Patterns as Problems

My last post dealt with the importance of looking past individual problems to see the patterns they represent. This time, I want to look at the tendency of individuals and organizations to apply patterns to problems even when none exists.

Human beings are hard-wired to make sense of situations. Every new piece of information we receive is considered in context. When the new item conflicts with our prevailing sense of a situation, we experience cognitive dissonance, which usually manifests itself in concern, confusion, opposition or rejection. However, before we reject anything new out of hand we give consideration to two important characteristics: 1) could it hurt me and 2) will it go away. I call this the Anxiety-Annoyance Continuum.

The more likely we believe something is to harm us, the more anxiety, if not outright fear, we will experience. These experiences activate our fight-flight-freeze response mechanism.

If a cue doesn't make us feel particularly vulnerable, the continued presence of an unpleasant, unwanted, or simply persistent stimuli will trigger coping behaviors. Usually, we seek the cause or attempt to restore our sense of control over our environment is such circumstances. This may involve an active effort to ignore the stimulus or an active investigation of its source or cause among many other options.

Cues that fall somewhere in between these two poles tend to generate a mix of behaviors, which often involve an effort to secure support in the form of reassurance or assistance from others when they are present. If we can enlist the support of others, we tend to work together to interpret and resolve uncertainties about the situation. This can take either an active or passive form depending upon the circumstances. If for instance, others seem unbothered by the stimulus we will take their lack of response as an indication that everything is fine and assume the situation will resolve itself until and unless the situation becomes threatening or otherwise intolerable. 

When others are not present, we tend to gravitate to a more extreme interpretation, anxiety or annoyance. At this point, it is worth noting that persistent annoyance tends to produce anxiety, which manifests itself as a sense of abuse or alienation due to the individual's lack of control over the environment.

Individuals and groups tend to apply a number of biases and heuristics to the consideration of context. Biases or preferences affect us all. They are deeply embedded in our culture and operate at both the psychological and social level. Heuristics operate only at the individual level and represent models or simplifications we employ to manage the complexity of everyday life. Most heuristics serve us well by helping us deal with complex situations quickly. In this respect, our reliance upon heuristics becomes more or less instinctual. We develop habits of thinking and acting that serve us well when things are going along smoothly. Heuristics can get us in trouble, though, when situations change rapidly or when the outcomes occur due to subtle or imperceptible interactions among many variables.

I have studied these sorts of situations and the resulting behaviors under extreme circumstances, such as human response to emergencies like fires and fire alarms. But the longer I work in senior management and leadership roles, the more application I see for these observations in organizational settings as well.

The exercise of these functions in extreme situations makes them easier to identify and appreciate. But the application of these insights to everyday behaviors, especially in an organizational context, is far more interesting.

Very few jobs push people to their extremes. The accrual of petty aggravations, on the other hand, is all too common. It is one thing to say we are all responsible for how we respond to situations (we all decide our own degree of happiness), but it's another thing to ignore the effect others' behavior or responses to these situations have on us and the workplace environment as a whole.

I would not go so far as to say we should encourage emotional outbursts or open expressions of offensive conduct in the workplace, but in some respects, our effort to steer a course to the middle leaves people with a sense that things never get fully resolved. Contemporary workplaces seem to have become conflict avoidance and risk management machines rather than places in which people can work through their differences to develop a common or shared ethos informed by a sense of purpose and belonging that benefits themselves and others.

Among the many things I learned studying people in extreme situations is just how quickly most of us recover from them. Given the right support, which begins by acknowledging the event and allowing adequate time to heal, we often bounce back better and stronger than we were before the incident occurred. Unfortunately, all too often we see these episodes in less extreme environments as so undesirable, so likely to become a pattern that will generate future problems, that we do not allow them to occur. As a result, we miss the opportunity to enjoy such benefits.

As such, my advice to managers and leaders is simple: Do not suppress conflict; do not fear or avoid confrontation, especially when it involves deeply held beliefs and convictions. Bring these issues to the surface and help people resolve them. Rely on a clear vision and positive interpretation of unifying values or principles to see people through uncomfortable situations and encourage virtuous practices like acknowledgment, dialogue, atonement, and forgiveness to put things right again. Ignoring situations that will not go away only transforms annoyance into anxiety, which ultimately leads people to exhibit the least productive responses and produces dysfunctional relationships.