Anomalies Pile Up and Cause a Paradigm Shift

ANOMALIES PILE UP AND CAUSE A PARADIGM SHIFT

Donna was in her early twenties and working in a restaurant when she got a message from a recruiter with Rodan + Fields, a skincare company, asking if she would like to become an independent sales representative for them. It was just what Donna needed to hear at that juncture in her life. She had been feeling frustrated and demoralized in her current job, with no clear sense of what to do instead. There weren’t any promising opportunities in the small town where she lived. The idea of being an entrepreneur, working for herself for once, sounded wonderful. She signed a contract and paid Rodan + Fields $1,000 for the “how to sell” start-up kit, which they strongly recommended she buy.

What Donna didn’t know at the time was that Rodan + Fields operated as a multilevel marketing company, or MLM, like Amway and Herbalife. The way to achieve success in an MLM is to recruit more salespeople to work under you, getting a cut of their profits in turn. When earnings depend heavily on recruiting more sellers, the recruitment needed to sustain everyone’s hopes cannot continue indefinitely. The account cites a study attributed to the Federal Trade Commission that estimated over 99 percent of people who sign up for an MLM end up with less money than they started with, in addition to the time they put into it.

But as I said, Donna didn’t know this, and she threw herself into her new job. She contacted hundreds of her acquaintances and tried to sell them lotions and creams. She posted ads on Facebook. She bought more instructional videos from Rodan + Fields that promised to teach her the secrets of successful salesmanship. But her sales still weren’t enough to recoup the cost of the products she was buying from the company, especially after her “upline”—the woman who had recruited her—took her cut.

Donna was confused. The promotional materials had made it sound so easy and liberating, but it didn’t feel that way at all. “Wasn’t this supposed to make me feel independent?” she thought in consternation. There were other confusing aspects to her experience, too. When she watched the instructional videos, they didn’t seem to contain useful information. Then there was the jarring disconnect between the way her fellow saleswomen talked and the reality of her own experience. Some Rodan + Fields saleswomen who had newborn babies gushed about how they were still working and making money. Donna had taken care of a newborn before, and she couldn’t fathom how anyone could manage to do both at once.

Her upline assured her that the system worked, and that if she was failing, it was because she wasn’t trying hard enough. So Donna tried to force the accumulating anomalies into the paradigm “This system works.” After all, Rodan + Fields was endorsed by lots of prominent people. It must be legit, right? She felt miserable, but blamed herself. “I reasoned that the ‘whys’ I didn’t understand would be clear once I learned more or leveled up,” she said.

Then the paradigm shift happened.

Donna was browsing Netflix and spotted a show titled Scientology and the Aftermath, a documentary series produced by and featuring actress Leah Remini. In the series, Remini talks about her experience of abuse and harassment while she was a member of the Church of Scientology and interviews other former Scientologists about their own often similar experiences. When Donna read the description of the series, she thought, “Oh, this will be fun, such a crazy cult.” But as she watched, she felt a growing sense of recognition. The way the Scientologist leaders spoke . . . the pyramid structure of the organization . . . it felt like watching the last year of her own life play out on the screen.

Donna thought back on the various things that had confused her about her experience with Rodan + Fields. The discrepancy between the “easy and fun” job she had been promised and the reality in which she was struggling to earn any profit at all. The lack of support from her fellow salespeople. The hard-to-swallow claims about earning a profit while taking care of a newborn. All those anomalies made a lot more sense when viewed through a new paradigm: “This organization is exploiting me.”

Once Donna’s suspicions had been triggered, it didn’t take her long to go online and find the facts about MLMs, along with many accounts from people just like her who had worked diligently for an MLM for years, only to end up in debt. When she realized what had happened, Donna began to cry. But at least she had only lost $2,000 and one year of her life. From the stories she read, she knew it could have been much worse.

To a casual observer, it might look like Donna’s mind change was sudden; one day she was a true believer, and the next she realized it was all a lie. But the groundwork for her “sudden” mind change had been developing for months. Even as she continued to believe overall in the paradigm “The system works,” she was simultaneously noticing anomalies, observations that were difficult to explain under that paradigm—“the ‘whys’ I didn’t understand,” as she put it.

That’s a key determinant of whether someone manages to escape an MLM after just a few months or whether they end up entrenched for years. Do they notice the anomalies, the aspects of their experience that aren’t what they expected? Do they notice when their attempts to explain the anomalies feel forced? Do they allow themselves to feel confused?

Instead, many people in MLMs actively suppress their doubts, often because they’ve been warned by the MLM leadership that negative thinking will make them fail. Each month, when they fail to turn a profit, they don’t say to themselves, “Huh, it’s weird that I’m losing money even though I’m working full-time.” They say, “I guess I’m not trying hard enough.” Signs of a problem accumulate, but each time, they are explained away without trouble.

In his book Sources of Power, decision researcher Gary Klein cites this as one of the top three causes of bad decisions. He calls it a “de minimus error,” an attempt to minimize the inconsistency between observations and theory. Each new piece of evidence that doesn’t fit a doctor’s medical diagnosis can be explained away or dismissed as a fluke, so the doctor never realizes her initial diagnosis was wrong. Each new development in a battle can be made consistent with the paradigm “The enemy is on the run,” so the general never realizes that the enemy has actually regrouped until it’s too late. Stepping back to consider the anomalies together might have made the weakness of the initial explanation harder to miss. But because they were explaining away one single anomaly at a time, their confusion never got the chance to build up sufficiently.

That doesn’t mean you should go to the other extreme and abandon a paradigm as soon as you notice the slightest bit of conflicting evidence. What the best decision-makers do is look for ways to make sense of conflicting evidence under their existing theory but simultaneously take a mental note: This evidence stretches my theory by a little (or a lot). If your theory gets stretched too many times, then you admit to yourself that you’re no longer sure what’s happening, and you consider alternate explanations. Marvin Cohen, a researcher who collaborates with Klein, uses the analogy of a spring: “Each time the decision maker explains a piece of conflicting evidence, it is like stretching a spring. Eventually, the spring resists any further efforts in that direction, and snaps back.”