Overall 3.5 Stars of out 5: ***-
Margaret Heffernan provides a dizzying array of business and non-business stories where people and organizations have willfully blinded of themselves, been overwhelmed by the complexity of their situations, or otherwise would not hold themselves responsible for taking action in a dreadful situation, and as a result, get further into a bad situation that eventually collapses around them.
Warning: this book also has some very dreadful stories in it that can hit home personally for parents. Be aware that if you read it or listen to it, and you happen to have a strong imagination, it can be very disturbing at times. The stories are not just about organizations being willfully blind, but also individuals, and yes parents, being willfully blind with respect to how they treat their children. Remember that you cannot unhear some things.
Obedience, conformity, bystander effect, distance, division of labor, and money are many subjects that she goes into when describing willful blindness. Near the end of the book, she starts to give examples of how organizations have attempted to remove blinders. She also discusses how academia is trying to address willful blindness issue as well. These are some good basic tools, but they come more from anecdotes than from a list you can follow.
Probably the most frequent, useful advice comes in the form of expressing dissenting opinions as early as possible. Whether she discusses how children are trained to identify bullying in the schoolyard and encourage their friends to step up with them, or expressing a dissenting opinion in a board meeting early in the conversation on how to handle something before momentum takes over, she shows us the value of at least trying to do something and doing something early on.
One of the solutions that she suggests is to ensure we’re paying attention to history, so we don’t repeat things. That seems fine, but it’s a bit high level. Another solution she suggests is watching for patterns. She even goes so far as to bring in basic scientific methodology, which is to establish a hypothesis and then look for data that makes or breaks a hypothesis. That also is a lot of work, but she argues it is better than turning a blind eye to something that eventually will cause more damage. Most of the examples she gives are large macro level examples, making them a bit of a challenge for a small business leader to use practically.
Chapter eight talks about conformity and the natural non-thinking work that the brain does to conform automatically. It makes me concerned I am conforming to ideas at work that I don’t necessarily believe in, but after much exposure to the culture, I am naturally becoming acclimated to those ideals. Does this mean I have to act more quickly, so that I don’t forget my personal views? Should I just document my view so that I can revisit it later? Will that even work? Well that is actually what I do. I document my earliest thoughts, knowing that I will review them later and see how my mind is being changed by repeated exposure. This is simply protecting myself from the basic “familiarity breeds liking” concept from Psychology 101. The same concept applies when you hear a terrible song on the radio, but you know you will like it by the end of the month, because it gets played eight times a day.
Chapter thirteen goes into a particularly interesting discussion around how money can reduce an individual’s commitment to community. Where it has been historically considered as a motivator to do more for the individual, money apparently damages the ability or motivation to do more for the community. And once introduced as a motivator and then removed, creates a lasting negative effect well past the time of removal.
This discussion reminds me of Dan Pink’s whiteboard video on motivation, where knowledge workers are no longer being motivated by money once it hits a certain threshold. This concept is so critical to today’s management of good companies. It also plays into my own theories of how well companies (including my current one) must work to produce a good work opportunity to potential talent. Companies can’t just offer potential talent a lot of money and hope to attract and retain them. Companies must offer an exciting workplace, flexible hours, cool cultures, autonomy, inspiring leadership, trust, valuable work, etc… They can compete on their own terms, once companies realize that talent isn’t only interested in money. Salaries just address a low water mark for most knowledge workers. Matching a person’s salary needs removes that as a distraction.
Unfortunately the one thing I see regularly missing from this book is advice on how to keep yourself from being willfully blind on a small scale. The author does not seem concerned with providing simple or practical tools on how to protect yourself or guide yourself away from willful blindness. To that end, I’ll take a shot with a specific example.
I would suggest to any Entrepreneur or small business owner out there that willful blindness can be both a blessing and a curse for you. It’s a blessing when you can ignore some of the scarier things about trying to start your own company, such as you don’t have income, the risk of failure is insanely high, and yes, you don’t really know half of what you are doing yet. Should those fears stop you from trying? Maybe, maybe not; this stuff is all tailored to the individual’s life situation. But if you are like myself and many Entrepreneurs I have mentored, you must be willing to ignore the fears when you are at low points. Low points come, but that doesn’t mean you are wrong in what you are doing; sometimes business just sucks.
At the same time, willful blindness can be a business-destroying factor for you, when you choose to ignore the very important things you need to make your business successful. Over the years, I have come to learn significant things from each failure I have had along the way. Some of the most important things are having the right team in place for your venture, having expertise in the field you are pursuing, and having enough financial understanding of your business model to know whether you even have a shot at making it successful. Yes there are many more critical pieces, but I recall once instance where an Entrepreneur was referred to me for advice for his software company. He had somehow gotten seed funding and built a prototype, but he was now looking at a second round. He was the only founder, not a software developer, and had no idea on how different software business models made money. I kindly advised him to consider investing in businesses that followed his other strengths, which were strikingly obvious, and I even showed him competition with his app that had tried and failed at what he was doing years earlier. He initially seemed disappointed, but within a couple weeks he emailed me a message explaining how new information he had found was justifying that he was on the right track. I wished him well, and at the time I didn’t know of this book, but I wasn’t surprised that he was certainly suffering from his own willful blindness. In this case, my recommendation is to keenly listen to an advice given to you by mentors, and get particularly good at listening for what people don’t say. If you only listen for things that confirm your belief that your project is good or going to be successful, you’ll fail to recognize the risks that will eventually break your business anyway.
This is also true for me as a leader of an organization, and I have to regularly remind myself that not every initiative is going to work. Not every initiative will get buy in. If I am to be successful at driving something I truly believe in for the organization, I also have to be willing to hear that it is a bad idea or needs some major renovation before it can be successful. That’s not an easy thing to do, when my passion is so strong. If I proactively ask for feedback and strive to listen to what I am being told, what I am not being told, and watch for when people shut down (and just let me go ahead anyways without their support), I will have a better chance of success. We’re not always right, and staying aware of Willful Blindness will also help us ensure, we’re aware enough to change before it’s too late.
I listened to this on Audible. She does a fine job of reading her book. It reads well at 1.25 speed.
I wanted more practical tools I can use as a leader, but the books serves more as a warning than as a list of useful tools. It’s not inspiring, but I don’t think she intended it to be either. For that reason, I say this book is 50% dark meat, 40% white meat, 10% potatoes. The dark meat is the doom and gloom. The white meat is for the tools she does provide. The potatoes are for inspirational material.
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