Thinking Together

What if the ability to reason is a collective skill rather than an individual one?

Early on in my management career, during the 1970s, I learned how important people management is to business performance.  That’s not to neglect the importance of managing business processes and management systems, but it seemed that there was a ‘human’ dimension to every aspect of business management.

When I started my project management consulting business in the 1980s, I named it Human Systems to acknowledge this unbreakable bond between management systems and the people who create, operate and transform them.  When I was studying for my PhD during the 1990s, I became familiar with Chris Argyris’ work on how hard it is to ‘teach smart people to learn’, and with Edgar Schein’s work on process management.  At the same time, I discovered the value of their insights while mentoring senior business leaders as they led their organizations through transformational change. 

By the time I was involved in post-doctoral research in organizational project management, Kahnemann and Tversky’s Nobel prize-winning work on heuristics and biases was becoming more widely known, perhaps most readily accessible in Daniel Kahnemann’s widely acclaimed “Thinking Fast and Slow”.  During the same period, Daniel Goleman’s work on Emotional Intelligence (EQ) was fast becoming mainstream in the management world.

But behind all of these influential strands of management orthodoxy lurked an assumption. That the human ability to reason is a cognitive superpower possessed by people who are fit to manage or lead, but at the same time, it is flawed and keeps leading people astray through a long and growing list of inherent biases.

In my practice, first as a manager and subsequently as a consultant and academic, my response to this was to develop as best I could a wide range of facilitation skills.  I recognized the value of William Isaacs’ work at MIT on ‘dialogue’ (as distinct from a debate). I learned how to help groups of people think together rather than argue or wallow in unproductive meetings.  But none of this caused me to question that unexamined assumption.

But that changed in February of this year when I came across a newly published book: ‘Conflicted: a History of Argument’ by Ian Leslie.  It contains much sage advice, not only for managers but for anyone that finds themselves caught up in ferocious social media argument or miscommunication.  If that rings bells for you, it’s a book I recommend.  But its impact on my life was not so much in the eminently sensible if somewhat unfashionable, advice to take personal responsibility.  No, what made me sit up and take notice, was the source of some of his main ideas: research described in ‘The Enigma of Reason: a new theory of human understanding’, a book by Dan Sperber and Hugo Mercier that challenges the unexamined assumption with a wealth of evidence.

The authors’ drop their bombshell very early in the book.  “Whereas reason is commonly viewed as a superior means to think better on one’s own, we argue that it is mainly used in our interactions with others. We produce reasons in order to justify our thoughts and actions to others and to produce arguments to convince others to think and act as we suggest. We also use reason to evaluate not so much our own thought as the reasons others produce to justify themselves or to convince us.”

We all know how quickly and intuitively we grasp our own reasons for preferring a particular belief, decision or course of action.  We also know how carefully we examine others’ reasons, especially when their conclusions differ from our own. And these two ways of thinking fit closely together.  As Sperber and Mercier put it, “Reason has two main functions: that of producing reasons for justifying oneself, and that of producing arguments to convince others.”  They point out that, “When we listen to others, what we want is honest information.  When we speak to others, it is often in our interest to mislead them, not necessarily through straightforward lies but by at least distorting, omitting or exaggerating information so as to better influence them in their opinions and in their actions.”

This mismatch between our speaking and our listening is what makes the process of thinking together more efficient than individual reasoning and is why it lies at the root of so much of our universal human experience.  Whether in the school playground, in a project team or in a National Parliament.

If this is true, then the art and craft of thinking together is not a nice-to-have add-on skill for those with a particular interest in an obscure corner of management theory.  It is a capability that is essential to effective performance whether led by a skilled external facilitator, or as a communally developed skill shared by a group, family, organization or community.  The implications for management practice are extensive.

Terry Cooke-Davies

29 March 2021