Thinking out loud
The way we think guides us in many ways but seldom do we stop to think what drives our thinking to the direction it goes and how it works - the process of it. Or the systems behind it.
I have been into Daniel Kahneman's work on thinking and it's inspiring stuff. As the title of his great work suggest we have two kinds of thinking going on - Fast and slow. He calls them system 1 and system 2. In layman terms we could call system 1 intuition and system 2 kind of more careful, deliberate thinking.
Most of the time our intuition is on a drivers seat and it helps us get by on everyday stuff pretty okay. Kind of things this works well is, if by chance should we be confronted by an angry person, we know that this person is angry. We don't know how we know, we just know. This is our intuition in action.
When it works. The unfortunate case is that it doesn't always work and we can get ahead of ourselves. This results into thinking out loud. This is not always such a awful thing. Yesterday I was completely captivated in a conversation and I assure you I might have said thing or two without really thinking how I come out of this sort of exchange. Guess no harm done but a reminder. Even the awareness of the intuition and how it works does not protect from thinking out loud.
It's not a real matter in a friendly conversation but in some other instances it can cause problems or at least raise a few eyebrows. The problem with the fast, intuitive thinking compared to the slow deliberate one is that it takes no effort to do it. On the other hand this slow thinking forces us to stop and focus on the problem, which in turn creates an effort. We have to do something. And surprisingly many people are lazy about this. This leads us to falsely interpret situations and occasionally awkward moments. Or worse.
How this manifests itself in a workplace environment, for example, is sometimes simple. In general we encourage people to seek help if they don't know how to do something but it's not normally a free pass not to think. Say a worker is faced with a situation and his or hers intuition kicks in and automatically the reaction is to ask from a higher up. Instead of actually stopping to think the issue and figure out if it's actually solvable with the tools at hand.
This kind of roughly divides two kind of people in any given workplace - the people who go out of their way and make things happen and the people who sit and wait for the shit to fall in their hands. If given a choice of from which group to hire we can make an assumption that most executives choose the active kind. They appear to be more intelligent and committed to the tasks at hand. This is true in some sense. But if not all but some of this at least can be deviated from our thinking patterns and our inherent talent of resisting laziness of thought, we might miss some gems here and there.
Suppose the best advice would be to stop a bit more often to think instead of blurting something out that really has no place to come out of there. The path of least resistance is easiest but more often than not those easy paths lead no where worth going.
I personally am absolutely fascinated about this subject. It's not what you would call my expertise but it's something everybody should spend some time with. The thinking we do really takes us to places or keeps us from reaching them. Time spent thinking about thinking is seldom badly spent.
I have been into Daniel Kahneman's work on thinking and it's inspiring stuff. As the title of his great work suggest we have two kinds of thinking going on - Fast and slow. He calls them system 1 and system 2. In layman terms we could call system 1 intuition and system 2 kind of more careful, deliberate thinking.
Most of the time our intuition is on a drivers seat and it helps us get by on everyday stuff pretty okay. Kind of things this works well is, if by chance should we be confronted by an angry person, we know that this person is angry. We don't know how we know, we just know. This is our intuition in action.
When it works. The unfortunate case is that it doesn't always work and we can get ahead of ourselves. This results into thinking out loud. This is not always such a awful thing. Yesterday I was completely captivated in a conversation and I assure you I might have said thing or two without really thinking how I come out of this sort of exchange. Guess no harm done but a reminder. Even the awareness of the intuition and how it works does not protect from thinking out loud.
It's not a real matter in a friendly conversation but in some other instances it can cause problems or at least raise a few eyebrows. The problem with the fast, intuitive thinking compared to the slow deliberate one is that it takes no effort to do it. On the other hand this slow thinking forces us to stop and focus on the problem, which in turn creates an effort. We have to do something. And surprisingly many people are lazy about this. This leads us to falsely interpret situations and occasionally awkward moments. Or worse.
How this manifests itself in a workplace environment, for example, is sometimes simple. In general we encourage people to seek help if they don't know how to do something but it's not normally a free pass not to think. Say a worker is faced with a situation and his or hers intuition kicks in and automatically the reaction is to ask from a higher up. Instead of actually stopping to think the issue and figure out if it's actually solvable with the tools at hand.
This kind of roughly divides two kind of people in any given workplace - the people who go out of their way and make things happen and the people who sit and wait for the shit to fall in their hands. If given a choice of from which group to hire we can make an assumption that most executives choose the active kind. They appear to be more intelligent and committed to the tasks at hand. This is true in some sense. But if not all but some of this at least can be deviated from our thinking patterns and our inherent talent of resisting laziness of thought, we might miss some gems here and there.
Suppose the best advice would be to stop a bit more often to think instead of blurting something out that really has no place to come out of there. The path of least resistance is easiest but more often than not those easy paths lead no where worth going.
I personally am absolutely fascinated about this subject. It's not what you would call my expertise but it's something everybody should spend some time with. The thinking we do really takes us to places or keeps us from reaching them. Time spent thinking about thinking is seldom badly spent.
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