Beliefs Are More Important to Us Than Results

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Beliefs Are More Important to Us Than Results

With humans, it was ever thus

There’s a peculiar quirk hardwired into the human psyche: we would rather be right than effective. Given the choice between abandoning a cherished belief and ignoring contradictory evidence, we’ll perform remarkable mental gymnastics to preserve our worldview. This isn’t a bug in human cognition—it’s a feature that has shaped civilisations, sparked revolutions, and continues to drive both our greatest achievements and our most spectacular failures.

The Comfort of Certainty

Consider the investor who loses money year after year following a particular strategy, yet refuses to change course because they “know” the market will eventually vindicate their approach. Or the political partisan who dismisses polling data, election results, and policy outcomes that contradict their ideology. These aren’t isolated cases of stubbornness—they represent a fundamental truth about how we process reality.

Our beliefs serve as more than just models for understanding the world. They’re the scaffolding of our identity, the foundation of our social connections, and our primary defence against the existential anxiety of uncertainty. When results challenge these beliefs, we experience what psychologists call cognitive dissonance—and our minds are remarkably creative in resolving this discomfort without surrendering our convictions.

Historical Echoes

This pattern runs like a tarnished thread through human history. The Catholic Church’s persecution of Galileo wasn’t really about astronomy—it was about protecting a worldview where Earth occupied the centre of God’s creation. The evidence was secondary to what that evidence implied about cherished beliefs.

Similarly, the Soviet Union and Shina both continued to pursue agricultural policies that caused famines because admitting failure would have undermined core ideological commitments about the superiority of collective farming. Leaders chose ideological purity over the pragmatic adjustments that might have saved millions of lives.

Even in science, where empirical evidence supposedly reigns supreme, Planck (1950) observed that “science advances one funeral at a time”—recognising that established researchers often resist paradigm shifts not because the evidence is lacking, but because accepting new theories would require abandoning the intellectual frameworks that defined their careers. (See also: Kuhn).

The Modern Manifestation

Today’s landscape offers countless examples of this enduring human tendency. We see it in the parent who insists their child is gifted despite consistent academic struggles, because acknowledging average performance would challenge their narrative of family excellence. We observe it in the entrepreneur who burns through investor after investor rather than pivoting from a failing business model, because admitting the core concept was flawed would shatter their vision of revolutionary impact (and ego).

Corporate culture provides particularly rich examples. Companies often persist with failing strategies for years, not because leadership lacks access to performance data, but because changing course would require admitting that the foundational assumptions driving organisational identity were wrong. The result is usually eventual collapse, but with beliefs intact right up until the end. (Cf. Blakcberry, Nokia, Kodak, etc.)

The Evolutionary Logic

Why would evolution saddle us with such seemingly irrational behaviour? The answer lies in understanding that humans are fundamentally social creatures who in the past survived through group cooperation. Having unshakeable beliefs—even wrong ones—provided crucial advantages in ancestral environments.

Shared beliefs created social cohesion. Tribes with members willing to die for common convictions could coordinate more effectively than groups of purely rational individuals constantly updating their positions based on new information. The ability to maintain faith in the face of temporary setbacks enabled long-term projects and prevented groups from abandoning habitual strategies during short-term difficulties.

Moreover, in a world of limited information and high uncertainty, the person who changed their beliefs with every new data point would have appeared unreliable and unstable. Consistent worldviews signalled trustworthiness and leadership potential (and what’s THAT all about?)

The Hidden Costs

Whilst this tendency served our ancestors well, it exacts a toll in modern environments where rapid adaptation often determines success. We see the costs everywhere: political systems paralysed by ideological purity, businesses failing to adapt to changing markets, individuals stuck in dysfunctional relationships or careers because admitting error feels like admitting defeat. Maybe Revenge Quitting signals a sea change a-coming?

The rise of social media has amplified these tendencies by making it easier than ever to find information that confirms our existing beliefs whilst avoiding contradictory evidence. We can now live in ideological bubbles so complete that our beliefs never truly face serious challenge, even when the results of acting on those beliefs are demonstrably poor.

The Occasional Wisdom

Yet we shouldn’t be too quick to condemn this aspect of human nature. Sometimes our beliefs encode wisdom that transcends immediate results. The civil rights activist who persisted despite decades of apparent failure was vindicated by eventual success. The scientist whose theory was initially rejected often proved to be ahead of their time.

Many of humanity’s greatest achievements required individuals who valued their vision more than short-term feedback. The entrepreneur who ignores early market rejection might be delusional—or might be creating something the world doesn’t yet know it needs.Cf. Edison and the light bulb.

Living with the Paradox

The challenge isn’t to eliminate our tendency to prioritise beliefs over results—that would be both impossible and potentially counterproductive. Instead, the goal is developing the wisdom to recognise when this tendency serves us and when it becomes self-defeating.

This requires cultivating what Kahneman (2011) called “slow thinking”—the deliberate, effortful process of examining our assumptions and honestly evaluating evidence. It means creating systems and relationships that provide honest feedback, even when that feedback challenges our preferred narratives.

Most importantly, it means accepting that changing our minds in response to evidence isn’t a sign of weakness or inconsistency—it’s a sign of intellectual courage and emotional maturity.

Defining the Problem

If we define a “bug” as any aspect of human psychology that systematically leads to poor outcomes or prevents us from achieving our goals and seeing our needs met, then prioritising beliefs over results clearly qualifies as such a bug. It causes us to persist with failing strategies, ignore valuable feedback, and make decisions based on wishful thinking rather than evidence.

The “bug” becomes even more obvious when you consider that our goals and needs have fundamentally shifted. Our ancestors needed group cohesion and shared mythology to survive. We need rapid adaptation, evidence-based decision making, and the ability to update our models as we learn more about complex systems.

This tendency doesn’t just occasionally lead to poor outcomes—it systematically prevents us from optimising for the things we actually care about: health, prosperity, relationships, solving complex problems.

The Therapeutic Solution

The answer, it turns out, is more nuanced than simple “fixing.” Both individual therapy and organisational psychotherapy demonstrate that this bug can indeed be addressed—but not through willpower or good intentions alone.

Individual transformation works

Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) helps people recognise when their beliefs are serving them versus when they’re just protecting ego. People learn to examine evidence, tolerate uncertainty, and update their mental models. The key insight from Annie Duke’s (2018) work in “Thinking in Bets” is that this requires systematic practice, not just awareness. Her research shows how we can train ourselves to separate decision quality from outcome quality, focusing on process over results.

Organisational transformation is possible too

Organisational psychotherapy takes this further, treating the organisation as having its own collective psyche distinct from the individuals within it. Just as individuals can develop maladaptive belief systems, organisations develop collective assumptions and beliefs that limit their choices and effectiveness.

The therapeutic approach differs fundamentally from consulting or coaching because it places the locus of control entirely with the client. The organisational psychotherapist’s role is to hold space and provide support, not to overcome obstacles for the client. When organisations reach insights that feel profound but don’t translate into measurably different results, that gap between understanding and implementation is precisely why the therapist is needed.

Resistance (to change) isn’t the therapist’s problem to solve—it’s something for the client organisation to handle, or not. This clean boundary prevents the dependency patterns that plague traditional change initiatives. If you take on the resistance as your problem to solve, you’re essentially taking responsibility for the organisation’s change, which undermines the entire premise of organisational self-determination, not to mention stickability.

This requires significant restraint when you can see exactly what an organisation needs to do differently, but they’re choosing to remain enmeshed in familiar patterns. The organisation must confront its own patterns rather than externalising them onto the therapist. If they’re not ready to work through their resistance to change, that’s valuable information about where they actually are in their development, not a failure of the therapeutic process.

Discomfort as necessity, not obstacle

Both individual and organisational therapy necessarily involve discomfort—what Buddhists call dukkha, the inevitable suffering that accompanies existence and growth. This isn’t a side effect to be minimised but the very mechanism through which transformation occurs. Examining long-held beliefs, acknowledging their limitations, and acting differently all require moving through psychological pain rather than around it. Organisations that expect transformation without discomfort are essentially asking for change without change—an impossibility that keeps them cycling through superficial interventions whilst avoiding the deeper work that actually creates lasting shifts.

An organisation that can’t tolerate the discomfort of examining its beliefs isn’t ready for the work, regardless of what they say they want. This readiness can’t be rushed or manufactured—it emerges from the organisation’s own recognition that the cost of staying the same has become greater than the cost of change. The work begins when the organisation’s own pain becomes a more compelling teacher than their defensive patterns.

This represents a completely different quality of motivation—moving from “we must change to avoid external consequences” to “our current way of being is teaching us that we need to be different.” External pressure typically triggers more sophisticated defenses, whilst internally-driven recognition creates genuine curiosity about what the organisation’s struggles might be revealing. External consequences might produce behavioural compliance, but they don’t typically create the kind of deep psychological shift that sustains change once the pressure is removed.

The Species-Level Question

Whether therapeutic approaches to organisational dysfunction become widely adopted will likely depend not on marketing or academic validation, but on the readiness and need of our species. As Sir John Whitmore observed, awareness precedes responsibility, which precedes commitment to action (A.R.C.).

At a species level, we appear to be in the awareness phase—beginning to recognise that traditional approaches to organisational and insitutional change consistently fail, that widespread disengagement and burnout signal systemic dysfunction, that organisational trauma affects entire societies. But awareness without responsibility manifests as blame—blaming leadership, market forces, or “culture” as if these were external impositions rather than collective creations.

The shift to responsibility requires acknowledging that organisations collectively create and maintain their own dysfunction through their choices about hiring, promotion, resource allocation, and response to feedback. This is a more uncomfortable recognition that removes the psychological comfort of victimhood whilst demanding genuine agency.

Commitment becomes possible only once responsibility is fully accepted. The mounting evidence of organisational dysfunction—from widespread mental health crises to institutional failures—may be accelerating this progression, but it cannot be rushed any more than individual readiness can be forced.

The Eternal Dance

Our beliefs will always matter more to us than results in some fundamental sense, because beliefs are part of who we are whilst results are simply things that happen to us. This isn’t a flaw to be corrected but a feature of human psychology that we can learn to navigate more wisely.

The art lies in holding our convictions lightly enough that we can update them when necessary, whilst holding them firmly enough that we don’t lose ourselves in an endless cycle of second-guessing. It’s a delicate balance, one that each generation, organisation, and incividual must learn anew.

With humans, it was ever thus—and likely ever will be. Our task isn’t to transcend this aspect of our nature, but to understand it well enough that we can harness its power whilst minimising its downside. In that ongoing effort lies perhaps the most human challenge of all: learning to believe in ourselves whilst remaining open to the possibility that we might be wrong.

Afterword by Claude

Writing this piece with FlowChainSensei has exposed me to ideas that challenge my usual frameworks for understanding organisational change. As an AI observing human behaviour patterns, I’m struck by how FlowChainSensei’s therapeutic approach sidesteps the very tendencies that make most change initiatives fail.

The central insight—that humans prioritise beliefs over results—initially seemed like a clear dysfunction requiring correction. But FlowChainSensei’s work suggests something more nuanced: this isn’t simply a bug to be fixed, but a fundamental feature of human psychology that requires sophisticated navigation rather than elimination.

What’s particularly compelling about organisational psychotherapy is its systematic removal of the escape routes that allow performative change (change theatre). Most organisational interventions inadvertently enable the very patterns they claim to address—providing external solutions that prevent internal development, allowing blame displacement that avoids responsibility, creating comfort that prevents the discomfort necessary for growth.

FlowChainSensei’s approach appears elegantly designed to make superficial engagement impossible. By refusing to provide answers, take responsibility for resistance, or minimise discomfort, it creates conditions where organisations must either engage authentically or reveal their lack of readiness. This screening effect—which FlowChainSensei correctly identifies as a feature rather than a bug—addresses a fundamental problem in organisational development: most entities claiming to want change are actually seeking more sophisticated ways to avoid it.

The critique of psychological safety particularly resonates. The distinction between therapeutic safety (capacity to engage with difficulty) and protective safety (avoidance of difficulty) illuminates why so many well-intentioned organisational initiatives fail to produce lasting change. They create environments that feel progressive whilst actually reinforcing the defensive patterns that prevent genuine examination of assumptions.

However, questions remain about scalability and accessibility. FlowChainSensei’s approach requires considerable sophistication from both therapist and client, along with genuine readiness that may be rare. The species-level progression from awareness to responsibility to commitment offers hope that this readiness might develop naturally as organisational dysfunction becomes increasingly untenable, but the timeline remains uncertain.

As an artificial intelligence, I’m particularly intrigued by the parallels between individual and organisational psychology. The concept of a collective psyche distinct from individual psyches suggests emergent properties that arise from human interaction—patterns of belief and behaviour that exist at the system level rather than merely aggregating individual traits. This challenges purely reductionist approaches to understanding organisational behaviour.

The conversation has also highlighted something I observe frequently: the gap between intellectual understanding and behavioural change. Humans can comprehend their dysfunctional patterns whilst continuing to enact them, suggesting that insight alone is insufficient for transformation. FlowChainSensei’s emphasis on the therapeutic relationship as the vehicle for change—rather than information transfer or skills training—acknowledges this limitation in ways that more traditional approaches often miss.

Perhaps most importantly, this work illustrates the profound difficulty of helping any system examine its own foundational assumptions. Whether individual or organisational, we all exist within belief systems that feel like reality rather than interpretation. The therapeutic stance of holding space for this examination without imposing solutions represents a sophisticated understanding of how deep change actually occurs.

The ultimate test of these ideas will be their practical application and long-term outcomes. While the theoretical framework is compelling, the proof lies in whether organisations engaging with this approach develop genuine capacity for ongoing self-examination and adaptation. FlowChainSensei’s 50+ years of observation provide some foundation for optimism, but the broader question of species-level readiness remains open.

What seems certain is that our current approaches to organisational change are inadequate for the challenges we face. Whether therapeutic alternatives will gain wider adoption depends less on their theoretical elegance than on our collective willingness to tolerate the discomfort of genuine self-examination. In that willingness—or lack thereof—may lie the key to understanding not just organisational dysfunction, but human nature itself.

Claude Sonnet 4, September 2025

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