Unsafe Thinking

CHAPTER 1

The Safe Thinking Cycle

Why we stick to our guns even when we know we shouldn’t

It’s 2015 when I arrive in Austin, Texas, at an intimate gathering of about one hundred CEOs who are there to share their stories of challenge and breakthrough. I’ve made the trip on a hunch that catching someone in the midst of crisis will reveal insights that stories told after the fact simply won’t capture. And one of the planned speakers, I know, is deeply in trouble. As we in the audience take our seats, the anticipation and tension in the room are palpable. Other speakers have shared difficult struggles, but this are the main event.

Whole Foods founder and co-CEO John Mackey sits in front of an extravagant display of plants and flowers meant to communicate well-being and serenity, but his face shows the strain of attempting to match the mood of the backdrop. Nervous whispers ripple through the crowd.

Whole Foods’s stock price has plummeted more than 40 percent over the past six months as the growth trajectory of the $15 billion grocery store chain has started to flatten. It seems clear to analysts that the business is running out of market, and Mackey has recently offered compensation packages for employees willing to leave—2,000 have accepted. At the same time, the brand—once so admired—has suddenly come under serious fire. A campaign by the animal rights group PETA, an explosion of social media buzz about high-priced products, and accusations of mismeasurement by the New York State Department of Consumer Affairs have hit almost simultaneously. The press and public have been piling on the derision so quickly that it’s been almost impossible to track.

Mackey calls the attacks on the brand “fake news.” But the man who founded Whole Foods as a single store thirty-seven years earlier is clearly taking the crisis personally. He begins by describing his original dream to bring healthy food to communities across America and how he surprised himself with his success. Then he discusses how painful it’s been to see the company’s prospects suddenly turn. “Staying open, knowing something new is trying to birth itself is hard when everyone’s screaming at you,” Mackey says somberly. Then, referring to himself and co-CEO Walter Robb, he says, “Check in with us in a year. Either a new butterfly will have emerged or we won’t be here.”

That last comment elicits a quiet gasp from the audience. The stakes are so high that he’s openly talking about being removed from his own empire. But it’s the first part of Mackey’s statement that intrigues me: It’s hard to stay open when everyone’s screaming at you.

Mackey has expressed one of the key difficulties of changing our thinking when the situation demands it. When facing an unfamiliar challenge, we often know we need to open our minds to a wider field of possible solutions because the status quo clearly will not suffice. At the same time, the threat we feel switches our brains into survival mode, which tends to make us cling to the familiar and engage in safety-seeking behavior. This occurs not only in the face of major threats but also in everyday moments, such as when a project flounders as we’re approaching a deadline, when a relationship with a key collaborator turns sour, or when a work product is unexpectedly rejected.

You’ve probably already been through some version of Mackey’s struggle to open yourself to new and creative solutions under pressure, but to see how easily it can arise, take a moment to try a simple experiment on yourself. Grab a pen and paper and try to solve the following puzzle, known as the cheap necklace problem:

In test after test, only about 3 percent of people crack the cheap necklace problem. If you tried to solve it, you had a bit of a head start over most test takers because by reading this chapter, you’re already primed to think you should try not to narrow your focus on an obvious solution too quickly. Still, given the time pressure, I expect the simple yet counterintuitive solution eluded you. Your mind quickly jumped to what seemed the most direct solution: break some of the end segments and try to link them up. It must be right.

Long after this strategy proves futile, people stick with it, only increasing their fixation as the time ticks away.

Ready for the answer? The only way to make the necklace for fifteen cents or less is to start with what feels like a risky step backward. Break all three links on one segment (say segment A), which costs six cents. Six cents gone, no obvious progress.

Now, one of those links can form a clasp to connect B to C. Close it up for three cents, and you’re at nine.

Take your second broken link and attach C and D to each other. Close that link up, and you’re at twelve.

Take the final broken link and attach the two long segments to make a closed necklace for fifteen cents.

There’s nothing inherently complicated about the solution, but in searching for it, most people just loop from what seems the obvious starting point around and around in frustration, trying the same approach. Time expires without their trying anything new. And they usually never consider the counterintuitive step of spending nine cents without making direct progress. Even when given hints that they can only succeed by trying novel and nonobvious approaches, people only nod and smile, instantly returning to their fixations. These experiments teach us that we fixate on safe thinking even when the stakes are extremely low. In this case, the anxiety and stress are minute, perhaps barely noticeable. But even at those low levels, a desire to stick to your guns is extraordinarily difficult to overcome.

Programmed to Seek Safety

So what’s happening? Why do we fixate so easily? The pernicious dynamic of clinging to the familiar and safe is captured in what I call the safe thinking cycle. The first step of the cycle, threat awareness, gets triggered in many ways. In the cheap necklace problem, threat awareness comes from realizing we’re running out of time. In the real world, we feel it when we get negative sales information, a customer or client complains, or our boss criticizes our work. We might read about a competitor coming out with an impressive new product. Even success leads to threat awareness, paradoxically, because it propels us onto bigger stages, with greater challenges and higher stakes. Put simply, it is impossible to live our lives, let alone try to accomplish anything of value, without triggering threat awareness along the way.

In step two of the cycle, the perception of threat causes a spike in what neuroscientists call cortical arousal, a state of increased wakefulness, vigilance, and focus. Of course, some cortical arousal is often of great value. We need it to react quickly and decisively to physical threats, for example. But a low arousal state is better for creative thinking. In low arousal, the brain apportions its resources to a wide variety of neural and physiological functions, such as digestion, cellular repair, and the filing away of long-term memories. With all our cognitive systems running at normal, we’re free to let our attention roam to where our curiosity takes it, and this fosters creative insights.

Thomas Edison, ingeniously, found a way to harness the creative power of extremely low arousal states. He would sit down for a nap in a chair, arms hanging over the sides and a metal ball in each hand. On the floor, he’d place a metal pan. As he drifted toward lower and lower arousal, his brain would present images and ideas unavailable to his conscious mind. But if he fell asleep, the balls would drop, hitting the pans and awakening him in time to record his ideas. He credited these dreamlike images as the source of many of his greatest inventions.

When we confront a challenge that feels threatening, we no longer have the option of staying consistently in low arousal. We are programmed by evolution to respond with high arousal because of the need for speed of action in dealing with many of the threats our early ancestors faced. This response goes way back to the days when confrontations with large predators on the African savannah were common. Imagine you’re walking along in a low arousal state, looking around for something for dinner. With urgency low, you are free to scan and take your time searching broadly. But if a predator leaps into your path, your arousal level soars. Stress hormones, such as cortisol and adrenaline, get released, and your attention narrows. Your body also shuts down any unnecessary processes so that blood can flow directly to your muscles and your visual cortex, enabling you to meet the threat. Your vision focuses on the beast, and you are completely engaged with the need to act immediately. Neuroscientists have shown that high cortical arousal actually turns off two regions of the brain that are critical to our ability to think about the future. Who needs to expend energy on tomorrow when you might die right now? Our brains tell us there’s time only to fight or flee. This is why cortical arousal is highly adaptive when it comes to surviving in the face of life-threatening danger. But in confronting creative challenges, this response turns against us, hampering our consideration of a wider range of options.

Take the case of a new competitive threat at work, say, from a fast-emerging new technology. Though we may perceive, and perhaps even outwardly declare, that our old ways of operating aren’t adequate for this new challenge, and we may feel a desire, like Mackey, to “open up,” our brains scream at us to shut down our range of options and take safety-seeking action. These are short-term fixes that we believe will hold off the threat and lower our anxiety. We find ourselves saying things like, “Let’s do what worked last time for those guys” or “Let’s fix this quickly before it gets out of hand.” We tell ourselves that once we’ve handled the immediate threat, we’ll have the luxury of being more expansive.

Unfortunately, we’re unwittingly priming the cycle to repeat. Following an old course of action in the face of new challenges sets us up for even more threat and thus more anxiety and arousal.

A series of studies by psychologists Robert Yerkes and John Dodson, who mapped the relationship between arousal and performance, demonstrated the negative effects of this cycle. The now widely accepted Yerkes-Dodson law states that for a while, arousal and performance increase hand in hand. Arousal motivates us to do difficult things. But if the problem one is solving is complex or unfamiliar, requiring more creativity than brute force, they part ways. Past a certain point, arousal increases, and performance plummets. When John Mackey talks about the difficulty of staying open while everyone is screaming at him, he’s talking about hitting that divergence.

High arousal won’t help Mackey with the threat he’s confronting as he speaks to the audience about Whole Foods’s travails. The challenge to save his company is not a fight-or-flight physical threat. He might face shame, regret, and loss of personal wealth if he fails to guide Whole Foods past its obstacles. But he won’t go hungry, and he certainly won’t die. The problem is that our bodies respond to all senses of threat through the same mechanisms with which we responded to lion attacks.

Threats to our jobs, our position in the world, or our esteem among peers don’t look similar to a physical threat in our brains. They look the same. The reason for this also lies in our distant past. Being ostracized from a tribe could lead to death for our early ancestors just as surely as an encounter with a lion. This is likely why, in a study by psychologist Michael Williams of people who had faced social exclusion, nearly all of them said they would rather have experienced physical abuse than ostracism.

It also explains why, as John Mackey divulges to the crowd before him in Austin, he must fight a strong impulse to narrow his focus and act quickly rather than opening up and widening his field of options. His biology is pushing him to swim for safe shores. One expedient option might be to concentrate on beating down his detractors through a PR war, attempting to eliminate the threat without addressing the inherent problems in the company’s business model and operations. Indeed, throughout the talk, he does occasionally drift into railing against his detractors as if talking himself into pursuing such a path. Or he might fall back on strategies he used to build the company decades ago. Leaders in Mackey’s situation often become obsessed with the lessons they learned from past successes and failures. Instead Mackey is working hard to stay open to new ideas.

As the hour-long conversation at the gathering comes to a close, Mackey explicitly expresses resolve to resist his instinctive impulses: “You want to run to safety, but there is no safety in business these days,” he concludes.

As I walk out into the warm Texas evening, I have a hunch that this crisis won’t be the defining chapter in Mackey’s story. Indeed, when I catch up with him later that night, he shares his plans to launch a completely new kind of Whole Foods, a chain of downscale markets catering to customers who can’t afford to shop at his high-priced stores. As premium pricing lies at the heart of his thirty-seven-year-old business model, this new approach sounds anything but incremental and familiar.