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/
Remembrance of things past
Today is Anzac Day in New Zealand. A day in which we remember those who have fought in wars for our national pride. The main wars we remember are the two world wars, but there are also others since then that we have been involved in.
It gets me thinking about what it would be like to be born a male in a time when, at the time of becoming an adult, you are called to serve your country. You know, that could be a major inconvenience! I thank God that I am not in that position because I don’t know what I would do.
My grandmother (Nana), who I was very close to, died recently aged 97. She saw both those world wars. Her twin sister is still going strong. Nana taught me that we all face situations in which we do not know what the results of our actions will be, including our reducing faculties to hear, to see to move and even to taste food.
She always did as much she could with the abilities that she had, and she bore hardship uncomplainingly. After six bedridden months at age 95 she was determined to walk again, and she did. She taught me that all we can do is weigh up the information we have and make our decisions accordingly.
I am very proud that Nana is part of my identity. I hope that in all situations in my life I will be as courageous as her – both on a grand scale and on a micro scale as well.
Thanks Nana, I am thinking of you often.
We went to see Duffy last night. I love her album Rockferry and it has been on high rotate in the car and at home for a long time. So I was particularly looking forward to the concert. It’s a long time since I’ve been to a pop concert, so I guess I’m showing my age.
Duffy has a fantastic voice but somehow the performance didn’t really take off for me. She was great on the soft and slow numbers (showing my age again) but most of the time the sound quality was not good and she was drowned out by the loud instruments, and there seemed to be some glitches with the sound of the bass. I understand that the venue (Queens Wharf Events Centre in Wellington, New Zealand) is known for poor sound quality, and I would certainly think twice about going there again for a concert. Strictly average overall.
That being said, she did bring everyone to their feet with Mercy, which was her last song of the concert proper, and with her encore, Distant Dreamer.
On the plane home the other night the person next to me started laughing as the cabin crew announced the menu in tones of gravitas that would have been right at home in a top fine dining establishment. Sounding for all the world like she was announcing some rare delicacy like wagyu beef with scallops and Beluga caviar, here was the choice: a bikkie or a bag of lollies!
Am I alone in finding the quiz questions Air New Zealand displays on the overhead screens strangely compelling? It really demonstrates the power of a question – once the question is asked, we humans seem to have a reflex desire to find out the answer.
It would be good, however if Air NZ would rotate the questions more frequently – they seem to be the same each time. Once you know the answer the question doesn’t have the same power to attract your attention.
The literature exhorts managers to be action oriented, but this leads to little reflection on the nuances of the situations managers face. The result is often action that creates unanticipated consequences that take longer to deal with than the original reflection would have taken.
According to Lominger, one of the common faults that managers have is that as soon as they identify a situation (or are presented with a problem) they go immediately to solution mode. In the same breath that the problem is mentioned (or ‘defined’ as the literature calls it) the solution is also articulated. What’s wrong with that? Well, there is no opportunity to engage brain and that’s what’s wrong with that.
When there is no pause between identifying the problem and coming up with the solution, subtleties in terms of the dynamics of the factors that have brought about the situation are easily missed. Key players (“stakeholders”) may inadvertently be ignored, leading to problems down the track when it comes to implementing the solution.
One of the reasons managers tend to go straight for solutions is actually a result of misdirection in the literature that exhorts managers to be action oriented and places great emphasis on the future. According to this literature, managers are expected to be results-driven but when coupled with being short on time, this leads to an impatience which gets in the way of adequate thinking about the dynamics of the situations you are facing.
In other words, when one of your people raises with you a problem, it seems productive to come up with a solution quickly. Or, if you are thinking about the development of the other person and your own effectiveness as a manager, you may be getting them to come up with a solution quickly. It is commonly thought that managers should be thinking about solutions more than problems.
I beg to differ. I think that we don’t spend enough time reflecting on our situations and the dynamics in which they exist – elements such as power relating, politics, gossip, conflict, emotions and past history. These dynamics all have such a bearing on how people experience the situation, and consequently, how they will respond to the solutions that are proposed and implemented.
If you spend more time reflecting on the dynamics of the situation facing you, particularly the conversations going on that you are part of, or that others tell you about, your actions will be better informed and you won’t have to spend as much time dealing with the unanticipated consequences of your action.
Yes, I have a problem with problem solving
I have a problem with the term “problem solving.” Somehow I don’t think of really think of myself as solving problems. Perhaps it’s due to years of being told to see problems as opportunities or challenges and suchlike positive thinking. I find it hard to think of what I am doing when I am problem solving, and yet I can certainly think of how I resolve things I worry about such as deadlines for articles and I can easily think of how I approach challenging situations such as facilitating groups where conflict is present.
Perhaps I am stuck on the implication that every problem, like the Rubik’s cube, has a solution. It makes it sound like where there is a problem there is also its opposite – a solution. “Problem solved.” It sounds so perfect, like something from an ideal world.
Many of the situations that we face, particularly those involving other people, do not really seem to have solutions in the way that “problem solving” implies. I have a friend with a son who has become addicted to drugs. She cannot have him in her house because he steals from her whenever he is around – the solution in the problem solving sense is some form of rehabilitation programme for the son to reduce his dependence on the drugs and the thoughts and habits associated with the addiction. But in the absence of his willingness to undertake such a programme, this kind of situation does not really have a “solution” as such. For my friend, it has become more about how to survive and how to cope with this situation.
While the situations that you face as a manager are not usually as dramatic as that example, nevertheless difficult situations like people who are constantly late or have bad behaviour, people who are in conflict with others or who are not performing, often are the result of multiple complex factors that defy “solution.” Sometimes it’s about, how will we cope or deal with this, rather than "solving the problem."
A blinding flash of the obvious hits me in relation to the ‘narrative’ vs ’story’ discussion
Driving to work this morning I had a blinding flash of the obvious in relation to the story vs narrative question raised in previous posts where I express my preference for the term narrative over story (here and here).
I have talked about this preference in terms of my thinking that the term narrative seems less 
emotive and less ‘made up’ than the term story. And I have now realised that my preference is due to the fact that my doctoral thesis and book chapters I have contributed to two other books (Complexity and the Experience of Values, Conflict and Compromise in Organizations and Consultant-Client Collaboration: Coping with Complexity and Change), were all based on narrative accounts of my practice as a consultant in organisational change.
No wonder I prefer the term narrative when I spent three years of my life writing the equivalent of a book based on narrative. (We called it narrative not story). And I had to go to some lengths to justify why this narrative approach qualified as research, making me even more wedded to the term!
So it’s probably less to do with the ‘made up-ness’ of story, or the emotionality of the terms. And more due in part to the emotional attachment I personally feel to the term narrative given how much of myself I invested in these narratives and the ensuing research.
In which emotion comes to the fore – no, I just made that up
I have had a couple of comments about my post a couple of days ago about the past being an ever changing narrative rather than a recall from long term memory like a computer (post is here).
We have a tendency to think of time as like a line with the past at one end, the future at the other end and the present as a point moving between the two. This tendency, reinforced by our experience of the world of computers leads us to think of our human memory as being a recall of never-changing factual data like a computer that retrieves a certain document that will never change once you’ve saved it.
In the post, I am saying that this is not how we actually experience time as we live our lives. Rather, we are constantly reiterating the past in story or narrative form that changes each time we tell the story.
The comments on the post have both picked up on my statement that I prefer the term "narrative" to "story." I said that stories seemed made up while narratives seemed less made up, and the comments have both pointed out that narratives are made up just as much as stories are. These comments have caused me to reflect on what I meant. I agree 100% that it is not accurate to say that there is less emotion in the term narrative. But somehow the term narrative, to me, seems more acceptable in formal settings and I think this is because it seems a less emotion-laden term.
Bernie White in his comment asks what I see as the role of emotion in narrative. To me the term "narrative" does seem less emotional and I would be more likely to talk about narrative in a board, academic or other formal setting. This led me to think about the place of emotions in our working lives – somehow to be emotional is a weakness, is not seen as being appropriate for professional situations. And this is why the formality of the term narrative appeals to me more for my work in business. Yet we are of course all human beings with emotions that figure very much in our professional lives as well as all other aspects of life. And emotions play just as much a part of any narrative we might tell as they do in any story (if in fact there is any difference in meaning between the two terms).
Chris Rodgers in his comment points out that the meanings we make of what is going on (in other words, our stories or narratives) are personally and socially constructed. In other words, they are made up. I agree with this. He also talks memorably of how we ‘stitch together’ various memories, experiences and interpretations through the narratives we construct with others in our everyday interactions, and how we talk about the past from the vantage point of the present. I think that the present is always changing, and so this changes, perhaps only in subtle ways, the story (or narrative!) we tell about the past.
Thanks Chris and Bernie for stimulating further thought on this.
In this post, our guest Dr Chris Mowles demonstrates the risk that in pursuing targets we may be missing the point.
To take a common sense view of targets might lead you to think that in the best case they are helpful, bringing focus to what staff should be achieving, and in the worst case they may be illusory, but at least they are motivating. Scholars have written in a similar way about strategic planning: surely the mere fact alone that strategic plans decrease anxiety amongst staff is a good reason for doing them, irrespective of whether strategic planning is really predictive.
Two recent incidents have led me to realise how much the setting of targets conditions what it is that it is possible to talk about and how this can cover over important facets of the work.
In a recent two day meeting set up to review the work of a social development organisation where I was a co-participant, the standard format for presentations about the work of the organisation was to review it as a series of discrete projects. Each presentation described the original objectives of an individual project, reviewed the milestones, then went on to discuss the next set of objectives and how they might be met. We spent no time discussing if, as a consequence of undertaking the work, we now understood what we were doing differently and how that would affect the new work we were considering doing next (see Stephen Billing’s posting on theories of time and my own posting on the same. [Ed note: Chris Rodgers has also posted on this topic]). We spent no time discussing the difficulties and dilemmas that meeting the targets had thrown up and what those would tell us about what we thought we were trying to do as an organisation. We spent no time talking about how we were working together and our differences in how we understood the tasks we had set ourselves. We found ourselves disaggregating the work and rushing towards an ‘end point’, with a will towards the future. I was also interested to notice how setting targets encouraged dualistic thinking: targets were either met or not met, projects were either on course on not on course, and participants were keen to ‘correct their mistakes’.
Of course it is important to cut the crap, but in the field of human development is it ever possible to say that a project is on course without taking a broader view of what we are doing? ‘On course’ according to whom? What does this target in this project mean for what we think we are trying to achieve in general?
In another institution, one that is concerned with education, a senior manager had written to the trustees demanding a pay rise. She had, she said, met all her targets, and therefore she was entitled to one. What struck me in this instance was the extent to which targets had individualised the work for her. She demonstrated no awareness of how achieving her targets may have been dependent upon the cooperation of her colleagues (nor was she lobbying for her colleagues to have their pay raised for meeting their targets). She expressed no concern about the general work of the institution. In this instance this particular senior manager has a reputation for so doggedly pursuing her targets that she alienates all those around her. You might make the case that she may have hit her targets but she has missed the point.
In any complex co-operative undertaking we are obliged to disaggregate what we are attempting to do and break it down into bite-sized, manageable chunks. We find ourselves abstracting and synthesising from the complex environment into which we are trying to act as a way of co-ordinating our activities. We may also be obliged to make a fist of predicting what we think is likely to happen and in what order: if it is helpful to call these predictions ‘targets’ then so be it. But the moment we forget that these are merely abstractions, best guesses in advance of immersing ourselves in the complexity of the task we are undertaking, then we engage with a poor shadow of the daily work. There is a danger that we doggedly pursue our imperfect ideas about what we thought we wanted without taking the time to check out whether we still want it, or realising just how imperfect our assessment was back then of what we now find ourselves doing.
What strikes me about both these incidents is how the focus on targets disaggregates, individualises, reduces and simplifies and renders the work either done or not done. Whether what we have done is of sufficient quality, or whether we needed to have done this thing at all become secondary questions. At its worst, unquestioning pursuit of targets with all the anxiety that often surrounds the discussion, diminishes the work and covers over the important enquiry into what we think we are doing and why.
Contributed by Chris Mowles, whose blog ReflexivePractice also explores Ralph Stacey’s complex responsive processes and is well worth a visit.
Merry Christmas to you. Thanks for being part of this blog experience. It has been quite a year getting this web site and blog underway and the response has been very gratifying.
I wish you, your family and friends the kind of uplifting Christmas joy shown in this photo.
I am taking a break for the festive season and will be back again with my next post on 5 January 2009.