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.

Why You Need to Think and Talk on Two Tracks

Metacommunication: talk about talk. It’s the ability to describe the intentions of what we’re saying and doing. It’s necessary and helpful for avoiding misunderstanding, especially when what we’re doing or saying can be readily misinterpreted. Metacommunication makes influence and cooperation from those we are working with a lot easier.

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 or processing their conversations. In our studies and experience with metacomm, we have found a number of metacomm 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 facilitate the conversation, following the implicitly agreed-upon rules and making effective use of time to achieve the set expectations. ”I’m saying this because. . . .”

Do You Have a Two-Track Brain?

In today’s tech oriented business world you’ll need it. Here’s why.

One of the most difficult problems with collaborative conversation is staying on track. Smart people inevitably get waylaid by tangential ideas that are suggested by their meeting interactions. That’s precisely why many think that team meetings are such a waste. Yet solutions and decisions in today’s business world inevitably require conversations to gain the buy-in of diverse teams and multiple business disciplines.

One underlying limitation business groups face is that few participants have a good handle on sequencing ideas. We used to think that software coders, who constantly work with digital sequencing, should be able to manage linkages. We’ve found, however, that the majority of technical people are unable to make the transfer of digital sequencing to conversational sequencing. Those with an extensive background in

The Irrational Fears About AI Just Keep Piling Up

You don’t have to look beyond today’s newspaper, the latest popular or business magazines or just about any news program, much less endless websites. Even a recent issue of AARP, the magazine for elderly and retired people, has scary ideas about artificial intelligence. AI may be more all-present than Trump.

Among the latest attention-getting issues and headlines are the following: how could AI take over elections—and undermine democracy; does regulating artificial intelligence save humanity or just stifle innovation; how can congress regulate AI; and not least—does regulating AI save humanity or just stifle innovation?

But the biggest fears for many surround the issue of jobs.
Two of MIT’s most knowledgeable guys on artificial intelligence, Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson, will tell you to cool it about jobs and AI. They argue, for example, that asking how many jobs will be killed by AI is the wrong question. Sure, Frey and Osborne’s analysis from early 2015 found that nearly 50% of current jobs are susceptible to AI. But by no stretch of the imagination is that the whole picture.

Why Do Business Chameleons Get Ahead?

That's not a trick question. Chameleons have developed a number of important qualities and competencies. The chameleon's success is built on their ability to self-monitor for the sake of impression management. It’s not that they’re manipulative, but that they’re superb at assessing situations and exceptionally astute in adapting to organizational needs.

Most employees make getting ahead a very high objective. Promotions can drastically change the lives of both those who stay in a company and those who move to another company. Promotions do more than provide different job duties and better rewards. They can also change where you live and who you get to interact with. In today’s high-pressured workplace, gaining new skills and working with different and more capable people can help keep you on the learning curve—and provide for job security.

Recently, studies have assessed the power of personality traits to impact promotion and rewards. The studies have ignored the actual performance of individuals and focused, for example, on the Big Five personality traits: conscientiousness, openness to experience, agreeableness, extraversion and neuroticism. Systematic studies have found that personality can predict job performance fairly well—but only under certain conditions. In fact, you may have lots of job relevant talent and personality traits, like conscientiousness and extraversion, but nevertheless fail to gain power or get promoted. . .

"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.