Episode 23: Limitations of self awareness and memory, disposition in complexity, navigating crisis using diversity and distributed decision making, and getting rid of individual leadership and embrace contextual and crew

This is episode 23 with Graham Norris and Dave Snowden. Welcome to the Futures Intelligent Leadership Flowcast. This is your host, Tyler Mongen. I am the president of Haku Global. This is a space for globally minded experts to dialogue about the future of leadership with a focus on the key question, how can leadership be more intelligent about futures?

From this conversation, innovative wisdom, practical tools, and actionable insights emerge to help future-ready leaders thrive in an uncertain, complex, and exponentially changing world. Let's jump in to the dialogue. Aloha and welcome to this episode of the Futures Intelligence Leadership Podcast. This is your host, Tyler Mongen, president of Haku Global.

Today's episode my co-guests are Graham Norris and Dave Snowden. Graham Norris is the founder of Foresight Psychology, delivering keynotes and facilitation to help people get comfortable with the future. and make better decisions his doctoral research focused on change adaptability and mindfulness among knowledge workers in china which has been experiencing exceptional rapid change and development over the past

several years. The subjects of the study showed that resilience and flexibility are key to overcoming biases and primal thinking that make optimal decision making in the modern world challenging.

Dave Snowden is a returning guest to the podcast. We're happy to have him here today. Dave is the founder of Cognitive Edge which was founded in 2005 with the objective of building methods, tools, and capability to utilize insights from complex adaptive systems theory and other scientific disciplines in social systems.

Even if you're not familiar with Dave, you may be familiar with or even used one of his decision-making frameworks called the Kniffin Framework, which is developed while at IBM to help understand the context for decision-making. You can find out more about Dave and his work at www.cognitive-edge.com. In this dialogue we discuss how uncertainty impacts our understanding of space and time.

the limitations of self-awareness and memory, the importance of disposition in complexity, how to navigate crisis using diversity and distributive decision-making, why leaders need better decision-making metrics, and why we need to get rid of the culture of the individual leader and embrace contextual and crew-based leadership. Let's listen.

So aloha, Graham and Dave. Thank you both for joining me here on this episode. And as always, I want to start with this key question of how can leadership be more intelligent about futures given this climate of uncertainty, complexity?

and exponential change in the world. And I'd love to start with Graham and hear your perspective from your work. Well, thanks very much indeed, Tyler. You know, I think looking at the pandemic, I've just been sort of blown away by... looking at how this disruption has really shifted people's perception of space and in particular time and that's something we can look at later on but maybe addressing your specific question I guess

I guess awareness is really the first thing that really comes to mind and awareness of probably a couple of things. Awareness of uncertainty and the impact that uncertainty has on the way we think. And I think because we are sort of our brains are sort of little prediction machines and when something comes along that sort of shakes all of that up and creates a lot of uncertainty like we're seeing at the moment.

You know, the impact of that is, you know, we're sort of highly motivated to reduce that uncertainty. And that can mean, for example, you know, trying to gather lots more information, which itself presents a whole host of problems. or trying to boil things down to some sort of binary black and white answers that oversimplified the situation, or even just sort of simply giving up and not sort of doing anything at all, letting the future hit us.

And so you see that with people saying, okay, wait and see, or, you know, talking about going back to normal, that kind of thing. So awareness of the uncertainty, the psychological impact of uncertainty is one thing. And I say the other thing.

the other sort of awareness is of our limitations. So even though we are little prediction machines and we are one of the few animals that can think productively about the future, we're still not very good at it. You know, our memories are... notoriously unreliable, we take into account the wrong information, we don't analyze it very well, we don't look at all the options.

And so I think sort of understanding those limitations that sort of think about the future really isn't the strength of ours. and acknowledging that and seeing what we can do to use the tools and the methodologies and everything else of foresight to help us make better decisions. So I think those two areas are what really stand out for me. Great. Thanks, Graham. And Dave?

Probably a slightly different take on this. I think part of the problem we got with uncertainty is we confuse leadership with the leader. So we assume the individual is paramount and the individual's psychological state is that. And we're not so much prediction machines, I think that's the wrong metaphor, both the concept of prediction and machine.

What we are is pattern sensors and we're better at sensing patterns in collective groups than we are individually. So we evolved to make decisions as extended families and tribes. And in that context, we can handle very high levels of uncertainty. In fact, nobody would attempt to forecast or predict at the family level, but we do it all the time at the company level.

So I think one key thing is to understand that collective leadership has more resilience than individuals as leaders. And you see that in phenomena like crews, for example, where people are trained in role and role expectation. So I was talking about this this morning with another group. So you can have a leadership crew, which means the pilot can change. So it's not always the same individual, but there's always a pilot. And that's where some of the new thinking is going.

I think the second thing is in a complex system, and we are in a complex version on chaotic system, what matters is managing the dispositional state. So that I'm going to be slightly technical here. So the energy gradient of exit. lower than the energy gradient of continuing to make things worse. And that actually means prediction is a very dangerous thing to attempt. It's actually more important to describe the present.

and to identify what in complexity is called the adjacent possibles, the spaces that you can move to which are proximate to where you are, and to keep options open within that. So I think that the second thing is this concept. dispositionality. And I think the third thing is how you get and use information. So we're now talking about big data, rich data and thick data.

So kind of like big data is high volume stuff, algorithmic, interpreted, that's the tarot type stuff. Thick data is ethnographic data. And then rich data, which is where we work. is cell theftnography or abductive research where you're actually using a cognitively diverse group of people to actually sanitize and feed you data so you can see wider patterns within that.

yeah and one final point going back to where i started on the individual most of us don't talk for example these days about cognitive bias because what you've actually got a cognitive heuristics Evolution doesn't throw out things which don't have utility and every single bias actually collectively has utility because it reduces the cost of making decisions, the energy cost of making decisions.

So things like inattentional blindness mean that we can actually cope. If we paid attention to everything, we couldn't cope with the volume of information. So once you recognize that, that's where you move into this culturally diverse...

interpretation of data so you can see dominant patterns and outlier patterns before you make a decision. Yeah, that's really interesting because I know a lot of people do talk about bias as, you know, it's inevitable, it's there, but as a leader, you're supposed to try to get rid of it, you know, or are you supposed to try to work with it? What's your take on that, Dave? You can't get rid of it.

So if we take the classic case on inattentional blindness, if you give radiologists or highly trained individuals a batch of x-rays, on the final x-ray you put a picture of a gorilla which is 48 times the size of a cancer nodule. and you've previously asked them to look for anomalies, 83% of radiologists won't see it, even though their eyes physically scan it, because they're not expecting to see it. Now, in overall energy terms, that makes a lot of sense.

But under conditions of uncertainty, you need to find the 17%. Now, that won't be done by leadership training exercises or focusing on the individual or trying to get rid of the bias. It's done by presenting situations to literally thousands of people for abstract interpretation. So you can find dominant views, but you can also find minority views like the 17%. And that's kind of like distributed decision support.

And that's built on the weak signal detection work that we originally did for DARPA in the US, both before and after 9-11, is you're not going to see things by becoming more rational. You're going to see things by becoming more distributed. if i was summarizing it quickly any follow-up thoughts on that graham no i totally agree yeah i mean uh some of the things i've looked at in terms of how people come to the decisions is because for example people's

Memories are not that reliable. At an individual level, it's impossible really for people to, maybe impossible is a strong word, but very difficult for people to address those biases. and sort of tackle those heuristics and but at a group level they can still come up with productive decisions that will you know be safe for them for the future. So for example I was looking at a hunter-gatherer tribe in Madagascar.

and individually they can't remember accurately what happened in the past and how much rainfall there was and if they planted crops what the results was but as a group they could still know and still diversify the risks by planting things that were either productive in the rain or not productive in the rain, so they wouldn't be short of food if there was or wasn't rainfall. And so as a group they could do that, but individually they would have probably failed and perished.

So that cognitive diversity was essential there. Absolutely, absolutely. Dave, some thoughts? On that, I think...

I think this is kind of like difficult, all right? I think that the danger is we go down simplistic routes, yeah? We try and jump on a single approach. Basically, you make decisions very differently in different contexts and the level of collective variation you need changes.

So if I take, I mean, we're doing work at the moment on EU handbook and how to manage a crisis. So if you're in a crisis, you've got a variety of routes out. So, for example, it's quite probable you've just ignored previous experts. And there's nothing especially wrong with that because somebody always advises you of disaster. So if you're a politician, you've got about 50 disaster predictions in front of you.

the fact that retrospectively it turns out the one you should have paid attention to is one of the ones you didn't is not really your fault when it comes down to it, right? But if you are in that crisis, then probably you need to go and apologise to the experts you ignored and under-resourced and let them run things for a bit.

If you're not sure which expertise to judge, so for example, the conflict between behavioural science and epidemiologists within the UK government decision making, you probably need to actually get highly focused. transdisciplinary competition over no more than two or three hours between different expertise to see what's in common what's different how you should apply that and there are structured methods for that

If you've got a series of hypotheses each of which is coherent then you run safe to fail experiments. If you're not sure you've got all the hypotheses identified. You do a mass scenario situational assessment and you involve very large numbers of people from different backgrounds. So the key thing is to have those tools and capability known and ready to run.

for when you need them. You can't be rushing to ad hoc decision processes for a crisis after the crisis has happened. And one of the ways we talk about this is you need to create network capability for ordinary purpose. that you can then activate for extraordinary need. So creating networks in a crisis is better than not having them. Creating them before the crisis, then repurposing them, that's actually more stable.

Now, I guess for both of you, have you seen, I'll start with Graham, have you seen some good examples of leadership? Or what's your take right now, I guess, on leadership in general and what you've seen and how they're responding? We were talking about living in Japan earlier. So I was living in Japan.

in the uh during the financial crisis 2008 2009 i was working for a financial news service at the time we used to handle the earnings reports so companies there just like other places they will tell you the earnings and also give you a forecast about their expectations for the upcoming quarter or year or whatever and at that time they just stopped doing it so the companies in Japan and other places like well you know Lehman Brothers has gone bankrupt

The situation now is just too crazy. It's pointless to give a forecast. And we're seeing that again now. Companies saying, well, you know, we have no idea what's going to happen. I think that's really sort of a terrible approach. because very very unhealthy because the future is still there and you still need to have an opinion about it and even in good times and still you don't know what's going to happen still ranges and just because you know various you know probabilities have changed

doesn't change the fact that there was still a range of possibilities and you need to have an opinion about that. And so I think, you know, I don't want to sort of misappropriate a movement or a term, but I think... you know, when the uncertainty increases, people will need to lean into the future more and get their arms around it and try a little bit harder. I mean, I was talking with someone yesterday who works for a software company and he said,

his company was you know deferring decisions on various things and actually not you know that sort of giving up responsibility for the decision-making you know they've actually decided not to do anything And sort of those implicit decisions that are being made, I think it's a little bit worrying.

um you know when i'm looking at sort of leadership in general i see a lot of people sort of um trying to sort of hide behind the uncertainty and saying well you know we don't know what's going to happen so we're going to have to take this sort of hands off a little bit wait and see approach There are probably three things to say. One is one of the golden rules of crisis management is the centre coordinates but it distributes decision making.

Because the minute the centre starts to make decisions, it gets sucked into the detail and it can't do the coordination. So whereas in the early days, you might make some hard decisions about slap-down constraints just to create some stability. As soon as possible, you move into coordination. So that's kind of like golden rule number one. And certainly some of the NHS people we're working with at the moment are demonstrating that big time on a leadership role.

It's partly because they've been taught, but the fundamental role is don't make the decisions coordinated, because you've got the big picture. But if you're going to distribute the decision-making, you distribute to processes, you don't distribute to individuals. Because individuals will have their own agenda you can't trust, so cruise is one aspect.

we use things like three people from a diverse background who don't know each other to validate difficult decisions say on ethics so there's various ways you can create structured processes around that i think the other thing is that you need and again the good leaders i'm seeing doing this is you need to start doing the lessons learning and i'm deliberately saying lessons learning not lessons learned during the crisis

So again, we're deployed at the moment across Welsh public officials, across NHS staff, using diary-based software to capture lessons learnt and opportunities for innovation now. Because with the benefit of hindsight, all sorts of biases will come into place. The way we remember things after the event is fairly different. And I think the other, the sort of third lesson is you communicate by engagement.

So people need to be engaged in situational assessment and near-term foresight rather than be communicated to. So we're, for example, using the whole workforce as an assessment capability to support leaders.

because then you're communicating by questions you ask them to engage with rather than make them passive recipients and there's stuff on there but overall i would i would i would say And this is actually a complexity v-systems thinking distinction of significance, which I'll bring into play here. Most of the systems thinking methods over the past four or five decades have focused on defining the ideal future state than trying to close the gap.

And certainly the anthropological side of complexity or ISIT has always said that's fundamentally an error. What you need to do is to describe the present and identify which pathways you can take. Now I think during a crisis, you don't want to be imagining a wonderful future, but you do want to be, to use Graham's phrase, leaning into the adjacent possibles.

yeah so yeah not you know keeping your options open because you're starting a journey you're not trying to achieve goals and it's that ability which comes with the coordination and the communication of our engagement all of these sort of things hang together

Just follow up real quick, Dave, on that, because I think it's a really interesting perspective on it, because a lot of people are thinking about the goals, like you said, and trying to fill the gap. How does a leader... um lead through that journey when people want that that vision you know oh first of all i mean if anybody's got kids knows you don't just do what people want right

this is kind of like one of the fundamental errors all right part of your role as a leader is sometimes to do things that people don't want right But there are different types of visions. So let's take an example. When Kennedy did the famous, we will get a man on the moon by X. He actually knew then it was an engineering problem, not a theoretical problem.

which actually means you could set some type of goal. I mean, one of the ones I would like people focused on at the moment is the fact that we now know how to refreeze the poles. So the theoretical part of that work is done. it's now an engineering program and if society rose to the challenge we could give ourselves another 10 to 15 years over the five we've currently got to sort things out yeah So that's setting a vision based on the fact that it's a matter of challenging people to execute.

and it's achievable and it's alignable and the criteria aren't so tight that you can have flexible goals and flexible achievements. Kennedy actually took a big risk, but it kind of played off. The other is where you ignore the present. So if you look at it, what I'm doing there is I'm not ignoring the present. I'm saying we're now at a stage where we can do this aspirational leap. So it's actually an adjacent possible. Land a man on the moon.

It's no longer wild science fiction. It's actually good engineering. It's just a matter of time to execute. The danger is people don't do that. So what actually happens in leadership theory over the last 30 years has perpetuated this. The leader sets the vision.

They ignore the present. Leader is brought in from outside. We no longer promote leaders internally. We have people in sideways from consultancy firms. And they ignore where we currently are in favor of where we should be. And that's what's really dangerous. In a crisis, it's even worse because you can give people false hope or you also get hit with what are called inconvenient truths. I mean, the British Prime Minister got hit with that in Parliament this week when...

He kind of like denied something which turned out to be true. So you don't want to make yourself a hostage to fortune and goals, non-achievement of goals. means that people lose confidence in you as a leader in your leadership group. So some of the things for example are setting goals about what we don't want to do, not goals about what we do want to do.

because it's much easier to actually get agreement on the negative and to avoid the negative than it is to focus on a positive. It gives you more options, gives you more confidence. which actually matches fairy stories. All fairy stories we tell our children are not stories about achieving the family goals or the KPIs. They're stories about things that we don't want children to do. We teach through failure.

So I think the sense of direction is the key thing. A leader's goal is to set a sense of direction and be open to discovery on journeys. Because if you start a journey, you can sense novelty, you can change what you do. If you have very specific goals, you either achieve or don't achieve them, it becomes binary. Any follow-up thoughts on that, Graham?

It's a very interesting perspective, actually. Almost talking about the way you approach the future is sort of dependent about your attitude toward the present. that's a really important point is to understand the present properly otherwise you know your bearings towards the future aren't quite right because you know you know often

You know, it reminds me of some research I was reading about hot stimuli. Are you familiar with hot stimuli? Maybe you are, Tyler. You're looking at neuroscience. Yeah. No, I haven't heard that term. Hot stimuli, so hot stimuli are sort of things that evoke the sort of basic instincts that can be sort of sexual desire or fear or hunger or these kinds of things and they found that if you

If you sort of evoke that kind of response in people, then they sort of give up looking at the future and everything comes about right now. And so their ability to sort of project into the future or plan. falls apart. I think that the research is really about looking at then they got men to look at you know women in bikinis cavorting around or I think they even just gave them a bra to you know to play around with and then they

Their view of the future was a quaint academic term, a time perspective collapsed toward the present. So basically their view of time just became all about the present. And interestingly for women, I think looking at fast cars evoke the same response for some reason or another. And so, you know, you can see this a little bit now is, you know, people's time horizons seem to be shortening.

um to the fact that they can't even really tell even what sort of day of the week it is or anything else so um you know there are healthy ways to look at the present and unhealthy ways to look at the present and being sort of distinguishing between those views um yeah i think it's i agree with dave it's quite important before uh sort of trying to set a direction for for where you want to head in the future i think you need to be careful as well because the problem with a lot of the

psychological experiments which aren't necessarily cognitive experiments is that they reduce the variables to get a result they can publish. And we're having huge problems with replication of some of the classic psychological experiments at the moment because minor changes in variables produce radically different outcomes.

I think the negative thing works in a subtly different way. So we know, for example, that cognitively, not behaviourally, the brain actually records failure faster than success. And it's not just the brain, it's a brain-body distributed function. And we think the evolutionary reason for that is avoidance of failure is a more successful evolutionary strategy than imitation of success.

and also gratification, which is kind of like the hot point. Human beings have learned sacrifice as an option to gratification, and we've learned altruism. So there are other factors which kind of come into play on this. And it's what Aristotle talked about when he said we have to train people to be virtuous. He said you can't train people to be ethical, but you can train people to be virtuous.

It's a habit of behaviour, not a compliance with rules. So I think that's where we need to start to work. And I think it's really important that... fundamentally we start to get leaders who have a degree of scientific education and not the sort of pop science books I mean when the issues is Leaders now get surrounded by MBAs and management consultants, whereas before they'd been surrounded with people with longer periods of time in the firm, with more diverse educational backgrounds.

We've done work, for example, by taking executives away and throwing them together with people from disciplines they've never thought that they would talk with. And that produces more innovation than bringing in McKinsey's or bringing in PwC or somebody like that. So I think this is what we talk about when we talk about naturalizing sense-making. We need to start to play the natural sciences onto social systems. And most social scientists, and I'd include psychologists and economics within that,

their experiments never replicate. And that's actually quite significant. You don't trust a scientific finding unless it's replicated and unless the context is defined.

And natural science is actually a safer source of constraints than that. Any follow-up thoughts on that, Graham? Yeah, I absolutely agree. I mean, social sciences in general do have a lot of trouble. with the research making it replicable or even applicable in the real world. The research under those controlled circumstances.

It doesn't always make much sense when you get into the real world, which is why behavioral science has become more popular because it tries to a little bit grasp what goes on. Although once again, it's not perfectly by any stretch of the imagination. It's the big data stuff. I mean, I've had two or three run-ins with help and then those guys, yeah, is they need huge volume data. And I mean, there's a wonderful book called Neuroliberalism.

by some behavioural economists at Aberystwyth University, which basically says most behavioural science has been a subordination of cognitive science and needs of neoliberal economics. And you can see that with a nudge unit. They don't nudge, they yank. And I think the sort of behavioral side is, I understand the need for it, but we need to get much more sophisticated in the way we use it. So I'd like to...

start to wrap up here, but I want to wrap up with a kind of a final question for both of you. And it's, what's the, what do you think is the way forward for leadership from where we are today? We need to get rid of the cult of the individual. We need to think about crews. We need to think about context. There's a famous adage, I do a lot of work with military and there's a famous adage in military environments, you have to wait two years of warfare for the peacetime generals to die out.

So if you go back to the Second World War, one of the most successful Allied commanders was Patton. He was an absolute bloody bastard, but he knew how to win wars. Bradley, who starts off as his subordinate and ends up as his commander, pulls him out of Germany because he's going to go and fight the Russians. So I think the need to understand that leadership is contextual is key.

And you can't have contextual leadership if you focus on individuals. I mean, just kind of a follow-up, is that something like having just a single prime minister or a president? that kind of model if you go back to when when i won the primary school mock election which is back in 1964 right and you look at the wilson cabinet which followed that

It had half a dozen double firsts from Oxford and Cambridge and a lot of conflict. So the prime minister was a coordinated chairman of people with different views. What happened under Thatcher and Blair is we switched to a presidential model. in which nobody would challenge the leader and therefore you lose diversity in the system. You can see the impact of that now. There's very few people of stature.

within the government because the presidential type of approach eliminates diversity. So, Britain is meant to be a parliamentary democracy, not a presidency. And we need to start to rethink that a bit. It's no coincidence that actually Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, the other three countries, are probably showing more leadership at the moment.

because they're smaller and they're more collective all elite just know each other there's a sort of population size you know Britain yeah England is very big Wales, Scotland and Ireland, they're all under five million. So there's a degree of cohesion there, which doesn't happen. So we need to think about leadership as a diverse, distributed function.

not as an individual quality. And we need to get rid of all those maturity models and psychometric tests and coaching. All of which have some utility for an individual, but don't have much utility for leadership. And Graham, your thoughts on the way forward? Well, I guess what I'm thinking about is really accountability or, you know, a better understanding about the results of people's decisions.

In a company, because there's a lot of things going on and basically, you know, leadership roles are often inhabited or filled by various people over time, it's quite hard for anybody to figure out what decision led to what result.

you know it all just sort of ends up in the wash and I think I think companies could do or leaders could do a lot better in understanding and you know trying to monitor the impact of decisions over time not easy to do but unless you start doing that then you know it's almost like you know you can make any decision because you never know what the result is and that partly maybe because of you know the sort of short cycles of

of reporting, but I think there could be a lot of benefit in terms of trying to really analyze the impact of specific decisions. Great. Any final thoughts, Dave? No, I think just remember those key lessons when you're in a crisis, centralised coordination, distributed decision making, engaged by communication, and start the lessons learned process now, if you follow those three.

You're gonna be better off than if you just try and execute a goal-based approach Graham any last thoughts? No, I think I've just been, I think I've already sort of talked quite a bit about time and how people's times got distorted. I mean, you know, even in terms of space, I mean, I was in China at the end of January. and we were in Beijing and you know they just shut down Wuhan a little bit early for the Chinese New Year.

and we were in Beijing and there wasn't any cases there yet but you know we thought we'd leave a bit early which was just as well because you know they cancelled the flight so we got back to the UK completely oblivious you know people still buying into the stock market people thought you know even if you didn't think the virus was coming you know the supply chains in china definitely would be disrupted people completely oblivious about that and you saw this repeated

time and time again around the world you know even in northern italy oh it's in the small towns it will never come to the cities no it's in italy it won't come to some other place so even these kinds of um you know cognitive failures that repeated over and over again. So it's just been very, very interesting to see it sort of played out so stark and so obviously. Yeah, great. Well, I'd like to end and ask you both to share just one word you want to leave future intelligent leaders.

So what's one word you would leave? Start with Dave. One word? One word. Coordinate. Coordinate. Graham, one word. Yeah, one word. Attention. Attention. Great. Well, thank you. Thank you, Dave and Graham, for joining me on this episode. I really appreciate your time, your energy, and your wisdom. Great. Thanks so much, Tyler.

Thanks, Tyler. Thank you for joining us today on the Flowcast. To get a summary of today's dialogue, find out more about today's guests, listen to previous episodes, or discover more about Haku Global's Neuroscience-based futures intelligent leadership programs or customized strategic foresight and innovation sprints, visit us at www.haku.global.

We believe it is time for more futures intelligent leadership. The future is something we need to think more intelligently and feel more deeply about so we can collaborate to discover today's solutions for future problems. Thank you. Thank you. This is your host, Tyler Mongan. And until next time, have a preferred and conscious future. Aloha.