Blind Spots

A reading from a popular job search book prompts a discussion about our inability to accurately self-diagnose — and what to do about it.

Show notes:

• Never Search Alone by Phyl Terry 
• Phyl.org
• Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman
• Never Eat Alone by Keith Ferrazzi and Tahl Raz
• What Color is Your Parachute? by Richard Bolles
• So Good They Can't Ignore You by Cal Newport
• Social Traps by John Cross and Melvin Guyer
• Mistakes Were Made (bot Not By Me) by Caroll Tavris and Elliot Aronson
• Confidential by John Nolan
• Johari window
• Using AI to Illuminate My Blind Spots by Jorge Arango

Transcript

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Harry 0:00

As a leader, we need better processes, techniques, and protocols for reducing the likelihood that we're gonna trip ourselves up and harm other people in our companies and our organizations because we are effectively willfully ignorant of the cognitive mechanisms and social mechanisms behind this.

Narrator 0:31

You're listening to Traction Heroes. Digging In to Get Results with Harry Max and Jorge Arango.

Harry 0:41

Jorge, it's most excellent to see you again.

Jorge 0:44

It's great to see you. And we usually do these calls over Zoom, so we are very far apart. But last week we had the incredible privilege of being able to share a meal, which is rare and very cool.

Harry 1:03

Yeah. I have to say, there are many people in my life that I appreciate seeing, but it is consistently the case that I am always beyond delighted to spend time with you. And I'm so glad we get a chance to do these readings because it forces that every couple of weeks as well.

Jorge 1:22

And let's jump into it because I suspect that folks don't tune in for our mutual appreciation. So, you said you brought a reading?

Harry 1:31

I do. This one popped out of some research I was doing in another direction. We'll see where it leads. "Let me begin by saying that no leader or decision-maker, or human for that matter, is immune. Still, this large body of work in behavioral economics has not been widely adopted by leaders who want to improve their own decision-making. The reason is something I've come to call 'Kahneman's conundrum.' Kahneman summarized the challenge succinctly in his 2011 international bestseller, Thinking, Fast and Slow. Kahneman says that he himself has no idea when he's making any of the cognitive mistakes that he spent a lifetime identifying: 'my intuitive thinking is just as prone to overconfidence, extreme predictions, and the planning fallacy as it was before I made the study of these issues.' Might there be a way for leaders to at least know when they're about to make a mistake based on a bias? Kahneman says no. We would all like to have a warning bell that rings loudly whenever we're about to make a serious error, but no such bell is available. I almost fell off my chair when I first read those words. The knowledge of these biases does not seem to matter. The expert knowledge gained from decades of research does not even help the co-founder of the discipline. We humans are destined to make the same kinds of mistakes repeatedly, to be blind about our blind spots. It is simple but true. We all know that we can easily see the errors in others while being frustratingly blind to our own. One of my GC members told me this dynamic reminded her of dating. She said, 'I recognize issues in others' relationships, and I even know how I need to change, but I can't do it.' True. Spouses can see the mistakes that their partners make repeatedly. CEOs can see the errors that their peers make. Product managers can see more clearly the errors or weaknesses in the products of a competitor than they can in their own. And job seekers can see the biases and blind spots that impair each other's job search."

Jorge 4:03

I have a lot going through my mind, but I suspect that we're gonna be talking a lot about AI in this conversation.

Harry 4:11

Now, you're totally gonna be surprised here. This is a book by Phyl Terry, and it's Phyl, P-H-Y-L. And it's a book called Never Search Alone: The Job Seeker's Playbook.

Jorge 4:25

I have heard a lot about this book because I know a lot of people who are or have been searching for a job, and they've brought up this very idea of not searching alone. And there's a... Isn't there a network of l-like people that are helping each other with this approach?

Harry 4:43

There is, and it's at phyl.com, P-H-Y-L.com, and it's based on the book. And the title picks up and riffs off of the book, Never Eat Alone, right? The author of which I've forgotten. But it's really about networking. And the thing is, for many years, I was incredibly fortunate to have a mentor by the name of Richard Bolles, who wrote the book What Color Is Your Parachute? And I myself have developed a methodology for job searching and for networking and working with folks that are trying to get beyond a lot of self-imposed constraints and limitations and some of the structural challenges of finding a new role. And I stumbled on this book. It just astonishes me how so few of the books I end up gravitating toward are recommended by Amazon. These are things I stumble on, or somebody recommends them to me, but it's almost never the case that I find something that says, "Oh, people like you have bought a book like this." But the methodology in this book, which very much pivots around building a job search council, is, I think, sound and really potentially valuable. I've not myself gone through it, but I've read the book, and I deeply appreciated the author's perspective on this. And it is the first time in perhaps ten years that I've seen a methodology laid out for finding a new role based on one's skills and mindset and capabilities that are calibrated by the outside world, and in this case, these job search councils, which the author helps facilitate through a network. But the thing that struck me about this reading was, here I am, having written a book on prioritization, and we've talked about this before. I know for myself, I've heard the phrase, "people write the book they need to read." And I'm probably at the top of the list of people who struggle with really dealing with the complexities of making sure that I'm focusing on the things that matter most. But of course, what I realize now, after reading this, is it's more likely to be the result of cognitive biases that are affecting me, that I am incapable of seeing in action at the time, that only reveal themselves after the fact, and that Kahneman himself asserts that even as an expert in cognitive biases, that he himself would fall prey to, to these particular mental challenges. And I thought given our, evolving conversation on leadership clarity, on getting traction, on trying to see the world as it is, not as it, "should be," that this seems really key to me.

Jorge 7:41

Yeah, I suspect that we could go one of two ways here. One is, there is a portion of our audience who likely want to hear more about the approach to finding a new role because they might be on the market for a new role. So that's one path we could take. But I think that more in the spirit of the podcast and our previous conversations, I'll just reflect back to you what I heard from the reading, which is a bit broader than that. And it's the idea that we are really not skillful at diagnosing our own shortcomings and reading the relevant factors accurately. And it feels to me like this is a variation of one of the themes in this show, which is that perceiving conditions IRL, like really what is going on, perceiving clearly and in an unbiased way is fundamental to making good decisions and to acting skillfully. And it's hard to do that in general. But what I heard from the reading is it's especially hard to do it as it pertains to yourself, and that's where the Kahneman thing comes in. It's like it's not enough for you to know that you have these biases and these shortcomings because it's really, hard to point that lens on yourself. Is that fair?

Harry 9:24

I think that's 100%. And I do agree that I think this is the vein that we should take the conversation, because if people are interested on the career side of things or in the job search side of things, there are so many good resources there. I'm just gonna list them real quickly. And if you're listening to this and you're struggling to find your next thing, I would start by reading, So Good They Can't Ignore You, right? And, oh, God, I wish I could remember the author's name. It's just completely escaping me right now. And What Color Is Your Parachute by Richard Bolles. So Good They Can't Ignore You follows the philosophy of, "do what you're good at and the love will follow," right? Versus What Color is Your Parachute is, do what you love and the money will follow. And now there's this book, that I think really provides a much more modern take on how to approach the search itself, which is Never Search Alone, which is build a collaborative network. And those three resources are your place to start. Listening to us is not gonna help, right? I think if you want to take something away from this conversation, it's learning that just knowing how to avoid these cognitive biases, whatever they are, is unhelpful in the moment. And...

Jorge 10:47

Yeah. And in that spirit, you mentioned three books. So, I would suggest that for the third of those, Never Search Alone, I've heard that book independently from two people who were following the methodology, and I just wanna emphasize that just based on their testimony, it's not enough to read the book. Like, they were actually doing the work with someone who was... Like, literally, it's like about not searching alone. You need to pair up with people. My sense, and I have not read it, I'm just saying from what I've heard from other people, my sense is that the effectiveness of that particular methodology is completely contingent on your ability to engage with people who will help you work through this.

Harry 11:37

Yeah, and I do think we should bookmark a future conversation on this because there is something missing from all three of those books, and it is how to tell your personal narrative. And that structure and that process for getting to a place where you can tell your narrative and have it come off in a way that feels really genuine and authentic and be able to do it when you're in a reactive mode going up an elevator with somebody who's putting some, some unexpected pressure on you to answer the question, "what do you wanna do?" That piece of the methodology is missing from all three of those books. And so we can talk about that at another point. But I wanna bring it back to this thing that Phil Terry says and that Kahneman points out. Because I became fascinated, and I know we've talked about this, I became absolutely fascinated with the mechanisms of self-deception and how they fuel, decision-making and action that tend to result in outcomes that are the opposite of what we say we want. And as a leader, we need better processes, techniques, and protocols for reducing the likelihood that we're gonna trip ourselves up and harm other people in our companies and our organizations because we are effectively willfully ignorant of the cognitive mechanisms and social mechanisms behind this, whether you're talking about books like Social Traps, which I know we've talked about in the past, or whether we're talking about Mistakes Were Made, But Not by Me, the Aronson and Tavris book, and I know we've talked about that. But there's something new here. And the thing that's new is... and in a sense, I would ask you, Jorge, the question, as one of the most thoughtful people I know. Given this new insight, what should people do to reduce the likelihood that no matter how smart they are on their own, they are going to fall prey to these cognitive biases? Because Kahneman himself, the expert in the field, couldn't figure out how to prevent himself from doing it.

Jorge 13:57

I think the answer is you cannot do it alone. And the traditional way of doing this has been through finding a mentor and finding colleagues, trusted advisors that you can check in on who will be candid and forthcoming and will let you know when you are screwing up. That's easier said than done, and I don't think it's easy to say it either, because we are not... We don't like to hear hard truths. We don't like to feel uncomfortable. And many people, and I think I've said this in previous episodes, I tend to be a people pleaser. So people who like to be perceived as being nice, it's harder for us to give advice that, that might be taken as criticism. But I think it's very important both to do it and to find people who will do it for us. I don't know the science behind it, but I don't think I need the science to agree with the sentiment that we all have blind spots. Our egos are an amazing construct that shields us from things that might feel like they diminish us. So we tend to not see hard truths that we need to grapple with. So if we wanna be very practical about it, like what advice can we give folks to finding those kinds of relationships with other people that will help expose us to... help reveal our blind spots and maybe help us move past whatever is keeping us stuck there?

Harry 15:59

Yeah, I think that's a great place to start, because it of course brings us back around to the notion of the Johari window, which is this two-by-two matrix, right? On one axis, it's, what you know about yourself, and on the other axis, it's what other people know about you, right? And your public persona is what other people know about you that you know about yourself, right? And your private persona is what you know about yourself that others don't know. But the blind spot is what others know about you that you don't know about yourself. And maybe the place to start is to understand what your tendencies are there that are visible enough for people that you know well enough or work with frequently enough to be able to speak to those things. I do use the Johari window in the executive coaching work that I do, not only for individual leaders, but also for teams. You know, what do other teams know about your team that your team may not be fully aware of or comprehend or willing to look at, right? And I still think that underneath all of that is this Kahneman piece, which is that the core, the primitives, the core biases that go into the decision-making, the apprehension of the world as it's functioning, and the filters that result from that are even lower level and more challenging. But maybe the blind spot and getting clearer about what other people know about you that you may either not know about yourself or be actively avoiding knowing about yourself, is a great place to start.

Jorge 17:46

I suspect that there might be a third dimension there, which is something like social dynamics between people.

Harry 17:57

Say more.

Jorge 17:57

In an organization, maybe things like politics. Let's take a step back. So what you're saying with the Johari window and the example that you used is the part that's missing in the picture or a part that's missing in the picture is what other people say about you. And the question that prompts is, where is that data coming from? Like, in the example that you brought up, I would imagine that you would want to do research, you would want to interview people in other teams.

Harry 18:26

Yeah. Yeah, 100%.

Jorge 18:28

Right? And maybe the questions are framed in such a way that you don't taint the answers too much, like you don't reveal what the survey is about.

Harry 18:38

Right, exactly.

Jorge 18:44

So at the core of this there is a data problem. Because let's say that even in the things that you know about you, like you would imagine, "Well, I have the data. I know what I've done. I know what I think." But we don't tend to capture those things systematically. And let's say that you were to initiate a relationship with someone who can mentor you, that person doesn't have access to all of that information that they need to help you make sense of the blind spots. It feels to me like there's a data problem, and the acquisition of that data, and here we come to the social and maybe political dynamics, the acquisition of that data can be tricky, particularly in an organizational context. Like we were saying, like you might have to ask the questions in such a way as to not reveal the true intent of the survey because, I don't know, people in that other group might not want to tell you what they really think. Maybe I'm being paranoid, but I've seen politics at work in organizations, right? So getting good data can be challenging. And, and anyway, I just wanted to bring in the fact that because we are now talking about involving other people in the sense-making process, anytime you do that, you have to think about social and political relations.

Harry 20:11

Yeah, that's an interesting angle here, and it harkens back to the discussion we had about eliciting information. I think we talked about the book Confidential at some point, which looks at acquiring potentially valuable or sensitive information without necessarily "interrogating" somebody or inquiring directly, because it can tend to cause people to deflect or avoid answering directly. And I think this is interesting because in the Johari window, it's not necessarily... and I may have misspoken when I said it's what people say about you. It's really what they think about you or what they know about you. It's what you know about yourself and what others know about you. Maybe they say it, maybe they don't, right? And in the qualitative 360 degree diagnostic process I use with executive coaching and team dynamics, yeah, I've gotta be very careful with how I probe for that. And generally, I can't go with one data point, right? I have to synthesize, multiple data points to get to some kind of resolution on a point of view to know that it's even marginally valid. But I think the most interesting angle here is a place I've run into for myself. Terrible challenges, especially in larger organizations and especially in political, small P politics, not capital P, horrible politics. But just the oxygen of how things get done in an organization tends to be political, right? And as a leader, one of the places that I find I struggle with what I know about myself and what other people don't know about me is my positive intentions, right? And if they only knew what I was trying to accomplish for the organization, for their team, for them personally, they would never question my motives, right? And yet, without being more on the nose about, as they say in the movie industry, about what I'm trying to accomplish or about how I'm trying to be of service for them or their team or the broader organization, and just hoping that they're gonna read my glorious positive intentions, they see the behavior, they hear the words, and they draw their own conclusions, which are sometimes, quite the opposite of what I wish or hoped or want.

Jorge 22:42

We can't evaluate these things by reading people's minds because we cannot read people's minds. So we have to do it based on eliciting information, like you're saying, and and that information might be based on unspoken things like actions, gestures, body language. I'll circle back to trying to make this as practical as possible, and this is why I suggested earlier on that I thought we might end up talking about AI. This is actually something that I've used AI for and I've found useful. And again, there's a data input problem because my interactions with, let's say, ChatGPT are not comprehensive. They're not holistic. ChatGPT doesn't know about everything in my life. It only knows about what I have asked it.

Harry 23:39

So far.

Jorge 23:40

So far... yes, that's true. And that's not a small thing because I've been working with this system for several years now, almost every day, and it does give you, by default, the ability to answer questions based on the entirety of your chat history, right? So I don't know where I saw this, but I saw a prompt that focused on this, and I tried it, and it was really revealing to the point where I actually wrote a blog post where I shared its answers.

Harry 24:16

Wow.

Jorge 24:16

And I'll include that in the show notes, but the prompt is: "Based on everything I've ever asked you, what do you think my biggest blind spots are?" And ChatGPT responded with five blind spots, and I'll read them to you real quick. These are just the headlines, but there's actually copy that explains each. The first is, underestimating the practical value of your ideas. The second is, too much focus on internal coherence over external resonance.

Harry 24:50

Ooh, wow. Wow.

Jorge 24:53

I felt really seen when I saw these. The third was, hesitation to fully embrace a leadership identity.

Harry 25:03

Boy, that's some X. It's true.

Jorge 25:06

The fourth, balancing craft and reach.

Harry 25:09

Huh.

Jorge 25:10

And the fifth was, difficulty letting go of roles you've outgrown.

Harry 25:18

Whoa, dude.

Jorge 25:21

Yeah, and it felt... reading through this, I felt... First, I felt a little, I felt seen, and I felt, you know that feeling you get sometimes it's like, "Oh my gosh, someone is speaking truth to me, and it feels a little embarrassing, but also it's like I'm really thrilled that I'm having someone tell me this." It's like you have, you have a piece of...

Harry 25:48

Cabbage in your tooth, yeah.

Jorge 25:51

And also I must say when I shared this originally on social media, a few folks chimed back to say, "It's kinda like a horoscope. Like, you read into it." And there might be a little bit of that. But I think that because what we're talking about here is self-reflection and introspection, that might not be entirely a bad thing. Like, even if I'm projecting more capability into this system than is truly merited, even so, it's useful. And the other thing I'll say is, this is only based on the things that I've talked or chatted with, ChatGPT about. So, it thinks, for example, and again, if you go to this blog post and read them in detail, one of the criticisms was something like you, over-polish things. And that's because I've spent so much time using ChatGPT as a copy editor, so it thinks like I'm obsessive about like copy editing texts. It's no, that's just how I use ChatGPT, right? But I just wanted to put it out there because I did find it useful, and there is a lot less social pressure in asking a chatbot for this kind of reflection than asking a fellow human who hopefully isn't... we want... whose respect and who might not know as much of our history as these chatbots do, right? So I just wanted to put that out there.

Harry 27:17

I love that you did that too, because, it's one thing to take the feedback from ChatGPT. It's another thing to share it with somebody who you might consider a trusted source for calibration, right? Because in this particular case, two of those things really, hit me, right? I'm like, "Whoa, yeah, those feel right," or they feel like they're interesting doorways to pass through and explore if you're interested in learning more. So maybe they're not the be-all, end-all truth, but at least they provide you a starting point to explore the possibility that maybe there's a blind spot there or something that you could start diving into and inquire more about.

Jorge 27:55

Absolutely. Like you could bring one of these to a conversation with a mentor, right? And say, "Hey, this one resonated with me. Do you see this? And could, how could I work on this?" It feels like a good starting point.

Harry 28:07

Or the other way, "This one confused me." Or, "This one I disagree with," right? Either way.

Jorge 28:12

Right. So I think we have tools, and I'm glad that you brought this to the table because I think that a lot of people right now are in a modality of introspection as they think about, "What am I gonna be doing next," right? So, I think that it's a useful conversation, so thank you for, bringing this reading.

Harry 28:32

I really appreciated the conversation. Thank you. Thank you so much. I'm looking forward to, to the next one.

Narrator 28:39

Thank you for listening to Traction Heroes with Harry Max and Jorge Arango. Check out the show notes at tractionheroes.com and if you enjoyed the show, please leave us a rating in Apple's podcasts app. Thanks.