Harry: 0:00

It might be the case that being more intentional about looking. At things more holistically might help us better fall in love with the problem. Than falling in love with the solution.

Jorge: 0:25

Hey, Harry. It’s good to see you, sir.

Harry: 0:27

Hey, Jorge. It’s a pleasure, as is always the case.

Jorge: 0:31

I’m always pretty busy with meetings, and whenever I see in my calendar, “Record an episode with Harry,” on the schedule, my spirits lift.

Harry: 0:41

Oh, that’s kind of you to say. I always figure I’m gonna learn something new or see a new opening somewhere in my day or my experience when I talk with you. I appreciate—I just so appreciate how thoughtful you are and in contrast to some of how I think about myself, which is tend to be more abstract. I appreciate the thoughtfulness you bring to our conversation. And just to your work in general.

Jorge: 1:13

Well, thank you for that. And not to belabor this, but just the having the ability to have a couple of meetings every once in a while that are not about, like, specific, like, moving projects forward, but actually about ideas is really refreshing. So anyway, speaking of ideas, I think you have a reading for us.

Harry: 1:32

I do. It’s a little on the longer side, but it’s fascinating. So here goes. Accomplished psychologists had uncovered substantial differences between East Asians and Euro-Americans in their reliance on analytic versus holistic thinking. The key distinction between their focusing on individuals or their relationships. When thinking analytically, people zoom in on and isolate objects or component parts and assign properties to those objects or parts to explain actions. They look for strict rules or conditions that permit them to place individuals, including animals or people, into discrete categories with no overlap. They explain things by coming up with types. What type of person is she? And they assign properties to those types. When thinking about trends, analytic thinkers tend to see straight lines and assume things will continue in their current direction unless something happens. In contrast, holistic thinkers focus not on the parts, but on the whole, and specifically on the relationships between the parts or how they fit together. And as part of a larger web of complex relationships, they expect time trends to be nonlinear or even cyclical by default. Various experimental tasks tap different aspects of analytic versus holistic thinking. In administering one of these tasks, the triad task, I presented individuals with a target image and two other images labeled A and B. For example, the author presents a target image of a rabbit along with an image of a carrot, A, and cat, B. After verifying what participants saw in the images, he asked them whether the target, for example, the rabbit, goes with A or B. Matching the target to one of the pair indicates a rule-based analytic approach while matching it to the other points to a holistic or functional orientation. If the participants match the rabbit and the cat, they’re probably matching them using an abstract rule-based category. Rabbits and cats are both animals. However, if they match the rabbit and the carrot, they’re probably prioritizing a specific functional relationship. Rabbits eat carrots. As usual, weird populations pile up at one end of the distribution. In black, while the rest of the world spreads out across a spectrum. Quick ellipse. The author refers to populations so commonly used in psychological and behavioral experiments as WEIRD, which is an acronym because they come from Western societies who are educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic. WEIRD people are highly analytical compared to most other societies. I’ll stop there.

Jorge: 4:56

Okay. Wow. I’m not sure what this is from, but it reminds me of the work of, uh, I think it’s Edward T. Hall who looked at differences, cultural differences between, you know, different groups of people. But I love this distinction between analytical thinking and holistic thinking. We can get into it, but I’m curious to know what this is from.

Harry: 5:26

So before I reveal the title, I’ll tell you that, and I may have told you this before, one of my favorite questions, and certainly in interview contexts when I’m interviewing somebody, but it’s a classic thing I’ll do at a party when I meet somebody new is to say, “You know, what book have you recommended or given away as a gift more than any other?” Right? We’ve talked about that. And I went to an Aspen Institute leadership event in San Francisco a while ago, and I bumped into an interesting guy who had a kind of mid-level management role inside of the Snap-on Tools business. And if you’re unfamiliar with Snap-on Tools, they make really high-quality tools that, you know, mechanics, auto mechanics, and other people use. You know, there are these Snap-on trucks that drive around and sell these tools, and I once thought it would be so cool to be a Snap-on franchisee. You get to drive around in a cool truck, and you get to talk to people who are doing interesting work, and you get to sell them tools, right? How cool is that? At any rate, when I asked him this question, he’s like, “Oh, that’s easy. The book is “the Weirdest People in the World.” And the subtitle of that is “How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous.” And it was written by a fellow, the name of Joseph Henrich. I haven’t finished the book yet, but given our work in design, in information architecture, and more broadly, leadership clarity, this passage really stuck out for me, because I’m weird, right? And the author goes on to make the case that, you know, in a lot of these psychological and neuropsychological experiments and research studies, these, you know, Western-educated, you know, highly intellectual, democratic, blah, blah, blah people are the subjects of their studies, and there’s a much broader range of people in the world than are often studied. And so the book is really looking at the compare and contrast there with a lens of this focus on weirdness, if you will, and how it affects culture, how it affects politics, how it affects society in general. And it’s a fairly novel worldview. I mean, it came out in 2020, and so it’s not new to some people, but it was certainly new to me. And I thought it would be a great topic to bring to our conversation.

Jorge: 8:18

Yeah, you know, I had heard the WEIRD acronym before, and I knew that there was a book where that was the book that popularized this thing. Did I understand the passage that you read? Did I understand that to be saying that in this distinction between analytical and holistic thinkers, WEIRD people, and it might be worth reminding folks what WEIRD stands for, right?

Harry: 8:51

Mm-hmm.

Jorge: 8:51

Western, educated, industrialized.

Harry: 8:54

Yeah, Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic.

Jorge: 8:59

And okay. So people who live in societies that. Where that’s an accurate descriptor of them, let’s say, right? So that would be like Western Europe, North America, maybe parts of South America as well. What I heard in the passage you read is that people who can be described with this WEIRD acronym tend to be more on the analytic side. Is that part of what you said there?

Harry: 9:34

I think that’s right. And yeah, most, yeah.

Jorge: 9:39

I’m asking it because I feel like I was, by all fair definitions, I was reared in a WEIRD environment.

Harry: 9:57

Mm-hmm.

Jorge: 9:58

Right? So I think that I’m a WEIRD person in that sense. But I’ve always been more of a holistic thinker than an analytic thinker. And in fact, I’ve always found myself uncomfortable with people who are overly analytic when making decisions because I think it’s like, well, they’re clearly missing something important here. Well, I guess I’ll ask it this way. To what degree do you feel that you, as I would presume another WEIRD person, how well do you feel that this describes you? Are you more analytical or are you more holistic?

Harry: 10:39

Well, I’ll say I’m not rich, but I think I would love to say that I’m more on the holistic thinking side of things. But I think the reality is that if you were to plot the characteristics and attributes that reveal my biases, you would probably see me on the side of the bell shape curve that is, according to these authors, more WEIRD. Which is to say, I tend to be far more analytical. But maybe not analytical in kind of that capital A sense of the word, but more that I’ll look at things... I’ll look at the thing as an object in the foreground as opposed to naturally, by default, looking at the broader context and setting whatever that object is in a set of relationships in the background.

Jorge: 11:40

I haven’t read the book, but I just want to circle back to you said, it’s like, “I’m not rich.” From my understanding of the WEIRD acronym, what it’s describing is not so much the individual as the society where they are, right? So when it says rich, it means a rich society, a society where

Harry: 11:56

True, yeah.

Jorge: 11:57

people’s needs are, you know, basic needs are kind of taken care of, right?

Harry: 12:01

That’s right.

Jorge: 12:02

So I don’t think that’s personalized in that way. And I also want to zoom in on this not capital A analytical distinction. Do you mean by that... Maybe I won’t say it like this, but I’m projecting here, but what I heard when you said that was maybe even those of us who consider ourselves to be more big-picture holistic thinkers still have a bias toward, for example, seeing how we might measure outcomes. So we start slicing and dicing the system to see how we can quantify its impact, perhaps, right? And that kind of belies a more analytical mindset, even if we are not reductionists.

Harry: 12:53

Yeah, I think that’s right. And part of that is just the assumption that there are strong causal or temporal relationships there that you can recursively from an outcome back up to whatever led to that outcome or would otherwise lead to that outcome, rather than thinking about an end state and then more broadly connecting it to all of the potential, relevant dynamics in its space. I don’t know how to talk about that. That’s probably because I’m WEIRD.

Jorge: 13:41

Well, this feels like this is fairly abstract territory, and we’re kind of abstract territory, and we’re. And this is a conversation that inevitably goes meta because talking about ways of thinking, ways of seeing the world, right? And. Again, not having read the book, I’m going to take a leap here and say that maybe the reason why societies that fall into that WEIRD description end up being rich, at least in part because of this bias toward outcome-oriented thinking. You know, it’s like we want to use an example here. We want to set goals that we work towards, and then we, you know, by making them quantifiable, we can know whether we have succeeded or not or how far we are from the goal. And that might lead to a different stance towards undertakings than someone who is thinking more big picture, holistically, ecosystemically, right? I don’t know. I’m making assumptions here.

Harry: 14:54

No, no, no. I think you’re onto something there, and I think I was trying and failing to sort of get to that earlier. But clearly, you know, if you buy what the authors are saying here, then it is naturally going to imply quite strongly that folks in a WEIRD society are going to be more cause and effect oriented. And a cause and effect oriented and outcome oriented society is going to be more inherently capable of achieving outcomes, I would think. Because you can look to a goal and then figure out what you want to do to achieve that goal and then pursue that goal, and that has a fairly strong arrow of time to it, versus this notion of populations that are not WEIRD, which is to say not Western and so on and so forth, look at time in a very different way, in a more circular way. And so I can easily imagine that it would be hard, not natural, it wouldn’t be a natural default state to say, “Oh, I want to achieve this outcome. What would have to be true to achieve that outcome?” And then plot a, you know, strategy, goals, objectives, tasks, and set that on a timeline and look at resources and go and pursue that, right? It might be a more socially oriented approach, for example. I don’t know. I don’t live in that space, but it really struck me as a leadership blind spot for me personally. I mean, I don’t... You know, those-- you, you’ve probably read about or seen, you know, they have those goggles you can wear if you, you know, want to pretend you’re drunk, you know? Like, to show you what it’s like to be a drunk driver or whatnot. And, like, I feel like I don’t have the goggles here to see what it would look like to be a more holistic thinker. I mean, I feel like I think very systemically, but it’s not a native viewport. It is a method for looking at the world rather than my native state.

Jorge: 17:24

I’m gonna read that back to you with an eye toward slapping snow chains on this.

Harry: 17:30

Mm-hmm.

Jorge: 17:31

Making it relevant to someone looking to gain traction because. I think it’s fair to say that. Being very outcome-oriented and pragmatic probably correlates with gaining traction.

Harry: 17:54

Hmm.

Jorge: 17:55

Somebody who’s very outcome-oriented and who can break problems down into a logical sequence of steps, achievable steps, might have more success than someone who’s thinking, you know, big picture and cannot descend from that to a more granular state of thinking. And what I’m hearing you say there is that leaders, perhaps because of mechanisms or selection mechanisms within organizations, leaders tend to be biased towards this more kind of practical, pragmatic mindset, perhaps at the expense of more holistic thinking. Is that what you meant when you said a leadership blind spot?

Harry: 18:42

I think very much so. And, you know, to take the traction imperative forward, I think it might be the case that being more intentional about looking at things more holistically might help us better fall in love with the problem than falling in love with the solution. And I think if we were better able to fall in love with the problem, so to speak, we might see the world a different way and might look at the challenges that we’re facing in a more ecosystem-centric way and may not pursue with such fervor attempting to solve things that may not necessarily be solvable at first blush. They may need us to manage them over time, for example. And I think we have a problem-solution or a very tight problem-solution orientation in our WEIRD society and certainly in leadership positions that I think may cause us not to see a lot of things by default. And so I think the opportunity for us and the practice might be to look at the background situations and dynamics and see how things are connected before we draw a conclusion that we then act on.

Jorge: 20:23

Again, again, this is kind of ironic and meta, but, uh, again, with the goal of trying to make this practical for folks and bring it down from the more holistic.

Harry: 20:34

Mhm.

Jorge: 20:35

Thinking, a few things come to mind. One is the more analytical bias, right? The more analytical bias, one of the corollaries, I think, of seeing the world through that lens is that it tends to nudge one towards short-term thinking. Might be unfair, but I think that in our society in particular, the way that, um, let’s say publicly listed companies, you know, the market, the way that it works is with this quarterly cadence, where every three months you have to be proving results. And that is a very different... Like, if your orientation is towards a pace where you have to be demonstrating a certain amount of traction in a three-month period, it’s going to be very hard for you to make decisions that have the 10-year time span as the scope.

Harry: 21:37

Mhm.

Jorge: 21:37

And I am a member of and an advocate for an organization that is based in the Bay Area called the Long Now Foundation.

Harry: 21:46

Uh, yeah.

Jorge: 21:46

We have talked before about Stewart Brand. He’s one of the founders of that. And they were founded specifically to address this, I want to say blind spot in our WEIRD society, right? That we are so near-term oriented. I think that looking into their work might be helpful, and I’ll include a link to their website in the show notes. Another thing that I can think of is. Using the same skills that we bring about, the same analytical skills that we bring to achieving results in the near term, we can apply to these larger picture, bigger picture orientations. And there’s an exercise, I think it’s called the futures wheel. Have you seen this?

Harry: 22:42

Hmm. I—no.

Jorge: 22:43

It’s a form of brainstorming. I learned about it from Stef Hutka, who has written a new book that is due out in November, so it’s going to come out after this episode comes out, and that’s where I learned about this. But it’s basically a visual brainstorming tool that is organized radially, where.

Harry: 23:05

Mhm. Mhm.

Jorge: 23:08

Second and third order effects kind of radiating out. I’ve only read about it. I haven’t actually used it in a workshop scenario. But that seemed to me like a tool that might be helpful in gaining this larger picture perspective.

Harry: 23:26

Yeah, that’s great. I mean, scenario planning itself, as simple as it is, may also help here too, because it forces you to open the aperture and look at different time horizons and look at the implications of those horizons.

Jorge: 23:43

Yeah, and scenario planning, again, that’s someone who is, I think it’s, is it Peter Schwartz who wrote that? The, the... And I’ll include a link to his—I forget right now the name of the book, but I’ll include it in the show notes. He’s also one of these people in Stewart Brand’s orbit, right?

Harry: 24:01

Yeah. Yeah, very much.

Jorge: 24:02

There’s a whole series of folks, I think they’re primarily based in the Bay Area, although not exclusively, that have been kind of pursuing this more kind of big-picture thinking, no?

Harry: 24:14

Mm-hmm. I think the area that I personally am going to look into a little bit more is sort of cross-cultural thinking styles, and I’m sure there are books and lots of work on this. It’s just stuff that I haven’t spent a lot of time looking at. And more importantly, not just to sort of educate myself about it, but to look and see whether there are practical ways that I can put into practice things that will help me see the whole rather than overfocusing or fixating on the objects that are prominent in the foreground.

Jorge: 24:57

Yeah, and I referenced Edward Hall earlier.

Harry: 25:00

Mm-hmm.

Jorge: 25:01

There’s a book that he wrote, and again, I forget the.

Harry: 25:09

Ways of Seeing, that one.

Jorge: 25:11

I don’t know if it’s Ways of Seeing. Or I—it might be called Deep Culture.

Harry: 25:16

Hmm.

Jorge: 25:17

His entire work is around this question of how different cultures see things differently. Another one is, I think his name is Geert Hofstede. I can’t pronounce that.

Harry: 25:31

Mm-hmm.

Jorge: 25:32

But he did research. He was at IBM, and he did research. Yeah, Hofstede’s Dimensions of Culture.

Harry: 25:41

I don’t know that work.

Jorge: 25:43

Yeah, he came up with six dimensions that can be used to assess differences between different cultural backgrounds, and there are things like individualism versus collectivism.

Harry: 26:01

Mm-hmm.

Jorge: 26:04

Let’s see. Power distance index, which sounds very technical. We’re not gonna get into it here, but there’s six of them, right? And that was really insightful to me, and then Hall’s work was really insightful to me here. And I do think that notion that different cultures have a different perspective when it comes to, know, am I thinking holistically about the entire ecosystem and all, you know, the, a very long range. Like, for example, Asian cultures, as the text implied, tend to have a much longer time window than Western cultures. So I do think that people with different cultural backgrounds do have differences in how we frame things, and, you know, this one that you’ve brought up is one that sounds very plausible to me.

Harry: 26:53

Mm-hmm. I just love the rabbit versus cat versus rabbit and carrot question. I mean, to me, that just... I was listening to this book and I got home and I was still thinking about it, and I realized that I really wanted to see the rabbit eating the carrot. But anyway, I want to learn more here because I suspect that I would be a better leader if I could choose the lenses that I’m looking at based on the circumstances that are facing me. And I currently, this is like a reveal to me that there are ways of seeing that are really default, and I’m missing some important stuff.

Jorge: 27:40

Well, I’ll add one more thing, and I know that we have to wrap up. But to what you just said, which is understand how you see things and whether that’s leaving some things out, maybe. But importantly, understand how others see things, because if you know that you are talking with someone who is more of a holistic thinker than you are or more of an analytic thinker than you are, then maybe you can adjust the way that you communicate so that you can be more effective when working with those people.

Harry: 28:13

I love that. That’s just gold. Yeah, thank you for that.

Jorge: 28:18

Awesome. Well, thank you for bringing this. I’m—this is very exciting. And, you know, that book has been on my to-read list. Tends to happen here, I might have to go off and get it.

Harry: 28:28

Yeah, I’m gonna—I’m about a third of the way in, and I think I’m just gonna go back to the beginning and start reading it a little more slowly because it’s a really rich book.

Jorge: 28:37

Awesome. Thank you for sharing with us.