Dan Erwin

The Surprising Habit of the Smartest People

If you really intend to excel in your field, it’s a smart idea to learn from the most inspiring, intelligent people in the world. To be specific, we know that brilliant people tend to read a lot, are very self-disciplined and set goals for themselves—achievable goals. In addition, my reading and studies—even since childhood—have indicated that one of the very best habits supporting success, a habit smart people use a lot, is the practice of metacognition: thinking about your thinking. 

Metacognition simply refers to your awareness of your thought processes. Whenever you reflect on your own ways of analyzing how you are thinking about a problem or decision, questioning whether that’s the most helpful way of thinking about it, that’s metacognition. “I’ve been thinking about the problem this way. Are there some other ways of thinking about the problem—or opportunity?” is the relevant question. From a business standpoint, I’ve noticed, even in top multi-billion-dollar firms, only a small percentage use metacognition. But those who do, not surprisingly, tend to be corporate leaders. Clearly metacognition is a learned behavior, not humanly inherent.

3 Steps for Limiting Confirmation Bias

Sharon Begley, the science writer, began a fascinating article some time ago on the limits of reason with these examples of "irrationality."  Women are bad drivers, Saddam plotted 9/11, Obama was not born in America, and Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.  Her article asks why we so often suspend our critical thinking and roll over to the irrational. 

The well-worn psychological answer to her question is confirmation bias.  We only look for and acknowledge information or data that supports our own beliefs.  So we expected to find WMDs in Iraq and refuse to admit that there were none.  Or we see all kinds of things in Obama's birth certificate that aren't there.  As a result, psychologists have been documenting since 1960 that we humans are really, really bad at reasoning.  It seems to make no sense, but there you go.

However recent research adds an intriguing evolutionary insight to why we avoid data and reasoning and only look for that which supports our bias.  Here's Begley intriguing summary of what's going on: 

The reason we succumb to confirmation bias, why we are blind to counterexamples, and why we fall short of Cartesian logic in so many other ways is that these lapses have a purpose: they help us “devise and evaluate arguments that are intended to persuade other people,” says psychologist Hugo Mercier of the University of Pennsylvania. Failures of logic, he and cognitive scientist Dan Sperber of the Institut Jean Nicod in Paris propose, are in fact effective ploys to win arguments.

See also: Selection bias.

This goes a long way to explain why we so often ignore data and reasoning and go with our emotions and our gut.  We want to win the argument.  It's why we look harder for flawed thinking or research when we don't agree with its conclusions.

Transparency and Truthfulness Can Be Stupid

Transparency and honesty are occasionally stupid. I don’t regularly recommend an outright lie, but on occasion. . . . it’s a very useful strategy. Here are two experiences.

I still remember with laughter the gruff, colorful-talking sales director from the Pillsbury Company who hired me to work with him years ago. Though most loved him once they got to know him, he could be scary to new hires. He just sounded very mean. But his best friends had advised him to work with me, and so he followed their recommendation.

The first meeting was unforgettable. Once we’d talked a little about the development process, he looked at me and said gruffly, “Erwin, I don’t want you doing any “mind fucking on me”. In other words, he didn’t want me screwing around with his gray matter. I smiled slightly, looked at him, and told him that “Of course I won’t be doing that. I don’t believe in it.”

And then I set out to screw with his brains and beliefs in the best coaching fashion possible, doing exactly what he told me not to do.

My diagnosis had revealed that my gruff friend believed that relationships had to develop over time and that nothing could be done to escalate that relationship. He naively believed that “sometimes two people have the right chemistry and sometimes they don’t. Only time will tell.” The consequence of that fixed belief was that he was also clueless about the skills for developing relationships.

An Age of Unreason?

Inauguration Day

If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, It expects what never was and never will be.
  --Thomas Jefferson

"In current culture, where is wisdom to be found? If wisdom is a hunger in the soul, as Plato said, and if we are transfixed with true figures of wisdom--the man who has had time to think enough, the woman who has the chance truly to reflect, how do we now slake the need? It turns out that the problem of wisdom is an easy problem to solve. For acquiring wisdom is dangerous.  The individual who pursues true insight. . . is untimely. That is, he strives to be ahead of his own time in his perceptions, albeist basing his thoughts in the intellectual achievement of the past.

My First Experience with ChatGPT

. . . was enlightening. It confirmed my knowledge of artificial intelligence and reinforced the need for assessing trustworthiness of Chat content.

So that I’d be able to evaluate the tool, I asked a question in the center of my religious and theological scholarly expertise. I asked “what’s the Biblical book of Jeremiah all about.” The errors were immediately obvious to my scholarly eye—and there were plenty of errors. So, I want to talk about how to assess just a few of the elements of a product or service.

To assess the value of any product or service, you always begin with the fundamental proposal—which usually appears in its advertising or in the sales pitch. In argumentation, the proposal is typically called the “claim,” which is built on specific data and oriented to an objective.

AI development folk have already created development guidelines for human system interaction. Although the guidelines are exceptionally specific for AI development, I’m going to work from the more standard argument process which works across all contexts and can be applied fairly simply—and then added to for specific contexts like digital chat. My basic approach—the Toulmin argument model--applies to absolutely every context imaginable and makes it easy to understand the issues. Then, if you so desire, you can apply the context specific translation of guidelines.

The underlying approach for assessing an AI app is like any other product or service--whether for an auto, a new house, a frozen vegetable or even a condom. I happen to drive a Mercedes C300. The Mercedes proposal is very clear-cut: “we are the defining class since 1886.” The Trojan condom, in contrast, proposes that they are the defining “instrument of closeness.”

The Chat GPT, too, makes a very clear proposal: “we communicate with enterprise data across industries, languages, and specialties. . . driving a new era of convenience, productivity, and connectivity.” Although generative AI is a unique species, it’s spread is moving across industry, healthcare, natural language processing, space exploration and science.

The fundamental issue in all these AI products is trustworthiness.

Sorry Counselor. Negotiating Boundaries Is What’s Needed.

Not setting boundaries.

What's the difference? Is it substantial? Or are they just two words for the same thing? And does it really matter? Prior to the 1950s, they would have been just two words for the same thing. That is, if anyone ever used the term “negotiating” boundaries. The practice of “negotiating” boundaries comes primarily out of the 1980s with the flattening of business hierarchies and the strong orientation to women’s rights. With the exception of sales negotiation, it was rare to talk about negotiating relationships until the mid-1980s. And since then, there have been tons of research and some training solely in the practice of negotiating interpersonal boundaries. In simple terms, setting boundaries is one individual determining boundaries for others. Negotiating boundaries is two or more creating a workable agreement on the boundaries between them.

So, there’s a significant difference between setting and negotiating boundaries. Major business leaders as well as many community leaders recognize these differences even without distinguishing between the two terms. But, ask the right questions and they can clarify immediately. I’ve learned, sadly, that these same professionals are typically incapable of using the negotiation competence in their family. Shifting competencies from one context to another without training is highly problematic—even for top business school grads. Similarly, lower-level bureaucrats, patriarchal families, pastors, the Roman and Evangelical churches, small and medium-sized privately held owner-firms lack insight to the distinctions and sometimes have a lot of resistance on their hands as a result of their ignorance.

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...

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. .

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."