Mindset, Leaders, Experts, & Facilitators

The other day I shared this article on a few platforms titled "Why we shouldn't push a positive mindset on those in poverty". The piece was about how people often use "mindset" as a means of blaming those in poverty for their predicament, an extension of the fundamental attribution error--"You must be in this situation because you're just not trying hard enough,?because there's something about you that has to change. If you just make yourself better, you won't be impoverished." It's easily supported by the majority of us who love to feel like our good fortune and privilege surely must be a product of our quality as a person. It's self-congratulatory and judgmental of those who are worse off. It might be a coping mechanism for having to drive our heated vehicles every day past homeless people asking for change on street corners in the Winter. That's a lot of cognitive dissonance to have to deal with. It only makes sense that we would seek out some kind of moral justification for such disparity, and the "mindset" argument serves us well in that regard.

"It was not so much that they feared poverty themselves, but rather that they found life infinitely more pleasant in a society where no one else was in a position of abject misery (perhaps much as Oscar Wilde declared he was an advocate of socialism because he didn't like having to look at poor people or listen to their stories)."?

- The Dawn of Everything , David Wengrow and David Graeber

The article I shared lays out research-supported logic as to why mindsets aren't the cornerstone of impoverished conditions as many like to suggest, but are rather downstream of conditions themselves (most of them being factors well beyond the control of those in poverty), and often the perceptions and postures of the less fortunate can be understood as a logical response to their condition. Blaming a person's poverty for their mindset might be as reasonable as blaming a person's injury on their bleeding or their PTSD on their nightmares... or the fact that their leg is caught in a bear trap on their screaming. If you could affect the latter, would it help them deal with the former? Logically, I guess it could... but it's really important to understand the difference between symptoms and causes here, especially when we're talking about culpability and the kinds of interventions that might be most impactful. In the case of poverty, rather than focusing on the symptom of mindset, we would be better off considering all of the factors that are?upstream of that and worry first about conditions which, if improved, would logically have the side-effect of improving mindsets anyways. Of course, there's an economical logic to focusing on the symptom of mindset that makes it particularly appealing--if it's the other person's fault that they're in this situation, then you might have no moral obligation to invest in intervention. You can justify allowing the status-quo to remain, and perhaps even justify actively punishing the victim for their refusal to put the work in. You can walk by the homeless woman with her children panhandling on the sidewalk on your way to buy yourself more food than you could possibly eat in one sitting, and still not feel like a monster. Your condition is simply a reflection of your hard work and mindset... and perhaps she actually needs this suffering to improve as a person and develop the mindset she needs... perhaps her children will actually benefit in the long-term from this difficulty (more on that later).

From the article:

"Mindsets are not free-floating. In low-income settings, they respond to socioecological cues in ways that help people deal with the pressures of financial precarity and marginalization. In middle-class settings, they can subtly reflect ideological agendas that uphold the economic status quo at the cost of everyone but those at the very top. Before we prescribe a particular way of thinking for those who appear to be struggling, we would do well to take a critical look at why we are so attuned to that outlook in the first place."

But I'm not here to argue about the origins of poverty or whether "handouts" (as some love to call charitable support) help people or actually make the problem worse. You are likely have opinions about those things that align nicely to your particular political tribe.

I actually want to talk about leadership.

When I shared the article, I had seen a clear connection to the concept of "mindset" in popular leadership and motivation theory, such as the "growth mindset" advocated by Carol Dweck in her popular book Mindset: the new psychology of success. I'm actually a fan of many of the ideas in Dweck's talks and her book; much of it rings true and offers possible utility in my experience and perception. I think that teaching people cognitive tools for framing adversity and posturing themselves for long-term success in the face of short-term challenges can be a valuable thing, especially when we're talking about the socializing processes of parenting and education. Also, when you're seeking to benefit people whose conditions you have no influence over, it makes sense to seek out vectors for positive change that they themselves control, and mindset makes for an appealing target in that regard. If I know you're suffering in a hostile work environment and I have?access to only you, it seems perfectly logical to suggest that you focus on changing those elements that are in your control. In the book Man's Search For Meaning, Viktor Frankl makes this exact point, such as in the following quote:

“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”

Frankl framed that idea slightly differently in another quote here:

“When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.”

There are two elements of that second quote that I think are particularly?important in this conversation. One is that he is speaking about people who are unable to change a situation. He's making this recommendation for those whose conditions will likely not change because they are powerless. The only thing left is to change themselves and shape themselves to be capable of surviving (or perhaps even thriving) in these sub-optimal conditions. He also uses the pronoun "we" here, which feels important to me, and it has something to do with what I'll call the ethics of imposed self-improvement. He's not suggesting that people with the ability to change a situation change the mindsets of those affected by that situation. He's not using language that suggests that people who are experiencing something outside of his lived experience change. He says "we" because he's talking about himself, and inviting others who also feel powerless. He ways "when we are no longer able to change a situation" because this invitation is for those without agency. Things get weird when those with agency over the situation twist this ethic to their own purposes, and make it read more along the lines of "If you want to change a situation, change yourself" with the clear subtext being "I could change this situation for you, but you don't deserve it yet".

You know what to call stoicism when it's willfully imposed on others? I'd suggest it's called abuse. You can believe that getting hit with sticks as a child made you the strong, capable, and resilient person you are today, but if you hit a child with a stick, you're not doing them a favor. You're abusing them. I think it's really important to acknowledge the difference between stepping into fast-moving water and being thrown in, and I think a lot of people who have adopted beneficial mindsets fail to see the importance of the agency they exercised in adopting them, and the agency they had over conditions themselves. The choice to grow and thrive in the face of hardship is a valid and very real one in a lot of people's experience, but those pulling the strings of that hardship have no ethical basis to suggest that they do so.

I have found myself on the receiving end of what I'll call the "mindset blame" problem, at times when I was in crisis and struggling and found myself judged and punished by leaders who insisted that I needed to improve my attitude, who at times appeared to use that as moral license to refuse to intervene on my behalf. I was a creature in pain and certainly lashing out, and the response from those with the power and authority to solve my situation only caused me more pain. It made me feel isolated, alienated, and increasingly bitter. I knew for a fact that my situation wasn't the result of my mindset. My mindset was a product of my situation. This is a kind of punitive spiral that I've seen play out a number of times in the Air Force, often leading to some kind of climactic event that precipitates the end of someone's career. I've seen it a number of times, and it's always tragic.

A person encounters some kind of hardship and they start making bad choices out of desperation, or they fail to meet standards because of personal distress, because the little traumas in our lives shake the foundations of our habits. Their leadership punishes them for bad choices or the violation of standards. Their mental health suffers further from punishment, amplifying the crisis, and they make more bad choices. Their leadership punishes them with increasing frequency and severity as things spiral further downward, and it only makes the problem worse. It seems obvious that if the person would just improve their attitude and "mindset" this would all stop, but of course the drivers of that attitude and mindset are only growing stronger. Mindset is a product of conditions, and leaders--those most likely to be pushing the mindset argument--will find that they are a powerful (frequently negative) agent of those conditions.

In cases like this, I actually think most leaders don't feel capable of letting up and easing off the pressure. To do so would be "soft". In many peoples' minds, I believe, the correct leadership approach is to continue to crank up the pressure. That's what leaders do. They push people to grow, especially in the military. They certainly don't coddle. If they push people and those people don't grow, then part of that leader's job is to get them the hell out of our Air Force, because we demand excellence, and a person who doesn't grow in the face of hardship, be it natural or orchestrated (such as we impose at places like basic training), lacks the mindset necessary for the excellence we demand... right? I don't think so, and I think anyone who would argue that is actually not exercising much of a growth mindset (see what I did there?)

Sharing the article about poverty and?mindsets on a couple social media platforms with a few reflections on leadership proved to be a valuable probe and brought me into some interesting conversations. I decided to write this piece after a short exchange with one Air Force leader in particular.

This person, former Air Force enlisted and now officer, shared with me their experience having grown up in section 8 housing and on food stamps. He believed that this experience had a strong positive impact on him and helped him become the leader he is today. Now, as an adult raising children of his own, he said that he had effectively shielded his daughters from that same hardship he experienced so that they could have the "best possible upbringing". He told me he was concerned that they were therefore missing out on what were to him important vectors for learning and growth. It sounded like he thought they couldn't possibly become the leader that he is today, having been spared the crucible of hardship that made him what he is.

He expressed a further concern about his children being incapable of empathizing with people whose mindsets might be the product of something like living in poverty--the kinds of hardships that he'd endured but?they never would. It sounded like he considered his upbringing in that hardship to be something that gave him access to the lived experience of others, which enabled him to understand and perhaps reach them better as a leader.

He also expressed concern that young people today like his children, whose lives were significantly easier, might not understand where their leaders were coming from--where their mindsets came from. I thought it was an interesting reversal of the earlier point on empathy for those being led. He worried that those being led might not empathize with their leaders, who had grown up differently from them. I actually really like the idea being hinted at here about the role of empathy in followership.

I find all of these concerns reasonable, especially in the light of how we talk about leadership and its relation to experience. It seems logical to think that having lived experience gives you increased access and empathy toward those with similar experiences. Further, if hardship makes people better leaders, then excessively shielding people from hardship must be some kind of disservice, if not to them then to the people they might end up leading in the future.

My first response was that it seems silly to think that one can truly protect their children from suffering. Everybody suffers eventually, at least as far as I've seen.

My second thought was that it's problematic to think that we require others' experiences to empathize with them. If the only people you truly empathize with are people whose shoes you've walked in... I'm pretty sure your empathy muscles could use an upgrade, and anybody in a leadership role needs to have a far more developed capacity for empathy than this suggests.

My third response to these ideas is that capable leadership doesn't ultimately come down to experience, at least not in the ways that we might think it does.

To illustrate, just talk to a handful of people who grew up "in poverty" and see what conclusions they drew from that experience. Do they all believe the same things about root causes or what helps people out of poverty? Of course not, though they will frequently tell you that having lived that life, they are an authority on what people need. Information about any lived experience isn't simple and linear. It's complex and multi-faceted. It's intersectional--interacting with other complex and nuanced aspects of their demographics, experience, and context. There is no single "being poor" experience. There are many. Different people arrive at it and remain trapped in it for different reasons, and the mindsets that people take away from that experience can vary wildly. So the idea that someone who grew up poor is uniquely situated to empathize and connect with those they lead who come from a place of poverty is not as clear-cut as some people might feel. There's a decent chance their experience of poverty was vastly different from this person they're approaching. Their chances of having differing mindsets on the subject seems pretty likely. This country has plenty of low-income Democrats and low-income Republicans, impoverished libertarians and independents. The world is full of poor capitalists and poor socialists, poor anarchists and... you get the idea.

To me, the question of the value of experience ties in very closely to concepts about complexity that I've shared before, often using the lens of the Cynefin framework. When we experience something complex, we frequently fall prey to something called retrospective coherence, wherein looking back it seems as though we can decompose that experience into simple factors--a linear chain of causality. But complexity can't be reduced to simple factors in this manner. That's why people come away from the same category of experience (such as poverty) with such vastly different ideas about what caused it and concluded it. Your retrospective conclusions about an experience, including the mindsets you developed to cope with or process that experience, might have zero utility for someone else, especially when they're actively going through it.

Now of course some positive things can come from shared experience, in particular when it comes to questions of credibility or affinity; but in my eyes, a true leader does not require the experiences of the people they're leading. And it's a good thing they don't, because talent-management for that kind of qualification would be... impossible. Are we imagining bringing in the leader who grew up poor every time we're having issues with the troop whose mindsets were informed by poverty? There is certainly value in considering just how diverse the background of our leadership team, its inputs and options for mentorship are, but these issues are far too complex to think that a simple matching function for leadership is the right answer.

Our goal as leaders shouldn't be to bring those we lead into alignment with our methods. It should be to bring our methods into alignment with what they need, in a way that serves the purposes of the larger systems we lead, and here is where I'm going to talk about the difference between expert leadership and facilitative leadership.

In a world where things are simple and ordered... in which simply having gone through an experience is enough to acquire the knowledge to guide others through that experience... leadership is a function of expertise--of accumulated know-how. In some areas of work and life, that might actually be appropriate. On a team of electricians, the senior-most among them can guide the team with knowledge through almost any challenge, because they've experienced a wealth of different scenarios. They might even combine the insights they've amassed over the years and apply them to novel situations. This is possible because the range of things that might happen with electrical work on a job-site is basically knowable. The range is at least not expanding all that quickly. This is basically an ordered domain and therefore, expertise is enough. In #Cynefin, the decision-making heuristic here would be to sense, analyze, then respond; and expertise is what facilitates good analysis. The expert leader can get the job done in this domain.

But in a complex domain like leading humans through crisis, lessons-learned from a previous experience will not neatly fit a unique individual going through a new and complex experience, no matter how categorically similar the experience might be to something the leader went through. Categories are helpful for ordered-domain problems, but can mislead us in complexity because they are misleadingly reductive. "Best practices" here might be no better than shots in the dark. I'd say the only way to effectively lead in this scenario is using what I've heard referred to as facilitative leadership (h/t Daniel Stillman), and that basically means that most of the information required to make decisions doesn't come from the amassed stores of knowledge about the past inside the leader's head or any other repository. It comes from the context of the individual and the unfolding scenario itself. The only way to really know what to do when a person is in crisis involves finding out what they're experiencing and co-creating paths forward with them--paths that are coherent with the needs, perceptions, constraints, and mindset of the person in crisis. To simply copy and paste an approach that worked for the leader at some point in their past is to take a complex solution well outside of the personal context it was solely suited for.?Instead of an expert leader, what we need here is a facilitative leader, one who can probe and uncover and bring to light the applicable complex currents of the unfolding situation.

We are quite capable of empathizing with those whose mindsets and experiences are different... so long as we don't allow the bias of our accumulated experience and its retrospective coherence to get in the way of that capacity. In complexity, the illusion of controllability that comes from retrospective coherence will act as an impediment to sense-making, and so it might be appropriate to frame leadership in complexity, rather than the employment of our vast stores of accumulated knowledge, as the capacity and humility to get the occluding past out of our way so that we can more clearly see the present. Facilitative leaders should be particularly capable of what Dave Gray refers to as "emptying your cup" (after the Zen proverb) in his book Liminal Thinking--the removal of all that information about our particular past that impedes us from collecting new information about the unfolding present.

The best leaders would be the ones who don't allow retrospective coherence to get in their way of helping someone despite having had a categorically similar experience to the one their charge is being influenced by. What we should learn from going through something complex like poverty is not how to deconstruct that complex experience into simple, linear, causal levers like mindset, but rather the perils of attempting to do so. But retrospective coherence just feels like memory and wisdom.

I'm reminded of another example of expertise in complexity that I noticed after my wife and I had our first child. If you've ever had a child, you'll suddenly notice you're surrounded by experts on the subject of child-rearing. They all know exactly what children need in order to be happy, healthy, build character, etc. Many have experiences that informed their professed expertise. They'll tell you what will work for you because it worked for them. I suggest they're victims of retrospective coherence. They found a path that worked for their child, so obviously it must be the path for children. They raised healthy and happy kids, therefore their methods must be worth repeating. You might say they had ascended to the peak of the first Dunning-Kruger curve after what definitely felt like a thoroughly edifying experience or two. In contrast, whenever we talked to my mother about techniques for child-rearing, she never pushed any approach as though it was a sure thing. She had plenty of things to recommend, but nothing was guaranteed. The funny thing here is that if anybody should be considered an expert on child-rearing, it's my mom. Over the last 40 years or so, she's been a full-time mother to my 8 siblings and I, and we really put her through her paces. Having raised 9 children quite successfully, she approaches inquiries about raising children with a wealth of suggestions, but never prescriptive solutions or even "best practices". Nothing is sure to work, because every child is different. It's a complex problem domain, and therefore the path forward can be found not in some repository of past wisdom, but in active, probative, tentative engagement with the present. As for me, I consider the whole child-rearing thing to be perfectly illustrative of the disconnect between inputs and outputs that is a true hallmark of complexity. You can do all of the "right things" and still fail. You can also do everything wrong and still somehow things turn out great. The greatest parents in the world are plenty likely to have a child grow up to be a criminal or a deadbeat, and some truly incredible people are the product of legit terrible parents. I never blame the parents. They deserve credit if they tried, but outcomes might the product of a whole lot more factors or factors more significant than they could ever hope to influence.

It's likely the case that someone experienced in facilitative, inquiry-based sense-making in a complex domain like this has more tools at their disposal for divergence and exploration because they've experienced a range of possible interventions, a small sample of the infinite ways in which they may or may not work, and gotten a taste of the weak signals that indicate when they're succeeding or failing. That might be the extent of the value of experience in the complex domain.

The task of leadership is not to lead only those people who are like us. It is certainly not to lead others as though they are us or to try and make them more like us. Having walked a single journey through a complex path at some point in the past, instead of thinking that we can walk those going after us through the exact same paces despite the geography being in constant flux, we should be capable of looking back and seeing the infinite other unique journeys to be traversed through the same categorical landscape. There is no map of this territory. It is always new, because it is actively emerging; but we can be competent at extemporaneous wayfinding.

No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river and he's not the same man.

-Heraclitus

We can and we must empathize with and lead others who are not like us, and to do so we have to facilitate their?sense-making to become who only they can uniquely become--to go where only they can uniquely go. We have to get ourselves out of the way of all of that.

I do believe that our mindsets can have an impact on our condition, but as I've laid out here, it's problematic and often unhelpful to target the mindsets of those whose conditions we have agency over. I do believe in post-traumatic growth and the kinds of actual benefits that can be derived from suffering, but that doesn't give us moral license as leaders to withhold a helping hand, especially when we consider that people don't tend to grow and can even suffer regression and damage when left in a condition of crisis, especially when we consider that we, as leaders, are a significant driver of the conditions that give rise to the mindsets of those we lead.

Thanks for joining me on this exploration. I invite any of your own reflections on the topic.