Maniacs, Morons and Me
What you see is what you get...
“Out beyond ideas of wrong action and right action, there’s a field. I’ll meet you there.” – Rumi
Have you noticed when you're behind the wheel, anyone driving slower than you is a moron and anyone going faster is a maniac?
Of course, in the eyes of the ‘moron’ we’re the maniac, and to the ‘maniac’ we’re the moron.
Walk a mile in the moccasins of the maniac and we discover she’s in a hurry to get to the hospital bedside of a seriously injured relative.
Drive a mile with the moron and we discover he’s got his daughter’s wedding cake on the back seat of the car and knows he faces dire matrimonial consequences if it gets damaged in any way on the journey home...
We all know how much our attitudes and behaviour are affected by the circumstances we find ourselves in.
But it’s deceptively easy to forget the same applies to others.
That’s why when they do what we don’t want they look like maniacs, and when they don’t do what we do want they seem like morons.
This tendency to attribute the behaviour of others to disposition, personality, or character defects but attribute our behaviour to situational factors, forces, and influences is known as the fundamental attribution error, observer bias, correspondence bias, or attribution bias. 1
It’s useful to remind ourselves that when someone behaves in ways we dislike, they usually have good reasons.
Good from their perspective, that is.
In his 1992 bestseller, The Seven Habits Of Highly Effective People, Stephen Covey described just how powerful this effect can be, recalling this experience of a Sunday morning subway journey in New York. 2
“People were sitting quietly – some reading newspapers, some lost in thought, some resting with their eyes closed. It was a calm, peaceful scene.
Then suddenly, a man and his children entered the subway car. The children were so loud and rambunctious that instantly the whole climate changed.
The man sat down next to me and closed his eyes, apparently oblivious to the situation. The children were yelling back and forth, throwing things, even grabbing people's papers. It was very disturbing. And yet, the man sitting next to me did nothing.
It was difficult not to feel irritated. I could not believe that he could be so insensitive as to let his children run wild like that and do nothing about it, taking no responsibility at all.
It was easy to see that everyone else on the subway felt irritated, too.
So finally, with what I felt was unusual patience and restraint, I turned to him and said, “Sir, your children are really disturbing a lot of people. I wonder if you couldn't control them a little more?”
The man lifted his gaze as if to come to a consciousness of the situation for the first time and said softly, “Oh, you're right. I guess I should do something about it. We just came from the hospital where their mother died about an hour ago. I don't know what to think, and I guess they don't know how to handle it either.”
Can you imagine what I felt at that moment?
My paradigm shifted.
Suddenly I saw things differently, and because I saw differently, I thought differently, I felt differently, I behaved differently.
My irritation vanished.
I didn't have to worry about controlling my attitude or my behaviour; My heart was filled with the man's pain.
Feelings of sympathy and compassion flowed freely. “Your wife just died? Oh, I'm so sorry! Can you tell me about it? What can I do to help?”
Everything changed in an instant.”
Covey saw differently because his awareness of self in the context changed — several times in the same subway ride.
Until the father and children boarded the subway car, Covey’s awareness of self in context was a passenger enjoying a calm, peaceful Sunday morning ride.
When the father and children showed up as they did, Covey’s awareness of self in context was of being justifiably irritated at the children’s misbehaviour, the father being irresponsible, and everyone else being affected.
When the father revealed the backstory, Covey’s awareness of self in context changed again - to being a fellow human, free from judgement, criticism & blame, full of sympathy and compassion for a grieving husband & father wondering how to cope.
Covey summarises the story by quoting Henry David Thoreau: “For every thousand hacking at the leaves of evil, there is one striking at the root.” 3
He concludes that we need to “quit hacking at the leaves of attitude and behaviour and get to work on the root, the paradigms from which our attitudes and behaviours flow.”
The power of awareness, mindset, and paradigms illustrated by Covey’s story mirrors the core insight in Donella Meadows’ seminal paper ‘Leverage Points, Place to Intervene in a System’ — that the highest leverage for systemic change comes from change at the mindset or paradigm level.4
In an increasingly uncertain and unpredictable world, organisations need a culture of innovation, agility, and adaptiveness. Future-fit cultures like these are built on a foundational mindset or paradigm that recognises:
None of us ever sees the whole picture, so no-one on their own can ever hope to be smarter than everyone together.
What each of us sees is always and inevitably a partial, biased and one-sided perspective with some truth value (‘signal’) mixed with some misunderstanding (‘noise’).
By being genuinely curious about what others see that we don’t (yet) see, we amplify collective signal, attenuate collective noise, and at the same time cultivate mutual respect. 5
Seeking earnestly to improve our own signal-to-noise ratio, and helping others do the same, maximises our collective capacity to co-create new value.
Curiosity and respect for diverse perspectives is fundamental to future-fit cultures of innovation, agility, and adaptiveness. 6
When someone with this mindset encounters a colleague who sees things differently, they don’t regard them as mistaken, misinformed, misguided maniacs or morons.
They see someone whose different perspective, insights and ideas can help enrich their own.
They see valued colleagues with whom they can co-create new value in the world. 7
For anyone we work with, it's always worth taking the time and effort to understand their perspectives, seeking the ‘signal’ and being less easily influenced by the ‘noise’.
Only by empathising with their reality - their awareness of self in context - can we respect them as individuals with a uniquely different take on things.
That’s definitely worth remembering if you ever find yourself working with a maniac or a moron...
Attribution Bias etc on Wikipedia
Covey’s 7 Habits scored 4.14 out of 5 from more than 600,000 ratings on GoodReads.com According to Wikipedia it’s sold more than 25 million copies in 40 languages.
The quote is from Thoreau’s Walden (1854) and is actually: “There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root”.
Meadows’ Leverage Points paper is available online here.
The simple act of being genuinely curious about someone else’s perspective communicates respect for them as a fellow human being.
This two minute video describes the need for diverse perspectives whilst simultaneously avoiding fragmentation.
This six minute video describes how this happens.