The Quantum Age of IT by Araujo Charles

Author:Araujo, Charles
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781849284516
Publisher: IT Governance Publishing

Expose assumptions and challenge mental models

Even if you have gotten this far and created a shared, aspirational vision, created a sense of personal accountability, and begun to truly embrace systems thinking, there are still two hidden landmines that are just waiting to destroy your efforts: assumptions and mental models.

We like to think of ourselves as highly rational people. We do things for reasons that make sense. We do them for the right reasons. I truly believe that most people are good at their core. Most of us do what we think is right, for the right reasons. We are not trying to be mean or stupid or vindictive. There are exceptions, of course, but in my experience this is the truth most of the time.

But when we step away from a situation, oftentimes the actions that we take do not hold up. They do, in fact, seem mean or ill-intentioned. At the least, they often look misinformed, sloppy, arrogant, or sometimes just plain dumb. But why? The reason is that we are often being much less rational than we think. Our subconscious mind is a powerful thing and it can cause us to do things that in retrospect or from an objective perspective make no sense at all.

In his book Predictably Irrational, Daniel Ariely lays out example after example of this exact thing. He does a great job of explaining the underlying causes of our seemingly irrational behavior and shows that we are, somewhat ironically, consistent in our irrationality. This is in sharp contrast to the image that most of us have of ourselves and our organizations – that we are perfectly rational and that our organizations operate in an unemotional state. But as Ariely repeatedly shows, this is patently untrue. As humans we are not nearly as rational as we believe ourselves to be and we are predominately driven by emotion. And as organizations are merely large groups of individuals, they too are largely emotionally driven.

Senge picks up this same line of thought when he identifies two of the greatest barriers to creating a learning organization. He points out that we all operate from a set of assumptions and combine those assumptions into sets of ‘mental models’ which subconsciously guide our actions and perceptions. This is fundamentally the same psychological underpinnings at work that Ariely describes. In order to function, our subconscious creates these sets of assumptions and mental models to enable us to rapidly discern our environment, prioritize, and take action. In the 2011 German documentary The Automatic Brain, the producers examine the power of the subconscious. According to their research, conscious thought takes 500 times the energy that subconscious activity does. Therefore, a vast amount of what we do is necessarily handled subconsciously.

This is, of course, a great thing. It is this dynamic use of our subconscious, to handle the everyday, trivial activities, that allows us to function and be productive. Without it, we literally couldn’t walk and talk at the same time. Without the power of

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