Mike Lehr's Blog

People often have unrealistic expectations for intuition, sometimes thinking it’s a crystal ball, magic lamp or answer giver. This usually stems from trying to see it as we do cognition. However, if cognition is a map, intuition is our compass. If cognition is our street address, then intuition is our city, state or nation.

Of course, visualizations help to differentiate between cognition and intuition. I use the schematic below that way. Cognition represents logic and reason, easily connecting each point because one naturally follows the other. One thought connects the next.

Intuition on the other hand is like trying to find the best line to represent a group of observations. It doesn’t connect them as easily and new points don’t always fall on or near the line; however, taken as a group, our observations form a pattern giving a sense of direction to them. Thus, intuition narrows our possibilities. More significantly, we don’t need many observations to get this directional sense.

For example, we can predict tendencies of people simply by looking at what they buy. In some cases, if we know their favorite car, beverage, hobby, store and book, we can make predictions about their favorite restaurant. Political campaigns take such consumer information and make accurate predictions about what candidates and issues potential voters might prefer. We can form psychological profiles of people from consumer – and other – activities, similar to what we see on crime shows when tracking criminals.

While these examples are very conscious, we unconsciously pick up patterns too. These are translated into feelings, emotions and finally intuitions. That is why it’s important to listen to how we feel. It might be our intuition giving us some direction, giving us a north. In this sense, intuition can be our guiding star.

Related link: My Intuition White Paper (3 pages)

How many times have you heard, “Don’t reinvent the wheel”? Why is it then that the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) has issued over 30,000 wheel patents since 1790? Moreover, as patent attorney, Lawrence Ebert, indicates, they’re approving about three hundred new ones a year. However, even Lawrence doesn’t tell the whole story.

You see, he only quoted figures from Patent Class 295 (Railway Wheels and Axles) and Class 301 (Land Vehicles: Wheels & Axles). He didn’t include wheels from Class D21 (Games, Toys, and Sports Equipment) which includes the following:

• Subclass 375: Roulette wheels
• Subclass 175-177: Steering wheels
• Subclass 204-213: Toy wheels
• Subclass 458: Pinwheel
• Subclass 477: Toys with steering wheels
• Subclass 543: Paddle wheels
• Subclass 779: Skating wheels for roller skates and skateboards
• Subclass 667: Fly Wheels
• Subclass 763: Rollers
• Subclass 563: Wheels for toy vehicles
• Subclass 829: Ferris wheel

Furthermore, he didn’t include Class 472 which contains crank wheels such as those powering our bicycles. He also didn’t include pulleys which fall under Class 474 and various kinds of tires (Class 152) and wheels that fit around other wheels (Class D12)

Now, just imagine if no one “reinvented the wheel.” We wouldn’t have all these wonderful wheels not to mention many folks wouldn’t have jobs and businesses. In short, many people wouldn’t be making the money they’re making now. Technological advancement has come because we like to reinvent things, always making them better and more adaptable to a need.

So, when people say, “Don’t reinvent the wheel,” take them up on the challenge and show them how you can make the “wheel” better and more profitable. Don’t let their lack of creativity chain your creativity and innovativeness to the ground.

YinYang, as expressed by the Taijitu symbol, has helped me solve many problems. The two major components represent the two major opposing forces in any event. The smaller part of each in the other represents the interplay between the two.

I have extracted five principles from YinYang that have helped me. In short, optimal solutions will:

1. Have opposing forces (i.e. ideas, emotions, things) at work
2. Not choose one force over the other
3. Balance and integrate the two forces
4. Have one force as dominant and the other supportive
5. Vary by situation

For example, let’s consider the problem of how much to water a plant. Two forces exist, dryness and wetness (#1). If we choose dryness over wetness by never watering the plant, it will die. If we choose wetness over dryness by constantly watering the plant, the plant will die (#2). Thus, we need to integrate the two and find the right balance between watering and drying (#3). In this balance, the plant’s soil will be mainly dry or wet (#4). This balance varies by plant (#5, i.e. cacti versus willows).

In business, we often view these as tradeoffs such as processes versus flexibility, positive versus negative reinforcements, best practices versus differentiation, focus versus situational awareness, change versus resistance, profits versus investments, and glass half-full versus half-empty. However, tradeoffs encourage the temptation to choose one over the other; it’s really about integrating the two (#4).

Many times, it’s difficult to identify the opposing force. So, I ask myself this question:

If I take an obvious solution to the extreme, what would happen?

For example, too much process makes everything bureaucratic. Too much importance on profits retards investments. Once accomplished, we can begin balancing the two to arrive at an optimal solution for the situation at hand.

In business, people often see aggressiveness as a virtue; however, it can be a defect. Exploring this will give us insights into dealing with aggressive personalities in our lives and examples of how different perspectives help in problem solving.

The Battle of Gettysburg in 1863 from the American Civil War, the turning point in that war, is a good initial example.  The Union won this battle over the Confederates but never attacked. That’s because the Confederates relentlessly attacked a different part of the Union line on each of the battle’s three days (see diagram to right) despite the Union being on higher ground and firmly entrenched. Consequently, the Confederates suffered heavy losses and retreated.

In nature, the article, “Unnatural Selection” from the May 23, 2009 issue of The Economist, reports on the work of Laszlo Garamszegi from the University of Antwerp. He found that the aggressive animals were most likely to be caught in traps. The Battle of Cannae from 216 B.C. is a human form of this. Hannibal had tapped into his Roman opponents’ aggressiveness and hubris to lure them into a trap, thus destroying an army twice his size. In American football, the screen pass takes advantage of aggressive defenses by luring them into the backfield.

Thus, aggressiveness alone is defective without intelligence, wisdom or insight. As these examples show, we can defeat aggressiveness by:

• Allowing it to tire itself on extremely difficult tasks
• Giving it “a bone” (a lesser important task) to distract it
• Tapping into its hubris and goading it into wasting time on irrelevant things

In business, we see examples when companies expand too aggressively, thinking they have the “secret,” taking shortcuts and ignoring planning. As a result, aggressiveness produces huge losses for them, just as it did for the Confederates.

It’s generally easier to understand what positive and negative reinforcements are than it is to understand their advantages and disadvantages. Tradeoffs exist. Generally, in terms of getting action positive reinforcements are better over the long run, negative over the short run. The table below explains:

Now, it’s important for us to understand and appreciate how these work together. After all, managers are likely to use both, not just one or the other. Therefore, here are two important ratios to remember:

Results Ratio: It generally takes five (5) positive reinforcements to do the work of one (1) negative one.

5:1

Relationship Ratio: It generally takes ten (10) positive reinforcements to overcome the negative feelings of one (1) negative one.

10:1

For instance, one could hold a gun to someone’s head and change his behavior very quickly, but the relational damage is immense. We don’t want to become overdrawn on our relational accounts because overreliance on negative reinforcements will reduce the effect of positive reinforcements. This will necessitate greater use of negative reinforcements and produce a synergistic spiral downward resulting in a compliant, uninspired workforce.

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?

There is no place that the revisiting of our unconscious urges are taken more seriously than in retailing. The Economist article “Retail Therapy” appearing in the December 17, 2011 edition gives a great historical accounting of the rise and fall . . . and rise again of the application of Freud in business which Ernest Dichter is noted for introducing. As the article asserts:

Every week seems to yield a new discovery about how bad people are at making decisions. Humans, it turns out, are impressionable, emotional and irrational.

Increasingly, researchers are finding Dichter’s assessment that “most people have no idea why they buy things” to be correct.

Of course, “Sigmund Freud argued that people are governed by irrational, unconscious urges over a century ago.” However, as we saw earlier, it took science almost a hundred years to acknowledge that the subconscious existed. Meanwhile, “businesses were recognizing the limits of quantitative studies . . . which offered little genuine insight into how customers behaved.” Said more directly, you can’t rely on customers to tell you what they might buy.

The failures of online dating showed this truth as well as research into people’s internet surfing habits. The Atlantic’s article, “Learning to Love the (Shallow, Divisive, Unreliable) New Media,” which appeared in its April 2011 demonstrated that it’s “not what [people] say they want, nor what they ‘should’ want, but what they choose when they have a chance.”

If this applies to purchases, it also applies to all decisions. Names can affect decisions about scientific grants, and information that judges know is wrong can affect their decisions. So, if people don’t behave and choose as they said they would, we have no one to blame but ourselves for not looking deeper into the real emotions powering us.

In a previous post, I briefly mentioned the work of Michael Tomasello of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology as reported by Elizabeth Kolbert in her article, “Sleeping With The Enemy,” which appeared in the August 15/22, 2011 issue of the The New Yorker. At the time, I cited Tomasello’s work to emphasize the natural orientation humans have toward cooperation. In this post, I am suggesting that cooperation is a higher form of intelligent behavior than self-interest.

Here are two quotes from the article indirectly suggesting this:

1. Apes seem to lack the impulse toward collective problem-solving that’s so central to human society.
2. If you were at the zoo today, you would never have seen two chimps carry something heavy together. They don’t have this kind of collaborative project.

Only thinking and working towards your self-interest without consideration for others is definitely easier to accomplish than cooperation is. Additionally, when you add the importance of context, empathy and intrinsic rewards – all ingredients we’ve discussed earlier – to encourage natural cooperative tendencies, the achievement of cooperation is difficult, demanding and warrants a higher form of talent, aptitude and skill.

Furthermore, we can even take cooperation to a higher level when it comes to encouraging it within a diverse workforce. Such a workforce is more likely to be creative, innovative and adaptable. It’s much easier to gain cooperation within an homogeneous workforce than a diverse one. Moreover, creating the context, empathy and intrinsic rewards to appeal to such diversity requires special talents.

Again, all of this is to suggest that the desire and ability to cooperate belongs in the realm of a higher life form, humans rather than apes. Seen more simply, whereas self-interest puts our behavior more in line with those of apes, cooperation elevates us above them.

Other links in this series:

• Cooperation vs. Competition on the Business-to-Business Level
• Cooperation vs. Self-interest: Which Reigns Supreme?
• Cooperation vs. Self-interest (Pt 2): Context – The Great Influencer
• Cooperation vs. Self-interest (Pt 3): Empathy
• Cooperation vs. Self-interest (Pt 4): Intrinsic Rewards

People periodically ask me, “Should I get a coach?” I chuckle because it’s akin to asking, “Should I get married?” Coaching as with marriage is great if you find a great person. However, it can be unrewarding, even harmful, if you don’t, especially if you’re already good at your profession.

If you’re considering a coach, I strongly recommend reading, “Personal Best”, by Atul Gawande which appeared in the October 3, 2011 issue of the The New Yorker. Gawande gives an excellent account of his decision-making process for securing a coach. More importantly, he made three points about coaching that standout from other coaching literature I’ve read:

1. “Good coaches know how to break down performance into its critical individual components.”
2. “Good coaches speak with credibility, make a personal connection, and focus little on themselves.”
3. “. . . bad coaching can make people worse [especially if they are already professionals]”

In many respects, it doesn’t matter what the coach’s credentials, experience, references or record of accomplishment are: if the coach and you do not connect on a personal level, your experience will be mediocre and possibly damaging. Yes, selecting a coach is a highly subjective affair.

Many coaches will transfer their failure to the client by saying, “I’m only as good as my client is.” Theoretically, this is true, but in reality, you can have two excellent coaches in a situation where one succeeds and the other fails. Coaching is not an objective science; it’s a subjective art. What works for one client might not work for another.

That means determining what you want in a coach. If credentials and experience are important, that’s great! If not, don’t fret. You’re in charge; it’s your coach . . . and your choice.

One of the paradoxes of best practices is that they promote unimaginativeness because if everyone followed best practices the differentiation among competing firms would drastically narrow.

In its raw form, BP is copying. Companies do not transform markets or shoot ahead of the competition by copying. If they do, they need to enhance the original. A better practice than the best practice will achieve this especially if every other company in that space is following the best practice. As a result, BP’s encourage “inside the box thinking” resulting in a workforce based upon complying with the BP rather than thinking about making the best better.

This occurs because to find a “best practice” people only need to dredge the internet or current research material. If they don’t want to do this, they only need to find an unimaginative expert who has already done this for them. However, bettering a best practice requires much thought and inspiration. That’s why in many law firms there are research assistants assigned with this task so attorneys have more time to think about the uniqueness of their cases.

Of course, many unimaginative people offer this defense: “Let’s not reinvent the wheel.” What they don’t realize is that since 1790 the United States Patent Office has approved over 30,000 patents for wheels. This number doesn’t include many specialty wheels in toys and machines such as the wheels on toy cars or the pulleys in machines like transmissions. It also doesn’t include the Ferris Wheel.

BP’s encourage employees to do exactly that: not reinvent the wheel. They don’t encourage them to think about improvements to make the wheel better or for other purposes. BP’s say, “Someone else has already solved the problem.” Thus, the best practice of inside-the-box thinking is to adopt a best practice.

Additional recommended reading: the post “The Downside of Best Practices” by Mike Wyatt