Mike Lehr's Blog

The Freedom-Order duality expresses a dimension of our personality involved in interpreting how we balance freedom and order. It can help us – in real time – understand, appreciate and predict better the reactions of others to such things as processes, decision-making, management, customer service, change and organization.

However, all of this is arbitrary, subjective, meaning different people are comfortable with different levels of freedom and order. To some freedom is chaos because it seems anyone can do whatever he wants. To others order is slavery because there is someone or a rule telling her what to do. Therefore, since there are no absolute states for either, you can be the benchmark as the figure shows. This allows you to assess whether people are more freedom-oriented or order-oriented than you are by the feelings and thoughts they trigger in you.

For instance, more freedom-oriented people might make you feel they are:

You might also notice they tend to use words such as these:

By contrast, more order-oriented people might make you feel they are:

Similarly, you might find them using words such as:

In our daily business lives, this means adding process and procedures to those who are more freedom-oriented than we are might stir anxious feelings about becoming nothing more than an automaton. Conversely, more flexibility and options to more order-oriented people might trigger anxious feelings about what is the right thing to do.

Once we are sensitive to this, we can better position the change by adapting immediately to what we observe in others. To the freedom-oriented people, we will need to reassure the flexibility of adding their own dimension, and to order-oriented people reassuring clear definitions of their duties will exist. In essence, we personalize our approach and words to by appreciating people and their needs better.

We often don’t learn the value of listening techniques in building relationships. Consequently, people might not realize we are listening; this needs to occur to build relationships.

Closed questions encourage specific or limited responses. For answers, they usually require one word, short phrases or a response from a menu of possibilities. Often, they begin with the words, “Who,” “How,” “What,” “Where” and “When.” “Yes” and “No” are often typical responses.

Even though many discount their value, when combined with other listening techniques, closed questions become extremely valuable in building relationships. They clarify specifics for us, pinpoint the facts, verify what we heard, nail down agreements and commitments, and test whether we can move.

Some examples include:

• Are you going out to the plant? (Yes/No)
• Which color do you want? (Facts)
• You want me to call the vendor . . . right? (Verification)
• Is seems you’re saying [X], correct? (Verification)
• Would today, tomorrow or the next day be better? (Menu)
• Do you agree? (Agreement)
• Will you help me? (Commitment)
• Do you need to tell me anything before we move on? (Testing)
• Is there anything else I need to cover? (Testing)

From a relational perspective, closed questions convey the feeling that you:

• Have a purpose for your conversation
• Grasp the details
• Understand them
• Respect their time by getting to specifics

The effect of closed questions is to encourage people to:

• Conclude that you’re listening and digesting
• Focus and sort through fuzziness
• Shorten their answers
• Clarify agreements and commitments

Closed questions have downsides. They can make discussions feel every interrogative and restrictive if used alone. Nevertheless, when integrated with other listening techniques they can reduce misunderstandings, demonstrate that you’re listening and build relationships.

When learning listening techniques, we often don’t learn their value in building relationships. As a result, we might be listening, but the other person doesn’t know it. The latter must occur to build relationships effectively.

Open-ended questions encourage a wide range of responses. Pragmatically, they retrieve an accurate assessment of the person’s thoughts and feelings. Relationally, they invite longer, deeper responses. This encourages feelings of freedom thought and expression.

Often, they begin with the words, “How,” “What,” and “Why,” or can include phrases such as “Tell me about . . .” and “Fill me in on . . .” Wording and tone should encourage the expression of thoughts and feelings, not just facts.

Some examples include:

• How do you think this project will go now?
• Fill me in on what you feel you want me to do.
• Why do you think Mary would be better than Nancy?
• How do you feel about that?
• What’s your reaction to Bill’s comments?

From a relational perspective, open-ended questions convey your desire to have answerers feel:

• Free to answer as they please
• You value their thoughts and feelings
• They control the direction of the discussion

The effect of open-ended questions is to:

• Minimize negative emotions
• Establish the questioner as someone with whom it’s easy to converse
• Encourage conversation and a longer interaction period
• Direct conversation with a talkative person

The downside of open-ended questions is that they can make discussions feel scattered or lacking purpose. That’s why we need to integrate them with other relationship building techniques.

Nevertheless, open-ended questions are often the first listening technique we learn. However, they let the other person know we are listening to them because we can’t use them well if we aren’t.

If you examine the two opposing sides in the Star Wars Epic, The Empire (Bad Guys) and The Rebels (Good Guys), there are two major contrasts:

1. There are no women on the bad side.
2. The good side has diverse characters, the bad side doesn’t

Upon contemplation, Point #1 is easy to see. Point #2 is a little harder, but essentially the Empire’s army consists of robotic droids who all look alike in white, shock-troop armor. Conversely, the Rebels are a collection of species, some humanoid, most alien and some even animalistic. Moreover, whereas the Empire’s forces are all dressed alike, the Rebels are not. Similar themes exist in Lord of the Rings.

What does this mean? Very simply, we tend to see evil as being a life of conformity without feminine qualities. In business, this movie helps us to see the emotional forces aligned against standardization and processing. It might also help us to understand why women are making such advancements: perhaps as an offset to these negative forces. Finally, it shows our inherent emotional propensity for diversity including in personality.

Women are closely associated with diversity; as they’ve been the first ingredient of diversity in many business settings. Heck, their wardrobe alone adds immense diversity to them. What would happen if two women actors arrived in the same dress for the Academy Awards: chaos, confusion, anxiety? What if two men came in the same black tuxedo, would anyone even notice?

Movies tend to tap into our deep, unseen, collective emotional currents. Consumer research shows there is often a different between “what people buy” and “what people say they will buy.” Thus, while we wring every cost saving from standardization and processing, perhaps on a deeper emotional level we feel “The Bad Guys” are winning.

I decided to revisit the illusion of free will after running across two other articles reinforcing it. As technology and research methodologies advance, we are finding more and more that biological and psychological factors heavily influence us without our knowledge, further eroding the rational actor theory. This theory forms the basis of many decision-making models in business; however, it’s turning out we cannot expect people to behave rationally.

The article by David Eagleman, “The Brain on Trial,” appearing in the July/August 2011 of The Atlantic, discusses recent brain and genetic research. Whether you believe nature or nurture is the more impactive force in our development, the point is this: we control neither. If free will really existed, we wouldn’t need drugs to cure depression because threats would work. As Eagleman also indicates, free will has tremendous difficulty overcoming what our subconscious has already decided to do. We cannot divorce behavior from biology or the unconscious. At minimum, free will operates in an increasingly smaller field of play.

We are also learning that genes don’t just change at an evolutionary rate but at a generational one too. In the July 23, 2011 of The Economist, the article, Baby Blues, mentions, “a mother’s stress while she is pregnant can have a long-lasting effect on her children’s genes.”
Biology and genes form an integral part of our personalities. As I mentioned in my previous post, if we look at personalities as being analogous to software in computers, we can see where knowing the personality can help us predict behaviors in much the same way as knowing the software can help us predict what a computer will do.

What this means is that our decisions need to factor in a reality where people don’t behave rationally because they aren’t free to do so.

Related link: Illusion of Free Will

If you research leadership, you’ll find virtually all leadership models promoting the concept as something approaching divinity. What we don’t address is the dark side of leadership: the herd mentality it can create in many of us.

For instance, in the February 7, 2011 of The New Yorker, John Seabrook writes in “Crush Point” about a study designed by Iain Couzin of Princeton University and led by Jens Krause at Leeds University. It found that a group of 200 randomly walking people, injected by a few purposeful walkers, ended up following the latter even though they had no idea where these purposeful walkers were going. In a previous post, we also saw people believing leaders over facts.

As a result, leadership will encourage a state of mind in which some, and likely many, followers neither think nor introspect; they just follow. This will occur whether leadership is good or bad. Even a good leader can’t ensure all followers will develop their thinking and questioning skills so they can evaluate what’s best for them. They will need leaders to make decisions for them.

This also explains why confidence can be the tool of the incompetent. It encourages those, who can’t or don’t want to think for themselves, to follow someone with a purpose, no matter what that purpose might be. It plays subtly into the idea that “going somewhere is better than going nowhere.” Thus, people can achieve a purposeful life by following someone, anyone.

In reality, leadership is subjective. As a result, especially if we don’t learn to think for ourselves, we could easily follow leaders who are good for others but not good for the rest us.

Think about it. If not, ask a leader to do it for you.

The May 21, 2011 edition of The Economist had two articles casting a cloud over the skill inherent in successful stock market investing. Why is this important to intuition? It’s because we tend to have an emotional bias that overweighs outcomes in the evaluation of skill.

In fact, the article, “Poker-faced”, cites Steve Levitt and Thomas Miles of the University of Chicago as having found more skill present in poker than in stock investing. Simply stated they found that historically good poker players tend to do better than those without a history of success do. However, such a correlation didn’t exist with stock investing, and thus, they concluded there is “little evidence of skill” in stock investing. Thus, we could claim that poker is more like investing and the stock market is more like gambling.

The other article, “The Missing Link”, reinforces this unpredictability of the stock market by surveying several studies saying there is no correlation that a good economy translates into rising stock prices. Yet, in spite of these articles, we often see investment professionals tout their historical performance to attract additional clients.

Nevertheless, we know that top poker players don’t always finish on top; it’s not unusual for them to go home early. Moreover, poker is more self-contained, more controllable than the stock market. Everyone plays with the same, small, finite deck of cards and, depending upon the tournament, the same amount of money. By comparison, the stock market is anarchy.

We like to believe there is a direct link between outcomes and skills as opposed to having outcomes linked to a myriad of forces beyond our control. The belief gives us security in an uncertain world.  Yet, it will encourage us to see more skill in stock investing than in poker.

A financial professional emailed me regarding bosses who “manage by email.” She implied that her boss rarely calls  or meets with employees. She asked, “What does this mean?” and “What should I do?”

First, email does provide certain efficiencies over personal interactions (phone calls and visits). However, from a relationship-building perspective the others are superior. Consequently, I advise managers to have at least one personal interaction with every employee every day.

Managers who MBE will do so for different personal reasons. Nevertheless, we can categorize them under one or both of the following:

• Wanting to minimize their personal interactions
• Liking something better about email communications

So, what do you do? Begin by uncovering the specific reasons under these broad preferences. Here are a couple sample questions to customize:

• What are the advantages of emailing on ____ over meeting to discuss it periodically?
• It seems you prefer to communicate by email; if so, would you share with me why so I can ensure I communicate effectively in them

Their answers will give you a general direction as to what bosses like to see in their relationships. For instance, if he references efficiency, then speed might be more important than substance in his relationships. If she references documentation, she might prefer accountability, organization and recollection. If he references organizing or forming his thoughts, he might prefer control to spontaneity in relationships.

After gaining this insight, employees can initiate personal interactions and seek to deliver the attributes they’ve identified. Regardless, employees are wise to reverse the tables and make it a point to call or visit their bosses at least once a day. This will not only help protect their jobs but also help employees be happier and more successful in them.

The notion of free will is a byproduct of our conscious, more specifically our ego. It treats emotions as a nuisance which it should control and the unconscious a fantasy which it should  ignore. Yet, these two are fundamental determinants of our personalities which make our choices quite predictable.

In the January 17, 2011 issue of The New Yorker, David Brooks writes in “Social Animal” that “A core finding of this work [cited in the article] is that we are not primarily the products of our conscious thinking.” In other words, we just think we are making choices.

Some people use choice as proof of free will; if we have a choice, we have free will. However, we program computers to make choices all the time. Under one set of criteria, they choose “A,” while under another it’s “B.” They can even make random choices: choosing “A” 65% of the time and “B” 35%. But, do they have free will?

Yes, they are just following coded programs, but we could be following our own program. It’s called personality and is heavily influenced by genetic code. When we understand a computer’s code, we can predict its choices. If it’s too complex, we won’t. The same is true for personality. If we understand it, we can make predictions about a person’s choices. If we don’t, we can’t.

David Brooks describes everyday events that appear choice-filled but are quite predictable. The key is to remember that we are observing a people who 1) believe they have free will and 2) don’t believe they’ve been programmed with a personality.

Related link: Illusion of Free Will Revisited

Looking at beauty as power is important in understanding and appreciating intuitive approaches because it dramatically expands the influences and solutions we see. However, as I mentioned in the A Blue Heron Instructs on Patience, we tend to be prejudiced toward action; therefore, we will often overlook beauty as power because it’s not an active force. Thus, it helps if we initially think of beauty as attractive because the verb “attract” implies some kind of active force.

For example, suppose we saw a metal ball rolling on a level table toward a wall. We might initially think that there was something about the ball that caused movement. However, suppose later we find out that a powerful magnet was implanted in the wall. Now, we begin to see the wall as the active force.

Another problem we tend to have is that we look at beauty very superficially, as something physically feminine. However, beauty can exist in anything, including intangible things. For instance, consider the movie A Beautiful Mind; also consider the attraction of beautiful ideas, prices, cars, paintings, formulae, advertisements, parks, scenery, etc. Anything that attracts us has some level of beauty in it; even power is beautiful to many.

So, if a car dealer stocks his showroom with a car that he knows is likely to attract us enough to buy it, who is really applying the active force: the buyer or the dealer? Similarly, when the Indians attracted General George Custer into the trap on Battle of Little Big Horn because he thought he had a beautiful opportunity to defeat them, who was playing the active force: Custer who rushed in or the Indians who created the attractive situation?