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If the barber shaves only those who do not shave themselves, then whoshaves the barber? It cannot be the barber himself, because he only shavesthose who do not shave themselves. It cannot be someone else, because thebarber shaves all those who do not shave themselves.The logician you call onyour cellular phone tells you this is an example of a paradox – a syllogism thatleads from true premises to untenable conclusions.What to do? What to think?The solution to the paradox is that no such barber exists.To get to it, however,you have to break out of the bounds of the problem statement, and considerthe way in which the problem is stated as the problem to be solved.

Managers are often trapped by their own problem statements. Shiftingthe way a problem is framed requires seeing it from multiple perspectives.

MINDFULTHINKING

By Mihnea Moldoveanu and Ellen Langer

The complexity of today’s management environment demands leaders who can think in creative, new ways. Mihnea

Moldoveanu, assistant professor of Strategic Management at theRotman School, and Ellen Langer, professor of Social Psychologyat Harvard, argue that a new way of thinking for the New Economycalls not only for new theories, but for new ways of thinking about theories. In this article, they describe cognitive strategies that allowbusiness leaders to see things in a whole new light.

Cognitive Strategies forAdapting in the Age of Uncertainty

If we want to train industry-makers, we needto teach the cognitive skills required to for-mulate new problems to replace old ones.New problem-statements are often based onnew ways of seeing, new disciplines and newassumptions.

Unfortunately, business education is divid-ed up into specialties that are individuallymonopolized by age-old disciplines: finance,operations, economics, accounting, organiza-tional behavior, technology strategy and soforth. When in ‘finance’ class, the would-be‘industry-makers’ solve finance problems;when in ‘operations’ class, they solve ‘opera-tions’ problems. But real-world problems oftenrequire solving engineering problems in opera-tions scenarios, programming problems inhardware scenarios, and psychological prob-lems in economic scenarios.

What are the cognitive and meta-cognitiveskills (ie: the ways in which we think ourthoughts and believe our beliefs) required totake control of the New Economy? We will ven-ture to build a case for a new way of thinkingabout thinking and learning, based on our study of the ways in which people believe their beliefs.

Cognitive commitment to an idea or a the-ory, we will argue, is not a friend, but anenemy that lures us into the lukewarm watersof various disciplines that strive to keep usthere. Getting out of a cognitive commit-ment, however, is just as difficult as gettingout of a bad relationship. New strategies arerequired to help us win the ensuing mentalbattles, and new thinking is required to craftthese strategies.

Our collective work on individual cognitionand learning and the processes by which beliefsget selected, validated or rejected reveals that:

•Mindsets are sticky: they are muchmore easily prevented than cured once theyhave been ‘learned’;

•Mindsets are alive: they are active, notobjects.They stick around because we active-ly defend them against refutation that discon-firms the theories on which they rest.

This, at least, is what studies of individualand group psychology seem to show. Psycholo-gists often stop here. On the other hand, episte-mology (the study of knowledge itself) and thehistory of science suggest that,

•Mindsets are provisional: they can bechanged, modified, or discarded when no

longer applicable because there is no theorythat is ultimately justified.All theories shouldbe regarded as subject to modification,improvement or deletion;

•Mindsets are not determined byexperiences: the ‘cold, hard facts’ do not‘determine’ any particular theory (although theydo shape and guide what we can sensibly andtruthfully say).We are ultimately free to choose,defend, or deport our cognitive commitments.

We have set out to map cognitive andmeta-cognitive strategies aimed at gettingpeople ‘unhooked’ from their own ideas, suchthat they may perceive old problems in newways, along with new problems that open upwhenever we become slightly more respon-sive to the anomalies that surround us.Thesestrategies are not in any sense ‘rules’, butrather guides to sequences of cognitive choic-es – choices among our beliefs, models andtheories. They are not meant to contain orconstrain cognition, but rather to guide andshape inquiry.

Thinking about ThinkingThe new informational and institutional land-scape calls for new ways of thinking – and ofdealing with complexity, uncertainty andchange. Many of the models and theories thatare currently being taught in universities relyon a dated metaphysical model of the world:the universe as a giant piece of machinery,whose components are linked by the ironchains of causation. This ‘world view’ hasbecome ensconced into the ways in which weinquire into the working of people, groupsand institutions: we expect law-like regulari-ties to show up everywhere, and discoverthem even in sequences of events that havebeen designed to be ‘random’ so as to fool us,as experiments on gamblers indicate. AsIsraeli psychologist Arie Kruglanski hasshown, experiments on people’s responses torandomness and uncertainty demonstrate thatwe ‘find’ patterns everywhere, as if motivated

to close our minds to ambiguity.Although causation is not clearly estab-

lished as an explanatory device on logicalgrounds, it is very well established as anexplanatory device on psychological grounds.Causal explanations have an air of certaintyto them that probabilistic explanations andexplanations based on mechanisms lack; andcertainty, it turns out, is something we crave.

A new way of thinking for the New Econ-omy calls not only for new theories, but fornew ways of thinking about theories, and newmeanings as to what constitutes a theory. Itcalls for new strategies of playing with yourown mind, such as:

•thinking conditionally, in terms ofwhat various objects could be, rather than interms of what they are, of what could ratherthan what will happen.Thinking conditionallygives us the freedom to flex the muscles ofperception. Experiments carried out by oneof us show that presenting information in aconditional fashion leads to better perfor-mance on cognitive tasks that require the useof that information in new ways;

•thinking in terms of particulars,rather than solely in terms of universal rulesand laws, lets us perceive the novel aspect of asituation and produce the adaptive behavior thatmay be required to successfully deal with it;

•thinking in terms of intentionsrather than causes, can unfreeze our cog-nitive commitment to the ‘one true picture’of the world that we may be stuck with.Think-ing in terms of intentions is at the core of thegreat discoveries in cognitive and social psy-chology, which have made us aware of the rela-tionship between the way we want to see theworld and the way in which we currently see it;

•thinking spirally, in terms ofsequences of events that amplify each other,rather than linearly, in terms of causes andeffects, lets us break out of the narrow cornerof the immediate experience;

•thinking holistically, in terms of thecharacteristics of a system that cannot be ana-lyzed in terms of components and sub-com-ponents of that system, can make the escapefrom narrow analytical corners easy andrewarding;

•thinking consequentially, not onlyin terms of choices and the consequences ofthose choices, but also in terms of the conse-

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“ To the answer embedded in everyquestion, answer with a question

from a different answer.” — Gilles Deleuze,

French Philosopher

quences of choosing to think in a particularway. This allows us to examine the effects ofour beliefs on our own ability to act decisive-ly and successfully;

•thinking in parallel, carrying forwardmultiple possible models of the world ratherthan discarding all but the ‘one true model’ –lets us form multiple perspectives of the samephenomenon;

•thinking like a detective, by treatingall theories, models and prescriptions ashypotheses to be tested through our actionsrather than conclusory statements of ‘truth’ tobe followed unquestioningly;

•thinking recursively, not only aboutthe relation between ‘data’ and ‘theory’ orbetween ‘model’ and ‘object’, but also aboutthe ways in which we think about the linksbetween theory and data, or model and object.

Thinking Interactively We reason about each other all of the time,but very rarely reason with each other. Wethink interpersonally, but rarely think interac-tively.We often make attributions and gener-alize from very few instances to constructentire schemas into which our experiencesneatly fit. But, we do not stop to ask:‘what ifeveryone else is also using the same schemas?’

Social psychologists have pointed out for along time that interpersonal reasoning isbased on a set of metaphors and schemas thathelp us organize our experiences and takeswift action.We are quick to categorize othersat work as ‘gamesmen’,‘schmoozers’,‘politi-cal animals’, ‘leaders’, ‘followers’ and ‘syco-phants’.That means, however, that others maysee us as gamesmen or schmoozers as well.

Far less attention, has been paid to theways in which people think about what otherpeople think, about what other people thinkthey think, and so forth. Yet, this form ofinterpersonal mindfulness is critical to ourbeing able to successfully engage in even themost trivial coordination tasks, such as keep-ing an appointment for a meeting (we thinkthat the other thinks we will make it), telling aplausible falsehood (we think the other thinksthat we are telling the truth, and that theythink we think they think we are telling thetruth, otherwise we would give ourselvesaway by a nervous twitch). Most social rea-soning, in fact, is interactive – even though

we may not be directly conscious of it.Becoming conscious of the structures of inter-active reasoning that we use can make usmore successful players of the social games,sub-games and super-games that often charac-terize organizational life.

Thinking DialecticallyDialectical thinking plays various ideas andtheories off each other without seeking toestablish any one of them with absolute cer-tainty.While goal-oriented thinking seeks cer-tainty and often shuns questioning, dialecticalthinking puts forth ideas with an eye to chal-lenging or refuting them using other ideas ortheories. When choices must be madebetween alternative points of view, it is withan understanding that these choices are neverabsolutely justified.

While it may seem that such playful think-ing can only be suitably engaged in by poetsand philosophers, it is nevertheless highly use-ful as a practical tool for decision-makers incomplex environments, where ‘certainty’ iscostly, as the financier and philanthropistGeorge Soros has recently argued.

Significant barriers must be overcome inorder to bring dialectical thinking into thebusiness education process. Quite often in theclassroom of the professional school, ‘theright answer’ consists of merely articulatinghow a case study fits under a general principle(a model or a theory). ‘Cracking the case’means, quite often ‘applying the rules’ thatappear on page ‘xyz’ of a textbook.This peda-gogical device efficiently solves the immediateproblems of the teacher and the taught, suchas producing a course that is easy to grade andwhose successful completion depends on atleast showing up. But it is unlikely that it buildsthe skills necessary to formulate or re-formu-late the problems that will be encountered inbusiness life. A manager’s predicament doesnot come packaged as a case study, and defi-

nitely not as a case that has been tailored forthe theory it is aiming to illustrate.

Invoking ScriptsWhat principles and immovable concepts areto individual minds, scripts are to interper-sonal relations, as the work of American psy-chologist Bob Abelson has shown.The teacherteaches. In his own mind, he has cognitivejurisdiction over the subject matter. His‘script’ calls for him to be correct all of thetime, for the student to be ‘incapable of givingthe right answer’ some or most of the time.

In the teacher’s script, the student is in theclassroom to learn, to be evaluated, and to failat least some of the time. Otherwise, therewould not be much that the teacher couldteach the student. Forced grading curves rein-force the teacher script.They legislate, ex antethat most students must get a grade that isless than the ‘top’ grade in the class.

Having figured out the teacher’s ‘script’,the student proceeds to ‘play’ it by producingbehavior targeted at reinforcing the script inorder to achieve optimum results. The stu-dent’s script calls for behavior that is designedto produce not necessarily the greatest amountof knowledge, but the most favorable impres-sion on the teacher. These two goals are notalways (if ever) identical.The student realizesthat the ‘teacher must teach’. She also realizesthat the quickest way to a teacher’s heart (andto good grades) is to ‘play the game’ of repeat-ing back to the teacher what the latter has pre-sented as ‘knowledge’ to the classroom.

The student counts on the fact that theteacher is too self-deceived to see through thestudent’s strategy of ‘appeasement’. Withevery action that the student takes, she rein-forces the teacher’s ‘teachers must teach’script.With every reward and punishment thatthe teacher metes out to students, he rein-forces the ‘teacher is stupid enough to be flat-tered’ script that the student has.The result isa mutually reinforcing spiral of actions thatjointly perpetuate the two scripts.

Dialectical thinking helps break us out ofthese self-defeating psychological dynamics.It focuses on empirical facts as challenges totheories and on theories as challenges toknown interpretations of empirical observa-tions. ‘Cognitive jurisdiction’ breaks down,and the ‘one

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“We see things not as they are, but as we are.”

— The Talmud

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