Have you ever used or done something based on intuition, experience or what you think is just common sense, and then found out that someone had given that something a name, studied it, tested it, researched it - and you never knew until you were lucky and happened on an article about it or heard someone talking about it?
Well, that recently happened to me too, as a result of my recent pursuit of readings in Social Psychology (Here is a really good starting textbook if you are interested).
When we facilitated negotiations, established and led cross-functional project teams, designed and led workshops on strategy, scenario planning, innovation and alliances, we always thought about the different current beliefs, values and attitudes of each individual in the room, in the teams, at the table and in the organization - and perhaps most importantly, as designers and facilitators we had to consider our own as well.
We knew we had to consider in our design and facilitation how those different beliefs, values and attitudes could be “suspended” or put aside in ways that enabled the negotiation to be successful, the team to function effectively and efficiently, an alliance created and launched adding value for all parties, or workshop participants ending the day(s) with work they could all accept and implement.
We didn’t have a name for it, but we knew we had to deal with it or all bets were off, especially when dealing with negotiations, scenario planning and strategic alliances!
And as I talked with my friend and collaborator Steve Barth over the past year, I realized there has to be deep implications here for Organizational Design.
Well, I have an email subscription to TED’s Edge Conversations and on August 22, 2014 I received a link to an Edge Conversation with Mathew D. Lieberman entitled “Latitudes of Acceptance” - and I finally had an understanding of the basis and name for the problem.
“I'll tell you about my new favorite idea, which like all new favorite ideas, is really an old idea. This one, from the 1960s, was used only in a couple of studies. It's called "latitude of acceptance". If I want to persuade you, what I need to do is pitch my arguments so that they're in the range of a bubble around your current belief; it's not too far from your current belief, but it's within this bubble. If your belief is that you're really, really anti-guns, let's say, and I want to move you a bit, if I come along and say, "here's the pro-gun position," you're actually going to move further away. Okay? It's outside the bubble of things that I can consider as reasonable.”
“We all have these latitudes around our beliefs, our values, our attitudes, which teams are ok to root for, and so on, and these bubbles move. They flex. When you're drunk, or when you've had a good meal, or when you're with people you care about versus strangers, these bubbles flex and move in different ways. “Getting two groups to work together is about trying to get them to a place where their bubbles overlap, not their ideas, not their beliefs, but the bubbles that surround their ideas. Once you do that, you don't try to get them to go to the other position, you try to get them to see there's some common ground that you don't share, but that you think would not be a crazy position to hold.”
And there it was - in two short paragraphs. I decided to dig deeper.
The original work and new theoretical framework was developed by Muzafer Sherif and was introduced in the 1961 Social Judgment volume (Sherif and Hovland) in the Yale series on attitudes and communications. And the theory did not just deal with acceptance, but also with latitude of rejection, and latitude of non-commitment – and made the concept even more encompassing and compelling, at least for my work.
The second theme of Sherif was ego-involvement - not from the Freudian context - but rather referring “…more generally to the “involvement of self or personal involvement…”
Read the complete conversation with Mathew Lieberman here and there is a link to the Edge video there as well - It’s is well worth your time!
Links follow to some selected works if you are interested in learning more. Start with the PDF download from the University of Chicago.
Download at University of Chicago of a 1992 reprint of a chapter from essays in honor of Muzafer Sherif
Social Judgement Theory, Wikipedia - The name chosen for Sherif's new attitude theory
Attitude, Ego-involvement and Change: Sherif and Sherif, 1976 (out of print and expensive, see if your library can get it on an inter-library loan)
Latitudes of acceptance and rejection and the belief-disbelief dimension: A correlational comparison. Powell, Fredric A., Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol 4(4), Oct 1966, 453-457, Abstract.
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