Work Disrupted

CHAPTER 7Leaders as Coaches and Designers : Moving Beyond Managing Workflows and Controlling Direct Reports to Creating, Influencing, and Building

Without leaps of imagination, or dreaming, we lose the excitement of possibilities. Dreaming, after all, is a form of planning.¹

—Gloria Steinem, feminist, journalist, and social political activist

When Daniel Kahneman demonstrated that the decisions consumers make are idiosyncratic, rather than rational, he flipped traditional economic theory on its head, and in the process, won the Nobel Prize in economics.² Kahneman was an unlikely recipient of the award. He is a psychologist and admits he has never even taken an economics class.³ He won the prize by exposing a flaw in a basic tenet of mainstream economic theory. He challenged the reliance on an idealized model of consumer decisionmaking as perfectly thorough and rational, sometimes referred to as “econs.”⁴ Human irrationality has been a key theme in Kahneman's work, especially the phase with Amos Tversky, his longtime collaborator.⁵ Tversky died in 1996, and could not share the prize Kahneman received in 2002—by the rules of the Nobel committee, you need to be living to receive the honor.⁶ With Tversky, Kahneman offered a more realistic view of humans as decisionmakers who do not weigh all the facts and who often defy logic. Kahneman and Tversky's findings have had far-reaching implications, influencing the way government leaders think through foreign policy, investors evaluate ...