6
Uncovering Your Biggest Blind Spot
What You’d Be Working On in a DDO
Now that you have a picture of the growth fostered by DDOs, we want to give you a direct experience of one dimension of the culture: edge. Remember Jackie from Next Jump, the marketing manager who was voted off the company’s leadership group? Although people told her that her backhand (weakness) was arrogance, she knew that she had truly zeroed in on her backhand only when she felt the pain of saying out loud her own version of arrogance: being selfish. In her words, “What is the thing that is more meaningful, that is actually painful to say, that is embarrassing to say? I think that’s when you really get to your true backhand.” That’s what we want for you by the end of this chapter—self-awareness of your genuine backhand, not to trouble you, but to enable you to identify and experience your own version of the personal learning curriculum you’d have the chance to take up in a DDO.
We’ll help you by guiding you through the immunity to change (ITC) exercise.1 To start, you identify a personal growth goal, a self-improvement issue that is important to you. (We often call this our one big thing, or OBT for short.) Then you answer a series of additional questions to reveal how you’re unconsciously getting in the way of achieving that important goal and becoming your best self. This is the quickest, most powerful practice we know for illuminating current blind spots. If you allow yourself to be completely honest throughout the exercise, you’ll discover your personal version of your backhand. (And it may not be painful or embarrassing.)
You will then have both a picture of how you’re limiting yourself and a glimmer of what it might mean to upgrade your own operating system. We also hope you will experience the sense of freedom and possibility that comes from seeing your limits in the bigger, more spacious context of your unfolding development.
If you’re a leader, we wouldn’t be surprised if you want to skip this chapter. Maybe you’re questioning its relevance to you or, more honestly, feeling daunted by the prospects of looking at yourself in this way. “Do I really want to feel such discomfort?” you might be asking yourself. If so, you might find it valuable to remember that (for example) Jackie’s world expanded when she embraced her backhand. She couldn’t have known that her tacit assumption—something like, “Spending time to help other people would diminish my success”—was wrong if she hadn’t squarely faced the truth. She couldn’t have known that helping people might actually lead to her greater success. What a revelation for her to discover not only that people actually were grateful for her time spent helping them but also that there was a whole different income awaiting her when she did!
You’ll also see in the pages ahead how someone you have already met, Decurion’s Nora Dashwood, who by all standards was an extremely successful leader, became an even more effective one by facing her limiting assumptions through the very process we invite you to engage in this chapter.
Creating an ITC map shines a light on what a person needs to work on to become, in Next Jump parlance, “a better me.” It will allow you, in Bridgewater terms, to touch the nerve that must be touched for you to face reality. You will see the ego attachments that need to be worked through in order for you to flourish (a favorite word at Decurion). If you want to do something bigger with yourself, your life, your leadership, your organization, this exercise will reveal something important for that journey.
Our two recommendations for getting the most out of the chapter. First, do the exercises! Don’t just read the examples; apply the ideas to yourself, your own mind, your behavior. The ideas themselves, as novel and intriguing as they may be, will not help you identify your growing edge. You’ll experience the ideas of this chapter only cognitively. You won’t feel them, or fully understand them, until you apply them to yourself. Second, we strongly recommend that you write your responses into the map (see figure 6-1). (Alternatively, you can download a map template from www.mindsatwork.com if you’d rather type into the template or print it and handwrite your responses.)
Writing your responses down will ultimately help you see something that just answering the questions in your own mind will not. You may also benefit from finding and doing the exercise with someone you feel comfortable with and trust (a tiny instance of the DDO dimension of home). Being in conversation with such a person may help you dig deeper.
Let’s look in detail at using the ITC map to find your edge.
FIGURE 6-1
The immunity to change map template
Column 1: Your Improvement Goal and Starting Commitment
We hope and expect that your experience with this tool will be interesting for you. We suggest that you think carefully about each entry you make, pushing yourself to be as honest as possible.
To begin, you need to identify your improvement goal. Because the rest of the process stems from this goal, it’s important to choose a good one. How do you do that?
Here are a few avenues to explore.
- What would you need to get better at in order to be more effective in your current role? What would you need to get better at in order to make a bigger contribution to your organization, or to a current high-priority initiative?
- What would you need to get better at in order to bring your organization or department closer to operating as a DDO? What changes would you need to make to your own behavior?
- Choosing any aspect of your life—work, family, friendship—what single thing is most important to you? Now, having identified that, ask yourself one more question: What one way of personally improving yourself would make the biggest difference for this most important thing?
- Is there some improvement goal you have already tried to accomplish, perhaps many times, but you have never been happy with the result or its staying power? What is it?
Generate a few possibilities, and then decide which one feels like the most powerful one to focus on. The more self-aware you are, the more likely you are to generate a good goal using this approach alone. However, we have found that individuals do not always, all on their own, choose goals that are most likely to impact their leadership effectiveness. Even among the leaders we have spoken with at each of the DDOs, where there is quite a bit of focus on helping individuals get better, we hear stories of how difficult it can be to identify the improvement goal that is right for each person.
We therefore recommend that you seek lots of input from others. Ask your supervisor, your colleagues, your direct reports, your friends and family: “What improvement would make the biggest difference in your evaluation of me and my potential in this organization? What contribution could I make that would have the most impact? What would I need to get better at in order to make that contribution? What would enable me to serve you better? What would I need to get better at to do so?” As you sift through this feedback, look for patterns, issues that hit home for you, and areas that feel most important for your own growth.
The best goal for this exercise should meet the following criteria:
- It should be about getting better at something, and not itself be a result or an outcome. “Being less controlling” is not an improvement goal; it is a result or an outcome. “Getting better at being less controlling” is OK, but “Getting better at giving more control to others” is an even better example of an improvement goal, because it names what you can do to become less controlling. And it identifies what you want to actually get better at, something that leads to the next criterion.
- It should be stated affirmatively, if possible. Saying that you want to improve by stopping some behavior or tendency is often less powerful than naming what you want to do instead. Consider what success will be for you.
- It should feel quite important to you, so that you imagine its realization—if you can achieve it—as personally valuable, desirable, or powerful.
- It should be something you have not yet accomplished or turned the corner on, meaning that there is plenty of room for improvement and future growth.
- It should be clear how getting better at this commitment means that you (and not someone else) must make changes to the way you live, think, and act.
Nora Dashwood, Decurion
In chapter 1 you met Nora Dashwood, who identified her personal challenge as “being with” people better, letting them learn how to do things in their own way rather than be directed by her. She wanted to stop withdrawing her goodwill, making the air in the room turn cold, when others made different decisions than those she would make. Rather than approach this improvement process as one solely focused on behavior change, the DDO approach is to look more deeply into the person’s mind-set and belief system, which for Dashwood were the roots of her unwanted behaviors. An ITC map, such as the one she actually constructed, helps us encapsulate this complex dynamic system in a single image (see figure 6-2).
Dashwood’s ITC map begins on the far left with her improvement goal:
I am committed to getting better at “being with” others, to being less controlling, to being more open to others’ ways of doing things.
Bob Prince, Bridgewater
Bob Prince, co-chief investment officer at Bridgewater, struggled with a large project Ray Dalio gave him that involved a particular type of exploration and analysis of the bond market. The project presented Prince with a complex and challenging problem; Dalio simply explained the goals of the project and then left it to Prince to lead a team to achieve it. The project took many years, entailed many failures, and required lots of reflections and changes on Prince’s part. He came to be seen as someone who was highly creative but who struggled to make things happen reliably. Greg Jensen’s synthesis of Prince (available for all employees at Bridgewater to see) was that Prince was a “mad scientist archetype: experimenter, great ideas, but unreliable/sometimes blows up lab.”
This characterization is one that Prince agreed with and also wanted to change. He acknowledged, “I’m really bad at getting in sync on the goal and coordinating the parts. [On the bond market project] I would tend to get off track, get in rabbit holes, stay in rabbit holes, do things that [led down] unproductive paths. It was not a well-directed process.”
Eager to overcome these weaknesses, Bob set out on a path of improvement (see figure 6-3). In particular, he was looking to get better at creating clear strategic plans for a team, specifying, for example, “what type of people are required for what roles and laying out the attributes of what’s required in spec sheets” and to “use this information to assign people to suitable roles, help them find ways to succeed, and guardrail them and us against their weaknesses.”
Here is Bob’s column 1 improvement goal:
To get better at making things happen reliably in projects by getting in sync on the goal and coordinating the parts.
Your Turn
Review your various ideas for your self-improvement goal, and choose one that meets all of the criteria. When you’re ready, write your starting commitment in the first column of your map (refer again to figure 6-1). We’ve started it for you: “I am committed to getting better at . . .” As you continue the exercise, you’ll need to return to this page to add new entries.
Column 2: What You Are Doing and Not Doing
Your next step requires brutal honesty. You need to develop a fearless inventory of all the things you do that work against your improvement goal, as well as the ways you’re working against that goal by what you are not doing. In other words, we’re asking you to fess up to your own bad behaviors. Your list will be a picture of you screwing up, working against your improvement goal. What are the things you’re doing and not doing instead? What do you do, or neglect to do, that derails, undermines, or sabotages your improvement goal?
Again, your list of behaviors in column 2 will be much more robust and accurate if you draw on feedback from others. If you do get regular feedback, supervision, mentoring, or formal evaluation, consider that input as a potential source of column 2 entries. Go back to the same people who gave you input about your improvement goal, and ask them to identify any behaviors in your repertoire that work against that goal.
There are two criteria for this column.
- Be sure that the entries you list are behaviors, and the more concrete you can be, the better. For example, rather than write, “I get bored when I mentor direct reports,” write something like, “I stop listening when a direct report explains his or her problem” or, “I immediately solve others’ problems before hearing the full story,” both of which are behaviors stemming from an inner experience of boredom. If you find yourself naming something that is more like a feeling, a state of mind, or an attitude, ask yourself, “What do I do (or what don’t I do) that leads to, or follows from, these feelings or attitudes? What do I do (or not do) as a result of these feelings or attitudes?”
- Each item is something you’re doing that works against your improvement goal. Our bet is that you’re doing lots of things in order to move toward your commitment, as well, but here we’re asking you just the opposite. We also imagine you could make a long and detailed list of how others are undermining your improvement, but we aren’t asking you to do that here either.
The more behaviors you can list, the better your chances are of coming to powerful insights later in the process. So give yourself plenty of time to think back to the times when you’ve vowed to improve and maybe even started to change your behaviors but then slipped back into old and familiar ways of being at work.
Write all of your behaviors in the second column of your ITC map. Review your list of behaviors carefully to make sure it is thorough, that all the entries are concrete behaviors, and that all the behaviors listed work against your improvement goal.
Nora Dashwood
Improvement goal: I am committed to getting better at “being with” others, to being less controlling, to being more open to others’ ways of doing things.
In column 2 (Doing/not doing), Dashwood listed, honestly and candidly, the things she was doing that were undermining her improvement goal:
- I don’t listen to others
- I talk too much to try to convince others that my way is the right way
- When someone presents an idea or plan that doesn’t correspond to my own view, I constantly ask questions and follow up too extensively, micromanage
- I freeze them out with a stony face, withdraw from conversation, lack of encouragement
- I solve smaller problems or challenges that I know I can control
- I don’t consider alternatives
- I spend time on things I don’t want to
- I don’t delegate
It is a long, courageous, vulnerability-producing list, one that doesn’t paint Dashwood in a glowing light. Of course she had already had a long and successful career, one that had brought her to the top of her field. At Decurion she was widely admired and beloved for her compassion, expertise, ability to teach others, and high standards. But she was unwilling to rest on that or hide behind it; she was open to remaking herself, as a way to continue to grow and learn.
Bob Prince
I am committed to getting better at making things happen reliably in projects by getting in sync on the goal and coordinating the parts.
Prince had a hard time seeing how he behaved in ways that undermined his goal. Although he wanted to be open-minded and take guidance from others who were strong in the strategic planning areas where he was weak, he regularly made plans and acted on them without realizing that he would do better to seek input from those who were more skilled at strategic planning. At Bridgewater, Prince was sure to get this feedback. Others reminded him of his weakness when they saw him behaving in ways he didn’t even realize were problematic. In Bridgewater terminology, they were guardrailing him against his weaknesses. In ITC terminology, they were helping Prince see the column 2 behaviors he engaged in that undermined his progress.
In a meeting dedicated to assessing whether Prince was making progress, Dalio told him, “Two basic things. You trust yourself too much. You don’t work it through well. If you had less confidence, felt you could be wrong with the strategic . . . trusting yourself less, you would have been much more successful. But because you are hell-bent to not do that, you went down that path. If you could be more open-minded, and trusted yourself less, you would have done a better job.” (Note that the picture this feedback creates, if it is accurate [and Prince felt it was], is one Next Jump would call overconfidence or arrogance.)
The Bridgewater culture is designed so that Prince would receive that feedback repeatedly—to know exactly what he did (or didn’t do) that undermined his goals. Painful as that process can be, the culture is also designed to help those like Prince consider feedback not only as a diagnosis of weakness and source of pain but also as the information they need to learn and grow. (Charlie Kim, at Next Jump, calls this kind of feedback “sunshine.” It’s what helps you grow.)
Prince added these behaviors to column 2 of his ITC map.
- I regularly make plans and act on them without seeking input from people (especially those more skilled at strategic planning)
- I regard my plans with too much confidence
- I tend not to question the plans I generate
Your Turn
What are you doing (and what are you not doing) that undermines your improvement goal?
People tend to go offtrack in this column in two ways. Either they write explanations for sometimes working against their goals, or they list what they plan to do differently. Notice that both Dashwood and Prince listed their undermining behaviors, without explanation or promises for change. If you find yourself adding justifications or new plans for change, you are in good company, but limit your list to just the behaviors.
It’s tempting to immediately start vowing and plotting to make things different. People usually feel guilty or embarrassed by their list and want to eradicate it by being stricter with themselves, punishing themselves for their “bad” behaviors, or willing themselves to be more disciplined. Again, the only things that should be in your second column are the things you do and don’t do that work against your improvement goal. No judgments, no explanations, no promises to yourself or future plans.
Write your own undermining behaviors in column 2 of your ITC map.
Column 3, Worry Box: Naming Your Fears and Worries
From an ITC perspective, reflecting on your behaviors, even very candidly, is rarely enough to lead to transformational change and learning. It can lead to the sincerest of New Year’s resolutions, but how powerful have these ever proven for promoting lasting change? You name the behaviors in order to go deeper, to consider (as you will see) what lies at their root—your anxieties, dreaded images, ego attachments, and patterns of self-protection.
As a result, something intriguing happens in column 3: a dynamic that has been hidden before now—the immunity to change—begins to emerge. Often, the work in this column feels unexpectedly potent and arresting. You start by filling in the box at the top, which we call the worry box. (In a moment you’ll move on to the bottom half of this column.)
In the worry box, name the fears and worries that come up when you imagine doing the opposite of each thing you listed in column 2. Typically, people spend a lot of energy trying to keep their fears at bay, trying to convince themselves and others that they’re brilliantly competent and have everything under control. But if that’s all you let yourself feel, you won’t have a powerful map. For the worry box, try to come up with something that feels scary or a bit dangerous, something that you feel in your gut. The goal is to locate an actual loathsome or fearful feeling, and not just a thought or an idea about an unpleasant feeling.
You may be able to get to a deeper level of reflection by slowing down your reactions and pushing yourself to imagine what is actually the opposite of (and not only different from) your column 2 behaviors. Actually imagine yourself doing (or even trying to do) the opposite of a column 2 behavior. Vicariously put yourself into that movie. Now—how does that feel? What is the fear or loathing (or both) that you feel?
Your Turn
One by one, look at the behaviors you listed in column 2, and imagine yourself doing (or even trying to do) the opposite. What worries or fears come up for you? What might you really hate for others to see in you? What might be a way you would least like to see yourself?
If you have identified something that feels bad but still seems a bit safe, try to push to a deeper level. Ask yourself, “What would be the worst thing about that for me?” If you have named a handful of fears, ask yourself that question about each one. You need to get to a place where the warning bells begin to sound, where you feel the threat of some loss—for example, to how others regard you, or your ability to maintain control, or your sense of yourself as loved, smart, worthy, or whatever.
Now enter your fears in the worry box in column 3.
Column 3, Bottom Half: Uncovering Your Hidden Commitments
Identifying your fears and worries will help you discover something else—what we call a hidden competing commitment. Your fears are the raw material for generating these commitments.
A central idea in the immunity to change practice is that we do not merely have these fears; we sensibly, even artfully, protect ourselves from them. No one wants to feel fear or worry. We don’t generally enjoy experiencing ourselves as in danger or at risk in some way. We don’t often seek that kind of vulnerability. Instead, we usually try to protect ourselves from these feelings. We defend ourselves from what terrifies us. We make sure that we’re not standing on the edge of our own personal abyss of anxiety and danger but that we’re standing quite comfortably far away—far enough away that we don’t even have to be consciously aware that the abyss is there. Hidden commitments are our mental strategies for standing far away from the abyss, our ways of keeping far away from the things we fear.
Although we’re actively committed to making sure the things we fear do not happen, we are not usually conscious of these commitments. To be conscious of them would mean we would also have the uncomfortable awareness of our fears. So they usually stay hidden from our consciousness, all the while working hard to make sure the things we fear do not happen.
Nora Dashwood
Dashwood surveyed her list of behaviors in column 2 and began to imagine what she would feel if she were to do the opposite of those things. What if she listened more and spoke less? What if instead of micromanaging, she actually encouraged others to fully develop their own ideas? Here are her worries:
Alternatives will emerge that I can’t accomplish; that these ideas might be better than mine, and I won’t be seen as valuable; that they are not and I’ll have to do more work to fix things since I didn’t veto the idea in the first place; that I won’t like leading in a different way; that leading in a different way means losing who I am; that if I try to lead differently, I might fail at it; that I’ll be taken advantage of or walked over.
These worries felt terrible and also true for her. They showed her that—like every human on earth—she had powerful, largely unconscious hidden commitments operating against the changes she was consciously striving to make. These commitments protect her from the dangers that some part of her brain felt she would surely encounter if she actually were to change. Could Dashwood fail in this new role? No longer be seen as valuable? Would others take advantage of a less controlling style? Would she no longer even feel like herself?
Because they’re usually hidden in our unconscious, these commitments are hard to unearth and name without undergoing the kind of triggering captured in the worry box. But when we uncover them, we can see how we’ve been preventing our own improvement. Dashwood found she was unconsciously committed to the following:
- Avoiding alternatives from emerging that I don’t think I can accomplish
- Avoiding being shown up, or my ideas being seen as less valuable
- Not having to do things twice
- Staying interested in doing by “leading”
- Not losing my sense of self
- Not showing that I will fail at being able to effectively support others
- Avoiding being taken advantage of or walked over
Now Dashwood clearly saw that she was heading into territory that tapped in to deep fears about what she would feel, and what she could find, if she began to lead in new ways.
Across the three columns she saw a schematic of her immune system, a picture that captured the reality: that even though there was a part of her that genuinely wanted to improve her leadership by being more open to others’ ways, there was simultaneously another part of her that wanted, actually needed, something counter to that goal in order for her to be safe. She had one foot on the gas pedal saying, “Go, go, go” (column 1) while her other foot was on the brakes (column 3), saying, “No way!”
Here’s what is going on, in a nutshell. We believe that the mind, like the body, has an immune system—a beautiful, intelligent force of nature that works continuously, beyond our awareness, with one purpose in mind: to protect us and keep us alive. And like our body’s immune system, our psychological one can occasionally misread reality and mistakenly see danger that’s not really there. Then our immune system itself becomes a source of trouble; as it “protects” us, it rejects what the system needs in order to thrive (think autoimmune attack on parts of your own body here, or the rejection of a donor organ).
Bob Prince
When Prince thought about doing the opposite of what was in his column 2, he imagined what it would be like to seek more input from others and to be actively skeptical of his own ability to make sound plans and follow through with them. A handful of self-protective worries arose for him:
Not being able to do what I want to do; won’t know how to engage with others to get in sync; being held back by others; not adding enough value to Bridgewater.
Prince now saw what he had been unconsciously committed to:
- Doing what I want to do, when I want to do it
- Not being held back by, or having to depend on, others
- Not having to experience my own inability to get in sync with the others
- Not continuing to feel I am adding insufficient value to Bridgewater
In Bridgewater’s language, Prince touched the nerve here. In our language, we now can imagine his immune system. By moving from the worries to the hidden commitments, and then connecting the dots between his conscious and unconscious comments, we see a system at play that must produce exactly the results that create ineffectiveness relative to his goal. He had a conscious goal he was failing at (becoming a more effective project manager), but the very behaviors that were causing him to fail (to blow up the lab, as Jensen said) were brilliantly serving the unconscious goal of his hidden commitments (e.g., “I don’t want to be held back, to be prevented from doing what I want to do, when I want to do it.”)
Like Dashwood, Prince was finally able to see why he was stuck, with one foot on the gas and one foot on the brake. This contradiction was not a sign that he was a bad thinker or illogical. It was nothing to be ashamed of. It was, in fact, a sign that he had created an immune system that took care of him and protected him. This system had helped him in many ways in life. It probably contributed to his being as successful as he was and being seen as an expert. However, his immune system also explained why he was not succeeding on his goal. No one could who was captive of this system.
Your Turn
You probably don’t want to experience those fears or worries in your worry box (let alone have them happen). What self-protective, hidden commitment stands behind each of your fears or worries? Don’t try to consciously figure this out. Just restate your worries in column 3 as commitments to prevent what you’re worried about from happening.
Here are three guidelines to help you come to a good list of hidden commitments.
- Keep the language of the particular fear, worry, or dread in the worry box when you write the hidden commitment. For example, “I fear others will think I’m not up to this job” should be converted to “I’m committed to others not thinking poorly of me,” or “I’m committed to not being seen as incompetent” and not “I’m committed to others thinking well of me” or “I’m committed to being seen as competent.” You may need to use a clunky double negative in order to preserve the danger you’re protecting yourself from, and that’s fine. This isn’t an English composition class.
- Remember that hidden commitments are forms of self-protection. They protect us from the dangers that may lurk in our fears. If your first attempts at identifying worries yield more noble-sounding, not-so-self-protective entries, keep asking yourself what would feel worst for you, what you are protecting yourself from, what is truly at stake for you, what would feel yuckiest to you—until you land on hidden fears that are deeper, harder to face, and yet ring absolutely true.
- Hidden commitments should show that the behaviors you’ve listed in column 2 now make perfect sense. Paradoxically, powerful hidden commitments mean that those “bad behaviors” are also simultaneously “smart behaviors,” making sure that one foot stays firmly on the brake. The problem is not that you can’t change your behavior. The problem is not that you are weak-willed. It is not that you’re not strong enough, smart enough, or brave enough. You are very strongly taking good care of yourself. Rather, the problem is that your perfectly sensible unconscious effort to take care of yourself is producing the very behaviors guaranteed to keep you from accomplishing your goal.
Write your list of hidden commitments in the bottom half of column 3 in your map (underneath the worry box).
The Immune System
Now that you’ve identified your own hidden commitments, you should see a whole picture across your three columns—a picture of your personal immunity to change. You should now see how you have one foot on the gas (your improvement goal) and the other foot on the brake (your competing hidden commitments). And you should see why you haven’t made progress on your improvement goal before.
Only when you see more deeply into how it is—and why it is—you have prevented yourself from making progress can you enter a new space to begin changing. Only when you have an accurate mental map can you correctly see the obstacles so that you can chart the course ahead. You have created a vivid and powerful, and perhaps painful, map of the problem. Now you can start working on creating your own personally powerful solution.
Where might you imagine doing that? Few people would think about the possibility (let alone weigh the value) of doing this in the public light of the shared workplace. On the contrary, psychological self-protection operates in full force in the culture of most workplaces. As we’ve said all along, in a typical organization, individuals expend enormous energy protecting themselves. People hide parts of themselves, avoid conflict, unwittingly sabotage change efforts, and subtly enforce a separation between their true, full selves and the selves they allow themselves to be at work. They hide these parts to keep themselves safe, for self-protection. They hide these parts because they (rightly or wrongly) assume that exposing them can only put them in danger. They hide these parts because they work in organizations that allow them to.
We have argued that there is no greater waste of resources in ordinary organizations than the energy spent to hide our weaknesses and manage others’ favorable impressions of us. As an organization takes steps to become deliberately developmental, the question is, Who else should know about your hidden commitments? Where else do these commitments undermine your effectiveness at work? What are the costs that you (and others, and the organization) bear because of your immune system?
Asking these questions doesn’t mean you will know yet how to solve the problem, how to end the struggling. That will come later. Einstein said that if he had one hour to save the world, he would spend fifty-five minutes defining the problem, and five minutes finding the solution. That is because we can’t get to the right solution if we don’t truly understand the problem. You will come to a solution, but only after you have gotten the problem right.
People sometimes tell us that mapping their immunity to change gets them quickly to a deep level of insight and awareness about why they’re stuck. Others need a bit more time and help to get to something that feels meaningful. We hope you feel you’re approaching something that is both powerful and intriguing for you.
So at this point it is worth asking yourself, “On a scale of 1 to 5 (where 1 means not powerful or not intriguing, and 5 means very powerful or very intriguing), how does this map feel for me?” If you answered 4 or 5, that’s great, and you should feel free to move on to the final column in this exercise. If you answered 1, 2, or 3, we recommend that you accept a little help to strengthen your entries. If the map doesn’t pop for you, there is probably a problem in one or more columns. You’ll find help in the box “Making Your Map More Powerful.”
If your map does not yet feel intriguing, what might help?
- Make sure that the fear, worry, or dread from the worry box did not disappear when you converted it into a hidden commitment. If it did, it means that the “virus” (the danger the immune system is protecting you from) did not get named in your hidden commitments. Remember, clunky double negatives are fine. (The fear that I won’t be listened to becomes the hidden commitment “to not be ignored,” or “to not be silenced,” “to not become invisible.” It does not become a commitment “to be heard.”)
- When you look at your hidden commitments, you should be able to see how you have been protecting yourself. If not, ask, “What is the danger lurking for me? In what way am I trying to protect myself?”
- Look to see whether everything you identified as a hidden commitment also shows how the behaviors you listed in column 2 now make sense. You should be able to see why it hasn’t worked (and won’t work) to try to change those behaviors only through willpower or increased effort. The harder you step on the gas, the harder your other foot will step on the brakes. You will spend more energy trying to go in opposite directions at the same time. If you can’t see how your hidden commitments make your behaviors in column 2 look perfectly reasonable, that’s a sign that you’ve gotten offtrack somewhere. You may need to revise your hidden commitments or go back to your fears to see whether you need to get clearer about them.
Column 4: Big Assumptions
The most reliable route to ultimately disrupting your immune system is to identify the core assumptions that sustain it. Big assumptions are the core beliefs that hold your immune system in place. They are the root of your behaviors. Assumptions are beliefs—ideas that we have about ourselves and about the world. They are mental constructions, but we tend to take these beliefs as truths, or rules about how the world really is. And we don’t know whether or not they are true until we can name them and explore them.
When we treat an assumption as if it were the absolute truth, we allow it to rule our actions. We allow it to shape everything we see. We don’t consider or explore other possibilities, and so it continues to hold enormous power over us. That is why it is a big assumption. But when we name the big assumptions underlying our immunities to change, we can consider the possibility that they may not actually be 100 percent true.
Nora Dashwood
Naming her fears and hidden commitments helped Dashwood identify the beliefs she had formed about herself—beliefs that were central to her identity.
- I assume my accomplishments and talents might be more about my good fortune than about my abilities; hence I am out of my league
- I assume that I have contextually developed (in Decurion’s structure) but have not been truly developing (across all contexts)
- I assume that I am a leopard trying to change its spots
- I assume that I care more about myself than I care about others
- I assume that a lot of my value comes from having the right view, that things done by others will likely not be done right—in other words not the way I want them done
- I need a certain kind of stimulus to be effective
- My prime source of enjoyment is in the role, of having the right view
There was a part of Dashwood that believed she could not change her spots, that she was not going to enjoy being a different type of leader nearly as much as she enjoyed being the leader in front, the one who has the right answer, and the one driving things. She felt she needed the type of stimulation that came with that style of leadership. And she felt she was the only one who could do it right. For her to make a successful transition into her new role, she would have to find out that this part of her was wrong. She would have to undertake an exploration to find out whether she could do more than she ever thought she could, whether she might be able to become a bigger person than she had been, and whether these transformations would bring her pleasure.
The reason Dashwood’s transition was successful was that neither she, nor those she worked with, approached it as simply a technical matter of learning new skills and new information. In fact, that kind of focus would likely have led to an unsuccessful transition, because as long as her fears and attachments were unexplored and untested, they would lead her to hold tightly to her controlling leadership style. Her visible, neocortex commitments (the ones in the first column) would be stymied by her amygdala commitments (the ones in the third column). Brain psychology talks about the importance of “dual processing,” of “thinking slow and thinking fast.” We’re more effective when we bring these modes of thinking into conversation with each other, as the ITC practice helps you do.
The curriculum for Dashwood’s learning, a curriculum provided for her in a DDO, was much deeper than the technical approach of skill change alone; it also included the adaptive approach of mind-set change. The ITC map provided a clear image of the way Dashwood’s mind-set shaped her behavior and held her back. It helped illustrate this deeper psychological dimension of human meaning-making that DDOs look to uncover for their workers.
But the far more valuable purpose of an ITC map is for you to generate these types of insight by creating your own map. In other words, creating your own map is a reflective process that allows you—in a DDO or in any other context—to begin to uncover the deeper psychological roots of your own limiting assumptions. Dashwood created an ITC map to help her reveal the deeper levels of her challenge and to focus her improvement work on overturning her immunity to change.
Bob Prince
Looking at his immune system, Prince identified several big assumptions that held it in place.
I may be assuming that:
- If I try to get in sync on what I want to do, I won’t know how to do it, others will “say no” and hold me back from doing what I want
- I know best, that my plan doesn’t need any external input, that nothing especially valuable will come about from getting in sync
- Once I have figured out what I want to do, others are more of a drag on me than a source of improved design
- I am not adding enough value to Bridgewater
- I need to significantly increase the value I add
- My best route to significantly add greater value is to unilaterally jam through my plan
- “Outsourcing” some of the work is no way to significantly add value
Why uncover these assumptions? Remember that we call these big assumptions precisely because they’re not being taken as assumptions that are possibly true, and possibly not true; rather, they’re being taken as unquestioningly true. By taking this next, crucial step, Prince created a clear and focused curriculum to consider the favorite Bridgewater question—What is true?—at a whole new level, and not only at the diagnostic level. At the diagnostic level he would have explored whether or not it was true that he really had a problem; but at the new, treatment level he had a path for changing his mind. By being conscious of his own big assumptions, Prince is able to search for the truth. His questions can become deeper.
- Is it true that if I try to get in sync with others I won’t know how to, and that others will say no and hold me back from doing what I want?
- Is it true that I know best, that my plan doesn’t need any external input, that nothing especially valuable will come about from getting in sync?
- Is it true that once I have figured out what I want to do, others are more of a drag on me than a source of improved design?
- Is it true that I am not adding enough value to Bridgewater and that I need to significantly increase the value I add?
- Is it true that the best route to significantly adding greater value is for me to unilaterally jam through my plan?
- Is it true that outsourcing some of the work is no way to significantly add value?
These are questions Prince pursued. Watching the video of his conversation with Dalio helped Prince begin to challenge some of his key big assumptions. As a viewer, he was able to step back a bit and take a third-party perspective, looking for the data that might show him that these assumptions were inaccurate. He reached several insights.
- The characterization of him as someone who “struggles to make things happen reliably” was accurate in this case
- There were others on the project who were very skilled at project management
- Drawing on data about his own weaknesses and others’ strengths to determine who should do what would lead to better project outcomes
Realizing how much he hadn’t seen before, and realizing that others had seen these dynamics in play, Prince had clear data that his big assumption—that he knew best, that his plan didn’t need external input, that nothing especially valuable would come about from getting in sync—was wrong.
As that big assumption began to crumble, he saw that other big assumptions were also falling apart. If understanding and sourcing work according to people’s varying strengths and weaknesses would lead to a better product outcome, then unilaterally jamming through his plan was not a good way for him to add value at Bridgewater. Instead, his great ideas for the project, and the project itself, would more likely be held back—the very outcome he dreaded.
As Prince explains, “I could be much more productive and would be much more empowered to pursue my ideas and add more value to Bridgewater if I operated in a different way; ‘outsourcing’ management design, learning how to get in sync on the goal and the path with others. This discovery helped me to improve and to add more value to Bridgewater (with less strain), so it was very rewarding to me.”
We should note that the video of Prince’s conversation with Dalio and Jensen, in which they all reflect on and describe Prince’s weaknesses in great detail, was developed into a short case (or tidbit) and published on the company tablet for all employees to view and reflect on. Prince is regarded as a great hero at Bridgewater, someone who has contributed enormously to Bridgewater’s success, but he has also struggled. The process illustrates how everyone involved can learn a great deal from that struggle, how everyone is expected to learn and grow from painful feedback.
Prince was “struggling well” in that he openly accepted feedback on his own weaknesses and acknowledged them. In fact, his admired contributions to Bridgewater are attributed to the fact that he struggles well. Viewers of the case are invited “to struggle openly, because it is good for you and good for the people around you.”
Your Turn
When you look over all that you’ve uncovered, and especially your column 3 hidden commitments, what does it suggest about your assumptions—the beliefs you hold about yourself and the way things are—that connect to and support your immune system? Generate as many big assumptions as you can.
Here are guidelines for doing this work.
- Some of your big assumptions may feel undeniably true (“What do you mean, ‘an assumption’? I think this is exactly the awful thing that would happen!”). Others you may know aren’t really true (although you act and feel as if they were true). And still others you may feel are only partially or sometimes true. However true you believe your big assumptions are, all of them go in your column 4, and they will be valuable resources if you decide to pursue working on your edge. (See “Big Assumptions at Decurion” for ways some of the leaders describe their big assumptions.)
- Every big assumption should show why one or more of your hidden commitments feel absolutely necessary. You should be able to trace your map backward and see how the big assumptions make your column 3 commitments necessary, how column 3 commitments lead to your column 2 behaviors, and how these behaviors undermine your column 1 goals.
- Your big assumptions set clear limits on what you must do and what you must not do; you should be able to see that your big assumptions are rules you have for how to live your life, rules you must always follow if you want to avoid danger and disaster and defeat. But you might also be able to see (at least hypothetically) that, like other rules, yours can be broken.
Generate as many big assumptions as you can, and write them in column 4 in your ITC map.
How Was That for You?
Now that you’ve diagnosed your own personal immune system, understandably you may be eager to learn how to begin overturning it. Before we turn to next steps, we want you to take a moment to think about what your experience of this exercise has been like. We hope you experienced something of the discomfort of stepping out of your mind-set (the root of your behavior)—what it means to be working on your edge.
You also may have experienced a range of emotions through this process—as both Dashwood and Prince did—and as those who work for DDOs experience regularly in their work. You may have felt twinges of pain or shame, which often happens when you gain difficult insights into your own limitations. And you may have also felt something of the joy of having insights that potentially can bring about transformational change in your life, a means to become a better you. That possibility exists because—instead of viewing your personal challenge only as it appears in columns 1 and 2 (identifying goals, finding motivation, focusing on unproductive behaviors you wish to change)—the ITC map targets hidden fears, commitments, and beliefs that, once uncovered, recast the personal challenge in a way that involves the whole self. You see how you can, if you’re willing, put your whole self at risk for change.
When you identify big assumptions that limit you, you experience a different, deeper type of learning than the more common technical learning. Decurion leaders describe the limiting assumptions they are working to overturn.
Bryan Ungard (COO). “My current practice is to start with what’s up for me in simple, raw, emotional terms, to be more disclosing about what’s behind my thoughts and feelings. My fear is that I’m going to be rejected unless I’m an expert on something, and if I don’t pull that off in a masterful way, I will be judged. So I’m practicing letting the real messy me be seen.”
Nora Dashwood (ArcLight’s COO). “I guess what I’m really practicing is how to just be okay with being me, to trust that I am enough. And to be more—to be more ‘needy,’ more interdependent. I have a thing about feeling like I have to be strong and independent and take care of myself because nobody else is going to. [It’s a] good motto to be instilled into the daughter of loving, immigrant parents, but it’s outlived its usefulness.”
Jeff Koblentz (President of Robertson Properties Group). “I’m working on not disconnecting from people or closing my heart when results are not good. My driving belief from early in life is that the world can hurt me, and that if I produce excellent results (i.e., am ‘competent’), I can protect myself. I’m sure this has served me well at times, but only associating oneself with things that are going ‘excellently’ is not an effective way to operate in business, to say nothing about how it works as a parent.”
What’s Next?
Now that you can both see and feel what it’s like to be out on your growing edge, where might you think to pursue the inner learning agenda that’s uncovered by an exercise like this one? In a DDO you could share your learning with others in your organization. They could give you feedback to help strengthen your column 1 and column 2 entries. You could begin to test the accuracy of your big assumptions (see “How to Test a Big Assumption” for more on this). You could let your colleagues know the big assumptions you’ve identified so that they can help you find out whether those assumptions are as true as you have seen them to be. You could provide your colleagues with the same feedback and support so that they, too, can evolve. You could make this part of the work you do every day.
This practice contrasts with the way things are done in a typical organization, where you might be advised to find a private space and a trustworthy coach or counselor with whom to work through the issues and implications the exercise provokes. “I wouldn’t want to wash my dirty laundry in public, for everyone at work to see,” you might say. And that makes sense if your work setting requires you to continually protect your brand and hide any indication of inadequacy or incompleteness. You can see your coach only an hour a week, however, and you can’t actually practice new behavior in the coach’s office.
Now imagine if you had coaching continuously, and work were a safe place to practice every day. Imagine if your organization figured out that it should help you overcome your limitations, not only out of the goodness of its collective heart but also because this practice is in its own interests: the longer you successfully hide your limitations, the longer the company has to pay for them. Imagine, then, that you will work out the implications of an exercise like this one, not behind closed doors in your coach’s office but in the daily conduct of your work.
Testing big assumptions is at the heart of overturning an immunity to change.
The purpose of a test is to learn about the accuracy of your big assumption by seeing what happens when you intentionally alter your usual behavior. When you design and run a test, you act as if your big assumptions might not be as absolutely true as you seem to believe. The purpose of the test is not to immediately improve or take a step closer to your goal. Nor are you testing yourself. You’re not trying to determine whether you have the wherewithal or courage to do something daring. Here are some tips.
- Rarely is a person’s big assumption simply “right” or “wrong.” Often, the problem is that we tend to overuse and overgeneralize it.
- No single experiment is likely to be conclusive about a big assumption. Consider the test as the first of several.
- Designing a good test includes planning how to collect data.
- A good test meets SMART criteria.
- SM means safe and modest. Safe means that if the worst-case outcome were to occur, you could live with it. It can also mean you make a small change in what you do. Modest means that the test is relatively simple and easy to carry out. Ideally, it doesn’t require you to go out of your way but rather is an opportunity to do something different in your normal day.
- A means actionable in the near term (within the next week or so) and relatively easy to carry out (you can easily imagine a setting or upcoming situation in which to run your test).
- RT means that the test researches the question, “How accurate is my big assumption?” and, like any good research, it requires collecting data (e.g., how people respond to you as well as your thoughts and feelings). The test doesn’t test you; it tests your big assumption and should be designed so that it can generate disconfirming data, if it exists. It shouldn’t be a clever way to prove that your big assumption is true.
Identify one big assumption to test. Which one jumps out at you as the one that most gets in your way? Or imagine that you can dismiss any single big assumption in your map. Which one would make the biggest, most positive difference for you? Be sure that the assumption you choose feels powerful to you.
Now design your test. Start with the end in mind by asking yourself, “What data would lead me to doubt my big assumption?” (If you can’t imagine what kind of data could challenge or cast doubt on your assumption, then you don’t have a testable assumption.) Work backward from there to figure out what action you could take that could generate that data. Your action is likely to be one that is the opposite of a behavior from your column 2 or an action that runs counter to your column 3 hidden commitment.
Following is a form you can use to guide your efforts.
Testing big assumptions workspace
Reflections on your test results
For more information on overturning immune systems, see Immunity to Change: How to Overcome It and Unlock Potential in Yourself and Your Organization, Robert Kegan and Lisa Laskow Lahey (Boston: Harvard Business Review Press, 2009), especially chapter 10.