Entitativity
Your mind is constantly managing cognitive load.
Navigating the complex social systems within your life, team, and organization makes that a challenging task.
When these factors consume bandwidth, you commit mental lapses like putting the coffee carafe in the refrigerator.
One of the ways your brain navigates the seemingly infinite volume of stimuli is through heuristics.
Entitativity is an example of your brain leveraging heuristics to simplify complexity.
Entitativity is a social processing where your mind perceives a group as a single thing rather than a collection of constituents.
While you might not naturally consolidate the individuals on your team into a singular “team” identity, what about other departments?
Without intentional effort, you naturally create entitative groups: IT, government, millennials, etc.
Entitativity enables you to make sense of complex social dynamics with less cognitive demand.
As a leader, entitativity poses a delicate balance.
On one hand, relying too much on entitative processing can be risky, unreliable, and prone to inaccurate bias-driven decisions.
On the other hand, part of your job is to create the conditions for your team to connect as a unified, entitative group.
Thoughtful leaders actively generate entitativity within their team.
Simultaneously, they challenge the default patterns of their mind in over-applying entitative processing.
You must understand, young Hobbit, it takes a long time to say anything with Cold Brew,
- Morning Cup