Can I borrow your watch….

What I am doing here is giving you ‘aha moments’ on what you already do.  Is this a cheap trick of mine?  Yes and no.

For the record- some of the stuff in my articles, in my posts, you know.  But some you don’t.  this is just about what you already know, or mostly know.  If it’s new to you, great.

Dragging type 1 thinking into the light

A lot of what my teaching involves is self-reflection and rational critique of partially known knowledge.  Most people partially know what I’m teaching.  But what they haven’t done is evaluate why they do what they do, and if it is indeed the best thing to do.  We are habitual creatures; we find something that worked, and then lock it in as how we do things in the future.

This works okay, and this ‘okayness’ (it’s good enough most of the time) both helps and constrains us.  It’s how we learn complex jobs quickly, it’s how we are able to transfer skills from job to job, workplace to workplace.  If you want to get really scientific, it’s type 1 thinking, an amazing cognitive mechanism for learning to make decisions quickly and efficiently.

But it constrains our learning.  It stops us learning to do things better.  How many habits do you have in life that go unquestioned, unevaluated?  Is your preferred dishwashing soap the best/cheapest/most suited to your personal preferences and circumstances?  Or did you make a decision one day and now you’re stuck in a habit?

Why we should reconsider and re-evaluate what we do

Like the soap decision, we stop make cognitive decisions over everything, and we get stuck in patterns of behaviour.  Don’t get me wrong, there is nothing wrong with type 1 thinking, it makes us highly efficient.  But once in a while we need to evaluate what we do, for the follow reasons:

-              What worked before might not work the same now.

-              What worked there might not work as well here.

-              You know more now than you did then.

To give a quick example- I’ve spent a lot of time working with people on their management style, and adjusting it to working in a new country.  Management style (to put it simply) is a series of habits and habitual choices, that sit in our subconscious and guide our behaviour and actions without need much cognitive direction.  But as we all know- what works in one culture doesn’t work in another, so habits need to be re-learnt.

Why this is a cheap trick (and not)

It yes, because the oldest trick in the consultant arsenal is repacking existing knowledge and sell it back to the customer.  Ever heard the adage- you hire a consultant so they can borrow your watch to tell you the time? 

That’s a skeptic’s mindset, and don’t let me or other consultants off the lease easily (if you want to see a good satire of cheap jingos see here.

Human’s love insight.  It literally releases dopamine.  Whenever you go ‘ohhh I see…’  you brain gives a little release of our feel-good neurotransmitter.  So yes, I am giving you a little drug hit.  But the brain does this on purpose- it also encourages learning and memory retention.  So yes, it’s a cheap trick, and be skeptical of aha snake oil salesmen, but it’s not wrong.

How you can tell if it helps?  If you do things differently.