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Some random thoughts I've had over the past couple of years, collected. Randomly. About what I call underemployed or underutilized high-mode individuals. Others call them "ex- gifted child" or "adult underachiever" or "irritating screw ups". If you don't know what "mode" means, here's a quick explanation.
Elliott Jaques and Wilfred Brown discovered that people's ability to handle complexity was tied to their mind's time horizon, and that different people grew at different rates. Not only that, but they tended to follow set paths from the time they were in the early twenties: people were on different development arcs.
Think of a chart with your time horizon on the X-axis and your age on the Y-axis. People are on different trajectories on this chart: the growth of their mental time-horizons is different. These trajectory arcs tended towards bands, with people staying in one band as they aged. Maybe with a lot of effort you can change your arc: Jaques and Brown didn't think so, and most of the research indicates that it is at least not what most of us do.
none of these are me
Here's a chart showing different bands. The vertical rectangles are where certain individuals were when they were evaluated. Let's take the yellow rectangle at the bottom left. This guy was 25 when I interviewed him. I believed that the evidence supported him currently having a time horizon of more than 1 year (which is represented by his position on the X-axis). My evaluation says that he is likely in the bottom of that range (the stronger yellow), and that he will continue growing in this band all his life.
Why is any of this important? What could it mean for your life?
People are closer in time-horizons when they are younger. (The time on the X-axis is logarithmic: that is, it increases exponentially as we go up it.) So if you are a "high-moder", in one of the steeper trajectory arcs, you actually grow farther away from people as you age. You become increasingly irritating to the people around you because you keep on trying to talk at your time-horizon.
Look at the red rectangle at age 40. He's in the 8th mode, according to this evaluation. His time horizon when I interviewed him was around 10 years. He works with people who are three to four trajectories down from him, but his age, with a time-horizon of 1-3 years. Every time he starts talking, he has to be very careful lest he overpower the conversations with time-horizons that are 3x+ longer than his coworkers.
When they were in college, at 21, he had a time-horizon of about 2 years, compared to their 3 months to 1 year. A big difference, and one that was noticed, but not too bad. Now he's just a freak.
An illustration: A coworker of mine, 42, had a time-horizon of about 3 years. He was consulting to a massive insurance company. His client contact was 27 and had a time horizon of less than one year. They were called into a meeting with a vice-president, who probably had a time-horizon of 6 years. She was considering whether she should pull the project that they were working on. Which would mean both would get fired.
She kept asking for something from the young kid. He kept thinking he was agreeing with her, when in actuality he was shrinking what she wanted to something he could handle, which is not his fault and something we all do. It was as if the conversation was like this:
"I want you to do this 5 METERS of work."
"I hear you and agree: this 1.5 METERS of work."
"No, I want 5 METERS of work."
"Yes, I hear you. You want 1.5 METERS of work. We're in total agreement."
"Listen, you obstinate little twerp: I want 5 METERS of work."
"I hear you, and I'm agreeing with you: 1.5 METERS of work. What's your problem?"
At this point my coworker steps in and translates between the two. This placated the vice-president who didn't pull the project.
But it totally pissed off the client contact, who walked out saying that if my coworker ever embarrassed him like that again in front of a VP, he would fire him and get rid of the entire consulting firm. The kid had no idea how badly things were going.
It wasn't his fault, of course. He should never have been in that position. He didn't have the ability to handle the mental complexity that comes with these longer time horizons.
The red rectangle guy has this problem with everyone. As a result, he has adopted several coping mechanisms that obscure his true mental size, which make him come off as a weirdo to many. But I've seen him go full bore. It scared me white. All those weird adaptations (which he needs to survive) fell away and I got the full force of his intellect. It was stunning.
But if he had tried to give that to most of the people he works with, they would have reacted with mental violence of some sort against him. It would have been threatening and hurting them. He would be trying to shove a 10 year time horizon argument into a 3 year time horizon mind. It won't fit.
Since that has made no sense to anyone yet (I'll clean this up for my business blog later), here's some random notes:
I have no idea where this came from. I can't seem to find the source any longer. Surely it's something from the pop press. I sent it to myself in an email while doing research on a different issue back in June 2006.
[ Continue reading "The Law of Consistency, source lost" ]Take, for instance, the example of the man who always buys a certain brand of car. He says it's the best and professes this profusely to anyone who buys another type of car. When he's shown in writing that the maintenance and repair record of that car is much worse than other cars of similar size and cost, he will most likely find some reason to dismiss the information and continue believing that his car is still the best.
I recently listened to a podcast from Radio Lab of WNYC that described recent results that confirmed William James's earlier suspicion, that our emotions are mainly centered in our bodies. You feel afraid because your body senses the bear, not because your mind recognizes the bear and says that you should be afraid of the bear.
This is an amazing discovery because it implies that much of psychotherapy is simply wrongheaded: you can't think yourself out of your responses like fear. Much of it is built in. It turns a lot of our thinking upside down, including how we behave.
[ Continue reading "Emotions Are Body, Not Mind" ]Although I have made money off enabling online activities (primarily securing finance industry work), I have serious reservations about the idea that we can fully meet without meeting physically. I use video conferencing, teleconferencing, chat, and chatrooms regularly to get work done. My current coworker is in the UK / Europe / Australia / Southeast Asia, depending on the time of the year, so I get a goodly workout with using email, chat and Skype, conducting much of our business in "cyberspacee" or "virtual meetings". But we still have to meet face to face, in "meatspace".
As I try to get things going at this new company, Yule, I've been reading some material that the boss has been consuming on the software industry. He found Yourdon's Death March to be incredibly discouraging — if the industry is this bad, how can we be of any help to them? — but that's what that book is all about. If you have been sent on a software "death march" (the term is one I wouldn't have used, in deference to the souls left at Bataan) you recognize what he is saying, and indeed the only thing to do is quit. I've found that the manager almost always comes out okay in these: his or her workers are always blamed and the stain stays with them.
Sometimes you can accomplish the incredible even when on these. Jim did. He got fired. The boss is now the CTO of a large investment bank.
Kinston, Warren. 1987. Stronger Nursing Organization: A Working Paper for General Managers & Nursing Managers. Brunel University / The SIGMA Centre: London.
Warren Kinston discussed the issue of expecting the people who report to you to take see the Big Picture or to take into account the other departments or groups within your organization.
The frequent complaint of top nursing managers that their line-subordinates will not take 'the wider view' is a mistaken one. In fact, line-subordinates, who are often line-managers themselves, should not be taking the wider view but should be fighting for their own patch. This is the inherent tension in the manager-subordinate relation, based on accountability for different levels of work; and it cannot be avoided. Line subordinates should not be treated or expected to act simply as assistants to their managers. [p. 14]
It's something that is obvious once I read it, but I have to admit that I hadn't thought of this before. I think I unreflectively assumed what I had been told, that we should all be looking to the bigger picture, that we should all be thinking of the shareholders. That's wrong: there aren't that many people who actually think of the shareholders at work (based on surveys) which works, since only the very top should be thinking of them at all.
He later talks about some of the ways that poor management of nursing creates many of the problems that we so often see in hospitals.
Kinston's dealing with a lot here, and he unpacks some of it in later works which will hopefully be posted to the GO Society website soon.
As a footnote, it's interesting to hear how the complaint that there was too much work and too few nurses twenty years ago. I wonder if the amount of nursing that we require expands to always be more than the amount of nurses that we have.
From "Thought Leader Interview with Rick Lash: Developing Better Leaders, Faster" on HR.com:
I spent some time coaching a senior financial executive of a major global organization. One of the things he said was, “It’s really nice to have grown up in this organization, where I feel I have a tribe.” I kind of paused and I said, “What do you mean by a tribe?” and he said, “Well, I have been in this organization for 20 years and there was a group of us who all started at roughly the same time and even though we have all gone on to different roles in the organization, we all feel that we have this deep connection to each other. That deep connection enables us to be able to navigate in the organization, influence the right people, get the information that we need and also feel that we have mutual support.”
That type of network or tribe takes years to build up and is critical for effective influence and for developing a “big picture” view of the organization.
I'm not sure that it really takes years to build up. I think that the timeframe is stratum dependent. These folks probably all came in at the same stratum and age, and therefore tracked together.
There's a problem with having one of these tribes, too: they can be destructive to new people in a higher-mode coming up.
