Struggling with colleagues in denial? (Wise Decision Maker Guide 19)

Greetings Decision maker,

When’s the last time one of your colleagues said something so ridiculous that it made your jaw drop? Such denial of reality happens surprisingly often.

A four-year study by LeadershipIQ.com interviewed 1,087 board members from 286 organizations that forced out their Chief Executive Officers. It found that 23 percent of CEOs were fired for denying reality, meaning refusing to recognize negative facts about the organization’s performance.

Other studies show that professionals at all levels suffer from the tendency to deny uncomfortable facts. Scholars term this thinking error the ostrich effect, after the (mythical) notion that ostriches stick their heads into the sand when they encounter threats.

Our intuition is to confront people with the facts, but research — and common sense, if the individual is, say, your supervisor — suggests that’s usually exactly the wrong thing to do. When we talk to someone who believes something we are confident is false, we need to suspect some emotional block is at play.

To help you deal with colleagues in denial effectively, I developed a 5-step technique that can be summarized under the acronym EGRIP (Emotions, Goals, Rapport, Information, Positive reinforcement).

To get colleagues in denial to believe the truth, you need to:

1) Discover their Emotions

2) Discover their Goals

3) Build up Rapport

4) Provide Information to change their mind

5) Offer Positive reinforcement when they update their beliefs

But how do you use this technique? The step-by-step methodology with a case study is in this blog.

A video interview on “ExecuNet” on how leaders can address COVID-19 effectively, in their careers and their organizations

An audio interview on the “Get Clients Now” podcast about leading your businesses through the pandemic

A text interview on “Nir and Far” on avoiding decisions disasters

An article in The Nonprofit Times in effective strategic planning for nonprofits

An audio interview on “Internal Control Toolbox” on addressing organizational processes in the context of COVID-19

What’s Up With Me

I’ve been dealing with many people in denial about the severity of the pandemic, people who believe the pandemic will be over in a few weeks or at most by the end of the summer. Unfortunately, as I discovered in the course of writing my forthcoming book, Resilience: Adapt and Plan for the New Abnormal of the COVID-19 Coronavirus Pandemic, realistically speaking our earliest possible and most optimistic timeline for the end of the pandemic is by the end of 2021, though I give that a less than 5% chance. A much more realistic timeline is 3-5 years, until an effective vaccine is found, tested, manufactured, distributed, and administered to most people.

We tend to make very bad decisions about slow-moving, high-impact train wrecks of a disaster like the pandemic. In this new book, I talk about the cognitive biases that cause us to make such poor decisions, and how organizations, individuals, and households can effectively adapt and plan for the long-term impact of COVID-19. I’ll let you know when it’s available for pre-order, in the meantime you can keep track of it at this Amazon link.

Help Me Serve Your Needs

How do you deal with people suffering from denialism? How might the methods in the article/video/podcast help you address this problem?

Look forward to your feedback! I strive to improve my ability to help you avoid decision disasters and maximize success, so any feedback you can provide on this content - or anything else - will help me serve your needs better.

Decisively Yours,

Gleb

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