I recall once doing workflow mapping with a team, where they insisted that three steps in their process were done sequentially, whereas I was pretty confident that they actually did them all in parallel. We discussed this back and forth for a bit and then I just accepted what they said and documented these steps as sequential.
Then when we’d finished the mapping, we spent the next few hours actually working on building something together in an ensemble. I noticed repeatedly that they were doing these steps in parallel, not in the sequential way that they had been insisting they did.
After several hours of this, I brought it up again and they argued with me again. “No we do these one after the other”. I had to point out that I’d been watching them for hours now and they were not doing at all, what they kept insisting that they were doing. Finally after some reflection, they realized the reality; that their words and their actions were completely misaligned.
This isn’t a judgement; they weren’t wrong to do things in either of these ways. What’s interesting is that they had become completely blinded by their own beliefs. They believed it was correct to do it one way and so they convinced themselves that this is what they were actually doing.
There’s a part of the brain, called the Interpreter, whose whole job is to take everything that’s going on and weave it into a coherent story.
The interpreter is the name given to the system that pulls the pieces together into a coherent story. This takes place in the left hemisphere of the prefrontal cortex. It takes in all the chaotic information and makes sense of it by linking causes and effect and then constructing our mental models. We then behave according to these mental models and are freed from simple stimulus/response behaviour1
Joseph O’Connor, Andrea Lages
Most of the time this is very useful; it’s what frees us from reacting blindly to whatever happens to be in front of us. The problem is that the Interpreter doesn’t wait until it has good information before it speaks. When it doesn’t actually know, it makes something up, and the story it produces sounds very convincing.
I’ve written about this before in the context of “why” questions. Ask someone why they just picked up a pen and the Interpreter will invent a reason on the spot, one that sounds perfectly reasonable and that the person may well believe, even though the movement itself was entirely unconscious.
What happened with this team was that same mechanism, running at a far bigger scale. My pen example is the Interpreter caught in a small, throwaway moment. This was the Interpreter defending an entire account of how a team worked.
It’s worth noticing how far it went. The team weren’t inventing a reason for a single unconscious gesture; they were describing the shape of their own process, the sequence of steps they ran every day, and they were getting it wrong. Their story wasn’t a fragile guess that fell apart the moment I questioned it. It was something they were willing to argue for. Most interestingly, the story held up even while they sat in front of hours of evidence that contradicted it. They could watch their own hands doing the work in parallel and still tell me, with a straight face, that they did it one step at a time.
It’s one thing for the Interpreter to fill a gap in our awareness. It’s another thing entirely for it to override what we can plainly see ourselves doing.
None of this is unique to that one team. Back in 1977, Richard Nisbett and Timothy Wilson gathered research2 showing that people routinely cannot accurately report on their own mental processes. We don’t actually introspect and read off the answer; we reach for the most plausible-sounding explanation and offer that instead, while at the same time believing the fabrications we just created.
The team wasn’t lying to me; they genuinely couldn’t see the gap between what they said and what they did.
When I ran that workflow mapping session, I was, in effect, interviewing the Interpreter. I was asking a room full of people to describe their own process, and I was faithfully writing down the story they told me. The ensemble was something completely different. It put me in front of the behaviour itself, with no story sitting in between.
The map we built together was a fiction, agreed on by committee and written down in good faith. The truth only surfaced once I stopped listening to what they said about their work and started making observations.
This is the positive side of the same idea I wrote about with why questions. There, the advice is to avoid asking questions that invite the Interpreter to make things up. Here it’s the corollary: when you genuinely need to know how a team works, don’t rely on what they tell you, watch what they do.
This is exactly the reason why, when I first start engaging with a new team, I don’t want to interview people to ask them how they work, I ask to sit in on their meetings, so I can see for myself.
If you want to understand how a team really works, don’t ask them. Watch what they do.
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“Coaching the Brain: Practical Applications of Neuroscience to Coaching”, Joseph O’Connor, Andrea Lages ↩
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Nisbett, R. E., & Wilson, T. D. (1977). “Telling More Than We Can Know: Verbal Reports on Mental Processes”, Psychological Review, 84, pages 231-259. Full paper (PDF) ↩