Food For Thought

Here is a folder of my articles on a variety of thinking topics.

Stovetop Thinking

“Why write about thinking? Ideas are just things that bubble up from our acquired knowledge.”

A friend posed this question about a year ago, and it has stuck in my mind ever since. Why, indeed, study and ponder something we get for free?

My skeptical friend sees thinking as some sort of convection process. Conceived in a stew of Stovetop knowledge, ideas are forced to the surface where we can savor them.

Actually, it’s not a bad explanation of one phase of thinking. But as you examine this stovetop model, you can see the points where thinking can make all the difference.

You choose the pieces of knowledge that are the ingredients in your recipe. In the cooking process, a lot of ideas begin to burst out of the stew; you must choose among them. Then you must decide how to season those ideas and get them ready to be served to an uncertain future.

Of course, as the observer implied a year ago, none of this intervention is required. Those ideas will bubble to the surface and we can simply grab the most convenient one for our needs.

So the question is, can careful thought improve our cooking? I think so.

Mentoring, Wisdom, and the Unique Self

Mentoring is a phenomenon; nothing like it. It’s so popular and so broadly beneficial that every type of organization you can imagine seems to have some version of a mentoring program. And most are doing well even though the programs are often wildly dissimilar.

It’s like some attribute of mentoring has magical properties. If that’s the case, we need to identify the magic and try to ensure that it isn’t lost or stretched out of shape in emerging applications.

Mentor The magic of mentoring is in the relationship itself, and the personal connection that goes along with it. The relationship is often able to create two benefits that might otherwise be difficult to acquire. One of these is exposure to wisdom.

We often use the term “wisdom” as an absolute that implies all-knowing, supernatural qualities. More practically, wisdom can refer to judgment and understanding that many people accumulate with age and experience.

It can be as simple as learning that confrontation and brute force may not be the best ways to achieve a goal. It may be in learning to consider different perspectives. Wisdom may even be found in some old sayings such as “look before you leap.”

Not only can wisdom improve our attitude and social skills, it also has a bottom line success component. Among its many values, wisdom enables people to make better decisions; lack of wisdom is often a reason for failure.

Useful as practical wisdom may be, there’s no evidence that young people are standing in line to learn it. It’s neither obviously entertaining nor exciting. Usually, the only time people seek out practical wisdom is when things are going badly and nothing else is working.

When they decide they need wisdom, the next problem, especially for young people, is where to find it. In our society, friendships and even communications between a younger person and an older, more experienced person are rare; people usually socialize only within their age group. The result is that wisdom has less opportunity to pass between generations.

As we consider possible sources, we’re looking for someone who has acquired wisdom and is willing to share it without any agenda other than trying to be supportive. This, of course, leads us to the mentor. Wisdom communicates best at a personal level between people who trust and care about each other – as in a mentoring relationship.

Besides exposure to wisdom, mentoring offers another rare opportunity worth protecting. Mentoring encourages people to tap into their uniqueness.

Outside of our peer groups, most of our relationships in school or business exist to impart knowledge or direct our actions. Listen and learn, practice and remember. There is little opportunity to add input. When we get the opportunity, it is usually structured and limited.

Mentoring, on the other hand, starts with the premise that the younger person has much to offer. Suddenly another person wants to hear their viewpoints and ideas. It may be the first time in their lives that their unique thoughts have been respected.

That same focus on uniqueness is virtually impossible The path to explore in groups of people. Often the resources aren’t available to support competing ideas and interests. In other situations, uniqueness is prohibited because focusing the group on a single path is the fastest way to achieve a goal. Many groups restrict uniqueness simply because they know that uniqueness is a high maintenance and sometimes chaotic quality.

If people are going to explore their uniqueness, the process probably needs to happen outside of the group. It’s an important pursuit. Each of us has unique intelligence, perspectives, and interests.

If we are going to attain our highest potential, we’ll most likely find it in our unique self. What we discover may become our career or our passion or both.

Think about the goals of gaining wisdom and finding our unique self. Many people might say that they are the essence of a mature mind. Then consider this: most of us will only achieve these goals with guidance and encouragement from someone in a traditional mentoring role.

Thinking to Win - VCA Antech

I might define a “field of dreams” business plan as one that predicts a sea change on dry land. Typical response would be “sounds good, call me when you see the waves.”

Casual observers must have had such thoughts when VCA Antech was getting started in 1986. This company had a plan to revolutionize the pet care industry, but the start had to take a leap of faith.

“We started in an industry where there was no capital and no careers,” recalls VCA Antech co-founder and CEO Robert Antin. Pet care back then focused mostly on inoculations, injury treatment, and parasite control. The most sophisticated equipment in veterinary hospitals were ultrasound devices.

Add to this unpromising business setting another apparent negative: Antin had no experience in veterinary medicine. His experience was in the field of human health care, a vastly different business from pet care.

This is a point where your average person would stop daydreaming and go get a job. Instead, Antin created a model for delivering an entirely new level of pet care service. While many powerful innovations contributed to the success of VCA Antech, I want to highlight an underutilized thinking skill at the core of this company's success. That skill is transference.

New model When businesspeople are tasked with making money, most of us typically concentrate on the periphery of an existing business; take market share or find promising marketing or product niches. The advantage of this approach is that we're staying within an area of demonstrated expertise.

The disadvantage is that these optimized businesses can run out of room to grow. When you've taken all the chips on the table, you're going to have to find a new game to play. That is essentially what transference offers - a new game.

Using transference successfully requires a different way of thinking. To practice this skill, take a step back and look at your assets. The trick is to separate each asset from its current application. What could you be doing with those assets in a new context?

Antin was using transference when he saw that his expertise in human health care could be applied to pet health care. This gave him the business framework. But market transference was also key to success: VCA Antech's model hinged on whether pet owners would want human health care practices to be applied in pet health care.

Turns out the market was ready. Today, through its 456 veterinary hospitals, VCA Antech is the largest provider of veterinary medicine and diagnostic equipment in the US.

Building a business model based on transference is sure to get those “field of dreams” criticisms I mentioned earlier. But when you succeed, they call you a visionary.

Leapfrog Thinking

Critical thinking seems so formal, so basic. Many of us prefer to leap, without the basics, into creative mode or its business equivalent, innovation. Innovation is obviously where the action is.

I’ll argue against the value of this leap; creativity and innovation can’t be reliable products of thought without underlying structure, such as that encouraged by critical thinking.

Unfortunately, we don’t produce consistent innovation by trying to be innovative. Yes, there will be moments of inspiration, but where do you go from there? How are you going to find innovation-on-demand?

Thinking is a skill. Its application is like most of our efforts: 90 percent perspiration and 10 percent inspiration. Do we understand how to invest the 90 percent perspiration?

The investment pays off best through structured critical thinking and, later, advanced and more fluid structures in creative thinking.

Nobody Caused the Financial Crisis, Really

This article was written in late 2008, before the election. Now, nearly a year later, do you think we’ve gotten a handle on cause and effect?

Nothing ever seems to happen without causing some good. For instance, there seems to be a little uptick in analyzing our thinking, as a result of wading through this financial crisis.

Radicals are starting to say that simple cause and effect reasoning could have prevented the current financial crisis. You may remember cause and effect from school, where as a thinking skill it is second in popularity only to the skill of avoiding thinking completely. But could an understanding of cause and effect have made a difference in the financial crisis?

Undeniably, cause and effect has its uses. The neat thing about cause and effect is that it can make you look really smart. You look up in the sky and see clouds. Then you casually mention to your friends that it is going to rain. Clouds, then rain; cause, then effect. When it starts to rain, your friends will be impressed.

Unfortunately, cause and effect can get tricky. After you start using cause and effect, you begin to believe that everything has a cause and that you can spot that cause. Not so fast; you’re getting a little ahead of yourself. Sometimes things just happen out of the blue, without warning or reason.

That’s the situation with the financial crisis. No matter what anybody says, the current crisis is just the result of bad luck. There was no cause. It just happened, like all those forest fires, droughts, 100-year floods, and mega-storms that people predicted would be caused by global warming. Get real; predicting something doesn’t actually mean that you know the cause.

With something this large, which has created hardships for more than half of the US population, people will probably ask questions: Couldn’t something have been done to prevent it? Cause and effect reasoning might have put us on the right track, if only those government economists could have found cause for alarm.

To understand whether cause and effect reasoning might fit with the current financial crisis, let’s take a look at the major pieces of the problem.

Cheap, cheap money - The Federal Reserve lowered interest rates, a lot. Who could know that cheap money would create a huge market of unsophisticated buyers and a huge industry of unscrupulous lenders?

Bait-and-switch loans, aka ARMs - Adjustable Rate Mortgage loans (ARMs) expanded the market and lender profits. And there was also something for consumers: low rates upfront and impossible rates to follow.

Inflated property appraisals - Lenders often worked with appraisers to inflate values and stimulate the market, creating what we now call “the housing bubble.” Sure the bubble attracted capital, but just because it was called a bubble, who knew it might burst?

Liar loans - Mortgage brokers from 2000 to 2007 routinely manipulated loan applications to let people get loans. Converting humbug into moolah is alchemy, not fraud.

Risk-free profits - Mortgage brokers quickly dumped new loans to avoid their default risk. Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac happily took on the debt with the backing of their rich uncle. Fannie and Freddie sound like the names of your slow-witted cousins; maybe if we called them Frances and Frederick they’d get a little more respect.

More profits - Weak loans were bundled, given blue-ribbon ratings, and sold to investors. Loan laundering is more important than money laundering because money has intrinsic value, while loans rely on a nice laundered appearance.

Reckless home buyers - People bought briefly affordable homes. Government economists didn’t see any problem at the time, but then they weren’t dealing with their own money. These economists now believe that home buyers should have known better.

This may seem confusing at first because there were so many moving parts. Clearly, the government economists were perplexed. Were cause and effect signposts warning us of a crisis? Was danger lurking in harmless business activities? The economists wondered.

Once the crisis struck, of course, the wondering didn’t stop, but it changed focus. Now, the economists wondered if the economy was sound; everyone agreed it was. The politicians wondered how to bailout businesses, including Fannie and Freddie, whose lending practices were so outrageously unsound that they were on the verge of collapse.

As the focus shifts to working through the crisis, cause and effect is something of a hot potato in official circles. Politicians are looking for airtime to show us that they’re fully engaged after the fact. This may result in some cause-effect rhetoric, accusing the financial industry of causing the crisis. No doubt it will blow over after the November election.

In the short run, politicians do have a small dilemma. They want to convince us that they were smart enough to see the causes of impending problems, while avoiding the question of why they didn’t work to prevent the bad effects. Here is an example of why people in the know say that politics is a tough business.

You can see now that cause and effect reasoning fails to explain the financial crisis. There was no cause; the crisis was just bad luck. You can’t expect this thinking skill to fit in every situation.

In general, however, cause and effect reasoning could be a great tool for holding people accountable. Instead of telling each other to get over it and “move on,” we might start telling government to “hold on,” as in “we want to check this out.” This could cause unpleasantness in which responsible parties are held responsible, but it might have a cleansing effect.

Wings for an Individual

As parents, some of the gifts we offer our children are straightforward; no interpretation needed. Love, support, and respect are this kind of gift. Many other gifts are almost the opposite. The giving takes a long time and a lot of thought.

One of my favorite examples of this second kind of gift is “personal agency.” I know when you’re dealing with everyday issues, increasing your child’s personal agency may not be high on your to-do list. Nonetheless, this is a very important aspect of parenting if you want your children to find their wings.

Wings Personal agency is an individual’s power to act independently. People with a strong sense of personal agency are self-directed, in control of their own lives, and willing to make decisions. They possess that extra spark that makes them want to learn new things. In any group, they’re the people who stretch, who reach out for success.

Children develop this sense of personal agency gradually as they absorb positive new experiences. Whatever they accomplish adds to inner confidence in their ability to take on new challenges. Mostly, our children start developing confidence and ability through our ongoing efforts as parents. At least, we need to put the process in motion.

When you’re planning where to begin, think “activity.” If they’re going to accumulate confidence and ability, children need to be involved in an activity with a goal. Of course as every parent knows, the trick is to find activities that grow from a child’s interests. But there is a lot of room to search within the type of activities that support personal agency:

Pursuing hobbies
Developing skills
Gaining varied knowledge

Early on, parents are the stage managers: they bring the child and the activity together, establish some procedures, set a goal, and applaud success. If setting a goal sounds too competitive, remember that most children love games and what is a game without a goal?

Parents also have a goal, which is to hand off the role of manager to the child as soon as he or she is ready. Besides gaining confidence and ability, children need to begin managing themselves – independent of their parents.

Creative Thoughts from Pre-Thinking

Our culture is only just beginning to view thinking as a skill worth learning. I certainly don’t want to steal any energy away from this central issue of our time. But it seems to me that we should also encourage attention to activities that precede conscious thinking, when the cognitive compounds begin to bubble and assemble. I’ll call it pre-thinking.

I’d guess that people who question the importance of conscious thinking probably give no attention at all to pre-thinking. If they did, they’d find that any of the pre-thinking activities go a long way toward making conscious thinking easier and more productive. Pre-thinking gives birth to thoughts the same way the primordial ooze on our new planet eventually yielded life.

Travel is an example of pre-thinking. Travel forces us to see other realities. Actually, anything that makes us curious is a pre-thinking activity. Anything that makes us want to make sense out of confusion is a pre-thinking activity.

Here’s a starter list of pre-thinking activities:

Sabbaticals - Go somewhere and live a different life for a month. (Too bad these are becoming so rare.)
Volunteering - This can be a great way to experience new perspectives.
Continuing education - Pick a course on something new that intrigues you.

To me these meet the definition of pre-thinking activities. You can participate in them and still keep your brain in mothballs; however, staying mentally aloof in these activities requires considerable effort. And if you don’t stay aloof, the benefits to your creative thoughts and innovation can be amazing.

Before you get the idea that pre-thinking begins with Reading a major time commitment or a trip out of town, we ought to look at the most obvious example of pre-thinking: reading.

Contrary to popular opinion, reading isn’t synonymous with thinking. But, as with the other examples of pre-thinking, reading breaks us out of habitual patterns, jump-starting our mental machinery. And once the machinery is turning, reading pushes, badgers, and seduces us into thinking. Curiosity takes hold: What do we think about the writer’s ideas? How do the ideas relate to us? What is the connection to our other ideas?

In our busy lives, we have less and less time for the activities of pre-thinking. In particular, I’ve read several articles lately about the death of readership in America. Nobody has time for books. Sort of begs the question: What are we thinking?

Public Education:
Just Another Burden?

One of the major themes in this website is that thinking is a learnable skill. Some of this learning comes from life experience, but experience has limitations. You’re learning anecdotally, with trial and error, some aspects of thinking. The question is, what are you missing?

Learning to think Usually, what’s missing are breadth, structure, and a good general plan for effective thinking. The best way to get these powerful skills is in school, in a program aimed at teaching thinking.

Today, such thinking programs seem to be seriously threatened as we cope with the current tough economic times. Regardless of how long the economic downturn lasts, the effect on so-called non-basic programs, such as teaching thinking, threatens to be very long lasting.

A view is emerging that public education is a burden that a sensible culture can minimize. In reality, of course, an educated population is a national resource. The better that resource, the more we’ll see high quality jobs and a high standard of living for Americans.