One of the things that struck me the most when observing managers at work, and in particular newly instated managers, is how managers become more and more out of touch with the realities of work. There’s actually a lot of research on that from quite a bit of different perspectives. Safety research for example has interesting things to say about “work as imagined” and “work as done”. This doesn’t happen over night of course, but rather a slow process - and I found it has a lot to do with the shift from doing and experiencing to planning and monitoring. In many ways, this is a shift from intuition based thinking to analytic type II “slow thinking” which is very different and requires very different ways of working. Unfortunately, most managers don’t get this and continue using their intuition instead of formal models when conducting planning and monitoring - with disastrous results. This isn’t an argument against intuition or analysis, but one should be aware which method they are employing and act accordingly. As an example, it is interesting to explore the stark difference between estimates on individual level where intuition works very well and on the team/group level, where our intuition fails.
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