Autopilot – what were you thinking (Part 1)

We all know what autopilot is as it refers to flying – but what about in terms of our own behavior? There have been so many occasions where I have felt this “autopilot” feeling as I subconsciously made it through each day, every decision and lived life in this very unintentional way.

In our book we defined autopilot as a “mode of living or working in which little purposeful or active thinking takes place.” It is synonymous with unconscious behavior. You can simulate this state by remembering a time when you drove home from a tough day at the office or back from the airport after a stressful business trip, and during the drive a disjointed tape of the stressful moments earlier in the day replayed in a loop in your mind. All of a sudden, you arrive at your home and have no memory of the drive. You drove home in a kind of daze and can’t even remember stopping at lights or making turns down particular streets.

Autopilot may seem like a benign state, but it is an insidious condition that can diminish work effectiveness and destroy careers. You would think that smart, savvy professionals would avoid autopilot since it’s clearly not in their best interest to go through work unaware of what’s going on inside of them, yet even some CEOs fall into the autopilot trap. This is a phenomenon that has an illustrative parallel in nature. John Fabre, a French naturalist, conducted an experiment involving processionary caterpillars. As the name implies, these caterpillars blindly follow the one in front of it. In the experiment, Fabre placed a flowerpot filled to the rim with dirt and pine needles, which provides these caterpillars with sustenance. The caterpillars were released next to the flowerpot and traveled in a processionary circle around the flowerpot, and within a short period of time, all the caterpillars dropped dead of starvation, even though food was just six inches away.

They were marching on autopilot, unable to break the unthinking grip of their habitual behaviors even to save themselves.

Last week in the New York Times there was an interesting article called “Mirrors don’t lie. Mislead? Oh, yes” which showed new studies regarding the use of mirrors and autopilot. The studies showed that “subjects tested in a room with a mirror have been found to work harder, to be more helpful and to be less inclined to cheat, compared with control groups performing the same exercises in non-mirrored settings. Reporting in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Neil Macrae, Galen Bodenhausen and Alan Milne found that people in a room with a mirror were comparatively less likely to judge others based on social stereotypes about, for example, sex, race or religion.”

What is interesting is that a connection was made that "When people are made to be self-aware, they are likelier to stop and think about what they are doing." Dr. Bodenhausen stated that "a byproduct of that awareness may be a shift away from acting on autopilot toward more desirable ways of behaving."

Many professionals are locked into autopilot routines. They run meetings the same way they have for years. They interact with customers as they have always interacted with them. They deal with crises in the same manner as they have dealt with crises in the past. As a result, they don’t take into consideration if an old approach that may have worked 15 years ago still works. I am sure we are all guilty of autopilot behavior at some point in time. In the next blog (Part 2) we will discuss how you end up in autopilot in the first place.