If “Life is the Curriculum” — We Are Being Asked to Learn Faster

Is now a good time for you?

Life sets us up with pandemic waves of disruption within pandemic waves of disruption. Sometimes we respond more effectively than other times.

We are the glorious protagonist. We are the inglorious bystander.

It’s situational. We’re situational. The situation keeps changing. “Leaders of leaders” ready themselves and others — they learn to anticipate and adapt to the times. We were made for these times. “Inglorious Bystander” isn’t the legacy we’re going for.

The way we anticipate/prepare ourselves to respond to situations a) influences our ability to respond effectively (in the moment of truth) b) influences the situation itself, and of course, c) influences the outcome. If our mind, body and emotional metabolism are not optimized/not conditioned to wrestle with the complex adaptive challenges of our time… we react based on our instincts, biases and existing mental models. Our brains are always applying default GOOD bias and default BAD bias. Our brains don’t care which. Our default biases and reactive thinking patterns are suboptimal (sometimes counterproductive) in the face of today’s bigger/more frequent waves of change and increased stress.

Our brains are in charge, but we are not innocent bystanders.

Our default biases and reactive thinking patterns are not a series of irresistible impulses — they are a series of impulses that we are NOT READY to resist. To be more effective, we have to learn to be more ready. We have to learn to be more ready for the physiological, psychological/emotional and relational tension that comes with change. Otherwise we can’t even entertain the intense conversations constructively, let alone the intense thinking and taking action. By not doing the readiness work, our reactivity diminishes the velocity, depth and scale of adaptation that we are responsible for leading. With our delay, comes unnecessary suffering and permanent system damage. After the damage is done — we can’t bear to admit the incompetency — so we strengthen our ability to look away. Even after the price of incompetence has been paid, we choose not to learn from it — we prolong/avoid building competency. We appear to choose dabbling & hacking at leadership vs pursuing mastery. We wind up strengthening the opposite of what we think we stand for. We’re always strengthening something.

“But bystandering and bias don’t apply to me.”

If you’re thinking to yourself: “sure, my co-worker, my friend, my family member, etc… is a textbook example of being a prisoner of outdated thought patterns and bias, but not me — I could never be reactive/trapped in the past like them”…. here is what the rest of that conversation might sound like:

• I do not suffer from cognitive biases. If I am biased, it’s only a little.
• I am not drawn to data/details that confirm my beliefs (confirmation bias).
• I don’t notice flaws in others more easily than I do in myself (bias blind spot).
• I don’t preference people I’m familiar with as better than others (in-group/out-group bias).
• I don’t fill in characteristics from stereotypes, generalities and prior history (fundamental attribution error, negativity bias).
• I don’t simplify probabilities and numbers to make them easier to think about (normalcy bias, gambler’s fallacy).
• I don’t assume I know what other people are thinking. I don’t infer what others’ intentions are (illusion of transparency, illusion of asymmetric insight, projection bias).
• I don’t favor the immediate, relatable thing in front of me over the unknown future thing (hyperbolic discounting).
• I don’t avoid making irreversible decisions or avoid making mistakes because I’m trying to preserve autonomy, self-interest and group status (status quo bias).
• I don’t have a tendency to disproportionately advocate for things I’ve invested time and energy into (sunk cost bias).

Without awareness, we forget that we have biases.

The problem isn’t that we have biases or that we tell ourselves stories. The problem is that we deny (or we never learned) that we have biases — so we believe our stories are true; we forget that we told ourselves those stories in the first place.

Without awareness, we are blind to our blindness and blind to the labels/stories we tell ourselves (illustrated by Chris Argyris’ concept called the “ladder of inference” and Alfred Korzybski’s abstraction model called “structural differential”).

This lack of awareness (lack of readiness) creates an unconscious obedience to our default/norms and a costly, unnecessary drag on progress.

This lack of readiness is how we unintentionally/inexcusably default to bystander roles. The bystander role enables cooperation and consent with the status quo — giving it it’s staying power. The (bias-built) veil of oblivion spreads like a virus as it fights for the immediate relief of tension and the perceived certainty/comfort of homeostasis. But homeostasis is an illusion. We prolong the adaptation process. This cycle of bystandering is self-perpetuated. Learning faster is how we self-correct it.

What will it take for me to learn what I have to learn?

Adult development is not a black box. What will it take for us to become more ready (e.g., more humble, curious, experimental, integral)? We all have these capacities inside us already; we have to do the readiness work to build the capacities into world class capabilities… otherwise we are in over our heads.

If we want to recover more quickly from reactivity and be more conscious when it matters most…then we have a lot more to learn. If we want to take actions that are more congruent with what we think matters most, more often…then we have a lot more to learn.

Bias is universal, individual and situational.

If we are aware of our own biases, then we can either choose to work on them — or we can choose to stand by ingloriously… at the merciless effects of them.

There are no more excuses for not doing readiness work — training our minds is a lifestyle— mental fitness is a choice. Let’s Drop Everything & Learn. Let’s learn faster.