Some good articles came across my desk this morning, dealing with some of the issues I’ve been writing about of late: cognitive errors or thinking fallacies, overestimating the power of government, and learning how to learn.

In the New York Times yesterday, David Brooks talks about overestimating one’s ability to solve complex, messy problems, and suggests focusing on discrete, rather than systemic good.

And another great article in the New York Times by Paul Tough whom I’ve  written about before. Tough wrote Whatever It Takes: Geoffrey Canada’s Quest to Change Harlem and America, about  Canada and his work with the Harlem Children’s Zone. This article focuses on teaching children how to learn, not how to succeed, and the fine art of  learning from failure.

Enjoy.

I’ve written a lot here about cognitive errors – how our minds lead us astray. It’s human nature to filter out information that runs contrary to what we already know, to overestimate things that have emotional impact, and fall prey to emotional reasoning, believing that what we feel must be true.

Even being aware that it happens, it’s still sobering to see yourself do it. We were out hiking last weekend with friends and with our 14 year old Lab-Malamute mix, Ranger. Like many senior dogs, Ranger has some trouble with his back and legs. He had run up ahead, and when we came upon him, he was stumbling around, his back oddly twisted, and his left leg dragging under him. He clearly had hurt himself, but we didn’t see how he did it. We felt along his back and legs, to see where he was hurt, but we couldn’t find anything. So we thought we’d continue and see how he went. We walked along for another hour or so, and he seemed to walk more steadily, with less limping. So we went home, kept an eye on him, and after dinner, checked on him one more time. Suddenly we saw a spot of blood where he had been lying. We grabbed a flashlight and looked under his belly and to our horror, saw a gaping 8 inch gash in his groin and abdomen area. He had impaled himself on a salmonberry cane, and for 5 hours, had walked, gotten in and out of the car, ate dinner, and lay around with an open gaping wound. And because we already ‘knew’ that he had back and leg troubles, it never occurred to us to check for something else. Like the old joke of the man looking for his keys under streetlight because that’s where the light is. Only this wasn’t a joke.

He’s OK now. The worst part for Ranger was the anesthesia and for us, spending an all-nighter at the vet hospital in Lincoln City.  But now I’m left with thought, what else am I missing? What else don’t I know because of what I know?

Expertise, mastery and feeling comfortable in our knowledge of our field, of ourselves, or of others is a great thing. But the lesson for me in this story is to remember the shadow that my knowledge casts.

I can’t say for sure, but I’ve either developed a competitive spirit as I have gotten older, or, I’ve just become less self-conscious about it. It’s become most evident when I cycle in large group events. While some riders have to tune out the others and focus on their own pedaling speed, I do the opposite. I quickly notice the more competitive riders and pace myself according to their speed.

In some areas, competitiveness is seen as a good thing. But where I come from – the peace and love era of the 70s, a progressive liberal college, the experiential psychotherapy culture – competition was a bit of a no-no. So noticing my burgeoning competitive spirit made me curious. What is it? What does it do for me? (more…)

I saw in the Letters to the Editor section of The Oregonian today

Burial at sea? I and now most Americans do not believe that Osama bin Laden was really killed by the United States. Most feel that it is a lie by the Obama administration.

Hmm. Just like that pesky birth certificate.

Which, in fact, did just what I predicted. The evidence just made the beliefs stronger.

Why are we surprised? Since when do facts play a role in politics? Whether debating health care or summer vacation plans, most of the time, debates are driven by feelings, not facts. Studies show decidedly that facts rarely, if ever, change people’s minds. And here is what we’re seeing now with the so-called ‘birthers’: Not only do facts rarely change minds, they even solidify them. As a well quoted article in the Boston Globe last year stated:

when misinformed people, particularly political partisans, were exposed to corrected facts in news stories, they rarely changed their minds. In fact, they often became even more strongly set in their beliefs. Facts, they found, were not curing misinformation. Like an underpowered antibiotic, facts could actually make misinformation even stronger.

So the question is: does this mean we should make more room for emotions in debates or less? If we are using facts to fuel our emotions maybe we should learn how to have more intelligent emotional debates?

My friend, Ioan Mitrea, who founded his company, Sellerengine, sent me this terrific post on the challenges of leadership: What’s The Most Difficult CEO Skill? Managing Your Own Psychology. The author, Ben Horowitz, is writing about being a CEO of your own company. But his words ring true for stepping up into any leadership position:

The first problem is that everybody learns to be a CEO by being a CEO. No training as a manager, general manager or any other job actually prepares you to run a company. The only thing that prepares you to run a company is running a company. This means that you will face a broad set of things that you don’t know how to do that require skills that you don’t have. Nevertheless, everybody will expect you to know how to do them, because, well, you are the CEO.

Read the full post here.

I recently heard an interview on my local public radio with a young woman on her struggle to learn the violin. She wrote a blog piece about it called The Virtue of Being Bad and concludes that being bad at something and persevering nonetheless is a virtue.

But here’s another reason why being bad is good. In looking at the corrupting influence of power, the culprit appears to the self-reinforcing nature of power. Power gives us the means to surround ourselves with people and places that reflect our rank back to us. And, as I write in The Expert Syndrome and the Problem of Transfer, it’s easy to transfer our sense of mastery in one domain to all domains, thinking we are truly invincible:

The sense of power we have gained is comfortable and fortifying; the energy we have invested in getting to this place of expertise is too much to just walk away from. This rank and expertise is reinforced daily, by every person who relates to us in that role. Every encounter adds to the identity. And it becomes a self-reinforcing mechanism; the more comfortable we are in that role, the more we surround ourselves with people who relate to us in that role.

Our rank allows us to surround ourselves with people, places, contexts, roles, that reinforce our rank. The more we stay within the context in which our rank is ratified, the greater the danger of identifying only with our rank, beginning to believe in our infallibility.

Is there a solution? No. But there are things we can do in leadership positions to mitigate this tendency. One of them: be a beginner at something. Be bad at something. Put yourself in positions of uncertainty. Remember your beginner’s mind. Above all, leave the “office,” literally step outside that context in which your rank is reinforced. For some people, having children is that humbling experience. For others, it might just be learning the violin. Every position of power is upheld by its context. And while it won’t solve all the problems of abuse of power, learning who we are outside that reinforcing context should be a requirement of ourselves and others in leadership.

Atul Gawande, in an article for The New Yorker, writing about the soaring cost of health care, looks at the role dying and the terminally ill play in those costs:

Twenty-five per cent of all Medicare spending is for the five per cent of patients who are in their final year of life, and most of that money goes for care in their last couple of months which is of little apparent benefit. … In the past few decades, medical science has rendered obsolete centuries of experience, tradition, and language about our mortality, and created a new difficulty for mankind: how to die.Technology sustains our organs until we are well past the point of awareness and coherence.

Death is the enemy. Though it’s not just death in the literal sense. Admitting defeat can be hard, and refusing to give up can cost us dearly. Whether the President or Congress continues to escalate a war in the hopes of finally turning it around, or someone stays in a troubled relationship in the hopes that things might just get better, it’s not easy to raise the white flag. (more…)

Last week the American Psychiatric Associations released a draft of DSM-V, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. The final version is set to come out in May 2013. It has a number of proposed revisions which have been widely blogged about, including a new diagnosis of hypersexuality. In just about every post I’ve read, at some point, the author proposes Tiger Woods as the poster child for this new diagnosis.

As a blog on power and leadership, I’ve spent a fair amount of time here discussing instances in which power goes awry, in particular, why and how public figures and leaders torpedo their careers by engaging in risky sexual behavior. How can public figures like Bill Clinton, John Edwards, Eliot Spitzer and Tiger Woods, believe their sexual behavior can be kept secret from the world?  It is easy to see it as a mental disorder and it very well may be. Undoubtedly we’ll even find the gene that’s responsible, but making this a medical disorder keeps us from contemplating it as a behavior on a continuum, one we’re all prone to. (more…)

There’s a lot of interesting research out there on excellence and superior performance. What accounts for superior performance? Why are some people superstars at what they do, and others just average? The question is pretty interesting, not only for what it says about excellence, but more generally, what it says about learning and development. Gladwell’s book, Outliers, is only one of several books looking at this phenomenon. The authors behind The Heart and Soul of Change: What Works in Psychotherapy, Hubble, Duncan and Miller have also been looking at superior performance in psychotherapy in their article, Supershrinks: What is the secret of their success?

As these authors and others point out, trying to account for superior performance by looking at innate talent, genius, high IQ hasn’t yielded many results. The fact is, superior performance is, in the words of Thomas Edison, one percent inspiration, ninety-nine percent perspiration. Now thatâ??s either inspiring or depressing for us average folks. Inspiring because it means excellence is available to all those willing to put in the work. And depressing because, well, hard work. Gladwell puts a figure to that hard work: 10,000 hours. It’s at 10,000 hours that people achieve true mastery. Bill Gates had 10,000 hours on a computer before starting his software business with Paul Allen. Michael Jordan spent thousands of hours in the gym, improving his performance, after he was cut from his high school basketball team. 10,000 hours of practice in one activity accounts for a virtuosity that we see as natural born talent. Or is it? (more…)

Iâ??ve got the task of developing a performance evaluation process with and for faculty at the Process Work Institute. Weâ??re a small training institute, and while we have had many different forums for feedback and evaluation, weâ??ve not created a standardized process that is tied to accountability.

Itâ??s a tricky process. As a colleague pointed out, itâ??s been a steep learning curve. Weâ??ve run into many snarls en route to developing this performance evaluation procedure. The topic is a minefield, on both sides, for the evaluated and the evaluator. For starters, itâ??s basically about being judged â?? am I good or bad? And trust. Can I trust whoâ??s evaluating me? What about the disgruntled colleague or student who has it in for me? Or that the feedback is filtered through the personality of the other person, complete with their values, beliefs about me, biases, etc. And of course, now that we are moving towards performance evaluation as mandatory, it raises the twin issues of motivation and resistance. Whatâ??s in it for me? Why should I jump that hoop? And do these standards relate to my own personal growth goals? And probably one of the biggest difficulties is that, like any tight knit organization, we sit comfortably in a single loop learning style â?? we have our way of looking at things and doing things, and when it comes to performance evaluation, we can police ourselves thank you very much.

But of course we canâ??t. And we know that. So we want the opportunity to reflect on ourselves, to a degree. Because itâ??s also human nature to bristle at anyone who points out any kind of flaw, even if they call it a â??challengeâ?? or â??opportunity.â?? We know negative feedback and criticism, no matter what perfume it has on.

I could write volumes on this, and others have, better than I can. So, the point I want to focus on is the question of accountability. Why do we, or does any organization, need evaluations, and accountability procedures? Why does bureaucracy have to intervene here?

As I ponder it, I think the real meaning of performance evaluation is a cost analysis: does what you add to a group outweigh what you cost your colleagues, customers, and organization? That sounds harsh to think that who we are has a price tag, but it does. Mostly, we add value. But itâ??s often hard to see the price others pay in getting along with us. Even our talents come with a price. I have a great talent at seeing the bigger picture, and this comes with the cost of frequently neglecting details and making small mistakes that definitely cause some teeth grinding downstream. Or, if I am difficult to collaborate with, I make the atmosphere tense, if I derail the conversation, neglecting the deadline that the other team members are trying to meet, I cost those around me in terms of energy, emotional wear and tear.

The problem isnâ??t what we cost; the problem is not knowing that cost, and not taking measures to reduce the difference between our value and our costs. For instance, if I am sloppy with details (as I am), and I send out information with the wrong date, this means that the office staff or my organizer has to spend extra time chasing me down to correct dates, sending out corrections, and responding to questions because people have been misinformed. In order to mitigate that cost, I need to do something â?? apologize, offer to help write the emails or mail out the corrections, or offer to pay extra money for the extra time involved. If I donâ??t, if I just assume someone else will clean up that mess, and anyway, mistakes happen, then laws, regulatory agencies, performance reviews, police forces, etc., spring up to fulfill the function I neglect.

Whatever we miss doing for ourselves, we outsource to another body. But this escalates the problem, and brings in force or power of some kind. If two people canâ??t resolve a fight alone, then a third party comes in to resolve it for them. When we outsource it to another we use power in place of natural consequences.

Barbara Coloroso, a parenting expert, uses the concept of natural consequences in parenting. Rather than controlling behavior through force or might (â??Do so because I say so!â??) children should learn that what they do has consequences for which they are responsible. You throw a cigarette butt out your house window and start a fire next door that threatens your home as well. You see and experience the consequences of your action, and are forced to take steps to counter it. But we seldom have that proximity to the effects of our action. We have lost contact between cause and effect. So laws are created that replace natural consequences with force. Donâ??t do this because the government says so. Now itâ??s impersonal, and there is no longer a reason attached. The violator, the one who throws the butt out the window, whether he obeys the law or not, is still dissociated from the loss of habitat, cost to taxpayers, homelessness, and the myriad issues caused by that one action.

Getting back to the issue of performance evaluation â??I donâ??t deal with my sloppiness, and eventually the office staff complains. So a new law gets posted: if you make a mistake on your dates, you are responsible for making the correction, or something like that. But now itâ??s bureaucracy, an arbitrary law. I might improve, but I probably wonâ??t. Even more significantly, I havenâ??t become more aware of what I cost.

I believe this is one of the reasons evaluators chafe at their role. Not only because they may not be trained for it, but also because they are recruited into the role because the person isnâ??t evaluating themselves sufficiently. The function really belongs to the one being evaluated. Thatâ??s why, in the way we do feedback at the Process Work Institute, we make a big point of training the ones giving and getting feedback to take the other roles.

The one receiving feedback should already know that feedback â?? itâ??s only coming to them from the outside because they somehow missed it. Feedback we donâ??t know about ourselves catches us by surprise, and is the worst kind. It hurts the most to receive criticism about something we donâ??t know about ourselves. But we should. We should be in touch with our cost, and have a sense of how we are received. On the other side of the equation, giving feedback is hardest when the person receiving it doesnâ??t already know about. Itâ??s for these reasons that the real learning involved in evaluation is less about substance (what should I focus on) and more about the process (Do I already know this, and if not, why not?).

And the big question is, why donâ??t we? Thereâ??s been a lot written about this, especially recently. Itâ??s a well know problem in social psychology that people chronically overrate their performance (unless they are  depressed). Cornell psychologist David Dunning, PhD. is one of the top researchers in this field. Heâ??s found that in North American culture, people overestimate their abilities, and that the least competent performers inflate their abilities the most. No one really knows for sure why this is the case. People are definitely prone to bias. They overrate the particular areas they excel at, and minimize the importance of those areas they donâ??t excel at. For instance, people with verbal ability would overestimate the role verbal ability, in contrast to mathematical ability, plays in intelligence. Or task focused people would rate task orientation as the most important leadership trait on a questionnaire about what makes a good leader.

Another reason we donâ??t see ourselves more clearly is due to fundamental attribution error, meaning, we tend to give credit to ourselves for a positive outcome, and lay the blame elsewhere for a negative outcome. Additionally, we seldom receive accurate feedback about ourselves. People tend to give each other more positive feedback to their faces, but say negative things behind their back. Finally, people lack the information they need to fully assess themselves; the paradox is that our incompetence makes us incompetent to accurately judge ourselves.

But another reason is that we donâ??t see ourselves as part of the whole. Itâ??s one of the reasons we struggle to see the environmental impact of our decisions, or the nutritional and health impact of our behaviors. Social marketers who try to educate the public about health issues such as skin cancer, AIDS awareness, smoking, and drunk driving, have to contend with this problem a lot: How do we get people to relate to the consequences of their actions? In organizations, how do we get people to identify with the organizational itself, not just their job, team, or silo?

Power is used as the intermediary between people, between individuals and whole. Rules and law force us to be responsible to each other, to think of the whole when we have lost our ability to do so. Weâ??ve made a big leap from performance evaluation to politics, but I think the common denominator is the essence of organization – association and affiliation. When we donâ??t affiliate with others, we outsource that task to the government or bureaucracy, and then inveigh against its restrictive rules and regulations. But we can and should police ourselves, not out of a sense of duty or morality, but out of the sense of connection and community. It reminds me of how Gandhi understood freedom â?? not as the ability to do whatever you wanted, but as liberation from the prison of dualism â?? that we are separate from each other. Democracy has always been a tension between its two parts: demos (people, community) and kratie (power, law). While we struggle to comprehend community, to identify with the demos, we depend on kratie, the power to force affiliation, but in the absence of heart, it becomes mere obedience.