At Work Newswire

By Jefferson Flanders

Wikipedia, the “user-generated” online encyclopedia, has gradually become the research tool of first resort on the Web. Nielsen//NetRatings now reports that Wikipedia was the top online news and information destination in May with 46.8 million unique visitors.

That domination should grow, based on usage trends and the search-friendliness of Wikipedia’s massive and constantly growing database, with its more than seven million articles in some 250 languages.

Jonathan Dee recently noted in the Sunday New York Times Magazine (“All the News That’s Fit to Print Out”) that Wikipedia has moved beyond its original mission of free reference and has morphed into a leading spot news provider. Millions turned to the site for updates after the Virginia Tech murders and the arrests of several young Muslim men in an alleged plot to attack Fort Dix.

Issues of accuracy

Yet Wikipedia has its detractors; if you use the site, you understand some of their concerns about the site’s reliability and accuracy. These critics question the “wisdom of crowds” (the site’s volunteer collaborative editing process with its emphasis on consensus over credentials) and point to Wikipedia’s inconsistencies and inaccuracies. Many college professors, wary of the quality of the online encyclopedia’s entries, prohibit students from citing Wikipedia as a reference. Author Nicholas Carr has decried what he calls the “cult of the amateur,” arguing: “What the Wikipedia community should do is put a warning notice on the top of every page: ‘WARNING: This page may include factual errors.’”

There is no question that Wikipedia must be employed with great caution. (I would look for an independent corroboration of any information you find on it). Despite its flaws, however, it can be used as a helpful starting point in research, a usefulness Carr concedes (just as an initial Google search is valuable for its quick scan of what the Web offers on a given topic). Wikipedia often provides a bibliography and a number of source citations from credible authors or institutions that can be used to dig further.

Moreover, researchers and scholars can testify that the problem of omissions, errors, and distortion is not confined to the Internet; as the Modern Language Association notes, sources are not “equally reliable or of equal quality,” whether in print or on the Web. Flawed sources, and flawed information, existed long before the creation of the Web; peer review and other checks-and-balances were developed to root out error in academic sources. The open access model of the Internet, where traditional information gatekeepers (librarians, academics, editors) hold less sway, leaves individual users to figure out what information is credible, accurate, reliable, and relevant. In the past, researchers confronted the challenges of access and scarcity; today they must struggle with an embarrassment of riches, a glut of information, accessible at the click of a mouse.

Evaluating information

Whatever the purposes of your research—whether for a marketing report, college paper, newspaper article, or for personal education—the key is to evaluate the quality and validity of the information you find. It’s vital when you are developing premises, establishing assumptions and reaching conclusions that your factual foundation is solid. (The dangers of GIGO—garbage-in-garbage-out—apply not only to computer programming, but also to critical thinking).

The careful researcher reviews the raw source material (ranging from published reports or documents to personal interviews to scholarly articles to Web blogs and postings) and looks to establish basic facts, to balance conflicting accounts, and to independently evaluate each source (all the while alert to potential error, distortion, and incompleteness.)

This evaluation should take into account five key factors in establishing the accuracy and validity of information, whether it is found by surfing the Web or in the dusty stacks of a university library. The five are:

• Authority. Who stands behind the information? Is it from a primary or secondary source? What expertise do authors or editors have, if any? What are their credentials, academic or professional? Is the information subject to peer review or an established editing process? If documents are involved, where did they come from? Who vouches for their authenticity?

  Clearly these questions reflect a bias towards establishment sources (academics, scholars, scientists, journalists), where there are professional standards and practices, and where authors or editors are generally selected for their expertise. This kind of authority does not automatically mean trustworthiness (witness recent embarrassing scandals involving plagiarism and falsification in journalism and academia), but there are more checks-and-balances and accountability when established institutions are involved.

• Point-of-View. What are the biases or prejudices of the creator(s) of any given information? Are they neutral or partisan? Are they looking to advance a cause or ideology? Do they try to pass off opinions as facts? What other motives may be at work that could introduce bias (personal aggrandizement, professional jealousy, institutional pride, etc.)?

• Transparency. How easy is it to trace the origins of the information? Are there citations or references? Can other researchers access the information (especially important with primary source documents)?

• Scope and Depth. How broad and deep is the information? What questions can this information help answer? How much detail is offered? What is missing?

• Accuracy. Has the veracity or accuracy of the information been challenged? Does it match other sources of information on the same topic, or on the facts? How current is the information? Is it the most up-to-date?

Asking and answering these basic questions will naturally reduce the amount of information you need to consider. Some sources will prove unreliable or biased; some will not offer enough detail; experienced researchers recognize that they will have to weed out and discard information as part of the process. At the end of this review, ideally you have refined your collected information into the most accurate and reliable research findings.

As more and more information migrates to the Web, the need for careful evaluation and examination (what the British call “vetting”) will grow. While Google’s plans to digitize the contents of the world’s libraries have been scaled back, largely because of legal concerns from publishers, information is nonetheless being transferred to the Web at a staggering clip. It is not hard to imagine a future where one mark of an educated person will be their ability to navigate this amazing digital repository of information, sorting and evaluating and extracting the information they need, confident of its relative reliability and accuracy.

Jefferson Flanders is an author, educator and independent journalist. He blogs on issues of the day at Neither Red nor Blue.

By Adrian Brown

Innovation in the public sector is particularly tough to pull off and those managers that are able to achieve it must be a particularly special breed. Consider Bill Strickland, a social entrepreneur who founded the Manchester Bidwell Corporation (MBC) in Pittsburgh.

MBC is an organization providing educational programs for struggling middle and high school students and unemployed adults. Strickland himself had struggled from a poor background and felt he had been “saved” by a local ceramic artist who took interest in him a taught him to be a potter.

MBC had grown from operating out of a row house basement in 1968 to a multi-million dollar social organization. Few doubt that the main driving force behind this extraordinary success has been Strickland’s intense passion and determination. He has toured the country for the past two decades giving “The Speech,” a passionate exposition of MBC’s work and call for donations. Strickland’s work was recognized in 1996 with a MacArthur Foundation no-strings “genius” award of $295,000.

The MBC story is not unfamiliar. Often we find that those public sector managers who are able to continually innovate are a rather special breed. Professor Robert D. Behn has called them “nuts.” Behn writes (in “Replication (continued): It takes a Nut!”, Management Insights, April 19, 2006): “These innovators want to accomplish something, and they realize that to make that something happen they have to think and behave differently.”

The most successful innovative public sector managers tend to adopt two tactics in particular:

• Persuasion. Showing the benefits of an innovation, establishing demonstration projects and social marketing.
• Accommodation. Consulting with affected parties, co-opting affected parties by involving them in the governance of the innovation, compensating losers and making the program culturally sensitive.

It is notable that strong-arm tactics rarely appear to be successful in the public sector, with an almost universal emphasis on consensus-building approaches. Successful innovators are also adept at marshaling a wide range of supporters from within their own agency as well as from other agencies, politicians and the wider community.

If innovation is driven by “nuts” then what happens when they move on or when you want to replicate their success in other areas? MBC has struggled to replicate its particular model in other cities. Only Strickland himself has been successful at selling the idea and establishing the sort of relationships that led to million dollar donations and his schedule was already punishing, delivering “The Speech” dozens of times a month and attending board meetings at affiliate organizations.

This is an excerpt from Adrian Brown’s book “Creativity & Innovation” (MindEdge Press, 2007). Brown has worked as a consultant and advisor in both the public and private sectors. From 2002-2005 he served as an advisor to British Prime Minister Tony Blair covering a wide range of policy areas including health and transport.

Copyright © 2007 Adrian Brown

By D. Quinn Mills

Most employees can benefit from coaching, and when employees benefit the work group benefits, and we as managers benefit.

Generally coaching is about how an employee should relate to others in the work group and to outsiders such as customers and suppliers. It’s about interpersonal relations – about how to be effective at work. Managers can hope that the company provides them with a team of employees who are able to work effectively with others. But often employees are sadly lacking in interpersonal skills required by the modern workplace.

These deficiencies become apparent. These employees criticize others bluntly and often without good reason; they react angrily to any criticism of themselves; they are very judgmental about others, but think themselves perfect; they get angry easily and burst out furiously at others; they make excuses for themselves frequently; they don’t listen carefully to what others, including their managers and supervisors say; they blame others for whatever goes wrong; they anger others by their attitudes.

Many managers think that it’s not their role as managers to have to deal with the inter-personal aspects of employees’ behavior; and that’s right, so long as the behavior doesn’t interfere with work. But often employees work in teams that are disrupted by inappropriate behavior and the manager is forced to deal with it in some way.

If you’re a high level executive, you may want to have the company supply a professional coach to a key manager who is rising to higher positions and whom you recognize needs assistance in preparing for the job. But a lower level manager can’t usually commit the firm’s resources on that way, so he or she must either coach or suggest that the employee involved get a coach.

Becoming an effective coach

A good response by a manager is to become an effective coach for the employee. Often employees will appreciate a well-timed suggestion from the manager. In some instances, employees resist our efforts to be constructive, and then nothing can be done except to try to get another assignment for the person. This is an unfortunate result but one that is all too common.

But managers want employees to be successful, and if coaching will help, then we want to do it and do it well.

How can we coach employees? First and foremost by making recommendations that are not taken by the employee as an implicit criticism of his or her behavior. Criticism makes people defensive—it often causes them to not listen to constructive suggestions, but to seethe internally with resentment at criticism. A manager can gather his or her team together and ask for suggestions, or make them, about how to conduct a project. No individual need be singled out for criticism.

Second, even though criticism is a dangerous thing to do, because it can be easily misunderstood and deeply resented, it is still often necessary and a manager can learn to give criticism as constructively as possible. The art of constructive criticism is to criticize not the person but the act or behavior.

Thus positive coaching does not say, “You did that wrong,” but “Another, better way might be…” Not, “You messed that up,” but “You might have done this instead…It might have worked better.”

When should we coach employees? Timing is crucial to success in coaching others. Never, if it can be avoided at all, condemn or criticize an employee in front of someone else (peers, subordinates, supervisors, suppliers, customers, friends). Never even coach an employee carefully and diplomatically in front of others. The implicit criticism will not escape anyone and it will cause bitterness and resentment. Always try to wait for a time when you’re alone with the employee and when he or she is receptive to your comments. Then be careful how you coach, as we’ve said above.

Coaching in this way requires concentration and focus by a manager until it becomes part of her or his ordinary behavior. It’s a skill that can be learned with practice and one that will payback in improved employee performance and a more effective work group.

D. Quinn Mills is the Alfred J. Weatherhead Jr. Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School. He consults with major corporations and teaches at Harvard on subjects of leadership, strategy, and financial investments.

By Jefferson Flanders

American colleges and universities currently fall quite short in developing clear thinkers and persuasive writers, at least according to some of those closest to the issue.

Derek Bok, Harvard’s former president, has expressed his concern that “[m]ost undergraduates leave college still inclined to approach unstructured ‘real life’ problems with a form of primitive relativism, believing that there are no firm grounds for preferring one conclusion over another.” The American Institutes for Research recently reported that more than half of graduating seniors at four-year colleges could not correctly summarize a newspaper editorial. And a 2006 survey of hiring managers (sponsored by The Conference Board and other organizations) surfaced significant deficiencies in the writing and critical thinking skills of high school and college graduates entering the workforce.

The academics, business leaders, government officials, and others worried about these trends have focused on how critical thinking skills are crucial for success in a knowledge-based economy. If Americans want to compete globally, they argue, our workforce must be able to think and communicate clearly.

Yet any erosion in our collective ability to think clearly presents other dangers. Democratic countries need citizens and leaders who are clear thinkers. A liberal education should also prepare citizens to evaluate evidence, look for biases, and question premises, assumptions, and conclusions in the political arena; they must be able to distinguish between truth and what comedian Stephen Colbert has called “truthiness” (“the quality of stating concepts or facts one wishes or believes to be true, rather than concepts or facts known to be true”).

The purpose of clear thinking

There is, then, a greater purpose in developing clear thinking than just preparing tomorrow’s labor force. Properly taught, clear thinking equips individuals to seek the truth (however narrowly or broadly that is defined) in all of their societal roles (student, worker, parent, consumer, citizen, etc.). Of course the idea of “finding truth” makes some (mostly academics) quite uneasy. Postmodernist thought has challenged the very notion of objective truth; cultural relativists, drawing on the insights of anthropologist Franz Boas, have also questioned the universality of truth. This at times makes for difficult discussions on campus; columnist Mark Steyn notes the challenges in arguing with a cultural relativist: “There is no longer enough agreed reality. It’s like playing tennis with an opponent who thinks your ace is a social construct.”

Common sense and basic human experience suggest, however, that the postmodernists have it wrong. As a practical matter, we need to know what is true and what is not. As Princeton philosopher Harry G. Frankfurt observes, truth “often possesses very considerable practical utility.” Journalist and political commentator Walter Lippmann has argued that the pursuit of truth can “bring to light the hidden facts, to set them in relation with each other, and make a picture of reality on which men can act.”

Having an accurate picture, a truthful picture, matters. We want the engineering specifications for our buildings and bridges to be true; we want our political leaders to make policy based on the objective facts; we want to rely on judges and juries to sort out the truth in matters civil and criminal; we want to trust the accuracy of the movie schedule in the daily newspaper; we want our colleagues to level with us. Simply put, we must establish what is true (or some close approximation of it) and depend upon it to go about our daily routines. Postmodernist skeptics do this, too; when they enter a university classroom, they assume the ceiling won’t collapse, implicitly relying on the accuracy of the civil engineers and architects who designed the building.

Some complications

However getting at the truth, even a provisional truth, isn’t easy. There are complications. Often when someone talks about truth, they mean their truth; but certainty is no guarantee of validity. (Whenever I hear the phrase “speaking truth to power” I wince, because it usually means “speaking opinion to power,” not talking about evidence or premises, assumptions, and conclusions.) Clear thinkers, however, do have some tools to help in assessing “truth claims.”

If someone advances assertions of truth, they should be able—and willing—to explain how they arrived at their conclusions. What evidence exists? What are the sources of that information? How credible are they? What are the implicit assumptions that lead to the given conclusion? What are alternative explanations? Are the conclusions reasonable? Logical? Are they supported by the preponderance of the evidence?

Ask enough questions, and bogus evidence or muddled logic or “truthiness” becomes apparent. Extreme claims (such as those made by Holocaust Deniers or 9/11 conspiracy theorists) founded on delusion or falsehood can be exposed and debunked. Appeals to emotion, or ideology, or authority can be surfaced and challenged. That isn’t to say that agreement will always be reached on what is true; it is possible to agree on the facts but not on their interpretation, to differ on the weight or importance of evidence, or to part company on underlying assumptions.

Clear thinking gets us closer to establishing the truth, or truths, in what historian John H. Arnold calls “their contingent complexity.” We may not completely discern the truth; we may have an imperfect understanding of it; we may have to change our premises, assumptions, or conclusions based on new evidence; but we should take heart from something the American singer Elvis Presley once said: “Truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a time, but it ain’t goin’ away.”

Jefferson Flanders is an author, educator and independent journalist. He blogs on issues of the day at Neither Red nor Blue.

By D. Quinn Mills

Most organizations are not particularly good at creativity. This is because large organizations exist to carry out a particular set of functions—production, sales, shipping, etc.—efficiently. This means that they are structured to do certain things over and over while minimizing the cost. Managers are there to see that things are done right, on schedule, and within budget.

Innovation, however, is a creative process and notoriously resistant to being reduced to an efficient routine.

A result is that many managers become actively hostile, though they don’t usually recognize it, to innovation. Innovation represents a departure from standard procedure that may prove expensive and ineffective. It means that employees are thinking about something else than being as efficient as possible in their current assignments.

So innovation is often pushed off to a special department—a “skunk works” or development laboratory.

This is unfortunate, because innovations arise most naturally out of the imagination of people in the ordinary work environment. They see what could be done differently and better. They see what new concerns the customer has and what new products or services might be offered him or her.

Discouraging innovation

Ross Perot was working for IBM as a salesman when he realized that customers wanted not just computer hardware but services. He tried to get his managers at IBM to move in that direction. They didn’t want to be bothered—they were too busy “pushing the iron,” as they called selling hardware. So after years of trying to urge a major innovation on his employer, Ross left to form EDS and created the computer services industry.

This sort of story is repeated continually in industry. Many, if not most, successful entrepreneurs first attempted to get their current employers to embrace the innovation, and when they failed, left to found new companies. While being a start-up entrepreneur is a very difficult and risky thing, it allows freedom to experiment and pursue innovation. So the challenge for a company is how to champion good innovations rather than drive them out of the firm.

There are innovations of different degrees. Some involve small changes in current products and procedures. A leader or manager can facilitate these by building a culture of continual improvement in his department, division or even company. Steady improvement in methods is expected—employees are encouraged and rewarded for good ideas; employees meet frequently to evaluate suggestions and plan for putting the good ones into effect. The efficiency of the department is expected to rise in small increments continually, so that over a long period of time, large improvements will have been accomplished.

Larger innovations are a much more significant challenge to managers. Most ideas that people have are probably not valuable—they’re often not really new, or they have major flaws. People can become very attached to their ideas and won’t accept their limitations. Some people get obsessed with their notions. A manager doesn’t want to have his or her time chewed up in discussing and rejecting idea after idea—it’s also discouraging to employees who offer ideas when they are rejected. Hence, most managers are not willing to have employees bring ideas for innovations, except on the small scale of incremental improvements in existing practices, brought to them.

Doing better

Can we do better? Perhaps. A leader or manager can let employees know that she or he will listen to ideas at certain times, say once a week or a month, in his office, alone, and will respond to the ideas in a week or so privately. It’s important not to let an employee get excited about an idea and spread it around the work place, only to have it rejected and lose face with his or her peers.

A manager should keep an open mind about the suggestions he or she receives. This is not easy. Many of us are not very innovative ourselves, and may not recognize good ideas. So if an idea appears to us to possibly have merit, we may want to have someone else to take the idea to for an assessment. Then, if it still stands scrutiny, we may want to suggest to the employee that it be taken elsewhere in the firm, and maybe we’ll support it on its journey.

In some companies there is no standard way for an innovative idea to go forward. In this setting it’s very difficult to advance an innovation, and the manager may simply have to decide if it’s worth it to take the idea directly to top executives—with the risk that may entail.

If a company has provided avenues for innovative ideas, as 3M is famous for doing, then a leader or manager has a much easier task in encouraging innovation in the organization.

D. Quinn Mills is the Alfred J. Weatherhead Jr. Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School. He consults with major corporations and teaches at Harvard on subjects of leadership, strategy, and financial investments.

Characteristics of Creative Teams

By Adrian Brown

Researchers who have investigated the characteristics of creative teams have identified the following five factors as particularly common to creative teams. (Note that you would expect to see several of these characteristics in any high performing team—others are unique to creative teams.)

1. Shared understanding of a clear goal.

It is common sense that a team with a clear goal will perform better than one without but all too often this basic rule is forgotten if the team is expected to think creatively.

Perhaps it is assumed that a goal will stifle the group’s thinking. On the contrary, a goal helps focus the team’s energy on the task in hand and allows creativity to blossom in a constructive way. Toyota’s G21 team had a very clear (and demanding goal) to improve fuel efficiency that everyone could focus on achieving.

2. Working to a deadline.

Another common sense rule for a healthy team is a deadline of some sort. As we shall see below a degree of time pressure can improve the creativity of a group, although as time pressure increases further, this rule breaks down.

In general, no deadline at all is a bad idea, as this reduces the need for the group to reach a firm conclusion. G21 was expected to meet a series of demanding deadlines culminating in the launch of the Prius in December 1997, one year earlier than originally planned.

3. Irreverent and non-hierarchical.

Hierarchy has little to add to the creative process. Creative teams tend to adopt extremely flat structures where roles are flexible and everyone is expected to contribute. Creative teams are also often somewhat irreverent as jokes and games are often the source of some of the best ideas.

We saw this was particularly important at Southwest Airlines. G21 was deliberately structured in a non-hierarchical manner to reduce functional silos and encourage open communication between team members. This model has now been adopted for all new product development teams at Toyota.

4. Diversity embraced.

A creative group exhibits a range of thinking styles and skills. If well managed, this diversity allows the group to attack a problem from a variety of directions and challenge conventional wisdom. Often this diversity presents a paradox in that the group is exhibiting contradictory skills or behaviors.

For example, the group may require deep functional expertise and yet be able to approach the problem with a “beginner’s mind.” It is the successful combination of these extremes that can often trigger the greatest creative insights. G21 brought together engineers from across Toyota and Uchiyamada was made team leader precisely because he would approach the problem with a beginner’s mind.

5. Empowerment of team members.

Creative teams will often have to “break the rules” and should feel comfortable doing so (within reason). The clear backing of a senior manager is very helpful in this respect. The G21 team took their orders directly from Eiji Toyoda, and were encouraged to disregard any Toyota components, systems or manufacturing techniques that they saw fit.

Managers who wish to encourage team creativity should think carefully about each of these characteristics within the context of their own organization and the particular task in hand.

This is an excerpt from Adrian Brown’s book “Creativity & Innovation” (MindEdge Press, 2007). Brown has worked as a consultant and advisor in both the public and private sectors. From 2002-2005 he served as an advisor to British Prime Minister Tony Blair covering a wide range of policy areas including health and transport.

Copyright © 2007 Adrian Brown

By Jefferson Flanders

Thinking clearly requires clear sight.

Seeing clearly is the ability to see things are they are, to overcome your own misperceptions or preconceived notions (what social scientists call cognitive bias) when you are called upon to think through a challenging problem or to make a decision.

Seeing clearly involves perception; despite following the rules of logic, if you start with a distorted perspective—with an obscured or narrowed vision—you may arrive at a flawed conclusion.

The dangers of distorted vision have been recognized for centuries, from the apostle Paul in his First Epistle to the Corinthians (“For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.”) to Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman and their 20th century Nobel Prize winning work on human cognition. Tversky and Kahneman found that humans fall prey to common cognitive biases and often employ mental shortcuts (or to use an academic term, heuristics) and oversimplify decision-making. Not surprisingly, English is filled with phrases that describe our tendency to faulty perception: blinkered vision, intellectual blindness, shortsighted solution, myopic thinking, clouded focus.

It’s easy to find recent examples in the public and private arena where clear thinking has been short-circuited by faulty vision. Consider these:

• Western intelligence agencies became so convinced that Saddam Hussein and the Iraqi military had weapons of mass destruction that they focused narrowly on the evidence supporting that interpretation, excluding other possibilities. Their flawed assessments set the stage for war in 2003.

• Executives at Polaroid Corporation believed that instant photography would never be challenged by the new digital means of making images; by relying on outdated perceptions of consumer preferences, they failed to respond to the digital challenge and doomed Polaroid to eventual bankruptcy.

• After the destruction of the space shuttle Columbia, an investigative board concluded that NASA management had regarded debris damage to the shuttle at take-off (from falling protective foam) as an acceptable risk. While some engineers had calculated a higher probability of catastrophic failure, NASA managers perceived the level of risk to be lower, based on the historical record, and this reliance on past performance, the board found, led to the disaster.

These examples highlight the dangers of bias: the intelligence analysts were blinded by confirmation bias, gravitating to evidence that confirmed their WMD suspicions and discarding that which didn’t; the Polaroid executives, confident that they had a superior technology embraced by customers, remained oblivious to their own egocentric thinking; the NASA managers fell prey to overconfidence and optimism—the Columbia had made 27 successful flights before its fatal launch in 2003.

There are many barriers to clear thinking, including our hard-coded reliance on mental models, or mindsets, to make sense of the world; our entrenched attitudes and prejudices; the impact of whatever emotional baggage we carry; and the limits of the way we process information (for example, engineers often think in more linear, cause-and-effect terms; those in the life sciences lean towards systems thinking). Further, recent research shows that “objectivity is in the eye of the beholder”—people quickly detect a wide variety of biases in others, but are less ready to acknowledge and accept their own biases.

Seeing clearly

How can we guard against distorted vision? Fortunately, both experience and research suggests that we can distance ourselves enough from our mental shortcuts and cognitive biases to see clearly. In turn, that helps us think clearly. (Princeton psychology professor Susan T. Fiske, for one, argues that we can “moderate even unconscious prejudice.”) Here are five ways we can begin to see more clearly.

1. Recognize that we are vulnerable to bias. Self-assessment and self-reflection are necessary. For those with an ideological bent, or who hold strong partisan political views, it’s especially important to remember what we’ve learned about human cognition and our tendency to develop mindsets. Our reasoning can be influenced by our biases; consequently, our thinking can be incomplete, hasty, and self-serving. Just the simple act of reflecting about our own biases can help in mitigating them.

2. Challenge our premises, assumptions, inferences, and conclusions. This often proves hard for successful individuals and institutions to do, witness Polaroid and NASA. Some organizations have created formal systems to challenge conventional thinking, recognizing the negative influence of peer pressure and institutional conformity. The Roman Catholic Church, for example, appoints a Devil’s Advocate to marshal evidence and to make the case against those nominated for sainthood. The Vatican has realized it needs to offset the tendency for groupthink in choosing its saints!

3. Consider other points of view and alternative interpretations. Richard Paul and Linda Elder, experts in the field, have written, “Critical thinkers strive to adopt a point of view that is fair to others, even to opposing points of view.” Nothing exposes flaws in thinking faster than the critique of those who disagree; however, you must be willing to hear their criticism.

   Looking at multiple theories or hypotheses is also healthy. The Central Intelligence Agency has experimented with a technique called “Analysis of Competing Hypotheses” (ACH), where multiple plausible hypotheses are tested against available information. Former CIA officer Richards Heuer has argued that rigorously employing an ACH approach might have surfaced flaws in the intelligence community’s consensus that Iraqi possessed WMD.



4. Explain our premises, assumptions, inferences, how we reached our conclusions, and where confident judgments can’t be made. This sort of transparency about process encourages others to review, question, and test what has been advanced, often raising valid issues that might have otherwise gone unexplored.

5. Treat conclusions as provisional and subject to change if the underlying information (premises) and assumptions change. This approach borrows from the scientific method, in part, where (as the editors of Scientific American have noted) “[e]verything that science ‘knows,’ even the most mundane facts and long-established theories, is subject to reexamination as new information comes in. The latest ideas and data are the most provisional of all.”

There is a bit of a balancing act required for clear sight. On the one hand we must address intellectual challenges with openness—to attempt to “see things new.” Yet informed curiosity is also called for, knowing enough about a subject to ask intelligent questions. The trick is not to let what you already know and believe crowd out fresh insight. The ideal is “experience simulating ignorance,” in the words of scholar and media critic James Carey, cultivating that vital “innocent eye” without abandoning the necessary skepticism that is at the heart of clear thinking.

Jefferson Flanders is an author, educator and independent journalist. He blogs on issues of the day at Neither Red nor Blue.

By D. Quinn Mills

Having effective employees is central to business success. Some executives say that the winning play every time is having the right person in the job.

But good people are not easy to get. A company must find a qualified person, identify her out of many candidates, and persuade her to accept a job offer. Once the person has been hired, it is important to retain his or her services. American employees are free to quit a job for a better one whenever they choose, so retaining good people is as important as finding them.

In our economy today several factors are creating what we can call “talent wars” – a contest among employers to attract and retain the best employees.

First, the economy has been growing for many years and unemployment rates are low. Many people have several job opportunities.

Second, the baby boomers, a large generation of employees, are now beginning to exit the work place. The generations that follow are much smaller – so that competition for this smaller pool of workers will be intense.

Also, the new generations have different attitudes, expectation and behavior – so a company must not only seek to attract and retain them, but must adapt to them.

Third, as our economy changes from manufacturing and goods producing activities to increasingly professional services, knowledge workers are in great demand, and they again are different from previous employee groups. Employers must not only attract and retain these knowledge workers, but adapt to them in order to get and keep them.

Competing successfully for talent

These three factors make competition for the most desirable employees intense today. How can employers “win the talent wars”? What are talent management strategies for these new conditions? Here are three approaches organizations should follow:

1. Don’t neglect employees you already have. Often, they can they can be retrained and given knowledge-worker assignments. Internal candidates already know the company and how it works and so save the company time and money bringing outsiders up to speed. In many instances it is far cheaper to retrain and redeploy existing employees than to hire new ones.

2. Look not only for skills that fit a job opening, but also for personal qualities that fit the organization. Large organizations can often provide skill training, but it’s much more difficult to train people in the attitudes and behaviors that cause them to fit well into an organization.

   In the hiring process look for candidates with an indication of greatness, those with high standards in either work or outside of work; a candidate’s resume should show some area where the applicant has excelled - this can even be a hobby or sport or other activity. A new employee’s personal standard of excellence will be a bit contagious within our organization — it will help motivate others.

   Look also for candidates with valuable qualities who are smart and capable and work well with others. Those who can interact well with others will improve the functioning of your organization.

3. Make adjustments in jobs, supervision, compensation, benefits and working conditions that will attract the best talent. Don’t try to fit the new workers into the forms created for the old. Be flexible. Don’t assume the new people are like you or like their parents. The children of baby boomers are any more like their parents than baby boomers were like their parents. Do focus groups with potential employees; talk with them yourself; seek to find out what drives them, and be prepared to try to provide it.

Employing these strategies in the talent wars can help an organization turn the talent challenge into a human resources opportunity. Those organizations that are prepared for the changing talent environment will be best suited to thrive and prosper.

D. Quinn Mills is the Alfred J. Weatherhead Jr. Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School. He consults with major corporations and teaches at Harvard on subjects of leadership, strategy, and financial investments.

By Jefferson Flanders

To the extent that I can claim to be a clear thinker, the credit goes to my parents. They met in the newsroom of the New York Herald Tribune and, true to their journalistic training, raised their five children with an appreciation of the power of inquiry. That my father and mother encouraged us to question, probe, and challenge our own and others’ premises, assumptions, and conclusions served as a sort of informal short course in critical thinking.

We became familiar with Kipling’s six honest serving men (”Their names are What and Why and When/ And How and Where and Who”) and we also learned that questioning alone was not enough. You had to ask the right questions.

Asking the right questions meant probing to make sure you understood the key issues or problems under consideration, and what evidence existed that addressed them. It meant asking what underlying assumptions existed, and what inferences were being drawn; it meant reviewing the alternative outcomes or resolutions that had been proposed, and considering their consequences. Finally, a last step involved making up your mind and reaching your own conclusions—and being prepared to defend them.

This questioning process meant you needed enough background and context about a given subject—be it American presidential politics or advances in genetic engineering or the state of the stock market—to ask intelligent questions. While it didn’t require becoming an outright expert, it did mean that the more you could learn, the more focused and telling your questions could be. In-depth mastery wasn’t a precondition for asking the right questions, but an informed curiosity was.

A baseline of understanding

Clear thinking commences with a baseline of understanding or knowledge; at a minimum the clear thinker achieves what writing coach Don Murray once called “intelligent ignorance,” and then moves on to ask a series of pertinent questions that spur analysis, synthesis, and eventually, lead to a well-founded conclusion. Attempts to teach critical thinking solely through a series of formulas or instruction in classical logic are misguided; this approach often ignores the role of informed curiosity and places the focus excessively on a detached process of “critical thinking.”

For example, how can you ask the right questions about the validity of a public opinion survey if you aren’t familiar with the basics of random sampling and confidence intervals, and the potential for sampling error, response bias, and other distortions? How can you ask the right questions about a proposed product launch if you haven’t researched the competitive landscape (who else makes similar products?), consumer trends, demand estimates, and the marketing costs necessary to bring the product to market? Won’t your questions about proposed legislation be more informed if you’re aware of the key pros and cons for that specific bill? Asking the right questions starts with context and comprehension.

Informed curiosity represents clear thinking in action—a series of questions that get at the heart of the matter. A New York Times Magazine article about one clear thinker, Dr. Steven Walerstein, noted his broad knowledge of medicine and his approach to problem solving: “If he didn’t know the answer right off the bat, he was known to ask questions that would lead to the answer.” In one difficult case, Walerstein, a general internist, asked a series of informed questions about a patient with liver failure and anemia, helping him “look for some kind of pattern buried in the chaotic assemblage of numbers and tests.” Reviewing the patient’s symptoms triggered Walerstein’s memories of a lecture on an inherited condition known as Wilson’s disease—which proved to be the correct diagnosis. Throughout the process, Walerstein’s questions were informed by his baseline of understanding (a baseline, which in medicine and the sciences, may require years of study and practice to acquire).

Historian David Hackett Fischer has argued that questions, and attendant hypotheses, should be “approximations, which are open to infinite refinement.” When a clear thinker arrives at a conclusion it should be regarded as tentative, one based on the most probable hypothesis. German philosopher Hans Vaihinger has noted: “The wise man is not he who avoids hypotheses, but he who asserts the most probable and who knows best how to estimate the degree of their probability.” Simply put, you have to go with the best you have.

The process of questioning should continue, however, because new information or evidence may surface that changes your evaluation and alters your hypothesis. That can be hard to accept, but intellectual honesty demands shifting your position in such cases. As the economist John Maynard Keynes once said, responding to charges of inconsistency: “When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?”

Jefferson Flanders is an author, educator and independent journalist. He blogs on issues of the day at Neither Red nor Blue.

By Adrian Brown

Some of the most famous creative minds who we may romantically assume were “lone geniuses” were in fact supported by large teams. Thomas Edison is considered to be one of the most prolific inventors in history. He has a total of 1,093 patents in his name at the U.S. patent office, including the phonograph, the telephone and the typewriter.

The vast majority of these inventions were only possible with the assistance of dozens of researchers working at what was the world’s first industrial research laboratory at Menlo Park, New Jersey. As Francis Jehl, Edison’s longtime assistant, explained, “Edison is in reality a collective noun and means the work of many men.”

The invention of the light bulb provides an illuminating example (if you will excuse the pun). Edison assembled a team of researchers at Menlo Park to refine and improve upon existing light bulb technologies. These bulbs tended to be temperamental even under laboratory conditions and burned out very quickly. Edison’s team boasted a diverse range of talents, from glass-blowing to machining, and this allowed Edison to experiment with hundreds of filaments and bulb designs. By 1879, they had produced a lamp in a very high vacuum which would burn reliably for hundreds of hours.

Edison’s success further stemmed from his ability to commercialize the discoveries flowing out of Menlo Park. He was able to sell the light bulb to many businesses and homes with the support of the first network for the distribution of electricity. Edison himself was under no illusions about the secret of his success. He once famously observed that “invention is one per cent inspiration and ninety-nine per cent perspiration.”

Rarely are we expected to work alone on a project from inception to conclusion. We usually find ourselves working within, and managing, teams of people. These teams are often required to think and act creatively. In fact, groups can often achieve greater creative output than individuals working alone because they bring a greater sum of competencies, insights and energy to the task at hand.

The benefits of teams become even clearer if we consider the psychological theories of creativity which describe breaking out of a particular pattern of thinking. The more diverse the group, the more likely it is that different individuals within that group will naturally display different patterns of thinking and therefore different ways of approaching a problem.

Working in a team also presents challenges such as agreeing on roles, managing conflict and reaching consensus. However, with some thought and preparation these challenges can usually be managed, freeing creative teams to solve some formidable problems.

This is an excerpt from Adrian Brown’s book “Creativity & Innovation” (MindEdge Press, 2007). Brown has worked as a consultant and advisor in both the public and private sectors. From 2002-2005 he served as an advisor to British Prime Minister Tony Blair covering a wide range of policy areas including health and transport.

Copyright © 2007 Adrian Brown