"I think if I could have seen the shore, I would have made it."

In the Summer of 1952, Florence May Chadwick set off to swim the 26 miles of ocean that stretches from the coast of California to Catalina Island. After about 15 hours, a thick fog rolled in. She swam for another hour before, unable to see the shore, she gave up and asked to be pulled into one of the support boats that flanked her.

She later learned that she quit just one mile from her goal.

Florence tried again two months later, and, again, a thick fog set in.

But this time she kept going and made it, she later said, by keeping a mental image of the shore in her mind.

"The only thing worse than being blind is having sight but no vision."

- Helen Keller

Thanks to friend and partner Ric McNally for pointing me to this lesson.

The Parable of My Trip to the Beach

"Everything happens for a reason. It is what it is. Whatever will be, will be. Accidents happen."

Sound familiar? They're all common, everyday variations of Murphy's Law: "Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong." If you're like most people, you probably drop plenty of phrases like these in casual conversation without thinking much about them.

But let's think about them.

Murphy's Law actually says a lot more about your subjective mental state than  your objective situation. It's a way to cope with a very human feeling that, like most people, you hate admitting in yourself as much as you perhaps enjoy celebrating in others: blame. Blame hurts, and that can trigger your instinct to deny facts and rewrite your history

The term "cognitive bias" refers to a family of such coping mechanisms, which are illogical tendencies to custom-tailor reality to better suit your ego. This particular flavor of cognitive bias, claiming personal credit for your successes while attributing your failures to factors beyond your control, is called the self-serving bias. By filtering out inconvenient truths, your self-serving bias helps you to artificially elevate your self-esteem, which, by avoiding the pain of blame for a failure and/or triggering the ego boost that goes with claiming credit for a success, reinforces your biased behavior.

Part of your self-preservation mechanism, your brain is wired to try to control your future, or at least to anticipate and prepare you for it. Therein lies the psychological difference between a promise and a prediction. Your promises commit you to outcomes while your predictions merely involve you in events. A particularly stressful complex of feelings and behaviors, blame happens when things don't turn out as you said they would.

Looking back on a disappointment, did you promise that outcome? Or did you just predict it? Cop to the former and, ouch! You take the blame. On the other hand, if you can somehow pretend to the latter, you can deflect the blame onto your imaginary friend "Murphy."

You learned this as a school child when you promised your English teacher you'd hand her an essay on Friday morning but, OMG! Unpredictably, your dog ate the only copy Thursday night. Can she please give you the weekend to write it again? What did your English teacher teach you when she said Yes?

You grew up and got better at it. One day, as a sales manager, you painted two pretty pictures of the future for your boss: 1) sales for the fourth quarter will be up 15% over last year; and 2) you'll organize the year-end company picnic, which will be held on June 30. 

The sun shone bright on the picnic that June 30, but Q4 sales were down 6% from last year. Those blown figures? Well, considering the thin support you got from Marketing,  the crappy product design, and a lousy economy, you and your team actually rescued the company by limiting the decline to just 6%. And, hey! Didn't you pick the perfect day for the company picnic?

Questions

• How did the boss hurt herself by glossing over or consoling you on the disappointing sales figures and congratulating you on the sunshine at the picnic? Why might she have done that?
• Is a "forecast" a promise or a commitment? What's the difference between a weather forecast and a sales forecast? What are the management implications of this difference?
• What happens within an organization when management obviously allows some people, but not others, to get away with their self-serving bias?
• How might a self-serving bias affect a company's security systems and business processes?
• What effect might the self-serving bias, in one or both parties, have on a bilateral negotiation?

According to Daniel Pink, author of Drive, you can't buy employee engagement. In fact, when it comes to encouraging people to work hard on brainpower tasks that require broad creativity or focused problem-solving, cash incentives can be more of a de-motivator than a motivator.

Don't believe me? Take ten minutes to watch this enlightening video.

“Bottom line: If we treat people like people, instead of like horses…”

Instead of inspiring excellence, extrinsic monetary rewards can actually discourage excellent work. Research shows that, if you don't pay people enough, they'll feel "ripped off" and stop contributing. On the other hand, if you pay them too much, they can feel they're just the "Flavor of the Day" in an unfair system that's probably ripping other people off and, you guessed it, they'll stop contributing.

First of all, to take money matters off the table and empower your people to focus on their work, your compensation plan needs to be perceived as 1) sufficiently generous and 2) fairly administered. So much for dangling the Almighty Dollar, huh?

Which, according to Pink, leaves you with three behavioral tools that can really pay off in improved performance:

• Autonomy. Don't micro-manage. Instead, to get the most out of your people, try to support their intrinsic, natural tendencies to behave in effective and healthy ways. Initially developed by Edward Deci and Richard Ryan at the University of Rochester, you can learn more about Self-Determination Theory here.
• Mastery. People have a natural need to feel they're becoming incrementally better, all the time, at what they do. Instead of just sitting them down once a year to tell them what you think they're doing wrong, find genuine opportunities, each and every day, to catch your people "doing things right." Never, ever compete with your employees. Instead, encourage them to compete with themselves.
• Purpose. The real motivational magic happens when your people perceive purpose in their work, a connection to a cause larger than themselves. Do you tell your people what they need to do, or demonstrate to them what needs to be done? There's a difference, and it's the difference between getting busy and getting results.

Questions:

• Leaders/Managers: On your team or project, or within your organization, which extrinsic incentives (e.g., money) have you used to motivate people? Which have worked? Which haven't?
• Everyone: Which intrinsic motivators best inspire you in your professional pursuits? Do you work within an organizational culture that understands and respects this? If so, how is this expressed in that culture? If not, what do you think management can/should do to correct it?

“God doesn't play dice with the Universe.” Thus tweeted the Great Albert Einstein in 1926. And ever since folks have been retweeting his profound revelation about God, straight from the Gospel According to Albert.

Problem is, Einstein didn't exactly say that. Here's what the man actually wrote, in a letter to pioneering quantum physicist Max Born:

“Quantum mechanics is certainly imposing. But an inner voice tells me that it is not yet the real thing. The theory says a lot, but does not really bring us any closer to the secret of the 'old one'. I, at any rate, am convinced that He does not throw dice.”

Albert's Intellectual Limitations

Turns out Einstein, who by 1926 had earned copious major honors for revealing the architecture of the Cosmic Universe at Large, wasn't really referring to God in his letter at all. The Great Genius was, in fact, confessing his own difficulty in grasping the basic architecture of the  Quantum Universe of the Very Small. Biased, perhaps, by his subjective familiarity with a personal Almighty, Albert's “inner voice” had  misinformed his perception of the nature of reality's littlest things.

Back in 1926, Einstein strongly believed that randomness in scientific observations resulted from human imperfection in observing and understanding. Make perfect the instruments and sharpen the theory, he figured, and, poof! like a god, you know everything, and can therefore predict the cosmically enormous set of all possible future events, even the very tiniest ones, with 100% certainty.

This Determinist Einstein just couldn't accept what his contemporary particle physicists were demonstrating over and over again in their labs. Where certain behaviors of really little things like electrons and photons are concerned, no matter how smart the physicist or perfect her instruments, making certain kinds of predictions about the outcomes of certain quantum phenomena are, well, just plain uncertain.

So, in his oft-paraphrased and widely misunderstood 1926 letter, the Great Albert Einstein was, duh! just plain wrong – at least about quantum physics, and perhaps even about God, Who may indeed have some sort of Supreme Gambling Problem.

The Psychological Limitations of “Process”

Wait! Don't stop reading. If you're a modern business leader, this story has everything to do with you.

Today's business leaders, of projects and of people, emerge from a fundamentally deterministic management culture wherein every action is believed to have a 100% predictable outcome. This certain world, of course, has its unexpected bugs and breakdowns, but the reliable solution is always process: time-proven repertoires of clearly documented procedures that mitigate the risks of a fault by rigorously squeezing out its pesky uncertainty. “After all,” our inner voice reasons, “aren't people really just like machines?”

The conclusion sounds right, but it's dead-wrong. Unlike machines, people, cursed as they are with Free Will, behave like quantum particles in fundamentally unpredictable ways. Psychologists have long recognized  a “Human Uncertainty Principle” of sorts: the more confined people feel by the processes their leaders impose on them, the less predictable their organizational behavior becomes. Business leaders see process as governance, but those so governed often perceive it as tyranny. Especially in the most talented and creative, tyranny triggers rebellion rather than compliance.

Frustrated by process, followers find creative ways to avoid following their leaders. In turn, their leaders, dismissing these little mutinies as failures of their Human machines, sharpen their procedures to tighten the harness and regain control, which only provokes further mutiny. As leaders lend greater and greater weight to following process in order to reduce the degrees of freedom for failure in the groups they manage,  they unwittingly generate a psychological “black hole” that ensnares all chances of success as well. Individual efforts stall, projects slip, and neglected infrastructure eventually sputters and fails.

A Way Out of the Psychological Singularity

Of course, process certainly plays a role in effective management, but it can't guarantee effective leadership. Go here and begin learning about the non-deterministic, Zen-like principles of Servant-Leadership: that the true path to leading people starts with serving them; that the most effective way to shepherd their efforts is to set them free.

When you come back from reading, try this new kind of “Non-Process” on for size in 2014:

Step 1. Accept intellectually that people behave in non-deterministic ways which necessarily limit your ability to govern their actions.

Step 2. Once you've accepted the basic uncertainty of human behavior, you will naturally begin to question your feelings about your colleagues and subordinates. This fresh uncertainty, while uncomfortable at first, is very healthy. Let it teach you:

• The people you “like” best aren't necessarily your best people
• The people you “like” least may, in fact, have the most to offer
• While, by behaving unpredictably, your tools and machines can only bitterly disappoint you, your people, with your permission and support, can very pleasantly surprise you.

Step 3. Beyond articulating the details of tasks, your transcendent role as a leader is to reveal the human value of the larger goals you choose to serve.

Step 4. Once the human value of your organization's goals have been revealed to them, people will drop the heavy baggage of their personal egos and begin to gravitate toward helping you to achieve them. Remember that they aren't following you as a leader; they're following your lead toward something more important than each and all of you. Congratulations! By tapping the source of authentic leadership, you've entered the larger world of the Servant-Leader.

Step 5. Never, ever play favorites. Everyone has value, whether you like them personally or not. Treat everyone with respect and, as you support them, they'll all work hard with you, each in their own wonderfully different way, to help you achieve your organization's goals. (Remember that, on the other hand, you cheapen the work you're trying to inspire when you treat it like a win-lose game. You may think you're being clever, but you undermine your own leadership in the long run when you “play” people for short-term gain.)

Step 6. Full- or part-time employee, contractor, consultant, whatever --everybody's somebody. Be prepared to recognize everyone for the value of their contributions, regardless of what's printed on their business cards.

Step 7. Every organization needs its “operators,” the go-to-guys, the t-crossing and i-dotting detail-oriented folks who devise and follow effective processes. But beware the hidden trap of settling for the merely routine and declaring it “excellence.” Excellence is something more.

Which prompts the most important of questions for any organization or society: what is Excellence?

Einstein Finally Redeemed

Is dancing purely a matter of process? Does clear and precise choreography determine the quality of a dance performance? Does putting your feet exactly where and when you're told make you a dancer? Will carefully following a really precise floor chart make you an excellent dancer?

Dancing, especially good dancing, transcends choreography. Excellent dancers exceed the specifications of choreography. They amaze an audience, and pleasantly surprise their choreographer, as they freely capture and ride the spirit of a performance.

Likewise, in all the work we humans do, how can excellence possibly emerge from simply following a process? Can a really good paint-by-numbers Mona Lisa elevate anyone to the level of a DaVinci?

Following process and meeting expectations is adequacy, and adequacy is virtuous. Adequacy has its place.

But excellence is more. Excellence is the miracle of exceeding expectations. Perhaps because we fear failing to repeat it, we sometimes tend to mistrust excellence. So, we shy away from it, perhaps most often by withholding, from ourselves and others, the freedom on which excellence feeds, which it needs to survive.

Here's where old Albert, after nearly a lifetime of saying his share of dumb things, got one absolutely right (Out Of My Later Years, 1950):

“Everything that is really great and inspiring is created by the individual who can labor in freedom.”

Once upon a time, hoping that they might learn about colors while haing some fun, the parents of young twins gave each a coloring book, “My Day at the Zoo,” and a big box of crayons. Working separately for many hours, the twins eagerly decorated the many black-outlined animal drawings in their books.

The Operator

At the end of the day, the first twin, beaming with pride, returned her finished book to her parents. She had colored the elephants a precise elephant gray, the horses in various shades of horse-brown, and the birds in many different and very bird-appropriate pastel hues. She had colored every animal picture in her book with obvious care, accurately, smoothly, and consistently, exactly within and never outside of its printed borders.

“What color is this?” the parents asked while pointing to the perfectly colored picture of a canary perched on the branch of a tree. The first twin proudly announced “Yellow!” “And this?” the parents asked, pointing to the tree's branch. “Brown!” she replied. “And this?” they asked of the leaves on the branch. “Green!” said the child with a broad grin.

To her parents' delight, the first twin knew the proper names of every color in the crayon box, too, and even the exotic shades, like periwinkle and cerulean blue. She generalized what she had learned that day as well, correctly identifying the color of the kitchen's new drapes as carnation pink and Dad's necktie as puce. Her parents were very happy. As they had hoped she would, she had learned all about colors.

The Conceptualizer

A while later, the second twin returned with a scribbled-on book full of absurdly colored pictures of bright red lions and deep blue turtles. His baffled parents looked blankly at each other.

“What's this?” asked his parents tentatively, pointing to a purple dog.

“Cool huh?” replied the second twin. “I got that color by mixing the red crayon with the blue one.”

“And this?” asked the parents, pointing to an orange giraffe.

“That's the color you get when you mix the red one and the yellow one,” he replied.

Perplexed, his parents fell silent. Sensing their confusion, the second twin explained, “There are lots of colors in the crayon box, but, here, see?” Using the blue and yellow crayons, he scribbled a few lines across a picture of a cow. “See?” he said again, pointing to the color he had just made. “You can make every different color in the whole box by mixing different amounts of just a few basic colors.” In response to another long, silent stare from his parents, he prompted “See? I made green! Isn't that cool?”

But all his disappointed parents could see was a sloppily colored green cow. “Uh huh… that's… cool...” they muttered through thin smiles, as they silently pondered enrolling him in a Special School.

Encouraging Forests to Hide Among Their Trees

As we travel along our separate paths to professional enlightenment, our journeys' peripheral details tend to distract and even divert us. Not surprising, as, after all, aren't we taught from childhood that great recognition and material reward bloom from the carefully cultivated seeds of knowing the littlest details? A young child, like our first twin, praised by her parents for having just learned and recited the names of the colors of all the crayons in the box, naturally sets about discovering and memorizing the names of all the other colors in her world, too. Eventually, after years of being praised for committing shade after shade to memory, the child, now all grown up, can “ace” a standardized test consisting of multiple-choice name-the-color questions, perhaps to be officially declared a Certified Color Expert (CCE). More recognition, promotion, and material reward ensue, all further proving the value of mastering even the tiniest details.

Yet, aren't the roots of a deep awareness of the human experience of color, which had begun to sprout within the second twin, in the enlightened observation that each can be formed by mixing different amounts of the primary colors of red, green, and blue? Burnt umber's Red/Green/Blue coordinates, for example, are 138, 51, and 36. Likewise, every hue can be expressed as numeric coordinates along these three basic dimensions, and even more profound truths underlie this knowledge, in the physiology of the human eye, and in the physics of light. Perched on the verge of these revelations, with a little encouragement, perhaps the second twin would uncover the few basic laws that govern all these many details? Will his parents find the wisdom to “color” him outside the lines of their own expectations and encourage his quest? Will he brave disappointing his parents and harness the power of his own curiosity to urge himself along in his unorthodox, but more deeply true, pursuit of understanding?

Details, we must master them, but the Truth calls us from beyond them. It waits, masked, behind them. To reveal it, we must risk a deeper way of thinking. And more than merely tolerate it, we must actively encourage such thinking in others.

Questions

• We respect and reward professionals who “cross their T's and dot their I's,” but why settle for mastering less than 10% of the alphabet?
• We express reverence for competency. We reward it publicly. We talk endlessly of “Core Competencies” and “Competency Models” as we build our “Centers of Excellence.” But, is competency a noble enough human goal? Is there a level of distinction beyond mere cmpetency?
• As a leader, are you annoyed by people who rewrite plans, waste time on research, and meander through ideas that have nothing to do with what you expect of them? What do you risk losing when you express this annoyance?