Many of them are extremely helpful and have kept your ancestors alive for long enough to pass on their genes. But evolution is a slow process and often we find ourselves out of sync with the world in which we live.
For example, scarcity of food was a real problem for our primitive ancestors.
Like wild animals today, enormous amounts of time and effort were spent just surviving. The primates that gorged themselves and put on weight when they found an abundant food source survived to pass on their genes. Over time, this gets built into the way that we think.
The problems arise when food is abundant but people behave as if it isn’t. They consistently eat until they’re full eventually putting on weight leading to health problems. At a macro level, this is one of the reasons that we have an obesity problem. We are genetically programmed to eat more than we need.
Now I appreciate that the problem is more complex than that.
What you eat is more important than how much eat and genetics play an enormous part in how you store fat and build muscle. The reason I use this example is that it’s a simple way of explaining the concept of mental models.
The focus of this article though is on another mental model. One the drives an enormous amount of our behaviour at home and in the workplace.
The Good vs. Evil Narrative
This is one of the strongest narratives that exists and it drives humanity to conflict time and time again. We embed this narrative in our children and reinforce it every day in the way we act and the way we behave.
My three year old daughter watches a lot of Disney films. In all of them, there is usually a character who is ‘evil’, Jaffar in Aladdin, Ursula in the little mermaid and the stepmother in Cinderella. There is never an explanation for why they behave in this way, they’re just evil.
But the world and people are more complex than that. In this brilliant video about her life as a CIA deep-cover operative Amaryllis Fox explains that ‘everyone thinks they’re the good guys and that they’re right’.
The behaviour of a jihadist or a terrorist, while incomprehensible to us, is entirely logical and justified to them. They are behaving based on the mental models that have been created through their collective experience, perception and judgment.
This may seem warped to us but it is logical to them.
Politicians play on this narrative because it is popular, builds support and creates momentum for action. If you can cast someone else as ‘evil’, you can mobilise people to vilify them.
How does this play out in the workplace?
Fortunately the model rarely shows itself in such extreme circumstances in the workplace, but it’s still there.
Not many people will turn up to work to make mistakes and deliberately screw things up. Their intent is rarely malicious. Stuff just happens, things get missed and people make honest mistakes.
Yet, so often people attribute this to a some form of negative intent. They talk as if people have deliberately done something to spite them or they write them off as stupid, lazy or incompetent.
This is an example of the good vs. evil narrative playing out in a much milder form.
The point I am trying to make here is not about competence or professionalism. It is purely about intent – and more often than not, the intention is well-meaning but the outcome might not be positive.
So What?