Work In Progress
Bill C-18 & The "Will" and The "Way" to Behavior Change
In Canada, Meta is no longer showing news on its platform. The hardline move is a defensive play to try and prevent further legislation around how social media companies deliver and monetize publisher content that is shared on their platforms. Granted, most everyone is favor of NOT seeing news when they log-in to their social accounts. But that does not make people's existing viewing and reading behavior any easier to unseat. Here, we will look at behavior change and review Berkman's framework for the "will" and the "way" problems that make behavior change difficult.
LK-99 & Lessons in Product Delivery
LK-99 drew the excitement of the scientific community and then drew its ire. Promoted as the highly improbable and equally sought-after room-temperature superconductor, replication studies quickly found blatant errors in the study design and data collection of the initial research team. Beyond the immediately obvious lessons, the story of LK-99 can teach us a thing or two about proper product delivery.
Barbenheimer & Our Development Dichotomy
Barbenheimer has become an internet meme sensation for the stark differences of its two titular characters. In truth, the movies and its protagonists share striking similarities as they respectively explore their theme of internal conflict. For us and our teams, the movies highlight a universal struggle that we all face - how can our strengths also present us with problems and opportunities for development. In this post, we will explore that idea to better understand how a single behavior can be both a strength and a weakness and we will look at tactics that can help us minimize those downsides without sacrificing our max potential.
Record Heat & Our Short-Term Thinking Demise
Across the globe, billions of people are experiencing a heat wave. June was the hottest month on record and July looks like it will warm up even further, with day-after-day of record high global temperatures. Climate scientists are consistently highlighting the cause - weak effects from an emerging moderate El Nino and strong effects from human-influenced climate change. Despite nearly universal alignment on the problem, a myriad of potential solutions, and high degree of support for implementing those solutions progress is slow. In part, the hesitant pace of change is caused by short-term thinking that preferences immediate and known value over longer-term benefits of more ambiguous proportion. Here, we will dive into some of the cognitive biases at play and discuss tactics to implement in our teams that help overcome these pitfalls.
Threads vs Twitter - How & Why to be a Good Copycat
Last week, amidst more troubles at Twitter, Meta released its twitter-killer alternative. Threads, like other apps that have already hit the market, mirrors many of the key features and the app interface of Twitter. As we look through history, we see plenty of stories of competitors copying from each other to win market share. But we also see that copying is only half of the battle. In this post, we will look at how the timing of the Threads launch has helped to separate it from the pack and discuss why imitation can often be a superior strategy to innovation.
The U.S. Supreme Court - How Structures Can Reduce Bias
The Supreme Court wrapped up hearings on its latest session with another round of blockbuster decisions, rolling back affirmative action and reducing civil rights protections for members of the LGBTQ+ community. While acting conservatively to try and reduce the impact of bias on our society, the high court is simultaneously and ironically failing to account for the bias in its own organization. Recent reports of lavish trips gifted to justices and aggressive decisions from the shadow docket have helped to drive the judicial branch into a legitimacy crisis. Structures, akin to the affirmative action programs it recently struck down, may provide an answer.
Reddit - Unnecessarily Difficult Change Management
Reddit found itself on the front page of the news this week as more than 2,000 community moderators continued their protest against the platform and co-founder CEO Steve Huffman. Focused around a change to the company's API pricing and the resulting loss of features from 3rd-party developers, the protest seems one-part anger about the policy change and one-part grief for how the corporate side of Reddit is evolving the platform as it heads towards its upcoming IPO. Huffman, for his part, could not seem to care less. As Huffman pushes forward with his plans while moderators attempt to slow him down, we can all learn about some common pitfalls that occur in organizational change management and the tactics we can use to avoid them.
The Writers Strike Part III - Generative AI
Are robots the future of news writing? Probably, at least, in part. One question at the root of the Writers Strike will be the degree to which humans maintain control and robots take over this aspect of production. History tells us that writers have little reason to fear for their livelihood. However, the potential biases that may come into play as executives go about designing the future of work should give all of us reason to pause. Here, we'll discuss both the optimistic and pessimistic viewpoint and their underlying factors.
More on the Writers Strike - Bias in Negotiations
This is not the first strike taking place over a conflict between the Writers Guild of America and Hollywood studios, and once again, writers are looking for updated compensation structures that properly reward their contributions. When we discussed regulatory fit, we covered how misalignment on promotion goals between an employer and its employees can create problems. In this post, we cover a number of the cognitive biases that each side brings to the negotiating table and why that makes proper alignment unnecessarily difficult.
The Writers Strike, Unions, & Interdependence Theory
Movie and TV fans, brace yourself because the entertainment industry is facing another writers strike. The Writer's Guild of America union and production studios are at loggerheads, and the impact could be challenging for an industry already in the throws of disruption. But how did we get here? In this post, we dive into the interdependence theory to understand why these protests have escalated and what it means for the management teams across industries.
Theranos & The Curse of High Expectations
Without a doubt, Elizabeth Holmes and the Theranos executive team are criminals. After defrauding investors of hundreds of millions of dollars, Holmes's fate was sealed this week as the date for her prison sentence to begin was set. Still, it is important for us to recognize that we are also prone to the biases and situational factors that accelerated the misbehavior of these individuals. Incentives inherent to our jobs and whether leaders highlight inputs or outputs of teams can have undesirable influence on the way that team approaches its work. These problems can be accentuated when we value people for the work they deliver rather than for who they are. Here, we will explore these influences and how we can minimize their damaging potential.
500 Pounds of Pasta & Handling the Unexpected
In business, things usually do not go according to plan. Even those surprises are not quite so unexpected as seeing hundreds of pounds of pasta suddenly appear in the woods of small town America. Officials of Old Bridge, New Jersey encountered just this problem. Their response has a lot to teach us about how to approach edge cases, recurring alignment with stakeholders, and the can-do attitude needed to fix issues fast.
The Met Gala & Reverse or Anti Role Models
The Met Gala held the spotlight in the fashion world this week. The event honored the late Karl Lagerfeld who played a key role in defining modern fashion. However, the event's theme sparked critique given Lagerfeld's history of controversial and diminishing opinions. In life and in our careers, not everyone we meet deserves to become a role model for us. Still, there is a lot that we can learn from their examples. In this post, we look at reverse and anti-role models and why you should keep them in addition to your positive role models.
News Closures & Why Everything Seems to Suck
April has been yet another tough month for media companies with layoffs and program shutdowns across Buzzfeed News, Vice News Tonight, and ABC News just to name a few. These digital-first outlets, like their print predecessors, often relied on stirring up negative emotions to create engagement. This practice specifically took advantage of people's natural negativity bias. But this bias influences a broad range of behavior, including our motivation at work. In this post, we look at why negativity can spiral us out of control and tactics for complaining effectively to keep it from doing so.
Earth Day and Being Agreeably Disagreeable
Earth Day is one of the most popular holidays on the planet with roughly 1 billion people celebrating every year. While support for the environment is consistently high, discussions about climate change are wrought with disagreement and entrenched opinions. Similarly in our work, we often encounter situations of heated debate despite clear alignment on higher level organizational goals. In this post, we look at why disagreement is common and also how to disagree effectively in order to make it productive.
The Discord Leaks, HROs, and "Just Right"
For any organization, critical errors always lead to difficult questions about the culture and processes that lead to the negative outcome. That is especially true when the error involves classified documents that influence national security, which was the case with the Discord Leaks that surfaced this past week. Clearly, greater reliability was needed from people and processes in the organization and when things go wrong, leaders often knee-jerk react to the other extreme. For some organizations, error-free work is not an option, but a requirement. Categorized as High Reliability Organizations, we can see the gold standard for operational error mitigation. But for most of us, the best option for reliability lies between these two extremes. Here, we see what we can learn from these standard bearers while pursuing a "good enough" approach. Reliability is good for all organizations, but not all organizations need to be HROs.
Momentum - Good or Bad? It Depends.
From the outside looking in, the AI race is an interesting case study in organizational momentum. For leaders, momentum can be a powerful tool to have your side. However, momentum should be approached thoughtfully as it can always risk snowballing out of control. The rapid surge of AI development in the past half year showcases what this can look like, both for good and bad. Here, we will talk about what momentum is and how to create it, the difficulty of overcoming inertia, and what happens when momentum grows out of control.
How to Plan a Barbecue or a Quarterly Roadmap
The start of Q2 is a common point when teams refresh their roadmaps for product, testing, or general priorities. While a useful tool, teams often experience stress and frustration with roadmaps due to their low flexibility, unrealistic expectations, misalignment with business objectives, and generally poor stakeholder communication. To address these issues, teams can find inspiration in another activity that commonly kicks up in Q2 - barbecue. Pitmasters start each cook with a good plan but the effective ones learn to adjust on the fly. Teams can benefit from looking outside of their primary domain to see what lessons can be learned from a backyard hero.
TikTok and Congress - Becoming Problem-Oriented
TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew did not have a great showing as he fielded questions on Capitol Hill this week. Granted, neither did the U.S House Committee on Energy and Commerce who held the hearing. Both sides were largely criticized for their entrenched view of data security and privacy concerns related to TikTok's relationship with China through its parent company ByteDance. The problem, as I see it, is that neither side wanted to discuss the core problems of the situation. This situation is a common one in the business sphere as stakeholders take a "solution-oriented approach" and miss out on solving the real issues altogether. Here, let's talk about what it means to be problem-oriented and how to start establishing this mentality in your teams.
Twitter 2.0 - How to Do Lean Staffing Wrong (and How to do it Right)
Internet outage trackers report that Twitter 2.0 is experiencing four to five outages per month, a number roughly equal to what they used to see in a year's time. Elon Musk's decision to reduce Twitter's staff by over 75% was focused on lean staffing benefits of cost efficiency. The actual outcome has been lost performance. Lean staffing is not inherently bad, but getting it right requires a meaningful investment in technology and in the operating teams. Here we cover what those investments look like and why Musk got things so wrong at Twitter.
Communication Breakdown - Lessons Learned from Silicon Valley Bank
Communication is one of the universal challenges of business. Silicon Valley Bank’s end is just the latest example of what can happen when that communication goes awry. Over the years, I have learned a lot of lessons in effective communication through failures - and occasional successes - of my own as well as by watching great communicators around me. We can see a few of the key lessons playing out here. Let us walk through some of the key communication missteps here and how we can learn for ourselves through SVB’s example. Communication has many sides and each benefit from different tactical approaches. For this review, we will focus on communicating about problems and their resolutions. With problem management, the name of the game is minimizing swirl. We will cover the importance of avoiding surprises, short-circuiting problems by aligning with critics, and why a single touchpoint is never enough.
Psychologically Safe is not Psychologically Soft
Psychological Safety is the most important thing, according to Google. It is also one of the most misunderstood and misapplied management principles according to, well, me. The concept is often misconstrued as being soft or lax, but when properly applied psychological safety can lead to teams with more rigor, higher job satisfaction, and greater career growth.
Ecological Disaster & The Loss of Trust
On multiple occasions, I have stressed that leadership is demonstrated in difficult situations. Still, I hesitate to cover a topic like this, which has such a profound and unjust effect on people’s lives. Yet, I think it is important to learn from failure with the goal of preventing its future occurrence. The Norfolk Southern train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio has been an unmitigated disaster. The toll on people's lives and the ecological impact are horrible. As officials have worked through the recovery process, misstep after misstep has completely eroded trust from the residents who are most in need of some good news. Here, we will break down each of these problems to more deeply understand the cause, why it matters, and what could have been done differently.
Relationship Advice - How to Work Most Effectively with your Boss
Every year the world celebrates Valentine’s Day, a holiday for our nearest and dearest relationships. But when we think about important relationships, there is one connection that gets consistently overlooked and under-analyzed - the one with our manager. They are one of the most influential people on our career. However, most of the advice on developing effective managerial relationships is woefully incomplete when compared to the amount of advice on building healthy personal relationships. Still, a lot of the same principles can apply in each case because a strong relationship only needs mutual respect, shared goals, and open communication - something we should strive for in our professional work as in our personal lives. In that spirit, let's take top advice on building quality personal relationships from certified experts and spin it to look at how we can work more effectively with our manager.
The Real Fraud - Imposter Syndrome
We've all heard of it and the majority of us have felt it - imposter syndrome. We get that sneaking suspicion that no one else can see all of our individual faults, and, if they could, there is no way that we would have had all the success that has fallen our way so far. We feel like a fraud. Ironically, imposter syndrome is the much greater fraud in this scenario. From its name to its impact on our lives, this psychological phenomenon has a dubious background. Here, we expose the whole truth and talk about how we can take back control over our response to impostorism.
Tom Brady & An Updated Model of Burnout
Over the past few decades few things have been inevitable as taxes, workplace burnout, and Tom Brady captaining a competitive team. Looking back over his career, we can start to piece together how Brady’s success was not only an outcome of his work ethic, but also, how it was a factor that enabled his ability to give tremendous effort year after year after year. Let’s review burnout’s loose definition, highlight its many oft-overlooked causes, and look at what the GOAT can teach us about how to prevent burnout or resolve it in our own careers.
Leadership Starts Where Layoffs End - Building Resilience in Teams
Leadership is defined when times are at their worst. For companies, there might be no worse time than the days after a layoff. After layoffs, employee motivation is at or near all time lows, momentum that had been building is very likely stopped, and team leads throughout the organization are assigned the difficult task of accelerating the organization back to full operating speed. In this post, we explore Suzanne Kobasa's three traits of psychological hardiness and how to build up resilience in your team.
Mass Layoffs and Bad Leadership
This post is just a rant. Nearly a quarter of a million people have been laid off in the tech sector over the past 13 months. That is a large amount of social disruption that has largely been explained away as a result of macroeconomic factors and the reversing digital trends post-pandemic. There are a myriad of nuanced reasons that each company who used layoffs chose to do so. However, in my opinion, there is really only one underlying factor - bad leadership.
Combinatorial Explosion & The Big, Bad Meeting
Mostly everyone hates meetings. And mostly everyones hates math. That's a shame because both can be pretty cool. Here we try and see if two wrongs can indeed make a right as we pull concepts from combinatorics to describe why big meetings are very often bad meetings. We will deep dive into the complaints on meetings that are often heard at different levels of the organization. Finally, we will look at some potential meeting alterations you can test to improve the productivity of your team's meetings.
ChatGPT and the Dangers of Overconfidence as a Leader
ChatGPT, the newly released language processing chat bot, has captured the imagination of the market with its ability to give complete and coherent text responses to prompts. There's just one problem - a lot of its answers are wrong. It is easy to mistake ChatGPT's apparent confidence in its answers with the affirmation that they are correct. In fact, this improper switch-up happens fairly commonly in the human dynamics that come in building organizations. Here, we explore the biases behind this confidence/correctness confusion and look at solutions to account for them.
Why New Year's Resolutions and Annual Reviews DON'T Work
Did you know approximately 80% of new year's resolutions fail? But that doesn't have to be the case. And the ideas and tactics that make the difference can also help you and your team get the most out your annual review process. Let me show you how an IDP can make all the difference.
Lionel Messi - Productive vs Busy
How can you not talk about the greatest player of all time after the greatest World Cup final of all time? Sharing a few lessons from Messi that we can all learn from, even if we're not (yet) performing on the world stage. . Data references from this article: https://lnkd.in/eMwxuiam
How NOT to Start a New Job
Elon Musk's first month as Chief Twit has been the opposite of a smooth start - dropping ~75% of his workforce, losing advertisers in droves, and a mess of new product feature rollouts. Personally, I have never started a new job as CEO of a company and maybe you have not either. But here is my advice to Elon (and you) for setting yourself for success in any new company - Focus on the people, Don't do anything, Solve stakeholder needs, and Trust yourself.