Creativity and Perceptions in Management: Cognition

Here we look at cognition in relation to creativity, how the brain works, intuitivity in management as well as the influence of beliefs.

Tacit Knowledge

Some management educators are now acknoledging having neglected the unconscious know-how and local knowledge, that play a part in the innovative endavour. Intuitive, tacit ways of knowing are critical when working with less than clear situations.

This brings us to how the brain works. It involves a hundred billion neurons, interconnected via electrical discharges with a critical feature being it’s plastic nature. Paths that have been traveled are easier to travel next time. These grooves are different for each person and people use different parts of their brain to answer the same question. The brain activily constructs everything the brain sees.

Perceptions do not offer an accurate relfection of what is happening but images are constructed by many different analyses and is effected by what we expect to see. Memory seems to be distributed throughout the brain. It seems that we recreate images of past events on each occasion and that due to our experiences, our recollection of past events change over time. Our memories are also state-specific in that they are easier to remember when we are in the same state as when things happened.

The unconscious seems to be processing information, learning and making decision without us really knowing. The unconscious is often quicker off the mark than the conscious. It seems that you can for example still read letters on cards even if you cannot consciously read them. There are lots of nice experiments in this book.

It seems that it’s really the unconscious that does most of our thinking, learning, decision making and problem solving. Interestingly our confidence normally lages behind our performance, especially because we cannot explain it yet. On top of that, what we learned is often tied with the situation it was learned in and hard to transfer to a new situation.

Based on studies, professionals often base decisions on hunch and intuition. These intuitive decisions seem to be able to incorporate information that is too complex to be verablized, going as far as verbalizing can worsen recall. Both creativity and intuitive thinking also rely on incubation where the brain mangles everything arround to communicate it further to the conscious mind. Reflection can also help you out when being stuck, to bring in different view points.

The important item here is that the unconscious is very important in learning, decision making and a lot of other things.

_Intuitive Management_

Studies show that managers spend very little time really planning. Even senior managers devote a large part of their time to the implementation rather than the formulation of strategy. Mintzberg (1976, 1994a) argues that management is normally about complex, ambiguous and uncertain situations which need more of simultaneous, relational and holistic kind of knowing, often placed in the right hemisphere.

Managers he studied relied more on soft data and rarely on explicit analysis, to make strategic judgements. He believes that management is more of an art developed from involvement and intimate knowledge. Visionary leaders typically have worked in the industry they want to transform for many years. Delayering, loosing middle management, also looses a lot of tacit knowledge.

Intuition is often used under time pressure, when you need to act before you have a complete picture, involving apprehending rather than analysing. Intuition even seems to be a learnt experience and is often bound up with the are of expertise is was built within.

To recognize intuition, pay attention to hunches. But a word of caution. Intuitions can fail. They work best if you are truely open to all possibilities. You also need to work against biases. It also seems that if we get the good information first of something, we are likely to reframe the negative information in light of the good.

We have several judgement biases in general:

\- availability bias is about believing events to be more frequent if they come to mind more easily.

\- confirmation bias is about sticking with out initial judgement

\- we tend to be overconfident with our own opinions

\- hindsight bias is about being more confident initially than we really are

Mind-Sets

We can’t absorb everything arround us, which means we choose what to attend to, namely things that interest us and that fit our world view. Our understanding of the world is therefore partial. These relatively fixed ways of thinking are often referred to as mind-sets. We try to impose order on chaos, simplify complexity and make the inconsistent consistent. These mind-sets are conditioned by our past experiences and values. Unnecessary assumptions limite the range of possibilites we are considering.

Also, when judging how people perform, we seem to include the information we have been given about them beforehand. If this information was bad, then we tend to believe that they do perform badly. Reframing is about transforming negative beliefs into something more positive and this can become an attitude in life, always seeing the good side, or the opportunity.

Instead of saying “yes but” you say “yes and” in a meeting, focussing on the strengths of a proposal. The amount of information we have to process leads to the reliance on short cuts within our brain to make sense of situations.

Deconstruction is about the fact that people construct how the world is perceived. This is the same for management, which does have some values, norms and practices that are deamed right.