I had already ruled them out.

I think of myself as pretty open-minded, someone who considers different sides before making a decision. An exercise at a leadership retreat this weekend showed me how much my own biases were shaping what I paid attention to and what I dismissed.

We worked through an ethical dilemma involving a sinking ship and limited seats on a lifeboat. We made our selections individually before discussing them as a group. Some of the people described had traits that bothered me, and I automatically excluded them. One was a former Army Ranger whose description said he created paranoia and tension with everyone around him. I crossed him off without reading much further. I gave others a place based on what I valued and what I thought they could contribute. By the time we got to group discussions, I could explain every choice.

Then we compared our lists.

There were strong opinions and some difficult discussions. As we worked through what the people we selected would need to survive together, I started reconsidering some of my exclusions. The Ranger had a strong background in surveillance, which is exactly what a stranded group with no rescue date would need. The concern that had stopped me was still there, but now I had to weigh it against something I had barely considered.

I changed my mind about him and a few others. It took talking through the consequences with other people to see what I had left out.

Everything I needed to consider had been on the page. I had read every description through my own filter, and the filter made the call.

In 1920, a psychologist named Edward Thorndike asked army officers to rate their soldiers on separate qualities, from intelligence to physique to leadership. The ratings came back overwhelmingly correlated. If a soldier was rated high in physique or appearance, commanders tended to rate them high in intelligence and leadership too, even though these traits should have been independent. Thorndike called it the halo effect, and it runs in reverse as well. One trait that bothers you pulls everything else about a person down with it.

I recognized the reverse version in my own list. With the Ranger, I read paranoia and choas and stopped there.

I am no stranger to labels. Early in my career, a performance review described me as overbearing and intimidating. I wrote about it a few weeks ago. I believed those two words, and for years they influenced how I showed up in meetings. I ran every contribution through a check before I spoke, and I let calls go by that I knew were wrong.

I know exactly what it costs when one description gets to stand in for a whole person. And there I was at a retreat, doing it to a fictional stranger on a sheet of paper without a second look.

I like learning, and I am willing to hear a different perspective. But someone had to put that perspective in front of me before I questioned my own choices. On my own, I had been satisfied with my reasoning.

I also left myself off the boat. My thinking was that nobody making the choice could call it fair if they saved a seat for themselves. That choice reflected something I believed about responsibility.

I had taken myself off the boat to stay objective, but my list was already full of me.

My values were there. So were my reactions to certain traits and my ideas about what mattered most. Leaving my name off the list had done nothing to remove those biases.

When I worked in pharma, every drug that went to market carried a side effect list, and some of those lists ran long. Nobody waited for a perfect drug because the people who needed relief couldn't wait. The question that mattered was whether the benefits of the drugs were worth the risks. I had been holding people to a standard no drug on any shelf could meet.

In the exercise, I had let a concern end my consideration before I had weighed what else the person brought.

It shows up at work too. A direct report misses a big deadline and every update from them afterward reads like a risk. A peer pushes back hard in a meeting and their next idea arrives already discounted. What happened may deserve attention. Over time, it can become the only thing you see.

You can have a valid concern and still give it too much weight. You can also have good reasons for a decision and discover that you have barely considered the reasons against it.

Somebody in your work or personal life right now is carrying one side effect you've let become the whole label. Maybe it's the colleague you stopped looping in, or the person you decided about before they finished their first sentence.

Who made it on your lifeboat and why? Who did you leave behind?

Hit reply and tell me who you'd reconsider. You can leave the names out.

Until next Tuesday.
Ceaneh