mixed practice, whereas 80 percent performed in a manner that proved the opposite. The feeling of learning, it turns out, is based on before-your-eyes progress, while deep learning is not. “When your intuition says block,” Kornell told me, “you should probably interleave.”
Transition is different. The starting point for dealing with transition is not the outcome but the ending that you’ll have to make to leave the old situation behind. Situational change hinges on the new thing, but psychological transition depends on letting go of the old reality and the old identity you had before the change took place.
Plenty of profiles of individual businesses were written in support of congruence. But in the first study that systematically examined a broad swath of organizations across an industry, researchers who studied cultural congruence at 334 institutions of higher education found that it had no influence on any measure of organizational success whatsoever. Administrators, department heads, and trustees in strongly congruent institutions did have an easier time classifying the culture when asked, but there was no impact at all on performance, from the academic and career development of students to the satisfaction of faculty and the financial health of the college. The researcher who led that work went on to study thousands of businesses. She found that the most effective leaders and organizations had range; they were, in effect, paradoxical. They could be demanding and nurturing, orderly and entrepreneurial, even hierarchical and individualistic all at once. A level of ambiguity, it seemed, was not harmful. In decision making, it can broaden an organization’s toolbox in a way that is uniquely valuable.
Art historian Sarah Lewis studies creative achievement, and described Geim’s mindset as representative of the “deliberate amateur.” The word “amateur,” she pointed out, did not originate as an insult, but comes from the Latin word for a person who adores a particular endeavor. “A paradox of innovation and mastery is that breakthroughs often occur when you start down a road, but wander off for a ways and pretend as if you have just begun,” Lewis wrote.
Dropping familiar tools is particularly difficult for experienced professionals who rely on what Weick called overlearned behavior. That is, they have done the same thing in response to the same challenges over and over until the behavior has become so automatic that they no longer even recognize it as a situation-specific tool. Research on aviation accidents, for example, found that “a common pattern was the crew’s decision to continue with their original plan” even when conditions changed dramatically.
In 2017, Geveden took his lessons to a new role as CEO of BWX Technologies, a company whose wide purview includes nuclear propulsion technology that could power a manned Mars mission. Some of BWX Technologies’ decision makers are retired military leaders whose dearly held tool is firm hierarchy. So when Geveden became CEO, he wrote a short memo on his expectations for teamwork. “I told them I expect disagreement with my decisions at the time we’re trying to make decisions, and that’s a sign of organizational health,” he told me. “After the decisions are made, we want compliance and support, but we have permission to fight a little bit about those things in a professional way.” He emphasized that there is a difference between the chain of command and the chain of communication, and that the difference represents a healthy cross-pressure. “I warned them, I’m going to communicate with all levels of the organization down to the shop floor, and you can’t feel suspicious or paranoid about that,” he said. “I told them I will not intercept your decisions that belong in your chain of command, but I will give and receive information anywhere in the organization, at any time. I just can’t get enough understanding of the organization from listening to the voices at the top.”
In a study using college math problems, students who learned in blocks—all examples of a particular type of problem at once—performed a lot worse come test time than students who studied the exact same problems but all mixed up. The blocked-practice students learned procedures for each type of problem through repetition. The mixed-practice students learned how to differentiate types of problems.
When Weick spoke with hotshot Paul Gleason, one of the best wildland firefighters in the world, Gleason told him that he preferred to view his crew leadership not as decision making, but as sensemaking. “If I make a decision, it is a possession, I take pride in it, I tend to defend it and not listen to those who question it,” Gleason explained. “If I make sense, then this is more dynamic and I listen and I can change it.” He employed what Weick called “hunches held lightly.” Gleason gave decisive directions to his crew, but with transparent rationale and the addendum that the plan was ripe for revision as the team collectively made sense of a fire.
Psychologist Barry Schwartz demonstrated a similar, learned inflexibility among experienced practitioners when he gave college students a logic puzzle that involved hitting switches to turn light bulbs on and off in sequence, and that they could play over and over. It could be solved in seventy different ways, with a tiny money reward for each success. The students were not given any rules, and so had to proceed by trial and error.* If a student found a solution, they repeated it over and over to get more money, even if they had no idea why it worked. Later on, new students were added, and all were now asked to discover the general rule of all solutions. Incredibly, every student who was brand-new to the puzzle discovered the rule for all seventy solutions, while only one of the students who had been getting rewarded for a single solution did. The subtitle of Schwartz’s paper: “How Not to Teach People to Discover Rules”—that is, by providing rewards for repetitive short-term success with a narrow range of solutions.
Our co-founder has quit. Our investors pull funding. Our number one customer returns the product because it simply doesn’t work. Our spouse gives up on us. Our board fires us. Such are the moments to stare deeply into our own experience. Who are we? What are we made of? What conditions are our lives in and, radically as important, how have we been complicit in creating the conditions we so steadfastly declare we do not want?
For general riding and travel, William used a light ‘palfrey’, while a stout and stocky ‘sumpter’ carried baggage, weapons and armour. However, Marshal’s most valuable mount was his destrier or warhorse – the animal ridden in combat. These cost anywhere from £40 to £100, sometimes even more. Working from the rates current in the 1160s, for the average price of one destrier William could have purchased either 40 palfreys, 200 packhorses, 500 oxen or a staggering 4,500 sheep.
Struggling to retrieve information primes the brain for subsequent learning, even when the retrieval itself is unsuccessful. The struggle is real, and really useful. “Like life,” Kornell and team wrote, “retrieval is all about the journey.”
a lovely riff from, he says, a Mississippi state senator, asked in 1958 how he felt about whisky: If, when you say whiskey, you mean the devil’s brew, the poison scourge, the bloody monster that defiles innocence, yea, literally takes the bread from the mouths of little children; if you mean the evil drink that topples the Christian man and woman from the pinnacles of righteous, gracious living into the bottomless pit of degredation and despair, shame and helplessness and hopelessness, then certainly I am against it with all my power. But if, when you say whiskey, you mean the oil of conversation, the philosophic wine, the stuff that is consumed when good fellows get together, that puts a song in their hearts and laughter on their lips and the warm glow of contentment in their eyes; if you mean Christmas cheer; if you mean the stimulating drink that puts the spring in the old gentleman’s step on a frosty morning; if you mean the drink that enables a man to magnify his joy, and his happiness and to forget, if only for a little while, life’s great tragedies and heartbreaks and sorrows, if you mean that drink, the sale of which pours into our treasuries untold millions of dollars, which are used to provide tender care for our little children, our blind, our deaf, our dumb, our pitiful aged and infirm, to build highways, hospitals, and schools, then certainly I am in favor of it. This is my stand. I will not retreat from it; I will not compromise.
The best theory going today about what really causes hangovers is that they are an inflammatory response, like what happens when we get an infection. Hangovers are accompanied by elevated levels of molecules called cytokines, molecules used as communications signals by the immune system. One research team in Korea found elevated levels of interleukin-10, interleukin-12, and interferon gamma in their hung-over subjects. If you inject those into a healthy subject, that person will start to have all kinds of familiar-sounding symptoms, including nausea, gastrointestinal distress, headache, chills, and fatigue. Potentially even more interesting, higher-than-normal cytokine levels also mess up memory formation, which might account for ethanol-related lapses in recall as well.
the Fourth Law of Organizational Development: whenever there is a painful, troubled time in the organization, a developmental transition is probably going on. The terrible morale, the intragroup conflicts, or the sudden drop in productivity that you’re trying to deal with are just symptoms of that transition and the toll it is taking on people. If such troubles are very disruptive, you may try to avoid making the transition.
things start when the plan says they will, but the new beginning takes place much more slowly. If transition is mishandled or if it is overlooked completely, beginnings often fail to take place. In such cases, we say that “the change didn’t work,” or that it “fell short of our expectations.”
