No one is keener than he to listen for just what the client really wants to do – but it’s rarely the same thing as what needs to be fixed. Sadly, my friend the shaman shoots too straight an arrow to pander, and most clients quietly fade away.   My friend shakes his head.  I notice the arrows stuck in his back. The thing is, I’ve walked in those designer moccasins, too.

Whether you are a consultant or a CEO, you’ll find this three-part blog invaluable, and all too painfully familiar.

Part 1: The Fine Art of Getting Fired from Consulting

Get the client to feel enough discomfort with the status quo, and you can wedge that door open. However, serious problems rarely are solved with incremental solutions. The dilemma is that unless you keep him comfortable with the solution ( cost, risk, politics, etc.), you’re out the door.

So here’s how I jumped from a profitable relationship and banzaied into political suicide.

The following dialogue happened over 18 months somewhere along the Detroit-Cincinnati corridor, once known as the country’s tool-and-die center where you’d be more apt to hear about LEAN than AGILE. “Schools of excellence” here pin their sciences on concepts of manufacturing efficiencies for tangible products.

Me: “The coolest thing in decision making is going to be in the latest neurologic imaging clarifying the key role of emotions in decision making.”

Lead: “ Our clients are engineers; they only want practical content. And don’t bring up anything about brain research – that’s a sure kiss of death.”

Me: “It’s more than just practical: in fact, we can’t make real decisions – a real shift in positions– without emotion.”

Me: “More importantly, the more chaotic the situation, the less useful are traditional “rational” methods. Heck, that’s why the whole project-management BOK that people are certified into, is having to be overhauled. The best tools emphasize shorter test-and-feedback loops, instead of massive GANTTs that are impractical for day-to-day management.”

Lead: “Hmm, just like the jet pilots’ OODA loops?”

Me: ”Right! And further, if you think about it, the more you frontload with information content instead of principles, the less limber the model. In fact, the breakthrough in self-learning Artificial Intelligence only came when they shifted from a knowledge-based model, to a learning machine that focuses on experiences from mistakes.”

Me: Getting excited. “And you know why we can’t make major decisions without emotion? It’s about expectations, it’s about a personal desire to be there instead of here – a shift. Learning is expectations versus outcomes.

Me: Waving my arms. “And you know how good salespeople and shrinks create an opening? It’s about wedging in a discomfort – fear is the strongest emotion, especially fear of loss.”

Lead: Stepping back again. “ Uh, that’s interesting theory. But these are engineers. I have to give them something they can use and drill right then. How about probability-v-outcome tables?”

Me: “ Well, everytime we step back for a larger frame, sure – heck, any generalization has to be an abstraction. But it’s hardly just theory – the most exciting breakthroughs are in neurologic studies of decision making.”

Lead: “There you go again…”

Lead: “Hmm. Well, let me take the lead in this meeting with the client, ok…”

Lead: (Nervous steps recede into an empty corridor. )

Me:  Silence.

Next:
Part 2: The Truth About Making Decisions: Real Men Are Emotional
Part 3: The Paradox of Chaos: Simplicity

Matched only by archives in Israel, the Hebrew Union College’s Cincinnati collection and library will be the latest casualty in the worldwide financial crisis.

A massive collection of history …matched only by resources in Israel – hold a physical connection to Jewish history…The Jacob Rader Marcus Center houses the archives, which boast more than 15 million documents on Jewish life. The nearby library holds hundreds of thousands of volumes. That collection includes everything from rare books and ancient scrolls to Bibles, cookbooks and Jewish songs. “There’s no other place like it in the world,” said Brian Jaffee, director of the Jewish Community Relations Council in Cincinnati.
–By Amber Ellis, Cincinnati Enquirer

The College faces having to close its Cincinnati and Los Angeles campuses,  leaving only its Jerusalem and New York campuses, unless people rally to help with its fiscal problems.

A quick side story here:  I first heard of the College from a good friend and mentor.  He was a history buff -  of flags, boundaries, churches and leaders, that in the end was his reason for an agnosticism towards ideologies and religions.

My friend would chuckle wryly about  being a Leipziger kind bullied in a predominantly Catholic school; of his early connoisseurship on just which leather and candles are edible, a ten-year old in the Hitler youth corps being marched in the countryside, and sleeping in cold stables; and yet still later by Russian liberators who singled him out because his capitalist stepfather had owned a bicycle manufacturing company.   My “arian” friend, by the way had to be the most unprejudiced person in actual practice – and made me see my own biases more honestly.

All cultures, all people-  don’t we all have prejudices? Profiling is often unconscious and instinctual; it’s our limbic survival mechanism for the jungles and urban back alleys,  and we must first recognize that. Think of the convolutions of political correct-speak;  isn’t it,  ultimately, naive and treacherous?

Understanding history is learning a greater empathy,  but also better self-honesty about innate human nature that would exploit, or simply forget.  ( By the way – so who out there knows what and when Galicia even was?  Exactly. )

Interior

The loss of the Hebrew Union College’s  Cincinnati campus would be a discontinuity, of political and cultural significance.   Here is where Rebbeh Isaac M Wise started the Reform Judaism movement in 1875 .  The Plum Street Temple, even just as an aesthetic artifact, is easily one of the most beautiful in the country.

Mine is not just abstract sentiment. I learned a lot from the College’s classes and dialogic seminars, which  offer to the entire community insights into Jewish religion and culture with comparative context provided by Christian priests/ministers and Islamic imams – some of whom are on its faculty -  which is perhaps the kind of understanding that real freedom and peace can come from.

Postscript: Some Must-Reads

You’ll  want to check out a Must-Have list of Exploration titles that are as fascinating as they are enlightening.     By the way – I’ve included Pulitzer-author G. Brooks’ recent People of the Book ,  a serendipitous find  you’ll like for its rich tapestry of realizations.  Great fun read, too.

I once walked for hours through old Jerusalem, and couldn’t help thinking of H. Raucher’s words, “Life is made of small comings and goings, and for everything we take with us, there is something we leave behind“.   The same words echoed in Cairo, as I listened to cyclic arabesques while sitting on the floor of the 12th century  Al-Hussein.

Indeed, nothing happens that ultimately is not part of our own history.

Toddlers (do) listen, they just store the information for later use, a new study finds.

“I went into this study expecting a completely different set of findings,” said psychology professor Yuko Munakata at the University of Colorado at Boulder. “There is a lot of work in the field of cognitive development that focuses on how kids are basically little versions of adults trying to do the same things adults do, but they’re just not as good at it yet. What we show here is they are doing something completely different.”

“For example, let’s say it’s cold outside and you tell your 3-year-old to go get his jacket out of his bedroom and get ready to go outside,” Chatham explained. “You might expect the child to plan for the future, think ‘OK it’s cold outside so the jacket will keep me warm.’ But what we suggest is that this isn’t what goes on in a 3-year-old’s brain. Rather, they run outside, discover that it is cold, and then retrieve the memory of where their jacket is, and then they go get it.”

But let’s look at that, in the context of other cognitive findings.  I’d highlight ten points:

1) Abstracting the experience: A three year old’s brain is learning to abstract elements of the experience.

2) Associative modeling:   The child compares a new experience to stored models (i.e., generalizations, abstractions) – an associative “this is like / not-like” comparison.

3) Time:  The kid’s temporal sense is still developing:  differentiating now-versus-future.  Think back further to babies enjoying presence-absence -  a.k.a. peek-a-boo play.

4) Linear sense of time – To plan, is to arrange objects along a single-line time sequence.   Planning is not an innate skill, and should be learned before the teen years.   Planning and patience both require the deliberative discipline  of “not-now-but-later”.

5) Models - The child’s brain sorts experiences to build models for analyzing and making decisions.    Faced with an unfamiliar situation,  she hesitates. Is it her deliberative mind racing to sort the data to a best-fit from among the many logic models kept on on the prefrontal cortex shelf? Or is it frozen fear?   Discern the natural inclination, and balance out the impulse, the emotion, the hesitation, the caution.

Some kids  thrive on instantaneous reactions. If gifted with good eye-motor synchrony as well,  she ‘s a formidable soccer forward.   It takes a longer route for the sensory signals to travel and return from logical analysis.  That momentary hesitation could lose the advantage, and this is why all animals do profile for friends or foes.  to the are simply overwhelmed as the brain tries to analyze the flood of sensory input.   Natural

Take the time to tie it to the why  Let’s… because…”.   There’s a time to assert parental authority, no doubt, but when parents dismiss questions with a “because I said so”,  it becomes power politics,  doesn’t it.

6) Decisions: The kid’s ability to make logical (causal) predictions (decisions) depends on its yet developing sophistication to decide if the stored model fits the situation.

7) Creativity: The child’s mind wants to explore and learn – i.e., test its models, change the models, create new models, or go out into the cold without that prescribed coat.

Our role: We should encourage play and provide an emotionally safe environment for the experimentation – i.e., the child’s intellect to develop.

9) Under the hood: The brain’s prefrontal cortex abstracts experiences and constructs a logical model: If this, then this. Alternatively, the amygdala might create an emotional model – especially from traumatic situations – for a more visceral or instantaneous reaction.

10) “Intuition” is the sophisticated ability to make a decision by quickly retrieving the best-fit model for that situation; BTW, consider how your sensibility might change if the English language did not have a future verb tense: then, consider that the Japanese language doesn’t!

Having followed Jonah Lehrer’s  Seed postings, I looked to the release of his new book.  How We Decide  is a fun and comprehensive survey of Decision Making’s neurologic and cognitive aspects.  http://www.powells.com/blog/?p=4507#more-4507

Book Covers the Landscape: Lehrer’s  How We Decide can seem to be a jumble of entertaining and bewildering fragments, perhaps because the book’s encyclopedic scope overwhelms.  The decision making process might not seem so chaotic, nor undefined, if we understand the sequential process of the sensory message traveling through the brain .

We know that the sensory signals coming in through the brain stem must first run the limbic gauntlet, the

brain’s front-line guards.  The emotions are associated with the amygdala which sits close to the brainstem.  It is not surprising that our emotions can be tied closely to our sense of smell, given their roles as front-line guards.

The incoming signal pattern is compared against a library of friend-or-foe profiles, “caricatures” of the usual suspects, designed for quick recognition for fast response -  as much as some would consider profiling impolitic.

If (a) the sensory signal patterns have not roused the front-line emotional guards, and (b) the brain decides there’s time for a more deliberate analysis, then the patterns are sent up to the rational PFC (prefrontal cortex) tecchie upstairs, which keeps a library of models of cool logic, abstracted from knowledge and experience.

Hopefully, there is a matching model – and a quick “intuitive” response is triggered

The process is sequential , and it’s not as if the brain consciously mulls, “Hmm, I wonder if I should get the PFC (prefrontal cortex) guys  work on this, if not I’ll just push it on my subconscious …”

The brain performs a triage on the incoming signal:  (Case 1) Do the incoming patterns match any known threat models?  If so, then the amygdala shuts the gates and sounds the alarms.   Case (2):  If the patterns are non-threathening, and there’s time,  then the sensory signals are sent up the to the PFC which then checks for a match against its abstracted models.

The brain’s two collections of models: To make decisions the brain has two “libraries” of models learned from its experiences and knowledge: (1) the rational (logical) and, (2) the emotional and instinctual models.     As a defensive mechanism for survival, Fear understandably predominates among the emotions.

We can train ourselves to recognize – i.e., “intuit” – without conscious analysis when a situation matches a model.  The incoming signal must first pass the instinctive and the emotional screens, before the signal is passed on to the rational PFC “techie” on the fifth floor, who might have  ready modules and won’t have to kludge a long analysis .

Two lines of defense : Some studies argue further that we cannot even make decisions without emotions.   You’d see this when the more savvy salespeople instinctually flank their prey:  When the purchase is a major shift for the buyer,  sell first to the fear: create a gap, a pain point. When  the buyer has made that shift, then sell on the product’s features, rationalizing the decision.

And impulse buyer that I am,  my survival instincts know to latch on to the practical features-  to justify later to the wife my latest and greatest gottahavit gizmo.    –

This series targets three topics (decision making, strategic execution, and project management).  You will also find links to thinkers, books, tools and other resources.

Looking at the recent years’ book releases, we see a shifting from rigidly closed decision and management models, to open-ended approaches and analytical tools. Why?  Information now floods us; it’s a faster flux of events, and reactions from a global pool of players.

Dilemma of Project Management

Recall that Microsoft Project and the PMI BOK co-evolved in over 20 years, back when organizations were localized with simpler markets and competition.  MS Project still narrowly defines “issues” as scheduling.  Ironically, the more detailed the GANTT chart, the less likely it can be maintained for day-to-day management.

Management modeling’s  roots are in manufacturing whose processes tend to be linear and determinate.  We  dismiss messy “unquantifiables”.  But complexity and the change flux may not allow methodical analysis.   Newer product life cycles are shorter and discontinuous.

Irony of Making Decisions in a Surplus of Information

Closed “rational” analyses need to be supplemented,  and perhaps not by another model, but an approach, plus shorter decision feedback loops. Think of a stance, rather than a stand:  aligning to the most strategic goals, alert to changes, updates, and collaboration.

“What’s measured is what gets done,” true enough, but often it’s what cannot be measured that may render a plan undone. We forget that straight lines and metrics are human devices. Nature neither draws straight lines, nor follows our plans.

System Reliability and Accidents

With the internet and globalization, has come an unprecedented complexity.  With complexity,  some say,  “system accidents” are a certainty.   Do we step back enough for a larger context,  searching for what we don’t know that we don’t know. Until the the 2007 financial collapse, risk was a matter of actuarial hedging.  Perpetual motion  powered by technology and optimism:  the 1987 market’ “system accident” from programmed trading was a distant lesson.  Until the “lightning victory” in Iraq,  war was a matter of technology and logistics.

This blog series, then, is a search for ways to see the grays and not merely the binary; and for clearer values to navigate to, as goals must be ever more adaptive.