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|In: Leadership|Last Updated:

The neural pathways humans use to, say, recognize a friend’s face are different from those we use to understand why the square of the length of a right triangle’s hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squared lengths of its sides.

As Daniel Kahneman explains in his mind-blowing Thinking, Fast and Slow, the former is, for us, quick and effortless (thinking fast) while the latter is a lot slower and takes much more effort (thinking slow).

This disparity of effort is one reason some people accept some profoundly wrong ideas while rejecting others that are correct beyond any reasonable doubt: The attractive-but-wrong ideas rely on the thinking-fast pathway, requiring minimal effort. Meanwhile … if you had a million bucks riding on the outcome, could you, on your own, with just pencil, paper, and a five-minute deadline, prove the Pythagorean Theorem?

Anyway … while thinking-slow is intrinsically hard, it doesn’t have to be quite so hard. It’s possible to jump-start the process through what we in IT might call patterns – pre-defined approaches to thinking through different sorts of situation.

Over my accumulating years I’ve collected quite a few of these, and as they’re the backbone of Keep the Joint Running I figured you might find my compilation useful.

What follows is the list. The extent to which I elaborate on anything in it in future posts will depend on the feedback I get from the KJR community (that would be you). So without any further ado, and in no particular order:

Outline Thinking: Top-down decomposition. Outlines may be taxonomic (breakdown at all levels is based on the same dimension of analysis) or attributional (different outline levels are based on different dimensions of analysis).

Mind Mapping: Like outlining, but with many-to-many relationships.

Systems Thinking: How different components interact and relate to each other – process flows, algorithms, rules, feed-forward and feedback loops.

Stochastic Thinking: How randomness influences and accounts for outcomes.

Anti-anecdotal Thinking: Recognizing that a single event does not represent a trend. Related to Stochastic Thinking.

Narrative Thinking: Connecting the dots in story-telling format to see if everything hangs together.

Geometric Thinking: Step-by-step logic, from premises to conclusions. Similar to Narrative Thinking but more rigorous.

Editorial Thinking: knowing what to leave out; clarity vs completeness. Similar to Narrative Thinking but with less nuance and more emphasis on ease of comprehension.

Causal Thinking: Keeping means and ends straight; keeping correlation vs causation straight.

Proportionality perspective: Placing metrics and measurements on a defined scale; insisting on the denominators that turn numbers into ratios.

Metaphorical Thinking: How an unknown circumstance resembles a known one; what our knowledge of the known one suggests about the unknown one.

Fractal / Recursive Thinking: Metaphorical thinking applied to observations at differing scales.

Pattern-based Thinking: Like Metaphorical Thinking, but more rigorous.

Trade-off Thinking: Recognizing that sometimes, better is the best you can achieve, and that an improvement in one dimension can cause deterioration in other dimensions.

Scientific Thinking: Having increased or decreased confidence in a proposition based on whether reliable evidence fails or succeeds in falsifying it.

Models and Thought Experiments: Exploring how a situation would play out by putting someone or something in a defined situation and applying what we know about how they would behave in that situation to predict what the results would be.

Political Thinking: Choosing what ideas to accept and reject based on what you think those in power prefer, or that members of your peer group will like.

Empathic Thinking: Imagining how others might feel if presented with the idea. Similar to Political Thinking, but nicer. Similar to Thought Experiments, but emotional.

Plausibility testing: Assessing whether an explanation passes the don’t-be-ridiculous test, keeping in mind that quantum physics doesn’t pass it.

Ridicule: When you don’t like an idea but can’t find anything wrong with it. Akin to Plausibility Thinking, but malicious.

Bob’s last word: The point of this list isn’t for you to decide which ones you like the best (hint: as a card-carrying member of Sarcastics Anonymous, Ridicule is my favorite). No, the point is to choose the thinking mode best-suited to the situation you’re dealing with.

# # #

Bob’s sales pitch: Want to be a great leader? I can’t help you. I doubt anyone else can help you either.

But if what you want is to be a better leader tomorrow than you were yesterday, get yourself a copy of Leading IT: <Still> the Toughest Job in the World. According to one reviewer, “This should be mandatory reading for any IT manager and above.” And as one executive told me after attending my leadership seminar that’s based on Leading IT, “I’ve attended at least a dozen of these, and this is the first one that wasn’t utter B.S.”

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|In: Career Management|Last Updated:

Draw a Venn diagram. Label one of the circles “What I’m good at.” Label the next “What I enjoy doing.” The third reads, “What someone will pay me to do.

Where the three intersect? That’s your career, if you want one. It’s also the core  framework hiring managers have in the backs of their minds when trying to staff their organizations.

They’re accustomed to hiring employees. They bring in contractors – independent workers, also known as members of the gig economy – for situations that call for individuals with a well-defined “sack o’ skills” for a finite duration.

Contractors are, that is, members of the workforce who have decided they won’t scratch their circle #2 itches through their careers. Their numbers appear to be increasing, very likely as an offset to those who prefer the traditional employment/career approach to earning a living.

Managers generally think of their organization as a social construct. When staffing a role, hiring an employee is their default, and for good reason. They want someone who will do more than just a defined body of work. Beyond that they want people who will pitch in to help the society function smoothly, who will provide knowledge and continuity, who find this dynamic desirable, and whose attitudes and approaches are compatible with the business culture.

Bringing in a contractor is, for most open positions, Plan B.

Which is unfortunate for hiring managers right now. The trend appears to be that if they want enough people to get the organization’s work done they’re going to have to make more use of contractors … and not only contractors but also employees who have no interest in pursuing a career, just an honest day’s pay in exchange for their honest day’s work – who want jobs, not careers.

A different approach to staffing to what we’ve all become accustomed to is evolving, one that’s more transactional and less interpersonal. Culture will be less of a force because contractors will spend less time acculturating than employees; also, the ratio of time working independently than in the team situations where culture matters most is steadily increasing.

In some respects it will be more expensive. Contractor turnover will be higher than employee turnover because that’s built into how the relationship is defined. The ratio of onboarding time to productive time will increase.

Managers who don’t want to head down this road do have an alternative: They can compete for those members of the workforce who don’t want to become independent. The law of supply and demand suggests that this approach will cost more. It will also mean thinking through how to make the work environment as desirable as possible.

One more factor, as if one was needed: The security ramifications of a more transient workforce are significant.

Bob’s last word: “Digital” refers to changes in a company’s marketplace that call for changes in a company’s business strategy in response. Digital is all about products and customer relationships.

The current restructuring of traditional staffing practices is the result of digitization, the rise of the remote worker digital technologies have enabled, and COVID-19, which accelerated it all. It’s the next digital marketplace transformation to which businesses must adapt, only this time the marketplace in question is the one that trades in labor.

Adapting to this nascent transformation of the employment marketplace is less familiar territory, but it isn’t different in principle. Strategists have always had to think in terms of where their organizations fit into an overall business ecosystem. Staffing has always been part of this overall ecosystem. It’s just that few business leaders, not to mention those of us who engage in punditry and futurism … anticipated how quickly and dramatically this ecosystem would morph.

Bob’s sales pitch: Ten years ago, when I published Keep the Joint Running: A Manifesto for 21st Century IT, “Digital” was still an adjective, “everybody knew” the rest of the business was IT’s internal customer, and “best practice” was a phrase people tossed around when they had nothing better to say.

Oh, well. You can’t win ‘em all. But even though Digital has been noun-ified, this book’s 13 principles for leading an effective IT organization are as relevant as the day the book was published.

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