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Competency Coordinates: Integrating Multiple Perspectives

Making sense of complexity through inquiry and integrating different sources of information, strengthening people’s interrelationships and bridging differences, understanding interests and identifying mutual benefits.

Addressing complexity is at odds with gut feeling!

  • Complexity means having different (even opposing) valuable opinions and courses of action to address a problem. People often consider that a good way to address complexity is to follow our own gut feeling. Many people believe that gut feelings are more genuine and purer and that thinking too much about a topic creates unnecessary noise and confusion. Gut feelings are useful indeed, but the ease and speed they provide come at the cost of biased reasoning! Bias might not be a problem in many daily contexts, like when someone is discussing a soccer game with a friend, but a biased reasoning can become a nightmare when making complex decisions that impact others.
  • Familiarity is a very common form of bias that can take place when complex information and interests are superficially considered. Accordingly, we are more likely to accept and endorse opinions and courses of action that are consistent with our own beliefs and discount the ones that are not. Many people believe that being impartial is all about motivation – they miss the point! While someone can have a deep, heartfelt intention of being impartial, their minds will more easily than not produce partial decisions that favor familiar information.
  • The cognitive challenge underlying considering and weighting different perspectives requires a set of conditions that are rarely anticipated and achieved:
    • Cognitive resources (e.g., good sleep habits, low to moderate stress levels, distractive information, good family-work life balance);
    • Motivation (e.g., autonomy, perceived competence, involvement with the topic); and
    • Analytic tools (e.g., data collection tools, analysis and representation tools, decision making tools).

Bridge differences by turning the “we” and “they” into “we all”!

  • There is often a discourse in project development that sets stakeholders into two factions: the “we”, for example, the proponent, the project staff, the consultants, and the “they”, for example, local communities, business and associations, and local power (note that “we” and “they” can be used interchangeably). Many believe that this is a useful and innocuous distinction differentiating those creating from those experiencing the impacts. However, the widespread acceptance among stakeholders of this social representation has a tremendous impact on how people consider information and, ultimately, on how people react towards each other.
  • When people are labeled as members of a social group, they will systemically bias their assessment about the social interaction with other groups. For example, people will value the in-group (the “we”) discourse and behaviors and, comparatively, devalue the discourse and behaviors of the out-group (the “they”) on the same theme. Another example, people will consider the in-group (the “we”) as diverse and complex and the out-group (the “they”) as homogenous and similar. This biased perceptions often underly intergroup conflicts.
  • The good news is that group belonging is flexible. Individuals balance group permanence, as a way to maintain continuity, with group change, as a way to adapt to new conditions. Turning the “we” and “they” narrative into superordinate “we all” is a powerful way to make proponents and communities feel they belong to the same broad social group of stakeholders, reduce social bias and conflict, and increase reasoning and sustainability.

Ways to deal with informational and social complexity

1. Learn more about “gut feelings” and “careful reasoning”

  • The Noble prize laureate, Daniel Kahneman, wrote “Thinking, Fast and Slow” describing two systems of thought and provides many examples of how they work in practice. You can start by listening to Daniel’s interview with Inc. Magazine about his book here and, if that spikes your interest, consider reading the book.
  • The social psychologist Dan Ariely has a widely popular TED talk, “Are we in control of our decisions”, discussing how pernicious our gut feelings can be. You can see it here, it is worth your 15 minutes.
  • The behavioral economist Katy Milkman has a podcast named “Choiceology” totally devoted to, imagine, irrational decision making! Consider following it and learn more about the many ways we can be trapped into bad irrational decision.

2. Set in advance the conditions for careful reasoning

As mentioned above, things like poor self-care habits, unbalanced family-work life, lack of autonomy, low perceived competence, low involvement with the topic, information gaps and in-existent decision-making tools have tremendous impact in your ability to deal with complexity. Find ways to develop these if you want to develop consistent careful reasoning about complex matters.

3. Understand the power of social identity

We all belong to different social groups, and that is simultaneously a source of comfort and a receipt for conflict. Learn more about how social groups form and engage in conflict. The psychologist Muzafer Sherif has a classic experiment on this topic with a group of boys in a summer camp and shows how these young boys could be drawn in and out of intergroup conflict. This is called the “Robbers Cave Experiment” and there is a short 5 minutes video about it here. Also, there is the original reference to the study below.

References
  • Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking, Fast and Slow. UK: Penguin Books.
  • Hewstone, M. (1990). The “ultimate atribution error”? A review of the literature of intergroup causal attribution. European Journal of Social Psychology, 20(March).
  • Sherif, M. (1958). Superordiante goals in the reduction of intergroup conflict. American Journal of Sociology, 63(4), 349-356.