Dan Erwin

The Lost Art of Thinking

On numerous occasions as a management consultant, I asked execs about how much time they took 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 refusing that business opportunity.

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.

In other words, it requires action more than thinking.” So guess what? It’s inevitable that we focus on what we get rewarded for. And in business, that’s execution.

The smart thinkers I’ve met in business simply refuse to get involved in much execution which would set aside their need for thinking. In other words, to get more thinking people firms are going to have to change the work situation--for at least a select group. Admittedly selection processes have a limited record of accuracy. Still, the process for developing thinkers will have more success than what goes on today. Years ago, one of the major firms to which I consulted offered year long, internship experiences with senior officers for their fast track people. They had a significant amount of success in developing thinkers who could take on the jobs of creativity and complexity. and strategists. 3M Corporation has had great success with similar projects over the years. And of course, the better business thinkers, like 3M, have better business.

The need for thinkers in business is obvious to many executives. One of my clients, a Pillsbury EVP in research and development...

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 28,000 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?
First, confronting your enemies is usually a waste of time and a bad conversational move. They’ve got their views and in a high percentage of cases you’re not going to change their mind anyway. You may feel good by confronting them, but that won’t make the problem go away. Sure, there are occasions when confrontation is useful, but they are rare. And sometimes confronting another is a form of suicide.

Furthermore. . .

Is Job Security Really All About “Who You Know”?

A little exercise in critical thinking.

Recently, I received an email from LinkedIn with the familiar heading regarding job security, “it’s not what you know, it’s who you know.” Let’s suppose you have no history with this kind of statement. How would you assess its truthfulness? For that matter, how do you test the truthfulness of any claim, whether email, text, tv or conversation?

 The either/or format of the LinkedIn claim is a common persuasive technique, often called the black or white fallacy because readers are asked to decide between two positions. Many business people recognize decision biases like anchoring, over-confidence and vivid anecdote, but few yet recognize the common fallacies of decision-making such as the false dichotomy, name-calling and card-stacking.  From the get-go, the ability to recognize a dichotomy like the LinkedIn claim is a kind of “sensitivity training” and a cue that the solution being offered is probably wrong.

Vantage point

LinkedIn has over 500 million users and, I assume, is the largest and most prominent professional network, suggesting that their pronouncements come with a lot of clout. So, it’s important to ask whether their claim, like those of other major institutions, is actually true.  Critical thinkers assume that when you construct an entire argument on one cause, you face the temptation to leave out anything that complicates that notion. It’s inevitable, therefore, that LinkedIn minimizes job performance, skips over issues of economic or organizational stability, ignores the job destructive digital technology—and avoids mentioning any other potential issues...

Why You Need to Think and Talk on Two Tracks (Part Two)

In complex business conversations, metacomm can profoundly impact conversations and make them far more constructive and efficient—even timesaving. To a significant degree, metacomm functions to facilitate conversation and is highly useful for training participants in sequencing 101. In our studies and experience with metacomm, we have found a number of these forms especially useful.

Monitoring processes. Conversations that stick to your planned objectives to focus on problem solving, innovation or developing cross-disciplinary agreements, readily become mere discussions rather than action-oriented. However, the use of metacomm can serve to 

What Can You Do If Your Boss or Colleague is a Real Asshole?

 
How do you deal with people who treat you like dirt? That’s a question you can read in social media, hear in the coffee shop or around the water cooler and just about any place two or more people gather. Bob Sutton’s first book, The No Asshole Rule, began to clarify this issue. But since its publication in 2007, it has brought him more than 8,000 emails and hundreds of interactions asking for more help. Thankfully, in this latest book, he answers all these questions in spades.

Upfront, let me bias you. This book is a masterpiece that nearly everyone will want to devour, share and keep as a reference. If you don’t need it today, you will eventually be racking your brain for insights that Sutton already has available. So why reinvent the wheel?

The book is unique among business books. It’s not merely for senior managers and executives—like too many business books--it will be useful for professionals at all levels. Furthermore, it’s immensely concrete and readable. And Bob’s delightful wit rolls on as if on casters. If you’ve read his blogs and previous books, you know he’s Yoda-like and you’re going to learn a lot of very practical human stuff and have fun doing it. In addition to the constant flow of how-to and anecdotes which illuminate his ideas, you’re going to get a load of research and relevant studies that you can readily understand and put to use. . .

Thinking:It's Not As Easy As You Think (Part 1)

  
            Nothing is as frightening as ignorance in action.  --Goethe

Nearly a year ago, after reading our blog, Habitual Striking vs. Mindful “Stucking,” one of our regular blog readers asked a formidable question: “So how did you learn to think?” Business people spend a great deal of their time thinking about how to solve problems and make decisions. Furthermore, thinking was at the center of Dan's business as a consultant. That meant it needed to be spot-on and really smart. As a result, his thinking was driven by a mish-mash of psychological issues: fear, insecurity, curiosity and a profound need to achieve.  But our answer to that reader is formidable, not least because of very human weaknesses, but also because business thinking about problem solving and decision making have gone through a number of stages over the past fifty years.  

More than that, effective thinking is really hard, even for scientists and philosophers...

Fearful You'll Lose Your Job to Artificial Intelligence?

Two of MIT’s most knowledgeable guys on artificial intelligence, Andrew McAFee and Erik Brynjolfsson, will tell you to cool it. In fact, they argue that asking how many jobs will be killed by AI is the wrong question. Sure, Frey and Osborne’s 2015 analysis found that nearly 50% of current jobs are susceptible to AI. But by no stretch of the imagination is that the whole picture.

Like previous predictions about gains and losses, they’ve almost always been way off. Furthermore, nearly all these predictions have been about job destruction and not job creation...

"Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me)"

I’ve had the above book setting on my shelves since it was first published in 2007. The title was a paraphrase of Henry Kissinger, responding to charges about his role in Vietnam, Cambodia and South America: “mistakes were quite possibly made by the administration in which I served.” Of course, more recently the line has been applied to Trump.

When clients and friends have asked about the failure of people to admit mistakes, I’ve often commented, “That’s reality. Get used to it.” That’s not just a flippant statement. It emphasizes the value of understanding the realities of interpersonal behaviors. Most people remain bothered or attempt to push back against these realities.  But, I’ve long since found that when you have a firm grasp on reality—how things actually work--you can go about your life and your work much easier, not wasting time and emotion on things that are inevitable. That doesn’t imply there are no exceptions to a reality or that it can’t be changed, but it does mean that you need to take behavioral realities very seriously.

So here’s the reality about admitting mistakes: 98—99% of the time, we’re all going to refuse to admit mistakes...

Cognitive dissonance and the failure to admit mistakes
Although there is recent research on the widespread failure to admit mistakes, the easiest way to understand our problem and Kissinger’s is through the older work of Leon Festinger on cognitive dissonance. To summarize, nearly all of us prefer a world that is orderly, planful, and predictable. And so cognitive dissonance, the engine that drives self-justification of our actions and decisions—especially the wrong ones—is that unpleasant feeling when a person holds two cognitions (ideas, attitudes, beliefs, opinions) that are psychologically inconsistent.

Dissonance is frustrating because holding ambiguities and conflicting ideas, norms or values is tough, very tough, for all of us. The pain, for example, of deciding to buy a Ford or Chevy truck makes us decide as quickly as possible, lest our gut churn too much. Although the expression, cognitive dissonance, has been thrown around a lot, few fully understand its meaning. Prior to Festinger, psychologists believed that actions are governed by reward and punishment. If, for example, you feed a rat at the end of a maze, he will learn the maze faster than if you don’t feed him. Or, if you feed a toddler a cookie to stop him from having a tantrum, he will have another tantrum when he wants a cookie. But humans think. And so dissonance theory teaches that our behavior transcends the effects of rewards and punishments and often contradicts them.

For example, nearly 15 years ago when my wife asked me to help her select a new car, rather than compare an Audi, Pontiac and Saab and get involved in ambiguities and conflicts, I simply asked her to lay out seven or eight priorities and rank order them. Then I would see what I could find. She did precisely that and I learned that only one car in 2003 met all her priorities: the Audi A4. When she looked at the price tag and commented on the Audi’s cost, I reminded her that price was not on her list of priorities. She smiled and accepted the keys from the dealer. Humans, in contrast to animals have far more brain power, so not everything operates on a reward/punishment basis. Instead, like me and my wife, we justify our behaviors.

These justification skills are the key to cognitive dissonance facts. They explain why we usually refuse to admit our mistakes and failures. And I assume you’re like me: I can readily justify most any decision.

Political and business reality: the bad and the good.
I suspect the most glaring failure of the 20^th century was that of Defense Secretary, Robert McNamara, regarding his support of the Vietnam war under JFK and Lyndon Johnson. Huge numbers of people knew the war was a serious mistake. It was not until old age that he wrote in his memoirs, "I'm very sorry that in the process of accomplishing things, I've made errors." Though he never formally apologized, he said he was haunted by the blunders made under his watch. Intriguingly, his obituary declared him the “architect of a futile war.”

 One of the more intriguing failures to admit mistakes in recent news is that of James B. Comey, the FBI director, who, a week before his firing, refused to admit to his obvious mistake in publicizing the Clinton emails, before the Senate Judiciary meeting. “It makes me mildly nauseous to think that we might have had some impact on the election. But honestly, it wouldn’t change the decision.”  How’s that for a self-justification and rejection of the obvious?

 

In business, the failure to admit mistakes is just ordinary practice. My colleague notes that the refusal to admit mistakes are justified in three different ways: blamed on another person, blamed on the context, or blaming the unpredictability of the situation. Pay attention to yourself and others and you’ll spot them every week of work, especially in teams and across disciplines. They’re generic.

My mistake
Shortly after the election, I publicly affirmed very strongly that Trump would either resign or be impeached. In spite of my background in politics and narcissistic psychology, I failed to do a thorough-going analysis of the Trump access to the presidency. I ignored the obvious fact that once narcissists are in power, they are rarely dislodged from power. Trump has shown himself to be magnificently unimaginative, incoherent and insufficient. Furthermore, I failed to analyze the legislature’s ability to use, work around and ignore the president to achieve their own ends. I suspect these men made their peace with Trump’s unfitness long ago.  It should have been obvious that a narcissistic president is a superb distraction for the legislature to go its merry way. Thankfully, that legislature has also shown itself unable to govern. Though we are regularly reminded that Trump should not be our president, I was quite mistaken in my conclusion. His removal won’t possibly take place before 2020. The nation, however, is liable to pay for this mess for many years to come.

Furthermore, based on Festinger, it’s also obvious that those who voted for Trump will never admit their mistake, in spite of what their brains and hearts might tell them. They will continue to justify their original decision. That invalidates most opinion polls on Trump voters.

The plus side of admitting mistakes
If you’re a high achiever and then make a mistake, admitting error can be constructive and relation-building, even supportive of your career. As I’ve written in earlier posts, the action of admitting mistakes can build both connection and trust. In addition, I’ve concluded that vulnerability, such as admitting mistakes, is certainly nothing over which I need to get my shorts all tied in a knot. It’s merely an announcement of the need to learn something. Nothing more.

So yes, my mistakes over Trump also came with a great deal of added insight to the human—and organizational--condition.

By Dan Erwin, with contributions from Liam O’Dea.

5 Blog Posts That Add Up to 94,967 Views

On a regular basis I check google analytics to see what my viewers are paying the most attention to. Sometimes it helps me to plan further posts, but I find it difficult to clarify just why my readers are interested in certain posts. As a long-time executive coach, I have my own views on what are usually the most helpful for business success. Several of the following posts just wouldn't survive the first cut. So if you've got some ideas why these top five posts are really intriguing, I'd like to hear from you. To make it easier for you, I've linked each to the original posting on my blog site.

Here are the five posts, including a sentence or two of description on each of them. Note, I'm also including the exact numbers of views, as of Sunday, April 23. These have also been on three other sites, so the total figure for the five may well be in excess of 125,000 views. 

What patterns do you see in these postings?  

Can you really change your personality? (43,663 views.) Our personalities can grow and change over time. Though it's a slow process, the skills of deliberate practice are among a number of ways to change. (This is more than double the 2nd highest so it's obviously significant.)  

Converse Like a Professional, But. . . .

. . . expect to revisit, restructure and revalue the conversation.

FYI: This is a response to a great number of interactions over more than thirty years of consulting. It grows out of two recurring questions: "How do I say that?" and"Can I say that?" They've been asked by entry-level employees and managers as well as senior executives. So here goes.

Conversely, don't merely talk. Conversation is about interaction and even dialog. It emphasizes shared, growing ideas. Talk tends to quickly become monologue or a presentation--as in, "my talk was about. . . " Talk is also very encompassing, whereas conversation refers to a specific kind of talk with definite parameters.

The term "professional" emphasizes a person who engages in a practice and has certain and unique kinds of competencies and skills. It can be used popularly to refer to any businessperson at any level: entry-level to executive. Although some academics don't think of business as a profession and some business people don't think of themselves as professional, clearly the term has cachet. The term is used both negatively and positively, as in "that's not very professional," and "you can count on her being very professional in her dealings." It's important to think about yourself in this manner. It implies a more careful consideration of your behaviors.

Ummm, yeah. Vocabulary is always important. The shift of a single word can automatically change one's perspective...