ROT131
The ‘ZOO’ can be a strange and nasty place, but embracing the fact
that we live inside it is the first step towards thriving within it.
Managing in the
Zone of Oblivion
by Mihnea Moldoveanu
MANAGING IN THE WHAT?
? That’s right: in the ZOO, or the Zone Of The ZOO is, nevertheless, where the action is, if we follow
Oblivion – both yours and that of others. The ZOO is a special both scrutinized introspection and the very large number of stud-
place: it comprises all of the facts, feelings and experiences that ies on the structure and dynamics of attention, awareness and
make a huge difference to you and your business, but which you social perception.
neither know, nor know that you don’t know. Consider this: is the CEO’s stern rejection of your plan the
“Ahhh!”– you will say, “I have heard about this before – in result of careful reasoning or of her state of low blood sugar at the
some classroom or workshop: slightly greying gentlemen telling end of the day? If it crosses your mind that she is unreasonable
me to beware of ‘unknown unknowns’with a look of self-impor- because youare near the end of a four-hour meeting with no snacks,
tant quizzicality on their faces.” I, for one, have never seen has she just seen the slight glimmer of irony in your eye and inter-
someone’s behaviour actually change as a result of hearing such preted it correctly, or is she making a sour face because the
a tired homily, just as you cannot actually grow eyes on the back hypoglycaemiahas become acute? Impossible to tell: what you do
of your head, no matter how hard you try. not know about her seems to always just out-pace what you do
Rotman MagazineWinter 2011 /47
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Ahmedabad from Apr 2024 to Jun 2024.
know. But you have to be careful with those facial muscles: your The episodes I describe are not ‘exceptional’ by any stretch of the
expression may give you away at any time. imagination; they are, rather, part of the very fabric of everyday
organizational life. But, because they are painful to think about
A few other typical scenarios from the ZOO: and even more painful to openly discuss, benign ignorance of them
seems to be a good way forward. That is, until ignorance is no longer
• Is your fund manager’s sudden bullishness the result of some bliss, but hell.
special insight or rather that of a torrid and illicit love affair Behavioural scientists have caught on to certain elements of
that provides a local hormonal colouring to his perception of the ZOO and have duly documented some of its symptoms: Dan
the facts? Asking is out of the question, because of the self- Simons of Harvard has shown that viewers of a basketball game
evident but often-violated rule – at least in North America – induced to count the number of passes among members of the
enjoining the coupling of business and personal life. same team in a short sequence have no immediate recollection of
a large man in a gorilla suit strutting across the court; Raymond
• Is the chairman’s broad and congratulatory smile addressed Nickerson of Tufts canvassed empirical studies indicating that
at you, or, rather, to the other people around the table, each of the members of even ‘well-functioning’ couples falsely
whom he intends to see him smile at you so that they do believes he or she knows what his or her partner believes about an
not think he bears you a grudge – which, unfortunately, he issue important to both; and MIT’s Sandy Pentland showed that
does? Careful, though: he will catch on that you have the outcome of some negotiations is far better predicted by a
caught on if your response deviates one bit from the series of physiological (skin conductance, heartbeat) and behav-
‘pleased and flattered’ script. ioural (distance, pitch, loudness of oral noises) measures taken on
the participants in real time, during the course of the negotiation,
• Does your colleague know about the plan that you showed to than by the substantive issues at hand and the positions of the
the Board last night because he guessed, or rather because he negotiators. Perhaps most depressing for my academic colleagues,
was blind-carbon-copied on the slide deck by the CFO, with Robert Rosenthal and Nalini Ambady of the University of
whom he is in complicity? And, by the way, what does he California (Riverside) have shown that graduate students’ end-of-
think you think about all this? the-course instructor ratings are highly correlated with their
reaction to the first few seconds of their first class. And we were so
• Does the chair of your audit committee suspect that the sure it was all about the content.
CEO you hired to clean up the business is secretly engaging Unfortunately, documenting these effects is very often where
in related party transactions precisely because he believes behavioural science stops, leaving managers asking: “OK, I get that
that no one believes that anyone would be foolish or auda- we live in one big ZOO, but what can I do about it?” My suggestion:
cious enough to engage in such dealings in the midst of a cor- rather than just marvelling at the foibles of experimental subjects
porate scandal? And, how do you signal this to her without and obsessing over subliminal signals from your boss, take con-
triggering the wave of destruction and hysteria that usually scious steps to understand the ZOO – both yours and that of the
follows such revelations? people with whom you work and play.
• Do you know that your key employees have all been inter- Navigating the Mind
viewed in depth by your staunchest competitor, whose under- To make progress on understanding the ZOO, think of it as a zone
standing of corporate ‘hardball’, it turns out, is a bit harder or a region (see Figure One) – in the way that Patagonia or
than yours? How will you broach the topic with them once Wyoming are regions. What better way to understand a region
you have the ‘occular proof ’ of their disloyalty, without push- than via the use of a map – which contains some representation of
ing them out the door for good? that zone that makes it possible for you to navigate it. To build up
some traction – not to mention courage – let us start by mapping
48 / Rotman Magazine Winter 2011
This document is authorized for use only in Prof. Parvinder Gupta and Prof. Pradyumana Khokle's PGPX (Term : 1) Organizational Behaviour (OB)2024 - 25 at Indian Institute of Management -
Ahmedabad from Apr 2024 to Jun 2024.
A Map of the ZOO Figure One
Zone of Informational
Oblivion
(The ZOIO)
Zone of Zone of Zone of Zone of
Awareness Attention Perception Computational
(ZOA) (ZOAT) (ZOP) Oblivion
(ZOCO)
the areas of your mind that you are aware of, attentive to and even know that you know it. You might ‘see’ a sudden lapse in
perceptive of. Unfortunately, this doesn’t cover as much territory employee accountability and an increase in absenteeism, in the
as you think. sense that if you are asked: ‘Have you noticed during the past three
months that after Barbara leaves at 5:45 pm, the halls clear?’ you
The Zone of Awareness. The ZOA is made up of the things you would say ‘Yes’; but, you do not take this into account when you
know, see, hear, touch and smell and whose implications you are make your quarterly plan for releasing a product ahead of schedule
actively tracking and incorporating into your behavioural plans. In based on increased levels of effort. Inconvenient truths are best
this zone, you know stuff and you also know that you know it – this forgotten when the time comes to make bold forecasts.
is where ‘awareness’ comes from. You see the sullen look on the
CFO’s face and carefully modulate your voice to draw some mean- The Zone of Perception. Let us go a little further out into our
ingful sentences from her. True, you do not know where the sullen- wilderness, to the ZOP. Here, you sense things – they are there and
ness comes from – that is still in your ZOO; but you have become they register on your senses, but you do not explicitly recall having
sufficiently adept at reading her facial expressions to know what to sensed them. This is the ‘gorilla-land’ documented by Simon – the
say in order to continue the dialogue. You hear what your business place in which your neurons know much more than your mind
development group is saying about the sudden shift in market does. Your eyes have seen the latest industry figures showing a sud-
demand, and can quickly figure out the implications for your den drying up of talent in your region, but your mind has not reg-
three-year EBITDA. True, you do not know where the evidence istered them, and you are therefore blissful in your pursuit of tal-
for the shift came from, if you are being deceived by your own ent by the usual means and channels that keep your HR depart-
direct reports and the like; but you do know that a shift was report- ment and head-hunters humming along. Your ears have heard from
ed and can figure out what it means for your prognostications, all your lead product developers that they have encountered bugs
other things being equal. which they cannot solve in a predictable amount of time, but
somehow these sensory experiences do not get turned into words
The Zone of Attention. Next up on our guided tour is the ZOAT, and numbers when it comes time to put together your project
which comprises the things you know and in various ways sense, chart. Should we really be surprised by the findings of Stephen
but which you have not fit into your behavioural ‘master plan’. Mezias and Bill Starbuck showing that executives and line man-
Here, you know stuff, but you do not necessarily know what differ- agers cannot recall even basic information about their business
ence the stuff you know makes to you. Quite often, you do not and industry that is directly relevant to their current quarter
Rotman Magazine Winter 2011 / 49
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Ahmedabad from Apr 2024 to Jun 2024.
business plan? I think not: the ZOP is actually a trap, which creates start-up called Flarion – a figure and a target reminiscent of the
an illusion of awareness that, in turn, functions to make human heady post-millennial dot.com. Few – if any – of the ‘respectables’
creatures overly confident about the link between what their eyes had bothered to understand Flarion’s patent portfolio, which con-
and ears register and what their so called minds know. tained an innocuous-looking patent – awarded in 2002 – for a
crucial piece of technology that is now at the very core of all the
The Zone(s) of Oblivion. OK, that’s enough about the ‘feel-good’ new-generation wireless systems, placing Qualcomm back in the
areas of your mind: now we are left with the ZOO, whose land- ‘hunt’ for cost-less revenue, if not quite in the driver’s seat. The
scape is not unlike the darkness of the Congo jungle in the days of good news about ZOCO is that you can make headway in it by
the ivory trade or of the American Midwest during the War of thinking it through a little – or, a lot – more deeply than you are oth-
Independence. But here, too, a distinction goes a long way to mak- erwise accustomed to doing. And that usually means thinking it
ing the ‘unknown unknown’ a tad more scrutable: the ZOO actu- through a little more deeply than the vast majority of those who
ally consists of not one zone, but two. currently have ‘expert opinions’.
But the darkness of being-in-the-world is, unfortunately, far
The Zone of Computational Oblivion – or ZOCO – comprises vaster, and much of it is taken up by the Zone of Informational
the things you could have figured out on the basis of knowing what Oblivion – inhabited by those things that you do not see, do not
you know, but have not, because you have not thought hard know, and cannot figure out on the basis of what you do see and
enough about it. Consider Intel, circa 2004. Analysts had a field know right now. The trouble with ZOIO is that the smarter you
day questioning its investment in broadband wireless chip sets, think you are, the less likely you are to penetrate it. By one
and in particular its venturesome meddling – to the tune of informed account, Henry Kissinger, a prototypically ‘brainy’ man
$200MM at first, followed by a $900MM investment in a new – at least in days when we thought the brain was about thinking and
service provider – in an upstart new technology for the next gener- not so much about feeling – found himself trapped in his own
ation of cellular phones and such, called WiMax. ‘What is a RISC ZOIO when he did not realize that the Soviet diplomats with
processor maker doing investing in radio frequency chip sets, of whom he was negotiating had figured out his proclivity to gorge
which it knows nothing?’ – they asked rhetorically, and basked in himself on Russian pastries and the effects of the pastries (edginess,
the apparent eloquence of their prose. It did not cross their minds impatience) on his ability to sustain prolonged discussions, and was
that the CPU behemoth had figured out that the best way to keep therefore oblivious to the diligence with which they made sure that
selling CPU’s is to increase the demand for higher processing ample supplies were always – under the guise of hospitality – readi-
power by the end user of laptops and other gizmos, that the best ly available for their entretiens with him. ‘Food matters’ – the
way to get users to buy souped up computing devices is to increase empirically minded social scientist might say, but that is neither
the bandwidth of their connectivity, and that the best way to stir here nor there; what is at issue is a far more challenging problem,
the all-powerful 3G alliance to build new and more potent cell which has to do with your understanding of your own ZOO.
phones would be to sire and nurture a scary competitor – all of The importance and pervasiveness of the ZOIO is also what
which, circa 2010, is precisely what happened. should render much of game-theoretic analyses of strategy highly
Or, take Qualcomm, Inc, the dean of the ‘old’ cellular tele- suspect: game theory is a ‘daylight’ technology, designed to help
phone handset business, sitting pretty atop a revenue stream from executives figure out optimal sequences of moves, countermoves
patent royalties which at one point reached 15 per cent off the top and likely end states and end games, given that they know their
line of service providers’ revenues – enough to fuel a $6Bn/year IP competitors’ strategies and payoffs, and vice-versa. But, ask your-
generation and prosecution machine: it raised the eyebrows of self this: what if my competitor had just sat in on this massive
bespectacled analysts halfway up their venerably wrinkled fore- debacle we call an ‘executive retreat’ and figured out that the fate of
heads when it shelled out $600MM in 2006 for a revenue-less our next-generation platform lies in the hands of five people who
50 / Rotman Magazine Winter 2011
This document is authorized for use only in Prof. Parvinder Gupta and Prof. Pradyumana Khokle's PGPX (Term : 1) Organizational Behaviour (OB)2024 - 25 at Indian Institute of Management -
Ahmedabad from Apr 2024 to Jun 2024.
are actively looking elsewhere for gainful employment? And why is The third manoeuvre is intuitive, but painful. It is inspired by
it that these same competitors do not constantly interview our one of the maxims of the Marquis de la Rochefoucauld, which
people for potential job openings, just as we too, are thinking of admonishes that the most talented crooks and charlatans act in a
doing to them? Would we know it if they did? Would they know it trustworthy fashion for very long periods of time, so that, at the
if we did? Hmmm... right moment, they can deceive their unsuspecting collaborators on
The ZOIO is tricky because it is so pervasive. It is everywhere the most advantageous possible terms. Which sets up the following
you turn your gaze from; and others – the ones who see your face, question: how to tell between a truly trustworthy person and a tal-
will always have privileged access to your ZOIO, which makes up ented criminal? Instead of engaging in the paranoia that the
the lion’s share of your ZOO. questions triggers, we can, instead, turn the Marquis’ little maxim
into a procedure for probing the ZOO: Look at your closest, most
Thriving in the ZOIO trustworthy advisers, friends and collaborators through both lenses
Unlike ZOCO, where you can dependably make progress by think- (true-hearted and emotionally-intelligent felon); flip among the two
ing harder, making more connections, and getting that under-uti- lenses, and notice what you are seeing in both cases. If it is true – as
lized neocortex to blast through more associations per second, the Jean Paul Sartre and Rene Descartes before him suggested, that
ZOIO only occasionally yields to three kinds of manoeuvres. human emotions are sense organs, then we should be able to tune these
The first is highly intuitive: if you cannot see behind yourself organs onto different regions of our ZOO by changing our feelings
all that well, then turn your head more rapidly. Scan, in other words. and altering our thoughts, thus turning the mind into a flashlight.
Focus not only on what your CFO says, but on how he says it, what
happens to his eyelids, to the flow of blood into his head and neck In closing
area, to the changes in pitch and loudness of his voice, and to his “Be a scanner!”
gaze: what happens to his risorius muscle when you behold his gaze “Seek out the eyes of thine enemies!”
directly? Don’t query your sales managers linearly, placidly and “Tinker with your own emotions so as to turn them into search-
over the phone – go there! – and figure out what is happening on lights!”
the ground, with the customer, with the field support staff; and by These are hardly ‘easy’ injunctions to follow; but then, the
the way: what are they all doing on the flight back? ZOO is a strange and often nasty place. Once we embrace the
The second manoeuvre is less intuitive, and it has to do with the inevitable predicament that we already live inside of it, the choice
fact that the others are likely to know more – much more – about between what is easy and what is optimal becomes clear.
the most relevant parts of your ZOO than you do. So, use them as
your rear view mirrors! You can figure out your own ‘tells’ from the
reactions (sudden focus of the gaze on your face, slight movement
of the ears, indicating interested attunement) of those who are try-
ing to figure you out. And, of course, it follows that the best mirrors
may not be your friends and allies, but rather precisely the ones that Acknowledgment: The author would like to thank all of the animals that have
are trying to figure you out not for the purpose of helping you, but attempted to enter his ZOO at various times during the past 10 years for the
for the purpose of helping themselves. This is, perhaps, also one of numerous and indelible insights they have provided.
the most under-valued roles of the senior advisor and consigliere –
that of a friendly enemy or inimical friend who helps the top man- Mihnea Moldoveanu is the Marcel Desautels Professor of
agement team explore its collective ZOO without in fact Integrative Thinking and director of the Desautels Centre for
Integrative Thinking at the Rotman School of Management.
exploiting it, thus making it possible for the client to take ‘the view Rotman faculty research is ranked #11 in the world by the
from outside’ of itself. Financial Times.
Rotman Magazine Winter 2011 / 51
This document is authorized for use only in Prof. Parvinder Gupta and Prof. Pradyumana Khokle's PGPX (Term : 1) Organizational Behaviour (OB)2024 - 25 at Indian Institute of Management -
Ahmedabad from Apr 2024 to Jun 2024.
