This week I listened to a fascinating podcast interview with author and journalist Gillian Tett about her new book Anthro-Vision: A New Way to See in Business and Life. The book is about what we can learn if we take useful concepts and methods normally hidden away within the fairly obscure academic discipline of anthropology,
A series of experiments at Harvard Business School by Michael Norton, Daniel Mochon, and Dan Ariely, found that people value products more when they have put work into assembling them. In one experiment, participants each assembled an item of IKEA furniture and then were asked how much they would pay for it. Then a new
Understanding the difference between First- and Second-Order Change in organisations, and how to recognise when each is appropriate One reason that so many organisational change initiatives fail is that the leaders and consultants involved don’t recognise the difference between ‘first-order’ and ‘second-order’ change. First-order change works within an existing structure and view of the world.
‘Ethical Fading’ happens in decision-making when we focus so much on other aspects of the decision that we forget about the ethical implications, as if they were fading from our view. Ethical fading has been applied to explain the actions of participants in the Watergate scandal, the News International phone-hacking accusations that led to the
Why do people often get bogged down in trivial decisions? It turns out that our brains use the difficulty encountered in making a decision as a factor in deciding how much more time to spend on it. Researchers Aner Sela and Jonah Berger call this process “decision quicksand”. We expect significant decisions to be difficult
More about Chris Argyris and Donald Schön’s ideas – following on from the “Espoused Theory and Theory-in-Use” posting. Our actions can be viewed as keeping some set of variables within acceptable limits. These variables are determined by our theory in use. When something goes wrong, we tend to look for another strategy that will keep
It seems that we are not as much in control of our selves and our decisions as our subjective experience would suggest. In fact, most of our decisions are made unconsciously by the "elephant" of our unconscious processing (in Jonathan Haidt’s useful metaphor from his brilliant book The Happiness Hypothesis) for while the main job of the "rider" of conscious awareness, who thinks and feels as if he is in control, is actually to make up justifications of the elephant’s behaviour after the event. These explanations may bear no relation to the actual reasons driving the unconscious processing.
This process, called ‘confabulation’, was first noticed in the 1880s when Russian psychiatrist Sergei Korsakoff observed some of his patients making up often impossible stories to cover gaps in their memories caused by previous alcohol abuse. It has also been noticed in people with brain damage and some stroke patients as they concoct elaborate alternative explanations for the effects of their impaired brain function.
You might think that confabulation happens only when the functioning of the brain has been in some way disrupted. However, research suggests that confabulation is something we all do, a lot of the time, because we don’t usually have access to the real (unconscious) reasons why we do things.
For example, Nisbett and Wilson’s classic experiment in 1977 asked people which of four garments laid out from left to right they preferred. 40% of people preferred the rightmost garment – as expected, since people will tend to choose the rightmost item in a series, other things being equal. When asked why they chose that one, the subjects talked about the quality of the weave and the vividness of the colour. But the items were identical! (Nisbett, R.E. and Wilson, T.D. (1977). "Telling more than we can know: Verbal reports on mental processes". Psychological Review, Vol 84 pp 231-259.)
What’s more, if we change our minds about something, we tend to forget that our original opinion is different – as in Goethals and Reckman’s 1973 experiment (Psyblog: Our Secret Attitude Changes).
Helen Phillips’ illuminating article Mind fiction: Why your brain tells tall tales (New Scientist 07 October 2006) quotes more confabulation studies.
So what are the implications of these findings? They add support to the NLP idea that "why?" is an unproductive question in therapy or coaching; not only are the responses likely to be excuses and justifications, but they probably won’t even be an accurate representation of the person’s real beliefs and decision-making processes.
Also, they suggest that asking "why?" in usability tests will be a waste of time. The same might apply in other types of research like focus groups as well.
What can you do to increase your self-awareness by becoming more aware of when you are confabulating? Reflect, meditate, get other people to explore your reasons through pertinent questioning (as can happen in coaching or an action learning set), practise self-hypnosis (with the intention of listening to your unconscious mind as well as merely giving it suggestions) or keep a learning log or a journal – if the evidence of the beliefs you used to hold is there in black and white, it will be available to your conscious mind to learn from.
It’s worth doing more to get to know yourself. The great hypnotherapist Milton Erickson used to say that the reason people had problems was because they were out of rapport with their unconscious minds.
I’ve looked around the web for a short and easy-to-understand description of Appreciative Inquiry for a while, without much success. Which is why I think this article is needed…. What is Appreciative Inquiry? Appreciative Inquiry (AI) is a way of looking at organisational change which focuses on doing more of what is already working, rather
Someone asked these questions on a coaching forum recently:
> Can emotions be intelligent? How can emotions be intelligent? How can the
> lymbic emotional brain learn from the intelligence of the cortex and vice
> versa?
I had time for a brief answer, as technically I was on my day off. I’ll reproduce it here in case it helps anyone:
Emotions provide information which is not available in other ways – including information about how other people are feeling (and hence how they are likely to act), and about the state of our health and energy levels, and what we really want.
It’s impossible to make decisions on rational criteria alone – in Descartes’ Error
How the limbic system can learn from the cortex: by mutual communication. If emotions are too strong, they shut down the ability of the cortex to think, reframe and make sense of things; but without emotion, nothing matters.
The ‘them against us’ thinking that <contributor> mentions is probably more to do with the brainstem, an even more primitive part of the brain concerned with fight or flight and territoriality.
We all have the capacity to think about things, we all have the capacity to love, *and* we all have the ability to revert to ‘them against us’ thinking under pressure.
If anyone wants a more academic answer about how emotions can be intelligent, they can have a look at some of the links from my site at www.practicaleq.com/eqlinks.html.
