Analyzing & Interpreting

Course Purpose

Marketing 2 students will ultimately be responsible for guiding the work of Marketing 1 students to ensure it meets the needs of the client. This is a particularly hard task as Marketing 1 students tend to struggle with identifying the critical statements from the client.

Back in the day a field emerged called Scientific Management. Scientific Management has one goal, efficiency (a second goal is masquerading as actually science). The founder of this theory can be traced back to Frederick Winslow Taylor, whose Principles of Scientific Management was hugely influential in the early decades of the twentieth century. Stalin himself, was a big fan, as were the founders of the first MBA program at Harvard.

Taylor writes, "The managers assume...the burden of gathering together all of the traditional knowledge which in the past has been possessed by the workmen and then classifying, tabulating, and reducing this knowledge to rules, laws, and formulae." The idea is to take the craft knowledge of the individual and form it into a handbook that can be distributed by the employer. Taylor went on to add that the "full possibilities" of this system "will not have been realized until almost all of the machines in the shop are fun by men who are smaller caliber and attainments, and who are therefore cheaper than those required under the old system."

Henry Ford grasped the entirety of Scientific Management and its potential when he fine tuned the assembly line model. No longer would a worker need any real skill, they just needed to understand a specific task, then repeat it.

The intention of these systems is "to transfer knowledge, skill, and decision making from employee to employer." In turn the employee is asked to do very little on the line any more. Modern business has found a way to reduce the complexity of movement and thought! But this simply does not seem to be very human at all.

Matthew B. Crawford points us in the right direction in Shop Class for Soulcraft when he provides the following vocational advice, "work that engages the full human capacities as fully as possible"... is work worth pursuing.

On a scientific level, Daniel Kahneman has explained the way humans think in Thinking, Fast and Slow. Kahneman says humans "intuitive thinking" works fast without much effort. Intuitive thinking provides snap judgments, instantaneous response, and immediate readings of situations. The intuitive thinking is what positively allows us to live without getting bogged down in the 10,000 decisions we make every day. Intuitive thinking is called System 1, and it is supplemented and corrected by System 2, the conscious reflection. System 2 kick in only when we perceive a problem, an inconsistency, an anomaly that to the System 1 capacities or experiences.

In case you are into this, Jonathan Haidt discusses this with a different analogy. Haidt refers to System 1 as an Elephant or intuition. For the most part the elephant just goes about its business doing what it pleases. The rider or reasoning acts as System 2, trying to turn the giant beast. Every now and again the rider needs to turn the elephant, but it is not easy.

In summary, the elephant and the rider can either work together or the elephant will rule over the rider. Both systems are critical to living a thoughtful life but both systems require maintenance.

Now that we understand all thinking must lead to some doing, we can move forward.

• ANALYSIS is breaking down the text or problem that you are examining in order to understand each individual part. Analysis is like taking an already completed puzzle apart. The goal is to look at the individual pieces that make up the whole.
  • Do you understand all the parts that are contributing to the situation?
  • Why are these parts aligned in such a way?
• SYNTHESIS is combining multiple sources or ideas into a whole, in order to understand Shared qualities between each individual part. Synthesis is the opposite of analysis: it is like taking individual puzzle pieces and putting them together to make an entire puzzle.
  • What are the common threads that unite the situation?

For obvious reasons, these two concepts are the foundations of engaging in critical thinking. Let's move on and start adding some practical concepts to this discussion.

In How to Think, Alan Jacobs defines thinking as "the power to be finely aware and richly responsible." His definition largely comes from John Stuart Mill who believed character was to be fully alive in all your parts and therefore ready to perceive the world as it is - and act responsibly toward it.

This is powerful stuff. Mill and Jacobs are saying that analytical power is not enough, if one's goal is to make the world a better place. Rather, one must have a certain kind of character: one must be a certain kind of person, a person who has both the ability and the inclination to take the products of analysis and reassemble them into a positive account, a structure not just a though but also of feelings that, when joined to thought, can product meaningful action.

With a far greater focus on the beauty of thought, Jacobs and Mill are us back to the first point of this lesson: thinking and doing cannot be separated. It is Jacobs who is now adding the value of our character to our thinking. Jacobs is simply saying that our morality and character will ultimately determine how our System 1 (elephant) and System 2 (rider) respond to situations.

As we grow as humans, it is our development of character and worldview which will most shape the two systems. This is what Mill meant when he spoke of the power to rightly ordered affections to shape the character. Learning to feel as we should is enormously helpful for learning to think as we should.

The best part about being a Dad is the creative license to play with legos (along with your children) for hours without being labeled odd. Our families favorite thing to do is to try and recreate an object from a book or life from legos. To me, this gift of experimentation and building is what childhood is all about.

As adults, we are typically no longer comfortable just building things for nothing. Because of this we invented a word called prototyping. David Kelley calls prototyping "thinking with your hands," and he contrasts it with specification-led, planning-driven abstract thinking.

The goal of the prototype is to provide something physical that can be interacted with. This could be made of wood or legos, but it must allow people to respond to it. Early prototypes should be fast, rough, and cheap. The purpose is to simply learn quickly.

An example would be our logo project. We start by designing 12 sketched rough drafts of unique logo ideas. This is a preliminary prototype that takes little time in comparison to creating on illustrator or photoshop. The sketches give us something to interact with and evaluate.

The goal of prototyping is not to create a working model. It is to give form to an idea (thinking) to learn about its strengths and weaknesses and to identify new directions for the next generations.

Prototyping at work is giving form to an idea, allowing us to learn from it, evaluate it against others, and improve upon it.

Questions

• Explain how thinking is ultimately an exercise in doing.
• In your own words, explain the relationship between System 1 (elephant) and System 2 (Rider) and how character forms them both.
• How does prototyping lead to a better form of thinking?

Sources

• Shop Class as Soul Craft by Matthew B. Crawford
• Change by Design by Tim Brown
• Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman
• The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt