Managing Wishful Thinking Risk

Wishful thinking is a means of reaching pleasing conclusions, maintaining preferred beliefs, or rejecting unfavorable beliefs. We think wishfully by cherry-picking evidence, bending the rules of rational thought, or creating substitutes for reality. Wishful thinking can be a source of risk in every human endeavor, whether we're rebuilding the U.S. Air Traffic Control system, or deciding whether or not to have a third child, or crossing a street in heavy traffic.

Because we can detect wishful thinking much more easily in others than in ourselves, tools for detecting it are important assets for people who must make decisions of consequence. For thinking about thinking, useful tools must be simple, because we need them while thinking about something else is actually happening. One such simple framework is the "Ingredients of an Interaction," a model of the person-to-person communication process developed by Virginia Satir. [Satir, et al., 1991] For our Wishful Thinking interventions, we'll use an even simpler form of the Satir Interaction Model, due to Jerry Weinberg. [Weinberg 1993] And instead of applying it to the case of person-to-person interaction, we'll be applying it to the more general case of person-World interactions.

For our purposes, the model describes the thought process that occurs from the moment we take in data from the World, to the moment when we execute a response to that data. The process has four stages, though we don't necessarily move through these stages in a strictly linear fashion. They are:

Intake

During Intake, Wishful thinking can be
a source of risk in every
human endeavorwe acquire information about the outside World. For example, we might receive a message that an "all hands" meeting will be held this afternoon at 3PM.

Meaning

Here we interpret the data we've acquired, and ascribe meaning to it. In our example, the meaning might be that we must attend an all-hands meeting at 3PM. There really isn't much more to it than that.

Significance

In this stage, we evaluate the significance of the meaning we made of the data. In our example, we might realize that we must reschedule our daily 3PM team meeting. Or we might begin to worry that layoffs are coming. Minds can easily boggle.

Response

Finally, we formulate and execute some kind of action. In our example, we might decide to notify the team that today's 3PM meeting is cancelled, and remind them that tomorrow's meeting will be held as usual. Or we might phone a trusted ally and suggest a meeting over coffee to discuss the layoffs.

That's the simplified form of the Satir Interaction Model. Our wishes, desires, and preferences can enter at any stage, and when they do, they do so in different ways peculiar to the stage involved. In coming weeks, we'll investigate how our wishes influence each stage of the process. Until then, think about which stage might be most vulnerable to wishful thinking for you.   Next issue in this series   Top    Next Issue

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More about layoffs

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A doorknob disclosure is an uncomfortable, painful, or embarrassing revelation offered at the end of a meeting or conversation, usually by someone who's about to exit. When we learn about bad news in this way, we can feel frustrated and trapped. How can we respond effectively?

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Beyond WIIFM  [August 13, 2003]

Probably the most widely used tactic of persuasion, "What's In It For Me," or WIIFM, can be toxic to an organization. There's a much healthier approach that provides a competitive advantage to organizations that use it.

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How to Avoid a Layoff: The Inside Stuff  [January 28, 2009]

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How to Avoid a Layoff: Your Relationships  [February 4, 2009]

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How to Avoid a Layoff: Your Situation  [February 11, 2009]

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Four Popular Ways to Mismanage Layoffs: II  [February 25, 2009]

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Your company has just done another round of layoffs, and you survived yet again. This time was the most difficult, because your best pal was laid off, and you're even more fearful for your own job security. How can you cope with survival?

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Teamwork Myths: I vs. We  [July 1, 2009]

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In some organizations entire professions are held in low regard. Their members become pariahs to some people in the rest of the organization. When these conditions prevail, organizational performance suffers.

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When things don't work out, and we investigate why, we sometimes attribute our misfortune to "wishful thinking." In this part of our exploration of wishful thinking we examine how we arrive at mistaken assessments of the significance of what we see, hear, or learn.

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Trauma is an emotional response to horrible events — accidents, crimes, disasters, physical abuse, emotional abuse, gross injustices — and layoffs. Layoff trauma is real. Employers know how to execute layoffs with compassion, but some act out of cruelty. Know how to defend yourself.

Footnotes

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