Rationalizing – Influencing and Problem Solving by Mike Lehr

Rationalizing Archive

America’s Faith-based Economy

By Mike Lehr

When I read articles like “Toss a Coin” (The Economist, January 12, 2013 edition), I’m reminded that our economy relies on faith. After all, as the article indicates, the U.S. Treasury prints money to satisfy its debts.

Of course, it prints purposefully to avoid the extremes of inflation and contraction. If the Treasury did not print money, our economy would slowly stop as our population expanded. It’s analogous to adding more oil to an ever-growing car engine so it won’t lock up.

However, the money is simply paper. Nothing tangible supports it. For instance, we can’t exchange dollars for gold. Only the U.S. Government supports it (“This note is legal tender for all debts, public and private”), and our faith supports the government. Since this seems so certain, it’s tough to see this as faith until we experience its loss.

For me, this occurred in the last two weeks of 1989 when visiting Poland for familial reasons. The Communists were transferring power to a democratic government on New Year’s Day. In those two weeks, the Polish zloty went from 3,000/U.S. dollar to 10,000. Knowing we were Americans, cab drivers began demanding payment in U.S. dollars; faith had vanished.

The importance of this prompts the question: How can we apply rationale to something rooted in faith? Do we rationalize religion? This is why neoclassical economics faces the challenge from behavioral economics. It incorporates emotions of which faith is a form. It means business is uniquely human not objective. It’s faith in each other with the U.S. Government (“We the People”) merely a conduit for that faith. Consequently, this dual anchor of people and faith makes business . . . well . . . personal.

What happens when we lose faith in each other?

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Stories as Inhibitors of Change, Innovation

By Mike Lehr

Stories form boxes outside of which we try to think.

Stories galvanize people, helping them to learn, to coalesce around ideas. If we look at this galvanization as solidification, we can also see how stories could thwart change and innovation.

In a book review titled “Dead Certain” [The New Yorker, November 29, 2010 edition], I came across this passage by George Packer quoting Dan McAdams, a psychology professor at Northwestern University:

Psychological research shows that powerful narratives in people’s lives make it nearly impossible, in many cases, to consider ideas, opinions, possibilities, and facts that run counter to the story

Now, let’s expand this thought. Stories have many aspects and many forms: allegories, rationales, themes, descriptions, characterizations, histories, records, chronicles, accounts, testimonies, anecdotes, biographies, depictions, portraits, assumptions and statements. All can create vivid pictures of events, ideas, plans and strategies.

These pictures define facts, accepted truths, and work the same as definitions. Stories become the box outside of which we are trying to think. They come to define the culture, traditions, practices and expectations of our businesses.

For instance, a business whose history, pride and success come from a particular market will find difficulty deemphasizing it as it diminishes. It will also find it hard to seize opportunities that it has traditionally scoffed.

Business plans are other examples of stories’ influence. Plans are not only stories themselves, but they contain smaller stories such as rationales, accounts, descriptions and assumptions. For instance, the main assumption driving plans and strategies is that last year is a great baseline for projecting this year, that this year won’t be vastly different from last year.

Therefore, when we seek to change, to innovate, we will likely need to question the validity of existing stories no matter how factual and truthful they seem. They are likely prisons inhibiting us from considering what is outside their walls.

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Emotions and Intuition as Foundation of All Decisions

By Mike Lehr

One of the more contrarian perspectives that has helped me appreciate people’s decisions is that emotions and its interpretive big sister, intuition, form their foundation. Even a logical decision comes about because of a person’s emotional preference for logic.

While this does not mean logic, reason and rationales are not involved; it does mean they take a secondary, dependent role similar to the way the frame of a house is dependent upon the foundation. In our decision-making, it means we select the rationale (frame) to fit our emotional preferences (foundation), which we more commonly experience as rationalizing.

Increasingly though, as technology and research methodologies advance, science supports this. For instance, the article, “Captain Kirk’s Revenge” (The Economist, December 23, 2006 edition), discusses a person who lost his emotional functions in his brain could not make decisions even though the rational portions were in tack. However, those who lost their rational functions could still do so if their emotional ones remained.

This is understandable when we consider people need motivation to make decisions and motivation is emotional. Rationales alone won’t motivate unless they stimulate our emotions. That is why the root word of emotions is “motion.” It’s active, whereas logic, reason and rationale are inert.

We further see the progress in this perspective with the research of Roderick Gilkey, Ricardo Caceda, and Clinton Kilts. In their article, “When Emotional Reasoning Trumps IQ” (Harvard Business Review, September 2010 edition), they found that the best strategic thinkers showed “significantly less neural activity in the prefrontal cortex [rational functional area of brain] than in the areas associated with ‘gut’ responses, empathy, and emotional intelligence.”

Since we are often experiencing these emotions on an unconscious level, we could feel completely rational. Consequently, all our decisions are emotional ones. We just might not believe it.

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Creative Innovation (Pt 15): Prototypes as Obstacles

By Mike Lehr

This entry is part 15 of 15 in the series Creative Innovation

“Once he gets an idea in his head, there’s no changing it!” As common as this comment is, it’s true for us all to some degree. It’s formally called anchoring. Such ideas can alter our thinking and feeling processes and undermine our creative efforts. In fact, anchoring is so strong that it can influence our decisions even if we know the information is wrong.

Words alone are often anchors (money vs. time; thinking vs. feeling) and set moods. When they form ideas, they are even more powerful. Now, according to Paul Leonardi’s article, “Early Prototypes Can Hurt a Team’s Creativity” (Harvard Business Review, December 2011 edition), prototypes can serve as anchors too:

. . . when people see a detailed prototype, something odd happens: They concentrate on the prototype’s form and function, forgetting to attend to any remaining ambiguities about the problem the product is meant to solve or the obstacles in the way. Instead of clarifying the path ahead, the prototype puts a halt to useful brainstorming.

Now, often we delude ourselves by exploring other options, but we sabotage them by emphasizing evidence and arguments that support the initial idea and discounting those that don’t. In short, we formulate a rationale making the initial idea best.

We can observe the effects of anchoring in our everyday conversations. The person who first expresses himself often sets the direction of the conversation because conversations often build from the most recent comments. Focus groups have to guard against alphas, people who dominate conversations, or their findings become skewed.

The physicality of prototypes (also diagrams, blueprints, plans, etc.) can do more damage to the creative process than discussed ideas. So, the next time you see or think something, ask, “Is this preventing us from seeing other options or revisiting the problem?”

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Memorable Pictures: Unconscious Attractions

By Mike Lehr

Seeking Whales

Allison Bond’s article, “Haunting Scenes” (Scientific American Mind, November/December 2011 edition), discusses the research of Phillip Isola (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) as to what makes a memorable photograph. While Isola generalizes it as “’related to strangeness, funniness or interestingness,’” specifics exist:

People – unknown people work too
Movement – the implication of it such as people running, waves crashing, birds flying
Human-scale objects – chairs, cars, tools, toys

Photographs with these elements tend to be far more memorable rather than those with beautiful landscapes and environs. In short, we are not likely to remember pictures simply because they are beautiful. Moreover, these findings are consistent with evolutionary theory that:

. . . our brain is wired to notice movement, other people and objects we can interact with . . . because these things would have been the most important features of the landscape we evolved in.

Just as important is that these properties are “largely constant from one person to the next.” This means a memorable photograph isn’t as subjective as we once thought. The general parameters of memorableness are coded in us. Said another way, we do not consciously, completely control our preferences. They are to an extent predictable regardless of who we are.

Thus, in our decision making and problem solving we are living to a degree under the illusion of freely deciding. In reality, unconscious forces are influencing our thoughts, and what seem legitimate reasons for decisions are nothing more than rationalizations of wants. In short, rationalizations are masquerading as reasons.

Of course, we aren’t totally at the mercy of these influences as long as we make ourselves aware of them and believe they influence us. However, many times, while we acknowledge these forces, we often believe they influence everyone else but us.

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Business Examples of Patience’s Merits (Pt 2): Ethical Behavior

By Mike Lehr

This entry is part 3 of 3 in the series Patience's Merits

When I first wrote about patience, a commenter asked for examples of its merits. So, when I ran across the article “No Rush” (The Economist, July 7,2012 edition) and the online interview between Adrian Wooldridge of The Economist and Frank Partnoy, I decided to revisit patience since both provided more excellent examples of patient’s merits.

The article focused on the work of Brian Gunia of John Hopkins University; and a popular new book, Wait: The Art and Science of Delay, by Frank Partnoy of University of San Diego. Gunia’s experiments found “that slowing down makes us more ethical.”

When confronted with a clear choice between right and wrong, people are five times more likely to do the right thing if they have time to think about it than if they are forced to make a snap decision.

In the article and interview, Frank Partnov begins with the prevalence of fast food in helping us to speed up our lives. He found that simply showing people a fast food logo would encourage them to accelerate; however, it comes at the expense of disruption to their cognitive processes and aesthetic pleasures. For instance, they find less enjoyment in music, reading and art.

In terms of ethical behavior, such devaluation of aesthetics means a souring of life in general which in turns encourages the rationalization of unethical behavior such as lying. People are more likely to view others negatively if they feel negatively themselves. However, by slowing down, as the above quote explains, people have time to counter the negativity from these feelings.

Therefore, if we feel ethics is suffering in our businesses – such as more concern for the bottom line than for being good corporate citizens – then perhaps we should not expect people to react to our every whim.

Our Personalities: Crashing Others’ Expectations

By Mike Lehr

As computers and robots are able to perform more of the mental and physical tasks of humans, we are finding they can become more unnerving to us. Why is that?

“Mapping the Uncanny Valley” (The Economist, July 21, 2012 edition) examines the work of Kurt Gray (University of North Carolina) and Daniel Wegner (Harvard) to find it’s a matter of expectations. We do not expect robots to be human – more specifically to have emotions – so when we observe or hear that they do, it unnerves us. They also found that humans who “did not feel emotion” unnerved us because we expect humans to have emotions.

Extrapolating, here’s the lesson for us:

When we don’t conform to the expectations of others, we will likely unnerve them.

How much will tend to be a function of the degree to which we crashed their expectations and the degree to which such crashing unnerves them. Some might find such crashing a refreshing departure from the norm, more likely not though.

As we saw with euphemisms, people tend to prefer their illusions to reality; thus, we could rephrase the powerful line, “You can’t handle the truth,” from the movie A Few Good Men to be, “You can’t handle the real me.” In other words, people will tend to prefer you think, feel, talk and behave according to their expectations rather than as you are.

For these people, societal, cultural and business conventions rescue them by providing rationalizations for this unnerving: it’s rational to be upset with violators of such conventions. In reality though, it’s an emotional response, a function of their personality.

Therefore, pragmatically, you will often need to weigh the risks of crashing their expectations. Your real aspect might just be too much for them.

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Intuition in Problem Solving: A Compass

By Mike Lehr

Someone once said to me that you can’t find your way if you don’t know where you are. I countered that that would mean a compass would be useless to you. That’s not true.

Unfortunately, when people talk about intuition in problem solving, then tend to think it should be as specific as cognition is. If it were, it wouldn’t be intuition. Intuition plays more of an introductory role in our thinking and behavioral processes. In this sense, our intuition acts as a compass. When we’re lost we have any number of directions to explore. A compass helps to narrow our selection. Intuition does the same in problem solving.

Many, many forces influence us without our conscious knowledge. On the knowledge map, we might feel these influences as awareness or knowing without having any proof or quantification to support them. These forces also influence our thought processes and encourage us to find rationales to support them.

Typically, we will experience these as feelings or sensations to:

Talk to a certain person or people
Analyze certain information
Visit a certain department, office or facility
Attend an certain event
Perform a certain analysis or experiment
Collect certain information

Now, I’m not referring to the normal, routine feelings that come about as a result of a planned problem-solving approach or one that conforms to a certain methodology. These feelings will encourage you to deviate from that process or plan. Since processes reduce flexibility, it’s important that we don’t become so focused that we ignore the opportunities posed by our intuition. Spontaneity and flexibility are important problem-solving attributes even if it simply means a “chance” encounter that aides us.

Next time you get that feeling to go off-process or off-plan, do it. Experiment!

3 Comments so far. Join the Conversation

Samantha posted on September 26, 2012
Thanks for sharing your pdf on intuition, Mike! Great info and loved all the analogies! Especially the example ...
Mike Lehr posted on September 24, 2012
Samantha, thank you for the poetry and links. Here is a link to white paper I wrote on intuition. It's ...
Samantha posted on September 21, 2012
Over the course of this past year, I have become quite a fan of the works of David Whyte. ...

Emotional Intelligence vs. Intuition (Pt 2): Distinct as Head and Heart

By Mike Lehr

This entry is part 2 of 6 in the series Emotional Intelligence vs. Intuition

Part #1 established a very broad framework for discussing the differences between Emotional Intelligence (EI) and Intuition. People often wonder if one is merely a subset of the other, usually intuition being a subset of EI. This post will focus on one important reason why they aren’t: they’re as distinct and separate as the head and heart are.

The basis for calling EI a head concept is simple. Compare Goleman’s definition of empathy with those even appearing in two common dictionaries, Merriam-Webster and The Free Dictionary. We find Goleman focused on “understanding” while stripping out all subjective aspects such as feelings, imagination and sensitivity. This allows EI to function without having to feel the other person’s emotions; all we need to be able to show is that we know them. Goleman even acknowledges a difference between knowing and feeling.

On the other hand, intuition is about emotions helping us acquire knowledge and make decisions. Whereas EI focuses on intelligence, Intuition focuses on emotions. Let’s remember it’s Emotional Intelligence not Intelligent Emotions or Intelligent Emotionalism. Intelligence is heady and rational. Thus, it’s difficult to see how EI and Intuition are a subset of one another unless we consider the head and heart similar subsets.

Throughout this post, I’ve used the head and heart symbolically to represent our rational and emotional aspects. Yes, they are distinct, but they no doubt influence one another. The same holds true for EI and Intuition; however, let’s not confuse influence as meaning one is the subset of the other. Thus, a good EI doesn’t ensure you have good intuition and vice versa; yet, it’s quite likely that each influences the other. Still, EI and Intuition are as distinct as head and heart are.

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Education Bias (Pt 3): Leadership Over Knowledge

By Mike Lehr

This entry is part 3 of 4 in the series Education Bias

An education bias overlooks the profound impact of feelings, emotions and intuition on thinking in choice. Leadership is the most poignant example. Patrick Spenner and Karen Freeman, managing directors at Corporate Executive Board, state in their article, “To Keep Your Customers, Keep It Simple” (Harvard Business Review, May 2012 edition):

. . . the [leader] cuts through the seemingly infinite options and provides decision-making criteria.

This occurs many times because the information by which we educate ourselves becomes so overwhelming as to render us powerless to think and act. From this perspective, leaders serve a function, even if it’s simply influential teenage girls suggesting to their peers what to wear and do by reporting their activities on various social media sites.

However, seen from a darker perspective, we not only see leadership’s dark side but also the impotency of facts and education in the face of eloquent leaders. In effect, knowledge is not power for it’s how we process that knowledge that is the real power. When it comes to that process, it’s not facts but the leader which has more power over it.

Thus, when we ask people, “Do they understand?” it’s irrelevant if the leaders people like support something else. This is where the two aspects of interpersonal relationships come into play: the knowledge from education (red) is subservient to the passion of the leader (blue). In other words, people may understand but their agreement, volition and heart rest with the leader.

Therefore, an education bias puts too much faith – and that’s what it really is, faith – in facts, knowledge, logic, reason and science to win the day. There are stronger emotional powers at work, especially those originating from leaders. That is why influencing is more a function of cultures and relationships than of data, information, strategies and vision.

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Influencing and Problem Solving by Mike Lehr

Rationalizing Archive

America’s Faith-based Economy

Stories as Inhibitors of Change, Innovation

Emotions and Intuition as Foundation of All Decisions

Creative Innovation (Pt 15): Prototypes as Obstacles

Memorable Pictures: Unconscious Attractions

Business Examples of Patience’s Merits (Pt 2): Ethical Behavior

Intuition in Problem Solving: A Compass

Education Bias (Pt 3): Leadership Over Knowledge

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