Archive for August, 2010

A great blog post on Harvard Business Publishing’s site–-Six Fundamental Shifts in the Way We Work by John Hagel III and John Seeley Brown—summarizes some interesting trends from the authors’ recent book The Power of Pull.  (I confess that I haven’t read the book, but it’s on my list!)  Two of the trends in particular jumped out at me:

1. “The collaboration curve supplants the experience curve.”  It’s no longer possible to keep up with the competition through individual experience and expertise alone; things are moving too fast.  It’s only through collaboration that an organization’s ideas and implementation can keep pace, and that’s why network-centric efforts in technology are increasingly popular.

2. “Companies will not be able to fully harness the potential of collaboration curves until they resolve the Dilbert Paradox.”  We continue to say that talent acquisition is our top priority but we do nothing to keep and nurture that talent, instead creating the stultifying work environments parodied in the Dilbert comic strip.  We talk about talent development but approach it through training programs instead of redesigning the work environment.

The point I want to make is that designing training programs and redesigning the work environment need not be two separate efforts competing for resources; they can be the same thing.  Set up your training as a collaborative effort; not only collaborative in the sense that full work teams attend the session together, but also that the session represents a collaborative effort between the team and the facilitator in the service of a particular goal.  If the goal is to improve a management team’s coaching skills, then that session should focus not only on imparting theory, tools and best practices to the team, but also on giving them time to work out how those new tools and best practices can be instilled in the workplace by the team, within the culture of that workplace.  If the goal is to increase awareness of diversity on a project team, the facilitator might alternate the presentation of diversity awareness material with time for the team to collaborate on how they might work differently together in order to leverage their diversity.

Any “training session” that does not include time for participants to make collaborative plans for putting new structures and norms in place, in my opinion, misses the mark.  That’s why I advocate sending teams and work groups to training together, rather than holding open enrollment sessions that are attended by employees from all over the organization who don’t work directly with each other.  In the latter case, participants may pick up a new skill or two, or increase their awareness.  But without the subsequent reinforcement from teammates who have just learned the same skills or increased their own awareness, there will be no “stick”.

The Dilbert Paradox happens when people work in isolation, instead of together.  We can’t always change that, but we can certainly change the way training happens.

Another great Newsweek column from Sharon Begley, The Limits of Reason—Why evolution may favor irrationality, describes a phenomenon of human error that brings to mind Chris Argyris’ Ladder of Inference.  Begley talks about the natural human tendency to succumb to confirmation bias when, for example, we have the idea that woman are bad drivers.   We see and recall only the bad female drivers we’ve seen lately and not the good ones.  Argyris describes the same thing; we walk up our ladder of inference, discarding the data that doesn’t fit with our previous theories and overemphasizing the data that does, and eventually our actions are impacted.  Next time we see a woman driver making a minor mistake that perhaps would have gone under the radar screen from a male driver, we give in to road rage.  It’s irrational, Begley says, but we all do it.

What’s interesting is that Begley cites a more recent idea from cognitive scientists that may explain why we do this.  It’s because irrationality helps us “devise and evaluate arguments that are intended to persuade other people,” according to psychologist Hugo Mercier of the University of Pennsylvania.  This is called motivated reasoning, and by this theory we come to realize that the holder of the confirmation bias about woman drivers simply wants to convince us that it’s true.  Argyris probably says the same thing when he says that we filter the data around us according to our “mental models,” but he’s a little more diplomatic about it, focusing on the fact that we can’t process everything that goes on around us so we have to choose certain data to notice and filter everything else out.  The guy who wants everyone to believe woman can’t drive, on the other hand, has a hidden and at least semi-conscious agenda.  Sounds more insidious, doesn’t it?

Begley’s other examples are, similar to the women drivers example, things I get worked up about.  Bush looking for evidence of WMD in Iraq because he was already convinced of its existence; tea partiers looking for evidence of Obama’s foreignness and ignoring the fact of his birth certificate.

It’s easy to think of workplace examples.  The manager who has to make cuts and so looks for performance problems that don’t exist, because it will make it easier to do what already has to be done.  The problem employee who is convinced of unfair treatment and thus can’t see that there are very really reasons why she’s being counseled and disciplined for chronic tardiness.  The senior leader who has decided a recent decline in profits is caused entirely by lazy workers and now can’t see any other theory as even remotely plausible.  Perhaps our focus in such situations needs to shift from trying to reason with someone to asking ourselves the question, “What is this person trying to persuade me of?  And why?”

The problem, as always, is that we can see this stuff when it applies to someone else.  But it’s not so easy when it’s about our own selves and our firmly held (irrational) beliefs.

I like to talk about the Fundamental Attribution Error, because after you explain what it means, everyone has a good story.

Take the workshop I taught this week, for example.  I explained the FAE theory (which states that we tend to attribute our own actions to situational factors, but we attribute the actions of others to their intentions) and someone said, “That really explains most cases of road rage.”  How true.  If I cut someone off in traffic, I usually have a reason and it has to do with the situation.  I was avoiding a squirrel in the road, or I was about to miss a turn, or perhaps I simply didn’t see the other guy.  But the other guy, meanwhile, is convinced that I am just a @#@#!  And he may tell me so, through a certain gesture or two.

What I was thinking about today is how the FAE tends to apply in situations involving gender differences in communication.  One of my pet peeves is men who think I’m asking for advice when I’m not.  In a paternal, perhaps even patronizing tone, they begin to bestow their great wisdom and experience upon me when all I was trying to do was make conversation by telling them about something I’m working on, or maybe something I’m doing for fun.  My immediate reaction is usually that the guy’s intentions are bad.  Because I’m a woman, he assumes that he knows more than I do and I must be asking for help.

Might it really be that I’ve been sending mixed messages to this particular colleague or friend for many years, and so he perceives this as a situation similar to a previous one?  Maybe I asked him how to change a tire last week, or I begged for his help with a particularly thorny computer problem.

I’d like to think so, anyway.  Because if it’s really matter of me sending mixed messages, than I can do something about it.  That’s the beauty of the FAE; it takes problems out of the realm of someone else’s control and puts them under our own control.

Got a good story of your own?

I love Sharon Begley, Newsweek’s science columnist, because she makes me realize I had a false notion in school: that I hated, or at least could not get interested in, science.  Of all the columns I read diligently in Newsweek every week, hers tends to be the one that most inspires me to make connections with workplace issues.

Last week, for example, she wrote a column call What’s Really Human? about the fallacy of psychologists drawing conclusions about “universal human nature” from their typical lab experiments.  These experiments usually use college students as lab rats, and the college students are almost always from WEIRD cultures, an acronym that stands for “western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic.”  The result, predictably, is that we conclude certain traits are universal when they are actually culture-specific.  The examples she gives range from things things like optical illusions to a sense of fairness and justice.  “While some scientists express skepticism that a discovery about college sophomores applies to, say, Tsimane tribesmen of Amazonia, all too many findings are cast as illuminating The Human Mind,” she says.

We continue to do this in the workplace, don’t we?  Everything we “know” about creating an engaged workforce comes from the organizational development theories of WEIRD cultures.  I can’t help but think that it’s usually a good thing; who wants to argue against the notion that employees who are treated well will perform better, or that positive feedback will create a motivational atmosphere?  But we also assume that the same things that westerners find motivational or rewarding will be equally so to employees of other cultures.  For how long have we been repeating the idea that managers should “praise in public and censure in private?”  In some cultures, where community is more important than the individual, public praise is terribly embarrassing.

What examples do you have?