There\u2019s a person I get to occasionally do work with who thinks that they are right about almost everything. This otherwise smart, reasonable, capable, and pleasant to be with human being simply can\u2019t back down when their perspective is being challenged. As I\u2019ve considered the reason this may be the case, I believe it\u2019s a combination of their strong ability to reason (which helps them \u201cget it right\u201d very often) and also their blindness to their own unconscious bias.<\/p>\n
Bias very often does not serve us or others, and the more it goes unrecognized the more havoc it can create in and through a person\u2019s life.<\/p>\n
This week I read a book about bias. In Sway: Unraveling unconscious Bias,<\/em> the writer and behavioral scientist Pragya Agarwal explores the biological and social\/cultural history of bias, and she offers solutions to recognizing unconscious bias, with the hope of decreasing this bias\u2014especially, it seems, gender and racial bias\u2014in our lives and in the world.<\/p>\n The book made me think of several other books we\u2019ve read in this program so far. From our first mindset orientation reading of Kathryn Schulz\u2019s Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error<\/em> to Bobby Duffy\u2019s Why We\u2019re Wrong About Nearly Everything, <\/em>to Daniel Lieberman\u2019s Spellbound<\/em>, to David Rock\u2019s Your Brain at Work<\/em>, and even David and Tom Chivers\u2019 How to Read Numbers.<\/em> It seems that every time we turn around, we are being reminded how easy it is to get it wrong; this reminder was at first was frustrating, but by now I\u2019ve come to greatly appreciate the warnings (and I will need to make sure I keep reading and heeding such books after I earn my doctorate).<\/p>\n But the strongest connection I kept making was to Daniel Kahneman’s\u00a0Thinking Fast and Slow<\/em>, partly because Agarwal explicitly mentioned it in her book a few times, and partly because I\u2019m once again being forced to recon with System One and System Two thinking in my own life.<\/p>\n In Jim Wilder and Marcus Warner\u2019s Rare Leadership<\/em> I found a justification (and great relief) for my often deferred-to System One thinking. They suggested that a leader can practice certain leadership skill so often that those skills become second nature and are expressed as automatic, intuitive and near instantaneous responses. Some of my leadership leanings and decisions can at times feel like the spiritual gift of discernment because they come quickly and naturally after decades of practice.<\/p>\n But as close as they may seem, I believe supernatural spiritual discernment and System One thinking are two different things. True spiritual discernment, energized by the Holy Spirit, would root out ungodly bias and discrimination, but System One thinking can keep that bias unconscious and unseen, and unfortunately, alive and well.<\/p>\n It\u2019s like practicing a golf swing for years using poor mechanics, which only reinforces and habitualizes bad habits. I can practice wrong for decades and have an automatic, intuitive swing that I don\u2019t have to think about but that is in terrible form. Worse yet, after so many years of practice it may become nearly impossible to undo those bad habits (fortunately I gave up golfing long before I could practice enough to ingrain any bad habits).<\/p>\n As much as I embraced the principle of \u201cPractice makes perfect\u201d in Rare Leadership<\/em> (and similarly in Eve Poole\u2019s Leadersmithing) <\/em>I need to remember the lesson from the iconic American Football coach Vince Lombardi that \u201cPractice doesn\u2019t make perfect; only perfect practice makes perfect.\u201d I want to be more intentionally cautious and recognize the fact that years and decades of leadership practice will not help\u2014and can actually lead to harm\u2014if it ends up only solidifying the unconscious bias that I started out with.<\/p>\n If Agarwal\u2019s goal was to make her reader aware of the possibility of their own and other\u2019s unconscious bias, I think she was successful. My first paragraph in this post referenced a denominational colleague who clearly struggles with unconscious bias. But in pointing them out I may have also been secretly suggesting that bias isn\u2019t something I wrestle with myself very much.<\/p>\n Transparently, after reading so many books about it over the last couple of years I was convinced I could be wrong, but I still didn\u2019t understand how biased I could be. While it stings to recognize the deep well of unconscious bias that\u2019s possible in my mind, I\u2019m hoping the self-realization is a threshold moment for me, and that I will not be able to unsee the potential of unconscious bias within me, and that it helps me to work harder at keeping my own side of the street clean.<\/p>\n \n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" There\u2019s a person I get to occasionally do work with who thinks that they are right about almost everything. This otherwise smart, reasonable, capable, and pleasant to be with human being simply can\u2019t back down when their perspective is being challenged. As I\u2019ve considered the reason this may be the case, I believe it\u2019s a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":169,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[2489,2244],"class_list":["post-36555","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-dlgp02","tag-agarwal","cohort-dlgp02"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36555","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/169"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=36555"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36555\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":36556,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36555\/revisions\/36556"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=36555"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=36555"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=36555"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}