Every team runs on stories. Mental models, in plain language: the stories we use to make sense of work. Whether effort is worth it. Who's allowed to be seen. What happens if you get it wrong. They drive decisions and behaviour, usually without anyone saying them out loud.
The stories I work with aren't the ones you share around the campfire. They're the stories your team tells itself. I surface these stories with leaders and teams to test them against reality. Neuroscience helps us understand how they're written, and coaching is one way to change how they end.
Ford, 1973, and the infamous Pinto
Back in 2013, during my MBA, I came across a story that has stayed with me ever since. It comes from Dennis Gioia, who became a renowned professor of management and organisational behaviour. In the mid-1970s, aged 26, he spent two years as Ford's vehicle recall coordinator: a classic child of the sixties who wanted to change the company from the inside.
It was clear to me that somebody needed to prod these staid companies into socially responsible action. Dennis Gioia
Gioia ran about a hundred active recall campaigns, more than half safety related, fed by field reports from across the country. His rule for flagging a possible recall: at least twenty reports showing a pattern, plus a cause you could trace.
Then the Pinto reports started arriving. Rear-end crashes with fuel tanks splitting. Only a handful, but they described cars catching fire at slow speeds. The engineer who inspected the first one spent all day on the car and found nothing wrong: a small car hit by a big car, it lit up, what did you expect?
Driving then was genuinely dangerous. In 1972, the year before Gioia took the job, 54,589 people died on American roads, the worst year on record, and driving was more than three times as deadly per kilometre as now. Seatbelts were optional and drink driving quietly tolerated. Australia's road toll peaked in 1970 at 3,798 deaths, six times today's rate. Against that baseline, burnt cars didn't stand out. Almost nothing did.
The Pinto file held five reports against his threshold of twenty, with no traceable cause. So it went nowhere. Gioia wasn't corrupt and wasn't covering anything up. He was doing the job exactly as he understood it, and as it was expected to be done.
Then he saw one of the cars. A burnt-out hulk at the inspection depot staff called the Chamber of Horrors. The revulsion was immediate, and it did what months of reports had not: he put the Pinto up for review himself. But his colleagues, who had read the same thin file but hadn't stood in front of the car, wondered why he'd even raised it. Five reports isn't a pattern. Those could all be outliers. Everyone voted against recommending recall. Including him.
Then, in 1974, the case came back. One morning Gioia found an engineering report lying on his desk. Dated 1970, it showed exactly why the cars were burning: the Pinto's rear axle was borrowed from a European Ford that needed four anchor studs. The Pinto didn't, but nobody removed them, and in a rear-end crash at around 40 km/h they punctured the fuel tank. To this day he doesn't know who left the report. But now he had his traceable cause, and he warned the executive committee a big recall was coming.
Ford tested the competition. Comparable small cars without the stud problem ruptured at about 44 km/h; the Pinto at 40. A recall meant US$30 million to buy 4 km/h, on a car statistically no worse than the cars nobody was recalling. For the second time, he voted no. He drove a Pinto himself the whole time, and later sold it to his sister.
He had a story about what a recall looks like. The Pinto didn't match it.
Years later, as an academic, he analysed his own decisions using script theory: the idea that experience builds mental scripts, and scripts run automatically. That is often a gift. It's how experts make fast decisions without exhausting themselves. It's also how you can look directly at information and not see what's in it.
Gioia's conclusion wasn't that he lacked morality or ethics. It was that his script had no slot for them. The question of whether this was a moral situation never came up, because scripts don't raise questions. They answer them, quietly, before you notice you were asked.
The brain sees what it expects
Neuroscience has since given this idea a deeper foundation. Neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett describes the brain as a prediction machine. It doesn't take the world in first and interpret it second: it forecasts what's coming, then uses your senses to check the forecast. When reality roughly matches the prediction, the prediction is what you experience. Only a big enough mismatch forces an update. Your brain sees what it expects to see. It's why you can't tickle yourself: it lands exactly as forecast, so your brain turns it down before you feel it.
Through prediction and correction, your brain continually creates and revises your mental model of the world. It's a huge, ongoing simulation that constructs everything you perceive while determining how you act. Lisa Feldman Barrett
Now put Gioia back at his desk. His brain held a precise forecast of a recall case: twenty reports, a traceable cause. The Pinto matched the forecast for ordinary accidents instead, so ordinary accidents are what he saw. Nothing mismatched hard enough to force an update. The evidence looked unremarkable because, to a brain running that forecast, it was.
When the anonymous report finally gave him his cause, the forecast still didn't update. It found a new comparison instead: the other cars are nearly as bad, so this is normal after all. Emotion at "the Chamber of Horrors" interrupted the script. Evidence challenged it. But neither was enough to replace the script.
Decades later, an interviewer asked whether he'd vote differently if he could go back, knowing everything except how it turned out. "The honest answer is I don't know." Fifty years on, the man who taught the world about his own blindness remains in two minds about what he decided.
What stayed with me from this story? Competent, decent people can make terrible decisions by applying a story that worked yesterday.
Your organisation has scripts too. What counts as a real problem. Who gets promoted. Which complaints are noise and which are signal. Most days they save you enormous effort. Some days they file something important in the wrong pile.
So what can you do to keep your hands on the wheel?
Gioia's own prescription was script interruption: moments that force the brain out of prediction mode into actual thinking. Here are two that work at different points: before a decision, and inside your current rules.
Run a pre-mortem on your next big decision. Before you commit, assume it's a year from now and the decision failed badly. Everyone writes down why. Decision researcher Gary Klein built this technique on a simple trick: risks invisible under the forecast "this will work" become visible under the forecast "this failed". You're not predicting doom. You're borrowing a different script for ten minutes.
Put your criteria on trial, not just your cases. Gioia's threshold reviewed every report that reached it. Nobody reviewed the threshold. Pick one rule your team filters by (what counts as a real risk, a valid complaint, a lead worth chasing) and ask two questions. What was this rule built to catch, and what would it miss?
Your team sees what it expects to see. The uncomfortable question is what it's expecting right now.
What stories have you seen running in a team you've been a part of? If you want to change one, it may take fewer people than you think: Do you need a majority to shift culture? Or contact us to talk about the stories running in your team.
