Changing behaviour >> Elephant Analogy 1: The Rider, the elephant, and the path

There’s nothing like a good analogy to explain things clearly. I found this analogy for change management in Dylan Wiliam’s book ” Leadership for Teacher Learning”. He summarises an analogy which was based on Plato’s ‘Chariot Analogy‘, which formed the basis Haidt’s (2005) analogy of the rider and the elephant, and was then added to by Heath and Heath (2010) in the book ‘Switch’. Wiliam summarises the analogy as follows: Continue reading →

The notion of “complexity bias” seems to be around a lot in blogs, pinterest posts and Twitter, but I have not been able to find a lot of academic research into it. In fact, the only common definition seems to be this one: “Complexity bias is a logical fallacy that leads us to give undue credence to complex concepts.” It a ubiquitous definition, and could perhaps come from Farnham Street blog, but it probably doesn’t.

“Complexity bias” is such an engaging idea though because feels like it make sense. So while I have not found anything beyond blogs to back it up, I do think it is useful to me because it is something that I do in certain situations and contexts: I overthink things, I want everything I do to be amazing, well thought through, complete, wonderful and the best. But sometimes that stops me from just doing things quickly. Perfection is the enemy of good.

I made the little poster below in Adobe Spark, and I often look at it when I indulge myself again in the fog of complexity thinking. It was inspired the article: “The 1 Question That Helps Me Beat My Procrastination” , by Haley Goldberg.  The one question you ask yourself is: “What would this look like if it were simple/fun/easy?” Continue reading →