Page 106 - The Power to Change Anything

Make the Undesirable Desirable 95

Engage in Moral Thinking

Most of us aren’t Perelman or anything like him. In addition to
the fact that we’re not math savants, we also don’t pursue a pas-
sion the way he does. Many of us spend much of our days going
through the motions without associating what we’re doing with
a sense of greater purpose. Consequently, these intrinsic sources
of motivation are almost never brought into play. Why is this?
Often humans react to their immediate environments as if
they were on autopilot. They don’t pause to consider how their
immediate choices reflect their ideals, values, or moral codes.
The connections between their actions and personal standards
are rarely “top of mind.” Michael Davis calls this failure to con-
nect values to action, “microscopic vision.” Ellen Langer calls
it “mindlessness.” Patricia Werhane prefers to refer to it as a lack
of “moral imagination.”
No matter their terms, each of the scholars was referring to
the human tendency to burrow into mundane details while fail-
ing to consider how they connect to our values, morals, and
personal standards. This means that when we make horrific and
costly mistakes, more often than not we’re not purposely choos-
ing to do bad things. It’s almost as if we’re not choosing at all.
It’s the lack of thought, not the presence of thought, that enables
our bad behavior.
As disconnected and unreflective as we may be during our
daily activities, it only gets worse when we feel threatened or
challenged. Under stress, when our emotions kick in, our time
horizons become even shorter, and we give less weight to our
abstract values. For instance, Robert Lund, vice president of
engineering at Morton Thiokol, sat in a meeting in January of
1986 where a group of very smart people deliberated about
whether or not to allow the space shuttle Challenger to launch.
Lund is a good guy. He’s a family man. He’s a good neigh-
bor. He’s an upstanding citizen. He rose to his rank as a senior
engineer at Thiokol because of his professionalism, dedication,