Image Source: Rae Allen, Creative Commons
Over the last twenty years of business consulting I’ve collected a nice little Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) data base of a couple of thousand business leaders. I’ve also been fortunate to compare my data base with a huge data base of business leaders collected by the Center for Creative Leadership and our percentages were nearly an identical match. Although there are a couple of outstanding features in the data, one feature in particular stands out above all others.
The 3rd of the four functions is called your “deciding” function. People fall into two categories: Thinking and Feeling. Thinking types tend to make decisions logically and feeling types tend to use values and knowing how people will react to make their decisions. In our data bases of business leaders, 84% rate themselves as T’s and 16% are identified as F’s. This means that the vast majority of business leaders believe they make decisions on a logical basis.
But, let’s examine the science. One new book about recent brain mapping and neuroscience, Management Rewired: Why Feedback Doesn’t Work and Other Surprising Lessons from the Latest Brain Science
“But perhaps the most surprising discovery has come from mapping the path information travels from our sense organs to our awareness of the world we live in. Not only are the perceptual areas of the brain involved, so are the areas responsible for our memories, our feelings, our beliefs, and our aspirations. Our minds aren’t objectively recording our experience of the world; they’re creating it, and that creation is influenced by everything else going on in the brain. Each of us lives in a mental world of our own making. The world we know is only what we think it to be, and we can’t assume other people will think the same way we do. Reasoning has nothing to do with the way we solve problems, make decisions, and plan for the future. At best, logic is just a way to justify conclusions we have already reached unconsciously.”
Wow! None of us actually has a grasp on reality. We’re each making up our own picture and story as we go along. We may be making logical decisions but they’re based on our personally developed and perceived logic. We know from our marketing guru’s that people make purchases based on emotions and then justify the purchase with logic (Once, while admiring a Chevy Corvette my wife said “I see no logical reason to buy a Corvette.” So, what does logic have to do with it ;-).
I’m afraid we make decisions the same way. We make them based on emotions (memories, feelings, beliefs, aspirations, etc) and then seem to justify the decision based on some sort of logic. This finding has a great deal of impact on teamwork, leadership and corporate cultures (TLC) that we’ll explore in the future.