Posts from — December 2009

Empiricists love data. Lots of data.

Warren Kinston and Jimmy Algie posited that there are seven, and only seven, unique mindsets or approaches humans use when making decisions about action. This is conscious decision, not simply unconscious reaction based on stimula-response.I’ve got the full article available, although the quality is wanting. (See [2])

Warren Kinston and Jimmy Algie weren’t a couple of bumblers: Algie had been looking at this since the 1970s and Kinston had, too, albeit from a different angle. Their work together extended Algie’s original work of four approaches and was based on extensive experience consulting with managers and professionals in commerce and medicine, and through many open workshops where the decision methods were taught and tested.

I’m going to be describing each different decision approach over the next few weeks as a I prep for some other work I’m doing.

Each approach has specific mindset and values that make it uniquely appropriate for certain types of problems. Adherents to a particular type (and we are all) believe that their favored approach works in all situations. But it doesn’t.

Decision making approaches can also be seen as “languages of achievement” [1] because it is through them that we act. We make decisions about action.

Many of our disagreements in meetings and even families can be seen as disagreements about how to decide, rather than the action itself.

Also, I will just note here something Warren has pointed out several times: your decision making language seems to be doing the work. If I know your dominant decision approach, I can predict with uncanny accuracy how you will approach the problem and what decisions you will make. It is almost as if we are simply channels for the approach. Knowing more about them can make this not true, so this is worth looking at.

(Let’s be clear here that I am writing up what I think is true. Warren wrote things up quite differently, and I need to translate what I have read and heard into my own words. I am likely introducing some error in my efforts to bring this to a larger audience, so feel free to comment.)

Here’s the first decision making approach.

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Here’s a good lesson demonstrating why you need native speakers to help you write your materials when working abroad, especially in non-Western languages. The illustration comes from the other way around, the world’s largest bank.

This is ICBC China’s attempt at English in an official recruiting site:

Our leading enterprise needs excellent talent, and excellent talent also looks forward to joining a leading team…. Detailed enrollment information, please refer to our website: www.icbc.com.cn. ICBC would like to be hand in hand with you, to develop our business and also help to achieve your personal value.

Yes, this seems to be real. You can’t make this stuff up.

This is so bad that I wonder if non-native speakers could properly parse its meaning.

Language mangling like this occurs all the time when people use computer translators, like Babel Fish or Google Translate. It should not be so obvious when they use human translators.

ICBC China would have done better to have used a two-step translation process, where the first pass is done by a real translator, and the second by a native-speaking professional writer to ensure that it makes sense in International English. As it is, it just makes them look like they aren’t even trying. Perhaps there are not that many proficient English speakers in Chinese banking, unlike their Hong Kong counterparts. It makes the ICBC look as provincial as many US-based banks, whose staff often speak nothing more than English.

Writers are paid because they understand how to use language more effectively than you do. (Disclosure: I have been a professional writer.) Skimping on language is much like having your IT support being done by your office manager: it can work, but it is usually less robust than having dedicated staff, especially in larger organizations.

You’ll have to follow the money

Did you know that if you start work during a recession, you are likely to never make as much as someone who started working during good times? This is probably not news to you: Forbes and the Wall Street Journal both covered this back before the class of 2009 graduated in May.

It turns out that economic research showed that people who graduate during a depression not only make less money when they come out, because the market is depressed and jobs are scarce, but they continue to make less for years to come and may never catch up with people who are exactly like them but graduated a couple of years earlier during a run-up. Even when times get better, they still earn less money for the same jobs.

The reasons for this should be obvious, but that hasn’t stopped people from continuing to spout useless claptrap.

For example, Forbes’s David Serchuk (“How To Graduate In A Recession”, 2009 April 16) wrote that:

Having the bad luck to graduate in a recession can mark someone’s entire career, as it can lead workers to start careers at smaller firms that pay less….

[S]ometimes having your plans shattered can bring you to make a career out of what you’d really like to do with your life, as opposed to simply chasing the money.

John Osborne, later in the article, said that

Graduating into a recession or a Great Recession or whatever we are calling it is a great gift, a real blessing in disguise. Why? For two simple reasons: You are learning in dog years (one year equals seven years of experience), and you are getting more experience since you are more actually valuable.

If your Bullshit Detector hasn’t already gone off, it should. Forbes, of course, doesn’t make money by telling people the truth which is why they seemed blissfully unaware of the impending crash even though everyone knew that it was coming. These are nice thoughts but they clearly aren’t true, or at least aren’t true for the vast majority of graduates.

To see why this is bullshit, we need to look at why recession-era graduates will make less, even after the recovery.

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It seems that I’ve done something here to upset Google. Back when I started writing about Dr. Elliott Jaques, my blog was #3 when you searched for “elliott jaques”, right after his own Requisite Organization and Art Kleiner’s excellent introductory article on the man and his stratified systems theory.

Now it’s #76.

It’s clear that somehow I’ve done something wrong, for I have continued to write about the good Dr. Jaques and Requisite Organization / Stratified Systems Theory, showing how they apply to a variety of different contexts. Maybe it’s because this is a blog.

But even in blogs I’m #7.

So….

It might be time to admit that while I really do think I explain Jaques’s work levels in clear english — I can even explain the basic ideas to the regularly dismissed “Level 1 worker” — I can probably do better by doing something else.

It’s a thought.