Leadership and Self-Deception. Getting out of the Box. The Arbinger Institute

we’ve encountered.”

– Mark Ballif, CEO, Plum Healthcare

      Preface

      For too long, the issue of self-deception has been the realm of deep-thinking philosophers, academics, and scholars working on the central questions of the human sciences. The public remains generally unaware of the issue. That would be fine except that self-deception is so pervasive that it touches every aspect of life. “Touches” is perhaps too gentle a word to describe its influence. Self-deception actually determines one’s experience in every aspect of life. The extent to which it does that – and in particular the extent to which it determines the nature of one’s influence on, and experience of, others – is the subject of this book.

      To give you an idea of what’s at stake, consider the following analogy. An infant is learning how to crawl. She begins by pushing herself backward around the house. Backing herself around, she gets lodged beneath the furniture. There she thrashes about, crying and banging her little head against the sides and undersides of the pieces. She is stuck and hates it. So she does the only thing she can think of to get herself out – she pushes even harder, which only worsens her problem. She’s more stuck than ever.

      If this infant could talk, she would blame the furniture for her troubles. After all, she is doing everything she can think of. The problem couldn’t be hers. But of course the problem is hers, even though she can’t see it. While it’s true that she’s doing everything she can think of, the problem is precisely that she can’t see how she’s the problem. Having the problem she has, nothing she can think of will be a solution.

      Self-deception is like this. It blinds us to the true causes of problems, and once we’re blind, all the “solutions” we can think of will actually make matters worse. Whether at work or at home, self-deception obscures the truth about ourselves, corrupts our view of others and our circumstances, and inhibits our ability to make wise and helpful decisions. To the extent that we are self-deceived, both our happiness and our leadership are undermined at every turn, and not because of the furniture.

      We have written this book to educate people about a solution to this most central of problems. Our experience in teaching about self-deception and its solution is that people find this knowledge liberating. It sharpens vision, reduces feelings of conflict, enlivens the desire for teamwork, redoubles accountability, magnifies the capacity to achieve results, and deepens satisfaction and happiness. This is true whether we are sharing these ideas with corporate executives in New York, governmental leaders in Beijing, community activists on the West Bank, or parenting groups in Brazil. Members of every culture participate to one degree or another in their own individual and cultural self-deceptions. The discovery of a way out of those self-deceptions is the discovery of hope and the birth of new possibilities and lasting solutions.

      This book was first published in 2000, with the paperback appearing in 2002. In this new edition, published in 2010, the text has been updated, and we have added a section at the end that describes the various uses people have made of the book and its ideas over the last decade. Initially, some readers are surprised to find that the book unfolds as a story. Although fictional, the characters’ experiences are drawn from our own and our clients’ actual experiences, so the story rings true, and most readers tell us that they see themselves in it. Because of this, the book delivers not just conceptual but also practical understanding of the problem of self-deception and its solution. The resulting impact has made Leadership and Self-Deception an international bestseller that is now available in over 20 languages. Our most recent bestseller, The Anatomy of Peace, published in hardcover in 2006 and in paperback in 2008, builds on both the story and the ideas developed in Leadership and Self-Deception. Individually and together, these books help readers to see their work lives and home situations in entirely new ways, and to discover practical and powerful solutions to problems they were sure were someone else’s.

      We hope that this introduction to the self-deception problem and solution will give people new leverage in their professional and personal lives – leverage to see themselves and others differently, and therefore leverage to solve what has resisted solution and to improve what can yet be improved.

       A Note about the Book

      Although based on actual experiences in our work with organizations, no character or organization described in this book represents any specific person or organization. However, the information that appears about Ignaz Semmelweis is a historical account drawn from the book Childbed Fever: A Scientific Biography of Ignaz Semmelweis, by K. Codell Carter and Barbara R. Carter (Transaction Publishers, 2005).

      PART I

      Self-Deception and the “Box”

      1 Bud

      It was a brilliant summer morning shortly before nine, and I was hurrying to the most important meeting of my new job at Zagrum Company. As I walked across the tree-lined grounds, I recalled the day two months earlier when I had first entered the secluded campus-style headquarters to interview for a senior management position. I had been watching the company for more than a decade from my perch at one of its competitors and had tired of finishing second. After eight interviews and three weeks spent doubting myself and waiting for news, I was hired to lead one of Zagrum’s product lines.

      Now, four weeks later, I was about to be introduced to a senior management ritual peculiar to Zagrum: a daylong one-on-one meeting with the executive vice president, Bud Jefferson. Bud was the right-hand man to Zagrum’s president, Kate Stenarude. And due to a shift within the executive team, he was about to become my new boss.

      I had tried to find out what this meeting was all about, but my colleagues’ explanations confused me. They mentioned a discovery that solved “people problems”; how no one really focused on results; and that something about the “Bud Meeting,” as it was called, and strategies that evidently followed from it, was key to Zagrum’s incredible success. I had no idea what they were talking about, but I was eager to meet, and impress, my new boss.

      Bud Jefferson was a youngish-looking 50-year-old combination of odd-fitting characteristics: a wealthy man who drove around in an economy car without hubcaps; a near–high school dropout who had graduated with law and business degrees, summa cum laude, from Harvard; a connoisseur of the arts who was hooked on the Beatles. Despite his apparent contradictions, and perhaps partly because of them, Bud was revered as something of an icon. He was universally admired in the company.

      It took 10 minutes on foot to cover the distance from my office in Building 8 to the lobby of the Central Building. The pathway – one of many connecting Zagrum’s 10 buildings – meandered beneath oak and maple canopies along the banks of Kate’s Creek, a postcard-perfect stream that was the brainchild of Kate Stenarude and had been named after her by the employees.

      As I scaled the Central Building’s hanging steel stairway up to the third floor, I reviewed my performance during my month at Zagrum: I was always among the earliest to arrive and latest to leave. I felt that I was focused and didn’t let outside matters interfere with my objectives. Although my wife often complained about it, I was making a point to outwork and outshine every coworker who might compete for promotions in the coming years. I nodded to myself in satisfaction. I had nothing to be ashamed of. I was ready to meet Bud Jefferson.