About leaders, mice, choices and navigating our complex world
It appears that our world is getting more complex and confusing: lock-down, lock-down light, politics, presidential elections, unrest, demonstrations for and against numerous concept and events, uncertain or reduced income, housing issues, terror from the right, the left or fundamentalists, to eat or not to eat meat, organic, fake-bio, isolation, social networks — virtual or in person, news or fake news…
Whom or what can I still believe? Where can I place my trust and where is it out of place? How do I best way manoeuvre my life through such complexities? What is right and what is not?
Humans crave a degree of certainty. We want to know where we are going and what is ahead of us. When we experience life as too confusing or too unpredictable, our fears take over. Once that has happened, it is difficult to rain them in again with logic and reason.
Here is a real-life example: A manager, new in his job, visited the regional offices, bringing scones and muffins as afternoon tea, introducing himself, and listening to staff. Every regional office? No, unfortunately not. As his workload increased, he decided to skip the announced visit to the last remaining office.
Four years later, I facilitated a problem-solving workshop at that office. It quickly became apparent, that many employees there did not trust the regional manager, and that some even resisted him and his instructions. The reason? The manager had not honored his announced afternoon tea meeting.
Yes! After four years, the employees’ trust in him was still precarious due to a missed afternoon tea!
To explain what happened, I borrow Chip and Dan Heath’s metaphor of the elephant and the rider: The elephant stands for our emotional side, and the rider represents our rational side.
The strength of the rider is their ability to approach problems logically, to have a wider perspective, to think rationally, to plan long term and to think beyond the moment. The big weakness of the rider is the running around in circles through overthinking and ‘paralysis by analysis’. We probably all know someone with rider problems: Someone who torments themselves for 20 minutes about what to wear; Colleagues who spend hours brainstorming new ideas but never seem to make a decision. And who among us has not had moments of frustrating ‘brain fog’ because there were too many possibilities and angles to consider?
The elephant, on the other hand, is a herd animal with enormous strengths: love and compassion, sympathy and loyalty, courage, and a strong protective instinct. The fierce desire to protect one’s children and friends from harm is a characteristic of the elephant. The feeling you have deep inside you when you stand up for yourself or for someone else, that’s the elephant. The elephant is also the one who gets things done. On the way towards reaching a goal, the energy, endurance, and drive of the elephant are what is required. The weakness of the elephant is that it tends to prefer rapid success over long-term benefits; that it can be sluggish, stubborn, and hyper-nervous.
Sitting on the elephant, the rider holds the reins and appears to be the leader. But the rider’s control is precarious. Every time the six-ton elephant and the rider disagree, the rider will lose. Furthermore, elephants get really jumpy around mice. Mice represent the seemingly small things in life. Those we tend to overlook, and which can lead to big, unexpected reactions.
Back to my example: Dismissed as a trifle, the broken promise of an afternoon tea had far greater implications for the emotional relationships in that organization than the rational mind could grasp. How much smoother it could have been, had the manager been more mindful of that ‘mouse’!
What does this story about elephants, mice, riders, and afternoon teas have to do with how we deal with our increasingly complex world?
The complexity, and the number of demands placed on our rider have, for many of us, increased disproportionately — especially since 2020. It has become increasingly common to over-think and over-analyze, to make quick decisions and to revoke them. The apparent hesitation, uncertainty and overwhelm of the rider is the picked up by the elephant. Consequently, the elephant wants to storm ahead in any direction, sit down stubbornly and do nothing at all, or, thanks to old learned behavior patterns, moves around in circles.
Every time the rider and the elephant do not agree on how and where to move, every time the rider ignores the mice, or lacks understanding of the elephant’s reaction towards them, there is a problem. As soon as we realize that, our rider resorts to various ways of self-control and self-discipline in an effort to end these unhelpful patterns.
The rider may be able to assert themselves temporarily and attempt to steer or move the elephant by tightening time the rains a bit more. We do that by using self-control. We may carefully consider our words, control the impressions we might give, hold back our emotions, suppress fears, and try hard to maintain focus despite distractions around us.
However, as unlikely as the rider can win such a battle with the elephant, as unlikely is it that we are able to change our own insecurities, concerns, fears, and old behavior patterns by solely relying on self-control, iron discipline, reason, or pseudo-reason.
The complexity and unpredictability of the world around places high demands on our rational minds, our focus, and our ability to think analytically when making decisions. What will help us is not to underestimate our emotional side and the great impact our needs for security, predictability, reliability, trust and belonging have on all our actions and decisions.
In order not to brush aside the emotional side of being human, or to underestimate the mice, it helps to slow down our lives. Even just a little bit.
As we become more attentive, aware and mindful, we give our emotional and logical sides opportunity to work harmoniously with each other — giving ourselves the best chance to make helpful choices in navigating our increasingly complex world.
