|
Reconsidering the Variables
When he was on the board of Swiss Re, Dr. Peter Frey, always had the
feeling that instinct and intuition were more important than rationality.
“My colleagues on the board were always astonished when told them to stop
rationalizing their gut feelings.” Was the instinct correct?
Prof. Klaus Scherer of the
University of Geneva says that people have been conditioned to believe that
the subconscious appraisal that underlies emotions can be wrong. In fact,
it’s the systematic bias against emotion that tends to create the wrong
emotions.
“We think that rationality is good and emotionality is bad,” he says. “The
key thing is to separate normal emotion from pathologies. Emotions are there
for evolutionary reasons. Emotion is not just impulse, but gut-feeling
integration of experience and values.” In other words, emotions make for
rapid decision-making because they encapsulate integrative knowledge, detect
relevance and get at real values with less rationalization.
Prof. Risto Tainio of the Helsinki School of Economics illustrated the usefulness of
emotions in three episodes in the history of Nokia.
· In
1992, when the diversified company found itself with a debt crisis, CEO
Jorma Ollila was able to leverage feelings of excitement, hope, fear and
distress to rally employees and investors to his vision of reinventing Nokia
as a global telecommunications company.
· Having
sold investors in the vision, Nokia next had to make good on the promise.
Divesting business units that no longer fit the core vision was easy
compared to acquiring the new skills and competencies needed. This time,
Tanio says, the dominant emotions that helped accomplish Ollila’s objectives
were relief, satisfaction, curiosity and joy.
· But
in 1995, beset by production and logistics problems and surrounded by dogged
competitors who had written them off, Nokia needed to be made of firmer
stuff. This time, to create a sense of urgency and focus on hard choices,
Nokia’s culture tapped into the anger, pride, courage and determination of
its workers.
“Affective learning is elusive. It’s more likely to be found in some
companies than others and in some episodes in others,” he explains. But he
adds, “Clearly emotion impacts learning and learning impacts emotion.”
Similarly, Prof. Peter
Knoepfel, Director of L'Institut de Hautes Études en Administration
Publique (IDHEAP) in Lausanne, Switzerland, studied how learning occurs in
and among public policy-making organizations. He concludes that ideas and
values also play a more important role than assumed by rational choice
theory. He finds five conscious, sequential steps in policy-oriented
learning: external stimulus must provoke concern in one or
more actors. Concerns may be different for different actors, but the
learning process begins when their concerns cause them to alter their
network or form a new one and begin negotiating to achieve consensus
at least on how they define the problem. Ultimately, there is a transition
from behavior to action, resulting in modified outputs. |
