You may know that I have a chapter in the new book that is due out soon, "Client-Consultant Collaboration" edited by Anthony F Buono and Flemming Poulfelt.
My chapter is called "Inside the Client - Consultant Relationship: Consulting as Complex Processes of Relating." It is expected to be out by the end of August.
Here is the flyer for the book (in PDF format), it even includes a special deal for purchases. I like the vibrant colours on the cover.
Very exciting.
I just found the attached blog post with lovely little examples of logic inaccuracies and how you can guard against them.
I was considering these, for example in the context of selecting a candidate for a job or choosing a provider. No doubt sales people will be able to think of some ways to take advantage of these…
http://litemind.com/thinking-traps/
In my last post I highlighted Saras Sarasvathy’s simile of a meal that can be prepared either by designing a menu and then assembling the ingredients to make the meal (which she calls causation) or by looking to see what ingredients are to hand and choosing the dishes based on the ingredients in the cupboard.
I am struck by how many corporate change initiatives focus on the set pieces such as road shows, documents and deadlines. The change team prepares a plan with these events set to occur at certain intervals. This is very similar to preparing a series of three course dinners over the course of the project.
The trouble is that while it will produce a number of lovely meals, it ignores the other nights when there is no meals planned by the change team. On those nights, the troops have to make their own meal out of what’s in the cupboard. In other words, your people have to make sense of what is going on by themselves, informally, and they do this in the tea rooms, at breaks and over drinks.
Your people can enjoy a lovely restaurant meal, but the restaurant food makes up only a relatively small proportion of their calory intake. In the same way, your road show events and documents you produce as part of your change project provide some opportunities for making sense of the change, but far more of the sense-making takes place back on the job. As a leader, you cannot be present at every sense-making opportunity.
But instead of providing only formal events driven by your project plan, you can pay attention to the informal communication that is going on, perhaps creating opportunities for genuine conversation with your people. This will assist their sense making process and you are more likely to get your change through with less resistance.
Saras Sarasvathy from the University of Washington uses the analogy of creating a menu for a dinner party, where you decide in advance what dishes to have and then go shopping for the ingredients (in an article published in the Academy of Management Review (available by subscription). She contrasts this with cooking a meal by looking in the cupboards to decide what to cook that evening. At our place, we use both methods, depending on the circumstances.
Sarasvathy points out that you can have dinner by either method. You can plan a menu in advance, then go shopping to make sure you have all the ingredients. This method she calls causation, because it’s a process of determining in advance what the meal will be, and then causing it to happen by shopping or acquiring the ingredients which cause the predetermined dish to materialise.
You can also have a meal based on what is in the cupboards, fridge and freezer - looking for the ingredients you have on hand and then deciding what to make with those ingredients. For example, we have a copy of Digby Law’s Vegetable Cookbook which is arranged in order of vegetable used. Inserted in this book are many recipes using particular vegetables so that if we are looking for what to do with cauliflower, for example, we have Digby’s ideas already published in the book plus a number of clippings for cauliflower recipes that have been stuffed in the relevant section like book marks. It’s primitive, but it works for us when we are trying to put together a dinner from what’s in the fridge. We also use Cuisine magazine’s amazing Meal Maker function for this - you can enter your ingredients and the software searches Cuisine’s recipes using those ingredients to give you some ideas for what to make with, say broccoli. Brilliant.
Planning a menu in advance, or causation, is similar to what happens in organisations when senior managers (i.e. chefs) determine in advance what results are wanted and then cause it to happen, through their actions. Let’s assume for the purposes of the post that managers can decide what result they want and then bring it about. This idea is problematic but is not the subject of this post, so I’ll leave it there for now.
Making a meal from available ingredients is what Sarasvathy calls effectuation, and she likens it to the entrepreneur’s task of working out what to do with the limited resources available. In other words, the entrepreneur does not have the resources available to go shopping to buy expensive ingredients like caviar and crayfish, but instead must work out how best to utilise the available resources such as contacts, technology and finances to create something that potential customers will be interested in.
More information on Sarasvathy’s ideas on effectuation can be found at www.effectuation.org.
I posted earlier about thinking being a silent conversation one has with oneself, and this is an inherently social way of viewing the process of thinking. It is inherently social because it is viewing thinking as a process of silent interaction.
There is another, less obvious
way in which this view of thinking is radically social. It is in the make up of the participants in the silent conversation that consitutes thinking.
Who is talking to whom in this silent conversation I am having with myself? Who is doing the talking, and who are they talking to? Please bear with me and see if I can answer this question, drawing on George Herbert Mead and Ralph Stacey.
The answer is that different aspects of the self are talking to each other. "I" am talking to "me." The aspect doing the talking is "I" as the subject, doer or initiator of action.
The aspect being spoken to is "me" as the object, the recipient of the action.
The "I" as the subject doing the talking is the individual in the present moment responding to the "me."
Mead pointed out that as humans we have the capacity to take on the attitude of the other person. In other words, you can perform an imaginative feat in which you experience what it would be like to be in the other person’s place. Mead said that it is because we can imagine ourselves in the other person’s shoes that we have human consciousness.
You imagine yourself in the other person’s shoes based on your experience of many social interactions over time - the results you received from these interactions and what they meant to you. These imaginings are therefore socially based because of the social experience you have had. For example, I moved around a lot when I was growing up and so would often have to leave my friends behind and make new ones. If you were brought up by different parents or in a different culture you would have different experiences and so your view of what the other person would be making of you would be different.
Humans also have a tendency to generalise.
The "me" taking part in the silent conversation of thinking is a generalisation that represents your generalised view of what society thinks of you. Society in this case is that group of people whom you identify with.
In a process that utilises both our human tendency to generalise and also our capacity to take on the attitude of the other, we imagine what others think of us. Our imagining of what others think of us is the "me" that is participating in our silent conversation.
This conversation between "I" and "me" is never resolved. It is a conversation in which "I" am constantly responding, in the present moment, to "me." In other words I am constantly responding to the generalised view that I think others have of me.
There, simple eh?
Thinking is a process of silent conversation with oneself and is therefore a social activity.
It makes you more effective when thinking about organisational change to be able to articulate what you think it means to be a person and to think. Why? Because how you think about what people are doing in organisations when they are thinking affects what you do to help influence the course of change. This is so in many subtle ways, whether or not you are aware of your assumptions about human consciousness. If you are aware of your assumptions about what it is to be human, you can be more deliberate in your effectiveness in organisational change.
Most people think of the mind as being something that lives inside a person’s head, something separate from the brain, that controls the actions of the body.
George Herbert Mead talked instead about a conversation of gesture and response in which meaning arises from the gesture and response taken together.
He proposed that thinking was the process of engaging in silent conversation with oneself. This makes sense in terms of our experience in which we do talk to ourselves. As a tennis player I tell myself to do things like hit up through the ball. And I hear other players admonishing themselves to "Concentrate" or "hit it" or "move." The silent conversation is then spoken aloud and in some cases becomes an exasperated shout!
So, this highlights one way in which the process of thinking, because it consists of silent interaction, is a social process.
Instad of thinking about thinking as a property of the individual, think of the mind and its process of thinking as silent conversation. This silent conversation is what constitutes human consciousness, and one of the great benefites of this view is that it means that cognitive processes do not need to remain a mystery as properties of individuals that we can never reveal or become aware of.
Instead, if you realise that thinking is a process of silent conversation, you can become aware of it and engage with others in their process of silent conversation. This will make you more effective as a facilitator of change in your organisation.
My previous post about whether you can learn by reading prompted comments from Andre Ling and Chris Rodgers. My thanks to you both.
Earlier I said that learning is an activity of interdependent people. I wrote in my previous post that reading is a social activity and therefore people can learn by reading.
I suggested that one of the ways in which reading is a social activity is that the reader is interacting with the author. Andre Ling in his comment pointed out that in fact the interaction is between the reader and the text, not between the reader and the author. I stand corrected and agree with this, my previous post was not correct in this respect.
I should have said that one way in which reading is a social activity is that there is an interaction between the reader and the text (not the author).
Chris Rodgers pointed out that the written text can be viewed as a gesture from the author, and that the responses of the reader will determine what meaning is made as a result of this interaction. To me, this builds on the notion that there is an interaction between the reader and the text. The text is written by the author, who cannot know how the reader will respond to what is written. As Chris points out, this is similar to the CEO doing a roadshow, giving a speech.
The CEO cannot know how the themes of the speech will be taken up in the organisation. Will the CEO’s sentiments be mocked, or will they constitute a point of view that the employees relate to differently, stimulating them to respond differently and helping to change the patterns of interaction taking place in the organisation and hence changing the organisation itself?
My short answer is yes, and this is because reading and thinking are social activities and therefore you can learn by reading.
In an earlier post I said that learning was a social activity of interdependent people. Chris Rodgers in a comment then asks a very natural question that follows on from that - can people learn by reading? By reading a blog perhaps, a book or a document? To me, this is a very logical question to ask because I have asked myself the same question.
lf learning is an activity of interdependent people, where does that leave reading? - which after all is a solitary pursuit. Can one learn from a solitary activity like reading, if learning is a social activity?
I want to start by drawing attention to how the logic of the question contains two hidden assumptions in the above reasoning. The first assumption is that reading is not a social activity and the second is that thinking also is not a social activity. Because these are seen as being non-social activities, it is relevant to question whether learning can occur from the experience of non-social activity of reading.
It assumes that your mind lives inside your head, is somehow separate from your body and is not a social phenomenon, but rather, the mind is a property of the individual.
George Herbert Mead suggested that the mind was not like this at all. He described the activity of thinking as being a silent conversation with oneself. I am a tennis player and I, along with others, can often be heard to be giving ourselves instructions (e.g. "bend your knees," or "swing through the ball," or "focus"). This to me is a visible example of the silent conversation that is always going on. We are always in a process of silent conversation with ourselves, and it is this silent conversation that constitutes the process of thinking, and the mind itself.
Taking this point, it is not hard to see reading as a silent conversation, not with oneself, but between the author and yourself.
The experience we have in organisations is the result of the interplay of conflicting intentions. We have less control than we think. But at the same time, our organisational experience is not random.
Having been critical in earlier posts of the concept of the learning organisation, I now want to explore instead what learning actually is. In previous posts I said that learning could not be understood as a property of individuals alone, because we cannot ignore the impact of social influences - learning is a social process.
And I also said that groups and organisations cannot learn - they do not have consciousness, minds nor bodies.
It is my contention, like Ralph Stacey’s, that learning is instead an activity of interdependent people. Ralph points out the inherently social nature of humans, the social nature of organising, and the social nature of learning.
As I have said earlier, an organisation is the thematically patterned activities of interdependent people, which constitute their closely interconnected individual and collective identities.
When I talk about thematically patterned activities of interdependent people, I am referring to the continually reiterated patterns of repetition that seem to have stability amongst the myriad interactions in power relationships. These repetitious patterns have meaning for us as people involved in the organisation. This might be what is often referred to as culture although I won’t go into culture here - it’s the subject of another discussion.
Human interaction is non-linear iterative process (i.e. myriads of interactions over time mean that you cannot map one to one causes with effects in human or organisational settings).
Because it is non-linear, "there is always the potential for small differences to be amplified into transformative shifts in identity," as Ralph says. In the same article he says "learning is the emerging transformation of inseparable individual and collective identities,’ and he goes on to say, "learning occurs as shifts in meaning and it is simultaneously individual and social."
In this way of thinking, learning is understood in terms of self organising communicative interaction and power relating, in which there is the potential for the transformation of identities.
What does this all mean? Well, think about computer based training. The theory was that people would sit down with a computer and learn stuff. Hence a plethora of "computer based training" in the nineties that was supposed to eliminate classroom-style training because people could do it at their desk, or in their down time and this would reduce down time and increase productivity. Sadly these promises have not been met.
Apart from limitations in the instructional design of such computer based training, I think the whole idea of computer based learning falls down because it ignores the fact that learning is a social activity of interdependent people. Without the social element of interaction, people do not learn well.
Teachers have known this for centuries, from the questions (i.e. interaction) of Socrates to the way good teachers in current times continue to involve their students in their learning, whether the teachers are teaching primary or secondary school, university, corporate trainers or good managers acting as coaches.