I want to talk about diversity, inclusion, and effective organizations. The diversity I want to focus on isn’t necessarily about immutable racial, ethnic, or gender characteristics. Diversity of lived experience bridges to what I want to discuss: diversity of ways of being, ways of thinking, and mental models.
“Let me explain something to you. This is not a democracy.”
Have you ever heard a CEO, executive, or manager say this? I have said it. In business, this is correct. A business is not a democracy. However, someone saying this out loud may also signal that a decision-maker sees no benefit in seeking different perspectives or making further effort to be transparent about their decision-making process. In doing so, they may miss opportunities to make more robust decisions and attract engagement from highly motivated team members.
The Common Experience
Working with other people can be hard. Most of us have been in situations where working with certain individuals is frustrating and can feel impossible.
I have coached well over a hundred executive leadership teams, as well as marketing, sales, product, and engineering teams. Two patterns appear almost universally:
- Dysfunction most often arises, and most deeply, between people who manifest significantly different “ways of being and thinking” from each other.
- People spend nearly all of their effort seeking to be understood and almost none seeking to understand.
Most people would agree that while 100% agreement on every business decision isn’t possible, some alignment and understanding are necessary to get the right people rowing in the same direction.
The “Junk Science” of MBTI and Other Personality Type Frameworks
MBTI, first developed in 1943, entered the business world in 1975 as the first long-lived, widely adopted framework designed to help people bridge gaps between their differences. Many of you have heard about MBTI tests and types. Some of you have taken the test and even routinely reference your supposed MBTI type in conversation.
I am an MBTI skeptic. And yes, I read “the book” and went through the formal “MBTI training”. And I agree that one key reason MBTI falls short is misunderstanding and misapplication. So let’s say I am more skeptical of how it is practiced than of the theory itself.
MBTI is not the only system that takes this approach. Other examples include DiSC, CliftonStrengths, Enneagram, and Predictive Index, which are widely used in today’s business settings. These systems share the goal of helping people understand themselves and each other to have effective discussions, build understanding, and align. Unfortunately, very few organizations that adopt these frameworks see durable, meaningful improvements in those areas.
The main reason I think MBTI and similar frameworks are ineffective is their fixation on the idea that any person’s way of being and thinking is narrow and static. For myself, I am confident that I manifest radically different MBTI type behaviors and thought patterns before and after my first cup of coffee every day. More seriously, the idea that someone’s way of being and thinking is entirely intrinsic and non-evolving is just wrong.
The problem with believing people have a narrow and fixed mode of thinking is that, if you believe that, there is almost no point in bridging different mental models and harvesting the benefits of triangulated thinking.
We can learn from MBTI: patterns emerge, and we can gain insight by recognizing distinct thinking categories. Most organizational dysfunction stems from people trying to communicate from different thinking modes and mental models, so anything that helps us understand that better might help.
What Are The MBTI Thinking Modes?
Let’s use the MBTI framework as a starting point. While I believe reality is more complex and subtle, I also think we can roughly categorize thinking modes along three MBTI dimensions.
- Abstract vs Concrete (N vs S)
- Plan & Focus vs Agility (J vs P)
- Objective Logic vs Feeling & Intuition (T vs F)
We will dive into each of these different modes of thinking in Parts 2 to 4 of this series.
As stated before, I do not believe any one person’s ways of thinking are fixed across all times and situations into narrow positions along the three dimensions listed above. What I do believe is that most people have natural tendencies and reflexive thought patterns that can be characterized as greater or lesser in the directions above. I also believe most people can learn to increase flexibility in their thinking and apply different modes of thinking. Doing this consciously and well can be challenging. It’s exceptionally difficult for nearly anyone to do this in the moment, while thinking or speaking. Therefore, time for reflection and context switching between mental models can be a powerful way to get the most from triangulation.
What To Do?
Assuming my beliefs are largely correct, let’s start with the goal. We might say that the goal is to achieve alignment and effective coordination within and across teams. I think this is a correct goal, but the wrong place to start.
Why is it the wrong place to start? If the goal is alignment, that presumes we have a clear, correct understanding of what we should align to. This is exactly where I believe most people, teams, and organizations go wrong. Inevitably, one or more people believe they have the “correct answer” and that their job is to convince others that this is right. Following this path fails in two ways. It disregards the power of using multiple modes of thinking and triangulating through multiple perspectives (mental models). And it requires people to subordinate their own thoughts and feelings to a decision process about which they do not fully understand or agree.
At the very least, I have learned that most people are more motivated towards alignment when they think their views have been heard and understood, even when they retain significant disagreement with a chosen direction. That being said, if a decision maker treats this process as a performative ceremony of “listening and understanding”, the outcomes over the long term are usually suboptimal. The engagement must be real and sincere. People are not stupid.
Spend more time seeking to understand than seeking to be understood.
Use diverse thinking modes and multiple mental models to reach the best decision through principled discussion and deliberation. This process can be frustrating and painful for many people, so it isn’t done as often or as well as it should be. Everyone must be prepared and willing to work through the pain and frustration. The good news is that the more you do this, the easier it becomes.
This is Not a Democracy
There are two modes of decision-making: consensus and dictate. In the extreme, both are wrong. Organizations that lean exclusively on consensus decision-making tend to make suboptimal compromises and create a culture of fecklessness and low accountability. On the other hand, decision makers who fail to triangulate will inevitably make bad decisions. Many of the best team members will also become demotivated if they believe they are locked out of the process of shaping decisions.
This is not about seeking some “balance” between empowered decision makers and consensus building. That usually leads to irrational compromises and erodes accountability. Instead, effective organizations seek to maintain a well-defined structure of accountability and empowerment for decision-making. Business decision-making is an executive responsibility, not a collective one. At the same time, the most effective decision-makers learn to leverage their team’s diverse thinking modes and perspectives to make the best decision. Along the way, almost as a side effect, they better motivate and align their team by letting them help shape decisions.
Let me be clear: if someone is the accountable party for making a decision, they get to make the decision. They are not required to, nor should they, compromise on anything that they believe should not be compromised.
This Approach is Not Universally Successful
I want to be clear that following this framework consistently and well is both difficult and not a panacea. Why?
Some people are less capable of or less willing to flex their modes of thinking. We might call these people “closed-minded” or “stubborn”.
Some people have learned to adopt dysfunctional behaviors as either a rational or irrational response to past and present dysfunctional or toxic situations.
And I hate to say this, but I must acknowledge it is true: some people are drones. They just want someone else to tell them what to do and how to do it. This actually makes me sad when I see it. It is a completely foreign way of being to me. Some organizations may have places where such people can deliver value, but outside roles that require physically skilled labor, there will be fewer and fewer roles for people who have rejected their agency this way.
And finally, the most frequent failure mode is leadership behavior. If leaders consistently show behaviors that run counter to a culture of transparent, accountable decision-making, they will destroy motivation and effective participation. That does not mean that every decision must be shaped and made publicly. Managers and executives often have good reasons they can’t broadly syndicate certain types of decision-making situations.
Behavioral change takes time and requires constant reinforcement until new behaviors have become second nature. This applies to both individual and team behaviors.
The Common Excuse: We Don’t Have the Time
The most common reason I hear managers give for not investing heavily in triangulated decision-making is that they “have to move fast” and “don’t have the time.” If you ever find yourself saying this, ask yourself, “How much time will we lose if this decision is meaningfully wrong or missing something? How much time will we lose if the team is less motivated, aligned, and engaged?”
I’ve seen other excuses and all manner of overt and covert avoidance to avoid taking the time to triangulate with the team before making decisions and pushing them forward. Everyone does it sometimes. Because it is hard. Because it is annoying. Because if you are honest with yourself, you don’t know how to do it well. Or maybe you think you are incompetent and unqualified for your role, and you don’t want people to find out because you have to explain your decisions. Or maybe you are just lazy and don’t like the discomfort of thinking and communicating well. So ask yourself, “Is that who I want to be?”
If you want to be the kind of leader who cares more about getting the right answer than about being the one who proposed it, I hope to help you understand how to do that a little better.
Next in this series….
Part 2: Abstract vs Concrete Thinking (subtitle: Completeness vs Anchoring)
Part 3: Planning vs Agility (Getting Things Done Under Conditions of Uncertainty and Change)
Part 4: Logic vs Intuition (The Power and Limitations of Decomposition)
Part 5: Mental Models (Ontologies, Causal Inference, Inductive Logic and Predictive Thinking)
Part 6: The Mechanics of Principled Debate, Triangulation, Decomposition, and Diagnosis