(2019-04-08) Chin Organisational Politics Beware The Simple Story

Cedric Chin: Organisational Politics: Beware the Simple Story. It’s easy to point fingers at other people and say “look at their flaws!” so here’s one that affects me badly. Perhaps this is something that affects you too.

This is the fundamental attribution error in action — that is, when other people mess up, we have a tendency to attribute it to their innate characteristics; when we mess up, we conclude that ‘it’s just this one time’. (cognitive bias)

The more interesting question to ask in this situation is: ‘what is the mechanism at work here?’ followed by ‘how can I put that knowledge to good use?’

I think that beyond a certain skill-level, emotional intelligence matters — people who can produce accurate judgment of others are more effective at work

When I was writing my Putting Mental Models to Practice series I found myself waist-deep in the judgement and decision making subfield of applied psychology

Reading everything in a period of a few short months made it easier to spot patterns across the books and papers. One of the most interesting patterns that I began to notice was the constant reiteration that our brains are just really good narrative machines.

Narrative is good when we’re using it for learning or reading, but it quickly becomes problematic when we are required to make decisions at work. Any time a story we generate matches up to our observations, our brain flags that story as ‘Plausible! I believe this!’ and then shuts down the machinery that is responsible for analysis.

It also explains company politics — something that affects our careers more than we’d like to think

I’ve noticed that the people I consider ‘good with people’ tend to not make egregious narrative errors.

It’s not enough to prevent yourself from forming judgments of people too quickly; you also need to protect yourself against forming your judgments of people too slowly, so that you can take action where it’s warranted.

There are two sides to this problem of character judgment. The first side is to figure out how to avoid such errors of judgment when you're doing the judging. The second side of this problem is when you are subject to someone else’s bad judgment

The solution that works for me is simple but difficult to do: whenever you find yourself generating an explanation for someone’s behaviour, generate multiple narratives at the same time

I find that updating existing beliefs to be as difficult as everyone says it is; I have no special techniques to solve for that problem.

Jonathan Haidt, for instance, argues that the best way to get around judgment biases are to create social environments that encourage productive disagreement.

Once you understand that errors in character judgment often stem from this sort of narrative generation, it becomes easier to deal with other people doing this to you.

Your job is now two-fold: you need to correct this judgment, and you need to do it quickly.