“What Do You Think?”
“Cogito, ergo sum” means “I think, therefore I am” is a principle developed by Rene Descartes in 1637, often referred to as a foundational element of Western thought and philosophy. It speaks to how we attain knowledge among other things. Western culture places great value on the individual, so the word “I” is a big deal for us. If we believe Rene, and we are because we think, then how we do this stuff called “think” is a pretty important process.
Here is where it gets interesting, scary interesting. How we think impacts what and how we learn. How and what we learn has enormous influence on how we judge and then decide and, eventually, how we think. Our judgment is a consequence. What we do is a second order consequence. What we become follows. If this feels like gibberish, please hang in for a bit longer…
Edward de Bono has done wonderful work evaluating and describing the “thinking” process. What we call thought is the process we follow in order to discern patterns. Finding that pattern, be it cause and effect, safe or dangerous, good or evil, pretty or ugly, lost or not, is a very big objective for us. When processing inputs, pattern recognition is the primary objective. As de Bono puts it, “the objective of thinking is to stop thinking.” Ask any football quarterback how important is his ability to read (substitute recognize) the opposing team’s defense (substitute pattern). Ask entertainers what it means to work an audience or a car dealer what buyer behavior looks like versus that of lookers. You will get lots of pattern data. Genius is an attribute of those who “see” the patterns the rest of us can’t. We like pictures for a reason….
What if some of the patterns that we pack away and use for our decisions are wrong? We really, really want these patterns to exist, so maybe we took an experience that we had and made it a formal rule or principle. There are many events that, when observed from different positions, are described as radically different. How do we know which to pick? History suffers lots from that problem. It’s worse, it suffers because what we get was what was recorded (or rewritten).
By the way, some of the data we use for decision making suffers too. In fact, we can take the same data set and use different types of graphs and draw different conclusions (prematurely). Uncertainty can be unnerving.
How do our thinking and experience affect how we manage our enterprises? How do they affect our policies and evaluation processes? How did we make our rules? How often do we test the established “patterns” to see if they are good? Does our high value on the individual overvalue individual experience and knowledge? Does it make it harder to challenge conventional decision making?
Is Y always a function of X?
What do you think?
