You Keep Reaching for the White Cauliflower

I've been thinking a lot about fresh produce lately. For a while, actually.

Yes, a number of foodborne outbreaks have put some produce in the news lately, but I've been standing in actual fields, thinking about what to grow next.

Right now I grow pears and pecans, and I've been wondering what else belongs on the land.

A few weeks ago, that thinking took me to a beautiful Amish farm in Oxford, Pennsylvania. The owner walked me out into the rows, sharing thoughts and insights on profitable and sustainable farming, and, at some point, handed me an enormous head of cauliflower he had just cut by hand.

It wasn't the first time I'd seen cauliflower in a field. But watching it come out of the ground and into my hands reminded me how little most of us actually know about where our produce comes from, or how it's grown.

Many people will only ever meet a handful of these plants on a real farm. The rest they meet under fluorescent light, already trimmed, washed, and sorted into what somebody decided was acceptable.

And standing there holding this thing, I started thinking about cauliflower as a near-perfect picture of how bias works at work.

Here's what a lot of people don't realize about cauliflower.

The familiar white head isn't the only kind, and it isn't even nature's default. There are orange varieties, purple ones, and a green spiraling one called Romanesco that looks like a fractal. But we've been so conditioned to accept white as THE cauliflower that the others read as novelties, or mistakes, or somehow not the real thing. Same vegetable. Different look. Completely different reception.

And the cauliflower, of course, has no say in any of it.

We often do the exact same thing to people by quietly deciding what "normal" looks and sounds like, and then we treat everything outside it as a lesser version of the thing, usually without noticing we're doing it at all.

It happens with appearance, with how someone talks, with how they carry themselves, with the parts of communication we never say out loud. And it builds a bias that starts working against us long before we ever set out to influence anyone.

Because the person on the receiving end, like the cauliflower, often has no power over how they're being read.

Here's the part that should bother anyone who believes in merit, which is most of us.

We tell ourselves, sincerely, that we advance people on the quality of their work.

However, when a size, a shape, an accent, a volume, an age, a background, or a communication style sits outside our norm, we respond to it differently, sometimes on purpose, far more often not.

So things that have nothing to do with merit start shaping who gets ahead, hidden underneath our sense of what is normal. To us. We keep the language of meritocracy while quietly running something else underneath it.

Now, you're probably confident this isn't you, because you judge people on their work. I'd gently point out that this is exactly what the bias feels like from the inside.

The white cauliflower doesn't look manipulated to you.

It just looks like what cauliflower is. A norm you can see is easy to question. The dangerous ones are the ones that feel like plain reality. Which brings me to the detail that actually stopped me when I looked it up later.

That perfect white color is manufactured.

To keep a head of white cauliflower from turning yellow or greenish in the sun, growers "blanch" it, tying the plant's own leaves up over the head to block the light while it matures.

The white cauliflower we've crowned as the standard is the one we deliberately shielded from the sun until it conformed. Colored varieties need no such thing. They grow as they are. The orange ones carry roughly twenty-five times the beta-carotene of the white. We took the version we had to manipulate into conformity, called it the norm, and treated the ones that showed up fully themselves, often better for you, as the odd ones out.

Sit with that for a second, because it's the whole idea.

The norm isn’t neutral. It is usually just the version that got standardized, for reasons that had little to do with quality, until we forgot it was ever a choice.

So how do you catch a bias that feels like plain reality?

Here are three ways I try to.

Let’s get it…

Watch your own defaults for a week.

That gap, between the people you hand automatic benefit of the doubt and the people you make climb for it, is often a map of your norm rather than a measure of anyone's merit.

The next time you have a strong reaction to someone, good or bad, stop and name the actual trigger.

Was it the substance of what they did, or was it the packaging: the accent, the volume, the age, the title, the where-they-came-from, the too-direct or too-quiet style?

Say the specific factor to yourself plainly.

If your judgment is riding on something other than the work, you've just caught the norm wearing a merit costume.

Here's the freeing part.

You don't have to personally love a style to recognize that it's good and that others value it.

I don't have to be the world's biggest cauliflower fan to know it matters, that plenty of people want it, and that knowing this is an advantage to me.

People work the same way.

You don't have to share someone's way of showing up to see what it makes possible, or to work well with them. So ask, about the people your instinct files as "not quite right," what is genuinely good here that I'm wired to miss?

The more varieties you can actually work with, the more people you can influence, and the fewer you quietly write off before they ever get a fair look.

There's a quiet mechanism running under all of this.

Our brains treat what's easy to process as more true, competent, and trustworthy. Familiar names, familiar accents, familiar ways of showing up all go down easier, and we mistake that ease for quality.

The norm doesn't win because it's better. It wins because it's fluent.

Which means a lot of what feels like sharp judgment is really just recognition, and recognition was never the same thing as merit.

I've written before that influence is never instant, that it gets built slowly across a lot of small moments.

Bias runs on the same clock, in the other direction. Every time you quietly discount someone who sits outside your norm, you spend a bit of influence you'll never notice leaving the account, long before you ever meant to lead them.

Catching it is slow, unglamorous work. It's also one of the most compounding hidden mechanics of influence there is.

The norm often feels like reality, but it's usually just the version that got standardized, for reasons that had nothing to do with quality.

We keep the language of merit while things other than merit quietly move the needle, hidden under our sense of what is normal to us.

You don't have to prefer every variety to recognize its value, and recognizing it widens who you can work with and lead.

So watch where you hand out "of course," name the trait behind your reactions, and go looking for the good you're wired to miss.

There's more than one kind of cauliflower. There always was.

Thanks for reading. Be easy!