performance excellence : mackenzian

Four bright red balloons to the right of the shot. A building name and part of a palm tree trunk to the left. The building is cream/off white. — Photo credit: Tatiana Niño

“Comparison is the thief of joy,” so the proverb tells us.

This saying discourages us from side-eying others’ accomplishments and minimizing our own. It also warns us against envy, the kind of attention to others that corrodes our ability to embrace them and share in their joys without suspicion or spite.

There are great reasons to be careful with comparison: we don’t always see what precipitated the outward advances others make, and as Lisa Nichols says, success often involves incredibly hard, un-glamorous work and a lot of inconvenience.

At the same time, as humans, comparison is one of the basic ways we learn. Small children mirror the expressions, gestures, and language of those around them. They learn from others how to respond to and interact with their environment. And being able to distinguish between this and that, to compare similarities and contrast differences, is a life skill.

Benchmarking, a form of comparison, is a core technique of fact-based management and quality improvement. The Malcolm Baldrige quality improvement community defines benchmarking as “identifying processes and results that represent best practices and performance for similar activities, inside or outside your industry.”

So we search out people and organizations doing similar work to ours, so that we can learn which of their practices, approaches, and outcomes work really well and which we might adapt to our own situation.

We’re looking at others, not from dissociative envy or to minimize our own contributions, but so that we can make more progress more quickly. In short, benchmarking is a way to take the stairs two at a time and rapidly build on others’ success.

Who we compare ourselves to and who we benchmark our work against are important decisions, and neither of them wipes out our need to do our own work!

Apply this to your own situation and see what changes. Do you have colleagues in a similar environment? Competitors to learn from? Does your industry have expectations of or performance standards for your work? If there aren’t industry standards, are there any fair expectations for your geographical region? Use these standards to assess yourself and plan for progress of your own.

Last month, Aeon Magazine published a provocative column from psychologist Robert Epstein titled, “Your brain does not process information and it is not a computer.”

In the column, Epstein pushes against the dominant metaphors of recent brain research, including computing, algorithms, and memory as storage. He explains that the metaphors for brain function have changed over the millennia, from fluid to mechanical to computational: each new metaphor makes new discoveries accessible to scientists but stalls their understanding of brain features that the metaphor can’t accommodate. And he suggests that alternative models such as embodiment will open up new insights for the field.

Reactions to Epstein’s article on the Aeon website and Facebook page are emphatic and vigorous. Whether positive or derisive, they’re as educational as the column itself: one respondent wrote, “You are witnessing a sociology of science drama!” We’re witnessing a field wrestle with how its members’ brains interpret incoming evidence on experience and learning.

“All that is required for us to function in the world,” Epstein writes in his article, “is for the brain to change in an orderly way as a result of our experiences.”

We don’t know things in the abstract; we come to know through experience. And the conversation around this article makes clear that even with all that we do know, the brain’s functions are still mysterious to us. Our metaphors and our prejudices work together to set our cognitive horizons, what we can perceive and what, beyond our horizons, we can’t even imagine is real or significant or useful as we engage our surroundings and seek to understand them.

Theologian M. Shawn Copeland includes Bernard Lonergan’s definition of the perceptual horizon in her book on embodiment, Enfleshing Freedom: Body, Race, and Being:

By horizon, I mean ‘a maximum field of vision from a determinate standpoint.’ What and who is outside the range of that field is eliminated from my knowledge and interest, care and concern.”

We each have cognitive horizons, and even though fundamentalism tells us it can teach us all the truth we need, we neither perceive nor know all.

We can stretch our horizons, continually expanding what and who we include in our field of perception: Earth is round, and there’ll always be more for us to learn over the edge of the sea. When it comes to knowledge and experience, intellectual humility just makes sense.

I’m defining intellectual humility as a continuing action, not a state. I’m defining it as the practice of holding yet stretching beyond the representations of the world fixed in creeds, organizational policies, and habits so that we can observe, interact deeply, and experience ordered change as a result.

So many interpersonal and social conflicts arise when we trade curiosity and humility for control and violence. My impulse is to drive in the opposite direction: to look for ways to replace custom with evidence-based action and trade hunches for as much knowledge as I can find.

One of the principles of NIST’s Malcolm Baldrige Performance Excellence program is data-driven decision-making—management by fact. It involves prioritizing experience-based learning, being willing to review what you and others are actually doing and not only what you planned to do, and what results you reap from that activity.

It’s a good way to approach business and social sector work, and it’s also a good way to approach personal life.

Give it a try in every sphere you can.

Comparison and benchmarking: related, not identical

Intellectual humility