Actually, that’s the short version. Here’s the long one.
Any opinion, value, product or service that achieves critical mass in terms of popularity will therefor become true (or false), or valuable, or not valuable (you get the idea) REGARDLESS of its actual characteristics.
Thus, you have pet rocks, Twitter, and other social media, other fads, myths about learning and training.
You probably don’t know that I’m the author of The Complete Idiot’s Guide To Consulting, which is now out of print. I’m still interested in the consulting business, and recently came across a conversation with a “consultant” stating that organizations resist change because of fear, and a few other generalizations that suggested HE knew organization’s problems even before meeting them. Yuck. So, this is what you do upon being retained.
1) Assume that the organization has rational, coherent reasons for the things they do and how they do them, even if, on the surface, those things don’t make sense to you. SEEK THEM OUT.
Fortune cookie talk involves a phrase which a) sounds a lot like the generic sayings one gets from opening a fortune cookie (no insult to the cookies intended) ; b) sounds profound (and isn’t), and c) actually means nothing if you think about it for a minute.
Fortune cookie talk is common with new agers, the new breed of elearners, marketers and the like, and makes up a significant portion of “educated” traffic on microblog platforms like Twitter.
For any phenomenon there will be a multitude of factors that caused the phenomenon. Therefore, any attempt to explain that phenomenon by invoking a single variable will always be wrong, and worse, misleading.
This is an exceedingly important element. We constantly look to change something by altering a single variable, then end up wondering why the results don’t change. It’s simple, though. No single variable, on its own, is responsible for any singl result. There are countless examples.
…are people who are ignorant about statistics.
There’s an old saw that goes: There are lies, damn lies and statistics, implying that statistics can be manipulated to “prove anything”. Not true.
The only people who can be fooled by statistical manipulation are those that know nothing about statistics and/or research. If you possess the knowledge, then you know what questions to ask, and how to interpret the answers.
This is a deceptively simple concept that affects much of our lives. It explains that from a distance, or with people we don’t know well (and we may not know many people well) everyone seems psychologically intact, or “normal”.
Until you know people well, they will not tend to display their abnormalities, or neuroses.