More prevalent than AIDS and more rampant than Bird Flu… CEO DISEASE!

As leaders in organizations it is often easy to fall prey to CEO Disease. This is a disease that can cause a multitude of side effects and a disease that few of us are immune to. Our television based society has pre-disposed … maybe the more accurate word is pre-conditioned , our thought processes to a particular way of “knowing”.

To display this, let me use a more obvious example. Last week we remembered the anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. Let me ask you a few questions. Which city did Katrina devastate? Who did Katrina hurt the most? If you had to name who failed in Katrina, who would it be?

Most would say New Orleans… when actually many cities in Mississippi were damaged as badly if not worse. Katrina probably hurt the Mississippi families and the fishing industry the most. And if we want to know who failed with Katrina, I would say it was the news media for doing an ineffective pre-strike job of motivating people to get out.

That just goes to show that we don’t always get the right skinny from the “people on the scene”. I’m not saying all of those answers have to be 100% correct, but most of us wouldn’t even think of them, and they certainly aren’t invalid.

Now, How did you “know” those things? The fact of the matter is that the majority of us got our information from the news media. This is not a rant about how terrible our news media is (although they are… even the good ones). Instead, I want to point out the inherent flaws that television has brought to our mental constructs of “knowing”.

During Katrina, and since, we have received all of our information through a flawed medium. The medium causes an ignorance of “knowing”. We think because we can see it, then we “know” about it. It’s the problem of RE-presentation. We see a digital 2 dimensional image of about 2 or 3 blocks and think we can “understand”. We hear emotional stories from people walking out of the water and think we empathize. We think that Anderson Cooper of CNN or even Shepherd Smith of FOX News will keep us “in the know”. We are suddenly “live on the scene” from a thousand miles away. When actually we have NO IDEA what the real situation is like. We can’t fathom it. We can’t even come close to being able to be empathic with it.

So why am I posting about this on change addicts?

Because although TV shows it and probably created it, the arrogant mental constructs of “knowing” have carried over into every area of leadership.

We “think” we “know”. In our top down leadership approach, we think we have a full picture by looking at a “sales report” or from even a direct report’s observations. Now don’t get me wrong, I hate being micromanaged and I refuse to do it, but I am all about encouraging MBWA (managing by wandering around).

Empathy is crap, until you’ve actually been there. I’m not discounting empathy, but how can you empathize with someone on the scale and magnitude of Katrina if you have never been through it. You can “feel” like you have experienced it, when really you have just seen an outside image from thousands of miles away.

Figure it out today! People you think you “know” you may not and the only way to “know” them is to go find out for yourself.

Am I saying that you have to live through every single experience to understand it? Of course not, but it certainly helps if you have at least seen the environment directly and have an understanding of the landscape.

Who or what do you think you "know", that you really probably have only seen snapshots and images of? List 3 now!