David Snowden talks about how our thinking/doing is entrained. I wasn't familiar with the word when I first heard it used in a podcast of one of his presentations. I think he's getting at how we have habitual patterns of thinking, of conceiving without considering the assumptions we have taken for granted. It is like our brain is onboard a train car barreling down a track. The track is narrow. Oh, it may branch but it still stays on the "straight and narrow." That is, we don't or can't cut across lanes as if we are driving a car on the interstate. David Snowden often uses as an illustration how we tend to group the words, "cow," "chicken," "grass."
I found the same illustration used in an Edge Perspective post by John Hagel to which Thierry de Baillon alerted his Twitter followers. It is an interesting and enlightening post. Let me quote a little bit from its beginning.
Do we all look at the world in the same way? Hardly. We can each look at the same scene and focus our attention on something completely different. Individual idiosyncrasies definitely play a role, but broader patterns of perception are at work as well. Are certain patterns of perception more or less helpful in these rapidly changing times? Most definitely – in fact, they may determine who succeeds and who fails. About five years ago, Richard Nisbett, a professor of psychology, wrote "The Geography of Thought." This fascinating book drew on extensive research pointing to fundamental cultural differences in how we see the world. Specifically, he contrasted an East Asian way of seeing the world with a more traditional Western way of seeing. While it would be difficult to summarize Nisbett’s rich analysis, I want to focus on a key distinction that he develops in his analysis of two cultural ways of perceiving our world. He suggests that East Asians focus on relationships as the key dimension of the world around us while Westerners tend to focus more on isolated objects. In other words, East Asians tend to adopt more holistic views of the world while Westerners are more oriented to reductionist views. This basic difference plays out in fascinating ways, including the greater attention by East Asian children to verbs while Western children tend to learn nouns faster. One very tangible illustration of this is a simple test reported by Nisbett. A developmental psychologist showed three pictures to children – a cow, a chicken and some grass. He asked children from America which two of the pictures belonged together. Most of them grouped the cow and chicken together because they were both objects in the same category of animals. Chinese children on the other hand tended to group the cow and grass together because “cows eat grass” – they focused on the relationship between two objects rather than the objects themselves. I found this intriguing in the context of our continuing work at the Center for the Edge on the Big Shift. As I indicated in a previous posting, the Big Shift is a movement from a world where value creation depends on knowledge stocks to one where value resides in knowledge flows – in other words, objects versus relationships. Our Western way of perceiving has been very consistent with a world of knowledge stocks and short-term transactions. As we move into a world of knowledge flows, though, I suspect the East Asian focus on relationships may be a lot more helpful to orient us (no pun intended).We can see such obvious one-track, narrow thinking exhibited by ideologues. For example, in politics there is Russ Limbaugh, Sarah Palin, and Tea Party protesters on the right and Michael Moore... . I am sure there are other liberal ideologues, but I can think of any more right off hand. I guess they don't irritate me like the ones on the right.
This makes me feel better about sometimes not getting the "right answer" on paper and pencil tests as a kid.
Posted by: martha.willis@brookb | Thursday, 21 January 2010 at 04:00 PM