FearOS: How Our Orgs Run on Fear and What We Can Do About It (According to Chris Argyris) — Part 1: Foundations of Fear
Most organizations operate on a foundation of fear.
Not intentionally, of course. And not even collectively.
It’s an unintentional, individual thing — wired deeply in the most primitive parts of our brain.
What used to be a fear of predators or a fear of starvation has evolved along with our basic needs as a species being (mostly) met on a (mostly) consistent basis.
And it’s evolved into a fear of failure.
The primitive desire for physical self-preservation has evolved into a desire for professional self-preservation.
To preserve is to defend. And that’s the default mode for most professionals:
Self defense.
There’s an interesting relationship between learning and fear that exists in our brains.
When you feel threatened or afraid, what you tend to learn is a “fear memory.” It’s an association between threatening information and negative feelings that get wired together in your amygdala.
Obviously these get encoded deeply when actual harm or pain is inflicted (e.g., a kid gets bitten by a dog and is now afraid of dogs, an employee gets chewed out by a supervisor and is now terrified of making another mistake).
But sometimes it’s a hardwired association between something that scared you and just the feeling of being scared.
The dog didn’t bite the kid, but it growled and bared its teeth in a scary way.
The employee didn’t get chewed out, but the anticipation that it could happen at any moment was horrifying.
They were never actually harmed, but the fear of being harmed was associated with whatever scared them in the first place, making them even more scared of having that experience again.
And organizations do have a history of using fear memories for learning.
In businesses, in schools, in churches… In many institutions, there’s been an ominous, prevailing threat of “this is what happens to people who___.”
The threat of…
Working “the right way” or getting fired.
Acting “the right way” or getting smacked with a ruler.
Believing “the right way” or… going to Hell.
(There’s more than a bit of “the nail that sticks out gets the hammer” at play here as well, which gets into things like norms and collective identities, but we’ll save that for another time.)
What’s interesting is, instead of individuals getting better at doing things “the right way,” they get really good at defending themselves from the perception they are doing things “the wrong way.”
Take no risks.
Avoid scrutiny.
Deflect accountability.
Deny wrong-doing.
And let’s be honest — that’s not what we want to be happening in our organizations.
Fear memories are not the good kind of learning.
The good kind of learning… the kind of intentional, attentive, knowledge-building, dot-connecting and way-making that lets individuals and organizations grow and evolve…
That stuff happens in other parts of the brains.
And when the alarm bells trigger the amygdala, all those other areas of the brain are shut down.
How many organizations are running on amygdalas?
How many are built — and running — on foundations of fear?
The late Chris Argyris — one of the godfathers of organizational development — wrote a short book in 1991 entitled “Teaching Smart People How to Learn.”
Except it’s not a book about teaching smart people how to learn. Not really.
If anything, it should be called…
“Teaching Smart People How to Stop Being So Defensive.”
Or maybe even…
“Teaching Smart People How to Stop Being So Afraid of Each Other.”
…
I think a lot about how organizations behave as a collective entity.
What they do, how they operate, how they evolve and change and grow.
Argyris thought a lot about how organizations learn, and how it ultimately comes down to how the individuals within the organization are able to learn.
I want to share some of the core themes from the book, because I don’t think there is enough attention to the role that fear plays within organizations, and how much that fear undermines the organization’s ability to learn and grow and evolve.
[DISCLAIMER: I’m drawing from notes I took while reading the book, so while I’m attempting to share my own thoughts in response to Argyris’, there’s a chance I might inadvertently quote him without citation. Rest assured, anything here that sounds like Argyris’ concepts are very much his — I’m just sharing and adding commentary.]
Image from birdviewjoey.blogs.com
If you ask most leaders if they want “continuous improvement” in their organizations, they will say “Yes. Of course.”
But what Argyris rightly points out is that it’s easy for individuals to support the notion of continuous improvement when the conversation is focused on improving anything other than their own performance.
It’s much harder when their own performance needs to improve.
The other thing to consider is that “continuous improvement” can elicit two very different responses:
- Excitement & energy. “Yes, let’s keep getting better!”
- Exhaustion & overwhelm. “Ugh, that sounds like a lot of work to never arrive.”
But Argyris might argue that even that tension between enthusiasm and reluctance is rooted in an ultimate tension between safety and change.
And how we navigate that tension depends on whether individuals in the org are using what he calls “single-loop” or “double-loop” learning.
And that’s what we’ll dive into in Part 2. Thanks for reading.
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