The CIA have an unofficial motto: ‘And ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free’ (John 8:32). In the same vein but more pragmatically, the Roman Emperor and Philosopher, Marcus Aurelius, reminds us that we have to see not what the enemy wants us to see but what is really there. In his book Meditations, he urges us to strip things of “the legends that encrust them,” – to remove the ‘magical thinking’ that distorts our picture of the world. The world is harsh, problems are real and no amount of hope makes it otherwise.
The problem is, when things are hard and scary, when we’re tired, when we’ve had blow after blow and we are fed up, that’s when it happens: Magical thinking kicks in. This will all be over soon, we convince ourselves. This one thing will solve all our problems. The pandemic will just disappear because we want it to disappear. This kind of thinking makes us feel better, sure, but it is delusional and therefore dangerous.
The last 6 months have been a great example of the costs that come when magical thinking doesn’t materialise and the consequences hit hard. When hope is your strategy, you get caught unprepared. When you expect problems to go away and you tell everyone you do and they believe you, you – and they – are disappointed. When you don’t listen to advice because it’s unpleasant or comes with difficult obligations, when you focus on short-term solutions or disregard risks, you’ll find even bad situations can be made worse. Just look at America’s experience of the virus and the magical thinking strategy of its President for proof. He hasn’t heeded his own intelligence agency’s credo, and it has come home to roost on a cataclysmic scale.
Not speaking the harsh truth, just because it might not be popular to say it, is dangerous. Dangerous at a national level and dangerous in business. However big the temptation, we must each combat magical thinking. It is not an answer to real issues to wrap ourselves in the flag and say that what is needed at this time is for us all to pull together and collectively hope for the best. That isn’t leadership. It is facile to see what you to see and believe what you want to believe rather than to seek to know what you need to know. For us in business, we cannot labour under the illusion that this is temporary. That things will revert to BAU. Now is the crucial time, on the day the Chancellor has faced the hard financial facts and is announcing a new package of measures, for us to coldly assess the facts, re-assess the risks, plan for the dangers, prepare for a worst case scenario and, most importantly, act. Now is the time to do the necessary things that will insure the business. What needs to be done? What must change? Take advantage of the crisis to cut through the bindweed that tied you down or held you back. Use it to cut through the inertia that exists in your organisation and make the changes that have needed to be made for too long but have not been made.
Facing the facts is liberating. It sets you free. We do not have the power to change the reality of this current situation. Things are what they are. The situation is what it is. And it must be faced—with courage, wisdom, discipline, imagination – and it must be acted upon. We cannot wait for a magic wand to make it all go away. For the foreseeable future, this is it. It is a gift. As the great Emperor philosopher said: “The art of living is more like wrestling than dancing, in so far as it stands ready against the accidental and the unforeseen, and is not apt to fall.” We will not fall if we use the time now to prepare, to ‘stand ready’ and to act decisively rather than to wait hoping.