More On Congnitive Myopathy

I was in a conversation with a colleague recently. We were discussing the importance of Group Think and how to avoid it during investigations. As we talked I had an epiphany: Group Think, Tunnel Vision and Myopic thinking can be distilled down to one term, which is Cognitive Myothapy. (I just did a quick Google search and the term "cognitive myopia" already exists, so I am going to lay claim to Congitive Myopathy, caps and all!)

At any rate, during this discussion I referred to, my colleague shared with me his thoughts on Cognitive Myopathy. He decided that every time he runs an investigation, he tells everyone to check their old paradigms at the door. He also said, if they insist on sticking with their old paradigms, that he requires them to produce the data to prove those paradigms correct. He gave an example of a massive investigation he was involved with.

Let's call my colleague "Kris" (that's actually his real name). He had a group of engineers, scientists and operations people trying to find the root cause of the Loss Event that had occurred. There was a great deal of equipment involved. Each piece of equipment had an "owner" responsible for it. As the group was building the Fault Tree and certain pieces of equipment came up as hypothetically contributing to the Loss Event, there were vehement denials. Kris would simply tell the equipment owner(s) that he had no problem with their assertions, but that he would include that equipment on the Fault Tree until data had been produced to support those assertions. Clever, eh?

I thought this was a masterful way to get the equipment hypothesis on the Fault Tree without having a blood letting take place. Once on the Fault Tree, you don't ever take off the hypothesis, you just upgrade, or downgrade the Confidence Rating or Fault Value (read as probability), assigned to it. No harm, no foul.

Kris is a great investigator, but I believe he is even better at facilitating difficult investigations. Doing so requires that the facilitator know how to recognize the potential for, and manage Cognitive Myopathy. I thought this was one of the most diplomatic ways to handle a difficult situation regarding an entrenched paradigm I had ever heard of. I'm going to use it myself.

So just remember, if you choose to ignore the potential for Cognitive Myopathy to creep into your investigations...

...Let the blood letting begin!