🚨 Why Leaders Fail 🚨

“Originality is the fine art of remembering what you hear but forgetting where you heard it.” -Laurence J. Peter

Have you missed my making fun of all of my shortcomings?

I have.

So let’s talk about my resistance to reusing material.

Whenever I start a new position, I am given material from my predecessor (spreadsheets, lesson plans, etc.). More often than not, I skim this material and don’t use most of it.

Not reusing material is a colossal waste of my time. While my boss might know that I can create things from scratch, there is no reason I have to. Sometimes, the material is lousy, but it’s unlikely that a boss would knowingly give me terrible material.

In a sense, my desire to create my own material is laudable; I take pride in my work and feel that my employer should receive my full effort. Moreover, I read Moneyball Judaism and know about the Ikea Effect, where people tend to value things that they made themselves more, even if something made by an expert would be of higher quality.

However, if I want to optimize my time, I need to get over my unflinching desire to aspire for constant originality. Too many leaders fail because they think they are original when they are not, bringing us to this week’s heuristic.

Not Invented Here Syndrome (NIHS)

When you read Moneyball Judaism, have you ever had the following reaction: “This idea sounds amazing, but it would never work for me?”

I feel you.

This is a constant dilemma consultants face every day. Good consultants spend time collecting data, collating strong case studies, and creating new material to show organizations that there is a pathway out of a troubling situation. And too often, the immediate response those consultants encounter is,

“I’m sure that this is well thought-out, but once you understand our organization a little better, you’ll see why this might work in some places but would never work here.”

Sound familiar?

I’m guilty of this all the time. I am stubbornly opposed to outsourcing almost any task involving adaptive change, and I think that people whose default option is to outsource others to solve big problems are people who have no original ideas or are too lazy to envision new ones. While it may be hubris to assume I have all of the answers, it’s also hubris to presume that someone else is obligated to solve my problem for me.

(Ouch.)

But as is often the case, my habitual resistance to outside information stems from a cognitive bias known as the “Not Invented Here Syndrome” (NIHS).

NIHS does not have a single intellectual founder (or at least I could not identify one.) The oldest reference I’ve found without an earlier citation comes from a master’s thesis written at MIT in 1967 by Robert P. Clagett. Clagett defines the NIHS as “the attitude (often spoken of as if it were a disease) of technical organizations who resist adoption of an innovation proposed from a source outside of the organization.” Today, NIHS tends to be a catch-all term for the resistance to using external knowledge to solve internal problems.

Jumping ahead to 2015, David Antons and Frank Piller argue that NIHS is an “attitude-based bias.” Sometimes, people resist external knowledge to project their own self-concept as an innovative person. Other times, people resist external knowledge so that the system of knowledge they created is not disrupted by an outsider or outside idea.

Seen this way, NIHS is a mental model that begs for a reframing of the kind we learned when we discussed Immunity to Change. The reason so many people fall guilty to NIHS is fear that if he or she becomes known as someone who uses outside information, they will no longer be seen as an innovative person. The thought process might look something like this:

1. I want to solve a problem
2. However, I am afraid that if I use an outside resource to help me solve my problem, then I will no longer see myself (or be seen by others) as a creative, innovative person
3. Therefore, I waste time creating everything from scratch to protect my self-image as an innovator

Even if this thought process is misplaced, it is reasonable to understand why someone might feel this way. Returning to my resistance to reusing material, I am so invested in others seeing as an original that I waste time and energy reinventing the wheel, time that could be used to pursue things that may actually be new and original.

To get out of this cycle, I need to change my relationship to the decision to use outside resources, recognizing that I can be recognized as the kind of person who can solve hard problems because I am willing to use knowledge anywhere I find it. All of a sudden, I’ve changed my relationship to using external knowledge.

This mindset shift is a form of leadership language and brings us to this week’s book recommendation.

How The Way We Talk Can Change the Way Work

I love a good reframing of the kind suggested by Antons and Piller: Reframing “costs” nothing, but the rewards are invaluable when harnessed properly. For this reason, I will recommend the second book from Robert Kegan and Lisa Laskow Lahey, How the Way We Talk Can Change the Way We Work.

You may recall Kegan and Lahey from Immunity to Change (ITC), my long-term intellectual crush. But Kegan and Lahey develop much of what becomes ITC through their discussion of language leadership and how changing our understanding of the words we use in organizations can make all the difference when trying to transform those organizations. The book outlines seven different language paradigms they want to change in organizations. My favorite is changing the “language of complaint” to the “language of commitment.”

Returning to the example of the exasperated consultant, anyone tasked with helping an organization solve a problem will encounter someone whose initial reaction is to dismiss the worthiness of the exercise. Kegan and Lahey call this the “language of complaint,” a language I imagine most of us are familiar with.

Typically, our instinct is to marginalize this person (and sometimes we have to.) But what if we resisted that initial instinct and recognized the devotion that someone shows by caring enough to complain? This is what Kegan and Lahey call the “language of commitment”:

“…we would not complain about anything if we did not care about something. Beneath the surface torrent of our complaining lies a hidden river of our caring, that which we most prize or to which we are most committed…leaders should consider fostering language contexts that encourage people to stay with, honor, and pursue further the transformative potential of their very complaints or disappointments.”

Everyone knows an immensely talented person who always seems to have a new critique or complaint (in my experience, this kind of person also tends to be harshest about themselves.) Kegan and Lahey urge us to help this person reframe their identity as a committed person who complains because they care.

Beautiful.

I Watch This Video to Help Me Sleep

Don’t judge me…

$2.2 Billion

Estimated net worth of Charlie Munger, who passed away last week at 99.

Hilarious and wise…

If you want wisdom, read this.

If you want humor, watch this.

What I Read This Week

1. How to Gift Experiences: Hanukkah has nothing to do with giving presents, but I don’t care. So if you are thinking about what to get people you love, consider gifting an experience.
2. Static Norms and Trending Norms: Great interview between two of our friends, Katy Milkman and Robert Cialdini.
3. Open AI’s Alignment Problem: Did the entire story around Sam Altman confuse you? Me too. Fortunately, I read Casey Newton’s Platformer.
4. Updates to ProPublic’s NonProfit Explorer: Not surprisingly, I love ProPublica, which does amazing investigative reporting about the nonprofit sector. They recently updated their online resources for researching nonprofits; take a look.
5. Read the Room: Loved this piece from Axios on body language. I kept it brief…