The famous Roschach test is probably the most famous psychological test. Patients are shown random images of inkblots and asked to talk through what they see. In the case of this test, it is not really important what the ink blots show, but rather what people see within them. While there have been some criticisms of the technique over the years, it continues to be widely used based on the amount of information that people share as they link into randomness and are asked to see patterns. Recently, when working through an initially elusive problem, we came to realize just how powerful this dynamic is within people as we identified a problem solving anti-pattern we dubbed “Rorschach problem solving”, where people look at the presenting evidence of a problem and project onto it their own biases. Continue reading
Author Archives: Brian
Culture of Blame
Most people who have worked in Corporate America for a few years eventually encounter what is commonly called a culture of blame. Organizations who become more focused on attributing blame rather than focusing on understanding and resolving the actual problems. Even those who don’t actively participate in attributing blame in such environments find that they must adopt a strategy of deflecting blame, which effectively only reinforces the problem. I knew the history of blame and scapegoating had a long history, but I had no idea just how far back this concept goes in our culture possibly as far back as 2500 years.
I grew up at BigVisible
I remember vividly the three month span of May through July 2008. It was probably one of the most eventful periods of my life. First, I completed my MBA from Boston College and later that week my wife and I closed on our home in Brookline. In June I accepted a job with BigVisible Solutions, becoming their 5th employee, and by July my wife would be pregnant with our first child. Looking back at that critical three month period, it feels like more change was crammed into that window than what followed for several years. Professionally, this also began my consulting career as I became an Agile Coach and started consulting with the large organizations that, up until that point in time, I had worked within as an employee. Now, over five years later I find myself leaving BigVisible and returning to the “other side of the table” as the Director of Product Development for Taxware. Those who frequented the BigVisible blog, know I have thoroughly enjoyed writing online, and indeed the very post owes itself to a comment made half in jest in response to the farewell email exchange with some colleagues that it should be the start of a blog post. Continue reading