Questioning

The Unlikely Barrier to True Diversity

May 31, 2021 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

As much as companies like to tout diversity, the definitive rule of getting ahead at work is to be likable—to follow the unwritten set of norms and adhere to your company’s culture. That is, you must fit and mix well with the rest of the “gang.”

As I’ve written before, likeability is a significant predictor of success. Well-liked people, especially those who work well with others, will advance. Those who aren’t very likable don’t usually get as far. If your company is conservative, you should be conservative. If the leadership is aggressive, snappy, and rule-bending, be the same. It’s better to be “one of them” to progress your career and endear yourself to your colleagues and higher-ups.

Every grouping of people, whatever the institution, community, or population, has an unwritten set of norms. It’s true for nations, in social groups, sports teams, and businesses. Wherever people form a group, they organically form rules. They institutionalize ways of doing things, traditions, and unquestioned assumptions. Such norms give the group a sense of identity. It’s natural. It’s tribe mentality. We, humans, are social creatures, and this is how we foster a sense of belonging.

Affinity Bias

Per affinity bias, human nature is such that people instinctively associate other people with labels, relate, and play favorites. Groups establish the norms and embrace and propagate them. The resulting categorization not only resists differences but also initiates prejudice and favoritism.

In professional settings, most workplaces tend to hire similar people and encourage them to think and work in the same way. I’ve previously written,

Even if nearly all corporate mission statements extol the virtues of “valuing differences,” managers stifle individuality down in the trenches. They are less willing to be receptive to different viewpoints. They seek to mold their employees to conform to the existing culture of the workplace and to comply with the existing ways of doing things. Compliant, acquiescent employees who look the part are promoted in preference to exceptional, questioning employees who bring truly different perspectives to the table. The nail that sticks its head up indeed gets hammered down.

Defining, fostering, and defending a corporate culture often becomes an exercise in clarifying ‘this is who we are’ and ‘this is who we are not.’ It engenders a strong norm, which builds an even more significant incentive to get people to think alike, get on, and tolerate or repel incompatible people.

Idea for Impact: Culture is a Barrier to Diversity and Inclusion

Culture is the unlikely—if unintentional—barrier to true diversity. Culture has a pernicious effect on hiring. It gives people ample reason to favor and engage who they believe to be “the right people.”

Three Lessons from Clayton Christensen’s ‘How Will You Measure Your Life?’

March 22, 2021 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Each term, on the last day of his management class, Harvard strategy professor Clayton M. Christensen had the habit of asking his students to apply the principles of management business to their personal lives.

“Don’t reserve your best business thinking for your career,” he would push them to ask the difficult questions and pursue purpose and meaning in their careers and their personal lives.

Toward the end of his life, after suffering a stroke and contracting cancer, Christensen published a Harvard Business Review article, which he expanded as How Will You Measure Your Life (2012.) This New York Times bestseller struck a chord with many business leaders, especially in favor of Christensen’s reflections on pursuing fulfillment.

Lesson #1: Don’t over-invest in work or under-invest in relationships.

Christensen talks about various motivators at work and encourages you to think about how you want to be remembered. He argues that ultimately your most significant sources of joy in life will be your family and your close friends. Devote time to these relationships, and they’ll enrich your life:

The relationships you have with family and close friends are going to be the most important sources of happiness in your life. But you have to be careful. When it seems like everything at home is going well, you will be lulled into believing that you can put your investments in these relationships on the back burner. That would be an enormous mistake. By the time serious problems arise in those relationships, it often is too late to repair them.

Lesson #2: Don’t lose track of the essential things. Allocate resources appropriately.

Christensen recalls some of his business school classmates entered the school with a noble cause—many of them wanted to change the world. But when they graduated with student debt, they took jobs for money to pay off their debts. And that was just going to be a temporary thing. But, over time, they got caught up in their careers, making money and chasing possessions. Their original pursuit of the noble cause petered out and, along the way, they lost track of what was important in their lives.

Christensen encourages building and implementing strategies in your career and your personal life to achieve your goals. The underlying tenet of that success is how you allocate your time, money, and other resources. How you spend these resources will determine your life’s outcomes.

How you allocate your resources is where the rubber meets the road. Real strategy—in companies and in our lives—is created through hundreds of everyday decisions about where we spend our resources. As you’re living your life from day to day, how do you make sure you’re heading in the right direction? Watch where your resources flow. If they’re not supporting the strategy you’ve decided upon, then you’re not implementing that strategy at all.

Lesson #3: “Decide what you stand for. And then stand for it all the time.”

Three lessons from Clayton Christensen's 'How Will You Measure Your Life?' Christensen tells a story from his college days when he played university basketball. His team worked hard all season and made it to the finals of some big tournament. The championship game was scheduled on a Sunday. For Christensen, a deeply religious Mormon, playing on the Sabbath (the “seventh day”) was against his religious beliefs.

Christensen did not comply with the coach’s demand to break the Sabbath statute “just this one time” for the big game. Christensen did not want to violate his religious principles. His team won the tournament anyway.

Because life is just one unending stream of extenuating circumstances. Had I crossed the line that one time, I would have done it over and over and over in the years that followed. … Many of us have convinced ourselves that we are able to break our own personal rules “just this once.” In our minds, we can justify these small choices. None of those things, when they first happen, feels like a life-changing decision. The marginal costs are almost always low. However, each of those decisions can roll up into a much bigger picture, turning you into the kind of person you never wanted to be. If you give in to “just this once,” based on a marginal-cost analysis, you’ll regret where you end up. It’s easier to hold to your principles 100 percent of the time than it is to hold to them 98 percent of the time.

Idea for Impact: Intentionally choose the kind of person you want to become. Commit to that path.

Read Clayton M. Christensen’s How Will You Measure Your Life (2012.) It’s not a long book—perhaps overly worded in parts—but it’s a intense and thought-provoking book.

Christensen and his co-authors don’t provide answers. Instead they present guiding principles that make you put things in perspective and help you become intentional about building a contented life. The parallels between running a successful business and running life are worthwhile.

How to Avoid Magical Thinking

February 22, 2021 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Magical thinking remains a subtle impediment to making sound decisions. The more you examine yourself, the more you can reduce your tendency to indulge in it.

Discover the truth for yourself. Beware of the tendency to let others think for you. Don’t believe what your parents, teachers, counselors, mentors, priests, and authorities of all inclinations have taught you from an early age. (The best predictor of people’s spiritual beliefs is the religiosity of their parents.) Question others’ underlying premises and discover for yourself what’s reasonable. Force yourself to test for alternatives.

Don’t believe what you want to believe is true. Many people believe in UFOs and ghosts, even when there’s no credible verification for any visitation from outer space or dead souls haunting abandoned buildings. Often, misinformation is cunningly designed to evade careful analytical reasoning—it can easily slip under the radar of even the most well-informed people. Shun blind optimism.

Consciously identify your biases and adverse instincts. Psychologists have identified more than 100 cognitive biases that can get in the way of clear and rational thinking. Explore how those biases could come into play in your thinking. Try to determine their motive. Work to extricate yourself from them to the best of your ability.

Demand proof when the facts seem demonstrable. Remain intellectually agnostic toward what hasn’t been established scientifically or isn’t provable. If you can’t determine if something is true or it isn’t, suspend judgment. Beware of anecdotes—emotionally swaying stories in particular—they are the weakest form of evidence.

Don’t believe in something that isn’t true just because there’s a practical reason to. If you feel emotionally inclined to believe in something because it gives you hope, comfort, and the illusion of control, identify your belief as just that. Faith is often no more than an inclination that’s not withstood the tests of reason. The process of faith is an absence of doubt. There’ll always be people who reject evolution for reasons that have little to do with evolution. Don’t act with more confidence in unproven theories than is justifiable.

Idea for Impact: Be wary of the influences that can put you at risk for magical thinking.

Give critical thinking and systematic evidence the central role in how you understand the world. Improving the criteria you use to judge the truth of things is difficult—but it’s of the essence. Have an unvarying, well-balanced degree of skepticism about everything, especially your own postulations.

How to Embrace Uncertainty and Leave Room for Doubt

September 7, 2020 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

The value of sound decision-making is to be mainly sought from embracing uncertainty.

As the Presocratic philosopher Xenophanes proclaimed, “All we have is but a woven web of guesses.”

The physicist Richard P. Feynman often talked about how doubt informs critical thinking and learning. In a 1964 lecture on “What Is and What Should Be the Role of Scientific Culture in Modern Society,” published in The Pleasure of Finding Things Out (1999,) Feynman warned,

A scientist is never certain. We all know that. We know that all our statements are approximate statements with different degrees of certainty; that when a statement is made, the question is not whether it is true or false but rather how likely it is to be true or false. … Scientific knowledge is a body of statements of varying degrees of certainty — some most unsure, some nearly sure, none absolutely certain.

Science produces ignorance, and ignorance produces more science, reminded Feynman in a 1963 lecture on “The Uncertainty of Science” published in The Meaning of It All (1999,)

To solve any problem that has never been solved before, you have to leave the door to the unknown ajar. You have to permit the possibility that you do not have it exactly right. Otherwise, if you have made up your mind already, you might not solve it.

When the scientist tells you he does not know the answer, he is an ignorant man. When he tells you he has a hunch about how it is going to work, he is uncertain about it. When he is pretty sure of how it is going to work, and he tells you, “This is the way it’s going to work, I’ll bet,” he still is in some doubt. And it is of paramount importance, in order to make progress, that we recognize this ignorance and this doubt. Because we have the doubt, we then propose looking in new directions for new ideas. The rate of the development of science is not the rate at which you make observations alone but, much more important, the rate at which you create new things to test.

The Czechoslovakia-born Israeli American scientist Itzhak Bentov formulated the so-called “Bentov’s Law,” reiterating that science produces ignorance both deliberately and unintentionally. In Stalking the Wild Pendulum: On the Mechanics of Consciousness (1977,) Bentov wrote,

One’s level of ignorance increases exponentially with accumulated knowledge. When one acquires a bit of new information, there are many new questions that are generated by it, and each new piece of information breeds five-ten new questions. These questions pile up at a much faster rate than does accumulated knowledge. Therefore, the more one knows, the greater his level of ignorance.

Idea for Impact: If you can’t tolerate uncertainty and ambiguity, you may as well embrace a fanatical ideology.

Learning the boundaries of your knowledge—the shortcomings, caveats, hedges, and the standard deviations toward everything you think you know—hones decision-making.

In other words, to get to the right answers, you first have to ask the right questions. So the first thing is to ponder about is what questions to ask and how to ask them. What are the things you don’t know, and how can you reach out into these areas that may be new to you to uncover somethings about the world and yourself?

Once you discover the answers, you’ll realize that approximate statements and varying degrees of certainty will require you to think probabilistically. Your inquiry shouldn’t be, “Will I be right, or will I be wrong?” but rather “What is the probability of this scenario versus that, and how does this judgment impact my choices?”

Leave room for doubt, even in your highest conviction ideas. If not, you’ll risk becoming smug and self-satisfied.

The Power of Asking Open-Ended Questions

August 24, 2020 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

When Bill Gates first met Warren Buffett, Gates was dazzled particularly by how Buffett asked open-ended “big questions”:

I have to admit, when I first met Warren, the fact that he had this framework was a real surprise to me. I met him at a dinner my mother had put together. On my way there, I thought, “Why would I want to meet this guy who picks stocks?” I thought he just used various market-related things—like volume, or how the price had changed over time—to make his decisions. But when we started talking that day, he didn’t ask me about any of those things. Instead he started asking big questions about the fundamentals of our business. “Why can’t IBM do what Microsoft does? Why has Microsoft been so profitable?” That’s when I realized he thought about business in a much more profound way than I’d given him credit for.

“What are My Questions?”

Asking great questions is a skill, but doesn’t come as you would expect. One contributing factor is that, with age, education, and experience, we become conditioned to cogitate in very rigid terms. Heuristics and mental shortcuts become deep-seated and instinctual to allow for faster problem-solving and programmed decision-making.

Idea for Impact: Don’t ask the same questions most people ask. The smartest people I know don’t begin with answers; they start by asking, “what are our questions?”

Make inquiries using open-ended questions that can’t be answered with a ‘yes’ or ‘no.’ Effective questions will help you think deeper, generate meaningful explorations, and yield far more interesting insights.

Let the Buddha Help You Appreciate the Role of Questions in Inquiry

March 19, 2020 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

The Athenian philosopher Socrates used a dialogic teaching method, now known as “Socratic Questioning.”

Socrates famously observed, “I know one thing, that I know nothing.” He habitually posed of ignorance even though he knew more about any subject matter than he let on. He led his pupils through a sequence of questions—not to test or assess them, but to draw out their “tacit knowledge.” According to Plato, Socrates assumed that a pupil already possesses the knowledge or the understanding, but is not aware of this until a skillful teacher can help the pupil draw it out of himself using leading questions.

In his dialogues, Socrates imparted no information about the subject of inquiry, but systematically asked questions. By responding to Socrates’s teased-out line of thinking, the pupils eventually arrived at the desired knowledge.

The Buddha’s Socratic Questioning Technique

Discoursing about finding cognizance through systematic inquiry, the Zen priest and poet Norman Fischer explains how the Buddha, like Socrates, used questions to help his disciples reveal the truth:

Buddha talked not because he was particularly loquacious, or because he was given to elaborate explanations, but in order to help people see through the smoke screen of their own language and views. Once someone asked him for his secret in answering questions as effectively as he did. He said that he had four ways of answering questions.

One way was categorically—just to say yes or no without ambiguity.

The second way was to examine the question analytically, clarifying definitions and trying to determine what was actually being said, usually by deconstructing it. Most of the time when the Buddha employed this method there was no need to answer the question: under analysis the question proved meaningless.

The third way was by posing a counterquestion, the purpose of which was to bring the questioner back to his or her own mind, redirecting attention away from the entanglement of the language of the question to something real that stood behind it.

The fourth way was simply to put the question aside, knowing that some questions are so hopelessly entangled that to take them up at all means beating your head against a wall—there is no end to it and you end up with a bloody head. To put the question aside is simply to walk around the wall. This way you can get to the other side without beating your head bloody. So sometimes the Buddha’s response to a question was silence.

Idea for Impact: Rational Inquiry is Driven by Questions

Become skilled at how to facilitate critical thinking with the Socratic Questioning technique. I recommend Richard Paul and Linda Elder’s excellent The Thinker’s Guide to the Art of Socratic Questioning (2006; excerpt.) Here’s a handy primer on the nine types of Socratic Questions.

With patience and loving-kindness, ask questions in such a way that can skillfully lead your interlocutors to a better understanding of themselves. Help them cross-examine and uncover the inconsistencies and errors of their thinking, and even change their mind—all without arguing with them.

You can also use Socratic Questioning for self-reflection, which in itself is a rhetorical device to discover the true self. Engage yourself in contemplation not to judge your past choices, but to ponder on them, learn from them, and make whatever changes you believe are right for you in the here and now.

Question Success More Than Failure

March 5, 2020 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Katrina “Kat” Cole, formerly CEO of the American baked goods-chain Cinnabon, in an interview for Adam Bryant’s “Corner Office” column in the New York Times:

I’ve learned to question success a lot more than failure. I’ll ask more questions when sales are up than I do when they’re down. I ask more questions when things seem to be moving smoothly, because I’m thinking: “There’s got to be something I don’t know. There’s always something.” This approach means that people don’t feel beat up for failing, but they should feel very concerned if they don’t understand why they’re successful. I made mistakes over the years that taught me to ask those questions.

People tend to attribute failure to external factors and success to their own abilities and performance (see self-serving bias and Dunning-Kruger effect.) The human brain is indeed riddled with cognitive and memory biases that are conducive to making people feel like they’re good and capable, regardless of reality.

Idea for Impact: Luck is so much more important than we acknowledge. Most successes and failures in life combine both skill and luck. Understanding the relative contributions of skill and luck in failure—and success, as Cole suggests above—can help you judge past and present results and, more significantly, prepare for future results.

Ask This One Question Every Morning to Find Your Focus

July 29, 2019 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Here’s a précis of psychologist Ron Friedman’s HBR article on how to spend the first ten minutes of your day:

Ask yourself this question the moment you sit at your desk: The day is over and I am leaving the office with a tremendous sense of accomplishment. What have I achieved?

This exercise is usually effective at helping people distinguish between tasks that simply feel urgent from those that are truly important. Use it to determine the activities you want to focus your energy on.

Then—and this is important—create a plan of attack by breaking down complex tasks into specific actions. Studies show that when it comes to goals, the more specific you are about what you’re trying to achieve, the better your chances of success.

Idea for Impact: Organize Yourself Good Concentration

Starting your day by mulling over proactively on “what should I have achieved” is a wonderful aid in keeping the mind headed in the right direction.

Planning is easier when your energy levels are highest, which, for most people, is first thing in the morning.

Knowing what your goals are before you launch your day can help you focus the mind and hold it steadily to one thing at a time and in the right order.

That Burning “What If” Question

August 8, 2018 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

The Rightness of Past Choices Become Obvious in the Clarity of Future Hindsight

In the Czech novelist Milan Kundera’s philosophical novel, The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984; film adaptation, 1988) the womanizing protagonist Tomáš deliberates if he wants to be single or with his eventual wife Tereza:

We can never know what to want, because, living only one life, we can neither compare it with our previous lives nor perfect it in our lives to come.

…

There is no means of testing which decision is better, because there is no basis for comparison. We live everything as it comes, without warning, like an actor going on cold. And what can life be worth if the first rehearsal for life is life itself? That is why life is always like a sketch. No, “sketch” is not quite the word, because a sketch is an outline of something, the groundwork for a picture, whereas the sketch that is our life is a sketch for nothing, an outline with no picture.

The Mournful “What If” is a Powerful and Emotional Inquiry about Alternative Lives You Could Have Lived

Oftentimes, when dealt with adverse circumstances, life’s self-criticism apparatus kicks in. Plagued with self-doubt, life asks the questions “Why did things turn out this way?” and “Why wasn’t this experience what I expected it to be?” Regrets gnaw in the back of the mind, “How would my life be different?” and “I never shouldn’t have done this.”

And when you cognize life in hindsight, your lived life doesn’t usually compare favorably with your imagined, could-have-been life.

And that’s why you should refrain from ruminating about those non-lived lives—such projections of your mind only instigate sorrow.

Idea for Impact: Sketch the Picture of Our Own Choosing

One of the most effective ways of eliminating regrets is to eliminate the underlying ignorance that is the cause. The wise fancy what the past was once and appreciate how it is molded them. But they no longer desire to live there or evoke the choices of the life that could have been.

As the great Stoics taught, you must reject regret, appreciate that you are now the distillation of all your past choices and experiences, and take the next positive little step. Reflecting on “What do I want to make of all of this?” and “What am I looking forward to?” can clarify your potential.

As Viktor Frankl emphasized in his 1946 masterwork on positive approach to psychological treatment, “Live as if you were living already for the second time, and as if you had acted the first time as wrongly as you are about to act now!”

Who wants to lament the life not lived when you can do dive into the life you’re actually in and do so much good now?

Live this choice. Sketch the picture of our own choosing.

Good Questions Encourage Creative Thinking

May 23, 2017 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Thought-provoking questions: potential game changers that are not asked nearly enough

“To think creatively, we must be able to look afresh at what we normally take for granted,” wrote George F. Kneller (1909–1999), the American academic and pioneer in the field of philosophy of education, in Art and Science of Creativity (1965.) Many people don’t know how to probe their thought processes with questions that encourage creativity.

Consider a brainstorming meeting where a new idea was received with comments and judgments like, “this won’t work,” “we’ve never done it this way,” “the customer won’t like it,” or, “if this is such a great idea, why hasn’t it been done before?” Immediately, a dysfunctional pattern ensues. Defensiveness sets in and the meeting’s participants will resist making any more suggestions and will fail to explore those ideas that were previously made. (One of the key principles of “divergent thinking” for idea-generation is to defer judgment. Neuroscience has suggested that the human prefrontal cortex—the self-monitoring element of the brain—is less active when we’re most creative.)

Creative thinkers ask open-ended, accommodating, and exploratory lead-in questions such as,

“I wonder if/why/whether … “
“Perhaps we could … “
“That would work if/when … “
“In what ways can we … .” This favorite of mine was introduced by Edward de Bono, the lateral thinking pioneer and creator of the “Six Thinking Hats” method for group creativity. De Bono called this lead-in question the ‘IWW.’

Instead of declaring “we could never do this,” ask “IWW (in what ways) may people start to do this?” In practical terms, this rephrasing may seem a small thing, but it embodies a leap in unhindered, open-minded thinking. The former seems a categorical rejection; but the latter invites an exploration of possibilities and signals the beginning of the search for solutions to constraints.

Idea for Impact: The ability to pose meaningful—and often deceptively simple questions is the hallmark of creativity

Often, what leads a creative person to get fresh insight is the quality of questions he/she asks. Questions such as “I wonder if …” and “In what ways can we … ” ignite dialogues in your mind that can lead to creative insights and new discoveries.

The prospect for creative thinking expands when you can reframe restraining statements into creative questions. Consider the following examples:

Restraining statement: “We can’t possibly do that.”
Creative question: “If it were possible, how would you do it?”
Restraining statement: “It’ll take too long.”
Creative question: “If it’s time-consuming, how can I make it short?”
Restraining statement: “I can’t talk to her.”
Creative question: “If you could talk to her, what would you say?”
Restraining statement: “I’m too busy to do this.”
Creative question: “In what ways can we free up some time for you?”

During brainstorming, asking questions in a way that opens participants’ minds to newer possibilities can have a transformative shift in the creative atmosphere. When participants suspend their judgments, everyone in the brainstorming session will feel comfortable enough to explore creative solutions to constraints.

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Questioning

Affinity Bias

Idea for Impact: Culture is a Barrier to Diversity and Inclusion

Wondering what to read next?

Lesson #1: Don’t over-invest in work or under-invest in relationships.

Lesson #2: Don’t lose track of the essential things. Allocate resources appropriately.

Lesson #3: “Decide what you stand for. And then stand for it all the time.”

Idea for Impact: Intentionally choose the kind of person you want to become. Commit to that path.

Wondering what to read next?

Idea for Impact: Be wary of the influences that can put you at risk for magical thinking.

Wondering what to read next?

The value of sound decision-making is to be mainly sought from embracing uncertainty.

Idea for Impact: If you can’t tolerate uncertainty and ambiguity, you may as well embrace a fanatical ideology.

Wondering what to read next?

“What are My Questions?”

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The Buddha’s Socratic Questioning Technique

Idea for Impact: Rational Inquiry is Driven by Questions

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Idea for Impact: Organize Yourself Good Concentration

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The Rightness of Past Choices Become Obvious in the Clarity of Future Hindsight

The Mournful “What If” is a Powerful and Emotional Inquiry about Alternative Lives You Could Have Lived

Idea for Impact: Sketch the Picture of Our Own Choosing

Wondering what to read next?

Thought-provoking questions: potential game changers that are not asked nearly enough

Idea for Impact: The ability to pose meaningful—and often deceptively simple questions is the hallmark of creativity

Wondering what to read next?