United States – Page 19 – understand-culture

Inductive reasoning

Jennifer leaves for school at 7:00 a.m. Jennifer is always on time. Jennifer assumes, then, that she will always be on time if she leaves at 7:00 a.m.

Every windstorm in this area comes from the north. I can see a big cloud of dust caused by a windstorm in the distance; so, a new windstorm is coming from the north.

Bob is showing a big diamond ring to his friend Larry. Bob has told Larry that he is going to marry Joan. Bob has bought the diamond ring to give to Joan.

The chair in the living room is red. The chair in the dining room is red. The chair in the bedroom is red. All chairs in the house are red.

Inductive: Latin inducere, from in + ducere to lead. To induce means to: move by persuasion or influence; call forth, effect; cause the formation of. Inductive reasoning begins with observing particulars.

Should the particulars indicate a pattern, a conclusion might be drawn or inferred. The particular is the starting point. To infer means: to derive as a conclusion from facts or premise; guess, surmise; involve as a normal outcome of thought; point out, indicate, suggest, hint.

Deductive: Latin deducere, to lead away, from de- + ducere to lead. To deduce means to: infer from a general principle; trace the course of. Deductive reasoning draws a conclusion about particulars based on general or universal premises. The general is the starting point. A premise is something assumed or taken for granted, presupposed, believed.

Empirical: Originating in or based on observation or experience; relying on experience or observation alone often without due regard for system and theory; capable of being verified or disproved by observation or experiment. Latin empiricus, from Greek empeirikos, doctor relying on experience alone, from empeiria experience.

Skeptical of deductive thinking

Americans are inherently skeptical of theory, theoretical thinking, and deductive approaches. They are empirical. For Americans „seeing is believing.“ Experience is real, factual, hard data. Experence informs. Americans prefer to build their processes from the bottom up, from „how the work is actually done.“

Process improvement: Americans asked to improve a process will imbed themselves in the inner workings of the team and the processes they use. They observe what does and does not work, what increases or decreases value, what is worth doing. They will then propose improvements, discuss these with the users of the process, then test, implement, improve upon. American process improvement is specific and experience based. It is not general and theory based.

Broad vs. Narrow: Americans distinguish between a narrow and broad process pragmatically. If the concrete actions to be taken are insufficiently spelled out in a process or a procedure, that process or procedure is not narrow enough. They are, in other words, too broad. If, on the other hand, a process or procedure demands too many deliverables, it is too narrow, focussed, inflexible.

Too many deliverables means too much time and too many man-hours are necessary without resulting in any clear value-added for the end-customer. Americans differentiate stringently between valuable and invaluable processes and steps in a process. Processes and procedures can be balanced or imbalanced. Balanced ones lead to a value-added ratio between work and results. Unbalanced processes and procedures are inefficient, costly, slow and cumbersome. They destroy value.

Atlas of Emotions

In the U.S. the field of psychology has grown in popularity. In the 2006-2007 school year, social science was tied with history as having the second largest number of awarded Bachelor’s degrees.

In fact, there are so many people majoring in psychology in the U.S. that psychology majors have the highest unemployment rates of all recent college graduates, with 19.5% of clinical psychology majors and more than 10% of educational and industrial/organizational psychology majors unable to find work.

A lot of this popularity is due to the work of people like Paul Ekman, an American psychologist, who has created an Atlas of Emotions, which identifies over ten thousand different facial expressions. He has also written fifteen books about body language including Telling Lies and Emotions Revealed.

Due to his high (albeit imperfect) success-rate with using small details in a person’s facial expressions to induce larger truths about that person, Ekman has served as an advisor to several police departments and anti-terrorism groups, including the Transportation Security Administration (TSA). Thanks to his work, Ekman has gained a reputation as the best human lie detector in the world.

Additionally, Ekman’s work was recently used as the basis for the television crime drama Lie to Me, a show in which several psychologists and facial expression experts use their knowledge of body language to assist in investigations. This show ran from 2009 to 2011, and won two People’s Choice Awards in 2011.

Inductive American science

Murray Gell-Mann, a theoretical particle physicist who won the 1969 Nobel Prize in physics, used the specific measurements of multiple particles with varying masses to induce the existence of quarks, half of the known elementary particles – the foundation of all matter, and what he called the eightfold way, a generalization of particle symmetries, which was able to predict the masses of yet undiscovered particles.

Linus Pauling, a chemist who is the only person to win two unshared Nobel Prizes, for chemistry in 1954 and peace in 1962, charted particular chemical bond angles and distances at Caltech following his fellowship. He then used these specific charts to formulate generalizations about atomic arrangements in crystals.

Henry Ford’s Assembly Line

One of the few Americans to focus on processes was Henry Ford. Born in Michigan in 1863 Ford began an apprenticeship as a machinist at the age of 16, and in 1891 he was hired as an engineer for the Edison Illuminating Company. Five years later, he constructed his first model of a horseless carriage, which he called the Ford Quadricycle. In 1903, Henry Ford started the Ford Motor Company, and soon began selling the Model A.

But Ford’s legacy was less in automobile design, and more in his manufacturing processes. Between his assembly line, which allowed cars to be assembled quickly with standardized parts, and his decision to add small amounts of vanadium to his steel, which made the steel production process much easier (not to mention resulted in stronger and more durable steel), Ford revolutionized the way that cars were produced, allowing them to be produced quickly and cheaply – which in turn allowed them to be sold in large numbers at a low price.

Optimum pairings

In one episode of the American television show Community, when eight people have to divide into partners, they first divide without considering any variables or long-term consequences. Shortly afterwards, however, they are so annoyed with their imperfectly chosen lab partners, that they decide to find a way to be in their optimum pairings.

This leads to them spending all night, and most of the following day, trying to decide what those optimum pairings are. They try several different systems to find new partners, including dividing by hair-color/gender/race, old/young, highest/lowest GPAs, and finally by rating each other then pairing the most popular with the least popular, etc.

After a failed attempt to implement the rating system, the 8 people succumb to fighting, angry at each other for the rankings they received. Finally, more than 12 hours after beginning the optimization process, the characters realize that their class is about to start, but none of them have done their work.

They go to class, and the teacher is so angry with them for not doing their work, and not even knowing who their partners are, that he forces 7 out of the 8 “partners” to all share one set of lab equipment, while the rest of the class no longer has to share.

Skinning cats and Westward Ho!

There is a popular American phrase which states “there is more than one way to skin a cat.” This phrase is used to express that there are multiple processes which produce the same result, and that as long as the result is achieved, the approach taken does not matter how.

It was first used in 1840 by American humorist Seba Smith in The Money Diggers, in which Smith wrote: “There are more ways than one to skin a cat, so are there more ways than one of digging for money.”

This phrase was (and still is) so popular that it inspired many variations. In 1855, Charles Kingsley’s Westward Ho! used the phrase “There are more ways of killing a cat than choking it with cream.” Many other popular variations include killing cats (and sometimes dogs) by hanging, choking with butter, and choking with pudding.

The phrase has also appeared in many American books, including Mark Twain’s 1889 book A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, in which the author wrote “she was wise, subtle, and knew more than one way to skin a cat.”

Adam Smith and the division of labor

Adam Smith’s understanding of a process – in the sense of division of labor – can be read in his famous statement about how a pin is producted:

”One man draws out the wire, another straights it, a third cuts it, a fourth points it, a fifth grinds it at the top for receiving the head: to make the head requires two or three distinct operations: to put it on is a particular business, to whiten the pins is another … and the important business of making a pin is, in this manner, divided into about eighteen distinct operations, which in some manufactories are all performed by distinct hands, though in others the same man will sometime perform two or three of them.”

Books about process

For “business processes and procedures” amazon(dot)com returned 1,800 titles. “business process management” yielded 26,000 books.

And “business processes” led to over 490,000 book titles.

Four hundred and ninety thousand. That’s a lot of books. Does this mean that Americans consider internal processes critical to the success of companies?