Dan Erwin

Deep Smarts, Deep Thinking and the Humanities

The 2020s are placing extraordinary demands on workers and organizations. Not just on managers and execs, but also on ordinary workers. A wide range of competencies and experiences are necessary for senior execs. But ordinary workers are also facing strategic uncertainty, new models of business and organization as well as new intellectual demands.

So what's the beginning place for ordinary workers? The answer to that is not surprising--deep smarts. That kind of expertise is always built on a distinct set of competencies: the humanities. It is the kind of stuff that more mature clients are after, especially when they face serious decision making or strategic needs. But it's only in the last few years that firms are really recognizing this need. In fact, years ago one highly placed officer told me he'd keep me busy the rest of my life if I could develop deep, strategic thinkers for his staff needs. I knew that given the intellectual decision making of his staff, it was an impossibility. So at the time I rejected his offer. I knew very few of his people were capable of learning the process, but I didn't know why. One thing was clear: he needed more people with a different kind of education and very few of his people had the right kind of education.

But I also recognized that deep smarts is the engine of every organization. You can’t really progress without them. And you’ll manage a lot more effectively if you understand what they are, how they are built and cultivated—and how they can be transferred to others. 

Of course, the real issue surrounding the deep-thinking failure is that a terrific number of business people have little to no background in the humanities supporting their business thinking, thinking which is primarily oriented to scientific thinking models—and not deep thinking. In contrast successful business leadership requires both humanities and scientific models of thinking. Since 2015 a number of business journals have picked up on the fact, including several articles in the Harvard Business Review and the MIT Sloan Management Review. By the humanities I refer to all languages and literatures, the arts (including painting, drama and music), history, philosophy and rhetoric, and the sorely abused English major. These are the required in top schools like Dartmouth, University of Chicago and Columbia University—in addition to whatever you majored in, like say math, statistics and engineering. Unlike my daughters, I didn’t go to any of these schools, but I got a big dose of the humanities in my undergrad at a small Kentucky state college. And even more so in my extensive graduate work.

"It's Just African. . .

It’s a stereotype, a racial stereotype. But is it negative, positive or neutral? One thing is certain: identifying African behavior as stereotypical is dangerous stuff.

I've learned from experience to issue caveats about most any racial or ethnic stereotype, admit to stereotyping and beg forgiveness--especially before using an ethnic or racial stereotype. Even then, you're liable to have to push through assumptions, in spite of the fact that the use of stereotype can be highly valuable for explaining behavior.

However, one of my young friends recently expressed his frustration at Nigerian and Somali friends who call to say they're in town and want to go out for a drink the same night. After experiencing this behavior on numerous occasions, he asked why they don't ever give him advance notice so that he won't have to reschedule his time to meet with them. They both responded, "It’s just African." In our diverse culture that kind of information can be highly useful.

7 Reasons Why I will Never Retire

This is not for fifty-year-olds, but for thirty-year-olds—who, thankfully,  are also the greatest number of my readership. Besides, a lot of people in their forties and fifties have already made their decisions for good or ill. I’m writing this because the earlier you make the decision, the better prepared you’ll be for never retiring.

I decided shortly after I reached 50 years that I’d never retire. Now, at 88 years, it’s one of the four or five best decisions I’ve ever made. Initially my decision was about the fact that I love my business and my profession. Not least because it’s been exceptionally lucrative, making possible a lot of things that I’d only dreamed about.  But as time has gone on, I’ve realized that there are many more reasons than just loving my lucrative business. My decision has surfaced many reasons for never retiring, reasons that were not obvious to a 50-year-old, even within my wide knowledge base.

First, people who continue working have the best health future. I have a high school classmate who was university faculty until his retirement at 70. I chatted with him a short while ago, just checking in on him and how he felt. His response to my question was that he was “bored.” His health shows it. He’s diabetic with a neuropathy, overweight, limited in his ability to get around, and living with his wife in a way-too-small retirement apartment. No question but what you can have plenty of diseases while working, but work often focuses your brain on health. Jobs usually require basic health and so taking care ourselves simply because we’re still working is inevitable for many of us.

The Upside of Career Flip-Flopping

“A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do.” Emerson

Given all the deception and obvious dissembling by politicians, government officials and intellectual leaders, I’m beginning to get the notion from opinion writers that changing your mind is an immoral act. I’ve changed my mind over the years on a number of issues, so if you know me you just might think that I’m writing this blog to do some CYA work. That’s not at all the case. Fact of the matter if you check a number of my blogs, you’ll notice that I’ve made a number of significant career changes over the years around a number of issues: politics, relationships, religion. And I’m presently in my third or fourth career change, depending on how you count them. My thinking goes something like this: “I’ve climbed that mountain. How about something more challenging?” And I've always found such changes to be delightful. Building a new world can be just great fun and very meaningful.

So, I’ve always preferred George Bernard Shaw’s orientation rather than Emerson’s. Shaw is much more philosophical and thoughtful: “Those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.”

Consistency
In career development, it’s usually the little things that derail a manager or exec. Thus, I typically focus on granular career issues. For example. . .

The Zig-Zags of Creativity and Innovation

Given the choice between the myth of the natural genius and the sobering reality of hard work, popular culture usually opts for the myth.  ---BD Burrell

When you’re getting advice about creativity or reading one of the many books about the subject, you need to be careful—very careful—because many, if not most, perpetuate our highly Western, misleading and individualist cultural ways. That typically means that we’re going to have to go digging into our own mindset and belief system to deconstruct and reframe these wrongheaded beliefs if we want to really understand creativity and innovation.

In his marvelous book, Explaining Creativity, Keith Sawyer psychologist and jazz pianist, describes four key errors and summarizes their problems—all very useful for today’s organizational emphasis on innovation. His insights will liberate you from demanding, painful, unrealistic expectations. Admittedly, however, the truth will give you heartburn as well as a lot of often painful, hard work.

**Creativity is fun.  When you get into the state of flow (Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi) and peak experience, creativity is extremely positive and self-actualizing. But it takes a lot of years and training to achieve flow.

So as Sawyer indicates, the “fun” is extremely, uncomfortable hard work. What a few would consider the “flow” of creativity is more deathly boring or extremely stressful. Once more: creativity and innovation are just plain hard work.

As a preaching pastor and seminary faculty member (22 years) and also as an evergreen blog writer (10+ years), the demands of creativity have always been part of my professional life. Creative writing is a mix of stress and self-actualizing. For the last three months, I’ve been working on a major writing project—a single chapter on the creative use of the humanities. It requires a lot of research, reading, writing and rewriting. And a lotta smarts on positioning and rhetoric. Sometimes it moves very fast, and other times it’s very difficult to get the writing moving.  It’s a strange mix of personal delight and satisfaction along with a lot of stop/start, stop/start pain.

Predictive Algorithms Actually Start Out as Historians

Historians are a lot better explainers than algorithmaticians. (Is there such a word? If not, I just made it up.) Let me argue my case.

Harvard’s Jill Lepore, one of the most fascinating and truly humorous historical writers, has superb explanatory insight on algorithmic prediction. That’s not a surprise. She approaches history from perspectives that have never crossed this historian’s mind--and does it with a lot of verve. She’s one of the few with a steady hand when the rest of us are lurching around with churning stomachs about artificial intelligence and moronic politicians.

With two talkative algorithmic geniuses in my own family, a son-in-law from Harvard and a recently minted Carnegie-Mellon data-scientist grandson, with whom I spend hours listening and making sense of their conversations, Lepore is an absolute delight at simplifying algorithmic insight.

She regularly seems to have the ability to condense an entire discipline, the whole shebang into a single readable paragraph. Here’s the first paragraph from her New Yorker article, entitled simply “Unforeseen.” Prophecy is a mug’s game. But then, lately, most of us are mugs. 2018 was a banner year for the art of prediction, which is not to say the science, because there really is no science of prediction. Predictive algorithms start out as historians: they study historical data to detect patterns. Then they become prophets: they devise mathematical formulas that explain the pattern, test the formulas against historical data withheld for the purpose, and use the formulas to make predictions about the future. That’s why Amazon, Google, Facebook, and everyone else are collecting your data to feed to their algorithms: they want to turn your past into your future.

What Am I Missing?

I was a bit surprised in a recent conversation with my ophthalmologist that though she was a superb eye physician, she was utterly in the dark when it came to human behavior. We got off my discussion of some refraction issues—readily resolved—and onto the behavioral failures of highly educated business people. Her underlying assumption was that the behaviors shouldn’t have happened because these well-educated people should know better.

I commented that far more often than not, behavioral failures are out of ignorance, not laziness or intention. Boy, that didn’t go over well. I repeated the simple statement a couple more times, but it was obvious from her nonverbals that she absolutely was not accepting my conclusion. I thought about saying, “look, I’m the expert in behavior and you’re the expert in ophthalmology,” but realizing that she wasn’t ready to go that far, I stuffed it, just letting it soak in and knowing she’ll want to talk about it six months from now at my next appointment. So, I went back to the questions about my refraction.

What she was missing was a great deal of understanding not only about human behavior, but especially about the complexities making up simple behaviors like listening and questioning, much less the rich complexities of highly interactional business conversations and often highly interactional personal conversations. Her problem was not unusual: medical specialties like business specialties (think “silos”) create thick walls. And some issues of behavior never break through such walls. And like plenty of professionals, they naively think they understand talk and communication. Sheer nonsense!!

Many never give thought to what they’re missing, especially in their conclusions about human behavior, business or otherwise. In this instance as in many, she was missing a lot of facts about the business of human interaction. Most people simply talk and communicate based on what they learned from their family of origin and perhaps from a teacher or two. I had a required speech communication course (“sending and receiving”) in high school in 1950-51, but very few have had my educational experience, much less a quality trained teacher.  And if you’ll think about it, very few families ever talk about talk and communicating, or even have the expertise to engage thoughtfully and accurately.

The “what am I missing” question is quite different than the “what am I missing out of” question. That’s primarily a question about missed luxuries in life—missed experiences that others might have or be having. “What am I missing?” is a question about your thinking related to problem solving and decision making. It’s an attempt at gaining better data and/or better ideas in your processes.

But this question of “what’s missing?” is assuming a far more important and obvious role in technology, a role that openly costs billions of lost dollars for a company. Of course, I’m quite capable of also arguing that what’s missing in conversations can also cost billions, but let’s not go there.

So, as I reflected about the issue with my eye doctor, I thought not only about what we miss in behavioral interactions and knowledge, but how often we miss major issues in business thinking—especially in the cutting-edge world of algorithms. And about how often algorithmic failures have become front page issues.

Six Resources on Creativity

Innovation and creativity, everyone says, are key to our nation’s success in the marketplace. While working through some new stuff on creativity and innovation, I stumbled, once more, across Robert Sternberg and Todd Lubart’s analysis of the resources for creativity. It has the intriguing title, "Buy Low and Sell High: An Investment Approach to Creativity."

The resources are a reminder of what it takes to get a leg up on creativity. More significantly and perhaps more usefully, the resources are especially programmed for succeeding as a worker in today’s business world.

1. Intelligence. This is not a reference to your IQ or to your capacities, but to your processes for planning, monitoring and evaluating your thinking. It’s more than a matter of gut feel, it’s reflecting on your decision process itself. The technical term is metacognition...

4 Key Attitudes of Critical Thinking

As a result of apartment renovation and moving upstairs, a number of my first floor and new second floor neighbors have been in my apartment. They wanted to see my new digs. One of the most striking features of their perusal is a seemingly profound lack of curiosity and very little ability to “notice.” “You have a beautiful apartment,” most respond. But what’s intriguing is what they don’t see unless I call attention to it. And these are not ill-educated people.

I have nearly 45 photos, sculptures, water colors, porcelains and artifacts hanging on the walls—all hung by a professional. One of the most gorgeous is an authentic Navajo rug, along with a recent painting of Indian tribeswomen. Not a single person mentioned one unique, beautiful, artistic hanging, a branch of spruce, covered with dripped copper. I have an extensive library, approximately 1500 volumes, yet no one gave it more than a glance. Not a single question was asked about any of the artifacts.

Even more sad than not noticing my personal context is the seeming lack of awareness of how context actually impacts each of as individuals and as members of a work team. So in the weeks following their visit to my apartment there was no sense they knew me any better, no attempt to get to know me better and no inherent projections of how I would respond to their conversations. The kind of familiarity information that can surface implicitly and explicitly in conversations was completely absent. And I’ve been watching and looking for that knowledge. But it was just never there in any of the dozen neighbor’s conversations. The underlying attitude of curiosity was absent—and so they remained in their small worlds. Expressing interest—but never following through on it. Perhaps, not recognizing what they were looking at or knowing the value of asking questions.

What is critical thinking?
Critical thinking, as I use the term, is the business of identifying the complications of relevant contexts and communication, and unpacking them thoughtfully. That includes physical contexts like those I describe in the above paragraphs. Of course, it also includes all the conversation and non-conversational talk, as well as the supportive physicality seen and heard in posture. So too, movement, non-verbal, language choice, values, arguments, persuasion, written materials, and linguistic forms like small talk, narrative, questioning. Including context artifacts like book choice, pictures, paintings and architecture.

To a very high degree, success in business—and life—is tied to one’s critical thinking skills in relevant, significant situations. One of the most illuminating experiences of critical thinking about “ordinary” talk took place at one of my last executive coaching jobs. I was working with the CEO of a major East Coast mortgage firm and had finished interviewing about twenty of his colleagues in preparation for coaching. I always got to their offices much earlier than any appointment, spending time with various execs and managers in “small talk.” Uniquely, the firm insisted on paying me on an hourly basis, rather than on a project basis. I had noticed the corporate attorney, who regularly received my billings, was unhappy with my fee. Late in the process, I happened to stop by his office and after he asked me how the “project” was going, he expressed frustration with my use of time—and the large bills he was paying just for “small talk.”

The Most Underrated Skill in Business. . .

...is not what top researchers think--even though it's printed in the MIT Sloan Review.

Recently, while reading a back issue of one of my favorite journals, the MIT Sloan Review, I stumbled on a research article entitled “The Most Underrated Skill in Management.” That sounded interesting, so I wondered what it had to say. At the conclusion of the third paragraph the authors wrote, “We’ve come to believe that problem formulation is the single most underrated skill in all of management practice.”

Good shot guys, but not quite. After thoughtfully re-reading the entire ten-page article, I concluded, that the article was exceptionally insightful from a process standpoint. It focused on a needy issue. But as far as being the “most underrated” skill, it’s nonsense. In fact, this is a research conclusion that needs serious rethinking. Actually amused by the authors’ conclusion, I was reminded of a brilliant and thought-provoking set of articles edited by the eminent psychologist, Robert Sternberg, entitled “Why smart people can be so stupid.”

The authors of “Smart people. . .” come up with a number of reasons for their conclusion. In spite of the MIT quoted research, one of the most apropos reasons for stupidity is what can be termed the mindless assimilation of social (business) biases. With their impeccable MIT Harvard reputation, these patently smart people demonstrate a bias that is clearly that of the academy. If you consult and read widely and analytically in business, it’s obvious that thinking about people competencies is controlled by organizational behaviorists, a solely psychological discipline--but in the work context. So, the authors looked at thinking, the black box and abnormal behaviors, but not at the inadequate conversing, right in front of their noses. That explains too clearly what’s going on in the MIT article.

The business world, since at least the 1970s, has been profoundly controlled by a theory built on both economics and psychology (organizational behavior). Business faculty and leaders are inherently aware of this theory. The consequence is that they tend to make choices according to its dictates. Social, behavioral and physical arrangements and decisions are implemented consistent with the theory’s prescriptions. When this happens, as in the MIT Review article, detriments to practice inevitably surface.  

Limiting research methods to their most familiar discipline, psychological behavior, inevitably impacts conceptual thinking and potentially creative solutions. In contrast, extensive research reveals that managers who use interdisciplinary research enable the individual and team to address complex problems more rationally and practically. But org behavior has become tacit when discussing any and all matters regarding humans. It’s like the impact of economics upon government policy. Articles about government policy are inevitably driven by the discipline of economics, even when thinking people have learned that the economic response may be irrelevant or heavily biased. It was no surprise that when Allan Greenspan dropped his economic bias and finally got around to interdisciplinary analysis--shortly after his retirement--he found that cultural orientation (anthropology) often determines important decisions—not economics. And that’s just a start. Just think about the 20 years of the Iraq war, based on the wrong-headed belief and methodology that all nations want a democratic country—whether or not they’re prepared for it. The Bush cronies were utterly lacking in anthropology and sociology disciplines. So, we had a still unresolved, disastrous mess with the loss of thousands, perhaps several million lives and trillions of dollars because of a completely fallacious orientation to an Asian culture. Utterly idiotic.

Though well-trained in modern rhetoric, communication, history and social-psychology, I’ve learned that when looking at a problem you need always to ask what discipline or disciplines can best explain the problem to get beyond Johnny One-Note. In short, the MIT research is indicative of the weakness of American specialization and its lack of interdisciplinary background. So, I’m arguing that when describing management, you need to think through the disciplines of management, psychology, anthropology, sociology, economics, linguistics, politics and certainly communication and rhetoric. Though I wouldn’t expect that from a business manager, I certainly don’t believe it’s too much to ask from highly educated academics from top schools. Evidently, I’m wrong.

The inarticulate
One of the delights of consulting in nearly all business disciplines, many Fortune 100 and 500 companies, and working primarily with senior execs, but interacting with mid-level employees for more than 30 years, is that you begin to notice what’s typically and uniquely true and prevalent in all companies. Certain business disciplines consistently show up as strengths in American companies and other disciplines as consistently weak. For example, American companies know more about strategy, sales, marketing, managing and technical innovation than the rest of the world. These are our strengths. You have to have your head in the sand not to know that Asians, and especially the Chinese, know a lot about manufacturing. But not about manufacturing innovation. That’s still American, even though being challenged today by the Chinese.

Turning Points and Milestones of Growth-Fostering Relationships

Every person who intends to exert leadership in his personal life, in business or any other vocation—and even in the family--will intentionally focus on personal growth. Research has shown us that effective business leadership growth inevitably requires mentors. Though true, that notion is plainly inadequate. The fact is that all living and all development takes place only with relationships. To put it still more directly, we experience growth because of our connections to other people. I can go through my years since grade school and well into my sixties, and still point to people that changed my life, impacts that would have to be considered as turning points and often milestones. Change that would never have happened without those connections.

 

The underpinnings of growth are inevitably acts of creativity built on relationships. Virginia Woolf puts it this way: Masterpieces (turning points and milestones) are not single and solitary births; they are the outcome of thinking in common, of thinking by a body of the people, so that the experience of the mass is behind the single voice.  

I still have a lot of memory about my first real growth experience, a phenomenally unique milestone while only in the 7^th grade. I’ll explain later why the experience was so important, why I remember so many details, and what it did for me. To begin, the experience was initiated by a civics teacher, Mr. Fickes, a teacher whom I thought was pretty dumb. I opened my mouth too often and after one episode he chewed me out, telling me I’d be in the “insane asylum by the time I finished high school.” Shortly after that experience, the chair of the social science department, Dr. Arthur, a very impressive intellect, and a delightful woman with sparkling eyes and a Michigan PhD, took seven top students out of the class and created a seminar group on civics for us. Fickes did not return the following year.