What Lies Beneath: Why Humans Do Stupid Stuff At Work (And Elsewhere)
A Bubble Story
A Bubble Story
The scene: a public company, in the bright shiny new “internet space”, San Francisco 1999. Our stock is on a tear. We look at our personal holdings and can’t imagine how things got this way. The only possible direction is up and to the right. Crazed, grandiose pronouncements are the order of the day.
And we need to make an acquisition. At least, we think we do. We want to enter a market adjacent to ours and think that building something would take too long — everything’s moving fast! The market is hot! We gotta get in there!
So we look at a bunch of companies. One is in Russia. We fly to Moscow for the weekend. A group of highly trained Russians stare at us with great curiosity whilst the US owners give us a dubious sales pitch. Another is in Vancouver. They are nice people, but the tech is built on a nasty old platform. We try and convince ourselves we can work with it. No. Really, no. Darnit.
And then there’s one in Boston. Small company, apparently reasonable people, sensible tech. OK, we’re on.
We send an exec to Boston to do the deal. We offer something like $200M. (A note about numbers: this was 1999 when $100M was still a noticeable amount of money). The company is about a year old and has barely any revenues. A $200M offer is insane, but these are, apparently, insane times. We’ve figured that much out.
Our exec quickly calls back. “They want a billion”, he says. “Hah hah hah” we say. And raise the offer some.
This goes on all day. We gather in the conference room and try to figure out how much we need this thing. How much diluting the company by, say, $600M will affect things. We, the product people, are, to our lasting shame, enthusiastic. “Spent a billion!” we say, crazily, “we have to do it! Time, speed, intensity, growth!”
We get to $800M.
“They want a billion”, says the exec. “Come home”, says our CEO.
End result: later, we buy somebody else for $250M. The company in Boston goes bust, the founders having missed out on a couple of hundred million each in a stock that subsequently tripled. Eeesh.
What On Earth Happened Here?
We think we are rational, but we aren’t. We think we are driven by thinking, but that is false.
We are driven by emotion, desire, bias, deep, deep patterns that we get from our family, our early years, possibly our genes.
The desire for a one billion dollar valuable was pure ego, hubris, maybe greed, who knows? Nothing rational about it at all. The only rational response to an $800M offer (or even a $200M offer) was “OMG, yes!”. And yet the people in that conference room stuck to a billion, were blinded by it, couldn’t get past it. Maybe they grew up poor. Maybe they wanted to prove themselves to their peers, their college friends. Maybe they had internal stories in which they identified themselves as master negotiators. We’ll never know, and it’s possible they don’t know even now, decades later.
On our side was desire — to be bigger, grow faster. And ego — to be even more on that groovy internet train (yes, those were the days, kids)! And greed, some, a higher stock, yet more money in the bank (astute readers will notice that Bubble thinking indicated that if you made ruinous dilution decisions, your stock would go up, not down).
The negotiation looked like two sets of people arguing about comparable valuations, stock dilution, build vs buy costs and timing. In fact, the conversation was driven almost entirely by the deep, unconscious currents that were flowing well beneath thinking, far more powerful than our clever, rational minds.
Our CEO was the only one who had a grip on the situation (somewhat — he was still cool at $500M, which would have been a grievous mistake), who was able to pull back from the nuttiness.
What Lies Beneath
This back and forth — between the deep swells of our unconscious patterns, and the models, rules and concepts of our rational thinking — is continuous, a natural, ever-changing, ever-reactive dynamic that drives us through life.
At work it governs us in meetings, as we write email, as we give presentations, as we build our strategies and follow our plans.
We look to our conscious thinking for guidance and find, over and over, that something else is in charge.
We set ridiculous deadlines, hoping against hope they will work out. We avoid difficult conversations, telling ourselves that “it’ll be OK, the situation will improve”. We fail to get the opinions of really smart people because they don’t look like us, or because they have an accent that’s hard to understand. Our boss barks at us and rather than tell them they are a rude and unpleasant human being, we go quiet and nod, cowed by our reaction to status, to strong emotion, to fear of losing our place, our job, our working identity.
OK, So What?
Understanding ourselves more deeply, digging into what lies beneath our rational mind is missing in our education and later training. We spend the years from five to twenty or twenty-five learning rules, facts and methods. Unless we are very lucky we learn almost nothing about the patterns that make us, how our deep imprints interact with other people and the world around us.
You can work effectively with certain people, and not others. Can you describe precisely why? You are always overwhelmed. It must be your calendar, or the company growth. Couldn’t be that being overwhelmed is just something you do, could it? Something you are actually, paradoxically, pretty comfortable with? Planning makes you uncomfortable, so you delay it. What’s there, inside you, about how you consider the future?
The good news, as I’ve written before, is that human beings have a built-in debugger. It’s called awareness — a directing of our attention inwards, to ourselves.
Without training, our attention is unfocussed and frittered away. By training our attention to be steady, curious and focussed on how we are reacting to the world, we can begin to become knowledgeable of our deeper patterns, and so be able to act skillfully, maybe even wisely (if we’re lucky).
The even better news is that the training of attention has become widely known and available recently: it’s just mindfulness. Find a practice, begin to notice yourself. Pay attention.
Right, But How Does This Make Me a Better Human At Work?
The more we act consciously, aware of the deep, strong currents working within us and other people, the more we can work with what’s really happening, what’s really at stake in our work.
Imagine a technical conversation with a colleague, perhaps over code, or a spreadsheet, perhaps a deal memo (depending on your profession). It gets heated, emotions are clearly strong. But why? The conversation is technical. There are pros and cons, objective arguments to be made one way or another.
Being aware of your own state, you might see a fear of being wrong, or of appearing “stupid”, or frustration that you can’t change things which so obviously need to be changed (“the world needs to be right” some voice inside you insists, “it has to be perfect!”). Some pattern is being matched for you in this conversation.
Attempting to be aware of your team mate’s state, you might guess that they have a great attachment to elegance, or “the right way” of doing things, or a sense that their senior position isn’t being respected, or they are not part of some inner tribe (“the people that really make the decisions”). You don’t know. You could ask.
Bringing those states into the conversation is going to help. You will then be talking about what you are really talking about — the real conversation between two human beings, not two sets of concepts.
Coaching, Personal Development, Leadership and the Two Minds
This interaction between the two minds, rational and instinctive, is happening all the time: every meeting, every interaction, every email, every slack message.
If we had been aware during that ridiculous negotiation during the Bubble, would the outcome have been different? We would have stopped earlier, certainly, and wasted less time and energy (and anxiety).
If the startup we wanted to buy had been aware of their biases, their emotions, would the outcome have been different? Probably.
Developing an awareness of the two minds, your strengths and weaknesses in each, and the deep patterns that drive you is critical to developing as a person, and as a leader (should that be your career path). Mindfulness will help you get there. A good coach will reflect back to you what they see as your patterns and suggest tools to work with them. Simply knowing this model is a start.
(Interested in coaching, learning about your own patterns and tools to approach them more skillfully? get in touch!)
