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For reflective leaders, trying to understand others can sometimes be difficult. Even when we take the time to reflect on the actions of others, sometimes we just can’t figure out why some folks react one way and other folks react in a completely opposite manner. In this article I’ll start to explore what makes us behave the way we do
There are many theories and models from the fields of Psychology and Social Psychology that describe the interactions between individuals and since it’s been over 25 years since I took a Psychology course, I’m not even going to try to pretend to know or understand them.
For simplicity sake, I like to use the rational-emotive-behavior model that University of Virginia professor Jim Clawson has created based on the work of Albert Ellis and others.
The Rational-Emotive-Behavior Model
Very often our reaction time is almost instantaneous to things that we see and experience. But when we break this process down we can start to understand what is happening.
Everything starts with an “event” happening that we observe. We experiencing something happening: we receive an email from a coworker, we talk to our spouse on the phone, or we see long distance TV commercial.
Everything that we observe we experience through the filter of our values, assumptions, beliefs and expectations (VABEs) or as I have previously described, the rocks that we collect throughout our lives and carry around with us.
Through the filter of our rocks, we add our perceptions and then our judgements to the event we have observed, leading us to a conclusion about what we have just experienced. Once we have reached our conclusion our immediate feelings and emotions come into play and lead us to a behavior that is a reaction to the original event.
The Ladder of Inference
This model is very similar to the Ladder of Inference explained by Peter Senge, et. al in The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook when they talk about our mental models. They explain that when we observe an event, we are selective in what data we observe from the event.
To this data we add our own meanings and assumptions, which allow us to make our conclusions about what we have experienced. We then take action based on our beliefs and sometimes actually adapt our beliefs based on our conclusions (or as I like to say we pick up a new rock and replace one of our old rocks with it).
In both models, we go from observing the event to reacting to it in milliseconds. Without understanding why or how we came to react in the way we have.
An Example
I like to use this example from one of my classes to explain this process:
I was teaching a rare 9:00 AM Saturday morning class. This group was going through the MBA program as a cohort and they all worked for the Federal government, in different agencies. This was my third course with this group and we had all become comfortable with one another.
One of the students, I’ll call him Mark, had a habit of coming in later than everyone else and left during class several times a week to answer his cell phone. One day I asked if he would mind me using him as my Ladder of Inference example because it was a perfect example of how we could get things wrong. Here is the example I used:
Mark is late for class.
Mark is always showing up late.
Therefore, Mark doesn’t care whether he is late of not.
Therefore, Mark doesn’t care about school and his degree.
Therefore, Mark is a slacker.
As a group we had great fun with this example because we all knew Mark well. You see, Mark was a full-time contract specialist with the Federal Government. We also knew that Mark had a roofing business “on the side”, in fact he had provided roofing estimates for a few of his classmates.
But it turns out that Mark’s little “side” business held the contract to do all of the roofing work for a national restaurant chain’s stores in Eastern Pennsylvania, Delaware and Southern New Jersey. Over 300 stores total. All while holding a full-time government job AND being an MBA student. So by definition, Mark was anything but a slacker.
This example shows how we can react to things too quickly and behave in a way that doesn’t make sense to others, especially if they have a filtered the information differently because of their unique set of rocks that they carry.
In the my next article, I’ll look at ways to consider the behaviors of others and how we can do a better job of understanding.
Leader’s Reflection: Everyone behaves the way that they do because they are acting through a filter of the rocks (values, assumptions, beliefs, and expectations) that they carry around. Leaders need to recognize that each individual’s reaction to things is going to be different because of their unique set of rocks.
Tom, nice post. I remember a discussion on this topic from Mark Batterson’s In a Pit With a Lion On a Snowy Day where he described our judgment of other’s motivation as an “Explanatory Style.” Our explanatory style provides an indication as to “our own meanings and assumptions” that you mention above. I’m always intrigued by how people project their rocks and meanings and assumptions onto others.
Thanks for the thoughtful post. Mike…