Hi Reader
( 2-minute read at most)
Let’s talk about self or personal improvement.
Not the motivational poster kind. The uncomfortable kind where you realise you might be working really hard at completely the wrong thing. And have been for years
As per normal, Readwise sent me a cluster of quotes this morning that have me thinking about how most of us misunderstand improvement & development.
I’m not talking about a "here's the one trick" way, but in a more fundamental "we're working really hard at the wrong thing" way.
Matthew Syed in "Black Box Thinking" tells this story about medieval doctors who killed patients, including their own family members, via bloodletting. The key line: "This happened not because they didn't care, but because they did care. They thought the treatment worked."
That's a bit haunting. I mean, maximum effort, deep commitment allied with complete confidence. And catastrophically wrong for generations.
Syed's research found something that should terrify every leader: you can spend years training, years in your profession, and not improve at all. Why? Because without access to what he calls the 'error signal', without a way to see when you're wrong, you're just practicing your mistakes.
Without access to the ‘error signal’. Important methinks.
I think that's where most leadership development programs go sideways. We iterate, or at least we think we're iterating. We run the quarterly retrospective, we adjust the strategy deck, we "course correct." But if the lights are off, if we can't actually see where we're wrong, we're just repeating the same patterns with slight variations.
Adam Grant captures this shift in "Think Again": "I started out just wanting to prove myself. Now I want to improve myself…to see how good I can get." The difference? He tracks his predictions. He asks what would have to happen to prove his opinion false. He deliberately hunts for his error signals instead of avoiding them.
That's a completely different orientation than what we normally see in leadership teams.
Most sports teams, businesses & organisations aren't set up to turn the lights on. They're set up to confirm existing beliefs. The incentives reward confidence and not curiosity about where we might be wrong. The reporting structures filter bad news through three layers before it reaches you, by which point it's been sanded smooth and made palatable. The metrics measure activity, not actual improvement. And so we iterate in the dark, convinced we're getting better because we're working hard and care deeply.
Bent Flyvbjerg talks about how Pixar's iterative process corrects for what psychologists call the "illusion of explanatory depth", that is, our tendency to think we understand something better than we actually do. But iteration only corrects for that illusion if you're actually getting real, honest feedback. If you're just running the loop without the error signal, you're reinforcing the illusion, not correcting it.
How long are you willing to get better at being wrong?
So here's what I'm increasingly convinced matters more than any particular leadership framework: Do you have mechanisms that actually turn the lights on? Not "do you care about improvement”? (Because remember, the medieval doctors cared.) But do you have reliable ways to see when you're wrong before the damage compounds?
Because without that, all your iteration is just expensive, and perhaps costly, repetition.
Another Newsletter you might find useful....
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Emerging Leadership
Alexis Monville
Co-Founder and Executive Leadership Coach at Pearlside. I’ve led teams for more than 30 years, from startup leadership to serving as Chief of Staff to the CTO at Red Hat. My work blends strategic thinking with hands-on experience helping organizations scale with clarity and alignment. I care deeply about building leadership teams that last. |
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The work on how to lead better is something you have to do alone.
But you don't have to do it on your own.
Onward and Upward,
Paul Clarke
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