The Great Furnace Caper, Part II

“Daddy!” came the all-too-familiar cry of our soon-to-be three year old, Parker, at 3 AM.

For whatever reason I am, and have always been, the night watchman, so I rolled out of bed to see what was up.

“A bird keeps flying into my window,” he whimpered. “There it is again.”

As I heard the bang, I knew exactly what was going on. This was the first night since I’d fixed the furnace by changing the air filter. And, as I mentioned in last week’s column, the heat was now roaring through the duct work into everyone’s rooms. The only problem was that since the ducts are somewhat flexible — think thin metal sheeting — sections would now expand when the heat kicked on and contract when it kicked off, creating a dull but certainly audible bang that reverberated through the bowels of our home.

With poor Parker’s room being right above where the furnace is situated, he was treated to the loudest earful. And at 3 years of age, his imagination is also the most fertile. As I sat on his bed, I explained exactly what was going on. I told him how, because Daddy had taken out that dirty air filter (he had watched me), the heat was now causing the ducts to make noise. I even took him downstairs into the furnace room where he watched me push on the side of a duct so he could hear the same noise he’d heard in his room. Amazingly — and I say that because it was the first time I saw him really process such a complex explanation — he both understood and was soothed in the understanding. And to this day, he has never once been upset by those noises.

As I laid back in bed, I thought about his hypothesis that a bird was flying into his window. Now, this makes perfect sense. I’ve got a few feeders in the backyard so, unfortunately, we do get the occasional collision. Also, the noise of the expanding and contracting ducts could have mimicked the sound of a bird hitting the window.

Just as nature abhors a vacuum, so does the mind abhor a mystery, and thus we see that young minds will not just complain of a causeless banging noise, but of “a bird hitting my window.” Brilliant. But what is important for you to remember is that such a dynamic is not reserved for the child brain, but continues with us into adulthood. It is an inheritance of our evolution and, as Michio Kaku writes, hardwired into who we are.

“Although consciousness is a patchwork of competing and often contradictory tendencies, the left brain ignores inconsistencies and papers over obvious gaps in order to give us a smooth sense of a single ‘I.’ In other words, the left brain is constantly making excuses, some of them harebrained and preposterous, to make sense of the world. It is constantly asking ‘Why?’ and dreaming up excuses even if the question has no answer.” ― Michio Kaku, The Future of the Mind: The Scientific Quest to Understand, Enhance, and Empower the Mind

When I thought about this dynamic, I immediately pictured the glass-walled conference room in one of my old job settings. And I thought of how whenever the right (or wrong, depending on your perspective) combination of people got together in there, the rest of us would automatically start congealing to debate what was up. And you can be sure the answer was never, “I don’t know.” We came up with any and every explanation for the summit — who was getting wacked, which division was dragging the rest of the company down or what the latest corporate fire drill would be about. Reading Kaku’s work, I found a biological reason for why we do this. We need to know, and if we don’t know (or nobody will tell us) we’re sure as heck going to guess.

What are the implications for you? First off, know that your people are doing this — all the time, and in every situation. And know that the greater the impetus to do it, the greater their powers of imagination. So if you’ve actually got something cooking — merger, outsourcing, RIF — you’d better get out there and communicate the truth before the troops concoct their own approximation of it.

This does not mean your folks are bad, just that they are humans, and therefore are programmed to act in certain ways, to do certain things and to fill in certain gaps. Fill them in and you get to create the narrative, you get to shape the spin. Ignore this dynamic and the team will fill it in for you, and they’ll take their sweet time around the water cooler doing it.