The Ostrich Effect

Solving Destructive Patterns at Work

William Kahn

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317690306
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Human Resource Management
• Index: Business

The Ostrich Effect goes beyond the typical "how to" approach of most books that deal with difficult conversations at work. It aims to teach the reader what conversations to have, and when to have them, in order to solve destructive problems that occur in the workplace.

Like the proverbial ostrich with its head in the sand, people often avoid confronting small issues at work, but, if avoided, these issues will escalate and inevitably wreak havoc. Drawing on a combination of social science research and Kahn's practical experience as an organizational psychologist, the book examines the micro-processes that underlie the way in which these problems develop and flourish. These micro-processes are tiny, fleeting, and hardly noticeable, but when they are identified, something startling becomes apparent: there is a predictable pattern to this escalation. The book uses a variety of examples to demonstrate this pattern across a range of organizations and industries, and offers a toolkit to help guide the reader in resolving people problems at work. The toolkit focuses not on changing others, but on changing how we interact with others—our own behavior is the most powerful force for change that we have.

The ostrich remains the symbol of those of us who foolishly ignore our problems while hoping that they will magically disappear. By identifying this "ostrich effect", the reader is empowered to re-frame and neutralize its impact.

1

HIDING IN PLAIN SIGHT

Staff members of the finance and operations areas are caught in the crossfire of their directors vying over policy and budget. Nurses and physicians in a surgical unit are at odds over changes instituted by the hospital’s senior management team. The new vice president of fundraising at a non-profit agency cannot get the attention of the CEO who hired her. Social workers feel betrayed and disrespected by an executive director who seems concerned only with financial performance. The new general manager at a manufacturing facility is frustrated by the lack of processes and systems that would enable him to assess quality and control costs, and angered by the lack of responsiveness of the family business owners. The middle managers of a growing financial services firm are frustrated by senior leaders who continue to involve themselves in operational issues rather than on figuring out how the firm can attract new clients. A partner in a law firm is upset about being left out of decisions that he and the other partners used to make together. The list goes on, its endless variations a product of the myriad of ways in which people at work get in the way of others and themselves.

There are various ways to understand these situations. Depending on their involvements—the roles that they have in particular groups and organizations, the interests at play for them, their histories, and their relationships with other actors—people are likely to choose to think about a troubling situation in specific ways that differ from the choices made by others with different involvements. The choices that organization members make about how to understand particular situations matter a great deal: like physicians who select medical interventions based on their diagnoses, how organization members think about troubling situations determines how they act and react in those situations. Individuals vary in terms of how aware they are of themselves as making such choices; they may be quite conscious about their tendencies and biases, or may be steered by unconscious wishes in ways of which they remain unaware. Regardless, they are active participants in how they understand the situations in which they find themselves.

This process is known as framing. As the renowned sociologist Erving Goffman (1974) articulated, people create frames that enable them to see the world in digestible ways that show them how to act accordingly. A useful analogy is the framing of pictures in an art gallery. While frames can often add to the aesthetics of pictures, their primary purpose is to guide the viewer’s eye; the frames signal what is important to examine versus what is not. People create frames by which to identify what is important in social situations by creating specific narratives; thus, they develop stories that help explain those situations, complete with narrative arcs, key actors and bit players, and plots (Polkinghorne, 1988). These stories guide people’s actions in and reactions to their situations. Goffman wrote eloquently about how such stories bring coherence to what might otherwise seem incoherent. The frames that people create lead them to act coherently: their actions make sense, given what has thus far occurred in their story and what needs to occur in order to further that story.

The framing process is adaptive, in that it enables people to move forward in situations whose complexity might otherwise prove too ambiguous and uncertain to allow for decisive action (Bolman & Deal, 2013). Yet the framing of such situations is in itself problematic as well. When individuals create or propagate stories that help them frame and make sense of situations, they are imposing a particular view. More to the point, they are imposing a partial view: their stories cannot help but adopt a point of view that is limited in its ability to take into account a variety of possibilities and explanations. People are, inevitably, limited to what they know and wish to know, and what they see and wish to see, about themselves and the situations in which they find themselves. In this regard, frames are like the blinders that press racehorses to see what is right in front of them, and to move there as quickly as they can without distraction. Ignored is the material that is to the side, dismissed as noise, and unimportant to what individuals have defined as primary and crucial.

The ideas presented in this book are meant to help people learn to see how they frame complex situations in groups and organizations, and recognize how their frames, in their partialness, are both useful and not (see Bolman & Deal, 2013). The typical frame to which people gravitate focuses on individuals as the source of good and bad events. The individual level of analysis is often the easiest for people to perceive: they see individuals in action, and can seemingly trace what those individuals do to better, or make worse, situations. Such causality seems quite clear. It is less simple to see other levels of analysis, such as interpersonal, group, and intergroup relationships, or organizations themselves. These levels emerge only through the painstaking work of examining patterns across individuals, and how those patterns are shaped by larger, systemic forces that are not immediately apparent. In the absence of piecing together those patterns, people are left with what is directly in front of them: individuals acting out of perceived interests, agendas, motives, and tendencies.

While the stories that frame individuals at the center of the picture are the simplest to see and relate, they are often quite misleading. These stories do not attend to the ways in which individual actions can signal issues that need attention at another level of analysis. The disturbances of relationships—between individuals or within or between groups—are revealed through the actions and reactions of the individuals who comprise those relationships. Such disturbances are revealed, however, only when people are looking for them, or minimally, are open to the possibilities of their existence and reality and thus able to take a more encompassing view of their behavior. I offer a view of human behavior—the Ostrich Effect—in which individuals are not simply the source of troubling issues but are signals of disturbances in the relationships, groups, and organizations of which they are members.

The simplest way to present this alternative framing is through a story. The story is that of a married couple. The Ostrich Effect is, at its core, a relational dynamic, based on how people act and react to one another as human beings with needs and desires, interests and motives, and tendencies and temperaments. The contexts in which the dynamic occurs add layers of complexity, which will be examined in successive chapters of the book. In its simplest, most stripped-down version, however, the Ostrich Effect is a set of interactions between individuals in relation with one another.

Moments of a Marriage

Consider John and Nancy Orlando. Their two children are grown. John is an engineer, with an eye toward retirement. Nancy has done a lot of volunteer work while focusing much of her energies on raising the children. John’s career and Nancy’s concern for her children’s education and development allowed them to not look too closely at how different they are. Nancy loves to travel, to take courses and learn, to discover other people, to socialize. John prefers home. He likes to stay close to his neighborhood, his house, his work. Nancy wants to be open to the world, to be curious about whatever shows up in her orbit. John is more self-contained; he likes his life bounded and clear. These differences have always been part of their relationship, of course. They were attracted to one another partly because each offered the other what they lacked and needed. Nancy brings John out of himself, as if leading him blinking into the sunlight where he has found friends, conversations, games, and barbeques. John tethers Nancy, offering stability, giving her a place to return from her travels and imaginings.

Yet there is great space between them. They had filled that space by becoming parents together. As the children grew the space became more visible, its emptiness more apparent. But that emptiness has not moved from the background to the foreground of their awareness. There have been flickers of thoughts, John wondering why Nancy doesn’t seem to like staying home and watching television with him, Nancy thinking that they need to sign up for some sort of class together. There have been brief flare-ups, each upset when the other did not seem to care about what he or she cared about. There had been disquieting feelings that came and went, John frustrated that Nancy was not home to make him dinner one night, Nancy saddened by John’s disinterest in taking a vacation. But these had all been fleeting, arriving and receding quickly. They were butterfly moments, darting in and then dancing away, borne aloft on a passing wind.

Then a moment of another kind happens. The butterfly lands, and sticks.

Nancy comes home from a yoga class, invigorated.

“I was talking with Jean,” she says to John, “and she told me about an amazing program, a yoga teacher who travels and teaches. He’ll be at a spiritual retreat center next week. What do you think?”

John twists in his chair, looks away from the television and at Nancy.

“About what?”

“What do you think about my going, of course?” Nancy says.

John nods absently, turning back to the baseball game.

“Sure. Sounds good.”

Nancy tells him more about the travelling yoga teacher, about his studies in Asia and India. Her husband pays her little attention. She falls silent. Thinking this means the subject has run its course John asks Nancy whether she is planning on having company over that weekend, which would mean that he would need to get the lawnmower fixed and take care of the lawn. He asks this question without turning his head from the television.

Nancy stares at the back of his head. She stands very still. Yet in the recesses of her mind, she is racing, like a puzzler grabbing jigsaw pieces at top speed and fitting them together, the outlines set and then the center of the picture falling into place and becoming clearer and clearer. Bits and pieces of her marriage reoccur to Nancy as she stands in front of her husband: images of herself talking and laughing and then falling silent as friends leave after a dinner party; of John hunched in front of the television; of travel brochures laying untouched on a coffee table; of John grimacing as she speaks of enrolling in a part-time graduate school program when the children began school; of herself younger, eager to dance and paint and travel. In that moment Nancy startles herself with sudden knowing. It is a revelation: her marriage, as it is, is not a place for her. She has given up too much of herself. Like a detective she has put together the clues that she has been gathering, if unwittingly. She has figured it out.

Nancy had inklings before but this moment is extraordinary. It stands out in sharp relief, a three-dimensional flash in a two-dimensional space. Nancy lets herself know something that is sharp and true about herself and her marriage. She also lets the knowing bring with it keenly felt emotions. In that moment Nancy feels terrible anger. She feels real frustration. She feels unaccountably, deeply sad. She feels despair. These emotions rush in like waters no longer dammed and take Nancy over even as she stands there unmoving, looking at and not seeing her husband. The feelings are all jumbled together, the moment too instantaneous for there to be any working out of what they are each about. The rush of feelings tells Nancy the moment is important, indeed, momentous. She knows, then and there, that this moment means something, and that within its particulars there is a larger reckoning. Nancy knows that the larger reckoning is dangerous even if she cannot say how and why. She is Eve, looking down at the bitten apple in her hand.

So Nancy stands there in her living room with her husband, flooded by anger, frustration, sadness, and despair. She is immediately anxious, not wanting to give in to her realization and emotions, and the disturbances that might follow in her life. She is frightened by the knowledge. Questions emerge: What would happen if she speaks the truth to John? Where and how would she live? Would there be divorce? Could she make it on her own? What would happen to her relationship with her children? Does she really have the courage to live her life another way? The questions appear fully formed as if they have been readied much earlier and were awaiting summons.

She turns and busies herself in the kitchen. She tells herself things: she is just tired, upset about something else; she has other people in her life, good friends, with whom she can take classes, and that should be enough; no marriage is perfect. Nancy decides to forget about it. She turns on the television to keep her company while she prepares dinner. Soon enough, she is absorbed in her cooking and absently watching the television, and feels better. The moment has passed.

Over the course of the next days and weeks, Nancy and John’s married life remains much the same. They talk pleasantly enough. They go about their work, hobbies, daily tasks, and routines. Then Nancy’s sister arrives for a visit. She has left her longtime boyfriend, is in the midst of a career change, and thinking about moving across the country. Money is tight. They all go out for a nice dinner. The waitress brings the check. John pushes his glasses up onto his forehead and starts to go through the check. He looks at Nancy and her sister.

“How should we split this?” John asks.

Nancy stares at him, mouth agape. As the sister reaches for her purse Nancy stops her with a hand on her arm. She turns to John.

“You’re being incredibly rude,” she tells him. “My sister will of course be our guest.”

“I just thought …” John starts to protest but stops when he sees how upset his wife is. He pays the bill, calculating the 12 percent tip, and joins the others in the parking lot.

Later that evening Nancy lights into him.

“You embarrassed me tonight. In front of my own sister! I cannot believe how cheap you can be.” She turns away, disgusted.

John is stunned. He does not think of himself as cheap, although he is careful about how they spend their money, certainly more so than his wife. He decides to tell her so.

“Look, I may be careful about money. Someone around here needs to be.” He is suddenly angry, surprising himself. He is usually quite even-keeled.

The argument escalates, to the point that Nancy and John are barely speaking to one another as they go to bed. Nancy cannot fall asleep for a long time. She cries silently, filled with hurt and shame about how her husband acted in front of her sister.

A month after the dinner debacle, Nancy and John argue again. It starts over nothing, a brief comment by John about not needing to pay the propane gas bill until the end of the month. John is sitting in the dining room sorting through the bills, talking mostly to himself.

“What did you just say?” Nancy says sharply, walking into the room.

“Huh?” John looks up and around, registering her presence.

“What did you just say about paying that bill?” Nancy points at the paper in his hand.

“Oh, nothing, just that this bill can wait until later. These guys charge us when they’re still in the mid–”

“Just pay them, okay?” Nancy cuts him off. “Stop obsessing over every bill, every nickel. Just pay it now.” Her voice registers disgust. “You get so damn small, you know?”

John sits stunned, as if hit by a plank. He has no idea what just happened. He starts to turn away and then reconsiders. He struggles to maintain his composure.

“I don’t know what’s going on with you. But you are way out of line.” He pushes back his chair, gets up and leaves the room without looking back.

Nancy collapses in a chair. She looks at the doorway, then down at the table. She closes her eyes, pinches the bridge of her nose between thumb and forefinger as if to stem a migraine. She too is stunned, by the viciousness with which she reacted to her husband. She realizes that some part of her is out of control.

The Ostrich Effect Sequence

Nancy and John have enacted a generalized, stable, and predictable sequence of events that, unless interrupted, routinely causes harmless problems between people to become quite harmful—a sequence that comprises the Ostrich Effect. The basic sequence is this:

People have difficult moments with one another. When Nancy comes home energized by the possibility of the yoga retreat, she inadvertently triggered a difficult moment: John ignores her, leading to her startling, painful realization of a marriage that stifles rather than ennobles her. Even though it is Nancy herself who experiences the difficulty, and is in distress, it is the relationship that is troubled.

Something about those moments triggers anxiety. Nancy’s realization makes her deeply anxious, as she experiences the fear of what it would mean to take seriously the idea that her marriage is fundamentally flawed. The anxiety gives her pause, triggers a fleeting calculus that leaves her at the mercy of her fears.

People avert their gaze from the source of their discomfort. Nancy pushes away from the realization of her own unhappiness in her marriage. She turns away, returns to the kitchen, and loses herself (rather than holds on to herself) in her tasks. She averts her gaze from that which she would rather not see.

People create and fasten upon compelling distractions. Nancy later attacks John about how he spends money and how he acts in front of her family. She is thus able to express the emotions triggered by the original difficul...