We’re becoming addicted to professional advice that promises transformation in five bullet points and a four-minute read. The hidden cost isn’t shorter attention spans. It’s that we’ve started believing human development can be reduced to quick fixes.
Short-form blogs fit perfectly with our current time and attention tolerance for information. I’m far from a prolific contributor, but I do create content for social media platforms and in doing so, I’ve felt the pressure of aggressively editing to meet word count thresholds or get AI to help me craft a high engagement title. Besides my personal irritation over the constraints on the full expression of thoughts, and the reduction of beautiful ideas to a slimy sales pitch, there is a true hidden cost to the consumption of 400-800 word, 3 key-point blogs.
The cost, in my opinion, is how that form of quick information has encouraged reckless oversimplification and reinforced our attraction to idealism.
I’m certain you’ve seen some variant on these: “Adopt these 4 practices to 10X your leadership impact” “8 quick ways to transform your management culture” “The 5 actions every leader must do to build greater capability and capacity!” With embarrassment, here are two from the blog page on my website: “5 ways to navigate awkward conversations” and “3 steps to closing the gap in self-perception.” The promise is attractive, but do oversimplified action points truly deliver measurable change? Simple is great. However, many of the challenges that people face personally and professionally are complicated and complex.
In Michael Lewis’ book, Flash Boys, he relays a statement made by a software engineer named Zoran Perkov regarding types of problems. “People think that complex is an advanced state of complicated. It’s not. A car key is simple. A car is complicated. A car in traffic is complex.” Human beings face simple, complicated, and complex problems.
It’s Complicated
Problems that are complicated are difficult, but they have known solutions which can be found by people who have insider’s information or who have solved that kind of problem in the past. If you’ve ever looked under the hood of a car, you understand that it is a complicated piece of machinery. When it breaks down, you take it to a mechanic who has this insider’s information enabling them to diagnose and fix what’s broken.
Many problems, like cars, are complicated, but some of the factors that make them malfunction or run smoothly are predictably common. A three-sentence fix or content on an infographic will not replace the need to seek out the guidance of mentors, advisors, or other professionals who have experience solving similar problems.
Complexity
Complex problems are difficult on a different scale. You may have your complicated vehicle in good repair, but the conditions of the road and the hazards of driving among thousands of other vehicles introduce unpredictable elements that create complex problems.
Some of the problems you face will be messy, unstable, unpredictable, confounding and don’t come with right answers, only best attempts. Complex problems require new solutions created specifically for the circumstance. Often you can only know that you’ve found a good one in retrospect.
Idealism’s Amnesia about Human Nature
Rutger Bregman in his book Humankind—A Hopeful History gives nearly 500 pages of evidence to support his central thesis that, at our roots, humans are “friendly, peaceful, and healthy.” I don’t disagree entirely with the premise, but I do believe that otherwise friendly, peaceful, and healthy people experience traumas, get trapped in unhealthy mindsets, suffer mental disorders, and live in protracted social and emotional dysfunctions. These obstacles all contribute to ways of thinking and acting that counterbalance that positive view of humanity.
This is what concerns me most in the overblown promises of overnight success. Businesses often create systems and measurements for those systems that are based on idealism. High visionary leaders are especially prone to chase that mirage. But idealism tends to forget the true burdens and limitations of human nature.
Realistic Optimism
Being solutions-minded, believing in better outcomes, and especially the personal hope for improvement in competency are essential for a person’s sense of well-being. However, when that optimism becomes disconnected from reality psychologically, or external pressures become idealistic, that wellness state drops more quickly than a flopping soccer player during a World Cup final.
Are your expectations of yourself and others designed around an inflated version of reality? Are we designing people systems based on what we know about predictive human behavior? I’m wondering if collisions with stakeholder expectations, the sudden impact of accelerated OKRs and KPIs, or a hit and run with the latest and greatest program for upscaling employee performance have resulted in a touch of amnesia.
Human beings are human after all.
The most predictable trait in human nature is that behavioral change is slow, incremental, and typically initiated through some sort of disruption or crisis. Remembering the human factor doesn’t mean you have to give up on lofty ambitions or business goals. It does mean that people need to be supported by resources to help solve complicated problems and provided with the time and failure space to solve complex problems. Additionally, they need organizations to remember that they enter and leave that problem-solving process as ordinary human beings.
Where humans have suffered the greatest losses
Remembering the burdens and limitations of human nature also means adjusting expectations to accommodate personal disruptions and barriers to professional growth that were not visible on their CV or characteristic of their previous job performance. I’m borrowing a term that comes from my work in religious organizations as I think about how human beings have an essential need to be shepherded.
This matters because our losses in social capital have been devastating over the past 50 years. The support networks found in religious groups, fraternal and service organizations, and sporting leagues began to drop significantly in the 1960’s. People today are far more inclined to retreat from social interactions and invest their leisure time in individual home-based activities and hours of media consumption. We know that’s true, but I don’t think we’ve fully considered the negative impact that an isolated, unsupported, un-mentored, or un-shepherded lifestyle has had on the humans in our workforce.
Is Human Development the Role of Businesses?
You may contend that those considerations are outside the purview of employers and managers. I suppose that argument has some validity, but I think it fits cultural realities that were true decades ago. Having led a large group of employees (especially younger staff), I don’t see that businesses can extract the productivity needed from their workforce without considering and contributing to their well-being and development as healthy humans.
Perhaps the future of professional development isn’t better training events or more sophisticated assessments. Perhaps it’s remembering that every employee we hope to develop is first a human being. They bring invisible burdens, unfinished growth, untapped potential, and the same slow process of change that defines every one of us. Professional development has always been human development.
We simply forgot.
I’m interested in reading your thoughts and ideas about this in the comments.