Dissociative Identity Leadership

Companies are like people. Other things being equal, companies which do well believe in themselves. They carry vivid images of victory, they fiercely belive success is their destiny. On the other hand, companies which fret about failure usually succumb to the fielding flu and fail.

Yet, the opposite is also true. My friend Greg Pye, the famous and profound management philosopher, writes here about the importance of staring into the abyss and looking for ways in which things can fail. This is an essential part of planning, both for putting defences (or plan Bs) in the right place and in setting expectations.

Balancing these necessary evils, faith and scepticism, is one of the hardest and most universal problems of leadership. Every healthy organization needs this split personality, or dissociative identity.



The simplest solution is to locate these faculties, and the associated sub-cultures, in different departments. This works fine in organizations of thousands of people, despite the friction between departments. But it is hard to do on a smaller scale, say at a cricket club or on a film crew.

The Six Thinking Hats technique popularized by Edward do Bono is also useful. It involves containing the sceptical imagining of failure within a contained area, called Black Hat thinking, before moving on to creative Green Hat thinking or optimistic Yellow Hat thinking.

My discontent with the Six Thinking Hats is with the assumption that faith - that sense of destiny - is the product of thought. It is not. It is an emotion. It is produced by thought, sure, but also by a whole lot else. I find that the more useful way of balancing faith and scepticism is to remain rooted in the emotional state of faith, even while working through the cognitive process of scepticism.

PS: John Kotter essentially wishes away this problem by labeling the faculty of faith as Leadership and the faculty of scepticism as Management. This is worse than useless, because "leaders" are paid a lot more than "managers". This tilts the playing field away from scepticism, and exagerrates the natural cognitive bias towards optimism.

PPS: The original title for this post was Schizophrenic Leadership. But wikipedia tells me that, despite the etymology, Schizophrenia is not about split personalities. It is about distorted perceptions of reality, typically hallucinations. People with split personalities have a dissolute identity disorder.

Another characteristic of great leaders... learning all the time :)