Is The Pain Real? Precedent, Phantom and Projection

One of the worst things I’ve experienced in my adult life was a horrific abscess I had in my tooth when I was 22. I was immobilised with pain and the infection got so bad, I ended up in hospital. 

One of the strangest things about the whole ordeal was that for months afterward, I thought I had a problem with the tooth directly above it. I went to the dentist several times, only to be assured that this was the combination of two weird phenomena.  

The first was projected pain. When one tooth is compromised, we sometimes feel the pain in a totally different place because of the way our nerves and signals are interconnected. 

The second was phantom pain. There wasn’t anything wrong in my mouth anymore, but my brain was still processing the lingering trauma of those sensations. You might have heard about this with amputees too, who often feel sensations in their now missing limbs.  

Thanks to the way our annoying brains work, phantoms and projections aren’t limited to our bodies. It’s easy to get signals about our thoughts, behaviours and feelings mixed up when they present as something they really aren’t. Internal imposters, if you like. 

“It is far harder to kill a phantom than a reality” – Virginia Woolf 

One of the reasons people like to bring me in – for executive coaching, or to work on strategy - is because I call out bullsh*t when I see it. More softly, I enjoy challenging invisible assumptions, to figure out what’s really going on. 

Working with leaders, I see a lot of projected and phantom pain. Those ideas that look perfectly reasonable on the surface, until you look a little deeper.  

A particular favourite is the (exc)use of precedent. How many times have you heard (or used!) “setting a precedent” to get out of doing something that should be done?   

I call bullsh*t on precedent. 

It’s inherently contradictory, especially as a reason not to do the right thing. If it’s the right thing to do, we would take the same decision again in identical circumstances. So, what’s really going on? 

Precedent is a phantom pain. It’s the projection of another, less comfortable fear. 

On the surface, this looks like fear of accountability. In my experience though, it’s often a lack of confidence in making the right decision, a fear of being blamed if things go wrong, a reluctance to acknowledge previous poor decisions, or worry about mobilising resources. 

Left unearthed, these fears will seriously undermine our ability to make good decisions. Phantoms and projections need challenging, or we can’t tackle the real source of the pain.  

What phantom pains are your leadership team dealing with?