Dan Erwin

How I Learned to Identify and Resolve My Unconscious Bias

On numerous occasions as a management consultant, I have asked execs about how much time they take to think about process, innovation or strategy. Often, the response was that they didn’t have time to think. A couple said that they were paying me to do the thinking. A compliment, but very unwise. And I provided a very deliberate rationale for why that rationale was lousy.

So how did we get to the place where managers don’t realize that thinking is part of their job? In a very thoughtful and fascinating article in the MIT Sloan Management Review, Duncan Simester pointed out that the bias for doing, not thinking, is built into business. Companies succeed by creating a successful business model—and then scaling it massively. Massive scaling requires a “finely tuned system with highly standardized processes.” So, getting promoted requires “almost a singular focus on execution. A bias toward execution.”

Developing Bias.
Although the study of bias has focused largely on about a dozen standard bias processes, it’s very important to understand how we usually--and unconsciously--create our own biases, sometimes helpful and other times damaging—and how we can sometimes spot them and change them as necessary.

How to Create and Use Power Successfully

To a surprising degree, the American culture tends to think of power from the downside. And so, power is seen as a negative, evil, coercive or repressive force that causes us to do things against our wishes. The effects of power are in negative terms. It excludes, represses, censors, masks and conceals.

But, in fact, power is also a very necessary force, a productive and positive force in our world. So at its heart, power is fundamentally creative. It took power to create our magnificent colleges and universities, to develop social nets, create our various park systems and build our great organizations. Fundamentally, it took a lot of guts for the 56 leaders to create and sign the Declaration of Independence, a fundamentally creative act shifting England’s power to them. And though Britain saw the signing as an act of treason, many colonists—though not all—saw it as an act of powerful liberation, putting their lives on the line--an act of group power.

In the final analysis, they saw power through the potential for hope. To paraphrase Immanuel Kant, they actually saw the hope of a national future as a moral obligation. A lot more than merely an attitude readily impacted by fear and the emotions. Hope provided them with an orientation for the creation of power.

Hannah Arendt (1906-1975), the Jewish American  philosopher, conceives power in a very distinctive way. She sees power as rooted in a political philosophy that celebrates the public realm of freedom that emerges when people act with others as citizens or political equals. For Arendt, power becomes a force when people act together to sustain or to change the world they share with one another. Her fundamental claim is this: “Power corresponds to the human ability not just to act but to act in concert.”

How to Keep Your Enemies Closer Than Your Friends

In April 2015, I wrote a blog questioning, “Why Should You Keep Your Friends Close and Your Enemies Closer?” With an excess of 30,000 reads of that post, it obviously identified a real need of a great many people.  The post provided a rationale for the issue, not least that you can learn a lot from people you dislike, gain a different perspective and make it easier for your allies to work with you. But it only addressed strategies for working with enemies and difficult people in a cursory fashion.

Near as I can tell, there are two vocations that absolutely require a person to keep their enemies closer just to keep their job: elected politicos and Protestant church ministers. However, most business people recognize early on that they’re going to have to work with “enemies,” people they don’t especially like or trust--or pay the price in performance and sometime job loss.

So how can you keep your enemies closer?