What’s Your Story?

Cognitive scientists believe that our moment to moment perceptions are tied together by our minds imposing a narrative. The story we tell ourselves then determines the meaning of our discrete experiences. It is the role of a leader to suggest a story that addresses our deepest aspirations and energizes us to pursue them.

In a recent column in the New York Times, Thomas Friedman gives us a perfect example of what happens when the narrative is missing. Reviewing all of President Obama’s policy initiatives, Friedman writes that they’re beginning “to feel like a work plan that we have to slog through,” because we’re missing the story that ties them all together and inspires.

Friedman’s description could apply to most business organizations. In the absence of a compelling corporate story told by the leadership, most people are in slogging mode. The work becomes a chore that is performed simply for a paycheck. This is not only sad, but costly.I haven’t yet met anyone that is engaged by just showing up to do a fair day’s work for a fair day’s wage. In the absence of a story, too many people are consigned to lives of quiet and not so quiet desperation. But this doesn’t mean that the story is simply nice to have. The difference between the productivity of people that are excited about their work and those that endure it as a necessary evil is vast.  Without the story, we sub-optimize our most valuable resource.

But the story also serves the purpose of focusing and aligning individual efforts. No objective setting process or control system can possibly cover all decisions and behavior. Without the story, wasted effort and inefficiencies abound.  With the right story in place, organizations can accomplish substantially more with less.

Unfortunately, the “soft” issues of inspirational leadership and an engaging story are all too often seen as just nice to have, and are only addressed once the “hard” business concerns are taken care of. Our logic may deceive us into believing the two can be separated, but in reality it is people, inspired and energetic or not, doing the work.

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Mirror, Mirror

Metaphors are nonpartisan. Today two New York Times columnists, one conservative and one liberal, used
the same “look in the mirror” metaphor. It seems that regardless of what side
of the aisle you’re on, those on the other side lack self-awareness.

In “The Tenacity Question,” David Brooks raises questions
about President Obama’s desire to pursue the war in Afghanistan. He suggests
that it’s not his scheduled meeting with the Joint Chiefs of Staff that’s
important, but the one with the “mirror, in which he looks for some firm
conviction about whether Afghanistan is worthy of his full and unshakable
commitment.”

Paul Krugman writing about health care reform in “The Defining Moment”
takes aim at the centrists opposed to the current bills. While he deigns not to
“psychoanalyze” them, he does urge them to “take a good hard look in the
mirror.”

Whether you agree with their positions or not, it would be hard to
deny that both of these men are brilliant, and that’s what’s so surprising
about their use of the same metaphor. The two are judging the character of
those opposed to their point of view, and asserting that with a little
self-reflection, they would recognize the error of their ways.

In rhetoric, going after the character of your opponent is known as an
“ad hominem” attack, and it is usually resorted to only when the logically
challenged fail to come up with a convincing counter-argument. Since it demeans
the other side, it’s hardly going to persuade anyone not already persuaded, and
it usually elicits an ad hominem attack in return. 

As Steven Pinker has pointed out in The Blank Slate, our minds have evolved to convince us that we are
always the one acting morally, regardless of whether we are or not. I’ve got to
believe that both Brooks and Krugman are familiar with Pinker’s work. So the
only way they could resort to an ad hominem attack is if they were lacking
self-awareness as well.

The findings of neuroscience suggest that the metaphor itself is
problematic, for we’re not capable of an objective view of the person in the
mirror. Our perception is a product of everything going on in the brain,
including our feelings of self-righteousness.

If my view of the mirror image were objective, I wouldn’t be so
shocked by the person that shows up in videos of my interviews and speeches.
While there are times that I’m less than pleased with my mirror image and
others that I’m quite happy with that good looking guy smiling back at me, what
I see is almost always a function of what’s going on inside of my head, and in
particular in the limbic system responsible for my emotions.

The objective self-reflection I believe both Brooks and Krugman are intending
for their opponents would indeed make us all better people, but it’s just not
possible unless we view ourselves not from inside, but from the outside. If we use
our mirror neurons to assume the perspective of others, we’ll be much more
objective when we look back at ourselves.

Even better, we should assume the perspective of those we feel are
deserving of those ad hominem attacks. Seeing the world from their perspective
will better enable us to appreciate the reasoning that got them to the position
we have such an issue with. While it may not lead us to agree with them, it would
make us better at reasoning them into an appreciation of our point of view.

And that should be why we take the trouble to state our position,
either orally or in writing. Otherwise, we’re no better than alpha chimpanzees
and their displays, “full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” We may get
people’s attention, but not their commitment.

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Switching Gestalts

A gestalt switch is when we change the framework we use to organize our perceptions and it fundamentally changes the meaning of what we perceive. Probably the best example is the popular old woman/young woman illusion. Seen one way, the drawing looks like an old hag, but when seen another way, it appears as a beautiful young woman.

Studies have shown that what is currently in our minds determines how we interpret the drawing. If we’re thinking about the perils of growing old, we’ll on average see the old woman.  But if we’re focused on the joys of youth and beauty, it’s the young woman that will appear.

Switching gestalts isn’t just a curiosity. It illustrates a basic principle governing how our minds work. We see what we believe, attending to information that supports our view and ignoring any that is in conflict.

The game of college football is a great example of gestalts at work. A well-executed strategy is a thing of beauty. From a bird’s eye view, its choreography rivals ballet. The athletic ability of the individual players can be a marvel to behold. The team spirit is infectious.

But football is also a horribly brutal game. The players are coached to hit hard, so that they knock loose the ball or take a player out of the action. Every game is marked by injuries.  When a player is lying on the field and not moving, the frame shifts and the game is no longer fun to watch.

Yet every weekend, I tune in to watch my alma mater, the University of Michigan. When the team wins, as irrational as it sounds, it seems to affirm my identity. My years in Ann Arbor were transformational and have informed my life and work. My liberal arts education taught me to respect intelligence, and it taught me the importance of human values, none more basic than the imperative to treat people with respect.

This has been a controversial period for the team.  A new coach, Rich Rodriquez, was hired from the outside last year and there were some contractual issues that cast a pall on his departure from West Virginia. This year opened with the news that he was involved in a failed real estate deal with an accused felon. Then just before the first game, the coach was accused by six Michigan players of violating NCAA rules on the number of hours of practice allowed per week.

But Michigan played brilliantly in its opening game and the sportscasters calling the game suggested that the allegations were just sour grapes by a few disaffected players. As I watched my team win, it seemed a plausible explanation to me. And, of course, West Virginia would not be happy about losing its coach, and how could he be responsible for the actions of his business partner.

The team didn’t do as well against Iowa in the sixth week and the precocious quarterback Tate Forcier struggled. After a particularly difficult series of plays, Forcier was benched and the television cameras captured Rodriquez going up one side of him and down the other.  It was then that the gestalt switched.

When the Michigan coach bullied his quarterback, he offended those very values that I associate with my years at the school. As a result, the real estate deal looked even more questionable and the allegations of NCAA rules violations more credible. The coach, I concluded with newfound clarity, wasn’t a very nice person, so everything he was involved in became suspect.

But it goes beyond the issue of the coach’s values to his intelligence. Tate Forcier is an obviously skilled and dedicated quarterback. In what universe could it possibly make sense to bully him? Is he going to be more motivated as a result? Will his judgment improve?

Not according to brain science. The only thing that’s going to happen is that his amygdala will key the release of cortisol, slowing down Forcier’s brain, narrowing his vision, and making his judgment worse. The coach’s aggression will summon up aggression on Forcier’s part, creating precisely the opposite kind of relationship high performance depends on.

It seems that Rodriquez has a rather skewed perception of human relationships. It isn’t surprising that the gestalt that would lead him to bully a player would also lead to a business partnership with a man of questionable character, to a less than congenial departure from his former school, and to a broken relationship with half a dozen of his players.

He lives in a world where hitting hard is a virtue, even when it makes no sense.

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