Book Review-Leaders: Myth and Reality by General Stanley McChrystal

I don’t usually read business books unless I am convinced that the book is extraordinary. I especially don’t indulge in this kind of reading unless I am convinced that the author speaks from a point of authority. In this case I was convinced of the veracity of General McChrystal’s bona fides to speak on the topic by what I had observed of his actions as a commander. This book was a group project, which also included Jeff Eggers and Jason Mangone as co-authors, but the voice of the writing centers around General McChrystal.

I am also very skeptical of any book that speaks of leadership. I am of the opinion that leadership is something that is hard earned and amorphous rather than something that can be attained by following scripts or checking off check boxes. Most business books, even other books written by military commanders have been disappointing because they fall into the trap of churning out books that are best sellers initially but end up in the discount bins because the wisdom, or lack thereof, are pedantic, formulaic, and promises too much while delivering too little.

This book however, is honest to the point of declaring that the authors’ intent was to dispel the mythology that accompanies our cultural worship of the leader. They immediately disabuse the reader of their romantic notions, taking on one of the biggest mythological leaders in American history: General Robert E. Lee. The deconstruction of the Lee mythology took courage, especially from a West Point graduate as General McChrystal. In addition, the book delineates the three myths that has obfuscated the characteristics of a leader and the qualities of leadership. In the first chapter, General McChrystal admits that the term “Leadership” is almost impossible to define forthrightly and correctly. The authors also drolly points out that a leadership expert found 221 definitions of leadership in 587 examined publications.

The foundation of the three myths is that those who study leaders and leadership, all focus narrowly on the leader — the person — at the exclusion of anything else. The three myths which results from our hero worship, or more accurately, worshipping in a cult of personality are:

The Formulaic Myth: We think leadership is achieved through rote procedures: being formulaic and following a recipe. This myth ignores the fact that leadership is tightly coupled to environment,  situation, and context.

The Attribution Myth: We attribute all the leadership to the leader, the sole chosen focus of our studies. This myth ignores the contributions of the many in order to simplify the vast and complicated reality so that we can create bullet points.

The Results Myth: We attribute the success and failure of the leader upon whether the narrow desired outcome is achieved. The myth ignores the fact that sometimes the symbolic worth of leadership is far more valuable in the final assessment of a successful leader than just the results.

We analyze leadership in the way that we do because we are ever the optimist, and we wish to indulge in our own confirmation bias by ascribing nobility to our leaders and promote the myths and ignore reality.

 The author’s stated purpose is to dispel our very comfortable biases and  conduct the very difficult exercise of reconfiguring the idea of leadership into a different structure, to show leadership in a very different light. They do this by employing the method first used by Plutarch in his Lives. Plutarch wrote biographies of 48 worthy subjects seeking to answer the question: “What sort of man was he”? He paired his subjects and set about identifying the salient factors which would answer his question.

While the authors used the same structure, they also made significant changes to the analysis as they sought to answer the question: “What sort of leader were they?” While Plutarch only wrote of men, the authors included three women, because we should be beyond that particular bias and the three women are worthy subjects. They grouped them into pairs as well, but in different categories: Founders, Geniuses, Zealots, Heroes, Power Brokers, and Reformers.  Some are notable in their fame, others are obscure. The authors gave a succinct and clear history of each leader, highlighting both their qualities as well as their weaknesses, which served to balance out their claims to leadership and made their place in history all the more real.  

Indeed, the histories of each of the twelve personages, fourteen if you included Lee and Winston Churchill—who’s history was also documented— were well written and honest. The judgements made were fair and informative.

It is the last two chapters that sucked me in. They analyzed the three myths, spoke of how their views of the myths changed over the course of writing the book, and finally gave a different, more useful structure for assessing leadership, and avidly avoided the same mythmaking that they were trying to dispel. As I sat on my chair trying to digest their conclusions, and I must admit, I am still chewing over the structure and idea, I was struck by the possibilities that the last chapter engenders.

Being cynical to the tricks of the business book genre, but especially skeptical of the leadership specialty, I want to consume and accept the concepts laid out in the final chapter, but I will think critically about the chapter, as the authors made a significant case. I must give them the respect of indulging in the granularities of their hypothesis.

Ruminations-Acatalepsy

The word acatalepsy appeared on my radar a few weeks ago. I looked it up and the definition from Merriam Websters is as follows: 

Acatalepsy (Noun): 

1: an ancient Skeptic doctrine that human knowledge amounts only to probability and never to certainty 2: real or apparent impossibility of arriving at certain knowledge or full comprehension 

Chambers's Twentieth Century Dictionary attribute the word to the sceptic school of Carneades (214-129/8 BCE) 

The reason the word caught my attention is that it perfectly describes my present belief regarding my own philosophical outlook; that my perception of now is probabilistic in nature and the certainty of what I know and see are uncertain and subject to randomness and any inference that I make about the future is uncertain and subject to that randomness. 

It hasn’t always been this way. As with most children, my worldview comes from my faith in the people around me, that they are giving me the straight dope; what they believe and what they tell me is certain and unwavering. Most adults are insightful enough to know that explaining the uncertainties of life to children will inevitably end up in frustration, for both the explainer as well as for the explained to. The fluid state of reality is such that the inevitable follow up questions tend to grow exponentially as the uncertainties concatenate and the naïve and innocent minds will inevitably find the loopholes in our explanations gaping. 

It is easier for adults to give young minds a set of absolute beliefs and dogmas to follow temporarily so that they can at least manage to live in this limited reality long enough to learn about uncertainties; we also hope that young minds can achieve a level of critical thinking which will allow them to question their first beliefs and dogmas intelligently as they gain more experience. 

Some can navigate this journey into the world of critical thinking as they gain more experience and come to understand the complexities and nuances of the real world; others hold steadfastly to their very first beliefs: some do it because it is just easier, while other cannot fathom the idea of randomness and uncertainty being the primary state of being. 

Historical lessons became set in stone and no amount of nuance or interpretational ability was allowed because it was easier to teach. The math and sciences became a recitation of accepted facts and figures. Of course, the way math was taught gave the students no recourse: if there is a number, then that number is correct according to the tradition. Math is never that way, the creativity and wonders of mathematics became lost in our desire to be deterministic. 

 My formal education reinforced this deterministic viewpoint. As an engineering student, my belief in determinism hardened into stubborn dogma. I became enamored with the idea that the world is certain, that the errors from my calculations and experimentation comes from unwanted noise — which is minimal— i.e. the signal to noise ratio is very large, so the introduced errors are inconsequential and negligible. My initial foray into probability reinforced my dogma, we wrestled with coin flipping, die tossing, and Polya’s urn problems until we were blue in the face. These seem to be childish games that are distracting our attention from the important work of engineering. The importance of how measurement errors, quantization errors, and approximation errors in simulations were lost on me. I took Einstein’s quote: “God does not play dice” to heart and was in denial about the role that randomness play in the physical world. As I worked away at my control system classes in gradual school, I became more predisposed to the optimal control course that I took because I did not have to disturb my beautiful solutions with small signals; while at the same time was much less predisposed to the optimal estimation course that I had to take at the same time, where I had to go through great lengths to filter out the randomness. Kalman filtering was just some mental gymnastics that I had to work my way through to get rid of those pesky noise that are predetermined to be large enough to be a nuisance and small enough to be handled efficiently. 

As I entered the work force, where I had to measure real signals, not signals cooked up by my professor to fit into an exam problem, reality intruded. It became apparent that the noise that we are measuring as a part of our experiment was many times greater than the signal that we were wanting to measure. First thing that occurred to us was that our measuring equipment was crap; so, we bought better, more expensive equipment, but even then, the relative magnitude of the noise was beyond what I was expecting. This was a cataclysmic shock to my philosophical foundational beliefs regarding reality. 

As I came to terms with the way reality really behaves, I became more interested in those things that I had subconsciously rejected as perturbations on reality. Probability and statistics became grudgingly interesting and important. As I progressed through the bastardized corporate versions of statistics in the form of Statistical Process Control (SPC), Quality Control, Six Sigma etc. I became better acquainted with the ideas of statistics. I read through some of the introductory texts of statistics with interest as I became a convert to SPC. The ideas of being in control and out of control, special and common cause variations crept into my vocabulary; run charts became a natural part of my subconscious. I took the SPC view of engineering processes into my outside life and looked at my real world reality in those terms, much as I had taken the dynamical systems vocabulary and framework into the way I looked at reality when I was introduced to control theory. 

 Even as I came to value the understanding the uncertainties in the physical world, I clung on to the old paradigm that is best expressed by the Michaelangelo quote. 

“Every block of stone has a statue inside it and it is the task of the sculptor to discover it.” - Michelangelo 

My belief was that reality existed under all the noise and randomness, much like the sculpture under the stone that Michaelangelo referred to. As such, I felt that it was possible to completely decouple the uncertainties and randomness structurally from the “reality”. Which is how I came to the belief that we can use the SPC tools in volleyball. The idea was to treat each player or each team as an industrial process, that we can identify the underlying physical process of the player or the team by applying the SPC and inferential statistical tools to identify the human capabilities of an individual or a team. I was hoping to gain an understanding of the essential ability of the athlete or the team so that I can devise training regimens which directly addresses the performance weakness identified by the SPC analysis. It was a naïve and simple-minded approach, one that I undertook because of my adherence to my rigid world view: randomness and uncertainties can be readily filtered and reality made whole by proper application of statistical tools, and we can make good decisions based on incomplete statistical information because of the previously stated belief. 

Yet, as I investigated further, I realized the immensity of the data set needed for each athlete and each player just so that I can indulge in my fantasy of consistently inferring and identifying training needs from pure statistical analysis. 

 A critical mistake I made was to underestimate the complexity and the deep coupling between the various parts of the process I was trying to measure, i.e. I underestimated human complexity, I assumed that we can easily decouple and measure parameter within humans and that the assumptions we make to measure isolated parameters would be simple and leave the parameters unaffected: I assumed that humans are as simple as machines and industrial processes. I realized quickly that I was on the wrong path as the complexity of human reaction forced me to rethink my ideas. 

 In addition, I had approached the measurement process in an open loop manner, I assumed that if I gathered enough data the numbers will tell me where to look, what to look for, that the calculated data will cause rational conclusions to jump out. Not adequately setting expectations meant that the data had little or no meaning. I did not know the question that I wanted to ask, so the answers that I got had no meaning. The data can and will mislead us unless we knew what we are looking for. 

 All my thinking does not, however, lead to the conclusion that the Moneyball idea is fundamentally flawed, it is saying that reliance on just numbers is as silly as relying on just “gut feel”. I cringe when I hear managers in corporations say: what does the numbers say, or the numbers will tell us the truth, or our decision is decided by the metrics that we can measure and not what we should measure. I also cringe when I hear coaches say: the numbers determine who plays and who doesn’t, or our numbers are why we lost, or we need to train to improve these numbers rather than improving our skills or our game play. 

“The world cannot be understood without numbers. But the world cannot be understood with numbers alone.” —Hans Rosling  

We mistakenly rely on numbers as the bulwark for our arguments because people tend to substitute numbers for their lack of expertise: i.e. I am not sure of what I am saying, but I have lots of numbers to prove it. 

There should be a hybrid approach which takes advantage of the salient qualities of both experiential knowledge while backing up the experience with good Design of Experiments practices. Being biased one way or the other will inevitably introduce fallacies and biases into the decision-making process, which leads to bad decisions. 

As my experience with uncertainty and randomness evolved, I changed my beliefs, I adjusted my assumptions about the role that randomness plays. I no longer look at the physical world as having a pure truth, i.e. I no longer see the statue in the stone that will inevitably be uncovered through my efforts. I see the randomness as part of the reality rather than as noise that we can filter out. I do believe that there are some noises that can be filtered out, but not all of it. I see our role as being able to discern and identify those noises that can be filtered and those that cannot; our more important role is to make better decisions DESPITE having those pesky random events constantly obfuscating our understanding of our processes, be they in the sciences or in sports. I now see reality as the parable of the blind men trying to describe an elephant. We “see” different parts of the whole and we come to an understanding of what we see, but our perception should be changing as we learn more by perceiving more of the elephant through our experience and measurements, even as the elephant is constantly changing. We must continue to gain experience and take measurements just to keep up. 

 So, this was a very long way to explain why the word acatalepsy describes my view of reality.