Following is an Excerpt of Testimony given by Dr. Michael O’Brien before an emergency session of the U.S. Senate Special Subcommittee on Un-Aware Leadership, April 1, 2010.
Caveat: There is no Special Senate Subcommittee on Un-Aware Leadership. It did not convene on April Fool’s Day. It did not invite Michael O’Brien to testify. If there were and it had and he did, however, O’Brien confirms that part of the exchange might have gone something like this.
Senator Insight: Dr. O’Brien, I invited you to testify before this panel because you have a unique perspective on the various crises we face today. Could you summarize?
MOB: Sure. Science shows that evolution has made most human thinking unconscious, or automatic. It’s the most efficient kind thinking most of the time. But when conscious thinking is needed, unconscious thinking, automatic thinking, can get us into big trouble quickly.
Senator Insight: And you believe “automatic thinking” is the underlying cause of many of the problems now facing us?
MOB: Yes. The reason is that we’re wired to think automatically as much as possible, and consciously as little as possible. I think that learning when and how to think consciously is humanity’s new frontier. I think we should be teaching it in our schools, and that every organization—including every level of government—should be conducting workshops in it. Conscious thinking, which really just means the ability to think differently on purpose when you have to, is a big deal for leaders, because of the way their thoughts amplify. This is especially true today.
Senator Insight: Why especially today?
MOB: Because digital technology is changing the world at a speed the human brain has never encountered. As a result, we really don’t understand the challenges before us. We can’t understand them; we’ve never seen anything quite like them. We have no “neural archive,” if you will, of challenges like these. Because we don’t understand them, we don’t know how to solve them.
Senator Insight: That sounds like a formula for disaster.
MOB: It’s a formula for breakdown or breakthrough. We’re mostly getting breakdown right now. My three decades as an executive coach persuade me it’s the most serious problem we face. It’s not just because we don’t know what to do, but also because we don’t know how to figure out what to do.
Senator Insight: In your book Quicksilver you cite evidence that this was the real cause of the financial meltdown of 2008, not just economic policy errors. Can you explain?
MOB: We use the example of the Congressional debate in the 1990s over regulating derivatives. The clash between Federal Reserve Board Chairman Alan Greenspan and Commodities Futures Trading Commission Chairwoman Brooksley Born was a classic…
Senator Codswallup: I hope you’re not one of those who question Dr. Greenspan’s patriotism.
MOB: No. I’m one of those who question his automatic thinking…
Senator Codswallup: You could have done a better job than Alan Greenspan as the Federal Reserve chairman?
MOB: No. I’m not an economist. But, I might have been able to help Dr. Greenspan understand how his old automatic thinking was about to lead him and the global economy over a waterfall.
Senator Insight: How?
MOB: The derivatives debate, the Greenspan/Born argument, most of the debates in government hearings like this one, amount to a collision of conclusions about how to fix what ails us. We go right to ideological clash instead of mutual exploration of the unknown. At best it’s noisy and distracting. At worst it’s destructive, because it closes our minds and causes us to stop thinking. That yields exactly the opposite of what we want. I see the same thing in boardrooms. This concussive collision of conclusions is not evidence of dysfunction or stupidity. It’s normal, God help us. It’s what happens when everyone is on autopilot, but no one realizes it. I try to help my clients see how questions are a better leadership tool than conclusions. I think all of us do a lot better by living with way more questions than conclusions.
Senator Insight: Why?
MOB: Because a conclusion is the end of thinking. A question is the beginning. And conclusions rooted in assumptions that no longer apply are—well, bad. Real bad.
Senator Gobsmacked: That sounds academic and simplistic at the same time.
MOB: Does it? All it really means is that you want to keep thinking, because things keep changing. We all have ghosts in our brains. We don’t want those ghosts doing our thinking.
Senator Gobsmacked: Isn’t that a little too philosophical to be useful to most leaders, like those of us on this panel?
MOB: Most leaders think so, which is a big reason why history repeats itself so unpleasantly.
Senator Insight: What do you mean by “way more” questions than answers?” What’s the right ratio?
MOB: Great question.
Senator Insight: Well?
MOB: Well, I think the question is more important than the answer, because it’s always a great question, and the answer will change. The answer depends on the circumstances.
Senator Insight: Well, can you generalize about the proper ratio?
MOB: I can generalize about the principle, but not a number, like five-to-one, ten-to-one, etc. The principle is: you want real dialogue with others. Real debate. Real debate, as opposed to what we think of as a “contest of ideas,” leads to the shared creation of new ideas. If you and I just try to change each other’s minds, we’re going to wind up doing things one way or the other. Maybe we’ll “compromise,” but there’s little “newness” in most compromises. They’re often just negotiated surrenders intended to stop conflict. In a real debate you and I intend to create new possibilities of action together that we can’t create alone. By ourselves, we have no way of knowing what we don’t know. We can only discover that together. It takes two or more to tango. I call it generating the truth.
Senator Gobsmacked: You make it sound awful easy.
MOB: I don’t mean to. True leadership is about the hardest thing I know, because it requires me to give up my automatic thinking. That feels like a kind of psychological disarmament. It feels scary. But it’s not disarmament; it’s liberation. It’s not dangerous; it’s the safest thing we can do, because it enables discovery.
Senator Gobsmacked: Are you saying if we had been asking enough questions, we could have predicted what was going to happen? We could have seen this tsunami coming?
MOB: Not exactly. In fact, if someone says he can show you how to predict the future I’d advise putting your hand over your wallet. I’m saying if you had been engaged in real debate you might not have confused a financial meltdown with a tsunami. God makes tsunamis. We decide stuff like financial meltdowns into existence. The question is, who decides unwanted events into being? Answer: the ghosts in our brains, the automatic mind. The executive function of the mind is much smarter than that. It’s those executives we need to wake up.
Senator Gobsmacked: Sounds like you’re telling us we screwed up.
MOB: Well, everyone’s telling you that. Blaming government for everything that goes wrong has become a national pastime. I call it the blame game. And, frankly, I don’t like the nastiness I’m hearing with some of the blaming. I don’t think you “screwed up.” It would be simpler if you had. I think you “normaled up.” That’s what we all do all the time until we learn to think differently on purpose when we need to.
Senator Insight: Practically speaking, how could that have prevented the meltdown?
MOB: Just as I’m not in the prediction business, I’m not in the second-guessing business, either. I’m confident, however, that had Congressional and Wall Street leaders asked the right questions, they might have foreseen that derivatives trading risked contaminating the global monetary system with $650 trillion of toxic assets, which is one current estimate. That’s what Born was trying to tell Congress before Congress put a sock in her mouth. Based on my experience, I can promise you that there was more than enough intelligence and goodwill on Wall Street and in Congress to avert this catastrophe. You just didn’t have a process in place to access that intelligence. As far as I can tell, you still don’t. That’s the leadership crisis we now face.
Senator Codswallup: Well, you can talk about things forever. Sooner or later you have to make a decision. Seems like we might never get any business done if we had as much dialogue as you recommend.
MOB: I think my clients would tell you that when you get your proportion of dialogue right, the business you don’t get done is business you don’t want to do—namely, making big mistakes. Yes, you have to make decisions, but you want to curb your rush to make sure you’re not deciding with your automatic mind when you shouldn’t be. Leaders are called executives, but Mother Nature has seen to it that we don’t use our executive minds automatically. It takes intention and practice. That’s the only way to build the kind of executive skill I’m talking about.
Senator Mooncalf: I’ve always said if we will just pull together we can create the perfect union we all want.
MOB: I’m afraid I don’t believe in perfection. I believe in learning and alacrity. My training teaches me that our capacities for learning and adaptability are infinite, which makes me a very cheerful person.
Senator Freeboot: I don’t know, I think we’ve done a pretty good job cleaning up someone else’s mess.
MOB: (Clears throat.)
Senator Insight: What’s the key to controlling the automatic mind?
MOB: Notice your feelings. They’re nature’s early warning system. If someone irritates you, try to notice it earlier and earlier. Same with worry, fear, anger, impatience, sullen silence, etc. We all know the phrase for this: emotional literacy. But it’s easier to say those words than to become emotionally literate. Emotional literacy takes practice. Only the emotionally literate can control their automatic minds and become “executives” in the neurological sense.
Senator Insight: Any tips for the members of this panel about becoming emotionally literate?
MOB: Try the buddy system. It’s pulled humanity’s fat out of the fire from the beginning. Get with a fellow panel member whom you trust and compare notes about anything in this hearing that irritated, angered, scared, saddened you, etc. Tell the truth. Reporting these experiences to someone you trust is a good way to learn how to start reporting them to yourself. Try to notice more and more, and every time you notice take it as a sign from your own internal tsunami coastal warning system that perhaps you have something to learn. And just maybe there’s a Brooksley Born available to help you. Look around.
Senator Insight: Can you leave us with one Quicksilver thought?
MOB: A mind is a dangerous thing to close. No one in his right mind does it.
Senator Insight: Thank you. If we decide to hold a real hearing on this subject, will you join us?
MOB: Sure. I attend them every day with my clients.
Tags: Business, Dr. Michael O’Brien, Economic Meltdown, Executive Coaching, Senate Testimony
