart and mind.
Building a tolerance for ambiguity means forfeiting a measure of certainty, sameness, and control. Building a tolerance for ambiguity means we let go of dogma and become skilled in both doubting and believing.
Call to action
Sadly I’ll never know what motivated that businessman to adopt his position and defend it so fiercely. Was it dogma? Bigotry? Fear? Something else? His refusal to engage leaves me guessing.
If it were within my power, I’d create a golden rule about making room for everyone. I’d enable people everywhere to replace their fear of not knowing or being right with unconditional positive regard for themselves and others.
Making figurative room for everyone wouldn’t mean having to accept someone’s differing viewpoint. All it would require is simply acknowledging without judgment that everyone has a right to believe and think differently. No one’s right or wrong, just different; and that’s OK.
What do you think?
Image credit before quote added: Pixabay
