Monday, I returned to my virtual desk after five weeks of family leave. One of the first emails to greet me was a tirade from a superior in my organization accusing me of undermining our organization and threatening action against me unless I immediately responded to their email. All this based on their interpretation of a letter from a support congregation questioning a new process of financially supporting international workers like me. They assumed I expressed disagreement with this new process since the letter said the church had had a conversation with me. They had copied the interim director and co-associate director of my team along with my immediate supervisor. I was floored.<\/p>\n
My interim director had sent me an email immediately upon receiving this tirade\u2014don\u2019t respond to this person. \u201cInstead, please share your experience with me of what unfolded with this church.\u201d So, I began recounting the conversation, a conversation where I had actually expressed my support for this new process and encouraged the congregation to give it a chance.<\/p>\n
All of this has happened in the same week as we have been reading \u201cThinking Fast and Slow\u201d by Daniel Kahneman. In five sections, plus a helpful introduction, conclusion, and appendices, Kahneman dives into the world of better understanding errors of judgment and choice, with particular attention paid to what he describes as both the marvels and flaws of intuitive thought. He contrasts the fast thinking of intuition (which includes perception, memory, and the mental shortcuts of heuristics), naming it System 1, with the slow thinking of effortful deliberation or System 2. \u00a0He then, in Part Two, elaborates and updates the work he and his thinking and writing partner of fourteen years, Amos Tversky, investigated during the 1970s on how people make judgements, especially in uncertain circumstances, making use of different heuristics. In Part Three he jumps into the limitations of our minds\u2014understanding this limit to be our tendency to overestimate and be over-confident in what we think we know and understand about the world. This argument forms part of the foundation of what he contends in Part Four\u2014we\u2019re not really as rational in our thinking as we would like to think, even in topic areas like economics which seems so objective. He uses two species to bring home his point\u2014the made-up Econs who live in the world of theory, and Humans who engage reality. Thinking of problems in isolation from each other and the choice of how one frames a situation both influence the way in which decisions are made by these species. This part of the conversation brought me back to Friedman\u2019s emotional processes and systems theory. In the last section, Part Five, Kahneman explores the fascinating tension between the experiencing self and the remembering self. Understanding this tension opens the pathway to better understanding the experience (or lack thereof) of well-being. I\u2019m very curious to look more deeply at this section based on his comment that this has implications for social policies aimed at the well-being of communities (an aspect of my NPO). In the conclusion, Kahneman the consolidates the implications stemming from the distinctions he has outlined in the earlier sections between the two systems of thinking, the two species, and the two selves. In the Appendices he shares the two key articles written by him and Tversky that laid the foundation for this book and Kahneman\u2019s Nobel Prize.<\/p>\n
Kahneman\u2019s work has helped me to slow down, to move from System 1 intuitive interpretations to more deliberate System 2 considerations, of the surreal start to my week. I am still not certain what is going on in the mind and spirit of my superior. But, as I slowed down in my evaluation of the situation, I could see how the intuitive side of my mind wanted to draw on the affect heuristic and base my response on my feelings of severely disliking the way this person made assumptions about me and my actions (I was also aware of the defended leader dynamics in me based on last week\u2019s reading of Walker). I\u2019m grateful for how slowing down to System 2 thinking helped me stay mindful of our cohort\u2019s conversations, reflections, and written engagements with one another over the past few weeks. I became aware of how I am carrying you all as a community inside me, and to attend to the community of the Trinity who sustains me. This helped me to stay in a less anxious place (Friedman) and write what I think was a more helpful response to my interim-director\u2019s query. The full outcome remains shrouded for now. But I feel better equipped to pay attention to how I am making my judgments and decisions and to the need to slow down when under pressure.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Monday, I returned to my virtual desk after five weeks of family leave. One of the first emails to greet me was a tirade from a superior in my organization accusing me of undermining our organization and threatening action against me unless I immediately responded to their email. All this based on their interpretation of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":141,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[236,2052,2071,2072,2053,1718],"class_list":["post-27817","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-friedman","tag-kahneman","tag-system-1-thinking","tag-system-2-thinking","tag-thinking-fast-and-slow","tag-walker","cohort-lgp11"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27817","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/141"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=27817"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27817\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":27818,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27817\/revisions\/27818"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=27817"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=27817"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=27817"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}