Category Archives: Thinking

Thinking

Do You Accept Bad Deals?

Taya Cohen

Taya Cohen

Agreement bias is the tendency to agree (“settle”) in a negotiation even if the outcome is disadvantageous to one participant.

During negotiation, each participant’s positions and interests may differ.
Skillful negotiators usually end the discussion if they determine that a stalemate is likely.

Leigh Thompson

Leigh Thompson

Negotiators may accept a disadvantageous deal for reasons besides personality traits, explained Carnegie Mellon’s Taya Cohen and Leigh Thompson of Northwestern with University of Toronto’s Geoffrey J. Leonardelli.

◦       Sunk Costs: Participants may wish to achieve any resolution, to derive some sense of value for the invested time and effort (“sunk costs”),

◦       Image: Negotiators may wish to appear likeable,

◦       Erroneous Anchoring Assumption: People may assume that their interests and the negotiation partner’s are mutually exclusive instead of investigating an integrative solution.

◦       Strength in Numbers: Negotiators who are outnumbered by the other negotiation team tend to agree to suboptimal deals.

Geoffrey J Leonardelli

Geoffrey J Leonardelli

Solo negotiators demonstrated more agreeable behavior, and were more likely to agree to unfavourable conditions.
When solo negotiators were joined by only one person, they avoided unfavourable agreements.

Douglas Jackson

Douglas Jackson

Agreement bias occurs even in anonymous surveys, reported Douglas Jackson, then of Educational Testing Services and Penn State.
This acquiescence bias, is triggered when people agree to survey items no matter the content.

Samuel Messick

Samuel Messick

Social desirability concern can accelerate agreements in negotiations, surveys, and life, found  Jackson and his ETS colleague Samuel Messick, in their factor analysis of Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI) items.

Robin Pinkley

Robin Pinkley

Inaccurate judgments of possible settlement options can lead also to unfavourable agreements, noted SMU’s Robin L. Pinkley, Terri L. Griffith of Santa Clara University, and University of Illinois’s Gregory B. Northcraft.

Terri Griffith

Terri Griffith

Pinkley’s group demonstrated ineffective outcomes when negotiators :

  • Accurately processed inaccurate or incomplete information
    (information availability errors),
  • Inaccurately processed valid or complete information
    (information processing errors).
Gregory Northcraft

Gregory Northcraft

-*How do you avoid agreeing to bad deals?

-*How do you reduce Information Availability Errors and Information Processing Errors?

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©Kathryn Welds

Are you Situationally Aware?

Apollo Robbins

Apollo Robbins

“Inattentional blindness” is an example of distraction and unawareness of the present moment.
Apollo Robbins’ illustrated the potentially serious consequences of inattention in his interactive Las Vegas, USA show, “The Gentleman Thief.”

He tells “targets” in the audience that he is about to steal from them, then uses visual illusions, proximity manipulation, diversion techniques, and attention control, to complete his imperceptible heists.

Unlike in real life, Robbins returns belongings to owners.
Former US President Jimmy Carter’s Secret Service agents were among those who  reclaimed their belongings.

These illustrations help people improve perceptual capabilities.
This increased awareness can reduce traffic accidents, industrial mishaps, and security violations.

The U.S. Department of Defense deploys Robbins’ skills at its Special Operations Command research and training facility at Yale University.

Barton Whaley

Barton Whaley

Defense application of these perceptual manipulation skills were identified by Barton Whaley of the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School and Susan Stratton Aykroyd in their Textbook of Political-Military Counterdeception.

Their historical survey of deception and counter-deception practices noted that amateur magicians’ practices were more advanced than those used by U.S. political or military intelligence analysts in the 1970s.

Stephen Macknik

Stephen Macknik

SUNY Downstate’s Stephen Macknik and Susana Martinez-Conde collaborated with Robbins on Sleights of Mind: What the Neuroscience of Magic Reveals about Our Everyday Deception.

Their empirical results supported Robbins’s observation that the eye will follow an object moving in an arc without looking back to its point of origin.

This perceptual tendency enables Robbins to distract audience members and to remove their possessions from their bodies.

Susana Martinez-Conde

Susana Martinez-Conde

Perceptual errors in illusions can suggest diagnostic and treatment methods for brain trauma, autism, ADHD, and Alzheimer’s disease.

These conditions may improve when patients practice observing illusion performances because they learn to train their attention and to focus on the most important aspects of their environment.

At the same time, they can suppress distractions that lead to disorientation and “inattentional blindness” (intently focusing a single task while overlooking things in plain sight).

Richard Wiseman

Psychologist and illusionist Richard Wiseman of the University of Hertfordshire demonstrated inattentional blindness when viewers failed to notice environmental changes while they focused on a card trick. 

Wiseman used these perceptual anomalies as a metaphor.
He suggested that people can recognise opportunities in life when they intentionally increase their attention.

Daniel Levin

Daniel Levin

Daniel Simons

University of Illinois’s Daniel Simons and Daniel Levin of Vanderbilt University demonstrated that observers were unaware of a person in a gorilla suit walking near people passing a basketball .

With Harvard’s Christopher Chabris, Simons reported that half of the observers said they missed this unusual detail when they focused on counting the number of ball passes by one team.

Christopher Chabris

Christopher Chabris

However, the same people easily recognized the gorilla when they were not asked to focus on a distraction task.

Edward Vogel

This finding shows that most people are unable to effectively “multitask” because they have limited ability to hold a visual scene in short-term memory (VSTM), suggested University of Chicago’s Edward K. Vogel and Maro Machizawa of Hiroshima University and separately by Vanderbilt’s René Marois and J. Jay Todd.

Gustav Kuhn

Gustav Kuhn

Gustav Kuhn of University of London collaborated with illusionist Alym Amlani and Ronald Rensink of University of British Columbia to classify cognitive, perceptual, and physical contributors in Towards a Science of Magic:

  • Ronald Rensink

    Physical misdirection by a magician’s gaze or gesture,

  • Psychological misdirection with a motion or prolonged suspense,
  • Optical illusions that distort the size of an object,
  • Cognitive illusions to prolong an image after the object has been removed,
  • Physical force and mental force influence “freely chosen” cards.

Rene Marois-J Jay Todd

Perceptual and cognitive illusions can cause people not to see things that are present.
This effect can lead to overlooking interpersonal cues, life opportunities.
and more dangerously, inattention in traffic accidents, and victimization.

Mindful awareness helps people pay attention to the present experience and to opportunities and to  mitigate potential perceptual misinformation.

-*How to you maintain focus to reduce “inattentional blindness”?

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©Kathryn Welds

Working toward Goals with “Implementation Intentions”

Heidi Grant Halvorson

Heidi Grant Halvorson

People are motivated by goals that enable:

  • Relatedness to others,
  • Competence in skillful performance,
  • Autonomy in directing effort, according to Columbia’s Heidi Grant Halvorson.

Juliana Breines

She advocated working toward “better” performance rather than focusing on achieving the goal.

This can be accomplished by acknowledging mistakes and practicing self-compassion, suggested by Berkeley’s Juliana Breines and Serena Chen, and University of Texas‘s Kristin Neff.

The Relatedness-Competence-Autonomy model aligns with Daniel Pink’s suggestion that meaningful goals enable two similar features and one different element:

Daniel Pink

  • Autonomy (same): Controlling work content and context,
  • Mastery (like Competence): Improving skill over time through persistence, effort, corrective feedback,
  • Purpose (in contrast to Relatedness): Being part of an inspiring goal.

Halvorson suggested ways to move closer toward goals:

Serena Chen

-Consider the larger context of specific productive actions, 

-Define reasons for doing what needs to be done – the “why,”

-Use “implementation intentions” to prepare responses for challenging situations: If X, then Y.

If “x” occurs (specify time, place, circumstance),
-Then I will respond by doing, thinking, saying “y.”

      • ->“When I feel anxious, I will focus on inhaling and exhaling slowly for 60 seconds.”
      ->“When it’s 7 am, I will walk for 10 minutes,”

Kristin Neff

-Apply implementation intention routines (habits) for “strategic automation” to reduce decision-overload that may undermine self-control,

-Focus on something interesting for five minutes to evoke positive feelings,

-Review “small wins” and progress toward goals.

Goal persistence can be increased, reported Stanford’s Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer in a study of employees at seven companies.

Teresa Amabile

Teresa Amabile

They found that “catalysts” and “nourishers” continue movement toward goals.
She recommended capitalising on preferred motivational style:

-“Promotion-focused” (maximise gains, avoid missed opportunities, powered by optimism),
-“Prevention-focused” (minimise losses, variance, powered by cautious pessimism),

Carol Dweck

Carol Dweck

Halvorson collaborated with Stanford’s Carol Dweck and quoted Henry Ford: “Whether you think you can or think you can’t, you’re probably right” to underscore the value of optimistic engagement with goals.

Henry Ford

Henry Ford

They synthesized Dweck’s work on “mindsets” with Halvorson’s recommendations for :
-Setting,
-Monitoring,
-Protecting,
-Executing,
-c\Celebrating goals.  

An earlier post outlined Dweck’s definitions of mindsets:

• Fixed Mindset:  Belief that personal capabilities are limited to present capacities, associated with fear, anxiety,

• Growth Mindset:  View that personal capabilities can expand based on:
-Commitment,
-Effort,
-Practice,
-Instruction,
-Correcting mistakes,
-Collaboration.

Peter Gollwitzer

Peter Gollwitzer

Columbia’s Peter Gollwitzer refined “mindsets” by distinguishing the Deliberative Mindset of evaluating which goals to pursue from the Implementation Mindset of planning goal execution.

His team found that the Deliberative Mindset is associated with:

    • Accurate, impartial analysis of goal feasibility and desirability,
    • Open-mindedness.

In contrast, the Implementation Mindset is linked to:

    • Optimistic, partial analysis of goal feasibility and desirability,
    • Closed-mindedness.

Halvorson, Dweck and Gollwitzer translated their research on self-determination and motivation into practical recommendations for goal seekers:

    • Adopt a supportive “mindset,”
    • Practice “self-compassion” when encountering setbacks to achieving goals,
    • Design effective responses to anticipated challenging situations,
    • Use “implementation intentions” and “strategic automation” toward goals,
    • Consider incremental progress toward goals.

-*What approaches help you work toward goals?

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©Kathryn Welds

Women Who Express Anger Seen as Less Influential

Jessica Salerno

Jessica Salerno

Women who expressed anger were less likely to influence their peersin computer-mediated mock jury proceedings, found Arizona State University’s Jessica Salerno and Liana Peter-Hagene of University of Illinois. 

Liana Peter-Hagene

Liana Peter-Hagene

More than 200 U.S. jury-eligible volunteers reviewed opening arguments and closing statements, eyewitness testimonies, crime scene photographs, and an image of the alleged weapon in a homicide.

Participants made individual verdict choices, then exchanged instant messages by computer, with “peers” who were said to be “deliberating their verdict decisions.”

In fact, “peer” messages were scripted, with four of the fictional jurors agreeing with the participant’s verdict, and one disagreeing.
In different test conditions, the dissenting participant had 1) a male user name or 2) a female user name or 3) a gender-neutral name.

Victoria Brescoll

Victoria Brescoll

Half of the dissenting messages contained no emotion, anger, or fear, and had no influence on participants’ opinions.

However, when a single “male dissenter” sent angry messages, characterized by “shouting” in all capital letters, participants’ confidence in their verdict decision significantly dropped.
This confidence-eroding effect of one “male dissenter” held even when the majority of “jurors” shared the same opinion.

A single female dissenter who expressed disagreement in an angry message did not undermine the other juror’s confidence in their decisions.

This finding suggests that a single male dissenter’s angry communication causes people to doubt their opinions, and that “female” anger was less influential than “male” anger.

In contrast, volunteers became more confident in their initial verdict decisions when their vote was echoed by the majority of other participants.

Eric Luis Uhlmann

Eric Luis Uhlmann

Male and female evaluators assigned lower status to female CEOs and female trainees when they expressed anger, compared with angry male professionals in research by Yale University’s Victoria Brescoll and Eric Luis Uhlmann, now of INSEAD.

Kristi Lewis Tyran

Kristi Lewis Tyran

Men who expressed anger in a professional context were conferred higher status than men who expressed sadness.

Likewise, women who expressed anger and sadness were rated less effective than women who shared no emotion, according to Kristi Lewis Tyran of Western Washington University.

Evaluators judged men’s angry reactions more generously, attributing these emotional expressions to external circumstances, such as experiencing pressure and demands from others.

These differing judgments of emotional expression suggest that women’s anger is more harshly evaluated because anger expressions deviate from women’s expected societal, gender, and cultural norms.

-*What impacts and consequences have you observed for women and men who express anger at work?

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©Kathryn Welds

 

Rationalisation: Coping or Complacency?

Sigmund Freud, Ernest Jones

Rationalisation was described by Freud biographer and psychoanalyst Ernest Jones as an unconscious maneuver to provide plausible explanations for unacceptable behaviour, motives, or feelings.

Gil Diesendruck

Children as young as ages four to six demonstrated this tactic in experiments by Bar-Ilan University’s Avi Benozio and Gil Diesendruck.

The research team found that young children learned to “reframe” disappointing circumstances.
This approach is often used by older people to reduce uncomfortable cognitive dissonance, described in classic studies by New School’s Leon Festinger.

Leon Festinger

In Benozio and Diesendruck’s experiments, children ages three, four, five and six years old completed tasks in exchange for stickers that varied in attractiveness to each age group.

Participants could invest considerable effort or minimal work in activities and could choose to keep these prizes or give them to another person.

Six year olds who invested substantial effort to obtain attractive rewards were less likely to relinquish stickers to others.

Elliot Aronson

When six year olds applied significant effort to obtain less desirable rewards, they also distributed fewer to others, but their reasoning differed.

They adjusted their appraisal of the less attractive stickers, judging these prizes as more appealing.
In contrast, four year olds discarded stickers rather than bolstering the value of the stickers.

Aesop

These differences suggest that children learn to rationalize by age six and continue using this strategy into adulthood, and validated by Stanford’s Elliot Aronson and the U.S. Army’s Judson Mills.

Their studies validated Aesop‘s observation of “sweet lemons” and “sour grapes” in the well-known fable The Fox and the Grapes.

To evaluate a possible relationship between cognitive dissonance and rationalization, UCLA’s Johanna M. Jarcho and Matthew D. Lieberman with Elliot T. Berkman of University of Oregon conducted fMRIs while participants responded to measures of attitude change linked to cognitive dissonance.

Joanna Jarcho

Joanna Jarcho

Brain activity showed significantly increased rapid reappraisal pattern used in emotional regulation, suggesting that rationalization may be an automatic coping mechanism rather than an unconscious defense mechanism.

Reinhold Niebuhr

Reinhold Niebuhr

Benozio and Diesendruck noted that this adaptive capacity could lead to complacence instead of working to change negative circumstances, articulated in the well-known Serenity Prayer attributed to Yale’s Reinhold Niebuhr:

…grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
The courage to change the things I can,
And the wisdom to know the difference.

-*To what extent is rationalisation a logical error?
-*How effective is rationalisation as an emotional regulation strategy?

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©Kathryn Welds

Range Offers vs Point Offers for Better Negotiation Settlements

Daniel Ames

Daniel Ames

Many people avoid making negotiation offers as a range of values, because they expect that co-negotiators will “anchor” on the range’s lower value or higher value. 

Malia F Mason

Malia F Mason

However, range offers led to stronger outcomes in experiments by Columbia University’s Daniel R. Ames and Malia F. Mason.
This team suggested that these “dual anchors” signal a negotiator’s value awareness and politeness.

Range offers and point offers have varying impacts, depending on the proposer’s perceived preparation, believability, respectfulness, and reasonableness.

Negotiators’ credibility, interpersonal style, and understanding of value  were associated with the anchor value’s influence on agreements.

Ames and Mason tested three types of negotiation proposal ranges:

  • Bolstering Range in which the target point value as the bottom of the range and an aspirational value as the top of the range.
    This strategy usually yields generous counteroffers and higher settlement prices. They recommend using Bolstering Range Offers in negotiations.  
  • Backdown Range features the target point value as the upper end of the range and a concession value as the lower offer.
    This approach often leads to accepting the lower value and they do not recommend this approach.
  • Bracketing Range includes the target point offer and often has neutral settlement outcomes for the offer-maker.
    This tactic can be perceived by co-negotiators as more collaborative and less aggressive.
Martin Schweinsberg

Martin Schweinsberg

Extreme anchors are often seen as aggressive and unrealistic, may lead to negotiation breakdown, according to INSEAD’s Martin Schweinsberg with Gillian Ku of London Business School, collaborating with Cynthia S. Wang of University of Michigan, and National University of Singapore’s Madan M. Pillutla.
Even experienced, skillful negotiators said they were offended by extreme offers.
Likewise, less capable negotiators were more likely to walk away from these negotiations.

Gilliam Ku

Gilliam Ku

Point offers and range offers operated independently and interacted to  influence settlement values. 
They concluded that Bolstering Range Offers imply the co-negotiator’s reservation price and can positively influence negotiation outcomes, whereas Precise Offers influence the perception of offer credibility

  • When do you present a precise negotiation offer instead of a negotiation range?

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Group “Intelligence”=Social Skills+Number of Women Members

Anita Wooley Williams

Anita Wooley Williams

A group’s “general collective intelligence factor” is related to social and communication skills, NOT to the average individual intelligence or even maximum individual intelligence of group members, found Carnegie Mellon’s Anita Williams Woolley, Christopher F. Chabris of Union College, with MIT colleagues Alex (“Sandy”) Pentland, Nada Hashmi, and Thomas W. Malone.

Group intelligence was most closely associated with:

  • Group member social sensitivity and empathy,
  • Equal conversational turn-taking,
  • Proportion of females in the group.
Christopher Chabris

Christopher Chabris

Nearly 700 volunteers completed an individual I.Q. test, then worked in teams on tasks including:

  • Logical analysis,
  • Coordination,
  • Planning,
  • Brainstorming,
  • Moral-ethical reasoning.
Simon Baron-Cohen

Simon Baron-Cohen

Each participant also completed a measure of empathy and social reasoning based on identifying emotional states portrayed in images of people’s eyes.

This instrument, Reading the Mind in the Eyes, was developed by University of Cambridge’s Simon Baron-Cohen, Sally Wheelright, Jacqueline Hill, Yogini Raste, and Ian Plumb.

Reading the Mind in the Eyes

Sally Wheelright

Individuals’ ability to infer other team members’ emotional states correlated with team effectiveness in solving workplace tasks, but not with extraversion or reported motivation.

Teams that performed best in online and face-to-face situations, also demonstrated stronger social and communication skills:

  • Accurate emotion-reading, empathy, and interpersonal sensitivity,
  • Communication volume,
  • Equal participation.

David Engel

High-performing teams accurately inferred others’ feelings even when emotional state was conveyed without visual, auditory, or non-verbal cues, reported Wooley’s team collaborating with MIT’s David Engel and Lisa X. Jing.

CONCLUSION: Teams increase task performance when members have well-developed “Emotional Intelligence,” social insight, and communication skills and when there is a high proportion of women in the team.
These factors are more important than when members have the highest average IQ. 

  • How do you enhance a work group’s collective intelligence in performance tasks?

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©Kathryn Welds

Confident Cluelessness = The Dunning-Kruger Effect

Stav Atir

Stav Atir

The Dunning-Kruger effect describes people’s overestimate of their own expertise and their unawareness of their incompetence in grammar, emotional intelligence, logical reasoning, firearm safety, debating, and financial acumen.

Emily Rosenzweig

Emily Rosenzweig

Cornell’s Stav Atir and Emily Rosenzweig of Tulane asked volunteers if they were familiar with concepts like centripetal force and photon as well as fictitious terms including plates of parallax, ultra-lipid, and cholarine.

About 90% of participants claimed some knowledge of at least one of the nine fake concepts.
People who thought they were most knowledgeable also said they recognized more of the meaningless terms.

David Dunning

David Dunning

Atir and Rosenzweig concluded that low performers lack insight about their skill deficits because they ”don’t know what they don’t know.”

Another study, by University of California San Diego’s Elanor Williams, Justin Kruger of NYU, and Cornell’s David Dunning asked volunteers to complete a logical reasoning task, an intuitive physics problem, and a financial challenge.

Elanor Williams

Elanor Williams

Participants who achieved no correct answers expressed the same degree of confidence as the most able performers.

Deborah Keleman

Deborah Keleman

Even 80 professionally-credentialed physical scientists at top universities provided a number of inaccurate purpose-based (“teleological”) explanations about “why things happen” in the natural world. 
These results are noteworthy because most physical scientists’ reject the validity of purpose-based explanations for natural phenomena.

Joshua Rottman

Joshua Rottman

When these professional scientists provided explanations under time constraints, they were twice as likely to endorse inaccurate rationales, reported Boston University’s Deborah Kelemen, Joshua Rottman, and Rebecca Seston.

Rebecca Seston

Rebecca Seston

Scientists were equally likely as humanities scholars to endorse inaccurate arguments. 

Both high and low achievers made judgments said they felt confident because they had a clear rationale for decisions, even though these were “intuitive rules” rather than empirically-based.
Williams’ team concluded, Rule-based confidence is no guarantee of self-insight into performance.”

Most people seem to hold pseudo-scientific explanations as “a default explanatory preference,” a mindset that could explain the appeal of myth and religion across cultures.

Justin Kruger

Justin Kruger

Similarly, people who filed for bankruptcy said they had high confidence in their financial acumen, although their real-life financial management skills didn’t keep them solvent.

More than 25,000 people rated their financial knowledge and completed the 2012 National Financial Capability Study, conducted by the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority with the U.S. Treasury.
Of these, 800 respondents said they filed bankruptcy within the previous two years.

Bankruptcy filers achieved financial knowledge scores in the lowest third of respondents, but they rated their knowledge more positively than financially-solvent respondents.
Nearly a quarter of the recently bankrupted respondents gave themselves the highest possible rating, whereas only 13 percent of financially-solvent respondents were equally confident.

Most people hold a positive view of their capabilities even when faced with contrary evidence.
However, women may hold an unrealistically modest view of their capabilities despite affirming feedback.
These biases in self assessment suggest the importance of realistic recalibration of confidence, aligned with consensual feedback.

-*How do you minimize the risks of “Clueless Confidence”?

-*How can systematic underestimates of competence be reduced to increase “Realistic Confidence”?

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Useful Fiction: Optimism Bias of Positive Illusions

Least Skillful Performers May Have Greatest Illusions of Competence

©Kathryn Welds

Creating Productive Thought Patterns

Albert Ellis

Albert Ellis

Leaders’ actions actions are influenced by unspoken self-talk.
Sometimes, these thoughts are self-critical and provoke anxiety.

Aaron Beck

Aaron Beck

Cognitive Behavior Therapy (CBT), developed by University of Pennsylvania’s Aaron Beck, provides a systematic way to notice and restructure “irrational self-talk.
Similar approaches were developed by Albert Ellis in Rational-Emotive Therapy (RET), and David Burns in his synthesis of CBT and RET.

David Burns

David Burns

Arizona State University’s Charles Manz and Chris Neck  translated these self-management processes to managerial development.
They outlined a Thought Self-Leadership Procedure as a five-step circular process:

Charles Manz

Charles Manz

1. Observe and record thoughts,

2. Analyze thoughts for potential errors in reasoning (jumping to conclusions, exaggeration),

3. Substitute alternate positive, realistic, plausible, acceptable thoughts,

4. Monitor personal reactions to these thoughts,

5. If more negative thoughts appear, continue to substitute the more productive thoughts.

Screenshot 2023-03-04 at 10.06.57

John Crimmins

John Crimmins

Other recommendations to manage thoughts about stressful situations were distilled by John Crimmins of Behaviour Institute in coaching people at work.

He suggested asking the following questions:

  • How do I know if this thought is true?
  • What evidence do I have to support this thought or belief?
  • How can I test my assumptions/beliefs to find out if they’re accurate?
  • What would a trusted friend say about these thoughts?
  • How is this thought helpful now?
  • What other ways that I can think about this situation?
  • What would a friend say when I blame myself in this situation?
  • What would I say to a friend who was in this situation?
  • What would a friend say to me when I take this situation personally?
  • How can I consider this situation on a continuum rather than in either-or terms?

-*What practices do you use to develop and apply productive thought patterns?

©Kathryn Welds

Career “Planning” = Career Improvisation

In “VUCA world,” described by the U.S. Army War College as volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous environments, career “planning” occurs under rapidly-shifting conditions.

As a result, it is difficult to  meaningfully respond to the interview question: “What are your career plans for the next five years?

Kathleen Eisenhardt

Planning is most suited to relatively certain circumstances when processes and decisions are linear, argued Stanford’s Kathleen Eisenhardt and Behnam Tabrizi.

In contrast, frequently-changing or uncertain conditions require improvisation, frequent testing, and revision.

Behnam Tabrizi

Iterative exploration, rapid prototyping/experimentation, and testing are used in agile software development and are applicable to rapid changes in economic, political, and technology changes that affect career paths.

Alison Maitland

University of London’s Alison Maitland and Peter Thomson offered this perspective in Future Work: How Businesses Can Adapt and Thrive In the New World of Work,

Related views on using flexible “planning” in career development come from Deloitte’s Cathy BenkoMolly Anderson, with Anne Weisberg of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison LLP in their model of The Corporate Lattice: Achieving High Performance in the Changing World of Work and Mass Career Customization: Aligning the Workplace with Today’s Nontraditional Workforce.

-*When have you found it more useful to “improvise” instead of “plan” your career?
-*What are the benefits of career “improvisation”?

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©Kathryn Welds