In a New York Times article today, John Tierney discusses the science behind hypocrisy and how we fool ourselves. It seems when we distract our conscious mind, we listen mainly to our “gut” (or our “heart,” depending on how poetic an image you prefer), and we know when we’re doing The Wrong Thing. When our conscious minds are free, however, we use them—to self-justify. When we engage in hypocritical or anti-social behavior, our conscious mind goes to work creating justifications so we believe we’re doing the right thing, even when we aren’t.

In the past several years, I’ve become more aware of my own “heart voice.” When I have a troubling decision to make, or strong ambivalence about a situation, I sit quietly. Actually, my brain is usually shrieking gibberish about how unfair I’m being treated, or about how I don’t deserve what’s happening, or about how I’m an utter and complete failure at life because I missed “9 Down” in today’s New York Times crossword puzzle. So here’s this Shrieking Monster in my head, and I let it rant while putting attention on the middle of my chest. Then when the Shrieking Monster stops to take a breath, I quickly ask, “What should I do in this situation?”

Then I sit. After a few minutes, beneath the Monster comes a little, quiet voice. It’s barely even in words. And it has an answer.

The moment the answer comes, I know it’s the right one for me. It’s almost always the moral thing, the ethical thing, the loving thing, the passionate thing. In some weird way, it’s the answer I already knew was right, but just wouldn’t admit to myself. It took a chat with the Little Voice to bring it to the place where it could be heard over the Shrieking Monster voice.

The Shrieking Monster is the one that usually pushes me to do stupid things. It goads me to yell at people when I’m frustrated, to get petulant and childish when I could be forging alliances, and to beat myself up when I don’t do well, even if I did my best. The Little Voice, though, is my own internal Dear Abby: its advice is excellent, even if its hairstyle could stand some updating.

If you’ve never tried this, give it a shot. Ponder a decision that’s giving you angst. Maybe it’s a word decision. Maybe it involves your Sweetie. Choose a really, really important decision, like: should I pick up the socks myself, or continue screaming at my sweetie for another eight months to pick them up? Sit quietly with the situation. Your Shrieking Monster will helpfully point out how unfair it is that you have to pick up the socks, how much you deserve to have the socks picked up for you, and how you really should break up because of the socks. Then sit quietly and listen to the Little Voice behind the shrieking monster. It just might have some good advice. If it seems reasonable, give it a shot. You might find yourself acting more ethically, more morally, more lovingly, and more happily. In other words, you just may find your little voice is the key to acting as—not just aspiring to be—your Very Best Self.

Find the article on hypocrisy at http://r.steverrobbins.com/hypocrisyarticle.

I tried to tell a friend that we’ve had cars that got 50-60 mpg for at least 30 years. When I was a teenager buying my first car, in the middle of the gas crisis of the 1970s, I was looking at a Honda Civic that was rated at over 50 mpg city. Once the oil shock was over, we went right back to huge, hulking contraptions that get gallons-per-mile instead of miles-per-gallon.

Is there anyone who didn’t see this coming? If so, you’ve never had a milkshake through a straw.

When you’re drinking a milkshake, you’re drinking faster than the milkshake can be replenished. Eventually, no matter what, you’ll get to the end of the milkshake and start slurping noisily. Sadness and despair, no more milkshake. If you knew how fast you were sipping and how much the cup held, you could predict exactly when you’d run out of tasty dairy mouth treat.

The story with oil is a bit more complicated. We don’t know how big the cup is, so we don’t know when we’ll hit bottom. And while one problem is how big the cup is, another problem is that more and more people are trying to suck on the straw at once, and we haven’t known how fast they would all start wanting some of our milkshake. (Warning: metaphor breakdown imminent.)

But the trend is utterly, completely, unambigiously predictable.

Because we don’t know the specific numbers, we can’t predict when oil will become expensive. But we know that it will, and there’s simply no doubt about it. If you jump off the top of a building, you’ll fall. How long you’ll fall depends on the height of the building. If you jump from a very tall building, you might even have enough time to pretend that the ride will go on forever. But eventually, you’ll land. That’s pretty much guaranteed. And you might even survive the landing (heck, Michael Holmes fell from 12,000+ feet without a chute and survived). It seems like a pretty stupid thing to do on purpose, though.

The sub-prime banking crisis was also predictable. All these analysts saying no one could have predicted it should be out of a job. The trends were obvious in a single news article last year. I—a non-finance guy—even blogged about it.

Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger have been watching the rise of complex financial derivatives for years, noting that their accounting conventions allow people to get rich when there’s actually nothing supporting the underlying assets. They’re pretty sure (and I agree) that the derivatives market is headed for a meltdown. We can’t predict when, but we can predict that markets are very good at eventually bringing assets back down to their underlying value.

Humans seem hell-bent on believing what we want to believe and ignoring unambiguous trends until they actually become crisis. There’s a whole field called “system dynamics” that deals with the behavior of complex systems, and more importantly, with the ways people seem to be hard-wired to misunderstand complex systems.

We’re living in an era of complex systems. Growth (and melting ice caps) happens faster than we project. Every year. On the surface, it appears things change, but the underlying trends are remarkably constant.

What are the trends you can predict now, but don’t want to? What are the underlying forces shaping your industry, country, or family that will come home to roost? You may not be able to predict specifics of when, where, or how, but you can predict with near-certainty that they will. And when they do, life will be … interesting.

Some interesting trends with highly uncertain timing, and highly certain momentum:

• The interest payments on the national debt will continue to grow as a percentage of the national budget. (Think: compounding interest on variable rate loans.)
• Wealth will continue to concentrate in the hands of a small number of people. (With the tax rate on capital gains less than the tax rate on income, even if everyone makes 10% more each year, the rich will get taxed at a lower rate and keep a greater percentage of the overall pie.
• We’ll have increasing demand for energy of all forms. (Whether or not our total supply will increase at the same rate or faster seems to be unknown.)
• We have a generation of people in our workforce pipeline of whom somewhere between a quarter and 40% don’t even have a high school diploma. There are serious societal implications there…
• Precious and non-precious metals are being steadily mined at a rate greater than the rate at which they’re replaced. (For example, Copper may be finished in 61 years, within the lifetime of some of you reading this article.)

So go out and buy a subcompact. And while you’re planning for retirement, consider that the world may be very different then than it is now. Those differences will be driven by our actions today (and our actions of the last 40 years, when it comes to climate change). Are you taking action today that will set up the trends you want in your old age?

I think on a personal level, there’s room for us to use data in our lives where we just don’t do it, yet life would be a lot better if we did.

Example #1, data about what’s going on in others’ heads: I “knew” Tom S hated me in high school. I never thought to ask him or find out, I just decided it, based on the way he treated me. One day we were assigned to work together on a project, I called his house, and his mother said, “Oh! You’re the boy he admires so much.” I was floored. Tom and I ended up becoming friends.

Example #2, retirement planning: after the March 2000 market crash, a friend was re-evaluating her retirement plans. Numerically, she could only meet her goals in the stock market by getting 15%+ returns for over 15 years. She thought it unlikely and began finding other ways to finance her retirement and diversified into other investments.

1. Is this a good topic for the book?
2. Do you have any examples of how you’ve used data to reach contrary or surprising conclusions?

Despite frequent moves and attending six schools between elementary school and college, science was in the air. I got a firm grounding in how to think critically, how to use data, and how to observe the physical world around me in pursuit of Doing Great Things. Whether my school was in a failing Pennsylvania steel town or in a full-on major city, science was present.

Science has given us great things. And therein lies the problem.

We’ve had it so good that we’ve been able to forget how we got here to begin with. In the convenience of indoor plumbing, central heating, and home-delivered groceries, we’ve managed to convince ourselves that the world naturally exists to make our lives easy, and it must be our inherent worthiness—not the hard work of millions of scientists, engineers, manufacturers, distributors—that has given us our standard of living.

In business, we have created a huge industry for business intelligence based on data. Hard data is used by successful businesses the world around to design, produce, and market products. That’s one of the cool things about business: when profits are down, people are sometimes willing to look at data to figure out what to do. Amazing how putting people’s year-end-bonus in jeopardy can bring them to appreciate the outside world, rather than the fantasy world they’ve made up.

(Equally puzzling are the many companies who collect data that could point the way and then never look at it or discard it when it doesn’t fit the CEO’s pre-determined course of action.)

In daily life, however, data, science, math, and engineer have become almost the subjects of contempt. It may be hip to be an engineer, but only if it’s going to lead you to a billion-dollar payday (look at the numbers: despite the hype, most entrepreneurs never make more than a modest living. It’s precisely because it’s a near-miracle that we hear about billion-dollar Facebook boy or the Google geeks). It’s the money we’ve come to admire, not the achievements, thinking, and science that got us there.

So now, we’re seeing that in America, almost half of our populous doesn’t believe in evolution, and half of those who do, don’t believe in natural selection, despite it being one of the most solid theories in science. Of course, most don’t know the difference between a scientific theory and an opinion (yes, Virginia, there is a difference), so even having the discussion is a losing battle.

Honestly, I couldn’t care less whether people believe in evolution, so-called “intelligent design,” or the flying spaghetti monster. But I care a great deal whether people know how to look at the physical world, monitor data, and—most importantly!—change their beliefs when the data shows they’re wrong. And even then, who cares if people live in fantasy land, except for matters of collective life and death.

For example: war. Peak oil and resource usage. Agribusiness and food production. Pollution. Nuclear energy. Global warming.

I’ve been feeling apocalyptic today and reading up on many of those issue. Amazingly, the American media has proven worthless in exploring any of those topics. Journalists no longer seem to research issues, but rather just present people of differing opinions and let them slug it out. Journalists overlook the fact that one person might be a recognized leader in their field with two hundred peer-reviewed papers, and the other a lobbyist for a special-interest group with a vested interest in suppressing the science. It’s bizarre(*).

Michael Crichton, the fiction writer (that means, ladies and gentlemen, that he writes lies. That’s what fiction is: lies designed to tell a dramatic story) seems to be carrying as much weight in climate debate as scores of scientists. He wrote a fiction book, State of Fear, whose untrue-but-engaging lie states that climate change isn’t happening. What’s amazing is that people hold him up as an important player in the non-existent-in-the-scientific-community “debate” about global warming, even while the very people he quotes in his book, have publicly said he distorted and cherry-picked his data to reach the conclusion he wanted. Yet people consider him more credible than the intergovernmental panel on climate change.

It’s weird. We have a huge problem imagining things we’ve never gone through before. So the idea that some of our big problems could destroy our way of life permanently (and if not within our own lifetimes, within our children’s) is literally inconceivable. But the numbers point that way more and more. Hubbard’s Peak, the prediction of the end of cheap oil, has been written about for years both oil geologists and investment bankers who have made billions understanding the science and numbers behind oil. Yet other than a rise in per-gallon gas prices, the general populace seems unconcerned. (The fact that our crop productivity relies on petroleum-based fertilizers seems to have gone largely unnoticed. Oil declines, and food might, too. Isn’t that a fun thought?)

So for whatever it’s worth, if you want to have a planet to live on in your old age, and if you want your children to have lives that aren’t spent dealing with crisis, look at data. Demand research. Learn to separate fact from fiction and wishful thinking. Understand the difference between expert opinion and shrill emotional manipulation.

And please, indulge in flights of fancy, wishful thinking, and imagination for creating your dreams and aspirations(2), but ground yourself firmly in fact when deciding how to get there.

(1) As Pat M points out below, I make a huge sweeping generalization without support, here. Pat is right, I was wrong. See my reply to Pat below, which gives links to some actual follow-up that’s much more accurate than my opinion. back

(2) Recommended aspirations: enough food for everyone, a stable climate, preventative actions taken to mitigate long-term problems in energy supply and global warming, and just maybe, a halt to nuclear proliferation.

One thing I’m sure of: none of you stopped to analyze the quality of your 2004 decision-making and explicitly change the criteria you used to make your bad decision. It may be 2008, but you’re about to use the same broken decision-making process in November and you’ll wonder why politics doesn’t change.

Political flaming aside, when you make a decision that turns out badly, do you explicitly learn from it? And if so, do you use an explicit “post mortem” process? And do you tend to learn about specifics of a situation (e.g. “I’m never voting for candidate Z again because they lie”), or do you actually change your decision-making process (e.g. “next time, I will look at voting records and read news articles on opposing web sites and supporting web sites before making my decision.”)?

What amazes me is that both of those are fully and completely under our control. There’s no reason our food companies have to produce food that’s bad for us. But they do, because that’s what we want to buy. Why do we want to buy it? Because our bodies are programmed to love the processed stuff, since back when we evolved, it was really hard to find usable carbohydrates, etc. It worked great on the tundra, but now, it drives us to crave things that create a market that is bad for us.

We weren’t thinking ahead when we developed our food production industry or laying down the rules of the market. We didn’t know. We didn’t look very far into the future, and if we could have, we didn’t have the knowledge or even the suspicion that our food production would have bad dietary consequences. And now, we look increasingly like little round beach balls. I suppose it makes clothes easier to design; all we need is a big circle.

So the question is: when we make decisions, how far ahead do we look? How certain do we have to be of the answers to take action? And what action do we take?

“Scenario planning” was all the rage in the late-80s and early 90s. It seems Shell had use future projections to predict the fall of the Soviet Union and they were all ready to take smart business action when they saw it coming. Which scenarios should we be considering? How likely do we think they are? And when do we decide we should prepare, given that we generally don’t know which scenario we’re living in until it’s too late to take action?

The part of the article I wasn’t expecting was the last two paragraphs, which point out that global warming, overfishing, and climate change could severely disrupt the food supply, even with a “modest” temperature increase of 2 degrees Celsius (and that’s below the lowest-end projections of the MIT climate scientist I asked about it).

So this time, we have the chance to think ahead. Other than speculating in food companies, what can we as businesspeople do to help prepare for something like that? Right now, we stick our heads in the sand and ignore the problem. Last time we did that, we turned into beach balls. This time, let’s think ahead, and not turn into something worse.

For any business that depends on transportation or petroleum, we just doubled that line item.

Are you assuming this is a temporary spike, and ignoring it? Are you factoring this into your long-term planning? How long-term? Are you assuming prices will keep rising or will fall?

I’m betting that most people are treating this as a new set level. But the assumptions you make about the future, and the time horizon of those assumptions, will lead you to vastly different conclusions and actions.

So choose wisely. Choose thoughtfully. And it may even make sense to do some scenario analysis, a decision tree or two, and facing unpleasant realities. You might event want to look at data, rather than just thinking wishfully (or pessimistically, for that matter). You might be surprised.

Buggy whip manufacturers got blind-sided when the world shifted to automobiles. Don’t let yourself be blind-sided because you aren’t paying attention to where the world is heading.

My background is in engineering and science, then business. As an engineer, I really liked that there’s a “right answer.” Or at least, there are clear wrong answers (the bridge will collapse if we make it out of tissue paper, period). In business, things aren’t so easy. Most situations have too many factors to identify, let alone consider deeply. Shareholders interact with managers who interact with technology and customer service people and engineers and operations and … it’s tough to know how to think about all this.

Make Your Own Luck lays out a 12-step process (hmm…) for taking risks. Some of the steps sound simple: Know your big goals before you begin, so when you make bets in your life, you’re betting on what you actually want. Sounds obvious? Yeah, but in my own work with executives, I’ve found that people easily lose sight of their real goals(1). The power from Shapiro and Stevenson’s approach comes from having a rigorous checklist to consider when making risky bets.

Some of their tools help evaluate risks that I’ve never known how to tackle. For example, the authors reject the conventional wisdom that “reward requires risk,” and give us “prediction maps,” a tool for identifying low-risk, high-reward opportunities. Simple, elegant, and practically useful.

Their other big new tool is “uncertainty grids.” Uncertainty grids let you quickly test your plans against combinations of uncertainties to realize whether you’ve unconsciously anchored yourself to a single scenario, or whether your plans can survive multiple uncertain events.

The writing style is fun, with thought experiments between the chapters, a final chapter of scenarios to analyze using the 12 steps, and haiku or other verse at the start of each chapter. I found it a pleasant change from the overly heavy style of most substantive business books, and it was an easy read cover-to-cover that did justice to its excellent content.

I heartily recommend the book. Go check it out!

- Stever

(1) Being a professional, of course, I never, ever lose sight of my own goals. *grin*