Facing choices in life and work

Ethics are needed where we face choices and there’s no one but ourselves to see what we do. If there are rules to follow, the choice is between compliance and rebellion. That isn’t an ethical matter. It depends on fear of punishment versus desire for whatever lies outside the rules.

If you face shame or scandal if you’re caught, that isn’t an ethical decision either. Prudence or fear decide the outcome. But if you face nothing beyond your own thoughts about living as you wish to live, you’re confronting a purely ethical decision.

The decision to gossip and pass on a rumor that will embarrass someone; the choice to go easy on a task and cut yourself some slack; the time spent chatting around the water cooler; using office phone lines, computers or stationery for your private needs; all are ethical decisions. No one will know what you’ve done (or they’re doing it themselves and in no position to point the finger).

These small, everyday instances of ethical decisions–are no different from the decision to win a deal by misleading the buyer, cheating a little on an expense claim (everyone does it, right?), or dropping a few words into a meeting that you know will mean someone you dislike will find him or herself under suspicion.
Continued

How false beliefs become fixed in people’s minds

Source Amnesia diagram
Source: Wikipedia

As we remember things, we also forget where we heard them or who told us about them. As a result, we easily forget whether a supposed fact is true or was originally merely a rumor.

Even when we are told something with a good many caveats attached, when it comes back into the mind, the disclaimers have probably been detached somehow, so we recall it as factual.

That’s the claim of this article in The International Herald Tribune (“Your brain lies to you”). The authors, Sam Wang and Sandra Aamodt, explain how information is moved around and processed in the brain before being stored in memory. It is this processing and re-processing that strips the supposed fact from the context in which it was originally received as data. Continued

Coaching and counseling may be getting out of hand in Australia

The ‘Modern Times’ blog for The Age, an Australian newspaper, has an article weighing in against the rise in counselors and the situations where their help is invoked. As the author says: “Is there a counsellor in the house? Bleeding well hope so because the counsellor is the new apple. You need at least one a day.”

Is the increase in the use of counseling a sensible response to the stresses of modern times? Or is it like the euphemisms everyone uses to get around saying things that sound ‘nasty’: a way of sending unhappy, feckless or angry people far, far away, where they can’t upset us; while managing at the same time to convince ourselves that we’re helping them — just so long as we don’t have to deal with them ourselves, naturally. Continued

Do you need to be more skeptical to survive in the world of business?

Barry Maher, author of Filling the Glass: The Skeptic’s Guide to Positive Thinking in Business, offers a quick quiz to help you decide if you need to be a little less trusting of those around you in the world of business.

My favorites include these:

10. You believe the numbers in the business plan. I can’t believe anyone is that dumb, but maybe I’ve written to many myself in the past.

7. When they tell you this is a “people company,” you think one of those people is you. Only one group of ‘people’ truly count and they’ve all got corner offices and vast numbers of stock options.

5. When the CEO says that customers come first, you think that means BEFORE short-term profits and driving up his stock options. I’m almost sure nobody can be that dumb, but . . .

2. You accept a lateral move and relocate to East Cowflop, North Dakota, because you think that puts you in line for the next promotion rather than at the top of the list for the next hellhole where nobody else is willing to go. Yes, well, if that’s how you think, East Cowflop is probably where you need to be.

Check out the entire list here.

Technorati Tags: gullibility, trust, humor

Try using this proactive tool for making better decisions

One of the worst aspects of the modern world is the way that speed rules people’s lives. Sometimes it seems that doing something quickly is seen as more important than doing it right. And nowhere is this tendency more common — and more dangerous — that when it comes to making up your mind about someone or something.

We’re also encouraged to accept superficial news measured in sound bites, accept the word of spin doctors as essentially true, jump to emotional conclusions rather that wait until feelings subside and reason re-asserts itself, and assume that there is a single, one-size-fits-all, ‘true’ answer to everything.

That’s why it’s important to train yourself to open your mind and see all those aspects of a situation that you miss by rushing — or which other, highly interested parties want you to overlook, so your decision works in their interests. Continued

Not only do set targets rarely prove useful, they can sometimes make things worse

Corporations and governments love setting targets. It gives them the illusion of being in control and allows them to tell the world how tough and businesslike they are acting — never mind that such targets can cause more problems than they cure.

That’s why this piece from The Guardian’s ‘Comment in free’ section in Great Britain caught my eye (“Crunch time for numbers”). The subhead says it all: “Government targets don’t work - and the decision of four police forces to dispense with them is a brave and significant step.”

The arguments against targets are now pretty familiar — the weaker pupils who lose out to those who might be coaxed over the line, the trains that set off happily without their passengers to avoid being late, the hospital bugs (the waiting lists are down, but one in 10 hospital patients now face real harm). . .

      Small changes in definition also have dramatic effects. Bag-snatching used to be defined as lost property until the 1930s, minor vandalism became defined as criminal only in 1977 - doubling the vandalism rate overnight, and fueling some of the angst about rising crime that followed.

Continued

What does it mean to be human in an age of electronic mob fashions?

I was intrigued by an article on Huffington Post, written by Andrea Learned (“Question External Expectations”), which questions why so many people seem blindly to do what they feel they should should over doing what they really want.

A good deal of the article is about the way the Internet is reshaping social contacts. To me, this is less important than the writer suggests. It’s easy to blame technology for things we maybe don’t want to face up to in ourselves: our sheep-like willingness to stick with the herd, rather than go it alone and state our views openly; our tendency towards finding it easier to let others do our thinking for us, rather than make the effort ourselves. Continued

How to use your time wisely by reflecting on experiences so you are free to make good decisions.

Webster’s Dictionary defines reflection as a fixing of the thoughts on something; careful consideration.

Reflection is not highly thought of today. Those of you who like to spend time reflecting may be accused of “doing nothing” and “wasting time in idle speculation.” If you take time to come to conclusions you are labeled a procrastinator. If you spend time with imaginative thoughts, you are a “dreamer” or accused of being idealistic and impractical. Modern society values immediate action. You are not given the time for reflecting on what that action should be. You’re expected to be able to select the correct action instantly, even though you have no basis on which to decide how to proceed.

This is ridiculous, and leads to all sorts of mistakes, when people are unable to take time to see the truth of what is required. The world is viewed through the ideas and values learned from the past. And that view will be faulty if those ideas and values are not sufficient for your to see clearly, or if they are obscured by falsehoods.

Will success only come about if you have experience you can call on? Are copying others or using standard approaches sufficient? Continued

Too many people rely on everything from blind intuition to excessive data collection when reasoning is a hand to help solve the toughest problem.

Do you seek help from others to work through your problems? If you do, it’s probably not because they have any specific knowledge about the subject. That’s not necessary. You usually have all the knowledge required. What you don’t know is how to organize your thoughts and come to a logical and reasoned conclusion.

Don’t rely on experience

If you have lots of experience, that may lead you to assume you can make quick decisions without bothering to collect background data. Sometimes it may work, but using your experience in this way can be a drawback. There will be a tendency to choose the answer which fits what you know. Continued