PERCEPTION: CLAIMING LEADERSHIP

Depending on Diversity

When a paradigm no longer provides reliable guidance for how to live in the world, the most common response is to grasp hold of it more firmly.

As it dawns on us that we don’t know how things work—that it’s not working—we become more insistent that it has to work just as we thought it did. Opening to the uncertainty, to the need for a new way of seeing, is not what we humans do well. We use our big brains and our powers of cognition to resist change. Our skills at manipulating information lead us to become more fundamentalist, more certain.

We see this type of fundamentalism in too many leaders these days as they grasp for handholds in practices that didn’t work in the past, but that they robotically keep doing, as if they have no choice. It didn’t work before, but at least they know how to do it that way, so let’s do it again. For a while, this repetitive behavior offers the comfort that actions are being taken, but it is also Einstein’s familiar definition of stupidity—doing the same thing twice and expecting different results.

At some point, leaders realize it’s just not working. Often it takes a major crisis to wake people up. But we can be smarter than that. The crises are already here. If we’re willing to notice our own pursuit of certainty, to see that our favored ways of working aren’t working, then we can use these magnificent powers of perception to obtain a clearer sense of reality.

Can certainty give way to curiosity?

Can arrogance give way to humility?

If so, we may be able to perceive what the environment has been trying to tell us all along.

In the After Action Review (AAR) process (see p. 128), its core strength is the profound respect for different perceptions. It is acknowledged from the start that everyone who was involved in the situation under review saw something that others probably missed. Or they saw things that only they could have noticed because of where they were at the time and who they are in the ranks. I was told that it took about fifteen years for soldiers to be able to speak truthfully in the presence of senior commanders. And it took even longer for senior commanders to appreciate the perspectives of those below them. What motivated everyone to learn how to think well together was the shared imperative of learning. It’s better to learn than be dead.

As often as I’ve repeated that phrase to leaders, I knew they couldn’t experience it with the same force as did the military. And of course this would be true. But now it’s not. We no longer can afford the luxury of certainty or arrogance. If we’re going to resist the life-destroying dynamics at play, we have to become as serious about learning as were those tired, hungry young soldiers standing at the back of a dusty truck.

We need to depend on diversity. It’s not about respecting difference for ethical reasons. It’s recognizing that none of us can ever see the situation clearly enough to act well on our own. Working with diversity is a life-saving capacity as well as an honoring of one another.

Diversity is valuing difference because it makes a difference: We see more when there are more of us seeing. We know more when everyone’s perspective is sought and incorporated into our learning.

Participative processes, listening skills, conflict resolution, problem-solving skills—these need to be in every leader’s repertoire. Over the past several decades, many excellent processes have been developed and tested in the heat of controversy. Resources are plentiful, and I expect that you’ve already used them on numerous occasions.²⁸

What I want to ask you is how often you use them now. All of these processes, including the AAR, require that scarcest of resources, time. Some processes take hours; some serve up good results only when given days.

They all require that we take time: to think, to settle in, to calm down, to sit still, to listen quietly, to not react instantly, to not pull out our phones, to not get distracted, to not get impatient, to . . . .

It is evident that these processes demand behaviors completely counter to our present ones. Some might call these revolutionary processes because they’re so foreign in our workplaces and homes. I choose to call them restorative. They are processes that reawaken our powers of cognition, reinstitute thinking, and redirect our attention to one another. The unintended but predictable outcome of these is that people once again feel confident and smart. We learn how to make sense of what formerly overwhelmed us, not only because we’ve opened our own minds but, as a collective of minds, we see more clearly. And the phrase “We’re all in this together” takes on real meaning.

The leader’s task is to ensure that thinking together is just the way we do our work. Learning is our highest priority. Once embedded in the culture, there is no question that you will have restored the means for people to act with those extraordinary powers attributed to our species when we labeled ourselves Homo sapiens sapiens.