Dan Erwin

How Silence Can Work in Your Favor

Silence works exceptionally well in many interpersonal situations. That’s especially true, for example, in a problem solving or conflict-oriented situation. In such contexts, strategic silence is often one of your best approaches to resolution. It’s an interpersonal behavior used when talk is expected. Someone has a pressing reason to talk, but does not talk and does not explain their silence.

So, when a person violates expectations by silence, the other’s attention is riveted on the silence. It violates expectations and typically leaves the other with “silence nerves.” A tension based on the innate need for social connections and relationships among humans. A tension often so strong that it defines the person—the initiator of the silence.

For example, I was recently involved in a highly frustrating situation with my website provider. Since my blogging and regular interactions were either via email or Typepad, I had decided that my website served no significant purpose and there was no reason to continue the monthly financial payment. Since my email worked out of the website, I contacted my provider and asked to keep the email. That was not possible, but I could purchase a simple stand-alone email site for just a few bucks a month. I also agreed to purchase a transfer process from a provider. But before I had worked thru the password issues for Outlook to transfer those archives and data, the hosting firm closed down my website. The provider sent me to the stand-alone email site, but I needed passwords from my old site to transfer all the data from that site. The agent worked with me for easily half an hour to transfer the material, but we failed. I couldn’t get the new site up and running and the agent couldn’t go online. Frustrated, he asked whether there wasn’t a more experienced person to do the work for me, an obvious snub. I had followed his instructions at least three times, but none of my passwords worked, resulting in a great deal of frustration for him. Clearly, he saw me as inept. I asked whether he could pass me up to his supervisor and his first response was negative. After ten minutes of more screwing around during which I said nothing, I asked again and this time I was passed on to a supervisor. In effect I rejected his definition of me—and he finally accepted my decision.  

The supervisor and I walked through the new email process twice, like the former agent. It failed both times. Then he suggested it might be a cache problem, so I followed his cache deleting instructions. That resolution brought me to the “create a new email” site. But we needed an accurate password to create a new email site and transfer all my materials. I had worked with the hosting firm for more than ten years so I had a number of passwords, but none of them worked, making transfer impossible. I owned the password problem, but here’s where the issue got messy. Because of the firm’s privacy issues, my contact couldn’t retrieve the working password. I was silent while he searched. He slowly went up the ladder, finally telling me that I’d have to handle the issue by paper and that it would probably take a week or two to get the password. I clarified quietly and slowly, “you’re telling me that I won’t be able to use an email for a week?” He didn’t respond. I remained silent. “Let me try something else” he finally said. That failed. I remained silent. So, he said, he might have another option. I remained silent. That failed. I remained silent. Finally, he said he didn’t think there were any other options except the paper route. I remained silent. Then he commented, “you’re not saying anything.” I very slowly and quietly remarked, “I don’t think you need to hear my anger” –and said nothing else. He was silent for a long time, as was I. My silence gave him no clues of how to work with me, so he was obviously playing around with the potential meanings of my silence. My past experience suggested that my silence was controlling the situation and the agent—exactly what I wanted. If I had talked, there was a high probability that I would have lost control of the situation. He would have responded to whatever I said, and taken back control.

Finally, he said that there was a “privacy team up the line, maybe they can help.” Again, I was silent. He said that he’d get back in a couple minutes. I remained silent. About three minutes later, he came back with both password and resolution of the problem. I responded quietly and with simplicity, “thank you.” The first agent was clearly both inept and pissed at me, a relation that brought practically nothing from me except silence, forcing the handover. The second agent revealed no serious frustration like the first. But my silence kept him from gaining control of the situation. “Silence,” however, drove his final search for me and ultimately resolved the problem.

Note well: Silence drives the resolution. Silence is tangible, the hard, strong presence that displays itself openly—so that we can’t escape its presence. The resolution is forced by the silence, not by me and not by the agent. If you can make that drastic mental shift, then tools and competencies assume a level of capacity that offers power that human persona cannot match. Our task as professionals, then, is to set these competencies free to operate in contexts of need.

On some occasions, however, silence does not violate expectations. It may be role silence, that of a subordinate to a superior--a sign of respect. Superiors may be silent toward others as a mark of their status. A senior person may not return a phone call or check in to update a subordinate. Though that kind of silence takes on meaning, it’s not strategic because it follows custom. In such customary settings the onus is inevitably on the subordinate to call the superior back.

It’s important to understand that strategic silence does not stand for, signify or symbolize the person. Instead, the behaviors actually create the person originating the silence. Silence controls the other. So, silence impacts us—and gradually creates us—our persona. It’s not just that the behaviors are different, but that the competency takes on a persona itself. Our task, then is to understand that persona in the contexts where it operates.

Processing strategic silence
Although silence is all around us, it becomes “strategic” only when talk is expected. Someone has a pressing reason to talk, but does not talk and does not explain their silence.

Strategic interpersonal silence is marked by a definite process, often involving a descriptive contextual comment, followed by a brilliant, daring, open question, then silence, then response from the “other,” then still another silence and then a more significant response, usually involving more significant clarity, a slight change of mind, and even material the person did not intend to share. It’s quite probable that the supervisor in the above case did not intend to go to the privacy team and resolve my issue. If I’d given him control, he’d quite happily have resolved the issue with paper and a week-long response. So, two silences or more in the rhetorical process are exceptionally useful. They tend to force a more thorough response. .

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.

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.

It's Even More Important Now to Keep Your Friends Close and Your Enemies Closer

When I first wrote this back  in 2012, it was just fairly relevant. Given the status of our culture today, this article is extremely relevant. People aren't talking to each other about their differences. They are not just marching, but sometimes they are rioting over their differences. The issues that divide are numerous: politics, science, education, religion, pandemic, etc. The list is seemingly endless. Now, more than ever, people are just ignoring those they know differ with them, and sometimes behaving like irreconcilable enemies.

So why should you keep your friends close--and your enemies closer? It wasn’t the Godfather’s Michael Corleone who first uttered this well-known dictum. Actually, it came from Machiavelli in "The Prince," the definitive primer for how to be a dictator. You’d think that with my easy-going optimism, I’d never write a blog on this subject.  But, au contraire!

As a manager or leader it is inevitable that we’ll want to add to your knowledge base, try to sell ideas, get people on board and even change the direction of our organization. One of the involved persons just might be your enemy. That’s my basic rationale for acting on Machiavelli’s instinct. In my first vocation, the Christian ministry, I worked diligently to stay close to parishioners who disagreed with my orientation. The consequence was that unlike many in the congregationalist polity I maintained significant support not only from those of my ideology, but also those of more rigid, fundamentalist ideologies. They could have been "enemies" and capable in our polity of creating a lot difficulties. But over an eleven year period, that never happened because I was close to those who differed--and worked to make "adjustments" without compromises.

In the business setting, I refer to “enemy” as a person you have to interact with, someone who’s competing for your resources, who doesn’t follow through on his commitments, whom you don’t trust, with whom the “chemistry” isn’t there, or who disagrees with your perspective from the ground up. These are also people whom you’ll need in order to get your own personal and organizational objectives met. As both a manager and a consultant, I’ve found a number of people who fit in that same box. In short, I’ve found Machiavelli very useful for my own success.

But there are a number of exceedingly important reasons for keeping your enemies close...

So why should you keep your friends close--and your enemies closer? It wasn’t the Godfather’s Michael Corleone who first uttered this well-known dictum. Actually, it came from Machiavelli in "The Prince," the definitive primer for how to be a dictator. You’d think that with my easy-going optimism, I’d never write a blog on this subject.  But, au contraire!

As a manager or leader it is inevitable that we’ll want to add to your knowledge base, try to sell ideas, get people on board and even change the direction of our organization. One of the involved persons just might be your enemy. That’s my basic rationale for acting on Machiavelli’s instinct. In my first vocation, the Christian ministry, I worked diligently to stay close to parishioners who disagreed with my orientation. The consequence was that unlike many in the congregationalist polity I maintained significant support not only from those of my ideology, but also those of more rigid, fundamentalist ideologies. They could have been "enemies" and capable in our polity of creating a lot difficulties. But over an eleven year period, that never happened because I was close to those who differed--and worked to make "adjustments" without compromises.

In the business setting, I refer to “enemy” as a person you have to interact with, someone who’s competing for your resources, who doesn’t follow through on his commitments, whom you don’t trust, with whom the “chemistry” isn’t there, or who disagrees with your perspective from the ground up. These are also people whom you’ll need in order to get your own personal and organizational objectives met. As both a manager and a consultant, I’ve found a number of people who fit in that same box. In short, I’ve found Machiavelli very useful for my own success.

But there are a number of exceedingly important reasons for keeping your enemies close...

Kevin Costner's "Yellowstone": "Cruel and Uncaring"

Toward the end of episode eight in the third season of Yellowstone, John Dutton (Kevin Costner) says this to his son, Kayce: “In case you haven’t noticed, it (the world) is cruel and uncaring.” And he adds, “you have to be meaner than evil--and still love your family and still enjoy a sunrise.” I could feel my skin crawling, tingling after his words. I understood my rejection immediately, but it took several days to figure out why my emotions were so strong. And why Dutton’s commitment bothered me so much.

It’s not that the words were out of sync with the storyline of the episode or the series. The entire series has been filled with gripping conflicts between good and evil, between protection of the family and property and the attempts to steal the property from the family. Often dripping with brutality. The stories in all three seasons have shown a high degree of consistency and suspense, interlaced with underlying questions about human reality. (Does this actually happen in our world today?) That’s part of the reason the show has kept my interest at very high levels. Obviously, I’m not the only committed viewer. That final episode set a ratings-record with 5.2 million viewers, claiming cable’s #1 spot, in live, same day. If you include the simulcast and encores, the closer drew 7.5M viewers on premiere night.  And it also set up the viewer for season four, next year.

More than a good show?
What bugged me so much about that narrative is that it’s reflective of the distrust of the world and the people in it, the background, for example, for our current conspiracy spasm. Both consciously and unconsciously, my person and my vocations have often circled around our trust and distrust of the community and the world—and how profoundly repetitious stories with similar distrusting values impact our relationships, vocations and communities. I don’t think of Dutton’s two sentences as merely a means for sharing information. It’s an arousing story in which we viewers have been conditioned to participate. And it appeals to our feelings rather than to our thinking. That’s what makes it so powerful and seductive, creating my intense emotional response.  

Dig into any conspiracy theory and you’ll find believers with shattered views of trust in the world, what Richard Hofstadter famously called "an arena for angry minds."

Must-Read (and View) on Today's Conflicted World

A blueprint to actually fix America's police. In this article by a professor of law, a former deputy chief of police and a criminology professor, the three argue very intelligently that we know what to do to stop police violence, but there's not the will to do it.  https://bit.ly/2A8aGc0

How the world can avoid screwing up the response to the next covid-19 again. Begley and Branswell, two of our very best science writers, lay out a highly useful and informative strategy to avoid getting caught with our pants down. They avoid the magic stuff, like "invent a vaccine." https://bit.ly/3eZnz6O

What does the shocking unemployment report really mean? The Atlantic's Derek Thompson writes that no one is sure whether this is a dead-cat economic bounce or the beginning of a glorious summer of economic recovery. He tries to figure it out for himself, gives up, and turns to especially thoughtful economist who talks about the answer to his question with two unusual terms: suppression and recession--a unique analysis that sounds accurate. https://bit.ly/374Sjka

James Mattis denounces Trump. He finally breaks his silence, tells you why he opens up and then explains our presidential predicament. https://bit.ly/37i2zWF 

With protests, the 'bright side' and 'dark side' of America are on display. With two straightforward conclusions, the sociologist, Harvard's Orlando Patterson, explains our historical predicament: the background for Mattis. https://on.msnbc.com/3eUQcCk

The Most Underrated Skill in Management??

This past Spring’s issue of the MIT Sloan Review (2017) had an intriguing article with the above title, minus the question marks. “This sounds interesting,” I thought. “Wonder what they’ll 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. But as far as being the “most underrated” skill, it’s nonsense. Uniquely, it offers me the opportunity to challenge common business priorities that need serious rethinking. But, reflecting for just a few moments more, 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 read widely and analytically in business, it’s obvious that thinking about people competencies is controlled by organizational behaviorists with a solely psychological background. They look solely at thinking, but not at conversing. It explains too clearly what’s going on in the MIT article. 

It’s an innocent limitation, but limiting conclusions to a single discipline, like psychology or organizational behavior, inevitably limits formulation and potentially creative solutions. Extensive research reveals that...

Three Steps for Reducing Your Decision Errors

Far more often than I ever expected, I’m still in the decision-making business as a semi-retired professional. So, I was initially intrigued and then amused by an article in the MIT Sloan Review on a structured approach to strategic decisions. What caught my attention were the authors: Kahneman, Lovallo and Sibony—some really smart guys in the decision-making process. With that kind of backing and world renown authors, the Sloan Review can get your attention to the process as though it’s something really new--a way to avoid biased decisioning.

The process is not new! But it is masterful.

I first borrowed the model from Russo and Schoemaker’s Decision Traps (1989), (later upgraded to Winning Decisions (2002)). There are two differences between Kahneman’s recommendations and those of Russo and Schoemaker. The MIT article focuses on organizational decision making, while R & S focus on individual decision-making. The second difference is that the MIT article lays out more than a dozen pieces of research, dating from as recently as 2017, while R&S worked from far less research...

The Flip Side of Happiness

Too much of a good thing can backfire. And that, research reveals, includes happiness. It’s intriguing to find significant research explaining the downside of emotions. Not least because I’ve always been intrigued with the upside of bad emotions and the downside of good emotions. Anger, for example, has an upside. And, in a never forgotten experience with a client, paranoia—at least for a lawyer—can have an upside too.

American culture is all about the pursuit of happiness. We’ve institutionalized that pursuit in the Declaration of Independence. But we understand the governmental caveats to that pursuit to assume also that we don't do anything illegal or violate the rights of others.

Still, I’m not a happiness-hater. Normally I have more than my fair share of happiness...

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...

Losing Faith in Expertise?

 
  We are moving toward a Google-fueled, Wikipedia-based collapse of any division between     professionals and laypeople. Tom Nichols, US Naval War College

Tom Nichols' engrossing study of how America lost faith in expertise--and why that's a giant problem--is long overdue. On numerous occasions I've listened to one of the least informed persons in the room hold court, confidently lecturing me and others with a stream of banalities and misinformation. And it's not just at a cocktail party. A few weeks ago a masseuse was talking with great confidence about national policy regarding healthcare, a subject about which she knew absolutely nothing. Since I was captured on a massage table, I merely grunted, but I wanted to throttle her.