Familiarity Breeds…Contentment?

It’s an old saw – familiarity breeds contempt. But in organizational settings, it’s also dead wrong.

Familiarity actually breeds contentment – and that can be dangerous.

We call it “corporate culture” or “organizational culture.” Put another way: “It’s how we do things here.” It’s what we believe in, and the values we hold.

Chip Heath and Dan Heath, in Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work, suggest that contentment often comes from repeated exposure to an idea, a program, a process. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, “but what’s more troubling is that mere exposure also extends to our perception of truth.”

In other words, the more we hear or read or see something, the more we believe it’s true. Even if it’s a flat-out lie.

How many times have you received a group email claiming something (usually outrageous or bizarre) is true and you’re urged to pass it on? The internet lends itself to this type of communication. If something seems unbelievably outrageous, it’s probably untrue.

I received one that claimed a certain consumer product (I won’t mention names here to protect the innocent product) was the cause of all cancers, autism, Parkinson’s Disease, epilepsy and virtually every other illness and disease known to humanity, supposedly on the basis of “new scientific studies.”(I am not making this up.) Looking at the email chain, it has already been passed on numerous times.

If you receive something like this, check Snopes. The odds are good that Snopes will have an answer as to the validity of an internet claim.

Why are we so prone to believe this stuff?

We trust the people sending the email or making the claim.

We see a lot of people making the claim on twitter and Facebook.

There’s an article about it on Wikipedia.

An online publication that you read regularly has an article about it.

We have a lot of reasons for doing this. The key point related to all of these is that we tend to believe something is true if it fits our pre-existing worldview.

If we mistrust big corporations, or big government, or big religion (or any religion), we are more prone to believe crazy things about them. We don’t stop and ask if something might be wrong with our worldview. We’re a consumer culture and we consume news and information just like any other consumer commodity.

For organizations, the Heaths say, this status quo or “it’s the culture here” mentality can be devastating. It’s often most easily seen when an outside executive is brought in to change things in a staff or business unit with a strong culture. Watch how fast the white blood cells go to work to “kill the infection.”

We all can do better than that. Not every status quo is bad or wrong. Not every change or innovation is good. But we need to develop a highly tuned sense of discernment to know the difference.

And stop forwarding those crazy email chain letters.

Over at The HighCalling, we’ve been discussing Decisive. To see more posts on this section about short-term emotion, please visit TheHigh Calling.

Photograph by Petr Kratochvil via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

Worldviews, Villains, and Decisions

I’ve been spending a lot of time reading about and considering the subject of worldviews – what they are, where they come from, and how they affect our day-to-day lives. As Chip Heath and Dan Heath point out in Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work, a worldview is how we interpret the world, how we make sense of it, and how we make decisions to live and work in it.

One problem with a worldview is that we tend to seek out information that agrees with our worldview, and filter out the information that doesn’t. Consider how seriously informed you would be if you got all of your information on the Obama Administration from either Rush Limbaugh or Chris Matthews – a steady diet of ridicule or chills running up your leg.

If we all did that, we would end up with a national government that was so polarized that nothing would get done.

OK, I’m trying to make a point here, because that’s exactly what we do have.

But it’s not just government. Think about how a worldview can affect a workplace, a church, or a relationship, simply by filtering our information that doesn’t conform to what we already believe.

The Heaths would say, and I would agree, that desperately holding on to a worldview at the expense of reality will, at a minimum, lead to bad decisions.

In the book, the call this “conformation bias,” and individuals and organizations do it all the time. It’s one of the “four villains of decision making” they describe in Decisive. The other three are narrow framing, or unduly limiting your options; relying on short-term emotions (if you’re upset, always chill before making a decision); and overconfidence, or having too much faith in our own predictions (and we all do this).

They’re not saying you have to jettison your basic beliefs if you want to make good decisions. But they do say that you should question why you react or respond in certain ways, and examine exactly why you believe one decision or course of action is better than another.

It could be that you confirmation bias – your worldview – is showing.

Can you think of an example of when the worldview an individual, a company, an organization, or a nation led to disaster? (There are some obvious ones – Nazi Germany – and some not-so-obvious ones – like Enron.)

Over at The High Calling, Laura Boggess is leading the book discussion this month on Decisive. A post will be published each Monday in June (and I’m guest-posting on the book next week). To view the discussion and the comments, please visit The High Calling.

Photograph by Petr Kratochvil via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

Stories and Worldviews

One of my responsibilities at work is to manage our company’s social media accounts, including Twitter. If you’re familiar with it, you know that most people use their real names in the Twitter “handle” or in their profile. Many don’t. Twitter allows you to participate without revealing your identity.

We get our share of profanity, invective, outright lies and distortions, and even the occasional threat via Twitter. One day, a tweet popped up with an accusation that was so blatantly untrue and provocative that we decided it had to be answered. We were polite, and cited a third party link disproving what was being claimed. The person tweeting responded with a loud wail. “Well, it should be true because you’re so evil.”

Welcome to the subject of worldviews.

In Every Good Endeavor: Connecting Your Work to God’s Work, Tim Keller discusses the importance of stories and worldviews. A story is a narrative, and narratives, he says, “are actually so foundational to how we think that they determine how we understand and live life itself.” Our narratives form and structure our worldview, from the German word Weltanschauung, meaning “the comprehensive perspective from which we interpret all reality.”

A worldview, Keller says, is a master narrative, a fundamental story about what life should be like, what has knocked it off balance, and what can be done to make it right.

If you think worldviews don’t matter, look at Washington, D.C., and the war of worldviews over spending, the budget, and the size of government. Our worldviews are growing more extreme, but that’s another story.

As Christians, we, too, have a worldview, the Christian worldview. We know there is wrong in all of us – and it’s called sin. (If you are uncomfortable with the word “sin,” and many Christians are – another worldview at play here – you can substitute “brokenness.”) We know there is wrong among all of us – and it’s called sin. And we know what can be done to make it right, or move it in a right direction – and that’s called faith in Christ.

Perhaps less obviously and spectacularly than politics, this plays itself out at work, too. A worldview exists at all organizations. It may be capitalist, for example. A strong component of the worldview at my company is technology. Other workplaces have worldviews that are outward-focused, inward- focused, utilitarian, benevolent, patriarchal and more.

As a Christina in a largely secular workplace, am I expected to conform and share the prevailing worldview?

In a word, no.

I see the sin and brokenness play itself out each and every day. And I have to decide how to act and respond, each and every day.

It’s not easy.

I’ve talked with enough Christians who work in Christian workplaces to know it’s not easy there, either. The secular workplace doesn’t have a monopoly on sin and brokenness.

A few weeks ago, I made a decision to start each day tell myself three things.

God’s creation is good.

The world is fallen.

That nasty person who knifes me in the back is just as much loved by God as I am; that person, too, is made in God’s image.

It’s not so much changing my worldview and fully embracing it.

Over at The High Calling, we’ve been discussing Every Good Endeavor. We complete the discussion today, and this section had a lot of material to cover, which I might write on another time. Please visit The High Calling to see more of what’s being thought about and said.