Tom Graves / Tetradian

Self-doubt.

It can be a real killer – in many different senses. A killer of ideas. Of motivation. Of hope, or joy. In extreme cases, even of people themselves.

For once, I’m very glad to say, it’s not me that’s in the throes of self-doubt here. But I’ve been watching several other colleagues go through it this week, in several different domains: narrative-enquiry, archaeology and enterprise-architecture, to name just a few of their respective work-contexts.

Not fun at all, for any of them. Not easy to help them, either: almost by definition, self-doubt is a very personal struggle…

Yet in some ways it seems an oddly necessary stage in the development of new ideas, or whatever: in the labyrinth, it’s the ‘Dark Night of the Soul’ (also known as the ‘”Oh, sod it…” point’ ), where we either have to face the darkness or throw away everything that we’ve gained.

It’s called the ‘dark night’ for a very good reason, because it can be real dark in there, real lonely… Oftentimes in ideas-development we’re assailed by others’ doubts, others’ over-certainties, but here it’s our own doubts that assail us:

• Is this idea any good?
• Will it ever be useful?
• Will it ever make sense to anyone else?
• Will it ever make sense to me?
• Am I just wasting everyone’s time with this?
• Am I just wasting my time with this?
• Am I just a waste of time?

…at which point it tends to go darker still… Yes, not fun…

What’s interesting here is that those who never have to face this space – or who shy away from it – are unlikely to ever create anything new. The ‘best’ that they can do is prevent others from creating anything, developing anything – a ‘skill’ that’s of questionable value in the broader scheme of things, perhaps?

So yes, sure, there are plenty of people who are always certain of themselves (or who are careful, perhaps, never to show their uncertainty in public…). Yet in many ways that certainty can perhaps be best understood as a peculiar kind of cowardice, because it takes real courage to face the unknown; it takes real courage to face the dark pain of self-doubt, and keep going through to the other side.

One way to deal with those doubts is to note that often it’s not about us at all: it’s about the idea that we’re working on, trying to find some means to express that idea in a meaningful way. What the labyrinth-model tells us is that that ‘dark night’ is a normal part of the process – an unavoidable stage that we must pass through in order to bring that idea to fruition. The way to break out of the ‘dark night’ is to care for the idea for its own sake – not for what it might bring us. The more we focus on ourselves in the ‘dark night’, the longer we’ll be stuck there.

Self-doubt is an occupational hazard for anyone creating anything new, whether for ourselves alone – such as in development of new understanding, or a new skill – or to be shared with others – such as a new product or process. For those of us whose work revolves around innovation, chronic self-doubt is often our common condition. It’s often made worse by a concomitant feeling that we’re ‘the Outsider’ – yet that ‘Outsider’ is exactly what we are whenever we’re developing something new. But that’s the nature of the work: painful as it is, there’s nothing wrong with self-doubt – in fact if we don’t experience self-doubt in this kind of work, that’s when the alarm-bells should sound.

What helps most, perhaps, is knowing that everyone who creates anything will suffer the same pangs, the same pain, the same inner struggles against a seemingly all-pervasive inner panic. That’s why and where a supportive peer-group will help so much: not just with whom to explore and test ideas, but to remind us that we’re not alone in this.

Self-doubt is hard; yet self-doubt is also good. We need self-doubt in order to create well. When the doubt hits hard again – as it always does, from time to time – it can help a lot to remember this!

[Update: a friend reminded me about Derek Sivers' great TED video, Leadership Lessons from Dancing Guy, which seems particularly pertinent here. (The full transcript is on that link, too: well worth reading.) The 'lone nut' who started dancing on the hill-slope probably suffered a few pangs of self-doubt (if perhaps masked for a while by a sufficient overload of alcohol? ) - but kept on dancing anyway, for the joy of the dance itself. Sometimes - as in this example - we gain a 'first follower' who helps us past the self-doubt, sometimes even moving on, as here, to a landslide of response; but sometimes it doesn't - sometimes (often?) there's no response at all. Either way is fine, in the larger scheme of  things: after all, once the dance ends, we're right back where we started (though perhaps a little happier, we'd hope? ). And since either way is fine, self-doubt is fine too - it's a necessary part of doing anything in depth, doing anything worthwhile. Rather than trying to fight against self-doubt, learning to work with it will certainly prove more useful - and probably less painful, too. Enjoy the dance! ]

The headline article in The Independent caught my attention this morning: ‘Head of bomb detector company arrested in fraud investigation‘. “This is an act of terrible betrayal”, wrote the Independent’s defence  journalist Kim Sengupta in a parallel piece – clearly an accurate comment given that the detectors in question failed to detect literally tons of explosives that were used to kill and maim hundreds in Iraq in a single suicide-bomb event, and all too many others like it.

As I read the article, my heart sank still further – though perhaps not for the reasons you might expect. Yes, the ‘bomb-detector’ has proved to be unreliable: there are huge problems on that score, without doubt. But to me the ‘betrayal’ turns out to be much more complex than it seems on the surface – because despite the ‘military-hardware’ packaging of the device in question, and its impressive-looking dials and cables and the rest, the underlying technology of the ‘bomb detector’ is a plain old ordinary everyday dowsing-rod.

Dowsing has been a serious interest of mine for several decades: over the years I’ve written what are now some of the best-known books on dowsing, in fact. Hence – unlike many of the critics – I do have some solid understanding of what’s going on in this case. And because of that longstanding background in the field, I’ll freely admit that I have few fundamental doubts about the use of dowsing in this context, not least because there’s plenty of long-documented, long-proven military practice in dowsing for land-mines and the like (contact the British Society of Dowsers for case-studies in Aden, for example, or the American Society of Dowsers for US use in Vietnam).  Like most people, I would much prefer a predictable and reliable machine to do the job, if there’s one available and it actually does work – which many don’t. But when lives are on the line and you don’t have anything else, a dowsing-rod in experienced hands can work wonders: so at least that part of this sad, messy story is no fraud. Yet that point about ‘experienced hands’ is extremely important: in unskilled hands a dowsing-rod can easily be worse than useless – as those on the receiving-end of those undetected explosives would have discovered to their cost…

(This is getting very long: better put a ‘Read more… link in here.)

Read more…

Came across this comment whilst exploring laptop.org.au, the Australian arm of the One Laptop Per Child movement [my emphasis]:

Learning is our main goal. … Epistemologists from John Dewey to Paulo Freire to Seymour Papert agree that you learn through doing. This suggests that if you want more learning, you want more doing. Thus OLPC puts an emphasis on software tools for exploring and expressing, rather than instruction. Love is a better master than duty. Using the laptop as the agency for engaging children in constructing knowledge based upon their personal interests and providing them tools for sharing and critiquing these constructions will lead them to become learners and teachers.

So why do we think it should be any different for adults in our organisations? – that ‘duty’ will somehow necessarily be a better motivator than love of the work itself?

Then crosslink that with Daniel Pink’s summary of recent research on extrinsic versus intrinsic motivators. From that, we discover that monetary bonuses and other ‘external’ motivators not only don’t help in knowledge-work, they actually make performance worse. What does work is ‘motivation from within’ – especially a commitment to the work itself for its own sake.

Crosslink that with what we know about the skills-learning process, and especially about the need for a ‘commitment of the heart’ – a commitment to the skill itself – to enable the capability to deal with real-world complexity in the context of that skill.

Crosslink that with what we know about the role of vision as a unifying force for and within an enterprise.

Crosslink that again with one of the core themes from the current version of ITIL (IT Infrastructure Library – the key international standard on IT service-management), that people do not want products or services as such, they want “satisfaction of a perceived need”; then note that this applies to all people within the enterprise as much as to the enterprise’s clients.

Given all of that, what types of motivation are provided or applied within your own organisation? Is there much evidence of awareness that “love is a better master than duty”? And if not, what would you need to change in the business-architecture or enterprise-architecture – such as in performance-metrics, performance-appraisals and the like – to support more of ‘love’ within the work itself?

Forgot to mention some new posts up on the SideWise weblog:

• What do shareholders own? – rethinking the implications of ‘ownership’ in business, particularly the notion that the shareholders own the company
• The reverse-test – on a nicely sardonic post by Fiona Czerniawska about rewriting marketing puffery
• 10, 100, 1000, 10000 – ballpark figures for the numbers of hours it takes to achieve the minimum for four specific levels of skill, and what those skills-levels look like in practice, mapped to the Cynefin framework

More to follow, but hope that’ll be useful for now.