Shedding
the Shackles of Judgment for Better Decision-Making
Passing
judgments of others and ourselves hampers our ability to learn. By asking
questions differently, we can learn more and make better decisions.
I
recently set off for a business trip to India. When I boarded my flight at New
York’s JFK airport, I arrived at my seat and saw that my seat-mate, a man in
his 50s or so, was already there. I smiled and said “hello” as I stowed by
luggage and settled in, but I got no response. The man didn’t look up or even
acknowledge my presence. I immediately jumped to a conclusion. “What an
unpleasant guy” I thought to myself.
It
had only taken me a few seconds to arrive at my conclusion based on very little
data. This is what learning scholar, Chris Argyris, calls “moving up the ladder
of inference”. I noticed only one of the many pieces of data in my environment,
attributed meaning to it, made an assumption and settled on a course of action;
I wouldn’t bother to engage him further.
Luckily,
I know from both science and my own experience that the human brain tends to
judge things instantly and is often dead wrong. In fact, snap judgments can
lead to missed opportunities or can cause us to make serious mistakes,
especially with those around us.
So,
when my seat-mate awoke after sleeping for the first six hours of the flight, I
tried again. “You must have been tired?” I said. He replied that he was. He
told me he was a pilot, dog-legging the trip back after flying to the U.S. from
Delhi where he lived in a small flat. He told me he spent most of his time in
France, on his houseboat. Intrigued, I asked a few questions and our
conversation started.
For
three hours, he shared an unexpected and remarkable story. He was a gypsy with
only an elementary school education. His grandparents had been interned in
gypsy camps during the Second World War, but had survived. When he was 14, the
authorities forcefully settled their caravan into a camp and his parents helped
him flee on foot to Austria for a better life. He never saw them again.
From
there, he’d studied in France, the U.K. and travelled around Russia. He’d even
helped multinational companies set up businesses in Eastern Europe and Russia
with his extensive knowledge and fluency in seven languages. He wove his story
in vivid colors, sharing with me both the beauty and the pain. He winced as he
told me of death of his wife and young son during the Serbian War and proudly
recounted his fiery mother and the image he held in his memory of her riding a
horse, her long curly hair ablaze in the wind. He spoke passionately about the
discrimination against his people and of his advocacy for the Roma in Europe
and America. He shared the history of the gypsies through the ages with me,
from the mountains of Afghanistan through India and to Europe. He taught me
more in three hours than I ever would have imagined.
Overly self-judgmental
By
putting judgment aside, I emerged from that flight enriched and inspired, more
than I would have if I had trusted my original assumption. Such judgments are
detrimental, not only to our own learning, but they can lead us to make poor
decisions, lose opportunities, and to alienate others. Furthermore, it’s not
just others we’re capable of judging, but also ourselves.
Most
of us have a running monologue in our heads with explanations for what has
happened to us in the past and our expectations of the future. This “self talk”
can have an overly positive bias in the form of overconfidence and lack of
humility. For others, “self talk” can be unnecessarily punishing, stripping us
of confidence and raising our stress as we colour our internal world with an
overly negative brush, questioning ourselves or beating ourselves up.
For
example, in my teaching, I came across a bright, personable and successful
executive, Bill, who confided that despite his accomplishments, wasn’t sure
that he was “good enough” to successfully lead his organisation and was afraid
to try something new and risky to turn his business around. Often known as the
“imposter syndrome,” this kind of thinking often starts young. My daughter
proclaimed “I’m no good at math” when she was 5.
From “judger” to “learner”
Most
of us believe that self-criticism is what keeps us in line, but research shows
the opposite. While persistence is a driver of success, it’s the persistence of
the “learner” in us, rather than the “judger” that fuels our success.
Marilee
Adams, a psychotherapist, personal coach and leadership trainer has developed a
very useful framework to approach these situations. According to Dr. Adams, we
all have both a learner and judger self and we can choose, moment by moment,
which of these two selves we want to invoke. When we invoke our “judger” self,
we ask, “What’s wrong with me? Whose fault is it? Why bother?” On the other
hand, our “learner” self lets us ask, “What do I want? What works? What are the
facts I need? What are my choices?”
With
some coaching, the talented but self-doubting Bill was able to change his
question from “am I good enough?” to “what am I great at? How can I use my
strengths to turn the company around? Who can help me?” It wasn’t long before
he told me that he had become bold enough to take a new approach to turn his
company around. He also had a new-found respect for his co-workers and employees.
Change the question
The
good news is that we can overcome judgmental behaviour, both toward others and
ourselves. But it involves changing the questions we’re asking ourselves and
those of others. My colleague Hal Gregersen, INSEAD Professor of Innovation and
Leadership, has discovered one consistent characteristic across the companies
he’s studied in The World’s Most Innovative Companies; the ability of these leaders to ask lots of
deep, provocative questions to which they don’t have the answers. In essence,
they’re inquisitive learners.
For
leaders, the impact that having a learning mindset has on their own behaviour
can be profound, but it also influences those around them. By building a space
safe enough for those around them to be learners and ask questions instead of
operating within a ring fence of judgments or assumptions can yield innovative
and creative environments for both leaders and employees.
In
some senses, we have to unlearn our unquestioning habits before we can reclaim
our unjudgmental questioning nature. Young children at school are naturally
curious and ask lots of questions, until about the middle of first grade, when
they start to realise that evaluation and the right answers are most important
and become more so as the years of school progress. We have been socialised to
suppress our “learner” mindset in order to excel.
But
the uncertain and complex world in which we live calls for new questions and
many answers. I turn to former Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin who made a
point of asking his children not “what did you learn in school today?” but
“what questions did you ask today?”
What
are you doing to encourage yourself and your co-workers to be “learners” and
not “judgers”? What questions are you living and what questions are you
encouraging in others?
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