Learn From People Like You – Learn By Observing People Unlike You

convergence and divergence I have been doing a deep dive on personality types recently. The transition to a free agent career path has imposed a steep learning curve. Lot’s of people will tell you that working independently requires more self discipline. What they won’t tell you is that working independently demands an entirely different sort of self discipline.

The hacks and habits that I had learned previously have not only proved insufficient; in many cases they have proved counter-productive. The habits that lead to success as an employee generally entail suppressing your unique strengths and emphasizing the strengths demanded by your employer. In fact, the ability to (on demand) suppress your areas of divergence and emphasize your areas of convergence is an employment skill in itself. The ability to thoughtfully choose between convergence and divergence is a free agent skill. That may be less true for people who have found particularly fitting professions, but of course the dream-jobbers are not the people adopting free agent life-styles.

The dictum – emphasize your strengths – can however be dangerous. It leads us to seek out people like ourselves and to emphasize divergence at the expense of convergence, rather than thoughtfully switching between the two. It leads us to more isolationism and less collaboration.

How does one discover an optimal balance between convergence and divergence?

What does it mean to switch between the two?

The best principle I have discovered to date is expressed in the title of this post. In the process of traveling deeper and deeper down the personality type rabbit hole I have hypothesized types for nearly everyone with whom I regularly collaborate or socialize. Given a sufficient sample, consistent patterns emerge quite clearly…

People with similar personality types are almost invariably people who speak my language. I can learn from them directly with very little effort. Our conversations feel like I have plugged a matrix jack into the back of my head and I am directly downloading their knowledge. Unfortunately, these people also share my same blind spots.

Communication with divergent personality types is more challenging. Often we don’t speak the same language. If I ask for advice directly, the response I get will feel wrong. Occasionally this reaction is simple resistence, but more often it occurs because our basic mental models are dissonent.

The easy thing to do in such situations is to dismiss the other person’s perspective…to assume I can’t learn anything from someone so different. The more productive response I am learning (and relearning, and re-relearning) is to observe.

More often than not, I can learn from what someone does even if our models for understanding that behavior initially appear irreconcilable. Moreover, if I can develop my own understanding of a particular behavior it will usually turn out that I can reconcile our mental models as well. That process of reconciling mental models is essentially what this deep dive into personality types has been all about.

The Lesson:

Effective personal development demands two distinct learning arcs. The first involves discovering and developing our own strengths. This process can be accelerated by learning from people with similar strengths. The perspectives acquired from these cognitive dopplegangers will click instantly and can often be adopted immediately.

The second learning arc demands that we identify our blind spots. These blind spots tend to reveal themselves through interactions with people operating from dissonant mental models. Though it may seem that such people are too different and have nothing to teach us, we do learn from our interactions with them. By observing divergent personalities we learn to emulate the strengths we wouldn’t develop natively.

photo courtesy of Eddi van W.

by Greg on November 21, 2011

http://twitter.com/danielfschmidt Daniel Schmidt

While the analogy doesn’t completely map, this post reminds me of a challenge in designing user interfaces. It is common that one must design interactions for people with divergent personality types. The correct way to handle it, I think, is similar to how you describe learning from people unlike you. It is a common mistake for a user interface designer to react to what users say about the interface at face value. Even if a user is similarly minded to the designer, their mental model often reflects a limited understanding of how the underlying technology works or of what types of changes are possible. Thus, changing a user interface per users’ literal requests often leads a design astray, to incremental feature modifications as opposed to structural improvements. Instead, similar to how you propose to learn from an unlike person, the designer must observe how users interact with the current interface and must analyze what needs are behind how they say they want it changed. This type of learning leads to how the interface should evolve; It’s the type of design thinking that led to the iPod.
- http://OnTheSpiral.com/ GregoryJRader
  
  Thanks, I would say your analogy maps quite nicely. In particular, your point about incremental modifications rings true. In both cases the literal approach tends to degenerate into something akin to negotiation. I’ll change my perspective this much if you change your perspective that much. I’ll change this feature over here if you will accept that usability compromise over there. In both cases, stepping back and abstracting away from that process of negotiation allows you to see options that aren’t apparent in the literal discourse.
  
  An interesting point that your comment suggests to me – the decision to step back and observe has to be taken unilaterally. If you tried to tried to translate a user’s feedback for him, he would resist you and think you hadn’t been listening. Often they won’t accept your interpretation of their feedback until they see it implemented. Likewise, the decision to step back and learn through observation has to be taken unilaterally. It is only by stepping away from the negotiation that we can demonstrate understanding through action.
  - http://twitter.com/danielfschmidt Daniel Schmidt
    
    Thanks for the reply. I’m happy the analogy resonates.
    
    > If you tried to tried to translate a user’s feedback for him, he would resist you and think you hadn’t been listening.
    
    I’ve had experiences to the contrary. In a previous job, I was responsible for designing the web publishing tools used by an editorial staff. This was by far the heaviest amount of direct engagement I’ve had with users as they literally worked alongside me in the building. They were extremely invested in seeing improvements to their tools as problems led to daily pain in their lives. I found that translating their feedback into deeper problems than they saw and devising solutions beyond what they imagined had a welcomed tangible and therapeutic effect. After earning their trust, I think they recognized that I was in a better position to invision improvements than they were, as long as I demonstrated and understanding of the essence of their issues and showed sincerity in wanting to solve them.
    
    Perhaps this is where the analogy has limits. I interpret the scenario described in your post as occurring when you’re interacting with someone who, while unlike you, has an equally valid vantage point on the matters discussed. In principle, your mental model is not more “correct” than theirs, neither of you is more of an expert or has access to more information. In the case of the user interface designer, they are intrinsically better positioned to know how the interface at hand should be changed than the user — they know more about the technology and have access to an array of user feedback. In a sense, the designer is required to formulate a meta-narrative that accommodates all of the user feedback they receive, not simply an opinion. And if this meta-narrative is conceived rigorously and conveyed diplomatically, most users of the interface will agree with it, and feel grateful that it exists, especially as they see the results.
    - http://OnTheSpiral.com/ GregoryJRader
      
      Two thoughts: It might also be that the users you were interacting with were in some relevant sense, similar to you…at least similar enough to understand your re-interpretation of their requests (your mental models were compatible, though not identical). It might also be that you were demonstrating your understanding through your implementation of their ideas.
      
      Your second point I think is relevant regardless of how we interpret the situation in your first paragraph. The recognition that someone else is somehow “unlike” is a recognition of a type of inequality. You might not be unequal in absolute terms but your divergence suggests contrasting strengths and weakness. If that is the case then you don’t want to compromise by merging the two perspectives…ideally you want to be able to switch between them and adopt the strengths of both.
http://www.newcommbiz.com/ tacanderson

I think the need to either highlight or suppress your natural strengths and inclinations has more to do with the actual job you’re hired to do and less to do with whether you’re self employed or not. BUT, I do think that the difference is that when you’re self employed you have to do a wider variety of things. You are biz, dev, cust support, and finance along with doing your job and invariably this will require you to stretch all aspects of your capabilities whereas when you work in a company it’s often easier to hide some of those weaknesses rather than improving them. This might lead to a poor review but you’ll still be paid the same on your next paycheck.

Regardless I think you’re points are spot on and are crucial for everyone to work on.
- http://OnTheSpiral.com/ GregoryJRader
  
  Yes, this is a nice point. I would add only that when you are self employed there are more degrees of freedom within which to discover “your way” of doing things. It is not a foregone conclusion that you must use the incumbent process. But if you are going to deviate from convention it is helpful to learn why that convention came into existence in the first place.
http://spiritsentient.com JasonFonceca

This is awesome! I especially love the example of how in an employee position, convergence is rewarded, but in a free agent position, it’s less clearly defined, and even counter-intuitive. Thanks for these perspectives.

I’ll offer this, hopefully interesting, related idea:

Life on earth is a shared, relational experience, and because of this it is vital that we do not eliminate our blindspots. It is a primal guideline that we do not become so well-rounded, that we no longer have any ‘driving reason’ to interact with others.

So the cliche to ‘focus on one’s strengths’ could be seen more as ‘focus on things that feel good to you, converging, diverging, or otherwise, and leave gaps and allow space for others to play a role’

This does not mean you’ll never diverge or converge, nor does it mean you won’t associate with those holding different mental models, it means mainly to ‘trust your feelings’ as an over-arching guide, hard-wired within us to ensure our inter-related survival and success.
Example:
Walmart for is not strong in providing ‘timeless, refined luxury’, nor do they seem interested in providing ‘timeless refined luxury.’ I speculate (and could be way off) that they spend little to no resources studying timeless luxury.Is this a blind spot? How does this relate to convergence + divergence? Are they simply realizing they ‘cant/dont want to learn everything’ and are leaving room for others to play a role?
http://www.ribbonfarm.com Venkat

An example of learning a blind spot from observing others who are different might be helpful here.
- http://OnTheSpiral.com/ GregoryJRader
  
  What I had in mind was something like what I described in my post last week using Cal Newport as an example (http://onthespiral.com/life-scripts-role-of-cognitive-blind-spots). He is someone who clearly has been quite successful, and there is a lot of appeal to much of his content, but the way he approaches that content rubs me the wrong way. To my mind, he is doing it all wrong…he assumes the stuff that should be concluded…he ignores the things that need to be justified and focuses on the stuff that could be assumed.
  
  That doesn’t mean that his insight (or his example) is without value. It just means that I need to reverse engineer it to interface with my mental model.
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