Showing posts with label objective. Show all posts
Showing posts with label objective. Show all posts
Wednesday 3 July 2019
Saturday 30 March 2019
Saturday 5 May 2018
Is Marx still relevant 200 years later?
Amartya Sen in The Indian Express
How should we think about Karl Marx on his 200th birthday? His big influence on the politics of the world is universally acknowledged, though people would differ on how good or bad that influence has been. But going beyond that, there can be little doubt that the intellectual world has been transformed by the reflective departures Marx generated, from class analysis as an essential part of social understanding, to the explication of the profound contrast between needs and hard work as conflicting foundations of people’s moral entitlements. Some of the influences have been so pervasive, with such strong impact on the concepts and connection we look for in our day-to-day analysis, that we may not be fully aware where the influences came from. In reading some classic works of Marx, we are often placed in the uncomfortable position of the theatre-goer who loved Hamlet as a play, but wondered why it was so full of quotations.
Marxian analysis remains important today not just because of Marx’s own original work, but also because of the extraordinary contributions made in that tradition by many leading historians, social scientists and creative artists — from Antonio Gramsci, Rosa Luxemburg, Jean-Paul Sartre and Bertolt Brecht to Piero Sraffa, Maurice Dobb and Eric Hobsbawm (to mention just a few names). We do not have to be a Marxist to make use of the richness of Marx’s insights — just as one does not have to be an Aristotelian to learn from Aristotle.
There are ideas in Marx’s corpus of work that remain under-explored. I would place among the relatively neglected ideas Marx’s highly original concept of “objective illusion,” and related to that, his discussion of “false consciousness”. An objective illusion may arise from what we can see from our particular position — how things look from there (no matter how misleading). Consider the relative sizes of the sun and the moon, and the fact that from the earth they look to be about the same size (Satyajit Ray offered some interesting conversations on this phenomenon in his film, Agantuk). But to conclude from this observation that the sun and the moon are in fact of the same size in terms of mass or volume would be mistaken, and yet to deny that they do look to be about the same size from the earth would be a mistake too. Marx’s investigation of objective illusion — of “the outer form of things” — is a pioneering contribution to understanding the implications of positional dependence of observations.
The phenomenon of objective illusion helps to explain the widespread tendency of workers in an exploitative society to fail to see that there is any exploitation going on — an example that Marx did much to investigate, in the form of “false consciousness”. The idea can have many applications going beyond Marx’s own use of it. Powerful use can be made of the notion of objective illusion to understand, for example, how women, and indeed men, in strongly sexist societies may not see clearly enough — in the absence of informed political agitation — that there are huge elements of gender inequality in what look like family-oriented just societies, as bastions of role-based fairness.
There is, however, a danger in seeing Marx in narrowly formulaic terms — for example, in seeing him as a “materialist” who allegedly understood the world in terms of the importance of material conditions, denying the significance of ideas and beliefs. This is not only a serious misreading of Marx, who emphasised two-way relations between ideas and material conditions, but also a seriously missed opportunity to see the far-reaching role of ideas on which Marx threw such important light.
Let me illustrate the point with a debate on the discipline of historical explanation that was quite widespread in our own time. In one of Eric Hobsbawm’s lesser known essays, called “Where Are British Historians Going?”, published in the Marxist Quarterly in 1955, he discussed how the Marxist pointer to the two-way relationship between ideas and material conditions offers very different lessons in the contemporary world than it had in the intellectual world that Marx himself saw around him, where the prevailing focus — for example by Hegel and Hegelians — was very much on highlighting the influence of ideas on material conditions.
In contrast, the tendency of dominant schools of history in the mid-twentieth century — Hobsbawm cited here the hugely influential historical works of Lewis Bernstein Namier — had come to embrace a type of materialism that saw human action as being almost entirely motivated by a simple kind of material interest, in particular narrowly defined self-interest. Given this completely different kind of bias (very far removed from the idealist traditions of Hegel and other influential thinkers in Marx’s own time), Hobsbawm argued that a balanced two-way view must demand that analysis in Marxian lines today must particularly emphasise the importance of ideas and their influence on material conditions.
For example, it is crucial to recognise that Edmund Burke’s hugely influential criticism of Warren Hastings’s misbehaviour in India — in the famous Impeachment hearings — was directly related to Burke’s strongly held ideas of justice and fairness, whereas the self-interest-obsessed materialist historians, such as Namier, saw no more in Burke’s discontent than the influence of his [Burke’s] profit-seeking concerns which had suffered because of the policies pursued by Hastings. The overreliance on materialism — in fact of a particularly narrow kind — needed serious correction, argued Hobsbawm: “In the pre-Namier days, Marxists regarded it as one of their chief historical duties to draw attention to the material basis of politics. But since bourgeois historians have adopted what is a particular form of vulgar materialism, Marxists had to remind them that history is the struggle of men for ideas, as well as a reflection of their material environment. Mr Trevor-Roper [a famous right-wing historian] is not merely mistaken in believing that the English Revolution was the reflection of the declining fortunes of country gentlemen, but also in his belief that Puritanism was simply a reflection of their impending bankruptcies.”
To Hobsbawm’s critique, it could be added that the so-called “rational choice theory” (so dominant in recent years in large parts of mainstream economics and political analysis) thrives on a single-minded focus on self-interest as the sole human motivation, thereby missing comprehensively the balance that Marx had argued for. A rational choice theorist can, in fact, learn a great deal from reading Marx’s Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts and The German Ideology. While this would be a very different lesson from what Marx wanted Hegelians to consider, a commitment to doing justice to the two-way relations characterises both parts of Marx’s capacious pedagogy. What has to be avoided is the narrowing of Marx’s thoughts through simple formulas respectfully distributed in his name.
In remembering Marx on his 200th birthday, we not only celebrate a great intellectual, but also one whose critical analyses and investigations have many insights to offer to us today. Paying attention to Marx may be more important than paying him respect.
-------
Slavoj Zizek in The Independent
There is a delicious old Soviet joke about Radio Yerevan: a listener asks: “Is it true that Rabinovitch won a new car in the lottery?”, and the radio presenter answers: “In principle yes, it’s true, only it wasn’t a new car but an old bicycle, and he didn’t win it but it was stolen from him.”
Does exactly the same not hold for Marx’s legacy today? Let’s ask Radio Yerevan: “Is Marx’s theory still relevant today?” We can guess the answer: in principle yes, he describes wonderfully the mad dance of capitalist dynamics which only reached its peak today, more than a century and a half later, but… Gerald A Cohen enumerated the four features of the classic Marxist notion of the working class: (1) it constitutes the majority of society; (2) it produces the wealth of society; (3) it consists of the exploited members of society; and (4) its members are the needy people in society. When these four features are combined, they generate two further features: (5) the working class has nothing to lose from revolution; and (6) it can and will engage in a revolutionary transformation of society.
None of the first four features applies to today’s working class, which is why features (5) and (6) cannot be generated. Even if some of the features continue to apply to parts of today’s society, they are no longer united in a single agent: the needy people in society are no longer the workers, and so on.
But let’s dig into this question of relevance and appropriateness further. Not only is Marx’s critique of political economy and his outline of the capitalist dynamics still fully relevant, but one could even take a step further and claim that it is only today, with global capitalism, that it is fully relevant.
However, at the moment of triumph is one of defeat. After overcoming external obstacles the new threat comes from within. In other words, Marx was not simply wrong, he was often right – but more literally than he himself expected to be.
For example, Marx couldn’t have imagined that the capitalist dynamics of dissolving all particular identities would translate into ethnic identities as well. Today’s celebration of “minorities” and “marginals” is the predominant majority position – alt-rightists who complain about the terror of “political correctness” take advantage of this by presenting themselves as protectors of an endangered minority, attempting to mirror campaigns on the other side.
And then there’s the case of “commodity fetishism”. Recall the classic joke about a man who believes himself to be a grain of seed and is taken to a mental institution where the doctors do their best to finally convince him that he is not a grain but a man. When he is cured (convinced that he is not a grain of seed but a man) and allowed to leave the hospital, he immediately comes back trembling. There is a chicken outside the door and he is afraid that it will eat him.
“Dear fellow,” says his doctor, “you know very well that you are not a grain of seed but a man.”
“Of course I know that,” replies the patient, “but does the chicken know it?”
So how does this apply to the notion of commodity fetishism? Note the very beginning of the subchapter on commodity fetishism in Marx’s Das Kapital: “A commodity appears at first sight an extremely obvious, trivial thing. But its analysis brings out that it is a very strange thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties.”
Commodity fetishism (our belief that commodities are magic objects, endowed with an inherent metaphysical power) is not located in our mind, in the way we (mis)perceive reality, but in our social reality itself. We may know the truth, but we act as if we don’t know it – in our real life, we act like the chicken from the joke.
Niels Bohr, who already gave the right answer to Einstein’s “God doesn’t play dice“(“Don’t tell God what to do!”), also provided the perfect example of how a fetishist disavowal of belief works. Seeing a horseshoe on his door, a surprised visitor commented that he didn’t think Bohr believed superstitious ideas about horseshoes bringing good luck to people. Bohr snapped back: “I also do not believe in it; I have it there because I was told that it works whether one believes in it or not!”
This is how ideology works in our cynical era: we don’t have to believe in it. Nobody takes democracy or justice seriously, we are all aware of their corruption, but we practice them – in other words, we display our belief in them – because we assume they work even if we do not believe in them.
With regard to religion, we no longer “really believe”, we just follow (some of the) religious rituals and mores as part of the respect for the “lifestyle” of the community to which we belong (non-believing Jews obeying kosher rules “out of respect for tradition”, for example).
“I do not really believe in it, it is just part of my culture” seems to be the predominant mode of the displaced belief, characteristic of our times. “Culture” is the name for all those things we practice without really believing in them, without taking them quite seriously.
This is why we dismiss fundamentalist believers as “barbarians” or “primitive”, as anti-cultural, as a threat to culture – they dare to take seriously their beliefs. The cynical era in which we live would have no surprises for Marx.
Marx’s theories are thus not simply alive: Marx is a ghost who continues to haunt us – and the only way to keep him alive is to focus on those of his insights which are today more true than in his own time.
How should we think about Karl Marx on his 200th birthday? His big influence on the politics of the world is universally acknowledged, though people would differ on how good or bad that influence has been. But going beyond that, there can be little doubt that the intellectual world has been transformed by the reflective departures Marx generated, from class analysis as an essential part of social understanding, to the explication of the profound contrast between needs and hard work as conflicting foundations of people’s moral entitlements. Some of the influences have been so pervasive, with such strong impact on the concepts and connection we look for in our day-to-day analysis, that we may not be fully aware where the influences came from. In reading some classic works of Marx, we are often placed in the uncomfortable position of the theatre-goer who loved Hamlet as a play, but wondered why it was so full of quotations.
Marxian analysis remains important today not just because of Marx’s own original work, but also because of the extraordinary contributions made in that tradition by many leading historians, social scientists and creative artists — from Antonio Gramsci, Rosa Luxemburg, Jean-Paul Sartre and Bertolt Brecht to Piero Sraffa, Maurice Dobb and Eric Hobsbawm (to mention just a few names). We do not have to be a Marxist to make use of the richness of Marx’s insights — just as one does not have to be an Aristotelian to learn from Aristotle.
There are ideas in Marx’s corpus of work that remain under-explored. I would place among the relatively neglected ideas Marx’s highly original concept of “objective illusion,” and related to that, his discussion of “false consciousness”. An objective illusion may arise from what we can see from our particular position — how things look from there (no matter how misleading). Consider the relative sizes of the sun and the moon, and the fact that from the earth they look to be about the same size (Satyajit Ray offered some interesting conversations on this phenomenon in his film, Agantuk). But to conclude from this observation that the sun and the moon are in fact of the same size in terms of mass or volume would be mistaken, and yet to deny that they do look to be about the same size from the earth would be a mistake too. Marx’s investigation of objective illusion — of “the outer form of things” — is a pioneering contribution to understanding the implications of positional dependence of observations.
The phenomenon of objective illusion helps to explain the widespread tendency of workers in an exploitative society to fail to see that there is any exploitation going on — an example that Marx did much to investigate, in the form of “false consciousness”. The idea can have many applications going beyond Marx’s own use of it. Powerful use can be made of the notion of objective illusion to understand, for example, how women, and indeed men, in strongly sexist societies may not see clearly enough — in the absence of informed political agitation — that there are huge elements of gender inequality in what look like family-oriented just societies, as bastions of role-based fairness.
There is, however, a danger in seeing Marx in narrowly formulaic terms — for example, in seeing him as a “materialist” who allegedly understood the world in terms of the importance of material conditions, denying the significance of ideas and beliefs. This is not only a serious misreading of Marx, who emphasised two-way relations between ideas and material conditions, but also a seriously missed opportunity to see the far-reaching role of ideas on which Marx threw such important light.
Let me illustrate the point with a debate on the discipline of historical explanation that was quite widespread in our own time. In one of Eric Hobsbawm’s lesser known essays, called “Where Are British Historians Going?”, published in the Marxist Quarterly in 1955, he discussed how the Marxist pointer to the two-way relationship between ideas and material conditions offers very different lessons in the contemporary world than it had in the intellectual world that Marx himself saw around him, where the prevailing focus — for example by Hegel and Hegelians — was very much on highlighting the influence of ideas on material conditions.
In contrast, the tendency of dominant schools of history in the mid-twentieth century — Hobsbawm cited here the hugely influential historical works of Lewis Bernstein Namier — had come to embrace a type of materialism that saw human action as being almost entirely motivated by a simple kind of material interest, in particular narrowly defined self-interest. Given this completely different kind of bias (very far removed from the idealist traditions of Hegel and other influential thinkers in Marx’s own time), Hobsbawm argued that a balanced two-way view must demand that analysis in Marxian lines today must particularly emphasise the importance of ideas and their influence on material conditions.
For example, it is crucial to recognise that Edmund Burke’s hugely influential criticism of Warren Hastings’s misbehaviour in India — in the famous Impeachment hearings — was directly related to Burke’s strongly held ideas of justice and fairness, whereas the self-interest-obsessed materialist historians, such as Namier, saw no more in Burke’s discontent than the influence of his [Burke’s] profit-seeking concerns which had suffered because of the policies pursued by Hastings. The overreliance on materialism — in fact of a particularly narrow kind — needed serious correction, argued Hobsbawm: “In the pre-Namier days, Marxists regarded it as one of their chief historical duties to draw attention to the material basis of politics. But since bourgeois historians have adopted what is a particular form of vulgar materialism, Marxists had to remind them that history is the struggle of men for ideas, as well as a reflection of their material environment. Mr Trevor-Roper [a famous right-wing historian] is not merely mistaken in believing that the English Revolution was the reflection of the declining fortunes of country gentlemen, but also in his belief that Puritanism was simply a reflection of their impending bankruptcies.”
To Hobsbawm’s critique, it could be added that the so-called “rational choice theory” (so dominant in recent years in large parts of mainstream economics and political analysis) thrives on a single-minded focus on self-interest as the sole human motivation, thereby missing comprehensively the balance that Marx had argued for. A rational choice theorist can, in fact, learn a great deal from reading Marx’s Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts and The German Ideology. While this would be a very different lesson from what Marx wanted Hegelians to consider, a commitment to doing justice to the two-way relations characterises both parts of Marx’s capacious pedagogy. What has to be avoided is the narrowing of Marx’s thoughts through simple formulas respectfully distributed in his name.
In remembering Marx on his 200th birthday, we not only celebrate a great intellectual, but also one whose critical analyses and investigations have many insights to offer to us today. Paying attention to Marx may be more important than paying him respect.
-------
Slavoj Zizek in The Independent
There is a delicious old Soviet joke about Radio Yerevan: a listener asks: “Is it true that Rabinovitch won a new car in the lottery?”, and the radio presenter answers: “In principle yes, it’s true, only it wasn’t a new car but an old bicycle, and he didn’t win it but it was stolen from him.”
Does exactly the same not hold for Marx’s legacy today? Let’s ask Radio Yerevan: “Is Marx’s theory still relevant today?” We can guess the answer: in principle yes, he describes wonderfully the mad dance of capitalist dynamics which only reached its peak today, more than a century and a half later, but… Gerald A Cohen enumerated the four features of the classic Marxist notion of the working class: (1) it constitutes the majority of society; (2) it produces the wealth of society; (3) it consists of the exploited members of society; and (4) its members are the needy people in society. When these four features are combined, they generate two further features: (5) the working class has nothing to lose from revolution; and (6) it can and will engage in a revolutionary transformation of society.
None of the first four features applies to today’s working class, which is why features (5) and (6) cannot be generated. Even if some of the features continue to apply to parts of today’s society, they are no longer united in a single agent: the needy people in society are no longer the workers, and so on.
But let’s dig into this question of relevance and appropriateness further. Not only is Marx’s critique of political economy and his outline of the capitalist dynamics still fully relevant, but one could even take a step further and claim that it is only today, with global capitalism, that it is fully relevant.
However, at the moment of triumph is one of defeat. After overcoming external obstacles the new threat comes from within. In other words, Marx was not simply wrong, he was often right – but more literally than he himself expected to be.
For example, Marx couldn’t have imagined that the capitalist dynamics of dissolving all particular identities would translate into ethnic identities as well. Today’s celebration of “minorities” and “marginals” is the predominant majority position – alt-rightists who complain about the terror of “political correctness” take advantage of this by presenting themselves as protectors of an endangered minority, attempting to mirror campaigns on the other side.
And then there’s the case of “commodity fetishism”. Recall the classic joke about a man who believes himself to be a grain of seed and is taken to a mental institution where the doctors do their best to finally convince him that he is not a grain but a man. When he is cured (convinced that he is not a grain of seed but a man) and allowed to leave the hospital, he immediately comes back trembling. There is a chicken outside the door and he is afraid that it will eat him.
“Dear fellow,” says his doctor, “you know very well that you are not a grain of seed but a man.”
“Of course I know that,” replies the patient, “but does the chicken know it?”
So how does this apply to the notion of commodity fetishism? Note the very beginning of the subchapter on commodity fetishism in Marx’s Das Kapital: “A commodity appears at first sight an extremely obvious, trivial thing. But its analysis brings out that it is a very strange thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties.”
Commodity fetishism (our belief that commodities are magic objects, endowed with an inherent metaphysical power) is not located in our mind, in the way we (mis)perceive reality, but in our social reality itself. We may know the truth, but we act as if we don’t know it – in our real life, we act like the chicken from the joke.
Niels Bohr, who already gave the right answer to Einstein’s “God doesn’t play dice“(“Don’t tell God what to do!”), also provided the perfect example of how a fetishist disavowal of belief works. Seeing a horseshoe on his door, a surprised visitor commented that he didn’t think Bohr believed superstitious ideas about horseshoes bringing good luck to people. Bohr snapped back: “I also do not believe in it; I have it there because I was told that it works whether one believes in it or not!”
This is how ideology works in our cynical era: we don’t have to believe in it. Nobody takes democracy or justice seriously, we are all aware of their corruption, but we practice them – in other words, we display our belief in them – because we assume they work even if we do not believe in them.
With regard to religion, we no longer “really believe”, we just follow (some of the) religious rituals and mores as part of the respect for the “lifestyle” of the community to which we belong (non-believing Jews obeying kosher rules “out of respect for tradition”, for example).
“I do not really believe in it, it is just part of my culture” seems to be the predominant mode of the displaced belief, characteristic of our times. “Culture” is the name for all those things we practice without really believing in them, without taking them quite seriously.
This is why we dismiss fundamentalist believers as “barbarians” or “primitive”, as anti-cultural, as a threat to culture – they dare to take seriously their beliefs. The cynical era in which we live would have no surprises for Marx.
Marx’s theories are thus not simply alive: Marx is a ghost who continues to haunt us – and the only way to keep him alive is to focus on those of his insights which are today more true than in his own time.
Monday 18 December 2017
Monday 4 September 2017
On Demonetisation - The de-mon is in the details
As everybody knows, any criticism of demonetisation is both unpatriotic and anti-national.
As everybody knows, any criticism of demonetisation is both unpatriotic and anti-national. In any case, it has been a success — if you read the right newspaper editorial, watch the right television channel or listen to the bright folk from the country the U.K. magazine Private Eye calls Aslikhan.
There is a good reason economics isn’t an exact science. It tells us demonetisation is both an unmitigated disaster as well as a resounding success.
The demonetisers think it was the latter while it was the former for the demonetisees. The de-mon is in the details.
To fully understand the whole thing, here’s an analogy. Imagine India preparing to put a man on Mars. He-who-has-your-best-interests-at-heart then goes on national television to announce the three reasons for doing so: to prove that Mars is inhabited by Indians, to bring back all the gold stashed away there by people not sympathetic to his philosophy, and finally, to arrest all the fake Martians and throw them into jail on Jupiter.
Weeks later the objectives change. Now we are told that the mission is to bring back Matt Damon who has been left behind there by Hollywood.
“But that was a movie, all fiction,” cry the critics only to be told to shut up because, as everybody knows, critics are the ones who have stashed away the gold. To err is human, but to criticise is (see above) …
A few more weeks go by, and it is discovered there are no jails on Jupiter. With the flexibility that allows him to hide unseen behind a spiral staircase, the spokesman now tells us that the mission is a success, that we have achieved everything we set out to do and anybody who doesn’t believe that can go to Jupiter, our neighbouring planet.
A confused population (was it Mars or Matt? Is there gold on Jupiter? Can we tell a real Martian from a fake one?) continues to look for answers. Finally these arrive. In summary, we shouldn’t have gone to Mars, the objectives made no sense. We told you so.
“April Fool,” says the spokesman, “we were misquoted on live television. The following are the real reasons for going to Mars: to help India win the cricket series in Sri Lanka, to give the television channels something to fight about, and to give us a reason to return to earth. You can’t come back home without going away first. We have achieved all these targets. We are the greatest.”
One point two billion people suddenly remember their Keats: Was it a vision, or a waking dream? Fled is that November speech –Do I wake or sleep?
Did someone forcibly pull out from our pockets all those ₹1,000 currency notes? Were we told in various accents across the country that everything was being done for our own good, so shut up and queue up? Was this the face that launched a thousand slips? Perhaps the Mars trip is the real story and demonetisation the fictional one, who knows?
Tuesday 27 December 2016
What is Strategic Thinking
Ron Carucci in Harvard Business Review
It’s a common complaint among top executives: “I’m spending all my time managing trivial and tactical problems, and I don’t have time to get to the big-picture stuff.” And yet when I ask my executive clients, “If I cleared your calendar for an entire day to free you up to be ‘more strategic,’ what would you actually do?” most have no idea. I often get a shrug and a blank stare in response. Some people assume that thinking strategically is a function of thinking up “big thoughts” or reading scholarly research on business trends. Others assume that watching TED talks or lectures by futurists will help them think more strategically.
How can we implement strategic thinking if we’re not even sure what it looks like?
In our 10-year longitudinal study of over 2,700 newly appointed executives, 67% of them said they struggled with letting go of work from previous roles. More than half (58%) said they were expected to know details about work and projects they believed were beneath their level, and more than half also felt they were involved in decisions that those below them should be making. This suggests that the problem of too little strategic leadership may be as much a function of doing as of thinking.
Rich Horwath, CEO of the Strategic Thinking Institute, found in his research that 44% of managers spent most of their time firefighting in cultures that rewarded reactivity and discouraged thoughtfulness. Nearly all leaders (96%) claimed they lacked time for strategic thinking, again, because they were too busy putting out fires. Both issues appear to be symptoms masking a fundamental issue. In my experience helping executives succeed at the top of companies, the best content for great strategic thinking comes right from one’s own job.
Here are three practical ways I’ve helped executives shift their roles to assume the appropriate strategic focus required by their jobs.
Identify the strategic requirements of your job. One chief operating officer I worked with was appointed to her newly created role with the expressed purpose of integrating two supply chain organizations resulting from an acquisition. Having risen through the supply chain ranks, she spent most of her time reacting to operational missteps and customer complaints. Her adept problem-solving skill had trained the organization to look to her for quick decisions to resolve issues. I asked her, “What’s the most important thing your CEO and board want you to accomplish in this role?” She answered readily, “To take out duplicate costs from redundant work and to get the organization on one technology platform to manage our supply chain.” Her succinct clarity surprised even her, though she quickly realized how little she was engaged in activities that would reach that outcome. We broke the mandate into four focus areas for her organization, realigned her team to include leaders from both organizations, and ensured all meetings and decisions she was involved in directly connected to her mandate.
It’s a common complaint among top executives: “I’m spending all my time managing trivial and tactical problems, and I don’t have time to get to the big-picture stuff.” And yet when I ask my executive clients, “If I cleared your calendar for an entire day to free you up to be ‘more strategic,’ what would you actually do?” most have no idea. I often get a shrug and a blank stare in response. Some people assume that thinking strategically is a function of thinking up “big thoughts” or reading scholarly research on business trends. Others assume that watching TED talks or lectures by futurists will help them think more strategically.
How can we implement strategic thinking if we’re not even sure what it looks like?
In our 10-year longitudinal study of over 2,700 newly appointed executives, 67% of them said they struggled with letting go of work from previous roles. More than half (58%) said they were expected to know details about work and projects they believed were beneath their level, and more than half also felt they were involved in decisions that those below them should be making. This suggests that the problem of too little strategic leadership may be as much a function of doing as of thinking.
Rich Horwath, CEO of the Strategic Thinking Institute, found in his research that 44% of managers spent most of their time firefighting in cultures that rewarded reactivity and discouraged thoughtfulness. Nearly all leaders (96%) claimed they lacked time for strategic thinking, again, because they were too busy putting out fires. Both issues appear to be symptoms masking a fundamental issue. In my experience helping executives succeed at the top of companies, the best content for great strategic thinking comes right from one’s own job.
Here are three practical ways I’ve helped executives shift their roles to assume the appropriate strategic focus required by their jobs.
Identify the strategic requirements of your job. One chief operating officer I worked with was appointed to her newly created role with the expressed purpose of integrating two supply chain organizations resulting from an acquisition. Having risen through the supply chain ranks, she spent most of her time reacting to operational missteps and customer complaints. Her adept problem-solving skill had trained the organization to look to her for quick decisions to resolve issues. I asked her, “What’s the most important thing your CEO and board want you to accomplish in this role?” She answered readily, “To take out duplicate costs from redundant work and to get the organization on one technology platform to manage our supply chain.” Her succinct clarity surprised even her, though she quickly realized how little she was engaged in activities that would reach that outcome. We broke the mandate into four focus areas for her organization, realigned her team to include leaders from both organizations, and ensured all meetings and decisions she was involved in directly connected to her mandate.
Unfortunately, for many executives, the connection between their role and the strategic contribution they should make is not so obvious. As quoted in Horwath’s study, Harvard Business School professor David Collis says, “It’s a dirty little secret: Most executives cannot articulate the objective, scope, and advantage of their business in a simple statement. If they can’t, neither can anyone else.” He also cites Roger Martin’s research, which found that 43% of managers cannot state their own strategy. Executives with less clarity must work harder to etch out the line of sight between their role and its impact on the organization’s direction. In some cases, shedding the collection of bad habits that have consumed how they embody their role will be their greatest challenge to embodying strategic thinking.
Uncover patterns to focus resource investments. Once a clear line of sight is drawn to a leader’s strategic contribution, resources must be aligned to focus on that contribution. For many new executives, the large pile of resources they now get to direct has far greater consequence than anything they’ve allocated before. Aligning budgets and bodies around a unified direction is much harder when there’s more of them, especially when reactionary decision making has become the norm. Too often, immediate crises cause executives to whiplash people and money.
This is a common symptom of missing insights. Without a sound fact and insight base on which to prioritize resources, squeaky wheels get all the grease. Great strategic executives know how to use data to generate new insights about how they and their industries make money. Examining patterns of performance over time — financial, operational, customer, and competitive data — will reveal critical foresight about future opportunities and risks.
For some, the word insight may conjure up notions of breakthrough ideas or “aha moments.” But studying basic patterns within available data gives simple insights that pinpoint what truly sets a company apart. In the case of the supply chain executive above, rather than a blanket cost reduction, she uncovered patterns within her data that identified and protected the most competitive work of her organization: getting products to customers on time and accurately. She isolated those activities from work that added little value or was redundant, which is where she focused her cost-cutting efforts. She was able to dramatically reduce costs while improving the customer’s experience.
Such focus helps leaders allocate money and people with confidence. They know they are working on the right things without reacting to impulsive ideas or distracting minutia.
Invite dissent to build others’ commitment. Strategic insight is as much a social capability as it is an intellectual one. No executive’s strategic brilliance will ever be acted upon alone. An executive needs those she leads to translate strategic insights into choices that drive results. For people to commit to carrying out an executive’s strategic thinking, they have to both understand and believe in it.
That’s far more difficult than it sounds. One study found that only 14% of people understood their company’s strategy and only 24% felt the strategy was linked to their individual accountabilities. Most executives mistakenly assume that repeated explanations through dense PowerPoint presentations are what increases understanding and ownership of strategy.
To the contrary, people’s depth of commitment increases when they, not their leader, are talking. One executive I work with habitually takes his strategic insights to his team and intentionally asks for dueling fact bases to both support and refute his thinking. As the debate unfolds, flawed assumptions are surfaced and replaced with shared understanding, ideas are refined, and ownership for success spreads.
Sound strategic thinking doesn’t have to remain an abstract mystery only a few are able to realize. Despite the common complaint, it’s not the result of making time for it. Executives must extract themselves from day-to-day problems and do the work that aligns their job with the company’s strategy. They need to be armed with insights that predict where best to focus resources. And they need to build a coalition of support by inviting those who must execute to disagree with and improve their strategic thinking. Taking these three practical steps will raise the altitude of executives to the appropriate strategic work of the future, freeing those they lead to direct the operational activities of today.
Uncover patterns to focus resource investments. Once a clear line of sight is drawn to a leader’s strategic contribution, resources must be aligned to focus on that contribution. For many new executives, the large pile of resources they now get to direct has far greater consequence than anything they’ve allocated before. Aligning budgets and bodies around a unified direction is much harder when there’s more of them, especially when reactionary decision making has become the norm. Too often, immediate crises cause executives to whiplash people and money.
This is a common symptom of missing insights. Without a sound fact and insight base on which to prioritize resources, squeaky wheels get all the grease. Great strategic executives know how to use data to generate new insights about how they and their industries make money. Examining patterns of performance over time — financial, operational, customer, and competitive data — will reveal critical foresight about future opportunities and risks.
For some, the word insight may conjure up notions of breakthrough ideas or “aha moments.” But studying basic patterns within available data gives simple insights that pinpoint what truly sets a company apart. In the case of the supply chain executive above, rather than a blanket cost reduction, she uncovered patterns within her data that identified and protected the most competitive work of her organization: getting products to customers on time and accurately. She isolated those activities from work that added little value or was redundant, which is where she focused her cost-cutting efforts. She was able to dramatically reduce costs while improving the customer’s experience.
Such focus helps leaders allocate money and people with confidence. They know they are working on the right things without reacting to impulsive ideas or distracting minutia.
Invite dissent to build others’ commitment. Strategic insight is as much a social capability as it is an intellectual one. No executive’s strategic brilliance will ever be acted upon alone. An executive needs those she leads to translate strategic insights into choices that drive results. For people to commit to carrying out an executive’s strategic thinking, they have to both understand and believe in it.
That’s far more difficult than it sounds. One study found that only 14% of people understood their company’s strategy and only 24% felt the strategy was linked to their individual accountabilities. Most executives mistakenly assume that repeated explanations through dense PowerPoint presentations are what increases understanding and ownership of strategy.
To the contrary, people’s depth of commitment increases when they, not their leader, are talking. One executive I work with habitually takes his strategic insights to his team and intentionally asks for dueling fact bases to both support and refute his thinking. As the debate unfolds, flawed assumptions are surfaced and replaced with shared understanding, ideas are refined, and ownership for success spreads.
Sound strategic thinking doesn’t have to remain an abstract mystery only a few are able to realize. Despite the common complaint, it’s not the result of making time for it. Executives must extract themselves from day-to-day problems and do the work that aligns their job with the company’s strategy. They need to be armed with insights that predict where best to focus resources. And they need to build a coalition of support by inviting those who must execute to disagree with and improve their strategic thinking. Taking these three practical steps will raise the altitude of executives to the appropriate strategic work of the future, freeing those they lead to direct the operational activities of today.
Saturday 29 October 2016
If economists want to be useful again they need to redeem themselves
Allister Heath in The Telegraph
Imagine that you kept getting it wrong, not just a little, but completely and utterly.
When times were bad you thought they were good, and when they were good you thought they were bad. You argued against successful solutions, and in favour of failed ones. You predicted a rise when in fact a fall materialised; to add insult to injury, you clung to your old ways of thinking, refusing to change apart from in the most trivial of ways. In normal industries you would be finished: your collection of P45s would fill half a drawer, and you would long since have been forced to retrain into somebody of more value to society.
But not in one profession. Yes, dear readers, I’m referring to the systemic, cultural problems of modern, applied macroeconomics, in the public as well as private sectors, where failure continues to be rewarded.
Economists who make all the wrong calls keep their jobs and big paychecks, as long as their faulty views echo the mainstream, received wisdom of the moment. I spent five years studying economics, and I still love the subject. At its best, economics is the answer to myriad problems, the prism through which to view the vast majority of decisions.
But I’m deeply frustrated with some of its practitioners: all those folk who predicted that the third quarter would see very little or negative growth, when in fact the economy grew by a remarkable 0.5pc, the most important statistic of recent times.
For political and psychological reasons, one small and rather unreliable snapshot had become all-important. Had that (preliminary and approximate number) been in negative territory, or close to zero, the outcry would have been deafening and reverberated around the world. The markets would either have slumped or more likely, bounced back, on the assumption that Brexit would be reversed. Yet the opposite happened, and the economy did well (France grew by just 0.2pc during the same time).
Combined with the news that Nissan will be sticking with the UK, it was a great week for Brexit, made all the better by the announcement of Heathrow expansion. Brexit won the referendum, lost the immediate aftermath, won the next few months and has now won again.
Of course, the war continues, and will do so for years. There are huge challenges looming. But this was the week that the economics profession was further discredited. The forecasts were not just completely wrong – my guess is that they were actually downright harmful, shaving growth in areas where elites that are most likely to be swayed by economists decisions.
Economists have form: most backed the euro, failed to see the financial crisis coming, missed the dot.com bubble and the Asian crisis, loved the European Exchange Rate Mechanism and never understood the Thatcherite revolution.
Previous generations failed just as badly: the vast majority loved Keynesian economics during the 1970s, read and recommended a textbook that thought that the USSR would eventually overtake America, backed corporatism, failed to predict the 1929 crash and provided all of the wrong answers in the 1930s.
One problem is groupthink, another is the inability to be objective. But the biggest problem is a faulty paradigm: a fundamental flaw at the heart of the models and assumptions of the economic mainstream, aided and abated by an academic establishment which excludes dissenters from its journals and top faculties.
So if economists want to be useful again, they should do two things.
First, we need a proper Parliamentary inquiry into the failures of the Treasury model and official forecasting before and after Brexit. There is an argument for this to be extended to the Bank of England and even to the private sector. Economists need to cooperate, if even anonymously: are some under pressure to toe various lines? If not, what is the real reason for such a succession of flawed consensuses?
Second, the real threat to the economy is absurd decisions such as the ruling that Uber drivers should be treated like employees (on the basis that the US firm exerts too much control and direction over drivers, even though they are free to choose their hours and commitment).
If not reversed, this judicial activism will destroy jobs and push up prices; it is a shame that such a good week ended on such a sour note. The Government may need to legislate to make it clear that Uber and other similar enterprises are platforms, not employers. If economists want to redeem themselves, they should explain why flexible markets are good and why it would be a genuine disaster if we kill off the sharing economy with red tape.
Imagine that you kept getting it wrong, not just a little, but completely and utterly.
When times were bad you thought they were good, and when they were good you thought they were bad. You argued against successful solutions, and in favour of failed ones. You predicted a rise when in fact a fall materialised; to add insult to injury, you clung to your old ways of thinking, refusing to change apart from in the most trivial of ways. In normal industries you would be finished: your collection of P45s would fill half a drawer, and you would long since have been forced to retrain into somebody of more value to society.
But not in one profession. Yes, dear readers, I’m referring to the systemic, cultural problems of modern, applied macroeconomics, in the public as well as private sectors, where failure continues to be rewarded.
Economists who make all the wrong calls keep their jobs and big paychecks, as long as their faulty views echo the mainstream, received wisdom of the moment. I spent five years studying economics, and I still love the subject. At its best, economics is the answer to myriad problems, the prism through which to view the vast majority of decisions.
But I’m deeply frustrated with some of its practitioners: all those folk who predicted that the third quarter would see very little or negative growth, when in fact the economy grew by a remarkable 0.5pc, the most important statistic of recent times.
For political and psychological reasons, one small and rather unreliable snapshot had become all-important. Had that (preliminary and approximate number) been in negative territory, or close to zero, the outcry would have been deafening and reverberated around the world. The markets would either have slumped or more likely, bounced back, on the assumption that Brexit would be reversed. Yet the opposite happened, and the economy did well (France grew by just 0.2pc during the same time).
Combined with the news that Nissan will be sticking with the UK, it was a great week for Brexit, made all the better by the announcement of Heathrow expansion. Brexit won the referendum, lost the immediate aftermath, won the next few months and has now won again.
Of course, the war continues, and will do so for years. There are huge challenges looming. But this was the week that the economics profession was further discredited. The forecasts were not just completely wrong – my guess is that they were actually downright harmful, shaving growth in areas where elites that are most likely to be swayed by economists decisions.
Economists have form: most backed the euro, failed to see the financial crisis coming, missed the dot.com bubble and the Asian crisis, loved the European Exchange Rate Mechanism and never understood the Thatcherite revolution.
Previous generations failed just as badly: the vast majority loved Keynesian economics during the 1970s, read and recommended a textbook that thought that the USSR would eventually overtake America, backed corporatism, failed to predict the 1929 crash and provided all of the wrong answers in the 1930s.
One problem is groupthink, another is the inability to be objective. But the biggest problem is a faulty paradigm: a fundamental flaw at the heart of the models and assumptions of the economic mainstream, aided and abated by an academic establishment which excludes dissenters from its journals and top faculties.
So if economists want to be useful again, they should do two things.
First, we need a proper Parliamentary inquiry into the failures of the Treasury model and official forecasting before and after Brexit. There is an argument for this to be extended to the Bank of England and even to the private sector. Economists need to cooperate, if even anonymously: are some under pressure to toe various lines? If not, what is the real reason for such a succession of flawed consensuses?
Second, the real threat to the economy is absurd decisions such as the ruling that Uber drivers should be treated like employees (on the basis that the US firm exerts too much control and direction over drivers, even though they are free to choose their hours and commitment).
If not reversed, this judicial activism will destroy jobs and push up prices; it is a shame that such a good week ended on such a sour note. The Government may need to legislate to make it clear that Uber and other similar enterprises are platforms, not employers. If economists want to redeem themselves, they should explain why flexible markets are good and why it would be a genuine disaster if we kill off the sharing economy with red tape.
Tuesday 1 July 2014
Monday 30 June 2014
NGOs of the mind
Shiv Vishvanathan in The Hindu
The NGO as an expression of voluntarism is a Janus-faced entity and it is this double-edged nature that puts it in a perpetual state of suspicion. The recent Intelligence Bureau report on NGOs against development has to be reread as a part of a new text of suspicion
Jairam Ramesh, the former Union Minister of Environment, once playfully, in fact factiously, commented that the word ‘Intelligence Bureau’ (IB) is an oxymoron. He was warning us that often, instead of collecting information, the IB projects the current fears of the state. It plays out the current politics of anxiety about security and development. What intrigues one is that such suspicion now acquires numeracy. The IB estimates non-governmental organisation (NGO) resistance as negatively impacting GDP by two to three per cent. Seen as a mirror inversion of a Human Development Report, the report becomes surreal. One wonders what the IB will estimate as the price of a dead myth or an extinct waterfall. One is not asking for the source of the estimate or its methodology but the idea itself conveys a false sense of objectivity about the acts of intelligence gathering.
One must also recognise that the NGO as an expression of voluntarism is a Janus-faced entity. At one level, it acts as an extension counter of the state, engaging in acts of humanitarian and social work. At another level, it is a political and cognitive entity challenging development paradigms and arguing issues of governance and democracy. This double-edged nature of the NGO puts it in a perpetual state of suspicion. Yet, we have to recognise that civic epistemologies and civil society creativity are crucial for democracy.
Text of suspicion
The recent IB report has to be reread as a part of a new text of suspicion. It combines issues of environment and defence, internal and external security, and security and sustainability to create a new monster, a threat called “NGOs against development.” The report focusses more on the initiation and delay of projects rather than the suffering caused by these projects through acts of displacement. Development is a benign act of the sovereign state. The NGO and social movements are seen as over-obsessed with acts of suffering. In that sense, it is an upstream rather than a downstream critique of the NGO. The delay becomes the act of sedition and it is these delays that contribute negatively to GDP.
The NGO is then read as a surrogate ploy for the alien or outsider. Behind each NGO is a foreign national or a grant-giving agency. The foreign hand, once legendary in the era of the Cold War, now returns not as CIA but as grant-giving agency. The language of human rights becomes a veneer for a new opposition to the state and serves as a cover for such disruptive activity. In fact, anti-development becomes the label for a network of conspiracies between the local NGO and foreign agencies to keep India in a state of underdevelopment.
Before one responds to the details of the report, one must confess that NGOs are not angelic groups. Many have become institutions which have turned seriatim protest into a career. One creates a trajectory from Bhopal to Narmada to GM foods oblivious of one’s last battles. Many of these groups have advocated transparency and responsibility but failed to apply it to themselves. If the report is a demand for self-reflexivity, one can sympathise with it, but when it clubs NGOs into one bundle and treats them as seditious, it threatens civil society as a space of freedom, dissent and creativity. Once one realises that development has created more refugees than the wars we have fought, one senses that development is more problematic than the IB report can imagine it to be.
‘Anti-development’ label
The report creates anti-development as problematic and especially turns Greenpeace into a monster. One must admit that it is easy to caricature Greenpeace. The organisation’s style is theatric, which often upsets the stuffed-shirt state, used to a sense of dignity. But Greenpeace raises critical issues, confronts the silences of development with a melodramatic, even overstated, eloquence, which is effective and attention-grabbing. It is seen as people-centric rather than government-centric and this focus is regarded as unpardonable. Because it amplifies marginal voices, it is seen as disruptive and yet as a critic said, “If Greenpeace did not exist it would have been invented. It is an early warning system on development and peace issues.” But the real sore point is not the Greenpeace style but the set of issues Greenpeace and other NGOs have raised.
The fourfold resistance of NGOs focusses on nuclear energy, coal-fired plants, genetically modified organisms (GMO) and anti-extractive activities in the northeast. All four are seen as attempts to protect livelihoods, local freedom and obtain fairness. The IB argues that because of this, India has become vulnerable in international forums, unable to voice its usual pieties of peace and development.
The report observes that international agencies earlier used “caste discrimination, human rights and big dams as items to discredit India.” These same forums have graduated to new embarrassments around growth retarding campaigns such as the anti-bauxite, anti-coal, anti-nuclear, anti-GM issues. It is their style and focus that make them so devastating. The IB reads each NGO as a pressure group which creates a specific scenario. It sets an agenda, creates debates in the media, lobbies diplomats and governments generally seeking to create a network of embarrassments. The keywords used are camouflage words, their democratic content hiding a malign intent, a strategy of disruption and delay, restricting development in key sectors. Each NGO is backed by foreign funds, each infiltrates a local group, commandeers a local issue to embarrass and delay the development projects of the regime.
These arguments seem reasonable, the scenario believable till one examines the array of people cited. It is the roll call of the best and brightest in the country. They include S.P. Udayakumar, Suman Sahai, Kavita Kuruganti, Admiral Ramdas, Paranjoy GuhaThakurta, Aruna Rodrigues, Surendra Gadekar. Because they criticise the development project in its specificities, they do not become anti-national. In fact this report should become an early warning system for civil society to gear itself for battles. Whether it is the Congress or the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), it is clear that development without jitters is a priority. Dissent becomes an activity frowned upon. In fact, one must recognise there is an NGO in all of us. One must also recognise that the well-being of the nation requires that the demand of the nation not be confused with the imperatives of the nation-state. Nations can allow for diversity, while nation-states seek uniformity and official diktats.
Ethics of intervention, memory
The activists listed link the ethics of invention and the ethics of memory. Tradition and change are linked not through sentimentality but through ideas of livelihood and empowerment. It is not only a rights discourse, it is a battle for survival arguing that the development discourse cannot be indifferent to voice, livelihoods and its roots in community. Riding roughshod over democracy is not a criteria of development. Delay is not the only criteria of evaluation. Time as plurality, history, myth, an ethic of memory, as a guarantee against obsolescence and triage are also relevant criteria. Delay speaks the language of growth without an articulate idea of responsibility and it is on this point that the IB report errs in its witch-hunt against “anti-development”. The politics of delay needs an aetiology, a discourse on causes. Delay is an intermediate stage in the development process. Delay comes because the government fails to talk to people about the location of a project, its implication for livelihoods and life in a locality. When people discover that the black box of national interest has trumped local empowerment they have to resort to politics desperately. What is often dismissed as sedition is mainly a crisis of empowerment, a failure of dialogue. A development that begins with diktats is bound to be delayed. The presence of a foreign hand often becomes a pretext for ignoring local voice and local issues.
The IB report emphasises that these NGOs are a threat to the national, economic security of India. But their understanding of security is restricted. It has no sense of seed security, or forest cover, no sense of trusteeship of the future. What is seen as sedition is often an attempt to combine an ecological sense of sustainability with a classical idea of security. In fact the IB’s sense of security allows for paranoia but not pluralism. A critical response has to deconstruct the categories of its official discourse, the 19th century suspicions that it stirs, and still show that civil society is adding a life-giving content to these categories. Suffering and sensitivity to suffering have to be a part of such measures and these the NGOs manage to do. The other issue the NGOs attempt to raise is the debate around choice of technologies and this the nation-state and its experts resent. A refusal to debate options for the future threatens the future and such stubbornness bordering on illiteracy cannot be conflated with security.
NGO transparency
To create the climate for such a debate, the NGOs have to spring clean their bureaucracies, show that foreign grants do not colour local issues. Second, they have to account for grants and any sub-grants they might make. The trajectory must be transparent to prevent suspicions clouding a crucial debate. Third, they have to demonstrate to the rest of the society that beyond protest, they are seeking to create new epistemologies of knowledge which adds to the quality of livelihood and thus reveal that obsolescence and displacement are not inevitable for the margins. One has to see this report as an anticipation of things to come, a symptom of a society that has become sceptical of some NGO battles. Dissent in these circumstances is going to demand both a heroic inventiveness and a quiet patience.
In reading such a document one has to be careful of labelling it a Modi ploy. It is as much a Manmohan Singh complaint. He was fed up with NGOs opposing nuclear energy. The politics of regimes might be different but their paranoias are the same — security being threatened by local groups. Both would love a discourse which subsumes sustainability under security. Moreover, suspicion and paranoia need a scapegoat. The funder abroad as invisible hand, the Greenpeace as the more visible hand become easy candidates. One cannot deny that foreign groups might help stir the political pot. Their behaviour often warrants suspicion. The challenge before these NGOs is to create a public space where three things are clear. First, they have to create systems of audit which are both rule bound, time bound and transparent. Foreign funds are not cornucopia to be showered on all and sundry like confetti. Second, one has to communicate the vitality and the life-giving nature of the issues. It cannot be left to the experts and the bureaucrats of the state. Third, one needs an ethic of responsibility which includes professionalism as ascetic lifestyle, a precision of articulation which carries greater conviction. The battle of competing rhetoric will not do. It is a challenge to create a public space around the silences of the state and include the margins of the nation. One needs a space which allows for dissent and debate, which is both cathartic and constructive and which incorporates the future as a constituency. It is not defensiveness that we need but a confidence to experiment, to debate, to create alternatives, The state could be afraid of the foreign hand but what states often found even more alien is the process of empowerment, the attempt to create a different democracy.
The IB report is right in emphasising the critical nature of the four issues. But what is equally critical is the synergy of democracy that NGOs need to create around these issues. Each struggle has to be a fable for the future. To do less would make the report more real and true over time. Civil society has to make sure that this IB report does not become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Friday 28 February 2014
You're more biased than you think – even when you know you're biased
Nobody’s political opinions are just the pure, objective, unvarnished truth. Except yours, obviously
When it comes to the important issues, I’m pretty sure my opinions are just right. Of course I am: if I thought they were wrong, I’d trade them in for some different ones. But in reality, there’s plenty of evidence to suggest that we’re all at least somewhat subject to bias – that my support for stricter gun control laws here in the US, for example, is partly based on wanting to support my team. Tell Republicans that some imaginary policy is a Republican one, as the psychologist Geoffrey Cohen did in 2003, and they’re much more likely to support it, even if it runs counter to Republican values. But ask them why they support it, and they’ll deny that party affiliation played a role. (Cohen found something similar for Democrats. Maybe I mentioned Republicans more prominently because I’m biased?)
Surely, though, if you tell people you’re giving them biased information – if you specifically draw their attention to the risk of being led astray by bias – they’ll begin to question their own objectivity? Nope: even then, they’ll insist they’re reaching an unbiased conclusion, if a new paper by five Princeton researchers (which I found via Tom Jacobs at Pacific Standard) is anything to go by.
Emily Pronin and her colleagues asked Princeton students, and other people recruited online, to look at 80 paintings, and to give each a score from 1 to 10 based on their artistic merit. Half of the subjects weren’t told the artists’ identities. The other half were allowed to see a name, purportedly that of the painter of each picture. In fact, those names were a mixture of famous artists and names pulled from the phone book. As you’d predict, those who saw the names were biased in favour of famous artists. But even though they acknowledged the risk of bias, when asked to assess their own objectivity, they didn’t view their judgments as any more biased as a result.
Even when the risk of bias was explicitly pointed out to them, people remained confident that they weren’t susceptible to it; indeed, they actually rated their performance as more objective than they’d predicted it would be at the start of the test. “Even when people acknowledge that what they are about to do is biased,” the researchers write, “they still are inclined to see their resulting decisions as objective.”
This is more evidence for the “bias blind spot”, a term coined by Pronin which refers to the head-spinning fact that we have a cognitive bias to the effect that we’re uniquely immune to cognitive biases. Take the famous better-than-average effect, or Lake Wobegon effect, whereby the majority of people think they’re above average on any number of measures – their driving skills, their popularity, the quality of their relationship – when clearly they can’t all be right. It turns out the bias also applies to bias. In other words, we’re convinced that we’re better than most at not falling victim to bias. We seem to imagine we’re transparent to ourselves: that when we turn our attention within, we can clearly see all the factors influencing our decisions. The study participants “used a strategy that they thought was biased,” the researchers note, “and thus they probably expected to feel some bias when using it. The absence of that feeling may have made them more confident in their objectivity.”
This helps explain, for example, why it’s often better for companies to hire people, or colleges to admit students, using objective checklists, rather than interviews that rely on gut feelings. As Jacobs notes, it’s also why some orchestras ask musicians to audition from behind screens, so that only their music can be judged. It’s no good relying on the judges’ sincere confidence that they’d never let sexism or other biases get in the way. They may really believe it – but they’re probably wrong. Bias spares nobody. Except me, of course.
Surely, though, if you tell people you’re giving them biased information – if you specifically draw their attention to the risk of being led astray by bias – they’ll begin to question their own objectivity? Nope: even then, they’ll insist they’re reaching an unbiased conclusion, if a new paper by five Princeton researchers (which I found via Tom Jacobs at Pacific Standard) is anything to go by.
Emily Pronin and her colleagues asked Princeton students, and other people recruited online, to look at 80 paintings, and to give each a score from 1 to 10 based on their artistic merit. Half of the subjects weren’t told the artists’ identities. The other half were allowed to see a name, purportedly that of the painter of each picture. In fact, those names were a mixture of famous artists and names pulled from the phone book. As you’d predict, those who saw the names were biased in favour of famous artists. But even though they acknowledged the risk of bias, when asked to assess their own objectivity, they didn’t view their judgments as any more biased as a result.
Even when the risk of bias was explicitly pointed out to them, people remained confident that they weren’t susceptible to it; indeed, they actually rated their performance as more objective than they’d predicted it would be at the start of the test. “Even when people acknowledge that what they are about to do is biased,” the researchers write, “they still are inclined to see their resulting decisions as objective.”
This is more evidence for the “bias blind spot”, a term coined by Pronin which refers to the head-spinning fact that we have a cognitive bias to the effect that we’re uniquely immune to cognitive biases. Take the famous better-than-average effect, or Lake Wobegon effect, whereby the majority of people think they’re above average on any number of measures – their driving skills, their popularity, the quality of their relationship – when clearly they can’t all be right. It turns out the bias also applies to bias. In other words, we’re convinced that we’re better than most at not falling victim to bias. We seem to imagine we’re transparent to ourselves: that when we turn our attention within, we can clearly see all the factors influencing our decisions. The study participants “used a strategy that they thought was biased,” the researchers note, “and thus they probably expected to feel some bias when using it. The absence of that feeling may have made them more confident in their objectivity.”
This helps explain, for example, why it’s often better for companies to hire people, or colleges to admit students, using objective checklists, rather than interviews that rely on gut feelings. As Jacobs notes, it’s also why some orchestras ask musicians to audition from behind screens, so that only their music can be judged. It’s no good relying on the judges’ sincere confidence that they’d never let sexism or other biases get in the way. They may really believe it – but they’re probably wrong. Bias spares nobody. Except me, of course.
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