All of us have biases which affect what we see when we look at a problem. I often notice others falling into the Fundamental Attribution Error assuming that people behave the way they do because 'that's the way they are' when in fact it's the system in which they operate and the incentives they are given which make it inevitable that anyone would act that way. The reason I notice the FAE so often is because I have the opposite bias. People who know me would say that I focus on systems and organisation as a way of explaining what is going on, at the cost of missing significant facts about individuals. I have to admit that they are often right, but that's fine because I've taught myself to take a second look so that I'm not completely blindsided by the thoroughly bloody-minded individual causing havoc in a perfectly sensibly structured organisation.
The point is that we all have biases, in one direction or another. If we want to improve our chances of finding the right diagnosis or the right response in any situation, we need ways of overcoming them.
Expand Your Comfort Zone
Now you know what you need to do, and it's time to start gently pushing outside of the comfort zone and do it. The key word is 'gently'. You have to take time. Think of it like climbing a flight of stairs. You might go up one step at a time, or possibly two, but if you try to do ten at a time you will just fall back down to the bottom again. The idea is that, over time, you can make the unfamiliar familiar, and hence unthreatening.
Recruit Some Help
Preferably strange help. You will have to overcome some strong social pressure if you want to upgrade your or your organisation's thinking. There is some good news from the experiment. I find that just one dissenting voice makes it much, much easier for the subjects to give the right answer to a problem.If you can arrange one dissenting voice, you will find it dramatically easier to spot where you are going wrong. If you can arrange several, better still. You will also find that the best people to help you are those from outside your own world. It's unlikely that anyone from yom own speciality (finance, FMCG marketing, software development or whatever) will be much help, nor will anyone from your own organisation.
How do you tell who is going to be a good collaborator?
There are a few points to look for.One is that they should have the ability to accept your situation but not be limited by it. Another way of putting it is that they can distinguish between what is genuinely a constraint on you, and what you only think is a constraint. Good collaborators know when to urge you on and when to hold you back. You will sometimes come up with ideas that seem insane. Some of the possibilities you see will make you fear that you are succumbing to delusions of grandeur. This is when you will need an objective opinion to reassure you that you're not taking leave of your senses altogether.
One of the crucial skills of a good collaborator is the ability to see the possibilities you are missing. Look, for instance, at Charles Babbage, who first had the idea for the computer. His vision was essentially for a large calculator, which could do what it was designed to do. It was Babbage's collaborator, Ada Lovelace, who had the idea of making it programmable. You could build the thing and then think of other things for it to do. He thought of hardware and she added software. Apply this kind of collaborative approach to your own situation. Look for comments such as: 'I like the article, but I think there is a bigger, more interesting idea lurking in there that you haven't brought out,' or 'If you changed this and this, you would have something that would appeal to a much bigger market.'
When you receive advice, ask yourself: 'Would they say the same to someone else?' This is very important, because the default position of so many people who offer advice is to tell you what worked for them, or for someone else, but which might not work for you. What your adviser must be able to do is to come up with ideas that might actually work for you. They must know enough about you to tailor their advice.
Take It Slowly
If you decide that you would like to break away from conventional wisdom and start living more effectively and more resourcefully, you need to recognise that the thinking is the easy part. The emotional aspect will be the more difficult one. You will need to manage with less social support, or organise alternative sources of social support. You will need to engage with some powerful, primitive parts of your psyche. This is where I really take issue with the motivational gurus and the self-help books. Liberating yourself from worn-out thinking will be a process, not an act. I can't offer you seven steps to anything, nor can I promise that it will all be done in 21 days.
There is no once-and-for-all method for freeing yourself from worn-out thinking. Rather, there is a set of practices for keeping your thinking, and therefore your decisions and actions, in tune with an ever-changing reality, making you a little freer every day, even if you never achieve complete liberation. It will always be worth the effort, and that effort will become less over time.
