Outsourcing our thinking

From the moment we are born, we look to other people for guidance and answers to the questions we have. We fall over in the playground, we run to mum to get it fixed with a kiss and a band-aid. We get bullied at school, we come home for comfort and advice on what to do next time. We want to learn about technology, we go to university and get taught by a professor.

This process of cognitive offloading, continues to extend well into adulthood. "Adults show remarkable flexibility in this ability, typically relying on internal cognitive processing when adequate but turning to external support in situations of high internal demand,” remarks Kristy Armitage. We look to our managers, leaders, personalities, news to make decisions for us. To paraphrase Kant, it’s easy to be immature and outsource our thinking and understanding to others. Also consider that just because you read, talk with others, get a degree, it doesn’t mean you love to actually think about things.

This outsourcing works for us in most cases. We want to lose weight, we search for a nutrition app and use it to guide us on what and how much to eat. What this doesn’t do, is encourage us to explore the reasons why losing weight is important, what it means to us and others, how we think about the resistance we might face in going down this path, and so on. I’ve seen the exact same patterns occur in business. Get outside advice and guidance on a new strategy, but why does that strategy matter to you and your clients?

Enlightenment is man's emergence from his self-imposed nonage (immaturity)
- Immanuel Kant

To actively engage in this way of thinking takes work. It’s difficult. We’re comfortable with where we’re at and taking a different path is often uncertain. There’s no surety on how things will work out, what others’ responses might be. We may also worry about having to answer questions people ask that we don’t know the answer to. Kant talks about this resistance as laziness and cowardice.

A battery of processes and methods have been developed to help people make these steps. In the business world, we use systems like Lean & Agile. In health there are numerous diets and plans to get us exercising. We have religion, mindfulness, stoicism, and many others. With all of these we can easily suffer from doing the process but not making any sustainable change. As I have been thinking on the reasons for this, it appears we should focus less on following a particular system to change our habits, and more on changing our habits of thought.

We are no longer mysterious souls; we are hackable animals
- Yuval Harari

Let’s take the “fail fast, fail often” approach prominent in many business start-up discussions. If we adopt those methodologies blindly, we easily fall into short-termism and create a race to the bottom just to get something done because we can change it later. If we think about what it means to “fail fast, fail often”, we recognise that it asks for an acceptance of failure whilst learning and moving forward. Fail fast, fail often is not an active attempt to fail as quickly as possible. Yet whilst catch-phrases are useful as a shorthand, and allow us to cognitively offload, we all too easily forget the totality of what they once represented.

The outsourcing of thinking will see us adopting processes without understanding their intention. We miss the opportunity to use them as a process to change our habits of thought. We must begin to make moves to apply actual thinking in a world of cautious consideration that rewards certainty in our output. Only then might we be able to emerge from the self-inflicted immaturity that Kant describes.