Ninety percent of the medical doctors who have taken the Kairos Assessment appear in the Sequential preference. That's in comparison with almost 60 percent of the general population assessed as Sequential preferent.
Medicine is data and practice driven. Hospitals don't have signs in the lobby saying, "Move fast and break things." As much as they depend on electric lights, under the rich illumination of the operating room, doctors don't repeat to their residents Thomas Edison's admonishment, "Rules? We have no rules. We're trying to get things done."
When I began work with the head of a trauma center, I asked what had her attention. She said, "We have to get people to slow down." They were literally an emergency room; and nonetheless, lives and limbs were saved through deliberate practice.
When I encounter an MD with an Associative preference, my first question often is, "How was Organic Chemistry?" Organic chemistry, even at the undergraduate level is complex, minutely precise, tedious, and the materials and processes can be highly dangerous if not handled with great care. And outcomes don't arrive with an intuitive flash. Chemistry Nobel Prize recipient Ada Yonath took 30,000 tries over decades to map the structure of the ribosome.
In organic chemistry, there are a lot of rules around getting anything done -- most of them unforgiving. One doesn't get into medical school without a top grade in Organic Chemistry as an undergraduate. The answer to 'how was Organic Chemistry?' from an MD with an Associative preference often begins with them turning a little pale from the memory of how arduous it was.
Doctors don't get to wake up in the morning and say, "I got this idea for a new treatment in a dream. I'm going to try it out on patients today." Doctors may wake up in the morning thinking, "I've been seeing a pattern. I'm going to start gathering data to see if the pattern gets stronger, and search for anyone else who may have data on this or something similar."
Do you have your attention on things that benefit from slow and deliberate thinking?
Knock on the door of your Sequential process and ask it questions like these. Our cognitive processes find questions irresistible, and yours will invite you in.
Evidence
What metrics can we use to know we are doing our best?
By what authority do we measure ourselves?
How do we know our metrics are accurate?
How do we resolve dissonance among measures: for example, if customer satisfaction goes up, but ROI goes down?
How effective is our time management?
What systems do we use to track and evaluate our use of time?
How do we evaluate processes?
Will more resources devoted to studying our process make us more effective? How will we know?
What is good enough? How do we know we’re good enough?
Process
What are our explicit rules and processes? Do they all make sense? Are they up to date? Do we actually follow our own rules and processes?
What are our hidden or unwritten assumptions about rules and processes?
What are our rules and what are our guidelines?
How much explicit training do we do, and how much do we rely on our own and others’ experience?
Who is responsible for process management?
Do we have adequate contingency plans?
What could better planning, deployment of resources, or time management allow us to do better?
Is there an identifiable risk reduction and ROI that would be improved by more resources devoted to planning and evaluation of processes?
Between this and the last post, practice becoming more conscious of your Associative and Sequential processes. Practice using questions to toggle back and forth. Feel the different experience of each cognitive state.
Be sure to gift the assessment to a friend this holiday season.
Warm regards,
Francis Sopper
REFERENCED IN THIS LETTER:
Ada Yonath: https://www.kairoscognition.com/blog/919a8a31af9f8856