Dan Erwin

When My Conclusion Was Dead Wrong

As a research-based consultant, I’m used to getting my ideas tweaked by new research. After all, I think of myself as a fairly flexible, open guy, so a small adjustment to my theories and ideas is usually illuminating. But unknown to Harvard’s Rosabeth Kanter, she took a Shillelagh, a big club to one of my big ideas. Her blog, Why running a family doesn’t help you run a business, knocked me back on my heels. And I yelled a silent Aaargh!, knowing full well that she was quite correct and I was quite wrong. So there, I admitted it Prof Kanter.

Kanter lays out her case with panache, acknowledging the conventional wisdom first. Here’s her argument:

In theory, those years of family work at home could look great on a resume. Consider the skills required: setting priorities, training others, organizing complex logistics and schedules, and using interpersonal sensitivity to handle difficult people problems. Indeed, some advocates have argued that the time women--and sometimes men--with advanced degrees spend out of the workplace managing a family is valuable experience for managing back in the paid work world. 

I agree it is valuable experience — if the paid job one returns to involves managing a handful of people who are vulnerable and can't leave. Otherwise, the operating skills for family manager are nothing like the qualifications for workplace professionals.

Her reasoning and evidence that follows are flawless—and quite correct.

Suffice it to say, that I’ve taught the very opposite and spent time preaching to the choir of empty nest women wanting back into the workforce.

To err is human
Yet I’m certain that most of us go through life assuming and even insisting that we are right about everything. And that includes stuff from the origins of the universe to how to load the dishwasher. That’s why Moliere’s comment is spot on: It infuriates me to be wrong when I know I’m right.

But I’ve figured out why, primarily, I’ve wanted so badly to be right. It was all about my allegiances and the narratives I’d built around them.

WYSIATI
In his fascinating book, The Black Swan, Nassim Taleb introduces the idea of narrative fallacy to describe how flawed stories of the past shape our view of the world—and our expectations for the future. I have three daughters, all of whom were raised to be professionals just like their mother. Inevitably, as a father of smart daughters, I experienced male chauvinists who drove me nuts. After all, every father wants his best for his daughters, and their achievement was always tops in my priority list.

So, for instance, when my youngest was a high school freshman, I found myself in a teacher conference that raised my ire. Her male math teacher rather pointedly said, “Kris does very well in math, especially for a girl.” Knowing that her husband was about to become slightly volatile, my wife kicked me under the table, got my eye and essentially said (nonverbally) “cool it.” But you get the point. And so in later life, after having kids, they went back into the workforce rather successfully. Clearly, because of my family allegiances I got caught up in the narrative fallacy about mothers going back to work and began to preach it.

The narrative fallacy
The narrative fallacy is a decision error that most of us make largely because we are gripped by the illusion of understanding. As Daniel Kahneman explains them, they arise inevitably from our continuous attempt to make sense of the world. And inevitably also, the explanatory stories that people find compelling are simple: are concrete rather than abstract; assign a larger role to talent, stupidity , and intentions than to luck; and focus on a few striking events that happened rather than on the countless events that failed to happen. 

Why Is Real Collaboration So Very Difficult?

Today’s business world requires a great deal of collaboration. That’s especially true because technology is inevitably both intergroup and across groups and disciplines. Yet collaboration skills are very tough for people to learn. You'd think that teamwork, where people have shared values and objectives, would facilitate collaboration. But no, put people from two different divisions or groups together--and it can become a really painful task with a lot of argument.

Hugo Mercier of the University of Neuchatel, Switzerland, has been looking at this issue all of his academic life. His conclusions are intriguing. Based on my own experience in a completely different context, he’s right on target.

In one of his earlier studies, Mercier and Dan Sperber looked closely at our human capacity for reasoning.  Remember that collaboration is about reasoning through options and differences and coming to a workable joint decision. Team members walk into collaborative discussions with a lot of ideas. Typically, they're conclusions they've held for a long time. But for collaboration to take place, there must be a lot of joint reasoning. As you know, however, when you get together to collaborate on something, most everyone already has their own conclusion to the problem. Their reasoning, supposedly, has brought them to the best conclusion(s).

What Mercier and Sperber point out is that though reasoning is usually seen as the best way to improve knowledge and make better decisions, it usually leads to distortions of meaning and poor decisions.

So they suggest that the entire use of reasoning should be rethought. In other words, they assume that people believe the purpose or function of reasoning is argumentative. So put reasoning in any group or collaborative setting and the people are going to automatically begin arguing. Reasoning take on a negative perception. The context motivates them to argue—so people turn out to be skilled arguers. Skilled arguers, however, are not after the truth, but after arguments that support their own views.

So, bear with me. A person's views—their conclusions--are simply old inferences, mental representations based on a lot of other ideas. Here’s how it works in architecture. Let's suppose, for example, that you're a school superintendent who's brought in an architect to build a new elementary school. In order for the planning to move forward, architects have to collaborate with the superintendent, the principal, and the teachers to put together their proposal.

Judi Dench vs. Barbra Streisand : A Stark Contrast

With Stephen Sondheim’s passing, there is a lot of reminiscing and a lot of his great work being newly performed on the web. Sondheim changed our whole idea of the “musical,” especially represented by “Sweeney Todd, The Demon Barber of Fleet Street,” a horror story if there ever was one. So, although Sondheim is dated for the youngest generation, his music is timeless. And very instructive.   One of the greatest opportunities to compare disciplines comes in two very distinct performances of “Send in the Clowns” from “A Little Night Music.”

The lyrics begin this way:  

Isn't it rich?
Are we a pair?
Me here at last on the ground
You in mid-air
Send in the clowns. . . (the song has nothing to do with clowns).

Here’s an education with two performances which remind me, better than any other experience, of the masterful distinctions between acting and singing.

Barbra Streisand
For years I’ve been enraptured by Barbara Streisand’s performance of Send in the Clowns (YouTube, 2020, Streisand). The musicianship is flawless. By that I mean that her intonation is always perfect. The sound she creates is highly resonant. It is always clear with just a slight vibrato. Her signature is fundamentally warm. The warmth is continuous, a legato even when the words might suggest breaks in her narrative. If you’ve heard music that’s played in smooth, fluid phrases where one note seemingly bleeds into another, you’ve heard legato. Legato is known for conveying elegance, fluidity, tranquility, and a sense of graceful motion.

One reviewer wrote about “desperation” in Streisand’s Clowns. I think, rather, that desperation is almost always in Streisand’s music, no matter what she’s singing. But then the desperation is resolved at the end—by her persona. So, in a sense a song for Streisand is always one long suspension. A suspension in music is where one note from a chord is held while the other notes of the chord change to a new harmony. The held note is discordant and clashes with the new chord and this tension is only resolved when the note moves down a degree to a note belonging to the new chord. So, in Streisand, the suspension is the entire song, held by discordant desperation, and finally resolved by her perfect persona at the climax.

Suspension is a wonderful musical effect that has been used for centuries and remains a key component of contemporary pieces and songs. FYI: If you listen closely, you can even hear it in Rap or Blues.

It’s only in writing this blog that I realized how Streisand’s voice works as an emotional suspension. The warmth, the legato actually overpowers the words in her songs. Send in the clowns is tragedy, but in Streisand the tragedy is always overpowered by emotion, by legato.  Yes, by desperation. The words are there, but they are ignored.

Listening to Streisand, in the final analysis, is “comfort listening.” It differs profoundly from, say, rap, which is a narrative of race and culture issues. Rap doesn’t make its listeners comfortable. Rap, in contrast, emcees the tough world in which its creators and listeners live. It’s not establishment music. It’s the music of the streets: conflict music. Streisand is establishment music, but the older establishment. It’s strongly oriented to the older generation, not the younger. The Streisand audience knows what they’re going to get. And it’s always going to be love and warmth. Neither love or warmth is central in rap.

Streisand’s warmth generates intense compassion in her audience. I suspect that compassion is driven by the understanding that life invariably includes both strength and struggle. Compassion is always about our shared humanity—it’s always relational. So, in Streisand the relationship is always laden with emotion. An emotion created by legato. And then her persona resolves the resolution. That’s obvious in the perfection of background, orchestra, her dress and the entire performance. Nothing is messy or sweaty. Desperation is the struggle, and perfection is the epitome of strength--the resolution.

In writing this, I realize that Streisand’s perfection is inhuman. We love the entertainment and the otherworldliness, but it is not real. I was silent for a few seconds at the conclusion—and then I clapped.

Judi Dench
Judi Dench is an actress—one of the greatest—not a singer. She both speaks and sings in her BBC performance {YouTube, 2010, Judi Dench). It’s not a performance, it’s life. Reality. The haunting bass clarinet sets the scene for Dench. She’s in her seventies. Her intonation is off, her voice cracks and breaks. The breaks are in the middle of words and between words.  Some words sound as though they’re not capable of being spoken. But the words go to the center of your being, evoking a rich pathos. The uncompromising honesty. The consonants are almost harsh. They grab you. Bliss. Clowns. Flair. Farce. And then the aching of her heart. You understand her experience just by the way she sounds. The words have a gnarling rasp about them as she grips your insides. It’s an awful, drawn out, yet very human experience.