Tag: Anders Ericsson

psychology

The Developmental Psychology of Organizations

on January 17, 2019
Organizations start change somewhere

Every living thing has a journey that starts somewhere and ends eventually. Our ability to see this, understand it, and apply what we know about how humans grow and develop (as individuals and organizations) is what helps us determine how this journey unfolds and where it ends up.

The psychology of individuals is a complicated affair that involves understanding a variety of matters from personal and family history, genetics, cultural context, education, and social situating. While all of these contribute to who we are as people, the degree of influence and mix is different from person to person. It means that we are all a product of a collection of forces that combine together in various ways that make understanding how we change a challenge because of this holistic complexity.

For example, some of us might have behaviours and preferences associated with a certain personality type (extroverted and introverted) and find that quality to be relatively stable across the lifespan. While there are times we might exhibit qualities of another type, those are more situational than stable. For those who are more of an ambivert, identification with a particular preference might be more challenging. Whatever investment you place in this kind of personality assessment, what is important is that the stability and consistency of certain characteristics are what largely shapes our identity to others (and ourselves). It’s what makes us ‘us’.

From Individuals to Organizations

It has been argued that organizations exhibit much of the same kind of characteristic habits on their own while providing an aggregation of the characteristics of those within them and leading them to various degrees. Personality theory has been applied to organizational behaviour as a means of understanding how it is that certain actions, activities, habits, and patterns form from within organizations and their implications. This involves taking ideas developed for individuals and applying them to groups and the implications of this are considerable.

If we are to consider organizations similar to humans seriously, it can have significant implications for the way in which we engage in organizational change efforts. Much of the research on organizational change is tied to the development and implementation of a strategy. Strategy, in most conventional applications, is an expression of intent manifest through specific choices of focus and action. This approach rests largely on a cognitive rational model of change (pdf) where information (e.g., data, ‘facts’, perceptions, beliefs, and opinion) guides an assessment of the situation that forms the basis for a plan of action. The idea is that we see and learn things and plan and act according to that knowledge.

Most individual behaviour change models are founded on this approach that has thinking preceding action in a relatively rational, logical manner based on an objective assessment of the facts and evidence (with some emotional contributions here and there to make life interesting). So if we tie organizational change to the similar kind of mechanisms and models that we use to understand individuals, should we not apply similar modes of change facilitation? We do — but its how we do it that might be the problem.

Change Theory to Change Reality

One of the most vexing (and little discussed) issues for behavioural scientists is that the application of the cognitive rational model to personal, organizational, and social change has a rather unimpressive track record. A look at how people change finds that relatively little change comes from rationally reviewing a threat or opportunity and planning out a strategy (nevermind executing the planned strategy as envisioned). Even when the effects are modest, factors such as the match between the person, technique or intervention approach, and the problem being addressed continues to mediate the outcomes.

What happens when our theories and our practices don’t really work? Or at least don’t work as well as we think they do?

The answer — using the very argument that we are looking to disprove — is that we will address the matter as many individuals might: disagreement, resistance, and denial.

The field of organizational decision-making and innovation is littered with case studies that show how, in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, organizations (like many individuals) resist change. Whether it was the speed at which those on the Titanic accepted the fact that their ship would sink after hitting the iceberg (nevermind the perception that the ship was invulnerable, to begin with) or companies who persist with a strategy that doesn’t match with changing times (e.g., Kodak and it’s photographic film business, Sears and its retail model), the inability to see, unwillingness to perceive or accept changing situations has led to major problems.

These problems are a matter of failing to change or adapt. To quote from The Leopard:

If want things to stay as they are, things will have to change

Change is something we need to do even if that is simply to maintain the status quo.

Person-Centred Organizational Change

Erik Eriksen, the Austrian-American psychoanalyst whose work focused on identity formation and development, was among the few to challenge the belief that people’s essential character was immutable and resistant to change. (The dominant view was that thinking and behaviour could change, but not ‘how one was’ as a person). He did, however, acknowledge that our ability to change who we are was not easy and takes a lifetime. This flies in the face of the dominant thinking in Western societies that we can make dramatic changes in an instant.

While talk-shows and popular self-books are filled with stories of dramatic transformation and inspiration about how you can change everything in an instant, the truth is that these cases are outliers (and often exaggerations) or misrepresentations. Much like the artist who ‘breaks out’ and becomes an ‘overnight sensation’ the journey to stardom is usually a long one that follows a Pareto distribution (that is a long, slow climb over time followed by very quick punctuation at the end). What is misread into these success stories is that the rapid change is a factor of a long, protracted build-up.

While there are some things that do follow this pattern much change is also linear and progressive. We see this in the work of another Ericsson: Anders Ericsson. His work is widely cited (and mis-cited) as being behind the ‘10,000 Hour Rule’ that suggests that expertise — a change from an unskilled novice to a skilled expert — is developed over that much time of practice. While the time itself is important, what is often missed in the citation of this work is that the key is on deliberative practice (pdf), which makes all the difference.

If we extrapolate from the work of both Eriksen/Ericsson’s we might develop a model of behaviour change that looks quite different than we have at present. Instead of trying 5-year plans, strategic goals, and inspirational visions of the future, we might be better off delving into an organization’s past, it’s formation, it’s core beliefs and personality, and spend more time looking at what it is already doing than what it seeks to do.

Developmental Organizations

We might then find what it seeks to deliberate on day-in-and-out and emphasize the ways in which to amplify the feedback that helps people learn deliberately and consistently. We might take these lessons — much like those small, tiny adjustments that expert violinists, athletes, and surgeons make to hone their craft — and make them visible and build on them. We would look upon organizations as developing organizations using approaches that fit with them developmentally (e.g., developmental evaluation). We would treat organizations like we would people.

Which is kind of funny because organizations are made of people. That’s some change.

Photo by Stanislav Kondratiev on Unsplash

education & learning

The Myth of Fast-tracking Learning

on August 7, 2014

The time keeper / El guardián del tiempo

The time keeper

In a quest for getting more, faster we pursue strategies that aim to compress and challenge the physics of time. Education is one of these areas where the quest to learn more, faster and ‘better’ may actually be taking us away from knowledge and speeding us to folly. 

What would you say or do if your physician or attending nurse in the hospital told you that they attended a medical school that distilled all the key sources of knowledge into packages that allowed them to complete their training in half the time?

Would you be comfortable being treated by them?

What if you were seated on your next flight  and learned that the pilot of your aircraft was taught by a flight school that claimed it could train pilots without the thousands of flight hours by focusing on the essence of what it meant to fly and do that really well in a short period of time?

Would you still want to fly with them?

What if someone said that they had a formula for taking Ericcson’s near mythical 10,000 hour rule* on building expertise and could halve it to produce the exact same results?

Would you believe them? And would you follow them?

Packaged learning and the myths of efficiency

While we might say no to these, we say yes to a lot of other things that are perhaps just as hard to believe. One of these is the myth of online education. Major online learning platforms (MOOC’s) like EdX, Coursera, and Udacity along with global education pioneers Khan Academy are delivering educational content to millions along with universities and thousands of smaller or independent education providers with the promise of offering distance education, some with degrees attached to them.

There is a place for this type of learning, but as often happens, the enthusiasm for speed, efficiency and profit blind and blur. Correspondence classes and the earliest online or distance learning programs were designed to meet the educational needs of those who were geographically isolated from others where face-to-face learning was impractical. What had a practical idea to solving a specific set of problem existing in a particular set of constraint conditions it is suddenly morphing into a standard for everyone and that isn’t a good idea.

Look around and you will see more ‘packaging’ educational experiences so that they can be scaled and delivered efficiently to different audiences. This might be fine if the content is simple and can be matched with the educator, the learning space (physical or online), and the cognitive and emotional demands placed on the learner in the process of learning the material. Yet, frequently this isn’t the case. Now, we see efforts to create programs to teach complex, important topics in a weekend, a week or a short retreat with the idea that we can just get to the essence of what’s needed and the rest will take care of itself.

Doing the work, putting in the time

No better example of this is hyper-learning myth is found that with Timothy Ferris, author of the 4-hour workweek and other rapid-fire learning books. Ferris takes his readers through his journeys to be hyper-efficient and learn things in a compressed time along the way.

One example is how he became a champion in a martial arts tournament in a sport he knew nothing about before engaging in mere weeks of training before the event. This achievement was done through some clever exploitation of tournament rules and engaging in a near obscene dehydration plan that enabled him to lose weight prior to weigh ins to allow him to fight below his normally expected weight class. This doesn’t change the outcome, but it adds a very big asterisk to its notation in the record books. Ferris’ work is filled with these sleight of hand kind of efficiencies that might work for a one-off, who’s longer term is questionable**.

Ferris has made a career out of intense, hyper-condensed learning and, even if he does what he claims, his approach to learning is his job and life. For most people, learning is one of a great many things they have on the go. Further, the problems they are trying to solve might not be ones that have a clear answer or a way to circumvent using a close read of the rules, rather they may be the kind of protracted, complex, thorny and wicked problems that we see in healthcare, social policy, environmental action, and organizational development. These are spaces where sleights of hand aren’t well received.

Other sleights of hand

In professional circles it is the longer-term that matters. System change, social innovation, healthcare transformation and community or organizational development are all areas where learning needs to start and continue throughout a long process. It often involves consideration of complex scenarios, an understanding of theory, reflective practice and experimentation that simply take time to not only engage with, but to contemplate.

It is like the parable about the farmer who wakes up one morning to find all of his crops dead because his unknowing son spent the night pulling up every stalk of grain with the belief that he could make them grow faster.

We have not been able to circumvent time, no matter what we wish.

The sleight of hand is in making busywork and information disguised as active learning and knowledge. There are certainly ways we can improve teaching, learning, knowledge translation and exchange and knowledge integration in its effectiveness, reach and impact, but we won’t be finding the ‘killer app’ that gives us the ability to download knowledge to our heads like the Matrix. These are developmental problems and thus ought to be treated using developmental thinking.

But we still try. Apps are being developed that allow us to learn anything, anywhere, in real time, from our phone or change our behaviour with a couple simple clicks, except there is virtually no evidence that we actually learn, actually change or do anything other than buy more and worry more.

True learning innovation will come from being wide-eyed about what we mean by learning, what we seek to achieve through it and creating the developmental thinking around what it means to bring them together rather than subscribing to legends or quick-fixes that simply don’t work.

 

* Anders Ericsson’s research on deliberative practice (PDF), which shows that attentive, intentional learning over time is a key determinant in high performing individuals. Malcolm Gladwell’s book Outliers highlights this work in detail and has led to the popularization of what has been colloquially referred to as ‘The 10,000 hour rule’, which reflects the approximate number of hours of deliberative practice required to gain expert-level skill and knowledge in a field.

**Many of Ferris’ claims from learning languages in a few weeks to mastering other subjects are unverified.

Image Credit: The Time Keeper /El guardián del tiempo by Jesus Solano via Flickr used under Creative Commons License. Thanks Jesus for sharing your wonderful art with the world through Creative Commons.

 

 

 

innovation

Acting on Failure or Failure to Act?

on April 8, 2014

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Who would have thought that failure would be held up as something to be desired just a few years ago? Yet, it is one thing to extol the virtues of failure in words, it is quite another to create systems that support failure in action and if the latter doesn’t follow the former, failure will truly live up to its name among the innovation trends of the 21st century. 

Ten years ago if someone would have said that failure would be a hot term in 2014 I would have thought that person wasn’t in their right mind, but here we are seeing failure held up as an almost noble act with conferences, books and praise being heaped on those who fail. Failure is now the innovator’s not-so-secret tool for success. As I’ve written before, failure is being treated in a fetishistic manner as this new way to unlock creativity and innovation when what it might be is simply a means reducing people’s anxieties.

Saying it’s OK to fail and actually creating an environment where failure is accepted as a reasonable — maybe even expected — outcome is something altogether different. Take strategic planning. Ever see a strategic plan that includes failure in it? Have you ever seen an organization claim that it will do less of things, fail more often, and learn more through “not-achieving” rather than succeeding?? Probably not.

How often has a performance review for an individual or organization included learning (which is often related to failure) as a meaningful outcome? By this I refer to the kind of learning that comes from experience, from reflective practice, from the journey back and forth through confusion and clarity and from the experimentation of trying and both failing and succeeding. It’s been very rare that I’ve seen that in either corporate or non-profit spaces, at least in any codified form.

But as Peter Drucker once argued: what gets measured, get’s managed.

If we don’t measure failure, we don’t manage for it and nor do our teams include failure as part of their core sets of expectations, activities and outcomes and our plans or aspirations.

Failure, mindfulness and judgement

In 2010 post in Harvard Business Review, Larry Prusak commented on the phenomenon of measurement and noted that judgement — something that comes from experience that includes failure — is commonly missing from our assessments of performance of individuals and organizations alike. Judgement is made based on good information and knowledge, but also experience in using it in practice, reminding me of a quote a wise elder told me:

Good judgment comes from experience, but experience comes from bad judgment.

One of the persistent Gladwellian myths* out there is that of the 10,000 hours rule that suggests if we put that amount of time into something we’re likely to achieve a high level of expertise. This is true only if most of those 10,000 hours were mindful, deliberate ones devoted to the task at hand and involve learning from the successes, failures, processes and outcomes associated with those tasks. That last part about mindful, reflective attention or deliberate practice as the original research calls it (as so many Gladwellian myths suffer from) is left off of most discussions on the subject.

To learn from experience one has to pay attention to what one is doing, what one is thinking while doing it, and assessing the impact (evaluation) of that action once whatever is done is done. For organizations, this requires alignment between what people do and what they intend to do, requiring that mindful evaluation and monitoring be linked to strategy.

If we follow this lead where it takes us is placing failure near the centre of our strategy. How comfortable are you with doing that in your organization?

A failure of failure

Failure is among the most emotionally loaded words in the English language. While I often joke that the term evaluation is the longest four-letter word in the dictionary, failure is not far off. The problem with failure, as noted in an earlier post, is that we’ve been taught that failure is to be avoided and the opposite of success, which is viewed in positive terms.

Yet, there is another reason to question the utility of failure and that is also related to the term success. In the innovation space, what does success mean? This is not a trivial question because if one asks bold questions to seek novel solutions it is very likely that we don’t know what success actually looks like except in its most general sense.

A reading of case studies from Amazon to Apple and Acumen to Ashoka finds that their success looks different than the originators intended. Sometimes this success is far better and more powerful and sometimes its just different, but in all cases the path was littered with lessons and few failures. They succeeded because they learned, not because they failed.

Why? Because those involved in creating these ‘failures’ were paying attention, used the experience as feedback and integrated that into the next stage of development. With each stage comes more lessons and new challenges and thus, failure is only so if there is no learning and reflection. This is not something that can be wished for; it must be built into the organization.

So what to do?

  • Build in the learning capacity for your organization by making learning a priority and creating the time, space and organizational support for getting feedback to support learning. Devoting a small chunk of time to every major meeting to reflecting back what you’re learning is a great way to start.
  • Get the right feedback. Developmental evaluation is an approach that can aid organizations working in the innovation space to be mindful.
  • Ask lots of questions of yourself, your stakeholders, what you do and the systems you’re in.
  • Learn how to design for your particular program context based on feedback coming from the question asking and answering. Design is about experimenting without the expectation of immediate success.
  • Develop safe-fail experiments that allow you to try novel approaches in a context that is of relatively low risk to the entire organization.

There are many ways to do this and systems that can support you in truly building the learning capacity of your organization to be better at innovating while changing the relationship you have with ‘failure’.

For more information about how to do this, CENSE Research + Design offers consultation and training to get organizations up to speed on designing for social innovation.

 

* Refers to ideas popularized by journalist and essayist Malcolm Gladwell that are based on the scientific research of professionals and distilled into accessible forms for mass market reading that become popular and well-known through further social discussion in forms that over-simplify and even distort the original scientific findings. It’s a social version of the “telephone game“. The 10,000 hour ‘rule’ was taken from original research by K. Anders Ericsson and colleagues on deliberate practice and is often discussed in the context of professional (often medical) training, where the original research was focused. This distortion is not something Gladwell intends, rather becomes an artifact of having ideas told over and again between people who may have never seen the original work or even Gladwell’s, but take ideas that become rooted in popular culture. A look at citations on failure and innovation finds that the term deliberate practice is rarely, if ever, used in the discussion of the “10,000 rule”.

 

Photo Credit: Project365Fail by Mark Ordonez used under Creative Commons license via Flickr. Thanks for sharing, Mark!