Voluntary Complexity

A while back, I posted about Peter de Jager’s  Seven Questions of Change Management.   My  old post is here  and here’s an updated link to de Jager’s own words.  I’ve continued to apply them especially when change doesn’t seem to be going so smoothly.   I have to say, 2020 has provided me with lots of opportunities to revisit these points.

Change can be exciting, but unwanted change, of which we’ve had more than enough recently, can sap energy and morale in your team.   Daniel Pink, in his book Drive, tells us that the old carrot and stick method of motivating people is flawed beyond repair, and he suggests three principles of motivation.  This new approach to motivation has three essential elements: Autonomy—the desire to direct our own lives; Mastery—the urge to get better and better at something that matters; and Purpose—the yearning to do what we do in the service of something larger than ourselves.

As I’m looking at motivation, and revisiting principles of change management, I noticed that de Jager’s first three questions line up with what we need to do to support purpose, autonomy, and mastery in times of rapid change.

“Why is this change taking place?”  is an invitation to connect the change with our purpose as an organization.  Does this change support our existing purpose or does it herald a change in direction?  The questioner wonders:  this change might be changing why I’m here at all.  Help me get connected again.

“What’s in it for me?” is a call to recenter autonomy for a person who may be losing some aspect of their freedom of choice in this change.   This change might disrupt choices the questioner has made before.  Help me regain a sense of agency, this asks.

And third, “What do I do Monday?” resets the feeling of competence we enjoy in our roles.   Where previously well-known skills may have to be adapted or changed, the questioner asks for direction for regaining mastery in their  position.

2020 has required us to be adaptable and patient, and we’re not done yet.  At best, supporting the motivation and morale of high performing teams is a crucial part of the job of a manager today. The alignment between these questions and the motivation that can so easily get crushed in times of rapid change is a new way in which this set of change management questions supports my continuing desire to help my team.  Also, I get a thrill when different mental models provide complementary ways of viewing the same information, and both patterns of thought become more useful with the synergy.

Looking back I realize it’s been almost 8 years since the first post I made on de Jager’s Seven Questions, and they’ve been an ongoing help to me.  So have several other things I’ve learned  from following along with Peter de Jager’s monthly webinar series.  It addresses change management and many many other topics, from project management to cognitive science to facilitation skills.   The series is available at https://technobility.online .   The library of over a decade of past content is members-only but each new webinar is generously offered to the mailing list when it’s first issued.  Readers, I hope you’ll explore and enjoy what it has to offer.

One way to look at imposter syndrome is as an internal, self-generated  mental health issue — a plague of self-doubt and self-confidence that undermines one’s ability to work.

This feeling can express itself as a belief that we’re “performing” expertise  rather than being the experts. It often comes along with baggage of shame and fear, that one will be found out to be a “fraud” or unworthy of the position one holds.

Self-awareness of the limits of our own knowledge can be a good thing, in moderation.  But it can go too far.  Self awareness can become self-doubt, self-doubt can become paralysis.   If you’re experiencing this, you are not alone.  The Secret Thoughts of Successful Women: Why Capable People Suffer from the IMPOSTER SYNDROME and How to Thrive in Spite of It is one of the more helpful resources I have found on the topic.  Despite the title of the book, not only women fall into imposter syndrome, but anecdotally, it does seem to be more common for women than for men.

Another side of impostor syndrome is to notice the ways in which the culture around us can create and sustain impostor syndrome.    How we recognize and acknowledge expertise in others plays a part.

It’s not uncommon for people to have internalized expectations of  how experts are expected to look and behave and be.   We might expect a certain way of dressing, or a particular gender.  So many things can come into play here – age, accent, education, race.   The sum of these can result in someone being judged as “not the expert you were looking for”.

The darker side of this is that people who have to prove their right to be in the expert seat over and over again do seem to be more likely to internalize those critical judgements and express imposter syndrome.

As I read Secret Thoughts of Successful Women I thought to myself that those thoughts and mistaken beliefs sounded familiar. In fact, I had seen statements like that before :

Just in case the text above the title is hard to read,  I’ll spell it out

She didn’t write it… but if it’s clear she did the deed… She wrote it but she shouldn’t have. (it’s political, sexual, masculine, feminist) She wrote it, but look what she wrote about. (The bedroom, the kitchen, her family, other women) She wrote it, but she only wrote one of it. (“Jane Eyre, poor dear, that’s all she ever …”) She wrote it but she isn’t really an artist and it really isn’t art. (It’s a thriller, a romance, a children’s book.  It’s sci-fi!) She wrote it, but she had help. (Robert Browning, Branwell Bronte, her own masculine side) She wrote it, but she’s an anomaly (Woolf.  With Leonard’s help…) She wrote it but ….

Joanne Russ showed how women’s writing has been repeatedly categorized as not art, as not looking like the the art and presented in the ways that critics expected – and thus could be ignored and forgotten in mainstream literature.   The  belittling tactics and disparaging remarks she catalogued were echoed in surprising fidelity in  Young’s work on impostor syndrome.

And this leads me to believe that a significant part of imposter syndrome – maybe not all but certainly too much – comes from internalizing the judgements of others that we soak up from the culture around us.  And we all hold a part in sustaining the culture around us, so we have a challenge – not to judge expertise by external, irrelevant markers.

When we do judge expertise by external markers,  subtly or overtly, it is toxic – it does harm – and we need to notice our own thoughts and assumptions  and resist at all costs.  Humans have been taking shortcuts to tribal identity as long as there have been humans, but we CAN do better.  We can look in ourselves for all the places we make these judgements and false equivalences between appearance and ability.    That’s self-reflection and hard work especially from those of us who have the privilege not to be on the sharp end of those judgements.  But it really will ease a burden on others trying to catch up and add their contributions.