Culture & Policy: System1 & System2

It turns out there are two ‘you’s: the rational, logical, furrowed-brow you. The you that you like to think of as you. And the other you: the part you have in common with animals - the part which has evolved for millions of years - the part which is instinctive, unconscious and infinitely more complex and powerful.

In his book, 'Thinking Fast and Slow' [PDF summary here] Nobel laureate Daniel Kahnemann describes your two 'yous', dubbing them (rather unimaginatively) 'system 1' & 'system 2'. System 1 is the unconscious, instinctive mind. The part that catches a ball, processes sound into words, and makes snap judgments about the person you just met. System 2 is feeble by comparison. Only able to handle a few things at once, slow, easily exhausted and with very little actual control. By and large its job is to come up with reasonable-sounding explanations for the decisions made by system 1.

I've talked elsewhere about learning as a system1 function (the Affective Context Model). But I wanted here to draw a parallel between the functioning of our minds and the functioning of our organisations:

Large organisations work very much like Kahnemann's model: there is the illusion of control and the attempt to rationalise. Policies and process are highly visible and circulate loudly. But the real machinery of an organisation is hidden. Just like system 1, the 'dark mechanics' of organisations is infinitely more powerful, instinctive, and almost completely obscured - surfacing in our behaviours but otherwise entirely unexplored. It has a name. We call it 'culture'. We know almost nothing about it.

There is tacit understanding of the power of culture expressed by organisational mavens: 'culture eats strategy for breakfast' they say. But that's as far as it goes. Look deeper and you will only find a jumble of ill-defined concepts: 'storytelling', 'leadership', 'artifacts', ‘symbols’.

And so it is with the mind- a pipsqueak conceit perched atop a vast, opaque leviathan, clinging to the illusion of control. Debating endlessly in the epiphenomenological space above reality, as our invisible lives play out like a song we are hearing for the first time but pretend to have written.

We do not know how our mind works, nor do we know how culture works. But at least we have started to wonder if it is really us who are in control. And technology offers a glimmer of hope: big data - big personal data - might for the first time make visible the cultural mechanics to which we are subject - such as why we chose the partners that we do, or the products that we buy, or make better decisions on a Tuesday morning than a Wednesday afternoon. What makes for a good leader. Which people should do which jobs. What things really make a difference to the success of a business. Who could have guessed that 'know thyself' would turn out to be a technology problem?