New York Times Op-Ed writer, David Brooks, has two superb articles about the skills needed to be a success in contemporary technological society, the skills I refer to as Getting-Things-Done Intelligence. One is a short article in The New York Times (2011-01-17), reacting to the common, but wrong-headed, view that technical skill is all you need for success, and the other a long, fictional disquisition in The New Yorker (2011-01-17) on the social skills of successful people. From the NYT article:
Practicing a piece of music for four hours requires focused attention, but it is nowhere near as cognitively demanding as a sleepover with 14-year-old girls. Managing status rivalries, negotiating group dynamics, understanding social norms, navigating the distinction between self and group — these and other social tests impose cognitive demands that blow away any intense tutoring session or a class at Yale.
Yet mastering these arduous skills is at the very essence of achievement. Most people work in groups. We do this because groups are much more efficient at solving problems than individuals (swimmers are often motivated to have their best times as part of relay teams, not in individual events). Moreover, the performance of a group does not correlate well with the average I.Q. of the group or even with the I.Q.’s of the smartest members.
Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Carnegie Mellon have found that groups have a high collective intelligence when members of a group are good at reading each others’ emotions — when they take turns speaking, when the inputs from each member are managed fluidly, when they detect each others’ inclinations and strengths.
Participating in a well-functioning group is really hard. It requires the ability to trust people outside your kinship circle, read intonations and moods, understand how the psychological pieces each person brings to the room can and cannot fit together.
This skill set is not taught formally, but it is imparted through arduous experiences. These are exactly the kinds of difficult experiences Chua shelters her children from by making them rush home to hit the homework table.”
These articles led me to ask exactly what is involved in reading a social situation? Brooks mentions some of the relevant aspects, but not all. To be effective, a manager needs to parse the social situation of the groups he or she must work with – those under, those over and peer groups to the side – to answer questions such as the following:
- Who has power or influence over each group? Is this exercised formally or informally?
- What are the norms and practices of the group, both explicit and implicit, known and unconscious?
- Who in the group is reliable as a witness? Whose stories can be believed?
- Who has agendas and what are these?
- Who in the group is competent or capable or intelligent? Whose promises to act can be relied upon? Who, in contrast, needs to be monitored or managed closely?
- What constraints does the group or its members operate under? Can these be removed or side-stepped?
- What motivates the members of the group? Can or should these motivations be changed, or enhanced?
- Who is open to new ideas, to change, to improvements?
- What obstacles and objections will arise in response to proposals for change? Who will raise these? Will these objections be explicit or hidden?
- Who will resist or oppose change? In what ways? Who will exercise pocket vetos?
Parsing new social situations – ie, answering these questions in a specific situation – is not something done in a few moments. It may take years of observation and participation to understand a new group in which one is an outsider. People who are good at this may be able to parse the key features of a new social landscape within a few weeks or months, depending on the level of access they have, and the willingness of the group members to trust them. Good management consultants, provided their sponsors are sufficiently senior, can often achieve an understanding within a few weeks. Experience helps.
Needless to say, most academic research is pretty useless for these types of questions. Management theory has either embarked on the reduce-and-quantify-and-replicate model of academic psychology, or else undertaken the narrative descriptions of successful organizations of most books by business gurus. Narrative descriptions of failures would be far more useful.
The best training for being able to answer such questions – apart from experience of life – is the study of anthropology or literature: Anthropology because it explores the social structures of other cultures and the factors within a single lifetime which influence these structures, and Literature because it explores the motivations and consequences of human actions and interactions. The golden age of television drama we are currently fortunate to be witness to also provides good training for viewers in human motivations, actions and interactions. It is no coincidence, in my view, that the British Empire was created and run by people mostly trained in Classics, with its twofold combination of the study of alien cultures and literatures, together with the analytical rigor and intellectual discipline acquired through the incremental learning of those difficult subjects, Latin and Ancient Greek languages.
UPDATE (2011-02-16): From Norm Scheiber’s profile of US Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner in The New Republic (2011-02-10):
“Tim’s real strength … is that he’s really quick at reading the culture of any institutions,” says Leslie Lipschitz, a former Geithner deputy.
The profile also makes evident Geithner’s agonistic planning approach to policy – seeking to incorporate opposition and minority views into both policy formation processes and the resulting policies.
