Three Tricks to Seeing The Bigger Picture

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onsummit

“I can’t recall a period of time that was as volatile, complex, ambiguous and tumultuous. As one successful executive put it, ‘If you’re not confused, you don’t know what’s going on’.”
– Warren Bennis

In 1961, Edward Lorenz was a junior professor at MIT working on meteorology. He used a rudimentary computer called the Royal McBee to crunch algorithms which simulated weather patterns. Using the computer program, he could plug in different variables into the equation and then let the virtual weather unfold. So it was sort of a weather simulator in that each time he would run the program, there would be underlying trends and patterns but no two sequences would be identical. He was trying to recognize the patterns – to see the big picture.

One day, he decided to revisit a particular weather formula which intrigued him. He plugged in the original numbers, intending to let the program run for a longer period this time, and then went to get a cup of coffee. When he came back to the computer the virtual weather pattern unfolding was drastically different than the first time he ran the same numbers.

In fact, the result was so incredibly unlike the first result using the very same numbers that he assumed the computer must have malfunctioned. What he discovered instead was that he had accidentally abbreviated one of the input variables from .506127 to .506 – an abbreviation which he thought was so small, as to be inconsequential.

Lorenz’ revelation in the power of seemingly inconsequential small actions, led him to write a paper in 1972 called, “Predictability: Does the Flap of a Butterfly’s Wings in Brazil Set Off a Tornado in Texas?” This beguiling idea crept into pop culture and time travel movies and later became known as the Butterfly Effect.

But what if we could learn to see the big picture, to simplify the complex, to develop what the French call “coup d’oeil?” Coup d’oeil is an expression meaning literally “stroke of the eye” or “at a glance.” It’s the ability to glance at a complicated terrain or environment and immediately see opportunities and understand the situation more simply – to grasp possibilities and connections within complexity.

Your turn. Here are three ideas to hone your coup d’oeil:

Draw a picture: Instead of writing down your next big idea, draw it. Turn words into pictures on a whiteboard. Or draw a map with plenty of circles, dotted lines and arrows. Or draw emoticons associated with the different ideas. As we know from researchers, when we can visualize something, we can often make new mental connections to simplify the situation.

Say it out loud: According to Harvard medical researcher Jenny Rudolph, often the best advice is to say what you are thinking out loud, in the presence of those whom you trust and who will hold you accountable. By simply saying our understanding out loud, we force ourselves to consider our opinions and biases. We not only hold ourselves more accountable, but implicitly ask those around us to also check our judgment.

Let it rest: Ever work on a hard problem that feels impenetrable, and then wake up and it clicks easily? If you study music, that piano sequence was impossible, yet felt easy in the morning. As sleep expert Dr. Robert Stickgold from Harvard Medical School describes it, ““When we first form memories, they’re in a very raw and fragile form.” But when we sleep, “the brain goes back through recent memories and decides both what to keep and what not to keep.”

This was written in memory of Warren Bennis, who contributed so much to big thinking. We cherish his immense contributions to the world.

The High Cost of Hiding Yourself

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Recently I was asked to be a guest speaker at an event designed for executives of a big technology company. I wore a black suit. The very next day I spoke at a marketing group event of a Silicon Valley gaming company. Unsure of what to wear I asked, and they said, “jeans and chucks.” And then, like an idiot I asked, “What are chucks?”

This is a pretty benign example of what the The Deloitte Leadership Center for Inclusion calls “appearance covering.” We do it all the time when we accept a dinner invitation or go to the beach. We try to wear the right thing to fit in, not stand out, or maybe just not stand out too much. We practice this kind of social covering so much so that in their study 82% of workers stated that covering for appearance was “somewhat” to “extremely” important for professional advancement.

Dressing to fit in can make us often feel even more committed to the team and the mission. But we also often “cover” other aspects of our authentic identities. We hide not only our political opinions, but also truths that deeply define us, such as our cultural histories, sexual orientations, socio-economic backgrounds, or even our age and any disabilities we might have. Comments from those who participated in the study include:

  • Covering family obligations: “I was coached to not mention family commitments (including daycare pickup, for which I leave half an hour early, but check in remotely at night) in conversations with executive management, because the individual frowns on flexible work arrangements.”
  • Covering socio-economic background: “I didn’t always volunteer the information that I grew up very poor and that I was the first to go to college. It seemed like I wouldn’t be accepted because I always assumed everyone I worked with grew up middle or upper class.”
  • Covering ethnicity:“I don’t want people to define me as an Asian, so I’ve been hesitant to participate in activities geared toward the Asian community.”
  • Covering physical health: “I don’t associate with cancer groups, because I don’t want to draw attention to my medical status, disability, or flexible arrangements. People tend to look at me like I’m dying when they find out I have cancer…”

However, as their study uncovered (pun intended), when we feel like we can be more authentically ourselves, we care more about our work, and hold stronger commitment to our company. When we feel that we cannot express ourselves authentically in identity, we feel inhibited in our ability to give our commitment fully to our work efforts.

As one respondent put it, “I understand that my opportunities to advance at my current company are restricted by the fact that I do not fit the ‘mold’ of their executive leadership. If I had the opportunity to do the kind of work I do at another firm with similar compensation, but could be more authentic without limiting my job security or chances for advancement, I’d switch in a heartbeat.”

Remember that partitioning our lives and identities is a trap. When we segment and partition our lives into work life, home life, sporting life, community-service life, etc., we deny a truth that often our greatest strength comes from integrating all the different and diverse network interactions, and ideas into a unified and integrated whole. After all, the etymology of Integrity is from the Latin integer, meaning wholeness, or the unit of one.

“A single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. When we stereotype others, we reduce them. We imprison them in our own small view, a dark and tiny place with no light and no room for growth.”

novelist Chimamanda Adichie

Building cultures of leadership, trust and innovation starts one small act at a time. Try our course Small Acts of Leadership to move the needle a little in your workplace.

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Our company Mindscaling, is busy building powerful human and digital learning experiences for companies of all sizes. My new book Small Acts of Leadership, is a Washington Post bestseller! You can grab a copy now. Have a meeting coming up? I love to work with groups large and small. Let’s talk. Last summer, my son and I bicycled across America with two other dads and their teenagers. We published a new book about it called Chasing Dawn. I co-authored the book with my cycling companion, the artist, photographer, and wonderful human jon holloway. Grab a copy. I’ll sign it and send it to your doorstep.

Yes, You Will Succeed: Three Keys to Building Persistence.

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mousetrap

“Amateurs sit and wait for inspiration. The rest of us just get up and go to work.”
– Stephen King

Back in the early 90s we used to go to a club in Charlottesville VA to see Dave Matthews and his band play. It was free to get in. One time we drove there and the doorman asked for $5, and we were like, “What!? What a ripoff, it’s just Dave.” During that same time period, I found myself president of the Student Activities Union at my college in North Carolina, a job which mostly required throwing parties and sometimes managing intramural leagues. I discovered if your job is to throw parties, people often recommend bands to you. A friend recommended some band from Columbia SC I had never heard of, but he assured me they would rock the house. So I called up Darius Rucker and asked if his Hootie and The Blowfish band would come play at our school. He asked for a keg of beer to play.

It seems like I blinked, but once I picked my head up to pay attention to popular music a couple years later, Dave Matthews and that Hootie band were playing stadiums at $200 a seat, and touring the world.

But here’s the thing: All of those blockbuster songs like Ants Marching, One Sweet World, Only Wanna Be With You, Hold My Hand, and so on, they were playing those same songs in little bar clubs for fourteen people back in the day. And had been playing them for years. They didn’t get famous and then write hit songs. They wrote hit songs and the world didn’t know it, until after they had played and played them again and again.

This is the myth of “suddenly” becoming famous. We don’t become successful overnight. We become successful as a result of showing up every day and putting in the hours, developing deep expertise and finding our tribe over time. Or as Aristotle so wisely put it, “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, therefore, is not an act but a habit.”

The standout word of the day is Grit. We implore our kids to persevere, to stay in the game, to try new ways of solving a problem. We encourage our colleagues to “fail faster” in expectation of finally arriving at an innovative breakthrough. We all just need to be a bit more gritty. One parent in California has a Kickstarter campaign to develop a line of dolls action figures for boys called Generation Grit.

But how do we instill a sense of stick-to-itiveness in our kids, and our colleagues? There are a few clues in recent studies from Brigham Young University in which researchers followed 325 families over a period of four years, examining the behavior of the families with kids between the ages of 11 and 14. After examining parenting styles, family attitudes and subsequent goals attained by the kids, the researchers concluded that three key ingredients consistently created higher levels of persistence:

  • supportive and loving environment
  • high degree of autonomy in decision-making
  • high degree of accountability for outcomes

There it is again – that word autonomy. From previous research by Teresa Amabile and others, we have known for some time that high levels of autonomy lead to more creative outcomes. But here we also see that high levels of autonomy also build greater persistence.

According to Paul Miller, associate professor of psychology at Arizona State University, “When held accountable in a supportive way, mistakes do not become a mark against their self-esteem, but a source for learning what to do differently. Consequently, children are less afraid of making mistakes, are more inclined to try to make better choices in order to demonstrate that they can accomplish and live up to the expectations they share with their parent(s).”

What Women Understand About Effective Modern Leadership

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In his wonderful book, Stumbling on Happiness, Harvard researcher Daniel Gilbert points out that often our best bet for making decisions we will both enjoy and benefit from, is to ask our peers who have made similar decisions. Gilbert’s advice before embarking on an important decision is to ask someone whom we trust, who has also made the decision we are contemplating, and follow their advice. And, as he points out, once we learn their point of view on the matter, we often refuse that advice on the grounds that our situation is different. We reject their advice claiming, “But I’m unique! How could they possibly know what’s best for me?”

Research finds that this inability to accept outside advice and insight only increases with power. The more power and resources controlled by an individual, the more confident they tend to be in their decision-making, and less they tend to listen and be influenced by outside opinions and points of view. However, in their study women were often an exception.

In two phases of the study, women tended to be more open to outside points of view regardless of their position of power within the organization. In their study entitled “The detrimental effects of power on confidence, advice taking, and accuracy,” Kelly See and her colleagues discovered that women more often reported less certainty in their decisions than men, and solicited the advice and opinions of their colleagues more. Most interestingly, because women more often solicited the opinion and advice of their colleagues, they were viewed by their peers as stronger leaders.

So while they may have lacked confidence in their decisions, women were regarded as more confident and effective leaders precisely because they asked for advice from their peers.

This innate ability hold separate ideas at once, and to solicit external opinions and advice is but one of many of the 21st century traits and competencies needed to be an effective leader in this turbulent economy. As author Tony Schwartz noted in the Harvard Business Review, “An effective modern leader requires a blend of intellectual qualities—the ability to think analytically, strategically and creatively—and emotional ones, including self-awareness, empathy and humility…I meet far more women with this blend of qualities than I do men.”

Schwartz goes on to say, “For the most part, women, more than men, bring to leadership a more complete range of the qualities modern leaders need, including self-awareness, emotional attunement and authenticity.”

At an unprecedented historic time in which much of the educated talent and a majority of the consumer decisions are made by women, we need gender diversity at all levels – and particularly the highest levels of organizations. As gender diversity expert Avivah Wittenberg-Cox researches and argues, some of the most successful organizations who are effectively adapting to change are populated at the highest levels with balanced gender diversity.

[Originally posted on Skip Pritchard’s great blog Leadership Insights]

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Shawn Hunter is President and Founder of Mindscaling, a company building powerful human and digital learning experiences based on the work of best-selling authors. My new book Small Acts of Leadership, is a Washington Post bestseller! You can grab a copy now. Have a meeting coming up? Let’s talk.

Last summer, my son and I bicycled across America with two other dads and their teenagers. We published a new book about it called Chasing Dawn. I co-authored the book with my cycling companion, the artist, photographer, and wonderful human jon holloway. Grab a copy. I’ll sign it and send it to your doorstep.

Your Decisions Become Your Possessions

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newideas

If I make a decision it is a possession, I take pride in it, I tend to defend it and not listen to those who question it. A decision is something you polish.
– Paul Gleason, wildland firefighter

In 1994, 14 heroic firefighters perished in the South Canyon fire in Colorado. Although they had been instructed to drop their gear when fleeing the advancing fire, none did. One body was found only 250 feet from the safety of top of the ridge still wearing his heavy pack and carrying a chainsaw. After the event, experts calculated that less than .5 mile per hour of faster speed would have saved them. Average humans, unencumbered, can run about 12-14mph for short distances. Carrying their gear the firefighters might have been half as fast. Perhaps they were disoriented in the smoke and fire. Perhaps the act of dropping gear would be to admit failure. Perhaps in the moment, and in spite of their training, they didn’t hear the order and simply never thought of it.

We also overvalue our possessions. In the 1949 wildfire disaster at Mann-Gulch, crew foreman Wag Dodge clearly ordered everyone to drop their gear and run from the advancing fire. Walter Rumsey testified that even though he was running for his life, he saw his partner Eldon Diettert was carrying a shovel. Rumsey grabbed it from him to lessen his load, but then searched around for a tree so that he could carefully lean the shovel against it.

Foolish consistencies aren’t only the domain of individual judgment. The final report of the Columbia shuttle disaster investigation stated that NASA “management was not able to recognize that in unprecedented conditions, when lives are on the line, flexibility and democratic process should take priority over bureaucratic response.” They simply couldn’t see beyond standard operating procedure in the face of changing circumstances and evidence.

Conviction can be a good thing. Conviction bolsters confidence and spurs action. But failing to abandon past practices and habits can also be catastrophic. We can become so enamored with our possessions that we self-identify with carrying them. To carry a Pulaski fireman’s axe is a badge of honor, just as carrying our habits and opinions with us everywhere we go affirms who we are.

So how can we identify those fixations that are holding us back and weighing us down, versus reaffirming those closely held convictions which empower and propel us? Taking a tip from Harvard medical researcher Jenny Rudolph, the best advice is to say what you are thinking out loud, in the presence of those whom you trust and who will hold you accountable.

In her research she found that once medical students made incorrect diagnoses, they would often persist in ineffective treatments long after it had become obvious that the treatments were not helping. They were simply unable, or unwilling, to revisit their original diagnosis. They became stuck – fixated – on their original decision.

Dr. Rudolph found that by doing three simple things, the medical students were often able to change their opinion quickly and effectively treat an accurate diagnosis.

  • Say out loud an expanded list of the symptoms identified
  • Say out loud an expanded list of the possible diagnoses that would fit the symptoms identified
  • Say out loud a plan to eliminate each diagnosis one by one

By simply saying out loud what we are thinking in the face of changing circumstances and evidence, we force ourselves to consider our opinions and biases. We not only hold ourselves more accountable, but implicitly ask those around us to also check our judgment.

After all, remember what Justice Louis Brandeis famously said, “Sunlight is the best disinfectant.”

Make the Comfortable Uncomfortable

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I coach lacrosse with my friend Pete. Coach Pete, who played Division I lacrosse back in the day, certainly looks the part. Big, fast, strong, and possessing a booming voice, one would think the new kids on the team would be intimidated by him, and only the seasoned players would be the ones who would dare to push his buttons, or have the audacity to slack off during drills.

It’s just the opposite. The new kids find him approachable, inviting and encouraging as a coach. Yet the kids who have been playing with Coach Pete for a few years find him sometimes demanding and expecting excellence. He pushes those experienced players the hardest.

Pete has a coaching philosophy worth borrowing. “Make the comfortable uncomfortable, and the uncomfortable comfortable.” What he means is that the new kids are already moderately intimidated by trying a new sport, developing new skills, immersing themselves in a fast, and often chaotic game. They are already on edge, and perhaps even a bit past the positive learning state that creates excellence. When the challenge and chaos of the game exceeds their skill and ability to deal with it, they feel overwhelmed, and move from a state of thriving and learning to a state of retreat. They close down. They drop a pass, take a hit going to a ground ball, and can’t figure out the strange offside rule. The game suddenly isn’t fun.

Inversely, the kids who have played the game for a few years have their posse, their attitude, and their predictable set of moves. These are the ones who need to try new things, who need to cradle and shoot with their non-dominant hand, play a new position, and work on the face-offs that start the game. They need to get out of their comfort zone. They will learn to see more of the game and become better players.

These are emotionally fluent leaders – those who can read people at their current comfort level and present just the right amount of challenge to let their skills and capabilities evolve. Sometimes to accelerate excellence, circumstances need to be chaotic by design – intentionally unstable.

Working in a world of constant change is half the fun of it. Deadlines shift, goalposts move, budgets shrink, markets evolve, new competition emerges, perceptions alter, stakeholders clash, and just when you are ready to deliver, your product is antiquated. After all, it takes a storm to make a rainbow.

The Innovative Leader: Finding + Seeing + Leading

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A short excerpt from Out•Think – enjoy!
Mashup
Innovation doesn’t have to be complicated. Sometimes it’s as simple as designing the shampoo bottle so it rests upside down. Sometimes it’s as novel as a vending machine that mixes your drink on the fly.

Today’s leader is an expert on figuring out how to stitch together varying ideas and technologies which result in realized value in the world. The challenge will become how quickly can we both conceptualize powerful combinations of ideas, and then lead a team to execute on that dream.

I had an interview two years ago with Venkatesh Valluri, President of Ingersoll Rand India. In our conversation, he spoke of the qualities of successful emerging leaders as possessing three distinct qualities:

  1. The ability to scan a constantly moving stream of technologies and information and pick out the meaningful trends in their businesses
  2. The ability to conceptualize a mashup of disparate technologies and capabilities into new valuable innovations which are right for your market
  3. The passion, communnication, and conviction to lead a team to execution on this vision.

As he described it:

Today if you asked me, What would be a leadership development model at Ingersoll Rand?—it would be a very unique model, in the sense that, Okay, is this leader prepared to have a conceptual flexibility, and strength to scan the environment, look where the problem is in that market, and build a solution backwards? Now once having defined that, then I guess the next piece which really comes is: Would he be able to execute on that? And once you talk about execution, then, at the same time, is he able to rally the entire team behind that by saying, This is the right thing for us to do?

Valluri pointed out that industries around the world are developing deep expertise in many fields, including nanotechnology, energy sustainability, food preservation, or GPS tracking and reporting technologies. Ingersoll-Rand doesn’t need to develop expertise in each of these, he said, but the company does need be aware of that these technologies exist and be able to conceptualize new ways to leverage them to solve problems for their customers.

Valluri calls this “innovation convergence,” giving the following example: Historically farmers in India have used the technologies available to them to move farm produce to market—namely, carts and wagons pulled by human or animal power. There are many variables that can lead to product loss and missed market opportunity while picking, loading, and conveying farm produce to a buyer’s market or distribution center. The farmer may be unaware of deteriorating weather. There may be a lack of buyers in the market, and the produce will spoil. The seasonal rains may have created mud conditions that slow the farmers’ progress. There may be a glut of produce at one market and scarcity at another.

Ingersoll-Rand integrated multiple technologies, including ruggedized buggies with four-wheel drive, GPS tracking to monitor the location of shipments, technology to determine the status of demand at different markets and shipping locations, and finally refrigeration technology to preserve the produce in transit.

This solution optimizes the entire value chain, reducing loss and maximizing delivery and value to the market—all without needing to have within the organization deep niche expertise of each of these disparate technologies. All that was needed was for leadership at Ingersoll-Rand to have an awareness of these technologies, strong networked collaborators, the ability to conceptualize a new solution for the customer, and, perhaps most importantly, the strength and conviction to lead a team to execute on the vision.

That, to Valluri, is real innovation.

Hacking the Super You

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superhumanOver the years, my friend Erich and I have probably logged thousands of miles cycling together. In all conditions – cold, wet, early, or in the fading warm July sunlight – we have ridden these Maine roads together. And when you train with someone for long enough you recognize their strengths (he climbs like a scalded cat), odd proclivities (he prefers riding on the right side of someone else), and their hesitations (he often descends cautiously).

We trained for a triathlon together a couple years ago. We would meet and ride the 40km course a couple of times a week, sometimes twice in a day. We got to the point where we knew the entire course in great detail – every crack in the road, every undulation of pavement, when to push and when to recover. And more or less, it seemed we were evenly matched.

On the day of the triathlon I had a fine race and the ride was my strongest leg of the event. I was pleased to finish in the top 10% of riders. Meanwhile, Erich blazed the ride. While averaging nearly 25mph on the hilly course, for some sections he led the entire field chasing only the pace car in front of him. On that day over 800 people raced the event. Only four individuals – all pros – were faster than Erich, and only by mere seconds. I was astonished. He was dumbfounded. He beat me by over 7 minutes on the ride. And he did it in celebration of his 50th birthday.

I had many questions about where this super-Erich performance came from. As I listened to him talk about his ride, he never once made any comparisons to other riders. He never spoke of how he was performing in relation to anyone else. He didn’t talk of the event as a competition. All of his language around preparation and performance was in terms of him versus the course. Actually “versus” isn’t quite the right word. It was more that he spoke of being in tune with how he felt in each moment – riding with the road with a sense of totally embodying the experience.

Another interesting comment Erich made was that during the ride itself he was aware that he was crushing it. He knew, on an innate level of consciousness, that he was absolutely killing the course, but there was no emotion associated with it. He felt not frustration, pain, angst, or struggle – only focus. The celebration and elation would come later. During the ride itself, he was all focused execution, hyper attention to nuance, flowing with the road.

As Steven Kotler describes in his mind-bending book The Rise of Superman, this sense of “deep embodiment” is one of the external Flow triggers of immersion in the moment. In short, Flow is an induced state of energized focus, heightened awareness, complete absorption, and elevated performance. And often, exceedingly high performance accompanies Flow states.

While these states are often spoken of by top adventurers, Flow states are also common among artists, musicians, professional athletes, and yes, even business professionals. According to this McKinsey study, business executives stated that when they were at their most effective – in a state of Flow – they were more than five times more effective than their more mundane, and common, moments of activity while attending meetings, interacting with colleagues, and executing tasks.

Much has been studied and written about the importance of developing a strong creative capability for today’s busy professional in this always-on, bottle rocket economy. IBM’s global CEO study asserts that creativity, mental flexibility, and collaboration have displaced one-dimensional intelligence and isolated determination as core ingredients of competitive advantage in today’s turbulent market. Creativity is treasured among the most-valued traits of sought-after talent. Yet, creativity is hard to teach.

Here’s the thing: Flow states induce creative states. As Teresa Amabile’s 2005 study shows, Flow states often precede creative states. Early findings at Kotler’s Flow Genome Project suggest Flow states later induce up to seven times the creativity in test subjects.

While developing creative triggers can be elusive, finding Flow triggers can be more predictable. We recognize that feeling when we felt hyper-present and alive skiing through the trees, immersed in a book, hypnotized in a provocative conversation, even mesmerized by an addicting video game. These induced Flow states lead to creatively productive states, often in the following hours and days after a Flow event.

Don’t seek on-demand creativity of yourself or those around you. Instead seek those circumstances, environments, and personal and social triggers which induce your own Flow states. To inspire creativity in those around you, start by finding it yourself. Model finding those Flow states you want to encourage in others. Creative productivity will surely follow.

Escaping the ignorance spiral

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ignorance

Honesty about performance, complete transparency about whether or not you’re doing it well. I think it’s a human right.”
– Jeff Immelt

Our son is in a phase in which he believes he is right about everything. He will correct or contradict just about anything I say, including the color of the sky. It’s cute until it’s not. His confidence on subjects he knows almost nothing about can be staggering.

The Germans have a word, fremdschämen, which is that feeling when you are in the presence of someone who should feel embarrassed for themselves, yet simply is not. And so you feel simultaneously horrified and embarrassed in their place. It’s that feeling you get when watching terrible auditions on American Idol. I can get a hint of fremdschämen listening to my son prattle on about subjects he is woefully ignorant of.

This ignorance can become a vicious cycle. As researchers Kruger and Dunning discovered, those students who scored in the bottom quartile estimated their mastery of the course material to fall in the 60th percentile. Just as 82% of drivers say they are in the top third of safe drivers, which is mathematically impossible. Or similarly a Bain study which revealed that while 80% of CEOs say their company delivers a “superior” product, only 8% of their own customers would agree.

And as Dunning and Kruger demonstrated, ignorance rewards confidence. But also, silence rewards ignorance. Yet, there may be a way out. In their study, once students had completed the test, the researchers gave half of the students a small tutorial on how to correctly solve the problems they were just presented. After the tutorial, the students were permitted to look over their own tests and self-evaluate their performance. Those students who received the tutorial on how to effectively solve the problems were much more accurately critical of their own performance.

Understanding this effect can often lead us to critically evaluate how astute or accurate others are, and take on the responsibility of correcting someone else. Wrong approach. Start with yourself. Critically self-evaluate your own performance, and seek ways to learn how to improve. Be the example you wish to see in the world.

Or as David Dunning himself put it so well, “The presence of the Dunning-Kruger effect, as it’s been come to be called, is that one should pause to worry about one’s own certainty, not the certainty of others.”

[For more on this subject, I recommend Chris Lee’s article here.]

The Power of the Humility Effect

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“The X-factor of great leadership is not personality, it’s humility.”
– Jim Collins

I’ll be honest. He wasn’t my first pick. Near the top yes, but he didn’t have my vote. Our small selection committee was trying to choose a keynote speaker for a big event and General Stanley McCrystal was on the short list. I think my gut instinct was that while he was indeed a highly decorated and remarkable leader in his own right, he might not connect in a human and honest way with our audience. I was concerned he would be aloof, imperious, unapproachable.

I got it all wrong. From the moment he arrived, General “call me Stan” McCrystal was gracious, funny, insightful, and willing to share his expertise with humility. Backstage before his presentation, he was generous with his ideas and time, and onstage at the beginning of his presentation he made several amusing self-deprecating jokes about his own professional blunders. Immediately, everyone liked and appreciated his presentation. He was polished, but not distant. Provocative, yet not condescending.

Every time I open up Adam Grant’s book Give and Take, I find some new intriguing piece of research and insight. Most recently, I was captivated by Grant’s description of a study called The Joy of Talking. In this case, now I understand the background behind one of the reasons why General McCrystal is so effective. It’s called the pratfall effect. It was a study conducted by Elliot Aronson at the University of California back in 1966. Basically what he discovered is that highly competent, often superior performing people become more likable when they have a social mishap befall them. It makes them more human, more likable.

Which led me to another study about how people make a positive impression in a more common workplace experience such as a professional interview or sales proposal. As Joanne Silvester and her colleagues confirmed, interview candidates who accept personal responsibility for past mistakes are regarded as stronger candidates than those who instead point to external circumstances beyond their control.

Saying, “I didn’t get the deal because I didn’t prepare well enough” will receive a much more favorable impression on others than saying, “I didn’t get the deal because the competitor’s proposal was stronger” or, “I didn’t get the deal because the requirements changed.”

When we accept personal accountability, with a recognition that we have the ability to make a positive influence on events, relationships and circumstances, we are more likely to leave a positive impression on others. We also develop and reinforce the belief and habit that our actions matter. And when we believe our actions matter, we are more likely to make positive, constructive decisions.