Reality-Distortion Field or RDF is a term famously linked to Steve Jobs and specifically to the effect he had on his colleagues and partners in persuading them to accomplish goals that they otherwise believed impossible, and believed so rationally and earnestly. Jobs\u2019 biographers have noted that he had a way of bending reality and real-life constraints through his willpower; examples include how he got Steve Wozniak to write a video game in four days and nights flat when ordinarily it would have taken several months, how he got his Macintosh software team to speed up the bootup time (\u201cIf it could save a person’s life, would you find a way to shave 10 seconds off?\u201d), or how he got Corning Glass CEO to manufacture and ship Gorilla Glass in time for the first iPhone launch, after realising just months before the scheduled launch that plastic screens scratched easily in pocket. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
A reality-distortion field was not unique to Jobs or the people who worked with him, rather it manifests in a staggering number of organisations. Also, Jobs’s RDF at best got his colleagues or partners to do things they believed impossible. But RDF is not always productive, it can instead become a form of organisational self-delusion, where leaders become disconnected from reality and push forward goals and objectives that are hardly realisable or feasible. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Management theory and literature has many mechanisms to describe similar phenomena where leaders lose touch with reality, from\u00a0CEO\u00a0<\/em>hubris<\/em><\/a>\u00a0<\/em>or\u00a0<\/em>disease<\/em><\/a>\u00a0to\u00a0Icarus Paradox<\/em><\/a>, or\u00a0groupthink<\/em><\/a>. What we also know from literature is that it is not always arrogance, incompetence, or any specific personality traits that give rise to an RDF around a leader; smart and capable leaders can equally succumb to distorted views of reality, and the reasons are frequently structural.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n A common reason is filtered information as described in the CEO disease<\/em> – the subordinates routinely tend to filter out bad news from upward communications towards the boss, and at the top of the organisational hierarchy this filtration compounds heavily. Leaders therefore believe in a highly airbrushed version of reality, without anyone necessarily lying to them outright.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But as we dig deeper, we find that this distorted view of reality by senior leaders in an organisation (for that matter, even senior public servants and politicians) is largely a function of the feedback-loops working in an organisation. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Our core argument is essentially this:\u00a0the intensity of the reality distortion field in any organisational function \u2013 marketing, PR, operations etc. \u2013 is inversely related to the quality of that function’s feedback loop<\/em><\/strong>.<\/p>\n\n\n