If You Want to Learn Something, Forget What You Know

The title of this article sounds like something that Yogi Berra might have said but didn't. And I think the slanted Yogi-like logic captures a basic truth regarding what it takes to learn about improvisation - and leadership.

In my previous article, I described Gary Klein’s research into the way that people make seemingly intuitive decisions – not by means of magic or ESP but by rapid (and largely unconscious) processing of various signals that point the way to the best course of action.

The signals and the processing can be incorporated into training materials to instruct novice practitioners. But how does a person proceed from conscious (and often tentative) processing of these signals to the type of instant intuitive calculation we saw in Gary Klein’s fire chief?

Well, in the words of the New York City jazz musician who was asked by a tourist how to get to Carnegie Hall: “Practice, man, practice.”

As simple as that sounds, though, many recent leadership experts have broken down the “practice” advice into more specific strategies.

First, to be most effective, practice needs to be more than just general immersion in the domain in which the person wants to gain skills. As Matthew Syed points out in his book Bounce, championship athletes don’t merely play lots of rounds of golf or engage in lengthy shoot-around sessions on the basketball court in hopes of improving their overall game. Instead, they first pinpoint the specific skills requiring development and then relentlessly target their practice sessions toward repeating and honing those skills.

A person wanting to develop intuitive command of leadership skills can take a page from the championship athlete’s playbook. As Daniel Goleman, Richard Boyatzis, and Annie McKee write in their book Primal Leadership:

“It’s possible to improve if you do three things: Bring bad habits into awareness, consciously practice a better way, and rehearse new behavior at every opportunity until it becomes automatic – that is, until mastery has occurred at the level of implicit learning.”

Leaders thus need to focus on identifying specific behaviors that require enhancement, by such means as competency models and self-reflection. Once the few high-impact areas of development opportunities are identified, the person can then create strategies (e.g., special projects, mentoring, job enrichment) to get targeted practice and feedback on their progress.

But as the quote from Goleman et al. above makes clear, before they can start focusing on the new ways of acting, leaders must often first unlearn bad habits that may have become embedded in their natural behavior. Goleman et al. go on to say:

“This suggests a learning strategy that at first focuses a bit more on overcoming the impulsive leadership habits you are trying to undo – before giving full attention to the new habits with which you want to replace the old.”

There is a direct connection here to the development of performance-improvising skills, since much of the trick of learning improvisation involves overcoming inhibitions and internal constraints that get in the way of one’s natural improvisational abilities. As Keith Sawyer’s research so vividly demonstrates, children are natural improvisers – but as they get older, their native creativity and flexibility often become casualties of their socialization into the adult world. Improv workshop games can act as a spark to jar them out of their self-censoring habits.

In the context of leadership development, “unlearning” can start with 360 feedback that serves to jolt the leader into awareness of how he is being perceived – followed by reflection, training, and coaching that guide the leader to acknowledge the drawbacks of his bad habits. At that point, the stage is set for new habits to begin settling into place – through practice, man, practice!

(I'll wrap up next time with some further thoughts about strategies to help engrain new leadership behaviors "in the bones.")

Why We Can't - and Shouldn't - Turn Off the Mind

“There’s something happening here / What it is ain’t exactly clear.” Stephen Stills

Awhile back I was conducting a leadership class in which I showed a video of a school principal who was a pioneer in the area of early education intervention for at-risk children. The video depicted a day in the life of the principal (whom I’ll call Kate) as she interacted with different groups – students, parents, administrators, corporate executives – and attempted to influence their participation in and funding of early education programs.

At the conclusion of the video, I asked my standard debriefing question: “What factors do you think governed Kate’s influencing approach to each of these different groups?”

By asking the question, I intended (and expected) the class participants to point out Kate’s use of certain approaches (rewards, sanctions, personal charisma) to influence students’ behavior, and her use of other approaches (her expertise in the field, her track record of success) to sway her corporate audiences.

I primarily wanted the class to acknowledge a key aspect of leadership: The ability to adapt one’s style to motivate different people based on a reading of the audience and the situation.

So I was intrigued when one of the participants gave me a somewhat unexpected response: “I don’t think she consciously considered any factors. I think she just acted intuitively.”

The response provided me a golden opportunity to refer to a situation described by Malcolm Gladwell in his book Blink. In Blink, Gladwell cites the work of a researcher named Gary Klein (whose company happens to be located two miles from my house – a connection I can’t resist offering up here, for what it’s worth). Klein’s company conducts detailed research into the ways that people make decisions – especially split-second ones in emergency situations.

Gladwell describes one of Klein’s research subjects, a fire department commander who once responded to a house fire that seemed to resist all of his squad’s efforts to extinguish it. As he and his squad stood in the living room trying to figure out their next move, the commander suddenly got a sense that something was just “not right” about the situation. He immediately ordered everyone out of the house – just before the living room floor collapsed into the basement.

Klein interviewed the commander about the factors that led to his decision to vacate and discovered:

“He didn’t know why he had ordered everyone out. He believed it was ESP. He was serious. He thought he had ESP, and he felt that because of that ESP, he’d been protected throughout his career.”

Most people would have chalked this up to “intuitive” decision-making born of years of experience. But not Klein, whose entire research is based on delving into how the mind arrives at such decisions, especially in the heat of the moment. As he pressed the commander to describe exactly what cues caught his attention as he moved through the house, Klein pieced together the thought processes that led to his urgent command to vacate. As Gladwell relates it:

“The fire didn’t respond to being sprayed in the kitchen because it wasn’t centered in the kitchen. It was quiet because it was muffled by the floor. The living room was hot because the fire was underneath the living room, and heat rises. At the time, though, the lieutenant made none of those connections consciously. All of his thinking was going on behind the locked door of his unconscious.” [emphasis added]

Similarly, in the situation of Kate, the school principal: She may not have been consciously aware of the signs she was picking up from her audience that governed her influencing behavior. However, under the surface, her mental computer was rapidly processing the cues and guiding her in-the-moment choices of behavior. (In this sense, she was very much operating in the same manner as a performance improviser – but more on that in a later article.)

Certainly, neither Kate nor the fire commander came into this world with their intuitive capabilities fully formed. Like anyone else, they first had to consciously learn the rudiments of effective action and proceed from a state of “conscious competence” to one of “unconscious competence.”

The good news, then, in these two examples – the fire commander and Kate – is that intuitive action can be taught, as long as we can isolate the inputs and processes that lead one to act effectively. Gary Klein is living proof that we can in fact identify the underlying dynamics of improvisational action in emergency situations. Similarly, through the creation of competency models and other behavioral descriptions, we can identify (and teach) what the best leaders do when they’re acting “in the heat of the moment.”

Of course, teaching intuitive action requires much more than just isolating key factors and presenting them on a Powerpoint slide. In my next article, I’ll describe strategies that can be employed to ingrain effective leadership behaviors (as my improv colleague Gary Schwartz says) “in the bones.”