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‘One or another’?

Goleman’s recent work identifies four components of EI, whilst his earliest writing on the subject identifies five.

Brilliant Writing

The simple answer, I suspect, is that Goleman brought the concept to the public’s awareness with his first, 5 million selling, book, and then made it an equally popular topic for business people and managers with his follow-up ‘Working with Emotional Intelligence’.

Each of these books and his subsequent publications are written with a strong journalistic flair that makes them compellingly readable and highly accessible to non-psychologists.  This is clearly one reason.  But I think there is another, even stronger reason.

Alternative Models

There is a wealth of alternative models and mash-ups, including the one in The Emotional Intelligence Pocketbook.  This one looks superficially like the earlier Goleman model, but combines the two social competences and introduces a new capability of ‘Emotion Coaching’.

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Goleman himself acknowledges the seminal influence of Peter Salovey, whose joint paper written with John Mayer was his first introduction to the topic in 1990.  Salovey and Mayer’s thinking has evolved, and their current model (1997) sets out four branches of EI.

The difference between this model and Goleman’s arises from the authors’ mission to demonstrate that EI is a true intelligence.  This gives rise to four mental abilities, or aptitudes, that we can develop and harness to practical purposes.

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You can view Goleman’s four or five competencies as practical skill sets that we can develop and put immediately to use.  Margaret Chapman takes this further with her entirely new skill set of Emotion Coaching.

It is the more practical nature of Goleman’s models that, I suspect, has made them far more popular.

A Combined Model of Emotional Intelligence

Goleman’s model clearly distinguishes the Intra-personal and the inter-personal domains (a distinction also drawn by Howard Gardner, founder of the theory of Multiple Intelligences).  Mayer and Salovey’s model resolutely does not.  So I can’t help wondering what happens if we impose this distinction upon their model.

I hasten to note that they are engaged in rigorous academic research and this new construct is little more than a whim of my own.  But here goes…

Some Management Pocketbooks you might enjoy

The Emotional Intelligence Pocketbook contains many fine resources.  You may also like:

• The Impact and Presence Pocketbook
• The Working Relationships Pocketbook
• The NLP Pocketbook

But have you noticed how many of us like to enumerate and collect?  Mostly it’s men, I hear some of you say, but I am not so sure.  Anyway, Howard Gardner noticed this, belatedly, when he added to his original seven Multiple Intelligences an eighth: Naturalist.

Seven …
there’s another magic number to add to last week’s three:

1. Seven samurai
2. Seven pillars of wisdom
3. Seven deadly sins
4. Seven wonders of the world
5. Seven against Thebes
6. Seven dwarves
7. Seven habits of highly effective people

One characteristic of the naturalist intelligence is the desire and facility to characterise, categorise and count (ooops three again!).

Let’s get Emotional

This time, I have been wondering how many emotions there are.  Two things may come to your mind: the pragmatists will say ‘but what has this to do with management?’ while the theorists will challenge ‘can you really count emotions?’

Let’s start with the theorists: counting emotions

No.  I don’t think that you can create a full count of the infinite varieties of human emotion, but I did think it may be interesting to try to list the main ones, and see where it takes me.

I started with a throwaway comment I remembered from a training course that there is a ‘big five’ set of emotions.  I can find no reference to these (unlike the ‘big five personality factors’ in any psychology books).  But I did find a Reiki Healing site, and as my NLP teachers were also reiki practitioners, I’m going to make a guess…

Anyway, this led me to:

1. Joy
2. Sadness
3. Anger
4. Fear
5. Grief

… which are big and there are five.  But there are other big ones too.  Next stop: Claudia Hammond’s excellent ‘Emotional Rollercoaster: A Journey Through the Science of Feelings’.  Dr Hammond lists

1. Joy
2. Sadness
3. Disgust
4. Anger
5. Fear
6. Jealousy
7. Love
8. Guilt
9. Hope

She doesn’t set out to be comprehensive, just to present fascinating research results.  The web will offer you uncountable numbers of lists, but in my £2.99 copy of the textbook ‘Psychology’ (I love charity shops), I found Plutchik’s Multi-dimensional Model of Emotions.  Oh how I love the idea of a multidimensional model!

As you can see, Plutchik’s model has eight primary emotions which are shown next to the ones they are most like and opposite the ones that are like polar opposites.  Each has a spectrum of intensity, giving a third dimension, with the peak intensity emotions at the top.  By combining adjacent pairs, you get more complex emotions.

To see this more clearly, we need to open out the solid, and this is done in many places on the web.  Here is my favourite representation (a public domain image from Wikipedia).

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You’ll notice that the two versions don’t quite match up (-  as my editor did!*).  The opened out “net” seems the more current and common articulation, with the levels on the “solid” diagram either poorly represented or from earlier thinking.

What has this to do with management?

Well, firstly, if you think that emotions and management have nothing to do with one another, you’re crazy.  But my serious point is that a greater understanding of emotions seems to me to be a major gap in much management training and education.  This is even true in many workshops and courses about ‘Emotional Intelligence’.

Yet Emotional Intelligence is one of the most powerful management models of the last twenty years.  I think we can now tentatively apply the label ‘enduring’.  So we’ll be taking a deeper look over the next two weeks.

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* In trying to answer my editor’s comment, I found two absolutely  fascinating articles on the web (30 minutes of displacement activity – thank you Ros) that you might like.  Plutchik’s original 1960 article is not available on the web (unless you have £23 to spare).  Anyway, check out:

• An Automatic Method to Generate the Emotional Vectors of Emoticons Using Blog Articles
• Pancultural Aspects of the Human Conceptual Organization of Emotions

I have well over a hundred packed away now, but my interest started in the 1980s when I cut out an entry from the Guardian’s ‘Notes & Queries’ column:

It is a much quoted maxim that there are only seven stories in fiction and that all others are based on them. Is it true, and what might these seven stories be?

I’ve just wasted 20 minutes looking for that cutting (I know it’s somewhere in my filing system) and then discovered in as many seconds that I no longer need it: you can read the answers that the question received here.

The Seven Basic Plots

What I do recall for certain is that this article predates, by many years, Christopher Booker’s mammoth book, ‘The Seven Basic Plots’, published in 2004.  I first discovered this book on my wife’s bookshelves, the first time I visited her house, and I have been meaning to read it ever since.  Once again I have been stymied, by this year’s 750 page Christmas present.  I am a quarter of the way through.

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Yes, by the way, I am one of those people who scans the bookshelves in every house I visit.  You can tell a lot about a person/family by the books on their shelves.

Anyway, back to the point…  Booker gives his book this subtitle:

‘Why we tell stories.’

As I have not read the book (yet), I can only give you my reasoning.  We are story telling creatures.  We enjoy stories; indeed, we crave them.  They are how we take in information most easily, how we are moved by it, and how it is best made to stick.

I think this is a view that Roger Jones might endorse.  I say this after reading the newest Management Pocketbook, Roger’s ‘Storytelling Pocketbook’.

Roger identifies a far more manageable three basic themes for your stories, advocating powerfully for using storytelling as your favoured means of communicating powerful messages at work.  Roger’s three themes are:

Challenge
Protagonist is compelled to take on a challenge of some sort and, in so doing, prevails.  Very much like Booker’s ‘quest’ plot.

Creativity
A story of innovating and breakthrough – like Archimedes and his bath or Coleridge and his laudanum-fuelled nap.

Connecting
Two people, teams or competitors are forced by circumstances to connect, and their complementary powers, styles or passions combine to prevail.  Think Kirk and Spock, Jobs and Wozniak, Aubrey and Maturin, Arthur and Merlin.

Ooops – there are three

You have probably noticed the power of threes in political rhetoric:

1. ‘education, education, education’
2. ‘I came, I saw, I conquered’
3. ‘Government of the people, for the people, by the people’

… but have you noticed that stories are full of threes?  My [ahem] three year-old daughter likes Goldilocks and the three bears, the three billy-goats and the three little pigs, not to mention Cinders and her two sisters.  Booker argues (I have skimmed the book) for the prevailing power of threes.  Think:

1. Brahma, Vishnu, Siva
2. The Roman Triumvirs
3. The large number of literary trilogies
   (LOTR, HDM, G, TTEOTE – go on, have a go.
   *Answers at the bottom)

The Storytelling Pocketbook

There is much to value in this excellent new pocketbook.  If you ever have to speak to an audience (3 to 3,000) then this one is a must-have pocketbook.  You can even buy it in e-Book format, right now.  Go on.  Treat yourself to some new year CPD*.

* Here’s a gratuitous picture to stop you seeing the answers before you are ready.

They are below

Answers

• Lord of the Rings (Tolkien)
• His Dark Materials (Pullman)
• Gormenghast (Peake)
  … or The Godfather, if movies are more your thing
• To The Ends of the Earth  (Golding)
• Continuing Professional Development

As we start a new year, it seems an opportune moment to introduce another phase: Transforming.

Transforming

As teams reach maturity, it is increasingly common that they do not simply adjourn at the end of their project.  More frequently, the team re-tasked with a new role.  Some members may move on and new people may join, but just like Murphy’s apocryphal pickaxe*, it is still essentially the same team.

Yet it is different: it has changed.  I hypothesise a new phase: Transforming.

When people leave, new people join, and the team has a new role, it is unlikely to easily remain in the Performing stage.

Perhaps a new member joins and people get their heads down, get on with their work, and figure out how to incorporate Mr or Ms Newbie into the team.  This feels a little like Norming.

Perhaps the new person has a significant role.  People may compete with one another to influence them.  Or maybe, someone significant leaves and two or three members of the team compete for a promotion to fill their place.  These feel a little like Storming.

Perhaps there is a big change in personnel or the role of the team shifts to a completely new project.  Most team members feel pretty uncertain about what’s expected of them and who their new colleagues are.  These feel a lot like Forming.

So Here is the Deal

When a change happens in your team, it is likely to transform.  Detect the extent of the change, and adapt your leadership style to accommodate the new dynamic.  If you continue to manage your team as if it were still in the Performing stage, then you will delay the team’s return to true performing status.

Happy New Year, and many
Prosperous Transformations,
from all of us here at
Management Pocketbooks

* Murphy’s Pickaxe

‘I’ve had this same pickaxe for 40 years,’ says Murphy; ‘it’s had seven handles and three heads, and I love it.’

Some Management Pocketbooks you Might Like

The Tuckman model and its variants are described in The Management Models Pocketbook.  You might also like:

• The Teamworking Pocketbook
• The Teambuilding Activities Pocketbook
• The Virtual Teams Pocketbook
• The Facilitator’s Pocketbook

This has been a great year for the Pocketblog, seeing reading figures rise substantially and reaching the milestone of our 100th blog posting.

So, with Christmas coming at the end of the week, let’s do a round-up of some personal favourites from among this year’s Pocketblogs.

Here is something for each of the twelve days.  Enjoy!

1. Start as you mean to go on: Happiness

After some New Year’s Resolutions to start the year off, we dived into the subject of Happiness, with ‘Happiness – as simple as ABC?’ about Albert Ellis’s Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy – the fore-runner of CBT.

2. … and Start Topical

We then moved into a subject that was much in the news in February; and still is.  With ‘Bankers’ Bonuses and Brain Biology’, we looked at recent neuroscience and how that relates to Adams’ Equity Theory.

3. Generations

In February too, I wrote two blogs about sociological ‘Generations X, Y & Z’ and ‘Generation Y at work’.  I followed this up by another about what comes ‘After Generation Y?’.

4. The Gemba

In May, inspiration waned for a week, so where did I go to find it?  ‘The Gemba’.  I got it back, and later that month, got idealistic in ‘Reciprocity and Expectation’ looking at the Pay it Forward ideal and the realities of Game Theory.

5. Why do we do what we do?

In the first of two blogs on how to predict human behaviour, I looked at ‘How to Understand your Toddler’ (mine actually) and Icek Ajzen’s Theory of Planned Behaviour.  Later in the year, in ‘Predicting Behaviour’, I looked at whether a simple equation (hypothesised by Kurt Lewin) could predict all behaviour.

6. One of the Best Business Books of the Year

… according to the Journal Strategy & Business is Richard Rumelt’s Good Strategy/Bad Strategy: The difference and why it matters.  In ‘What Makes a Good Business Strategy’ we looked at some of his ideas.

7. The Apprentice

This year, I have been a big fan of both series and have written my own episode by episode analysis of both The Apprentice and Young Apprentice.  I also did one blog on each for Pocketblog: ‘The Apprentice and Five Levels of Leadership’ and, for Young Apprentice, ‘Decision Failure’.

8. Drucker Triptych

Has any one individual been as influential in establishing management as a pragmatic academic discipline as Peter Drucker?  To recognise his various achievements, I wrote a triptych of blogs over the summer:

1. The Man who Invented Management
2. Management by Objectives
3. R.I.P. Corporate Clone: Arise Insightful Executive

And one of Drucker’s direct contemporaries was W Edwards Deming, so I also took a look at ‘Demings’ System of Profound Knowledge’.

9. Crazy Times

Will history look on Tom Peters with the respect that it holds for Drucker and Deming?  Who knows?  But without a doubt, Peters has been influential, insightful and provocative for thirty years or more, and I am sure many of his ideas will survive.  In ‘Crazy Times Again’, I drew a line from FW Taylor (father of ‘Scientific Management’) to Peters.

10. The Circle Chart

In ‘Going Round in Circles’ I returned to management models and one of my all time favourites: Fisher and Ury’s Circle Chart. I applied it to problem solving rather than, as they did, to negotiation.

Fisher and Ury are experts on conflict resolution, as is Morton Deutsch. In ‘Conflict: As simple as AEIOU’, I looked at a fabulously simple conflict resolution model that originated in Deutsch’s International Centre for Cooperation and Conflict Resolution.

11. Two Notable Events

Two notable events made the autumn memorable for Pocketblog: one sad and one happy.

1. In ‘A Bigger Bite’ we marked Steve Jobs’ passing
2. With ‘Three ways to get it wrong’, we marked our hundredth blog, by looking at one of the towering social psychologists of today, Daniel Kahneman

12. And finally, our most popular topic

Tuckman’s model for group formation has proved to be our most popular topic by far this year.  We have returned to it three times, each time looking at a particular facet:

1. ‘Swift Trust: Why some teams don’t Storm’
2. ‘Team Performance Beyond Tuckman’
3. ‘Tuckman Plus’ is the first of two posts.  It is the last topic post of 2011 and its companion (‘Part 2: Transforming’) will be the first of 2012

So here’s the deal

• Have a very merry and peaceful Christmas.
• Have a very happy and healthy New Year.
• Be good, have fun, stay safe, and prosper.

From all at Management Pocketbooks,
our colleagues at Teacher’s Pocketbooks too,
and from me particularly.

Mike

Later, he and Mary Ann Jensen wrote a follow-up article, ‘Stages of small group development revisited’, in which they proposed a fifth stage, adjourning.  We summarised these stages earlier this year, and looked at why teams don’t always go through the storming phase.

Critical Review

Tuckman and Jensen’s critical review in 1977 was just the first re-analysis of Tuckman’s original 1965 paper.  As recently as 201, there was a wide review article: ‘40 years of storming: a historical review of Tuckman’s model of small group development’ by Denise Bonebright, a graduate student at the University of Minnesota.  In it, Ms Bonebright concludes that there are new theories that are ‘exponentially broader and deeper than Tuckman’s original model. They provide detailed discussion of many aspects of group dynamics from forming through adjourning.’

These theories examine a range of other factors, and yet they do not

‘provide the same breadth of application. HRD scholars and practitioners can learn something from a model that has proved valuable for almost 45 years. The utility of providing a simple, accessible starting point for conversations about key issues of group dynamics has not diminished.’

Can we extend Tuckman’s Model?

There are two principal extensions to Tuckman’s model that give valuable insights, yet do not add unnecessarily to its complexity.  We will look at the more sophisticated early in the new year, and tackle the simpler, commoner one here.

Yawning

Are you getting tired at the end of a long year?  Is your team getting stale and bored?

A lot of management trainers add an extra phase beyond performing: ‘yawning’.  This recognises that a team, once formed and into performing stage, can become stale.  It is a teaching aid as much as an extension of the  model, to highlight the importance for a team leader to keep the team fresh and challenged – in both the task and relationships dimensions – if you are to maintain high performance.

It is also a reminder that, if your team slips from its high performance levels, this may be what is happening.

Some Management Pocketbooks you Might Like

The Tuckman model and its variants are described in The Management Models Pocketbook.

You might also like:

• The Teamworking Pocketbook
• The Teambuilding Activities Pocketbook
• The Virtual Teams Pocketbook
• The Facilitator’s Pocketbook

Bennis had a career in Management

Not only did Bennis lead men in the second world war, but after his studies, he took on a succession of senior academic administration roles, between 1967 and 1979.  Here he tried to put the ideas of Douglas McGregor to good use, and here, he started thinking about the nature of leadership.

However, it was when he returned to academic research, that he started to become a true leader.  His keystone work is ‘Leaders: The Strategies for Taking Charge’ and I relish an irony at the core of this book.

Managers and Leaders

In response to a Harvard Business Review article by Abraham Zaleznik in 1977, Bennis articulated his famous set of comparisons between a manager and a leader:

So it seems to me to be delicious that, in articulating the four common abilities of a leader, from their research into 90  US leaders from all areas of endeavour, Bennis and co-author Burt Nanus expressed them in terms of management.

4 x Management = Leadership

The four strategies that Bennis and Nanus articulated are each about superb management of themselves, in essential arenas of the leader’s domain.  They do not set this up as a prescriptive model of leadership, but as a descriptive model of how real, successful leaders act.

Strategy 1: Attention through Vision

Leaders can manage their attention and the attention of followers by articulating an engaging vision of the future state of their organisation.  They must also find a way of getting followers to start to treat that vision as their own.

Strategy 2: Meaning through Communication

Leaders manage the meaning of their message by using vivid imagery and salient metaphors to create deep understanding and resonance that leads to real hope and trust.

Strategy 3: Trust through Positioning

Building and managing trust requires effective action that aligns with the vision you have set out.  Leaders can position their organisation in any of four ways:

1. Reacting to external changes
2. Changing the organisation itself to lead external change
3. Changing the organisation’s external environment to create change
4. Create new links between the organisation and its environment

Strategy 4: The Deployment of Self

Constant learning and relationship building establishes permanent leadership traits within you, giving you the confidence and experience to take risks and to trust followers.  This enables you to manage your own self-confidence and emotional states, leading you to be seen as stable, adept, and reliable.

So here is the deal

Leadership and Management are deeply intertwined.  To understand and excel at one, we must equally understand the other.

Bennis is not just an expert on leadership – which he undoubtedly is.  It was he who created the modern interest in the subject, with the book he co-wrote with Burt Nanus: ‘Leaders: The Strategies for Taking Charge’.

Bennis was greatly influenced by Douglas McGregor, who both taught and mentored him.  McGregor was influential, with his Theory X and Theory Y, in examining the ways we can manage colleagues at work, and influence their motivation.

The Story of Motivation in the Workplace

… is one of shifts towards and away from a prescriptive scientific perspective.  In a recent Pocketblog, I described how FW Taylor invoked ‘scientific management’ to create a repeatable process for optimising work-rates.  His follower, Elton Mayo then discovered that human factors can over-ride the simplistic approach to theoretically optimised efficiency levels.

It was Douglas McGregor who characterised these two approaches as Theory X (controlling, task-focused management) and Theory Y (more democratic, relationship-driven management).  McGregor argued powerfully in ‘The Human Side of the Enterprise’ and later books that Taylorism could not work sustainably in the modern world; Theory Y must dominate.

Enter Warren Bennis

Bennis followed McGregor in studying organisational development and looked to him as a mentor.  McGregor to a great extent shaped Bennis’s career and we will see more about that next week.

What Bennis contributed was a focus on the work of leaders, and what leadership means in an organisational context.  For all those of us who work in organisational development or leadership development, he has provided the foundations of modern thinking.

And for me, his principal contribution is the body of evidence he accumulated to show that leadership is open to everyone.  It is not a product of birth, of genes, or even of the type of school you went to.  It can be learned and developed like any other skill.

The Science of Leadership

There are two ways of doing science.  In my own discipline of physics, you can even study it formally in these two ways: experimental and theoretical.  Theoreticians dream up grand theories in response to limited experimental data, and then make predictions that experimentalists test.  It is only when the data prove the theorist wrong that science truly advances.  The smug feeling theoreticians get when the evidence supports their theory cannot mask the deeper knowledge that it can never constitute proof.  A theory is never more than one experiment away from falsification.

Experiments, on the other hand, are glorious.  They always yield knowledge.  Maybe it corroborates existing knowledge – which is comforting – or maybe it challenges it, from which progress arises – which is truly exciting.  Theorists know we are at the weak end of the process.

Bennis is a data gatherer.  He has not presented a grand theory of leadership.  Not for him: four leadership styles, six leadership roles or eight ways to lead.  Bennis and Nanus started their revolution in leadership thinking by surveying 90 leaders, from business, sports, the arts and exploration.

Some Ideas 

Bennis is perhaps best known for his tabulation of the differences between leaders and managers – which we mentioned a year ago.  The phrase ‘managers do things right: leaders do the right thing’ has become a commonplace – even turning up with very little adaptation, in a speech by Nick Clegg over the summer.

But many other ideas that we accept as commonplace were first articulated in their modern form by Warren Bennis:

Leaders learn from failure.
Adverse circumstances and a series of failures is a more valuable learning route than early and continued success.

Leaders create empathy
Leaders must bring people alongside their own views and they can only do this by empathising with their followers.

Leaders create great groups
Bennis and Nanus argued that great results emanate from great groups and it is the role of a leader to bring them together and and create the opportunities for them to thrive.

So here is the deal

Leadership can be learned and it was Warren Bennis who did more than any other thinker to put these ideas to us.

Some Management Pocketbooks you might enjoy

The Leadership Pocketbook
As you would expect, a lot of Bennis’s ideas suffuse this volume.

The Management Models Pocketbook
Looks at models of leadership that are often informed by Bennis’s thinking.

The Emotional Intelligence Pocketbook
Bennis has often stressed emotional intelligence as a vital leadership skill.

The Empowerment Pocketbook
Empowerment is what a leader should be about.

The Self Managed Development Pocketbook, and
The Learner’s Pocketbook
Bennis argued that leaders need to be learners.

At the heart of our understanding of these biases is the work of Daniel Kahneman.  He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Economics for his work in this area, with co-worker Amos Tversky. in 2002.  Sadly Tversky died in 1996 and was ineligible for the prize, under Nobel rules.

Behavioural Economics

Kahneman is perhaps the leading psychologist in the field of behavioural economics – very much a field du jour.  His research was carried out with many collaborators including Paul Slovic, an expert in the field of perception of risk, and Richard Thaler, most notable for his use of the term “nudge” to describe how we can use perceptions to shift behaviour.

The classic paper that Kahneman and Tversky wrote was ‘Judgment under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases’, published in the Journal Science in September 1974.

Heuristic: A rule of thumb or simple procedure for reaching a decision or solving a problem.

In this article, they introduced three important heuristics, which guide many of our decisions – and frequently let us down.

Representativeness

We tend to believe a possible event is more likely when we can recognise it as a part of a familiar pattern.  It is as if we like to create stories about our world that follow standard arcs or plots (see for example Christopher Booker’s wonderfully argued The Seven Basic Plots: Why We Tell Stories.  If a potential event slips easily into one of these plots, we rate it as more likely than if the plot seems to need adjusting.

Availability

Recent salient examples render a possible event more likely in our minds than other events that do not trigger such easy recall.  Immediately after a rail accident, people fear rail travel more than normal and take to their cars.  The resulting spike in road deaths usually exceeds the immediate effects of the road accident.

Anchoring

We make estimates and decisions from a starting point and the point we choose can bias our estimate or decision.  Surprisingly, even an unrelated figure presented randomly can skew a later numerical estimate.

Kahneman won’t stand still

In 2007, Kahneman received the American Psychological Association’s Award for Outstanding Lifetime Contributions to Psychology and this year, he was included in Bloomberg 50 most influential people in global finance.  He says that all he knows about economics, he learned from co-workers like Richard Thaler.  He is a much sought-after speaker and commentator in the business arena, and you can find recent work documented on TED (see below), in an extended interview, and in two excellent articles on the websites of prominent global strategy consulting firms,McKinsey and Booz & Company:

• Beware the Inside View – McKinsey
• When can you Trust your Gut (in debate with Gary Klein) – McKinsey
• The Thought Leader Interview – Booz&Co’s Strategy+Business

In Hannah’s case, she let personal loyalties and enmities over-ride good judgement, but this is not the only reason for failed boardroom decisions.  In fact there is a whole array of decision-making traps available to us.  Let’s look at a small sample:

1. The Anchoring Trap

In a discussion at a board meeting, if the first speaker has a strong opinion, they can sway the whole tone of the debate, focusing not on what is right, but on the extent to which the first speaker is right.  This “first speaker advantage” can lead to poor decisions, when the first speaker takes an extreme position.

2. The Confirming Evidence Trap

When a Board approaches a consensus view it will rarely discuss information that conflicts with this view, focusing rather on evidence that confirms it.

3. The Sunk Cost Trap

Board members invest a lot of political and social capital in key decisions that can make those decisions hard to reverse if the situation changes or new information comes to light.  Errors can be perpetuated and good money thrown after bad.

4. The Seduction of Appearances Trap

Beautifully and eloquently presented evidence often carries more weight than more robust but less attractively presented evidence.  This is one of the reasons why PowerPoint-style presentations are a dangerous component of any board meeting.

5. The Prudence Trap

Caution is wise.  Risk is dangerous.  Uncertainty is risky.  Prudence is called for.  But risk can be managed and the status quo is also a dangerous strategy in fast-changing times.  Risk-taking is neither good nor bad, but a strategy to discuss and evaluate in the light of all options and all mitigating strategies.

Good Decision Making is an Art

… and a science too.  There are a lot of tools you can draw upon and it is also important to understand the vital role of intuition, when you are operating in complex environments, where you have substantial relevant experience.

Management Pocketbooks you Might Enjoy

The Decision-Making Pocketbook is filled with practical tools to support decision making.

Also try:

The Problem Solving Pocketbook

The Thinker’s Pocketbook