Decision-making is a black box

It’s amazing how many people don’t know how to make decisions, which is curious if we think of how many decisions, we are making every day in our private and our business life. Decision making is for most people a process of “guessing” or “betting” on an outcome, starting from what to eat in a restaurant to choosing a job or a life partner. A coherent decision-making process is mostly lacking and is often replaced by a story that provides sense in hindsight, meaning: people make up a story afterwards that seems to come up with a process, explaining to others – and themselves- how they decided afterwards. They think they have decided in a coherent way. This phenomenon is called “retrospective coherence”. Fun fact: that story depends a lot on the outcome of the decision: if a decision leads to success (the right ‘bet’) it tends to draw a completely different retrospective story than an outcome considered a failure. I will continue this exploration into decision making; drawing on different authors and frameworks for the, looking forward to shedding some light into the DMP-black box.

Don’t believe everything you think

Deconstructing Transformative Processes for Individuals

Once in a while people want to change something personal, learn more, grow or reinvent themselves on a different level. Here, I want to take a closer look at those change processes where simple, technical solutions don’t work keep producing limited outcome. If the solution is not ready at hand or fails repeatedly the challenge requires most often an adaptive solution. Resistances and pushbacks that are arising make it difficult to get to the root causes of unwanted behaviour or undesired personal realities. This is where it gets interesting.

At the bottom of these phenomena are patterns with a combination of properties that are

• difficult to detect (fast, automatic, hidden, with defraction),
• difficult to understand (non-logic, pre- or non-conceptual origin, based on incorrect ‘meaning-coupling’), and
• actively protected with what can be described as an immune reaction against the intended change (“immunity to change”): the wrong meaning-coupling or ‘mapping error’ is considered or perceived of existential importance for some sort of survival– hence resistances and pushback are getting more intense the closer the individual gets to the source of the unwanted behaviour (see graphic)

However, with the right understanding of the nature of these processes, a willingness to explore and stay in the process despite of discomfort and resistances, and with the adequate tools and guidance, transformative change is not only possible, but can take days instead of lifetimes, hours instead of years. We are talking legitimate shortcuts. 

In case you are dealing with personal challenges that are automatic, lightening fast, go unobserved, are hidden from your own logic and seem somehow protected, have a closer look at the course we are offering through EZC.Partners in July in Germany.

For more information click on EZC.Partners website.

Company Values

 

Companies have become aware of the fact that core values – integrity, trust, fairness – can function as attractors that drive beneficial behaviours in the workplace. What they are not getting is that core values just can´t be prescribed, top down or in any other direction.

While many companies large and small have come to the laudable conclusion to focus their organizational development efforts on values rather than behaviours, most go about this strategy in a wrong way.  When values are defined upfront without letting them emerge through a process and paying attention to which values are currently operative, people tend to game the system and display what HR and HQ want to hear. Dave Snowden puts it this way: “As soon as you write your values down, you´ve lost them”.

Even if you work with more sophisticated approaches that try and distinguish between actual and desired values in the organisation, the methods used to survey those values most often distort the results. Questionnaires and 360s are gamed easily and you know where to put your x-es in your sleep. Experts are biased with unconscious hypothesis while surveying and indexing the data.