Categorical thinking

In one of my interactions with a CHRO, the discussions centered around skills for the leaders.  While discussing the several skills that HR leaders should develop, the question then centered around the most important skill that a leader should possess. While the usual candidates such as accountability, integrity, empathy, and other related skills, we were not satisfied with this. We researched finding that one quality that limits the potential of a leader. (so rather than listing out the essential skills., we tried to see what limits potential). Because human potential is infinite. We went back to several behavior models and to understand the most important quality that limits leadership potential. The work done by Sandford Professor Robert Sapolsky is fascinating in these areas. Professor Sapolsky is a biologist who warns that Categorical Thinking may lead to leadership failure. Categorical thinking is one that, based on the data one extracts from the environment, establishes categories in which practically everything that surrounds us fits. In many ways, humans are machines that process large amounts of data and categorizes.  This limits the human potential in an enterprise in a very big way.  The big side effect of Categorical Thinking is compression. Not being able to see the full learning potential of an enterprise is a very big negative side effect of Categorical thinking. The experiment that Professor Sapolsky conducted that in a visual spectrum of colors – different languages arbitrarily split up the visual spectrum differently. (for example where the visual spectrum changes from blue to green). This is fascinating research.

Let us look at what happened to Blockbuster. Once a dominating chain and where the family visited almost like a ritual every week, it does not exist anymore. Blockbuster was a victim of categorical thinking. Blockbuster never realized they were in the Entertainment industry and could not think beyond one form – DVDs. Human Resource Leaders should set very lofty goals for Reskilling. Our research shows that only 20% of the Enterprises have done something meaningful in this area.  Categorical thinking limits the learning potential of employees. Our research shows, not having enough entry-level roles could be the reason why we leaders are forced to resort to categorical thinking.  Let us say you are training a business analyst in Python.Post-training completion, we still have to give them six months to be able to decide the effectiveness of training. It may be beneficial to create a variety of indices to administer this. Of course, when you index something, you have to be careful. The London A level grade confusion that took place two weeks back is a great example of what not to do in Indexing