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?

Part of what makes intuition so powerful is the assumption that we are born with personalities, talents and knowledge. Life then becomes the challenge to express them.

For example, we are born knowing about the “opposite sex.” It’s only later in life we arrive at an understanding of it and the ability to verbalize it. However, this contradicts the more popularized view of humans being born a “blank slate.” The article, “Transporter of Delight”, in the October 15, 2011 edition of The Economist, severely undercuts this notion by beginning:

“The idea that the human personality is a blank slate, to be written upon only by experience, prevailed for most of the second half of the 20th century. Over the past two decades, however, that notion has been undermined.”

The article cites research concluding, “personality is the single biggest determinant” of happiness with “a third of the variation in people’s happiness [being] heritable.” For example, extroverts tend to feel happier than introverts do. Thus, what I wrote regarding free will (more) and “who we are” being quite different from “who we think we are” is really about us being substantially more than “the sum of our experiences” and more than “a product of our environment.” There are opportunities for us when we realize we weren’t born slaves to our conditions, environments, societies and cultures.

Yet, this poses some thought provoking questions such as, “What happens to us when our nature is in conflict with our culture, our society or our upbringing?” Also, “What happens when we try to express ourselves in the midst of such conflict?” In such situations, we can easily see how God or Nature created us to alter the status quo, to change things . . . to encourage growth where stagnation exists. Growth cannot occur without change.

Classical business literature emphasizes focus: set goals, plan, and then focus on execution. However, it’s relatively void of focus’ downside: obliviousness to peripheral threats and opportunities.

In the mid-1900’s, when conditions didn’t change as dynamically as today’s, extensive research, planning and focus worked. Today, most research is outdated upon completion. Consequently, situational awareness (SA) becomes more important as part of an adaptive business strategy.

SA is the degree to which a person or company can be aware of surrounding conditions while focused on a task or plan. Ironically, SA came of age with aerial combat; you need to know where you are in the sky while focused on engaging enemy aircraft. If not, you could crash your plane from flying too low or from enemy fire simply because you were oblivious to those factors.

Context strongly influences our planning; however, if conditions forming that context are dynamically changing, that means our plan – the object of our focus – might become invalid by new threats and opportunities, and our focus and poor SA might cause us to overlook them. Psychological influences such as anchoring and optimistic planning will create additional pressures to keep us focused and ignorant.

These will also influence our assessment of talent by tending to make it too static and historical. Rather than basing it on people’s potential within new conditions, we will tend to base it on performances under old conditions. We will tend to believe that successes and failures transfer rather than assess actual skills and actual aptitudes within a new set of actual conditions. More simply, this is pigeonholing.

Technology and the internet strongly influence today’s dynamic conditions. Our focus shouldn’t blind us. SA will help us see the many threats, opportunities and talents that will influence our success.

The downside of many personality tests is that you need to administer them. Yes, some will teach you how to assess without doing that, but you must learn their system. In reality, we can all develop and do a real-time personality assessment.

In the first post of this series, “Assessing Personalities thru Everyday Discussions (1.0),” I wrote that asking “Why?” in response to other people’s observations can give you insights into their personalities. In this post, I’ll explore how we analyze the answer.

If you ask two people why they like a car, most likely they’ll give two different answers. For instance, if one answers, “performance,” and the other “looks,” both answers begin to help you distinguish their personalities by identifying important qualities to them. These qualities will likely extend to other areas, but we need to realize we’re are only hypothesizing right now; we only have one data point.

Now, if we discuss their favorite athletes and ask why they like them, this gives us more information. If the first one says, “She’s the best in the game,” and the second one says, “He just looks like he’s ready to play when he shows up,” we have additional information reinforcing their answers about cars: performance and appearance. Thus, the first person seems to prefer performance related qualities while the second one prefers visible ones.

Therefore, when we discuss other subjects with these people, we will need to highlight the positive performance attributes with the first one and the visible ones with the second if we wish a positive response.

Obviously, it’s not always this easy and obvious, but over a five to fifteen minute conversation, through careful listening, patterns like these will emerge. These patterns will allow us to extrapolate on a person’s decisions and behaviors.

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.

Previously, I listed some unconscious biases we have in decision-making. What I witness is that people just don’t believe that known wrong information has any affect on them.

For example, research in “Before You Make That Big Decision” by Daniel Kahneman, Dan Lovallo and Olivier Sibony* which appeared in the June 2011 Harvard Business Review showed that dice rolls “suggesting” sentencing decisions to judges did in fact influence their final decision even though they knew these decisions were made by dice.

Cognitively and psychologically, we call this “planting of a seed” in our minds as anchoring. We experience its negative side when someone is locked on a thought based on incorrect information that we tried to expose for them. As with the judges, this erroneous information assumes a frame of reference for their decision on a subconscious level.

As the writers indicate, anchoring’s real danger is “that people always believe they can disregard them” because the information is incorrect. They don’t believe it. However, it affects them in the same way that intuition affects our thought processes. However, since people don’t realize it, they will shop for rationales to attribute elsewhere this influence on their decisions.

Anchoring also affects our views of people and contributes to the unconscious pigeonholing of people. This can tremendously affect our ability to assess and develop talent. This is why the gossip and unfounded opinions of others will still influence us even though we “ignore” them to form our own opinion.

We need to raise our awareness concerning the influence this has on others, and more importantly to us. We can’t believe we are immune; we need to make conscious adjustments or else we will fall prey to the influence of known wrong information too.

*Olivier Sibony is a director in McKinsey’s Brussels office.

A question emailed to me asked for elaboration on this quote of mine:

The difference between wisdom and intelligence is that you cannot be wise unless you have sensitivity for the human condition.

The primary difference between intelligence and wisdom that my quote highlights is an emotional one. For instance, who would you consult on relationships, on love; an intelligent person or a wise one?

Stated more pragmatically, we often hear psychopaths described as intelligent but not wise. If they were, would they go around harming people? Thus, we can more easily picture an insensitive, intelligent person than an insensitive, wise one.

Examine our intelligence tests. They have little to do with relational issues among people. Do any of them ask about love, happiness, sadness, hatred? They deal more with concrete concepts such as shapes, numbers and words. Intelligence and sensitivity are segregated.

Yes, the concept emotional intelligence exists; however, its basis is a mental one not an emotional one; it’s intelligence about emotions. It refers to empathy as an “understanding” not a feeling; it’s a mental task. We can see the mental aspect in advanced computers because we’ve begun to program robots to be emotionally intelligent based upon certain observable clues. Emotional intelligence tries to teach people the same thing. Yet, we refer to these robots as “artificial intelligence” not “artificial wisdom.” Again, the segregation of intelligence and sensitivity.

I define empathy as feeling what others feel. Mothers often feel what their children feel. Analogously, the difference between understanding and feeling is the same as the one between seeing a picture of a place and actually being there. Thus, we see wisdom as emotionally very different from intelligence, and that difference has a huge sensitive, empathic component.

Wisdom and sensitivity are not segregated.

I’m frequently asked about the difference between emotional intelligence (EI) and intuition. Essentially, EI is a head thing, intuition a heart thing. EI is being “intelligent” about emotions; it’s not about feeling. If you look at EI’s definition of empathy according to Daniel Goleman, this distinction becomes clear:

Ability to understand the emotional makeup of other people

In my work with intuition, I define empathy as a feeling (or collection of feelings):

Ability to feel what the other person is feeling

Just because we understand someone’s emotions, it doesn’t mean we feel what he feels. If a truly totally empathic person existed, she would not be able to kill anyone because she would die too from intense pain and sorrow. The closest real example is a mother losing her child; that bond is so empathic, that mothers never really recover from this. A part of them dies with their child. EI understands this but wouldn’t necessarily feel it.

This head/heart difference between EI and intuition shows up in two other areas besides empathy: the unconscious and problem solving.

EI is about intelligence; therefore, it’s concerned with conscious activity (the head). On the other hand, since intuition is about the acquisition of knowledge and the making of decisions through emotions, unconscious activity plays a vital role because emotions emanate from there.

As for problem solving, EI doesn’t play if you’re alone in the woods. It requires a social or interpersonal context. However, intuition plays in social, interpersonal and solitary contexts. Thus, while an inventor would not need a high EI, he would definitely benefit from keen intuition.

Therefore, EI and intuition differ when it comes to empathy, the unconscious and problem solving. Symbolically, EI is a matter of the head while intuition a matter of the heart.

After watching PBS NewsHour’s analysis, “What’s Next for U.S. Military in Fight Against Al-Qaida?” which aired on Monday, May 2, 2011, I recalled an adage from a childhood story, “Sometimes the best place to hide something is in plain sight.”

In the story, someone hid an incriminating letter in his apartment. Rather than a secret place, he kept it with his routine correspondence. The authorities never found it because they didn’t believe he would keep it there.

Bin Laden’s death highlights that we are prejudiced toward three types of solutions: logical, technological and consistent. As a result, we are prejudiced against solutions that are emotional, human and deviant.

For example, we could not emotionally believe that bin Laden would hide in plain sight and in the midst of military forces that could destroy him. Furthermore, it took the consolidation of intelligence personnel (not technology) from Iraq before we saw dynamic progress. Finally, we did not expect Pakistani real estate, zoning and building protocols to be so deviant from ours.

Here are some questions that can help overcome these three prejudices:

Emotion

• What are the emotions behind the situation and our thinking?
• What solutions are we not considering because they are “unreasonable”?
• How likely will people behave as they told us?

Human

• What vulnerabilities and limitations do our technological solutions have?
• How can human intervention help?
• What assessments can humans do better?

Deviation

• How closely are we expecting others to behave the way we do?
• How much of this is because we’ve made them behave as we do?
• What would someone with an opposing perspective think and do?

It took ten years because bin Laden wasn’t rational, our technology wasn’t omnipresent and Pakistan’s zoning protocols weren’t like ours.

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Here are some related links if you’d like elaboration on these points. These two further explore how people can behave much differently than they say they will:

• “Who We Are” is Different From “Who We Think We Are”
• What the Failures of Online Dating Can Teach Us

This one gives an example of a low-tech solution besting a high-tech one: When Best Technology Isn’t Best

This one takes a “universal good” and demonstrates how it changes under the challenge of a different perspective: Is Freedom for Everybody?

I received a question about Emotional Intelligence and Leadership in a comment about Leadership vs. Management: The Difference (Part III):

What are your thoughts on Emotional Intelligence(EI) and whether you feel there is a way to objectively measure EI and if it is a measure of Leadership?

Essentially, EI is a head thing; my work is a heart thing. EI is about being “intelligent” about emotions; it’s not about feeling. If you look at EI’s definition of empathy, this becomes clear:

Ability to understand the emotional makeup of other people.

With intuition, I define empathy as:

Ability to feel what the other person is feeling.

Understand is a “head” term, not a “heart” one. Feel is about the heart not the head. EI helps people read the reactions of other people to understand their emotions. In contrast, a true empath (someone who is empathetic) will tend to feel what the other person is feeling even before needing to see a reaction.

Since EI is learnable and is all about understanding and not feeling, a psychopath could learn to become more emotionally intelligent because he can understand without feeling. Empathy, on the other hand is only developed from the emotional sensitivity given to us at birth. It’s analogous to us only being able to develop our athletic capabilities from our given physical attributes.

As for leadership, EI aids it, but it does not objectively measure it for two reasons. First, other personal attributes contribute to leadership which EI does not measure such as our ability to communicate and influence. Second, EI is not measured objectively. As with any personality assessment tool, EI is dependent upon the assumptions and benchmarks underlying it. Those are subjectively determined by the tools’ creators based upon what they feel will work best.