
A meeting of people and their laptops. Maybe they need their laptops for some reason related to the content of the meeting. Maybe for some other reason. Hard to say.
In a 1945 monograph, Karl Duncker reported several experiments that demonstrated what he called functional fixedness. [Duncker 1945] Functional fixedness is our tendency to fail to recognize creative uses for objects when we know of — or shortly after we've been reminded of — conventional uses for those same objects. It's one of what we now call cognitive biases, which cause us to make systematic errors of thought or perception.
For example, everyone recognizes that coins are money, and that we can make purchases with them; not everyone recognizes that coins make effective doorstops when wedged into the space between the hinged side of an open door and the jamb. Upon seeing this "trick" for the first time a typical response is surprise — in part because of functional fixedness. (Light reading: "Ten Uses for Coins")
Much has been written about functional fixedness, especially in connection with creativity, because it can prevent people and teams from finding innovative solutions to important problems. But functional fixedness also has a dark side. It causes us to interpret the behavior of others in terms of the goals that those behaviors usually serve, even when those behaviors are serving a very different goal for the person who's using them. Here are three examples. I'll use fictitious names for people: Adrian and Brook.
- Reserving a meeting room or conference facility
- The usual way to reserve a facility for a meeting is to sign up for it using scheduling software. Another perhaps more effective method of reserving meeting space is to schedule a regular meeting in that space for the entire foreseeable future — six or twelve months. The meeting thus serves the purpose of reserving the meeting space, which for many regular meetings, can be more important than any item that ever appears on that meeting's agendas.
- Functional To exploit functional fixedness,
use an everyday behavior
for some other purposefixedness causes us to interpret meetings as meetings, rather than as a means of reserving meeting facilities. - Asking for information
- Usually, when we ask someone about X, what we want to know is X. But sometimes Adrian might ask Brook about X not to find out about X, but to determine whether Brook knows about X.
- Functional fixedness prevents us from seeing this transaction as something different from an attempt to learn about X.
- Delegation blockage
- Usually, when a manager delegates a task T to someone, the purpose is to ensure that T will be completed. But sometimes the purpose of assigning a task T to Adrian is to keep Adrian busy, perhaps as a distraction, or perhaps to ensure that Adrian is unavailable for some other task T'. Maybe the manager doesn't trust Adrian to handle T', or the manager has promised T' to Brook. In such cases, the manager likely cares less about task T than about keeping Adrian from working on T'.
- Functional fixedness can prevent us from seeing delegation as anything other than a way to partition responsibility.
When Adrian's phone rings, and she excuses herself from the meeting to take the call, we tend to assume that it's an important call. But what if Adrian has an app on her phone that makes fake calls? Yes, fake call apps do exist. They "work," in part, because of functional fixedness. Next in this series Top
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Related articles
More articles on Workplace Politics:
Managing Pressure: The Unexpected
- When projects falter, we expect demands for status and explanations. What's puzzling is how often this
happens to projects that aren't in trouble. Here's Part II of a catalog of strategies for managing
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The End-to-End Cost of Meetings: I
- By now, most of us realize how expensive meetings are. Um, well, maybe not. Here's a look at some of
the most-often overlooked costs of meetings.
Appearance Anti-patterns: II
- When we make decisions based on appearance we risk making errors. We create hostile work environments,
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and the substance of things can help.
Three Levels of Deception at Work
- Deception in workplace politics is probably less common than many believe. Still, being ensnared in
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of deceptions: strategic, operational, and tactical.
Quasi-Narcissistic Quasi-Subordinates
- One troublesome kind of workplace collaboration includes those that combine people of varied professions
and ranks for a specific short-term mission. Many work well, but when one of the group members displays
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See also Workplace Politics and Critical Thinking at Work for more related articles.
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And on December 20: Contrary Indicators of Psychological Safety: II
- When we begin using new tools or processes, we make mistakes. Practice is the cure, but practice can be scary if the grace period for early mistakes is too short. For teams adopting new methods, psychological safety is a fundamental component of success. Available here and by RSS on December 20.
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