Alpha Mind Blog

After quite some time blogging, I’m now pretty comfortable with it.

So I can see no further excuse not to get this blog onto its topic, which I have neglected for a while.

The premise of “The Alpha Mind” is that thought leadership needn’t always remain a nice-sounding, meaning-free buzzphrase. Quite the contrary, I believe it is worth taking very seriously, which means it is worth defining.

It makes sense to say that a thought leader leads thought. Fair enough. But, as we normally use the words, there’s already an inherent contradiction, or at least a tension.

Our normal thinking about thinking is that it is an individual endeavor. Our normal thinking about leadership is that leaders lead more than one person at a time—that is, leaders lead groups. Then the phrase “thought leader” seems to depict a person who leads a group in a process that is an individual not a group process.

Then the key to taking “thought leadership” seriously, and to understanding it, is to start thinking of thinking as a social activity. It has taken me only a few minutes of this effort to realize that, while we’re unused to conceiving it that way, thinking is a social activity. This is so in two ways:

First, even individual thought is informed by one’s social environment, and in fact a great deal of human thought is about how to negotiate the social environment.

Second, every act of communication between people is an act of corporate, communal thinking.

Clear as this seems to me as I write it, still the prejudice against seeing thought as anything a group can do is deeply held. It’s embedded in our language—notice we have a word “groupthink” which denotes flawed thinking. When we use this term, we use it in some assurance that groups cannot think.

Ah, but there’s precisely why I think the effort I’ve embarked on has begun to look valuable to me.

Because groups really can’t think.

And yet they must.

And so “thought leader” must morph from meaning someone who’s publicly opinionated and who wields opinions as a tool for self-advancement, to someone who is undertaking one of the most crucial human endeavors.

I named this blog a long time ago, so you might guess that I’ve done more thinking about this than I’ve posted. And I have. And tomorrow I begin sharing it.

I’m writing a book called Thoughtcraft. Tomorrow its chapters will begin appearing serially here on the blog.

I hope for feedback.

And I hope you enjoy the book.

In moving ideas towards realization, people are even more likely to fall prey to the sunk cost fallacy than they are in economics. Bob Sutton’s post on “Why Specialists are Grumpy and Generalists are Happy” suggests two things:

1. people who are deeply invested in a single idea are likely to be touchy when the idea is attacked, and
2. this may, by extension, explain why generalists are happier than specialists.

This certainly rings true to my experience. Leaving aside specialists and generalists (about which I commented on Sutton’s blog), I think it applies to innovation processes in organizations as well. A company that has a regular and monitored innovation process is likely to have a healthy attitude toward ideas. It knows how to let a thousand flowers bloom and how to let nine-hundred-ninety-one of them die. Pathological emotional attachment to a single idea is unlikely in a true idea factory.

But when a company unused to innovating finds itself in need of a new idea, say because growth is stalled or a market is disappearing, it may only know how to work with one idea at a time. It can then invest far too much in that one idea, and ride it all the way to disaster.

I saw this at work in one of the consultancies I worked for in the 90s. We decided we needed a “signature analytical model” as part of our thrust into new practice areas. In two tormented brainstorming sessions, I was the only person who had come up with a viable idea, and I’d had only one, which I’ll call The Widget-Gadget Matrix. It wasn’t an earthshaking idea, but it might have worked. But only one day after the second session, I was shocked to hear one of the consultants say “We’re locked into the Widget-Gadget Matrix.”

Of course I was pleased that my idea had been accepted. But I was also dismayed that the company saw any need to lock itself into the idea. Maybe in a year or two, after we had published our book on Industry Analysis Using the W-G Matrix, we might have been locked in, in the sense that to recant or demote the idea might make us look silly. But before the idea had even appeared in a single article? We weren’t locked in nor should we have been.

I’d only been at the firm a short time, and I was pretty sure that with a bit more experience I’d come up with better ideas than the WGM, and probably several ideas, not just one. This was why I was personally so un-locked-in to my own idea. Not just because I wanted to leave room for better idea, but simply because I was confident there were more where that one had come from. I didn’t feel I’d invested much in it. The rest of the firm, though, was exhausted by the brainstorming sessions and felt that it had shot its creative wad. All its eggs were in that one basket.

Make no mistake, I liked my idea. Ten years later it still looks to me like an idea that could become a successful brand for a consultancy. But even if I had felt strongly attached to it, I would have felt a caution against the attachment, because to be locked into it would have been just the recipe for shutting off the flow of new ideas.

So you don’t manage software engineering projects. Then should you read Jerry Weinberg’s Overstructured management of software engineering?

Absolutely. Positively.

If you write, read it. Weinberg is a model of lucid and engaging writing.

If you manage organizations of any kind, read it. Weinberg understands what you face. (Weinberg is writing about “overstructuring” errors which software managers are especially prone to because they were once programmers. But they are errors one sees in every kind of organization.)

If you simply like seeing a true alpha mind at work, read it and anything else by Weinberg.

I took a course in software development management at MIT Sloan, and this article was one of my favorite pieces of reading for that course. Although it’s probably been online for eons, I’m delighted to have found it, and happy to share it with you.