Decision-Making and Depth Perception
"Turn it inside out and see what it is like - what it becomes like when old, sick, or prostituting itself. How short-lived the praiser and praised, the one who remembers and the remembered. Remembered in some corner of these parts, and even there not in the same way by all, or even by one. And the whole earth is but a mere speck." - Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 8.21
Every so often it's good to cull books from the crowed shelf space in my office. Space isn't the problem. Quantity is. Fifteen-ish years ago I counted close to 3,000 books on the shelves. They were everywhere. Sometimes even on actual bookshelves. I think I'm down below 1,000 books now. Most of what's gone are technical books. When I did a massive purge of software development bricks a few years back, there must have been several hundred pounds of books on coding. Detailed tomes of now extinct coding languages. These days, I'm letting go of more and more management books. The world of organizing people has changed since I first started managing them. Much of what worked then doesn't work now. (That doesn't prevent the change-breakers from trying.)
During a recent culling exercise, I pulled Virine and Trumper's (2008) "Project Decisions - The Art and Science" from the shelf. I recall this book being quite influential. Thumbing through it, there is much that is still relevant. A sample:
Most people believe themselves to be objective observers. However, perception is an active process. We don't just stand back passively and let the real "facts" of the world come to us in some kind of pure form. If that were so, we'd all agree on what we see. Instead, we reconstruct reality using our own assumptions and preconceptions: What we see is what we want to see. This psychological phenomenon is called selective perception. As a project manager, you have a number of expectations about the project. These expectations have different sources: past experience, knowledge of the project, and certain motivational factors, including political considerations. These factors predispose you to process information in a certain way. (p. 22)
This is as true today as it was 15 years ago. However, there is an important perceptual position missing in these observations: Others. You and others have a number of expectations about the project. These expectations predispose you and others to process information in a certain way. Virine and Trumper leverage Brunswik's lens model to illustrate their point. It's helpful to extend the lens model to illustrate the effect of multiple perceptual positions on communication.
In very general terms, the lens model describes how an individual's model of the world is derived from perceived differences in physiological cues. For example, the slightly different points of view afforded by two eyes are combined to generate depth perception. I explored this idea a little in Seeing vs. Visualizing and stereo triptychs. If you're old enough to remember View-Master stereoscopes, it's the same thing. Adding a second perspective, even if it's shifted by a few inches, results in significantly higher quality information from the same data. In the case of eyes, the quality of depth perception is much higher.
So why don't we have three eyes? Or twelve? Probably because the addition of more eyes - of more perspectives - doesn't increase the quality of information to the same degree as adding a second perspective did to the first. The same is true for adding perspectives to any human endeavor. A second perspective, or opinion, is highly valuable and should be sought, even if you don't think you need it. Adding a third perspective, probably a good idea for important decisions. Adding a thirty eighth perspective would do little more than freeze progress. The phrase "too many chefs in the kitchen" comes to mind.
Marcus Aurelius hints at another way to gain perspective. Not only are alternative perspective available to us in space, but in time as well. What will be the consequences of a decision in a day, two months, or five years?
Knowing where the line is between not enough and too many perspectives is part of what makes quality decision-making an art. There are a lot of good books available for learning the intellectual side of this art, but the actual skill behind the art can only be gained from experiencing the consequences of too few or too many perspectives followed by hard wiring the lessons from those experiences into daily practice.
References
Virine, L. & Trumper, M. (2008). Project decisions: The art and science. Vienna, VA: Management Concepts
Photo by Daniel Seßler on Unsplash