Cognitively complex? Or emotionally difficult? The germ of an idea.
Here’s a postulate: We tend to conflate the emotional difficulty of something with its cognitive complexity — and it gets in the way of our success in business.
Let’s define our terms:
- Cognitively complex: possessing many rational layers, elements, or valences. Examples would be advanced mastery of chess, organic chemisty, or computer-network architecture, or the level of complexity that routinely faces big-company CEOs as they try to make decisions for their companies.
- Emotionally difficult: things that are painful, like the death of a loved one, or facing one’s deepest fears in life.
My hypothesis is that, in our working lives, we often experience emotional difficulty while labeling it as cognitive complexity.
In cases like this, what’s really holding us back are deep-seated emotions — fear, self-doubt, apathy, or what-have-you. But who wants to admit that emotional hangups are hampering their progress on Big Project X? Aren’t we supposed to be grown-ups? Tough, business-minded professionals? Right?
It’s hard — painful — to confront thoughts like these. So we end up averting our gazes elsewhere. And what do we land on instead? The purported complexity of the tasks at hand.
It’s easy to tell your team: “This thing is way more complicated than we ever thought. We’re going to have to do a lot more research to get a grip on it.” It’s much harder to tell your team: “You know, there’s some complexity here, but I think what’s really holding me back is that I’m just afraid this whole thing is going to blow up and I’m gonna get blamed for it.”
Or how about this one? “Deep down I believe we’re headed down the wrong path, but I’ve been too afraid to say anything about it for fear of rocking the boat. I think we’ve been making this more complicated than it is, just so we don’t have to admit that it’s a failed project, plain and simple.”
If it’s about cognitive complexity, then all we need is more studies, more thinking, more meetings, more PowerPoint decks, more committees. We can do that. We know how to budget for that. Time to start adjusting the Gantt charts . . .
If it’s about emotional pain, then we have to muster the courage to confront our own hangups and those of our organizations. And where does that fit into the project-management lifecycle? Or the budgeting process? Or our quarterly reviews?
What do you think? Am I on to something here? I’ll be looking for examples of what I’m talking about in the business news; meanwhile, please share your own insights.
[Chess photo by dlkinney; grief photo by MegElizabeth.]
Category: The language of business, The working life5 Comments so far
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Yes, I think you’re on to something. I’d add that there’s another relationship between complexity and emotional difficulty: the amount of ambient complexity creates a lot of hiding places (scapegoats) for emotional difficulty. I’m interested in thinking about how we can remove the hiding places.
For example, after a certain number of people are involved in a big project, we throw up our hands and just wait to see what will happen. But if everyone could EASILY see who’s doing what, what has to happen next, etc., we could expose the sticking points and confront them out in the open. A similar argument could be made for sunshine laws in politics.
Amen, JohnD! What you’ve said is a great argument for sustained *clarity* and *accountability*.
In football, they have a stat called “missed assignment.” Players need this kind of feedback so they’ll *know*, “Okay, I missed that block. That’s my job. That’s why that play didn’t work.”
In actual fact, football plays are very complex as they unfold and they can still fail even though everybody does what they’re supposed to do — but knowing who had a “missed assignment” on which play is at least the *beginning* of wisdom for doing things better next time.
I think that in the working world we tend to emphasize an avoidance of mistakes rather than the pursuit of objectives. This leads to LACK of accountability and clarity, since people tend to engage in finger-pointing and other CYA activities instead of just saying, “You know what, that was my bad. I’ll have to fix that.”
Interesting how quickly the cognitive complexity vs. emotionally difficult conversation you’ve triggered has moved to one about accountability and transparency.
Being able to say “my bad” takes adultness and it is usually an adult who can distinguish what it means to be accountable and clear. But I often have the distinct impression that under the guise of our adult personae in our daily business transactions, a four-year old self is running the show for us unbeknownst to us and quite uninvited. What I mean is our sensibilities are often informed by powerful childhood triggers that render us less than powerful in our adult dealings. Waving to and acknowledging that four year old self, setting him/her gently aside and proceeding to distinguish our emotional responses formed by our childish selves can help give us, and others the space to examine the business process improvement activity or business challenge or project implementation goals minus *some* of the childish baggage. I know it sounds overly simplistic, but when I take stock that it is the tantrum child having a fit over the deadline and not the adult, I begin to have more space to examine what is material. I can’t think well with all the noise of my screaming 4 year old self distracting me. So I often find myself saying “ok, thanks for sharing”, now let’s my 56 year old self take back control. Recognizing other 4 year olds in a room also helps to diffuse non-productive situations.
I think one of the challenges is the common misinterpretation of accountability as “blame”. In an environment where making a mistake or trying something new and failing is seen as something “punishable”, people will continue to hide their mistakes, find someone else to blame or being afraid to try anything new. This includes creating the illusion of intellectual complexity so “no one can blame you that it failed- look how complex and hard it was”.
The smartest lesson I was ever handed is that while successes feel great and are wonderful achievements, you do not learn anything from them. You only really learn from failure.
When we get to a point that corporate cultures are willing to allow people to fail, and to assist them in learning from that failure, then people will stop being so afraid and creating lots of complexity to hide that failure.
Nan — Yes, yes, YES.
Keep it simple. Try out new things. When they don’t work, fix them, improve them, learn from them. And keep moving forward. DON’T get bogged down in trying to be perfect or faultless or brilliant or, above all, prescient.
Very often, with the very best ideas, you WON’T know until you try. So, go try. And if you’re a manager or company leader, make sure your people have room — and organizational safety — to go try.