As the COVID-19 virus passes, it will leave many changes in its wake, including some in business practices. It’s not too soon to consider what lessons we will take away – and making sure they are the right ones.

Human beings have two traits that can affect this, positively and negatively:

Our brains automatically make patterns – whether we want them to or not!
We are adaptable, picking up information and learning rapidly – and sometimes, too rapidly.

Leaders need both, but they must be balanced against the needs of the situation.

Pattern-making

The recognition and formation of patterns is a basic level of conceptual thinking, a fundamental thinking ability that ranges from recognizing similarities through seeing patterns in information to creating new concepts that explain complicated issues in simple ways. We use the more basic levels of pattern-matching or pattern recognition every day: For example, seeing the constellation Orion instead of a random pattern of stars that happens to have three stars in a row.

At higher levels, conceptual thinking is one of two key precursors to executive-level strategic thinking, along with analytical, cause-and-effect thinking. But even at the more basic levels, it helps us prioritize core issues and identify short-cuts for decisions, by spotting the most important issue out of a mass of concerns, or recycling a past approach from a similar situation — crucial in a fast-moving crisis, and essential to any manager, who must constantly make decisions with incomplete information. However, making too quick a pattern, or with insufficient data, can create “unconscious bias.”

Amazon developed an experimental AI-based hiring tool which they hoped would capture the intuitive insight of its managers in hiring, but unintentionally magnified a bias in the data: there were significantly more men than women in engineering roles. Because there were twice as many men as women in these roles, the tool decided that women were simply bad hires and eliminated them from consideration to save time and effort – without considering how many applied in the first place. That’s how over-hasty pattern-making works in people, too.

A “stuck” pattern leads to a response lag: people continue to impose past patterns on a changing world, e.g., minimizing or ignoring oncoming change. For example, many respected business leaders completely underestimated the power of the internet – even Bill Gates had no reference to it in the first 1995 edition of his book The Road Ahead, and numerous experts of that time predicted it would be irrelevant. (Gates caught up fast, however, for the reason discussed below.)

In leaders who also have an emotional investment in keeping things stable, such as political leaders, this can have an even more profound impact. And adapting once isn’t enough, because when the crisis passes, a response lag means a leader will continue to manage events as if in crisis mode, e.g., "firefighting,” scrambling to act immediately on an issue, if there is no time to discuss other solutions.

Conceptual thinking provides tremendous reasoning power, and contributes to the strategic thinking required of top leaders – but in isolation or excess, any strength can become a weakness.

Adaptable learning

The second trait, adaptability through learning, also acts as a strength and a weakness. If you learn quickly, you can act quickly and more intelligently, and obviously this matters in a fast-moving world. “Early movers,” who see what is coming and jump ahead of the first-movers, are often highly effective: Apple didn’t get to the smart-phone market first, but it totally transformed it. Likewise, Amazon studied existing ebook readers, learned what worked better, and came up with the Kindle to come closer to the experience of books on paper.

Past research has shown that executives who accept new information quickly and use it readily have better-performing companies and are themselves promoted faster. This can counteract response lag.

However, changing constantly, or “shifting with the wind” can derail focus on one’s overall strategic goal and frustrate and confuse the people you lead. In other words, leaders’ messages and actions become unpredictable.

Unpredictability means others can’t follow you consistently, either, sometimes because they simply can’t keep up. When Gil Amelio ran Apple, every different innovation team got something out, which lead to inconsistency in the marketplace and in the hardware. Upon Steve Jobs’ return, one of his first acts was to eliminate almost everything then being produced, and focus on the iMac.

In fact, in the absence of consistent information, people tend to create a pattern of their own: they assume the worst, that they lack information for some sinister reason. (See our article on Leadership at a Distance for more discussion of this: https://ascent.net/blog/2020/3/23/leadership-at-a-distance)

As a leader you cannot provide too much information, including as things change. But you must also think about how changing information affects your people, and ensure that there is at least some thread that people can follow.

The COVID-19 world

We see both patterning and adaptive learning in play now, and not always in good ways. Some, governed by past patterns, refuse to maintain social distance, instead going out in crowds or working in groups as usual. Worse, leaders can reinforce this pattern, risking that asymptomatic people can still carry the virus to vulnerable populations.

Likewise, extreme adaptability has sometimes led to quick action that doesn’t make sense – false “cures” like gargling with vinegar; or combining dangerous cleaning chemicals because if one is good, two must be better; or buying up all the toilet paper in town. To be fair, the latter may also be a pattern left over from experiencing blizzards, but the longer the hoarding goes on, the more likely it is a reaction to seeing everyone else hoarding.

The balancing act

Leaders must maintain both traits in balance: identifying patterns to support a long-term objective, and adaptable learning to stay aware of current events. But sometimes even using both can go awry.

For example, because people must maintain social distance today, we are learning that we can get a lot of work done remotely and in our homes. However, that does not mean we should all give up offices or professional gatherings permanently – that’s a false pattern based on a near-term reaction, potentially leading to a destruction of a common culture and a decline in commitment and motivation to perform. Having said that, this practice may (and probably should) lead to more flexibility in office attendance and timing, which has been recommended as a powerful supporter of diversity, as well as a reinforcement for those who like working from home at least occasionally.

It helps to be able to assess these traits in yourself and others, and also to get supported development in using it. (Check us out at www.ascent.net if you want some help.)

The solution

How can one maintain the right balance and keep getting the right answers? There’s no simple solution, but try keeping both the pattern-making and adaptable learning in play repeatedly. Don’t adapt once; don’t make one pattern – keep flipping back and forth between adapting and patterning.

For example, you may have learned a new fact. Instead of pushing it out immediately, try to include it in a pattern with previous facts, then see if that works. (That’s kind of a definition of science!) Or you have got everyone in a pattern, but question if it is the best pattern for the moment, or if it requires change. It’s okay if it doesn’t - but you need to keep checking.

Question your assumptions. Look for organizing principle. Examine alternatives. And ask others for input – tapping the insight of the people around (even virtually) in your network or organization can prevent mistakes and enable timely but effective change.

Using both these powerful traits together and repeatedly will help prevent us learning the wrong lessons from a crisis, because we will be treat all lessons as conditional on their enduring value.

References

Making patterns is known as apophenia, and contributes to phenomena such as the “gambler’s fallacy” and "patternicity.” https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/reality-play/201207/being-amused-apophenia

“Amazon scraps secret AI recruiting tool that showed bias against women” https://www.reuters.com/article/us-amazon-com-jobs-automation-insight-idUSKCN1MK08G

“Many respected business leaders completely underestimated the power of the internet – even Bill Gates had no reference to it in the first 1995 edition of his book The Road Ahead.” https://www.inc.com/tess-townsend/what-bill-gates-got-wrong-about-the-internet-in-the-1990s.html

“Past research has shown that executives who accept new information quickly and use it readily...” https://www.spencerstuart.com/research-and-insight/developments-in-predicting-ceo-success

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