We tend to hear what we want to hear. In an age of artificial intelligence, limited social capital, and disinformation we’d better understand the echo chamber.
An echo chamber exposes people to information, opinions, and/or beliefs that align with their own views. The result is an amplification of these perspectives and the exclusion of dissenting or alternative opinions.
As service management professionals, we need to understand these echo chambers. They’re everywhere; service desk and incident management, SIAM, DevOps, ITIL, and many other practice frameworks, methods, models, technologies, (yes, even USM)…at the end of the day we’re all groupies.
But living in an echo chamber is like being a groupie for your own thoughts — loving the same old tunes and hoping for an encore but missing out on the musical diversity playing in the rest of the world.
Our tendency to hear what we want to hear is influenced by:
- Confirmation bias, i.e., seeking out information that aligns with our existing beliefs and values
- Selective attention, i.e., focusing more on details that support our perspectives and selectively ignoring or downplaying information that contradicts our beliefs
- Cognitive dissonance, i.e., avoiding the discomfort that arises when hearing conflicting beliefs or attitudes
- Desire for confirmation, i.e., our tendency to seek validation and affirmation
- Emotional influence, i.e., our inclination to hear information that resonates with our emotional state, even if it contradicts objective evidence
Being open-minded and avoiding the echo chamber you’re in takes effort. As for me, I’m well aware that I’m living in a Unified Service Management method echo chamber, and I’ve made a conscious effort to deal with this.
- I’ve continued to seek out other methods and approaches, as well as engage in discussions about technologies, methods, and approaches outside of USM
- I’ve questioned many aspects of USM and continue to cross-reference it with other guidance and sources
- I think I’m pretty objective about USM; (my livelihood does not depend on it)
- I’m still a student of service management and use social media sparingly
- I’m learning how AI works (and doesn’t work) like the rest of us
- I fact-check whenever possible
- I love the dialog!
I’m pretty convinced that the USM method provides the enterprise with the ‘social circuitry’ that’s critically needed today:
- A unified management system can help prevent the isolation of information and encourage broader participation and understanding
- It can help promote cross-functional collaboration and break down silos
- It can create diverse discussion spaces, so people in different roles and with diverse backgrounds can engage with each other
- It can be moderated both to ensure inclusivity and avoidance of echo chamber tendencies
The routines of an enterprise are social circuitry.
USM supports an integral and integrated management approach which restores and optimizes the control over each service team’s contribution to the whole system. A singular normalized management system as an acceptable link is the core concept of the Unified Service Management method, and it is based on the concept of an integral and integrated process architecture.
An integrated, non-redundant process model with 5 processes and a simple set of 8 workflows serve as templates for all daily routines in any service providers’ practice. The management of these routines can be considered the core of the USM method.
But then again, I’m a USM groupie.