I’ve recently started reading Nigel Nicholson’s “Managing the Human Animal”. The book uses evolutionary psychology to help us understand the behaviour of people in organisations.
I’m sure I’ll be blogging more about this book and evolutionary psychology later, but for now I wanted to share Nicholson’s terms “migrants’ optimism” and “residents myopia” – both of which resonate oh-so-loudly with me!
Migrants’ optimism is the tendency to think that after we undergo a change, things will definitely get better. For example, those people who move jobs will think that everything will be rosier in the new workplace. I’ve seen this so many times with friends of mine who have changed organisations (I am self-employed myself so haven’t been “migrantently optimistic” for a while). Picture this: you make the decision to leave your job. During that month where you can’t wait to wrap things up, you begin to imagine your new workplace: a happy place devoid of all those things you cannot bear any longer.
And indeed, the first few weeks are such. Until you begin to identify the little things that you didn’t observe in your previous organisation, but which now begin to bug you in this new one.
Of course we have to be migrantely optimistic (sorry, I know I’m making up words here), else, how could we cope with change? If we were convinced that our new situation was going to be much worse than our current one, we would never change and therefore, we would never evolve.
Residents’ myopia could be thought of as the opposite of migrants’ optimism. It is, in Nicholson’s words:
The tendency of the long-term denizens of a subculture to become blind to the inefficiencies, irritants and foibles of their local world.
The evolutionary advantage of this is obvious – if you are stuck in a situation (and I try to use “stuck” here without its negative connotations), then you might as well be a little bit oblivious to its “malfunctions”, to ensure your ongoing happiness.
I suppose then, that I would add a third “affliction”: residents’ pessimism, when you are stuck in a not-too-bad situation but can no longer see its advantages. To avoid both residents’ myopia and pessimism, it might be a good idea to check-in with someone outside your organisation often – be it a friend, a professional contact or just someone who knows your organisation but does not reside within it. Let them point out those things that could improve but also, make sure you listen when they identify those things worth hanging on to.
