Time for Quiet Leaders

In a media-saturated culture where business heroes can achieve cult-like status and presidential candidates appear to be auditioning for a television gig and not the office, is it time for quiet leadership? "Why We Need Quiet Leaders" argues that in knowledge-based organizations quiet leaders offer a better signal-to-noise ratio.

The authors argue that extraverted leadership commands the center of attention: being assertive, bold, talkative and dominant, providing and clear authority, structure and direction. However, pairing extraverted leaders with employees who take initiative, are more independent and speak out can lead to conflict, while pairing the same type of employees with an introverted leader, can be more successful. The researchers found in their study that when employees are more proactive, introverted managers lead them to higher profits, whereas where employees are not proactive, extraverted managers are more successful. They concluded that introverted and extraverted leadership styles can be equally effective, but with different kinds of employees.

The "authors" referenced in the quote above are behind this study: "The Hidden Advantages of Quiet Leaders."

Wayne

Sensual Science, Listening to Atoms

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If atoms are like phonons, why not drop those measures 27 octaves into the audio domain so that we can directly experience that information? Such techniques are not entirely unknown. After all, through infrared imaging, we can map heat of a fireplace - or the contours of the earliest known epochs of our universe. Could material science be improved if one could actually listen to exotic new combinations, if for example, oxygen, hydrogen and zinc all had distinct audio signatures?

What would it be like to walk in fields of sub-atomic particles, or to watch and listen to dilated time?

In this video, Professor in the Media Arts and Technology Department at the University of California-Santa Barbara, JoAnn Kuchera-Morin, describes how the creative and scientific communities collaborate using a domed sound proof instrument three stories high to make new discoveries, to materialize the immaterial.

Wayne

JoAnn Kuchera-Morin: Allosphere from Open Quantum on Vimeo.

Seeing the World As We Are

When encountering an interruption, the mind takes a step back and begins to think on a broader scale. The effect of has been well documented, but what's so interesting, according to Keith Sawyer's blog, is that the benefits of so called "global thinking" tend to linger after the original problem being addressed. The abstract he cites references six total studies on how the presence of obstacles triggers a broader take on the situation at hand, one of which concludes rather academically: "Conceptual scope increased after participants solved anagrams while hearing random numbers framed as an "obstacle to overcome' rather than a 'distraction to ignore.'"

Non-academically, context matters. Positive emotion contributes to expansive thought, and, in fact, a growing body of evidence from happiness studies links the two. In addition to the new information about the expansive mind - the effect can linger - the study reinforces the point that we see the world as we are, not as it is, and that, depending on whether the obstacles are viewed a positively or negatively, we might solve, or run, from the challenge.

Perhaps that's also part of the dizzying effect of falling in love - new possibilities and alternate futures become available, materializing in that comely woman or that tall and broad shouldered man - or why, in the course of normal development, children are so uninhibited and think so creatively. Everything in a child's environment is a challenge to her. With the energy of youth, she confronts them.

Just some thoughts.

Wayne

Lean toward risk

In part two of a series on "life reports," David Brooks summarizes the lessons learned, good and bad, by his readers on the other side of 70. There are a number of points to think about, but my favorites are "beware rumination" and "lean toward risk."

Some rights reserved by renaissancechambara

Wayne

Irrational and Happy About It

If we can be fooled so easily, what's the point of reason?

The New York Times Book Review reviewed Daniel Kahneman's "Thinking, Fast and Slow" Sunday. I've mentioned it a couple of times already, but the book, which I just bought for the Kindle, is a warm and deeply informed take on the cleaved and error prone human mind by the Princeton psychologist and Nobel Laureate. The reviewer Jim Holt, however, raises one point that Kahneman doesn't spend much, if any, time discussing. Namely, if our reasoning ability has developed to cope with the world as it is, then the cognitive illusions described by Kahneman are the norm, not a departure from it.

Even if we could rid ourselves of the biases and illusions identified in this book — and Kahneman, citing his own lack of progress in overcoming them, doubts that we can — it is by no means clear that this would make our lives go better. And that raises a fundamental question: What is the point of rationality? We are, after all, Darwinian survivors. Our everyday reasoning abilities have evolved to cope efficiently with a complex and dynamic environment. They are thus likely to be adaptive in this environment, even if they can be tripped up in the psychologist’s somewhat artificial experiments. Where do the norms of rationality come from, if they are not an idealization of the way humans actually reason in their ordinary lives? As a species, we can no more be pervasively biased in our judgments than we can be pervasively ungrammatical in our use of language

The following logical puzzle is frequently cited as an example of biased thinking in reviews of the book: If a bat and ball cost $1.10, and the bat costs one dollar more than the ball, how much does the ball cost? Think for a moment. The irresistible - and wrong - answer is ten cents. A ten cent ball and a bat that costs $1.10 (one dollar more than the ball) totals $1.20. The correct answer is the ball must cost five cents.

For those of you at IdeaFestival 2011, Daniel Simons did a brilliant job of demonstrating in startling detail how even the obvious visual details are missed when our attention is directed elsewhere. The mind goes astray. It wants to fill in the empty cognitive blanks. It longs for meaning. Our wetware is wildly suggestible and magicians, for one, take advantage of this flaw one misdirected gaze at a time.

Would life go better if we were rid of the mind's shortcomings? Like Holt, I don't think the answer is at all clear. In my view, the shortcomings, when they rise to the level of conscious mistakes, are related to the capacity for suspended belief. Giving up to too soon on the logic comes in mighty handy at the movies or when reading a novel, or expands on the possibilities in games like Minecraft and makes coordinated acts possible in government. The last point is a stretch. But in contrast to make believe, belief-made is that sly waive and a nod to circumstance, the vision that makes transcendent acts possible. In complex and dynamic environments, it's our adaptive and idealized better selves.

Wayne