Or
How we look at things
For some minutes it puffed away without speaking, but at last it unfolded its arms, took the hookah out of its mouth again, and said, “So you think you’re changed, do you?”
Yes, I think I have changed. Have you? The objects I look at have changed, too, or is it just my perception? And ah, again, it just happened, new colors, new meaning. My gosh, again. Or is it not the coloring but my eyes, my brain? And how about you? Do you see it, too? Because otherwise what good does it do? We will get into all of this. Step by step, but first let me assure you we are still talking about business, management theory, systems and organizations. And we are talking about people, me and you and them. The subject today is perception and perspective, framing and assumptions. How we look at something. Why is this important? Well, it is pretty much the first step. Without looking at something — or perceiving it in another way — how should we do anything with it? So we have to capture IT somehow, make IT our own. Sounds logical? Yes? The problem is that this might exactly be the start of our problems.
When we look at reality we build fixed, isolated and often fictional snapshots and think it’s the real thing. A KPI this afternoon. Three months of data. Option A, B, or C. True for a fraction of a second, but treated as permanent.
We do this for three reasons — time pressure, missing knowledge, and something harder to admit: intellectual laziness. Not stupidity. The simple failure to use a capacity we already have, our ability to reason.
It matters because it’s the same failure that lets evil become ordinary, that lets a bad decision go unexamined, that lets a strategy run without ever checking its own facts. This happens all the time — quiet, everywhere, and costly. Let’s talk about how to avoid it.
That is what we always do. We take fixed snapshots of reality. We calculate a KPI this afternoon, we make an analysis of the last three months. We evaluate options A, B and C. But these are just aspects; they leave out the majority. We look at the front but forget what is behind or behind the behind. Plus these facts are true only for a fraction of a second. After that reality has changed again, even the past. What we capture are fictional, fragmented versions of reality — sometimes that is necessary, sometimes this is flawed and sometimes downright catastrophic. Or as in Köhler’s experiments it can cost us the banana. Understanding that coloring alone is not what points you to the food. He discovered that apes can learn that relation matters. Dark grey and light grey are not just important because of their individual colors. The fact that when an even lighter grey is placed beside the light grey, the even lighter grey is the correct path, is an important lesson to learn. It is about relational perception. We tend to view stuff in isolation when the relationship is really the meaningful part. And if apes can learn it, we should be able to as well.
Why then do we often stop before we have a good enough perception of what it is that we are concerned with? One reason is what you might think right now: “I don’t have time for this!” Time or other resource pressure leads us to take shortcuts. To think that a superficial idea is enough. Something that we also encountered when we looked at decision-making processes.
Second is that all of this sounds rather complicated. Stuff behind other stuff behind other stuff. And how should I know how two things relate, let alone a dozen different aspects? It’s like when I look at the inner workings of my computer and don’t have a clue what each shiny piece of hardware does or if it short-circuits when I put the cable in the other way — a hard disk in 1998, if you wonder. That is me not having had enough education or knowledge or experience. Both of these things — resource and knowledge scarcity — will be the topic of future essays.
Today we talk about the third reason that keeps us from having a good enough perception of reality. And for lack of a better term I have to call it Intellectual Laziness — sorry for the bluntness.
Let me make one thing clear, because I’ve had that discussion many times. By Intellectual Laziness I don’t mean the opposite of being an intellectual — Rodin’s Thinker, sitting around pondering the great questions of existence. I mean something much simpler: our tendency not to think when we could. We all have the ability to reason, to draw conclusions, to question assumptions and to follow a thought from one step to the next. Intellectual laziness is simply the failure to use these abilities when we should. Even apes can do it. If you cannot reach the banana with one stick, maybe two sticks will do the trick.
We talked a lot about the problems of missing moral reasoning when we looked at organizations and totalitarianism, with Havel, Jung and especially Arendt pointing out what happens if individuals cease to reason, to think for themselves. It leads to a void, a sum of a million zeros, that is often filled by bad actors, or the worst possible, as in the example of Nazi Germany. The same failure that makes evil become ordinary lets a bad decision go unexamined or keeps a strategy without a foundation of facts.
This shortcut to snapshots, to the superficial, is something we already found with Boorstin when he analyzed the media in the 1960s. The difference between the ideal and the image. The complex actual thing, the complicated idea of it, gets covered up by a simple image. Quick to draw, easy to market. It’s the slogan that replaces the mental health program, the RCA sticker that replaces actually getting dirty, digging beneath the surface and looking for the roots and worms and bacteria.
One particularly nasty problem with this kind of fixed snapshot thinking that we so often find in organizations is that it is self-destructive by logic. See, if you perceive your organization as something fixed, its most important characteristic — its purpose, what it does — is also fixed. We make shoes for runners. We make computers for normal people. If Nike or Apple had stuck to that initial purpose — as the story is usually told — they would have done that, and once accomplished, there would be nothing left to do. That would mean that in the end, accomplishment would lead to failure as an organization. What successful companies like the ones mentioned did was expand their purpose — to other athletes and customers, in Nike’s case, or to other product categories, in Apple’s. Of course, if an organization fails to reach its purpose it also fails — stating the obvious. In both cases purpose should be more understood as a direction not as a destination. Barnard already described this mechanism in his book “The Functions of the Executive” from 1938. He also notes that this giving of purpose is a tricky thing anyway, because it is a generalization which “is normally substituted in our minds for the concrete performances that are the real purposes.” Just think of it like a slogan, the kind organizations often use to make their purpose more general but also easier to understand. This is not actual performance. It’s marketing. The image, not the ideal.
A similar issue is described by Follett, whom we already know from the discussion of the manager’s role, in her book “Creative Experience” from 1924. In organizations we often work with concepts in various forms. Concepts can be strategies, process descriptions, org charts and such things. The problem is that on their own they are not more than the words they are made up of. See, a concept is something that was created in the past that is supposed to describe the present or future. What connects it from the past to the future, what gives it meaning, is the described activity. A concept is the materialization of an ongoing discussion that can be used in putting something into action. Most importantly, it stays viable only as long as it’s connected to that activity. Viewed on its own, it loses its sense. That shifts how we quality people should look at process descriptions, for example. They need to be directly connected to actual work — a living document is a good description of this. If a concept loses its connection to what it describes, it’s losing life, and it cannot tell us anything about reality.
Follett describes some more issues, but let me just point out one that is very impactful and close to all of our experiences. The problem with specialization. Jobs and tasks have become more and more specialized — another obvious statement, sorry. The connection to perception is that people are trained with the intended purpose of only seeing a very narrow part of the whole. She gives the example of a celery-disease specialist who is asked by the farmer how to improve his cultivation of said plant. The specialist replies that he has no knowledge of how to grow celery, only of its diseases. Compartmentalizing knowledge to such a degree makes his knowledge useless the moment the farmer asks a real question. The farmer would need a person with experience of at least everything that has to do with growing celery — probably even wider. Somebody having only a narrow view cannot give him a good enough idea of reality.
So we saw the issues relating to fragmented and fixed snapshots of reality. Now how do we catch ourselves and others when this happens? We can split this up into individual perception errors and group perception errors. Be aware that individual perception errors can of course also happen in groups, since groups are just a bunch of individuals.
The first thing we individually do is forget which level or which part we are looking at. Or just the fact that we are looking at only a part of the whole thing — which, by the way, is always the case, but we’ll get to how to solve that later. First it is important to acknowledge that we look at parts, and to know which one. Goffman described this famously in his book “The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life” from 1959. He uses the metaphor of a theater play to separate the frontstage and the backstage. The audience is shown the act on the frontstage, but all the preparation and the actors’ real selves are only visible backstage. Frontstage is not a lie. It is just the part that the audience sees, or the customer in an organization. It’s the finished product — not the R&D, not the sourcing, not the production. That is all backstage. For an auditor this has always been important to distinguish. He is shown some facts but not what leads up to them. His job, or mine, is then — if he wants to do it well — to discover the backstage area. The most important thing to remember is never to mistake the frontstage for the complete thing. Already realizing that will give you a better idea, because knowing that you don’t see everything is the first lesson.
The second important point comes again from Follett. And it sort of brings in time as an aspect — where Goffman was more about location, if you want to put it that way. And it’s even more important, because situations and facts always change over time. The constant is that everything changes. Usually we just think, well, let’s update the numbers, but the situation is still the same. That’s actually a logical shortcut — you know, laziness again. Because the situation consists of the facts. If they change, the situation also does. Or, as she puts it: “And when a situation changes we have not a new variation under the old fact, but a new fact.” You might say that if this is true, we never have any consistency. Yes, that is kind of the point. Change and time are the only constants. Too philosophical? Well, if you are making an important decision it is worth checking how accurate your information still is so you don’t act on outdated data. So this is a very practical issue.
Location and time perception are issues we all have as individuals, but when we get into multiplayer mode, there are more. And most important analyses happen in a group environment, although I still prefer a good single-player RPG. We stay with Follett and the problem of muddle vs. difference. When we individually gather facts we will have other perceptions of reality. But these other perceptions can be two different things. They can be differences that are based on accurate information. This would be absolutely normal and a good basis for discussion. But a lot of the time, different perceptions of reality are based on inaccurate information. Follett calls that muddle, and it should be detected. If I am looking at a black snake, my perception is different from yours if you think it’s a fallen branch. We are then in completely different situations. And one of us — or both of us — clearly has inaccurate information, because they cannot both be correct. And any collaboration in this moment would be very difficult. Should we throw the thing for our dog to catch, or should we run away? And even if we had the same information that it is a snake, we could still differ in what to do. Kill it? Feed it? Or cuddle it? This is then something we can sort out together, because we have the same accurate information. Follett calls the first — snake or branch — muddle, and the second kind — kill or cuddle — difference.
What also happens a lot in groups is that we don’t even talk about the same question. Sounds familiar? I know it does. As a moderator in countless meetings and discussions, I often realize that people have somehow drifted apart — not necessarily in their opinion, but in the subject itself. We call this the mis-scoped question. In auditing training I often put beginners in a role-play situation in which the auditee never talks about the points he or she has been asked about, but about something completely different. And I do this not because it is funny to watch — although it is — but because it happens a lot when two or more people discuss a point. The reason behind it is our tendency to come up with these fast snapshots of our situation, or discussion topic, in this case. And since they are not based on real facts and not well reasoned, different people develop different snapshots of what the topic is – freestyle perception. So it is really important to always ask whether you are arguing about the same question or sub-question — the same scope — or whether you have drifted apart and are needlessly spending effort discussing different topics.
So after catching issues with perception based on location, time, accuracy and scoping, we have to ask ourselves how this can be avoided from the start. The solution needs to address both individual perception and group perception. In my opinion it is a combination of two ideas from two thinkers. Follett has already shown us a couple of issues, and she also has some neat ideas — actually so many that some will be discussed in later essays.
Specifically regarding the identified issues, she offers the idea of cooperative fact-finding. Some issues arise because in groups we look at different levels, from different time periods, and scope issues differently. But we can avoid that intellectual ego-odyssey when we collect facts together as a group. Imagine this practically — not some lone analyst crunching numbers in Excel or watching a process with a stopwatch, but groups of people looking at reality, observing it together. This solves the issue of agreeing on facts, because we find them together at the same time, and it also saves the time of presenting facts to others. If you feel a bit uneasy, you are not alone — most people do. For now I would say this is mostly because we are not used to really collaborating on that level. I try to encourage these moments in more formal ways when I promote people doing gemba walks — groups of managers together looking at processes in real life from an improvement perspective. When I join them, I often feel like a herding dog, keeping the sheep together, catching any strays. Improvement workshops and coaching sessions can be more informal moments when you look for facts together, and the experience is truly inspiring. It is just thrilling, digging into a system, getting data out, analyzing it as a group.
Finding facts together does not solve all differences — I mentioned that before in the muddle vs. difference part — but it gives something worth the effort to discuss. And because facts have been collected together, everybody feels entitled to discuss them. It enables individuals in groups to confront each other’s perceptions of those facts more, and you get less crowd unanimity. Because they are not just somebody else’s facts, they are your facts too. You own them too, and you can have an opinion about them.
What we are still missing is a clear instrument, a looking-glass with which we can — hopefully together — perceive reality. Luckily for us, there is already sort of a looking-glass in management theory. It comes from W. Edwards Deming, the four-lenses approach, as I like to call it, or as he called it: PROFOUND KNOWLEDGE. Sorry, it just sounds so epic. Jokes aside, he addressed a lot of issues we have with looking at organizations. But his approach works for other areas too. The four lenses are System, Variation, Knowledge and Psychology.
It is really important to understand that these are not the “what” we are looking at, but the “how” we are looking at something. Yes, a system is something. Deming defined it as a number of components which are interdependent and have an aim. And that is essentially the same definition we also find with systems thinkers like Donella Meadows. Elements plus interconnection plus purpose. These must always be present, and they always are. For now this is important for us insofar as it gives us a list of must-sees. When we look at a process, for example, we usually look for the main elements, we usually know the purpose of the process. What we often forget are the dependencies on other elements. Take, for example, a thermostat and a heater. Those are the elements. When the room — another element — gets too cold, the thermostat turns the heating on. The heating raises the temperature of the air — again, an element — which causes the thermostat to turn it off again. The purpose, of course, is to keep the room at a certain temperature. The interconnection is the temperature affecting the thermostat, the thermostat affecting the heating, and the heating affecting the air. Now, if we are interested in room temperature, there will be other interconnections that affect it. The temperature outside the room, the insulation of the room, and any windows and doors and how they are opened or closed. Which brings in humans as an element in that system. Their behavior will be dependent on other elements. Time of day might be an element, or a schedule. These depend on more elements. This raises an issue that has come up before. How much detail is enough in our perception of reality? Can I live with seeing only part of it? Can facts be slightly outdated? We will certainly discuss Systems Thinking in more detail, and how it can be used practically, in a future essay, but to answer the question briefly: there is something close to what I call — inspired by Meadows — the boundary-drawn-for-purpose principle. We have to set limits to what we look at based on why we are looking at it. Otherwise we would go further and further into details and get lost. The decision about what is enough is not easy, but we will experience it once we use applied Systems Thinking.
Deming’s next lens is variation — or data and its most important characteristic. We all know data, right? Yes, but that is exactly Deming’s point. We look at data all the time. We compare it, we manage it, we get bonuses based on it, we get fired or promoted based on hitting a certain number. But we often forget the most important thing about it: its variation. See, data, numbers — they are just that when viewed in a fixed and isolated manner. Take the number of smartphones sold. Okay, I have a quarter with one million sales. I can say that’s more than last quarter. I can say that’s more than my target. But that is still limited information about my business. Now I can put it in relation to other data — let’s say how many people work in my stores, or how much I invest in marketing. That is useful if I build a system view with that — the previous lens — because I see how different elements influence each other. And I can look at the changes within my data, the variations. Because there are always smaller and larger changes over time, and other factors (location, department, etc.). These variations have different reasons, or causes. It was actually Shewhart — an influence on Deming — who defined that there are common causes and special causes, and how to tell them apart statistically. Common causes come out of the system itself, how it is set up, the elements, the interactions. Special causes are triggered, well, by special events, usually from outside the system. This is important to determine, because the actions to change them are fundamentally different. I know it sounds like all nerdy statistics stuff — it is — but it is also really important, because it gives you more than the comparative view you usually get when looking at data. It’s so important that we will also look at it in more detail in a future essay.
Next up is epistemology — ha, see, I can do big words too — or just: how does knowledge work, and how is it acquired? Deming goes back to C. I. Lewis for this, and his 1929 book “Mind and the World-Order.” Sounds grand, but he was a pragmatist philosopher, so it’s not that far up in the sky. And it actually connects to the data bit we just discussed. The whole common-cause and special-cause thing is a well-thought-through theory which makes sense of the data variations that we see. Without the theory we would just see spikes in a graph and would not have the slightest idea how to look at it and gather meaningful information — which essentially is what knowledge is. C. I. Lewis said that is always the case. Facts are important, of course. They are what we see, what we observe. But without a theory they do not contain more information than just a value. Five hundred thousand smartphones sold. Okay, nice, but what does that mean? If this is 10% higher than last year, and this year I lowered prices, I can form the theory that sales increased because I lowered prices — and yes, something as simple as this is also called theory, it doesn’t have to be something super complicated. With this theory I have more information than with the simple sales numbers alone. And I can make predictions for the future — maybe lower prices more to increase sales even further. The tricky thing is that this is not a one-time process. As I collect more facts I have to constantly compare them to my theory. Maybe I find out that this year my main competitor went out of business. Could this also have influenced my sales numbers? I could look, in this case, at the sales development from when he was still operating. It can go either way. It can support my theory, or it can cause me to revise it. Either way, I learn more, I gain additional knowledge, and my perception of reality becomes better. The value of theory is not just in explaining facts. It is about what more I need to look at, and sometimes it means I just need to change my mind, because I learned something better.
One additional point regarding facts and theory. And it comes again from Follett. She points out that theories are never neutral. She has a good example of this regarding flour. She says that when white flour is scarce, experts talk about how much more nutritional value brown flour has. When white flour is abundant, they say that white flour is more easily absorbed by the body. Neither of these theories is wrong. But it is obvious that they are used when one of the two results is more convenient. This does not mean that theory is bad altogether, but we should always ask ourselves about the intention behind a given theory. This gives us then even more knowledge.
The fourth lens is that of psychology. I admit I would not have mentioned that lens separately if I had made the list myself. For me, psychology is just another source of facts and theories. But Deming — maybe because he was an engineer by training — treated the field of human behavior and the mind as something special, worth naming as a different way to look at an important element in systems: the human being. Feelings like fear or love, motivation, learning abilities — these have an important role to play in systems. In my opinion these are just facts — however complicated to explain — that have to be incorporated into any perception of reality. That being said, I admit that humans in systems are something a bit odd. They are not just actors or agents — elements of the system — but they are also us, the observers, the analysts, the theory formers. Sometimes one person can even have both roles at the same time. Furthermore, psychology matters because motivation and feelings influence the perception of facts — they distort them, you could say. So it is really important to be aware of them when trying to understand an interconnected social system. And almost all relevant systems are at least partly social systems. That is also why I would change this last lens into psychology-slash-sociology, to incorporate human mechanics even more broadly, because systems are rarely purely individual-psychological — they live from the interaction, the social. That being said, Deming was most interested in two aspects of psychology: motivation and learning, and — you guessed it — both will get their own separate essay, because any perception of reality would be truly incomplete and truncated if these two aspects were missing.
So, summing up — sorry, I love it when authors use obvious formulations like this, it gives me an anchor — in order to avoid fixed and fictional snapshots of reality, we need to follow Follett and collaborate on fact-finding and discuss its meaning. In addition, we need the discipline of a multi-lens approach suggested by Deming: thinking of reality as an interconnected system, seeing the variations in the data, using theory together with the facts we find, and taking psychology and sociology into the picture.
Sounds like a lot?
“You’ll get used to it in time,” said the Caterpillar; and it put the hookah into its mouth and began smoking again.
Don’t just take it from me, here is some good stuff to read:
Carroll, Lewis. “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland”. 1865.
Boorstin, Daniel J. “The Image”. 1962.
Goffman, Erving. “The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life”. Doubleday, 1959.
Barnard, Chester I. “The Functions of the Executive”. Harvard University Press, 1938.
Follett, Mary Parker. “Creative Experience”. Longmans, Green and Co., 1924.
Köhler, Wolfgang. “The Mentality of Apes”. English translation, 1925 (German original 1917).
Deming, W. Edwards. “The New Economics for Industry, Government, Education”. MIT Press, 1993.
Lewis, Clarence Irving. “Mind and the World-Order: Outline of a Theory of Knowledge”. 1929.
Shewhart, Walter A. “Economic Control of Quality of Manufactured Product”. 1931.
Meadows, Donella H. “Thinking in Systems: A Primer”. Chelsea Green Publishing, 2008.