Looking for further reading on a concept in organizational psychology
August 29, 2020 8:47 AM Subscribe
The conslusion to this recent article introduced me to the term “substitute focus”:
Social defense systems are insidious. They divert attention from a core anxiety-provoking problem by introducing a less-anxiety-provoking one that can serve as a substitute focus. At our client firm, the core problem was the impossibly long work hours, and the substitute problem was the firm’s inability to promote women.I’m interested in other examples and further reading on the idea of organizations and groups choosing easy problems as a way of ignoring hard ones. In individual psychology I’ve heard of similar concepts like designated patients, and I’m curious about how this works in social and professional groups.
Time and again I've gone back to a thing that worked in a previous setting because it worked, but this new setting is different enough it won't work -- I say that "generals re-fight their previous victory."
People under-estimate complexity (see Dunning-Kruger effect for also over-estimating competence) and accept unknowns as components of risk evaluation, when unknowns should be measured so you know, rather than bet on, the risk.
When it goes wrong, we over-compensate and demand to map out all the unknowns. This over-plan eats time recording things you may never need instead of keeping short feedback loops. A short feedback loop reduces the time from doing something to having information about whether to continue with it or change again.
It's a place of vulnerability to admit you might not be doing the right thing. Change needs to be led and people need to be given permission to vary from what they've previously known they should do to what they need to do now. In fact, knowing you can trust colleagues and partners to learn with you and not blame you when you try something that fails is a vital part of psychological safety. We follow figureheads who sound competent until they're proven not, and then they're scapegoated away, or they've established a cult of personality such that they're bedded in.
posted by k3ninho at 12:29 PM on August 29, 2020
People under-estimate complexity (see Dunning-Kruger effect for also over-estimating competence) and accept unknowns as components of risk evaluation, when unknowns should be measured so you know, rather than bet on, the risk.
When it goes wrong, we over-compensate and demand to map out all the unknowns. This over-plan eats time recording things you may never need instead of keeping short feedback loops. A short feedback loop reduces the time from doing something to having information about whether to continue with it or change again.
It's a place of vulnerability to admit you might not be doing the right thing. Change needs to be led and people need to be given permission to vary from what they've previously known they should do to what they need to do now. In fact, knowing you can trust colleagues and partners to learn with you and not blame you when you try something that fails is a vital part of psychological safety. We follow figureheads who sound competent until they're proven not, and then they're scapegoated away, or they've established a cult of personality such that they're bedded in.
posted by k3ninho at 12:29 PM on August 29, 2020
The book Seeing Like a State by James C Scott talks about something very similar, though it is mainly about when these substitute focuses have unintended side-effects.
The thesis of the book is that states often impose policies on the populace that don't end up working because the state ends up substituting the real problem at hand with the problem of how to make the people/resources/etc at question legible--i.e. how they can be measured, tracked, and managed. These policies focused on legibility often go on to undermine the solutions that are implemented once the phenomena at hand can be tracked.
For example, he talks about how the German state introduced a planned monocrop system of forestry in an attempt to maximize harvesting. So they focused on questions like "how do we make it easier for lumberjacks to harvest trees?" and concluded the answer was clearing all the underbrush. But in doing so, they destroyed parts of the ecosystem that made the trees bountiful in the first place.
Also, I'd be remiss if I didn't mention that the academic article that hbr article is based on is available online. It might be worth looking through so you can see if the authors cite anyone else using that specific concept, or cite similar cases. Here is a link
posted by davedave at 10:36 PM on August 29, 2020 [3 favorites]
The thesis of the book is that states often impose policies on the populace that don't end up working because the state ends up substituting the real problem at hand with the problem of how to make the people/resources/etc at question legible--i.e. how they can be measured, tracked, and managed. These policies focused on legibility often go on to undermine the solutions that are implemented once the phenomena at hand can be tracked.
For example, he talks about how the German state introduced a planned monocrop system of forestry in an attempt to maximize harvesting. So they focused on questions like "how do we make it easier for lumberjacks to harvest trees?" and concluded the answer was clearing all the underbrush. But in doing so, they destroyed parts of the ecosystem that made the trees bountiful in the first place.
Also, I'd be remiss if I didn't mention that the academic article that hbr article is based on is available online. It might be worth looking through so you can see if the authors cite anyone else using that specific concept, or cite similar cases. Here is a link
posted by davedave at 10:36 PM on August 29, 2020 [3 favorites]
Since davedave steered us into social /cultural theory, I'll add this, from an anthropological text by Marilyn Ivy that draws on psychoanalytic criticism. I can't say I fully understand every idea in this book, but it seems like this notion of a substitute focus might be related to the "logic of the fetish." Here are some quotes from pages 10-11:
"The linkage of recognition and disavowal describes what in psychoanalytic criticism is know as the logic of the fetish, the denial of a feared absence through its replacement with a substitute presence."
"This concurrent recognition and disavowal can only be sustained by a certain splitting of the subject, a topological segregation of the subject who knows (something is missing) and the subject who (fixed on the replacement of absence) doesn’t.”
“We could thus say that the formula of fetishism is “I know but nevertheless…”
posted by umbú at 9:49 AM on August 30, 2020 [1 favorite]
"The linkage of recognition and disavowal describes what in psychoanalytic criticism is know as the logic of the fetish, the denial of a feared absence through its replacement with a substitute presence."
"This concurrent recognition and disavowal can only be sustained by a certain splitting of the subject, a topological segregation of the subject who knows (something is missing) and the subject who (fixed on the replacement of absence) doesn’t.”
“We could thus say that the formula of fetishism is “I know but nevertheless…”
posted by umbú at 9:49 AM on August 30, 2020 [1 favorite]
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posted by fingersandtoes at 10:07 AM on August 29, 2020 [8 favorites]