Jennifer Garvey Berger has written a thought-provoking book, Unlocking Leadership Mindtraps – How to Thrive in Complexity. The book’s main premise is that the human brain was designed for a simpler time when the world wasn’t as complex as it is today. As a result, our brains today are filled with “mindtraps” that Berger defines as “part cognitive bias, part neurological quirk, part adaptive response to a simple world that doesn’t exist anymore”.

The author lists five major mindtraps:

  1. Simple stories – “Your desire for a simple story blinds you to a real one”.
  1. Rightness – “We look at the world and believe we see it as it is. In truth, we see it as we are, a gap that is as large as it is invisible”.
  1. Agreement – “Longing for alignment robs you of good ideas”.
  1. Control – “Trying to take charge strips you of influence”.
  1. Ego – “Shackled to who you are now, you can’t reach for who you’ll be next”.

Berger recommends different keys for unlocking these mindtraps.

Simple Stories

  • Make this person a hero– “When you realize that you’re carrying a simple story about a person or a group of people, it can be useful to name the role they’re playing and then intentionally switch the role and see what that allows…See if you can reframe her actions as the hero in her story rather than the villain in yours”.
  • Carry three different stories– “’To disrupt the simple stories you tell, you can develop the habit of carrying multiple stories about the events in your lives. The best way I’ve found to do that is to notice your story and then create another one. And then another. And another…The point is to notice your simple stories, remember they’re simple, believe in them less and use this habit to multiply the options you are considering”.

Rightness

  • What do I believe and how can I be wrong? – “What do I believe is an important question for two opposite reasons. The first is that without it we often believe things without noticing we have a belief; it feels like noticing the truth…Naming these as our beliefs opens up the possibility that we or others could have other beliefs and not simply be wrong…The second reason is the opposite. Sometimes we really don’t know what we believe”.
  • Listening to Learn – “The way we respond to others can keep us out of the trap over time. The most important escape move when we are trying to get out of the rightness trap is to change the way we listen. It turns out that much of the time we listen to win. Or to fix…What we need to escape the trap is listening to learn”.

 Agreement

  • Reframing Conflict – “We could understand conflict (carefully handled) as a way to deepen our relationships with one another and disagreements (carefully handled) as a way to broaden our solution set”.
  • Could this conflict serve to deepen a relationship? – “It is a challenge to make conflict about resolution rather than winning. Resolution is about understanding one another more deeply so that you can come to a third way together, a way neither of you had considered before…We’ll have to really hold on to the idea that other people can disagree with us and still be right”.
  •  Disagree to expand – “We can disagree with one another in order to expand our possibilities…In unpredictable times, coming up with an answer that has been tried before is not that helpful because who knows how it will go this time”.

 Control

  • Shift thinking to influence – “Instead of craving control, in complexity we have to shift to thinking about influence. We will not be able to make things happen, but we can be thoughtful about how we support the emergence of the things we want”.
  •  What can I enable? What could enable me? – “One of the most helpful ways to shift away from thinking about outcomes to thinking about influence is to consider what seems to enable the direction you most desire. Thinking about enablers helps us resist thinking about causes – which is what our controlling minds want us to believe”.
  •  Experimentation at the edges – Looking at the journey instead of the destination allows us to think about “experimenting – trying something where we really don’t know what might happen next to see if it helps us travel in the direction we seek. We also want to experiment at the edges rather than at the very center of the issue”.

Ego

  • Who do I want to be next? – “Asking ourselves and others to think about who we will be next keeps us from falling into the trap of believing we have arrived, and that keeps us living in a world of possibilities instead of creating and defending the current reality”.
  • Listen to learn from yourself – It’s important to question “how you see the world in such a way that your current perspective is the one that arises for you… By asking questions and listening to yourself, you can find out what’s really shaping your thinking and you can begin to find your own growth edge”.
  •  Look to your future instead of your past – “This “allows us to release some of the pressure of defending where we are, and encourages us to think with curiosity at the way life is supporting us to grow into the next version of ourselves”.

Unlocking Leadership Mindtraps – How to Thrive in Complexity is an important book to read in our VUCA (volatile, complex, uncertain, ambiguous) world.