HR Meeting Resources Part 1: Daniel Kahneman

Thank you to all of you who attended the June meeting “Hierarchy, Heterarchy, Holacracy Oh My”.  I appreciate the opportunity, your rapt attention and kind comments.  Many have reached out to me for the promised resources.  I am in the process of chunking the slides you requested into short digestible lessons (as per the Khan Academy approach). 

The “Bee the Difference” characters included throughout are, like my red high-tops, symbolic of the first and most important step in any sustainable transformation.   Most believe in the Nike “Just Do It” approach to change possibly unaware that the slogan was inspired by the last words of death row inmate Gary Gilmore before his execution in 1977.    Career criminals, as you will learn from Gladwell’s David and Goliath don’t make rational cost benefit choices before committing a crime.  If we are to avoid the same trap of unexamined assumptions that lead to Gilmore’s death by firing squad we need our own team of sharp thinkers to shoot holes in how we think.

As you will find repeated many times throughout these books changing what we do starts not with action but understanding.  Unfortunately for many of us the obvious answers, what Daniel Kahneman would call System One Solutions are both reasonable and wrong.  So the first resource I will connect you to with is a slide-show of the almost 100 ways we distort and delude our own thinking.  Through a series of shortcuts defined as biases and heuristics we see what we expect often acting without examination. 

Suggestions for applying these tiny seeds of awareness are included at the end of the article.  If you simply read Thinking Fast and Slow you might just as well use it as a door stop. 

You don’t win a Noble Prize for simple ideas.  Each Chapter is filled with science but if you learn anything from this monolith of metrics is that the voice of our System One assumptions is omnipresent. 

The solution to this endless barrage of beguiling banter is simply to be aware.   There are moments when System One will save your life.  If the need for urgency is inevitable go with your gut but when accuracy is essential use your System Two to find what’s true.  

Kahneman Keys:

Our Inescapable Illusions

Death by Email

Change is far too difficult to be ENDURING without reminders that are RECURRING

Create a NO JUDGMENT ZONE

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