The Long and The Short Of It

Episode 276 - The Case of the Missing Stools

Transcript:

Jen: Hello, Peter.

Pete: Hello, Jennifer.

Jen: The game is afoot. Peter, this week, I had an experience where I had to become a detective and solve a mystery.

Pete: Oh my gosh.

Jen: Which, I have to admit, was kind of fun for me. And I'd love to share with you The Case of The Missing Stools.

Pete: Oh my gosh, Detective Jen Waldman. I am all ears. This is The Long and The Short Of It.

Jen: Okay, Peter. I'm laughing because I know where this story is going, but you don't. So, let me fill you in.

Pete: And I have no idea.

Jen: I come to work on Monday morning. And I walk in, and I'm like, "Something's different in here. What is going on?" Now, in the entryway of my studio, like in the lobby sitting area of my studio, there are two benches and three stools. And I realize the stools are gone. And I'm like, "Huh."

Pete: Bom-bom-bom.

Jen: Bom-bom-bom. So I go into Studio One, I don't see them there. I look in the closet, no. I go into Studio Two, no, they're not in there. "Ah," I remember, "I have a camera."

Pete: Oh my gosh.

Jen: "Let me go back and see. Is it possible that someone stole my stools?"

Pete: This is so random.

Jen: Meanwhile, Pete, I have lots of very expensive audio recording equipment in here.

Pete: Right. But no, the stools.

Jen: But the stools were what was gone. So I go to the security camera, and lo and behold, at 7:22pm on Friday night, someone got into the studio, which had accidentally been left unlocked (not by me, by someone else, but that's another story), picked up the stools and left with them.

Pete: I have so many questions. I have so many questions.

Jen: Okay, so let me just finish giving you the context.

Pete: Please.

Jen: So I go and I talk to the super, and he's like, "Well, you know, there was a party on the floor that night. I wonder if the person hosting the party took them." So, I go over to their suite. It's locked. Nobody's there.

Pete: Hmm. How convenient.

Jen: And I'm like, "What do I do?" So I write a fairly passive aggressive note, and I hang it on the wall by where the exit to our floor is, and I say, "If on Friday night at 7:22pm, you removed three black stools from Suite 231, I have security camera footage. Please return them."

Pete: Oh my god, yes.

Jen: Okay. So Monday goes by, no stools. Tuesday goes by, no stools.

Pete: Is the sign still up?

Jen: Oh, the sign is still up. And that door at the end of the hallway is still locked.

Pete: Oh my gosh.

Jen: I still don't know what's happened to the stools. So Wednesday, I come into work. The stools are still not there. I leave for a little bit to go get a caesar salad.

Pete: An important detail.

Jen: I come back. The stools are there.

Pete: Oh my god, they were back. They've appeared.

Jen: They have magically appeared.

Pete: Are they in the studio, or are they just back in the foyer?

Jen: They are exactly where they used to be, like as if they had never disappeared.

Pete: Oh my gosh.

Jen: So of course, I go back to the security camera footage of Wednesday and there is a person carrying the stools back, looking kind of ashamed. So I'm like, "Okay. Now's the moment, Jen. Get your game face on. You are marching down to that suite at the end of the hall." I'm literally practicing going, "I'm here to discover the why and the how my furniture ended up in your suite." I'm like, you know, "Nobody's going to push me around." And I go to open my front door, to go out and march out there, and I'm like, "I'm ready," and there's a woman standing there with her hand up, like as if she's about to knock.

Pete: She's ready to knock and she's like, "Oh my gosh."

Jen: And I'm like, "Oh, hi. Can I help you?" She says, "Are you Jen?" I said, "Yes." "Hi, I'm Rebecca. I'm the stool thief."

Pete: Oh, yes. Self-proclaimed.

Jen: Okay, so I'm like getting ready to do my, you know, "Who do you think you are to let yourself in here and just take whatever you want?" And she says, "I am so sorry. We were hosting a party in our gallery. There's no seating in our gallery, and we had several seniors come in who couldn't stand. And I was panicking because they needed a place to sit and I had nowhere for them to sit, so I went all over the floor knocking on everyone's door to see if I could borrow seating, and yours was the only door that was open. And when I came in, nobody was here. And I thought, 'Oh, okay. I'm just going to take a risk and I'm going to borrow these, and I'll bring them back at the end of the night.' And then, I forgot to bring them back. And I've been sick all week, and I haven't been in to work. And it's all I've been thinking about all week, is, 'I never returned those stools.'"

Pete: I feel this all over my body. This is great. This is great. I could just imagine you unraveling in this moment.

Jen: And I was like, "You know, Rebecca, next time you come in to steal something, go for the audio equipment. It's so much more expensive." And we're laughing and having a great time, and she's like, "Do you want to come down and see the art?" So we go on in to her gallery, and I'm like, "Oh my gosh, I love this." She's like, "You know, come in any time. Come hang out. I'm so sorry. You know, it will never happen again." And I was like, "Any time you need the stools, come take them."

Pete: "They're yours."

Jen: Anyway, I know that there is some sort of a lesson here around the story I thought was happening and the story that was actually happening.

Pete: Oh, yes.

Jen: And now that I know who the stool thief is, and I kind of want to be her best friend, help me see the learnings here, Pete.

Pete: Oh, this is such a beautiful and hilarious story. And so, okay, so two things come to mind in terms of like the lesson I'm taking from this. One is, this feels like an example of sonder, S-O-N-D-E-R, which is that word that...we've actually recorded an episode about it. But it's, I think of it as like the precursor to empathy. So someone wrote The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, which is a book where basically this guy invents words. And he invented this word "sonder", which has become a lot more popular than I realized, actually. There's like pubs in Australia called "Sonder", like named after this idea. (Which, by the way, is a great name for a pub.) And the word essentially means...I paraphrase when I give the definition...but it's like that feeling when you realize that everyone else is living a life as rich and as complex as your own, that everyone else has context and experiences and hopes and dreams and fears and illnesses and stories that we just don't have any insight into. And if we can remind ourselves of that and like have that feeling of like, "Oh, yeah," then I think it opens the door for us to be able to empathize and connect with people. So the first thing, I just feel like you just had the most hilarious and profound and beautiful moment of sonder. Which leads to my second thought/observation, which I think is an important one...which, I feel like these words were put in this order by Brene Brown, but I don't think the idea is necessarily unique to her. And that is just that without information, we create stories.

Jen: Yeah.

Pete: Right? Like humans without information, without facts, or without clarity in between two events like, "I had stools, and I didn't have stools," we create stories in our head about what might have happened, to help fill those gaps.

Jen: Yep.

Pete: And that can be a superpower at times, because it can enable us to be detectives and connect dots. And it can also lead us to jumping to conclusions and assuming bad intent. Which, in your case is funny. But in the case of, for example, a leader in an organization, if we are making assumptions about the people that we lead or the teams that we work within that are incorrect or false or harmful, because we don't have accurate information or because of the stories we tell ourselves, then you can see pretty quickly how you get into trouble and how you become a pretty ineffective leader. So it just feels like another case that I'm going to use in keynotes, another story that fits into the quiver of sonder/empathy/without information, we create stories. What do you think?

Jen: Oh, it's so true. And it's interesting to me because I try to practice, in theory, "Assume best intent."

Pete: Mmm-hmm.

Jen: But in the moment when the information is nowhere to be found and the only evidence I have is a video of a person running down the hall with my stools, I did not assume best intent. I assumed malicious intent, like someone was out to get me or hurt me somehow. It's an interesting thing because theory and practice are different. So in theory, I want to assume best intent. But in practice, I did not.

Pete: Right, because you're a human being. I mean, the whole idea of framing these things as practices, I think, is deliberate. Because sometimes you forget to practice. Or sometimes practice doesn't go as well as other times. Sometimes you're in the zone and your practice is absolutely on point, no matter what the skill. And other times, you're like, "Oh my god, why am I bothering? This is a mess. My practice is way off course." You also remind me, I'm reading Shane Parrish's book Clear Thinking, which is so good.

Jen: Oh, it's so good. It's so so so good, highly recommend.

Pete: So good. And the first portion of the book is about the fact that we humans have all of these defaults that we fall to when we aren't doing our best thinking, when we react or when we're thinking too reactively. And he talks about...I hope I'm not missing any. He talks about the emotional default, the social default, the ego default, and the inertia default. I think that's all four them, there may be a fifth. If so, I'll correct it in the Box O' Goodies. And he has countless examples of times when, because of the situation without information, we can default to being highly emotional, or protecting our ego, or following the crowd because of the social default, etc., etc. And it just strikes me as like, I feel like that is just a useful reminder for you, but also for everyone, to go, "You could be the most empathetic person on the planet, and you're still fighting these biological defaults." And sometimes, when you have footage of someone literally coming in to your studio, which is meant to be locked, and taking things from you, that's going to trigger some defaults in you, no doubt.

Jen: Oh my gosh. Okay, are you familiar with the fundamental attribution error?

Pete: Oh my gosh, I've heard you talk about this before. I'm like, I need a refresher.

Jen: So fundamental attribution error is our tendency to attribute other people's actions to their character, but our actions to our circumstances.

Pete: Oh, interesting. Yeah. Interesting.

Jen: So this other person, I'm attributing her actions to the fact that she's a bad person who is out to get people, who is dishonest and not neighborly. But she attributes her actions to the fact that she had elderly people in her space, who were going to be harmed by all the standing that was happening and who needed a chair.

Pete: Right. Right, they're sort of the exact opposite. Like because of fundamental attribution error, you're assuming a non-generous reason for this person taking your stools. And she is assuming nothing but a generous part, of like, "I need to look after these people. And it's generous of me to go and get stools so that they can sit"

Jen: Yeah, and this is something we do all the time. It's just, you know, our human tendency. If someone else is late, I label them as rude or irresponsible. But for them, they're late because the subway broke down.

Pete: Right.

Jen: So we do have to remind ourselves that fundamental attribution error exists, and sonder and empathy seem to be perhaps the way to counteract it.

Pete: I think so too. Like, I think about this story I've been sharing recently in some workshops, where I was running this in-person workshop earlier in the year. And I got there early to help set up, there was going to be fifteen general managers in the room. And two of the executives who would help to orchestrate the day were there helping set up, and one of them got this text message from someone who was meant to be coming in, saying, "Hey, really sorry, I won't be able to join today in-person. Is it cool if I dial in?" And it was so wild because these two executives had like the polar opposite response. The first kind of threw his hands up in the air and said something along the lines of, "Oh, that's completely disrespectful. Like, we all agreed this is going to be in-person. This has been in the calendar for six months. How dare they decide not to come in? We haven't even set up the AV. There's no way we can make it work. Rah, rah, rah. Rant, rant, rant." And I guess in this case, fundamental attribution error was, "This is this person making a slight on me, the executive who's helped organize this," versus the second person, the second executive who said something along the lines off, "Wow, that seems really out of character for this person. I hope everything's okay. I wonder if there's a way we can support," and then proceeded to ask me if I knew anything, because I've been coaching this person. And I said, "Actually, last week, the person in question was excited and enthusiastic about coming in. So I bet there's a pretty good reason that they're not coming in." And as it turned out, it was a family emergency of the worst kind. And the fact that this leader even wanted to dial in was a sign of the character of how committed they were to the program. So it was like another example of sonder and fundamental attribution error. And like I think in that moment, it's hard, but you have a choice. "Am I going to be the kind of leader who shows up, you know, with empathy and sonder and curiosity? Or am I going to be the type of leader who makes this all about me? And, you know, because of fundamental attribution error and other things, am I going to make it all about me?" So, anyway.

Jen: Wow. Who knew...? Before we started recording, I said to you, "I have something, but I'm pretty sure it's not an episode. I'm pretty sure there's going to be nothing to learn from my story, but I'll tell you the story because it's funny." And it turns out, Pete, there actually is quite a lot to learn from The Case of The Missing Stools.

Pete: Ha-ha, The Case of The Missing Stools.

Jen: And just so everyone can get a little chuckle, I will absolutely put my security footage in the Box O' Goodies.

Pete: Oh my gosh, please. I'd like the security footage of you prepping yourself for confronting this person.

Jen: Oh, well, I don't have a camera in the studio. It's just right outside the door. But you know what I have not checked?

Pete: The interaction?

Jen: What I haven't checked is the footage of the two of us talking to each other and laughing, and then walking down the hall together.

Pete: Slapping each other on the back as you go, yeah, like best friends.

Jen: We'll see if it's there.

Pete: Oh dear. Well, Jen, your detective work not only was an entertaining story (especially the way you told it), but also it's just a great reminder for me and for our listeners, I think, that the stories we tell ourselves aren't always true. And that without information, we are even more likely to tell ourselves stories that are untrue. So remember sonder, remember empathy, and hopefully assume best intent.

Jen: And that is The Long and The Short Of It.