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.
First, you need to make sure that your silence is not held against you as evidence of your guilt if the case later goes to trial. And after Salinas, as we have seen, that means that you cannot simply remain mute in the face of police questioning, but rather must say something to invoke your legal right to refuse to answer their questions. Second, you also need to make sure that you get the police to stop questioning you and leave you alone. You need to bring the interrogation to an end, once and for all, and as quickly as possible. But that will not happen unless you say something. Just
In ordinary conversations, all of us are constantly making assumptions and deductions based upon things that our interlocutors did not actually say, but which we gather that they meant to imply. It saves us all a great deal of time, and it is all just harmless fun in the context of a chat between two friends. But this natural human tendency, which normally works in ways we do not even perceive, can get you into a great deal of difficulty if you ever agree to talk to the police. Even if you were not present at the scene of a crime and know nothing about it, it is impossible for you to answer questions (or just to make truthful denials) about that event for several hours without eventually slipping up and unintentionally revealing that you have made an assumption about something that you were not actually told. And heaven help you if even one of those assumptions turns out to be true, because then you have just incriminated yourself.
Instead mention your Sixth Amendment right to a lawyer, and tell the police that you want a lawyer. Is that honest? Not entirely, because it sounds like you are implying that you might be willing to talk to them after a lawyer shows up, and of course that is not true, and your lawyer will not agree to that. But a little dishonesty is a small price to pay to defend your freedom and your constitutional rights, especially when dealing with police officers who will lie to you until the sun goes down.
My client asked for my advice. I told her to send the agent a letter, explaining that she would be happy to consider answering any questions he might have, but only if he would extend her the minimal courtesy of putting those questions in writing, so that she could also put her answers in writing. What on earth would be so unreasonable about a request like that? Nothing at all. It would enable this woman to think carefully about her answers, possibly obtain the assistance of a lawyer, and check her records to make sure that her answers were accurate. It would also eliminate the very terrible danger, discussed at great length in this book, that the agent might later unintentionally misquote her in ways that could make her statements sound more damaging than they really were. The request was perfectly reasonable—and, I might add, it was exactly what any federal agency will tell you to do if you want to get important information out of them.
When you ask for a lawyer, do not worry about sounding polite, because that will make you sound unduly tentative or equivocal. Never ask the police officers what their opinion might be. In fact, do not ask any questions when you insist on the presence of a lawyer. Do not even use the words I think or might or maybe. You need to say, with no adverbs, in only four words, “I want a lawyer.” And then you need to say it again, and again, until the police finally give up and realize they are dealing with someone who knows how our legal system really works.
By invoking your Sixth Amendment right, if you are charged with a crime and the prosecutor wants to use your invocation of that right against you, you will probably be able to keep that information away from the jury under the law, because the federal courts (at least so far) generally agree that you cannot tell the jury that the defendant has asserted the Sixth Amendment right to a lawyer, or to use that as evidence against the defendant.2 And even if you cannot keep it out of the evidence at trial and the jury is allowed to learn what you said to the agent, it will sound far less suspicious if you merely told the officer that you wanted a lawyer present before you agreed to be interviewed. That makes it sound, after all, like you were willing to answer their questions.
It isn’t the changes that will do you in; it’s the transitions. They aren’t the same thing. Change is situational: the move to a new site, a new CEO replaces the founder, the reorganization of the roles on the team, and new technology. Transition, on the other hand, is psychological; it is a three-phase process that people go through as they internalize and come to terms with the details of the new situation that the change brings about.
Did the Second Amendment protect militias, or an individual right to a gun? The answer: both, and neither. It protected the individual right to a gun . . . to fulfill the duty to serve in a militia. To the Framers, even our question would make little sense. To us, today, their answer makes little sense.
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.”
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.
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.”
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.
