Strategy. Innovation. Brand.
Critical Thinking and the Job Market
Because I know how to think.
I used to teach research methods, which is about creating knowledge. Now I teach critical thinking, which is about assessing knowledge. How do we know what we know and how can we assess knowledge in an objective, fairminded way?
It’s a fun course because we think about thinking. We discuss everything from egocentrism to reason, logic, ethics, media bias, and unfair ways to win an argument. Many of the students challenge their own beliefs and we all challenge each other. It’s a stimulating way to learn to think clearly and to avoid getting bamboozled.
What surprises me about the class is how surprised the students are. Even though much of the course is applied common sense, they’ve rarely thought of this before. That concerns me because these are Master’s students. All of them have at least four years of undergraduate study. Yet they haven’t thought about how to think. Here are some quotes from recent student papers:
I never thought to think about thinking
It is revolutionary for me to understand that there is an analytical process called critical thinking that I can [use] to systematically develop clearer thinking…
… while I practiced some critical thinking basics, I had really only scratched the surface
This class taught me that I was unconscious of the connection between my thoughts and emotions.
It was not required in my undergraduate program and I have never taken a class similar to it.
So, I’ve been asking myself, why aren’t we teaching college students how to think? My Mom always told me that the purpose of college was to learn how to think. Was she wrong or have we given up on that objective?
When I was in undergraduate school, the first two years of our four-year curriculum were given over to “general education”. We didn’t start to specialize in our major – finance or engineering or anthropology – until the third year. Today, it seems that general education has simply evaporated. Students start specializing as soon as they land on campus.
So when do they learn to think? If a finance major takes four years of accounting courses, what do they really gain, other than an exceedingly narrow view of the world? I wonder if we haven’t gone too far in the direction of preparing students for the job market. We identify the technical skills the market requires – accounting, programming, etc. – but not the thinking skills.
Do companies really want ace spreadsheet jockeys who don’t know how to evaluate whether an assumption is logical or not? As someone who hired several hundred people in my career, I would say no. I preferred hiring people who can think clearly and communicate effectively. The rest is trivial.
So, I’m all in favor of bringing back general education and teaching students how to think. I’m not sure how to go about it but I’m developing a theory that the MOOCs will help get us back to basics. That may be the silver lining in the coming wave of MOOC disruption.
Appreciative Inquiry
When I encountered a problem as a manager, my natural inclination was to delve into it with sharply defined questions like:
- What went wrong?
- How did we get here?
- How did this happen?
- Who was responsible?
- What was the root cause?
The first thing you’ll notice about these questions is that they’re all in the past tense. As we know from studying rhetoric, arguments in the past tense are about laying blame, not about finding solutions. The very way that I phrase my questions lets people know that I’m seeking someone to blame. What’s the natural reaction? People become defensive and bury the evidence.
The second thing you’ll notice is that all my questions are negative. The questions presuppose that nothing good happened. I don’t ask about what went right. I’m just not thinking about it. And neither is anyone else who hears my questions.
In many situations, however, a lot of things do go right. In fact, I would guess that in most organizations most things go right most of the time. Failures are caused by a few things going wrong. It’s rarely the case that everything goes wrong. Focusing on what’s wrong narrows our vision to a small slice of the activity. We don’t see the big picture. It’s self-defeating.
So, I’ve been looking for a systematic way to focus on the positive even when negative things happen. I think I may have found a solution in something called appreciative inquiry or AI.
According to Wikipedia, appreciative inquiry “is based on the assumption that the questions we ask will tend to focus our attention in a particular direction.” Instead of focusing on deficiencies, AI “starts with the belief that every organization, and every person in that organization, has positive aspects that can be built upon.” AI argues that, when people “in an organization are motivated to understand and value the most favorable features of its culture, [the organization] can make rapid improvements”.
The AI model includes four major steps:
- Discover – identify processes and cultural features that work well;
- Dream – envision processes that would work well in the future;
- Design – develop process that would work well in the culture;
- Deliver – execute the proposed designs.
The ultimate goal is to “build organizations around what works, rather than trying to fix what doesn’t”.
Paul Nutt compares appreciative inquiry to solving a mystery. To get to the bottom of a mystery, we need to know about everything that went on, not just those things that went wrong. Nutt writes that, “A mystery calls for appreciative inquiry, in which skillful questioning is used to get to the bottom of things.”
I’m still learning about appreciative inquiry (and about most everything else) and I’m sure that I’ll write more about it in the future. In the meantime, if you have examples of appreciative inquiry used in an organization, please let me know.
Perverse Incentives
But is it for the right thing?
Let’s say I’m a successful sales rep at a business-to-business software company that’s trying to improve customer satisfaction. The company wants me to take good care of my customers, tell the truth, and make them feel loved.
At the same time, the company pays me based on how much software I sell each quarter. It’s in my best interest to sell as much as I can even if I have to stretch the truth a bit and promise more than I can deliver. Of course, stretching the truth and failing to deliver often result in lower customer satisfaction. So the company is incenting me to behave in ways that defeat its own objectives.
In Britain, this is known as the principal-agent problem. In this case, the principal is the company. I’m an agent acting on the company’s behalf. The problem is that the agent’s incentive (my commission) is different than the principal’s objective. We’re working at cross-purposes.
Paul Nutt and other American writers generally refer to this situation as a perverse incentive. According to Wikipedia, a perverse incentive”… has an unintended and undesirable result which is contrary to the interests of the incentive makers.”
Examples abound. We may strive for smaller government but we typically pay government managers based on how many employees they have, not on the profits they generate (since they generate no profits). We encourage orphanages to place children with families, but we pay subsidies based on how many children are in the orphanage.
The examples may sound bizarre but perverse incentives are all too easy to create. Nutt gives a particularly perverse example: the company that proclaims, “We will not accept failure.” While that may sound bold and brave, it sets up a perverse incentive.
Every company fails from time to time. When a failure occurs, it’s in the company’s best interest to analyze it, understand it, and use it as a teachable moment. But companies that don’t accept failure will never get a chance to do this. Employees associated with the failure will bury it as deeply as they can. Otherwise, they’ll get fired.
What should you do when you inevitably encounter a perverse incentive? The first thing is to make sure it’s known. Many times executives set lofty goals (“we will never fail”) without realizing just how perverse they are. Calling attention to perversity is a useful first step.
Second, it’s time to discuss alignment. We often think of alignment in terms of focusing on the same goal. That’s good but only if the incentives for achieving that goal are also aligned. A comprehensive and detailed review of incentives will help identify areas of misalignment. This is when a good HR department is worth its weight in gold.
MOOCs and Me – 2
I can teach from anywhere.
So, what about it? Will MOOCs destroy academic life as we know it? Or will they be more like correspondence courses – an interesting niche but only a niche? As a teacher of MOOC-like courses, I do have an opinion. (See yesterday’s post for the background to this burning question).
Here’s what MOOCs are good for: transferring structured bodies of information and testing to see that it was accurately received. Actually, the testing is still a bit slippery. It’s not always clear who is actually taking the test. However, I think that will be worked out over the next couple of years with proctored exams and/or new forms of identification.
Here’s what classroom-based education is good for: growing up. MOOCs can’t teach you much about integrity, social interaction, clear thinking, mature judgment, and the responsibilities of adult life. Campus education – especially residential campus education – can teach you far more about living than MOOCs ever could. As David Brooks points out, morality is a group activity.
People who want to grow up will continue to choose campus-oriented higher education. People who want to earn professional credentials may find MOOCs are a much better choice.
What does this mean in practice? I think undergraduate schools will be relatively unaffected by MOOCs. There will always be good reasons to ship your kids off to college.
Further, some skills are more readily taught face-to-face, including negotiation, mediation, critical thinking, disputation, public speaking, rhetoric, and writing. Undergraduate schools will place increasing emphasis on these foundational skills. In this sense, they’ll be more like colleges of the 1930s and 40s than those of the 1980s and 90s.
Graduate education, on the other hand, is about to get Amazoned. Why would a student take a course in, say artificial intelligence, from a local professor when they could cover the same material (for free) from a world-renowned expert? When it comes to transferring a structured body of knowledge, MOOCs are hard to beat.
Is there any value of going to graduate school on campus? Well, foundational skills are still important. I teach Master’s students and I can attest that they would benefit by improving their ability to negotiate, speak persuasively, and write effectively. Additionally, on-campus programs may be better at helping students develop life-long networks. Actually, I’m a little skeptical that this is a significant advantage – social networks can fill the same need. Still, there’s probably a modest benefit from meeting your co-conspirators on campus.
To survive, I think that many graduate schools will shift their emphasis away from codified bodies of knowledge and toward the foundational skills. They can offer the bodies of knowledge through MOOCs. In their on-campus courses, they’ll focus on teaching the “softer” skills. In my experience, these are far more valuable than structured bodies of knowledge.
In terms of market positioning, I think it’s simple. The best grad schools in the future will position themselves along these lines: Any MOOC can teach you how the world works. We can also teach you how to work in the world.
(By the way, these opinions are my own and not those of any of my clients or employers).
Is Happiness Authentic?
Navajo or Rothko?
I’ve been worried about the word “authentic” recently. I just don’t understand what it means any more. In fact, I’m worried that it doesn’t mean anything.
Oh, I get what “authentic” means when applied to an object, particularly an art object or an antique. Let’s say, for instance, that you just bought an “authentic Navajo saddle blanket”. Presumably that means a Navajo wove the blanket in a traditional style. If a gringo had woven a similar blanket using traditional techniques, it wouldn’t be “authentically” Navajo.
What if a Navajo decides to become an abstract expressionist and weaves a blanket in the style of Mark Rothko? Is that still authentically Navajo? It’s an interesting comparison because – if you look at blankets as art – Navajos may well have been the first abstract expressionists. So is the saddle blanket depicted here authentically Navajo, or authentically abstract expressionist, or an authentic precursor to Rothko?
It gets even weirder as we apply “authentic” to people. Self-help enthusiasts tell me that I should be my “authentic” self. Well, OK … but who else would I be? Is my “authentic” self somehow different from the self that I’ve grown so comfortable with over the years? Is it somehow trimmed or edited?
And how does my “authentic” self relate to reality? I’m the product not only of my own efforts but also of many years of bumping into other people. Like a stone in a river, I’ve been shaped by millions of interactions with other people. Is that shaping process part of my “authentic” self or should I just ignore it?
And what does “authentic” mean when it’s applied to literature? I’ve heard authors, especially novelists, described as “an authentic voice of XYZ”. Then I read their books. They’re depressing. In fact, here’s what “authentic” novels seem to have in common: They’re about poor people or outsiders. They’re pessimistic. They rail against the establishment (or just rich people in general). They’re angry. Has a happy novel ever been described as “authentic”?
Don’t get me wrong — some “authentic voice” novels are superb. For instance, I think Vilhelm Moberg provided an authentic voice of the 19th century Swedish diaspora in his novel, The Emigrants. It’s an epic story about people who must choose between famine and emigration. It’s about poor people; it’s pessimistic; it’s depressing. It’s also great.
But why are only sad, depressing, pessimistic novels described as authentic? Is there something inauthentic about happiness? Denmark is often described as the happiest country in the world. Does that mean that Danes are inauthentic? (Well, there’s always Hamlet – was he more authentic than modern Danes?) Similarly, could you write a novel with a happy ending and call it “authentic”? Or, as one critic put it, is a happy novel just “too working class”?
I’ve decided not to use the word “authentic” until I get a better handle on what exactly it means. In the meantime, I have a simple question: Is “authentic” authentic?
My Social Media
