The North Star

You Never Chose

When I was ten I made a radio out of cardboard and sticky tape. It did not work, and it was never going to work, but it looked close enough to the transistor radio I was copying that I carried it around the house showing it to anyone who would stop long enough to look at it. One of the adults who looked at it told me I would make a great engineer, and for reasons I still cannot properly explain, that landed. From that afternoon on, whenever anyone asked what I was going to do with my life, the answer was engineering.

I was not a driven kid with a plan. I liked sport and music and mucking around with my mates, and I was not at home in the evenings sketching bridges. But the answer never changed, and by Year 12 I was committed enough to fake my career guidance assessment so that engineering came out in my top three. Then I did one year of an engineering degree and quit, and went into teaching, and after that psychology, which are about as far from engineering as you can get without leaving the building.

(I work with a lot of engineers these days, and I have a brother who trained as one, and I can say with real confidence that the world has been spared having to drive over, live inside or rely on anything I might have designed.)

What interests me now is not that I got it wrong, because plenty of us pick the wrong course at eighteen and it is hardly a tragedy. What interests me is how clear it felt for eight years, and how everything I noticed about myself seemed to agree with it. I was good at maths, which was a tick, and I liked making things, which was another one.

The usual explanation for this is the reticular activating system, that cluster of nerve cells at the base of the brain stem which supposedly filters the world and decides what gets noticed and what slides past, and it is why people say you start seeing a particular car everywhere the week after you buy one. I have used that explanation for years, and it is worth knowing what actually sits underneath it, because the RAS is an arousal system rather than a meaning system. Moruzzi and Magoun (1949) found it by stimulating the brain stem in cats and watching the EEG shift out of a sleeping pattern into the fast activity of a waking brain, so what it governs is whether you are awake, not what you care about.

The filtering sits further up. Folk, Remington and Johnston (1992) showed that even the attention shifts we experience as involuntary are contingent on what they called attentional control settings, meaning a stimulus only grabs you when it matches what you are already set to look for, and it does not feel like a choice because it is not one. Nickerson (1998) then reviewed the evidence on confirmation bias and found the same pattern in what we do with information once we have it, which is that we favour the belief already in hand.

Which is my eight years of engineering, with my attention set to notice evidence of an engineer and my reasoning reading whatever it noticed in an engineer-shaped way. There was no gatekeeper in my brain stem doing that for me, I was doing it myself, and the direction was never tested because it never looked like it needed testing.

I had a North Star, and it was never mine.

A clear direction and an owned one are not the same thing

I have watched senior teams do a more expensive version of the same thing. A leadership group goes away for two days and comes back with a statement about where the organisation is heading, and it is genuinely good work, and it is on the wall within the month. Everyone in that room can feel the pull of it, which is exactly the problem, because the pull they can feel is the residue of two days of argument that nobody else was in.

Klein, Wesson, Hollenbeck and Alge (1999) pooled eighty-three separate samples in their meta-analysis of goal commitment, and what they found is uncomfortably simple. Commitment comes down to whether the goal matters to the person and whether that person believes progress on it is actually possible, and the belief in progress is the more consistently supported of the two, which is its own hard message for anyone setting a target nobody thinks is reachable. So the honest question about your direction is not whether people can recite it, but whether they want it and whether they believe they can get anywhere near it.

Deci and Ryan have spent decades on the second half of that, and their work describes a continuum of internalisation running from doing something purely under outside pressure through to genuinely valuing it as your own (Ryan and Deci, 2000). A direction handed down and never made personal produces the compliant kind of motivation, which looks perfectly healthy in a good quarter and folds in a bad one. For a leader that means the work of setting direction is not finished when the words are agreed, it has barely started.

Where this belongs in the rhythm

All of this gets caught, or missed, by whether people can tell the truth early. If nobody can say out loud that they do not recognise themselves in the direction, you will still find out, through drift and disengagement rather than through a conversation, which is a far more expensive way to learn it.

Which brings it back to Pause, as most things do. The reason my engineering answer survived eight years is that I never once stopped long enough to ask where it had come from, and we tend to test direction least at exactly the point it feels most settled.

So here is the question I would sit with rather than answer quickly. If you asked the people two levels below you where this organisation is heading and why it is worth the effort, would you hear your words coming back at you, or would you hear theirs?

One of those is a statement on a wall, and the other is a North Star. Download the North Star Alignment Check and run it with your team.

North Star Alignment Check

References

Folk, C. L., Remington, R. W., & Johnston, J. C. (1992). Involuntary covert orienting is contingent on attentional control settings. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 18(4), 1030-1044.

Klein, H. J., Wesson, M. J., Hollenbeck, J. R., & Alge, B. J. (1999). Goal commitment and the goal-setting process: Conceptual clarification and empirical synthesis. Journal of Applied Psychology, 84(6), 885-896.

Moruzzi, G., & Magoun, H. W. (1949). Brain stem reticular formation and activation of the EEG. Electroencephalography and Clinical Neurophysiology, 1(4), 455-473.

Nickerson, R. S. (1998). Confirmation bias: A ubiquitous phenomenon in many guises. Review of General Psychology, 2(2), 175-220.

Ryan, R. M., & Deci, E. L. (2000). Self-determination theory and the facilitation of intrinsic motivation, social development, and well-being. American Psychologist, 55(1), 68-78.