Defensive Reasoning Analysis

Defensive Reasoning Analysis

Most people when faced with their mistakes tend to deny responsibility and seek external reasons for their failures or shortcomings. Chris Argyris, in his article “Teaching Smart People How to Learn” talk about the defensive reasoning mechanism that a lot of professionals use in their work environment. When professional feel the threat of embarrassment or criticism they turn on their defensive mechanism and try to shift focus of attention from themselves instead of embracing the situation and learning from it. Here are two situations that I witnessed or took part in that involve defensive reasoning.

1) I work for a forensic accounting company as a staff accountant. Our company is very detail oriented and for that reason we have a specific set of rules we need to follow. When a senior accountant works on a claim the final procedure is to make sure all the schedules have been Tick & Tied before sending them to a client. Tick & Tie is a procedure where a person who did not work on the claim goes through the schedules and makes sure the schedules flow smoothly and there are no mathematical errors. It is a very serious task that requires time and concentration. This task frequently falls on me, as I am a stuff accountant. This is a very important part of the learning process and very beneficial. I had an incident once where I did not catch a mathematical error and the schedules were sent to a client. The blame for that fell on me. I was extremely upset and defensive about it and did not want to take the blame because I was afraid it would ruin my career. My defensive reasoning was that essentially these schedules did not belong to me and how could I find an error if even the person who worked on this claim for months did not notice it. The reasoning of the senior accountant was that I should have been more detail oriented and asked more questions. Even though I was defensive I still felt like I failed my company, so I decided to clear up the situation. A few hours later, I went back to talk to the senior accountant and resolve the conflict. By being defensive about the whole situation I was missing the opportunity to learn and better myself. It is always difficult to critically look at yourself, but it is essential for the learning process. The senior accountant explained to me that there were key factors that I missed in my analysis and therefore I missed the mathematical error.