Reason, Stakeholder Engagement / Management and EA
Current issue of the New Scientist magazine has a very interesting cover story on “Seven reasons why people hate reason”. Now, that is a guide I would have loved to have alongside during some rather difficult stakeholder engagements, when I couldn’t stop thinking “If only they could be reasonable…”.
The above cover story is developed through seven micro-essays written on each reason by a separate neuroscientist. It summarises a number of issues about influencing others that we have learnt either by experience or through the practices of organisational change. Practical techniques such as Storming, norming, forming and performing provide us a tool for systematically influencing groups.
At a summary level, seven reasons why people don’t like reason are:
- Reason stands against values and morals (or in my opinion, the existing order)
- No one actually reasons (as illustrated by the micro essay, decision making a complex brain activity. We only use reason to hypothesise about a conclusion or decision that our brain has already reached).
- I hear “reason”, I see lies – We are all familiar with this one. To really capture an organisation’s reality, you need to document the walk the executives walk, rather than the talk they talk.
- Reason excludes creativity and intuition
- Whose reason is anyway? .. or the subjectivity of reason
- Reason destroys itself
- Reason is just another faith
When an EA project sponsor entrusts you to work with his or her stakeholders, they are asking you to lead part of their organisation’s journey from one way of thinking to another. Those of us who have attempted this many times know that the success rate is less than 100%.
What is your experience in this regard? What techniques have you settled on? Is storming-norming-forming-performing enough?
At another time, I will talk about recent thinking in economics about "a society of minds", as described in the book "Origin of Wealth". But for now, I will like to know your experiences in the area of influencing individuals and groups during enterprise architecture engagements.
