{"id":5068,"date":"2016-01-07T10:04:48","date_gmt":"2016-01-07T18:04:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.chriscorrigan.com\/parkinglot\/?p=5068"},"modified":"2016-01-07T10:12:49","modified_gmt":"2016-01-07T18:12:49","slug":"the-curse-of-predetermining-outcomes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.chriscorrigan.com\/parkinglot\/the-curse-of-predetermining-outcomes\/","title":{"rendered":"The curse of predetermining outcomes"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\"Courtesy<\/a>

Courtesy WRme2 on flickr<\/a><\/p><\/div>\n

Entraining your mind to outcomes is the hardest practice to beat as a facilitator working in complexity. \u00a0Whether it is learning, strategy or design, if you are in the complexity domain your attachment to an outcome is highly dangerous. \u00a0It will shape your process, and cause you to harvest only what you are looking for, missing out on the juiciest, most powerful places of potential in a system.<\/p>\n

Over the past week I managed to watch the entire 10 part series on the trials of Steven Avery on Netflix called Making a Murderer. \u00a0Regardless of whether you think Avery is guilty or innocent of the murder, the series is a brilliant case study in what happens when we enter processes with our minds made up about the outcomes.<\/p>\n

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At one point in the final episode, Avery\u2019s lawyer Dean Strang talks about the fact that people hardly ever set out to frame innocent people. \u00a0Instead what they do is try to find the evidence to prove the guilt of those that they believe are guilty. \u00a0When you believe someone is guilty you will look for evidence that proves that. \u00a0And when you are an investigator that is a completely focused on a single outcome, you are going into the work with the problem already solved, and no amount of contrary evidence will change your mind.<\/p>\n

Strang is gracious is labelling this a feature of the human condition: we are built this way. \u00a0And it is that human failing is what makes justice sometimes an unattainable ideal.
\nMaking A Murderer is an incredible portrait of how the entrained mind works. \u00a0It illuminates a problem we all have to confront when problem solving, harvesting data and dealing with complexity: how do we let go of a pre-conceived outcome so that we can truly learn what\u2019s going on and make decisions based on good information? \u00a0And how do we do that while still holding on to a higher ideal. \u00a0In other words, everyone in the case was motivated by justice (and justice what SHOULD have led everyone in the case), but the evidence that was collected and presented seemed to have motivated by a pre-conceived outcome to the trial.<\/p>\n

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In the world of practical complexity work there are a number of principles I have been using in harvesting and working with data, many of them informed by Dave Snowden\u2019s work. \u00a0These include:<\/p>\n

Gather information with open questions that do not embed assumptions in them (the interrogation of Brendan Dassey is a perfect example of the very opposite of this – fishing for answers). \u00a0In truly complex situations don’t ask direct questions, rather ask indirect questions about a person’s activities so they can’t game the system (or confirm your bias).<\/p>\n