Reducing Bias In Organizations

On Reducing Bias In Organizations

We must believe in something and we organize ourselves around our beliefs. As things change and that something we believe in begins to fail us over time, we find it difficult to agree to organize ourselves in better ways to search for alternatives to believe in. We have become that which we choose to ignore as well as that which we choose to see and believe. This is the essential basis of organized bias. Within this essay I discuss some of the problems and tendencies of unchecked organizational bias as well as potential solutions to the problems that we face with respect to this endemic problem.

By Roy D. Follendore III

June 7, 2006

Of course we see it all the time in the news. Discussions are rampant with it and every disaster is full of it. We blame our calamities on the failure of morality, race, religion, sex and mechanical things that fail us. We do not seem to realize that we are deaf and the noise of bias is deafening. In order to gain and maintain pubic safety and security within organizations, we need to manage the problem of bias.

Perhaps bias is a primitive vestige of a survival mechanism. It certainly seems that organizations are not asking the big questions these days. They are not looking at themselves as biased decision makers and with regard to their bias, they are not looking at how they structure themselves to do things. In order to understand how to produce the right solutions, the leaders of organizations first need to ask the right questions. For instance...How are executives to create a new generation of organization that consistently minimize the inherent bias of data, information and knowledge within organizations? How are we to prevent internal bias from being externally manipulated by others? Moreover, how are we to properly and consistently measure bias? How is it possible to measure qualities such as truth in information? How are we to maintain the proper relationships of diversities of views and opinions that range in form and function, efficiency and effectiveness within theoretical debates when the entire organization is at stake? How should organizations manage the reduction in the internal noise that prevents us from maintaining that proper posture that is so necessary for unbiased discrimination of truths from their surrounding operational noise?

All of these represent extremely important questions that impact all modern organizations and yet the potential answers are being ignored. Human beings are essentially communicators and as a communicator I submit that we are not validity checking on the ways that we organize groups. We are ignoring the fact that we live in an age where our most important decisions are being made through what can only be described in terms of organizational alchemy. It is amazing just how much people within organizations are willing to participate in the experimental decisions of leaders, simply because they are able to project the aura of all knowingness. Our most adroit leaders throw their most trusted and savvy representatives into a pit, in order to thrush out the issues without regard to variability and uncertainty of the group mix. We expect the best results and yet are continually surprised when it does not happen.

This occurs because we do tend to ignore the fact that the organizational solution set begins with our mindset. For instance, an ordered military mindset tends to overcome perceived obstacles through the almost religious notion of a chain of command rather than operating through a scientific understanding of certainty. The idea that that any decision is better than no decision comes to us by way of that military mindset towards crisis management. Today their adage "Kill the bastards and let God sort it out." can be easily translated as "Give no more or less than the absolute solution that our chief has asked us to provide and let our President figure out if it is worth while." This may be that "can do" orientation of organizational management upon which many organizations were originally founded but it is also a mindless process that has too caused so many horrific organizational problems. Too often the captains of organizations seem to have lost the notion of the existence of objective 'truth.'

If we are actually going to be able to organize our analysts in ways that produce better and true results then it is clear that we need to better understand how groups of people can work together to form consensus. We need to implement better ways in which people who have different kinds of knowledge can organize themselves.(1.) We need find ways to reward the composition of those groups as well as the individuals within groups who have shown objectivity in producing unbiased and truthful products. We need to properly represent the organizational mission 'objectivity' of issues while reaching truthful conclusions. To accomplish this we need to find new ways to identify and train catalysts who can help to accomplish this and reward them for their constancy.

In past discussions on topic the probable role genetics might be playing within organizations, I proposed that a proper organizational catalyst might be a dyslexic communications consultant, a group of trained dyslexics, or a group of dyslexic visual thinkers who have the natural tendency to reverse ideas and meanings but who also recognizes this knows how to communicate the creative value and potential importance of issues both forward and backward. (Read: "Thinking Like Einstein by Tom West) Such people can and often already do successfully suggest to groups that their thinking is biased. My suggestion is that instead of this happening as fortunate accidents, we look into using such 'gifts' as organizationally engineered benefits to the process and products. As 'bias coordinators', these gifted individuals can become scientifically responsible for seeing through the almost cryptographic veil of problems, insuring that problems have been thoroughly reviewed and fairly rated with regard to the perfection of unbiased group productivity.

Gifted people who both have the innate ability perceive the means as being just as important as the ends, and who can help groups validate their orientation are real time mangers of decision making. Procedural bias hinders our ability make organized decisions as it reduces our ability appropriately communicate both our individual and group orientation of thinking. This is why it seems that most of our time seems to be wasted in meetings, because it is. In spite of this the major problem that we constantly face is that people in positions of authority fail to see the advantages of tracking of our decision making processes. They may see the tracks of decision making as against their best interests, unnecessary and even detrimental to progress. "People are constantly pulled between profiting from the things they know will reap rewards and exploring new options – but it is exploration that uses high-level regions of the brain, according to a study by UCL (University College London) scientists published in Nature on 15th June." (See: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/06/060618234508.htm) This is the case where progress is represented in terms of the discrimination of noise in order to acquire the necessary knowledge for decision making and where decision making for them, right or wrong, is the principle and primary objective.

How we organize ourselves and how we organize our communication of data, information and knowledge are different things.

Communication and cryptography are intimately interlinked in a number of ways. Both are ultimately all about the the discrimination of noise and knowledge and both bias organized decisions and actions in direct and indirect ways. I have found that problems of key management involves the biased products of key creation and distribution. This is partly because cryptographers have traditionally been more interested in the issue of key existence then they have been in key creation. Cryptographers have isolated their roles and duties within communication. They narrowed their interests and concerns as though do so limits the potential of organizational bias. Executive leaders do much the same thing as they define the goals and processes of decision making. They often prefer to limit interaction within organizations in mechanical ways, while failing to recognize that people within organizations do not truly operate as mechanical parts. Organizational failure often occurs because the mechanical analogy eventually fails. Broadcast and point to point connectivity are equally biased forms of communication. As an organized society, executive leaders are not trained to realize that they have established a formal technical bias that delineates their practice in terms of functional mathematical logic. They essentially lump data, information and knowledge into to a single class of transactions that they represent in their minds as a communication machine. They are inappropriately choosing to discrete mechanical processes over rational communication objectives.

Through advances in cryptography, I have created and patented better technical ways to manage the core communication processes and reduce bias. Simple point to point metaphors are mechanical and do not adequately represent complex issues.

The best metaphorical story which came to mind is "The Man in the Iron Mask" by Alexandre Dumas. This story was based on a famous French legend about a prisoner whose existence was so sensitive that he was forced to wear a locked mask at all times, within a cell with multiple doors. In thinking about this story I wondered who would be trusted to hold the single mechanical key to that mask and came to the conclusion that I would not want to be that person. The solution would have been to create the iron key from a mold, lock the man into the mask and then melt down the key. I would then break the mould up into pieces and have my most trusted subordinates store the parts that when combined create the key. This is the analogy of the way that people work together to reach consensus within a decision making process. If you think about the origins of bias in this way, there is in a tangible sense a masked man who is locked within every group and each member is expected to have a portion of the proper mould and the ability to help forge the decision making key.

The point of this is that there exists this tangible dynamic mechanical process of the key creation which must be maintained so that if our 'man in the iron mask,' is to be undone. To release our masked prisoner, we must call in all of the disassembled parts in order to assemble the original mould and create a fresh new key. This means that the paths we choose can become a part of the key recreation and in doing so this solution can remain understandable and rational. Through it may be considered by some to be indirect and counter intuitive it is also quite possible to model. This potential for modeling the rationally structured relationships that occur within the relationships of data, information and knowledge was a principle concept through which I have even designed and patented my "KeyByte" patent. (See: http://www.noisetoknowledge.com/keybyte.htm)

In thinking about the notions of organized decision making bias I have intentionally returned to this example for a valid reason. There can be a multitude of reasons why such counterintuitive ideas are important to the way in which people view concepts. In this particular cryptographic case it means that there can be an infinite number of keys created on the fly for many different rationalizations for modeling unbiased organizational structures. Through the creation, distribution and management of the inherent mould it becomes possible to securely embed the reasons for creating that lock which secures our organizational masks. It would be wonderful if we could do this just as dynamically with inter and intra dependent groups. The potential implications of unbiased decision making systems are boundless and I believe that this is what we may find future organizations must become. This does not mean that a certain amount of bias will not exist, but it does mean that bias will not be synonymous with randomness. At some point, humanity will look upon the way in which decisions are made today and gasp at the expedient ways that we arbitrated made and communicated our biased choices. Just as it is possible to securely create the multitude of reasons to create the key to unlock and remove the prisoners mask, it is also possible to unlock and remove our mask that limits our best group decisions.

With respect to data, information and knowledge, we so called organized human beings exist as though we have been forced to wear iron masks. We are all prisoners who grown up and have only been allowed to witness and communicate about the truth that our mask allows. The weight and scope of our disability has always been there, to the extent that most of us may be completely unable to recognize that the mask has always been there. For this reason, some people don't see the potential that is involved in the process of organizationally creating and maintaining the control of our own organizational decision making keys. They see the iron key as the means as the only necessary end game solution.

Fortunately there are however subpopulations of people who do see things differently. Visual thinkers and dyslexics don't necessarily see the world in the same way. Dyslexics exist as a significant population because they have been successful. I believe that dyslexics have been successful in maintaining the intellectual balance and by reducing intellectual bias within organizational performance. (2.)Author Tom West, of the Kraznow Institute at George Mason University, a man who has also written the pivotal book on the subject; "In the Minds Eye," has shown to all that dyslexics have a celebrated history of dramatically contributing to the progress of Science.

For the various reasons that I have given I believe that we can and should consider the use the influence and talents of different kinds of individuals to unlock the organizational iron mask that has taken such a hold on and narrowed the value of our organized products. I also feel that we both can and should provide technical tools to support this approach. I believe that it may very well be worth while to investigate the potential use of dyslexics and visual thinkers as decision making catalysts, in order to reduce bias and make better decisions. I have felt that by doing this we can and will be able to achieve appropriate and measurable changes in the performance of analysis and decision making process. The long term effects of doing this will be potent because both visual thinkers and dyslexics possess the hard wired differences necessary for more creative and thus more consistently repeatable tends toward processing ideas more openly. It is within the group dynamic that dyslexics, along with organizational communication training, can contribute reliable catalysts for a deliberate positive changes in group dynamics and decision making processes. I have found that by opening up and maintaining new expectations to the light and scrutiny of different perspectives, we can, should and will see the reasons why regardless of our good intentions, the products of our group intelligence as well as our subsequent unfavorable reactions to improving the mode and methods of the true source of our catastrophic failures have not been intelligent.

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(1) Managers seem to think that human beings tend to simply react to stimulus while groups simply fall into place and organizations go undirected. Most expect this even though they really can't afford it.

(2) Some research indicates that up to 10 percent of people in English speaking countries have some form of dyslexia. ( See: http://www.dyslexia-teacher.com/dyslexia_japan.html and http://www.dyslexia-at-bay.com/whatdysl.htm ) Some believe that Dyslexia is a gift. (see: http://www.dyslexia.com/qagift.htm) .

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