Water Torture
Surely this will save the Jewish people
“You will either step forward into growth, or you will step back into safety.” -Abraham Maslow
Tell me if this sounds familiar:
You are making an important presentation about a difficult challenge you’ve been charged with solving. After hours of work, you make a solid presentation, and most people in the room nod vigorously in agreement with the goals and strategies you outline.
However, like a voice in the wilderness, someone in the corner cries angrily, “THAT will never work. We’ve tried that before.”
All of us have been there.
In fact, I’m willing to bet that when you subscribed to this newsletter, many of you were dealing with a similar dynamic happening right before your eyes.
Too often, I was taught in my leadership training that this person crying out in the corner needs to be managed. A person who makes those complaints is just a modern version of Stadler and Waldorf:
Sound familiar? Good.
But let’s zoom out and look at this situation differently.
Reusing failed strategies makes me furious; I cannot unsee it once someone has chosen a predictable failed path. Yes, there is a danger in allowing the nattering nabobs of negativism to win the day. However, over time, I’ve learned to love people who sound the alarm in organizations because they see something the rest don’t: the difference between goals and strategies.
And that brings us to this week’s idea.
Einstellung Effect
“Insanity is doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting a different result.”
I’m sure you’ve heard this quote before.
I used to think this was a quote from Albert Einstein.
But I was wrong (naturally.)
In all likelihood, credit for the original quote should go to an author named Rita Mae Brown in her novel Sudden Death or Alcoholics Anonymous.
Either way, the quote’s not from Einstein.
I suspect Einstein will make out ok…
Observing someone repeat a failed strategy is frustrating, especially for an organization we care about. But it happens constantly, and it’s more normal than we think. Meet the Einstellung Effect.
The Einstellung Effect describes how once we find a solution to a problem that works, we tend to apply it to similar variations on the same problem, even if it’s not the best solution. Abraham Luchins1 and Edith Luchins2 first demonstrated the effect in a series of experiments focusing on pouring water into different-sized containers. Here is a helpful summary:
As we learned in our discussion of System 1 and System 2,3 the human mind takes shortcuts to maximize its ability to perform tasks and minimize the energy it uses. By extension, just as heuristics can lead us astray when making isolated decisions, they can cause us to pursue entirely mistaken strategies.
This brings us back to Stadler and Waldorf (and their modern equivalents).
The Einstellung Effect is about using solutions that did work in situations that don’t apply, which is different from having an angry person in a meeting tell us that our goals will fail. However, consider that when we are in a new position of authority, we are immediately tempted to bring our previous solutions that worked to a new situation that may require something different. When a person in the corner tells you that “This will never work” because it’s been tried before, it’s easy to see this person as someone not aligned with your agenda, but it’s more subtle and interesting than that.
Remember the language of complaint versus the language of commitment?4 The person in the corner shares their concern with you because they want you to be successful; they have a hard way of showing it.
If the person wanted to object to whether or not your goals are good, they would focus on the goals themselves, as opposed to the strategies. Remember, they are telling you that a strategy was tried before and did not succeed, not that the goal is not worth pursuing.
Additionally, since you are coming into a new role with a set of assumptions about what worked in the past, you are also more likely to try something that worked for you before without exploring whether or not it’s the best solution for this particular situation.
In this sense, by focusing on the strategies, the person is actually giving you the gift of feedback, namely, how to chart a path to succeed where others failed or at least be more mindful of previous landmines.
But if we marginalize that person rather than get curious, we may miss some of the most crucial information for our success.
Of course, the person making these critiques needs to self-reflect; perhaps if they changed their approach to giving feedback, you might not be disinclined to listen to them. But that’s for another day.
In the meantime, let’s complain about politics!
Politics is for Power
If there is one area of our lives beset by pessimism, it’s politics.
Perhaps you already know this because you are “active” in politics.
But are you, really?
In Politics is for Power, Eitan Hersh examines this question in greater depth. Normally, I joke about how much I enjoyed a book even though the author has no reason to care what I think because they have no idea who I am. This week, I actually know the author for real!
In 2020, Hersh wrote a powerful article in The Atlantic entitled “College-Educated Voters are Ruining American Politics,” he argues that many people who claim to be politically engaged are actually doing something far more casual, what he calls “political hobbyism”:
“Many college-educated people think they are deeply engaged in politics. They follow the news—reading articles like this one—and debate the latest developments on social media. They might sign an online petition or throw a $5 online donation at a presidential candidate. Mostly, they consume political information as a way of satisfying their own emotional and intellectual needs. These people are political hobbyists. What they are doing is no closer to engaging in politics than watching SportsCenter is to playing football.”5
If you are interested in a more academic explanation of political hobbyism, please read this article from 2017.6 Either article is a readable introduction, and I will confess that my first feeling upon reading both was guilt.
By Hersh’s definition, I am a political hobbyist.
I won’t pretend that reading this article made me completely change my ways, but it did provide me with some much-needed perspective on the relative unimportance of how most people engage with politics in my life.
For years, I got annoyed about political postings made by others on social media and definitely got into more than a few arguments that felt apocalyptically important. Once I realized that none of us were “really” doing politics, I cared less and posted less. When we argue about politics online, we are one mediocre step above (or below) this guy who gets a Fisher-Price Podcast Set:7
Politics is for Power takes Hersh’s theory of political hobbyism and examines the data alongside stories of citizens engaged in making change. The book is inspiring and sobering, but that’s what I love about it.
And this brings us back to our original question.
While Politics is for Power focuses on politics, truthfully, we could make the case that many of us are engaged in hobbyism about topics we claim to care about, including in the Jewish Community. As a test, keep a time journal:
Pick a topic you say that you care about in Jewish life.
Whenever this topic enters your life over the next few weeks, log how long you are engaged with the topic.
What percentage of your time is spent doing the work that makes a difference in moving the larger issue forward, and what percentage is focused on commenting about the work from your couch?8
Warning: You will likely be depressed by the results.
For me, the ability to sit in collective judgment of a problem is one of the cheapest and easiest ways to convince myself I am making an impact (even when I’m not.) So long as I stick to the same beats as everyone else, I feel comfortable with why certain things I know should change but never do, and I feel validated when the next person fails, telling myself, “I told you so.” But what if our instinct is to find fault through comfortable narratives is actually the comfortable behavior we need to disrupt?
In this sense, the exercise is sobering but necessary.
The Jewish Community often struggles with not enough people, but I still think we have too many hobbyists…
Don’t Treat Politics Like a Hobby
$150 Billion
According to Giving USA, this is the total amount of money donated in the United States each year to charities focused directly on poverty, housing, education, and other issues of societal anxiety.
According to Mark Kramer and Steve Phillips in a provocative article for the Stanford Social Innovation Review, it’s not clear what we have to show for it.
What I Read This Week
The Sleep of Reason: Can we argue that artificial intelligence is a monster? Perhaps, if you accept the view of Enrique Dans in this article. I’m freaked.
Why Scientific Fraud is Everywhere: I’ve written about this topic a few times and found this piece from New York Magazine a helpful analysis of the current state of academic fraud. The bulk of the article is an interview with Ivan Oransky and Adam Marcus.
Looking Closely is Everything: If I had to choose one motto for getting better at anything, it would be “slow down.”
Seven Theories from Daniel Kahneman: I’ve made clear how much I love Daniel Kahneman, and the tributes keep coming in. If you get what all the fuss is about but haven’t had the time to read his original articles with Amos Tversky, read this summary.
What Are Numbers, Really?: I did not understand this article. Can you?
See under: Reasons why I’m not starting a podcast.
For what it’s worth, this is the reason why I’ve refused numerous times to join a Facebook Group about the future of Conservative Judaism. To me, this is patient zero of political hobbyism in the Jewish community; lots of pontificating and zero accomplishment. I’m sure similar groups on other topics exist.