Conflict sells.

Papers polarize issues to sell papers. Televisions shows and movies sell us villains and heros. Pure good and evil is so pervasive in our pop culture, yet it rarely exists.

For every Russell Williams there are hundreds of thousands of Canadians that could never be labelled ‘evil’ or even ‘bad’. So it is unfortunate that conflict sells, because its popularity hyper-sensitizes us to label the people and organizations we see in our daily lives as good or bad, and I’m as guilty as the next guy.

But experience has taught me that, whenever I start to think of a coworker, group or organization as an bad or as an adversary, I’m usually wrong. I now force myself to stop and think: Is the individual behaving badly because they are bad, or because they are being put in a bad situation? In my experience, there has been almost no case where bad behaviour could not be explained by a bad situation. As a result, I inevitably see bad systems, not bad people.

But I’m not saying that this is an easy thing to do, it isn’t!

If every time you interact with a person they seem to get angry at you for ‘doing your job’, something called ‘cognitive dissonance‘ kicks in. This is the uncomfortable feeling that you get when things don’t jive. You think “This person is treating me like I am an unreasonable or incompetent person,” and this very likely conflicts with your view of yourself. In an effort to deal with this dissonance, it is much easier to say to yourself, “well this person must be a jerkface”, than to cool your anger and think “this is the product of a pretty standard human in bad system or situation”. In fact, a more likely course of action is that you try and find other people who also think that this person is a jerkface, share your experience, and feel better that your observation has be corroborated by others (helping satisfying the dissonance). You also become more perceptive of the other actions confirming that this person is bad (confirmation bias).

It is human nature, but it just isn’t very productive.

Since it so hard to react in a positive way when you feel like you are being attacked, prepare yourself ahead of time:

Dog-ear a page in your notebook and write a few things down to prompt you the next time you are dealing with a confrontation. Some suggestions:

If you’re too angry to think straight, disengage!
He/she probably isn’t angry with you, it’s their situation
Say “I see that this is causing you concern, what can I do to help?”
I can tear a strip out of this guy/gal, but would it really help my cause?

Remember, the best place to find a villain, is in the movies.

Witch Hunt 2.0

Click to read the story behind the photo.

When something bad happens, it seems to be human nature to find something –or someone– to blame it on. A few-hundred years ago, it was easy to find a scapegoat for a bad harvest, mental illness of a loved-one, the sudden death of your goat, a boil on your butt, or a hangnail. This scapegoat was called a witch.

It must have been pretty easy to find someone in any 17th century town that could be easily labelled a witch. It could be someone that didn’t follow societal norms, had mental illness, had a preponderance of warts, or had the dreaded third nipple (these were sometimes called the ‘witches mark‘ as the nipple was supposed to be used by demons to feed).

Today we are so much more knowledgeable about the world. When we have a bad harvest, we generally recognize that weather patterns have a random element. Mental illness is generally considered to be something hereditary, or environmental, and not the result of being cursed. We seek rational and scientific explanations when things go wrong, right?

Not so in politics and business. It’s the Witch Hunt 2.o.

Now, instead of comparing the weight of the accused to a duck, the yard stick of choice is an auditor.

We like to think that auditors are unbiased, truth-seeking individuals right? Well, if your competence is estimated by your ability to find fault in something, I think you are likely to find fault in anything. For comparison, think of a crown prosecutor or district attorney: are they lauded by the number of cases they won, or with the number of cases where justice was done? Yah, when an auditor is asked to find fault, they go for the win too.

A case in point: Toronto Mayor Rob Ford goes after the Toronto Housing Board (TCHC).

Mr. Ford has asked for the resignation of the volunteer TCHC board members citing the auditor’s findings that revealed: “between $4 million and $10 million was wasted on sole-sourced contracts. The report also revealed issues with record-keeping at the agency and found that $200,000 was misspent on luxury chocolates, spa trips and a Christmas party.”

Wow, doesn’t that piss you off? A government agency wasting $10M and spending $200K on chocolate. The nerve! Fire all those evil volunteer board… WITCHES!

But lets scratch the surface by actually reading some of this auditors report:

Significant cost savings are likely possible if the recommendations contained in this report as well as the City Auditor General’s previously issued audit reports are implemented. Procurement at the TCHC is in the range of $200 million. Savings as a result of increased competition could in our view be anywhere from two to five per cent of this amount. Conservatively, cost savings of approximately $4 million to $10 million may be possible. In addition, significant savings are possible as a result of increased coordination of operations between the TCHC and the City.

Wait, 2 to 5%? I’d be willing to bet that any armchair quarterback could look at any organization’s books and find 2-5% that could have been saved. Would you call for the leadership’s resignation? If they took such liberties with $4-10M headline, I am starting to wonder how much was spent on chocolate…

What happened next? The volunteer, unpaid, counsellors were dismissed and replaced by a close friend of Rob Ford (he lead his transition team) who is going to receive an undisclosed paycheck! Wha?

The point of this post is not to show that Rob Ford is reading from a well-worn copy of ‘Dictatorship for Dummies!’, but how we as citizens and employees so often get duped by the same refrain: “The system is broken because of evil corrupt people that go to work every day trying to screw us!” Nobody seems willing to look at all the people they know, and at themselves, and realize that the vast majority of people don’t think this way (Rob Ford could perhaps be an exception here).

Lets look at some of the drawbacks of using the Witch Hunt 2.0 mentality when trying to improve organizational performance:

Successful organizations are based on trust, you start with a serious trust deficit if you treat the organization as they enemy
Fear is a poor motivator, when was the last time you heard of a team winning a championship because of fear?
One of your first moves is usually to oust a bunch of people who have organizational knowledge of the very problems you are trying to fix
A focus on bad people ignores a much more prevalent problem: bad systems