Welcome

Welcome to An Examined Life. Occasionally I delude myself into thinking that I understand some part of my life (or life in general) and I thought it might be a hoot to share those thoughts with whomever happens to stumble across this. I hope you find something enjoyable here. If I'm really lucky, I'll make you stop and think for a moment.

Sunday, December 18, 2011

Picard vs. Kirk: A Few Thoughts on Leadership

In my last entry I made an offhand comment about which Star Trek captain – Picard or Kirk – was better. If you’re the type to read footnotes on blogs, you’ll know that I believe Picard was the better captain. Thinking about that got me thinking about leadership: how I got to be a leader and what I’ve learned about leadership along the way.

My first leadership position came in the job I had right after high school. I was working in a theater. It was one of the big, old 1000-seat, single screen theaters that were dying a long, slow death in the mid- to late-1970’s. I was hired as an usher and eventually became assistant manager. But, I moved up when the people over me quit to get jobs that paid at least minimum wage. By the time I got to be the assistant manager there was no one under me. So, as assistant manager I was still performing all my usher duties, plus I got to unlock the front doors. I’m not sure that I learned much from that.
My next job was with Kmart. The store manager’s name was John Lipp. I learned a lot from him. Every so often I Google him, because I’d really like to find him so I can say thanks. So far I’ve been unsuccessful. So, Mr. Lipp, if you ever read this: Thanks.
I started as part-time help in the toy department at Christmas. I worked for an assistant manager named Patricia. Apparently I impressed someone, because after Christmas I was hired full-time and was made the department head of three departments: rugs, furniture, and plastics (the faux Tupperware stuff that Kmart sold). I did that for awhile and then was offered a promotion to assistant manager, with several department heads and other employees reporting to me. And I started working much more directly with Mr. Lipp.
I remember the first time I got a note from him assigning me some task to do. It was written on a leftover goldenrod inventory tag. I don’t remember what the task was now, but written under it were the letters WIT. As I recall, the task was clear and easy, but the WIT stumped me. I was pretty sure he didn’t want me to be funny while I did the job, but I just had no idea what the WIT meant, and I didn’t want to start on the task if WIT altered what I thought the job was. Eventually I gave up trying to figure it out, went back to the manager’s office and admitted that I didn’t understand. He looked up at me and said, “Get it done Whatever It Takes.”
There were other acronyms, but that’s the only one I can remember now. I spent most of my retail career working for John Lipp and a lot of my style (such as it is) comes from him. I worked for other managers at Kmart, but most of what I learned from them was how not to lead. There were other managers at other chains, too, but the only other one who I feel was a positive role model was Fred Cole at Marshall’s. Thanks to you, too, Mr. Cole.
So, what did I learn? I could be here a long time and not get it all down (plus you wouldn’t read it all if I did – assuming that you’re even reading this). So, here’s some of what I think are the more important things.
First, you set the tone for your organization (your store, your department, your business). You do that directly by how you lead. If you’re a little ankle-biter, yappy dog of a micromanager you’re probably going to be leading a group of people chewing on their fingernails and watching the clock waiting for their shift to be over. They won’t go the extra mile for you, because you’re standing over them to make sure they do the required mile exactly to your specifications. You’re going to make them nervous and edgy and, I think, you’ll sap whatever creativity they might have. You’ll probably also make them a bit resentful – why did you hire them if you don’t believe they’ll do the work without you telling them every minute how to do it? That leads me to the indirect way that you set the tone for your group: you set the tone by hiring the people you hire. If you hire a bunch of jerks[1], you’re going to have a group that really doesn’t work well (Think about it. Who would really want to work with Dr. House?).
As a leader, you want to hire good people and then treat them right. Obviously, you want competent people (or ones you can train), but you also want someone who gets what your organization is about and who fits with your group (see the above comments on, umm, jerks). Given a choice between someone with lots of experience who’s a jerk and someone I’ll need to train who fits in, I’ll go with the later every time. The best of all is the job candidate with experience and who fits in. You also want to avoid judging on appearances. A good employee might not be the one who’s most polished in the interview. I remember one Christmas I was hiring part-time people to staff the toy department. I hired three people who didn’t fit the conventional mold (one, for example, wore faded denim and chains to the interview). The Boss (I won’t say which one) was leaving on vacation and said that my three would be gone before he got back. He much preferred a different more polished three who’d been hired for other departments. When he got back, the polished three were gone. Two of my three eventually ended up in management positions (the third left to go to college).
Once you’ve got good people you need to treat them right. You want to train them, let them know what’s expected (and high expectations are good), and then get the hell out of their way and let them do their jobs. Praise them when they do well, but let them know when they do something wrong (after all, how can they correct the problem if they don’t know it’s a problem). Another part of treating them right is the tone of the organization (you set that –see above). By way of example, retail stores tend to be a bit busy between Thanksgiving and mid-January. The first part of that is the Christmas season. After Christmas, most chains then do their yearly inventory. Everybody works hard. The best people I worked for asked for a lot during that time, but as soon as inventory was over, all the assistant managers found three-day weekends worked into their schedules. The lesson: ask a lot but give something back. Thank you notes are another way to let people know that you value them. Keep in mind, though, that three-day weekends and thank you notes only go so far. Thank you notes don’t pay the mortgage. Part of treating your people right is to pay them well.
A final point: you can’t lead by just quoting the rule book. No set of rules, no matter how well-thought-out they are, can ever cover every possible situation. As a leader, the situations that don’t fit the rulebook – either there’s no rule that speaks to the issue or someone’s asking to violate a rule – will come to you for your decision. It’s uncomfortable, but no one ever promised that leadership was easy. By accepting the position you’ve put yourself right where the buck stops. In those situations, you need to keep in mind the mission of the organization. You also need to bear in mind any general principles that your organization might have. Sometimes those general principles will be spelled out (see, for example, the APA Ethics code at http://www.apa.org/ethics/). Most times they won’t be. If they’re not, study the rules. They were written for a reason. If you can figure out that reason, that purpose, you’ve got the general principles. A rule against accepting a starter check for payment at a store probably wasn’t written simply to turn down starter checks. It was probably written with the larger purpose of avoiding bad checks. You need to make decisions that are consonant with those principles and further the mission of the organization.
So, why do I prefer Picard to Kirk? In my opinion, Kirk violated too many of these principles I’ve learned. First and foremost, Kirk didn’t let his people do their jobs (with the exception of Scotty. Kirk never went to engineering to repair the warp drive). If anything was going to get done, Kirk was going to do it. He had all these competent people sitting around watching him do all the work. Give me a break. Picard, on the other hand, let his people do their jobs. As a matter of fact, he demanded that they do their jobs (“Give me options,” he’d often say). He also had good people who didn’t fit the conventional mold: in the first few seasons a blind man flew the ship, a machine was third in command, a former enemy was the security officer, and his first officer often wouldn’t let him do something he wanted to do. And they did amazing things and had a bit of fun doing it.
That’s leadership.


[1] I’ve often thought (and said) that one of the greatest benefits that psychology could give to humanity would be to create a jerk test2.
2 Ok, to be honest, jerk isn’t the word I really use, but I think my kid reads this.

Thursday, December 1, 2011

Do You Believe?

In my last post I mentioned that deep down I wanted to be a scientist. I’m sometimes asked why. Often I answer that I wanted to be a scientist because of Gilligan’s Island and Jonny Quest. Usually around that time people seem to remember the old quip about psychologists – that there are two kinds of people who go into psychology, the ones who want to help and the ones who need help – and decide that I belong in the latter group. But stick with me a minute because it actually makes sense. First, think about the Professor on Gilligan’s Island. He was a scientist who knew just about everything (except how to fix a boat). He was the rational, objective guy who people went to in order to solve whatever problems might arise on the island. That’s a pretty cool kind of a guy to be, right? And it wasn’t Jonny Quest who impressed me, it was his father Benton Quest1, the government scientist who was so important that he rated some sort of secret agent guy to protect his family so he could make cool jet packs and stuff without worrying about the bad guys. Again, a cool sort of a guy to be. So, I wanted to be a scientist. I ended up in psychology because I wanted to be a ghost buster (before the movie even existed), but that’s a story for another time.

Ok, so what’s so cool about science? I think the answer to that was summed up quite nicely by Carol Tavris, a social psychologist, back in 2001 when she wrote in the APS Observer, “When psychological scientists speak to or write for general audiences, they should take the opportunity to model the key themes of scientific and critical thinking: that what we know is inseparable from how we know it; that opinions must be based on evidence; that not all opinions have equal validity; and that science gives us probabilities - only pseudoscience gives us certainties.” What I think is important in this quote is the middle bit – the bit about opinions.
When I talk about that part, I start with the last statement – that not all opinions have equal validity – first. The whole idea that some opinions are more valid – are better – than others really rubs a lot of people the wrong way. In some realms, it might be true that one opinion is just as good as another. Whether Kirk or Picard is the better captain may be one of those2, along with discussion of whether the blue or the green drapes go better in the living room. But, when you’re trying to discover what’s true about the world, some opinions are better than others.
The better opinions are the ones that rest on evidence. If, for instance, Waldo thinks that short-term memory has unlimited capacity and George thinks that short-term memory has a limited capacity, George has the better opinion: there’s tons of evidence that short-term memory capacity is limited to just a few items (beginning with Miller’s 1956 paper The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on our Capacity for Processing Information).
Like opinions, not all evidence is created equal. Every first-year psychology student is taught the mantra, “Correlation does not imply causation.” For a great example why, see http://www.dilbert.com/2011-11-28/. The pointy-haired boss has evidence, but it’s not as good as he thinks. He should have run an experiment to test his hypothesis that Dilbert is dissing him; after all, as far back as 1600 William Gilbert wrote, “In the discovery of secret things and in the investigation of hidden causes, stronger reasons are obtained from sure experiments and demonstrated arguments than from probable conjectures and the opinions of philosophical speculators.” I could go on about the strengths and weaknesses of various research methods, but this isn’t the time or place.
Ok, some will say at this point, science is good, but it’s not the only way of knowing, right? What about the other ways? Often such people will point to Charles Pierce’s 1877 paper and say, he talked about all the different ways of knowing. What about those other ways? Sorry, but that’s not what Pierce was doing. Pierce was evaluating reasons people might have to hold beliefs (opinions). He talked about four reasons: tenacity, authority, the a priori method, and science. He concluded that the only one of those that results in holding true beliefs was science. (Don’t believe me? You can read the paper for yourself here: http://www.peirce.org/writings/p107.html).

So, what do you believe? Does life begin at conception, at birth, or some other time? Are humans involved in global warming or not? Is the death penalty effective at deterring crime? Can humans multitask well enough to drive and text at the same time?
Now tell me: why do you believe what you believe?

1 Put a pair of glasses and a sweater vest on this guy and who does he remind you of?
2 Picard, obviously.

Monday, November 28, 2011

The Evolution of My Cognitive Revolution

In the mid-1980’s I was extremely dissatisfied with my career. I’d left an assistant manager’s position at Kmart only to find that things really weren’t any more to my liking at Marshalls. After 3 or so visits with a career counselor, I made the decision to go back to school and finish my undergraduate degree in psychology.

I returned to George Mason University in the fall of 1986 as an undergraduate psychology major with the idea that I’d finish my BA and then get a Master’s degree and become a high school guidance counselor. I’d do that while I worked on my PhD. I wasn’t sure what I’d do with a PhD, only that I wanted an officewith my name on the door stuffed with books. I think I was planning to eventually be some sort of clinician.

A year and a half into my studies I was dissatisfied again. Deep inside I wanted to be a scientist. Psychology was claiming to be a science, but I just wasn’t seeing it in the courses I’d taken so far. It seemed that all you had to do to be a major theorist was to grow a beard and make up stuff about hating mommy. That wasn’t what I was looking for. But that semester I was registered for a course on the history and systems of psychology with Alan Boneau. In that course I found the science of psychology.

I also found a mentor. It was so clear to me that Dr. Boneau was thinking on a level far above the rest of us mere mortals and I wanted desperately to learn to think like that, even if only just a little. I rearranged my schedule for the next semester so I could take Memory and Cognition with him. That class was the one that altered the course of my life and changed my career plans. I gave up on wanting to be a guidance counselor or any other kind of counselor. I wanted to study human information processing.

I learned in that class about the cognitive revolution. In the 1950’s, American psychology was behavioral psychology. It was strongly empirical in the sense that it was widely accepted that humans are born as Locke’s blank slates and that all of our behavior comes from experience with the environment (i.e., learning). I have to admit that this is where I was ideologically when I went back to school. The problem was, there were significant aspects of behavior that behaviorism simply couldn’t explain. Developments from within the field and from other fields, led to a fundamental shift in the focus of American psychology. It was now permissible to study the mind again, but the mind as an information processing mechanism. Theoretical constructs (say, short-term memory) had to be operationalized and tested. This was science and it was my cognitive revolution. I spent the next 20 years investigating human working memory, culminating in a stint at Carnegie Mellon where I helped develop a computer model of working memory limits.

Recently, though, I was getting dissatisfied again. Every time I taught memory and cognition to a new group of students I was troubled by the fact that it all seemed so negative. Working memory capacity is severely limited and that limits performance on some tasks. We don’t make optimal decisions. We don’t store memories in perfect detail and we often twist what we do remember to match our preconceptions. Humans seemed like a bunch of information manglers rather than information processors.

My first glimpse of the answer was in a couple of pieces by Leda Cosmides (one with coauthor John Tooby; you can see them at http://www.psychologicalscience.org/observer/getArticle.cfm?id=1960 and http://www.psych.ucsb.edu/research/cep/primer.html). I knew that these were important, but I couldn’t quite get how. Then I checked out Shepherd’s copy of The Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology (edited by David Buss) and read a couple of chapters. It was eye opening, to say the least. It provided the beginnings of an answer to a question I hadn’t even thought to ask – why? Why would working memory capacity be limited? Why would we make less than optimal decisions?

The authors of the chapters (David Buss, Peter Todd, Ralph Hertwig, and Ulrich Hoffrage) provided a new framework for understanding humans as information processors. The original cognitive revolution left us with the idea of the mind as a general purpose processor of symbolic information. The evolutionary approach suggests that we have a mind built of modules, each adapted to solve particular problems faced by our ancestors. Instead of a mind similar to a general purpose computer, we actually have a mind something like a Swiss Army knife. In terms of working memory, the argument is that limited working memory capacity facilitates the learning of relationships between variables in the environment (say presence of a particular kind of poo and presence of a bear). It does so by forcing us to rely on small samples (limited capacity), thus skewing the sampling distribution.

So, what does this have to do with leading an examined life? Well, it is part of the story of how I got to where I am today. And it helps explain why my memory and cognition course is going to look a bit different when I teach it in the Spring of 2012.