Everyone is hobbled by false perceptions of opportunities
and threats that lead to wasteful and inappropriate
efforts. Millions establish internet based businesses and
few make significant income because they believe they can
easily make a fortune with little effort. Why? They read
and hear a lot about the exceptions who do well in this
challenging medium. Yet tens of millions shun profitable
franchise operations that would earn them vastly larger
incomes than they enjoy now. Why? They read and hear a
lot about a few unethical franchise operators who offer
poor opportunities.
Do you believe everything you read in the newspaper and see
on television? You're in trouble if you do.
Organizations do even worse. Why? The false perceptions
of each individual are multiplied as it usually takes
agreement to move forward. Fewer and less appropriate
opportunities are pursued as a result.
What can you do? Assume that all of your beliefs are based
on misperceptions until you've checked them out.
Apply Sophisticated Thinking
In his wonderful book, The Unschooled Mind (Basic Books,
1991), cognitive psychologist Professor Howard Gardner
argues that people usually think at three different levels.
Gardner defines the five-year-old's mind as the first level.
Five-year-olds usually live in a world where others take
care of them and keep them safe from harm. That belief
persists when most people become adults and prevents many
from becoming independent, fully functioning adults.
Overprotection after age five makes matters worse. Another
common example of the five-year-old mind is that confident
people falsely believe that they are superior in every way
to others. Ask any roomful of five-year-olds if they are
terrific at something and almost all will agree.
The second level of thinking develops when training,
usually in high school and college, gives teens and young
adults a grasp of sophisticated concepts that are
counterintuitive to the five-year-old's thought process.
Here's the problem: The student memorizes the concepts long
enough to pass the examination.
But Gardner argues that relatively few adults reach the
third level of thinking where they can apply the
sophisticated concepts to real-life problems. In the
absence of that faculty, almost everyone reverts to the
five-year-old's misconceptions for making decisions.
The person who can apply the principles learned in school
to a real-life situation becomes a disciplinary expert. But
those effectively working minds are few and far between in
most organizations. Think of what could be accomplished if
you consciously shed your five-year-old's misconceptions,
applied sophisticated adult reasoning to expert knowledge,
and questioned common assumptions of the prevailing
five-year-old mind.
Round Out Your View
When only an experiment will do, cross-check your idea in
other ways to get a better sense of what you are about to
try. Consider Columbus. While some feared sailing west
across the Atlantic believing they would fall off the edge
of the Earth, Columbus knew better. He had made a point of
studying the early Viking explorations of North America. In
fact, in 1477, 15 years before heading toward the
Caribbean, Columbus visited Iceland to learn more about the
northern "islands" across the Atlantic.
I'll Get Right on It
Even if people attempt to apply sophisticated thinking,
they will still jump to conclusions too often. If service
was slow the last two times you went to a given store, you
may decide this store will always offer poor service and
don't go back. Statistically, two experiences do not
constitute a trend. It's possible that the manager was away
on vacation on both occasions and the rest of the employees
took it easy.
The executives of one award-winning multibillion-dollar
manufacturer were clearly intelligent, well educated, and
widely admired for their decisions. Ever curious, these
managers wanted to measure the quality of their decisions.
They knew good decision making has to reflect solid
statistically based data, and they wondered what
statisticians would say about their decisions.
Statisticians were assigned to follow the executives around
for six months to watch them in action. Almost without
exception the executives treated random events as
representing what was typically occurring in the business.
Executives were constantly trying to eliminate these
few random variations in performance. All this scurrying
around kept the executives from having time to work on more
promising opportunities for gain. Despite learning this
profound insight, the organization faltered by continuing
to mistake the actual trends. The lesson: Be sure you are
focusing on the areas where action will do the most good.
This example also shows how wide the gap can be between
perceptions of management quality and actual effectiveness,
another example of misperceptions. You have probably
noticed the frequency by which "widely admired" companies
rapidly fall from grace as performance plummets.
Misperceptions have pulled them away from good
opportunities.
Copyright 2007 Donald W. Mitchell, All Rights Reserved
----------------------------------------------------
Donald Mitchell is chairman of Mitchell and Company, a
strategy and financial consulting firm in Weston, MA. He is
coauthor of six books including The 2,000 Percent Squared
Solution, The 2,000 Percent Solution, and The 2,000 Percent
Solution Workbook. Free advice on accomplishing 20 times
more is available to you by registering at
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