About me: I'm an unrepentant generalist finding my way in a world of specialists. I started this blog to review books, but I now talk about topics ranging from management to cognition to social software.
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One of the topics I want to think more about is organizational cognition aka how organizations think, and how to design an intelligent organization. For some reason, I was thinking about this today, and made a connection to standard theories of cognition that I hadn’t made before.
Let’s start with Descartes’s view of the world: I think, therefore I am. In this view, consciousness is what fundamentally defines us as human. Our rational, conscious minds take in sensory input, make decisions and execute actions in response. Consciousness and thinking are assumed to be identical. Note: I am aware this is an oversimplification and possibly a mis-statement of Descartes, but that’s what straw men are for – see the Wikipedia entry on the Cartesian theater for a similar take.
This view of how we think has been shown to be incomplete, at best. Books like The User Illusion and On Intelligence describe an unconscious mind which is doing so much processing and filtering that it can often respond without ever involving the conscious mind. One might picture this as a bubbling brew of unconscious perceptions and responses which only rarely permeates the conscious mind.
What was new to me today is how these two views of the human mind might map to theories of corporate management.
The first view of cognition corresponds to the archetypal hierarchical command-and-control corporate structure, with the executive team corresponding to the conscious mind. All major decisions are brought to the CEO or executive team, a decision is made, and instructions are fired off to the rest of the company to execute. Once decisions have been made, processes can be put in place to ensure that such decisions are made consistently without the need to bring them to the executives again, much like McDonald’s has its three-ring binder which specifies every aspect of running a fast food franchise in a completely standardized way.
It’s less clear what would be the management equivalent of the second view of cognition. I think it’s closer to my idea of what an intelligent organization might look like, with self-organizing teams that band together to achieve a common goal. In such an organization, managers might not be hierarchical decision-makers, but instead “exception handlers” who trouble shoot problems that are not handled well by the existing teams (for some reason, I’m picturing the Wolf from Pulp Fiction here). This would be the analogue of the conscious mind only being involved in decisions where there is no established cognitive subroutine. In such an organization, most things would bubble along, being handled by the teams, and only rarely would be surfaced to the “conscious mind” of executive management.
Of course, this is an overly broad analogy, and figuring out what such an organization would look like in practice is really difficult (how do we balance between surfacing problems when needed and keeping the critical decision-makers from being overwhelmed?). But I thought it was interesting to explicitly draw the cognition analogy to organizations and see what that might imply about management. I’ll have to think about this some more. And, of course, I’d welcome any thoughts you have.
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The process of taking in information and processing it is something that has been on my mind – particularly with a newborn bopping around in the house…
Previously, I’d been more of a “Rational Thought” kind of person – that when a person came to bad conclusions, it was because there was some failure of rationality on the person’s part. They were just wrong, and being wrong was a defect in their character that they were responsible for.
These days, I keep feeling like places where we often consider ourselves rational people, our thought processes are much more reflexive than I’d originally been willing to accept. It just seems like a lot of the “ways people think” – how or why they get defensive, when a person’s self-destructive, curious, in love, whatever – it seems like a lot of a person’s behavior can be thought of in terms of how their thought patterns trace all the way back to the way the most primitive humans must have thought and what kinds of situations they had to survive.
I can’t say I’ve got a lot of examples, here, but definitely reading Nurtureshock, dealing with a newborn, having a dog, and dealing with a lot of customer support issues recently, I’m definitely not feeling the rational brain these days.
seppo
It might be a bad sign when I immediately thought of another analogy — the short term decision based only on immediate desires. Like how every night I say I’m going to get up and run or swim, and then the next morning I just lie in bed that extra 45 minutes.
Plenty of orgs have decisions that are made at the team level that are short-sighted, and based on what’s easier to do now, rather than what will be good in the longer term picture. I wonder how those bad choices can be stopped.
Seppo: Yeah, the rational brain is pretty much out the window, as far as I’m concerned. Books like Blink and Sources of Power show how leveraging our pre-conscious mind can lead to better decisions than if we employ our conscious mind. I just read a book called Born to Be Good, by Dacher Keltner, which traces back how many of our altruistic and community-building impulses have evolutionary roots.
I think it was the Keltner book that referred to this wacky case where a man had a tumor removed, and thereafter was completely unable to make a decision, despite still having high intelligence test scores. It turns out that emotions are how we make decisions – this man that was trying to make decisions purely by rational means was overwhelmed by the vast number of choices he was faced with.
Chuck: The short-term vs. long-term tradeoff is another good example. Although I’m not sure we can design an organization to encourage that when we fail so miserably as a society at encouraging those choices in our populace. Part of it is B.F. Skinner’s advice to make the right long-term thing easy to do. Part of it is just designing things so people want to do the right thing e.g. I hate running, but love playing frisbee, even though frisbee is mostly running.
Malcolm Gladwell’s collection of columns also has a bit about the interview process, and how much of a person’s opinion about a potential candidate is formed during the handshake – and how the interview only compounds that initial impression, unless you’re very careful about the questions you ask. Definitely made me wonder about how I’ve formed the mental models of the people I know, and how much basis in reality they actually have.