In 1846, doctors at Vienna General Hospital were killing their patients. Not intentionally—they'd taken the Hippocratic oath—but they were carrying microscopic pathogens from cadavers to the maternity ward, driving mortality rates to one in ten. When Ignatz Semmelweis proposed hand-washing, the medical community didn't embrace the breakthrough. They ridiculed him, fired him, and institutionalized him. He died at forty-seven, the same year Louis Pasteur proved germ theory.
The parallels to organizational life are uncomfortable. We show up every day, dedicated to our mission, blind to the problems we're carrying from interaction to interaction. We rate our organizations a 4.5 on mindset. We rate ourselves a 6.8. That fifty percent gap—the self-deception gap—exists in every organization Arbinger has ever measured. And as long as it exists, transformation is impossible. Because how do you invite change when no one sees themselves as part of the problem?
This webinar introduces the two mindsets (inward: others don't matter like I matter; outward: others matter like I matter), the Warren Higgins case study (brilliant, hardworking, impossible to work with—and completely blind to it), and the fundamental redefinition of what a "job" actually is. Spoiler: you cannot be hard to work with and good at your job, because your job IS working with others.
Cameron Cozzens walks through three practical tools—the Outward Mindset Pattern (SAM), the Job Map, and the Three Questions—that allow any employee to reorient their work around impact rather than output. The result: an onboarding process that starts with "who do you affect and how can you help them?" rather than "here's your task list."
Learning Objectives
- Recognize self-deception as blindness to how you create problems for others, combined with resistance to any suggestion that you might be part of the problem
- Distinguish inward from outward mindset and identify the three ways we objectify others (vehicles, obstacles, irrelevancies)
- Identify the "outwardly nice" inward mindset—doing things for others without understanding their actual goals, challenges, and objectives
- Apply SAM (See Others, Adjust Efforts, Measure Impact) as the pattern for turning outward
- Use the Job Map and Three Questions to reorient any role around impact rather than output
