Imaginary Time Travel as a Leadership Tool

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The first time I noticed a leader who used imaginary time travel was back in the 1990s, when a colleague and I did an 18-month ethnography research project at IDEO. Today, IDEO is a renowned innovation consulting firm, but in those days, it was a small product design company with about 100 employees.

IDEO’s founder (and then-CEO) David Kelley used this intriguing tool when designers complained about things that upset them, like difficult clients or tough technical problems. Kelley would acknowledge their immediate pain. But he would soon shift the conversation away from the present and focus on either the past or the future. Kelley made three kinds of points that seemed to calm and motivate those distressed designers:

  1. He would suggest that, in a month or so, when the designers looked back on what upset them, it would seem like no big deal — just a temporary rough patch.
  2. He would remind designers of past troubles with clients or vexing technical challenges and how, by persisting and banding together, they endured, did good work, and had fun.
  3. He would talk about exciting new projects that IDEO was about to land, which the designers would love working on.

A hodgepodge of behavioral science research suggests that Kelley was wise to shift designers’ attention from the present to the past and future. Indeed, every leader can harness the human capacity to “transcend the here and now” by nudging others to engage in “mental time travel,” as psychologists Emma Bruehlman-Senecal and Ozlem Ayduk put it.

The Power of Impermanence

By urging designers to imagine how much less upsetting current problems will seem in the future, the IDEO CEO was using what psychologists call temporal distancing — reminding them that the pain of a current experience would fade as time passes. Six studies by Bruehlman-Senecal and Ayduk confirm that when people focus on the impermanence of a distressing event, such as a poor exam performance or a relationship breakup, they feel less upset about it and less worried that it will hound them in the future. Similarly, leaders can ease the sting of current troubles by reminding others (and themselves, too) that “this too shall pass.”

The other two points that Kelley made shifted designers’ attention away from the present and toward similar past and future experiences at IDEO. Research on the “rosy view” phenomenon by Terence R. Mitchell and his colleagues at the University of Washington suggest that Kelley was using sound psychology. The researchers studied emotional reactions to experiences such as vacations to foreign countries and a three-week bicycle trip. Mitchell and his colleagues found that, compared with their feelings during the actual experiences, people were more positive about their vacations and bike trips when they anticipated them or remembered them.

Rosy anticipation occurs because most people have positive illusions about the future. They believe, as psychologists Shelley E. Taylor and Jonathan D. Brown have written, that “the future will be great, especially for me.” People — especially those with good mental health — are prone to savor an event before it occurs and downplay the risks and resulting aggravation — such as, in the case of an upcoming bicycle trip, the saddle sores and annoying companions they may likely experience.

Rosy retrospection happens because, when people look back at an experience, they reconstruct which parts are remembered and forgotten, and adjust their assessments of which parts were good and bad, as well as their overall assessments. Talking with others who shared the experience, or with people who just listen and ask questions, further shapes reconstructed memories. People have happier memories of past experiences because they place less weight on bad elements. They edit their memories in part to justify past decisions to themselves, in part to protect their self-esteem, and in part to convince others that they make good decisions and are happy and well adjusted.

Mental Time Travel in the Workplace

Alas, “rosiness” is a double-edged sword. Some leaders exploit their employees’ optimism and their penchant for misremembering the past as better than it ever was. They entice employees to work for yet another cruel client or on another slipshod project with hollow promises that things will be better next time. They fail to acknowledge that past experiences were marred by incompetence, errors, or broken systems. Instead of identifying and repairing problems, such leaders twist the facts in ways that condemn their people (and often themselves) to live through similar ugliness again and again.

That said, when used with proper precautions, wise and ethical leaders can use these tools for shifting focus to help their people downplay and forget bad times that will haunt, distract, and discourage them, as well as help them crank up constructive energy and enthusiasm for future adventures. After all, part of a leader’s job is to raise others’ spirits and keep them moving forward despite setbacks, failures, and heartbreaking events.

But leaders can use imaginary time travel for more than fueling good feelings and constructive optimism and persistence. Some use it to identify dangerous risks and delusions in order to avert future failures, through “failure premortems.” The premortem is psychologist and Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman’s favorite method for making better decisions (he credits psychologist Gary Klein for inventing and developing it). A failure premortem works something like this: Leaders and their teams are asked to imagine that it is, say, a year after they’ve made a decision, and that the decision turned out to be a massive and unambiguous failure. The leader asks people to imagine looking back from that terrible future to develop detailed lists and stories about what happened and why.

Preemptive premortems improve decisions in part because dissecting an event as if it did happen rather than might happen makes it seem more concrete and likely to really occur, which motivates people to devote greater attention to understanding its nuances. Experiments by marketing professor Deborah J. Mitchell and her colleagues found that, compared with looking ahead at an event that might occur, imagining that the same event has already occurred “increases the ability to correctly identify reasons for future outcomes by 30%.” In addition, when a premortem is convened by a trusted leader, naysayers and pessimists feel free to speak their minds. A well-run premortem creates a competition where people score points for identifying risks and obstacles that others haven’t. As psychologist Klein put it: “The whole dynamic changes from trying to avoid anything that might disrupt harmony to trying to surface potential problems.”

Finally, everyone — leaders and employees alike — can use imaginary time travel to manage themselves, not just others. Stanford’s Hayagreeva “Huggy” Rao and his students recently conducted a field experiment on the impact of writing personal premortems. The experiment involved more than 750 new hires at a large software company. Preliminary findings suggest that new hires benefited from looking back from the imaginary future and explaining why their first year on the job had been either a failure or a success. New hires who were randomly assigned to write failure or success premortems were more likely a year later to have received large pay raises — over 10% — compared with new hires who were randomly assigned to control conditions, and thus didn’t write premortems.

Focusing on the impermanence of a bad experience can help control emotions and protect your sanity. A former U.S. Air Force Academy cadet who was determined to graduate and fly planes wrote to me about how he used this mind trick to survive encounters with several fellow cadets who berated and insulted him. During trying episodes with these flaming jerks, he imagined that his tormentors weren’t there, envisioning instead that it was a few years in the future and he was flying a plane. It worked: He graduated from the academy and went on to spend nearly 20 years as an Air Force pilot.

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Comments (4)
BHUVANEASHWAR SUBRAMANIAN
An interesting article that offers the possibility of applying visualization in the corporate world. Come to think of it, guess most cultures Buddhist, Hindu, Christianity and almost every other religious practice that stresses on the importance of meditation, advocates meditation, and the principle of manifestation as being core to achieving objectives. The principle of impermanence or anahatha, is perhaps the core of some of the greatest teachings by Great masters, which has now found application in management thinking. I think , the novelty of the article is not so much about the concept, but about how to leverage these philosophical principles to operationalize and improve  employee engagement and efficiency at the workplace
Laura Weiss
I love this piece because it illustrates the benefits of seeking alternate perspectives when faced with a challenging situation or question. There are other precedents for taking this approach. In 2009 Suzy Welch published her book "10-10-10" as a guide for imagining the impact of any given decision in 10 minutes, in 10 months, and in 10 years. This is a different kind of time travel but it enables a new view of the situation and supports deliberate, active choosing about how to engage. In the coaching world we refer to this as exploring different "geographies", and it's an amazingly powerful way to get unstuck and make forward progress.
Mahmoud Dawaba
Well written article. 
Thank you
Milind Anjankar
The article is well written.I am in sales profession of selling capital  equipment used in mining and construction industry .Some times I find it difficult to nudge sales  colleagues to engage in "mental time travel"The impact of past experience about particular product which might have failed  technically & commercially  will discourage people to sell those products and change their line of business or products .

Milind anjankar