A major new review from scientists at UCLA highlights practical ways to boost our open-mindedness. We ignore it at our peril.
5-minute read – 100% written by humans
We know what great leaders do, don’t we? They see the solution rapidly and then remain unwavering and single-minded in its pursuit, refusing to be blown off course by interference from lesser minds.
Or do they?
If we look past the myth of the rugged individual, we see that history teaches us something quite different. The ability to change one’s mind is a vital failsafe.
A failure to change minds
Catastrophes generally happen because of a failure to change minds when the situation changes. The greatest loss at sea of World War Two was the Allied Arctic convoy PQ17. It carried supplies from Britain to the Soviet Union through the Norwegian Seas. Intelligence suggested the powerful German battleship Tirpitz might sortie against it. From London, Sir Dudley Pound the First Sea Lord ordered the escorting cruisers to withdraw and the merchant ships to scatter.
It would mean the convoy broke apart into individual ships across the Arctic Ocean. Sailors on board the ships could see where the real threat was coming from. Numerous messages to that effect were sent back to London. But Pound pressed ahead with the order.
The feared attack by Tirpitz never came. Instead, the scattered ships were picked off by U-boats and aircraft. 35 ships and 28 lives were lost.
It was a familiar story of leadership failure. Pound had refused to change his mind in the light-of the real-world feedback from the frontline. In the Naval culture at the time, the idea that the First Sea Lord could be seen to be wrong was unconscionable. (Even if he was 7,914 KM away.)
Or take the example of George Oldfield, Assistant Chief Constable of West Yorkshire Police. He led the enquiry into the UK’s most notorious serial-killer, dubbed the “Yorkshire Ripper.” When Oldfield received letters and tape-recordings of someone claiming to be the killer and taunting him personally, he redirected the investigation’s entire resources towards tracking down the individual on the recordings.
The hoax disastrously diverted the inquiry for years. It led to the absurd spectacle of the tape being played in nightclubs across the country, in the hope that someone might recognise the voice. Oldfield never listened to the people around him who pointed out that all the information in the letters and the tapes was already in the public domain; hence there was a fair chance that it was a hoax. Like Pound, Oldfield seemed incapable of changing his mind.
Finding a way to prosper
In the world of business, Kodak, Nokia, Blackberry and Blockbuster may all have found a way to prosper if they’d had leadership with greater psychological flexibility. In other words, leaders who were able to update their models when the evidence changed.
On the flipside, Microsoft, IBM and Intel all reversed potential decline and went on to prosper because the people at the top were willing to change their minds.
So, let’s celebrate some great mind changers
Those who work closely with billionaire investor George Soros, note that one of his great strengths is his willingness to change his mind without defensiveness. In Fooled by Randomness, the author Nassim Nicholas Taleb recounts an anecdote in which Soros announces a strategy to his close circle that appears to be at odds with his analysis of the previous day. When Soros is questioned about this, he simply replies, “I changed my mind.”
As Taleb puts it, “One of his strengths is that he revises his opinion rather rapidly, without the slightest embarrassment.”
Jobs was a mind-changer
When we talk to business school grads about the benefits of changing one’s mind, someone will invariably push back citing the example of Steve Jobs. Wasn’t Jobs one of those heroically single-minded and unshakable leaders? In reality, Jobs was a mind-changer. He knew when to listen and adapt his view.
The first iPhone prototypes were designed with plastic screens which was normal at the time. Plastic was cheaper, lighter and widely used in handheld devices. But when Jobs carried a prototype in his pocket and found it scratched from contact with keys, he became adamant that the new iPhone would replace the plastic with glass. Determined to get what he wanted he summoned Wendell Weeks CEO of Corning, Apple’s glass supplier.
But Corning had a different view. Unbowed by Jobs’s reputation, Week’s sat him down and said, “let me teach you about glass.” Jobs listened. Weeks explained that ordinary hardened glass was not the best answer. If you simply make glass harder and thicker, it can become more brittle and impractical for a phone. Jobs changed his mind. Together they developed the solution that’s still used on iPhones today.
So, if there’s such a great upside, why do we humans find it so difficult to change our minds?
The backfire effect
Anyone who has tried to change someone’s mind by marshalling the evidence will have noticed that far from becoming more open minded, people frequently become more entrenched in their pre-existing viewpoint. Psychologists call this “The backfire effect.”
Spontaneous preference for own theory
Aiden Gregg and his colleagues at the University of Southampton first coined the term SPOT – spontaneous preference for own theory. They staged a number of experiments (ingeniously using imagined planets and aliens) which showed that we tend to believe that our point of view is right simply because it is our point of view.
Identity threat
This is because most of us self-identify as being smart. The logic works something like this: I believe X; I am smart: therefore , X must be true. Accepting we are wrong risks a sense of dissonance between the real world and the way we see ourselves; what psychologists call “Identity threat.”
What’s more, once we are already invested in an opinion, our ability objectively to draw conclusions by evaluating evidence slips out of the back door.
Motivated reasoning
Professor Dan Kahan and colleagues from Yale University sought to test this idea with an experiment. They presented a group with data about the efficacy of a skin cream. Most were pretty good at drawing out accurate inferences from this data.
But here’s the rub, most of us don’t feel strongly about skin cream. So, what happens when people are looking at data about an area in which they already have firmly held views?
The same sample of people were given data about the relationship between gun control and public safety. The experimenters already knew that some people were more pro-gun control and some more opposed. But both groups, for and against, concluded that the same data supported their previously held beliefs.
If we don’t feel strongly about an issue (in this case face cream), we can interpret the data relatively fairly. But if we do hold strong views on a topic (such as gun control) then we interpret those data to support those views.
So, do we need to train people at being better at interpreting data? Well, interestingly the more data-savvy people are, the better and more likely they are to use the data to support their views. Psychologists call this motivated reasoning.
The key to better decision making
The key to better decision making is to cultivate psychological flexibility. The conclusions of that review led by Stephanie Y. Dolbier (UCLA) with colleagues, about the science of open-mindedness interventions, are aligned to the methods that we encourage at Threshold. Here are three that people find most useful:
- Reduce Identity Threat: Spend a moment reminding yourself of what you truly value in your life and the achievements of which you are most proud. The confidence that gives you unhooks your sense of self from the decision. You are not the decision.
- Cultivate emotional awareness: The ability to step back and take an observer perspective on your thoughts and feelings without judgment, helps you to be OK with the discomfort of occasionally making the wrong call. Mindfulness often helps here. This is sometimes known as Wise Reasoning
- Prime your mind: Before you make a big decision remind yourself of a time when you have had the courage to change your mind on something. Identifying yourself as intellectually humble and psychologically flexible will make you far more likely to act accordingly.
To find out how we can help leaders in your organisation to be more impactful, influential and persuasive visit www.threshold.co.uk
