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Why do you think so many people operate with blinkers on? It’s a decision to be short sighted and only think first order. Do you think it’s the way we are shaped and conditioned?
Or do you think we are primed for survival and therefor most make decisions based on survive not thrive?
Or something else?
Why do you think so many people operate with blinkers on? It’s a decision to be short sighted and only think first order. Do you think it’s the way we are shaped and conditioned?
Or do you think we are primed for survival and therefor most make decisions based on survive not thrive?
Or something else?
Oh, gosh...well I always preface any evolutionary explanation with the caveat that it is a just so story. But...here goes...when we evolved, we stayed in a small territory and interacting with less than 300 people. Many of the heuristics we developed were energy savers and also mostly accurate. Availability bias, for example, maps to what is actually the most frequent if you only experience a small territory and only a handful of folks. Second order thinking is effortful. We are energy savers and a lot of heuristics work well enough in many environments. The problem is that when they don't, they really don't. I don't think we have caught up with ourselves or our environments.
Thanks Annie. I think you hit the nail on the head “I don't think we have caught up with ourselves or our environments.”
I often compare how we evolve in work and out of work, and how you mimic others to do well in that work environment that ultimately hinders most when they leave
The reason is combinatorial explosion. That is, in any situation (and I do mean any), the number of things that could be considered before taking action is infinite. Therefore, our brains have to limit the scope of the things that we consider to be important enough to deal with. This process is called Relevance Realisation. The problem with this is that we can easily confuse things that are salient with things that are relevant. So for the example above, the hiring person's experience of engineers being disagreeable is salient but not necessarily relevant.
For a proper discussion of this I'd direct interested readers to John Vervaeke's magnum opus, Awakening from the Meaning Crisis.
Thanks Steve. I’ll take a look into your recommendation.
My recent observation is first order effects thinking is default to 90% of people and increasing. It’s very rare even with c suite they are really thinking second to third order and to mid to long term and I see this impacting business and personal relationships as busy is everyone’s badge of honour rather than going deeper into topics and themes to really understand the ripple effects
I couldn't say what the percentage of people who rely on what Kahneman calls "fast thinking" is or whether it's increasing.
My perspective on the C-suite is that this kind of second-order thinking as you term it is something that the inhabitants definitely "ought" to be doing. The questions I have long pondered are, why don't they do that kind of thinking and how did they manage to get selected for the role?
As someone who has been close to, but not in the C-suite in a number of different roles, my intuition is that the skills that are required to attain the C-suite are not the same as the skills that are required to be effective in the C-suite. I think that people also underestimate the role that luck plays in early career success - this applies to both the people who have these "successful" career trajectories and those who hire them.
From experience and coaching c suites - Most c-suite is about protecting your team, your budget and thinking about 4-6 months ahead. It’s often survival versus how do we thrive and collaborate. Very human instincts but many are being reshaped to think shorter term and protect themselves at all costs. Environmental for sure, but blinkered and detrimental for wider successes