I once knew a gold robot with a silver leg

This past Monday, my wife and I chose to celebrate Martin Luther King, Jr Day by going to the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center.  It's really a very cool place, so if you are ever in Cincinnati, Ohio, it's well worth a visit!  There is an exhibit there on Nelson Mandela, called "Mandela: The Journey to Ubuntu" that we both really enjoyed.  There are a lot of leadership lessons to be learned from studying Mandela's life (I highly recommend his autobiography, "Long Walk to Freedom", as well as the 2009 movie Invictus starring Morgan Freeman as Mandela).

Anyway, the visit jarred my memory of a conversation earlier this year with two of our daughters.  They were both telling us about something called the"Mandela Effect" that has absolutely nothing to do with our visit to the Freedom Center (my mind works weird that way).  Basically, the "Mandela Effect" is a kind of false memory, in which an individual recalls something that either did not happen or at the very least happened in a different way.  What makes the "Mandela Effect" different from the typical "false memory" is that a number of people share the false memory - the "Mandela Effect" is an entirely different scale of false memory!  The effect is so-named because during the 1980's, a large percentage of the public believed that Nelson Mandela had already died (he, in fact, did not die until 2013).  A number of individuals even claimed that they remembered watching his funeral on television!

There are a few other notable examples.  Do you remember reading a series of children's books about a family of bears when you were little?  What was the series of books called?  If you said, "the Berenstein Bears" you are absolutely incorrect!  Most individuals, in fact, think that the book series (and the children's television program based on the books) was about the Berenstein family.  The series is actually about the Berenstain Bears! 

There was also a 2010 study about the Bologna Centrale railway station in Bologna, Italy.  Apparently, the clock at the railway station was damaged in a 1980 terrorist bombing.  Most individuals (92% of those surveyed, in fact) remembered that the clock was permanently stuck at the time of the incident.  While the clock did stop working at the time of the bombing, it was repaired shortly afterwards.  Only years later, after the clock stopped working again, was the clock set to the time of the terrorist bombing permanently:



Finally, and perhaps best of all (prepare to have your mind completely blown away!!) is the case of the robot, C3PO in the original Star Wars trilogy.  You probably remember that C3PO was metallic gold in color.  Do you remember that one of his legs was silver?  It's true!  See the pictures below:






The actor who played C3PO, Anthony Daniels, recalled a time when one of the still photographers came up to him on the movie set and said, "Why are you wearing a silver leg today?"  It seems that even people on the set every day failed to notice the subtle difference.

So, what is my "leadership takeaway" here?  It's really quite simple.  As leaders, we need to be cognizant that the "Mandela Effect" exists and watch out for it in our daily work.  It's highly likely that someone in your organization (or even a whole group of people, for that matter) will recall specific events or conversations so strongly and so vividly that they will swear up and down that they are right, even if they are completely wrong.