"The consulting institute that named the mental trap behind most workplace conflict."
The Arbinger Institute is an organizational training and consulting firm whose book, Leadership and Self-Deception, has become a widely used text in corporate leadership development for its accessible, story-driven explanation of a deceptively simple idea: many of our interpersonal and organizational problems stem from a kind of self-deception the authors call being 'in the box.' Told as a business fable, the book explains how a single small act of betraying our own sense of what we should do for another person can lead us to start viewing that person as an object — an obstacle, a vehicle, or an irrelevance — rather than as a person with needs and hopes as legitimate as our own. Once inside this mental 'box,' the Institute argues, virtually every strategy or solution we generate to fix the resulting conflict actually makes things worse, because the problem was never really about the other person's behavior — it was about our own distorted way of seeing them.
Our in-depth summaries and reviews of his work
The Arbinger Institute's framework for escaping the "box" of self-deception that sabotages leadership, relationships, and results. Practical 7-day plan included.
Read Summary →The Institute argues that betraying our own sense of what we should do for someone else is the moment that triggers self-deception, causing us to start seeing that person as an object rather than a person.
Once we view someone as an obstacle or object, the Institute argues, our proposed fixes to the resulting conflict actually make it worse, since the underlying problem was our own distorted perception, not their behavior.
The path to more effective leadership, in this framework, is recognizing when we've begun to see others as objects and consciously choosing to see them as people again.
"Self-deception blinds us to the true causes of problems, and once we're blinded, all the 'solutions' we can think of will actually make matters worse."— Leadership and Self-Deception
"We're either in the box or out of the box toward each other at any given time."— Leadership and Self-Deception
The Arbinger Institute's framework for escaping the "box" of self-deception that sabotages leadership, relationships, and results. Practical 7-day plan included.
