Book Review for Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error

Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error by Kathryn Schultz (2010) HarperCollins Publishers: NY

We like to be right. We enjoy it. Being right makes us feel “smart, competent, trustworthy, (p. 3)” aware, and connected. We figure we are usually right and consider being right the normal or natural way to be. We look in our own mind and see rationality. We view our being wrong as rare and strange, and others being wrong as the main problem.

 My grandmother Ruby (seated) moved to Kansas City, MO, from the small town of Concordia, KS, to study nursing, even though her parents were convinced she was making a mistake!

We feel more secure with people who agree with us. If others don’t share our viewpoint, we are likely to conclude that they are ignorant of the facts or the reality of the situation. Others make mistakes. Other people’s errors seem to highlight the “types” of people they are: immature, uninformed, ignorant, lazy, and/or lacking moral character. 

We feel right in pointing out the flaws in other people’s thinking, though others often take it wrong that we are trying to clear things up for them. When others are set in their viewpoints, they may appear ridiculous in their certainty (p. 164). Realizing that we have been wrong shocks us; we might also be mortified, confused, amused, embarrassed, illuminated, or changed for life. 

 Some mistakes turn into family stories. In this picture, my son Micah's granddaddy had taken him to show off the new riding mower. When Grandpa started it up in the shed, the sound was so loud that it sent a terrified 4-year old running crying into the house. Only after much reassurance and coaching was our little guy convinced to visit the tractor again, this time to ride, with the promise that granddaddy would never crank it up so loudly for him again!

A pessimistic view of error sees mistakes as bad, something that we need to be better than. If we hold this pessimistic view, we resist admitting any contribution to the problem at hand. Even if we can admit to ourselves that we didn’t see the whole picture correctly, we may find ourselves “too exhausted, sad, or confused to risk feeling worse (or even just feeling more)” (p. 199) to face up to our shortcomings and admit them to others. Instead, we may find ourselves getting stubborn, or defensive, or downright mean. But none of these feelings is that great either, and we don’t make friends with such attitudes (p. 199).

Despite our dislike for mistakes, errors are common—large and small. People used to think the world was flat and that the earth was the center of the solar system. On a day-to-day basis, I miss key information when I don’t pay good enough attention. Plus, when there is a lot going on it is easy to miss things. Some mistakes are no big deal. Some affect a lot of people.

 

In this photo, Micah (at the second row far right in the white shirt) had been very cranky and difficult to get ready for the photo. Later that night, he registered a fever of 104 F! I felt bad for not telling earlier that he was sick but instead fussing at him to cooperate better. (I am in the second row, holding baby Luke in his red pants and blue striped sweater.)

Let’s, therefore, look closely at what can happen as we experience being wrong. First, we are knocked off our high horse. In many cultures, our experience of being wrong causes us to “lose face.” We may want to crawl into a cave or otherwise disappear. In a culture that values rationality over emotion, we find that our capacity to tolerate error depends on our capacity to tolerate such emotions as dismay, foolishness, guilt, shame, or loss (p. 199).

 My mom felt terrible when she opened the door and our new beautiful boxer dog Baron ran out and into the street, where it was hit by a car and killed.

Our ability to benefit from error depends on resisting the urge to not face up to our part in it. Wisdom is the attitude gained from experience that no one knows everything. All of us screw up, misunderstand, and misjudge. An optimistic view of error sees it as a resource for fascination, excitement, hilarity, and delight. Error, because it indicates a “false” reality, also includes dreams and goals, imagination and entertainment, creativity and surprise.  “Forming theories about the world, testing them, then figuring out where we went wrong—is how children play and live in a world of great newness to them” (p. 291).  To feel like a kid again is to experience the world as new and learn about it by playing. 

These animals seemed so big at the time! Here I am behind my brother Martin. 

As we identify and correct our misconceptions, we become less rigid, more functional, and more forgiving of ourselves and others. When we admit that we were in error (more typical of women’s speech than men’s), we find others defending us, telling us what we did right rather than emphasizing our errors. 

By seeing ourselves as able to be wrong, we improve how we think, empathize, decide, imagine, plan, and act.  When being wrong means seeing what is not, then any of us who see something “not as it is but as it could be” we begin to act like leaders, strategists, visionaries, and artists. It was George Bernard Shaw, Irish playwright and founder of the London School of Economics who said, "Some men see things as they are and say why - I dream things that never were and say why not."

 When we don’t face up to our wrongness, we miss out on it. If the ability to admit that we are wrong depends on our ability to tolerate emotion, it is because being wrong, like grieving or falling in love, is fundamentally an emotional experience. When we were tiny, our survival depended on the ability of our care-takers to get “us” right: responding appropriately to our cries of hunger, etc. As we grew older, we were no less fond of being understood. In fact, it is the feeling of being understood—gotten—that is the hallmark of being in love (p. 250). We can learn to live with disagreement and error as long as we feel esteemed and loved (p. 272). 

 Here I am with my dissertation professor, Dr. James F. Cashman.His management specialty was the importance of supportive relationships among leaders and members at work. He was one of the kindest people I ever met, and I felt secure going to him and discussing my confusion and uncertainty.

Finding ourselves mistaken, even in our expectations of what was going to happen, we step beyond our limited idea that we are most certainly right. We see ourselves as more and other than we had known ourselves to be. While this might feel humiliating, we are growing! We learn we need to listen. We might even risk laughing at ourselves. Being wrong can be funny!

Maybe not funny at the time, our mistakes can later make for great stories. Here, my brother Martin is showing off the results of a miscalculation he made on the high school football field. 

 As we grow older, we may restrict our exposure to new settings, until we travel! “The further afield you venture, the more you set yourself up for confusion, surprise, and the violation of your beliefs” (p. 292). We travel to feel like a kid again: to experience the world as new and learn about it by playing. 

By being willing to imagine seeing ourselves as wrong, we improve how we think, empathize, decide, imagine, plan, and act.  When being wrong means seeing what is not, then any of us who see something not as it is but as it could be are playing in what the author calls the margin of error. Error, she goes on to note, comes from the same root word as the Sanskrit word arsati meaning "flows,” the Spanish word ir, “to go,” and the Latin word errer, "to travel or wander, as did the knight errant and traveling minstrel. 

Here I am in San Diego, which felt like a foreign land to this Midwesterner-turned Southerner!

Managing Across Cultures

Intercultural tips, taken from Culture from the Inside Out: Travel—and Meet Yourself by Alan Cornes (2004). Intercultural Press: Yarmouth, Maine.

A sojourner, one on the journey,

1. feels comfortable and at ease in the new environment.
2.  successfully completes tasks and projects. 
3. puts local people at ease, and they enjoy her or his company.

Here I am with my two younger brothers. I think I looked happy and at ease, loving them.

This book helps us understand our own thoughts and feelings. We look inward to check in with our intentions. Are we authentic? Do we really want to build personal relationships with our hosts? Committing to what we are doing, we make the effort to be alert, aware, perceptive, and empathetic. We seek out opportunities to experience and to learn about the host culture in order to be able to see from our hosts’ points of view.

In this photo, I am in a small town in Nicaragua, Central America, going with my Peace Corps friends to a U.S. movie. 

We learn about ourselves when we find ourselves in a new culture. We have our own mental programming challenged; what we thought was universally true turns out to be only a regional preference! We may find ourselves an “outsider” for the first time, though “class, age, gender, race, culture, and many other aspects will affect the individual’s actual and perceived power, status, and confidence” (p. 11).

Even across different languages, people can often tell whether we have doubts. Words contribute less than 10% of the total meaning. Our tone of voice and body language tell the real story. If deep down you don’t trust your hosts due to a previously ingrained prejudice, it will be nearly impossible “to stop some of that bias from leaking out, even if you want to make a good impression.” Our tone and attitude depend on our emotions, so it is crucial to be aware of them. We need to actively deal with any concerns, anxieties, or insecurities within ourselves because they can sabotage our plans.

As we deal with our inner concerns, we find ourselves better able to become “comfortable, open-minded, relaxed, outer-directed, curious, respectful, and humble” (p. 25). We carefully draw on what we have learned about general dimensions of national cultures.  We avoid stereotyping by looking at what is unique about the hosts we are conversing with right in front of us. We consider ways in which we are different and ways we are the same between our hosts and us.

Where we see differences, we seek out similarities.

Where we see similarities, we seek out differences, because we see them as valued and interesting.

 Here is a family reunion. My mom is in the middle. My family is in the gray. Families are good examples of how we are similar AND different.

Becoming flexible with our thinking, we learn to tolerate uncertainty—even when we “are not in possession of all the facts, have no idea what the big picture is or what will happen next” (p. 48).

“Empathy is the term used to describe the ability to view a situation or a problem from another person’s point of view” (p. 50). It requires sensitivity to non-verbal cues and an attitude of respect, even reverence, for the challenges both you and the other person are facing. You adapt your language in response to the nonverbal feedback given by the host—even being courageous enough to ask for help from them in understanding their responses and adapting appropriately.

 I like this picture for the nonverbal signals of my younger sister Sue (in the glasses) as she empathizes with my effort to blow out the candles!

1.      When you find yourself taken aback, nervous, or uncertain, wait a beat or two before responding. Your first, automatic reaction is usually culture specific, so give yourself time to choose how best to respond.   Snap yourself out of any states of emotional upheaval or paralysis. Substitute words of love and support for the complaints (about yourself or others) that you are thinking. Breathe and relax. Imagine a friendly and mutually beneficial process and outcome.

In sum, when you experience a cultural difference,

1.       Recognize it

2.       Respect it

3.       Manage it by making respectful choices out of love and optimism. Maintain your sense of humor, and enjoy the adventure!

Collectivism

Collectivism

This is the book I used for the following information: Adler, N. J. (2002). From Boston to Beijing : managing with a world view Cincinnati, Ohio : South-Western/Thomson Learning.

Hofstede, G., and Hofstede, G. J. (2005). Cultures and Organizations: Software of the Mind. McGraw-Hill: New York

Collectivists live, work, and play among relatives, from birth to death, 24/7.  We dress up together for baptisms, marriages, and funerals (Hofstede and Hofstede, on page 88), even for birthday parties.  Unlike individualists who communicate in order to bond, collectivists are relatively silent. High Context Communication means that a lot goes without saying.

Adler (2002) said that the relationship between individuals and their relatives is circular: an individual is helped by relatives, who are in turn helped by that individual. Individualist cultures focus on how the individual is improved, while collective cultures think about how individuals help the group. 

 Hofstede and Hofstede (his son) help us understand how we got to be individualist and/or collectivist. They ask us (on p. 9) to answer some questions to see how we learned the cultural values of collectivism (or individualism).

1. Alone or in a group: When you were tiny, how much did your mom carry you? Did you sleep with your parents or siblings? Who all held you? Was it noisy with people around you, or quiet? A child in an extended family is rarely alone. Given the frequency of social contact, social harmony is the key virtue.

(L to R: Ruby Connor and children Mary, Bill, Jody, Betty, and Genny)

My mom, the littlest child in the picture, shared a bed with one or two of her sisters, including Pat and Ruth, who came later. My mom interacted frequently with her sisters, so in an important sense I grew up in a collective culture.

We don’t always copy what we grew up with, so culture can vary across generations. 

(Rita Durant)

Although my mom shared a bed with siblings when she was tiny, I slept in a crib by myself. 

(Rita Durant holding newborn Micah Durant)

And our babies often slept in our bed, which was different from how I was reared. Sharing sleeping space is more a sign of collectivism than individualism.

Most of us probably have some degree of cultural impulses toward collectivism and individualism. Hofstede’s dimensions measure the average amount of each in a given nation, or country.

(My grandpa George H. O’Laughlin and his wife Mary Marcella McGraw O’Laughlin are holding me on my baptism.

My dad was raised around fewer people, so even though Catholics tend to be more collective, and they were Catholic, having only one sister meant that Dad learned more individualism values.

2. Role models: As you grew a little older, who did you follow around and try to copy? How did you learn what was good to do and what was dirty or evil or gross?

(Here my dad is taking us for a boat ride. I am learning to steer.)

As the oldest child, I looked to my parents and teachers for models. Now I am a parent and a teacher. Collectivists tend to follow in their parents’ footsteps when they choose their career paths.

3. Gender expectations: What did you learn about what being a boy or girl meant?  How were you supposed to act, speak, dress, etc. ?

(Here I am, the oldest, playing on the tire swing with, by age and height, Martin, Brian, and Susan.)

I wore a dress to church and school, and I didn’t play team sports (1950s USA), though I did play in the backyard with my siblings and neighbors. Our Catholic school separated boys from girls starting in 7th grade. I went to an all-girls’ high school.

4. Ambition. How much initiative are you supposed to take? How bad was it to break rules? When were you told to be proud? When were you told to feel guilty (individualist) or ashamed (collectivist)? A good child does not overtly disagree with others. A child who repeatedly voices opinions different from that of the group is considered to have a bad character.

(Here I am in middle school, reading.)

In school and at home, I mostly tried to stay out of trouble by keeping quiet. I read a lot. I won’t even start in about the guilt and shame I was taught to feel when I got in the way.

5. Friends/Allies: Were you born with people around you, or did you seek out friends? Because collectivists already have built-in bonds of loyalty, they don’t need to seek it in friendship, like Westerners do. 

(These are my best friends from high school and me at a friendship group reunion. L to R: Rita Durant, Sheila Yepsen, Mary Robinson, Susie Bower, Patty Campbell, Susan Klein, and Susan Schilling.)

Lacking cousins or sisters my age, I was happy to be part of a friendship group: a strongly bonded “in-group” of a high school clique. I am friends to this day with those women. Here we are at Camelback Mountain Spa in Phoenix, where two of “us” live now.

Now that we have considered 5 ways we were socialized into collectivism versus individualism, we can see how this learning collectivism from an early age shows up later in life in school and in the workplace. The page numbers tell where in Hofstede andHofstede these lists can be found.

p. 96-97

Collectivists at school …

1.      only speak up with approval from their whole group.

2.      don’t value being better than their relatives.

3.      stick with their own amidst classmates.

4.      expect preferential treatment from related teachers or administrators.

5.      study in order to contribute something to the whole.

6.      the diploma is a ticket for membership rather than an individual honor

p. 99

Collectivists at work

1.      relatives works together

2.      share earnings with relatives

3.      follow relative’s wishes

4.      hire and promote relatives

5.      don’t fire family

6.      prefer a group goal

7.      prefer anonymity

8.      organizational culture makes a difference

9.      discussing performance openly risks loss of face

10.  trusting relationship is needed before business can be done

Hofstede and Learning Goal 1: 1. Understand how differences in cultural values can be used to describe national culture

According to Luthans and Doh (2012, p. 116), "Dutch researcher Geert Hofstede identified four dimensions, and later a fifth dimension, of culture that help explain how and why people from various cultures behave as they do."

In the late 1970s, Hofstede sent questionnaires to tens of thousands of IBM employees in dozens of countries. Because the jobs were similar across the world, Hofstede claimed that differences between the answers of the employees were likely due to the culture of the country they lived and worked in.

His "onion" is similar to Luthans and Doh's (2012) concentric circles seen in the previous post. As Hofstede (2005, p. 8) put it in his book Cultures and Organizations: Software of the Mind, "The core of culture [as seen in the figure] is formed by values. Values are broad tendencies to prefer certain states of affairs over others": good over evil; clean over dirty; beautiful over ugly; rational over emotional... and so forth.

And these circles go on at many levels of analysis: from as large as the entire nation all the way trhough many social settings and down to the family. As Hofstede describes it, any person or group's values, rituals, heros, and symbols, and practices involve different levels: national, regional/ethic, gender, generation, social class, and organizational, including family. Therefore, the way I dressed as a child reflected how I was a citizen of USA, an Irish-Catholic, a female, born in 1953, to a first-generation college graduate (law school was two years of college at the time my dad got his degree), and to my particular parents.

Here I am in second grade in my first communion dress. For us, white symbolizes purity. This is not true for all cultures. In some Asian cultures, white symbolizes death.

So, admitting there are MANY levels of influence on persons, Hofstede directed his focus to how the national level has similar values among citizens. Further, he sought to establish that countries can be compared and contrasted in terms of only a few values. These values he calls his dimensions. Here is one of the dimensions, Power Distance, and how the countries compare in terms of how much it is considered valuable for some people to have a lot more authority than others.

http://gbr.pepperdine.edu/2010/08/to-tell-or-not-to-tell/

According to your book (Luthans and Doh, 2012, pp. 116-118), the four main dimensions that Hofstede found to be consistently important to different degrees between different countries are the following: Power Distance high versus low (PDI), Uncertainty Avoidance high versus low, Individualism versus Collectivism, and Masculinity versus Femininity.  Another dimension he looked at was short-term versus long-term time orientation.

Here is a chart comparing different countries: (https://blogs.commons.georgetown.edu/isdyahoofellow/using-geert-hofstede-cultural-dimensions-to-study-social-media-usage-in-bric-countries/)

Please take a minute and consider that the World (blue bar line) is an average. So, too, is each of the country's scores. Individual respondents varied; however, the average has been relatively consistent for several researchers over several decades.

Please look, too, at the IDV dimension--the second from the right along the x axis--for the USA. See how very tall its bar is compared to the other countries? That is how extreme the USA values are in terms of assuming that power comes from individual effort rather than from collective support. Therefore, the next post tries to explore the relatively underdeveloped USA value around collectivism: "The tendency of people to belong to groups or collectives and to look after each other in exchange for loyalty" (Luthans and Doh, 2012, p. 117).

This is a photo of my high school social friendship group welcoming me back from fall 1971 semester abroad in Spain. My sister Sue is dressed in her Catholic grade school uniform and holding the sign (She was the one in tears in the family Easter photo).

Culture

Culture

As we are growing up, we learn what the right ways to think, feel, and act from the people close to us. For me, that usually meant that I did or said something that got me in trouble. For example, my brother and I were throwing our little sister into a pile of leaves. All of us were laughing. My dad came out and saw us and started to holler. I was so shocked I started to cry until my shoulders heaved and I could hardly catch my breath. Note to self: Don't throw siblings into the leaves.

I wondered why they didn't just tell me all the rules up front and be done with it. Why did I have to be surprised, even shocked, that something I was enjoying was against the rules?

That's the thing about culture: It goes without saying. Mostly what anthropologists look at, then, are called the artifacts--the clothes, language, art, objects, tools, and so forth.

For example, in my family Easter photo, the girls' hats,  the boys' ties, my corsage, and the fact that our picture was taken at all, are all visible symbols that this was a special day. In terms of Luthans and Doh's Model of Culture (see below), our clothes and the other ways we celebrated Easter are "the explicit artifacts and products of the society" in which I grew up.

The norms and values occupy the middle circle. In my 1963 Easter story, it was the norm for girls to wear dresses to church, for men to dress in ties and slacks and a jacket. For Catholics, it was the norm to attend church on Easter. For our family, it was the norm for Dad to buy his wife and daughters flowers on Mother's Day and Easter.

Image from Luthans and Doh (2012, p. 110)

The inner-most circle represents the implicit, basic assumptions that guide people's behavior. While many of our basic assumptions that guided our behavior came from our religion, others came from being of Irish heritage, from growing up in the USA at the time, and so forth. For example, as a young child, I liked my cowgirl outfit.

Culture, therefore, is a hidden influence on motivation. And sometimes the land, the shape of the Earth where we find ourselves, influences culture. For example, and speaking of cowboys, the idea that there is more land beyond the frontier has been said to influence how we Americans ARE.

"The presence and predominance of numerous cultural traits -- "that coarseness and strength combined with acuteness and acquisitiveness; that practical inventive turn of mind, quick to find expedients; that masterful grasp of material things... that restless, nervous energy; that dominant individualism" -- could all be attributed to the influence of the frontier." (http://www.pbs.org/weta/thewest/people/s_z/turner.htm)

This last photo was taken outside of Taos New Mexico, whose desert land provides stunning vistas of the horizon and nearby mountains.


Speaking of Easter, and of culture, I laughed out loud upon hearing a book on tape called Me Talk Pretty Some Day by David Sedaris. The first link is to a summary of Sedaris' work created for CI 403 Section E for Dr. Arlette Ingram Willis' class at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.. http://students.ed.uiuc.edu/dashton2/autobiographywebpage/storysummaries.html. The essay about Easter is entitled Jesus Shaves, and is the story about David and his international classmates in a French language class in Paris trying to use their very limited French to explain Easter to their Moroccan classmate:

Despite her having grown up in a Muslim country, it seemed she might have heard it mentioned once or twice, but no. "I mean it," she said. "I have no idea what you people are talking about."

The teacher then called upon the rest of us to explain.

The Poles led the charge to the best of their ability. "It is," said one, "a party for the little boy of God who call his self Jesus and . . . oh, s---."

She faltered, and her fellow countryman came to her aid. "He call his self Jesus, and then he be die one day on two . . . morsels of . . . lumber."The rest of the class jumped in, offering bits of information that would have given the pope an aneurysm.

"He die one day, and then he go above of my head to live with your father."

"He weared the long hair, and after he died, the first day he come back here for to say hello to the peoples."

"He nice, the Jesus."

"He make the good things, and on the Easter we be sad because somebody makes him dead today."

Part of the problem had to do with grammar. Simple nouns such as cross and resurrection were beyond our grasp, let alone such complicated reflexive phrases as "To give of yourself your only begotten son." Faced with the challenge of explaining the cornerstone of Christianity, we did what any self-respecting group of people might do. We talked about food instead.

"Easter is a party for to eat of the lamb," the Italian nanny explained. "One, too, may eat of the chocolate."

"And who brings the chocolate?" the teacher asked.

I knew the word, and so I raised my hand, saying, "The Rabbit of Easter. He bring of the chocolate."

My classmates reacted as though I'd attributed the delivery to the Antichrist. They were mortified.

"A rabbit?" The teacher, assuming I'd used the wrong word, positioned her index fingers on top of her head, wiggling them as though they were ears. "You mean one of these? A rabbit rabbit?"

"Well, sure," I said. "He come in the night when one sleep on a bed. With a hand he have the basket and foods."

The teacher sadly shook her head, as if this explained everything that was wrong with my country. "No, no," she said. "Here in France the chocolate is brought by the big bell that flies in from Rome."

Ideas for International Projects

Hi class!

Some thoughts about what kind of information could be useful to us classmates for your Feb 7 question about what aspect of international management is relevant for you:

1. Someone wrote and asked whether the international version of the textbook would work. I didn't know. Maybe you could look into the international aspects of textbook publishing and distribution, including copyright laws.

2. My colleague says that tax treaties with different countries could be relevant to those of you interested in tax.

3. For our accountants, international standards is a big question now. What aspect of this would be interesting and relevant to you, maybe?

4. Do international currency exchange rates affect you and/or your business?

5. Are you trying to get a job overseas?

6. Are you, or one of your loved ones, working to get a visa, or residency, or citizenship for the US or another country?

7. Is language learning a challenge in your life?

8. Are you planing to study abroad? Can you research things that will be important to know about that adventure?

9. Do you have an upcoming international expansion you need to undertake?

10. Are you having trouble understanding one or more people due to cultural differences?

11. Other?