Practice management - Error of judgements

Right now it’s 11am, and two dinner plates and a clutter of cutlery lie in my washing-up bowl. What might a first-time visitor deduce? That I’m a stable soul who lives with someone? A reprobate who’s had someone round for dinner – or breakfast? A lazy loner who hasn’t washed up for two days? Whichever conclusion the visitor came to, would he or she have considered any or all of the other possibilities first – or even been aware of how he or she chose?

This is not merely idle speculation. Misunderstandings based on the interpretation or misinterpretation of external evidence are probably the most common cause of tension between professionals and clients, bosses and staff, one colleague and another, and people at large.

The problem seems to be that we make such deductions so rapidly and automatically that we don’t even notice ourselves doing it. And what drives the choice of one interpretation over another is usually simply the unconscious habit of fitting the new data into an internal pattern or belief system derived from our earlier interpretations of previous experience. Once the pattern has been chosen, we tend to keep fitting new data into the same interpretative framework.

At some levels, this habit is ludicrous – sometimes deliberately so, as in the joke about the husband driving his wife down a winding country lane. “Pig!” shouts the wife suddenly as they round a corner. The husband, outraged by the assumed slur, shouts back: “Cow!” And they hit a pig in the road.

In other circumstances, it can be tragic, as for someone suffering from acute paranoia, who sees everything that happens through a fog of suspicion and anger – and who, as an inescapable part of that condition, spurns any help as well.

What makes the habit tricky for professionals is that it happens so fast and we don’t easily slow down long enough to unpack what has actually happened (as opposed to what we think happened) … or talk about it … or check out our assumptions with anyone else. Two examples.

A City financial services chief – a highly intelligent perfectionist – has been in the habit of asking her staff quick-fire questions of detail.

Her purpose is to give herself comfort that projects are on track. But her staff interpret the questions as nit-picking, control devices or as challenges to their competence. Result: uncertainty, suspicion and some resentment on both sides.

A lawyer – an introvert with a talent for generating new ideas – has been in the habit of holding back in meetings until his inner pressure becomes too great to contain. Then he blurts out his views in the form of a counter-argument to the previous speaker. His colleagues, unsure of the value of their own views, have heard him as a threat and written him off as a grumpy maverick. Result: irritation on both sides, the lawyer feels isolated and his ideas get ignored. Add clients to the equation and the cost of such instant judgements can escalate very rapidly.

A friend new to consultancy has been worrying about a training assignment to help a customer services team take on a selling role. He had interviewed the team and discovered that they hated the idea of selling. The manager didn’t know how to tackle the resistance. And the sales director, their overall boss, was said to be a rhino who insulted the team publicly and insisted that if attitudes and behaviour hadn’t been transformed by the morning after the planned training course, my friend wouldn’t get paid.

Assuming the team and manager were telling the truth (and my friend was convinced they were) the obvious conclusion was that the sales director was a monster – and that my friend should walk away from a hellish assignment in which every road was bound to lead to failure.

But how fair was his judgement of the director, on which the decision to walk away was based? The staff may, after all, be sincere and yet mistaken. As an old editor of mine used to say: “There are always two sides to a story – at least.”

How often, though, do we skip the effort required to dig the other sides out? How often do we choose to duck the risk to our comfortable (and comforting) habits of thought, or avoid giving house-room to ideas which might challenge our pre-existing judgements and beliefs?

More often than we suspect, probably. And when we do duck, when we leap to the easy judgemental conclusion instead, we won’t notice what we missed.

By definition, blind spots are invisible. Yet such choices tell us more about the choosers than they do about the reality the choosers are trying to make sense of.

Once my consultant friend saw that his condemnation of the sales director and his instinct to walk away told him more about his own anxiety in a new profession than it did about the assignment’s pitfalls, another option opened up: talk to the director directly about the mood and morale of the staff, establish clear ground rules about the fee, and enlist his support.

That’s what he did in the end (the director turned out to be a likeable rogue quite unaware of the terror he induced), and the job went off fine.

The moral of the story is, I suggest, that what look like clear, quick and rational conclusions may be being driven by unnoticed, quicker and irrational emotions. Judgements kill judgement.

So my New Year’s resolution for 1997 is to watch out for my own judgements more often this year – and hold off from them.

As for the truth about my dirty plates? Come up and see me some time.

Tony Scott, an independent consultant, specialises in business communication issues.