Knowledge workers need to prepare for the coming reality: the rise of thinking AI. As AI evolves to handle much of the thinking required in manufacturing to retail to healthcare, humans will need to recalibrate and capitalize on strengths beyond pure intelligence—like intuition, empathy, creativity, emotion, and people skills.    

The first wave of artificial intelligence (AI) has already replaced humans for repetitive physical tasks like inspecting equipment, manufacturing goods, repairing things, and crunching numbers. That shift started way back with the Industrial Revolution. This gave rise to our current Thinking Economy, where employment and wages are more tied to workers’ abilities to process, analyze and interpret information to make decisions and solve problems … Just like the industrial revolution automated physical tasks by decreasing the value of human strength and increasing the value of human cognition, AI is now reshaping the landscape and ushering in a Feeling Economy.

What characterizes this emerging economy? Consider, for example, the role of a financial analyst, which seems pretty quantitative and thinking-oriented. But our recent research shows this field as increasingly feeling-oriented over the last ten years. As AI-powered tools increasingly do the analytical work, it’s more critical for financial analysts to interact skillfully with clients – to reassure them about things like stock market dips. The “people” person becomes much more valuable than the anti-social numbers or tech geek. 

This trend illustrates a convergence of artificial and human intelligence and why it’s crucial for companies and workers alike to embrace such to be viable. The stakes don’t only apply to specialized analytical work. Managerial jobs need to be more people-oriented and feeling-conscious as well.

Knowledge workers, especially in leadership roles, can swiftly act to safeguard their careers and better position their organizations to prosper in this AI revolution.

Shift the Recruiting Mindset: Since AI can do more of the thinking tasks, firms need to recruit people who can perform well in feeling tasks and jobs. People management, working with others, emotional intelligence, and negotiation skills are already in strong demand and will be even more critical in the future.

Update Existing Jobs: Collaborating with thinking AI inevitably changes the nature of human jobs. And, business leaders can keep pace. This starts with upgrading existing jobs to emphasize people skills. This means placing increasing emphasis on feeling, empathy, and emotional intelligence in positions such as immigration officer, bank teller, physician, and especially the aforementioned financial analyst.

Protect your job now: Individuals can safeguard their jobs by enhancing their feeling and empathetic skills and gravitating toward jobs that emphasize those tasks. The most successful workers will be those who can manage relationships in an understanding and emotionally intelligent way.

Intuitive and creative professionals will hang on longer than the purely analytical workers in terms of AI disrupting their careers. Humans cannot compete head-head with machines, as they are powerhouses of analytical thinking. Computer scientists have tried, and are still trying, to design machines that can think in a human way – significantly for responding to unknown and new environments. Nonetheless, knowledge workers should focus on the long game. And career seekers should not focus and plan on being analytical workers — even though the analytics field is very hot. As hockey legend Wayne Gretzky has said: “Skate to where the puck is going, not to where the puck is.”

To broadly reiterate, the emerging Feeling Economy is changing the nature of all jobs, so companies and individuals should prepare. Organizations need to manage differently, with more emphasis on feeling, empathy, and emotional intelligence. The companies that take advantage of this trend will be the most successful. There will be new opportunities for feeling-oriented companies and products. This also creates opportunities to pull ahead in the global market.

Like many that have come before, this crisis can bring out the best and worst in leadership. I witnessed some of the best actions as a crisis responder after 9/11 and the California fires and realized that crises do indeed provide opportunities to change the way we do things.

This pandemic is illuminating inequalities, lack of vision, and support at every level. As a leader, it’s time to ask yourself what qualities in your organization will make everyone want to contribute their best ideas, help set records for achievement, and support each other in ways that lift the team, your products or services, and the greater economy. 

One way to do that is by exercising empathy. Before you discard it as just another “soft skill,” think about how empathy requires you to walk in someone else’s shoes to understand what they are facing, especially amid all this uncertainty. No one knows what the future may hold as people continue to get sick, millions are out of work, and others struggle to work in creative new ways. While we’re all walking through this time together, we need to understand our team’s needs, the challenges they may be facing, and look for ways to make their work easier. That means adopting empathy as the core of your management style and listening to your employees, so you can truly understand their perspectives and help them excel at their jobs. 

This crisis has blended work and home as never before. Both men and women face interruptions while working at home that cannot be ignored. COVID-19 has shone a light on how caretaking and work collide, especially when home-schooling is added to the mix. Boston Consulting Group’s recent study of working parents revealed that half of those surveyed felt their work suffered. Women estimated they spend 15 more hours a week on household chores. Both men and women estimate they are spending an extra 27 hours a week on childcare, chores, and education than they were before the pandemic. BCG authors offer several solutions while admitting that nothing is perfect during anxiety over layoffs and with children possibly not returning to classrooms full-time.

Given that 60 percent of parents have not found alternative childcare in the wake of school and daycare closures, flexible policies are needed. Some may not want to return to work full time. Men may feel social pressures to prioritize work, and women may feel the opposite pressure to quit and focus on home duties. With employee turnover costing 33 percent of an employee’s salary, BCG points out that it’s ultimately beneficial to keep the employee and “lead with empathy” to understand their situation. 

Another critical point is not to assume that employees working from home will be at their regular capacity or on their usual schedule. That means managers need to have open conversations about workloads and workflows, prioritize mission-critical tasks, and reallocate resources to create short-term flexibility. Reaching out to support others is the most rewarding act you can take in a crisis —
or anytime, for that matter.

I founded Women Connect4Good for that very reason: to help and support other women. It came about as the result of a podcast interview when I asked my guest, “Mary, how can I help you?” The silence was so long that I was afraid we had lost the connection. Finally, this small voice answered, “You mean you want to help me?” Yes. That’s exactly what I wanted to do. And I realized that the most powerful thing we can do for each other is to reach out and ask how we can help. That is empathy in action. And I made it the mission of my foundation. I have enlarged it to encompass men, too — everyone must help and support each other. My whole team knows it and works to achieve it.

My team was already working remotely, so we were lucky not to have to change the core of our working style. Recognizing that the greatest challenge in a physically distanced workforce is effective communication, each member thinks of the others and how they contribute. When something in their lives — not work-related — requires attention, the others step in to help. We keep each other in the loop, keep no secrets, and empower each other to achieve our common purpose. Likewise, when something happens to derail a plan, like the pandemic, the team is flexible and able to shift direction. For example, our Lift Women Up marketing campaign was in place months before the first case of COVID-19, but just when it was launched, everyone’s attention shifted. Women still needed lifting up — so we revised and adapted it to fit the circumstance and forged ahead with it. The complete collaboration, culture of trust, and authentic, honest communication make my organization agile and able to respond immediately to changing needs.

Great leadership starts with listening and understanding what everyone needs to excel at their jobs. Engaging empathy throughout your organization may require a shift in focus away from the bottom line to the talent that makes achieving that bottom line possible. By developing relationships that foster collaboration and performance beyond expectation, we can create an entirely new business environment that sustains everyone. Imagine a workplace that everyone wants to serve, and give their best effort and innovative ideas — at every level. When we choose to open our minds and hearts to engage empathy, we acquire more tools for strategies that transform our current business models and succeed in unforeseen ways.

The title of this story is a line we use at my house when a product or service is unusually challenging. It might be that bottle or package that requires a hack saw and a blow torch to open, or it might be that service that offers way too many steps to reach your desired outcome.  

Our most recent experience was the black pepper container that added an “open the whole box top” feature instead of only the shake side, scoop side or pour side. We found it challenging to seal shut this new feature. The result? The whole top of the can unexpectedly opened, dumping a box of pepper in our soup instead of the dash we desired. Reviews on the pepper company’s website revolve around harsh suggestions of what to do with the product’s designer.

We all know the value of making products and services tamper-proof, shoplifter proof, and over-the-top safe. Buy a new ladder, and you’ll have countless warning stickers to remove, each a likely response to a ladder lawsuit. Governmental regulations dictate full disclosure, transparency, and accommodations to consumers with unique needs or restrictions. We accept these boundaries as well-intentioned defensive efforts. Yet, too often an enterprise will place “delight the user-consumer-customer” far down their list of priorities.    

My business partner, the late Ron Zemke, and I pioneered the universal practice known as “customer journey mapping” in the late 1980s. The back story is the classic “let the CEO open it” saga. 

You can read about our early work in Ron’s 1989 book, The Service Edge, and our 2003 book, Service Magic.

We consulted with a large phone company and focused on what customers went through when their telephone did not work. After countless interviews, focus groups, ride-alongs in telephone repair trucks, and sit-alongs at call centers, listening to customers, we decided to graph what we had learned as if customers were telling us their stories.

We took our diagrams to senior leadership. Their classic answers were, “No wonder the customer is angry when they finally speak to a call center rep, look at what we’ve put them through,” or “We sure make customers wait a lot,” or “I would be confused if I were the customer, too.” When we drilled down to understand better customer expectations around each encounter (the moment of truth), we saw that we were actually being instructed by customers on how to make their experiences better.  

Remember, people within organizations cannot accurately see through their customer’s eyes since they know too much and are blind to customer experience. But there are ways to come closer to “being the customer.” It demands that the CEO “open it.” Here are three ways for the C-suite to gain close inspection from the customer’s purview.

Stop Thinking Boardroom Briefings Are the Voice of the Customer

“How do you know what matters most to your customers?” is a question I have asked many C-suite leaders. I often hear reports of briefings conducted by the chief customer officer, complete with slides, graphs, and survey stats. When I reference the fact that customers’ connections with the organization is through a relationship and then rephrase the question to end with the word “spouse” instead of “customers,” I get a less confident tone. While the parallel is admittedly extreme, it dramatizes the point that customer encounters are emotional and thus far from the sterility of a data point. 

When a whole box of pepper dumps into my soup, “strongly dissatisfied” is not the phrase I would use.

Create a board of customers and rotate membership, so no member loses objectivity or the capacity to be candid. Hold “What’s stupid around here” meetings with front line employees to learn what impedes their ability to serve customers effectively. Invite customers to board meetings for direct feedback. Turn all receptionists, security guards, and drivers into valuable scouts who learn about customer experiences and priorities. Meet with them frequently to get their scout reports.  

Go Where You Can Hear the Voice of the Customer 

I once worked with a client in Miami and stayed at the Biscayne Bay Marriott. 

Checking in, I spotted a familiar face behind the check-in counter a bit further down from me. It was Bill Marriott. This was years ago, when every property sported his portrait with his father in the hotel lobby. As I got into the elevator with the bellman carrying my luggage, I confirmed my observation. “He has been here a couple of days,” the bellman told me, “spending time in various departments.” Now in his eighties, Marriott still visits over a hundred properties a year.  

Become an expert on your products and services and, if possible, get into your “customer’s shoes” to experience things exactly as they do. Marriott told a group of senior leaders, “Leaders should spend time with the frontline, not to make them feel better, but to learn.” When you speak directly with customers, ask them questions about their hopes and aspirations, not just their needs and expectations. Turn customer interviews and focus groups into a treasure hunt in which you are likely to be surprised by the answers, not a dialogue to confirm what you already know or suspect.

Take a Bold Step to Improve the Customer’s Journey

Years ago, I consulted with a major bank. Correspondence to branch managers at that time was mainly through inter-office mail and couriers. Interviews with branch managers revealed managers were severely restrained from spending valuable time with customers and branch employees because of the time required to respond to various bank departments for information or reading reports they were expected to read. When I mentioned my findings to the regional bank executive, he hit the roof. He had a branch manager box up all the requests for one week, rented a van, and had the boxes of paperwork delivered to the CEO’s office. Stacks of boxes sent a powerful message, and the process was changed to ensure someone was always aware of the whole picture.

Knowing the real world of your customer is the first step. It then takes execution — that creates a delightful experience for them — right alongside the priority list of safety, security, and accommodation. To paraphrase poet Maya Angelou, “Customers will remember how you made them feel long after they have forgotten what you did for them.”

The development of the COVID-19 vaccine is an example — probably an extreme one — of the importance of leadership and team commitment to achieving breakthrough results.

Typically, it takes about ten years for a vaccine to get to market. But Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine took less than a tenth of that time. And, the vaccines developed by Moderna and AstraZeneca have been on a similar schedule. In the face of the global pandemic, all three have been developed in far less time than anyone thought possible.

There are two critical lessons for leaders here, with implications beyond COVID-19. The first is that leaders have an essential role in redefining what is possible and encouraging people to pursue solutions beyond old, familiar ways of working, which are often not adequate to solve unprecedented problems. The second is that it’s fundamental to establish a shared sense of commitment and direction for a group of people to become a dedicated team that works together creatively and efficiently.

No doubt, Albert Bourla, the CEO of Pfizer (pictured above), has helped redefine what is possible. Reportedly, Mr. Bourla was not satisfied when told that the vaccine for COVID-19 would be ready only by mid-2021. He told his senior management that people tend to underestimate what they can achieve and that his team was capable of much more. And as we can all see now, Mr. Bourla was right.

Simultaneously, the pandemic provided a catalyst that gave a common purpose to Pfizer’s team as they worked to develop and produce the vaccine.

But what happens in a different context, when a collective crisis is not so obvious? Can leaders still shape a common purpose? In those situations, what we might call genuine leaders are especially important. These are leaders who follow their convictions and passions and establish relationships with their teams openly and authentically. These leaders know how to create a shared purpose and the conditions that empower each of their team members to give their best.

This kind of leadership is not about having “charisma” or “executive presence.” Nor is there a universal formula to follow. It’s something that takes work and dedication but can be developed with practice and intention. Each person can develop their genuine, unique style of leading.

But beyond the specific character of each leader, we find some common traits. Recently, in preparation for my book The Expanding Circle, I interviewed more than three dozen “genuine” leaders and found some common threads:

Lead with your story. Genuine leaders tend to have a good understanding of themselves, their values, passions, and motivations. Leading from their passion gives them internal harmony, strength, and resilience. At the same time, their teams perceive them as genuine, which helps foster trust.

Many of these leaders are also good at articulating who they are and what they care about in a personal story. That articulation allows team members to make sense of who their leader is, and it helps them relate to her as a person — beyond her formal authority.

Mr. Bourla’s story was well-known to Pfizer’s employees long before the pandemic. Originally from Greece, he never imagined that he would end up running a pharmaceutical giant. In fact, his original training was as a veterinarian. But once he arrived at Pfizer, his self-knowledge told him that this was the place for him. And according to many people in his team, Mr. Bourla is friendly with colleagues at all levels and always ready to engage in open conversations.

Articulate a common purpose. Genuine leaders spend much of their time listening. Not listening passively, but actively spending time with staff, asking questions, seeking to understand their motivations and stories.

Based on this understanding of others and a clear idea of the objective to be achieved, these leaders create and share a narrative that gives meaning to the joint work, a common direction that facilitates collaboration.

In a way, COVID-19 made it easy for Mr. Bourla and his leadership team to articulate a story that facilitates a common goal and fosters commitment. The importance of the vaccine endeavor was evident for everyone. But at every opportunity, both in person and in writing, Mr. Bourla reminded his team what was at stake, why they needed to do more, and that is was needed faster.

Empower others. Genuine leaders create the conditions for others to take the initiative, be creative, and contribute their best. They do not micromanage but rather work to guide and empower others.

During the development of the vaccine, Pfizer’s team met biweekly. There were no set agendas. The goal was to allow open participation and encourage everyone to share their views. This helped underscore the shared commitment to their goal, and it demonstrated that everyone’s engagement was critical to collective success.

COVID-19 is still with us, and we continue to learn how to deal with it every day. Indeed, it will leave scars, but it will also drive some positive lessons. Among them, we can explore new horizons and redefine what is feasible when we face unique and even unprecedented challenges.

We can be sure that COVID-19 will not be the last crisis that demands new ways of thinking and working. And genuine leaders, such as Mr. Bourla, will be especially well-positioned to motivate their teams to challenge themselves and achieve breakthrough results.

While crisis thrived during 2020, CEOs, VPs and entrepreneurs should be brainstorming ways to lead with love in the year ahead — to recharge teams, rebuild trust and inspire employees by clearly defining a higher business purpose.

Based on servant leadership success principles created in the 1970s by Robert Greenleaf, 2021 is the perfect time to apply some success principles to restore your employee engagement and hope.

Let’s take a closer look at what’s happened and how leaders can switch the narrative to improve morale and results in 2021, as the world strives to get back to a “sense of normality.”

From environmental disasters to social unrest to a global pandemic to political chaos, we bounced around from problem to problem like human pinballs in 2020. With little reprieve from the constant stress caused by these challenges, our evolutionary fight or flight mechanisms and associated chemical reactions have exhausted our collective will and spirit, shortened fuses, and brought out the worst in many of us. Unfortunately, some leaders have also been the worst offenders and stressors of this past year.

Before 2020, Gallup had reported a positive shift in global employee engagement for the first time in many years, but in their latest tracker, things have gone back to pre-COVID levels. 

Naturally, there are many potential root causes for lower employee engagement in 2020, but leadership preparation and response to unprecedented challenges cannot be underestimated. When leaders panic, abdicate responsibility, or worse, double-down on toxic behavior, employees and businesses suffer. The result is the opposite of health and well-being and productive work — two essential Sustainable Development Goals.

These leaders can reverse the damage done during the pandemic by eliminating toxic leadership behaviors and unneeded stressors, embracing the principles of positive psychology detailed by Abraham Maslow in the 1950s, and by practicing servant leadership.

Positive psychology, especially in the form of the strengths-based leadership movement, has been proven to deliver dramatic results for teams and organizations that have embraced them. Servant leadership is an idea whose time has come. It deals with individualizing leadership for employees, which is key to engaging people in the most diverse workforce in U.S. history. With flattening hierarchies, matrix structures, and agile methods transforming how work is done, leaders capable of connecting with employees and bringing out the brilliance of individuals and teams are more in demand than ever before. 

When combined, positive psychology and servant leadership have the power to improve the lives of employees and increase engagement. Here are five servant leadership success keys for leading with love in 2021.

1. Re-focus Your Team on a Higher Purpose

Many organizations and leaders lost sight of their broader purpose when the pandemic began. They contracted their workforces, furloughed employees, and preserved the salaries of senior executives. These actions do not inspire employee engagement. However, suppose your company took the opposite approach — by protecting employees, serving customers with excellence, and furthering progress. In that case, it will be much easier to lean into your organization’s purpose and use it to energize your teams in the new year. Leading in 2021 will be just like the movie Avengers: Endgame. In this Marvel blockbuster, when the dust settled five years after Thanos’ snap-killed half of all life in the universe, the heroes had to regroup, remind each other of their shared purpose, and get back to work to bring everyone back.

2. Invert the Hierarchy to Serve and Connect with Employees 

Part of leaning into purpose is demonstrating to your people that you and other senior leaders genuinely exist to serve and support employees to enhance a value transfer to customers. This inverted hierarchy approach is the key to connecting with your millennial and Gen Z employees who desire purpose-driven work and expect to be coached, empowered, and supported in their career journey. When people feel supported, they bring their best selves to the task at hand, and the organization can ride this productivity boost toward achievement.

3. Build Trust with Empathy and Transparency

In these trying times, trust is a currency that no leader can succeed without. The leader’s shadow is real, and consistency between words and actions has never been more on display than now. Trust-building leaders who lead with authenticity, transparency, and empathy build concrete bridges between themselves and employees that can be counted on during good times and bad. Trust is especially essential when working virtually as you no longer have the benefit of standing over someone’s shoulder and watching them work. Avoid incessant, unnecessary meetings, exercise decisiveness, and let people positively surprise you. And when the next crisis arrives, cash-in on the reservoir of confidence you’ve already secured to move your teams forward.

4. Prioritize Health and Wellness to Improve Lives

Due to the polarization of public health messages, and misinformation, many people are unsure whether to take certain steps – such as vaccinations. This is the sort of leadership vacuum that leaders must step into — to demonstrate the value, safety, and necessity of caring for the health of every colleague. Mental health and other stress-related health issues multiplied during the lockdown and It’s necessary to invest in resources to assist employees in managing these very challenging circumstances. Employees who feel that their employers are genuinely focused on improving conditions for them from a wellness perspective will reward this support with hard work, loyalty, and enhanced problem-solving. 

5. Leverage Love

Empathy is something humans cannot get enough of — at work or at home. When leaders demonstrate empathy for the cause of stress, anxiety, and demotivation and try and minimize these issues, they can create a virtuous circle within their organizations. Empathy, importantly, is not passive. When taken in the form of the acronym L.U.V. which stands for Listening, Understanding, and Validating, it becomes a powerful connection tool to be leveraged with employees. During and after a crisis, it’s essential to listen to the stories of those most impacted; seek to understand and identify with their struggles; and then make them feel heard and validated by working to improve conditions. The more you apply this approach, the more insight you will gain into how to best serve and support your employees and colleagues. 
 
In 2021, the more leaders practice L.U.V., the more validated employees will feel, and the faster problems will be solved. Lead with love by using these five servant leadership success principles. It will result in overall improvements in health, wellness, engagement, and quality of work.

Like most professionals, you are wary of making decisions or offering advice when uncertainty is high, when you are likely to be wrong, and when the blame for failure will be yours. So, you err on the side of caution and pause to collect additional information in the search for clarity and certainty.

But the situation is complex, dynamic, and unique, so further information is unlikely to help, and you get stuck in analysis-paralysis. That means you’ve delayed the decision, which means you’ve allowed the status quo to continue, which means you’ve probably enabled worse outcomes than if you had acted and failed. Moreover, by not acting, you missed the opportunity to learn how the system responds to interventions, which is one of the critical tenets of learning-by-doing and what you need to do to make sense of the situation. 

But you know that if you rush into a decision, you may misinterpret it because you’ve seen research showing that experts don’t do well in ambiguous and uncertain situations: experts tend to fall victim to the confirmation bias that selectively identifies observations that fit their theories and past experiences. You’ve also read that people make poor decisions about unique situations when stressed, hurried, and have limited information. In such cases, most people instead invoke stereotypes, see patterns where none exist, and ignore anomalies. So you pause, ponder, and analyze.

And, importantly, you are aware of the sunk-cost fallacy: once a decision gets made, people tend to defend and repeat the same or similar decision, regardless of whether it is working, because to stop and try something different is to suggest that the time, resources, and people who supported previous efforts were wasted. So, if you commit to an action, you worry that changing direction will be difficult. Knowing this, you are cautious about making quick decisions, trapped in analysis-paralysis, and supporting the status quo, which you know is bad and what to avoid. The cycle repeats, and you are trapped in analysis paralysis. 

If you find yourself in such situations, then sensemaking provides a way forward. Sensemaking has two aspects: mindset and practice. 

Sensemaking as a mindset requires being flexible, taking time to consult others, broadening your perspective, and searching for the next decision without getting trapped in searching for the right decision. When things are highly uncertain, better decisions emerge when ideas are proposed, tested, rejected, and replaced with new ideas to retest, again and again, and again. That means you must be courageous enough to propose and make decisions while being humble enough to abandon what does not work, following the vital sensemaking principle of strong ideas weakly held. A sensemaking mindset encourages course corrections rather than rigidly following a planned path toward a predetermined solution. It promotes tolerance for results that differ from those that were predicted. It views failure as an opportunity to learn rather than an opportunity to cast blame.

Sensemaking as a practice can be equally powerful. When confronted with ambiguity and overwhelming complexity, sensemaking provides a place to engage the problem. Here are several tools you are probably familiar with:

– sSWOT: The Sustainability Strengths Weaknesses Opportunities and Threats analysis helps organizations take action on environmental challenges by exploring collaboration with internal departments, as well as suppliers, customers, or other stakeholders on strategies to create and sustain long-term value. Most importantly, it can help identify and communicate possible decisions.

– 3SO: Every sustainability situation has four dimensions: Stakeholders, Strategies, System, and Outcomes. Stakeholders use Strategies to change Systems to produce desired Outcomes. To quickly make sense of a situation, iteratively work through each of these four dimensions. What you learn from one dimension (i.e., stakeholders) can inform and help you more effectively see relevant information in another dimension (i.e., strategies the stakeholders are using and the outcomes they seek).

– Cynefin: The framework sorts the issues facing leaders into five contexts—simple, complicated, complex, chaotic, and disorder. It helps leaders diagnose situations, so they respond in contextually appropriate ways, make better decisions, and avoid the problems that arise when they otherwise respond with their preferred/default management style.

– PEST/PESTLE/STEEPLE: Helps analyze the Political, Economic, Socio-Cultural, and Technological challenges you face. It helps understand the “big picture” forces of change you’re exposed to and take advantage of the opportunities that they present.

– Natural Step’s 5-Level Framework: Most every situation has five levels: (1) the System in which it is embedded, 2) what counts as success, 3) the strategies that produce success, 4) the concrete actions or tactics associated with those strategies, and 5) the tools those actions use such as life cycle analysis or ISO 14001.

– VISSI.  The Vision and goals describe what success looks like. The indicators help gauge progress towards those goals. The System maps the causes, effects, and leverage points where Innovation is needed to create change, and the Strategies produce the required change. 

The scale, complexity, and uncertainty of sustainable challenges can be daunting. Where do you start? Who should you talk to? What can you do? The familiar parable about blind men encountering their first elephant illustrates how easy it is to misinterpret complex situations and how easy it is to become stuck in analysis paralysis.

Six blind men encountered an elephant. Not knowing what it was, they decided to explore it. “It’s a pillar,” said the man who touched a leg. “No! It is a rope,” said the man who touched the tail. “It is a tree,” said the man who touched the trunk. “It is a hand fan,” said the man who touched the ear. “It a wall,” said the man who touched the belly. “How can that be. What I feel is a solid pipe,” said the man who touched the tusk. 

Because the six could not make sense of the situation, they could not respond to the risks and opportunities it presented. We can only hope they are well and did not extend the analysis of the elephant much further.  

The most successful people are those who are mentally tough. They choose thoughts that biologically improve their quality of life. 

Twenty years ago, I set out to combine what I knew about cognitive neuroscience, brain chemistry, and human performance to create a training method to show people exactly how to develop mental toughness. After years of research with clinical patients and having worked with thousands of people considered “the best,” I developed Relentless Solution Focus (RSF). It’s a three-step process that has since been proven to help people win World Series, Super-Bowls, National Championships, Olympic gold medals, and increase business productivity by up to 30 percent year over year.

Mentally tough people actually choose the thoughts that cause them to take actions that lead to positive outcomes, although this is contrary to the way humans are hardwired. Over millennia, our very survival relied on our ability to be alert to potential dangers. That is, we are pre-disposed to look for problems – what I call “Problem-Centric Thought.” This negativity bias significantly limits our potential and increases stress, pressure, and underperformance.

By developing a Relentless Solution Focus (RSF) – which along with my colleague Ellen Reed, we have taught tens of thousands of clients – people can be prepared for adversity and thrive in it. This mind-training regimen makes it possible to reframe every problem into an opportunity for positive, productive action. Here are the three steps:

1. Recognize – First, recognize when negative thinking has set in. The RSF process teaches people to be alert to negative thoughts and to use the onset of this thinking to create positive behavior change. This is critical because what anyone focuses on expands. Focusing on problems makes them larger and less manageable.

2. Replace – Once people recognize their problem-focused thoughts, it’s essential to replace negative thinking with more positive thoughts. The key is to do this quickly — within sixty seconds or less. To do this, people must ask themselves one simple question: What is one thing I can do right now that could make this better? Dr. Selk advises using what he calls “The Mental Chalkboard” to ensure that people focus on solutions. Fortunately, just as focusing on problems causes them to expand, focusing on solutions has the same effect.

3. Retrain – No muscle becomes strong without training. Developing mental strength requires training, as well. Although negative thinking is hardwired, the brain has the ability to change.  

Adversity itself isn’t controllable. What is always controllable is what you do about it — the mentally tough zero in on what can be done — the mental chalkboard’s solution side.

Whenever you hear something repeated, it feels more real when you hear it repeated. In other words, repetition makes any statement seem more trustworthy. So anything you hear will feel more accurate each time you hear it again.

Do you see what I did there? Each of the three sentences above conveyed the same message. Yet each time you read the next sentence, it felt more and more trustworthy. Cognitive neuroscientists like myself call this the “illusory truth effect.”

Go back and recall your experience reading the first sentence. It probably felt strange and disconcerting, perhaps with a tone of outrage, as in “I don’t believe things more if they’re repeated!” 

Reading the second sentence did not inspire such a strong reaction. Your reaction to the third sentence was tame by comparison.

Why? Because of a phenomenon called “cognitive fluency,” meaning how easily we process information. Much of our vulnerability to deception in all areas of life – including misinformation – revolves around cognitive fluency in one way or another. 

Now think about how rumors spread in your organization’s grapevine. It works on the same principle. Employees hear a rumor – say about a proposed headquarters move, just like Elon Musk’s move of Tesla’s HQ to Texas. It feeds into their fears, which is a very cognitively fluid part of our minds. 

They repeat the rumor, and it goes around, and then they keep hearing it from others. It begins to seem more and more authentic, regardless of reality. Before you know it, those who want to stay where they are looking for another job, even though you might never have intended to move your headquarters! 

Fortunately, we can learn about these mental errors, which helps us address misinformation and make our workplaces more truthful.

The Lazy Brain

Our brains are lazy. The more effort it takes to process information, the more uncomfortable we feel about it, and the more we dislike and distrust it. 

By contrast, the more we like specific data and are comfortable with it, the more we feel that it’s accurate. This intuitive feeling in our gut is what we use to judge what’s true and false. 

Yet no matter how often you heard that you should trust your gut and follow your intuition, that advice is wrong. You should not trust your gut when evaluating information where you don’t have expert-level knowledge, at least when you don’t want to screw up. Structured information gathering and decision-making processes help us avoid the numerous errors we make when we follow our intuition. And even experts can make serious errors when they don’t rely on such decision aids.

These mistakes happen due to mental errors that scholars call “cognitive biases.” The illusory truth effect is one of these mental blindspots; there are over 100 altogether. These mental blindspots impact all areas of our life, from health and politics to relationships.

Other Important Cognitive Biases

Besides illusory truth, what are some other cognitive biases you need to beware of to protect your organization from misinformation? If you’ve heard of any cognitive biases, you’ve likely heard of the “confirmation bias.” That refers to our tendency to look for and interpret information in ways that conform to our prior beliefs, intuitions, feelings, desires, and preferences, as opposed to the facts. 

Again, cognitive fluency deserves blame. It’s much easier to build neural pathways to information that we already possess, especially when we have strong emotions; it’s much more challenging to break well-established neural pathways if we need to change our minds based on new information. Consequently, we instead look for information that’s easy to accept, which fits our prior beliefs. In turn, we ignore and even actively reject information that doesn’t match our beliefs. 

Moreover, the more educated we are, the more likely we are to engage in such active rejection. After all, our smarts give us more ways of arguing against new information that counters our beliefs. That’s why research demonstrates that the more educated you are, the more polarized your beliefs will be around scientific issues that have religious or political value overtones, such as stem cell research, human evolution, and climate change. Where might you and your team be letting your smarts get in the way of the facts?

Our minds like to interpret the world through stories, meaning explanatory narratives that clearly and straightforwardly link cause and effect. Such stories are a balm to our cognitive fluency, as our mind continually looks for patterns that explain the world around us in an easy-to-process manner. That leads to the “narrative fallacy,” where we fall for convincing-sounding narratives regardless of the facts, especially if the story fits our predispositions and our emotions. 

Do you ever wonder why politicians tell so many stories? How about the advertisements you see on TV or video advertisements on websites, which tell rapid visual stories? How about salespeople or fundraisers? Sure, sometimes they cite statistics and scientific reports, but they spend much, much more time telling stories: simple, straightforward, compelling narratives that seem to make sense and tug at our heartstrings. 

Now, here’s something that’s actually true: the world doesn’t make sense. The world is not simple, clear, and compelling. The world is complex, confusing, and contradictory. Beware of simple stories! Look for complex, confusing, and contradictory scientific reports and high-quality statistics: they’re much more likely to contain the truth than the easy-to-process stories.

Fixing Our Brains

Unfortunately, knowledge only weakly protects us from cognitive biases; it’s essential but far from sufficient.

What can we do? You can use decision aid strategies to address cognitive biases to defend your organization from misinformation.

One of the most effective strategies is to help your employees and yourself build up a habit of automatically considering alternative possibilities to any claim you hear, especially claims that feel comfortable. Since our lazy brain’s default setting is to avoid questioning claims, which requires hard thinking, it helps to develop a mental practice of going against this default. Be especially suspicious of repeated claims that make you feel comfortable without any additional evidence, which play on the illusory truth effect and the confirmation bias combined.

Another effective strategy involves cultivating a mental habit of questioning stories in particular. Whenever you hear a story, the brain goes into listening and accepting mode. Remember that it’s very easy to cherry-pick stories to support whatever position the narrator wants to advance. Instead, look for specific hard numbers, statistical evidence, and peer-reviewed research to support claims.

More broadly, you can encourage employees to make a personal commitment to the twelve truth-oriented behaviors of the Pro-Truth Pledge by signing the pledge at ProTruthPledge.org. These behaviors stem from cognitive neuroscience and behavioral economics research in the field called debiasing, which refers to counterintuitive, uncomfortable, but effective strategies to protect yourself from cognitive biases. Peer-reviewed research has shown that taking the Pro-Truth Pledge effectively changes people’s behavior to be more truthful, both in their statements and in interactions with others.

These quick mental habits will address the most fundamentally flawed aspects of our mind’s tendency to accept misinformation.