The key ideas

Leadership and Self-Deception: Getting Out of the Box

The Arbinger Institute, 2000

Tom, a new manager, is told he has a problem that everyone can see except him. So begins a day of conversations about self-deception: why we fail to notice our own part in conflicts, and how a small refusal to help someone can recolor our whole view of them. A parable about how people quietly keep alive the very things they complain about.

Who it is for

For managers, employees, parents and spouses: for anyone stuck in a conflict where it seems only the other person is to blame.

An act contrary to what I feel I should do for another is called an act of self-betrayal.

What the book is about

Tom Callum has been a manager at a company called Zagrum for a month. He's pleased with himself: he works hard, and his results are decent. Then the vice president, Bud Jefferson, calls him in for a meeting and calmly tells him: you have a problem. Your colleagues and the people close to you can see it. The only one who can't is you.

How can you fail to notice your own problem if everyone around you knows about it?

This book was written by the Arbinger Institute. It's built as a parable: a day of conversations between Tom and his mentors. In it you'll find a baby crying at night, a seat on a plane and a nineteenth-century Viennese doctor. And one more thought that may sting a little: some of the conflicts we complain about are ones we ourselves help keep going.

Idea 1. A problem its owner can't see

Bud explains to Tom where the trap lies. An ordinary problem is visible: you make a mistake, you notice it, you fix it. But there's another kind of problem. A person doesn't see it and is sure the problem lies with others. The authors have a name for this: self-deception.

To show how it works, the book recalls the doctor Ignaz Semmelweis. In a nineteenth-century Vienna hospital, many women were dying of childbed fever, and no one understood why. Semmelweis noticed that doctors were coming to women in labor straight from autopsies. The disease was being carried by the doctors themselves. When he introduced handwashing, the death rate fell.

A manager complains that nobody on the team takes initiative, and doesn't notice that he picks every idea apart the moment it's raised.

If a problem can sit inside the observer, it sometimes helps to look for it in the same place you look for a solution: in your own behavior.

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About the author

The Arbinger Institute is an international consulting and training organization. Its approach grew out of the philosopher Terry Warner's work on self-deception.

All books by this author: The Arbinger Institute

Terms from the book

  • Self-deception: In the book's model, a state in which a person may fail to notice their own problem and sincerely see its cause in others.
  • Self-betrayal: Acting against your own sense of what you should do for another person. In the authors' view, afterwards your view of the situation can shift toward self-justification.
  • The box: An image from the book, not a scientific term: in the authors' view, it's a state in which a person looks at others through their own justifications and may see them as objects rather than as people with needs of their own.
  • Collusion: The book's own term, not a scientific category: a situation in which two people in the box, as the authors describe it, push each other toward the very things each of them condemns in the other.

All terms

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