fabulous book – The 4-Hour Work Week – and I was set to live the dream. I thought that, once I had a virtual assistant, everything would get easier. It didn't. It required me to establish some really good systems, and unpack my default thinking into a whole heap of default templates to live within these systems. These templates included simple things like email responses – including what to do if someone important emailed while I was out of the office or overseas:
Acknowledge their email [as in, say something nice about something they've mentioned] and then explain that I'm out of the office until [specify day and date]. Offer to be of assistance if there is anything they need urgently.
And so back to my doodles. After my presentation, the client mentioned via email something to the effect of, ‘the audience loved Jason's doodles'. But alas! My template did not capture the nuances of such things as the distinction between one's doodle and the doodles one sends through after graphically recording an event.10
Anyhoo, I thought this was a good template for a fairly repeatable task. Templates are the physical bits that make up a system and, when they work, they save us a heap of time by minimising any unnecessary duplication of effort.
For example, beyond some basic html, I don't know how to code. I wish I did, but I don't just yet. But, thankfully, website templates exist – which means I don't need to bear the cognitive burden of learning to code. I can use a template and save a heap of time and mental angst.
In an organisational context, performance reviews are a fairly common phenomena. The common intent behind performance reviews is to periodically assess an individual's productivity and efficacy in relation to a set of pre-established criteria and organisational objectives (defaults). Additionally, the process may be an opportunity to review the employee's aspirations, goals, strengths, weaknesses, learning opportunities and behaviours.
But what tends to happen is that everyone is busy, and these performance reviews become simple box-ticking activities that do little to improve things. Whole industries are designed to provide box-ticking solutions for performance reviews. In these industries, instead of having meaningful conversations, managers can simply generate a specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-bound goal, and employees can then proceed to show incremental progress towards that goal. Again, this is fine for formulaic work with predictable outcomes – but it's horrendously limiting for any organisation or leader looking to do something new.
And so, the cracks in default thinking begin to show.
Templates and systems serve our default thinking. They're the instructions and guideposts we turn to when we're uncertain about what to do. And, because we are so primed to recognise patterns and minimise cognitive strain (that is, the burden of thought required to process what to do), defaulting to the assumptions, systems, templates and structures we have already established is an incredibly alluring proposition.
Reverting to the default saves you time, thereby enhancing your productivity and efficiency. But it costs you accuracy, empathy, relevance and meaningful progress.
NORMS
‘Erm, that's just not the done thing around here.'
Norms are cultural products (including values, customs and rituals) that represent our understanding of what others do, and what others think that we should do. Norms occur in many contexts, not only at the team level, the organisation level and the industry level, but also across countries, age demographics, cities, suburbs, and so on. For example, I'm writing this book at a cafe in Fitzroy, an inner-city suburb in Melbourne that, according to a 2015 article published in London's Telegraph, ranks in the top three of the most hipster neighbourhoods in the world. As such, good coffee, ironic tattoos, beards, skateboards, pop-up stores, ripped skinny jeans, thick-rimmed glasses, craft beer (and so on) all contribute to the norms of this area. I get no comments on my flaming red beard or coffee snobbery in Fitzroy – but very much do when I travel abroad.
Norms influence our defaults. When at a loss as to what to do, our brain will scan for a default. If we identify a pattern we haven't experienced yet, one of the reference points that will influence our decision on how to behave is the established norms. ‘What would others do? What would they think I should do?' The answer to these types of questions is usually something that's predictable and safe.11
As a leader, understanding the values that influence your behaviour, the values that drive your colleagues' behaviours, and the company values12 that influence the collective behaviour of your organisation is really important.
Norms are powerful. They are frequently repeated and reinforced by the people who surround you. Deviance from the established norms is often frowned upon, and viewed with mistrust. If one strays too far from the established norms, one may be cast as a pariah or deviant.13 This is unfortunate, because most norms are established in precedence (the past), and are self-validating and reinforcing.
PRECEDENTS
Because our default thinking relies so heavily on pattern-matching, it can be hard for folks to explore or accept new ideas that lack an established precedent. Leading folks through unprecedented territory, towards a future not yet realised, can be even harder.
Part of leading such a quest is the process of creating precedents. This is where we gather evidence to serve as a reference point for decisions (covered in more detail in chapter 4).
Naturally, the psychology of what informs our thinking is much more complex than the brief tour I've provided. We haven't even ventured into the territory of the identity you form within given social constructs, and how you manage cognitive dissonance in reference to that.
Suffice to say, our default thinking is a comforting, complex thing that favours efficiency and the status quo. Whenever we believe the world makes sense, it's due to our profound ability to ignore our own ignorance.
And so ends our lukewarm homage to Default Thinking.14
It's good, fast and often useful. It forms the basis of our ‘system 1' (fast) thinking. And a heap of leadership, strategy and motivation books out there support a collection of comfortingly familiar thinking around this.
Keep in mind default thinking is primarily formed through pattern matching – the more experience we get, the more patterns we recognise. This, in turn, gives us more codified patterns to call upon, and access to more cognitive shortcuts.15 For formulaic work with predictable outcomes, this is quite a boon – it's what allows us to enhance our mastery of musical instruments, or to accurately predict the outcome of things.
Clever systems exist for more complex phenomena, and handy templates exist for more repeatable phenomena. Both of these constructs serve to guide us through complexity and reduce cognitive burden – instead of having to think too hard, we have a system or template to guide us.
With all of this clever, time-saving stuff, one would think that we would have more time to work on the important stuff – like strategy, progress, and the threats and opportunities that lie on the horizon.
In fact, in an ideal world, we'd invest roughly 80 per cent of our time doing the core work that needs to be done – the default, productive, operational ‘business as usual' work that Ought To Be Got Done, and that only requires fast thinking.
But then everyone would also ensure that a good 20 per cent of their
I'm sure I could add some pun using the word ‘graphic', but I'll resist.
Remember – default thinking favours the minimisation of angst in return for the greatest short-term gain.
I'm not talking here about understanding the standard mix of integrity, innovation, collaboration, safety, diversity, community, and other ‘default' values. Unless, of course, you've actually done the work of translating what these values mean in terms of keystone behaviours.
Which is why the hero's journey is so challenging, and why it's incredibly important that leaders invest in culture change to ensure the folk they work with are part of the journey too – it's a lonely journey, otherwise. Pioneering strategy requires pioneering leadership, but it also requires a cultural norm that supports it – even if it's a bimodal culture to begin with (see chapter 16).
My intention with this opening chapter was actually to be all jolly-like, pointing out the many merits of default thinking. But I fear my disdain for unquestioned thought might have crept in. Oh well! Stay tuned …
Assuming we've had diverse experience. If this isn't the case and we've only had more experience doing the same thing, our default thinking may just be that much more ingrained and harder to challenge or budge – hence the need for diversity in leadership. This also highlights the effect that fresh eyes can have – without having a database of patterns to call upon, less experienced folks can often ask good questions, or see things others cannot. At least, until the point at which they become ‘normalised'.
