If a general counsel thinks that early case assessment is hogwash, but his counterpart at his company’s biggest competitor praises it and offers proof, guess what the skeptic feels and does? People feel uncomfortable when their beliefs face a challenge, and they typically react by trying to ease the discomfort.…
In the words of Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert I. Sutton, Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths & Total Nonsense: Profiting from Evidence-Based Management (Harvard Bus. School Press 2006) at 191, years of research into organizational climates have routinely found that “60% to 75% of the employees in any organization … report that…
Collective intelligence is a fascinating notion. When many people weigh in with a view, especially if they put money on their positions, the market value of an outcome often predicts very accurately the actual result. According to Inkling Markets “Prediction markets allow a group of people to express an opinion…
Cognitive scientists define two sorts of knowledge, declarative and procedural, according to Arthur I. Miller, Insights of Genius: Imagery and Creativity in Science and Art (Springer-Verlag 1996) at 271. Declarative knowledge refers to static, fact-like representations that serve as innate structures and can be propositional or imagistic. An in-house lawyer…
According to the “under-determination thesis” there can be an infinite number of scientific theories to describe any set of experimental data. Arthur I. Miller, Insights of Genius: Imagery and Creativity in Science and Art (Springer-Verlag 1996) at xii. This esoteric idea probably means that there could be an infinite number…
Long and careful deliberation can be ineffectual, because the conscious mind has a very limited processing capacity. “People who mull over their decisions typically get the relative importance of the various pros and cons very wrong.” Research reported in the Harvard Bus.Rev., Vol. 85, Feb. 2007 at 30, discloses that…
“Creativity,” the subject of several forays on this blog, is a tough term to define. Fortunately, an article by Angela Stevens, “An Examination of Job Satisfaction and Creative Work Environments, OD Practitioner, Vol. 38, No. 3 2006 at 36, cites an expert’s definition (Theresa Amabile): “business creativity is an idea…
Another post explains the modest influence leaders have on the performance of organizations and teams (See my post of Jan. 14, 2007 calling leadership into question). Even those general counsel who want to lead are anchored by the deadweight of many constraints. The constraints on a general counsel include the…
A classic book, Groupthink by Irving Janis, studied the US Cabinet-level decision-making before the failed Bay of Pigs invasion. “Groupthink” has come to summarize a congeries of characteristics that lead to bad decisions. Meetings of legal leadership teams can suffer from groupthink. These maladies include “a premature sense of ostensible…
Law is cerebral, and many people don’t question the common assumption that brainier lawyers do better. Whether that is generally true, I at least have always thought that a person’s IQ is an invariant figure. Determined by what you are born with and what relatively early experiences you have, IQ…