Mike Lehr's Blog

Even though rankings are extremely subjective, they seduce us as strongly as the sirens did sailors in Greek mythology. Consequently, we often wreck ourselves on the rocky shores of fantasy island.

In order to understand the lure of rankings, we need to understand the lure of numbers. When we quantify something, it becomes easier to grasp. However, easier doesn’t mean that what we are grasping is real. It’s often easier to understand what we want to believe than it is to understand reality. For example, in reality a woman’s measurements don’t tell us much about her, but that doesn’t prevent them from triggering our fantasies.

Applying this illusionary power to rankings, they tap into our insecure desires for:

1. Simplifying a complex world
2. Defining limits to large or limitless knowledge pools
3. Quantifying the unquantifiable
4. Delivering certainty in an uncertain world

Rankings perform complex thought for us by determining which is better by deciphering many, many variables. They imply we can get by on much less knowledge by giving importance to the top ten rather than the top million or billion. Their parameters and measurements are subjectively determined, trying to measure something that normally is immeasurable. Finally, as implied above, the quantification inherent in rankings provides certainty; “these are the important ones and that’s it.”

For instance, consider these Google searches:

“Top 10” = 743 million results
“Top 100” = 1,083 million
“Top 1,000” = 46 million
“Top 10,000” = 17 million
“Top 100,000” = 2 million
“Top 1,000,000” = .6 million
“Top 1,000,000,000” = 5,250

Clearly, our focus is on the simple with limits; so, the problem is this: How are we going to ever appreciate the billions of unique people, places, creatures and things in this universe if we’re so focused on the top ten?

Person A has solved a hundred problems while Person B has only solved five. Who’s the better problem solver? The answer is B, but the question is, “Why?”

Initially, people often say that Person B’s problems were tougher. However, I tell them that Person A also solved all of Person B’s problems in A’s hundred problems. Some say that B did a better or faster job. I tell them there was no difference in the solutions. Occasionally, someone gives this answer: B solved the problems on his own while someone taught A how to solve his.

I once told a friend that I thought someone was smart because of an idea she had. He asked me whether she had read it somewhere. I didn’t know the answer, but it eventually led me to create this puzzle about problem-solving capabilities. Yes, there are many correct answers; however, the one I seek is rarely given.

Consider any brainteaser. It’s more impressive if people hadn’t seen it before than if others had already shown them the solution. Yet, in everyday life, we don’t really care because as long as someone can give us good advice, we don’t question whether she learned it from someone else or discovered it on her own.

In fact, we tend to feel more comfortable with those who can show training and education rather than those who arrive at good solutions without them. Yet, it’s the latter group that has the talent to solve novel situations; the former can only learn from experience, theirs or others.

So, next time someone gives you advice, ask him how he derived it. After all, my math teachers always wanted me to see my work, not just the answer.

My Beauty as Power posts have generated emails regarding teaching what beauty is. Unfortunately, even though beauty is extremely subjective, we’re often taught it in a “one size fits all” perspective. Consequently, we often confuse beauty with popularity. Tossing that aside for the moment, it’s difficult to learn about beauty without learning appreciation.

For example, most people find maggots extremely ugly and gross. However, Maggot Therapy involves injecting maggots into body parts to remove gangrene so they can heal. By doing so, patients avoid amputation. This happens because maggots only eat dead organic material and are extremely thorough about it. Now, to people on the verge of losing limbs to gangrene, they learn to appreciate the beauty of maggots’ work very quickly.

Something similar happens to men when women nurse them back to health. Many movies play upon this theme such as Witness and Hang ‘Em High.  In medical facilities, it’s not unusual to have seriously injured male patients become attached to their nurses. They learn to appreciate the dedication and healing power of women whom they would not have considered otherwise.

As a more humorous example, there is Tom Sawyer’s fence painting. Tom’s given the undesirable task of painting a fence; however, by exhorting the virtues of fence painting to his friends, his friends come to appreciate the “privilege” of doing it for him by paying him.

As other examples, antiques, family heirlooms and memorabilia become more beautiful to us when we appreciate the story, memories and people behind them. Thus, appreciation is a process by which we learn to value something. Since we value beauty, it’s hard to learn about beauty without learning how to appreciate things . . . and people. Teach people appreciation, and you will teach them beauty.

Related links:

• Beauty as Power
• Beauty as Power (Part II): Attraction vs. Beauty

We often hear, “People will believe what they want to believe,” the Henry Louis Mencken quote. We also find that people will tend to hold onto their perceptions once knowing the facts. A Special Report about Democracy in California by The Economist in its April 23, 2011 edition contained the article, “What Do You Know?” It seemed to confirm Mencken’s view.

The article mentioned, Kimberly Nalder, a professor at California State University, Sacramento. She studied the degree to which citizens were misinformed about Proposition 13. Often we assume less educated or younger people are the ones misinformed. However, Ms. Nalder found, older, more educated citizens who had lived in California the longest were.

The problem is how do we work with these people? Most of the time, we tend to leave them alone. However, if you need to change someone’s perspective, there are four approaches to remember:

1. Do not argue facts; any kind of rationale is inferior to the power behind the emotions holding a person’s perspective in place
2. Do not believe more education will solve the problem; it can help but not alone
3. Most importantly, focus on strengthening your relationship with the person
4. Learn to understand the emotions behind a person’s perspective no matter how wrong you think it is
5. Accept that you will need to alter the person’s perception over time

As we saw in the post, People Follow Leaders Not Facts, people will tend to believe a credible leader over a fact even if the leader is incorrect. As we also saw in Change Management – Tactic #2, relationships are the primer for the paint of change. Thus, when it comes to changing perceptions, it’s not about facts, logic, education or statistics; it’s about leveraging relationships.

The Hot Spotters, by Atul Gawande in the January 24, 2011 issue of The New Yorker spoke primarily to minimizing medical costs but had much relevancy to my experiences in effecting change. It covered five tactics. This is the fourth of a five part series.

One of the biggest problems we have in promoting change is the assumption that people are light switches. We expect to say something once, and they will change. Advertisers learned long ago that running an advertisement just once doesn’t encourage behaviors of consumers and build brands inside their heads. Repetitively encouraging people to adopt change is a natural part of the change management process. Generally, we should expect to have to instruct and model the change three to four times, maybe more.

The problem is that we often position this more as following up to ensure people do what we told them. Typically, we code this as accountability in our business jargon. It’s better to position this repetitiveness more as a normal part of the instructional and modeling process; it’s a natural part of the change management process. We can do this by saying something like:

I don’t expect you to learn and perform these changes well overnight. There will be challenges. Therefore, I will commit to being available to you on a regular basis so we can help one another make these changes as easy and natural as possible for all of us.

This language establishes an expectation that our follow up is normal and not punitive. It indicates we’re in this together. Otherwise, they could easily construe our actions as micromanagement. The actual frequency of our repetitive instruction and modeling will depend upon the nature and scope of the change.

Other links in this series:

• Change Management – Tactic #1: Pick the Right Moment
• Change Management – Tactic #2: Strengthen Relationships
• Change Management – Tactic #3: Very Small, Simple Steps
• Change Management – Tactic #5: Request Demonstration
• Change Management – Tactic #6: Guard Employees’ Time

The power someone has as a leader in an organization is a function of 1) the authority it gives him and 2) his personal influence within the organization. The former is formal organizational power (FOP) and the latter informal organizational power (IOP). Figures 1 and 2 help us visualize their difference.

Figure 1: Formal Organizational Power

The importance of IOP becomes more apparent if we view leadership beyond a management context. For instance, one client expanded its definition from those in management to those who could initiate and develop new services, those who could grow existing services and those who could find and develop new customer channels.

The source of IOP varies by person. It could be his expertise, knowledge, experience, achievements, attractiveness, personality, education, intelligence, relationships, character, talents, skills, abilities, credibility, reliability, judgment, wisdom, seniority plus many other things. I knew one machinist who was a leader because he could run more of the machines in the plant better than anyone could.

Figure 2: Informal Organizational Power

FOP gets people to do things because they must; it’s the rule. IOP encourages people to do things because they want to; they like those with IOP or do so out of respect. Using a body as an analogy, FOP represents the bones and IOP the muscles. The most powerful leaders have a lot of both; organizations give them a lot of authority and people within the organization have a strong desire to help them.

Thus, when we try to understand and appreciate how organizations work, looking at the organization chart shows formal organizational power. Overlaying this chart is the influence of a multitude of relationships that vary by situation and by moments in time. In effect, we don’t really know an organization unless we have a feel for how informal organizational power influences it.

Related Link:

• Leadership vs. Management: The Difference (Part II)

The Hot Spotters, by Atul Gawande in the January 24, 2011 issue of The New Yorker spoke primarily to minimizing medical costs but had much relevancy to my experiences in effecting change. It covered five tactics. This is the third of a five part series.

Tactic #3 involves breaking down and delivering change in very small, simple steps. For organization-wide change, every manager has responsibility for detailing this for every one of his employees. This is difficult.  Usually, there are two problems:

1. Failing to uncover some important details
2. Seeing only one step where there are two or more

Unfortunately, the difference between too little and too much detail isn’t clear. Generally, it’s better to err on the latter; while keeping in mind timing and the threat of over planning, and accepting that we will always overlook some details.

When we bring the change to the individual level, it’s extremely important that we break down the change into small bites and deliver them one at a time. Emotionally, the change is too daunting if we show someone all of it at once.

Often, the worse person to detail these steps is someone who performs them well because they come naturally to her. Thus, what she sees as one step could easily be five to ten. In these cases, someone with a project or process management orientation is helpful. He can observe and work with the model to detail the steps. If the change is dramatically new and lacks a model, he can jointly work with the expert on the new process and those affected employees to detail the new steps.

Once detailed, someone with a training attribute can help organize them into a developmental plan for the manager’s use with his employees.

Other links in this series:

• Change Management – Tactic #1: Pick the Right Moment
• Change Management – Tactic #2: Strengthen Relationships
• Change Management – Tactic #4: Repetitiveness
• Change Management – Tactic #5: Request Demonstration
• Change Management – Tactic #6: Guard Employees’ Time

Long ago I sat in on the reprimand of an employee by a manager. The manager concluded his discussion by asking the employee, “Do you understand what I’m saying?” The employee responded, “Yes.” It suddenly occurred to me how biased we are in thinking that education alone will correct behavior. In other words, we assume that if someone understands our argument and reasons they will adopt our point of view.

In this above situation, there was no follow up by the manager to explore whether the employee agreed with the manager’s alternative action or whether the employee was moved to act accordingly in future situations. Yes, he was aware of the consequences, but we tend to forget that sometimes people are willing to pay those consequences.

I refer to making this false assumption about “Do you understand?” as a cognitive bias; we tend to believe that reasons, logic and rationales are enough to win the day. This bias will tend to make us wrongly believe that we’ve done “our best.”

I also experience this in non-disciplinary situations in which anyone is trying to influence another person. This cognitive bias happens frequently with instructors trying to move participants to take action in such settings as business training. They will ask participants, “Do you understand what I’ve shown (said, did, etc.)?”

Therefore, in summary, I find four basic hurdles, represented by the following questions, that we need to negotiate and verify before we can have significant confidence that we’ve persuaded someone:

1. Do you hear me?
2. Do you understand me?
3. Do you agree with me?
4. Are you moved to take the recommended action (to act on this idea)?

As I had mentioned in a previous post, who we are (WWA) is different from who we think we are (TWA), an important concept behind intuitive approaches. It can explain many of the contradictions we observe in what people say and do and explain the problems with self-report personality assessments. Awareness of TWA-WWA will help us minimize erroneous conclusions when predicting human behavior.

Who We Are is Different From Who We Think We Are

Whereas TWA resides in our conscious, WWA resides primarily in our subconscious and is much greater. Consequently, TWA only represents the tip of the iceberg in terms of our potential. We often only discover aspects of WWA when we are challenged to learn or face a crisis.

On the downside, TWA holds much of what others (parents, friends, educators, community, etc.) teach us or condition us to believe about the world and us. Consequently, TWA can impede us from doing what we really want to do by causing us to ignore, deny, discount or suppress it. Pragmatically, the TWA-WWA difference will often account for the many errors we find in all kinds of surveys (quality service, market research, etc.). On an interpersonal level, it will account for much of the hypocrisy we see in others.

We learn WWA by listening to what we say, observing what we do and interpreting what we think; we can do the same with others. It works because we cannot consciously control every aspect of what we say, do and think. There are gaps; our subconscious fills them. It’s this “filler” that provides clues to WWA; it’s a matter of learning to read these clues. Many times this can only be done through direct interaction with the person so we can make ancillary observations; something surveys often don’t do.

In the last two weeks I ran across articles in The Atlantic and The Economist about online dating: “Take the Data of Dating” and “Love at First Bite” respectively. Regardless of your relational status, the surveys and profiles people are completing to facilitate the process are instructive in understanding the pitfalls of objective personality tests (also known as self-report inventories). Contrast these to the projective tests I discussed in a previous post.

The basic problem with most kinds of self-reporting is that it assumes people are consciously aware of their tendencies. In reality, there usually is a significant difference between “who we think we are” and “who we are.” We often observe this disconnect in others as hypocrisy. Thus, simply answering a series of questions similar to another person doesn’t mean we are even remotely similar.

Things like upbringing, culture, religion, politics and education can condition us to like certain things that we might not like on a deeper level. This can affect our emotional health and our social and interpersonal interactions. Yes, it’s possible to match up objective factors such as income, profession and education, but subjective factors aren’t so easy.

For example, people who talk a lot will often vehemently claim to dislike those who do. Its psychological underpinning is similar to the one in the Shakespearian line from Hamlet (III, ii, 239), “The lady doth protest too much, methinks.” That’s why we should not be surprised to find vehement protesters of an action to be conducting the action themselves.

It’s these kind of personality traits that self-reporting inventories, such as online dating surveys, have difficulty capturing. These can often lead to faulty matches.