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Personality Types

Book Review-Personality Types: Using Enneagram for Self-Discovery

I’m not stranger to personality types. Whether it is doing impromptu Myers-Briggs Type Indicator analysis (guesses) for friends in the SPTechCon speaker room in Boston, or evaluating folks in terms of their time perspective (ala The Time Paradox), I enjoy personality typing tools as a way to seek a better understanding of the folks that I live and work with. I know that this “automatic typing” that I do makes some folks nervous; however, it’s just one attempt on my part to be able to communicate in ways and languages which will resonate with the other person.

When a friend suggested that I look at the Enneagram, I found the official web site and took their free version of the test. It came back for me as a type 1 –”The Reformer.” However, I wasn’t sure what that meant exactly. That’s where the book Personality Types: Using the Enneagram for Self-Discovery comes in. It explores the enneagram and how the system works – including the intricacies of the different types.

Fundamentally the system revolves around nine different personality types which fall into three categories. The categories are Instincts, Thinking, and feeling. The idea is that every person struggles with one of these three and that they are more prone to completely repressing the category, over expressing it, or under expressing it. For instance, my type “The Reformer” is likely to under express their instincts – they’re less likely to accept things the way they are.

The system is most frequently expressed as a circle since the nine type (The Peacemaker) is connected to the one type (The Reformer), however, that’s difficult to quickly express so I’ll convert some of the data to tables. For the categories (called triads in the book) and the under/out of touch/over is here in the following table (with the names):

Category (Triad) Under Out of Touch Over
Instinct

1

9

8

Thinking

7

6

5

Feeling

4

3

2

It would be easy to believe that’s it. There’s all great detail and news about the personality types based on this information, however, this isn’t the end. In fact, it’s just the beginning because each of the types has nine operating levels. That is that inside of each personality type there’s a level of operating effectiveness. Three are healthy levels of operating (One-Three), three are average (Four-Six), and three levels of operating are unhealthy (Seven-Nine). Here’s a matrix of the personality types and their nine levels of operating using the labels from the book:

Personality Type

Level 1-Reformer 2-Helper 3-Motivator 4-Individualist 5-Investigator 6-Loyalist 7-Enthusiast 8-Leader 9-Peacemaker
One Wise Realist Disinterested Altruist Authentic Person Inspired Creator Pioneering Visionary Valiant Hero Ecstatic Appreciator Magnanimous Heart Self-Possessed Guide
Two Reasonable Person Caring Person Self-Assured Person Self-Aware Intuitive Perceptive Observer Engaging Friend Free-Spirited Optimist Self-Confident Person Receptive Person
Three Principled Teacher Nurturing Helper Outstanding Paragon Self-Revealing Individual Focused Innovator Committed Worker Accomplished Generalist Constructive Leader Supportive Peacemaker
Four Idealistic Reformer Effusive Friend Competitive Status-Seeker Imaginative Aesthete Studious Expert Dutiful Loyalist Experienced Sophisticate Enterprising Adventurer Accommodating Role-Player
Five Orderly Person Possessive “Intimate” Image-Conscious Pragmatist Self-Absorbed Romantic Intense Conceptualizer Ambivalent Pessimist Hyperactive Extrovert Dominating Power Broker Disengaged Participant
Six Judgmental Perfectionist Self-Important “Saint” Self-Promoting Narcissist Self-Indulgent “Exception” Provocative Cynic Authoritarian Rebel Excessive Hedonist Confrontational Adversary Resigned Fatalist
Seven Intolerant Misanthrope Self-Deceptive Manipulator Dishonest Opportunist Alienated Depressive Isolated Nihilist Overreacting Dependent Impulsive Escapist Ruthless Outlaw Denying Doormat
Eight Obsessive Hypocrite Coercive Dominator Malicious Deceiver Emotionally Tormented Person Terrified “Alien” Paranoid Hysteric Manic Compulsive Omnipotent Megalomaniac Dissociating Automaton
Nine Punitive Avenger Psychosomatic Victim Vindictive Psychopath Self-Destructive Person Imploding Schizoid Self-Defeating Masochist Panic-Stricken “Hysteric” Violent Destroyer Self-Abandoning Ghost

Higher levels of functioning have embraced their struggles based on their personality type. They’ve integrated their ego into a part of healthy functioning rather than having it angrily demand that it’s needs be met and that past hurts be soothed. They’ve learned to heal their own brokenness. The lower a person slides in their healthiness the more their ego takes the reigns and the more self-centered rather than self-less that they become.

Integration and Disintegration

The enneagram also has the concept of integration and disintegration. That is that healthier individuals in a personality type can take on the healthy aspects of another personality type. For instance, a healthy one (Reformer) will take on the thinking and behaviors of a healthy seven (Enthusiast). Similarly, an unhealthy personality may take on the unhealthy thoughts and behaviors of a different personality type. Again using Ones as an example they disintegrated into fours (Individualist). Take a look at the following table of integration and disintegration:

Personality Type Disintegration Integration
1-Reformer

4

7

2-Helper

8

4

3-Motivator

9

6

4-Individualist

2

1

5-Investigator

7

8

6-Loyalist

3

9

7-Enthusiast

1

5

8-Leader

5

2

9-Peacemaker

6

3

Wings

Another concept is that of wings – that is that you’ll also to a lesser extent be influenced by either the personality type on either side of your primary type. That is a One may be influenced by a tendency to nine or to two. (In my case it is two – helper.) This influence is called a wing. Wings come in a range of scales. By definition your primary personality type must be at least 51% of your personality so the most a wing could influence you is 49%. However, there’s a range here from very impactful (49%) to very negligible (technically 1%). The degree these wings play on a personality can explain some level of variability even within a personality type. To simplify this scale it might be useful to consider three categories of impact from a wing: High (49%-33%), Medium (32%-16%), and Low (15%-1%).

Simple and Complex

So at its heart the enneagram system contains nine basic personality types. Considering the potential variants in the Myers-Briggs system is 16 – nine seems less fine-grained. However, when you consider the nine functioning levels to each of the nine types and then add three potential levels of impacts for wings you end up with 243 combinations – more than anyone could keep track of in their head. So at one level the system is relatively simple – at least less complex than other measurements. On the other hand, at the most detailed level the variation is sufficiently nuanced that you should have a good idea of the core makeup of a person.

The Value

So what’s the real value of the enneagram? Well, as the book’s title says, it’s self-discovery. While it may be interesting to be able to gain insight into others, the real value is gaining insight into you and your own thoughts and behaviors. Unique (as far as I’m aware) to the enneagram and the book is the discussion of how the personality type breaks down into lower levels of operating effectiveness. For my own situation the prescription is to be wary of the possibility to become a judgmental perfectionist or worse (see the table above). The book has given me a map to follow to know when I’m descending into lower levels of effectiveness. What to do about the slide is simply a reflection of thinking and behaving like the level above. If you’re interested in being the best person you can be, you’ll want to pick up Personality Types: Using the Enneagram for Self-Discovery.

Article: 5 Steps to Take after a SharePoint Debacle

A fresh start means a clean stop, a frank assessment, and a good deal of recalibration before you try moving forward again.

The train is off the tracks. Your users hate SharePoint, and they refuse to use it. You know the organization needs an intranet and a collaboration platform, but how do you get back on track and rolling again? Here are five steps for getting to your goal.

1. Stop

It’s really difficult to evaluate a situation as it’s changing and as more energy is being poured into it. If the train is off the tracks and skidding on its side, stop the engines and let it come to a screeching halt. Once the train is back on the tracks, you can get it moving again—in the right direction.

2. Honest assessment 

Step 4 of a 12-step program is making a “fearless and searching moral inventory.” Openly assessing what went wrong in your SharePoint implementation won’t be gut-wrenching, but it’s likely to hurt. The politics of the situation—with everyone wanting to “save face”—won’t make it easy, but openly assessing the problems is essential.

Linked in Map

I was in Detroit, MI a few weeks ago when someone showed me a social network analysis of their linked in contacts. I took a look and it was crazy. I finally got around to doing mine…

Check out my map at http://inmaps.linkedinlabs.com/share/Rob_Bogue/270766507395274865442277988124393646145

It’s pretty crazy. If you look at the map you’ll see some of the bigger parts of my network. It’s probably not surprising that one of my largest groups is SharePoint followed by Microsoft. I’m sure there’s a way to actually use this map but for now it just looks cool.

Announcing: The SharePoint Shepherd Reveals Introduction to SharePoint 2010 Development

I’m pleased to announce that we released our new DVD under the SharePoint brand last week. The DVD is “The SharePoint Shepherd Reveals Introduction to SharePoint Development.” The title is in two parts. The first part includes “reveals”. I use the word reveals because this series will be trying to reveal the technology things that may be hidden from view – but are real. They aren’t abstract – they’re just not yet known.

The rest of the title conveys that DVD is designed to get folks from “zero to 60” in SharePoint development as quickly as possible. We believe it’s the fastest way to get a developer productive in SharePoint development.

The DVD is the culmination of years of personal work helping developers learn SharePoint. I won’t belabor the specific contents of the DVD here; you can take a look at it on the product page on the SharePoint Shepherd web site. Suffice to say that the key things you need to know like building web parts (including web part properties), querying data, timer jobs, event receivers, workflows, tips for debugging, etc., are all there. I would, however, like to share some of the journey to creating the materials – and why I believe they are the fastest way to learn how to develop for SharePoint.

Back in 2008, Andrew Connell and I did the first set of Microsoft videos/web casts for SharePoint 2007 development. (Sidebar: Andrew Connell and Ted Pattison’s Critical Path Training is where I recommend developers get their training if they need a live instructor led format.) Before that and since then I’ve worked with numerous development teams helping them deliver projects for SharePoint. I worked with the Microsoft Patterns and Practices team on the development of the SharePoint Guidance. We toiled for months-and-months to produce the best practice ways to develop on SharePoint. (They would prefer I say proven practices rather than best but the point remains.) I’ve also been writing whitepapers for MSDN on specific areas of development including search customization and accessing Office 365 data from on premises code. I also wrote the Microsoft Learning 10232 course – Designing and Developing Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 Applications. It is the advanced decision making concepts course for 2010 development (should I use an event receiver or a workflow, for instance)

In short, I’ve struggled alongside developers as they try to get up to speed on how to develop for SharePoint quickly. I’ve seen where the confusion sets in. (Like the first time a developer realizes there is not a “default.aspx” page for each site – there’s only one.) I love my conversations with developers but don’t want to see them struggle to learn SharePoint.

A few years ago Eric Shupps and I started doing preconference sessions where we would take six hours and teach the same concepts that I deliver in the new DVD. We delivered this session to hundreds of developers and I refined it into the content you see in the DVD. We’ve tested the material with developers so we know that it works.

Ultimately the decision to birth this into a DVD format was due to the simple fact that I can’t be with every developer – and they can’t wait for the timing to work out. I realized I had to have a mechanism that allowed the developers to get the training they needed when they need it rather than waiting on a class.

I’d invite you to buy and watch the DVD – and tell me if it isn’t the best and quickest way to learn how to develop for SharePoint.

Five tips to transition to SharePoint with Ease

Transitioning from email to an intranet as a primary communication hub is easier than you might think. These guidelines will help get you up and running.

Search the Internet, and you’ll find all sorts of articles on being successful with a SharePoint implementation—from a technical perspective. There are technical challenges, hurdles, and barriers, but they’re not nearly as important to overall success as the approach you take to SharePoint from a communications perspective.

Here are five approaches that will help you find success.

Build content creators, not content.

In organizations of all sizes, the content is actually being created from scratch by corporate communications. Whether the communication happens via email, newsletter, or intranet, the burden is on the shoulders of corporate communicators.

Read More…

Article: Seven Omissions That Will Doom Your SharePoint Launch

Review these steps to make sure your implementation meets your objectives and keeps all those involved happy as it evolves.

Sometimes it’s not the things you do that cause problems, but what you forget to do.

Miss a utility bill, and you might be trying to read in the dark. Miss a car payment, and you could end up walking to work.

Here are seven elements that, if missed, might doom your SharePoint implementation.

Define the goal 

Sometimes we get so engrossed in our activities and projects that we forget to look at the horizon and set goals. It’s all too easy to succumb to the pressures of the daily deluge of information and just keep plodding along; however, that makes it difficult to define goals.

In implementing SharePoint, are you trying to get communications out quicker? Are you trying to increase the number of stories or reduce email? I’m sure you’d like all of these results, but what do you want—or need—most? You should remember the broader picture of why you’re putting forth any communication: Is it to improve employee engagement and/or efficiency?

Read More…

Redirect

Book Review-Redirect: The Surprising New Science of Psychological Change

One of the sad things about having read a few books at this point is that I can’t always recall what put me on to the book in the first place. While I can’t remember where I picked up on Redirect, it’s a book that took a winding path that challenged what I “knew” about psychology. I’ve seen this model before where the conventional wisdom is wrong. (See Efficiency in Learning) It’s great to find a research-based book that speaks about some of the common problems that humans face.

The central thesis of the book is that an approach that Timothy Wilson calls “Story Editing” is a powerful way to drive self-sustaining change. The idea of story editing is that we all have our own inner monologue going on at every moment. It’s this inner monologue that we try to bring our life in harmony with. If the inner monologue is positive and powerful – so shall we be. However, this story is often subtly influenced – and influenced in a negative way. Story editing is changing that core story (and the smaller stories that surround it) so that it is more positive.

To accept this you need to start with a belief that we can all change – that we’re not a fixed quantity but an infinitely expandable capacity for learning and growing. This was the central core of Carol Dweck’s book Mindset. Once you’ve accepted that you can change it’s a hop, skip, and a jump to realize that you can influence the direction in which you grow.

Redirect speaks of Cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) and its use in counseling to improve the outcomes by working directly on the way that people interpret the world around them. It’s all about that internal monologue and changing the bad patterns (e.g. “I’m not good enough”, “Bad things happen to me”, “I can’t do that”) into positive patterns (e.g. “I’ll get good enough with practice”, “Bad things happen to me but they help me become better”, “I can’t do that – now”). To some extent we all have these internal monologues – these tapes – playing in our head. CBT is generally regarded as an effective psychological treatment.

Of Chickens and Eggs

Which came first, the chicken or the egg? When we confronted by correlated data – such as chickens and eggs – we often consider which of them is causal. That is which one causes the other one. We know that chickens come from eggs – but if eggs come from chickens where did the first egg (or chicken) come from. (For more about correlation and causation see Thinking, Fast and Slow.) Sometimes we get the answers wrong – or backwards. So with that preface, does behavior lead or does thinking lead when we’re trying to change behavior?

It’s true that for the most part a person’s thinking and behaviors are aligned. Notwithstanding the internal conflict of the Elephant and the Rider (see The Happiness Hypothesis or Switch) most people will generally align their thinking and behaviors. Sometimes the behavior shifts to the thinking and sometimes the thinking shifts towards the behavior. (This is called rationalization – “It’s OK that I behave that way.”)

The answer, it turns out, to whether thinking or behavior leads is “sometimes.” (I realize this is a non-nonsensical answer.) In some cases changing the behavior will cause the thinking to change. In some cases you can’t change the behavior with the same thinking. Most of us would, however, say that thinking should precede behavior. In fact, that’s the standing assumption in the Diffusion of Innovations and the Knowledge-Attitude-Practice model. However, in some cases doing the behavior is the key to success.

By the way, eggs came first, they just weren’t chicken eggs. They were reptile eggs.

Heading to Happiness

It seems that every book has to take a crack at what happiness, and Redirect is no exception. In a bizarre sense of irony the book says “I have a wise friend who points out that whenever there are multiple solutions to one problem we can be pretty sure that none of them works.” While there’s some alignment about how to be happy, there are certainly a great number of different flavors. I’ve already reviewed The Happiness Hypothesis and Stumbling on Happiness – as just two books that speak about happiness. If you want to lose a day go to the self-help section in the bookstore and search for happiness.

One of the common threads to happiness is relationships. That is the more time that we spend in, with, and for our relationships the happier we are. Certainly this fits with our friends and our families – however, it is also can fit with the people we form relationships with while we’re volunteering and doing service to others (which as it turns out is a key in improving outcomes with teenagers.)

Another thread among the books is what Daniel Gilbert called the psychological immune system, which we were talking about rewiring above with CBT. Basically it’s the way that the internal monologue happens in your head. In Redirect, it’s framed in the context of how optimists see their world. It’s not that they don’t see reality; it’s that they believe that they can overcome the roadblocks in their path. They believe that they are not overwhelmed or crushed.

There are a few clues to being happier in the absence of making a new set of friends – which is recommended. One of the clues comes from the therapy of writing. The book opened with a discussion of how many police departments used a policy called Critical Incident Stress Debriefing (CISD) where people who have gone through traumatic incidents are asked to relive it. The problem is that this sort of forced approach can do more damage than good. What works better? Getting folks to write about their experiences a few weeks after the event –there is no expert guidance and no formal program. Just sit and write down feelings about the event.

It turns out that writing is therapy. That’s not just a saying. It’s not some vague concept. Writing about your thoughts is really therapeutic. The theory is that it allows you to integrate the world into the single worldview that you desire – but no matter how it works, it does work.

Before I go too much further, there’s another critical point to be made. That is that some folks have encouraged the use of gratitude journals where you write a list of things that you’re grateful for. For some reason these gratitude journals can backfire and can actually decrease a person’s happiness. One theory is that this process robs the positive moment of its mystery and that mystery is part of the fun. So writing is therapy – but not when you’re writing about how great things are.

The Inside Out and Upside Down

One of the crazy things about our brain – which I relearned from Redirect – is that in order to not think of something we must first think about it. If I tell you not to think about a white bear, you must first picture a white bear to exclude it from your mind. This means that it’s generally a bad idea to use the word not in a sentence because the inversion may be missed. The very thing that you are trying to drive folks away from may be what you drive them to.

Equally crazy is that a moderate warning is much more powerful than a strong one. In the presence of a strong motivator (to not do a bad thing) you’ll associate your behavior to the strong motivator. However, in the presence of a more moderate motivator, you’ll rewrite your internal monologue to indicate that you’re a fundamentally good person and you’ll do the right thing even when motivators are all gone. We aren’t trying to teach our children to behave when we’re present – we want them to behave all the time.

While finishing with motivators for behavior, social norms are incredibly powerful. If we believe that we’re using more energy than our neighbors we’ll start to conserve but if we perceive that we’re using less energy than our neighbors we may adjust our energy usage upwards to meet the perceived norm. This is powerful when you’re trying to create a better outcome for a small number of outliers doing more of a bad behavior than you want – and a caution to applying a norm to those who are doing less of the behavior.

It’s useful in that social norms are based on perception. If we believe that our friends are consuming more energy we’ll adjust our energy usage upwards – whether this is reality or not.

If you’re curious about commonsense that doesn’t really work, you’ll want to read Redirect.

Article: SharePoint or Point Solution – The Series

I mentioned a few weeks ago that I had a series of blog posts on the Colligo blog about whether you should consider a “point solution” or SharePoint. The entire series is now posted:

Check out the whole series.

Thinking, Fast and Slow

Book Review-Thinking, Fast and Slow

In Boston at SPTechCon, I had the pleasure of giving the keynote titled “SharePoint Psychology”. After that Jeremy Thake and I were talking about the keynote and he mentioned that to him many of the concepts were familiar. He traced his thoughts back to the book Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman. Having not read the book I put it in my queue to read. Knowing that Jeremy aligned it to my previous reading and works, I decided to prioritize reading it. There are a few important bits about the author and the book before I start to review the contents.

First, the author is the winner of the Nobel Prize for economics. There is certainly sufficient information in the book to support this. While it is at its core a psychology book, there’s a great deal of the focus which is on how people work in an economy and how the rational behavior model isn’t sufficient to describe human behavior.

Second, the book is 512 pages. It’s not the short, mind-candy, reading of Who Moved My Cheese. It’s the same length as the Diffusion of Innovations book I recently reviewed. My notes for the book (the process I use is outlined here) are 25 pages in length. Needless to say this is a short summary of what I got from the book – no matter how long it may seem.

With that out of the way, I think Jeremy is right. The undertones and overtones of Thinking, Fast and Slow are woven through out other books that I’ve read like Demand, The Happiness Hypothesis, Switch, Sources of Power, Finding Flow, and Social Engineering. In fact many of the authors are quoted in Thinking, Fast and Slow and Gary Klein – the author of Sources of Power – was a reported one time collaborator of Daniel Kahneman’s for a while though they approach decisions from opposite sides of the table.

Of Two Minds

When folks say they’re of two minds about something perhaps they’re exposing their inner conflict or perhaps they’re showing you a glimpse of how they think. Kahneman proposes a model where we have two different but interrelated systems for processing information. System 1 is the automatic and rather mindless operating mode that we find ourselves in daily. It’s the threat management engine that watches for urgent threats to us and in its constant vigilance it is called upon to make very complex assessments with relatively little information. This mode of operating – this system – is designed to jump to conclusions without realizing how far it has jumped.

The other system, called System 2 throughout the book, is the deliberate processing of information. This system is “in control” in that its answers are generally the more thoughtful ones and the ones which tend to be more accurate – except when it collaborates with System 1. System 2 is lazy. Honestly trying to keep our brains actively engaged in thinking about every little thing will drive us crazy. So it’s important that System 2 be lazy, to ensure that it’s not left on too long. The collusion between System 1 and System 2 happens when System 2 doesn’t bother to check the facts for the assumptions it got from System 1. System 2 in its laziness will just assume that System 1’s information was accurate – or at least it will accept System 1’s assessment of how accurate the information is. The problem is that System 1 – our automatic operating mode – isn’t designed to assess the accuracy of the information. It’s designed to create coherent stories that it can base evaluations on.

I’ve often said that I construct mental models for people I meet – based on Myers-Briggs and others. I then run a mental simulation of how I believe they’ll react to information and how I believe they’ll behave (Sources of Power talks about mental simulations). This is my way of leveraging a coherent story about a person that I’ve made up – to be clear it’s made up. However, some folks (Chris Riley for instance) are amused by the fact that I can get pretty close pretty quickly. For me, most of this process is automatic. I’m building on the automatic capabilities of System 1 to do on-the-fly assessments and then trying to leverage them in a quasi-conscious way.

Before we leave the idea of two minds, I’ve got to be clear that the personification of the two systems allows them to be more clearly understood, Kahneman was clear that his academic colleagues would object to this. From my point of view I believe it’s eminently helpful in creating understand.

Jump to Conclusions, Please

One of my favorite Emerson quotes is “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” The key word is foolish. Our automatic mode of processing information is ever vigilant for information that matches its conception of the world and integrating information that’s consistent with our view of the world. In essence, System 1 is in place in part to keep a single unified model of the world that it can use to predict situations quickly. System 1 is designed to jump to conclusions. It is designed to predict that a red light will come after a yellow one – and it’s designed to do this very quickly. It’s designed to determine when to engage System 2 and when to continue to operate on the mental model that it has created.

System 1 operates with heuristics. That is to say that it uses rules of thumb to operate. It assumes that all things will be the way they normally are. This plus a vigilant observation for items which violate the expectations is very effective as an operating mode. Where problems occur is when the heuristics that are being applied by System 1 are wrong or inaccurate. It takes careful analysis to determine why an operating mode may not be right – and most of the time System 2 doesn’t get the message that it’s needed.

I wrote a blog post about the Apprentice, Journeyman, Master journey that we use to train in industries where tacit knowledge is the lingua franca. What I failed to mention in my post was that apprentices are assigned simple tasks which don’t require much global knowledge, just a few basic local skills. Journeyman are taught to use “rules of thumb” or heuristics to do their slightly more complicated and global understanding dependent work. Masters can use the “rules of thumb” but their expertise is in knowing when they don’t apply or they don’t have to apply. In a trade the master is, hopefully, constantly looking over the shoulder of the journeyman and the apprentice – noticing when they’re not executing a skill correctly, or when they’re incorrectly using a “rule of thumb” where it shouldn’t be used. Of course, if the master it is busy it’s possible he’ll miss something critical that he should have stopped.

This is the problem of System 2. Being lazy, System 2 by default it will rarely (if ever) check the work of System 1. As a result, System 1 applies the wrong heuristic or applies the right heuristic too broadly. This leads to a systemic bias – and this is often the way that we go wrong. Consider the situation where System 1 quickly substitutes a difficult problem to solve with an easier problem – and doesn’t even tell System 2 what is going on. One of the quoted studies asked students about the number of dates they had in the last six weeks and then asked them how happy they were. These two answers had a very high degree of correlation – so the students substituted how happy am I with my love life for the question of how happy am I, in general, without notifying System 2 that the substitution had been done.

I mentioned in my review of both Switch and The Happiness Hypothesis about the Elephant, Rider, and Path. I believe System 1 describes the Elephant well, mostly in control. System 2 is the rider. He believes himself to be in control but really is subject to the elephant much more than he realizes. The elephant and the rider are even more concrete ways to see the model Kahneman proposes with System 1 and System 2.

WYSIATI

One of the recurring themes in the book is What You See Is All There Is (WYSIATI). This is a bias that you’ll develop that the entire world is similar to what you’ve seen. For me, I see this bias most prominently with folks who never travel. They may know that China is different from Illinois abstractly but they don’t understand the extent of the differences. If you pull four red marbles and a single white marble from a pot, you’ll automatically make the assumption that the pot contains 80% red marbles when you haven’t pulled enough marbles to really know. This WYSIATI makes us believe extremes. Whatever we see at the moment we believe will continue forever.

Babies when they’re developing cry when their mother leaves the room because for them their mother is gone forever. It’s difficult for them to realize that people will come back. Whatever they can see is all there is. If they’re in a room alone there is no one else in their world. It takes time for them to be able to realize that what they’re experiencing (or not experiencing) at the moment will not last forever. (I want to attribute the preceding to Brain Rules, but I can’t be sure.) In Thinking, Fast and Slow there’s an interesting discussion about how people experience their world and how they remember it. If you offer students 60 seconds of their hand in cold water or 60 seconds in cold water followed by 30 seconds of slightly less cold (but still painful) water they’ll pick the 90 seconds. It seems that the way that we perceive time and pain is different than how we remember it. So it’s no wonder that we believe that WYSIATI. For most animals – including young humans – remembering something that’s out of sight is difficult.

How We Learn

I mentioned above that our automatic system (System 1) is always running, always trying to integrate information into a mental model that will allow it to predict events – particularly negative events. I have mentioned a few times in previous blog posts, the work of Marcia Bates where she asserts that 80% of the information that we learn comes to us from undirected and passive behavior. That is to say that are learning – and integrating that learning – all the time. We don’t have to be actively pursuing specific information (which by the way Bates estimates at 1% of our overall learning).

I recently had an opportunity to see this in action. During a road trip my wife was working on a puzzle book. The page she was on was one where the answer was two words the first word beginning in the letter E and the second word ending in the letter E. She turned to me and asked me for the nickname for Ireland. After an incredibly brief pause I answered Emerald Isle. This startled me. I don’t ever remember studying Ireland. I don’t anticipate that this was ever anything that I consciously was aware of knowing and yet after a microseconds’ search of my entire library of experiences I was lead to the answer. This isn’t good for those in the business of training and development including me.

Kahneman diverts his attention to speaking of expertise and outlines how we learn well from high-validity environments – that is places where there is a true causal chain and when feedback happens regularly and reliably. We’ve all gone to a hotel and struggled to get the water temperature right for a shower because we have to wait some period of time before our adjustment in the controls results in the final adjustment to the water coming out. The longer the gap between feedback and the less clarity to the feedback the less likely we’re going to learn well. We need reliable feedback in order to make adjustments.

One caution is that we sometimes see patterns where none exist. We are too eager to assign a pattern to the random. We’re equally likely to confuse correlation with causation. That is to say that just because two variables seem to be related we may choose to believe that one of the variables causes the other. The most poignant example for this to me is the housing bubble in the US. One of the factors was the decision to encourage home ownership. This was due to the fact that economic stability and home ownership were shown to be correlated. The error was in the belief that home ownership caused economic stability (instead of perhaps the other way around.) As a result, policies were enacted both explicitly and implicitly that led to many more folks owning homes than previously. When the economy sputtered and the housing market crashed numerous home owners defaulted on their loans taking out a significant part of the financial industry and setting off alarm bells. The belief that home ownership caused the desirable state of economic stability created a policy that lead (in part) to the collapse. These policies created artificial home ownership in a group of folks who were not able to maintain them. This was a costly misstep on the road to learning.

In my world it’s interesting to speak of experts – those who have reportedly learned a great deal about a topic. It’s interesting because of my work with certification exams and training where we establish a baseline that is typically quite low across a broad set of skills. Candidates that pass the certification exam have shown reasonable competence across the skills measured by the test. Even here, however, some candidates have extremely good skills in one area and missing skills in other areas. It’s a balance to ensure that there’s a baseline set of skills to support the designation earned through the certification.

So called Experts are even more diverse in their skills. Some who would consider themselves to be an architect are great at the IT Pro side of things and lousy at the development side of things – or vice versa. Kahneman offers a simple explanation. Expertise isn’t a single thing. It’s a collection of mini-skills. That is a set of skills that overlap and build on one another. It’s completely possible to be an expert and to have areas of missing skills. That’s because they never built those skills – but those mini-skills as a total percentage of the area of practice are relatively small. For instance, I’ve never worked with multi-tenant environments in SharePoint. It’s a skill set that I’ve never developed. Does that mean that I’m not an expert? No, it just means I’ve got more to learn when the opportunity arises.

Kahneman points out that even experts with experience and skills can often produce bad results unintentionally. He relates a project where an expert was brought in to be a part of the group. One of the exercises was to estimate the remaining time on the project. Everyone on the project produced similar estimates around a two year estimate – including the embedded expert. However, when the expert was questioned about other projects similar to this one the result was a completely different – seven year – answer. The expert had the requisite knowledge but it wasn’t integrated to a single thinking. Kahneman refers to this as an inside view (the first estimate) and an outside view (the second estimate). Sometimes we have the knowledge and experience that is necessary to realize the folly that we are on but we remain ignorant of our delusion.

Humorously, Kahneman points out that even when taught extensively, students don’t always apply what they learn of human psychology. It seems that we may be caught in the same trap described in Diffusion of Innovation where we the progression between knowledge, attitudes, and practices isn’t linear. We can intellectually be aware of information and at the same time not use it to influence our behavior. We continue to see the illusion even after we know it is an illusion.

As a sidebar here, it occurs to me that reflection time is absolutely critical for the ability to identify when a delusion is happening. I think of all of the times that I’ve been on delusional trips and I realize that they’re caused in part because of a lack of reflection time on my part. I fill my “me time” with a desire to read more or to do more. As a result, I reflect less and end up allowing delusions to continue to the point where they can no longer be supported. If you’re trying to ensure that you’re not being delusional in any aspect of your life, make sure that you have time to reflect. I believe it’s this reflection time that allows you to build the connections that System 1 needs to leverage the information in the moment. I mentioned above that I’ve got a process for reading books. However, I didn’t say that I spend a lot of time capturing the notes, copying them and refining them into notes. I spend even more time on blog posts like this one trying to understand what I got from the book and to connect it to the other things that I’ve learned from other readings and experiences. (While this is a labor of love – or at least passion, it is still a labor.)

When Gary Klein was studying fire commanders for the research that eventually found its way into Sources of Power, he rejected intuition. There had to be a reason. However, time-after-time fire commanders said it just “felt wrong.” Intuition is just subconscious recognition. In the case of the fire commanders it could have been a violated expectancy or it could have been an opportunity that others would have missed because of the recognition of a pattern. So if intuition is simply recognition at a subconscious level, shouldn’t we be able to encourage the incorporation of experiences into our thinking to make them available not as a carefully considered variable but as a part of our automatic operating system, System 1?

To understand how to integrate our experiences, I want to rewind and connect some learning from Lost Knowledge. This title was focused around the conversion of tacit knowledge into explicit knowledge – or holding on to tacit knowledge as much as possible. The problem with tacit knowledge – and the experts that hold it is that expertise is notoriously fickle. Give the same expert the same evidence twice and you’re likely to get two different answers. Kahneman speaks about judges whose case reviews for parole would vary based on the time of day that they saw them (and by extension their blood sugar level). To eliminate the unseen biases that influence an expert, we need to pull up the key criteria that they’re subconsciously using.

Ultimately, the conversion of tacit information into explicit information is about the identification of the specific attributes and characteristics that influence the situation. From there it’s a hop, skip, and a jump to getting to a formula that can be used to create a quick assessment of a situation given a relatively complex situation. The process of converting tacit into explicit information is the process of converting intuition into a repeatable formula. That isn’t to say that the process will be easy nor that everyone will like it. Ashenfelter converted the tacit knowledge about the impact of weather to the value of wine in the future. His algorithm has a 90% correlation to the price of wine in the future but wine connoisseurs were quite unhappy about this. That doesn’t mean that it wasn’t still the right thing to do. It converted what the industry implicitly knew into a very repeatable formula – which is a good thing.

The Specifics

In parting I’d love to leave with the specific heuristics, biases, and effects mentioned in the book (along with a few that were just related thoughts) and my own definitions for them.

Heuristics

  • Availability Heuristic – We believe that things which are easier for us to retrieve in our minds are more frequent.
  • Affect Heuristic – Your likes and dislikes sway your perception of the entire system. If you like the benefits of a technology, you’ll deemphasize the risks.

Biases

  • Imaginability Bias – We assess the frequency of a class of events based on the retrievability of a few instances (See Availability Heuristic)
  • Hindsight Bias (“I knew it all along” effect) – We believe that we remember our past well, however, our memories are subject to reevaluation when we learn something new. We tend to believe that our previous perceptions match our current perceptions.
  • Confirmation Bias [From Sources of Power]– We tend to seek and be aware of information that confirms our position rather than refutes it.

Effects

  • Priming Effect – The effect of priming someone with some information to cause a temporary bias in responses. Sales people are taught to get their prospects saying ‘Yes’ to lead them to say yes when asked if they want to buy.
  • Halo Effect – The tendency to view all aspects of a person favorably or disfavorably based on a very narrow interaction. Consider your perceptions of a person that was volunteering with a cause you liked. You’re more likely to believe that person is good – with insufficient background.
  • Framing Effect – A decision can be framed (presented) in a way more likely to lead to one outcome over another. Consider a discount for cash or a surcharge for credit. One will cause a negative emotional reaction (surcharge for credit). The framing will drive behavior towards paying with cash.
  • Exposure Effect – If we’re exposed to something – even briefly and unconsciously – it will have an impact on us. (See Subliminal stimuli @ Wikipedia)
  • Illusory Correlation Effect – The impact of randomly occurring stimuli being erroneously correlated in a person’s mind.
  • Ego-Depleted Effect – In sugar deprived situations the increased tendency to make intuitive errors. i.e. System 2 doesn’t get engaged.
  • Anchoring Effect – The effect of presenting a person with an initial value from which they will adjust their perception. Adjustments are frequently insufficient and therefore anchoring creates bias in the perception of the person.
  • Above Average Effect – The belief, with moderate skill, that the person has above average skill. E.g. 90% of the people believe they’re above-average drivers.
  • Endowment Effect – The resistance of a person to trade something that they have. Possessions have a higher value than what would be paid to acquire them. Exceptions are those items held “for exchange” like money.
  • Possibility Effect – The tendency of people to weight small possibilities with more weight than would be statistically appropriate.
  • Certainty Effect – The tendency for people to weight certainty with greater emphasis than it should be when compared to a near certainty.
  • Disposition Effect – The bias in investments to sell winning stocks when compared to loosing stocks.
  • Polarization Effect [from Unknown] – The tendency to be prone to one result or the other and not a moderated answer. A bias away from indifference.

So Read It Already

If you’ve managed to plow your way through to this point in the post… You need to pickup – and read – Thinking, Fast and Slow.

EweTube Galore – 116 Videos for SharePoint 2007 uploaded

Over the last few days we’ve uploaded the SharePoint 2007 videos to YouTube (Or is it EweTube?) to make them easier to find. You can check out my channel to see the complete list. Of course, the entire corporate license including videos is available for free on the Shepherd site. I think it’s a better experience because you get both the text and the video on the same page – but if you’re on YouTube looking for SharePoint content, the uploads there will be more findable.

Enjoy

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