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How to Be a Fool-Proof Leader On April Fool’s Day and Every Day!

April 1, 2015 by Lizabeth Phelps

Today is April Fool’s Day–and in service of ensuring that YOU not be one yourself…here are some stories that will amaze you–and a vital quiz to take. 

In 1941, Alice Stewart was a resident in Oxford, England at the Radcliffe Infirmary. She was a highly respected doctor. She treated patients, but also undertook research projects on problematic, puzzling disease patterns. One in particular was the rate of leukemia affecting children ages 2-4. 

The high rate of cancer in this age group was odd; by that age, Stewart knew, most children are healthy. And more perplexing, these children were from countries with good medical care; they weren’t poor. She set out to interview the mothers and found the answer: 

A single diagnostic X-ray was enough to double the risk of early cancer death. Within three years, Stewart and her colleagues had traced 80% of all childhood cancer deaths in England to X-rays. 

Yet, imagine this: doctors continued X-raying pregnant mothers for the next twenty-five years!!!! 

How could doctors the world over be so blind? 

Simply, Stewart had to be seen as wrong. If she was right, it meant too many other things also had to be wrong. It couldn’t be true that radiation was both a new wonder tool AND also killed children. It could not be true that doctors “cured patients” AND made them sick. The easiest way to reduce the pain of two opposing “truths” is to eliminate one of them. “It was easier for doctors to 

cling to their beliefs and to the idea that doctors are authoritative, smart, good people—than to save children!!” 

Imagine that!! 

This is one of many stories in an incredibly provocative book I’m reading, Willful Blindness: Why We Ignore the Obvious at Our Peril by Margaret Heffernan. 

“We are prepared to pay a very high price to preserve our most cherished ideas,” she writes. 

And we know this. We see it every day. We see governments turning blind eyes to their own behavior; executives turning blind eyes to the unethical actions of their corporations. We’ve watched nations be willfully blind about genocide; the Catholic Church about abuse of its children. 

“We prefer ignorance to knowledge, and deal with conflict and change by imagining it out of existence. We don’t want to change, so we pretend we don’t know.” 

And, Heffernan points out in her opening chapter, we all do it. We are fiercely committed to our own status-quos, to what is comfortable and easy for us.

The statistics on who we marry and whom we befriend show that we choose those who will reinforce our self-identities and turn away from those who will challenge them. And so we ignore realities..at our own peril. 

We smoke, overeat, stay in abusive relationships, fail to speak up about abuses and injustices. 

Heffernan: “We mostly admit the information that makes us feel great about ourselves, while conveniently filtering out whatever unsettles our…egos and most vital beliefs.
Ideology powerfully masks what is obvious, dangerous or Absurd. Fear of conflict, fear of change keeps us this way.” 

And I think we would all agree there is no better definition of “fool” than one who ignores the facts, the data, the reality staring us in the face. 

So, today is your chance to “fool-proof” yourself! 

To check-in on all the areas of your life where you are being willfully blind—and as a consequence, harming others and most assuredly yourself. 

Here’s a small quiz–that will only be effective if you dare to be honest with your answers. 

Why would you take this quiz? Because if you’re in business for yourself, you are a leader, and this is critical to your success as one. 

1. What have I been pretending not to see about my business?
   (Or career.)
2. What have I been pretending not to see about my clients?
   (Or boss?)
3. What have I been pretending not to see about my finances?
4. What have I been pretending not to see about my relationship to money?
5. What have I been pretending not to see about my bank account?
6. What have I been pretending not to see about my mate?
7. What have I been pretending not to see about my friends?
8. What have I been pretending not to see about my family?
9. What have I been pretending not to see about my moods and attitudes?
10. What have I been pretending not to see about my choices?
11. What have I been pretending not to see about my lifestyle?
12. What have I been pretending not to see about my living conditions?
13. What have I been pretending not to see about my health?
14. What have I been pretending not to see about my eating habits?
15. What have I been pretending not to see about what is lacking in my life?
16. What have I been pretending not to see in what I have been tolerating?
17. What have I been pretending not to see about my likely future?

If you follow me, you are committed to changing the world in some way. You are here to wake up the sleepers. To wake up those who are willfully blind. 

Well, here’s one of those nasty realities you can’t be willfully blind about:

If you’re a coach, consultant, trainer or speaker waking up others…you cannot be turning a blind eye to anything in your life.

As a leader, you must be awake and conscious yourself. 

In one of the studies Heffernan recounts, nurses were “tested”  to see if they would blindly accept orders from a doctor that conflicted with their primary duty to care for patients.

Prior to the test, the researchers surveyed 33 graduate and student nurses and asked how they predicted the experiment would go. Thirty-one believed the subjects would not administer
the medication the nurses would be told by a doctor to give. 

The study showed that 21 of the 22 participating nurses would have administered the drug. The research team wrote: “Insofar as the nurse is concerned, [she is] operating to a considerable extent below the threshold of consciousness.” 

It is a point Heffernan makes about us all. 

You are a transformation artist. An agent of change. You cannot operate at below the threshold of consciousness. 

On this Fool’s Day, commit to yourself forever not to be one–so you can do the work you are here to do! 

Here’s a 2-minute video-story I created recently about this very phenomenon. Go take a look! 

Here’s to changing the world–FOOL-PROOF!