Is this really about me? Storytelling and survivor bias
Let us begin this post by telling you a story, to talk about a bias that relates precisely to storytelling, but also to talk about how the risk of a mechanical view of reality can lead us astray.
During the Second World War, a group of researchers in Britain was faced with the problem of how to redesign aircraft so as to minimise their losses. The starting idea was to analyse aircraft that had returned to base, even though they had been hit by enemy shells. On analysing them, the researchers discovered that the bullets had mainly hit the wings and tail, drawing the conclusion that these parts needed to be reinforced because they were more exposed than others.
Fortunately, Abrham Wald, a mathematician who was involved in the project, had an insight before the team started working on the planes: the sample was missing the crucial part, that of the downed planes. By looking at the unreturned aircraft, one could indeed find an interesting lead for the redesign: it was the engine that was the weak part, not the tail or the wings! The crashed aircraft, crucial to understanding the real reasons for the vulnerability, were not present because they were not returned.
Survivor bias is a type of bias that impacts the selection of the sample to be considered as significant when analysing a phenomenon. It occurs when an individual mistakes a visible success subgroup for the entire group. In other words, we forget to consider all the data on those who did not make it.
Survivor's bias, as well as a great lesson on how important it is to form consistent samples when we really want to understand a phenomenon, is a good starting point to listen critically to the various storytellers and gurus who tell us success stories: "how I made my first million" "how I founded the start-up that raised 20 million in funds" "how I invented the revolutionary product" etc. But this storytelling does not allow us to also hear the stories of all the other people who failed to launch their start-up, to get huge funding, to get rich, it does not give us elements to refer to the 'worst practices' as well.
This is not the only limitation of storytelling, there is also another risk we can run when we take the stories told by and about role models from a mechanistic view of reality.
On a Diversity & Inclusion project on gender, for instance, it might seem like a great idea to elevate a woman and tell her story with the intention of motivating others to follow the path laid out. But this exercise risks making us lose sight of the fact that there are specific elements ONLY of this story that are not found in the other stories: what specific conditions in the context in which the person acted, e.g. what organisational culture, but also what internal conditions, what mental patterns she had to overcome. In role modelling there is therefore a risk of not taking into account the fact that investors lend less to women, poorer people etc.
In short, the exercise runs the risk of being inspiring in the moment but, disconnected from the context and the system in which the person acted, of leaving the people listening with the illusion of being able to uncritically decline the story in their own context. To put it another way, by locating the root causes of the success in the individual, we blind ourselves to the contextual and systemic causes, which are often much more structural for the outcome than personal “heroship”. Moreover, in the case of aircraft the resolution of the problem is relatively simple and mechanical: once the survivor's bias is discovered in the sample then one can easily intervene on the real reasons and reinforce the engine part.
But if we take the case of personal or professional success, and for example in the story told the person tells us that they had to learn to trust themselves, to negotiate with sceptical investors, etc., can we really think that once we listen to them then immediate change will be triggered? These factors do indeed take a long time to evolve, and do not follow a simple pattern of insight -> resolution.
To the contrary, transforming one’s own disabling psychodynamic patterns requires more than just knowing we’ve got them; it requires inner work, that doesn’t happen at a click of a finger. In the case of aircraft, we are in a system, albeit one with many variables, that is simple: the intuition that the sample needs to be revised is enough for us to solve the problem. When we apply this bias to the case, for example, of a start-up, we are instead acting in a complex and much less mechanistic system, in which it becomes more difficult, even once we have heard the missing story, that of the and the 'non-survivors', to really trigger complex change.
Are we therefore to conclude that these practices are useless? Absolutely not! On the contrary, it is important to give visibility to these stories and to continue listening to them and telling them. Just as it is important to also tell the stories of failures, of those who did not succeed, did not get funding, did not get their start-up of the ground.
To tell the stories as whole as possible, providing the contextual elements but also making a rational analysis of them to understand what is applicable to our own, and what it teaches us with respect to our context, our resources, what the story we have listened to highlights with respect to our mental models, without thinking we can reproduce it uncritically. Who knows, it may also point to more structural leverage points that need activating before single individuals can truly blossom, however heroic they aspire to be…
Mental models, subtle racism and chocolate: a breakthrough
The context is an international and multi-ethnic meeting with some 20 participants, with the aim of reconnecting with the organisational purpose, in order to then be able to set the activities for the coming months and to appoint suitable leadership to accompany the emerging future.
The official language of the meeting is French: it was estimated that all members of the group speak it well enough to be able to follow without problems. Sporadic and spontaneous translation 'as needed' from Portuguese to French is offered, but not vice versa, organised voluntarily among the participants.
The method of animation includes that, at the end of each day of collective work, one-hour evening debriefing sessions are held, with a small group being part of the large one, called the "Coordination Committee". The group's objective is to review the contents and topics that have emerged, but above all to be a place for analysing the large group dynamics that have occurred during the day in order to link them with the dynamics of the broader system, and to draw up coherent work proposals for the following days.
The 'Coordination Committee' is composed of four fixed and two variable components, members of the large group who offer to participate, on a voluntary basis, at the beginning of each day.
One 'fixed' member of the committee, joking about the fact that a lot of chocolate had been consumed the night before during the 'Coordination Committee', and with the intention of encouraging the two volunteers from the large group, jokes "And then there will be a compensating factor, we will eat a lot of chocolate".
One of the members of the large group, a young African girl, Louisa, appears evidently perturbed after this joke and remains silent. The two volunteers are finally found and the day continues by exploring the topic "What leadership is needed to lead in the coming years?". Suddenly Louisa blurts out, in Portuguese "I didn't offer to be on the committee this morning because I realised that the volunteer members would be treated like chocolate and eaten by the group members as a reward".
Several years ago, during a then pioneering work on the emergence of alternative leadership models (at the time it was called "Emergence of Women's Leadership" a title I would no longer use today) that we were carrying out in a large bank, we used the term "alterphagia" to describe one of the collective resistances to change, manifested during the project.
Alterphagia describes the attempt to transform the other by manipulating them, turning them into an object, assimilating them to oneself through "eating" them, thus denying their difference. For the bank we worked for, alterphagia manifested itself in various attempts to assimilate women into the male stereotype-based leadership model that was dominant at the time.
In the case of the 'chocolate' a staff member makes a joke, having no intention to excluding or insulting. This joke, however, is misunderstood in a particular way, among the many possible misunderstandings, which touches on an organisational dynamic that has been present in the organisation for years, concerning leadership and the feeling, on the part of the people in Africa in particular, that there is a European (and white) thinking head and an operating arm in the South (black) undergoing a process of colonisation. This dynamic means that people in Africa are never considered in the shortlist of candidates to lead the group.
The 'chocolate misunderstanding' allowed the group to make explicit something very difficult to say, in particular the feeling of inferiority felt by some of its members, the perception of exclusion from certain roles, and this not on the basis of skills more or less possessed but on the basis of personal characteristics such as skin colour and geographical origin.
It also allowed the European side, identified as the group's 'coloniser', to reflect on what they had (unconsciously) done, a reflection that, due to a creeping feeling of shame that emerged during the exchanges generated by the analysis of the metaphor, had not yet been done in full.
The space that opened up when we offered the opportunity to stop and explore more fully what had happened allowed for a deep, authentic, moving dialogue about what one part of the group had experienced for years.
After an initial almost violent, minimising reaction, the group opened up to the possibility of enriching the metaphor of 'chocolate', of making other associations than those that had been offered by the staff to go further.
It opened up a moment of deep exploration of mental models, their function, their limits and the consequences they can have on people and performance that allowed for a healthy regeneration, in view of the appointments of the new leadership team.
Ethnic differences: the case of a sensitive conversation
Conversation about ethnic differences is never easy within a group. On the other hand, after the #blacklivesmatter movement, having these kinds of conversations and acting on them has become a necessity and a starting point for creating organisational environments in which fairness and belonging can acquire concrete meaning, beyond declarations of intent and hashtags on social media.
I often observe, in the groups I work for, that when racism experienced by some of the members is mentioned, after an initial moment of awareness, it then becomes very difficult to really continue the conversation and ask oneself what to do concretely. It is as if a kind of embarrassed chill comes into the room.
In my experience what is difficult is on the one hand to talk about one's emotions and experiences on the subject and on the other not to let guilt and shame take all the space in the relationship and make a truly transformative exchange impossible.
This week I found myself more or less in this situation, together with the group I was working with. After many attempts to avoid the topic, the group had finally managed to name a major source of conflict that had remained latent until that moment, "the elephant in the room": the fact that a part of its members, of African-American ethnicity, felt systematically excluded from the decision-making places, their voices forgotten or at least not heard.
I tried several times to raise the issue but each time the group, while recognising that it was important to talk about it and act accordingly, found ways to divert to other topics.
One of the possible causes of this dynamic is what is called “white fragility”, described in the fine book of the same title by Robin DiAngelo: it is the stress experienced by white people, in having these kinds of conversations, in the defensive attitude that is assumed when it comes to talking about racism in the inability to process information received on this subject. 'White fragility' can trigger very strong emotions such as anger, fear, shame.
But also “benaltimisation” when trying to shift the focus to other forms of discrimination, minimisation, when trying to de-emphasise the issue with accusations of exaggeration and over-sensitivity made against the aggrieved party, exactly what was happening in the group I was working with.
I asked myself how to have an open conversation, what barriers were preventing it, and I told myself that perhaps the various attempts to talk about this visceral dynamic in a rational way were not touching the right chords and that the right way to start a deep conversation was with the body.
I proposed to the group, instead of the ritual check in at the beginning of the session, to compose a living statue, using some cues from Social Presencing Theatre together with some psychodrama techniques. I asked a sub-group of volunteers to each play the following characters: the clients, the parent company in Europe, the European people in the group, the African-American members, the leadership group, the European members, Europe, and the South. The rest of the group members acted as spectators.
The volunteers started to move around the space and I asked them, once they felt ready, to form a living sculpture representing the current situation. Once the 'current situation' sculpture was formed, I then asked them to express their emotions and thoughts from this position.
The exercise, which had started with some laughter, continued in total silence. The group seemed deeply involved and the living statue that the members formed was a powerful and clear representation of the ongoing exclusionary dynamic. Then the volunteer members of the sculpture began to express themselves.
The phrase "I feel suffocated, I feel that I have no voice, I wish I could speak and be heard, I wish I could access roles of power, not just listen" with its reference to George Floyd's atrocious death, produced great emotion in the audience. The person playing the leadership group represented the current situation with an arm, placed affectionately (but also paternalistically) on the shoulder of the African-American members.
Once all members had spoken, I asked them to evolve the sculpture to respond to the new purpose the group had given itself for the future, undoing the knots and mental patterns, particularly the in-out group dynamic, that would prevent them from creating an authentic alliance to achieve their goals.
The conclusion of the exercise was a collective elaboration, starting with the question "what has changed in me having witnessed this exercise?" which allowed everyone to express points of view and experiences. Many members of the group were able to express shame, pain, the wounds inflicted by this dynamic of exclusion.
The result was a radical impact on the action plans that had been produced in the previous days, which took into account this collective moment of transformation, in order to reformulate them with the aim of regenerating relationships and in this way regenerating belonging for all. The leadership group that was then formed was finally able to include those who had hitherto been excluded.
Feedback? No thanks!
Antonio, marketing director of a multinational company, is a firm believer in the practice of 'continuous feedback' that has recently been introduced in the performance management cycle. Antonio thinks that, precisely through feedback, it is possible to develop the soft skills of his employees, not only their technical skills. That is why he never misses an opportunity to have individual interviews to give feedback on their assertiveness, on the empathy shown in relationships, on their ability to read the needs of internal and external customers. These weekly interviews begin with a series of so-called 'improvement' feedback, given on the parts of performance that did not satisfy Antonio, and end with a series of reinforcement feedback, on the parts of performance that were effective. Antonio is certainly a capable and exemplary manager, and the practice of feedback should certainly be encouraged - I think of how many people I have come across in organizations who have no idea what their managers see of their performance. In light of an interesting article, appearing in HBR 2019, by researchers Marcus Buckingham and Ashley Goodall of ADP we can ask ourselves whether this ongoing practice is really beneficial for people's learning.
This blogpost will explore some questions, starting with observed practices and literature on the topic and in particular: does continuous feedback always increase our awareness? Does it always make us grow? Is it always a generator of learning? Providing, in the final part, some practical management ideas.
These questions recall certain beliefs and habits of thought with respect to feedback, derived largely from models inherited from a past in which the level of scientific knowledge had not yet allowed for the interdisciplinary understanding of its effects that we are beginning to have today, thanks also to IRM. I am thinking, for example, of a model I love very much, the famous Jo-Hari Window, created by Joseph Luft and Harrison Ingham, named after the initials of its creators. And how much I have always enjoyed sharing with students and course participants an almost magical story about the fact that 'johari' in Sanskrit means 'he who possesses treasures and jewels' (I think read in a note in Enzo Spaltro's essay 'Subjectivity'). This hidden and mysterious meaning has always seemed to me a magical metaphor for how valuable the activity of giving and receiving feedback is in adding precious pieces to our identity, which we would otherwise have no way of integrating.
But some recent findings, particularly on negative feedback, show us how thinking that we will always achieve a goal of personal and professional growth through feedback can prove deceptive. This is the 'feedback fallacy' explored through different research by Buckingam and Goodall. For example, according to research by their ADP institute on the needs of the Millenial generation, the demand for more attention is confused with the demand for 'more feedback'. In reality, the underlying need would rather be for an audience to be attentive to them, as happens in social networks when people receive stars, hearts, likes. Thus, when we adopt processes of 'radical transparency' or 'hard feedback' that consist of putting people at the centre of a continuous stream of feedback, negative or positive, we are questionably responding to a current need. In fact, while 'procedural' negative feedback, that of correcting operational errors, helps us to correct ourselves and is always useful, total feedback that describes performance through strengths and weaknesses even on behavioural areas such as assertiveness, risk-taking, overview, empathy, etc. presents the risk of being even harmful and we shall see how.
Buckingam and Goodall in their research identified three mental models, three biases, that guide our use of feedback without being questioned:
- The 'source of truth' model according to which the other who observes us, has the more or less objective truth about our performance. In reality, the other has only a partial, fallacious and subjective perception far from absolute truth. If we take, for example, a typical behavioural competence, 'Overview', even if it is declined and described by related behaviours, it is evident that arriving at a precise and measurable perception is practically impossible. This fallacy becomes evident in 360° feedback systems, which, by putting together numerous perceptions, give us the illusion of arriving at a good average approximation. The basic fallacy, however, remains that of thinking that by averaging together perceptions distorted by a set of biases, we can arrive at something precise.
- The 'bridging gaps through learning' model. According to this model, there are target competencies for each role and those not possessed must be learned. It has, however, been discovered more recently that neuronal connections are mainly generated where other connections are already present, whereas it becomes more difficult to create new ones. When the brain receives positive feedback, the signal received is that someone appreciates what we are doing and this creates the possibility of generating new connections and learning. Negative feedback, on the other hand, produces the activation of the 'fight or flight' survival mode and the stress generated not only does not produce learning but reduces it. This result is counterintuitive to so many slogans about the need to 'leave one's comfort zone': on the contrary, learning, creativity, productivity are generated within it or with careful accompaniment to cross the 'survival mode' zone, not just by leaving the person with negative feedback.
- The third mental model is the 'excellence theory' according to which there is an excellent way to achieve goals. And this assumption is also easily disassembled. There is an excellent way when tasks are repetitive and mechanical, but in complex contexts it becomes difficult to select a single way to excellence. It is even more futile, according to the researchers, to think of arriving at excellence through the correction of failures, which leads, perhaps, to the development of adequate performance, since excellence for different people takes different forms. Removing subjectivity from performance therefore does not lead to an alleged 'objective excellence'.
What to do with the results of these studies? Stop giving corrective feedback?
The answer, supported by research on the effects of 'informational' feedback that is given to correct performance, is definitely 'no': since it is feedback that is given to correct concrete actions, immediately comprehensible to the receiver, we can continue to give it - with all the necessary precautions. A circumstantial feedback, focused on the specific action, as close as possible to the moment when the error was perceived. This type of feedback is perceived as non-threatening, shifting the focus from the negative emotions due to the error made, to the task and the need to perform it correctly. It is therefore useful to provide information that allows the error to be corrected.
Feedback, on the other hand, which aims to correct more complex behaviour, such as relational skills, must be handled more carefully.
In particular, thinking about the three mental models highlighted by research, which produce the 'feedback fallacy' feedback givers can:
- Adopt an attitude of 'humility' and openness to a different story emerging: it is a perception, not the truth, we may not have grasped the full complexity of the action;
- Emphasise strengths. This helps to consolidate learnings within people's comfort zone and reinforce what they do well, particularly if done at a time when we see people's talents being expressed. "Yes that's exactly it!!!" said at the moment when excellence happens works much better than an objective and impersonal description of what should be;
- Starting from the self and not from the other or the other. What we are seeing makes us think about, how we receive it, what emotions and interpretations we give with respect to what is happening and also what we would have done differently; on this the matrix of the generative speaking, which you will find within this blog, can provide useful practical insights for this conversation;
- Helping the person connect the past, the present, the future. Theory U, which is based precisely on this ability, from the present, to be in connection and in continuity with the past and future, may prove to be a really useful frame to avoid "downloading" and instead direct feedback to the future we wish to build together.
- Finally, one possibility, more in the order of diversity management and beyond, of organisational citizenship, is to compose teams with people who bring difference: people who are different in terms of skills, cognitive styles, origin, gender, age, etc., so that we can reinforce the strengths of each and every one and leverage the complementarity of skills rather than making immense efforts to create them where it is most difficult.
Women in a World of Men: The Transformation of Gender Dynamics through the Recovering of Identities
A few weeks ago, someone wrote to us on Linkedin saying that he had very much appreciated an article of ours, published in 2008 in Organisational & Social Dynamics.
We went to pick it up and decided to republish it on the blog. Sure it has taken a few years and there have been many evolutions. But it was definitely a pioneering article (and work). Some parts of it today, I think, among all, the nuance we had kept around 'nature or culture' today we would certainly write more decisively and consistently from a theoretical point of view.
But there is something that remains very present for us in the work on diversity in organisations, read through the psychodynamic keys of Group Relations, and it is around the theme of the recognition of identities, of the unconscious attempt to flatten them, to smooth them out, the alter-phagia we talk about in the article and the shame that risks, when not recognised, named, managed, to completely block the transformation.
Read te article on Organisational & Social Dynamics
Othering
This morning while reading the newspaper I was struck by a piece of news. A family in Palermo had agreed to take in refugees from the Ukraine, especially students of economics and medicine. When the refugees arrived, the family realised that the refugees from Ukraine were two Nigerian students studying in Kiev, who were fleeing the war, and refused to take them in. How did the family go from a charitable, generous, compassionate intention of welcoming to rejecting? The article suggested that two factors were at the root of this behaviour: skin colour and origin.
In connection with this episode, in this week's post we would like to explore a very interesting concept, which generates a whole family of stereotypes, what a nice English word calls "othering".
Our relationship with the outside world consists of a series of continuous evaluative acts, which allow us to form categories that, by reducing the complexity of the signals we receive, make us construct approximate and reductive representations of reality, which however have the major advantage of allowing us to make quick decisions. The categories have a hierarchical order so that the macro category can then contain a series of sub-categories that are linked to it.
This way of knowing has been necessary for our evolution, it has allowed us to make quick decisions even if approximate, activating the basic mechanisms of fight/flight.These categories work both for the perception of the environment more generally and for the perception of our relations with others, activating boundaries between who belongs to our group and who does not.
The term "othering" helps us to explore this process when it occurs at a systemic level on the basis of a characteristic (sexual orientation, gender, skin colour, disability, age...) that is collectively culturally attributed to "others" and then becomes a source of discrimination, injustice, conflict, war, great human suffering. From a political point of view, it is important to note that the process of othering is triggered by those who control the resources, the dominant group, which through it excludes the "othered" from distributive power, in a vicious circle of exclusion and loss of resources/power generating even more exclusion and so on.
In the 1960s Mrs Jane Elliot, a teacher in Iowa developed an interesting experiment in this regard. In a class homogeneous in colour and social status she induced discrimination based on eye colour, artificially creating a dominant group and a dominated group within the class (you can find numerous videos of these experiments on Youtube). Very quickly (one day) the dominant children started an escalation of exclusion and violence towards the dominated group.
Mrs. Elliot repeated the same experiment over the years with adults and with other classes, always with the same result. The initial objective was to test a dynamic of exclusion among an in-group with very marked homogeneity. What is interesting about the process of othering is that prejudice, created ad hoc by the group's leadership, took hold where it was completely absent, generating a spiral of violence.
The political communication of extreme right-wingers seems, among others, to have precisely this objective. Leveraging fears, then trying to organise them, manipulate them and take advantage of them. This communication aims to create forms of 'othering' where none existed, or to increase othering where it was already latent.
In 2008 the research group composed of Amy Cuddy, Susan Fiske and Peter Glick published a very interesting study entitled "Competence as Universal Dimensions of Social Perception: The Stereotype Content Model and the BIAS Map", which contained a model of interaction between individuals and groups, based on two essential dimensions in human relationships: the perception of warmth - how close, similar, sympathetic the other person is to me, etc., and the perception of competence.
Crossing the two dimensions in a matrix we obtain four categories of relationships. The one we are interested in exploring now (for the others, see the research) is that of groups perceived as "low warmth, low competence".
In another research on mirror neurons, which are those that allow us to empathise, it was shown that in the brains of the subjects investigated, the suffering of people classified in the "Disgust" group did not produce any movement of these neurons, demonstrating a total absence of empathy and compassion towards these human beings. When in the process of othering the other is classified as belonging to the first quadrant at the bottom of the matrix his or her suffering is therefore completely indifferent to us.
Is this perhaps what happened to the family in Palermo who refused to take in refugees? The hypothesis may be that, given their origin, the two young people went from "Sympathy and Pity" to the quadrant below, generating emotional detachment from their suffering, albeit the same suffering that had produced the offer of asylum when brought in by the white population. Is it this process that causes war refugees to be categorised, and that for some of these categories, particularly those who die daily trying to cross the Mediterranean, there is no compassion, but rather a debate about closing borders?
In the beautiful article "The problem of othering Towards inclusiveness and belonging", John Powell and Stephen Menendian ask what systemic responses to othering should be given (if you are interested in this topic, do not hesitate to visit the UC Berkeley website otheringandbelonging.org, which is full of materials).
The two authors analyse the systemic responses given so far, all of which have created great human suffering as well as a host of other problems, in particular
- segregation - denial of the humanity of the other, which artificially separates groups that risk conflict, preventing their contact and access to the same resources, as happens for example in the Parisian banlieues, with the result in this case of leading to the radicalisation of some of them;
- secession - allocating a territory to the 'others', arbitrary labelling on the basis of a single dimension, which historically has rarely proved to work, and which, taking homogenisation on the basis of one criterion for granted, does not take into account that within the separated territories there will be othering at work;
- assimilation - with its set of obligations for the dominated party to adapt to the dominant party by renouncing its culture, language, religion... in which those who assimilate renounce key elements of their identity in order to continue to be considered "other".
The conclusion is that the only possible dynamic that opposes othering is belonging. Not belonging granted a posteriori, after the resources have been distributed, but beforehand. The belonging in which the other is not asked to "fit in", to adapt, but that which has at its base an idea of shared equity, in which the rules of the game are discussed together, not established unilaterally by the party with power.
Belonging that goes beyond the concept of inclusion, in which there is no party that decides who is in and who is out, but in which, together, using dialogue, we establish how to live together. The leadership that serves this purpose, the leadership of belonging has as its objective the regeneration of relationships and, with them, of systems, just as happens in Nature.
Photocredit ©Reuters
"Manterrupting' - do we really still need to talk about it?
Manterrupting is a phenomenon that has been described and publicised for many years now. It has been explored, ridiculed, caricatured, dissected and analysed for many years. Just by searching for the hashtag on social networks, hundreds of examples, researches, articles illustrating it come up... so why talk about it again?
Marianne is a young executive in a multinational company, who came to the role after being placed in a development programme for high potentials. During one of the individual coaching sessions included in the programme, Marianne arrives very angry. She tells me that she often attends meetings with colleagues and management levels higher than her own. Before these meetings, she prepares thoroughly for the topics on the agenda, but she is often unable to contribute. In coaching, she tells me about the last meeting. She tells me that it was on a subject she knows very well, that she had prepared a whole series of data to contribute to the decisions, that she tried several times to share them but that in the end she had to give up: she was interrupted almost immediately when she started to speak.
From the 1980s onwards, a number of university studies began to highlight this phenomenon, showing that female researchers were interrupted much more often than their male colleagues, for whom, moreover, the measured speaking time was much greater than for them.
Interrupting someone in a conversation from time to time is normal: to add information, to bring the other person back on topic, to show agreement, to limit verbiage... But during the 1990s, the phenomenon continued to be investigated and a hypothesis began to emerge: not all interruptions are the same, some are quite intrusive and, behind them, there is a conscious or unconscious desire to question the legitimacy of the word of the person who is communicating.
The systemic theories on relationships (Gregory Bateson, P. Watzlawick), in particular the description of the different levels of human communication, provide us with interesting insights to analyse what happens in "manterrupting": there is a level of content, in communication, which we can call level 1, where the interruption actually serves to add information, express an opinion, circulate the word among the participants in the meeting. In this level we can analyse the "what" is exchanged in the communication and realise, for example, that the added content actually contributes to the objective of the communication.
There is also a level 2, which defines the relationship between the participants in the conversation, including the distribution of power between them. It is a level in which we can analyse the process of communication, the 'how'. Research at Princeton University has shown that manterrupting is, for the men who practice it, rather a way of re-establishing power relations that they feel are threatened by women. It is as if, by interrupting, the communication passed implicitly to the other party is 'look what you say is not important, because you are not important'. While interrupting having in mind the objectives of the communication (the why) can be useful, manterrupting is dysfunctional because its unconscious objective is not to enrich the conversation but simply to exercise its own power, which it feels threatened.
Marianne's company has, as in many companies, agendas around DE&I and unconscious gender bias. In the top management's statements about the company's culture and values, there is a willingness to move towards a state of equity, where gender should not affect skills or professional relationships, but the focus is on performance. It is the 'stated' theory that should define what people should do to produce results.
But if we analyse Marianne's case within the relational schema described above, we realise that, unconsciously, the "theory in use" (what really happens, beyond the declarations) is quite different. Marianne's colleagues unconsciously (or consciously?) operate in the sense of re-establishing a power relationship over her by interrupting her during meetings.
In the intentions, there are attempts to bring about a change, stimulating women to "dare", to take their own space: within the talent programme itself, in which Marianne is included, there are modules on women's leadership. But behind the manterrupting there is a visceral drive, a patriarchal occupation of territory that does not tolerate being questioned. Marianne's silence corresponds to an implicit acceptance of the rules of the game. The cultural mental model of male power must not be questioned.
Why, after so many years and so many declarations, does gender equality still seem so far away?
There is a first, very important step that has been taken. That of naming the phenomenon and describing it in order to give keys to interpreting an often inexplicable reality for women and men, and not only in the workplace. After awareness, there is action to follow. And for this there are different ways. One possible way is to realise, collectively, what are the rewarding leadership models of how leadership manifests itself, for women and men, and then to imagine a new leadership, different, more inclusive, less guided by laws that were fine (perhaps!) for men and women in other eras but are no longer suited to the challenges of 21st century organisations.
With Marianne, in the coaching process, it was very important to start from this observation, which helped her to understand that what is happening is not her fault: it has nothing to do with her level of preparation, her skills, her personality. It is important, in order not to aggravate what is happening by attributing blame that does not exist, that the different phenomena are read within the contexts in which they occur. The keys that come from the theories of group relations are particularly useful, in order not to limit oneself to a personalistic reading. What unconscious mental models condition people's actions within this system? Marianne can answer this question, but a collective questioning can be much more effective in order to really produce a profound change. In coaching we then opened up on the question "what is concretely in my power to change the situation?". A realistic exploration is important in order to accompany the person to operate at a level of responsibility that is possible and not on an omnipotent idea with respect to transformation, which risks being comforting in the short term and very frustrating in the medium to long term, once we become aware that it is not only the action of an individual that can operate on a cultural model but that of a collective.
From her point of view Marianne can work on her assertiveness, on her ability to immediately point out to the men who interrupt her the dynamic in which they are caught by saying something like "You have just interrupted me, but I will continue what I was saying" or "I was talking, now I will finish what I was saying". These are some of the issues we are addressing, together with the group of women who are involved in the leadership workshops, in the same company. This kind of intervention allows to interrupt the vicious circuit. One does not interrupt the other by speaking louder and adding content (level 1) but by redefining the relationship (level 2). Another type of assertiveness intervention is to avoid any sentence that undermines Marianne's legitimacy to intervene in that meeting. This means dropping all openings such as "Excuse me, but I would like to add...", "Perhaps it would also be important to take into account..." etc. and replacing them with, for example, "I will now give you some data that it is important to take into account...". "The argument in favour of this decision is...' etc.
Another track of change is to work on creating alliances, both with other women sensitised to the issue and also with men. This is the theme of "allyship" and its importance in transformation processes affecting DE&I. Together with Marianne we produced a " map of allies and sponsors " and how to work on these alliances. Without a viable alliance with the "dominant" party, it is much more difficult for change agents to achieve the desired results, while waiting for interventions on the organisational culture to bear fruit. Allying is different from simply 'networking'. Allies can, for example in a manterrupting situation, in turn interrupt the switch to give the interrupted woman back the floor, thus breaking the 'two-way' relational dynamic. Going from two to three, in the relationship, means not only avoiding the risk of escalation "I'll interrupt you more", but also taking a step towards the collective. The game is no longer between the dominant group and the dominated group, the third party also has the role of questioning the status quo and promoting movement.
The link between risk aversion and the inner critic: self-sabotage in transformative decisions
Emma is an executive in a multinational company. She is 40 years old and her career path is built on a continuous series of successes, brilliant results, a very fast progression, until she was promoted to her last position, as marketing director of one of the company's business units, a few months ago, crowning a goal she had had since she was young. Very quickly, the new role begins to weigh on her, not only because of the work itself, but also because of the team she is called upon to lead, her colleagues, and the extent of her decision-making, which turns out to be less than she expected. We start coaching after a few weeks in which she has felt the victim of pressure, which she considers unjustified and unhelpful in relation to the results she is asked to achieve. She is full of doubts about the company itself, which seems to betray the declared value system, but also about continuing her career in the private sector. She tells herself that perhaps she should try something more aligned with her values with a greater social impact. After a few sessions, having clarified that she doesn't want to stay in her current role, we start to explore other possibilities of roles even far away from the one she is doing, because she says she feels like a radical change. And Emma begins to have a particular behaviour in this respect. Every time an idea comes up and she seems to like it, she starts to find arguments against it: "No, I would have to train for years to do this", "I don't have the skills", "All the people I studied with are doing prestigious jobs ", "I won't succeed and I will have to go back to a company in a less important position", "I would like to but I am not able to do it"...
The risk aversion bias was identified by Tversky and Kahneman as early as 1973. It is the thought process that links risk to the possibility of losing, and which produces distorted decisions because the possibility of winning is underestimated in the face of possible losses. From the point of view of neurological functioning, the amygdala signals a threat. The striatum, which is responsible for assessing possible losses and gains, skews the perception towards losses; the insula, together with the amygdala, which is responsible for disgust, steers us away from behaviour that is considered risky. Risk aversion is related to our investment decisions, including, for example, those related to insurance. But today we will talk about this bias in connection with a psychological phenomenon that originates from it, the so-called "Inner Critic". The Inner Critic is that persistent and insistent voice that reminds us how incapable, incompetent, unsuitable and not fit we are; that makes us ashamed even to have thought of doing a certain thing, of speaking in public, of speaking at a meeting, of wanting that role, of doing something we have never done. Always that voice that makes us adopt a "fixed mindset" rather than a "growth mindset", pushing us to see, in an unconscious way, every learning as a risk, highlighting the losses that will be caused by the novelties, activating that ancestral circuit of defensive thinking, mentioned above, that was so useful to us at the dawn of our species, which now only risks to nail us to painful and unwanted situations for fear of the risk of going down new paths.
Basically, we can imagine the internal critic as a kind of little bad guy sitting permanently on our shoulder. On the other shoulder sits a much more benevolent character, the one that Doena Giardella in an article in the MIT Sloan journal calls the “inner champion” or in other literature the 'inner mentor or coach' (Tara Mohr), who suggests new ideas, creativity and tells us that everything will be OK. But the spontaneous tendency is rather not to listen to this voice and to let the inner conversation we have with ourselves and ourselves rather be directed by the person who loves us least and to let him guide our actions.
The voices that animate it can be different and come from our past: those who brought us up, parents, reference adults, school educators, sisters and brothers, but also environments that were not restraining, perceived as threatening, in which we could not develop relationships in safety, as happens, according to attachment theory, when we experienced so-called "avoidance" relationships during childhood.
The voice of the internal critic does not speak kindly to us, as one normally speaks to someone who loves us, but labels us "you are not the one who does this kind of thing", it can be at the origin of the famous "impostor syndrome", it reminds us of all our weaknesses, compares us to others always more performing than us, makes us imagine disastrous results in which we feel a great sense of guilt and shame for what we have done. It is the voice of (fake) wisdom that tells us "don't leave the old road for the new one" " whoever praises oneself gets cheated" and that, at the moment of acting to transform and regenerate our lives, our role, our company, our family, paralyses us and pushes us to prefer the status quo rather than risk losing something, as in all changes.
It is this voice that the manager Emma in our case heard, loud and clear, as she began to think about going off the beaten path to transform her life towards something more consistent with the vocation she feels at the moment. When we explored, during the coaching, the voice of the internal critic, some episodes of her childhood that Emma recalled, allowed us to shape the voice: in particular Emma heard the voices of her family, the criticism and advice, recommending her to go towards a course of studies suitable for her environment and social position and then the professional and career choices, the approach to work characterised by extreme devotion and perfectionism. These are voices that she has made her own, and that have often put her at risk of burnout, never making her feel competent enough, good enough, brilliant enough, performing well enough, both in relation to herself and to the other people in the company.
The inner critic risks profoundly undermining self-confidence and trust in others when he or she produces projections onto others, generating a dynamic of attributing bad intentions to ourselves, "it's their fault, they make me feel bad", "my colleagues don't like me", etc.
What can we do, concretely, about the internal critic?
- Tara Mohr, in the chapter of "Playing Big" dedicated to the subject, suggests above all not to reject it outright. After all, if we go back to the evolutionary usefulness of the "risk aversion" bias that lies at its origin, we can link it to the fact that one of the objectives of this critical voice is precisely to protect us from the hostility of the environment. The suggestion, therefore, as in the Jungian theory of the shadow is to welcome it, to be aware of it. A good way is to bring out the confabulation and write down what the inner critic is telling us in order to transform it. Tara Mohr suggests dividing a sheet of paper into two columns with, for example, the internal critic on the left, and the "rational thinker" on the right. In the latter column we can capture the wisdom of the message we are sending, which allows us to, for example, calculate the risks and rewards of the choice in a rational way;
- When the internal critic is active we speak to and about ourselves in a mean, harsh way, without empathy. Doena Giardella from MIT suggests that we include this dimension in our internal conversation. Be kind. At a time when there is a lot of talk about "kind leadership", it becomes essential to start with the self, using compassion and understanding in our internal conversation, in order not to self-harm or self-sabotage in transformation processes. The idea is to use the "inner champion" or "inner mentor" (the good guy who talks to us from our shoulder) to help us reframe criticism.
- In the moment when we are acting, for example in relationship with others, and we feel that in our internal conversation we are criticising ourselves, decentralise from ourselves, return to relational connection with others and ask ourselves what they need. The internal critic removes us not only from empathy towards ourselves but also from empathy in the relationship, making us focus only on our unconscious need to preserve the status quo.
- In the ex post analysis (of a meeting, of a change, but also of a failure) look for the silver lining, the lesson learned, the sprout of something new that has been born. Allow regeneration, we would say in Nexus.
- In a management position we might unconsciously reproduce the familiar script, for example by creating a work environment that can be defined as "avoidance" according to Attachment theory. In this kind of environment the internal critic could correspond to a demand, more or less implicit, for perfection not only towards us but also towards the other members of the team. In the case, for example, of a change we want to promote or of a mistake made, it will be useful to use humility to investigate the causes and the responsibilities, from what is called an "inquiring" position, of benevolent and truly open investigation, instead of resorting to advocacy, to accusation, to soliciting the feeling of guilt and shame in the team members.
'Illusion of transparency bias': when we don't take the risk of actually meeting the other
The illusion of transparency was first defined in 1998, in an article published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, by the research team consisting of Thomas Gilovich, Victoria H. Medvec, Kenneth Savistsy. It consists of 'the tendency of people to overestimate the extent to which others can discern their internal states'. The name describes well the phenomenon that occurs when we think that others can, almost magically, look into us, and see our emotions, our thoughts, our desires. Transparency here, as you can see, has a very different meaning to the one we are used to see, in relation for example to governance.
Reading the research took me back, way back, and I found myself, fifteen years old, in the corridors of the school, hopelessly in love with the star of the student movement, while I wandered around trying to see him, telling myself that surely he must have seen the blushing, the languid looks, the paralysis that took hold of me every time I crossed his path and, linked to this, all the turmoil of emotions that the sight of him provoked in me. At the time there was a novel that had struck my imagination enormously, "The Princess of Clèves", and the school corridor had become for me like the king’s court in which, almost as if on a stage, everyone was attentive to reading the feelings of others on their faces, in a communication made up of nuances, of glances given and not given, of heads turned, of palpitations all clearly or almost clearly seen, decoded, understood.
But this functioning and this attention on the others do not really exist, because everyone is much more concentrated and taken by what is happening inside themselves, an effect called spotlight, related to the illusion of transparency, which manifests itself in the idea of having a social spotlight on us. This is all the more true when the emotion that runs through us is strong. Of course, there are adjustments we make to moderate these illusions and disengage ourselves from our internal experience, but they are not enough. What we are left with is the feeling that what is going on inside us is much more visible than it really is.
Some examples of how this bias manifests itself are: when we are angry or upset with someone and we stop talking or we answer in monosyllables and we are surprised that the person in question doesn't realise, doesn't ask us what we have, etc. This is a situation I have often heard about in coaching, for example in relationships between managers and employees, but it is also very common in relationships between couples. The strong emotions that run through us, be they anger, fear, sadness, disgust, and which are present and in the foreground for us, are invisible or almost invisible for the relationships around us, be they professional or personal. Illusions of transparency and the spotlight effect can be attributed to anchoring and adaptation bias, according to the three researchers. "When individuals try to determine how obvious their internal states are to others, they begin the process of judgment from their own subjective experience. The adjustments they make from this anchoring-adjustments that result from the recognition that others are not as aware of their internal states as they are - tend to be insufficient. The net result is a residual effect of one's own phenomenology and the feeling that one's own internal states are more apparent to others than they actually are."
There are situations in which thinking about this effect can benefit us. Think, for example, during a moment of public speaking, when you may be feeling the sweat running down, you have the impression that your voice and hands are shaking and that everyone is noticing your agitation. Or during a job interview, when we are trying to turn a less than glorious moment in our CV into a positive one. Or, again, when we are telling a lie, and think of the popular belief that lies are obvious. In reality, agitation, anxiety, fear are much more perceptible to us. The person or persons in front of us will be caught in their own spotlight and will pay much less attention to us than we think.
The illusion of transparency and the spotlight effect can give us an idea of how distorted, illusory, superficial, distant from reality relationships with others can be in general, and of the difficulty of meeting the other person for what he or she is, beyond our projections and ego.
What can we do then to moderate these effects?
The tools of generative dialogue offer us a possible way for this encounter to take place. Generative listening allows us to temporarily silence our ego in order to open ourselves up to the experience of encounter, starting from a deep connection, which is not made (only) through rationality and words, but through the observation of the other, of the metaphors they use, of the emotional signals they send, of their life path. A connection in a space freed from our presence, from the need for reassurance, control, certainty... Generative speaking then helps us to build on the deep listening, allowing us to give names to what is present but also to what is implicit, new, surprising, in order to create a common ground of encounter. It is in dialogue that the illusion of transparency and the spotlight effect can be overcome.
But to enter this process requires an inner readiness to be Disturbed, Displaced & Disrupted, i.e. to accept that my own assumptions, or certainties, may be seriously challenged by this ‘real encounter’ with the other person, particularly when I discover that my explanations of why certain dynamics were happening in our relationship are no longer appropriate now that I realise that they didn’t have the information about me which, because of this “illusion of transparency bias”, I was so convinced that they had.
Unconscious Bias and the performance management and development process
This week for our blogpost on bias we are not going to talk about a single bias but, as we have already done on climate change, we will take a cluster of biases, in particular some of those that impact performance management.
Innovations in this area have been taking place regularly in recent years, in an attempt to create systems that are as fair as possible and that accommodate the learning and development paths of those involved: 360° rating systems, self-assessment crossed with the assessment of the manager, refined skills systems, consistency checks to focus on the collective dimension of assessment and moderate its subjectivity, increasingly precise KPIs, right up to the recent OKR goal-setting systems introduced by Google as an evolution of the MBO and continuous feedback... to name but a few. In reality, even well-designed performance management systems capable of grasping the complexity of organisational action remain anchored to a basic and spontaneous human activity: that of observation and the process of attributing meaning and interpretation based on these observations.
It is in this perspective that the increasing attention to the distortions and traps inherent in these processes becomes an interesting reflection for both the evaluated subjects and the evaluator. Awareness and transformation of the unconscious biases of individuals, but also coming from the organisational culture, becomes crucial for these systems to really serve to generate the individual and collective learning necessary to meet the challenges of the organisational context.
Let us try, in the following, to categorise some of these biases even if, as we shall see, forming precise categories becomes difficult and somewhat artificial since biases often regroup in the single evaluative act.
Biases related to identity factors of the evaluating manager or manager
- Identity bias (or Similar to me bias). It derives from the ancestral tendency to form relational subsets, "in-out groups", according to characteristics actually possessed or projected onto others, which make them feel similar or distant from us. Belonging to one group or another is a strong identity factor. The subject perceived as similar to us is therefore better evaluated and managed than the subject perceived as 'different'. Numerous studies show that gender, ethnicity, educational background, religion and age are among the "in-out group" factors that have a strong impact on evaluation. This bias manifests itself, in a favourable evaluation for those who feel similar, also in the communication of the performance evaluation, through, for example, a use of the pronoun "you" to distinguish those who are perceived as out-group and "we" for those who are "in-group", with impacts on the sense of organisational belonging, the feeling of being recognised, and motivation. It is is also important to mitigate this bias, that diversity is represented in all hierarchical levels.
- Attribution bias (or opportunity bias). This is the tendency to attribute successes to us and our abilities and failures to bad luck or causes external to us. This tendency is reversed in the case of assessed subjects for whom the opposite happens: a good performance when this bias is in action is attributed to luck or favourable conditions in the context and, for a bad performance, only the person's inabilities are highlighted. This bias, combined with the identity bias, can generate a systematic good or bad perception of the assessment, attributing to some only merits and to others only the intervention of fate and vice versa.
Biases linked to the use of rating scales
- Leniency Bias. The manager uses the rating scale in a systematically generous way.The indulgence may be higher for some employees (see bias above) but may also be more generalised. Behind this bias there are meta-models of description of reality in the evaluator, such as "I need to be loved or cherished and if I evaluate realistically I will not be loved or cherished anymore" or "I evaluate generously to signal encouragement so the person will do better",The indulgence may be higher for some employees (see bias above) but may also be more generalised. Behind this bias there are meta-models of description of reality in the evaluator, such as "I need to be loved and if I evaluate realistically I won't be loved anymore" or "I evaluate generously to signal an encouragement so the person will do better" or "if I evaluate negatively a performance then I will have to face a conflict and it scares me" and a distorted idea of "kindness", which does not take into account that the objective of management and evaluation is not to punish but to generate learning in the evaluator and in the evaluated.
- Severity bias.The manager systematically evaluates more severely. The mental models behind this systematic error may be, for example, "I've paid my dues, now the person being appraised has to pay their dues", or "if I use high values then the person will not work hard", etc. Numerous researches have been carried out to link personality traits (e.g. detected with the BigFive test) and systematic errors in the scales, e.g. linking traits of emotional stability and extroversion to lenient use and vice versa. Interesting results emerged from recent research on the link between generous or severe use of the scales and, once again, identity characteristics of the person assessed, which highlighted the risk of greater assessment severity towards dominated groups (women, people of colour, LGBT+, cognitive diversity etc.). Another interesting aspect on this topic is the use of scales in self-assessment linked to the famous "impostor syndrome" that consists (also) in a systematic error of severity in self-assessment that produces a feeling of inadequacy and illegitimacy in the person.
- Central tendency. Especially on odd-numbered scales, tendency to use only the central values and not the whole scale, in order to avoid taking full responsibility using the extreme values.
Biases related to the partial focus on the performance of the assessed.
- Positive and negative halo effect. The halo effect, one of the first biases to be studied, occurs when a positive or negative part of the performance is focused and emphasised, so that the whole assessment is affected. For example, John has very high skills in customer negotiation, contract closure, team management, but rarely speaks up in meetings. His manager might, based on this last characteristic, evaluate him negatively on the whole performance. I have taken the example of "speaking up in meetings" also because, according to some research, there is a positive halo effect affecting those who are good at speaking up in public. The halo effect may be even wider and concern not so much a part of the performance but characteristics of the person, in particular attractiveness, enthusiasm, positivity that are associated with effective performance, going so far as to conceal non-positive results.
- Recent memory bias (or availability bias). It consists in the belief that an event that happened recently is more likely to happen again. Hence, with respect to performance management, the tendency to recall mainly the last three or four months of performance and leave the rest of the year in the shadows. A curious effect of this bias is the so-called "hot hand", a metaphor taken from sport where a tendency to pass the ball more frequently to people who have scored a point has been studied, in accordance with the belief that one success can easily be followed by another (and reconfirming this belief because greater possession of the ball creates more opportunities to score points). In the business environment this effect produces the assignment of interesting and challenging projects one after the other to people who have been successful in one project, recreating the conditions for another success. A good way of counteracting this bias is through continuous feedback systems or the OKR methodology as a whole.
- First impression effect. Contrary to recent memory bias, this effect anchors us to the first general impression we had of the person and makes us revert to the judgement we formed in the first few seconds of the relationship, regardless of the results the person actually achieved. So a good first impression can hide negative performance and a bad first impression produces the opposite results. In a future post on bias we will talk about the famous Harvard research on "warmth & competence".
Comparison Biases
- Contrast effect. One of our ways of learning, as human beings, comes from comparing information to analyse its differences and similarities. This routine of thinking, when applied to performance management, distracts us from the object of our observation - the relationship and results of an individual, in relation to his or her objectives - and moves us to comparisons with other members of the organisation, or between members of the same team. Performance is thus assessed not for the added value on objectives given by the individual, but as better or worse than other team members.
- Job vs Individual bias. In most organisations, there are mental models that lead to a focus on certain roles, which are perceived as more contributory to the production of results, than others. I am thinking for instance of research roles in hi-tech companies or sales and marketing roles in consumer companies (where we happened to hear these two functions referred to as "la voie royale"). This bias consists in favouring, in performance management, those roles that intervene in the functions perceived as having the highest added value in the company, negatively impacting the sense of fairness, by evaluating in a worse way roles considered as minor.
At the end of this roundup, the evaluator may feel a little uneasy 😊. We offer some ideas to try to contain this bias.
- We can't say it enough, but the more awareness we have of how we think and the processes that lead us to frameworks for action, the more chance we have of finding the biases and errors. This means helping our rational side to participate in the process as much as possible. Performance management tools are also made for this, to take the evaluative activity out of spontaneity. Awareness needs to take the time, and this is another key factor. Evaluations done in a hurry, at the last minute, in a ritualistic way just to fill "the report card" (in how many organisations have we heard this term again!!) are the breeding ground for bad evaluations. A good appraisal creates the conditions for better performance in the next period, so it is not a cost in terms of time but an investment in the future and in creating a good team climate.
- Having a performance management and development system that is as articulated as possible, with properly written objectives, truly relevant measurement indicators, competencies described clearly and factually, multi-channel feedback is an important part. But, as mentioned above, no system can be completely bias free, e.g. those who designed it.
- An interesting device is the consistency check. At the end of the evaluations, the and the peer managers get together to tell how they came to place people on the scale. The peer managers and other participants in the meeting challenge the assessment through counterexamples, questions about specific behaviours observed etc. It is an good solution and the consistency checks we have witnessed have been great learning moments. As long as people play along and are willing to see not only each other's biases but also their own and work on the organisational level, asking themselves for example "what are we not seeing, because of habits, routines, 'this is how we do it'?"
- When you have a lot of team members it is good not to do evaluations all at once. If you reread the list of mistakes above, it is clear that if you add to these an unspecified number of evaluations made all in one afternoon, it becomes very difficult to know who did what.
- Continuous feed back becomes a very good tool, especially when it is possible that the evaluator and the evaluated can agree on its content and keep a common record of it. The advantage, apart from the evaluation, is above all on the learning cycle of the person, which is thereby enhanced.
- A culture of acceptance and growth through error helps the assessor and the assessed to open a dialogue, in which the relationship is protected from the risk of the "one story". The eye (and brain) of the evaluator are not infallible. There are (at least) two versions of the story and, through a clear and circumstantial exposition of the facts, both can perhaps enrich the reconstruction that has been made.
Phote credit Rob Gonsalves