The dopamine hit in being right

Have you ever known you shouldn't say or do something, and said or done it anyway? I have. And it didn't go well.

What surprised me, as things were going badly, was the layer underneath the regret. Deep down, even though I was upset that things had gone badly exactly as I predicted, I was secretly happy that my prediction had been right. The secret happiness inside the upset was the dopamine hit.

People get a dopamine hit from predicting something that turns out to be true, even if it sucks that it turned out to be true. That hit is part of why unproductive cycles are so hard to break. The brain rewards us for being right, whether or not being right helps us.

Why the cycle keeps winning

Think about a team member who says, "I know this meeting is going to be a waste of time," before a meeting they helped make unproductive. Or the CEO who thinks, "If I don't make this call, nobody will," and then collects evidence that nobody made the call. Each time the prediction comes true, the brain gets a little reward, and the cycle gets more entrenched.

Confirmation can be rewarding, even when what it confirms is something we didn't want to happen. There is a peculiar satisfaction in thinking, I knew it. The brain reinforces confirmation, especially when it resolves uncertainty, and it doesn't ask whether being right helped you. This is how the brain works, not a personal failing. It simply likes being right, and once a prediction pays off, even a painful one, we are more likely to follow that pattern again.

In enterprises, this can show up in many places, including with a leader whose habitual response keeps reproducing the same predicted undesirable result. Each outcome confirms the underlying belief, and the belief keeps producing the outcome.

The belief can even help produce its own evidence. If everyone has learned that the CEO eventually makes the difficult call, they wait. The CEO sees them waiting and thinks: Exactly. If I don't do it, nobody will. What looks like proof may partly be the system adapting to the leader.

Breaking the cycle

The cycle is a loop: a belief drives a behavior, the behavior produces a response from the people around the leader, and that response comes back looking like confirmation of the belief. Because the loop confirms itself, it tends to keep running until one of its parts changes.

Once a CEO can see the loop, they can change one element and watch what happens. Change the behavior, and the organizational response changes with it; change what the organization has learned to expect, and the old behavior no longer produces the confirmation it used to. The loop that locked itself in place can be taken apart the same way it was built, one element at a time, and each change shows its results quickly enough to tell whether the new pattern is taking hold.

The hard part is that these predictions are invisible to the person making them. A leader can feel the cycle and still not see the belief underneath it that keeps confirming itself. That's one reason the first thing I do with a new client is the EQPlus^® Motivation Profile. It takes very little time, and it makes those internal predictions visible fast: the motivational patterns driving a leader's decisions and behavior, the ones they have been confirming for years without knowing it. More importantly, it gives us a shared language for the conversations that follow, which is where the real work happens. Once a leader can see those patterns, they can work with them instead of being run by them.

The question worth sitting with

Change becomes easier when you understand what you are actually up against. You are fighting a reward system that has learned to prefer a familiar outcome over a better one.

The question worth sitting with: Where is an unproductive cycle showing up in you or your enterprise, and what is it worth to you to change it?