We live in an era of overindulgence. While the media likes to turn the spotlight on our junk food and computer game–addicted youth, our overindulgence is not confined to the physical (or lack thereof).
Today, our psychological lives are also characterised by relentless positivism and happiness delusions as we strive to create a perpetual mono-emotional state, such that we can never be truly sated.
One of the problems with our overindulgence in the positivity and hope fantasies touted by much of the self-help school is that they inform so many of our strategies in business, and in life for that matter. Added to this is the fact that they’re not especially helpful if we want to achieve actual results.
Sure they’re entertaining and they temporarily make us feel good (selfhelp’s comparison with rock concerts is well earned: you leave on a high, buy the merchandise and a month later it’s all gathering dust). But the motivation industry’s almost religious status has convinced many of us to abandon our own cognitive processes and ‘follow our bliss’: trust the universe and invest in a cork-board! (It’s important to note at this point that there is a huge distinction between affirmations and mental rehearsal.)
Consequently, great ideas, extraordinary teams, powerful organisations and some exceptionally gifted and talented individuals often fail. This is principally because they haven’t even considered the possibility of failure, let alone designed an environment or processes that help them thrive in spite of it.
Worse, they come to blame themselves and process failure as a character trait rather than as simply another result, however undesired it may be.
For instance, if we were to suggest to you that you volunteer to be the test subject for a never before tested parachute design that we were really positive and fist-pumpingly confident about, how readily would you give up the option of a reserve chute? The question is almost ridiculous, and yet this formula is repeated in offices, homes, schools and fitness centres around the planet every day. In fact, rather than being the exception, it has become the strategic norm.
We have designed our world in such a way that only perfect execution can succeed … and just in case you haven’t taken a good look around recently, perfection is pretty rare.
Of course, there are a number of reasons for this. It is in our natures to err towards optimism. Hope is quite possibly the most powerful drug we have ever injected into our cerebellums and many of us have an addiction so acute that we will sacrifice almost everything to satisfy it.
Now we’re certainly not suggesting that optimism underscored with effort is a bad thing — quite the contrary. What we’re talking about is the baseless optimism that dominates so much of our social commentary and leaves us impotent in the face of reality. More importantly, we’re asserting that one of the consequences of this kind of optimism is that we court failure by not accounting for it.
We act as if we are generous, bold and intelligent all the time, and as a result we adopt hope as a strategy. We shun criticism as pessimism and at the first sign of negativity, we put our fingers in our ears and note at this point that there is a huge distinction between affirmations and mental rehearsal.)
Consequently, great ideas, extraordinary teams, powerful organisations and some exceptionally gifted and talented individuals often fail. This is principally because they haven’t even considered the possibility of failure, let alone designed an environment or processes that help them thrive in spite of it. Worse, they come to blame themselves and process failure as a character trait rather than as simply another result, however undesired it may be.
For instance, if we were to suggest to you that you volunteer to be the test subject for a never before tested parachute design that we were really positive and fist-pumpingly confident about, how readily would you give up the option of a reserve chute? The question is almost ridiculous, and yet this formula is repeated in offices, homes, schools and fitness centres around the planet every day. In fact, rather than being the exception, it has become the strategic norm.
We have designed our world in such a way that only perfect execution can succeed … and just in case you haven’t taken a good look around recently, perfection is pretty rare.
Of course, there are a number of reasons for this. It is in our natures to err towards optimism. Hope is quite possibly the most powerful drug we have ever injected into our cerebellums and many of us have an addiction so acute that we will sacrifice almost everything to satisfy it. Now we’re certainly not suggesting that optimism underscored with effort is a bad thing — quite the contrary. What we’re talking about is the baseless optimism that dominates so much of our social commentary and leaves us impotent in the face of reality. More importantly, we’re asserting that one of the consequences of this kind of optimism is that we court failure by not accounting for it.
We act as if we are generous, bold and intelligent all the time, and as a result we adopt hope as a strategy. We shun criticism as pessimism and at the first sign of negativity, we put our fingers in our ears and chant, ‘I’m not listening, I’m not listening’. Or else, we double down on a positivity bender and cavort like an evangelical congregation reciting cheery affirmations laced with doubt and desperation: ‘I am rich, thin and successful … I am a preciously unique snowflake filled with abundance’, and the like.
The truth is, we set ourselves up for failure
Children in modern life are, rather notoriously, never allowed to experience anything remotely like failure (heaven forbid they miss out on a ‘pass the parcel’ prize). As a result, failure hits them hard
when real life refuses to grade them on a curve suspended over a padded floor with a loving acceptance of ‘their own special spelling’.
Of course it’s easy to pick on children and no-one will thank us for it, so let’s turn our attention to the adult world. The same can be said of most corporate and government processes, business systems and self-management programs. The more you set strategy or design systems without a consciousness of even the possibility of failure, the greater the chance of realising that failure actually is. Diets — or ‘wellness programs’ as they have come to be euphemised — are famous for simultaneously promising the virtually impossible in record time, and for almost universally failing to provide lasting results. And yet, the more preposterous the claim and the more inflated the possibility, the more these books, powders, audio-programs and reality television shows seem to sell.
What’s more concerning is that when we do eventually fail or backslide (the faith-based terminology is not coincidental), we end up blaming ourselves rather than the system we’ve bought into. We desperately self-flagellate as our internal dialogue runs to phrases such as, ‘I’m weak … I’m hopeless … I can’t do it …’ and so the cycle continues.
By ignoring the possibility of failure in our thinking, we unwittingly increase the chances of it ultimately eventuating. Contrast this strategy with the design parameters of commercial aircraft. In 2012, while speaking at an international business summit in Bangkok, Thailand, we struck up a conversation with another speaker, Richard de Crespigny. Richard is the Qantas pilot who successfully landed QF32, the Airbus A380 that, en route from Singapore to Sydney, experienced catastrophic engine failure causing an enormous hole in the wing (which, it is pretty well agreed by all flying experts, is rather a bad thing to happen!).
In a typically Australian, self-deprecating way, Richard is quick to deflect credit for the safe arrival away from his skills as a pilot and onto his crew and his aircraft. But when you probe a little deeper into his story, you really do get a sense of just how ‘foolproof’ the systems built into the A380 actually are.
It turns out that all commercial aircraft are designed with the possibility that they may crash taken into consideration. And this stretches to considerably more than the life vest and its amazing light and whistle combination (which no doubt is immensely reassuring as you bob up and down in the middle of a vast ocean). Failure, it turns out, is actually factored into the engineering.
In other words, when a system suffers a serious failure, the plane will, in most cases, stay in the air. It is only in the very unlikely event of multiple system failures of significant magnitude that you may really want to locate the nearest exit (if only to be sure of where holes in the plane are supposed to be).
But even this understates the over-engineering involved in the building of the A380 (given the successful landing of QF32, the term ‘over-engineering’ may be an overstatement in itself). According to de Crespigny’s account, the aircraft exceeded even his expectations and what most pilots would consider its baseline specifications. The plane simply refused to let a ridiculously long string of errors lead to complete failure.
So it appears that, when it comes to things where our lives are at stake (such as sitting in a metal chair at 9000 metres while travelling at 800 kilometres per hour) we start to get a little more realistic about our chances of success and in fact we improve those chances by preparing for the chance of failure. So how is it that we set ourselves up for failure?
Discipline is hard work
As the sun rises on a crisp 1 January morning, those living in the Northern Hemisphere breathe out visible air in the cold as they step into a fresh new world rich with possibilities. Meanwhile those in the Southern Hemisphere, many of whom are already halfway through the new day, bury their toes in the sand on sun-drenched beaches clutching Moleskines and pens with pages optimistically titled ‘New Year’s Resolutions’.
We may have partied hard over the holiday break but now it is time to get a grip on our lives — to make some ‘positive’ changes, rein in excesses and do a little exercise, maybe learn a language, be kinder to our livers and perhaps get back to playing the piano.
This is the kind of interior dialogue we all engage in as we usher in a new year (those in Asia no doubt think this is a ridiculous practice best left until the ‘real’ new year a few weeks later). And what better way to embrace these possibilities than to apply a little healthy discipline. After all, surely that’s a good thing. It shows we’re willing to take responsibility for our lives and not passively allow life to simply dictate terms to us.
So we swear off alcohol, join a gym, go out and buy some appropriately stretchy fitness attire, throw out every can of soft drink and refill the refrigerator’s crisper tray with loads of fresh vegetables (where they will, of course, rot as they have all previous Januaries).
By February, we’re berating ourselves, ‘Why am I so undisciplined? Why can I not stick to anything? What is wrong with me?’ The answer is, ‘Nothing is wrong with you’, unless of course you consider being exquisitely human ‘wrong’. Yet, much of our culture, certainly the ‘self-improvement’ industry, asserts that what we are lacking is discipline. They inform us that our attitudes need a tune up, that it’s all about our states of mind and that we should push ourselves to higher levels of self-control.
This, of course, is mostly nonsense. Many of those who espouse this herculean discipline, be they personal trainers, life coaches or ‘self-actualising consultants’, are just as undisciplined in other areas of their own lives. Consider the typical Boot Camp–owning physical trainers who scream at their clients as they torture them in public parks but are incapable of picking their children up from school on time or organising their receipts come tax time. It makes you wonder how they would respond to a rather feeble looking accountant standing over them and screaming, ‘You’re worthless and weak … look at your expense reports … you disgust me!’
Discipline, it seems, owes rather more to the hierarchy of our own personal values and internal filters than it does to any self-imposed directions running to the contrary. But does that mean we should all surrender to failure and simply give up? Well, yes and no. There are certainly some things we should give up, such as strategies that don’t actually work (more on that later). But it would be wrong to see this as surrender. What it does indicate is that being successful in any sphere of life clearly comes down to quite a lot more than discipline, not in the least part because we don’t actually behave as predictably and rationally as we think we do.
Human irrationality
In the 1600s, French mathematician, inventor and philosopher Blaise Pascal famously suggested in his dissertation on ‘decision theory’ that human behaviour was the result of an individual looking at all of their available options, weighing up the pros and cons and then making the most logical decision possible. Of course, this was in the 1600s and there was very little reality television around to dissuade him from his idealism.
More recently, scholars of the behavioural sciences, such as Daniel Goleman in his ‘Emotional Intelligence’ series, have suggested that we are far more driven by emotions than simple logic and that by developing our Emotional Quotient (EQ), we may better understand what drives human behaviour and belief systems. This certainly seems to be the case. Everything we do is to some extent filtered through how our actions will make us feel.
Of course, we still post-rationalise our emotional decisions. There are plenty of men in their fifties driving around in sports cars who can tell you all about aerodynamics, German engineering and their marque’s racing heritage … but all they are really interested in is attracting women half their age. Alarmingly, behavioural studies carried out in Las Vegas indicate that this may often be a successful strategy (good news for the ageing gent in a Porsche or Ferrari then).
Hot on the heels of Goleman’s research is the work by Simon Sinek, who tries to narrow down our emotional focus to dealing with a single question — ‘Why?’ — a question that he rather neatly dovetails into the subsequent questions of ‘How?’ and ‘What?’ This echoes the earlier work of Friedrich Nietzsche and of Viktor Frankl, who, in Man’s Search for Meaning, asserts that one can achieve any ‘what’ if the ‘why’ is large enough.
All make a compelling case for the importance of developing and buying into a clear and inspiring ‘Why?’ This has certainly been a significant part of our leadership strategy during our combined 50 years in the commercial world and it is abundantly apparent in other people whose leadership we most admire. However, as anyone who has ever been on a diet can attest, ‘why’ is often temporary. Initially the ‘why’ — be it a high-school reunion three months hence, or a wedding, or a hot date — will inspire enormous amounts of action and even results. But, inevitably, time goes by and the ‘why’ fades. All of a sudden, we find ourselves back on the sofa in our sweatpants, watching Oprah and eating chicken out of a bucket!
Why? Good question. It turns out that, like discipline, an inspiring ‘why’ can be difficult to maintain over the long haul. A lot of this is driven by our sense of Identity Congruence, our innate need to behave in a way that aligns with our sense of self. If the ‘why’ or the program of discipline conflicts with who we think we are at our core, it is highly unlikely to be sustainable.
However, it is also a function of the environment and systems we create around ourselves. Discipline is a lot easier to maintain in an environment that supports it. Abstinence is relatively easy when you’re an overweight, bombastic senator with nothing on offer (versus being a charismatic President such as Bill Clinton). Eating fresh food is simple in the absence of fast-food options in your local area and workers without families in remote locations are more likely to be willing to put in a little overtime than those surrounded by other priorities. (Why wouldn’t they be?)
People working in business-to-business sales often pride themselves on the rationality of both themselves and the customers they serve. In fact, many scoff at anything other than an order-taking approach to engaging their customers: ‘They’re not interested in soft sell, they want what they want. It’s a necessity’. While we hold an almost fetish-like fondness for office equipment, it does seem a bit of an overclaim to call it a necessity.
So what is it that drives these ‘rationalists’ of the corporate procurement world? When you dig a little deeper and ask them some provocative questions, the process of buying business-to-business products reveals itself to be anything but the straightforward, rational process that its participants claim it is. Do they buy the best product? No? Then perhaps they are not driven by a rational need for quality. Do they buy the cheapest product? No? So it seems they’re not driven by a rational need for economy either. The truth is, if they are lazy, they buy what they have always bought; if they are fearful, they buy the best known brand (remember, ‘no-one ever got fired for buying IBM’); if they are the typically disengaged middle manager, they don’t change things until someone higher up the chain complains. Of course, the list of causes goes on and on, but very few lead to the world of rational decisions that Pascal promised. These compromised decisions even follow us into our personal lives.
A restaurateur once shared with us that if you have an oversupply of a particular wine, you should present it on your menu as the second least expensive option, something they referred to as the ‘first-date’ wine. The paying partner’s ‘logic’, they claim, runs along these lines: things may not go well, so they don’t want to waste money on the really good stuff, but of course, looking cheap may decrease the chances of things going anywhere at all. So they assiduously avoid the cheap plonk and opt for the second most expensive option (‘A very good choice if I may say so, Sir’).
Beliefs are hard to shift
So, if discipline is hard to maintain and our rational minds are little help, perhaps we can enlist the help of belief systems. Of course, this is easier said than done. Yet this methodology — the shifting of belief systems — has come to dominate in the spheres of leadership, psychology, marketing, sales and performance coaching.
We talk about changing our beliefs in such a casual way that it makes us seem ignorant of just how powerful these beliefs actually are. Many of our beliefs have proved stubbornly hard to move in even the slightest terms over the past few millennia and have in fact led to wars, murder, family breakdowns and even suicides. Nevertheless, it seems to be a logical place to start.
One of the main problems with most campaigns around behavioural change, be they commercial, government or personal, is that we do tend to focus only on shifting beliefs. We employ communications campaigns, advertising, keynote speakers, audio programs and the like. However, try as we may to bludgeon our beliefs into submission with affirmations, rational platitudes and emotional blackmail, the beliefs prove to be the cockroaches of the mental world — impervious to even nuclear attack!
Almost every one of us can name at least one thing in our lives that we believe down to our toes is bad for us, self-destructive, unhealthy or emotionally heart wrenching. We know we should stop doing it and yet, despite all our affirmations — sticky notes stuck to the refrigerator, extra coaching sessions and seemingly rigorous strategies to counter this behaviour — we continue to do it.
Part of the reason for this is that our beliefs are very much attached to our conception of ourselves. For example, followers of the various religions do not typically say, ‘I believe in the teachings of the Bible’ (or the Koran, the Torah, the Bhagavad Gita the Dhammapada)’. They are far more likely to say, ‘I’m a Christian’ (or a Muslim, a Jew, a Hindu, a Buddhist). For people who are of Jewish ethnicity and Jewish religious belief this is no doubt even more self-defining. What this means is, changing what you believe is not as simple as … well … changing your mind. It actually involves changing your conception of who you think you are.
So what are beliefs in essence? It is helpful to think of beliefs as simply meanings we’ve attached to the events that occur in life, either through personal experience or adoption through cultural context. Over time, and in accordance with our brain’s desire to streamline our very complicated decision-making processes, this distinction tends to get lost and the meanings we’ve attached to one occurrence start to become more concrete, universal and non-negotiable.
At this point our brains behave very much like The Filter Bubble, which Eli Pariser describes in his excellent book of the same name. We selectively filter the information we seek and then absorb to reinforce these newly entrenched beliefs and simultaneously filter out anything that may challenge them. This is part of the reason why true diversity is so important in teams.
Ethnic, gender and cognitive diversity actually make a group or team collectively smarter. They allow for points of view that would otherwise be missed in a more homogenous group due to contextual blindness. What this all means is that our beliefs are far more powerful than we give them credit for. But what is more disturbing is that we tend to view our own internal persuasive powers as more than up to the challenge of changing them.
Our brains are over-confident
Confidence is drummed into those of us who have worked in the corporate world. It is seen as one of the defining characteristics of a leader and its absence is seen as a life sentence of working in middlemeh! So much so, that employees are often rewarded for talking themselves, and their capabilities, up while quietly intelligent souls who come at the world with a dose of wariness and caution are not so quietly sidelined and told, ‘Stop being such a downer’.
Of course, there’s nothing innately wrong with a healthy sense of confidence or in being engagingly extrovert. In fact, it can be very useful as long as it is supported by a measure of complementary competence. The reasons why over-confidence evolved in our collective psyche are not completely understood, although perhaps having a bit of swagger and being skilled in the persuasive arts was as important to reproduction in our prehistoric years as it appears to be today.
However, the problems with over-confidence are two-fold. Many of us don’t know where confidence ends and over-confidence begins, but more concerning are the small over-confidences we use in our everyday decision-making — the things we don’t even process as overly confident. The educated guesses we make, the assumptions we use based on past experience and the little generalisations we cumulatively filter the world through have the capacity to create enormous problems.
Part of this is socialised into us in schools. Whenever a student asks a teacher how to spell a word or what the capital of a particular state is and the teacher replies, ‘What do you think?’ or ‘Try to answer it yourself’, they are unconsciously increasing the chances of guesswork becoming a lifelong strategy.
In fact, when we conduct over-confidence tests in the field, asking random passers-by in the street a series of questions they think they should know the answer to — such as, ‘How many countries are there in Europe?’ — or asking them to point in the direction they think is north, people are far more likely to take a guess than to simply admit, ‘I don’t know’.
Of course, teachers are not to blame for this; taking chances based on limited information is necessary for human beings to just get through a typical day. This is partly because we don’t want to appear ignorant and lose social standing, but also because we create mental shortcuts out of a need for efficiency and rarely have all the information we would like before making a decision. For example, even though we know there is a slim chance a driver may not see the red light as they approach an intersection, most of us still step boldly onto the street when that little green figure appears on the other side of the road without a moment’s hesitation. The ‘confidence’ we exhibit in other people’s social conformity, however, can get us into rather a lot of trouble.
Just how much of an issue our over-confidence can be is explored in detail in the book Confidence: Overcoming Low Self-Esteem, Insecurity, and Self-Doubt. Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, a professor of business psychology at University College London, writes that lower confidence is in fact necessary for gaining competence, which obviously sits at the base of genuine confidence. In other words, overconfidence gets in the way of us being curious, asking questions and developing our skills such that real confidence is justified.
But the issue is larger than that. When you consider that, statistically, for any endeavour humanity has turned its hand to, half the people involved possessed a less-than-average competency, you begin to understand just what the scale of the over-confidence problem may be.
The dilemma really lies in what over-confidence robs us of. Of course leaders must convey some sense of certainty in order to engage their team to at least attempt to prove a hypothesis right or wrong. It also makes sense that they have a reasonable amount of confidence that their hypothesis is probably correct. However, over-confidence stops us looking too closely at blind spots and possible errors. It has us ‘hope for the best’ and ‘keep calm and carry on’ rather than dealing with issues that may completely derail our objectives, regardless of our confidence levels.
Laboratory conditions don’t exist
Even when we don’t rely on our own prejudices, belief systems and confidence levels and instead do some research into what may be the best course of action, we can still come undone by the environment we choose to test in.
Entire industries exist to help mitigate the mistakes we may make in our endeavours. Researchers, social scientists and strategists of all sorts test hypotheses, conduct double blind experiments and enlist carefully selected polling of ‘typical’ subjects, producing reams of data … even big data (the corporate world’s new security blanket).
And yet, failure is everywhere.
We have often been wary of the true intentions of much research and testing, suggesting (perhaps unfairly) that this work is largely used as ‘screw-up insurance’ — in other words, research conducted not to inform, but as a defence should things go horribly awry. An employee or consultant can hardly be held responsible for failure if the research suggested success was a more likely outcome.
However, even when the aspirations and the participants involved in the research are noble and rigorous, errors still persist. Part of the reason for this is the choice of environment in which research is conducted and the margins for error agreed upon. So much of the research people do isn’t conducted in the real world and the artificiality of the environments we create can’t help but skew the results. For example, if you ask someone about their political ideals in a polling questionnaire, they are likely to want to appear more caring, more intelligent and more interested than they may actually be. As a result, a lot of research suffers from much of the same over-confidence in its results as our own best estimates.
To be fair, big data has started to go a long way to improving this process, given its real-world sourcing, although, like all data, big data is only as powerful as its interpretation and application.
Another possible solution lies in a more scientific rather than corporate view of research; that is, research that’s designed to generate information, not conclusions. In other words, rather than looking only to prove a hypothesis, we should also use research as a way of identifying the threats to our hypotheses and the conditions under which this proof may come undone.
So instead of focusing on an outcome, we should be focused on generating outcomes.
We over-focus on results
Exacerbating the problem are our goal-fixated cultures. Again, this is a hanger-on from the world of personal development. For years self-help gurus and business consultants have whipped us into a frenzy with goal-setting exercises and experiences that are analogous to facing our fear — such as walking on hot coals or performing a ‘trust fall’ — all while they drum into us a mantra of a no-excuses results obsession.
Given the fervour with which the corporate world has embraced this kind of thinking, you’d expect organisations around the planet to be ridiculously over-achieving and ticking off milestones and goals like crazy. But that’s not what’s happening. In fact, the gap between our goals and our achievement of those goals is glaring. In 2011, researchers at US management consulting firm Bain & Company found that among the organisations they surveyed, a mere 20 per cent achieve their annual goals and expectations. Once again, as we’ve seen in our personal lives, this is often interpreted as the failure of the individuals involved while our systems and the process of goal setting itself remain unquestioned.
At sales conferences around the world, inspirational speakers with big teeth and a disturbingly psychotic amount of enthusiasm pump up salespeople, telling them to focus on results with pithy maxims such as, ‘Don’t make excuses, make results’.
The same empty platitudes are often applied in every sphere of life. To experience this phenomenon for yourself, simply hire a personal trainer or a life coach. One of the favourite anecdotes of the goal-setting fraternity is the 1953 Yale goal study. The story has it that 1953’s graduating class at Yale was surveyed to see who had written goals and who had not. It transpired that only 3 per cent of students had written down goals. Years later, when the class was contacted again to check on their
progress since leaving college, it was revealed that the 3 per cent with written goals had eclipsed the personal wealth of the other 97 per cent put together.
What makes this story interesting is just how powerful stories are in building corporate cultures and strategy, but mostly what makes it interesting is that it is completely made up. Yale has repeatedly denied any knowledge of this survey in 1953 or in any other graduating year.
Yet this story has been repeated so many times by so many different sources that it has fallen into the category of belief. As a result, goal setting remains the holy grail of corporate and personal strategy, but more than that, it is often the only strategy employed, which is not to say that goal setting isn’t useful or that it doesn’t lead to success. In fact, we annually set goals for our organisation and staff and use benchmarks of accomplishment to monitor our progress. The issue occurs when it is seen as a single-bullet strategy.
Buddhists refer to this results obsession as ‘attachment’ and they frame attachment as one of the roots of disharmony. We prefer to see it more as one strategic strand of many that are available. In other words, a clear goal or result is useful, but it may become a limitation as better options and information become available.
A great example of this is the Indian story of how to catch a monkey. It is said that in order to catch a monkey you have to stake a coconut filled with peanuts to the ground. The coconut must have an opening in it just small enough for a monkey to slip its hand into, so that when it reaches inside, grabs the peanuts and forms a fist, its hand becomes too large to come back out again. The monkey becomes so fixated by the goal that its hand becomes stuck and therefore it is trapped. (The story doesn’t explain why you’d want to catch a monkey; we’ll leave it to you to add your own editorial flavour.) What’s interesting about this story is that it’s a metaphor for how modern goal obsession has affected some of the actual results we’ve achieved. Poor work–life balance, chronic health issues, family breakups, environmental disasters and artificially stimulated truck drivers falling asleep at the wheel are all examples of goals getting in the way of success. In reality, we actually have very little control over results in our lives. The drunk driver who fails to yield as we approach an intersection, the earthquake that claims our home and even the client who fires us because their marriage is on the rocks and they feel a need to assert power in at least one aspect of their lives: all of these examples, despite the self-help industry’s protestations to the contrary, lie beyond our control.
However, what we can control — and this is where we should look for control — is our behaviour and our environment.
Failure is an error in design
We tend to personalise failure when we experience it. For all the corporate world’s talk of failure being an essential ingredient to success, it is seldom greeted with the enthusiasm of a student learning a valuable lesson. The language is often reminiscent of the breakup speech, ‘It’s not you … it’s me!’
So instead we look to apportion blame, limit damage and, depending on the political environment we’re working in, find a scapegoat. That’s very much how we build our cultures inside organisations too. So, given that so much of what passes for strategy in the worlds of business and personal development is fraught with faux science, ineffective processes that fight against human nature and systems that set us up for failure, what do we do now? We would like to suggest that we need to change environments and systems, not people. Rather than ignoring or denying our foibles, weaknesses and bad habits, we should instead be designing our systems with them in mind.
If we assume that failure is simply part of the process (and we should), then rather than planning for the best-case scenario (those days when we are filled with willpower, charisma, clarity and courage) we should instead plan in such a way that we can be successful on days when we are just average, middle of the road or plain old run of the mill.
In other words, we need to design for being selfish, scared and stupid.
Published by WILEY, Selfish, Scared & Stupid is available now in paperback, RRP $25.95, from all good bookstores and www.selfishscaredandstupid.com
