A Conversation with
Flavia Cymbalista
including a case study:
A Real World HRIS Dilemma
By Robert H. Stambaugh
RHS: Hello, Flavia. I’m really excited
about this interview — I got your name
from Tom Stewart, just before he left Business 2.0 to take over as the editor of the
Harvard Business Review. Tom told me he
had explored some of the “focusing” ideas
with you as a part of his last Business 2.0
article on “hunches” in business decisionmaking — and that you had also helped
him learn the focusing technique for personal use.
FC: Yes, Tom has been picking my
brains on the relationships between uncertainty, complexity and hunches/intuition/gut feeling (whatever you want to
call them) for quite a while now.
When I first told him about the procedure we developed for improving the
intuitive element of decision-making in
financial markets, he immediately
thought that this would be very interesting for management, too.
Managers make decisions. It’s really
their basic, most important job. In the
20th century, the science of management was mostly about making decisions that would increase an organization’s predictability — or put another
way, decrease uncertainty. That part of
the science won’t go away, but Tom is
convinced that the fundamental challenge of the 21st century is different: It’s
about how to cope with intrinsic uncertainty, not just decrease it.
Now, financial markets are, after all,
the best-studied example we have for intrinsically uncertain systems. That’s why
he finds that the way I combined my un-
derstanding of market uncertainty with
psychology to develop a new approach
to decision-making under uncertainty
has many important implications and
applications.
That kind of a reception encouraged
me to broaden the group of decisionmakers I worked with, and I must say I
haven’t yet found a field where a tool
like this is not needed.
RHS: I’m glad to hear about the background. I have to tell you, I was originally a
little leery about exploring this whole approach in a business setting, especially
with an audience of hard-nosed information systems analysts and HR managers
who’ve been working hard for a decade or
more to dispel the “touchy-feely” cachet
that goes with human resources. But with
Tom’s seal of approval, I started out, and I
was surprised to learn about the kinds of
clients you and others work with in this
area. Tell me a little more about the background and context.
FC: Where do I start? I initially developed the methodology in the financial
markets decision-making context. That’s
really my background — my doctoral
dissertation in financial economics was
already on the question of rational valuation under intrinsic uncertainty. But
that was highly theoretical work, and afterwards I went on to the question of
how speculators actually know what
they know. That may sound awfully theoretical — but I’ve recently written a paper called “How George Soros Knows
What He Knows.”
Now, back to my research background: I wanted to find out what is it
that speculators are actually doing
when they “smell the market” — and
whether this was something that could
be systematically taught. So I went on to
do post-doctoral work in psychology —
working with the leading edge of cognitive science, embodied cognition. That’s
about what we call “bodily knowing.” I
experimented with several different
methodologies, practices and educational systems, evaluated whether they
could be adapted to the market situation, and field-tested them out with real
traders.
One technique, focusing, turned out
to be the simplest, cleanest and best researched. That’s where I started. I then
adapted it to the particulars of the decision-situation that traders face, creating
a procedure that adds my concern with
uncertainty to the original technique.
And it proved itself the most successful
in improving traders’ decision-making.
That may seem a little surprising, since
it is a totally different type of learning
than what is taught in business school,
where people are taught to dismiss their
“subjective,” more organic bodily reactions. I work hard to dispel the “touchyfeely” cachet, so I can relate to the problem that IS analysts and HR managers
have with “soft” approaches. It’s a critically important expansion of where we
have been. That’s because there is a vast
amount of information, which you can’t
get otherwise. It’s in your experience,
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and you simply have no way of accessing
it through “hard” approaches.
RHS: This is exciting — what I wanted
to do in this issue of the Journal is go outside the usual approaches we employ
with HR systems and look for some real
departures from what we’ve seen as
“best practices.” I think there are some
valuable lessons here for our readers.
So I want to do a couple of things with
this session. First, I want to learn a little
about the background to this whole field
of inquiry — the more we know, the more
credible it becomes for the hard-liners.
Next, I’d like to have you walk me stepby-step through the basic sequence you
use and teach — what you taught Tom
— and you can use the “case study” I
sent to you ahead of time to help illustrate
some of the issues HR and HR systems
people deal with. It’s a real-life case, and I
think it represents the sort of challenge
most of us in this business have been
dealing with for a long time now. Then, if
we have the time, I hope we can look at a
couple of the other dilemmas that people
in this business are now starting to encounter as their systems do more and impact more people in the enterprise.
Let’s start with “the birth of focusing.”
What’s its pedigree?
FC: Well, the first important point is
that this isn’t something new. It’s a timetested approach. A philosopher and psychologist, Eugene Gendlin, at the University of Chicago, created focusing in
the 1970s. He was looking for experimental evidence for his philosophical
work on the relationship between logical
reasoning and bodily-felt experience,
and he thought the question of psychological change was the right testing field:
what makes therapy work for some people but fail for so many others? After analyzing thousands of therapy sessions,
he was able to show that the successful
cases were differentiated by their ability
to tap an internal process ignored by
most other subjects. Right from the beginning the successful ones showed a
capacity to attend to the murky edge of
what is being said — which can only be
sensed physically. This different kind of
attention — inward attention — to what
is, at first, sensed unclearly allows people to identify broad attitudes or larger
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March/April 2003 • IHRIM Journal
issues that underlie specific problems
and questions. Gendlin then devised a
method that includes specific directions
to systematically contact and explicate/articulate this intuitive level. Loads
of subsequent experience and research
have proven that this kind of skill can be
taught. Focusing is now used in many
fields. Gendlin and I then honed my application for financial markets into a
procedure that can be applied to any decision-making under uncertainty. We call
the approach “MarketFocusing.”
I found that focusing ideally complements the analytical tools that traders
use. They cannot just follow known rules
and procedures blindly since the rules of
the game are constantly changing. Their
analytical tools assume the relevant
variables they have captured are going
to remain the same in the future.
You have to remember that analytical
tools always abstract from the context,
it’s in their nature. They cannot tell you
when they’re relevant and when they’re
not — when they are applicable to the
particular concrete situation you’re facing right now. So, how do you judge
that? Where can you find this situational
information that addresses relevance?
The answer is pretty clear: it’s in your
experience, all tacit, implicit. Focusing
articulates your implicit sense of the situation and how it can unfold.
RHS: Okay, let me see if I can paraphrase the whole thing in general, in nonHRIS terms. I’m an investor, and I have a
lot of experience to draw upon. Maybe I
started out by reading a book or two, or
maybe going to a seminar on investment.
Maybe I even listen to a broker or analysts. But I start out thinking I can be successful by applying and acting on a series
of rational tests and approaches that are
very much the accepted way to go when it
comes to making stock market decisions.
And all of them are, I guess, based on
looking at past activity and what we now
know about future strategies and markets, and then moving forward based on
what we just analyzed. And the more
analysis, the better. Is that a fair description of the way most people think we
work?
FC: Yes. These old approaches —
and there’s a wide variety of them, some
more, some less mechanized, all based
on past data and expert past experience.
They’re like “expert systems.”
Now, just think of how those expert
systems were constructed in the first
place: they didn’t just rely on analyses;
they made explicit the expert’s tacit
knowledge. But here’s the problem: the
more structured at the detailed level you
make your system, the less opportunity
there is for utilizing this other type of
knowledge, the expertise, that users do
have of the particularities of their companies and their current situation and
needs. For some applications, the benefits can outweigh the costs, but what are
you going to do when this is not the
case? And how will you know whether
this is the case?
RHS: So, once I get better at what I do
— stocks, or any other decision for that
matter, I subconsciously or unconsciously modify the original analyses
with a “little voice” that warns me or encourages me, based on something else?
FC: Actually, it’s not a “little voice” —
it doesn’t really have words at first. It’s
truly a bodily sensation, and I recognize
how threatening that may sound in the
world of information systems and engineering. But it is a critical concept. Subtle bodily feelings communicate to us all
the time when a decision that might
look perfectly logical and reasonable on
paper doesn’t really address the crux of
the problem. It’s not a voice, but an uneasiness, which — if you attend to it —
you can feel in your body, perhaps in
your stomach, chest or throat. It’s often
dim and fuzzy at first; something we usually dismiss because we think it’s just an
uncomfortable “nothing.” In fact, what
you’re experiencing is your body complaining that your decision is violating
your experiential knowledge; there’s
something crucial that you’re not taking
into account.
RHS: So I eventually want to get to the
point that my decision-making behavior
consciously accesses what might have
been called — in a less politically correct
age — women’s intuition?
FC: You can call it intuition, bodyknowledge, gut feeling — however you
decide to characterize it, what’s meant
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by that is the store of experienced information that simply cannot be summoned piece by piece. The process takes
you to the point where you can access
all that. But I need to emphasize that it’s
not a matter of finding your gut feelings
and following them blindly. It lets you
think with your gut. So the process leads
you to articulate what really matters. Let
me repeat this because it’s so important: it lets you think with your gut.
RHS: I think I have it. Now let’s suppose
we are in an HR systems setting. The
“case study” I sent — and that I included with the printed version of our
discussion — will resonate with most of
the people who read the Journal. Can
you walk me through the steps the
“hero” in the case would likely follow, assuming familiarity with the focusing approach, so the resulting decision about a
new system would “feel right?”
FC: Before I address the situation itself, I need to describe a little about the
approach. Let me first re-emphasize the
general idea that the unease one feels
about decisions that don’t sit right can
be recognized as a bodily sensation.
Let’s start by thinking of two decisions you’ve recently made — preferably
decisions where the outcome is not yet
known. Pick one that will “sit right;”
you’re comfortable with it. For the other,
pick something that, when you think
about it, you feel some hesitation; it just
“sits wrong”— you wish you had found
another solution.
Now take a moment to sense your
body from the inside. Sense your throat
from the inside, your chest and your
belly. Ask yourself: what’s it like, this inner space, right now? Search for a word
or phrase that describes its quality.
Maybe it’s soft and wooly or jumpy, or
wiry, maybe it’s described with a
metaphor — for example “being at the
edge of a cliff” — would better describe
what’s there.
Once you know what it’s like right
now — even if you haven’t got the perfect description for it — recall the decision that “sits right” as you keep sensing
this inner space. Maybe there’s a slight
shift and you can sense a subtle change.
Maybe the quality you now sense is a bit
clearer, more open or brighter.
Now recall the decision you’re less
happy with. Keep sensing your throat,
chest and belly from the inside, and notice how the quality of your inner space
changes. The change will now be less
subtle. You might feel a constriction,
heaviness or nervousness.
Is that clear now? I’d encourage your
readers to actually try it out, and if they
do, most of them will start to recognize
what we’re talking about — they’ll have
had an experience of it. Some people
are naturally very adept at sensing
themselves from the inside. Many,
though, aren’t that used to this and
need some training.
RHS: Well, I know that when you and I
tried the process, it took me a little while
to make contact with the sense, and then
a little longer to recognize the sensation
you’re describing. But you know, as soon
as I did — how did you put it? — “say
hello,” I recognized a feeling I have had
all too many times in the past.
FC: That’s it! Let me give you the
seven basic steps that people can use to
accomplish what we’re talking about.
And I’ll do it in the context of the HR
systems dilemma you gave me as an example when we first talked several
weeks ago.
The first step in the process is what I
call “Finding the murky zone.”
Your character would begin by sensing himself from the inside and contacting his bodily felt sense of the decision
situation — the way we discussed it a
moment ago. Remember, this bodily-felt
sense is nothing mysterious. On the
contrary, it’s so familiar that we’re generally barely aware of it.
You always know what you’re doing
and how you came to be here, right now.
Well, how do you know this? You have it
as a wordless bodily sense of knowing
what’s going on. It’s different than mere
physical sensations such as indigestion
or heart pound. And it’s not the usual
“feelings” either. At first, it does not fit
any recognizable category. We are used
to paying no attention to it, but once we
do pay attention, it’s definitely physically
here — that’s what I call the murky zone.
So, after our HR system manager
found the murky zone, he’d clear the
bodily sense of other concerns. That’s
because when you first find the bodily
sense, it almost always contains not
only the decision-situation but also a
lot of other concerns that one is carrying
in it just now. For example, it is often
something that happened earlier in the
day that still occupies you. Many people
also carry certain chronic worries. Each
such concern results in a certain quality
in the body. These are mixed into what
is at first perceived as one’s bodily
sense. It usually takes only a moment to
find these and sort them out. The
unique physical quality of each might be
like a weight, constriction or a sense of
restlessness. Actually, some of these
won’t be “cleared”— some of these are
always there although they won’t be noticed any longer. In my experience, it
takes a minute or less to set each of
these physical qualities aside — not
just mentally but with a physically-felt
“clearing,” so that one can then focus
fully on the situation in which one
needs to make the decision.
You know, this first step alone is a vital skill one can use whenever one
needs to concentrate fully on any task.
People I’ve worked with use it all the
time.
Let me give you an idea of how that
goes. Start by making a mental list of all
the sources of unease you feel right now
— all the concerns that are pressing in
on you. Think of each one of them as a
weight that you put down one by one.
You stack them up in front of you or to
your side. You’ll get a lot of different
things, personal concerns mixed with
professional ones, major life issues
mixed with trivial stuff like: “oh no, I forgot to mail the letter.” or maybe “have I
fed the cat?” Don’t bother sorting them
out, and don’t get into any of them, just
keep stacking them up. When you think
you’re done, keep sensing yourself from
the inside and tell yourself: “If it weren’t
for this, that and the other — everything
that’s now stacked up — I’d be perfectly
at ease right now.” If this is true, the inner space will feel spacious. If that’s not
true, something inside you will protest.
You’ll feel some something like a tightening in your throat, chest or belly. That
means you haven’t yet finished, there’s
another source of unease that you
haven’t yet acknowledged.
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RHS: Our HRIS manager will do what
you’ve been describing, and let’s say
stack up other concerns like the quarterly
budget, or a project review, or maybe
some task force deliverable that’s also on
his plate?
FC: Exactly! And then he’s ready to
move on to the second step. I call Step 2
“connecting with what the body knows.”
Here’s how it works. By now our HR
systems manager has located the murky
zone and cleared some space. He’s
ready to evoke this specific bodily sense
of just what refuses to “sit right” about
this decision, now. One way he can do
this (among others) is with the apparently paradoxical procedure of “pretending you have nothing to decide.”
To locate the unease about the current decision, this manager would go
back to sensing himself from the inside.
He’d tell himself that his current decision about what to recommend has already been made, and that he’s perfectly
satisfied with the corporate solution,
while attending to the inside of his
throat, chest and belly. If the decision
doesn’t sit right — and we’re pretty sure
this is the case — something inside him
is going to complain, and he’ll feel a
sort of bodily protest, letting him know
that this “done deal” is not really true.
RHS: Right about now, everyone who is
reading this will be nodding their heads
— vigorously. Most of us have just assumed this feeling was just part of any
HRIS project.
FC: (Laughing) That’s nothing
unique to HR or systems implementation! Everyone’s familiar with all this —
so what we have to do is “trap” it if you
will: time for the next step, which I call
“stabilizing the bodily signal.” See, in
order to be guided by your bodily knowing in making a decision that sits right,
you need to stay in contact with the
bodily signal. Remember our investors?
They need to be in contact with the bodily sense all the time, while they’re making the split-second decisions they live
by.
How do we do that? Well, the unease
now needs to become a stable enough
presence that it takes a concrete shape.
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March/April 2003 • IHRIM Journal
Your HR system manager would now
search for something — a word, an image or a metaphor — that describes the
“protest” he’s experiencing when he tells
himself that he’s perfectly satisfied with
the corporate solution. He’d look for a
“quality word” that describes the sensation, a “handle” for it. This “handle” word
or image does not express the content
— not “expensive” or “it will cost too
much” — instead, it’s a word that applies to this particular bodily sense of
the decision that experienced right now
— “nervous,” “jumpy,” “stuck,” “antsy,”
“wired,” “fluttery,” “heavy.”
RHS: Yes. Our readers could probably add
another hundred synonyms from painful
and personal experience.
FC: If the word or image our subject
has found is right, that is, if there’s a
good “fit” between the bodily signal and
the handle, he will experience a slight
change in the body signal itself. This response is somewhat subtle, I have had
people say it’s similar to the relief you
feel when you remember a word you had
forgotten and had been looking for.
What’s important is that by having a
handle, you are creating a firm and repeatable contact with something that is
otherwise ephemeral and that may disappear easily. When you lose hold of the
bodily sense, when something else
come up (in the regular business day —
NO, in the course of the process, as
you’re trying to do it) and you lose track
of your concern, saying the handle word
will bring it back concretely every time.
Say this manager’s bodily signal was
like a knot in his belly. The knot will
guide our HR systems manager into
finding out what’s so knotted in the situation — and how to unknot it. That
leads to the next step in the process.
Think about Step 4 as “Clearing the
decks.”
Before our HR manager can really begin inquiring into his felt sense, he
needs to establish the “right” attitude
towards it. This guy needs to be able to
observe his felt sense of the issue with a
sort of interested curiosity, like a scientist who’s interested in finding out whatever is there. This stance is a necessary
condition for accessing the information
that it contains. It involves learning self-
listening skills, which is a difficult thing
for people to do on their own. In fact, it’s
maybe the most difficult thing to learn
about this whole process — most people need to have some training for that.
RHS: Did you train Tom Stewart?
FC: I guided him through the
process a couple of times, for a couple
of different decisions. When I guide
someone, they “catch” the right attitude,
they learn it by having experienced it —
and often can then have it on their own
later on, in other circumstances. They
already know what to look for and how
to go about it.
Here’s what happens: once the body
signal is a concrete presence, you can
take a position in relationship to it; you
can look at whatever arises from your
felt experience as an “it” to which you
can relate. If the quality you felt was, for
example, “nervous,” you need to go from
“I’m nervous” to “there’s something nervous there.” Looking at our HR systems
manager, he’ll then go from “I have a
knot in my stomach,” which feels bad
and which he’d like to have disappear,
to “there’s something knotted there,”
the exploration he welcomes and is curious about.
At this point he’s ready to start finding out what makes “it” so knotted. See,
when we first meet a bodily sense, it is
undifferentiated. It’s just a glob. It contains lots of emotional, personal, irrelevant components along with the factual
component — everything’s mixed up.
This “glob” explains why our hunches
are so often unreliable. So next our HR
system manager needs to “clean up” his
bodily sense of these biases so that he
can get to the knowledge that is specific
to this current situation.
At this stage he might find, for instance, that he’s offended by the fact
that upper management hasn’t recognized all the work he and his staff have
done to customize the basic system and
make it fit the real needs of the customers. Or maybe he dreads telling his
staff that all their work was for nothing
— maybe they’ll quit or transfer. These
are reactive familiar feelings, and once
he acknowledges each of them, he can
put them to the side.
After he’s done that, if he again tells
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himself the decision is fine, the bodily
sense ought not feel like a tight knot any
more — it’ll be more like a bundle with
different strands, maybe like a bundle of
spaghetti that needs to be untangled. At
this point, he’s now found the edge of
what he knows. He’s ready for the next
step.
This is where the manager needs to
start “nurturing and creating alternatives.” He will now have a sense that the
problem isn’t really how good his system already is, but — something else —
what?
One of the strands he starts to unravel might have something to do with
one of the unique capabilities he’s been
able to build into the current system
and the accompanying data warehouse;
he’s been around long enough to know
how the company works and he’s built in
some data elements and reporting capabilities that he knows will be needed the
next time a business downturn begins.
From what he has seen and heard about
the potential replacement systems —
maybe from trading stories at an IHRIM
meeting — he suspects that “you can’t
get there from here” with the new packages.
Or perhaps, he has a different view of
the costs of implementing or even maintaining the system. Let’s say he’s seen
the projections for five-year cost of ownership as they relate to the HR department — and they are based on the assumption that a new system, using
industry best practices, and with enterprise-wide processes and data consistency, won’t need major modification. If
he’s a veteran, like many of the investors
I’ve looked at, he knows things will
change and the rules won’t work the way
they were originally defined.
There’s probably a political component as well: “corporate” versus line control, U.S.-centric versus regional or truly
global definition, IT versus HR ownership and stewardship for the new system. And this might have several
smaller strands: sure, there would be
politics, but there may be personalities
in play, or a sense that IT is going to
make a major shift in infrastructure that
could frustrate HR users.
And just for fun, let’s add a third
strand: he’s been in contact with his network or community, and he is starting to
hear lots of horror stories about other
companies that have started doing what
he’s being pressured to do, only to find
part way down the road that what works
for other areas doesn’t always work in
HR. If he is a real veteran, he probably
has a few war wounds, and maybe he’s
not eager for any more.
Sometimes, this process surfaces entirely new issues. I’m not an HRIS expert, but let’s say one of the vendors being considered is “different” — perhaps
there’s a perception or suspicion that
the whole process isn’t fair; it’s “wired”
for one vendor. Maybe something in
vendor demos tipped that vendor’s
hand. They acted like the decision about
packages was already made. On the
other hand, maybe one of the vendors is
rumored to be in the middle of a management change, or a strategic shift in
direction, or — after all, this is the Enron era — maybe someone is suspected
of “cooking the books.”
RHS: Flavia, every one of those possibilities occurs every day in this business. I
want to hear how we address these “gut”
issues in the context of the focusing
process.
FC: None of the factors that he already knows is a monolithic thing: once
you start to see what’s in there, each factor includes many factors, and the focusing process guides you into finding
out exactly where you were hung up.
Sometimes what looks at first like a
small detail leads you to new questions
that end up shifting the whole picture.
You re-organize the knowledge you
have. And your gut feeling guides you in
that until you’ve articulated what you
need to know — it accepts or rejects certain directions, it will only take in what
really fits. It’s like when you cannot find
the words to express what you want to
say — there’s a tension in your body,
which only “lets go” when the right
words come. The tension “knows what’s
needed,” and it guides you into finding
it out.
Now, exactly what our manager will
find out here, I cannot say — it’s in his
experience. But one thing often happens: once new information is there, it
seems like it’s been there all along,
merely overlooked. You’d be surprised
how frequently people ask “how come I
didn’t realize that before?” In fact, the information was there but not in its current, new form. It had been previously
undifferentiated, just part of an initial
mess, and it emerged out of there.
Here’s an interesting thing: what
emerges is always logical in retrospect.
But while with hindsight you can see
how the new piece of information logically follows from what you knew before,
you couldn’t have deduced it by abstract
reasoning alone.
That’s why we say that market focusing — this is what we call my application
of the focusing process — is a tool for
“more-than-logical” decision-making.
Here’s where we start with the sixth
of the seven steps. Let’s call it “Stepping
through the alternatives.”
At this stage we take a look at the alternatives that have been identified —
which, by now, often differ from the ones
we had at the beginning. And then repeat the process for each of the alternatives, pretending we have already decided for each solution, in turn. If there’s
a bodily protest, going through the steps
will clarify what exactly is “off,” which
facets of the situation are really crucial.
So, our manager now pretends that
he’s already decided to reject the overall
solution. Guess what? That doesn’t sit
right either. Meaning: there’s something
about the political solution that is indeed needed. To find out what it is, he
then goes through Steps 2-5 again. At
Step 5 he might find out, for instance,
that not causing trouble for a successor
is not the main point, and pin down exactly what political solution is wanted,
why it matters to be a “good citizen.”
Step 7: Embracing the parts
Now he has a clear sense of what’s
wanted: result from 5 and result from 6.
It’s clear that he’s looking for a solution
that encompasses the pros of the two
sides — “good citizen,” but with no loss
of the crucial capabilities that the existing system has. Instead of being torn between the two alternatives, he’s now formulated the crucial features that an
overall solution would need to make it
desirable.
From there, theoretically, what’s
wanted could be reconciled experien-
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tially, and new steps of action would
emerge. I have no idea about what’s
technically and otherwise feasible, in
any case it would come out of his experience and his differentiating it, pulling
out strands, with the process. He’d then
be able to re-constellate what’s needed
without being caught up between the already formulated alternatives. I can
imagine such a step being something
like proposing that the big vendor customizes the new system so that it also
delivers what he needs, with the price
difference being funded by HR (in theory, it’s thinkable also that if this vendor
doesn’t do it, another one might, and a
positive outcome for the company as a
whole would be if IS were to shop
around with an expanded set of criteria
and see if they can come out with a better overall solution). Does that make
sense? What happened in real life —
how did he decide?
RHS: Wow! We have been so indoctrinated
to downplay all these feelings and nonquantifiable phenomena. But they’re there
— as I said, I’ve had that sinking feeling
on just about every needs assessment and
implementation project I ever worked on,
and I have just swallowed my misgivings
and papered them over with some more
return on investment calculations.
Have you ever run into situations where
making these issues visible creates an
ethical issue for your clients? For example,
does a stockbroker recommend a stock or
portfolio distribution based solely on the
technicals, or do they pass hunches on to
clients? There’s an analogous situation
with the HR dilemma we just discussed: do
I push forward with the system I selected
solely based on my analyses, or do I make
a case for doing something other than the
best “paper” solution?
FC: You use your discomfort, your
misgivings, to guide you into improving
the case you’re making for something
other than the best “paper” solution. Until it looks good on paper, too.
You know, it’s not a matter of playing
best “paper” solutions against hunches.
Just a feeling of this or that doesn’t
mean anything until you identify the
piece of information that your bodily experience is telling you that you aren’t
taking into account. Once you articulate
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March/April 2003 • IHRIM Journal
your discomfort, you can put that on paper, too. It’s no wonder people don’t
trust unarticulated hunches — they just
aren’t reliable.
RHS: It seems to me that this approach
also has some real promise for decisions
that are made by a group — like a project
team looking at new software, or the committee that’s trying to come up with next
year’s compensation plan. Again, we’ve
been used to very deliberate and straightforward rational approach: we ask members of the group to present their evaluations, there’s often a process of weighting
and prioritization, and then — voila! — we
have a plan that everyone is supposed to
get behind and support.
I have two questions here — first, is there
any way to balance multiple individual focusing outcomes? I may be falling into the
quantification quagmire here, but how do
we weigh and balance different hunches
about the same problem? And second, is
there a way to use the focusing process
not only at the individual level, but also for
a group as a whole? Could you apply the
steps we’ve just discussed during a weekend retreat where the project team for a
new system works through its misgivings
about what’s being proposed — or how
it’s supposed to unfold — so that there’s
an appreciation of the concerns or an
agreement on some of the unspoken concerns?
FC: It’s not so much a matter of balancing different outcomes as of using
each of them as input. The outcome is
not some amorphous “feel” — remember, that’s how you begin, but then with
the process you differentiate and articulate all that is implicit in the “feel.” The
outcome is, therefore, information that
is always logical in retrospect and with
which you can argue logically. Now, in a
group situation, if each member goes
through the process individually, different people will be sensitive to different
aspects of one and the same situation,
situations are multi-schematic, not
monolithic. They’ll have a multiplicity of
relevant aspects. So in a group process,
each person might bring to the table a
different facet. Each facet is an input to
the group — and each one can then be
thought over and thought out by everybody else.
RHS: Flavia, how long does this process
take? Do I need a gazillion dollars and
three weeks or a month to apply it in a situation like the case we reviewed? Or can I
apply it in the two-hour meeting where
someone presents a system proposal that
just plain makes me squirm with a discomfort that I can’t identify?
FC: In your business, it seems like
more time is often equated with better
decisions. But, the focusing method actually generates better decisions in
short periods of time. Remember, it was
first developed as a method for improving decision making in financial markets,
where participants sometimes make
more decisions in a day than most of us
make in a month or year.
But exactly how long it takes, well,
that really depends on the nature of your
decision. When I guide a client through
the process, our sessions are usually
one-hour long. Sometimes we cover a
great many decisions in a single session.
Sometimes the outcome isn’t a final decision at all, but rather a step where new
questions emerge, and the person then
has to go and look for more information.
Instead of an answer, the person finds
out what’s the right question to ask. Or
what’s the right question to ask next.
Whether you can apply it in a two-hour
meeting also depends on a lot of other
factors — such as how comfortable you
are with the group, if others have the
good listening skills that support your
process, how practiced you are in selflistening in a group situation, etc. It’s
not easy to “not-know” in public, but
once the members of the group have experienced the focusing process individually, and as they become more practiced,
the easier it becomes.
RHS: There’s another area we’ve addressed in passing, I think, but I want to
get a better idea about it before we wind
up using the technique to deal with the
kind of uncertainty we have when we plan
for the future. When I think about hunches
and making decisions based on feelings, I
generally assume we’re addressing decisions we make “now” for courses of action
we’ll be following next week, month or
year. So it seems like we are applying our
tacit knowledge and experience to “today’s” problems. But I wonder, isn’t our
FEATURE
non-rational side strongest when it’s handling all the ebbs and flows of future
events that collectively create “uncertainty?” Is there a less or more compelling
reason to “focus” when I am trying to decide about things three or four years out,
as opposed to next month’s questions and
answers?
FC: Your sense of the situation also
includes ways in which it can unfold,
your sense of possibilities, and also the
possibilities you have not met in the
past. This is an area of inquiry that cannot be covered by the standard approaches. The farther you think into the
future, the more likely it is that the assumptions underlying an “objective” approach won’t hold — and the more important it is that you come to a decision
you’re comfortable with. Otherwise you
won’t be able to adequately react to unforeseen factors and developments. I
can’t emphasize this enough: your level
of comfort is not a luxury — it’s a necessity.
RHS: And you know what often makes me
uncomfortable? It’s the decisions that
come from — for lack of a better analogy
— being painted into a corner. Most of
what we do is so constrained by standard
definitions, standard processes, standard
templates for ROI. It’s as if we start out
thinking we have choices, but we’re really
being led to the only outcome that could
have been possible.
FC: In HRIS, as in lots of other areas,
wherever decisions have been standardized and made mechanic to the point
where the experience of the people in
the organization is not being made use
of, you’ll see an opportunity for focusing. You had a good example of the spot
where experience should play the most
important role: detecting a mismatch
between the standard procedures and
the specifics of the actual company situation. There’s knowledge that is being
wasted. I can also see the process being
very beneficial in improving the quality of
feedback you get from communication activities, whatever they are, like chat rooms.
It’s a useful tool wherever improving
the quality of decision-making is
needed — that is, everywhere — from
strategic planning to product innovation
to ethical questions. It’s proving exceptionally helpful for “right vs. right” decisions, for reconciling what you feel like
doing with what you think you should be
doing — both at the level of corporate
ethics and at the individual level, where
the question of meaningfulness and employee motivation comes up.
RHS: Great! You know, what I really like
about this is its personal nature: we learn
how to do it and then keep doing it, and
getting better at it, without big-dollar intervention from consultants and vendors.
Before we conclude, can you give us a few
suggestions for getting started with this
kind of program? Any books, seminars,
Web sites? Any tips for personal approaches?
FC: You can find more information
about decision-making under uncertainty, the procedure that resulted from
my collaboration with Gendlin and articles by both of us at www.marketfocusing.com.
The Focusing Institute, a non-profit
organization presided by Gendlin, also
has a Web site, www.focusing.org, with a
lot of information on the basic methodology and uses in different fields — education, psychotherapy, medicine and
other non-business areas. Many articles
by Gendlin are available online, along
with some longer works. The site has a
bookstore, too. They also announce
workshops on the basic methodology,
and have a program where you have
some coaching sessions that qualify you
for a partnership pool — many people
prefer to focus with a partner rather than
on their own. As a non-profit, they’re
self-help oriented.
RHS: I’m so glad we could get together for
this interview. I know I will apply the technique when I get into some of the strategic
planning projects I’m scheduled to do this
year. And I suspect I’ll use it on some nonbusiness settings as well.
Have you seen people who become proficient with this approach use it elsewhere
in their life?
FC: In fact, I’ve never seen people
who become proficient with it not use it
elsewhere. They get attuned to this side
of their experience, and use it in all sorts
of situations and decisions, professional
as well as personal. With time, it becomes more and more second nature.
People become sensitive to the signals
that are telling them when something is
“off,” and they learn to listen to them
and find out the knowledge that they
contain.
I think that’s because the methodology starts exactly at the spot that traditional approaches neglect: the inner
place from which decision and action
both originate, the inner source from
which we operate: our experiencing in a
situation. By beginning at the “edge” of
what you know, rather than ending there,
you can learn to find the things that you
sense are important, but can’t immediately define. When you do access them,
small surprising new items come, shifts
in your take of the situation that leads to
new action or new inquiry. By means of
the steps of this method you find new
factors, new alternatives, new questions
about facts that you can find out. These
factors were implicit in what you knew
and sensed, but they were not separately
seen and formulated.
Let me just summarize what focusing
can do — what we’ve seen with the case
you provided. I see six (we have five areas there) main areas of value:
It positions you to generate a “reliable hunch” when you need one.
It enables you to base your decisions
on knowledge from all your experience
and from your sense of the present situation.
It helps you discriminate and set
aside emotional reactions and irrelevant
influences that distort your body’s sense
of the real situation.
Even with routine decisions, you can
keep your moves sound so that you
don’t have to fix so much later, or do
something over again.
It will show how to find and decide
from the place where you actually care
about what you’re doing, rather than
from anxiety or concern.
RHS: Thank you for sharing your expertise
with us. What you’ve described reminds
me of a poem by Patrick Overton, which
includes the words:
“When you walk to the edge of all the light
IHRIM Journal • March/April 2003
7
FEATURE
you have
And take that first step into the darkness
of the unknown,
You must believe that one of two things
will happen:
There will be something solid for you to
stand upon
Or, you will be taught how to fly.”
REPRINT 032003-05
Seems to me our systems approach gives
us a place to stand. I think you may have
helped us to fly.
If you have comments or questions on
anything you read in the Journal, write to
Editor–In–Chief, [email protected].
A Real World HRIS Dilemma:A Case Study
A hi-tech company with lots of engineers and a very
developed culture of constructive confrontation and
structured decision-making has decided to implement a
new company-wide enterprise resource system (ERP)
from one of the big vendors. Their rationale is that standardizing all the IT systems in the organization — customer relationship management, accounts payable, receivables, scheduling, general ledger, order entry, all the
way to travel reimbursements — will be better if there’s a
single set of data definitions, procedures, and practices
that can be used worldwide, assuring consistency, minimal cost and exemplary data quality.
HR is the one possible exception to the “everyone
must get on board” directive, partly because it has recently spent about seven gazillion dollars installing and
customizing a separate system that — finally — appears
to meet at least the basic needs of the many different
user populations. The powers that be are trying to entice
the HR people into switching to the proposed enterprise
system, but there is widespread resistance, especially at
the corporate site — where a cadre of HR systems specialists now do all kinds of reporting and analysis in addition to basic processing of transactions like salary increases and transfers, terminations and promotions, etc.
This headquarters (HQ) group has been using and polishing their current system for five or six years — it’s been a
showcase for the vendor, and the head of the systems
group is on the vendor advisory board and is a frequent
speaker at conferences here and abroad. They’re ready to
begin the latest upgrade in a month or so.
The lure management is dangling for a changeover to
the corporate standard is an open checkbook for the
process: HR can have this new system and the company
won’t charge the HR budget for a thing.
There are two other options for the HR systems group:
one is to upgrade the current system, which would be
funded by HR, so it offers a slew of new capabilities that
far exceed what is there now or, for that matter, what
would be possible with the corporate option during the
initial three or four years of operation. The other path is
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March/April 2003 • IHRIM Journal
to allow new parts of the company to go with the corporate system, but to allow those now using and comfortable with the old package to keep and even expand it.
The HR systems manager has to come up with a recommendation for the head of HR to take forward to the
management committee in a few weeks. He understands
the political value of being a good corporate citizen and
going with the new one-size-fits-all approach. He knows
he is in the minority with his desire to keep what he has.
An ERP is clearly the path the folks in Information Systems want to take as well.
On the other hand, he knows from more than 20 years
at the company how fast things shift in HR and how difficult it would be to get information he is often asked to
provide if he accepts a new and (in HR terms) very
mediocre system. When he tries a rational balance sheet
approach, he ends up with an equal number of plusses
and minuses for the two main options — upgrade the old
and acquiesce to the new. He feels too close to the problem. He tried to take a vacation during the company’s
“shut down” at Christmas time, but even sitting on the
beach in Maui didn’t do much good. The problem remained.
With time running short after the holidays, he decides
that he’s only going to be with the company for another
three or four years (it’s time for retirement as soon as the
stock option situation improves), and with things in a
deadlock, he opts for the “good citizen” option and rationalizes it by saying it’s the best way to secure a productive
playing field for his replacement when the time comes.
He has about five or six days left before the decision
goes to his boss. He’s got the white paper finished and is
just sitting on it for a day or so — so he says. But he’s also
agonizing about the outcome: stomach in knots, trouble
sleeping, inability to concentrate on other issues. What
he keeps coming back to is all the work he and his staff
have done to customize the basic system and how good it
seems to be right now. He feels like any other “solution”
would be going against the tide. He’s tired. And he’s very,
very unhappy.