subscribe  |    email  |    print  |    continue the debate

In his postwar analysis of the U.S.’ unpreparedness for the Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor, economist Thomas C. Schelling famously emphasized the dangers of conflating “the unfamiliar with the improbable.”

Schelling outlined a destructive cycle of rationalization whereby “the contingency we have not considered seriously looks strange; what looks strange is thought improbable; what is improbable need not be considered seriously.” In the end, the calamity that comes to fruition is often the very one that we neglected to study, and that only with hindsight seems inevitable.

Psychologist Ellen J. Langer has studied the types of thought processes that cause us to miss clues and thereby squander opportunities. In her book “Mindfulness,” Langer has done us all a tremendous service by writing about the experiments she has conducted, as well as the conclusions she has drawn, in a manner that is concise and accessible to those of us who are not clinicians.

There are many important books that force us to re-examine a particular issue in a fresh and revealing light. The power of Langer’s book is that it challenges not what we think, but rather how we think. This humbling process of breaking down and re-evaluating the mind-sets that inform our actions cannot help but make us more thoughtful and, perhaps in the end, more effective. Moreover, the applications of Langer’s theories range from the everyday challenges of personnel management to the profundities of strategic decision-making.

Achieving Langer’s desired end-state of “mindfulness” will neither ensure success nor enable us to accurately foresee and head off every gathering threat. But a mindful individual or organization will be considerably less likely to fall into Schelling’s trap of circular reasoning, which can result in a failure to anticipate catastrophic events.

The settings in which Langer performed most of her studies were predominantly academic and medical. However, many of the concepts she addresses hold particular relevance in a military context.

By necessity, and indeed by definition, the armed forces are a rigidly hierarchical organization. The significant upside of this attribute is discipline, which no less a luminary than George Washington deemed “the soul of an army.” Yet the hazard this hierarchy poses is a heightened susceptibility to what Langer terms “self-induced dependence.”

Boss or assistant?

In a study that Langer and her colleagues conducted to test this phenomenon, they chose two groups at random and asked them to perform simple arithmetic problems. The two groups displayed equal competence. Next, Langer informed the members of one group that their title would be “boss” and the other group that their title would be “assistant.” After play-acting in these boss-assistant roles for a short time, the two groups were administered another arithmetic exam. On the second test, the performance of the “boss” group remained constant, but the “assistants” performed half as well.

If such labels can undermine performance, then first-level supervisors and commanders overseeing lower-ranking personnel may have to think creatively about tools to motivate their work force. In certain cases, empowerment of subordinates may yield superior results to rigorous supervision. Moreover, several of Langer’s experiments revealed that managers who are unafraid to express their own uncertainty about the solutions to certain problems make more effective leaders. Rote responses to unfamiliar situations — “No, you can’t do that. What if I let everyone do that?” — may be the surest route to extinguishing innovation. What if I did let everyone do that? Maybe we would save money and time, and increase output.

Another novel and provocative approach to workplace relations that Langer considers is the idea of “decreasing prejudice by increasing discrimination.” Many of the initiatives aimed at stamping out prejudice in the workplace emphasize the sameness among persons. Langer said this approach may be doomed to fail because human beings are naturally programmed to categorize almost everything we encounter. Furthermore, impeding people’s “perception of differences” might blind us to the advantages that someone’s difference provides in a particular context.

Rather than insisting on a program that is unnatural and perhaps counterproductive, Langer suggests that encouraging more categorization will result in fewer stereotypes and thereby reduce prejudice. The problem is not discrimination per se, but rather “indiscriminate discrimination.” If someone is wheelchair-bound, we label him “disabled” and fail to categorize further. If we did, we might see that the concept of a disability is “function-specific and not person-specific.” The wheelchair-bound individual may be disabled in terms of playing basketball but not in terms of diagramming plays, motivating players and coaching a team.

Receptive to signals

The best model of mindfulness may be the GPS receivers that the military and the general public now rely on so heavily. The receivers are constantly receiving new data, informing us of where we are and where we are going. In comparison to our navigational aids, how receptive are we, their users, to unfamiliar information and unexpected signals?

In discussing the perils of “petrified mind-sets,” Langer juxtaposes Napoleon, whose “blind obsession” with the conquest of Russia was “a portrait of mindlessness,” and his nemesis Kutuzov, who realized that a series of tactical retreats could yield overwhelming strategic victory. Whereas Napoleon allowed for only one definition of victory, the unheralded Kutuzov was flexible enough to respond to his adversary’s moves and create new categories of success and failure.

Today in Iraq, we are benefiting from the leadership of officers who were studying counterinsurgency and irregular warfare precisely when the Powell Doctrine made such ideas unpopular and seemingly obsolete. Just as the so-called Petraeus Doctrine is apparently supplanting its predecessor as the conventional wisdom, there is, thankfully, another small cadre of officers questioning its tenets.

It is hoped that this tradition of skepticism will prevent us from falling prey to what Langer calls “premature cognitive commitments” — a mind-set committed to one predetermined use of a particular piece of information. As Schelling warned nearly a half-century ago, the next threat may be something we have not yet considered, and the next war is unlikely to look like the last.