Titus Mehta

One must firstly understand the term "Cherry Picking" and its origins completely to assess its pro's and cons. I believe that Peter Suber in his book "One-Sidedness Fallacy" who's title rightly mentions too, cherry picking can be a one sided approach to selecting something, It does not mean that your argument or premise is false or wrong it only means that it is incomplete or not fully sound. Take for example the literal interpretation of the term, to pick cherries - as a visitor to a farm, if I were to pluck the good looking and shiniest cherries from the tree confidently believing that they will be the best or tastiest, I may be in for a surprise. For in the eyes of the farmer it isn't about the outer appearance only but also the ripeness of what is happening inside the fruit also the consistency in texture, shape, etc could tell us which fruits are the tastiest of the lot. As we put this same logic to our work - life situations, we many times realize that perspectives of various viewpoints play an impact in the things we do, invest or participate in. This can also crucially decide the fate of your decision to be a success of a fail, a profit or a loss. Therefore, let us further understand how this selection process can affect or be beneficial for our project. This shows us that 2 or more arguments will help us achieve a reasonable amount of information making our decision one that has a strong structure of key points that will create a stronger and effective impact. Cherry picking, may not be the best approach. However it may be essential on certain aspects and in certain areas to an extent. It may also help in the elimination of creating waste. For example in selecting a quick lean project at the workplace during a brainstorming session individuals may bring to the table a varied number of problem areas to work on. Engineering on some engineering issues, customer service with some customer related problems, admin with some administrative processing problems, etc. though each area is crucial and important you as a manager can look at the future interest of the companies goals which might not be in the light yet and cherry pick on a particular departments issue to work on. This may not go down well with the other departments but explaining to them how a future goal which could cause damages to the organization can be averted by giving priority to this project might justify your choice over the groups. This could also play out on a flip side where a bias manager who leans more toward marketing goals and sales targets or HR practices and other such roles could cherry pick a situation based on benefiting his or her personal achievement of respect among his subordinates or teams, also to benefit the teams by achieving their targets and making life at work easier for them first, etc. This can have a detrimental effect on the organizations critical areas that need to be addressed first. Ironically, I too have faced this recently where in I led a meeting cherry picking areas I enjoy working on such a creative solution areas for a companies improvement strategy for the future. My passion being creative innovation and brand identity management and all things creative from a user interface and experience point of view, I completely missed the boat and luckily a close friend on the clients team pointed that maybe we need to also focus on some backend as it has been causing some concern. I had to apologize and found out that an innovative change in the ERP system and CRM system was actually the only innovative solution they required, having completed these two tasks we saw massive growth and true value creation was achieved. Therefore, it is very important, when selecting continuous improvement projects we need to assess the idea from various perspectives not just ours and see if we are in any way cherry picking where it is not the right approach. We must also always remember the quote that was made famous by Edwin Rolfe and Lester Fuller in 1946 “You can never tell a book by its cover.”