There are no levels

Today I want to tell a story. It’s one of my favourites. Certainly my favourite ‘when I was a consultant’ story. Hopefully, we’ll laugh a little, and then I’ll use it to point out three ‘problems’ that often get in the way of us solving other problems. I won’t really have a solution. I just think it’s amusing.

¶The set up

I’ve spoken before about how leadership consulting is particularly nebulous. Because, as I point out there, when you hire leadership consultants, the business case is usually similarly vague:

You might say “my executive team is a bit fucked” and these people will say things like “we will make them less fucked” I guess? And then … you will pay them.

Of course, leadership transformation is obviously where the best money is to be made. It’s very easy to maximise profit margin on “making executives less fucked somehow”.

But, the nebulousness doesn’t stop there. It might surprise you to learn that, in the highfalutin world of leadership consulting, the best trick is to build a company without ever hiring anyone or having any products to speak of.

Here’s how it works. First, you go to the client. You ask them what they think they need and then—this is the important part—whatever they answer with, you say something like “hey, yeah, how funny, that’s exactly what ‘we’ do!” Then, you rush as quickly as you can back to your home office or co-working space and call all the people you know who might have anything to do with whatever the client said. Usually, some of them will agree to help you pretend you have a product that does exactly what the client said they wanted for some money. Together you create a ‘pitch deck’, which advertises this product that doesn’t exist yet, and you use that to try to get the client to agree to pay for it.

The difficult part of this trick is then actually creating the non-existent product. Mostly, this is easy. For example, very often clients want their leaders to ‘align on a north star’ or something like this. As far as I can tell, this is almost exclusively some problem related to the fact that everyone’s too busy or too cantankerous to talk to each other, so you just need to stick them in a room with some hors d’oeuvres and wine for a couple days, and they seem to sort it out no matter what you do.¹ Stick in some fake meditation or fake yoga and some ice-breaker activities with funny names, call it a ‘methodology’ and you’re golden.² Everyone gets particularly excited if you say that whatever you’re doing is ‘neuroscience’, because neuroscience is trendy, so you might also occasionally murmur nonsense jargon like ‘this activity helps us get out of our amygdala and avoid dorsal-vagal shutdown’ with a sage expression plastered on your face. Oh, and you shouldn’t forget to have a ‘fireside chat’ or two. I think there is a law somewhere that says there needs to be a ‘fireside chat’ at these things.

Unfortunately though, sometimes, things aren’t so easy. Occasionally, the client has a problem that isn’t fixed by sticking them in a room and making them do summer camp activities. Now things get sticky, because you told the client that you had the solution to their problem, and they paid you for that solution, and you don’t actually have a solution. In this case, you need to rush back to your home office or co-working space, and call more people in the hope that someone else knows what to do.

¶The story

It’s this latter situation in which we find ourselves for my story. One of my old colleagues—another ‘call them when problems need fixing’ person—sent me a message asking if I’d meet with the current collection of called people for this client. You see, he thought they might benefit from some ‘psychology of systems’. Now, this is technically a thing, but so niche that it may as well not be. More to the point, in leadership consulting, the word ‘system’ is thrown around so much that it doesn’t really have anything to do with any discipline. It’s more of a vague sort-of pointer to “people aren’t working well together”, and almost a pre-requisite to include in any conversation about improving leaders.³ So I suggested we have a quick chat, together with the team, to try and work out if I thought I could be helpful.

We sit, and the mandatory powerpoint slides emerge. We have leaders. They weren’t working well together. They weren’t talking to each other. They needed to align on a collective vision.⁴ Over two years, we have gotten to a place where they are talking to each other. They are agreeing on things. They have aligned. There are steering groups and working groups—all sorts of groups. But now they actually need to do something about this vision of theirs, and things have stalled. This is a common problem in leadership consulting that’s hard to solve for reasons I talk about elsewhere. And for the leadership consultants that dare to venture past summer camp activities and into do something territory, it’s a big risk because there is only so long you can distract leaders with education and activities before leaders begin to get antsy and wonder whether they should be getting back to their jobs.

For best effect, I would like to relay what followed as a relatively faithful transcript:

Me: “Ok, so tell me if I have the sense of things: [I echo back roughly what I heard, to make sure I have it right.]”

Them: “Yes, exactly: [they repeat again roughly what they said, leaving me a bit confused as to whether they are correcting me or confirming, but it doesn’t seem too complicated, so I assume the latter.]”

Me: “Ok, so how do you think I can help?”

One of them, boldly: “Well, we need to move the leaders to the next level, and we thought you might have some insights from your psychology background. [Lots of nodding in agreement around the table].”

Me: “Sure. Why don’t you tell me what the levels are?”

The same one of them, more diffidently now: “… Hm… [Looks of mild consternation are exchanged from left to right.] Well, there aren’t really any levels…”

Me: “… Right. No worries, what did you mean then?”

[A pause.]

Another one of them, abruptly: “Well, what we really need to do is move the leaders along the journey. [Nods of a more enthusiastic nature erupt around the table. Some smiles too.]”

Me: “Great! [I am smiling too, the enthusiasm is infectious.] Ok, so a journey—we have a starting point, an end point, and some kind of trajectory. Why don’t you describe those for me?”

That same other one, substantially less abruptly: “… Mm… [Looks of a more troubled nature are exchanged from left to right.] Well, I guess… It’s not really like a journey…”

Me: “…”

Them: “…”

We eventually did work out the problem. Something about how leaders are not do-ers. Leaders lead do-ers, and so getting leaders to do things themselves is not straightforward, and often not actually even desirable. So we went off and put together a programme that would help the leaders motivate each other to engage their do-ers in the things that needed doing. But…

¶The ‘question’ problem, the ‘language’ problem, and the ‘naming’ problem

This amusing little interaction highlights three interesting general problems that you’ll sometimes come across when you’re trying to do things. These three problems are distinct problems of their own, but also often come together to really mess us about.

The first is what I’ve taken to calling the ‘language’ problem. You see, these people had gotten stuck. They knew they needed their leaders to do something different to what they were already doing, but they didn’t know what it was, really. They weren’t confused about this. That’s why they called me. And when one said ‘we need them to get to the next level’, no one was really thinking about levels. They all just recognised that someone had named their problem—it was a shared language. But I did not share this language. When they said ‘we need them to get to the next level’, I thought that there were actual levels.

This is a very common problem. I’d bet money that this has happened to you. You will say ‘here is an idea, or a solution to your problem’, and people will sort of ignore you. Then someone else says the exact same thing but with different words and people will go ‘oh wow, yes, that was what we needed!’ and you will quietly simmer in your seat. The language problem bites again.

The second problem here is that, if you don’t ask the right questions, you won’t get to the right answers. Here, I am asking about ‘levels’ and ‘journeys’ because I think (understandably, I hope) that levels and journeys are relevant to what we’re trying to do. But, we’re getting nowhere because they’re actually completely irrelevant.

This is also a common problem. For example, I’ve written before:

You can kind of think of three layers to what someone is saying:

1. The first layer is descriptive. Like, “I’m going to be late for my train”.
2. The second layer is emotive. Like, “I’m stressed because I’m going to be late for my train”.
3. The third layer contains the meaning. Like, “if I’m late for work, I won’t have time to print out the documents for the meeting and I’ll look like an idiot in front of my boss again, because I already spilled coffee on her last Thursday and I messed up the presentation last quarter”.

Now, if someone says something like, “I’m late for my train”, we’re not always encouraged to go after the emotive underlayer. But when we do, all of a sudden we have access to a whole bunch of questions we might never have thought to ask. From them, we start to pick up the meaning, and a descriptive statement has suddenly become a full fledged conversation.

Lots of everyday conversations are stilted or awkward because whatever someone is saying is not prompting us to ask the right questions to figure out what they mean. Or, as another example, PhDs are entirely centred around this problem. It’s all well and good to say “we don’t know about <whatever esoteric thing>, and we would like to”. But you will spend half the PhD just working out what questions you need to ask to actually get some resolution on <whatever esoteric thing>.

The last problem, we might call it the ‘naming problem’, is almost a combination of the two. In my fun little interaction, ‘journeys’, ‘levels’, and ‘systems’, were all acting as vague pointers to “these people are not working together properly, and we need them to change what they’re doing”. No one was confused about that (except me). But what’s interesting is that in naming these things, we sometimes think we have explained them, and we sort of just stop thinking properly. This had happened to this group of consultants. They saw a problem. They named it. And then they’d gotten themselves stuck, because they thought they’d explained it. What levels? What journey? What is the nature of this problem? They weren’t sure, because the name didn’t allow them to ask the kinds of questions they needed to solve it.

I’d like to give you another example of all these problems in a completely different setting—the sciences of mind—to really emphasise how common, and difficult, they are. In his 1943 treatise on behaviour, Clark Hull wrote that we could:

regard, from time to time, the behaving organism as a completely self-maintaining robot … to consider the various general problems in behaviour dynamics which must be solved in the design of a truly self-maintaining robot … A tendency against which the robot concept is likely to prove effectively prophylactic is that towards the reification of a behaviour function. To reify a function is to give it a name and presently to consider that the name represents a thing, and finally to believe that the things so named somehow explain the performance of the function.

We say, for example, humans have a ‘mind’, because we sometimes appear to think before we do stuff. We’ve named something. But we haven’t solved anything:

The introduction of [the concept of a mind] would not really solve the problem of designing a robot because there would still remain the problem of designing the [mind] itself, which is the core of the original problem all over again.

He is pointing out the naming problem, almost 100 years ago, and how the naming problem means that we often face the question problem. But because of the language problem, thirty years later someone went ahead and rediscovered both as the ‘homuncular problem’:

One may explain human vision by noting that light from the outside world forms an image on the retinas in the eyes and something in the brain looks at these images as if they are images on a movie screen. The question arises as to the nature of this internal viewer. The assumption here is that there is a “little man” or “homunculus” inside the brain “looking at” the movie.

Maybe that’s not funny to you, but it’s funny to me. I bet Clark was pissed.

Maybe more funny for you is to consider the rationalist community. This is an online community that tries to think better. Their sort-of ‘home page’ is called LessWrong which describes itself as:

an online forum and community dedicated to improving human reasoning and decision-making. We seek to hold true beliefs and to be effective at accomplishing our goals. Each day, we aim to be less wrong about the world than the day before.

It’s all about having ‘accurate beliefs’ and:

a desire to know what’s actually true (not just what’s convenient or pleasant to believe), being deliberate about processing the evidence, and avoiding common pitfalls of human reason

So they spend a lot of time worrying about this stuff. But then they will post stuff like this:

“Trapped Priors As A Basic Problem of Rationality” was the title of an AstralCodexTen blog post. Scott opens the post with the following:

Last month I talked about van der Bergh et al’s work on the precision of sensory evidence, which introduced the idea of a trapped prior. I think this concept has far-reaching implications for the rationalist project as a whole. I want to re-derive it, explain it more intuitively, then talk about why it might be relevant for things like intellectual, political and religious biases.

The post describes Scott’s take on a predictive processing account of a certain kind of cognitive flinch that prevents certain types of sensory input from being perceived accurately, leading to beliefs that are resistant to updating.

Trapped priors is essentially a statistical idea about how some kind of local minima can be confused for a global one (i.e. we assume something’s x because it has many of the characteristics of x, but actually it’s y, which has similar characteristics but is importantly different). This concept is revelatory enough to the author for him to go on and try to find answers in spirituality. And they are quoting there from one of the most prominent rationalists, Scott Alexander, who is also apparently quite impressed by the idea.

But, as I’ve complained about before they’re just sort of re-discovering ‘preconceptions’? Can you imagine being committed, on a values level, to ‘accurate thinking’ and needing preconceptions to be explained to you in pseudo-statistical terms just so you can comprehend the notion?

¶Outro

Anyway. I don’t really have a solution to all this. I just think it’s amusing. The ‘language’ problem, the ‘question’ problem, and the ‘naming’ problem. They’ll get ya. And it’ll be embarrassing. “There aren’t really any levels” indeed. We really are such half-made creatures.