The Hindu Business Line : <I>Why we think inside boxes </I>

Our thinking is very much a result of conditioning, the way we have been taught to think — not what opinions to hold, but rather how to think straight, and freely. Conditioning works in two ways. One is through the upbringing in society, and the other by the way we have been schooled and the frameworks unconsciously acquired. An unusual question at the end of a management course drives home this very point: "If your business and personal success depended on just one idea from the course — which would it be and why?" Here are some examples.

Life is about paradoxes

We often tend to see life in terms of polar opposites — good and bad, effective and ineffective — rather than as a continuum, though sometimes we make the mental adjustment. But we can go much further. Some aspects of life are good sometimes and not so at some others, meaning that life is mostly about paradoxes.

And human behaviour has to be seen in its own context and not in absolutes, which means that one man's meat can indeed be another man's poison — and even the same person can see a thing as either at different times! Keeping such ideas firmly in mind helps one-approach organisational issues more flexibly.

Scenario thinking

Another such idea is of looking at business futures as scenarios and not, as we normally would, a numerical projection based on a statistical function. Scenario thinking enables the mind to accommodate a range of divergent possibilities, regardless of how probable each outcome could be. When you think about it, developments in international politics, economics and climate affect us all and we have absolutely no control over them. Scenarios are a discipline that inoculates the mind against dogma and intolerance, enabling the imagination, to think the otherwise unthinkable.

In the realm of human relationships, it is particularly unwise to use two axis and four quadrants model (such as competence and character), in the typical 2-by-2 matrix which managers are so familiar with.

We cannot put people into boxes so easily, which is also the reason why all psychometric classifications from personality inventories have to be used very carefully in recruitment decisions. Yet the exactness-oriented training of the engineer inclines us in favour of such classification.

Linear thinking

Perhaps the most powerful and deep-rooted habit of the mind is our tendency to linear thinking, from an input through a process to a predictable and measurable output. This works well in physical sciences and in technology, making problem solving relatively simple. One has to find the cause that is related to the unwanted end-result and just eliminate it. No wonder this habit is the most difficult to dislodge.

Systems and cellular networks are a very different way of thinking altogether. More and more it has been discovered that life from the solar system and the cosmos down to the human body itself is an amazingly complex network, a lattice work as it were which is not just interconnected, but linked at several levels and backwards and forwards.

Causation is neither straightforward nor easy to express. This is the crux of our difficulty in dealing with the vast issues confronting humanity such as global warming, the environment, or world peace. One does not know where to start because there simply is no single right answer.

S. Ramachander

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