Why So Pessimistic?
On June 12th of this year, I embarked on a three day journey from Portland, Oregon to Madison, Wisconsin in a fifteen foot Uhaul® truck that contained our eldest son and his girlfriend’s belongings. What a great father-son bonding experience!
On the morning of the second day, we departed from Bozeman, MT and headed east on Interstate 90. Our first bit of excitement came as we crossed the Yellowstone River for the first time in Livingston, MT. If you’ve been keeping up with the news, the Yellowstone experienced major flooding in mid-June, driven by heavy rains and a rapidly melting snowpack. To say that the river was angry would be a gross understatement. Trees and other debris careened over whitecaps in wild, muddy waters that resembled boiling chocolate milk. It was quite the sight.
As we proceeded east, the landscape became flatter and the road was dominated by large over-the-road trucks. As we approached the outskirts of Fargo, ND in the late afternoon, I was in the left lane, slowly passing an eighteen-wheeler to my right. Ahead of me were two more eighteen-wheelers traveling abreast. Sandwiched between all four of us was a Toyota Prius—one of the original hybrid-electric cars that’s tiny in comparison to the behemoths to its front and rear.
We cruised in unison in this configuration for a few miles—all traveling at a brisk 75 miles per hour. One wrong move by any of the monsters on the road would have spelled certain doom for the inhabitants of the Prius. What struck me in that moment was the incredible amount of trust we place in complete strangers when we’re on the road. We know nothing about the drivers’ backgrounds, skill levels, or temperament. We simply trust that each driver is going to follow the rules of the road to keep both themselves and the other participants in this vehicular dance safe.
After this unique configuration of vehicles drifted apart, I thought more about the mutual trust we share with unknown drivers when we’re on the road. Any seasoned driver is consciously aware that accidents happen frequently and most of us have been in situations where an inattentive or malicious driver has created a high risk environment that we’ve been caught up in or had to navigate through.
Instead of waking up the next day, committed to never drive again, we tend to compartmentalize the negative experience we just had and get right back on the road. We do so in part because we tend to underestimate the risk of a traffic accident due to optimism bias. In addition, the rules of the road are assumed to be universally understood and traffic control signs and signals are ubiquitous. As a result, we don’t have to blindly trust other drivers, we can trust and verify. We can use our senses, skills, and experience—coupled with clarity regarding the rules of the road to anticipate the behavior of other participants in a traffic pattern.
Pessimism Bias at Work
As Fargo, ND came into view, I began comparing how we behave and treat one another on the road to how we behave and treat our fellow humans at work. When we’re on the road, resetting our trust meter after a negative experience is more straightforward because (a) we’re in control of our own vehicle, (b) we have no emotional or personal connection with other drivers on the road, (c) we make the assumption that we will encounter a completely different set of drivers when we set out on our next journey, and (d) rules are clear and visual management tools are plentiful. These factors contribute to an optimism bias that’s durable.
In business, these conditions are reversed and pessimism bias prevails. Yes, we may have some degree of control over our own work, but our individual or team contributions are typically part of a much longer value stream whose outcomes we have limited control over. Also, while we typically arrive at our first job or a new place of work with trust as the initial condition, we quickly develop personal connections with our co-workers, splinter into tribes, and adopt cultural stereotypes regarding who the good and bad actors are in the business based primarily on hearsay. Hence, when a service failure occurs along the value stream driven by a colleague or another team, trust is easily broken and cultural viewpoints tend to be reinforced. Finally, verification of the root cause of a service failure can be difficult if goals and metrics are neither clear nor shared.
To reduce pessimism bias in business, we can do the following:
Instead of thinking that co-workers from other teams are “out to get us” or are our competitors, remember that you’re all on the same team with common goals and a common purpose. Gossip at the watercooler can be awfully tempting, but the emotional and physical waste the watercooler can generate is just not worth the temporary high from pointing fingers or berating a colleague behind their back. The titillating sensationalism of Real Housewives of ___ or Below Deck ___ or Big Brother Season ___ may be fun to talk about, but we should refrain from infecting our organizational cultures with this mindset.
Improve organizational clarity by sharing goals and expected outcomes between departments that operate along the value stream. Put simply, if one part of the organization does not know what the other is up to, then trust is very difficult to establish.
Make human skill development a priority in your organization. Here, we start with the recognition that we’re all fallible humans. The fact is that emotions do play a role in business and to ignore them is a sure-fire way to ensure a “car wreck” between individuals and teams. Communication, empathy, situational awareness, and self-awareness are just a few of the skills that must continually be nurtured to create high-functioning teams. An understanding of various cognitive biases is also important.
Install effective visual management tools and ensure their transparency within and across teams. If there’s a known blinking red light in one department, team members from other departments will be more willing to help. If Suzie is waiting for an output from a different department but is unaware of current challenges that are constraining outputs, then Suzie will stew and create negative narratives that may or may not be based in fact. Alternatively, if Suzie is aware of challenges in the upstream department, she may be more willing to help alleviate them. At a minimum, she’s likely to be more understanding of the delay.
Conclusion
As we come to the end of our exploration of the differences between how we approach trust on the road versus at the office, the big difference is human connection. When we’re on the road, the drivers of other vehicles are nameless, faceless humans that we’re likely to never see again. No lasting relationship exists, so the prospect of being hurt emotionally is much lower.
At the office, we do forge relationships—some that last a lifetime. There, it’s much easier to be emotionally affected by the callous actions of a co-worker or not being in the loop on the status of an important project. We do take things personally. We do have feelings. This is why we need to work diligently to reduce pessimism bias through consistent and effective communication, reinforcement of clarity, and establishment of transparent operational metrics.
