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Why Saying ‘I Understand’ Is an Act of Arrogance

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Empathy symbolIn an episode of Two and a Half Men (a high-ratings US television sitcom), the rakish cad character played by Charlie Sheen discovers that he can easily manipulate others by solemnly saying to them, “I understand.”

When he first says it, other people believe him, and begin to gush their feelings to him. Of course, his empathy is faux, and so the comedy begins.

Empathy is Cognition Plus Connection

The best way to influence (not manipulate) others is for them to feel that you understand them.

Yet the key word in the preceding sentence is not ‘understand,’ but ‘feel.’

It is one thing to understand someone; it is quite another for them to feel understood.

A seller might perfectly understand a buyer’s needs; often, in fact, even better than the buyer. That doesn’t mean, unfortunately, that the buyer feels understood.

A consultant might perfectly understand what a client is going through, on all levels—including the deeply emotional issues facing the client. But even understanding the emotional issues of the client doesn’t guarantee the client will feel understood.

A common sales truism says, “People don’t care what you know, until they know that you care.”

Just because it’s a truism doesn’t mean it isn’t true.  And it is, profoundly so.  The point of listening is not what you hear–it is the act of helping another feel heard.

Why Saying “I Understand” is Arrogant

On the face of it, the statement “I understand” is the perfect expression of empathy. Unlike Charlie Harper (Charlie Sheen’s character in the sitcom), we usually mean it. We are sincere when we say it, so for me to suggest that ‘I understand’ is arrogant may sound insulting.

But think of it this way. The feeling of being truly understood is, by definition, something that must come from the one who is understood—not from the one doing the understanding. To assert that you understand how someone feels about their situation is to usurp their very role as object of the understanding.

It is not our right as advisors or sellers to tell someone we understand them; it is only they who can inform us that they feel understood. For us to make the claim ourselves is arrogant.

A Better Way to Express Empathy

We can never truly know another. All we can do is to guess at how we might feel in similar circumstances—and assume that they might feel likewise. The source of much tragedy—and comedy—comes from mistaken assumptions that others are exactly like us.

So, what is a better way to express empathy? How do we communicate, across the divide of individuality, a sense of connection with another? Here are a few ideas.

  • That must feel…
  • I can only imagine how that must be…
  • I suppose if I were you I’d feel…
  • Is that (difficult, easy, complicated…) for you?
  • I think I might have a glimmer of what that means for you…

The particular words don’t matter as much as a combination of sincerity and a respect for the ineffable separateness of the other person.

Ironically, the way to convey connection is to acknowledge the impossibility of fully achieving it.
 

Fixing What Ails Wall Street: Ethics, or Incentives?

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ShrugThe financial and insurance sector of the US economy has more than doubled  since the 1960s. Compensation levels in that sector have way more than doubled, and in way less time. Finally, the finance sector is highly responsible for the recent massive losses in asset value, with the attendant down economy, unemployment, etc.

If you’re with me on those three statements, then you probably agree that something is wrong on Wall Street. But just what?

Are warped incentives to blame? A Gordon Gekko-ish culture of greed? A mugging of economic thinking by anti-Keynesian theorists? An over-emphasis on competition? A failure of regulation?

(And let’s not go to the ‘we need to be less trusting, because there are bad people out there.’  We do not need more suspicion in the world today; we need more trusting, and more trustworthiness of those who would be trusted.)

If we force it, most answers boil down to two: it’s either the greedy financiers’ fault, or the fault of the system to restrain natural greed. Let’s look at some recent examples of both views.

In This Corner: The System’s to Blame

Eric Dash, in the blog Economix,  does a fine job running down several reasons why pay packages got so out of whack with performance. He focuses particularly on moral hazard and timing issues. If you can gain big by risk, but can’t lose, then the game is rigged against the public. And if you take the money and run, then no one can hold you accountable.

But in the end, Dash suggests culture is key—the culture of correctly linking risk to pay–or not–encouraged by those at the top.

It seems curious to cap a structural critique of the industry with a conclusion that is based on a human-nature sort of thing like culture.

Curious, but rather right.

And in This Corner: It’s Ethics That Are At Fault

Over at Investment Business Daily, Gary Stern reports that companies are cutting back significantly on ethics training. “The decision by some firms to cut back on ethics training may haunt them,” reports Stern. “Analysts say creating an ethical culture can help sustain long-term growth, not hamper it.”

Interestingly, Stern also cites a strong culture as the ultimate source of ethical behavior.

But the quotes above illustrate a weakness at the heart of much of the arguments for ethical behavior. They often try very hard to prove that ethical behavior is profitable behavior, hence we can have our cake and eat it too.

Problem is: if the ultimate test of ethical behavior is profitability, then it makes a complete hash of ethics.

I happen to believe that for the most part, behaving ethically is indeed profitable; the longer the timeframe and scope, the easier it is to prove this (sustainability initiatives are a good case in point). But to use bottom-lines to justify ethical behavior is hugely back-asswards.

The Worst of Both Worlds.

What happens when we combine a reliance on structural issues with a casual view of ethics that defines moral behavior in terms of profitability?

A striking example, it seems to me, occurred this summer in healthcare legislation hearings. Representative Stupak of Michigan asked  three health insurance industry leaders whether they would commit to ending the practice of rescission unless there were fraud or misrepresentation.

They fact that the companies refused to so commit is not surprising, or even troubling, to me. There could have been valid business reasons not to knuckle under to such a public hijacking.

But then the leaders opened their mouths to explain why they would not so commit.

“No sir we follow the state laws and regulations,” said one leader.

“No, I would not commit. The intentional standard is not the law of the land,” said another.

Allow me to translate. ‘The reason we won’t stop nailing innocent people to the wall and rescinding life-saving policies for trivial reasons is—because it’s not illegal for us to keep doing it.  And we’ll keep doing it until you stop us by making it illegal.’

What?

I suggest that’s the result of decades of decay in ethics. We have come not only to over-rely on structural solutions, but have produced business ‘leaders’ who blithely abdicate any ethical responsibility in favor of laws passed by state legislatures.

How can business be trusted if it has no ethics beyond a lawyer’s opinion?  What kind of ethics is that?

The law should be based on ethics, more than ethics should be based on the law. Law schools, business schools, corporate boards, industry and professional associations should all be ashamed that they have lost track of the difference, and have got it thoroughly backwards.  They need to be held accountable for encouraging this kind of bland monstrosity.

What’s really wrong with Wall Street? Not misaligned incentives, but misaligned views about who owes whom: it’s business that has an obligation to society, not the reverse.  Apparently not everyone got the memo.

 

 

Is Trust the Answer to Your Short-Term Memory Loss

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concentration and focusI think I’m more forgetful these days. Names, next steps, appointments; calls to return, to-do’s.

Is it due to age? Perhaps; every year I seem to get 365 days older.

Is it due to the complexity of the world? These days, 6 degrees of separation is so five minutes ago. It’s at least down to 4 degrees, closing in on 3.

Is it the ubiquity of mechanized devices to substitute for memory? Could be: kids who learn math on calculators forget how to do addition, and with wireless to-do lists integrating with everything, we have no good reason to exercise our memory muscles—maybe they atrophy?

Maybe. But there’s another explanation.

My doctor put it this way:

The brain circuitry for cognition is fairly complex. Before you can talk about memory, you have to talk about the whole process that precedes it.

If memory is flawed, sure, your memory recall capability can be to blame. But so can your memory storage capability—perhaps it slowly degrades.

Further back in the chain, maybe the storage placement function is to blame—memories are getting stored in the wrong places.

But most likely [says my doctor] it’s that the event was only weakly impressed on us in the first place. The photo was under-exposed. The signal to noise ratio was too low.

In other words, if you’re not paying full attention in the first place, your memory recall is doomed from the outset.

Multi-Tasking is Mugging My Memory

I think he may be right. Multi-tasking may be mugging my memory. I certainly see that happening in others—sitting in classes with blackberries and open laptops. Texting and phoning; reading and watching TV and texting.

A close friend made the same suggestion to me just a few days ago. Since then I’ve been making half-hearted efforts at stopping my multi-tasking addiction, and what I’ve discovered is–I’m pretty hooked.

Interestingly, paying attention is also at the heart of trust. Trust is inherently a relationship: a relationship between one who trusts, and one who is trusted.

At the heart of any relationship is the attention that must be paid, one to another. If attention is high, the relationship is strong. If it’s weak, then so is the relationship.

Why Focus is Central to Trust and to Memory

What is it about paying attention that makes it critical to both memory and to trust? I think it is the same phenomenon. Relationships, like events, only make impressions on us if we are open to them.

If I’m not paying attention to you, you can’t make an impression on me. And of course I won’t trust you. Which means you will not be trusted, and I will miss out on the experience of trusting. Bad stuff all around.

But if I pay attention to you, I will notice things about you, as well as being open to you. I may come to trust you; and you, being noticed by me, may behave in a more trustworthy manner. We allow ourselves to be paid attention to. Good stuff all around.

I think I’ll start small; batch processing email rather than staying constantly on the grid. Cold turkey is kind of frightening.

Who knew that fixing my multi-tasking might help my memory as well as my relationships?

I’ll keep you posted. If I remember.
 

Hard Solutions to Soft Trust Problems

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I write a lot about how trust is a soft solution to hard problems—like profits, revenue, loyalty, and retention.

Trust itself has some ‘soft’ and some ‘hard’ components. In the Trust Equation,  we usually think of Credibility and Reliability as the “hard” aspects of trustworthiness. And we think of Intimacy and Self-Orientation as being the “soft” aspects.

But it’s messier than that. For example, a firm handshake and look in the eye go to enhanced credibility, yet they have nothing to do with credentials or expertise.

And then there’s a really big one.   Sometimes, very ‘hard’ actions can dramatically affect the ‘soft’ emotions of our clients, customers, employees.

Take my friend R.

How Weak Business Processes Hurt Trust

He shared with me an email exchange with the customer service folks at American Express. He has an Amex-CostCo card that offers rebates for various categories of expenses.
As he puts it, “I trust Amex to get the rebate classifications right.”

Until, that is, he checked and noted a number of vendors who had not been picked up in the rebate program.  They included such obscure names as Southwest Air, Exxon, Red Lobster, and Marriott.

R. wrote Amex a nasty-gram, and heard back (quickly) with a number of reclassifications. However, Amex also said they didn’t know of Red Lobster or Java City, and would R. please give them more information.

This had the unfortunate effect of upsetting R. more, not just because they didn’t know Red Lobster, but because they didn’t try to look it up. As R. put it, “this made me doubt your past statements.”

Sure enough, he went back and found numerous previous missed classifications. He asked Amex to make these changes and further investigate prior months and years on their own. 

In response to this email, he received an apology and a $50 rebate.

Which, again, didn’t mollify him, but had the effect of getting him even more upset.

And it’s not hard to see why. When you’re talking about money, and when you have as good a reputation for customer service as Amex does, customers come to expect, if not perfection, then something not far off. A series of ‘close enough’ efforts, capped by a weak attempt to buy peace, is ineffective—even brand destroying.

The customer just wants things to work the way they should. You buy a BMW, you expect it to work—and well. You go into McDonald’s, you expect the experience to be predictable, on-time and flawless. You enter into a program with Amex, you expect them to get it right. Not close; right.

The effort to get things right is not rocket science. It is just very solid blocking and tackling; making sure your systems and procedures and processes are as airtight and foolproof as you can get them. It’s the “hard” stuff—there is nothing squishy about nailing down business processes.

But look at the result. R. may or may not have been as ticked off as you would be. But your response, like his, would surely be an emotional one.

What Starts as Bad Execution Gets Interpreted as Bad Intentions

The truth is, we impute emotional intentions to hard actions. We see ‘hard’ behaviors, and we impute ‘soft’ motives—resulting in very intense ‘soft’ feelings.  You don’t just engender ‘hard’ trust by doing ‘hard’ things. You can create ‘soft’ feelings by ‘hard’ actions, just as you can create ‘hard’ results through ‘soft’ actions.

Perhaps ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ aren’t really all that useful. It’s all part of a package. If we are trusted, and if we trust—legitimately—everything gets a lot better. It’s all part of a package.
 

They’re Just Not That Into You

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I remember an old, old Peanuts cartoon. Charlie Brown is watching Lucy and another girl from afar. He approaches them: “You girls were talking about me, weren’t you!” he says accusingly.

“No we weren’t,” the girls say with a smug expression. Charlie Brown reverts to his earlier distant position, and waits a bit. Only to return once again, and ask: “How come you girls never talk about me?

We All Act Like We’re the Center of the Universe

A basic human presumption seems to be that we are, each of us, the Center of the Universe (COTU).

I recall reading about a Brazilian native tribe largely insulated from the rest of the world. Some westerners took two tribesmen on a trip to Sao Paulo, and then New York.

At their first stop, a large village of several hundred, they were a little nervous, but not intimidated. Then they made it to Manaus, Sao Paulo, and so on. At each stop, they became more shut down. When they finally returned to their part of the Amazon, they were permanently shocked out of their beliefs, and were not much the better for their education.

The Chinese call their land The Middle Kingdom. World maps in the US have, guess which country at the center? Not the same country as with maps sold in, say, France.

Years ago I read a study of students and professors. The study asked students how much time they spent thinking about the professors (not much), and how much time they thought the professors spent thinking about them (a lot,the students figured).

The professors, asked the same questions, said they didn’t in fact spend much time thinking about the students, but they were sure that the students, of course, spent lots of time thinking about them. Wrong again. Center of the Universe.  COTU all over the place.

On a more cosmic scale, it was only recently in history that we could as a species countenance the idea that the universe might not revolve around planet earth. And as ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, each child grows up thinking his family, her bedroom, is probably the center of the universe.

Some of us—some a bit more than others—escape from the tyranny of self, but only just a little bit. We get angry, resentful and afraid—basically because people don’t behave the way we would like them to. After all, aren’t we the center of the universe?

We’re Not the Center of the Universe–Fortunately

Of course, we are most assuredly not. All those would-be subjects of ours aren’t paying us homage—basically they’re just not that into us.  They pay us about as much attention as we pay them (embarrassingly little, and please don’t tell anyone).

But there are two great causes for optimism in this observation. First, since most of humanity doesn’t really concern itself with us (or give a damn?), we are quite free of the bondage of others’ opinions. Our slavery is of our own creation.  We hold our own keys to freedom.

Second, once we see that others have the same uni-centric disease that we do, we can lighten up a bit and reach out over the 50-50 line for a touch of human contact.

Yul Bryner once said, “We come into this world alone, and we leave it alone; and if someone offers you kindness along the way, you don’t spit on it.” And, by and large, we don’t.

Bryner’s is the minimalist version. The maximalist version is that if you touch someone, you help to free them from their own self-obsessed bondage. By reaching outside yourself, you initially delight them; but quickly that turns to teaching by example. You show that it can be done, and you role-model the benefits of doing so.

If you live in the space that says you’re the center of the universe, people’s orbits tend to fly away from you. But if you reject that belief, then people become attracted to you; oddly, you become (directionally) the center of much more.  They trust you.

If  you think this blogpost isn’t about business, please think again. Think of what it means for sales, customer service, negotiation, contracts writing, supply chain management, marketing, advising, accounting, and customer engineering.

You are not the center of the universe. What a blessing.  Go pay attention to someone else.

Hire for Trustingness, Train for Trustworthiness

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You may know the HR saying, ‘Hire for attitude, train for skills.’ Our own Sandy Styer reminded me of that the other day.

The reminder came at an opportune time, as I was reading Eric Uslaner’s  excellent 2002 book The Moral Foundations of Trust, a book I’m embarrassed to say I haven’t read until now.

I’ve written before that trust is an asymmetrical relationship between one who trusts, and one who is trusted. (Most recently, in Why Trust is Assymmetrical, and What that Means for Trust Strategies).

Since 2000, when The Trusted Advisor came out, I have autographed my books with the simple phrase, “May you trust—and be trusted.” They are not the same thing.

Trust, Trustworthiness, and Trusting

Uslaner writes mainly about trust. Steven Covey Jr writes mainly about trusting. I have tended to write mainly about trustworthiness, and something about the interplay between the two (see The Dance of Trust.)

But I have to confess, the insight expressed in the title of this blog didn’t really come to me until I connected the HR insight and Uslaner’s work.

Uslaner eloquently makes the point that there are two kinds of trust. There is the kind you read about every day in surveys and headlines about ‘trust in Wall Street down last month,’ or ‘most trusted brands decline compared to internet,’ or ‘Obama’s trust rating down 10 points in 3 weeks.’   That kind of trust is pretty short-term, situational, and closely resembles things like reputation, brand image and customer loyalty.

There is another kind of trust: what the academics call social trust. That kind of trust is literally learned at home in our childhood. It doesn’t change rapidly or easily, is maintained in the face of specific events; it is, as Uslaner so correctly claims, in my humble opinion, a moral value. And it is that kind of trust–or its absence–that undergirds civil society. 

Hire for Trustingness, and Train for Trustworthiness

How does one become trusted as an advisor, a salesperson, and internal advisor, a consultant? The short answer is: be trustworthy. How do you do that? Read my blogs and articles for the last 2-3 years, or buy my books.

But how do you create an organization that lives on trust? How do you create a trustworthy people-creating organization? How do you lead and manage a business that runs itself on trust principles? 

There are a number of answers, but it may be that number one in that list is: hire people who learned that deeper attitudinal moral value of trust at the age of 3 or 4. Hire trusting people. Hire people who know how to trust, and are not afraid to do so.

Hire people who treat trustingness as a moral value. Because that is hard to teach.

Get an organization full of high-trusting people, and you have amazing potential. Such people can quickly ‘get’ the skills of trustworthiness. By being surrounded by others they trust and who trust them, they get a lot done.

By contrast, high-trusting people may not be changed by low-trust organizations—but they’ll leave.  And low-trust people likewise may not be changed by high-trust organizations; but they’ll be a drag on things.

I’ll be writing much more on this. For now, the catch-phrase is:

Hire for trustingness, train for trustworthiness.
 

Deposits and Withdrawals at the Trust Bank

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I’m going back and re-reading Chris Brogan and Julien Smith’s excellent new book Trust Agents.  At #25 on Amazon’s sales ranking, it’s “only” at 425 tonight. Look for a review upcoming on the book from this blog.

One of (many) points it re-emphasized for me was the nature of trust value creation.

How often have you said something like, “I can’t ask that question, or discuss that topic, or have that conversation—we haven’t established enough of a trust relationship yet.”

Maybe you think of trust in the way you think of deposits at the bank: you need to make enough deposits before you can make withdrawals.

But trust relationships only follow that metaphor up to a point. Trust is, after all, a relationship; it takes two to tango. One-sided “deposits” don’t build a relationship–they make a relationship uncomfortable.

If all you do is do favors for someone, you don’t create trust—you create guilt. In order for trusted relationships to work, you need to allow the other party to discharge some of the accumulated obligations that you create by being trustworthy and trusted.

If you allow the other party to do you favors—to trust you in turn—you actually deepen the relationship. Asking someone a favor—far from drawing down on deposits at the trust bank—actually builds the net trust between you.

It’s an issue of balance between deposits and withdrawals, and of activity in the account. If the balance between deposits and withdrawals is roughly equal, that’s good; gross imbalance is not good. And the level of activity has to be maintained; a stagnant account negates all the deposits.

Yes, it’s good to make “deposits” in the “trust bank.” But withdrawals are equally important. All trust “accounts” are truly joint accounts. Both parties have access to it, and both parties must play their roles.

If they do, then double-entry bookkeeping does not apply to trust accounts. Some other law of multiplicative value applies.

The trust bank operates by those multiplicative laws.
 

The Perils of Measuring Trust

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The desire to measure trust is busting out all over. Some of it is due to management myths (“you can’t manage it if you can’t measure it”), and some of it is due to natural curiosity.

Do People Trust the Government More Under Republicans?

A great example is last Friday’s op-Ed in the New York Times, Imbalance of Trust, by Charles M. Blow. 

Says Mr. Blow:

…Americans seem to trust the government substantially more after a Republican president is elected than they do after a Democratic one is elected — at least at the outset.

Since 1976, the polls have occasionally included the following question: “How much of the time do you think you can trust the government in Washington to do what is right — just about always, most of the time, or only some of the time?”

The first poll taken in which this question was asked after Ronald Reagan assumed office found that 51 percent trusted the government in Washington to do the right thing just about always or most of the time. For George H.W. Bush, it was 44 percent, and for George W. Bush it was 55 percent.

Now compare that with the Democrats. In Jimmy Carter’s first poll, it was 35 percent. In Bill Clinton’s, it was 24 percent, and for Barack Obama’s, it was only 20 percent. (It should be noted that the first poll conducted during George W. Bush’s presidency came on the heels of 9/11).

The implicit assumption Mr. Blow makes is that trust changes quickly, and that polls reflect it; that the selection of a Democrat quickly results in low trust scores, while the selection of a Republican quickly results in high trust.

Or Do Democrat Administrations Build Trust in Government?

Let’s challenge Blow’s assumption.  Let’s assume that social trust–as many academics suggest–changes much more slowly than Mr. Blow assumes.  That in fact, questions like “do you trust the government” shift over a matter of many years–not a few months.  (See, for example, Professor Eric Uslaner, whose studies suggest that many forms of social trust evolve not only over years, but over generations).

Now let’s rewrite Blow’s paragraph—same facts, different implicit assumption:

…Americans seem to trust the government substantially more after a prolonged period of Democratic leadership than they do after Republicans have held the office—and the effect even carries over into the next administration for a few months.

Since 1976, the polls have occasionally included the following question: “How much of the time do you think you can trust the government in Washington to do what is right — just about always, most of the time, or only some of the time?”

The first poll taken in which this question was asked was when Carter had taken office, after eight years of Nixon and Ford.  In that poll, only 35 percent trusted the government in Washington to do the right thing just about always or most of the time.  Carter restored trust in government; when Reagan took over, that number tested at 51%.

However, after 12 years of Reagan/Bush, when Clinton had moved into the White House, it had been driven down all the way to 24% (Reagan did, after all, preach that government itself was the problem, not the solution).  By the end of Clinton’s two terms, that number had gone back up to 44%, of which George W. Bush was the beneficiary 8 months into his first term.

But with Republican Dubya at the helm for 8 years, trust in government dropped precipitously (Iraq, Katrina, et al); so far that the score early in Obama’s term was only 20%. 

Same facts: different assumptions. Who’s right? It depends. It depends on partly on how people interpreted that question, and even moreso on how long it takes people to shift their viewpoint on that particular question.

Trust is tricky. It’s not like measuring the temperature, or even political polls. The interpretation contains a lot more art and a lot less science than most simple surveys would suggest.

Interpreter beware.

The Paradox of Selling, Simple and In Your Face

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rantRantmaster (among other titles) Jack Hubbard , over at St. Meyer & Hubbard, has a lovely little blog piece whose simple charm belies the depth of its message.

Seems Jack’s wife got laid up due to a fall. So Jack had to curtail his travel schedule.

This meant two things. First, an exploratory trip to a piano store to satisfy a long-lasting desire by Jack which would keep him (and his wife) entertained for the weeks of enforced home time.

Second, a call from American Airlines Platinum asking Jack if his many cancellations meant they’d done anything wrong.

The details are worth reading, but basically, the piano guy kept calling with harassing product-based demands for Jack to buy a piano. And the American Airlines guy called back just to see how Jack’s wife was doing.

Small difference? Big difference, as Jack explains well.

Buyers Are Happy to Buy, They Just Don’t Want to be Sold

The paradox of selling, put as simply as I can, is that if you are willing to give up your attachment to the sale, you are more likely to get the sale. And that is counter to almost every sales program you’ll read, which all teach you—in the latest and greatest neuro-behavioral-process language–precisely how to get the sale. Now, that’s attachment.

The real answer of how to get the sale is: stop trying to get the sale.

You do not increase sales by concentrating all your energy and attention on getting the sale: paradoxically that just broadcasts how selfish you are.

Instead, you do what the American Airlines guy did: you focus on the customer’s needs—even if those needs don’t immediately have to do with your product.

Does that mean the American Air guy didn’t want to sell? That he had no quota, or interest, or that he was giving away free product? Heck no. He just saw the bigger picture.

Stop Trying the Close the Sale

It’s accepted wisdom in most parts that you should pretty much always be trying to get, and to close, the sale. Well, not so fast.

The bigger picture is, people buy from those who actually seem to give a damn, to actually care about their customers. Customers know the deal, they know how you get paid and that you’re in business to make sales. They just don’t want you shoving it up their nose at every turn.

The paradox is: if you’re willing to help people and not turn every interaction into a “closing moment,” ironically people become more willing to buy from you. It’s not a trick, it’s not a gimmick: people genuinely prefer to deal with people who behave generously toward them.

Does it work? Of course it does. The amazing thing is, it’s so simple. Be decent to people–people prefer to buy from decent people. Why haven’t sales authors and sales trainers picked up on this non-secret?

Here’s Jack’s take-away:

Mrs. Hubbard? She is fine now, thanks. And she is much more likely to step onto an American Airlines plane in the future than to ever step foot back in that piano store.

‘Nuff said. Thanks, Jack.

Does Multitasking Ruin Your Ability to Multitask?

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Last week I went on a gorgeous scenic train ride through the Canadian Rockies. We were pretty much entranced by the scenery, which only got better with each mile.

A couple seated near us took it in differently. In their 30s, they each spent about 50% of their time reading a Kindle (latest model, her), or an iPhone kindle book or iPhone game (him).  Another 25% of their time was spent sleeping.  The remaining 25% was jumping up with their (very cool hi-powered) cameras and going to the open-air platform to snap a few pics, to then return to their digital or somnolent worlds.

I felt myself feeling judgmental, which of course is my problem, not theirs. At least I didn’t say anything. But in the end, it got me curious.

Who does that?
From the BBC comes a possible answer.
A study reported in the British Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and reported in the BBC News Blog suggests that three skills are critical for successful multi-tasking. They are:

·        Paying attention and screening out irrelevant information

·        Organizing working memory

·        Ability to switch tasks.

The study identified two groups of people: multitaskers, and non-multitaskers, and applied a classic psychological test of each skill to each group. In each case, the non-multitaskers out-performed the multitaskers. 

Say the study’s authors: 
"The shocking discovery of this research is that [high multitaskers] are lousy at everything that’s necessary for multitasking," Professor Nass said.
"The irony here is that when you ask the low multitaskers, they all think they’re much worse at multitasking and the high multitaskers think they’re gifted at it."
Several of the commenters on the blogpost insist either that they themselves are excellent multitaskers, or that the tests selected do not in fact test for multi-tasking. Me, I’m inclined to go with the authors.

The study authors themselves suggest that the remaining “pressing question” is whether multitasking degrades skills, or people with degraded skills are drawn to multitasking. Me, I figure it’s a classic predisposition-plus-opportunity thing, not unlike alcoholism or a bad sense of humor.

I hypothesize that playing an iPhone game while travelling through the Canadian Rockies on a sight-seeing train probably qualifies as multi-tasking. While I couldn’t judge how well they were doing in the digital world, I suggest they were doing badly at noticing the analog world, and their switching appeared pretty clumsy.  As to sleeping: hey, what do I know what their nights were like? Maybe they were massively jet-lagged.

But enough about others. I wrote the first paragraph of this blogpost watching a re-run of Two and a Half Men, one I’ve probably seen twice before. And I stopped in the middle to upgrade to Snow Leopard. Plus I like my coffee a lot, and like to claim it keeps me sharp, though I’m increasingly doubting that. So I’m not exactly pure snow here.

Plus, it’s not a value thing. There are a lot of things in this world that require being good at multi-tasking. More than in the past. The ability to focus and concentrate may still be critical to some things, but probably not as many, proportionately, as in the past.

But I do think focus and mindfulness and paying attention are critical to trust. Trust may be more rare, less frequently required, than in the past; but the nature of its requirements haven’t changed.

Maybe the big question is: can we switch gears between multi-task mode and single-minded focus mode? Is there a flip-switch move we can make, an exercise we can conduct, that will let us enter the other realm?

Judging from the couple next to us, it’s doubtful. Their social interaction, unlike most on the train, was pretty much nil, even with each other. And judging from my own experience, changing habits is awfully, awfully hard.

It takes a lot of focus to be able to multi-process, especially since multi-processing degrades the ability to focus.