Small boxes, backstabbing, and big scissors.
"Why did they backstab our team?"
"Why did they ignore this information?"
Why are we rowing in different directions?
"Why can’t we all agree on what the goal is?"
"Why does it feel like we are competing against ourselves?"
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You’ve felt this before at your company. The data objectives are ignored in favor of other goals. A clear decision is pushed aside for something that feels irrelevant to you.
There’s a good reason for this. Humans are great at thinking in boxes. It’s a necessary coping mechanism for survival in a complex world.
We’re wired to draw boxes and to optimize our decision-making for what’s inside our box. We make choices based on what’s best for what’s in our box. Both biologically and psychologically it’s nearly impossible for us to do otherwise.
In your personal life, your primary boxes might be yourself, your family, your neighborhood, city, state, country, and planet. You make choices based on what’s in the best interest of the smallest box first and work your way out. As you move out, it gets increasingly hard to make optimal choices that take into account both the smallest box (yourself and your family) and the larger boxes (your country and the planet).
When buying groceries we cannot simultaneously make optimal decisions about my family's health needs and financial constraints, while also thinking about the economics, environmental, and political factors of my state, country, and planet.
To handle this overload, our brains make simple optimizations. We allow ourselves to be rational in only the smallest boxes.
This shows up constantly in the workplace.
Our boxes are - ourselves, our team, our department, our company.
Just as in our personal lives, we struggle to make optimal decisions for all areas of our company, and so we focus on optimizing the smallest boxes.
Which leads to infighting, contradicting goals, frustrating leadership meetings, and a lack of progress.
What makes the role of CEO, President, Prime Minister, etc. so incredibly hard is to make decisions about very large boxes constantly!
So how do you manage these boxes in your workplace?
Let’s talk more about that tomorrow,
I’m here,
Sawyer
from The Data Shop
