The root of the matter

What would you do in the next situations?

1. You have solved this problem already two times, but it comes back a third time.
2. Doing one thing doesn't help, doing the opposite doesn't help. Doing something in-between doesn't help either,
3. You have done something and it didn't work. The next time it doesn't. What now?
4. You don't know what to do. Everybody has different suggestions.
5. You are tired and disappointed with your success.
6. You have read it two times. You read it a third time. And you still don't get it.
7. You can't choose between two attractive options.
8. You can't choose between two unattractive options.
9. You are about to solve a problem, but somehow the last step escapes you.
10. You seem to run around in circles.

In all these cases minus one, you have to take one step behind and find the essence of the situation, the core, the key, the marrow, the basis, the center. Don't you find it? Take one step more behind. To find the core you have to raise your point of view. Didn't you know you are your own drone?

How do you know you found the essence? Because everything becomes suddenly clear. Because you see the whole field from a different perspective. Gestalt psychologists call this field restructuring. In system dynamics the golden rule when you are stuck is: Widen the system.
The essence of every situation opens the story of the situation. Discovering the essence is understanding the system, understanding the story, the story of the system, the system of the story.
System dynamics is the discipline to understand the story of a system. And what is the understanding of the system of a story: getting the plot right.
The central art of communication is communicating the plot. What leads to what? And why and how? And we don't find linear cause-and-effect relationships. Several causes usually lead to several effects. And effects may feed back in the causes. There is no simple cause-and-effect, there is something called causal texture.

This brings me to the one exception: situation 6. In this case, don't find the core, don't go for understanding; find a better text. And if the text is a manual? The only manual? Find a knowledgeable person.
Many texts are difficult or impossible to understand. Why?

• Some people write about things they themselves don't understand properly.
• Or they don't care about their writing, because they don't care about their readers.
• Or they want to hide that they don't want you to understand.

During the Second World War, Churchill had a discussion with Roosevelt and his aide, Harry Hopkins. Suddenly, Churchill turned to Hopkins and told him they were going to offer him a fine British title and they knew already which title he would get. Hopkins was embarrassed. The title Churchill had in mind, he told Hopkins, was Lord Root-of-the Matter. Now that is a compliment for you.
Anyway, go for it. The Root of the Matter. Everything else is a waste of time, a waste of energy, a waste of brain space.

Again: practical wisdom

Another list I came across about sound judgment had five items:

1. Be open-minded.  Deal with uncertainty. Welcome new evidence. Notice the limits of your knowledge. Probe your assumptions. What additional information could give you a more balanced viewpoint? Make your convictions explicit and take the opposite standpoint. Or put yourself in someone else’s shoes.
2. Admit when you have been in the wrong.
3. Imagine what if… Re-imagine key events. Consider eventualities and form hypotheses. It broadens your mind when grappling with the unexpected.
4. Use checklists in complex situations.
5. Recognize your bias.

A good list. But how to recognize your bias? Wikipedia has a list of 100 bias. And they missed a few. Even downsizing that list, I couldn't come under 50. I grouped them for better grasp.

Egoism and emotionalism

• Narcissism: rosy self-image; overrate your abilities; overrate your personal importance; take credit for desirable but not for undesirable outcomes.
• False pride: claim more responsibility for successes than for failures.
• False modesty: blame failures on yourself while attributing successes to circumstances or others.
• Narrow-mindedness: familiar is better.
• Puberty: doubt or ridicule the judgment of others; overrate your own judgment.
• Selective perception: focus on what you like - or on what you dislike.
• Avoidance of embarrassing questions and aspects.
• Overrate the control you have over events and conditions.
• Framing: overvalue presentation over facts.
• Sensationalism: focus on the most salient and emotionally-charged aspects.
• Embellishing: inflate recall and description.
• Justify actions already taken, like rationalize your purchases.
• Avoidance of extremes; prefer intermediate options.

Disregarding evidence

• Professional conventionalism.
• Unwarranted assumptions: assume without evidence.
• Credulity: believe in something without reason or evidence.
• Dogmatism: protect your beliefs against evidence.
• Prejudice: assume qualities, attitudes and behavior from appearance.
• Joining the bandwagon: believe things because most other people believe the same; adopt opinions and follow behavior.
• Data-doctoring: manipulate an experiment or misinterpret data to confirm expectations.
• Group thinking: go for the comfort of commonality instead of the discomfort of the unknown, the ill-understood or the search for new evidence.
• Negative hallucination: not see what is. 'It didn't happen.'
• Nitpicking: focusing on insignificant details.

False evidence

• Myopia: only see the immediate facts.
• Tunnel vision: interpret everything in line with earlier assumptions, earlier analysis or earlier conclusions; ignore alternative explanations; protect current investment. Often the result of group thinking.
• Pseudo-recall: imaginary recall or imprinted recall.
• Illusion: imagine patterns and cause-effect relationships where none exist.
• Believe that the world is just and that people get what they deserve.
• See deeper meaning in random events.
• Positive hallucination: see what isn't there. 'It really happened.'
• See everywhere what you have just learned or noticed. (Like the 'medical disease.)
• Halo effect: generalize from one positive or negative trait.
• Barnum effect: mistake confection for individual profile.

Unwarranted expectations

• Wishful thinking: be over-optimistic.
• Worrying: be over-pessimistic.
• Planning optimism: underestimate task-completion times. (usually about 3x)

Space and time distortions

• Project present attitudes and behavior into the past.
• Hindsight: see the past through present knowledge: 'I-knew-it-all-along.' Harry S. Truman: ' A schoolboy's hindsight is better than a president's foresight.'
• Overrate the recent, the immediate, the remarkable.
• Conservatism: old is better.
• Progressiveness: new is better.

Lack of statistical thinking

• Generalization: underestimate the variety in people.
• Disregard probabilities, especially unknown and unwelcome probabilities.
• Assume that specific conditions are more probable than general ones; judge the probability of the whole to be less than the probability of a part.
• Accept risk to avoid negative outcomes, but avoid risks if expecting positive outcomes.
• Preference to reduce a small risk to zero over greatly reducing a large risk.
• Action bias: overrate the harms of action compared to the harms of inaction; overrate the benefits of action compared to the benefits of inaction.
• Texas sharpshooter fallacy: select or adjust a hypothesis after the data are collected.
• Endowment effect: demand much more to give up an object than you would be willing to pay to acquire it.
• Anchoring: interpret new information by comparing it to accidental previous information.

The best system for vetting and limiting the consequences of bias is the scientific method: develop ideas from evidence and test them to new evidence. And in daily life? Return to the first advice: be open-minded.

SOUND JUDGMENT; PRACTICAL WISDOM. Ten suggestions to the wary

1. Avoid narrow-mindedness. Don't get stuck in one viewpoint. Look at issues from different sides, different perspectives. Take a helicopter-view.
2. Identify the possible risks and find early warnings for them.
3. Don't stare at large problems metaphysically. Don't indulge in principles, ideologies or philosophies. Know your preferences, but remain pragmatical.
4. Keep your judgments open. Postpone irreversible decisions when you can, take them when you must.
5. Suspect proposals that are too easy, too attractive. Especially by trustworthy strangers.
6. Have a fall-back position. Don't gamble everything on one horse.
7. Distinguish what is slow or difficult to change from what changes relatively fast or relatively easy.
8. Roll with the punches if you have to.
9. Nudge people, but don't try to change them. Adult education is a rare bird. Adult self-education is all we can hope for.
10. Life is short. Do what you can, but take things easy. If you can't, explode or implode as beautifully as you can. Then take things easy again.

Use this list to find your weak points and do something about them. Like changing. Nudge yourself into adult self-education.

The Latest Management Technique

An audience listens enchanted to a wise and brilliant speaker. They leave in a daze, no idea what to do next. (Management by fads)
Nails are hammered in a huge wooden plate. Threads are stretched and wound between them. It doesn’t result in a recognizable picture. Grown-ups play children’s games without pleasure. (Unthinking application of management techniques)

These two belong together, though the first one is the province of empty-headed top people and the second one is the province of lightweights one or two levels lower.

Of course, most of these techniques are useful, few are useless. But usually they have a much more limited application than their champions advertise, especially those about leadership and motivation. There are as few recipes for keeping employees happy and productive as there are recipes for marital felicity. Even sensible approaches can be misapplied and become nonsensical. I have seen overhead ratios brought back and the percentage of productive functions increased to the detriment of over-all productivity. The once famous 7-S model of McKinsey was nothing more than a checklist with a gimmick. Again, even simple checklist can be useful if they draw attention to underestimated aspects of organizational health, but applying techniques without real knowledge of the work processes involved leads astray. With knowledge, interest and judgment in place, most new techniques perform. Without knowledge, interest and judgment even proven techniques lead to sham success.

Management literature is replete with reinventing the wheel, but now with a fashionable twist. Even one of the most worthwhile endeavors - applied system dynamics - can lead nowhere when the analysis is too broad or too limited. I saw a system dynamics analysis of the American intervention in Afghanistan that convinced me that the intervention was bound to fail. And what about strategic planning that doesn't show even an inkling of what a stable desirable situation could look like? I have heard brilliant negotiation experts rattling away their precious (at least expensive) teachings without any notion of the factual conditions of the negotiations the audience was involved in.

Enthusiastic proponents of new management techniques are most successful when they interface with critical and seasoned practitioners. That interaction is key to success. But often the prophets are into a conversion game, not a practical improvement game. When a company trading in building materials took over supermarkets for do-it-yourself stuff, they applied rigidly their proven success formula: to go for margin. They eliminated all articles that to them had ridiculous low margins. Within a year they had to sell their acquisition with great loss. They didn't understand that in such shops turn-over speed is a much more important indicator than margin. And they didn't understand that buyers leave when they have to visit several shops to get what they want. One-stop shopping is important for people involved in maintenance and repair and in home improvement.

See new management techniques for what they usually are: a new methodical viewpoint that gives a new and possibly useful view. But without knowledge and judgment of the products, services and activities involved it is just icing without a cake.

And why do I consider this a systemic problem? Because underlying is the decoupling of management from effort and responsibility, from the real world. There is no methodical solution to that problem, only a gross cleansing of all management layers, especially the higher ones. That only happens in Neverland. What happens in reality is bankruptcy in the private sector and what is euphemistically called restructuring in the public sector.

Managing by abstract numbers: the eighth systemic disease of organizations

A Japanese house with many paper walls and  paper ceilings with many layers. It seems designed by a paper-obsessed architect.

Numbers are necessary to keep track of where we are and where we are going. Necessary, but not sufficient. Another simple ingredient is required: the competence to interpret the numbers. Unfortunately, this means direct experience with whatever it is that is measured or counted or registered. It means also to realize which facts are not in these nice numbers.
It is easy to calculate how much money you save when firing workers, but not what the cost may be of lost experience, know-how, of hiring and training and induction of new workers. It is easy to calculate what your turnover has been, but not the value of client satisfaction and dissatisfaction. It is easy to calculate what money you save by automating the response to income phone calls, but not what you lose by losing client
Saving money on execution is often used to increase staff and managerial positions. Boards rather discuss new building projects than upkeep or upgrading of existing facilities. The euro value of stock is based on assumptions, the value of goodwill is a fantasy coming out of accounting conventions. Writing off on property is based in tax and other financial considerations. But the value of any property is zero, unless you have a buyer. And what the buyer will be willing to pay is the umpteenth assumption.
Figures only seem precise. Accountancy is the most esthetic variety of quasi-precision: balances are by definition balanced. Administrators of bankruptcy proceedings are among the most realistic managers.

Many managers strive to a company in which nothing has to be done anymore: the hollow corporation. Everything is contracted out, if possible even the contracting out. What remains is supervision. Supervising things you don’t know and don’t want to know. Production is the first thing that should be eliminated. It produces noise and smell, it takes up space, it needs maintenance and repair, warehouses, transport. Its main drawback is that you need personnel to work there and people are always creating problems. If you can’t avoid having them, you prefer temps, so you can get rid of them the moment they start to have comments, criticisms and, worst of all, suggestions. But the most horrible thing of production is that things may go wrong. Imagine being responsible for that!
Sales is much more difficult to get rid of. But even that can be contracted out. You can limit yourself to creating the condition for sales: marketing. The main drawback of sales compared to marketing is that failure is much more visible and direct.

The only things you can’t get rid of, are finance and legal. Even in the most abstract of worlds, wriggling with money and contracts remains important. Anyway, it is a clean world of board rooms and hotels with only civilized and clean and well-dressed people.
And if you still want something tangible? Build a new headquarters. Of course, it will be much too grand for what you really need. So you rent it out to prestigious firms and events. And you sell shares in it. In the end, everybody invests in everybody else. Till reality kicks in. Preferably as far away as possible.

All this is in government administration as rampant as in business administration.

Bureaucratic politics: the seventh systemic disease in organizations

A lot of buzz in an auction room. Small groups watch each other furtively. Bidding is about to start. Who will go home with what?

Maybe we should have started with this dynamic. It is so prevalent, that it often seems to be the natural condition: the way things are. Especially larger organizations are often like this: everyt issue, every plan, every decision, every action is turned into internal politics. People defend their turf, want to enlarge their turf or are eying for a next, bigger and better-paid turf. Is there an outside world? Yes, but mainly insofar it helps to define the turf, and influences who gets what money, prestige or power. Customers or clients, unless they represent big money, big prestige or big influence, are a necessary evil. They may have complaints and problems to solve, they have unrealistic expectations; basically they are a nuisance.

Is it possible to avoid or eliminate internal politics? No, it isn’t. But unattended it is a cancerous growth that will supplant all healthy tissue. It becomes especially evil when it is infected with fraud or corruption of any kind and when egotists at the top only allow other egotists to join their ranks.
What is the ideal counter-poison? Someone at the very top who has backing from external directors, with a direct interest in the services or products, in the end-users of these services and products, in the development and production of these services or products and the people who make that practically happen. Usually, but not necessarily, that person has come from the ranks.
Why is the top person so important? Isn’t that idolizing the strong man or the strong woman? No. The point is that such a person is essential to prevent people not really interested in these aspects to fill the positions below the top. The top person is not only a role model, but the only guarantee against empty careerists.

And not even that works always. Especially when the top executive is an entrepreneur who started his own company and the company becomes so big that he or she can’t handle everything anymore, such a person may be enamored by candidates for the number 2 position who come from bigger firms, often have very general backgrounds like financial and legal types. Marketing people are suspect, unless they have been in sales before. usually, marketing is for people who are too sensitive to engage in the rawer edges of the commercial world, like sales. Sales have the nasty habit that they often fail. Not all tenders are won, not every sales pitch hits home. And if you are too sensitive even for marketing? Then you can go into public relations. PR, darling, PR!

Of course both marketing and PR are legitimate functions, just like financial and legal work are. But they are more easily taken over by people with more form than substance. I have learned to watch for those managers who want to distance themselves as far as possible from the coal face, the place where real work is done. In public institutions it is often worse than in companies.
Now many companies are so big that you can’t expect top people to stay near to the primary process of developing, providing and selling products and services. There are simply too many products and services. So there the heroes are at the level of business unit managers. But size is less important than diversification. In huge companies of Shell or Apple the main products will still be known in the board room. There will be people there who actually held the new prototypes of the iPhone or know how an oil well and a refinery look like and smell.
But in a city it is possible that the manager of the sewage department has never seen or smelled a sewer and doesn’t plan to come near one.

In any organization internal politics is natural. But where reality is held at bay, internal politics take over. And good people leave, if they can. If left unstopped, the organization becomes a hollow organization, an empty legal and financial envelop. Everything is outplaced. The ideal of financial and legal types. Marketing types then preside over a collection of brands. They exploit trademarks.
When in a still large organization degeneration continues, this may change into the forth dynamic: executive psychopaths.

Perfectionism: the sixth systemic disease in organizations

A cylinder is pulled through a half-open gutter, again and again and again and again. To minimize friction, they say. It is never good enough.

This is the sixth image of a systemic disease.
Perfectionism is the exorcism of friction, the exorcism of frustration.
Imagine, still something that is not perfect! That could produce irritation. Or criticism. Or disappointment. Or failure. Imagine, being guilty of such things! Worse, shame may be involved. Perfection is the only  way to avoid all these horrors.

The search for the perfect diagnosis makes therapy obsolete. The search for perfect justice creates intolerable delays and byzantine refinements. The search for the perfect job leads to eternal dissatisfaction and job-hopping. The search for the perfect words aborts the manuscript. The search for the perfect partner leads to insupportable singles. The search for the perfect jet fighter leads to wasted billions - which is why the receivers of the billions are all crazy about perfectionism.

Perfectionism is for people who are too refined for reality. It is also a marvellous way to denounce people, their ideas, their proposals, their efforts and their results.

Beware of perfectionists! Flee them, avoid them like the plague. They are like man-eating robots: superior and unrelenting.

Perfectionism in organizations is another systemic disease. It kills humanity, consideration and what is worse: common sense. Organizations delivering top-service or top-products easily become arrogant. Nothing succeeds like success. In the short run, that is. In the long run nothing fails like success. Especially grand, momentous failure make come out of too much success.

Perfectionists have a death wish. They hate life, they hate reality. The real world is messy, people are grubby. Cleanliness may be close to godliness. But too much cleanliness is killing. Perfect plastic surgery creates dolls without character and so without attractiveness.

We can always improve quality, we can always improve productivity, we can always improve profit. Till the clients are satisfied and the makers are satisfied, the banks are satisfied and the neighbors are satisfied. And then we go one step further. And then we stop.

The only perfection that is recommendable is the perfection of being in flow. Robert Pirsig wrote about his fascination with Quality: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Quality, that is what it is all about. Quality, not perfection.

Fighting terrorism

How do we deal with terrorists? After the fact, we find them and disarm or, if necessary, eliminate them. Before the fact, we try to find them and then we do the same. That is, with real terrorists: people who kill, maim and rape unsuspecting, usually unarmed others.
Then we try to contain potential terrorists. We find them among the psychopaths: people without conscience, without remorse, without compassion, without empathy. Most psychopaths are made: by humiliation and torture, that is, by other people who are already psychopaths. And sometimes by extremists: people with lofty goals who consider everything acceptable that will lead to their goals. Extremism is fanaticism turned into action. More often than not, fanaticism is religious. What is wrong with religion?
There is not necessarily anything wrong with religion. We could state, more fundamentally, that out there is no such thing as religion, only religious people, people with certain convictions.
The most practical way is to look at religion as a booster. It makes broad-minded people more broad-minded, even incredibly so. And it makes narrow-minded people more narrow-minded, even incredibly so. It makes humane people more humane, and inhumane people more inhumane. It makes the wise wiser and the fools more foolish.
The problem of the superhuman is that it has so much to offer to the inhuman. The inhuman feels at home in the superhuman. And so the strongest light attracts also the strongest darkness. The most peaceful religions, like Buddhism, are more mental hygiene than religion. Confucianism is even more so. Though it can be stifling, it is rarely violent.
Religions that touch our soul the deepest, evoke the most enthusiasm, have the darkest fringes. Christianity and Islam come to mind. Fortunately, Christianity seems on the whole to have passed its psychopathic excrescences, Islam still has it. But when Christianity was as old as Islam is today, the religious wars were still in the future. An the first centuries of Christianity after it came into the open, where more violent and mad and cruel than Islam was in its first centuries. During the Crusades, the Europeans were much more primitive and cruel butchers and the Saracens were relatively enlightened, cultured and mild-mannered.
It is not religion that is decisive, but the mind-set of the believers.
Suppression of women in many non-Christian cultures is unbelievable to modern Europeans. When did we start to appreciate and value women? Around 1200 the Church began to teach that women should not be forced to be married against their will. That enlightened view started in the South of France and became part of chivalry, later of the cult of the gentilhomme, the gentleman. And where did the troubadours get it? From the highly cultured Moors in Spain. The people that were later, together withe Jews, wholesale murdered and subjugated by the barbaric Spanish Christians. The Spanish Inquisition and its auto-de-fés made even Rome look tame.

How many psychopaths are there? A reasonable estimate is around 2% of the population. Some may be born that way, others become psychopaths by growing up with psychopaths, or mixing with psychopaths in war, guerrilla, revolution or organized crime. The nazis emptied the prisons and offered the inmates work in the concentration camps. A few psychopaths in positions of power may unleash the others on the population at large.

Terrorists as we know them the last decades are small fry. The big thing is when regimes are run by psychopaths. Usually they remain at the intermediate level: warlords and crime bosses in failed states. Sometimes they come to the top and unleash a reign of terror. Not all dictators are psychopaths, but many fill the description, most, I suspect.

When, around 1980, I tried to identify the main international challenges, the first was cruelty, torture and terror, especially terrorist regimes. If you are interested in the history, the psychology and the sociology of terror, you may read the third chapter of  How People Make the World.* It includes what we should do about it.

The debate if Islam is a violent or a peaceful religion, is besides the point. It is both, of course. It is a source of inspiration for peaceful people. And also for violent people. For a full appreciation of women. And for a rampant suppression of women. As is true for all religions. Also the Bible is full of texts supporting one point of view as well as the other.

By the way, what is the easiest and the fastest way to grow and promote psychopaths? Consistent, mean, immense humiliation. We may have to confront terrorists and to isolate potential terrorists, but on the long run we have to eradicate humiliation - of any kind, in any shape.
To solve terrorism, fear doesn’t help, anger doesn’t help, prayer doesn’t help. A modicum of respect does. Also for the unwashed, the unkempt, the backward, the angry. If necessary, we should even kill respectfully.

Weird? Read Big Six Henderson by Jules Loh.* This feature ends: He was a legend in his time, all right, and not just because of his uncanny skill and his zealotry. He also had e reputation for fair play and decent treatment of the moonshiners he caught. ‘I never regarded them as doing something evil, just illegal,’ Big Six Henderson said, ‘and I never abused them.’ The big man thumbed through a sheaf of his faded daily reports, looking wistfully at the names. ‘Killed a few, but never abused them.’


*Hans TenDam - How People Make the World: The Ten Global Challenges, an Essay on Politics, Civilization and Humanity.   http://www.lulu.com      http://www.onlineoriginals.com
* Rene J. Cappon - The Associated Press Guide to News Writing