Tag: bias

How Will Your School Community Share Your Story?

LeadershipPublished onUpdated onLeave a Comment on How Will Your School Community Share Your Story?

The pandemic experience is an opportunity to create a story to tell future generations.

King Lear and Cordelia (Shakespeare, King Lear, Act 4, Scene 7) Francesco Bartolozzi , CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

A look at storytelling and leadership, here is a summary.

Key Points

  • Story bias helps us organise, filter and remember information.
  • Storytelling is critical to successful leadership — this is especially true during disruptive change.
  • Teleological explanation helps us to understand what we are trying to become.
  • The pandemic experience gives us an opportunity to create a story to tell future generations.
  • Read more articles on leadership.

Narrative Bias

We rely on the story bias. It helps us process our experiences into manageable chunks. This cognitive bias is our tendency to assimilate experiences and information into a coherent narrative or story pattern.

We filter the masses of data we encounter. This pattern recognition lets us jettison the information that does not fit into our story view.

There is a downside. Although experiences are more memorable, we might force information into a preset mould and disregard new insights we need to pay attention to.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb illustrates how stories are more memorable when they offer layers of meaning. Compare the following statements:

“The king died and the queen died.”

“The king died, and then the queen died of grief.”

This exercise, presented by the novelist E. M. Forster, shows the distinction between mere succession of information and a plot. But notice the hitch here: although we added information to the second statement, we effectively reduced the dimension of the total. The second sentence is, in a way, much lighter to carry and easier to remember; we now have one single piece of information in place of two. As we can remember it with less effort, we can also sell it to others, that is, market it better as a packaged idea.

The second example is more memorable because the chunks of data become tied together with the story and a layer of meaning.

Lead With Stories

Peter Senge explains that leaders add new layers of meaning when they focus on the ‘purpose story’ — why do we exist, and where are we heading?

[stories] provide what philosophy calls a “teleological explanation” (from the Greek telos, meaning “end” or “purpose”) — an understanding of what we are trying to become.

Purposeful narrative, coupled with system strategy, creates a sense of continuity and identity not achievable in any other way.

Activating purpose is impossible without storytelling ~ John Coleman

Use stories to help people reflect, learn and understand the forces of change within our education systems.

Leaders in learning organizations have the ability to conceptualize their strategic insights so that they become public knowledge, open to challenge and further improvement.

We also have to figure out ways to share stories across time and create artefacts that guide future generations.

Cautionary Tales

In issue #172 of my weekly email, we looked at how tsunami stones represented the catastrophic stories of the past. Dotted throughout the landscape of coastal communities are large stone tablets, some as tall as 10 feet, that date back to the 1890s. Carved into these are the stories of past tsunamis.

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Photo by Cindy Chan on Unsplash

Some feature warnings to seek higher ground in the wake of an earthquake. Others give death tolls or mark mass graves. A few denote place names with clear messages, like Nokoriya (Valley of Survivors) and Namiwake (Wave’s Edge).

These monuments saved lives in more recent events and act as a storied artefact and cautionary tale across generations.

I challenged readers of issue 172 to reflect on the story you might tell of our current times.

What will be your community’s story of the pandemic? Will it be of the virus? Or our struggle with isolation and remoteness? Or will your community story be about compassion, empathy, generosity, resilience, innovation and relationships?

Your Talking Points

  • What stories filter your experience?
  • Years from now, how will our storytelling be instructive, purposeful and add value?
  • How will it be pointed reminders of our collective commitment to a set of values that can resist a global pandemic?

This is a snippet of my Dialogic Learning Weekly. ⚡A weekly email designed to build your cognitive toolkit and enhance your practice. It saves you time and provokes your thinking.

Exactly the nourishment I need on a weekly basis.

⚡️ Subscribe now and get started this week.

5 Methods For Creatives To Overcome The Crippling Blocks To Original Ideas

CreativityPublished onUpdated onLeave a Comment on 5 Methods For Creatives To Overcome The Crippling Blocks To Original Ideas

Did you know that you judge ideas more harshly when you feel uncertain?

In this article, we explore some of the crippling blocks to creativity and five methods to overcome them.

William Blake reminded us — in chilling words — that the person who does not alter their opinion in the face of new knowledge is like a “stagnant pool which breeds reptiles of the mind” — Photo by Krystian Piątek

What gets in your way?

Your fear of making mistakes or taking a risk is one of the most common emotional blocks to your creativity.

James L. Adams, the author of Conceptual Blockbusting, also lists “an inability to tolerate ambiguity and the overriding desire for order” as a block.

You can jump down this rabbit hole if you like 🐇 6 Emotional Barriers to Generating Ideas and How to Overcome Them

Here’s @JimAdamsSU again

You must usually wallow in misleading and ill-fitting data, hazy and difficult-to-test concepts, opinions, values, and other such untidy quantities.

When it comes to problem-solving, your ability to tolerate ambiguity is vital. This emergent idea space is where you make unexpected insights and new connections.

If you’re in a truly new space, you won’t always know the answer. Your team won’t either. You’re going to venture into the unknown together. Curiosity is a great way to lead that charge.

@IDEO Tim Brown 

Negative Bias Towards Creative Ideas

Your inability to tolerate ambiguity also means you don’t appreciate a new idea when you see one.

A 2011 study by Jennifer Mueller whilst at the University of Pennsylvania, points to an underlying negative bias towards new ideas when we feel uncertainty.

Our results show that regardless of how open minded people are, when they feel motivated to reduce uncertainty either because they have an immediate goal of reducing uncertainty, or feel uncertain generally, this may bring negative associations with creativity to mind which result in lower evaluations of a creative idea.

What’s Blocking Corporate Creativity?

When you attempt to reduce uncertainty, you are less receptive to promising ideas.

This negative bias compounds in scenarios that need your creativity. These scenarios are often periods of change or transition, which bring more ambiguity.

Phew, let’s rest here a while. How about some Calvin + Hobbes inspiration on getting in the creative mood?

Do some of these blocks resonate? 

🔴 Fear of making mistakes
🔴 Inability to tolerate ambiguity

Let’s have a look at some methods to help overcome these challenges.

Five methods for overcoming common blocks to creative work.

1 ⟶ Write a Catastrophic Expectations Report

Keep it all in perspective by writing a report on the worst-case scenario. What is the worst that could happen? Analyse the details.

swap your analytical capability for your fear of failure — a good trade 

2 ⟶ Create with others

Team up with trusted colleagues to create and share your ideas. Fears and uncertainty almost always reduce (or at least, fade) in a collective.

3 ⟶ Trust a process

Do you have a clear method to follow? We tend to tolerate more ambiguity when we know there are discrete phases. It is not going to be ambiguous forever.

4 ⟶ Activate feedback loops

The sooner you can jump into the iterative process of sharing, the sooner you increase your tolerance for ambiguity. Identify a trusted feedback buddy and talk about your ideas.

5 ⟶ Review Your Success Swipefile

Anchor your creative work in past success. Swipe through previous ideas, projects and periods of creativity that illustrate how you can overcome any fear or uncertainty. Bookmark those moments, note how you can reprise what worked.

Quick recap

⟶ You judge ideas more harshly when you feel uncertain
⟶ Fear of making mistakes is a common block to creativity

⚡️Write a Catastrophic Expectations Report
⚡️Create with others
⚡️Trust a process
⚡️Activate feedback loops
⚡️Review Your Success Swipefile

One final thought. This beautiful description from author @danijshapiro makes me smile, as it captures the challenge of doing, crafting and shipping creative work.

#antifragile

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5 Questions For Team Leaders To Challenge Willful Blindness And Create An Open Culture

Mental ModelsPublished onUpdated onLeave a Comment on 5 Questions For Team Leaders To Challenge Willful Blindness And Create An Open Culture

Willful blindness is a cognitive bias that explains ‘the deliberate avoidance of knowledge of the facts.’

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Closed minded? Photo by Bart Christiaanse

if there’s information that you could know and you should know but you somehow manage not to know, the law deems that you’re willfully blind. You have chosen not to know.

What are you wilfully blind to? — Forward Institute

What Harm Might We Cause

Just recently, I learned of a school leader pushing the idea of learning styles. They used the flawed concept and strategies to frame student needs.

Readings and examples that explained the issue were ignored. They chose not to know.

Ideology powerfully masks what, to the uncaptivated mind, is obvious, dangerous, or absurd and there’s much about how, and even where, we live that leaves us in the dark. Fear of conflict, fear of change keeps us that way.

Why We Ignore the Obvious: The Psychology of Willful Blindness – Brain Pickings

Every minute counts with students; that is why these mental models are essential. We have to peer into our gloomy thinking shadows and ask:

Conscious Avoidance of the Truth

According to Margaret Heffernan, as much as 85% of employees report people are afraid to raise issues at work.

This compulsion not to rock the boat is a survival impulse that protects us from conflict and confrontation. “We can’t notice and know everything”.

We mostly admit the information that makes us feel great about ourselves, while conveniently filtering whatever unsettles our fragile egos and most vital beliefs. It’s a truism that love is blind; what’s less obvious is just how much evidence it can ignore.

How many issues and negative work habits in schools are ignored? Perhaps wellbeing and health are where willful blindness in education is most prevalent.

Your Talking Points

  • How might we be wrong?
  • What process might surface any negative work habits?
  • How might we reduce the discomfort and fear of change?

This is a snippet of my Dialogic Learning Weekly. ⚡A weekly email designed to build your cognitive toolkit and enhance your practice. It saves you time and provokes your thinking.

Exactly the nourishment I need on every week.

⚡️ Subscribe now and get started this week.

Will this cause harm?

Mental ModelsPublished on1 Comment on Will this cause harm?

I have been reading Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s brilliantly tangential book Antifragile: Things that Gain from Disorder.

A concept and mental model he shares is iatrogenics. This is a medical term that refers to “harmful unintended side effects”.

In Antifragile, he writes:

In the case of tonsillectomies, the harm to the children undergoing unnecessary treatment is coupled with the trumpeted gain for some others. The name for such net loss, the (usually bitten or delayed) damage from treatment in excess of the benefits, is iatrogenics.

Iatro– means “a physician; medicine; healing,” from Greek iatros “healer, physician”. –genic means “producing, pertaining to generation.” So harm caused by a healer.

While some have advocated using ‘iatrogenesis’ to refer to all ‘events caused by the health care delivery team’, whether ‘positive or negative’, consensus limits use of ‘iatrogenesis’ to adverse effects, possibly including, broadly, all adverse unforeseen outcomes resulting from medication or other medical treatment or intervention.

(Iatrogenesis)

Taleb extends this concept beyond medicine and it has helped me think about the total impact of any intervention.

When we intervene without a full appreciation of the potential positive and negative effects, Taleb describes this practice as  “naive interventionism”.

What does this look like in other fields like education?

In schools these interventions might be a simple timetable change from one year to the next. You may be experiencing that now – as the the new academic year in Australia has just started. Perhaps you are only just realising the negative impact of that extended first session or the longer lunchtime.

Perhaps something more significant like streaming in primary maths classes causes obvious missed opportunities for building relationships – perhaps the negative impact outweighs the positive. We are causing more harm than good – this is iatrogenics.

I experienced many primary schools in the UK with complex intervention programmes for students I taught in my classes. I don’t remember ever fully evaluating the negative side effects of those interventions and how they were delivered.

Taleb suggests any intervention will have iatrogenics – the question for leaders is whether we are even aware of them?

It is easy to begin to use the mental model of iatrogenics in your development planning – all we have to do is ask ourselves a few questions:

  • “Will this cause harm?”
  • “How might we understand the negative impact of this idea?”
  • “What can we do to minimise the negative impact?”
  • “How will we know if the negative impact of this outweighs the positive?”
  • “What would happen if we did nothing?”

#28daysofwriting

Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash

Escaping old ideas and the bias that erodes your creative culture

Creativity, Innovation, LeadershipPublished onUpdated on1 Comment on Escaping old ideas and the bias that erodes your creative culture

I recently discovered the above quote from John Maynard Keynes, an influential English economist, about the challenge of thinking creatively.

It got a bunch of attention on Twitter and seemed to really resonate with people, as it did with me, so I thought I would spend a little longer considering what he is saying.

The creative process continues to be a passion and fascination of mine. What that process continues to rely upon is a creative culture within an organisation. When strong it is supportive of new ideas, when weak it erodes them.

John Maynard Keynes points us to the challenge of “escaping” old ideas, a direct reference in my opinion to two things. (1) The creative culture those new ideas are born into, (2) the mindset of those attached to existing ideas.

A 2010 study by the University of Pennsylvania points to an underlying negative bias towards creativity when we feel uncertainty. New ideas may often be generated in times of change and when things are in flux, and the sense of uncertainty may actually be getting in the way of being open to new ideas. As Maynard Keynes states escaping old ideas is harder and the bias research sheds some light on this.

Our results show that regardless of how open minded people are, when they feel motivated to reduce uncertainty either because they have an immediate goal of reducing uncertainty, or feel uncertain generally, this may bring negative associations with creativity to mind which result in lower evaluations of a creative idea.

Back to thinking about culture. If there is such a bias, implicit or otherwise, we have to mitigate against this within our schools and organisations. Familiarity with constant change and development is key, creating a new norm. If we can reduce the negative bias by increasing our level of collective comfort when faced with uncertainty we might recognise and encourage more creative thinking.

This makes me think of Dear Mr Judgy Pants, my open letter to those judgemental types who shoot down ideas too soon. Those people, and I know many of us have encountered them, are showing a fear of the wider uncertainty that is in fact forcing us to think creatively in the first place.

I just wanted to let you know that there are thousands of idea headstones carved because of people like you. We mourn those precious little sparks, those little glimpses of something new, different and unexpected. We still think about those ideas and the fleeting moments we had with them.

James L. Adams refers to the “Inability to tolerate ambiguity; overriding desire for order; ‘no appetite for chaos’” as one of a number of emotional blocks to creativity. When it comes to complex development and problem solving the ability to tolerate some chaos is vital.

You must usually wallow in misleading and ill fitting data, hazy and difficult-to-test concepts, opinions, values, and other such untidy quantities.

 The key thing I have been pondering on, since I shared that tweet, is about better understanding the people in our organisations and so better understand the creative culture.

Perhaps if we were to extend the research to create a measure of people’s tolerance of ambiguity <a> and compare this with a measure of their propensity for divergent thinking <b>, we would have an interesting +/-differential <c> that we could explore further.

If we were able to gather individual or collective measures we might be able to better understand the collective creative culture and make plans to support and encourage positive change.

Of course we can easily hypothesise that those individuals who are able to generate new ideas and have a high level of divergent thinking, coupled with a high level of tolerance for ambiguous and uncertain developmental states, may prove to be the most innovative.

Across an organisation these values may be carried by different people at different times and the make up and balance of our teams is something else to consider.

As much as it may feel odd to attempt to measure the artful design of innovative culture, I think there is huge value in exploring the science of it too.

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Maybe a further thinking matrix or framework might look like this.

I am grateful to have had the provocation from that quote this week to think more deeply about the individual contribution we make to a creative culture. As always, let me know what you think and how you help yourself and others “escape old ideas”. I think that is the next step to consider, what are the practical tools that allow us to escape.