Harry 0:00

Self-deception is both a very positive thing and a very negative thing. And you could think of it in a positive light by thinking of it in terms of goal setting as a very positive form of self-deception, right? A goal is this thing in the future that doesn't exist, so you have to deceive yourself into imagining it existing in order to be able to mobilize your energy and your resources and your activities and decisions and everything that's necessary in order to realize that goal.

0:34

You're listening to Traction Heroes. Digging In to Get Results with Harry Max and Jorge Arango.

Jorge 0:44

Harry, it's good to see you.

Harry 0:46

That's a delight to see you too. Jorge.

Jorge 0:49

What's lighting you up these days, man?

Harry 0:51

I just got back from a two day course in Boston at MIT. The Sloan Business School has their executive education stuff. And I'm not part of the program per se, but somebody sent me a link to a course called Embracing the Unexpected co-taught by, Hal Gregerson, an MIT lecturer, and Ed Catmull, the founder and longtime president of Pixar Animation Studios and eventually Disney. And it was just an unbelievably great course, where he shared his insights over the, last 30 ish years on how to improve the world through organizational change and helping people deal with uncertainty and complexity and different time horizons and whatnot. So that's what's lighting me up. And he updated the book: if you haven't read Creativity Inc., I would go get a new copy of the expanded version and read it. I'm about halfway through. It's just amazing.

Jorge 1:50

I'm excited to know that the name of the workshop that you went to was Embracing the Unexpected because I've selected an excerpt of a book here that I think deals with this idea.

Harry 2:02

Ha! I love that.

Jorge 2:02

And you may have fresh insights coming off this experience. And what I'm gonna do is, I think I'm gonna read this first before telling you what book it is and who the author is. Okay? So I'm quoting here.

Harry 2:14

Yeah.

Jorge 2:15

"Your company has no choice but to operate in an environment shaped by the forces of globalization and the information revolution. Companies today basically have two choices. Adapt or die. Some have died in front of our eyes. Others are struggling with the adaptation. As they struggle, the methods of doing business that worked very well for them for decades are becoming history. Companies that have had generations of employees growing up under a no layoff policy are now dumping 10,000 people at a time onto the street. Unfortunately, that's all part of the process of adaptation. All managers in such companies need to adapt to the new environment. "What are the rules of the new environment? First, everything happens faster. Second, anything that can be done, will be done, if not by you, then by someone else. Let there be no misunderstanding: these changes lead to a less kind, less gentle, and less predictable workplace. Again, as a manager in such a workplace, you need to develop a higher tolerance for disorder. Now, you should still not accept disorder. In fact, you should do your best to drive what's around you to order." I'm gonna skip a little bit now. "You should be prepared for the shockwaves engendered by a brand new technique pioneered by someone you had never even heard of before. You need to try to do the impossible, to anticipate the unexpected. And when the unexpected happens, you should double your efforts to make order from the disorder it creates in your life. The motto I'm advocating is let chaos reign, then reign in chaos."

Harry 4:10

Tell me that is not Alvin Toffler.

Jorge 4:13

It's not Alvin Toffler. This is from a book by Andy Grove and I think it's coming up on thirty years; I think it came out in 1995. It's called High Output Management.

Harry 4:24

Oh yeah. That's a great book.

Jorge 4:26

I'm really drawn to this idea, particularly in this year where, at least in the field that I have most visibility into, which is user experience design, there's been a lot of upheaval. And when he writes about companies... the phrase he uses is "dumping 10,000 people at a time onto the street." We've seen a lot of that happening in our field, and it is a time of great upheaval. And this notion that we somehow need to balance chaos with order seems very appropriate for our time. And part of the reason I wanted to hear your take on this is that in some ways, I think your book is about reigning in chaos and focusing on the right thing. What does this excerpt bring up for you?

Harry 5:22

It brings up a topic that I've been discussing with John Cutler. I don't know if you follow his work at all. Just a brilliant guy and one of the people I look to in terms of being able to articulate some of the central ideas behind how to think about prioritization. And he's been pushing at the edges of a topic that I called out in a call with him. I said, "This is really about coherence." The idea that there are things that are incoherent and then there are things that are coherent. A laser is a coherent light beam. And It's very focused and very direct. And incoherent is very diffuse. When I hear that, "let chaos reign and then reign in chaos," what I hear very much was central to not only the approach that I take in prioritization, but also, what I was deeply immersed in the workshop. It's about being able to allow yourself to focus on the things that are required in order to stay on top of what's necessary to survive and thrive in the moment today, day to day, running the business or the organization, and also in that staying attuned to what are the softer, quiet signals of what's not working or what's lurking in the background that might impede or torpedo progress while simultaneously understanding that you have to point into the future sometimes quite far and make sure that you are continually investing in the insight development and experimentation and work that's required in order to pull that incoherence together that chaos together into a future that you co-create with the activities and the people that you're engaged in. And so it's this set of things that you have to do along multiple time horizons that have to be done at the same time, which is hard to wrap one's mind around. But you have to do the things that you need to do now, if you don't stuff doesn't work. And if you don't stay focused on the future five to seven to ten years out certainly in a large organization and arguably in almost any organization it becomes very difficult to end up going to a place where you would prefer to have gone. Because it's all about this notion of where you are in the present, it's easy to know where the stepping stones are. And as you move into the future, into a greater degree of uncertainty, you start to have to rely on to some extent faith that you're gonna put your foot down and you're gonna land on something solid. And as you get further and further into the future, sometimes you have to make fairly big jumps. And sometimes those jumps are wrong, but you won't know they're wrong unless you go there. And talking about the kinds of choices that leadership at Nvidia made, for example, to speed up its clock to six month development release cycles rather than the typical very long chip design development release cycles that exist in the industry, is an example of how Nvidia pursued a long-term vision while allowing chaos to reign in the moment. So those are just some initial thoughts that I'm having about two ideas that were discussed in the MIT course that I would've discussed here had I not taken that course, which is about knowing that you have to manage multiple timelines and multiple horizons and step into a future that becomes increasingly uncertain, but never take your eye off the work that allows you to keep going day to day, but keep shaping the future that you're hoping will, to a greater or somewhat lesser extent, become real over a longer term time horizon as you move into that uncertainty.

Jorge 9:52

Let's acknowledge that there is tension there between keeping your eye on the longer timeframe, bigger picture understanding of where things are going, and you also talked about the fact that you do have these near-term commitments, requirements. I think Andy Warhol talked about bringing home the bacon, right?

Harry 10:14

Exactly.

Jorge 10:14

Like, you gotta bring home the bacon, right? So, you have to be able to keep your focus on both of those time perspectives simultaneously. All the while dealing with the fact that you are in a... Grove's phrase was, "less kind, less gentle, less predictable workplace," which is a source of anxiety. When you were talking about your conversation with John, you said that there's work that we need to do, and I imagine that there's work at the level of the organization, but there's also work at the level of the individual, right? What kind of work, do you need to do in order to act skillfully under these conditions?

Harry 11:00

A couple thoughts come to mind. One is that people.... It's a crazy topic, self-deception, right? You hear the term self-deception and naturally you're probably gonna think of it in pejorative kind of negative terms, right? And yet, you think of somebody like Steve Jobs. I'll use him as an example of a visionary, right? Self-deception is what allowed him to create a vision and a reality distortion field in the future, and then navigate toward it. Self-deception is both a very positive thing and a very negative thing. And you could think of it in a positive light by thinking of it in terms of goal setting as a very positive form of self-deception, right? A goal is this thing in the future that doesn't exist, so you have to deceive yourself into imagining it existing in order to be able to mobilize your energy and your resources and your activities and decisions and everything that's necessary in order to realize that goal. And at the individual level, there's this notion of being able to hold a paradox. It's being able to hold two things as true. One is the truth of your current situation, the realities that you're dealing with day to day, the good and bad. But the other thing you have to hold as true is this possible future or even possible futures. The idea to be able to hold two things together that are in competition, that are effectively paradoxes as both possible truths at the same time. And in this case, those opposing truths are the realities of your day-to-day and the possible future that you want to create and what's necessary to get there. That's like the work, that's where hope comes from. That's where goal setting comes from. That's where having strong convictions about what's possible comes from. It's this idea that these conflicting realities can be true at the same time. One is an imaginary reality that you have to hold is true as a sense of possibility in the future. And the other is the present reality, which is very concrete that you have to interact with in order to make it happen.

Jorge 13:25

I would imagine that self-deception is useful up to the point where you start believing your own press. Because you do have to have a clean read on reality if you are to act skillfully, no?

Harry 13:40

That is that individual work. The individual work is being able to imagine this possible future and hold it as a reality, and yet not be sucked into this seductive sense that the present facts of your current situation are not true. You have to accept the facts of your current situation. A friend of mine whose father was a minister used to say, "The facts are friendly." The facts don't have an emotional, valence It's your reaction to those facts. So that's the crux of this issue. You have to maintain a fact-based objective sense of where you are in reality in time, while simultaneously being able to imagine or deceive yourself into imagining a possible future that you will have to also act on today or it won't happen.

Jorge 14:42

Maybe the word deception is triggering me a little bit. How about this? You could take the facts and have a clean read on the facts as clean as you can have and frame them in different ways. And some framings might lead you to despair, some framings might lead you to act in positive ways. And part of what I'm hearing at least is that the inner work entails losing the kind of innate capacity that we have to assign emotional valence to the facts so that we can take what we're observing and I'm thinking of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and the big don't panic thing –it's like, "Don't panic!" Right? Choose to frame the facts differently and maybe see where that takes you.

Harry 15:39

I like how you responded to the pejorative notion of self-deception. Because when I say self-deception and hear it, it doesn't have a pejorative meaning to me anymore. I think of it in terms of, if I can't deceive myself into seeing this possible future, I won't be able to convince other people it's possible. Everything will be hedging a bet, everything will be... I'll be qualifying everything: "If it were possible, or if we could get there," rather than saying, "This is what I see." And so the notion of framing, I think really helps remove maybe even remove that term from the conversation so that it shifts back to the idea of imagination. It shifts back to the idea of goals. It shifts back to the idea of possible futures or even possible selves.

Jorge 16:34

The reason that I think "deception" triggered me is that there might be a trap there at two different levels. One level is, you might go out of your way to limit your inputs to those that confirm your hypothesis so as to not fall out of your deception zone. As an information architect, I value having a clean read on the context, and it's something that I would want to keep. So that's one level at which it concerns me. But the other level is that it might suggest something like the law of attraction or wishful thinking. It's like, "Well, if I deceive myself enough, I'll achieve the coherence that you're talking about. I'll focus the laser beam enough to make this happen." And maybe you do make it happen, but did you do it at the expense of your ability to have a clean read on the facts?

Harry 17:45

So I love where you're going with this and here's why. I got caught up in the language of this, and what I was trying to get across was the magic of this. The work at the individual level is living in the middle. It's not going all the way out to the edge and fully deceiving yourself. And it's not staying locked into the presentism of current perceived reality. It's somehow this interplay between the possible slowly unfurling reality that could be with the ever present challenges of the grit of what's going on in the moment. And it's that in-between space that is that personal work. It's being comfortable being uncomfortable in that squishy space that makes it more likely that you'll be able to realize a future that doesn't necessarily exist and can only be imagined.

Jorge 19:03

Let's put it this way: among many possible ways forward, your ability to focus to achieve this coherence that we're talking about enough coherence to get your wood lined up behind your arrow, by definition, your limited time, resources, energy, etc. pointed in a direction that will make it possible for one of those possible futures to become actual, and ideally the possible future that you have framed as the most desirable one. And It sounds like there is internal work that needs to be done here, and I would like to bring it back to actionable things that folks listening in might do to achieve that level of coherence in their framing so that they can become traction heroes.

Harry 20:03

Yeah, I love that. And to me, there are really among all of the hundreds of tools at our disposal, as designers, information architects, as entrepreneurs, as traction heroes in the world, in our own mind anyway, understanding how to write a problem statement and writing problem statements, not just necessarily problems per se, but also opportunities. Like how do you succinctly articulate what you're trying to go toward or what you're trying to get away from and why? And by a succinct, I mean a short paragraph. And when you can do that, it puts you in a position of spelling out a compelling reason for change. Because absent of being able to spell out a compelling reason for change, why do anything different? I use a form that's in my book. It's called an Outcome Driver. It's a three sentence thing, and it's a very succinct statement of the current situation. It's a very succinct statement of the problem or opportunity, and a very succinct statement of how it's bad or good. And you tie those together, and you have an outcome driver, which is in effect a very short problem statement. And two or three or four of those, if they're lined up, they point in a direction of a compelling reason to do something different. And that gets you half of the equation. And the other is, what is the desired outcome? And that has a format. There's seven questions. I'm not gonna go into all of them right now 'cause it might be too much, but the idea is the combination of a set of outcome drivers and a desired outcome, which answers the question, what do you want? Who wants it? How will they know when they have it? across a spectrum of, what would be barely sufficient to what would be hopelessly idealistic and beyond. When you have those two things, you have a painting of a future, and that future painting becomes a bookmark for a possible future. So for me, working with people, those are two of the most fundamental tools I would want people to get comfortable with to spell out how they want the world to be different and how would they know if they had it.

Jorge 22:32

I love this. My preferred definition of design is: design is the means through which we make the possible tangible.

Harry 22:41

Totally.

Jorge 22:43

And it feels to me like this exercise is about making a possible future tangible and in so doing, bringing it closer to reality, right? Because once it's more tangible, first of all, the process of doing that forces you to think more rigorously, maybe? I mean that might be overstating it, but it at least forces you to think through what the shape of this future might be, what conditions might be like once it happens and what the context might need to be to make that come about. So it almost like starts suggesting the plan, which, might be maybe, again, not self-deception, but maybe it's self-confidence, right? Once you have a plan, now you are more likely to be able to line up your efforts and achieve the coherency that you were aspiring for earlier.

Harry 23:35

Yeah, I think that's right. And I actually think the plan is the fourth step. I think there's a third step. So if the outcome driver or problem statement is step one and the desired outcome to paint a picture of what's wanted is step two, the step three before the plan is actually answering the question, "What would have to have been true to realize this future?" And then you start with that in the future and you work back to the present. I call it back planning. And then once you know what would have to have been true and you spell it out in words as stated events in the past, not activities that are happening, but rather a set of recursive outcomes from the present to the past, then you can look at what activities would you have to engage in order to realize that possible future that becomes your plan.

Jorge 24:34

Well, Harry, I'm very inspired by this conversation. This is very useful. Thank you so much. I look forward to having the next one.

Harry 24:43

Oh, this is just so much fun. Thank you so much, Jorge.

Narrator 24:50

Thank you for listening to Traction Heroes with Harry Max and Jorge Arango. Check out the show notes at tractionheroes.com and if you enjoyed the show, please leave us a rating in Apple's Podcasts app. Thanks.