This post is designed to be shared with:

• Your leadership team (ONLY if you are on it!)

• The team you manage

• Peers, if you want to partner with them better

• Someone whose feedback you trust, to spur actionable feedback for you

• Your coach

Are you feeling it?

To keep this newsletter feeling like it’s producing positive G-forces in your life and on your team, I’m prioritizing a series of topics that can produce big leaps for you right away, if you really grapple with them. This is the last “chewy” post we will have in a little while (I’ll give your brain a break and get into a bunch of quick wins in the coming weeks). This week is packed and will give you and your team two big questions to wrestle with together:

• Are we good at cause and effect? How can we get better?

• Are we really in touch with reality? How could we learn a few key things that would dramatically improve our decision making?

Whether you use these topics to build a path for consistent incremental progress or you’re using them to ignite big change, that’s up to you. Just decide how big of a bite you’d like to take and make the journey what you want it to be. Either way, I’d recommend taking these first four topics seriously because using them to audit your current approach and make just a few adjustments can fundamentally alter the trajectory you and your team are on.

1. Learn to move your thoughts to the best parts of your brain.

2. Learn when and how to focus at the right level, leaving “efficient productivity” (beta) behind at times when it pays off big to think deeper.

3. Learn that leadership is about activating (and not deactivating) human brains…all the rest of the things you do sit on top of that foundation.

4. And today: Make sure you’re really connected to reality.

Have you ever seen the show Undercover Boss? In a way, that’s what this week’s topic, Your Connection With Reality is about. And, shockingly to many, that show would be just as interesting if anyone in the company was the one being followed around, not just the CEO. Sure, these particular CEOs are missing an understanding of a lot of the reality unfolding in their business, but so is just about everyone else.

This fourth topic is an interesting one because your connection with reality is a big part of your ability to turn intentions into reality. The first three topics in the list I wrote above are about priming your brain so that it intends to get something right (purpose, focus, and using those tools to activate minds as a leader activate intentions, regardless of ability). Clearly, if our brain doesn’t even intend to get it right, we won’t get it right.

Wait.

That might sound absurd. Who doesn’t intend to get things right? Well, the answer is pretty much everyone with a brain that is seeking safety, every brain that is in it for rewards, any brain that is in “just get it done” mode, and any brain using the wrong part of the brain to do its thinking. In any of those situations, the intent is not to get it right, and that’s why you’ve worked with so many people who don’t seem to want to get it right.

How many brains around you are in those modes? In my experience, it’s been a lot of them. If your experience is otherwise, count it as a blessing to work with people who are so focused on trying to get it right. But the business world has a hyper-massive intentions-level problem that it’s struggling to diagnose properly, distracted believing all manner of other things.

So lesson #1, putting the pieces together: If we use the best parts of the brain, focus the right way, and get into the purposeful state of mind, we intend to get things right. And intentions are causal of our success as a team, but only partially.

The last thing we need, after our intentions are great, is to have ability. Ability is the stuff that allows people to turn intentions into reality. It’s the skill that aims and hits the bullseye (or at least the target) with the arrow.

At CORE, we define ability as a trio of “connections” that people have. We call them connections because it’s pretty clear when a human brain is disconnected from reality, reason, or imagination.

Every brain has connections with reality (essentially knowledge), reasoning (comfort with accurate logical deduction and prediction), and imagination (comfort with generating and simulating options). The stronger these three connections, the greater a person’s ability will be. And if a person has weaker connections with reality, reason, and imagination, we will see that directly reflected in their ability to make decisions that consider context, are logically sound, and reflect sufficient creativity and imagination.

This week, we’re going to start with the easiest part of ability to improve quickly: the mind’s connection with reality.

Causality

I just used a word above that is maybe the most important word in this newsletter. It’s something we will explore constantly: causal.

This word is extremely important for any individual or team to fully understand. As professionals, we will never understand the importance of our connection to reality if we do not understand causality first.

The entire business world is a system of causality. We are constantly exploring what is causal of what, and how causal it is. What causes customers to stay and net retention to be > 100%? What causes our teams to be engaged and resilient? What causes us to form brilliant strategy?

Causality is what we are all actually doing all day. Marketing campaigns, sales, product, experience design, strategy, M&A, etc. It’s all just parts of a giant system of causality.

So, sort of obvious. But what’s missing in most teams is that causal systems are systems of choice, not just systems of effect. What I mean is that there are almost always multiple inputs that can cause an outcome. We always have choices, and some of those choices are better than others. So we shouldn’t just ask whether or not something is causal. We should ask how causal it is compared to the other choices we have.

Take mission statements and values, for example. Are those causal of people’s behavior? Yes. They are!

But not very causal.

How many teams roll their eyes at values? How many teams (including some leadership teams) routinely deviate from mission or values, making them look like pretty words on the wall, but not much more?

Our research and work has discovered an approach to culture that is vastly more causal of ideal behavior than mission and values, yet we meet a lot of people who want to stick with their “slightly causal” mission+values system that works maybe 5% as well as ours, because it is also causal.

You see, most people struggle with seeing causality choices because they are stuck on believing the idea they already have does work. Instead of seeing something that could work 20x better, they forge ahead with something that works with 5% potency, reassured that their slightly-causal idea is a winner. Sadly, that win comes at the opportunity cost of 20x the success they should have had.

This whole newsletter is about cause and effect. To be even more precise, it’s about the best causes of the effects we want, because this newsletter is about the deepest causes of the effects we want, working at the brain level instead of the surface level most people talk about.

I’m not saying all of that as a sales pitch for this newsletter…I’m saying it as a sales pitch that you and the members of your team should become massive causality snobs, only accepting the most causal ideas you can surface, rather than executing on things that have weak (or even no) causality.

Let me give you an example of how causality helps us tackle any question best. Take one of the most important questions in business, for example: what causes our team to do better work?

Any ideas come to mind? Go ahead, start coming up with ideas.

Those ideas you’re having right now are your brain’s effort to explore causality.

Pay? Bonuses? Clear roles and responsibilities? Deadlines? OKRs? Aligned incentives? Good data? Perks? Work/life balance? Well-designed space? Appreciation? Pizza? Ping pong tables?

I’m sure a lot of ideas like those are coming to mind. But while many of these ideas are causal of teams doing better work, they are all surface level ideas, not brain-level ideas. That means we can do even better, because we know a thing or two about the brain.

At the deepest level, ping pong, OKRs, incentives, data, appreciation, clarity of roles, and more all just does stuff inside of people’s brains. These tactics cause brains to release dopamine, cortisol, adrenaline, oxytocin, feel clarity, and crave knowledge. The tactics that have the biggest impact to the human brain are inherently the best causes of the effects we want. This is why we want to understand the brain, so we can translate all of our surface level ideas into the brain-level reactions they cause, and understand that there are powerful and pure answers to critical business questions like these.

How clear? This clear:

What causes a human being to do the best work (objectively) is purpose, plus focus, plus ability.

If a brain…

…understands the impact of its choices and is connected to the humans their choices impact,

…and it chooses the correct level of focus,

…and it also has or accumulates the knowledge, skills, context, reasoning, and imagination required to turn their intent into output…

…this formula is fully, maximally causal of better work, especially over longer periods of time.

And this is bi-directional. A lack of purpose, focus, and ability is also causal of disengagement, toil, and poor execution.

What I want us to explore together are the most causal inputs to get the outcomes you want. And though that journey, I’d very much encourage you to understand causality deeply and become a true causality snob. Becoming a snob is how you and your team will save a lot of time and energy by doing things that work incredibly well and by not doing things that don’t. Causality is how you will negotiate on strategies and priorities. It is how you will anchor feedback and learning cycles. Once you see causality around you, you will never be able to unsee it.

Along our journey together, we will also continually discuss things (including many popular theories and books) that are not causal of your success, and even the things that are causal of you not succeeding.

Causal of you not succeeding?

Yep, this is a real thing: when we believe or try certain things (like believing that monetary incentives are most causal of the outcomes you want), those beliefs and attempts can cause you to be unsuccessful. The world is filled with advice that will cause you to be unsuccessful. And as a causality snob, you will be able to spot and avoid that advice with ease, enjoying vastly better outcomes along the way.

Causal Diagrams are incredibly powerful

So before we bend this back and connect the dots to reality, I think it’s important to make causality itself a useful tool to you and your team, starting this week. The incredibly-simple approach we’ll cover here might just 2x or 10x the speed at which a team can navigate debate and commit to vastly more effective action.

One of the best books (in my opinion) on the topic of causality is The Book of Why. In the Book of Why, a simple but profound point is made early on, and it carries through nearly all of the chapters: simple diagrams show causality much better than data. Of course, we will often need data to validate that these diagrams are telling the truth, but the diagrams are a much more obvious way for our brains to explore, express, and grapple with causality.

Here’s a very common example of cause and effect, in diagram form:

In the diagram, we see that rain is causal of umbrellas. That’s what the arrow means. Data can show us that there is a connection. Causality shows the direction of the connection and makes data more discussable.

If you’re going to become the best thinker and leader you can be, you must understand causality like this. What would this diagram look like for our sales? Marketing? Customer retention? Error rates? These diagrams are how we best explore the roots of all ideas, decisions, and execution, yet most teams are doing all sorts of things that are obviously weakly-causal, non causal, and causal of failure. All the evidence we need that they are not elite at discussing causality.

So looking over the last several weeks of content, let me turn those posts into examples of how you can use causality to make a point.

In my post, Why to understand the mind, this is the causal relationship I argued:

Let’s look at this critically. I want you to find the flaw in the logic and causality here, if you can. Even though you won’t, that’s the right way of looking at a causal diagram. Your aim is to find the flaw or make it better. When you can’t, you act.

So, what’s the main point of that post? The headline “Why to understand the mind” suggests that you should connect the first and last box directly. I am trying to get you to believe this sentence fully:

When I understand the mind, I get better outcomes.

So how did I get there in the post? I knew that once you decided that the system in the middle is true, you would inherently arrive at that conclusion.

Here’s how I unpacked the causality of this system the middle:

• Understanding the mind will make you more self aware - once you see your brain working, you will realize its instincts are powerful, yet they aren’t always right. You will understand your preferences and be able to spot when your preferences aren’t ideal.

• With greater self awareness, you will stop being so confident in your knowledge, personal experience, and pattern matching (red arrow).

• With greater self awareness, you will start becoming more confident in your logical abilities, instead. You will start to approach problems logically by understanding them instead of instinctively by trusting and repeating the patterns in your knowledge and memory.

• This shift in confidence will ripple through to a massive increase in your self control and self regulation. You will shift from being instinctive, patterned, and predictable to being logical, thoughtful, and dynamic.

• This shift in self control will be causal of you making better choices. Since you’ve used your intellect instead of your patterned knowledge, every single choice you make will be superior.

• Your better choices will be causal of better outcomes. Duh.

So, once you see all of that, your brain goes, “Got it. Yeah, so I guess it’s true that a better understanding of the mind will get me better outcomes.”

I also wrote a post about how a paid subscription to this newsletter would be causal of success in your life. Why? Because subscribing to this newsletter is probably one of the best sources you will ever find to better understanding the mind.

Subscribing is causal of understanding the mind, which is causal of better outcomes as an individual, manager, and leader. And I made that center box a dotted outline because we know from the previous diagram above that this box of “understanding the mind” represents a whole causal system (that we have hopefully already accepted above) represented by this one box. That is how we simplify causal diagrams so they don’t turn into giant, incomprehensible messes.

If you have already gotten a paid subscription, it is simply because your logical abilities felt like this causal diagram was correct. If you haven’t yet, it’s because your mind does not yet believe that this causal diagram is true.

So if you aren’t yet a subscriber yet, what better time than now to see that subscribing is causal of your success, and to pull the trigger (and give it a shot for a month)?

Still on the fence after learning about causality? Reply and tell me why!

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