Category Archives: Psychology

Team Conflict Isn’t Always Bad

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Team Conflict Isn't Always Bad

GUEST POST from David Burkus

Conflict on teams is inevitable. But here’s the real question: does it need to be resolved? Not always. In fact, the type of conflict matters just as much as how you address it. Some conflicts demand immediate resolution, while others can be channeled into creativity and progress. Knowing the difference is critical to leading a team effectively.

At its core, conflict on teams falls into two categories: personal conflict and task-focused conflict. Personal conflict is what most of us think of first—tensions that get personal, unkind remarks, or behaviors that erode respect. Left unaddressed, this type of conflict undermines trust and productivity. Task-focused conflict, however, is entirely different. This is the natural tension that arises from diverse ideas and perspectives. It’s not a problem to be solved; it’s a tool to be harnessed. Handled well, task-focused conflict can propel a team forward.

Let’s look at both in depth—how to resolve personal conflict and how to channel task-focused conflict into better outcomes for the team.

Resolving Personal Conflict

When personal conflict on teams arises, it can feel uncomfortable, even awkward, to step in as a leader. Yet the cost of avoiding it is far greater. Toxic behavior, left unchecked, damages the entire team. Addressing it quickly and thoughtfully is key to maintaining a healthy team dynamic.

The best approach often begins with a private, one-on-one conversation. For less overt issues—like someone cutting a teammate off during a meeting or taking a criticism too far—pulling the individual aside after the fact is often more effective than addressing it publicly. Explain what you observed, how it impacts the team, and what needs to change. Your goal isn’t to embarrass them but to guide them toward more constructive behavior.

When the conflict on teams involves repeated tensions between two people, start with separate conversations. This allows you to understand each person’s perspective and identify the root of the issue. Once you’ve done that, consider bringing them together for a mediated discussion. The goal isn’t to force them to like each other but to secure a commitment to respect and professional behavior. Over time, if people consistently act respectfully, they often grow to genuinely respect one another — a win for everyone involved.

Whatever the situation, don’t wait to act. Personal conflict that lingers becomes a poison to the team. Address it early, directly, and consistently. Your willingness to confront these issues sends a powerful message about what kind of culture your team will have — a culture of respect and accountability.

Harnessing Task-Focused Conflict on Teams

Task-focused conflict, by contrast, is not something to resolve. It’s something to embrace. Teams are made up of individuals with different experiences, perspectives, and ideas. That’s their strength. When these differences lead to debates over the best course of action, your role as a leader isn’t to shut it down. It’s to create the conditions where productive conflict can thrive.

The first step is to foster an environment where everyone feels safe sharing their ideas. Too often, leaders assume they’ve created space for feedback simply by asking, “What does everyone think?” at the end of a meeting. But vague invitations rarely lead to meaningful input. Instead, make feedback an active part of your team’s discussions. One approach is to explicitly ask for “builds” and “flags.” Builds are suggestions that add to or improve an idea. Flags are concerns or alternative approaches. This framework encourages participation and ensures that all voices are heard.

Equally important is creating psychological safety—the sense that team members can share dissenting ideas without fear of judgment or retaliation. This starts with you as a leader. When you express doubt, admit uncertainty, or genuinely invite feedback, you show vulnerability. That vulnerability signals trust, which is the foundation of psychological safety. But it’s not enough to invite ideas; you must also respond to them with respect. Engage fully, listen actively, and ensure that team members feel heard. A team that trusts its leader and each other will embrace conflict as a pathway to better solutions.

When it comes time to respond to conflicting ideas, focus on the assumptions behind them rather than the ideas themselves. People often tie their identities to their ideas, which can make critique feel personal. But assumptions are different. They can be questioned without sparking defensiveness. For example, if a debate arises about project timelines, you might uncover that one person assumes it will take six months while another assumes a year. By exploring these assumptions, the team can arrive at a clearer understanding—and a better decision.

When the Team Can’t Agree

Despite your best efforts, there will be times when the team can’t reach consensus. This is where your leadership is most crucial. After everyone has had the opportunity to share their perspective, it’s time to decide and move forward. This is the principle of “disagree and commit.”

Make it clear that every voice matters and that the decision-making process is the team’s opportunity to influence the outcome. But once a decision is made—whether by consensus or by you as the leader—it’s time for everyone to align and commit. The team must understand that revisiting the debate later is not an option. This clarity ensures that even unresolved disagreements don’t derail progress.

Turning Conflict Into a Strength

Conflict on teams isn’t inherently bad. In fact, task-focused conflict is one of the best tools a team has for finding innovative solutions. The challenge is in how you, as a leader, handle it. Personal conflict needs resolution, quickly and thoughtfully. Task-focused conflict needs space to flourish, guided by a culture of respect and psychological safety.

When managed well, conflict on teams transforms from a source of tension into a driver of success. It pushes teams to consider new perspectives, challenge assumptions, and arrive at better outcomes. As a leader, your job isn’t to eliminate conflict. It’s to create an environment where it can be constructive, where it can make your team stronger.

Conflict on teams isn’t something to fear. It’s something to embrace. And when you do, you’ll find that the best ideas—and the best teams—are forged through it.

Image credit: Pixabay

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Strategic Self-Righteousness is Not a Thing

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Strategic Self-Righteousness is Not a Thing

GUEST POST from Greg Satell

Not long ago I was participating in a discussion on the social audio app, Clubhouse, and I said something a lady didn’t like that triggered her emotions. “Obviously, you need to be educated,” she said before subjecting me to a prolonged harangue riddled with inaccuracies, logical gaps and non-sequiturs.

Yet putting the merits of her argument aside, her more serious error was trying to overpower, rather than attract, in order to further her argument. If anything, she undermined her cause. Nobody likes a bully. Perhaps even more importantly, silencing opposing views restricts your informational environment and situational awareness.

This is why Gandhi so strictly adhered to the principle of ahimsa, which not only proscribed physical violence, but that of words or even thoughts. Everyone has their own sense of identity and dignity. Violating that will not bring you closer to success, but will almost certainly set you on a path to failure. Self-righteousness isn’t a strategy, but the lack of one.

Forming An Identity With Differentiated Values

Humans, by nature, seek out ideas to believe in. Ideas give us purpose and a sense of mission. That’s why every religion begins with an origin story, because it is our ideas that differentiate us from others and give us a sense of worth. What does it mean to be a Christian, Jew, or Muslim, a socialist or a capitalist, if we’re not differentiated by our beliefs?

So it shouldn’t be surprising that when people want to express their ideas, they tend to start with how their beliefs are different, because it is the dogmatic aspects of the concepts that drive their passion. Perhaps even more importantly, it is their conspicuous devotion that signals their inclusion with a particular tribe of shared identity.

Humans naturally form tribes in this way. In a study of adults that were randomly assigned to “leopards” and “tigers,” fMRI studies noted hostility to out-group members. Similar results were found in a study involving five year-old children and even in infants. Evolutionary psychologists attribute this tendency to kin selection, which explains how groups favor those who share their attributes in the hopes that those attributes will be propagated.

So when we’re passionate about an idea, we not only want to share it and “educate” others, we will also tend to see any threats to its survival as an affront to our identity. We begin to view ourselves as protectors and bond with others who share our purpose. We need to be aware of this pattern, because we’re all susceptible to it and that’s where the trouble starts.

Echo Chambers And The Emergence Of A Private Language

Spend time in an unfamiliar tribe and you’ll immediately notice that they share a private language. Minnesota Vikings fans shout “Skol!” Military people talk about distance in terms of “klicks,” and might debate the relative importance of HUMINT vs. SIGINT. Step into a marketing meeting and you’ll be subjected to a barrage of acronyms.

The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein explained how these types of private languages can be problematic. He made the analogy of a beetle in a box. If everybody had something in a box that they called a beetle, but no one could examine each other’s box, there would be no way of knowing whether everybody was actually talking about the same thing or not.

What Wittgenstein pointed out was that in this situation, the term “beetle” would lose relevance and meaning. It would simply refer to something that everybody had in their box, whatever that was. Everybody could just nod their heads not knowing whether they were talking about an insect, a German automobile or a British rock band.

Clearly, the way we tend to self-sort ourselves into homophilic, homogeneous groups will shape how we perceive what we see and hear, but it will also affect how we access information. Recently, a team of researchers at MIT looked into how we share information—and misinformation—with those around us. What they found was troubling.

When we’re surrounded by people who think like us, we share information more freely because we don’t expect to be questioned. We’re also less likely to check our facts, because we know that those we are sharing the item with will be less likely to inspect it themselves. So when we’re in a filter bubble, we not only share more, we’re also more likely to share things that aren’t true. Greater polarization leads to greater misinformation.

The Growing Backlash

One of the many things I’ve learned from my friend Srdja Popović is that the phase after an initial victory is often the most dangerous. Every revolution inspires its own counter-revolution. That is the physics of change. While you’re celebrating your triumph, the forces arrayed against you are redoubling their efforts to undermine what you’re trying to achieve.

Yet nestled safely within your tribe, speaking a private language in an echo chamber, you are unlikely to see the storm gathering storm. If most of the people around you think like you do, change seems inevitable. You tell each other stories about how history is on your side and the confluence of forces are in your favor.

Consider the case of diversity training. After the killing of George Floyd by a police officer led to massive global protests in over 2,000 towns and 60 countries, corporations around the world began to ramp up their diversity efforts, hiring “Chief Diversity Officers” and investing in training. For many, it was the dawn of a growing consciousness and a brighter, more equitable future.

It hasn’t seemed to turn out that way, though. Increased diversity training has not led to better outcomes and, in fact, there is increasing evidence of backlash. In particular researchers note that much of the training makes people feel targeted. Telling people that they owe their positions to something other than hard work and skill offends their dignity and can actually trigger exactly the behaviors that diversity programs are trying to change.

These misgivings are rarely voiced out loud, however, which is why change advocates rarely notice the growing chorus waiting for an opportunity to send the pendulum swinging in the other direction.

Learning To Survive Victory

In The Righteous Mind, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt makes the point that many of our opinions are a product of our inclusion in a particular team. Because our judgments are so closely intertwined with our identity, contrary views can feel like an attack. So we feel the urge to lash out and silence opposition. That almost guarantees a failure to survive victory.

I first noticed this in the aftermath of the Ukraine’s Orange Revolution in 2004. Having overcome a falsified election, we were so triumphant that we failed to see the gathering storm. Because we felt that the forces of history were on our side, we dismissed signs that the corrupt and thuggish Viktor Yanukovich was staging a comeback and paid a terrible price.

I see the same pattern in our work helping organizations with transformational initiatives. Change leaders feel so passionately about their idea they want to push it through, silence dissent, launch it with a big communication campaign and create strong incentives to get on board. They’re sure that once everybody understands the idea, they’ll love it too.

The truth is to bring about lasting change you need to learn to love your haters. They’re the ones who can help alert you to early flaws, which gives you the opportunity to fix them before they can do serious damage. They can also help you to identify shared values that can help you communicate more effectively and also design dilemmas that will send people your way.

But in order to do that, you need to focus your energy on winning converts, rather than punishing heretics. It’s more important to make a difference than it is to make a point.

— Article courtesy of the Digital Tonto blog
— Image credit: Pixabay

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Are We Suffering from AI Confirmation Bias?

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Are We Suffering From AI Confirmation Bias?

GUEST POST from Geoffrey A. Moore

When social media first appeared on the scene, many of us had high hopes it could play a positive role in community development and civic affairs, as indeed it has. What we did not anticipate was the long-term impact of the digital advertising model that supported it. That model is based on click-throughs, and one of the most effective ways to increase them was to present content that reinforces the recipient’s existing views.

Statisticians call the attraction to one’s existing point of view confirmation bias, and we all have it. As individuals, we believe we are in control of this, but it is obvious that at the level of populations, we are not. Confirmation bias, fed first by social media, and then by traditional media once it is converted to digital, has driven political and social polarization throughout the world. It has been further inflamed by conspiracy theories, malicious communications, fake news, and the like. And now we are faced with the advent of yet another amplifier—artificial intelligence. A significant portion of the fears about how AI could impact human welfare stem from how easily it can be put to malicious use through disinformation campaigns.

The impact of all this on our political life is chilling. Polarized media amplifies the impact of extremism and dampens the impact of moderation. This has most obviously been seen in primary elections, but it has now carried over into general elections to the point where highly unqualified individuals who have no interest in public service hold some of the most important roles in state and federal government. The resulting dysfunction is deeply disturbing, but it is not clear if and where a balance can be found.

Part of the problem is that confirmation bias is an essential part of healthy socialization. It reflects the impact that narratives have on our personal and community identities. What we might see as arrant folly another person sees as a necessary leap of faith. Our founding fathers were committed to protecting our nation from any authority imposing its narratives on unwilling recipients, hence our Constitutional commitment to both freedom of religion and freedom of speech.

In effect, this makes it virtually impossible to legislate our way out of this dilemma. Instead, we must embrace it as a Darwinian challenge, one that calls for us as individuals to adapt our strategies for living to a dangerous new circumstance. Here I think we can take a lesson from our recent pandemic experience. Faced with the threat of a highly contagious, ever-mutating Covid virus, most of the developed economies embraced rapid vaccination as their core response. China, however, did not. It embraced regulation instead. What they and we learned is that you cannot solve problems of contagion through regulation.

We can apply this learning to dealing with the universe of viral memes that have infected our digital infrastructure and driven social discord. Instead of regulation, we need to think of vaccination. The vaccine that protects people from fake news and its many variants is called critical thinking, and the healthcare provider that dispenses it is called public education.

We have spent the past several decades focusing on the STEM wing of our educational system, but at the risk of exercising my own confirmation bias, the immunity protection we need now comes from the liberal arts. Specifically, it emerges from supervised classroom discussions in which students are presented with a wide variety of challenging texts and experiences accompanied by a facilitated dialog that instructs them in the practices of listening, questioning, proposing, debating, and ultimately affirming or denying the validity of the argument under consideration. These discussions are not about promoting or endorsing any particular point of view. Rather, they teach one how to engage with any point of view in a respectful, powerful way. This is the intellectual discipline that underlies responsible citizenship. We have it in our labs. We just need to get it distributed more broadly.

That’s what I think. What do you think?

Image Credit: Pixabay

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The Future of Humanity in an Artificially Intelligent World

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The Future of Humanity in an Artificially Intelligent World

GUEST POST from Greg Satell

The Argentinian writer Jorge Borges had a fascination with a concept known as the infinite monkey theorem. The idea is that if you had an infinite amount of monkeys pecking away at an infinite amount of typewriters, they would randomly create the collected works of Tolstoy and every other masterwork ever written (or that could be written).

The theorem, which has been around for at least a century, is troubling because it calls into question what it means to be human. If we can be inspired by something that could so easily be randomly generated, then what does it mean to be meaningful? Is meaning just an illusion we construct to make ourselves happy?

In recent years, the rise of artificial intelligence has transformed this theoretical dilemma into an intensely practical issue. In a world in which machines are taking over work long thought of as intensely human, what is the role of human labor? How do we create value that is distinct from what machines can do faster and cheaper? The answers will shape our future.

Machines Replacing Humans

The first industrial robot, called Unimate, was installed on an assembly line at General Motors in 1961. Since then, robots have become highly integrated into our economy. They do dangerous jobs, like bomb disposal, as well as more prosaic ones, like running warehouses and legal discovery.

And lest you think that automation only applies to low-skill, mechanical jobs, robots are also invading the creative realm. One book written by a machine was even accepted as a submission for the prestigious Hoshi Shinichi Literary Award in Japan. There are now robots that advise physicians, movie producers and music executives. Some even write songs.

Yet these things have been, for the most part, going on in the background. Very few of us see robots at work in factories, much less evaluating scripts, reading mammograms or doing research for lawyers. However, the introduction of ChatGPT brings the power of AI to anyone with an Internet connection.

If you haven’t tried it yourself yet, here’s an example: I asked it to explain the infinite monkey theorem to me and this is what I got:

The infinite monkey theorem states that a monkey hitting keys at random on a typewriter keyboard for an infinite amount of time will almost surely type any given text, such as the complete works of William Shakespeare. The theorem is often used as a humorous illustration of the basics of probability theory. However, the theorem is actually a misnomer, since the chances of a monkey randomly typing a meaningful sequence of characters is incredibly small, and the concept of an “infinite” amount of time is physically impossible.

And just for fun, I asked it to produce a one paragraph promotional biography of Greg Satell:

Greg Satell is a thought leader in innovation and business strategy, with over 20 years of experience in the industry. He is a popular speaker and author, known for his bestselling book “Mapping Innovation: A Playbook for Navigating a Disruptive Age.” Greg has also held executive roles at leading companies and has a track record of driving innovation and growth through effective business strategies.

Each of these responses appeared in seconds and, while they are not what I would have chosen to write myself, they are more than passable. With the technology advancing at this pace, how can we compete with the machines?

The Automation Paradox

In 1900, 30 million people in the United States were farmers, but by 1990 that number had fallen to under 3 million even as the population more than tripled. So, in a manner of speaking, 90% of American agriculture workers lost their jobs due to automation. Yet those out-of-work farmers weren’t impoverished. In fact, the 20th century was an era of unprecedented prosperity.

Consider this: Although the workforce in the US has more than doubled since 1950, labor participation rates remain close to all-time highs. Still, a recent report by the US Chamber of Commerce found that we have a massive labor shortage. In the highly-automated manufacturing sector, it estimated that even if every unemployed person with experience were employed, it would only fill half of the vacant jobs.

In fact, when you look at highly automated fields, they tend to be the ones that have major labor shortages. You see touchscreens everywhere you go, but 70% of openings in the retail sector go unfilled. Autopilot has been around for decades, but we face a massive global pilot shortage that’s getting worse every year.

Once a task becomes automated, it also becomes largely commoditized and value is then created in an area that wasn’t quite obvious when people were busy doing more basic things. Go to an Apple store and you’ll notice two things: lots of automation and a sea of employees in blue shirts there to help, troubleshoot and explain things to you. Value doesn’t disappear, it just shifts to a different place.

One striking example of this is the humble community bookstore. With the domination of Amazon, you might think that small independent bookstores would be doomed, but instead they’re thriving. While its true that they can’t match Amazon’s convenience, selection or prices, people are flocking to small local shops for other reasons, such as deep expertise in particular subject matter and the chance to meet people with similar interests.

The Irrational Mind

To understand where value is shifting now, the work of neuroscientist Antonio Damasio can shed some light. He studied patients who, despite having perfectly normal cognitive ability, had lost the ability to feel emotion. Many would assume that, without emotions to distract them, these people would be great at making perfectly rational decisions.

But they weren’t. In fact, they couldn’t make any decisions at all. They could list the factors at play and explain their significance, but they couldn’t feel one way or another about them. In effect, without emotion they couldn’t form any intention. One decision was just like any other, leading to an outcome that they cared nothing about.

The social psychologist Jonathan Haidt built on Damasio’s work to form his theory of social intuitionism. What Haidt found in his research is that we don’t make moral judgments through conscious reasoning, but rather through unconscious intuition. Essentially, we automatically feel a certain way about something and then come up with reasons that we should feel that way.

Once you realize that, it becomes clear why Apple needs so many blue shirts at its stores and why independent bookstores are thriving. An artificial intelligence can access all the information in the world, curate that information and present it to us in an understandable way, but it can’t understand why we should care about it.

In fact, humans often disguise our true intent, even to ourselves. A student might say he wants a new computer to do schoolwork, but may really want a stronger graphics engine to play video games. In much the same way, a person may want to buy a book about a certain subject, but also truly covet a community which shares the same interest.

The Library of Babel And The Intention Economy

In his story The Library of Babel, Borges describes a library which contains books with all potential word combinations in all possible languages. Such a place would encompass all possible knowledge, but would also be completely useless, because the vast majority of books would be gibberish consisting of random strings of symbols.

In essence, deriving meaning would be an exercise in curation, which machines could do if they perfectly understood our intentions. However, human motives are almost hopelessly complex. So much so, in fact, that even we ourselves often have difficulty understanding why we want one thing and not another.

There are some things that a computer will never do. Machines will never strike out at a Little League game, have their hearts broken in a summer romance or see their children born. The inability to share human experiences makes it difficult, if not impossible, for computers to relate to human emotions and infer how those feelings shape preferences in a given context.

That’s why the rise of artificial intelligence is driving a shift from cognitive to social skills. The high paying jobs today have less to do with the ability to retain facts or manipulate numbers—we now use computers for those things—than it does with humans serving other humans. That requires more deep collaboration, teamwork and emotional intelligence.

To derive meaning in an artificially intelligent world we need to look to each other and how we can better understand our intentions. The future of technology is always more human.

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— Article courtesy of the Digital Tonto blog
— Image credit: Gemini

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Why Words Matter

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Why Words Matter

GUEST POST from Mike Shipulski

We all want to make progress. We all want to to do the right thing. And we all have the best intentions. But often we don’t pay enough attention to the words we use.

There are pure words that convey a message in a kind soothing way and there are snarl words that convey a message in a sharp, biting way. It’s relatively easy, if you’re paying attention, to recognize the snarl and purr. But it’s much more difficult to take skillful action when you hear them used unskillfully.

A pure word is skillful when it conveys honest appreciation, and it’s unskillful when it manipulates under the banner of false praise. But how do you tell the difference? That’s where the listening comes in. And that’s where effective probing can help.

If you sense unskillful use, ask a question of the user to get at the intent behind the language. Why do you think the idea is so good? What about the concept do you find so interesting? Why do you like it so much? Then, use your judgment to decide if the use was unskillful or not. If unskillful, assign less value to the purr language and the one purring it.

But it’s different with snark words. I don’t know of a situation where the use of snarl words is skillful. Blatant use of snarl words is easy to see and interpret. And it looks like plain, old-fashioned anger. And the response is straightforward. Call the snarler on their snarl and let them know it’s not okay. That usually puts an end to future snarling.

The most dangerous use of snarl words is passive-aggressive snarling. Here, the snarler wants all the manipulative benefit without being recognized as a manipulator. The pros snarl lightly to start to see if they get away with it. And if they do, they snarl harder and more often. And they won’t stop until they’re called on their behavior. And when they are called on their behavior, they’ll deny the snarling altogether.

Passive-aggressive snarling can block new thinking, prevent consensus and stall hard-won momentum. It’s nothing short of divisive. And it’s difficult to see and requires courage to confront and eviscerate.

If you see something, say something. And it’s the same with passive-aggressive snarling. If you think it is happening, ask questions to get at the underlying intent of the words. If it turns out that it’s simply a poor choice of words, suggest better ones and move on. But if the intent is manipulation, it must be stopped in its tracks. It must be called by name, its negative implications must be be linked to the behavior and new behavioral norms must be set.

Words are the tools we use to make progress. The wrong words block progress and the right ones accelerate it.

Why not choose the right words?

Image credit: Unsplash

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Three Reasons You Are Not Happy at Work

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And What to Do to Become as Happy as You Could Be

Three Reasons You Are Not Happy at Work

GUEST POST from Stefan Lindegaard

Most people spend years in jobs that feel fine. Not great, not terrible – just fine. But fine isn’t the goal. You deserve to do work that energizes you, challenges you, and gives you a sense of purpose.

Yet too many professionals stay stuck. Why? Because they fall into one (or more) of these three traps:

1. You’ve Let Work Happen to You

The problem: If your career feels like a series of random events rather than intentional choices, it’s because you’ve been reacting instead of leading. Maybe you took the first job that paid well, accepted promotions without questioning whether they aligned with what you wanted, or stayed in a role simply because it was comfortable.

The fix: Take ownership of your career. What do you actually want from your work? More impact? More autonomy? A new challenge? Stop waiting for opportunities to fall into your lap and start actively shaping your path. Schedule time this week to reflect, map out your ideal work life, and make a move toward it.

2. You’re Valuing Stability Over Growth

The problem: If your job is predictable but uninspiring, you might have traded growth for comfort. Sure, stability feels safe, but it comes at a cost – boredom, disengagement, and a slow decline in motivation.

The fix: Push yourself out of autopilot. Challenge yourself to take on a stretch project, learn a new skill, or initiate a conversation about expanding your role. Growth is what fuels long-term satisfaction – without it, even the best job will start to feel dull.

3. You’re Waiting for the ‘Perfect’ Job Instead of Making the Most of Where You Are

The problem: Many people think happiness at work comes from finding the right job or employer. But job satisfaction is not just about where you work – it’s about how you work. If you’re constantly waiting for a better company, a better boss, or a better opportunity, you might miss the chance to make your current role more fulfilling.

The fix: Find ways to bring more purpose and energy into your day now. Connect with colleagues who inspire you. Start a project that excites you. Look for small ways to align your work with what matters to you. The next big move will come – but don’t let the wait stop you from enjoying today.

Happiness at Work Isn’t Luck. It’s a Choice!

You don’t need a new job to feel more engaged, fulfilled, or challenged. You need:

  • A clear direction for where you want to go
  • A commitment to continuous growth
  • A proactive approach to shaping your experience

Are you leading your work life or just letting it happen to you? The choice is yours.

Image Credit: Stefan Lindegaard

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You Must Accept That People Are Irrational

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You Must Accept That People Are Irrational

GUEST POST from Greg Satell

For decades, economists have been obsessed with the idea of “enlightened self-interest,” building elaborate models based on the assumption that people make rational choices. Business and political leaders have used these models to shape competitive strategies, compensation, tax policies and social services among other things.

It’s clear that the real world is far more complex than that. Consider the prisoner’s dilemma, a famous thought experiment in which individuals acting in their self-interest make everyone worse off. In a wide array of real world and experimental contexts, people will cooperate for the greater good rather than pursue pure self-interest.

We are wired to cooperate as well as to compete. Identity and dignity will guide our actions even more than the prospect for loss or gain. While business schools have trained generations of managers to assume that they can optimize results by designing incentives, the truth is that leaders that can forge a sense of shared identity and purpose have the advantage.

Overcoming The Prisoner’s Dilemma

John von Neumann was a frustrated poker player. Despite having one of the best mathematical minds in history that could probably calculate the odds better than anyone on earth, he couldn’t tell whether other players were bluffing or not. It was his failure at poker that led him to create game theory, which calculates the strategies of other players.

As the field developed, it was expanded to include cooperative games in which players could choose to collaborate and even form coalitions with each other. That led researchers at RAND to create the prisoner’s dilemma, in which two suspects are being interrogated separately and each offered a reduced sentence to confess.

Prisoner's Dilemma

Here’s how it works: If both prisoners cooperate with each other and neither confesses, they each get one year in prison on a lesser charge. If one confesses, he gets off scot-free, while his partner gets 5 years. If they both rat each other out, then they get three years each—collectively the worst outcome of all.

Notice how from a rational viewpoint, the best strategy is to defect. No matter what one guy does, the other one is better off ratting him out. If both pursue self-interest, they are made worse off. It’s a frustrating problem. Game theorists call it a Nash equilibrium—one in which nobody can improve their position by unilateral move. In theory, you’re basically stuck.

Yet in a wide variety of real-world contexts, ranging from the survival strategies of guppies to military alliances, cooperation is credibly maintained. In fact, there are a number of strategies that have proved successful in overcoming the prisoner’s dilemma. One, called tit-for-tat, relies on credible punishments for defections. Even more effective, however, is building a culture of shared purpose and trust.

Kin Selection And Identity

Evolutionary psychology is a field very similar to game theory. It employs mathematical models to explain what types of behaviors provide the best evolutionary outcomes. At first, this may seem like the utilitarian approach that economists have long-employed, but when you combine genetics with natural selection, you get some surprising answers.

Consider the concept of kin selection. From a purely selfish point of view, there is no reason for a mother to sacrifice herself for her child. However, from an evolutionary point of view, it makes perfect sense for parents to put their kids first. Groups who favor children are more likely to grow and outperform groups who don’t.

This is what Richard Dawkins meant when he called genes selfish. If we look at things from our genes’ point of view, it makes perfect sense for them to want us to sacrifice ourselves for children, who are more likely to be able to propagate our genes than we are. The effect would logically also apply to others, such as cousins, that likely carry our genes.

Researchers have also applied the concept of kin selection to other forms of identity that don’t involve genes, but ideas (also known as memes) in examples such as patriotism. When it comes to people or ideas we see as an important part of our identity, we tend to take a much more expansive view of our interests than traditional economic models would predict.

Cultures of Dignity

It’s not just identity that figures into our decisions, but dignity as well. Consider the ultimatum game. One player is given a dollar and needs to propose how to split it with another player. If the offer is accepted, both players get the agreed upon shares. If it is not accepted, neither player gets anything.

If people acted purely rationally, offers as low as a penny would be routinely accepted. After all, a penny is better than nothing. Yet decades of experiments across different cultures show that most people do not accept a penny. In fact, offers of less than 30 cents are routinely rejected as unfair because they offend people’s dignity and sense of self.

Results from ultimatum game are not uniform, but vary in different cultures and more recent research suggests why. In a study in which a similar public goods game was played it was found that cooperative—as well as punitive—behavior is contagious, spreading through three degrees of interactions, even between people who haven’t had any direct contact.

Whether we know it or not, we are constantly building ecosystems of norms that reward and punish behavior according to expectations. If we see the culture we are operating in as trusting and generous, we are much more likely to act collaboratively. However, if we see our environment as cutthroat and greedy, we’ll tend to model that behavior in the same way.

Forging Shared Identity And Shared Purpose

In an earlier age, organizations were far more hierarchical. Power rested at the top. Information flowed up, orders went down, work got done and people got paid. Incentives seemed to work. You could pay more and get more. Yet in today’s marketplace, that’s no longer tenable because the work we need done is increasingly non-routine.

That means we need people to do more than merely carry out tasks, they need to put all of their passion and creativity into their work to perform at a high-level. They need to collaborate effectively in teams and take pride in the impact their efforts produce. To achieve that at an organizational level, leaders need to shift their mindsets.

As David Burkus explained in his TED Talk, humans are prosocial. They are vastly more likely to perform when they understand and identify with who their work benefits than when they are given financial incentives or fed some grandiose vision. Evolutionary psychologists have long established that altruism is deeply embedded in our sense of tribe.

The simple truth is that we can no longer coerce people to do what we want with Rube Goldberg-like structures of carrots and sticks, but must inspire people to want what we want. Humans are not purely rational beings, responding to stimuli as if they were vending machines that spit out desired behaviors when the right buttons are pushed, but are motivated by identity and dignity more than anything else.

Leadership is not an algorithm, but a practice of creating meaning through relationships of trust in the context of a shared purpose.

— Article courtesy of the Digital Tonto blog
— Image credit: Pixabay

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Learning Business and Life Lessons from Monkeys

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Learning Business and Life Lessons from Monkeys

GUEST POST from Greg Satell

Franz Kafka was especially skeptical about parables. “Many complain that the words of the wise are always merely parables and of no use in daily life,” he wrote. “When the sage says: ‘Go over,’ he does not mean that we should cross to some actual place… he means some fabulous yonder…that he cannot designate more precisely, and therefore cannot help us here in the very least.

Business pundits, on the other hand, tend to favor parables, probably because telling simple stories allows for the opportunity to seem both folksy and wise at the same time. When Warren Buffet says “Only when the tide goes out do you discover who’s been swimming naked,” it doesn’t sound so much like an admonishment.

Over the years I’ve noticed that some of the best business parables involve monkeys. I’m not sure why that is, but I think it has something to do with taking intelligence out of the equation. We’re often prone to imagining ourselves as the clever hero of our own story and we neglect simple truths. That may be why monkey parables have so much to teach us.

1. Build The #MonkeyFirst

When I work with executives, they often have a breakthrough idea they are excited about. They begin to tell me what a great opportunity it is and how they are perfectly positioned to capitalize on it. However, when I begin to dig a little deeper it appears that there is some major barrier to making it happen. When I try to ask about it, they just shut down.

One reason that this happens is that there is a fundamental tension between innovation and operations. Operational executives tend to focus on identifying clear benchmarks to track progress. That’s fine for a typical project, but when you are trying to do something truly new and different, you have to directly confront the unknown.

At Google X, the tech giant’s “moonshot factory,” the mantra is #MonkeyFirst. The idea is that if you want to get a monkey to recite Shakespeare on a pedestal, you start by training the monkey, not building the pedestal, because training the monkey is the hard part. Anyone can build a pedestal.

The problem is that most people start with the pedestal, because it’s what they know and by building it, they can show early progress against a timeline. Unfortunately, building a pedestal gets you nowhere. Unless you can actually train the monkey, working on the pedestal is wasted effort.

The moral: Make sure you address the crux of the problem and don’t waste time with peripheral issues.

2. Don’t Get Taken In By Coin Flipping Monkeys

We live in a world that worships accomplishment. Sports stars who have never worked in an office are paid large fees to speak to corporate audiences. Billionaires who have never walked a beat speak out on how to fight crime (even as they invest in gun manufacturers). Others like to espouse views on education, although they have never taught a class.

Many say that you can’t argue with success, but consider this thought experiment: Put a million monkeys in a coin flipping contest. The winners in each round win a dollar and the losers drop out. After twenty rounds, there will only be two monkeys left, each winning $262,144. The vast majority of the other monkeys leave with merely pocket change.

How much would you pay the winning monkeys to speak at your corporate event? Would you invite them to advise your company? Sit on your board? Would you be interested in their views about how to raise your children, invest your savings or make career choices? Would you try to replicate their coin-flipping success? (Maybe it’s all in the wrist).

The truth is that chance and luck play a much bigger part in success than we like to admit. Einstein, for example, became the most famous scientist of the 20th century not just because of his discoveries but also due to an unlikely coincidence. True accomplishment is difficult to evaluate, so we look for signals of success to guide our judgments.

The moral: Next time you judge someone, either by their success or lack thereof, ask yourself whether you are judging actual accomplishment or telltale signs of successful coin flipping. It’s harder to tell the difference than you’d think.

3. The Infinite Monkey Theorem

There is an old thought experiment called the Infinite Monkey Theorem, which is eerily disturbing. The basic idea is that if there were an infinite amount of monkeys pecking away on an infinite amount of keyboards they would, in time, produce the complete works of Shakespeare, Tolstoy and every other literary masterpiece.

It’s a perplexing thought because we humans pride ourselves on our ability to recognize and evaluate patterns. The idea that something we value so highly could be randomly generated is extremely unsettling. Yet there is an entire branch of mathematics, called Ramsey Theory, devoted to the study of how order emerges from random sets of data.

While the infinite monkey theorem is, of course, theoretical, technology is forcing us to confront the very real dilemma’s it presents. For example, music scholar and composer David Cope has been able to create algorithms that produce original works of music that are so good even experts can’t tell they are computer generated. So what is the value of human input?

The moral: Much like the coin flipping contest, the infinite monkey theorem makes us confront what we value and why. What is the difference between things human produced and identical works that are computer generated? Are Tolstoy’s words what give his stories meaning? Or is it the intent of the author and the fact that a human was trying to say something important?

Imagining Monkeys All Around Us

G. H. Hardy, widely considered a genius, wrote that “For any serious purpose, intelligence is a very minor gift.” What he meant was that even in purely intellectual pursuits, such as his field of number theory, there are things that are far more important. It was, undoubtedly, intellectual humility that led Hardy to Ramanujuan, perhaps his greatest discovery of all.

Imagining ourselves to be heroes of our own story can rob us of the humility we need to succeed and prosper. Mistaking ourselves for geniuses can often get us into trouble. People who think they’re playing it smart tend to make silly mistakes, both because they expect to see things that others don’t and because they fail to look for and recognize trouble signs.

Parables about monkeys can be useful because nobody expects them to be geniuses, which demands that we ask ourselves hard questions. Are we doing the important work, or the easiest tasks to show progress on? If monkeys flipping coins can simulate professional success, what do we really celebrate? If monkeys tapping randomly on typewriters can create masterworks, what is the value of human agency?

The truth is that humans are prone to be foolish. We are unable, outside a few limited areas of expertise, to make basic distinctions in matters of importance. So we look for signals of prosperity, intelligence, shared purpose and other things we value to make judgments about what information we should trust. Imagining monkeys around us helps us to be more careful.

Sometimes the biggest obstacle between where we are now and the fabulous yonder we seek is just the few feet in front of us.

— Article courtesy of the Digital Tonto blog
— Image credit: Flickr

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Identity is Crucial to Change

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Identity is Crucial to Change

GUEST POST from Greg Satell

In an age of disruption, the only viable strategy is to adapt. Today, we are undergoing major shifts in technology, resources, migration and demography that will demand that we make changes in how we think and what we do. The last time we saw this much change afoot was during the 1920s and that didn’t end well. The stakes are high.

In a recent speech, the EU’s High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy Josep Borrell highlighted the need for Europe to change and adapt to shifts in the geopolitical climate. He also pointed out that change involves far more than interests and incentives, carrots and sticks, but even more importantly, identity.

“Remember this sentence,” he said. “’It is the identity, stupid.’ It is no longer the economy, it is the identity.” What he meant was that human beings build attachments to things they identify with and, when those are threatened, they are apt to behave in a visceral, reactive and violent way. That’s why change and identity are always inextricably intertwined.

“We can’t define the change we want to pursue until we define who we want to be.” — Greg Satell

The Making Of A Dominant Model

Traditional models come to us with such great authority that we seldom realize that they too once were revolutionary. We are so often told how Einstein is revered for showing that Newton’s mechanics were flawed it is easy to forget that Newton himself was a radical insurgent, who rewrote the laws of nature and ushered in a new era.

Still, once a model becomes established, few question it. We go to school, train for a career and hone our craft. We make great efforts to learn basic principles and gain credentials when we show that we have grasped them. As we strive to become masters of our craft we find that as our proficiency increases, so does our success and status.

The models we use become more than mere tools to get things done, but intrinsic to our identity. Back in the nineteenth century, the miasma theory, the notion that bad air caused disease, was predominant in medicine. Doctors not only relied on it to do their job, they took great pride in their mastery of it. They would discuss its nuances and implications with colleagues, signaling their membership in a tribe as they did.

In the 1840s, when a young doctor named Ignaz Semmelweis showed that doctors could prevent infections by washing their hands, many in the medical establishment were scandalized. First, the suggestion that they, as men of prominence, could spread something as dirty as disease was insulting. Even more damaging, however, was the suggestion that their professional identity was, at least in part, based on a mistake.

Things didn’t turn out well for Semmelweis. He railed against the establishment, but to no avail. He would eventually die in an insane asylum, ironically of an infection he contracted under care, and the questions he raised about the prevailing miasma paradigm went unanswered.

A Gathering Storm Of Accumulating Evidence

We all know that for every rule, there are exceptions and anomalies that can’t be explained. As the statistician George Box put it, “all models are wrong, but some are useful.” The miasma theory, while it seems absurd today, was useful in its own way. Long before we had technology to study bacteria, smells could alert us to their presence in unsanitary conditions.

But Semmelweis’s hand-washing regime threatened doctors’ view of themselves and their role. Doctors were men of prominence, who saw disease emanating from the smells of the lower classes. This was more than a theory. It was an attachment to a particular view of the world and their place in it, which is one reason why Semmelweis experienced such backlash.

Yet he raised important questions and, at least in some circles, doubts about the miasma theory continued to grow. In 1854, about a decade after Semmelweis instituted hand washing, a cholera epidemic broke out in London and a miasma theory skeptic named John Snow was able to trace the source of the infection to a single water pump.

Yet once again, the establishment could not accept evidence that contradicted its prevailing theory. William Farr, a prominent medical statistician, questioned Snow’s findings. Besides, Snow couldn’t explain how the water pump was making people sick, only that it seemed to be the source of some pathogen. Farr, not Snow, won the day.

Later it would turn out that a septic pit had been dug too close to the pump and the water had been contaminated with fecal matter. But for the moment, while doubts began to grow about the miasma theory, it remained the dominant model and countless people would die every year because of it.

Breaking Through To A New Paradigm

In the early 1860s, as the Civil War was raging in the US, Louis Pasteur was researching wine-making in France. While studying the fermentation process, he discovered that microorganisms spoiled beverages such as beer and milk. He proposed that they be heated to temperatures between 60 and 100 degrees Celsius to avoid spoiling, a process that came to be called pasteurization

Pasteur guessed that the similar microorganisms made people sick which, in turn, led to the work of Robert Koch and Joseph Lister. Together they would establish the germ theory of disease. This work then led to not only better sanitary practices, but eventually to the work of Alexander Fleming, Howard Florey and Ernst Chain and development of antibiotics.

To break free of the miasma theory, doctors needed to change the way they saw themselves. The miasma theory had been around since Hippocrates. To forge a new path, they could no longer be the guardians of ancient wisdom, but evidence-based scientists, and that would require that everything about the field be transformed.

None of this occurred in a vacuum. In the late 19th century, a number of long-held truths, from Euclid’s Geometry to Aristotle’s logic, were being discarded, which would pave the way for strange new theories, such as Einstein’s relativity and Turing’s machine. To abandon these old ideas, which were considered gospel for thousands of years, was no doubt difficult. Yet it was what we needed to do to create the modern world.

Moving From Disruption to Resilience

Today, we stand on the precipice of a new paradigm. We’ve suffered through a global financial crisis, a pandemic and the most deadly conflict in Europe since World War II. The shifts in technology, resources, migration and demography are already underway. The strains and dangers of these shifts are already evident, yet the benefits are still to come.

To successfully navigate the decade ahead, we must make decisions not just about what we want, but who we want to be. Nowhere is this playing out more than in Ukraine right now, where the war being waged is almost solely about identity. Russians want to deny Ukrainian identity and to defy what they see as the US-led world order. Europeans need to take sides. So do the Chinese. Everyone needs to decide who they are and where they stand.

This is not only true in international affairs, but in every facet of society. Different eras make different demands. The generation that came of age after World War II needed to rebuild and they did so magnificently. Yet as things grew, inefficiencies mounted and the Boomer Generation became optimizers. The generations that came after worshiped disruption and renewal. These are, of course, gross generalizations, but the basic narrative holds true.

What should be clear is that where we go from here will depend on who we want to be. My hope is that we become protectors who seek to make the shift from disruption to resilience. We can no longer simply worship market and technological forces and leave our fates up to them as if they were gods. We need to make choices and the ones we make will be greatly influenced by how we see ourselves and our role.

As Josep Borrell so eloquently put it: It is the identity, stupid. It is no longer the economy, it is the identity.

— Article courtesy of the Digital Tonto blog
— Image credit: Unsplash

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Do You Have Gumption?

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Do You Have Gumption?

GUEST POST from Mike Shipulski

Doing new work takes gumption. But there are two problems with gumption. One, you’ve got to create it from within. Two, it takes a lot of energy to generate the gumption and to do that you’ve got to be physically fit and mentally grounded. Here are some words that may help.

Move from self-judging to self-loving. It makes a difference.

It’s never enough until you decide it’s enough. And when you do, you can be more beholden to yourself.

You already have what you’re looking for. Look inside.

Taking care of yourself isn’t selfish, it’s self-ful.

When in doubt, go outside.

You can’t believe in yourself without your consent.

Your well-being is your responsibility. And it’s time to be responsible.

When you move your body, your mind smiles.

With selfish, you take care of yourself at another’s expense. With self-ful, you take care of yourself because you’re full of self-love.

When in doubt, feel the doubt and do it anyway.

If you’re not taking care of yourself, understand what you’re putting in the way and then don’t do that anymore.

You can’t help others if you don’t take care of yourself.

If you struggle with taking care of yourself, pretend you’re someone else and do it for them.

Image credit: Unsplash

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