How (20 page)

Emory University professor of psychology Drew Westen demonstrated how this works.
¹²
He put self-described partisans from opposing political parties in brain scanners and asked them to evaluate negative information about various candidates. Both groups rapidly identified inconsistency and hypocrisy in the candidates,
but only in the ones they opposed
. When Westen confronted them with negative information about the candidate they supported, the parts of the brain associated with reasoning and learning switched off and the parts associated with strong emotions kicked on. These strong emotional reactions allowed them to easily reject the information they found dissonant. Then something really interesting happened. Their brains released endorphins, the body’s natural opiates, flooding them with a sense of warmth and happiness. In other words, subjects
rewarded themselves
for finding a way to resolve dissonance without having to change their beliefs.

Business in the internetworked world moves faster each year, and the conditions of the marketplace reward organizations and teams most able to adapt to changing circumstances. Companies who subject their employees to mixed messages, repetitive policy changes, or in-congruent practices may actually be causing the workforce they so desperately want to be nimble and adaptive to instead become hooked on resistance to adaptation and change. When things get
really
out of hand, you end up in the Kafkaesque reality of the bakery that won’t cut. Other studies of cognitive dissonance have shown that when learning something has been difficult, uncomfortable, or even humiliating enough, people are
less
likely to concede that what they believe is useless, pointless, or valueless because to do so would be to admit that they had been duped.
¹³
Thus the counterperson at the bakery can, with a sweet and genuine smile, tell you that it is against policy to cut a roll, no matter how long or vociferously you attempt to convince her otherwise. For her to see your logic and admit to the folly of the policy would be to admit to being a fool, which, obviously, she will naturally resist.

Though companies desperately want employees to keep their heads in the game, it turns out that generally they do a terrible job at creating the conditions necessary for employees to do so. A three-year survey of about 1.2 million employees at Fortune 1000 companies conducted by Sirota Survey Intelligence concluded that, although the vast majority of employees are filled with enthusiasm when they begin a new job, in about 85 percent of companies morale declines dramatically after six months and continues to do so for years afterward.
¹⁴
The Sirota research lays the fault squarely at the feet of management and its inability to create policies and procedures that satisfy the three sets of goals that the great majority of workers seek from their work:

1.
Equity:
to be respected and to be treated fairly in areas such as pay, benefits, and job security.

2.
Achievement:
to be proud of one’s job, accomplishments, and employer.

3.
Camaraderie:
to have good, productive relationships with fellow employees.

These statistics illuminate the ultimate cost of dissonance: cynicism. When a company breaks trust and fails to live up to the representations it makes and the values it professes, the enthusiasm new hires bring to the company gets eaten away until nothing is left but the dry bones of cynics. Cynics believe that people are motivated by pure self-interest rather than acting for honorable or unselfish reasons. They create a space of suspicion between themselves and the actions of others—a permanent and unfillable Certainty Gap—and habitually question whether something will happen or whether it is worthwhile. While it is not necessarily corrosive to question things—skepticism can be a healthy response in the right circumstances—to do so reflexively, out of unconscious habit of mind instead of honest consideration, places you at a distance from the events around you.

Cynicism hampers more than just the intangibles of the way people interrelate; it directly affects the bottom line. Studies indicate that highly cynical employees are more likely to file grievances against the company, show lower levels of commitment, and be less likely to believe management would reward good work.
¹⁵
(This last fact is particularly relevant to cultures that govern primarily through carrot-and-stick motivational models. When the power of the carrot becomes moot, the stick becomes the only means management has to achieve progress.) Cynicism consumes energy like a sport utility vehicle consumes hydrocarbons. You can’t make a Wave in a stadium full of cynics. No matter how passionate and transparent your persuasion, or how much integrity you bring to your initiative, the cynics will sit on their hands convinced that your desire to help the team is nothing more than self-aggrandizement. Though you may cajole until you are blue in the face, the corrosive drag of cynics will eventually wear you down to a stub. “Cynicism can poison a company,” said John Wanous, professor of management and human resources at Ohio State University in Columbus. His three-year study of more than 1,000 workers concluded that “Cynicism spills over and colors how employees see everything about the company and their jobs.”
¹⁶

DOING CONSONANCE

You don’t have to be a passive victim of dissonance; you can learn new HOWs of thought that can help you to see it coming and employ conscious strategies to minimize its ability to colonize your brain. The first step, obviously, is to become aware of how dissonance affects the mind and the emotions, which we have already done. The second step is to interrupt that emotional reaction, and then substitute one of several strategies to resolve the conflict.

The most common resolution strategy involves
changing
one of the held ideas.
¹⁷
Say, for instance, that you hold the belief that, in general, suppliers cannot be trusted and must be carefully monitored at all times. Suddenly, you realize that a number of your suppliers recently caught ordering mistakes and, rather than exploit them for their own profit, reported them to you for correction. In order to reduce the embarrassment you might feel from having misjudged the situation, you could choose to review your contract monitoring procedure in light of your new perception. In this way, you turn emotion into improved decision making.
¹⁸

Another technique is to
bolster
the new idea, thus giving it more weight in relation to the previously held idea. One study demonstrated this quite clearly. Researchers told a group of subjects a sexist riddle and, after they laughed at it, made them aware of its discriminatory nature. They then gave them a test to measure their attitudes toward feminism and compared the results to those of a group who had not been told the joke or confronted about its derogatory nature. The joke group tended to overemphasize answers that demonstrated sensitivity to equal treatment. By having the new idea bolstered, the joke group was more easily able to balance their previously held, sexist beliefs with their newly sensitized notions of gender equality.

When the desire to achieve is strong enough, you sometimes
trivialize
a conflicting idea that prevents action. A rock climber faced with a fear of heights might find a way to mock or ridicule his fear in order to accomplish his goal. Once the goal is accomplished, the emotions from the two dissonant ideas tend to dissipate. When the challenge to deeply held beliefs activates strong emotional responses to new information,
emotional expression
can also remove the mind-clouding effects of dissonance. Talking about the emotions helps to normalize them, which minimizes their distracting influence. Lastly, if you can identify the source of dissonant ideas, sometimes simply
avoiding
the cause of them can be an effective strategy for keeping your head in the game.

All of these techniques of dissonance reduction can improve decision making and learning and help you actively reduce the internal noise that dissonance brings.

FRICTION

Imagine a dynamic and successful young businessperson with a major university MBA and a bright future. Her boss has been entrenched in his position for some time. One day, she receives a seemingly innocent e-mail from her boss about a job opening at another company. The note says something like, “I heard of this great opportunity. Do you happen to know of anyone who might be interested?” The job, suspiciously, fits her to a tee. One of the things they teach you in big college MBA programs is that a superior threatened by a rising young star will often try to protect his or her own position by indirectly removing the threat. Recommending a job at another firm fits that bill nicely. Could the e-mail from the boss, while masquerading as an innocent gesture, in fact be a stealthy attempt to undermine his competition?

Try as she might, she can’t get the e-mail, and its possible implications, out of her thoughts; it pulls her head out of the game and begins to affect her productivity. Uncertain, she can’t help but forward the e-mail to others to get their opinions. She discusses it with friends, and worries about her position and what she would need to do to protect it: all the classic signs of distraction. The dissonance it breeds is equally destructive. Instead of the calm confidence and trust in her position she formerly felt, now her workdays are filled with insecurity and tension. She questions her choices and spends more time making them, sacrificing some of the nimble agility that made her such an asset to the company.

Finally, the emotions she feels make it impossible for her to relate to her boss in a free and unfettered way. Their relationship becomes uncomfortable, a fact noted by the rest of her team. What had once been a smooth-running unit begins to falter. Instead of filling the synapses between them with trust and support, this boss has just gunked up the works. Communication breaks down as spaces previously filled with trust became clouded with doubt. Political tensions arise, people start bickering, and morale plummets. The friction worsens as people become irritated or insulted, then get more people involved, who in turn grow counteraggressive, clouding the synapses with more real conflict.

It’s difficult to gauge who is hurt worse by this political maneuver (if, in fact, it is a maneuver), the woman whose productivity suffers or her boss, who sacrificed the cohesion of the entire unit on the altar of his own insecurity. Perhaps the e-mail was entirely innocent and the whole situation could have been avoided if the boss had found a more direct and transparent way to reach out, if he had gotten his HOWs right. In either case, what is perfectly clear is how destructive these forces can be. In a transparent world, where your HOWs are as closely scrutinized as your WHATs, keeping the interpersonal synapses between you and your co-workers in an optimal condition for making Waves is crucial to meaningful action. It takes constant care and attention. When distraction, dissonance, and cynicism overflow the boundaries of the mind and manifest themselves in conduct they contaminate these spaces. That’s where
friction
comes from.

In the mechanical world, friction is the force that occurs when two surfaces in contact rub against one another in oppositional ways. In organizations, it results when the forces of distraction and dissonance infect the spaces between people trying to work together. We know from the laws of mechanics that friction slows progress. Friction extracts energy from the system and creates a by-product: heat—wasted energy released into the atmosphere. Excess heat makes people uncomfortable. It requires more energy—in the form of air-conditioning—to cool things down. Without stretching this metaphor too far, we all know what happens to worker productivity when people are hot under the collar. We know, too, how much additional managerial energy it requires to keep an overheated working atmosphere cool and comfortable.

Though distraction, dissonance, and friction can each develop independently in an organization, often they compound each other, like in the situation just described, and set off a self-perpetuating spiral of destruction. Small or large distractions set up powerful dissonance that leads to overt friction. If the situation continues to deteriorate, the heat generated by friction will lead to combustion. Suddenly, your energy will be diverted from the task at hand or there will be two teams working at odds where there used to be one in common purpose. Thriving in a world of HOW involves recognizing and avoiding the conditions that cause distraction, dissonance, and friction; learning to break these cycles when they occur before they can spin out of control; and finding ways to rebuild situations where they already have.

PUTTING IT IN THE WHOLE

It is one thing to talk about reducing distraction, resolving dissonance, avoiding friction, and expunging cynicism from your life, and another to actually do it every day. That is why I began this chapter with my extraordinary conversation with golfer David Toms. Toms sits proudly atop the Hill of A in this area, a master over those forces and events that could pull his mind out of the game. He wrestles with the voices in his head and gets hot under the collar when he is disappointed in his performance, but at a deeper level he recognizes the potential pitfalls that would impede his greater goals and either chooses a course of action that prevents these corrosive forces from entering the fragile machine of the mind or tames them when they do.

What guides him? First, he realizes that rules and rule keepers are just a floor of what he does, not the ceiling. The officials at the Royal and Ancient Golf Club of St. Andrews, the same officials who established and have governed the rules of golf for hundreds of years, would have allowed Toms to continue in the tournament if he had so wanted; according to the rules, he had done nothing wrong. But, prompted by a wise official who undoubtedly understood, too, that rules have limits, Toms knew that he should not. He knows the rules, the
can
s and
cant
s, and plays within them when they apply. But he lives in
should
s. His values—honesty, obligation to others, leadership, and integrity—transcend the rules. Rules can’t touch the spirit of golf, his love of the game, or the purity of his pursuit of excellence. These values keep him focused on higher goals.