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3. The Three Mindfields

The Three Mindfields

For you as a project manager, the subject is engaged thinking and the audience is your team, your stakeholders including your sponsor and hopefully even yourself. By engaged thinking we mean someone who is paying attention to their natural human tendencies for patterned recognition, susceptibility to bias and the powerful influence of emotions. Think of each these three oriented to either the future, the present and the past. Patterned recognition is literally your brain identifying what your next step should be in the future based on the patterns it has seen. Emotions live in the present and influence how you interpret things right now and can be positive or negative. Your biases have a history and reinforce and feed off their mental ancestors. They are clearly from the past.


I call these gifts of evolution – “The Three Mindfields” because like minefields in the military environment patterns, biases and emotions are hidden and encounters with them can be very harmful. Also, just like a minefield, you don’t know that you stepped on one until it’s too late.

0. Future - The Impact of Patterned Recognition
As the human mind instinctively views the world in terms of patterns based on its memory of past experiences, we automatically see patterns in situations and in sequence of events. While this valuable capability is useful in our ability to function day to day effectively, our compulsion to see patterns, which is primarily subconscious, can lead us astray when we analyze problems. Much of project management is a “thinking” activity – planning, analysis, investigation, initial design, proposal generation, specification, business decisions and last but not least, risk management. Proactively coaching and teaching your project stakeholders to know the difference between patterned recognition that supports versus pattern recognition that endangers, is a very good investment. Remember that the brain will continually want to expand its neural network of patterns and will continually seek to create mental shortcuts especially tailored for you to use in the future. Repetition of the unwanted patterns, while being on autopilot, end up being called prejudice and jumping to conclusions.


0. The Past - The Impact of Bias
Bias is an unconscious belief that conditions governs and compels behavior. Almost everything we are involved in is driven by a bias. More importantly, a bias is not a conscious mental process – we really don’t have a role in it. The mind does it mostly without our knowledge or conscious input. Therefore we are stuck with bias, whether we want them or not, and unfortunately they influence everything we think about or do. It is how our mind works. It is routed in our past. Bias enable us to process new information very quickly by taking the mental shortcuts brought to you by patterned recognition. The speed of this process and the fact that it is unconscious (and uncontrollable) have the effect of strengthening and validating our bias at the expense of the truth. In addition, we tend to give a lot of traction to new information that is consistent with our biases. Conversely, new information that is not consistent with our biases is given low value or outright rejected. Either way, on autopilot, it is a “mind” field


0. The Present
Interestingly, the mental trait with the greatest influence over our thinking is emotion. In fact, sometimes, as Daniel Goleman wrote in Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ, emotion is a strong link that hijacks or overwhelms our power to reason. 

Our emotions have projective power over our thoughts. They act as filters to form our desires, furnish our capacities, and to a large extent rule our immediate thoughts. As we encounter fresh situations, become faced with novel problems, or grapple with new ideas; our emotional response to each of these sets in motion the initial allocation of our mental resources. In essence, our first "read" of a new situation is always centered in our emotions, feelings, and attitudes. As such, our emotions are laying the groundwork for the thinking that is to come. This rule of "emotion before thought" is actually quite adaptive. It allows us to act on instinct and initial impressions when we are threatened or in danger. Our emotion provides us with an immediate reaction when there isn’t time to think. 

In addition, our emotions can direct our thoughts longterm. When we feel empathy for another’s plight, our emotion may help us to direct our energies to doing something about the situation. When we feel joy upon discovering a new idea, our emotion may motivate us to make our discovery accessible to others. Our emotions act as magnets to either pull us into action or channel our energies in a particular direction. Our emotions are also and important means by which we evaluate situations and make decisions about what is appropriate in given situation. 

The role emotions play in shaping thinking may account for a large part of why we see a failure of good thinking in our team members. When our consistent expectations for higher-order thinking still don’t translate into our team members consistently using the critical and creative thinking skills we have either conscientiously taught them or we know they have, it may be because their initial emotional reactions are carrying the day. In reality, it is not enough to teach thinking skills, we must also pay attention to the emotions that front the thinking process.

As a project manager, your job is ironically not so much how to show your team how to be an engaged thinker as it is to show them how to detect when they have become a disengaged thinker – maxed out on patterns, oblivious to their biases and overdosed on emotions.

Bill Richardson, PMP

As a top tier Project Manager Coach, Bill Richardson specializes in helping and championing project managers to their personal best. Inspiring greatness for individuals, teams, communities and organizations, Bill raises the bar for top performance. Bill is PMP certified with extensive hands-on experience in leading major technological and change initiatives in the Financial Services industry. He has managed several large-scale Project Management teams in the IT environment including the set up and day-to-day management of centralized PMO functions. Having worked in a major Canadian Bank in senior positions, Bill brings the unique blend of account management, project management and process management to the realm of maximizing the ROI of projects, program portfolios and people. As an accomplished speaker, facilitator and trainer, Bill brings years of accumulated corporate experience and know-how to project management organizations, leaders and practitioners, strengthening vision and competencies, and delivering the right solutions for winning products. Bill Richardson, a principal with Process Design Consultants, can be reached at .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)