Learn or Die (book by Hess)

Learn or Die

Edward Hess

Learn or Die

 This is a book about learning at both by individuals and groups. When people talk about high performing operations, they are discussing an organization that is constantly seeking better ways to execute, and that requires constant learning. When people talk about innovative organizations, they are usually talking about organizations that make new things and that requires learning. No matter how an organization positions itself, they need to be learning. The book describes a high performing learning organization as an organization that has the right people and the right environment and the right processes. Over the last few decades quite a lot has been learned about how individuals and groups learn. One goal of this book is to explain some of that science. Another goal of the book is to illustrate the behavior of learning people and organizations through a few examples.

Central to controlling our learning is to recognize and control our “thinking” – sometimes called metacognition. Implicit in thinking about learning (and thinking) is that the concept that learning only matters when it leads to some sort of decision or action, in fact it implies a change in the actions or decisions that we would take. The foundation of this sort of metacognition is Kahneman and Tversky’s System 1 or 2 model of thinking which seeks to explain how we make decisions. To improve our thinking, a metacognitive effort would focus on three knowledge-based strategies. We would think about:

• Knowing what kind of actions can be taken quickly and which require reflection and analysis.
• Knowing when decisions are being swayed by emotions.
• Knowing when to use debate to clarify issues and actions.

Examples of these strategies would include anticipating the day’s activities in order to prepare for those activities requiring deeper thought or debate, or keeping a checklist of frequent “System 2” type decisions to aid in their recognition. Equally important, it is important to recognize the role of emotions in decision-making. Emotions have both good and bad influences on decision making, but two emotions that must be treated with special care are fear and pride. Fear may be present but not consciously sensed. Fear makes us conservative and prone to over-caution. We may fear being wrong, being rejected by others, or losing our status or jobs; these fears can be deeply buried without losing their impact on us. This fear blocks our ability to learn and take action. The impact of fear on learning and our decisions has been known for a long time. “We know that when people feel threatened (a) their perceptions become narrowed to the threatening events and (b) they are forced to the defense of their existing perceptual organizations.”*Once our perception closes down, our learning potential is restricted. Pride has a similar effect on our perception, but for a different reason. We often assume that we are in our positions because of what we know and how we have decided things in the past. We assume that that knowledge and style is suitable for the present and thus ignore signs that we are unprepared to face the current issues. Our ego prevents us from learning – especially about things that are close to our identity.

 These two barriers to learning may be manifested in the following “values”:

• To remain in unilateral control
• To maximize “winning” and “minimize” losing
• To suppress negative feelings; and
• To be as “rational” as possible by defining clear objectives and evaluating our behavior in terms of whether or not we have achieved them

Acting on these value prevents feelings of vulnerability or incompetence. It requires a sort of surrender to escape these hindrances. Ray Dalio suggests that accepting that “We all are dumb shits.” is a good starting point for opening ourselves up to the need to learn to think better. Mentors and coaches can help you to learn to think better, but the main strategy for learning to think better (to control metacognition and so improve learning) is to deliberately practice critical thinking. The author confesses that his early life made him think he was pretty smart and it was not until midlife that two failures made him look around and recognize that he was not thinking well. It was not a lack of intelligence, but a bad approach to learning with roots in pride and fear that held him back. With the help of a coach, he began to practice thinking better, which had benefits through most facets of his life. He became devoted to learning.

 The previous paragraphs emphasized the negative consequences of emotional thinking, but that is an incomplete view. People who say “let’s leave emotion out of it” are assuming that emotion is a kind of opposite to rationality; it is not. Rational and emotional thinking are deeply intertwined and practically inseparable. We tend to depend on emotion to help us make quick decisions – they just feel right. In complex decisions, we tend to judge our reaction to facts based on emotional reactions; again facts can “feel” right or wrong. We check seemingly logical decisions against our emotional reactions to the decision. The importance of emotions in making decisions has been studied for a number of professions, but perhaps most interestingly in the US Army. Soldiers face significant uncertainty and serious setbacks. They can be in situations that breed real fear – and yet must be able to make decisions and take action – often quickly. To improve soldier and officer performance, the Army has developed training in what they term “hardiness”, but this is often referred to as “resilience” in a business context. The Army describes hardiness as follows. Hardiness is a psychological style associated with resilience, good health and performance under a range of stressful conditions. People high in hardiness have a strong sense of commitment to life and work, and are actively engaged in what’s going on around them. They believe that can control or influence what happens, and they enjoy new situations and challenges. Also, they are internally motivated and create their own sense of purpose.

 One of the main approaches to developing hardiness is training people to think positively. While this is sometimes mocked, the real-world observation is that it works – and not just for military people. The approach involves four “skills”.

• Perceiving emotions – the ability to recognize and appraise verbal and nonverbal information
• Using emotions – the ability to access and/or generate emotions that facilitate cognitive processes such as creativity and problem solving
• Understanding emotions – the ability to cognitively process and gain knowledge of feeling of self and others
• Managing emotions – the ability to regulate emotions in oneself and others

It is not hard to see the connection of these four skills to leadership and interpersonal relation building. But is also key to learning. Positivity is a powerful, enabling force in learning. One example of positivity is a belief that learning is possible.

 Right People

A learning organization is built with “learning” people, people who like and are good at learning. A learning mindset involves a desire to learn and a belief that learning is a result of effort. If a person’s experience of learning is positive, they are more likely to seek more. People hold two perspectives on how they learn. One perspective is that knowledge is a result of intrinsic skill or ability. Smart people learn things easily so it is either easy (if you are smart) or very hard to learn (if you are not). People who believe this, believe that they are not in control of their learning; in other terminology, they lack self-determination and self-efficacy. These two terms are related, but slightly different. Self-determination is characterized by a need for autonomy, effectiveness and relatedness. The second perspective springs from this sense of self-efficacy. In other words, they feel that they have choice and control over their own actions, that they are competent and accomplished, and they feel that they are respected and relied upon.  Self-efficacy is a belief in our ability to do things – particularly “new” things. If we have a strong sense of self-efficacy we will tend to:

• Approach difficult tasks and view them as challenges rather than threats
• Be persistent and sustain strong commitments to our goals
• Attribute failures to insufficient effort or bad learning strategies
• Work even harder in the face of difficulties…
• Rebound quickly after failures of mistakes.

If I think that problems are solved by hard work and persistence, then it is easier for me to recover from a setback with more hard work and by looking for new ways forward. If I have low self-efficacy, then I might blame a setback on external overwhelming forces. Since what I can do does not matter, I might as well quit. The two perspectives have been called ”fixed” and “growth” mindsets. A fixed mindset believes that learning is either possible or impossible for a person based on some intrinsic property. Smart people can learn most things and no-so-smart people may not. By extension, a person probably can’t change the world. In contrast, the growth mindset believes that learning (success) is the result of effort, so if initial efforts to learn are unsuccessful, then more effort will lead to success. This is a mindset that thinks that change is possible through human effort. This links to the previous sections observations about positive thinking. A positive thinker will have optimism about changing things, including their own knowledge and skill. They believe that they will be able to use their knowledge to make positive changes and this will create a reinforcing feedback loop. A learning organization should seek out people with a growth mindset to join their organization and avoid people with a fixed mindset.

 This description implies that people have either fixed or growth mindsets, when people lie somewhere along this spectrum of mindsets. Not only that, but a person may vary in their mindset by specific subject or as a consequence of other things in their life. In fact, their mindset can change over time. You hear about people who become fixed in their ways and others who seem to open up. It is possible to learn to be more “growth” oriented. So in bringing people into the organization, it might be more useful to focus on people who are not strongly fixed in their mindsets, but show signs of growth mindsets in many parts of their lives.

 Rewards are related to this description of fixed and growth mindsets. Rewards in this sense are both tangible and intangible. To distill this down, a growth mindset and intrinsic rewards are closely connected. Most of the reward of learning is intangible and intrinsic. An organization hoping to maintain a growth orientation to learning should think about how to maximize the intrinsic rewards of learning to better match the inner experience of the learners.

 Right Environment

A learning organization is more difficult to create and maintain when it has a growth mindset in some parts and a fixed mindset in others. Leaders of organizations that aspire to be learning should consider how the entire system promotes or retards learning behaviors and learning people. As indicated above, people with growth mindsets are more likely to be oriented to learning, so policies that decrease their autonomy and control will impair their learning (and presumably people with high self-efficacy may choose to leave an organization that decreases their autonomy and control). A learning environment promotes connection between people (as a source of learning), intrinsic rewards (where people learn for the pleasure of learning) and removal of fear or other stresses (minimizing internal barriers to learning).

 The book describes a number of features of learning organizations. One feature of learning organizations is that they have a purpose greater than making money; they aspire to making some kind of difference. This may have its roots in the difference between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. The consequence of this is that people feel a greater “permission to speak freely” because they are not just “in it for the money”. Adapting concepts from Collins’ book “Good to Great”, other features of a learning environment include leaders who not only permit open discussion but listen to what is being said without their ego defenses getting in the way…leaders begin with questions, not with answers and confront reality without attacking people.

 The idea of creating safety in the workplace is related to the idea of eliminating fears that inhibit learning. One contributor to fear is buried in people’s view of hierarchy. From a young age we are indoctrinated in our position in the hierarchy. We are to be seen but not heard or not to speak until spoken to. We carry this over into the adult world, where ranking may be subtle or obvious, but rarely absent. Leaders in learning environments must give people permission to speak, and they do this by listening and being open minded to what they hear. They need to be suitably humble and willing to admit their own mistakes. An organization demonstrates its openness when it is confronted with information that challenges the established orthodoxies of the organization.

 This becomes even more important when an organization aspires to be innovative. Innovation is dependent on challenging orthodox assumptions and practices, learning new concepts, facts and perspectives, and then trying to solve problems by trial-and-error.

 Right Processes

The third leg of the learning organization is processes that help people think and learn. Some are individual processes and some are group processes. Most are intended to slow down thinking to allow the slower non-reflexive thinking to occur. Some concepts are described below.

 A System 2 conversation is a deliberate, nonjudgmental, nondefensive, open-minded exchange; it might be with yourself or others. The goal of these conversations is to challenge assumptions and thinking. These conversations require trust and respect; but mostly they require a commitment to listening. Conventional conversations sometimes to seem about “winning”, but the goal of these conversations is a combination of understanding and knowing.

 A way to emphasize this latter point is to focus on communication as asking-not telling. The core idea is to ask humbly so that you place yourself on the same “level” as the other person. When you tell someone something, you put yourself in a superior position. This influences what others share with you and it influences how you hear what they have to say. It can be hard for people to admit their ignorance and people in leadership positions might find this especially difficult (they are subject to an unobtainable expectation of competence in all things). A humble inquiry signals an openness to listening and learning. The interest in the other person’s knowledge must be real; you have no problem knowing when your discussion partner checks out – and having the other person check out does not encourage you to share or listen . Some discussions have little emotional content, but others can be emotionally intense. The Harvard Negotiation Project created a framework that imagines that every conversation is actually composed of three conversations. One conversation is about the positions, information and facts that each person contributes to the exchange. A second conversation is about each person’s thoughts, analyses and feelings about what was shared. The third (inner) dialog is about how each person’s ego is being damaged by the conversation. The point of the framework is to acknowledge that the exchange of facts is resting on top of two other conversations that are emotional. When no space is provided for the emotional content, information may be withheld, people may not challenge orthodoxies or assumptions, and they may not be able to reach an understanding of the “real” problems or their solutions.

 Finally, one of the prime needs for people learning from each other is to make “sense” of what is happening. The meaning of sense here is a bit different than usual. It is easy to understand this meaning when you consider someone who does an extremely routine job and then is exposed to an unusual event. For example, a baggage screener may see 1000s of bag with no contraband. When they see contraband, they may not be able to make sense of what they are seeing - in the sense that they may notice that it is different without knowing why. Under pressure to make a decision, they may just let it pass. In a way, passing 1000s of bag is a success and “…success narrows perceptions, changes attitudes, feeds confidence in a single way of doing business, breeds overconfidence in the efficacy of current abilities and practices, and makes leaders and others intolerant of opposing points of view” [quoting Karl Weick]. The example of baggage screening might seem irrelevant in business – but it is just like business as usual. It can be quite hard to see anomalies or weak signals when they appear in an environment of a successful routine. To decrease the risk of this kind of blindness, people can seek feedback, engage in after-action reviews, do certain kinds of scenario planning (more about this later), study “near misses”, and generally develop a culture of respectful challenge. It is often the case that after-disaster investigations turn up information pertinent to the disaster but ignored because the source was untrusted or the possible event was too different.

 Another group of right processes are sometimes called “critical thinking tools”. Their purpose is to slow down the thinking process so that we can digest more information (especially disconfirming information), examine our assumptions, and consider any lessons to be learned from past actions. Another way to think about these tools is as counter-weights to our natural tendency to be lazy thinkers. Thinking is hard and we avoid doing more than needed. These methods require effort but they are simple to act on.

 One specific method is called the pre-mortem where a group about to make a decision imagines that the decision was acted on and a team is being asked to look back at it a few years later to understand how it went all wrong. The intent is to discover “what must be true” for the decision to succeed. It is hard for people to look ahead with much clarity, but we are quite good at looking backward and explaining things. We are especially good at explaining failure. Based on this analysis, the decision or plan can be modified to mitigate the risks identified. 

 A second method is called an “Insight process” and seeks to deliberately find things that we would normally ignore. These insights could be in the form of new connections between things or contradictions and inconsistencies. Insights arise when open ended questions are asked with a kind of “what if” open-mindedness. Questions like the following can help.

• What data contradicts my hypotheses and assumptions?
• What is new or unusual that is related to my decision?
• What other conclusions could I draw with the same information?
• Does it feel like it all fits? Is there anything that is bothering me?

Unpacking assumptions is a third critical thing tool that is used to discover the assumptions that lie behind plans and decisions. Possibly the most powerful method is “5 Whys” which digs into a decision by asking for the assumptions that support the decision. Once the assumptions are noted, then inconsistent or weak assumptions can be identified and appropriate action taken. We often think of data being independent of us, but it is our interpretation of the data that gives it meaning. Our interpretation is a consequence of our assumptions, so different assumptions can lead to different interpretations. Over time, assumptions get built into mental models that we use to process information – and we lose track of the assumptions. Most professions have a distinct set of mental models that rest on assumptions that are rarely discussed. Though the author does not explicitly say this, having a single mental model is quite limiting and can narrow perspectives very significantly. The line about “If all you have is a hammer…” is emblematic of this. Unpacking assumptions is part of building more mental models and creating more ways to solve problems.

 A final critical thinking tools is the after-action review. Extensively used in the military, the AAR is intended to be factual. Typical questions might be: what happened, why did that happen, what did and did not work, why did things that worked, work, and what should be done differently in the future? The assumption is that nobody is at fault for undesired outcomes, but that there is a better way to do things so that the failure is not repeated. This is critical, because fear of failure blocks good thinking. To the extent that an organization can’t throw away people who worked on something that failed, it does not want them limited by fear going forward.

 So to summarize the principle of a good learning organization:

• Learning is promoted when it meets the needs of the learner for autonomy, effectiveness and personal growth, which means that it is intrinsically motivated.
• Learning is promoted in a trust-rich environment. It is hard for nervous people to learn.
• Learning requires people to change and to be useful, the organization must change. The organization must be prepared to change if learning is desired. The direction of change might not be predictable.
• Learning requires that “the truth” must be viewed as conditional. Critical thinking and analysis combined with unpacking of assumptions can show that there is a better explanation of reality than what we believed before. This search often requires the perspectives of many people to break down the assumptions. Processes help guide this search for better thinking.
• Good learners need awareness of the three meta-skills: metacognition (thinking about how we think), meta-emotion (understanding the roots of our emotions) and meta-communication (the whole of our message that includes both the factual and emotional content). In this regard, the restraining effects of fear must be identified and managed.
• Learning is better in an emotionally positive environment. When we accept that we are ignorant about some things, some of what we think we know is wrong, and we are not what we know but what we can learn – and that everybody is in the same situation, we have a mindset primed to learn.

 The last part of the book takes a closer look at three quite different “learning” organizations: Bridgewater Associates (a hedge fund), Intuit (software) and UPS (package delivery). Each demonstrates a different approach to learning.

 Bridgewater Associates invests much of its approach to learning in what they call “radical transparency”. This is an environment where candor and feedback are a major emphasis. For example, every conversation and meeting is recorded and archived for any employee to review. Every employee is getting real-time feedback through an internal electronic application that feeds into a “playing card”. The playing card of every employee, including the founder and CEO, is available to every employee. People get feedback from all directions and they are expected to pay attention to it. Feedback is individual, and personal accountability is emphasized. In particular, there is considerable attention to weaknesses and mistakes because these are where there are the best opportunities for learning. This sounds very harsh and threatening, and many people choose to leave the organization despite an intense effort to select people who will fit. Behind this approach to direct feedback are beliefs that everybody has strengths and weakness, that some jobs fit people better than others, and that many mistakes are caused by the design of work rather than the person. While accountability is personal, feedback is focused on the work or result rather than the person. “You were not prepared” is good feedback, but “You are lazy” is not.

 Bridgewater employees are encouraged to pay a lot of attention to “knowing what you don’t know” as a way of both uncovering opportunities for learning and decreasing the over-confidence of people about their thinking. The candor in all things is most useful in debating decisions. Over-confidence is one of the ego barriers to learning and critical thinking. One of the goals of the intensive feedback is to develop critical thinking skills which also means breaking down ego barriers. People are constantly challenged and decisions are intensely stress tested. The company founder, Ray Dalio, has published a set of principles (see: http://www.bwater.com/Uploads/FileManager/Principles/Bridgewater-Associates-Ray-Dalio-Principles.pdf ) that express his beliefs about how we can be better. Meetings provide an example of the Bridgewater view of performance. Five things are common to meetings.

• The person responsible for a meeting is identified. There is always ONE person responsible.
• Everybody agrees on the purpose of the meeting which have one of three purposes: a debate (which is between “equals”), a discussion (which is among all those present) and teaching (which involves those of different experience levels).
• There is regular checking with others to see if ideas “make sense”. Is the thinking good? A good idea can withstand challenges which becomes clear when it withstands a challenge.
• Any to-do is assigned to ONE person who commits to doing that specific task within a specific timeframe.
• Every meeting ends with “tidbit” comments made on each employee’s iPad about other meeting attendees. This feedback goes to the employee and is available to all employees.

Each employee accumulates a believability score which is based on the number of times they are right about things. This is public information, and feedback is weighted by the believability score of the provider. This highlights another feature of the Bridgewater world – it is data rich. There is data about ideas, predictions, investment results, and more. This data is used to generate objective feedback to learn from. All employees have a wide range of information available to help them identify weaknesses and mistakes so that they can be learned from. The attention to mistakes might seem negative, but it has the following basis. Mistakes are inevitable and necessary when people explore new ideas. Improvement requires new ideas, so there will be mistakes from trying new ideas. What is important is to learn from the mistake so that better future performance is possible. It is OK to make a mistake, but it is not OK to not learn from the mistake. After action reviews are commonly used to identify what was learned and to identify what barriers should be removed that impede performance. This is an intense environment, but people who stay form very close personal relationships. One of the analogies to this learning process was the military Special Forces. People in both groups are intensively trained with very high individual accountability expectations within a group setting. Feedback is very direct and mission oriented. The goal is to be accurate – not kind or cruel. While the stakes are different in the two settings, both create strong cultures with a strong orientation towards outcomes. Both focus on both process and results.

 Intuit represents a different kind of organizational learning focused on product development. Intuit has embraced a philosophy called design thinking that observes that it is hard to ask people for useful information that allows you to solve their problems because it is hard for them to articulate the real problem. Design thinking seeks to develop insights about problems by direct observation, then to validate the insight through small, fast experiments. The process that Intuit developed is called “Design for Delight” (D4D) and has as its goal to develop products that delight their customers. One of the key features of the D4D process is that decisions are made through experimentation rather than discussion. This approach is captured in a quote from the founder Scott Cook, “…you must change how decisions are made to what I call leadership by experiment. Moving from politics and PowerPoints to enabling the idea to prove itself. From the hierarchy sets the agenda, to the customers set the agenda.” Experiments are not confined to product development, but are used for continuous improvement of all functions. Key to experimentation is development of a clear objective hypothesis that can be tested. If the experimental results confirm the hypothesis, the effort can continue. If it does not, the team may learn something that will allow the effort to be re-directed, which they call a pivot. Financial analysis does not occur until much later in the overall process, but can be based on real-world information derived from users.

 Intuit’s rapid experimentation process differs substantially from the traditional business planning processes used by many companies to determine which ideas are to be funded. A traditional business plan process usually focuses on market analysis and creating a detailed financial projection to justify allocation of investment dollars. The focus is analysis to justify an investment. The process is usually colored by risk adversity. Experimentation is expected to have failures and those failures serve as opportunity to learn. The best learning comes in the form of a surprise. Many Intuit stories describe an experiment that led to a surprise that led to a new and different product or service offering. Three questions help experimenters “discover” their results.

• What surprised you on the upside, and what did you learn that drove that upside versus expectations?
• What surprised you on the downside, and what did you learn that caused the downside surprise?
• What barriers are getting in the way of what you are trying to achieve?

The first people to learn the D4D process were the senior most leaders in Intuit. This design thinking process must be supported at all levels of the organization because the experimental approach will fail if it is not accepted by the major decision makers. This, in turn, led to development of a robust 360 degree feedback system. When some senior leaders received negative feedback, they publically acknowledged the feedback and explained what they were doing to improve. This acknowledgement that senior people do not have a monopoly on quality thinking or behavior helps everyone else in the organization look at themselves and seek opportunities to be better. Intuit is very much a company that learns by doing and doing includes using feedback of many sorts to guide learning.

 UPS is a high performance company. Over 100 years old, the company has had to undergo a number of substantial pivots from a local delivery company for Seattle stores to an intercity carrier and most recently to a global “logistics” company. In many cases, UPS was not the first to the market and so they are not innovative in this sense. However, they are fanatical students of all the ways that packages can be handled more efficiently. At UPS mistakes are admitted and the need for change recognized because the culture is about the relentless pursuit of constant, incremental improvement. Dissent, inquiry, questioning, challenging, and critiquing are all valued and encouraged because they help UPS improve.  

 This environment could be stressful for employees but employees are highly engaged and loyal. The retention rate is over 90%, very high for such a business. Employees own a significant portion of the stock. Senior leaders and manager are primarily employees who came up through the ranks – often starting in sorting or driving. All of this would seem like a prescription for limited learning except for their belief in continuous improvement. The company has run into trouble on numerous occasions from the early days of becoming a common carrier to the launch of their air fleet and the redevelopment of their IT infrastructure in recent years. In each case, they persistently tried to analyze the problems and solve them. To demonstrate the persistence, the international package delivery business took almost 28 years to become profitable. Along the way they learned that one size did not fit all, that local people often understood local issues better, and that it was often better to acquire a local company and transform it with UPS processes than to build an organization from the ground up. In most ways, UPS looks like an unlikely example of a learning company, but it presents the version that may come closest to everybody’s approach to learning. It is not the revolutionary or transforming processes that change us but the persistent evolutionary reactions to changing circumstances combined with a sense of being “constructively dissatisfied” with the status quo.

 Comment & observation:

• The book mentions that two of the methods used to teach advanced students have ancient origins. The case study method has been used by Chinese and Hebrew scholars for centuries; the emphasis in this method is study of a situation in detail and then discussion of the situation until it is understood. The Socratic Method was used by Greek scholars; by asking a continuous stream of questions, contradictory assumptions are uncovered and this conflict is discussed in search of resolution. The contradiction was the opportunity to learn. Both of these teaching methods have the goal of forcing you away from reflexive answers. In the terminology of Kahneman, these methods force you to use System 2 deep thinking by breaking down the simple answers provided by System 1, in effect forcing System 1 to fail. This approach suggests that “real” learning is a function analogous to System 2.
• Learning is both natural and learned. For the kind of learning that is desired in an organizational context, the learned kind of learning is more important. It is important to learn how to think about how we learn so that we can be increasingly able to learn.
• Another quote from Ray Dalio is “Don’t let your emotions highjack your thinking.” It is so easy to become angry and frustrated when you don’t get your own way that it is as easy to stop thinking although different ways to solve the problem. I get high jacked periodically. I get so angry that I can barely think about other perspectives or ways to approach a problem until my anger dissipates. Because expressing anger is fairly unacceptable in a business environment, the problem is even worse because I must suppress the anger when it arises – which just makes it worse. When it winds down, I sometimes feel like I can literally feel my mind relaxing and opening up. Solutions occur that seem quite logical and effective (often an illusion, but a useful one) that allow me to get back into action.
• When I was growing up, we had a dinner ritual. My father would ask us what we had learned that day. Usually, this was what we had learned at school. Part of what was different about this recitation was that he would immediately question our report. He would ask for details, poke holes in assumptions and basically initiate a debate. Many people are horrified to hear me discuss this, but what I learned was that every story has more than one side, usually more than two. As you look at an event from many angles, it is hard to have a dogmatic view of it. Eventually, we learned to take any side of an argument. Very few things were fixed in this world. My father was a very opinionated guy and some of his opinions were firmly fixed, but in parts of his life his views were very flexible and he often acted out of sync with his stated opinions because the specific case did not fit with his fixed generic view. As I have aged, I find myself asking others what they have learned recently. In reading this book, I wonder if this is not the question I should be asking candidates much more often.
• Though the book does not come out a say this directly, extrinsic rewards might actually suppress learning motivation if people view the reward as manipulative. I have read about work that tested the effect of rewards (like money) on learning. The conclusion was that this trained students to learn only when a reward was offered and only enough to gain the reward. As a student, I was usually aware of what score was required to gain a grade. The ideal effort in that case was to earn exactly enough points to gain the target grade and invest absolutely no more effort than that. Required courses of no interest to me got exactly this treatment, while classes where I was interested got my full attention and a significant overshoot in my learning.
• Many public companies have become so lean that employees…and leaders are pushed to do more and faster with fewer resources. The pressures ae great to increase production….In these environments, the easiest way to grow is through operating efficiencies…This type of strategy rewards machine-like operating systems. Learning in these environments is hard because learning is not an efficient process. Learning requires people to change what they think and how they act. That in turn requires System 2 thinking and System 2 conversations, and they take time….They require the machine to slow down. I was really struck by this passage. This is another perspective on why an obsession with efficiency can be a barrier to innovation. If innovation requires learning and efficiency blocks learning then doesn’t efficiency block innovation? This seems overly simple, but consider that the pressure to be productive has been shown to narrow perception. It is not that hard to link the ideas that efficiency and learning exist in a tension; and at any time you may have to choose between the two.
• Listening is hard, but for an interesting reason. When we read, we can absorb the equivalent of 600-1000 words per minute. But a fast speaker can talk at about 100—150 words per minute. That means that 75-90% of our cognitive ability is unoccupied while listening. The mind is never idle so you either live with boredom or seek to pay attention to other things too. Thus most of your attention is not on what the other is saying. Some of the spare attention is spent on nonverbal signals like vocal tone, body language and so forth. It is hard to avoid the temptation to split attention when talking in person, but when you are communicating over the phone – the problem is even greater. It is interesting to consider how such cognitive loading works. On the one hand, just listening to someone provides almost no challenge to me when I am sitting and listening on the phone. If I must walk and talk on the phone, this can overwhelm me – too much from my brain to do. But if I am walking with someone and talking to them – this is no real problem (maybe we are both equally impaired so it seems balanced).
• The section on critical thinking tools promotes methods of doing System 2 thinking, but the very first tool that is described is recognition-primed decision model, which is functionally a System 1 method. This is the approach used by experts in “high velocity” decision making like fire-fighting, sports, and emergency room medicine. The value of acknowledging this tool is that developing expert intuition is a critical thinking approach for fast moving high consequence environments. What is critical in developing the expertise is practice, practice, practice and practice. What is an interesting extension of this model is that it applies as well to slower moving ambiguous situations where you can’t gather much information. Experts appear to examine the situation, choose a course of action and then do a bit of mental scenario planning to see what could go wrong. They may adjust the plan accordingly and proceed. What is striking is that there is essentially no consideration of different options. Pick a course, check it for flaws and execute the plan. It is this internal scenario thinking that distinguishes this approach from a reflexive decision and elevates it to critical thinking.
• One chapter of the book is dedicated to a verbatim interview with Gary Klein, one of the leaders in high velocity decision making. Klein is asked about training people to be open minded. He responds, “There are some people who are open to new experience and become curious when they see anomalies and there are people who, they may have risen to high levels because they’re determined. You can count on them and that’s because once they say something, they’re committed to it. And that’s sort of the opposite of being open-minded and open to changes in the situation.”  It had never occurred to me to think of determined as closed minded, but there is an aspect of determination that does close off alternatives.
• Elsewhere in the interview with Klein, there is a discussion of the concept of “permission to speak freely”, a kind of speaking truth to the more powerful. While, the military would like this to be true, it is like most other organizations. It is difficult for top leaders to hear the truth because intermediate layers filter information. The only way around this, according to Klein, is individual initiative by the leader to ask low level people directly. One general found a captain who was willing to speak freely in private in order to get a less varnished truth. When intermediate officers complained about this arrangement, the general told them to get used to it. It is interesting to observe how often tours by executives are organized and practiced to create the right impression and how rarely senior leaders drop in unannounced. Speaking freely probably needs more than “permission”; it probably also requires a relationship and trust between the two people given the power disparity.
• Most people are familiar with the 9-dot problem where you need to connect the dots with a few lines (4 in most versions). The problem is usually described as a “think outside of the box” example, but Klein describes it as a “seeing the invisible” example. I think this is a much better explanation of our reaction and helps generalize this example to the wider world of problem solving. We often see things that are invisible – in fact things that are not there at all, except in our imagination. Our mental models create a lot of imaginary walls.
• In the interview there is an extensive discussion about the disagreement between Klein and Kahneman about confirmation bias. Klein agrees that the apparent bias can be demonstrated, but he does not think it is important in the real world. In most cases, people are using their experience to choose which information to attend to and which to ignore. In lab studies, the information is more limited and so selection is not a major problem, which it is in the real world. A version of confirmation bias shows up in the real world when an expert is presented with anomalous information. They can use their expertise to explain away the anomaly.
• Klein is often asked to help companies “think better” and he divides this request into two aspects. The first is a question of skill – the first is essentially critical analytical and thinking skills. Klein refers these elsewhere as that is not his expertise. The second is when people are avoiding thinking about long-term aspects of their decisions, which Klein can help with. One of his observations is that many people are “afraid of creativity, afraid of insights that they were dampening those things and creating environments that suppressed insights; then I would look for ways of undoing that damage and create the right kind of balance”….What kind of environments suppress insights?...I [Klein] just came to the conclusion that organizations are inhospitable to insights. Organizations do a better job of managing and eliminating errors …increasing predictability…And insights don’t do any of these things….Insights are disruptive. So for a manager, insights are disorganizing. This discussion follows a discussion on confirmation bias and mental models. It seems that an intuitive connection is being made between the goal of an organization to operate predictability (to confirm that the future is in control by behaving as predicted) and the difficulty of recognizing something that is unexpected. For people with a strong mental model associated with variance elimination (operational efficiency), it is hard to also be open to seeing the value in variance.
• The final part of the Klein interview I’ll mention relates to an observation that Klein has made in a few organizations. He will asks senior leaders what actions their successor ought to take that the current leaders are not. This form of scenario planning reveals that most leaders actually know what they need to do, but they do not think about it normally. I have had this experience a few times in my own work. I do not think I know what to do, but a good questioner reveals that I really do know what to do, but could not independently articulate the work. When this first happened, I thought I could train myself to do this. So far, no luck. But, I keep having the experience of being questioned and subsequently being able to answer the questions that I could not think of myself. I thought this was just me, but apparently not.
• The discussion of Bridgewater Assoc. mentions a study of scientists. It contends that science is driven by what is not known much more than by what is known. I think this highlights the big difference between science and technology. Science is driven by the unknown and technology by the known. This may be part of why most companies are uncomfortable with science – its focus on the unknown is an embrace of uncertainty – which most organizations want to avoid. Technology is much easier to accommodate.

 *text in italics is directly quoted from the book