Knowing What You Don't Know
The power of challenging your own perceptions, assumptions, and beliefs
A quick word first
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Have a plan. Don’t let the plan have you.
In Lakhdar Brahimi’s remarkable career, the U.N. diplomat strove to negotiate peace in some of the world’s bloodiest trouble-spots. Many of the conflicts he ventured into others wrote off as hopeless. Sometimes Brahimi’s efforts failed, but in other cases he succeeded, sometimes spectacularly. In one place, where bombs had been dropping in the morning, just a few hours later citizens were dining in outdoor cafes.
Brahimi’s approach to navigation is “navigating by sight,” as he puts it. Prepare your strategy carefully, he says. Map out a possible route to agreement. But somewhere in whatever sea you’re voyaging in, there’s bound to be at least one submerged rock that’s not on your chart, yet is big enough to sink your ship.
“You have got to use your eyes,” he insists. “That’s the only instrument you have. Don’t ask reality to conform to your blueprint, but instead you have to be prepared to adapt your blueprint to the reality you are seeing.”
Why it’s hard to criticize your own thinking
I was prompted to recall Brahimi’s wisdom while reading Adam Grant’s newest book, Think Again. He writes, “Intelligence is traditionally viewed as the ability to think and learn. Yet in a turbulent world, there’s another set of cognitive skills that might matter more: the ability to rethink and unlearn.”
At the heart of it, Grant urges us (especially the smartest among us) to be humble about what we think we know and deeply curious about all that we don’t know for certain. Nurturing that attitude is important in life in general. It’s essential as we plan for, conduct, and learn from all our negotiations.
That’s easy to say. Much harder to do. Grant explains why:
“When it comes to our knowledge and options, we tend to stick to our guns. Psychologists call this seizing and freezing. We favor the comfort of conviction over the discomfort of doubt, and we let our beliefs get brittle long before our bones.”1
Overcoming rigid thinking requires the experimental mindset of the best scientists and medical practitioners. Instead of carving strategies in stone, we should work from plausible hypotheses, with a sharp eye out for disconfirming evidence.
Years ago, I had the privilege of meeting the late C. Miller Fisher, an eminent neurologist who was treating a member of my family at Massachusetts General Hospital. Over his career Dr. Fisher developed seventeen rules for diagnosis and treatment.2 He wrote that list decades ago, but the thrust of them fully aligns with Grant’s principles in Think Again.
Fisher’s list is well suited for negotiation, to boot. Rule 3 states, “Make a hypothesis and then try as hard as you can to disprove it or find the exception before accepting it as valid.” As he explained to me, “I wanted to discover I was wrong before anyone else did.”3
In a negotiation context, imagine that a supplier royally messed up an important delivery to you. You’ve scheduled a phone call and know that they’re going to give you some lame excuse and you don’t want to hear it. Instead you want to tear up the contact and get a full refund.
Hold on a minute. How you know they’re going to give you a phony alibi? Maybe they will but isn’t it possible something happened beyond their control? And if so, maybe they will offer a refund without you beating up on them. There’s a chance that continuing to business with them may make sense. Don’t close that door so quickly. Instead, start with an open mind and learn what they’re thinking. Navigate by sight, as Brahimi would say.
According to Adam Grant, that kind of attitude pays off twice over. “Recent experiments show that having even one negotiator who brings a scientist’s level of humility and curiosity improves outcomes for both parties, because she will search for more information and discover ways to make both sides better off. She isn’t telling her counterparts what to think. She’s asking them to dance.”
Count me in!
Housekeeping
The poll for the July Single Question Pop Quiz will close midnight this Sunday (7/18). I’ll post an article analyzing the responses next week. I’ve gotten great ones so far and am eager to read yours!
I’d add that when we’re working within a team, group-think can further ossify our thinking. Another recent Jazz article, Pre-mortems: Stress Test Your Strategy. It describes a simple technique for opening up a people’s thinking .
Here’s a link for a two-page summary of Dr. Fisher’s rules from the Archives of Neurology.
Fisher also maintained his humility. His Rule 14 provides, “Be a good listener; even from the mouths of beginners may come wisdom.”