Dan Erwin

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...

When My Conclusion Was Dead Wrong

As a research-based consultant, I’m used to getting my ideas tweaked by new research. After all, I think of myself as a fairly flexible, open guy, so a small adjustment to my theories and ideas is usually illuminating. But unknown to Harvard’s Rosabeth Kanter, she took a Shillelagh, a big club to one of my big ideas. Her blog, Why running a family doesn’t help you run a business, knocked me back on my heels. And I yelled a silent Aaargh!, knowing full well that she was quite correct and I was quite wrong. So there, I admitted it Prof Kanter.

Kanter lays out her case with panache, acknowledging the conventional wisdom first. Here’s her argument:

In theory, those years of family work at home could look great on a resume. Consider the skills required: setting priorities, training others, organizing complex logistics and schedules, and using interpersonal sensitivity to handle difficult people problems. Indeed, some advocates have argued that the time women--and sometimes men--with advanced degrees spend out of the workplace managing a family is valuable experience for managing back in the paid work world. 

I agree it is valuable experience — if the paid job one returns to involves managing a handful of people who are vulnerable and can't leave. Otherwise, the operating skills for family manager are nothing like the qualifications for workplace professionals.

Her reasoning and evidence that follows are flawless—and quite correct.

Suffice it to say, that I’ve taught the very opposite and spent time preaching to the choir of empty nest women wanting back into the workforce.

To err is human
Yet I’m certain that most of us go through life assuming and even insisting that we are right about everything. And that includes stuff from the origins of the universe to how to load the dishwasher. That’s why Moliere’s comment is spot on: It infuriates me to be wrong when I know I’m right.

But I’ve figured out why, primarily, I’ve wanted so badly to be right. It was all about my allegiances and the narratives I’d built around them.

WYSIATI
In his fascinating book, The Black Swan, Nassim Taleb introduces the idea of narrative fallacy to describe how flawed stories of the past shape our view of the world—and our expectations for the future. I have three daughters, all of whom were raised to be professionals just like their mother. Inevitably, as a father of smart daughters, I experienced male chauvinists who drove me nuts. After all, every father wants his best for his daughters, and their achievement was always tops in my priority list.

So, for instance, when my youngest was a high school freshman, I found myself in a teacher conference that raised my ire. Her male math teacher rather pointedly said, “Kris does very well in math, especially for a girl.” Knowing that her husband was about to become slightly volatile, my wife kicked me under the table, got my eye and essentially said (nonverbally) “cool it.” But you get the point. And so in later life, after having kids, they went back into the workforce rather successfully. Clearly, because of my family allegiances I got caught up in the narrative fallacy about mothers going back to work and began to preach it.

The narrative fallacy
The narrative fallacy is a decision error that most of us make largely because we are gripped by the illusion of understanding. As Daniel Kahneman explains them, they arise inevitably from our continuous attempt to make sense of the world. And inevitably also, the explanatory stories that people find compelling are simple: are concrete rather than abstract; assign a larger role to talent, stupidity , and intentions than to luck; and focus on a few striking events that happened rather than on the countless events that failed to happen. 

3 Keys to Successful Career Change

Although the notions around career change have been in flux for a number of years, there is one identifiable thread running through the rhetoric of the past 50 years: always build on your old career and its well-developed competencies.

You won’t need all of your old competencies, but a significant number must be available to support your new career. Journalists love to report on the unique people who won’t follow that rule. But the number of people who build a successful career that ignores their previous competencies is miniscule. Analyzing the past can force you to define what’s transferable and what’s not. In the long run, the distinctions between the past and the future provide focus for gaining new learnings quickly and efficiently.

This approach has two significant advantages: it is not overwhelming—and it makes you immediately valuable to your (new) organization. I always assumed this was self-evident, but experience reveals that few really understand the process initially!

One of my mentees provides a superb example for successful change. About a dozen years ago, he got into a major financial firm right out of college as a client relationship specialist. An English major, his conversational and linguistic skills were superb. Though he did not initially recognize his giftedness, he almost automatically thought first in big pictures, then created or broke out process from that macro understanding. This unusual competency sometimes goes with a humanities degree, but is usually missing in those with technical and business degrees.

His use of that expertise was spontaneous and unconscious. Early on in the financial firm, he began using technology with his relational skills, the focus of the finance position. After just a couple years, he bumped up that elementary experience into making sense out of tech strategy, assessing internal tech needs--and working with technology folk. Pretty soon, though he’d never had any technical background in software, he began to understand technology process and strategy more richly. (You don’t need to know how to code to understand process and strategy). Soon, with articulate questioning and networking, he became adept at figuring out what various programs could and could not do. As a result of his curiosity and focus, he became an expert strategic and planning thinker. That led to project management in a leading tech firm. (Still no coding expertise.) But from that experience he recognized the value of Agile, got his credentials very quickly and was soon using Agile in his project management. Next, you guessed it, he got on the Scrum bandwagon and is now a Senior Scrum consultant. I suspect there’ll be still further vocational and growth moves.

His career development model is simple and straight-forward: develop by adding strategic tools.

Sure, this sounds like overly simple process. Yet, the model is fundamental to all career change. Surprisingly, no more than five to ten percent of business folk seem to have the understanding and discipline to follow the model. Indeed, my observation of several hundred individuals attempting to develop skills without anchoring growth in the past reveals ongoing, unnecessary limitations.

Why is that?

Edgar Schein of MIT has talked and written about this macro problem for years.  More recently, Herminia Ibarra has also been dealing with this same issue. They believe that when the gap between your present situation and the hoped-for new situation is too large, the more likely it'll be that you'll ignore or misunderstand the information in the new context. And the result will be—failure...

Why Is It So Hard to Learn?

There are at least ten or so reasons that tend to make learning difficult for most of us.

Less than 10% of professionals are agile enough learners to quickly process an experience and apply their lessons to new situations. That's a spooky statistic. In today's economy where innovation, skill development  and learning are the only means to circumvent  personal obsolescence, why is the number of agile learners so small? In other words, why is it so hard to learn? Max Bazerman of Harvard  suggests three basic obstacles to learning. In this brief summary I add eight more insights gleaned from both research and face-to-face experience with hundreds of clients. 

The need for balance
If you’ve achieved some level of professional success, the idea that your skills could be lacking won’t compute. In fact, as Bazerman reminds us, balance theory emphasizes that we want consistency when we organize our thoughts and think about our expertise. To maintain our cognitive balance—our need to believe we’re consistent--we are nearly certain to avoid hard or painful truths.

If it ain’t broke, why fix it?
Generally, most of us reach a level of competency between four and six years into our vocation—then we slow down and eventually stop learning. Partly, that’s because we’ve been praised in the past for our work prowess. According to reinforcement theory, we tend to continue behaviors (skills) that brought positive rewards such as raises and promotions. If your professionalism has rewarded you, you’ll tend to resist information suggesting that your judgment and your toolbox could be systematically improved. 

Mistakes were made, but not by me
You’ve probably relied on your way of doing things for years. When you receive negative feedback about your performance, that will mean that you’ve made some costly mistakes in the past—and that will be unsettling. Interpersonal studies suggest that getting negative feedback causes us to avoid the person who gave it, filter information to him in the future, and constrict our  thinking. It’s no surprise that most of us will try to discredit the truth about our deficiencies, and become impervious to self-correction.

Missing the big picture
When learning new competencies, some people are so wrapped up in the detail and concrete specifics of a new skill that they miss the big development picture. Our education, whether business, law, architecture or engineering is highly specialized—making us all "Incrementalists." As a result, we fail to fully integrate the new skill into our toolkit, thinking that learning is merely an item-by-item matter. Without integration, our learning results will be nothing more than mediocre, barely moving the needle.

If you want to be great at something, who should you learn from?

In an absolutely fascinating opinion article, Adam Grant opined that "those who can do, can't teach." I laughed as soon as I saw the title. It was pretty clear to me where he was going. Grant argues rightly that the greatest experts in a subject are not necessarily the best teachers. My usual way of getting to this issue is to tell an entry-level person that the best coach will never be more than two levels above you. Beyond that, the expert will be highly abstract, assume the unassumable about you, and won't be able to put the skills in a concrete package.

But Grant's way of going at the issue is so very useful, it needs to be added to your toolkit for coach selection. 

First, pay attention to how long since the teacher studied the material. Ignore the top universities' boast about how most of their classes are taught by top faculty. The best teachers are probably grad students who just learned the material and know what it's like to be a beginner. In my post-doc work, I signed up for a course in adult learning and was initially disappointed that it was going to be taught by a teaching assistant, a grad student in his last year of PhD. From the start, he surprised me with his thoroughness. Later in the semester the top prof in the field subbed for his grad student when he had a bad case of the flu. Wow, was I glad the TA was teaching. The expert couldn't get the cookies on the bottom shelf for us no matter how many questions we asked...

The Demands of Extreme Teaming

In an interview with Harvard’s Amy Edmondson, the professor points out that today’s managers have to work with teams that cross distance, discipline and hierarchy—a task that doesn’t come naturally. She refers to the task as “extreme teaming,” arguing that with the complications of 24/7 global operations, more people than ever are required to collaborate outside the context of a formal team.

Edmondson is extremely cautious in her conclusions. For example, when asked why we’re seeing more extreme teaming, she responds, “beyond the increasingly globalized workplaces, there’s a recognition that we’re not always going to rely on vertical integration to solve all of our challenges. It sometimes just makes sense to team up with another organization to get something done.”

Note the language: “not always going to rely…” “increasingly globalized workplaces” “sometimes just makes sense.” That many caveats and qualifiers in just two sentences of 37 words including articles? Really? In medium-sized or large corporations, 90% of execution is cross-disciplinary. And in small tech firms, close to 95% of execution is cross-disciplinary.

There actually are hurdles, as the interviewer writes, “Many managers are not equipped with the skills to capture the full value of these multifaceted collaborations.” And what about the ordinary workers who are involved in all these cross-disciplinary teams?

Actually, team failures abound in virtually every organizational change. One recent study of 95 teams in 25 leading corporations found that nearly 75% of cross-functional teams are dysfunctional. Engineers don’t converse well with designers, marketing doesn’t converse well with development, and so on. It’s becoming rather clear that the real business of business is conversation. Yet few have these skills at the level necessary for today’s successful business person.

And what about the few that have these skills in spades?

How to Be Your Own Worst Enemy

One of the most damaging cognitive biases, especially for the successful, is the illusion of control. It’s the tendency for people to overestimate their ability to control events. It occurs when someone feels a sense of control over outcomes that they demonstrably do not influence. The illusion of control is a confusion between skill and chance situations. So, it’s seen in issues as disparate as gambling behavior and belief in the paranormal. Another place it operates—very much out of sight--is in business conversations.

In a fascinating study Boaz Keysar and Anne Henley, psychologists at the University of Chicago, studied 40 pairs of listeners and speakers.  The talkers believed that their intended meaning was understood "most of the time."  But that belief, like a lot of other so-called "soft skill" beliefs, won't stand up to the scrutiny of research.

Instead, the research showed that nearly half the time that speakers thought they were understood, they were actually wrong.  In 46% of the cases there was a breakdown--the listeners didn't get it.  What's most surprising is ...

"Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me)"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

Top Workplaces for Millennials

You'll be very surprised to learn which firm is number one in the nation for the huge millennial generation. You might guess Google, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon or even Buzzfeed. They're in the top ten, but none of the usual standbys are #1. Facebook is not even in the top 25.

The National Society of High School Scholars partnered with Hanover Research on the survey. They surveyed over 13,000 students and young professionals between the ages of 15 and 32. The goal was to understand the preferences and attitudes of "high achieving millennials." It's no surprise that career interests are heavily focused on science, technology, engineering and math...

Three Skills to Thrive in the New Workplace. Hint: **Coding Isn’t One of Them.

We all know about STEM, but Geoff Colvin suggests that’s not the whole problem for our future work success. Instead high achievers know stuff that STEM, brilliant software and machines will never know or bring to the party.

In his Fortune article and new book, Humans are Underrated, Colvin certainly has his finger on the right three issues. What’s unique is his framing of the issue of technological obsolescence. Typically, the framing is around what computers can’t do. Year after year we try to estimate the answer to that problem. But year after year software developers and algorithms prove us wrong. Amusingly, the Germans have a new robot that can both load and unload the dishwasher. So, what next? Driving the car? Diagnosing your illness? You should know better than that. Figuring out...