YouSaid · the spoken record

Jeff Hunter

lines on the record: 120
first: 2020-01-21
most recent: 2020-01-21
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“But those are the only two kinds of result. You can't define a set and say, this is the perfect set. And I'm going to get every one of them. So we're constantly dealing with this problem like as a manager, I think you have to determine in effect what bet you're willing to take. And the bet you're willing to take will range from it will be worth my time and effort to find somebody who could be the diamond in the rough. But I should prepare myself and set expectations that this person, they're going to not have the same resume as everybody else. They're going to have done different things. They're going to have sort of lateral or orthogonal skills, experiences. But that's a bet I'm willing to take because if that bet pays off, it pays off huge. Somebody being truly excellent in something is a Is a change multiplier inside an organization.”
2020-01-21 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #74 Jeff Hunter: Embracing Confusion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Statistically, you can't avoid the two and five. In other words, like there's no perfect way to do this. I no longer do much computer. There was a period in time where I did a little bit of coding and everything. And like most people, I know just enough to be dangerous. But one of the things and one of the companies I co-founded, I co-founded with a guy, a brilliant guy, and he told me, you know, Jeff, a lot of things are just a data problem. You can either say, I want the one perfect.”
2020-01-21 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #74 Jeff Hunter: Embracing Confusion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so we're littered with biases, you know, well over a hundred sort of named biases and recency biases and all these kinds of things. And we're just doing that when we're talking to another human being in an interview and interview is a terrible sort of circumstance to try to find out about somebody. Everybody's sort of doing Kabuki Theater. And so those three things together, it's really a terrible system and it's designed to get really bad outcomes. And yet everybody doubles down on it and says, if we just did, if we just had more candidates, right? We'd get better hires. And of course, that's not true. But anyway, that's why we end up with so many bad hires.”
2020-01-21 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #74 Jeff Hunter: Embracing Confusion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“How they started to see more women in philarmonics when they started auditioning them behind screens, all of the numerous and terrible unconscious biases and conscious biases that we have when we're assessing another. There was this big thing for a while where you got to hire for culture fit and now there's sort of this trend where you can't hire for culture fit because human beings just are actually talking about when they're hiring for culture fit what they're really doing is giving them an excuse to hire somebody they want to go have a beer with well i don't i i don't think that's true i think culture fit's really important but i agree that most human beings are actually just interviewing for somebody that they either find attractive or trustworthy and neither of those in a one hour interview are very good um criteria for whether somebody's going to be good in a job um”
2020-01-21 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #74 Jeff Hunter: Embracing Confusion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Species, if you've ever watched American Idol or any show like that, you see a bunch of people show up and then you can divide those people into three buckets, right? The people that think they're incredible singers who are terrible, the people who think they're terrible singers and they're incredible, and the people who think they're great singers and they're great. That last bucket is really small. The other two buckets are really big because we're just not very good at understanding what we're good at because it's different contexts, et cetera. So even if you have this great specification, you're talking to people and trying to assess them when they often can't give you the information they need to know whether they'd meet that specification. And then the third problem is that we're actually very bad at assessing human beings for jobs, actually worse than random in many cases. And I think there's a lot of really cool stuff that's been written about this. You know, if you read blink and...”
2020-01-21 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #74 Jeff Hunter: Embracing Confusion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then once the job a year after that, and a year after that, what do I imagine are the kinds of circumstances we as a company are experiencing? How fast are we growing? How big does this thing get? Because all those things are contacts. All those are contexts that affect performance. So the first problem is we're really bad at imagining the future. And we don't even have to be especially accurate that imagination, just the act of imagining it will cause our cognition to sort of get into this future-oriented state of picture, not getting hamstrung by the past, but imagining the future. That's one. Two, most human beings, when they're applying for jobs, actually don't know what they're good at. They know what skills they have, or at least people have told them they have. They know what jobs they've held, but they actually don't know what they're good at. Again, human beings are generally confused as a”
2020-01-21 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #74 Jeff Hunter: Embracing Confusion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And that, you know, the thing we were talking about before, that physical discomfort, it's like this anxiety that I got to get somebody into this job starts to really pervade your thinking and how you're working through the hiring process. And so you're really specifying for the past. You're really creating a specification of what you need in the job based on what's been happening. It's very rare that human beings step back and think, you know, It's going to take me three months to hire somebody. It's going to take them, once I hire somebody, it's going to take at least three months to onboard them. It's going to take another three months for them to actually really get in the swing of things. So what's the job in nine months?”
2020-01-21 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #74 Jeff Hunter: Embracing Confusion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so if you look at this, the various studies, and it's hard to be scientific about this, but as somebody who's run large recruiting organizations that have hired thousands and thousands of people, yeah, I would say the chances that you're going to find somebody who's extraordinary in a position is about one in five. And those are really bad odds. And so it's a great question. Why does that happen? Well, there's a couple of reasons. One is we're not good as a species at figuring out what problem we're going to solve. We're really good at figuring out what problem we've been trying to solve. And what that means is we're always sort of driving by looking in the rear view mirror. So when you go to hire somebody, typically you hire somebody because you have a need to fail or you're in pain in some way. Like work is too much. This responsibility is untended.”
2020-01-21 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #74 Jeff Hunter: Embracing Confusion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Maybe, or maybe you're not a good manager, because if you were a good manager, if you had designed this thing well and hired well, probably those people would do incredible work. I have hired many young people in my life and they were extraordinary. And I've hired people who were, you know, part of the greatest generation and they didn't work out. So I think that while you can say there's an overall generalization that might help you make sense, like people grow up in a particular time and share common experiences and that shapes them, I think it's probably not wise to deal in generalities about any type of group based on any characteristics, but instead deal with individuals and try to figure out how to create a system that identifies people are going to do well in that system and unleashes their. potential.”
2020-01-21 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #74 Jeff Hunter: Embracing Confusion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think most managers really struggle to be good at their jobs, to be a good clarity manager, really hard, especially in the midst of a lot of unpredictable change. And so when stuff starts going squirrely on you, you're going to reach for any convenient narrative you can get your hands on to make sense of like why this is happening. And I think a lot of people have just bought into this narrative of, you know, if a millennial isn't working hard, it's because they don't care or, you know, they don't have the work ethic we had. And, you know, frankly, every generation does that to every other generation. Every generation thinks the generation that follows.”
2020-01-21 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #74 Jeff Hunter: Embracing Confusion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But then, okay, great. Yeah, of course. But then that means that's the same for everybody. In other words, like millennials grew up in a particular point in time where there was different technologies and more relative wealth, but more confusion and relative insecurity. They were growing up in a time that formed a lot of their beliefs about how the world works. And so the people who say there's no sort of generational, you know, that's all made up. That doesn't make sense to me. And I experience different ways of thinking sort of categorized by age groups. Having said that”
2020-01-21 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #74 Jeff Hunter: Embracing Confusion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You live in this big house and we're saving the stale cereal. But they were very much a product of that experience, of that hardship. They were very much a product of having grown up in a situation where, you know, existence was really a problem. It wasn't just about whether you're going to have a bigger house or a faster car. It was about whether you're going to be able to get on the right breadline. And of course, that shapes somebody, right? Those experiences shape people. And it gives you a set of mental models about how the world works and what risks exist, et cetera. So when I tell that story, most people are like, well, yeah, of course.”
2020-01-21 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #74 Jeff Hunter: Embracing Confusion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So my grandparents grew up during the Great Depression and struggled. Even later in life when they were fairly wealthy, my grandmother wouldn't throw anything away. And so we'd go over their house and she'd have sterile cereal and all this stuff and it'd be sort of confusing to me as a kid”
2020-01-21 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #74 Jeff Hunter: Embracing Confusion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, this is a feedback method that we've talked to lots and lots of people. And when you do it and you're orienting to like being explicit about the standard norms, whatever you're comparing to, taking a look at just your own confusion against that expectation and figuring out what the other person was experiencing, and then move to the gap in performance and then figuring out together why it happened, then I think you're actually doing a couple things. One, you're being very explicit about what you believe is something somebody else needs to know. Two is you're being open-minded about what you could be missing. And three, you're conducting the feedback in a way that the person feels enlisted in the process because it's not an accusation. It's a attempt to discover what is true.”
2020-01-21 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #74 Jeff Hunter: Embracing Confusion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so you're sitting across from this, you're sitting having a conversation with this person about that you want to help them. And so you're really side by side looking at this reality and saying, okay, aren't we in sync? Like this is a bad outcome. You're not assigning blame here or anything. You're just saying, are we in think this is a bad outcome? And now let's figure out why that bad outcome happened.”
2020-01-21 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #74 Jeff Hunter: Embracing Confusion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The gap between those two things is the gap of performance. It is the feedback you're trying to deliver. that we're both aligned on that, the other person knows what you know. And second, you're getting in sync on what the reality was. And then third is you're looking at the gap between those two things and sort of looking at it together, right? We're not counterparties here. I'm not accusing you. I'm assuming the person you're sitting across from has signed this basic implied contract that, yeah, I want to unleash my potential. I want to be great. Not everybody signs that contract, by the way. A lot of people are like, yeah, I don't really care. And you got to know that. You got to know that you do care about unleashing potential and you want to hang out with other people who do. And then you actually have to be explicit about that expectation in the hiring process, et cetera.”
2020-01-21 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #74 Jeff Hunter: Embracing Confusion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Again, you're not casting blame. You're not even diagnosing. You're just saying, what I experienced is, you know, the project wasn't delivered on time, or I was confused about why we waited so long to deliver this to the customer or whatever it is. And you're not seeking to get in sync with that. All you're seeking to do is to give them transparency into your confus And then what you're trying to do is figuring out what they experienced. Well, yeah, I delivered it late to the customer, but it's not that big a deal. Oh, okay. So you actually knew that you were delivering late, but you just deprioritized it. Now what you do is the next stage is you look at the difference between the standard you agreed upon, what it looks like, and what actually happened.”
2020-01-21 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #74 Jeff Hunter: Embracing Confusion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Both of those are confusion inducing failure to actually work out your confusion. And so the way to do it is consistent with what we've said before. You have to work out your confusion first. So the way you do that is you say, listen, I want to be explicit about what I think good looks like. And I don't want to talk about outcomes right now. I just want to be explicit about what I think, what's the goal or how should this work. And so you have that conversation and you get in sync with another person. Again, you're not talking to them about how they're bad or how they're good or whatever. You're just getting in sync on what's the standard. Then you complete that part of the conversation. You move to the next part of the conversation and say, now I want to talk about my experience.”
2020-01-21 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #74 Jeff Hunter: Embracing Confusion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so let's start with how we give it. So we all have these expectations. Most of the time those expectations are unknown to us. We're not aware of them. They exist. We're just not aware we have them. Things happen. We perceive them. We get confused. That confusion leads to these internal narratives. So that person's bad at their job or whatever. And then the feedback is either withheld because we don't like hurting others. humans as a species are relatively conflict adverse or we like blurt out this stuff like you know you screw that up your bad so both of those are terrible both of those are non neither one of those is a feedback loop”
2020-01-21 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #74 Jeff Hunter: Embracing Confusion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Your TV is the stadium. You just launch it on your TV, scan the QR code with your phone, and boom, you're shooting and passing in sick.”
2020-01-21 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #74 Jeff Hunter: Embracing Confusion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Obvious to them, it's obvious to others. None of that's true. And then things start spinning out of control. People are interpreting their behaviors and that signal in different ways. And all of a sudden you got this culture of reality, which is the lowest common denominator of how you win and lose here. Like here are the behaviors that you never lose with as opposed to here are the behaviors you win with. And then you've got the leader up at top saying, no, no, we value these things, but the signal's pretty clear that they don't. And you end up with that bifurcation that you're talking about. So I absolutely agree that that's endemic, but I don't think it's just because we don't live up to our aspirations. It's because leaders are confused about the impact they have given the position they hold.”
2020-01-21 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #74 Jeff Hunter: Embracing Confusion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That of any human being, but especially a leader. But their failure is in help making sense of why they're doing what they're doing and communicating, that sense making to others, and being open to the feedback of others about how it confuses them or diminishes their ability to do good work or to achieve their potential of the organization. Because that failure is pretty endemic in most organizations, leaders don't have that sense of clarity about why they're doing what they're doing. They don't help others make sense of it. They're moving fast. They're acting. They're assuming, you know, again, I said like we see reality clearly. It's valid and it makes sense to us. It's got to make sense to everybody else. Those classic cognitive blind spots we all have. When leaders have those, they're just moving. They're doing stuff. They're assuming it's pretty obvious why they're doing it.”
2020-01-21 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #74 Jeff Hunter: Embracing Confusion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Answer people's questions about why you're doing that thing, why you're behaving that way, why you're producing that outcome. And so with respect to your question, yes, we find that there's the aspirational culture and the culture of reality and the connection between those things can be tenuous at best. But that's just because there's a leader at the top who has higher fire authority and then a group of leaders under them who have both their aspirations and their reality and often the connection between those things stenuous within them. They have the person they aspire to be and the person they are in contact. And sometimes they're in church and sometimes they're at the bar and the failure is not that they're not perfect as human beings. I do not think it's wise for us to expect.”
2020-01-21 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #74 Jeff Hunter: Embracing Confusion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Why that's happening. And if a leader who's just a human being and confused day in and day out does something and isn't explicit about why they're doing something, then it will become interpreted and probably interpreted based on the degree of trust in that leader, either overtly positive or overtly negative. Like there'll be a narrative that gets applied to the sense-making of that thing. So a leader makes a decision to acquire a company. What does that say with regards to do they not have faith that we're going to grow organically or know that's the right strategy? Everybody's telling themselves stories. And so leaders, like all human beings, they have aspirations. They have the people they want to be. And then in context, the people they are. And so sometimes they're awesome and sometimes they're struggling. And that's to be expected, but there's a pretty high price to not.”
2020-01-21 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #74 Jeff Hunter: Embracing Confusion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And you're saying, okay, first of all, an organization is a hierarchy. Most organizations are, right? There's a CEO and then there's SVPs. And it's just a hierarchy. And hierarchies have problems and advantages to them. But one thing for sure you know about a hierarchy is there's an implied higher fire authority embedded in that hierarchy, right? And when somebody has higher fire authority over another human being or set of human beings or promote demote authority over those human beings, they are actually have the keys to that human being's psychological kingdom. And what that means is as human beings, we're very social, we're very tribal, we're very connected into the people around us. We're spending a lot of time making sense even unconsciously about what's going on around us and then telling ourselves stories about”
2020-01-21 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #74 Jeff Hunter: Embracing Confusion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it's so true. Well, organizations are just a bunch of people working together to achieve a shared goal, right? And so what are people like? You know, they're virtuous in church and they're sinners in the bar. People are very context sensitive. And so what you're trying to do is you're trying to step back.”
2020-01-21 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #74 Jeff Hunter: Embracing Confusion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“If you shove garbage out the door, but you make your number, that's good. We may not love it, but that's good. That'll get you a win here. And if you take the extra time to make something beautiful and miss the deadline, that's bad. Like that'll get you a loss here. Those kinds of things being explicit about those kinds of things. And there are others, but those are the big ones that we see are key elements of creating clarity inside an organization.”
2020-01-21 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #74 Jeff Hunter: Embracing Confusion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Then there's a number of culture, like being specific and clear about the behaviors that are accepted and punished inside the organization. Most organizations put up these culture statements that are like, I think they're marketing statements in effect, like they care more about how it works in recruiting than they actually are using it as a way of managing the company. And so they put up these ambiguous high statements like we care about quality. And nobody really cares what that means. And then they see lots of decisions that confuse them because there's a lot of just trying to get garbage out the door in order to make a deadline. And how does that mean quality? It's just confusing as hell. And so what you need in a, you know, when you're describing norms, it's not like what we hoped we would be. It's like, what are we? Like, how do we act around here? We need to be clear to people about.”
2020-01-21 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #74 Jeff Hunter: Embracing Confusion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Most organizations do not make a clear statement of what the employee can expect with regards to the quality and frequency of feedback and how it will be delivered. And yet if you don't have a feedback loop, you cannot improve. You can't. The things we were talking about before, where as an internal feedback loop where you're making sense of your experience and your confusion and your trying to update your mental models as a result of that. But organizations need an external feedback loop as well because a business isn't just one person. It's a lot of people and they're having different experiences of their reality, different experiences of each other. And so you have to have a feedback loop that is good to get people information they need to make sense of where they are against those goals and where they are.”
2020-01-21 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #74 Jeff Hunter: Embracing Confusion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“up to. So that's the first thing. You got to be really clear on where you're going. And then the second thing is you got to be clear on how you measure getting there because human beings don't just need a point on the horizon. They need to know whether they're actually making progress. A lot of times when we're picking goals, it takes a while to achieve those goals. It takes a while for us to actually reach that destination. And in the meantime, you got to measure whether you're getting there. You got to know whether things are working or not. So being clear on how progress is measured and being clear on what those measurements mean is the next thing. Another thing would be what we call the diagnostic loop feedback.”
2020-01-21 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #74 Jeff Hunter: Embracing Confusion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We work primarily with what we call big change companies, companies that are growing incredibly rapidly. They're in the midst of a lot of change themselves. So depending on change in the marketplace, they're sort of like both the victim of change as well as the perpetrators of change. And they're all the time in the midst of this confusing sort of confusing sort of movement towards trying to grab market share, make better products or hire more people or whatever it is. And in the midst of that, what we find is it's very common for people not to be explicit about their goals. It's very common for the executives not to be explicit about their goals. It's very common for the managers. Everybody just sort of shows up and works on the thing that's present and works on the thing that's right in front of them. And they don't step back and try to pick a point on the horizon they're going to that all this work will add.”
2020-01-21 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #74 Jeff Hunter: Embracing Confusion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so we've got this thing we call the enterprise clarity model. And what we mean by that is in order for an individual inside a business, inside a commercial setting to be maximally productive as they can, you need to be clear on these elements. And so the first is goals.”
2020-01-21 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #74 Jeff Hunter: Embracing Confusion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Better and getting this group of people to clarity and high productivity so they feel great about their experience doesn't mean that they love every minute of it. There's challenge, there's struggle, but they see they can make sense of things productively and they can do great work and the bar keeps going up because the competitive landscape keeps getting tougher and that's a challenge they relish and they look forward to and that's all happening because you're investing first in your own clarities a manager and then consistently in a machine like way creating that clarity in the people who work for you.”
2020-01-21 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #74 Jeff Hunter: Embracing Confusion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Things yourself, which is very difficult. We don't train managers on how to think about those things. We just sort of put them in the firing line and tell them to go to it. But first and foremost, to be clear about those things themselves, and then to actively in purposefully and consistently spend time clarifying for the people who work for them. And if you do that, you will unleash their potential. Now, not everyone's going to be great in every situation, right? We say you got to find your home. And so some managers aren't going to be good for some people and they're going to be great for others. Some cultures aren't going to be good for some, but great for others. So you as an individual have to find the place where you can unleash your greatness and own that journey and own the experiences you're having. But as a manager, you have a responsibility to constantly be improving and getting.”
2020-01-21 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #74 Jeff Hunter: Embracing Confusion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When they have a sense of understanding of goals and measures or culture, those kinds of things, they'll tend to want to achieve against those things. They'll tend to want to be good at those things. It's when you fail as a manager to actually clarify both your set of expectations and what these things mean and why they're important. When you fail to clarify that, you set up a condition for confusion. You literally prevent yourself from achieving your responsibility, which as a manager is to achieve goals through the work of others. So if you take the time to create an environment where people, where there's design of the organization, how things work, what could looks like, what is our culture, how should we behave with each other, what are the standards of outcomes, those kinds of things. If you can take the time to not only be clear about the”
2020-01-21 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #74 Jeff Hunter: Embracing Confusion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's progressing from classic economics to behavioral. What we now know is, again, that's just not true, right? So human beings want to do good work by and large. They want to feel valuable. They want, as Daniel Pink says, have a sense of purpose and autonomy. They want to build mastery. And so how do you as a manager do that? How do you do this practical thing of achieving goals? Because goals, achieving goals is important for the organization. It's also important for the individuals you manage. Well, same time recognizing you're not dealing with a bunch of rational actors making rational decisions. You're in the midst of a lot of complexity and complexity leads to confusion. And so how do you manage that? And the first thing is a manager is you understand that your job is to be their first and job foremost is to focus on clarity, not control. Because when human beings are clear,”
2020-01-21 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #74 Jeff Hunter: Embracing Confusion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so, again, going back to this like in a rational, if human beings are rational, and then when they fail, they're lazy or stupid, you know, there's a whole line of management thinking that goes back, it starts roughly 100 years ago, where people were making management, quote-unquote, scientific, and they were saying, hey, listen, you know, you got to find the bad actors and you got to weed them out. Management is a control function. It's a resource and information allocation function. Your job is to make sure that all these stupid, lazy human beings don't cause you a bunch of risk. And so that's what your job is. And by and large, that's most of still that sort of belief system still persists about management. You know, it's about control. It's about risk. And it's about protecting yourself from the human beings that you're working with. But what we now know, similar to how...”
2020-01-21 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #74 Jeff Hunter: Embracing Confusion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it's such a great question. So cool. Yeah, so I completely agree with everything you just said. Ultimately, regardless of whether we're a manager or an executive or we're just somebody working inside an organization, whatever we're doing, we have to own our own experience. But there's a difference between owning our own experience and taking responsibility for something. And managers, ultimately, the way we think about management or describe it is management is the act of achieving goals through the work of others. You know, managers are not people that actually are supposed to be doers. They're supposed to be designers and they're supposed to be designers.”
2020-01-21 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #74 Jeff Hunter: Embracing Confusion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“of the accusatory, either self accusatory or accusatory of others sort of loop and instead get the information we need to improve.”
2020-01-21 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #74 Jeff Hunter: Embracing Confusion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And in that way, you're not making an accusation. Again, it's the whole like outbound BSL sort of thing. You're not making an accusation against another. What you're doing is actually trying to be introspective about your experience and help you be productive in your sense making. So you can get the data that you're probably missing. And so I think that's a more effective way to engage in that kind of interaction. And the corollary of that is when somebody accuses you of something, probably important to understand that they're in confusion, right? Most accusations are not an act of clarity. Most accusations are an act of confusion. So if someone says, you know, you're always this way in meetings, all right, well, hold on. Let's make sense of that. What are you saying? Can you help me understand that? Can you give me data? In this way, we can actually get out.”
2020-01-21 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #74 Jeff Hunter: Embracing Confusion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Maybe they are, maybe they aren't. Maybe you're just confused. So, what you do is you ask questions, get to clarity. You say, you own your experience. You say, I'm experiencing you doing this. Doesn't mean you are, just like that's how it feels to me. That's how I'm seeing or what I'm feeling. Can you help me understand?”
2020-01-21 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #74 Jeff Hunter: Embracing Confusion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, you know, I think, first of all, there's a question of culture, right? So every culture is different with regards to how it thinks about how we help another and how we take responsibility for ourselves, et cetera. And that's a culture inside of a company, culture in a community. But the way I think is more productive, regardless of whatever the culture is you're in, is first you got to own your own experience. And I think a simple way to do that is Stephen Covey wrote the book, Seven Habits of Highly Effective People many, many years ago. But one of his seven habits is seek to understand before you're understood. And so the way it works is this. Like you sense yourself in confusion. You're attuned to that. You're like, huh, I'm confused. And then rather than going and saying, hey, listen, you're behaving this way. You're doing this.”
2020-01-21 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #74 Jeff Hunter: Embracing Confusion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A bad diagnosis often, not all the time, but often of what is really going on, which is two people who are blind and don't understand their blindness, had a bad communication or bad interaction. They didn't take the time. They weren't sensitive to the signals that it was going badly. They failed to correct it in the moment and deal with it. They walked away with completely different assumptions about what just went on. They activated those assumptions and all of a sudden everything's a mess. That's not about stupidity or lack of motivation or determination or a character flaw. That just like what it is to be human trying to do big things inside of a company. And so to me, as you're saying, you can't get into these narratives about like, oh, I'm terrible or that person sucks or whatever. I mean, obviously we're all going to get.”
2020-01-21 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #74 Jeff Hunter: Embracing Confusion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's right. So if you're sitting there, we talk about something called the BSL narrative, bad, stupid, lazy. And most of the people we work with, including some incredible leaders who are very public and are doing big things. And I know thousands of people look at them and say, oh, they're amazing. But, you know, in our work with them, they're just human beings like everybody else. And they do this thing called BSL narrative. They get confused either about something that somebody else is doing or something they're doing or failing to do. And then they tell these stories about how bad, stupid, or lazy, either the other person is or how they are. And that BSL narrative is terrible. It obscures what's really happening. And it's based on this theory, like if I just tried harder, if I'd just been more determined, or if that person was just smarter, then this would have gone better.”
2020-01-21 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #74 Jeff Hunter: Embracing Confusion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, that's awesome. Yeah, yeah, I love that. Yeah, and the whole concept of fault. just not very productive yes people fail and people struggle and all those things but so much of what we do when we're confused is tell ourselves stories to make ourselves feel better and that's one of the worst things we can do but we all do it”
2020-01-21 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #74 Jeff Hunter: Embracing Confusion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so owning, having a deep sense of personal responsibility for your own experience, looking for indications, those physical indications of confusion and making sense of them by saying, I expected one thing and I got another, and I wonder what it is in my model that I expected this thing. And what does that mean about how I view the world and how can I update that? That to me is how you can be conscious in the learning about the most important thing, which is your brain and how your brain works in different contexts, because that's the tool you're using to unleash your potential.”
2020-01-21 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #74 Jeff Hunter: Embracing Confusion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so from that, you can say, that's interesting. I wonder what I actually expected because the beliefs are unconscious, right? You have to access them. And so you're like, you can say, I wonder what I expected instead. And through that, you learn about things like blind spots, which we all have. We all have them and they can kill us, right? And so we're sitting at a meeting. We think one thing's happening, another thing's actually happening. We leave the meeting. We're all feeling happy about it. And all of a sudden, we think, you know, in this imaginary meeting, I'm describing, we believe that we just got in sync with somebody or in alignment with somebody about something to be done. And then all of a sudden, a day later, the person's doing something different.”
2020-01-21 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #74 Jeff Hunter: Embracing Confusion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Propel you to greatness. It just depends on how you deal with it. But first, go into the meeting. You got your hypothesis. You have the meeting come out. And the first thing you're doing is you're checking in on the feelings you had in that meeting. And the feelings where you felt tight under threat, you get that, you know, maybe it's that steel or peanut butter taste in your mouth, whatever it is. You're having these negative physical reactions. Those are indicative of threat. Those are indicative of you expected one thing to happen and another thing happened instead. And if you, again, care about this unleashing of potential, it's a beautiful moment when you see that, when you experience that, because it's telling you about the insufficiency of your model. It's not telling you how bad things are, how bad other people are or whatever. It's telling you about the insufficiency of your model, of your applied beliefs.”
2020-01-21 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #74 Jeff Hunter: Embracing Confusion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So we've got these mental models. They're unconscious. That frames what we believe the world is like and what it should do for us, right? And so as long as our experience basically matches up to that mental model, we don't notice anything. Like we're just going along. So the best thing that can happen, in my opinion, if you care about learning and again, unleashing potential, is you want to get confused. Confusion is indicative of the fact that you are having an experience that's different than what you expected. And that confusion is necessary to start to make sense of the world yourself and the connection between the two. We talk a lot about confusion. We think, you know, confusion is both the thing that can kill you and the thing that can actually...”
2020-01-21 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #74 Jeff Hunter: Embracing Confusion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's because your mind is very effective at taking care of complex tasks without you paying attention. So this thing I'm talking about with hypotheses and thinking of your day as a series of experiments causes you to focus and pay attention to the experiences you're having as opposed to just be on autopilot to achieve a bunch of stuff and then leave.”
2020-01-21 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #74 Jeff Hunter: Embracing Confusion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT