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REFLECTION 2 - What a World, What a World - Being Certain, Being Wrong
30 Plays1 month ago
HOST: Jess Villegas / ACUITY Business Consulting
This is a Reflection from The Leader’s Commute. From time to time, I share a story that continues to shape how I think — not because the facts have changed, but because my perspective has. These reflections stand on their own, and they often sit behind the conversations you hear elsewhere on this podcast.
This REFLECTION is titled What a World, What a World! – It’s a story about being certain, being wrong, and learning that the problem isn’t the world—it’s how we choose to see it. AND, It’s about how, without the discipline to question our assumptions, we risk damaging the very relationships and outcomes we’re trying to protect
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Transcript
Reflections on Perspective and Life Lessons
00:00:06
Speaker
This is a reflection from the Leaders Commute podcast. I'm Jess Villegas. From time to time, I share a story that continues to shape how I think, not because the facts have changed, but because my perspective has.
00:00:19
Speaker
These reflections stand on their own, and they often sit behind the conversations you hear elsewhere on this podcast. This reflection is about being certain, being wrong, and learning that the problem isn't the world, it's how we choose to see it, and how, without the discipline to question our assumptions, we risk damaging the very relationships and outcomes we're trying to protect.
00:00:42
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For me, that lesson has been hiding in plain sight for years.
Blame and Responsibility in Personal Growth
00:00:46
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In a single line from a movie I've probably seen a dozen times, The Wizard of Oz, there's a moment near the end where the Wicked Witch, after spending the entire story trying to control the outcome, suddenly finds herself on the losing end.
00:00:59
Speaker
And instead of taking responsibility, she cries out, what a world, what a world. And for a long time, I couldn't quite explain why that line stuck with me. But eventually, I realized it wasn't just what she said, it was what she meant.
00:01:15
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Please enjoy. How about little fire, scarecrow? Oh, no! I'm burning! I'm burning! I'm burning! I'm burning! No, no, no, no!
00:01:29
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You cursed brat! Look what you've done! I'm melting! Melting! Oh, what a world! What a world! Who would have thought a good little girl like you could destroy my beautiful wickedness?
00:01:42
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Ah!
Imparting Wisdom Through Family Stories
00:01:54
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My young grandchildren, Jackson and Dylan, not being able to appreciate the more nuanced applications of my wisdom as a business performance consultant, had to settle for a more basic delivery of my grandfatherly advice.
00:02:07
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Life lessons were doled out in easily digestible movie quotes, along with some witty commentary. The Shawshank Redemption's get busy living or get busy dying spoke to the freedom to choose a life of growth or one of constriction.
00:02:21
Speaker
The Jaws line, we're going to need a bigger boat, surfaced the need to increase our personal capacity to meet opportunity head on. John Kinsella, who in Field of Dreams asked the question, is this heaven, only to discover it was in fact Iowa, taught that the quality of our current circumstances is a function of how we live, not where we are.
00:02:43
Speaker
But the quote I employed most often was one from the Wizard of Oz. The Wicked Witch of the East, who had been stalking Dorothy, her three friends, and her dog on their way to Emerald City to get assistance from the wizard, confronts them and proceeds to set the scarecrow on fire.
00:02:58
Speaker
Dorothy, trying to save her friend with a bucket of water, inadvertently douses the Wicked Witch, causing her to melt into the castle floor. Writhing in agony and at a complete loss as to how Dorothy could overcome her substantial power, screams out, what a world, what a world.
00:03:15
Speaker
This utterance fascinated me for years, though I was not sure why. After a countless number of viewings, I determined it odd that the Wicked Witch, who had created the circumstances that had led to her demise, appeared to blame some outside force for her situation.
00:03:31
Speaker
This suggested that if the world were a different place, bad behavior would have been rewarded versus punished. The witch was not a stoic who believed that we create our circumstances primarily through our interpretations of things and events and the actions that we take to deal with them.
00:03:48
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Therefore, we should always do our best, take responsibility for the outcomes, and migrate to better ones if that's what's necessary. In grandkids speak, don't blame everyone else for your problems.
00:04:00
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Do something about them. We'll come back to the witch later in the podcast.
Assumptions and Apologies in Personal Stories
00:04:04
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Many years ago, during a presentation on leadership and executive excellence, I opened with a provocative question.
00:04:11
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Think back to when you first recall being absolutely wrong about an assumption you made, something so substantial it caused or could have caused grave damage to an important relationship or the derailment of an important project.
00:04:25
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I then asked the participants to yell out the age at which they reached this self-enlightenment. 17. seventeen
00:04:39
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One gentleman in the back shouted, I'll let you know when that happens. Wide, skeptical grins all the way around. I was 24 when I suffered the embarrassment of realizing I was completely wrong about something that I would have bet my house on, given the chance.
00:04:54
Speaker
Even though my error did not result in damaging one of the most important relationships in my life, the prospect that it could have continues to inform me today. My daughter Nicole was about three years old when she started gathering that a thing called money was important and helped sway over many of mine and my wife Leslie's conversations early in our family history.
00:05:15
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An unsanctioned collection of stray pennies and nickels made their way into the various knickknacks on Nicole's dresser, now doubling as piggy banks and safety box depositories.
00:05:26
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In time, she made her way to quarters, deducing that bigger coins had some relationship to more value. The whole thing was cute for a while, but soon things proceeded to the need for several parental admonitions.
00:05:41
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Around the same time, I was experiencing some modest success advancing my young business career. However, pay continued to be modest and the two-week pay regimen significantly stretched our cash allocation strategies.
00:05:56
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Fortunately, we were appropriately frugal and meticulous in the management of our limited financial resources. Before the days of Venmo and online banking, a common technique for us was to allocate various amounts of cash into separate envelopes for the most expensive bills.
00:06:12
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These required special attention because of our ongoing need to push payment due dates. In one instance, not having time to place them in an envelope, I set four $20 bills on the corner of our common desk, intending to return after a day's work to pay the bill in person. But when it came time to grab the cash, I saw there were only three $20 bills remaining on the desk.
00:06:33
Speaker
Leslie did not have any idea about what might have happened to the money. I began a frantic search, looking around the desk, rifling through dog-eared papers and magazines, fingering through other cash envelopes, and checking and rechecking my wallet, all to no avail.
00:06:49
Speaker
The only place my mind could go from here was to assume that Nicole had made the jump from small coins thief to more ambitious currency. I searched around her room, but there were no $20 bills to be found.
00:07:00
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On most other days, I would have given her the benefit of the doubt and worked her through a session of try to remember and other hiding places, but my anxiousness grew as we neared the five o'clock bill pay deadline.
00:07:11
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In my frustration and impatience, I yelled out, Nicole, where is my money? Seconds later, the backyard's green door flew open and Nicole scurried in, eyes wide with fear, sneakers dirty, and lips ruby red with strawberries from foraging in the garden, making a beeline to her room.
00:07:31
Speaker
Okay, I thought to myself. I should not have yelled like that, but now that we're making progress, I can come back and thoughtfully redress the situation later. Nicole came streaking back through the living room, her clenched fist opening as she pounded its contents onto the desk, continuing to the backyard without breaking a stride. And there it was, a bright, shiny, new quarter.
00:07:56
Speaker
About a year later, a friend was helping me load furniture into a truck for a move to a new home. One of the few nice assets we owned was a desk, a surprise gift from a neighbor who was getting married and had no use for it.
00:08:09
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It was dark solid oak with a real leather top, gold inlay, and well-constructed drawers. but its most interesting characteristic was a built-in bookshelf on the front side of the desk.
00:08:21
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Our limited living space did not allow us to enjoy this feature, as it was constantly hidden against the most accessible wall in the room. We were working hard and carefully to get it loaded into the truck when my friend said, hey, i just found $20. Feigning ownership and hypothesizing on potential purchases, he confessed that the money had fallen out of the built-in bookshelf.
00:08:45
Speaker
I had never reconciled in my mind what happened to the money. Somehow, we paid the bill, chalked the situation up to one of those things, and moved on with life. I never found the need to discuss it with Nicole, nor a reason to apologize. But I will say this scared straight experience did seem to dampen Nicole's theft-prone tendencies.
00:09:05
Speaker
My face became immediately flush with embarrassment as I gave my friend a half-hearted recitation of what had led to this finding. But my focus had immediately gone to a rationalization of why I was justified assuming that Nicole had taken the money. After all, I had looked in and around the desk, even pulling it away from the wall to see if it had landed in the space in between.
00:09:26
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I mean, what are the chances that a $20 bill would fall behind the desk and then float into an open shelf area? Did a slight breeze grab it on its fall and push it into the shelf?
00:09:38
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The whole thing practically defies physics. On and on it went, with these mental rationalizations distracting me the entire time we were loading the truck, After some reflection, I realized i had to apologize to now four-year-old Nicole.
00:09:53
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Ultimately, she did not remember the incident, but she forgave me anyway, rubbed my face, and ran off to play in the garden. My initial context for the situation with Nicole, once it became clear that I had improperly blamed her for the theft, was primarily shame for having raised my voice the way I did.
00:10:13
Speaker
Nicole not remembering the event gave me some relief, plus another item to add to my checklist of things to do to become a better human being. But what continues to haunt me is the thought that this could have easily occurred when Nicole was 14 or 15, when she was part of a demographic that had many more creative reasons for requiring $20 bills.
00:10:34
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A misstep of this type, at this age, is not easily forgiven, and it becomes another distraction in the dynamic of building trustworthy relationships between parents and adolescents.
Professional Lessons from Personal Reflections
00:10:45
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My next opportunity to apply additional context to the incident came a few years later while at work. By this time, I was operating in a supervisor role, conducting analytics and scheduling priorities for a small accounting department.
00:10:59
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I was relating the story to a fellow supervisor, choosing to focus more on the humor of it versus the life lesson. But then he made a reasonably thoughtful remark along the lines of, raising kids seems pretty complicated, so it must be hard to be right every time.
00:11:14
Speaker
He continued, by the way, you were a young father, only 24 the time. I mulled that over and over in my head for a while. Only 24. Only 24. And then a wave of realizations hit me.
00:11:30
Speaker
The first was that, at 24, I had already been married for three years. We had managed to purchase a house, and I had the makings of a nice career. There were lots of decisions I had to make while working to achieve these things. So, if this is correct, what is a likelihood that the first significant mistake I ever made was at the age of 24?
00:11:51
Speaker
It's infinitely more likely that I made many mistakes, but the results never rose to a level of consequence. Or, mistakes were made, and individuals chose not to bring them to my attention for whatever reason.
00:12:04
Speaker
Or, perhaps mistakes have been made, but being long-term in nature, the consequences have yet to materialize. The next realization was that, at least in the situation with Nicole, it was not hard to know what was right.
00:12:19
Speaker
I was dealing with a toddler who could only have a limited understanding of how to satisfy my pressing her. It was absolutely wrong to make a monumental assumption that I had not taken the time to verify.
00:12:30
Speaker
I treated the pressure of the moment in terms of paying bills on time and keeping credit scores high in order to get a better interest rate on a new house as a reason to shortcut a process for a correct outcome with a critically important person in my life.
00:12:45
Speaker
Finally came the realization that if I can be wrong at home, i can be wrong at work. This seems obvious, but I invite high-level executives to say that out loud three times.
00:12:57
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It's very sobering. The most recent opportunity to apply a more substantial context to this experience evolved over the last 20 years via an intense study in systems thinking.
00:13:09
Speaker
Dawnella Meadows, an environmental scientist, explains systems thinking as looking at the world in terms of connections and interactions. It is a framework for seeing interrelationships rather than things, for seeing patterns of change rather than static snapshots.
00:13:24
Speaker
But what does this mean day to day? What the Wicked Witch and I had in common, at least until I was 24, was a propensity for letting our weaknesses and passions dictate how we see the world.
00:13:35
Speaker
She was the evil witch who would stop at nothing to secure the ruby red slippers from Dorothy in order to command more power, an action that led to her demise. I was the big, strong father who had bills to pay and credit scores to remediate, acting in the role of breadwinner while potentially hurting the individuals for whom I was working to protect.
00:13:57
Speaker
The lion needed courage. The tin man needed a heart. The scarecrow needed a brain. What the wicked witch and I needed was a feedback system, a discipline and a set of habits that invite diverse and wide-ranging inputs from the systems we inhabit.
00:14:12
Speaker
In the witch's case, it might have been well to set a weekly reminder that anything that involves fire could also involve water. I would have done well to remember that three-year-olds do not have the capacity to be responsible for 24-year-olds. Unfortunately, waiting for the world to meet our needs fosters a tendency to abdicate responsibility for managing our lives.
00:14:34
Speaker
This also holds true for managing organizations. Recall from the opening quote the sentiment, the commonest kind of trouble with the world is that it is nearly reasonable, but not quite.
00:14:47
Speaker
We may believe that our intelligence, hard work, and good intentions in a situation we believe we understand well, in other words, that is nearly reasonable, is going to be enough to address complex organizational challenges.
00:15:02
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But it is the not quite part that can get us in trouble. For this reason, it is important that we institutionalize systems of diverse, well-considered, and consistently available feedback.
00:15:15
Speaker
Most organizations understand the relative importance of this, and they minimally satisfy the requirement with things like process efficiency analysis, key performance indicators or KPIs, gross margin analytics, et cetera.
Organizational Growth Through Feedback and Data
00:15:30
Speaker
But I have often found that information is gathered as a checklist item, as data that has value only in its accumulation. What is lacking is a way to animate the information into actionable initiatives towards accountability and acceptable results.
00:15:47
Speaker
Over the course of my consulting practice, I have evolved a strategy for keeping me alert to leveraging all of my feedback regimens. It draws on some pervasive accounting analogies.
00:15:59
Speaker
I would like to share these with you today. Number one, increase the size of your calculator. Organizations should continually increase its capacity, both on a structural and personal level, so that it remains well equipped to handle new and varying challenges.
00:16:17
Speaker
In other words, build a bigger boat. Number two, Manage along the x-axis while remaining attentive to the y-axis. In the Cartesian coordinate system, the horizontal line is called the x-axis, runs left to right, and is used to represent the independent variable in a two-dimensional graph.
00:16:37
Speaker
However, my liberal use of it is to encourage the building of feedback systems that are most appropriate for your level of responsibility. This involves looking to your left and right for support.
00:16:50
Speaker
These can take the form of reports, KPIs, co-worker input, and network building. In this example, the vertical y-axis would represent superiors and direct reports.
00:17:03
Speaker
I don't mean to disrespect the role they can play in your feedback systems. However, interactions at this level tend to be more about reconciling agendas than addressing a particular challenge.
00:17:14
Speaker
Number three, subtract 100 from 50. Sometimes when considering it an action, things just don't add up or make sense. But even so, you can likely think back to a time when your data and your intuition were telling you one thing and you did a different thing anyway.
00:17:32
Speaker
Of course, unforeseen variables can lead us to less obvious decisions. The intent here is to just be mindful of these dynamics. Number four, start from zero.
00:17:43
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Bring as clear a slate as possible or at least well-tested assumptions to your most impactful decision-making process. In the accounting world, this manifests as zero-based budgeting.
00:17:54
Speaker
This approach gives us the freedom to consider a wider array of possibilities and solutions. Number five, first black and red, then gray. I am a tremendous advocate of objective information.
00:18:08
Speaker
Look at the charts, review the numbers, talk to the suppliers, check the delivery logs, track the rework, look at the profitability. Sometimes the numbers will be black and sometimes red.
00:18:21
Speaker
This is the quantitative paradigm, one that gives disproportionate importance to data only, but it must be paired with qualitative paradigm, with a way to look at less traditional measures of success in order to reach a more complete solution.
00:18:36
Speaker
Number six, always be adding and subtracting. Organizations are dynamic. There must be constant vigilance about what is needed and what is not needed in order for the organization to remain adaptable and optimized.
Lessons from The Wizard of Oz: Optimism vs. Cynicism
00:18:53
Speaker
One last thing. In spite of the obstacles Dorothy continually faced during her journey to Emerald City, she remained upbeat and fully appreciative of the goodness in every individual and every situation.
00:19:04
Speaker
Had the Wicked Witch survived, it is likely all future encounters would continue to be replete with terror and threat. By the same token, Dorothy's worldview, one where every challenge was mitigated simply by a return to her home, would continue to see the world in its best light.
00:19:21
Speaker
This prompts me to consider what is more similar about the Wicked Witch and Dorothy, and me for that matter, than in what is different. It is that we are each the common denominator of every positive and negative situation we have ever experienced.
00:19:37
Speaker
Remembering this, I think, is a simple way to be more reflective about the decisions and choices that we make. This has been a reflection from the Leaders Commute podcast.
00:19:48
Speaker
Thank you for listening and for your thoughtful engagement.