Missing what is right in front of us.
“It’s odd to notice just how hard our brain sometimes works to hide the truth from us. The clues are right in front of our eyes but our minds refuse to assemble the pieces”.
Vadim Baranov, an advisor to the ‘tsar’ in 1990s Russia in the mesmerizing novel ‘The Wizard of the Kremlin’ by political scientist and author Giulianoa da Empoli has to finally admit defeat to himself as he is about lose his paramour to an oligarch. All the telltale signs were obvious to Baranov after she left him, and at the same time he really knew it all along.
In the current unpredictable and complex geopolitical context, what we choose to see, what we unconsciously choose not to notice, as well as how we explain all of this to ourselves seems to be a notion of ever greater importance and urgency.
At work, the stories we tell ourselves can happen in situations where at a gut level we know something isn’t quite right. Yet we somehow tend to avoid noticing the clues that are there for us to see in plain sight. For example, successful sales people attribute their success to their own prowess. Any failure to secure a deal is pinned on the client. A senior leader once said to me ‘I know that I am comfortable in my role. Is that ok?’ Staying too long in an organisation even though we know it’s time to move on is another case of not paying attention to important clues.
One of the most difficult challenges is to remain open to the need to adapt when the company is so successful. Making the conscious effort to pay attention to potential early warning signs is very difficult to do when we have experienced such prolonged and remarkable success.
What can we do?
· Try to surface our own assumptions about how we implicitly explain our own successes as well as setbacks. This is almost impossible to do on our own
· Work with a peer who acts as a sounding board
· Find an external party to help you bridge the gap between your internal beliefs and the story you tell
Where have you experienced situations where ‘the stories we tell ourselves’ was not so useful?
