Why is thinking frowned upon?

Your organisation probably states that it values innovation, strategic thinking and taking the initiative. But such values typically contrast with operational reality. In this article, we will explore both the rationale and the implications for organisations that perceive thinking as a ‘nice to have’, which by the way is a strong ‘sell signal’ for any evolutionary biologist.

What’s wrong with thinking?

Thinking was never engineered into industrial era organisations. Anyone caught thinking at the mill would end up having a stern conversation with HR, or its Victorian equivalent. Process ruled and deviations from the ops manual of the day was considered an act of sabotage.

Management philosopher Peter Drucker coined the phrase ‘knowledge worker’ to reflect the increased contribution that workers made to value creation by using their head instead of their hands. Over time knowledge workers and people who used computers at work became one and the same.

As we know, not everyone who uses a computer today is bringing their cognitive capacity to bear. Such people might not work up a sweat in the same way as their predecessors, but they didn’t have much leeway in respect of process deviation. So Victorian work principles have remained largely in place.

Going back 40 years, I was a member of a team comprising five hundred software engineers developing a real-time naval command system. During the design phase, the building was like a library. Each morning you would be greeted by silence as your ‘on time’ colleagues settled into their design work. To the untrained eye this looked like variations of sleeping and daydreaming with the occasional jot.

Design is inherently creative and so thinking is a prerequisite. Design is hard. Rewiring neurons requires effort. So it costs energy, which at some level our brain is wired to discourage. So we tend to avoid tough decisions and simply follow any pre-baked processes / habits.

Management thinks different

The workers are often told to not overthink it or just get on with it, which are signals for action, not design. From a time and motion perspective, the organisation can make significant savings suppressing such behaviour.

I must be careful here in that different societies approach thinking differently. The further West you travel the more likely you will hear, “That is okay in theory, but what about in practice.” The further East, the more likely you will hear, “That is okay in practice, but what about in theory”. Both are extremes, so we require balance.

Thought crime

Management also has a problem with managing ‘thinkers’, ‘if it can’t be measured…”. They can’t use keypress count or eye trackers. Possibly cranial alpha wave emission monitoring headsets might work?”

So is Fred asleep, or on the verge of giving birth to an elegant system architecture blueprint?”. This frustrates distrusting managers / organisations.

Thinking remedies

Inadvertently, or otherwise, many organisations are designed to thwart thinking. Specific initiatives include:

• Back-to-back meetings

• Instant response expectation. Best not to relax or get too deeply into your current task

• Rewarding visible busyness

• Maintaining a perma-emergency environment.

Doing creates certainty. Creativity ruffles the plan. And we can’t have that. No matter what reality tries to tell us.

Stupidity isn’t free

There’s not much time to reflect if you find yourself in the middle of a barroom brawl. Though the aforementioned perma-emergency state is a pretty good simulation. In general an absence of thinking leads to:

• Poor decision making

• Repeated mistakes

• Mistaking opportunities for threats, and vice versa

• Little to no innovation

• Burnout at every level – leaders, managers and staff.

Reflect

If time permits(!), consider the following:

• Do you empower your people to think?

• Is the challenging of assumptions rewarded or punished?

• Is your organisation optimised to harness cognition or to just keep people on their toes?

• Are meetings purely to remind people of who is in charge?

• Do you feel that having your workforce plough through the rush hour just so that they stick to the company hours is a smart move from a cognition perspective?

• Does your workplace ‘ideas box’ look remarkably similar to a wastepaper basket?

  
  

Trust me

Intelligent organisations sense, decide and act. When one or more of these capabilities is compromised, an organisation risks sliding down the food chain, from predator to prey.