Psychology – Jeremiah Stanghini

The Key to Making Good Decisions

Sorry for the clickbait-y post title. To be honest, I toyed with the idea of having a 15-20 word headline and then decided against it. Of course, there are lots of important factors that go into making good decisions and there’s been plenty of that written about online (including here on this very website). There is one thing, there is one piece of advice, though, that I don’t often come across when it comes to how to make good decisions. In a word — Fermi-ize. Huh? Yeah — Fermi-ize.

A few weeks ago, the superforecasters on the Nonprophets podcast were talking about the possibility that the current POTUS will be impeached. Part of this is because it’s “in the news” and partly because this is one of the forecasting questions that’s currently up on the platform. The framing of the question is important (as is the case with any decision!). The question asks when will POTUS cease to be POTUS (before inauguration day 2021, on inauguration day 2021, or after inauguration day 2021). We’ve got all the important components of a good forecasting question (i.e. falsifiability, etc.).

If you think about the different buckets to that question, you’ll notice that different things would have to happen for the question to resolve in a different bucket. For instance, some sort of untimely death would mean the answer is before inauguration day. So, would impeachment/removal. On inauguration day could mean that POTUS loses his bid for re-election. After inauguration day could mean he’s re-elected. It could also mean that there’s some sort of power struggle with the 2020 election whereby the vote is so close, that we find ourselves with some sort redux on Bush v. Gore (2000).

Circling back to the superforecasters podcast, listening to them (disclosure: I’m a superforecaster) discuss the prospect for impeachment was fascinating. And the main reason is because of how they were fermi-izing the problem. Right, I didn’t explain that earlier. Fermi is one of the scientists responsible for bringing us the nuclear reactor. You may have come across a question like, “How many piano tuners are there in Chicago?” This kind of a question is sometimes referred to as a Fermi problem, whereby you’ll need to breakdown the question into component parts. What’s the population of Chicago. How many people live in each house (on average). How many households have a piano (on average). How often is a piano tuned (on average). Etc. Etc. That’s Fermi-izing.

So, on the episode, listening the superforecasters Fermi-ize the prospect of impeachment — it reminded me of how decisions in the C-Suite unfold. Often times, there are a lot if inbuilt assumptions in a question that might be unbeknownst to all the people sitting around the table. In fact, it’s possible that the question might even be completely wrong. Maybe the question (if we put it back in the political terms of POTUS above) being asked is, will the House vote to impeach POTUS. Many folks think that this is a “slam dunk” that the House will do that. But, what if you’re interested in whether or not POTUS will remain as POTUS. Well, then, you’re probably more interested in whether the Senate will vote to remove POTUS from office. However, even that question might be wrong. For instance, what if the House votes to impeach, and before the trial can be had in the Senate, what if POTUS resigns (!). If you’re focused on the prospects of a Senate trial, you’ll miss the possibility of a resignation. If you’re focused on the trees, you’ll miss the forest.

The key to making good decisions is asking good questions. And when it comes to answering good questions, you’ve got to breakdown the question into its component parts.

Whose Thinking Is It, Anyway?

Consciousness has always been a topic that’s fascinated me. How do we know that we’re aware? How do we know that other people are aware? Where is consciousness? Who’s voice is that in my head? Do other people have voices in their heads? Fascinating.

There are a couple of things I’ve come across recently that, if this area is of interest to you, too, I suspect you’ll find compelling. The first comes from Seth Godin’s podcast, Akimbo. In particular, the episode from a couple of weeks ago. At the end of this episode, a listener asked Seth a question about consciousness. That is, “what do you think consciousness actually is.” Seth’s answered reminded me of some of the stuff I’ve come across, but the example he cites is on-point. In the context, he’s talking about the idea that the voice in our head might be a vestige of history:

Let’s think about a football game. Let’s think about the idea that there’s instant replay and there’s play-by-play and there’s the colour commentator. Now, let’s imagine that a play has just unfolded before our eyes. What happens is, the QB drops back to pass, he fakes a hand-off, he throws a long bomb, it’s going, it’s going, it’s a TD. Now, you just heard what the play-by-play announcer was saying.

“2nd and 13, Pickett under pressure, puts it up deep, and oh, what a play by Brandon Llyod. An incredible catch. A one-handed leaping catch by Brandon Lloyd.”

“This is one of the best catches you’ll ever see. Ever.”

You heard it after you saw the play on the field. Of course you did. Because the announcer also saw the play as you saw the play and after the fact, the announcer made up all of this story about what you just saw. For a moment, imagine what it would be like if it was in the reverse order. Imagine what it would be like if when you were watching a football game, the announcer, sped up by 10 seconds on the track, said what was about to happen and moments later, it did happen. How weird would that be?

Well, we have come to be comfortable with the idea that we say stuff in our narrative brain, in our conscious brain, and then we do it. But it’s probably true that it’s the opposite case. That at a base chemical level, much quicker than we come up with a narrative, we’ve already decided to do something. We’re already doing something. And then, only then, only after that fact do we come up with a narrative. It’s possible using fMRI and some thoughtful mind experiments to prove that this happens all the time. That really what we’ve got in our head is a play-by-play announcer. It’s possible that this evolved over time. That human beings talked to themselves. And that that was the version we had first of what we now call consciousness. But then, our brains evolved to the point where we could talk to ourselves without talking out loud. That language leads to this notion that we have a little man or a little woman in our head who’s telling us what to do. But, we don’t.

Another example that comes to mind comes from another love of mine — baseball. When a pitcher throws the ball, it reaches home plate really fast. It’s so fast, in fact, that the batter doesn’t have time to think about the pitch and then decide to swing. There technically isn’t time to make a decision to swing (or not swing). So what’s happening there:

(With pitch velocities ranging between 80 to over 100 miles per hour, it takes approximately 380 to 460 milliseconds for the ball to reach the plate. Minimum reaction time between the image of the ball reaching the batter’s retina and the initiation of the swing is approximately 200 milliseconds; the swing takes another 160 to 190 milliseconds.) And yet, from the batter’s perspective, it feels as though he sees the ball approach the plate and then he decides to swing. (This discrepancy in the timing of our perceptions, though ill-understood, is referred to as the subjective backward projection of time.) One of the all-time great hitters, Ted Williams, once said that he looked for one pitch in one area about the size of a silver dollar. Not to be outdone, Barry Bonds has said that he reduced the strike zone to a tiny hitting area the size of a quarter.

Even though players know that their experience of waiting until they see the pitch approach the plate before making a decision is physiologically impossible, they do not experience their swing as a robotic gesture beyond their control or as purely accidental. Further, their explanations for why they swung/didn’t swing will incorporate perceptions that occurred after they had already initiated the swing.

We spectators are equally affected by the discrepancy between what we see and what we know. Take a group of diehard anti-free-will determinists to the deciding World Series game and have them watch their home team’s batter lose the Series by not swinging at a pitch that, to the onlookers, was clearly in the strike zone. How many do you think would be able to shrug off any sense of blame or disappointment in the batter? Indeed, how many would bother to attend the game if they accepted that the decision whether or not to swing occurred entirely at a subliminal level?

Worse, we think that we see what the batter sees, but we don’t. Not needing to make a split-second decision, we can watch the entire pitch and have a much better idea of its trajectory and whether it is a fastball, curveball, or knuckleball. And we judge accordingly. How could he have been a sucker for a change-up, we collectively moan and boo, unable to viscerally reconcile the difference in our perceptions. (Keep this discrepancy in mind the next time you watch a presidential debate from the comfort of your armchair. What the candidates experience isn’t what we onlookers see and hear when not pressured for a quick response.)

Outcomes vs. Outputs – The “How’s” of Decision-Making

Recently, I read (er, re-read?) Phil Tetlock’s Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction. This book came out a couple of years ago (and was co-authored by Dan Gardner, whom I believe is a senior advisor to Prime Minister Trudeau – or was at one point, I’m not sure if he still is). Anyway, the book is excellent and I highly recommend it to anyone who wants expand their understanding of decision-making.

The reason I’m mentioning this book today is because of one of the chapters: The Leader’s Dilemma. The crux of the chapter is a juxtaposition between the central theme of the book – individual superforecasters and their ability to remain steadfast in the face of uncertainty and the fact that leaders need to take action. They can’t waffle in their decision-making – they have to choose. The chapter invokes a German General from the 1800’s, Helmuth von Moltke. To be frank, I haven’t read many books (or seen many documentaries/videos, for that matter) about military leadership and strategy, so this was new to me.

You: Jeremiah, why are you talking to us about German Generals from 200 years ago?

Me: I’m going somewhere with this, I promise, just hang with me for a bit.

So, Moltke. He had a particular way of leading that is often characterized by the German word Auftragstaktik. In English, we know this as mission command. Essentially, this style of leadership boils down to top-down intent, but bottom-up(ish) execution. For example, the leader of the military would say that we need to expand our defenses west, but the leader wouldn’t say how we’re going to do it. Instead, the order makes its way down the hierarchy – absent the how, every time! – until someone would then be executing on that order.

The key here is that there’s no prescription for how to do something when the order is given. The emphasis is on the outcome. Expand our defenses west. Invade that country. Secure that town. OK. So, why is this important? Moltke: “In war, everything is uncertain.” If a General were to give prescriptive orders about how to takeover a bridge, there will absolutely be things that occur on the ground that aren’t accounted for in the General’s orders. Maybe there’s heavy rainfall, which presents a problem for the troops who were told to stake out in the nearby field and wait for the cover of night to execute the plan. Maybe when they arrive, the enemy has three times (!) as many soldiers there to defend the bridge. What will they do? Well, they’ll have to callback to HQ, as everything’s being run through the General.

/It’s at this point that, if I were doing a video of this, I’d splice in a scene from Family Feud where Steve Harvey (or Ray Combs) points to the big board and says, “Show me… waiting for orders from HQ when you’re under heavy fire and have no place to go…”

/Stttttttttrrrrriiiikkkkkkeeee

Yeah, that strategy will not pan out – every time. OK, so we’ve established that in the military, they push decision-making down the hierarchy. How does that relate to us, you might be asking?

Well, how many things do you do at work where you have complete control over how you do them? We need to brief the Director, quick write a briefing note.

/Stttttttttrrrrriiiikkkkkkeeee

What if a briefing note isn’t the best way to brief the Director? What if the Director would rather a quick 2-minute meeting to explain what’s going on, rather than you spending the next 2+ hours crafting the ‘perfect’ briefing note, only to have your manager spend an hour after that re-writing the whole thing? And how does it make you feel after you’ve done all that work, had most of it invalidated by your manager, and then the Director calls you and your manager in anyway because he doesn’t want to read 300 words on the topic, but instead, wants to have a quick chat about it.

Or let’s say you’re working in operations – the front lines – where the proverbial ‘government meets the Canadian.’ You’re working with a Canadian who needs a new passport, but is having trouble getting it. Your performance metrics are clear – you’ve already spent 20+ minutes on the phone and if you stay on the phone longer, you know that you’re not going to be able to meet your performance objective because this call will inflate your average time on call.

/Stttttttttrrrrriiiikkkkkkeeee

Clearly, time on call isn’t the best metric to use to evaluate folks who answer calls from Canadians, but the order has already been given from down on high (we need to spend only x-amount of time on the phone with Canadians because it’s part of my performance agreement that our average call-time improves year-over-year).

Or how about this – the DM has decided that the department is short on funds so we’re going to reorg two branches – they’re now going to become one branch. *gasp* The ADMs filter the message down to the DGs that they want these directorates axed, the others merged, and some others expanded. The DGs filter that message down to the Directors about which divisions will be axed, merged, and expanded. The Directors filter that message down to the managers about whose role will be shifting, reassigned, or expanded. The managers filter that message down to their teams. And at the end of this exercise no one is happy.

There were no consultations, no engagements, and no empowerment. People were told what they were going to do and how they were going to do it. No one considered that the people they were managing might have ideas about how to do things better. The person filtering the message down was always assumed to be ‘right.’ That’s no way to run a firm and it’s certainly no way to manage change in an organization. Push the “how” of decision-making down the hierarchy. The people you hired are smart (otherwise you wouldn’t have hired them, right?). Let them prove your decision to hire them was a smart one. They can’t wait to do it.

This post originally appeared on GCconnex/GCcollab.

Mutual Trust or Mutual Bust

When I’m walking on the sidewalk, I trust that the cars will drive on the road. When the cars are driving down the road, they trust that pedestrians will walk on the sidewalk. When I sit down at a restaurant to eat, I trust that the server will bring me the food as quickly as possible. When the meal is finished, the server trusts that I will pay my bill. When I board an airplane, I trust that the two people in the cockpit have completed the requisite training to pilot the aircraft safely to our destination. When the pilots sit in the cockpit, they trust that passengers will sit quietly in the cabin and not interfere with the pilots’ ability to fly the plane.

What’s the common denominator in all these circumstances? Trust. More specifically, mutual trust. Both parties trust each other. Now, you might be asking yourself – why?

Why is it that when I walk down the street that I trust cars to stay in the road? Why is it that when cars are driving on the road, they trust pedestrians to stay on the sidewalk? Well, you could argue that the trust is there because the rules (i.e. law) stipulate that that must be what happens, but that doesn’t explain the whole picture, nor does it explain most of the picture. The reason that pedestrians and cars alike trust each other is because there’s a body of evidence that suggests they should trust each other.

There’ve been numerous occasions for each where they’ve walked/driven down the road and the other has walked/driven down the road. After years and years of repetition, after years and years of reinforcement that this is how we do things, cars and pedestrians have grown to trust each other that each will continue to abide by the norms of sidewalks and roads.

So, what happens when there isn’t trust between the parties? What happens if the pedestrians and the cars didn’t trust each other to continue doing what they’ve always done? Well, there’s going to be elevated levels of stress for both the cars and the pedestrians. The people walking down the street will constantly be looking over their shoulder or gazing out into the road and wondering whether that car will swerve up onto the sidewalk. The cars driving down the road will wonder as they approach a pedestrian whether or not that pedestrian will lurch out into the road.

That doesn’t sound like a state of being in which anyone would want to exist.

Trust is foundational to this interaction. Trust is foundational to a lot of interactions. And when it comes to the workplace, trust is *it.* It is the be-all, end-all. If you want your people to do something, they need to trust you and you need to trust them. Nobody wants to work for someone they don’t trust and who could blame them. They’d never know when that “car” is going to swerve and hit them on the sidewalk.

I can respect that you might not be fully convinced – heck, I really backed into that change management tie-in, eh?

Well, here’s a better example. Life and death. Literally. Remember the Ebola outbreak from a few years ago? There was some excellent reporting on this and in fact, quite a wild story as to how the ‘world’ was able to get a handle on what was happening in West Africa. If you have the time, I highly encourage taking the time to listen to or read the story.

The key piece I wanted to highlight from the story is that there were people from the CDC (i.e. government) who were dealing with an emerging situation. A situation that could easily cost the lives of hundreds or thousands (!) of people. They were racing against time and against the norms/mores of the cultures of West Africa. There were people who were predisposed to mistrust anyone from outside their village, much less people from any sort of “government” agency. In order for the CDC to get to do what it needed to do, it had to gain trust extremely quickly. The one problem is “gaining trust” and “quickly” are usually antithetical. You usually aren’t able to gain trust quickly, but the CDC had no choice. This was life and death. In the end, the folks from the government saw a window into doing this (I won’t spoil it for you, as it’s worth it to listen or read it).

The point here is that trust is foundational. If you are trying to move people (and what is change management if it isn’t moving people?), you must – must, must, must – gain their trust – FIRST. If you haven’t done that, then anything you try and do will be twice as hard and take twice as long. Do yourself – and your people – a favour: first, earn trust.

This post originally appeared on GCconnex/GCcollab.

The More Things Change, The More They Stay The Same… Wait What?

Change management is the cornerstone of shepherding an organization through and to change. And since change is the only constant in life [side note: how many articles are there out there about change management where you think Heraclitus is not mentioned?], it seems pretty important that we understand the best ways to go about doing that.

When I think about the times that I’ve aided in an organization undergoing large-scale change, I think about the principles used to help bring that to fruition. Some lean on approaches like Kotter’s 8-step change model while others lean on approaches like ADKAR. For as long as I’ve been part of making change happen more smoothly (or teaching it to university students!), I don’t remember coming across this approach –

Emphasize What Will Stay the Same

Wait, what? We’re changing things here, why do we want to talk about what’s staying the same? We need to sell our people on this new vision and way of doing things. Won’t this torpedo our efforts?

Well, as it happens, no, it won’t. An excerpt [Emphasis Added]:

A root cause of resistance to change is that employees identify with and care for their organizations. People fear that after the change, the organization will no longer be the organization they value and identify with — and the higher the uncertainty surrounding the change, the more they anticipate such threats to the organizational identity they hold dear. Change leadership that emphasizes what is good about the envisioned change and bad about the current state of affairs typically fuels these fears because it signals that changes will be fundamental and far-reaching.

We announce that a change is coming and then people begin to fear the ramifications of losing what it is that they know. We then think that by emphasizing how things are going to be better (read: different) that this will then onboard people to this new vision, when instead, we’re giving them even more reason to dig in their heels against the change. Wow. It reminds me of those times in parenting when, as the parent, you want things not to go a certain way and by espousing that wish, you unintentionally expedite its occurrence.

What should we do, then? Well, how about:

In overcoming resistance to change and building support for change, leaders need to communicate an appealing vision of change in combination with a vision of continuity.

Let’s see if we can apply this knowledge:

We’re going to centralize all IT within the federal government. While this change will help us realize efficiencies upon efficiencies, our main goal is – and always will be – to continue to deliver exemplary service to Canadians.
We’re going to fundamentally improve the way that public servants apply for positions within the federal government. This change will allow us to better track the knowledge and experience of public servants and of the kinds of skills required of hiring managers across the government. While the interface for jobs.gc.ca will appear different, you’ll still be able to offer hiring managers the same information you did previously (more efficiently to boot!).
We’re going to Make America Kind Again increase the level of respect within the federal public service. You’ll still come to work and work on all the same cool things that you get to work today, but now we want to emphasize actions and behaviours that end harassment, curb negative behaviours, and multiply positive behaviours.

Can you think of other examples where you can apply this approach in your upcoming (ongoing) change management efforts?

This was cross-posted to GCconnex/GCcollab.

The Inevitability of Change Forces Faith in the Flexibility of the Flow

You awake on Monday morning ready to meet the day. You’re excited about work today because your new manager is finally ready to join the team. You feel pretty happy to prepare to change your signature from A/Manager back to Senior Analyst/Officer/etc. You get yourself ready to go and make your favourite breakfast because – why not – today’s a great day!

You catch the earlier bus into town because you wanted to make sure that you’ve crossed all the t’s and dotted all the i’s before the new manager arrives. The clock strikes 9 and it’s time for the weekly management meeting. You grab your notebook and head for the elevators – happy that this will be the last time you attend one of these meetings as the manager.

You exit the elevator and head to the boardroom. The DG and the Directors are already there. You take your seat as the remaining managers file into the room. The DG begins the meeting and you can hardly contain yourself. You’re already looking forward to this afternoon when you can begin working on that side-of-the-desk project you’ve been eyeing for weeks. Your reverie is cut short because you notice your Director is now speaking and they start talking about one of the files from your team. (Ha! Soon to be something that your new manager will be concerned with, not you, you think to yourself.) Your Director takes a beat and looks at you, so you add a bit more colour to what they were saying before the conversation changes gears.
The Director begins to speak again and you hear something, or at least you thought you heard something. The Director begins speaking about the new manager status except they’re not doing it in a jovial tone. And then you can feel the blood draining from your face as you quickly realize what the Director has just said. “The new manager we’d hired to fill the vacancy won’t be able to join us. So, you’re going to be filling in as the A/Manager… indefinitely.”

How could this happen?! The Director told me that it would be for just a short period of time. Just a stop-gap to fill-in, until they could bring in someone more permanent. I just want to be the person who does the stuff, I don’t want to be the person who manages the stuff. How could my Director do this to me?!

All kinds of thoughts rush through your head, all sorts of scenarios cascade in your head from the potential avenues you could take. Instead, you steel yourself in your chair, feign a smile and say, “Happy to help the team however I can.” The Director gives you a nod and moves onto other business.

————–

There’s a lot to unpack in the above narrative, but I want to draw your attention to the change management aspects (naturally).

Clearly, the “you” in this have lots of feelings about what’s happening (and not happening) in your work environment. You probably feel rather miffed to find out you’ll be continuing on in the manager’s role at the management meeting. Why didn’t the Director tell you before – that seems pretty disrespectful, doesn’t it?

Well, what if I told you that the incoming manager’s mother just had a heart attack and so your manager-to-be had to the cancel their plans for the assignment as your new manager from another government department because all their energy is now spent either at the hospital with their mom or at home with their kids? And what if I told you that the heart attack happened early this morning, so your Director only just found out about it and only just had time to tell the DG and the other Directors, but wasn’t able to squeeze in five minutes to warn you. And, what if I told you that the Director has also been dealing with a messy divorce, so they haven’t been in their usual tip-top shape, when it comes to being on top of some of the “human” elements to managing.

————–

We’re supposed to spend 37.5 hours a week working. Some spend more, some spend less. That’s only 33% of our waking hours (assuming that we each get 8 hours of sleep, which is probably laughable, given the statistics). That leaves 67% of our waking hours for non-work things. That is a lot of time to get into other kinds of activities. Some have hobbies like playing guitar or learning how to cook. Others volunteer at the local YMCA and others still, have all sorts of things going on in their lives from sick kids to sick parents to relationships beginning and relationships ending. The varieties of experience for the 250,000+ public servants are endless. The point I’m trying to make is that when we come to work – home office or shared office – we bring our whole selves.

In a perfect world, senior management would draw up an ideal change management strategy that fits into the broader departmental strategy. In an ideal world, you’re given plenty of notice about changes to the files you’re working on and the role you’ll play for the team. In an ideal world, people wouldn’t let that angry conversation they had with their spouse or stranger that morning interfere with how they interact with their colleagues the rest of the day. In an ideal world… an ideal world wouldn’t exist. The world is chaotic. Full stop.

Now, just because the world is chaotic doesn’t mean we shouldn’t still have expectations or goals. But, when it comes to those goals, we need to be more flexible and fluid. For those that prefer metaphors – think of yourselves as Niagara Falls, rather than the pond at the end of the lane. Niagara Falls almost never freezes, whereas the pond down the way freezes whenever the temperature drops below -10°C for a few days. Flexible vs. rigid.

So, how do you know if your goal is too rigid? Well, here’s two ideas (hat tip to Jon Acuff):

You become angry when someone interrupts it.
You beat yourself up if you miss it.

Think back to the narrative above. You were rather upset when you found out you wouldn’t be able to go back to “doing” stuff. Was your goal too rigid? Maybe. How do you think the Director felt when they found out that the manager-to-be’s mother was preventing the manager from coming in? I’d like to think the Director was sad to hear that, but maybe the Director was beating themselves up because they weren’t able to meet the goal. Was the goal too rigid? Maybe.

————–

Change management initiatives are happening all the time and they’re happening all-around us. What if, instead of thinking, wishing, and hoping that these initiatives were 100% successful based on the plan as written on the page, what if we recognized the rigidity in that and cut each other some slack. What if we, instead, expected some degree of rockiness. What if we built into our expectations that there is going to be some many things that occur unexpectedly and what if we made it our goal to respond to those happy accidents with grace and humility. I wonder what change management in the Government of Canada would look like if we all became ambassadors for flowing with the river.

This post originally appeared on GCconnex/GCcollab.

Silence Isn’t Golden: Everyone Thinks You Should Speak

You’re sitting in the weekly management meeting and the senior person at the table is running through the agenda at a fevered pace. Decisions are being made, left, right, and center, and you can barely keep up with what’s going on. Wondering if you’re alone, you look around the table and it seems that most of your colleagues are following along splendidly. All of their body language indicates that they know what’s going on and are in agreement. As you didn’t have time to read the accompanying materials, you think that it’s probably just you.

How many times have you found yourself here? Watching something happen and assuming that you’re the only one that disagrees with the way things are going.

Hopefully, not too often, but my guess is that 100% of the people reading this have, either: a) found themselves in this scenario, or b) know someone who’s found themselves in this scenario. OK, OK – 99% of you.

As it happens, there’s a name for this – pluralistic ignorance. Huh? Yeah, it’s a bit heavy on the jargon – both in its name and often times, its description. In fact, there’s even disagreement from academics about how to describe it. That’s why it’s often best to explain the phenomenon through examples. There’s the one I shared in the opening, but let’s be honest, that was only a few sentences and you probably spaced out reading it [are you back?].

OK. Here’s a quick video example of one I’ve come across that usually helps crystalize the concept for folks.

https://vimeo.com/63062967

The video shows a few minutes of Prof. Dan Ariely’s class at Duke. It’s only about 4 minutes, so go ahead and give it a quick watch (I’ll wait).

Seriously, g’head and watch it. [Note: it’s a Vimeo link, so many apologies to any of you unable to watch it because of a firewall/blocked IT.]

~~~

Pretty cool, eh? Now, I bet some of you might be saying to yourself, “Yeah, but I would have spoken up and asked the professor what the heck he was talking about.” Sure, maybe you think you would have or maybe you actually would have. The point here is that most people don’t or won’t. This post is supposed to be about change management, after all, so let’s bring it home with something a bit more on-point for all of you.

If you’re reading this, you probably have some experience in change management. Whether you’re a seasoned executive who’s led through countless mergers and acquisitions or a student who’s recently joined the team and are finding yourself super-bored (i.e. you’re on GCconnex/GCcollab reading whatever you can get your hands on), you’ve come into contact with change management. Yes, you have. Depending upon where you are in your career, your examples might be more personal (hello Generation Z!) or professional (hello seasoned executives).

So how does this relate to pluralistic ignorance? Remember that example I shared in the beginning where you found yourself at the decision-making table, but you weren’t quite sure what the heck was going on? That’s exactly the kind of meeting that might happen before a major change. Everyone appears to be in agreement with what’s being said. However, what’s really happening is that most people aren’t in agreement with what’s going on, but think that everyone else is in agreement with what’s going on, so they bite their tongue. Then what happens? Well, then, your group becomes a statistic. And not a good one.

Do you want to become a statistic? Do you want to continue to perpetuate the terrible idea that any change in an organization is doomed to fail more than half the time? I sure as heck don’t. So what can we do? Well, we can speak up. We can prove ‘pluralistic ignorance’ wrong by raising our hand in the management meeting. We can speak up when we don’t understand what’s happening or don’t believe we’re headed in the right direction or think that our decisions aren’t based on foundational data.

This post originally appeared on GCconnex/GCcollab.

Quick Thoughts: Planning Fallacy, Sci-Fi, Gendered Language, and Scarcity/Excess

As I look to breathe some life back into writing, I thought I’d take a quick peek at some of the “drafts” I had saved from when I used to write regularly. Fortunately, there aren’t too many there. In the interest of trying to start fresh, I thought I’d do a quick post addressing some of these ideas kind of in the same way that Wikipedia has stubs.

Planning Fallacy: Many years ago, I wrote about the planning fallacy as part of my series on cognitive biases (i.e. how to make decision better). Something I didn’t talk about in that post was the difference between a 7-day and 5-day workweek. Let me explain. For those that go to university, everyday is eligible for a “work” day (i.e. homework). Many things are due on Monday morning and rather than push to complete something on Friday afternoon (or night?), students will often be writing things on Sunday night. Not only am I drawing on my experience as a student, but I’ve been teaching for the last 7+ years and I can say with authority, if I give students a full week (7 days) to complete an assignment and make an assignment due at 1159p on Sunday night, 50%+ of the class will complete that assignment sometime on Sunday. I’m digressing a bit from the point. So, we get used to this “7-day workweek” to complete things. When we move into the work world, that “week” shifts from 7 days to 5 days (and even less in cases of holidays or even less than that if you take into account mandatory meetings, etc.). So, when someone estimates how much time they’ll have to complete a work product, they’re used to (primacy effect?) how they were estimating when they were a student and don’t take into account the ‘truncated’ week.

Science Fiction, Humans, and Aliens: In those sci-fi movies that have some form of alien (i.e. non-human), often times, there’ll be a scene where the humans are kept in a cage. It made me think about how humans keep some animals in cages (i.e. zoo). Maybe to a different species, we (humans) would be treated in the same way we treat animals.

Gendered Language: There was a journal article from a few years ago that caught my eye. Here’s a bit of the abstract:

The language used to describe concepts influences individuals’ cognition, affect, and behavior. A striking example comes from research on gendered language, or words that denote individuals’ gender (e.g., she, woman, daughter). Gendered language contributes to gender biases by making gender salient, treating gender as a binary category, and causing stereotypic views of gender.

Like I said yesterday, if you’ve been following me for any sort of time, this bit about our words having an effect on us shoudn’t come as a surprise. However, this journal article is strong evidence to keep in your pocket if you need to point to something evidence-based in a discussion.

The Problem of Excess: Another good journal article that I’ve been saving for over 5 (!) years. /facepalm. I still remember my first grad school economics course and the professor was explaining the fundamental principle that underlines economics — scarcity. I wanted to raise my hand and disagree on the merits, but it didn’t seem appropriate. I can see and understand how scarcity came to be the dominant theory of the day, but a part of my being just feels that that interpretation is… near-sighted. Seeing this journal article a few years after that class highlighted a different perspective. Here’s a bit of the abstract:

This article argues for a new branch of theory based not on presumptions of scarcity—which are the foundational presumptions of most existing social theory—but on those of excess. […] It then considers and rejects the idea that excess of one thing is simply scarcity of another. It discusses the mechanisms by which excess creates problems, noting three such mechanisms at the individual level (paralysis, habituation, and value contextuality) and two further mechanisms (disruption and misinheritance) at the social level. […] It closes with some brief illustrations of how familiar questions can be recast from terms of scarcity into terms of excess.

Enjoy your weekend!

The Tyranny of Saying “Good Job”: Parenting Without Borders, Part 4

In the Introduction, we broached the idea that the way other cultures parent might be more “right” than the way that the culture in North America parents, as discussed in the book Parenting Without Borders. In Part 1, we looked at some of the different cultural thoughts around sleep. There was also that stunning example of how it’s normal for babies in Scandinavia to be found taking a nap on the terrace in the dead of winter! In Part 2, we explored “stuff” and how having more of it might not be best for our children. In Part 3, we looked at how different cultures relate to food in the context of parenting. In Part 4, we’ll take a closer look at self-esteem in the context of parenting.

If you have kids or you’ve been around kids, I feel pretty confident in making the assumption that when your kid (or the kids you happen to be around at the time) do/does something well, you almost reflexively say, “Good job!” Of course, though — why wouldn’t we? We notice someone doing something well and we want to praise that, right? Well, it turns out that this might not be the optimal way of interacting with our little ones:

It turns out that when parents and educators send children the message that their needs and their individual happiness and dreams are more important than other things, like being a compassionate, ethical, hard-working person, it makes them unhappy.

I think that we can all agree that it’s probably a good idea that our children grow up to be compassionate, ethical, and hard-working, right? Not to mention, happy. It appears that somewhere along the way, parents got the idea that the best way to achieve these ends were to focus on a child’s self-esteem by telling him how good they are. As it happens, this may have been a perversion of the initial way of thinking about parenting and self-esteem:

But the earliest proponents of raising self-esteem to ensure children have a successful, productive future actually believed this could be done best through a child-rearing style that employed clear rules and limits. Research backs this up: it is parents who allow children freedom and independence within clearly set guidelines, while treating children with respect and love (as opposed to being top-down dictators) who tend to raise confident adults.

One of the best parts about the book Parenting Without Borders is that it give the reader a flavour of different cultures. And when it comes to this chapter, that’s very helpful. In North America, we’re used to focusing on individual happiness and to instill that in our kids, we often tell them how well they’re doing. This has the effect of kids thinking that they’re great. You might expect a child raised in North America to say, “I’m awesome!” If an American kid were to ask a Japanese kid how to say, “I’m awesome,” in Japanese, the Japanese kid would be dumbfounded, as this isn’t something that a Japanese kid would even think to say. Consider this:

Students reflect frequently, especially after a big event, like the annual sports day, or a field trip, or a class presentation, but also after more ordinary moments. On many class handouts our kids received at school, there was a space to write down, “what I can do better next time; what I’ll try to work harder on next time.” Children are taught the habit of always remaining attentive to how they can improve. (By contrast, children in our country are typically asked to reflect on what they did well.)

There’s even a word for this process of self-reflection in Japanese: hansei. How great that at such a young age, kids are learning how to reflect on their process. It’s almost like taking the scientific method and reappropriating it. Can you imagine how different American culture would be if every kid in America were taught to think about how they could have done better on an assignment rather than being giving the customary, “Good job, let’s go out for ice cream,” speech.

Now, I understand that some parents will balk at the idea of not telling their kid how well they’re doing and that’s not what I’m saying (nor is it what the author is saying). However, it’s important to consider the ramifications of our decisions to praise our kids, especially as it relates to labels that they then have to live up to:

A child who is told he is very smart, will begin to define himself through this label. While this sounds like it would be a good thing, even so-called positive labels can be harmful when they give a child a fixed view of himself, since it is a view he must protect.

[…]

What a lot of parents don’t see is what happens when we boost our kids too much. If we let “making kids feel good” be our guiding principle, we are buying short-term goodwill at the expense of their future resilience.

In this way, telling our kids that they are smart isn’t so much a nice thing to do as it is a curse. Telling them how smart they are might handcuff them to this label that they have to continually live up to. Not that we want to handcuff our children to labels, but might it better for them and for others if we handcuff them to labels that have them perpetuate actions of compassion and ethics?

Maybe it’s as Gross-Loh alludes to that telling kids how smart they are has more to do with how we feel. Maybe telling our kids they’re smart has to do with us wanting our kids to like us. Gross-Loh has certainly given us a lot to think about in this chapter, but before I close this post, I wanted to leave you with something else that can be done. That is, instead of telling our kids, “Good job,” what else can we say?

Dweck’s research shows, a good parent doesn’t undermine her child’s motivation through empty praise and encouragement. She scaffolds her child’s ability to face challenges and even accept failure as something that anyone can grow from.

So, instead of focusing on the outcomes and the end goal, maybe it might be better if we focus on the effort and the steps that our children take to get from A to Z.

Positive Stereotypes Are Pervasive and Powerful

Pop quiz: hands up — how many of you think positive stereotypes are OK?

I suspect that for many of you, your first reaction may have been, “well, yeah, they’re positive, right?” I can totally empathize with that shortcut, but consider this excellent quote from Gordon Allport, one of the “founders” of personality psychology: “People may be prejudiced in favor of others; they may think well of them without sufficient warrant,” [quote excerpted from journal article cited below].

Last year, researchers sought to summarize some of the research about positive stereotypes. There were a number of interesting findings. For instance:

Among [a] sample of Asian American students, the majority (52%) had negative reactions (e.g., feeling marginalized) to their group being considered the “model minority” compared with 26% who had positive reactions. […] Although the subjective favorability of positive stereotypes may facilitate their expression among perceivers who intend them as “compliments,” the targets of such stereotypes can feel depersonalized as if they are being acknowledged exclusively through their category membership. [Emphasis mine]

So, while it might be a ‘positive’ stereotype that Asian Americans are considered the “model minority,” it’s possible that an Asian American may feel as if they are being depersonalized when having the stereotype directed at them. That is, they may no longer feel like they’re a person, but rather that they simply belong to this category called “Asian American.”

Let’s back up for a moment.

When I talk about stereotypes in my lectures to students, one of the first things I do is explain the mechanics of a stereotype. Our brain is processing way more stimuli than we could possibly fathom. For instance, in your office right now, do you hear the hum of the lights or the sound of the fan? If you’re on the bus or in a car, do you notice the sound of the brakes? How about at home… do you still hear the creaky sounds of the floorboards or the plethora of sounds that come out of the basement/vents? I suspect the answer to many of these questions for most of you will be no and that’s because you have habituated to them. Your brain has recognized them as non-threatening and moved on to focus on other stimuli — people.

There are so many people on the planet. Really, we could say that there are over 7 billion different kinds of people, but that’s impossible for a brain that’s trying to process as much as it can. So, when you meet people, your brain is busy trying to recognize patterns that it can map onto previous people you’ve met. When everyone’s brain does this, it follows that a thing called “stereotype” emerges. That is, a stereotype is our brain’s way of trying to find a shortcut for understanding the different kinds of people we interact with during our lives.

So, in the example above about Asian Americans, somewhere along the way, someone’s brain decided Asian Americans represented what they believed was a ‘model citizen.’ Forgetting for a second whether this is valid, it’s likely that there were other people’s brains came to this conclusion and so the stereotype is perpetuated.

Just because our brain is doing this in the “background” doesn’t make it ok. As humans, there are so many biases that we have to be aware of when making decisions — our brain taking shortcuts with stereotypes is just one of them. So, what can you do?

Well, as I often say when it comes to biases — the first step is awareness. You’ve gotta recognize that you’re falling prey to stereotyping and once you recognize that you’re doing it, I urge you not to be so hard on yourself. Let’s be clear — I’m not giving you a “pass” for stereotyping, no. But the culture from which you derive can have a lasting effect on your beliefs about people (which inform whether you employ stereotypes).

One quick and easy way to awareness — if you’re ready for it — is Harvard’s Project Implicit Test. I did a quick search and I was surprised that I’ve only mentioned this one other time in the last few years on this site and it was only in passing. From their site:

Psychologists understand that people may not say what’s on their minds either because they are unwilling or because they are unable to do so. For example, if asked “How much do you smoke?” a smoker who smokes 4 packs a day may purposely report smoking only 2 packs a day because they are embarrassed to admit the correct number. Or, the smoker may simply not answer the question, regarding it as a private matter. These are examples of being unwilling to report a known answer. But it is also possible that a smoker who smokes 4 packs a day may report smoking only 2 packs because they honestly believe they only smoke about 2 packs a day. Unknowingly giving an incorrect answer is sometimes called self-deception; this illustrates being unable to give the desired answer.

The unwilling-unable distinction is like the difference between purposely hiding something from others and unconsciously hiding something from yourself. The Implicit Association Test makes it possible to penetrate both of these types of hiding. The IAT measures implicit attitudes and beliefs that people are either unwilling or unable to report.

If you’re ready for the results, I strongly suggest you take the test.

Czopp, A., Kay, A., & Cheryan, S. (2015). Positive Stereotypes Are Pervasive and Powerful Perspectives on Psychological Science, 10 (4), 451-463 DOI: 10.1177/1745691615588091