Occam's Razor And The Leadership Talk
The author advocates that you use a concept developed more than 700 years ago by to boost the effectiveness of your leadership.
By Brent Filson - 2006
A Medieval English philosopher and excommunicated Franciscan friar can help you markedly with your leadership today.
William of Ockham (1295-1349) is credited with the concept of Occam's
razor, a heuristic that is used in many disciplines but somewhat
neglected in leadership.
Ockham wrote, "Pluralitas non est ponenda sine neccesitate" or
"plurality should not be posited without necessity." In other words,
one should always choose the simplest explanation of a phenomenon, the
one that requires the fewest assumptions. He used the razor to
criticize the convoluted elaborations of the scholastic philosophy of
his time, criticism which led to his excommunication.
Today, Occam's razor is applied in science, helping winnow out the more
promising theories from masses of available ones; in biology in
evolutionary hypothesizing and Systems constructs; in medical
diagnostics, identifying the fewest possible causes that will account
for all the symptoms; in manufacturing, making products using the
fewest parts and least amount of energy; in engineering, getting
maximum output from minimum input. And in many other fields.
But Occam's razor has not been used extensively in leadership; and when
used, it has been applied mainly as a problem solving tool rather than
a tool to help promote the people's motivation.
Clearly, problem solving is part of a leader's portfolio. But if your
leadership job description is simply to solve problems, you might as
well call yourself a manager or a technician. As a leader, you need to
be more than a problem solver. You need to motivate people to take
action to achieve extraordinary results.
Motivation is the operative word. Leadership devoid of motivational
strategies and tactics is leadership that is running around in the dark.
Let's apply Occam's razor to motivation in leadership. Most leaders
fail to motivate people because they misunderstand the concept of
motivation. To understand what motivation is, you first must understand
what motivation ISN"T. Motivation isn't what you do to the people you
lead. It's what the people do to themselves. You can't motivate anybody
to do anything. As a leader, you set up an environment in which the
people make the choice to be motivated. You communicate, they motivate.
Occam's razor, then, is a tool to help the people make that free
choice. The tool is effective because it slices through clutter that
multiplies the opportunities for error.
Today, many kinds of clutter prevent the people you lead from making
choices you want. There's the clutter of the Leader's Fallacy, the
mistaken idea that just because you are a leader speaking that the
people will automatically want to hear from you and agree with you.
There's the clutter of your misunderstanding their needs. There's the
clutter of your focusing on your needs and the organization's needs at
the exclusion of a focus on their needs. There's the clutter of
confusing what is changing for you and the organization with what is
changing for them. There's the clutter of misreading or ignoring their
major problem; the clutter of not understanding what gets them angry;
the clutter of being oblivious to what they're truly aspiring to.
To wield Occam's razor against clutter, let's understand how the razor
interplays with three key factors of motivation: logic, emotion, and
time.
Since Aristotle, it's been well known that the choice people make to be
motivated is predicated on both the rational and the emotional. The
word motivation comes from the Latin root meaning "to move." When you
want to move people to take action, you engage their emotions. Yet
before they can become involved emotionally, your communication must
make sense to them. This is an important psychological point. Before
the people make an emotional commitment to act, they usually undertake
– however briefly, however adequately or inadequately – an assessment
of the logical necessity of what they are being asked to accomplish.
To understand this, try this mind-experiment. Picture a crying
policeman, hair disheveled, weeping into his hands. We don't know what
to feel about that policeman until we can logically connect who he is
and why he is crying with what we are. He might be a crazed, mad dog
killer who has been shooting at people and is weeping because he's run
out of bullets. On the other hand, he may have been trying all night to
talk someone from jumping off a bridge; the person has jumped to his
death, and the policeman is weeping over the tragedy. Your logical
assessment of the policeman either as a crazed killer or a
compassionate Samaritan lays the groundwork for your emotional reaction
to him.
That's where Occam's razor comes in. To communicate so the people
choose to be motivated means "plurality should not be posited without
necessity." Your introducing extraneous factors into their assessment
process may frustrate their making that assessment in your favor.
Furthermore, simplicity promotes motivation because of an extraordinary
feature of the human heart: its capacity to be profoundly changed in an
instant. Experiences that take place in the blink of an eye can propel
individuals to radically alter their behavior and even the course of
their lives. Once you understood precisely why the policeman was
crying, you could immediately form a judgement about him; and brought
to bear on that instantaneous judgment is a wealth of values,
experiences, viewpoints, and suppositions that you had learned
throughout your life.
This simple experiment is borne out by many studies in neuroscience,
especially findings detailing the brain structure called the amygdala
and its electrochemical interactions with the brain's reasoning
regions. In fact, the "blink of an eye" has been precisely measured
decades ago by pioneering neuroscientist, Dr. Manfred Clynes. In his
groundbreaking findings, Clynes discovered that two-tenths of a second
is the shortest time in which humans can consciously respond to
stimuli. "All consciousness depends on time," he said. That fraction of
a second is the unit of awareness of the mind. I submit that is the
time it takes for somebody to make the choice to be motivated.
History is replete with instances of people's lives being changed in an
instant of understanding. Just one example out of countless: In 1835,
when Wendell Phillips saw William Lloyd Garrison dragged with a rope
down a Boston Street by a pro-slavery mob, Phillips became so outraged
that he joined the abolitionist movement and became one of its most
effective activists. I'm sure you can look back in history and also
back on your life and come up with examples in which a moment's
realization prompted a change in thinking and behavior.
Since it is in the realm of heartfelt words and actions that great
leadership results accrue and since your understanding and use of the
heart's miraculous capacity to be instantly transformed can boost your
leadership, the razor can be one of your most important assets. It'll
help you cut away the sapwood of extraneous thoughts, speech and
actions to reach the heartwood of the true motivational impulse in the
people you lead.
However, be careful that you don't cut into or cut away that heartwood.
Apply the razor adroitly by taking Einstein's advice about using it in
physics. He said, "Theories should be as simple as possible but no
simpler."
2006© The Filson Leadership Group, Inc. All rights reserved.
The author of 23 books, Brent Filson's recent books are, THE LEADERSHIP TALK: THE GREATEST LEADERSHIP TOOL and 101 WAYS TO GIVE GREAT LEADERSHIP TALKS. He is founder and president of The Filson Leadership Group, Inc. – Celebrating 25 years of helping leaders of top companies worldwide achieve outstanding results every day. Sign up for his free leadership e-zine and get his FREE report "7 Steps To Leadership Mastery"