Too Much Information

We are all familiar with TMI, Too Much Information. Usually we hear it when we are exposed to some gory or elicit detail we’d rather not hear. It has however a more serious application when it comes to how we make decisions.

In these days of big data, ubiquitous connectivity and apps at every hands turn we often have lots of data about the choices we need to make in life, be that at work or at home. Too much information however can impede our ability to make decisions.

On the face of it, this is counter intuitive. We like to think that more information drives smarter decisions; that the more details we absorb, the better off we'll be. Knowledge is power and information feeds knowledge.

However when presented with loads of facts, we have difficulty in selecting out the items that really matter, it takes time and effort that we may not have. Worse still, the key pieces of information that should influence our decisions remain hidden and unused.

Malcom Gladwell makes this point in his book Blink. He tells a story about Cardiologist Lee Goldman at Chicago's Cook County Hospital.

Goldman used some statistical rules which mathematicians designed for telling apart subatomic particles. He fed a computer data of hundreds of files of heart attack cases and crunched the numbers into a “predictive equation” or model.

Four key risk factors emerged as the most critical tell tale of a real heart attack case:

1. ECG (the ancient electrocardiogram graph) showing acute ischemia

2. unstable angina pain

3, fluid in the lungs

4. systolic blood pressure under 100

Previous to this Cardiologists took quite an amount of time looking at patients, got information on weight, gender, lifestyle, how they came to be admitted, what their living conditions were at home. Goldman got Cardiologists to park their instincts and thirst to find out everything about a patient and used his 4 simplistic reference points. 

Outcomes improved on wards and fewer of the patients who were sent home from ER represented back at a future date with a heart attack. Using four simple facts that mattered led to better decisions.

Gladwell makes another point on how knowing less can improve our decisions. Not quite as serious as heart attacks but still interesting. For years it was believed that women could not play in orchestras as well as their male counterparts. Men dominated the ranks. 

Then someone had the bright idea to put in a screen for auditions where the musician was only heard and not seen. The blind audition was born. The number of women in major US orchestras increased fivefold. Decision makers knew less about their applicants (their gender) and now made their call on what was the core question, how well someone could actually play.

The take away is that when you have a decision to make, look at the information available to you. Try to critique what is important what and what is background noise. Write down the facts that influenced your decision, were these the facts that really mattered? Try to resist gathering KPI after KPI just because you can. 

Bad at saying 'No'? That's a probem

I read a good article by Peter Bregman about how to say 'No'.

This is a very under-rated skill to have. Saying 'No' is vital to keeping work and customer expectations at manageable levels.Failing to say ‘No’ when we instinctively know that we may not be able to deliver is a bad move that can come back to bite us over and over. What ensues is usually a lengthy and awkward process of realigning customer expectations and eventually telling them ‘No’. In the meantime, you probably have damaged customer relationships, frustrated staff and wasted time figuring out how to limit the damage.

This happens quite a bit in software start-ups that code their own product. Feature creep can set in and it’s easy to say ‘Yes’ to an important client when they inevitably ask for a function or change request. At start-up phase pretty much any client is an important client.However, you will find yourself making promises you can’t keep, burning the candle at both ends (working late / weekends) to come good on commitments when you should have said ‘No’. That leads to endless firefighting where you neglect the basics of making sure your strategic business systems are running properly (sales pipeline, support documentation, credit control, cost benefit analysis of activity).

Key staff will get demotivated at constantly working under pressure or jumping from one ‘priority’ to another and probably leave (if you have more than three priorities, you don't have any). You will more than likely rehire in a hurry because you need someone straight away. Because you have taken your eye off the ball on the fundamentals of the business you may neglect your sales process, prospect call backs etc, so the clients that made the initial request now become even more important (as other sales haven't grown as planned ). It then gets even harder to say 'No' to their next change request. On and on it goes.

If you are a start-up company in firefighting mode or constantly find yourself avoiding calls from clients, end up working weekends, late at night, ask yourself how often you have said ‘No’ to a request in the last week. Chances are it’s not very often. There is nothing wrong with being busy and firefighting, just so long as it’s for a strategic or commercially sound reason. If it’s purely because you could not say ‘No’, then it’s a problem. 

As someone once said, 'The road to hell is paved with good intentions', failing to say 'No' might be just laying another stone on that road for your projects or organisation. 

It's not as bad as you think

Part of the human experience is to find ourselves in embarrassing situations. We have all been there. In the pub we have knocked over a drink, had the odd wardrobe malfunction, or made an embarrassing mumble when giving a speech or presentation. 

You wish the ground would swallow you up. However, it may not be that bad, research now suggests that we generally overestimate the extent to which our actions or appearance are noticed by others. This phenomenon has even been given a name, The Spotlight Effect.

ProfessorThomas Gilovich, at Cornell University gave the spotlight effect its name and did some of the early research in this area. In one study he had participants put on a t-shirt showing a large picture of Barry Manilow’s face, (deliberately embarrassing) and then briefly go into a room filled with students. After each participant left the room, he or she was asked to estimate how many people in the room would be able to remember who was on their t-shirt. The students in the room were also asked if they could remember who had been on the t-shirt.

Participants completely overestimated how many people would remember they wore an embarrassing Barry Manilow t-shirt. Gilovich followed this up with a further study to see if the spotlight effect extended not just to people’s appearances, but also their actions. He put people into groups to discuss inner city problems. At the end of the discussion each person estimated how the other members of the group would rate their contribution and the performance of other group members. In most cases people overestimated how much attention had been paid to them when they were speaking.

According to Gilovich this happens because we are completely focused on ourselves, what we are doing and how we look. We have trouble appreciating that other people might not be that interested in us. Ever had an embarrassing post or picture put up on Facebook but never got the ridicule you initially expected? We focus on our own profile way more than others do.

Gilovich found evidence for this self-consciousness or self-focus when he ran the Barry Manilow t-shirt study a second time. On this occasion half the participants waited for 15 minutes before they completed their estimations. By delaying the estimation process, the experimenters gave the participants time to get used to wearing their shirts. Once the participants got used to their shirts, and became less self-conscious about their fashion infringement, they were no longer as aware of Manilow’s face, and neither did they assume that everyone else would notice it.

You have probably seen this yourself where the day after an embarrassing haircut or black eye, we are sure the whole world is pointing and laughing, but a few days later when we have got used to the face in the mirror, we think everyone else has too, even though many of the people we meet are seeing if for the first time.

The next time you make that mistake in public, don’t feel you have to blush and hide. You are probably the only person who was really paying attention to your calamity. But this is a two way street. For the same reason we also have to understand that when we make a witty remark or wear what we think is a cool or clever t-shirt, we may not get the attention or compliments we think we deserve. People aren’t paying as close attention to our appearance and actions as we are. Like us, they are too busy paying attention to themselves.

Being aware of this Spotlight Effect is important. Hanging on to or continuing to focus on your embarrassing mistakes can impact on your self-esteem and how you think of yourself generally. The best response is to smile, even if it comes out as that weird smile of embarrassment and admit that it was a cringe worthy experience. Then let it go because people who display embarrassment at their social transgressions are also the most prone to be liked. We like honesty.

The take-home message is perhaps this. When you find yourself mortified, be aware that other people simply don't pay as much attention to you as you think they do. Your slip up will not loiter long in the memory and that peculiar stain on your shirt or character won’t be the hot topic in the canteen. 

Your legend will not be secured on the basis of one particularly brilliant or embarrassing remark. It is not that you won’t be noticed, just that people do not brood over your actions you as deeply as you do. In other words, while you're stuck on your current problem or predicament, everyone else has already moved on. Shine the spotlight somewhere else, it will make you feel better about yourself. 

Why a bonus might be a bad idea

You have a business problem to solve or a new project to get live. In order to make sure your people deliver, you decide to offer a bonus, stock options or some other incentive to get the job done. This might be a really bad idea and here is why.

Way back in 1945 Karl Duncker had his candle problem experiment posthumously published. It was a task based on problem solving. Participants were given a candle, some matches and a box of tacks. They were then asked to fix the candle to a cork board on the wall. They needed to do it in such a way that when lit, the candle wouldn't drip wax on the table underneath the cork board.

The solution (spoiler alert), is to use the box holding the tacks as a candle holder, attach the box to the wall and put the candle in it. Most people solve this eventually but they solve it a lot quicker if the tacks are out of the box and the box is seen as a separate piece of equipment.

When the tacks were in the box the participants saw it only as a tack-box, not something they could use to solve the problem. This phenomenon is called ‘Functional fixedness’.

Sam Glucksberg added a very interesting step to this in his 1962 paper, “Influence of strength of drive on functional fixedness and perceptual recognition”. He decided to incentivise people to solve the candle problem. One group got money for solving the problem, the quicker they solved it, the more money they got. Another group were offered nothing, they were just asked to solve the problem.

When the tacks were presented outside the box (making the solution more obvious) the group that were incentivised out-performed the group that were paid nothing. This is what we would expect, rewarding results improved performance.

However, when the problem was presented in its more complex form with the tacks in the box, the incentivised group did significantly worse than the group paid nothing. Incentives killed performance and results. The bonus for getting it right back-fired big time. Participants with no financial incentive took 7:41 minutes to solve the problem, the people who were incentivised, took 11:08 minutes to solve the problem.

Glucksberg found that not only did the financial incentive make people slower at problem solving, the slowness increased with the incentive. The higher the monetary reward, the worse the performance. This was not a one off, the result has been replicated over and over in other experiments.

The key point is that incentives narrow our focus. When participants are incentivised, they can’t see the solution to the problem (the box holding the tacks). They think mechanically not creatively. Narrowing our focus inhibits this creative thinking and gets us straight into the task as we see it.

The lesson here is that if your employees have to do something straightforward, like putting regular parts together or following a specific instruction on an assembly line, financial incentives work well for these mechanical tasks.

However when we need do something that requires any creative or critical thinking, financial incentives damage performance. When we need to think out of the (candle) box, offering a financial incentive keeps our focus in the box. We don’t see the big picture and solutions prove more elusive.

For the types of jobs many people have in the 21st century knowledge economy, bonuses and incentives are a bad motivator. Worse than not getting results, they damage performance, it’s not that they don’t do any good, they actually do harm.

Giving a bonus to software developers to get a project delivered on time or Business Development Manager to get a new commercial product live or a Marketing Executive to hit a sales figure are all the types of tasks that Glucksberg and others have shown, suffer when people are incentivised.

This has been well documented and repeated since 1962 and yet pretty much ignored in most management strategies. It is a mistake that companies continue to make today, more than 50 years since Glucksbergs first publication. 

It could go some way in explaining the disastrous performance of our banks, which had a well embedded bonus culture in senior management, the guys who should have been watching the big picture. It may explain why many well-funded start-ups disappear shortly after venture capitalists arrive. Most VC funding involves the current management staying on for a while and the company or its share price hitting incentivised targets for set time period. The creative thinkers that set up and got the company going now have their creative thinking dimmed and their focus narrowed by VC penalties or bonuses.

The next time you offer or are offered a bonus think again. Fifty years of research suggests that you will lose sight of the big picture and your days of thinking outside the box could be over.

Daniel Pink has an excellent TED talk which covers this and is well worth a listen.

More information doesn't neccessarily improve our decisions

You have decision to make, you decide to confer with a colleague who is well informed and a good logical thinker, an all-round bright guy. Sounds like just the person you need. Perhaps not.

A study by Nyhan and colleagues at Dartmouth University looked at how people can come to hold false beliefs. The study provided parents with comprehensive information about vaccines. The idea was to counter the false beliefs that some people have about the links between vaccines and autism. The better informed people become, then the more willing they would be to vaccinate.

Interestingly this was not how it turned out. Having people well informed, giving them more objective facts, didn't make people more likely to vaccinate. People just used the additional information to support or rationalise their pre-existing view point. Worse still, it gave them ‘evidence’ to hold their views a little more tightly. They became more polarised and extreme in their opinions.

In one way this is not surprising. It touches on a number of well-known biases such as the confirmation bias, where we take information that suits us and ignore everything else. It also highlights how our thinking is very much guided by our belief systems. We tend to use facts to feed our beliefs.

In another study Lewandowsky and his colleagues at the University of Western Australia had participants read a report about a robbery at a liquor store. Everyone read the same report, but in some cases racial information about the perpetrators was included and in others it wasn't. In one scenario, the suspects were Caucasian, and in another that they were Aboriginal. At the end of the report, participants were told that the racial information was incorrect and should be ignored.

Participants were then asked to recall details of the robbery (type of car used) and also to speculate on aspects of the crime (who may have carried it out, why was violence used).Separately, participants took part in an assessment of racial prejudice against Aboriginals.

All the participants recalled the details of the crime. However the participants who scored highest on racial prejudice continued to rely on the racial misinformation that identified the robbers as Aboriginals, even though they knew it had been corrected. They answered the factual questions accurately (type of car, times, what was taken) but still relied on race when speculating on who carried out the crime.

This is similar to Nyhans study. Providing facts and correcting the record does not change beliefs that easily. It is not that people are ill-informed, it is that they use facts to bolster what they believe.

The point here is that being well informed or getting access to more information may not improve our decisions or choices. We simply follow our beliefs. If we are good logical thinkers then we will be able to neatly organise the facts to create a decent argument as to why our beliefs are right. 

The smarter we are, the better we can weave our supporting argument. This is why we see relatively smart (and in fairness some dumb ones too) people pro and anti global warming, liberal and conservative. They have beliefs that are not shifted by information and can create a logical rationale to support their stance.

Getting back to where we started, rather than choose someone who is very well informed or really smart when conferring, find someone with an open mind (they can still be smart), who does not have strong beliefs on the subject matter in hand. Give them the facts and you may get a more objective appraisal, as long as your own beliefs do not get in the way.

No time like the present

We are biased to getting our pleasures in life in the here and now. This is known as the ‘Present Bias’. Unlike the kids who could resist the marshmallow in Walter Mischels experiment, most of us are unwilling to put off getting what we want. Economists have noted this and describe the effect as Hyperbolic Discounting.

Essentially it means we are suckers for a discount now or a low ball entry price, even if the long term price is pretty high.

A 1998 study by Read and van Leeuwen investigated this by asking participants to make food choices for today and for next week. When it came to next week, 74% of participants decided on fruit. But when thinking about today, 70% chose chocolate. Putting off the treat was not on the menu.

Getting back to the economists, their modelling of this has influenced how many services and goods are presented to us. You can get a new iPhone for a really low price but must sign an 18 month contract with a minimum monthly package. Getting the iPhone now is very attractive, though the long term cost over 18 months can be quite expensive. Similarly you will hear advertisements for new cars which only cost €100 per week. Again, that sounds very attractive, though the long term part of the deal is often based on Hire Purchase or relatively high interest rates.

The take away here is that we fall for the ‘get it now, pay later’ deals. Like the participants in Read and van Leeuwen’s study, we are more concerned about today than next week. We are willing to spoil our present selves at the expense of our future selves.

If you are selling, then tap into this Present Bias or Hyperbolic Discounting, if you are buying, be wary of the discount offers and try to think a little more long term.

Will that promotion or new job make you feel happier?

Are you working hard to get that promotion or new job in the hope that it will make you happier? Do you drive home from work thinking that if only you got that lotto win and could quit your job, you would be happy? Maybe it’s time to think again.

Daniel Gilbert at Harvard University has done a lot of research on “Affective Forecasting” of what we think will make us happy in the future. In other words, how good are we at predicting our future happiness or other emotional states.

In his 2007 book ‘Stumbling on Happiness', he goes into this in some detail. It turns out that we are really bad at predicting what will make us happy in life. His research consistently found that the things we do in search of happiness like moving house, changing job, winning the lotto don’t make us feel happier, though we expect that they will.

Gilbert links this to the strength of human resilience. We are not the delicate beings which self-help books or day time TV would have us believe. When we suffer real tragedy or disaster, we often recover more quickly than we would expect to. We can rediscover happiness. This is a good thing. As a species it makes us more adaptive and helps us cope with the woes of life.

The downside is that good things which happen to us are also less effective in the long term than we might think. Winning the lotto, getting the new job or house, doesn't feel as good or last as long as we expect it will. Resilience works both ways. We rebound from distress but we also rebound from joy, back to how we normally feel about life. 

According to Gilbert, if you want to know how happy you will be in the future, look at how happy you are now and that will probably answer your question.

This is not to say that we can’t aim to feel happier, we can. It’s just that we overestimate how much happier a specific item or event like a new car, job or house will make us feel. It is not that simple. Moving house or job to spend more time with loved ones or earning more money to do more of the things we enjoy, can make us happier, as long as these things are important to us.

These events or changes are more like an opportunity for happiness, but it is an opportunity that we routinely waste because the things we think will make us happy often don't. If that extra salary from a new job is spent on a bigger mortgage and the rewards and stressors in our life have increased in equal measure then don’t expect to feel any different.

If you are wondering if the promotion, job or some other windfall will make you happier, look at what is important in life. Ask yourself if the resulting change will allow you to do more of these important things. If it does then great, if not, then maybe focus on a change that will.

Fading Memories

"Fading Affect Bias" (FAB) describes the way negative emotions fade quicker from memory than positive emotions. This happens when we experience something that we perceive as threatening, unpleasant, unpredictable or chaotic. Once we decide we don’t like something, our cognitive response is to forget it over time, unlike pleasant experiences, which we want to remember. The bad experiences gradually fade out, the good ones remain.

A study published in the journal ‘Memory’, found this to be cross cultural. The researchers organised 10 samples from different groups of people around the world. These included Ghanaian students and elderly German citizens (who were asked to recollect the fall of the Berlin Wall). In total, 562 people were included in the research.

The people participating in the study had to recall a number of events in their lives, both positive and negative. For each event, they rated the emotions that they felt at the time it happened, and then the emotions that they felt in the present when remembering that event.

The authors found that every cultural group included in the study experienced the FAB. In all of those sampled, negative emotions associated with remembered events faded to a greater degree than positive emotions did. Interestingly, there was no evidence that this effect changed with people’s age. The FAB is a lifelong cognitive bias, it affects young and old.

The conclusion is that our ability to look back on events with rose-tinted glasses might be important for our mental health, as it could help us to adapt and move on from adversity: It only makes sense to enjoy the positive benefits of pleasant experiences and to limit our potentially traumatic recall of unpleasant experiences. The authors suggest that the FAB is part of a set of cognitive processes that help emotional regulation and aid psychological resilience. 

From a work point of view, if you are reviewing past projects, sales initiatives or previous product launches, be mindful that some of the problems experienced at the time may have faded from memory.

If you want to know what went wrong, better check the written records and formal notes taken at the time. Chances are most of the people involved in the project will have a version of the truth coloured by the FAB which may not reflect what really happened. If you are involved in a project that did go wrong, get the facts on paper as early as possible, before the fading kicks in.

Don't underestimate yourself

You may have read about the ‘Dunning Kruger Effect’ which outlines why incompetent people do not realise they are incompetent. Guess we could all think of a few people we've worked with that would fit into this theory.

There is however another scenario, the ‘Worse than Average Effect’. The idea here is that when we are good at something we assume other people are good at it too. We don’t give ourselves the credit for being particularly good at complex tasks and can even assume that loads of other people are probably better than we are.

A study from J Kruger found that we can underestimate our ability  for something difficult like playing chess, telling jokes or computer programming. At the same time we overestimate our ability at seemingly easier tasks like using a mouse or riding a bike.

The take away here is that when it comes to staff self reporting their ability on tasks or project work, take into account a possible tendency to underestimate how good they may be at the more complex items such as system design or process management and over estimate how good they are easier tasks like logging time records, drafting project plans, organising meetings. 

What to expect when you're an expert

So, do you value the opinion of experts? If you do then maybe you need to do so with some caution. A 2007 study gave 40 students a memory test consisting of eleven animal names and eleven body parts. There was also a twist, all the animal names were also NFL team names, like dolphins, colts, seahawks and bears. The group was divided into those who knew their NFL pretty well and those who didn’t, essentially NFL experts and NFL non-expects.

When the results of the memory test for the two groups were compared, the NFL experts remembered more of the animal names than the non-experts, while there was no difference between groups on the body parts test. Interestingly though, the researchers also tested for incorrect answers. They looked at NFL animal team names and body parts that were not part of the original test.

The results indicated that the experts were much more likely to make incorrect guesses than the non-experts. The researchers suggest that this may be a memory error. The domain-relevant information (or expertise) of the experts, got in the way of their accurate recall of the animal names. There was no difference between groups in body part experience, false answers were about even between groups on that test.

The point here is that experts have expertise in specific areas (NFL) but this does not improve performance in other areas (body parts). You may have a consultant who is an expert in financial management but this is no guarantee of success in marketing management and visa versa. Expertise is not necessarily transferable. 

Experts may also have such a depth of their specialist area that this may inhibit their thinking. They see everything against the backdrop of their expertise and this can impact on their reasoning, memory or how they approach problems. Just like the NFL experts, they may perform no better in more general tasks and indeed even under perform in their own areas.

The take away from this is that experts need to play to their strengths and focus on their own domains of knowledge. Keep an eye out for a few more mistakes that you might otherwise expect. That’s expert advice. 

Boring is not all bad

Barack Obama has a well reported practice of never wearing anything other than blue and gray suits. According to the president, “I’m trying to pare down decisions. I don’t want to make too many decisions about what I’m eating or wearing. Because I have too many other decisions to make.” This ties in with the idea ‘Don’t sweat the small stuff’.

A study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology has another take on this. The authors tested the idea that making many choices impairs subsequent self-control. The study used a limited-resource model of self-regulation and executive function to determine if decision making depletes the same resource used for self-control and active responding. In 4 laboratory studies, some participants made choices among consumer goods or college course options, whereas others thought about the same options without making choices.

Making choices led to reduced self-control (i.e., less physical stamina, reduced persistence in the face of failure, more procrastination, and less quality and quantity of arithmetic calculations). A field study then found that reduced self-control was predicted by shoppers' self-reported degree of previous active decision making. Further studies suggested that choosing takes a greater toll than just deliberating.

There are a few lessons in this. Like Barak Obama, try to focus your limited patience and executive function on the stuff that matters. Spending time at the deli counter figuring out what sandwich to have is not a great idea if you have to go back to the office and make some complex or important decisions on how to manage scarce company resources.

If you are a retailer, you could provide a variety of choices and have customers making decisions just for the sake of it. This may lower their self control and get them to spend a little more freely.

 If you are a consumer and have just made a load of decisions e.g. where to park, whether to buy on credit or pay cash or whether to take out an after sales contract or not, be wary of your self control. It could be on the slide and you may be about to buy something you don’t really need.

If you see some guy in work wearing the same suits everyday and eating the same boring lunch, he could be the go to guy for some of those big decisions or someone to trust with that big marketing budget where self control could be tested. 

Know more about your decisions

Nobel Laureate David Kahneman is an interesting guy. He won the 2002 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. This achievement was based on his work in the area of Judgment under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases, published in 1974. Amos Tversky co-authored the paper but unfortunately had passed by time the Nobel prize was awarded.

The 1974 paper is worthy of a discussion in its own right but Kahnemans influence does not depend on that seminal work, he has constantly developed and built upon both his and other studies in the area of Decision Making.

His recent book Thinking Fast and Slow looks at several studies which explain how we are often deceived or mistaken in our thinking. It shows how our decisions are affected by silent influences such as previous experience, how questions are phrased, how we estimate/interpret results. Complex statistical ideas like ‘Regression to the Mean’ are explained in accessible terms that a layman would both recognise and understand.

Having read several interviews, books and papers by Kahneman over the years, out of all of his ideas and theories, one in particular has always resonated – Keep a Decision Journal.

If you are making a decision of consequence, take a moment to think. Write down the relevant variables that will decide the outcome, what you expect to happen, and why you expect it to happen. If a few of these are unknowns, that is ok, just note them as such and state why you have made assumptions in the absence of all the facts. Most times you won’t have all the facts or variables defined.

This seems basic enough - write down how you came to a decision and what you know about what you decided. If you can’t write down what was discussed, the relevant variables that give rise to the decision and why you believe something will turn out the way you expect it to, then maybe you should not be making a decision in the first place.

The act of writing out a decision and its variables will counter some of the biases we all have. These include overly relying on information that is easily available, or being anchored by a previous estimate or being unduly influenced by hindsight bias. 

If you review your decisions you will see a trend in the number or types of unknown variables, poor assumptions, poor outcomes etc. You can then address and measure improvement in these areas for future decisions. At its most basic level, you will see which decisions were not thought through and what assumptions were relied upon.

The best part is, to implement this Nobel Prize backed management technique only costs the price of a student copy book and a pen. Now that’s good economics. 

Go easy on the new guy

When you induct new employees or make a change to how current employees work, do you consider how safe or stressed they feel? Starting a new job can be a stressful enough time. We can feel under pressure to live up to our interview or CV, we might be anxious to impress a new boss or just fit in. The level of stress we feel in those type of situations could be important. There is some research from the academic world suggesting that stress and safety concerns impact negatively on students ability to learn while in school.

The same could be true in the work place. The idea is that stress makes it harder to learn, by reducing working memory and self-control. This could be particularly important in areas like induction into software development where new hires may only be hired because the current staff are very busy or there is a pre-existing product problem. Chances are their first project could be a busy one with tight deadlines.

As a software developer they may also need to learn new coding procedures, maybe a new language or use of some customised in-house development tools. This cocktail of new systems and pressure may result in induction not going as smoothly as envisaged. Productivity, quality and compliance could all take a dip and there may be a few more mistakes than expected.

The take away from this is that if you work in an area where learning new systems is a big part of induction, try to avoid dropping the new guy in the deep-end straight away. You might end up with a better trained, more productive and happier inductee. 

The weather is not just small talk

So, are you one for checking the weather forecast on a regular basis? We all like good weather at weekends so we can get out doors and blow off some steam. During the week we like to make sure that we wear the right clothes going to work and have our raincoat or umbrella if we need it.

It turns out however, the weather also affects how we think. It does not have to be as extreme as Seasonal Affective Disorder (S.A.D.) It can affect us in far more subtle ways. 

I recently came across a 2009 study which showed that in something as specific as job interview performance it can have a real impact. The study analyzed the results of  medical-school interviews at the University of Toronto between 2004 and 2009. People interviewed on rainy days received a one per cent lower score than those interviewed on sunny days. While it seems small, the difference in scores was equivalent to a ten per cent lower total mark on the Medical College Admission Test for the university.  

The paper suggests that the mood of those conducting the interviews is lowered by the poor weather. This literally dampens their thinking when they score their candidates. If this is the case then the same cognitive influence could be at play when you have a salary review, when you try to close a big sale with a customer or when you gather some marketing material such as customer surveys. It may also play a role in performance of focus groups or any other setting where people subjectively score performance based on how they feel about it.

Try to pick a nice day for your review or that important sales meeting. If things don't work out and you are fresh out of other excuses, dodge the bullet by blaming the weather.

Bitter Tastes makes us harsher judges

So what do you drink when sitting at your desk, do you go for a plain stilled water or something a little more flavoured?

If you go for the latter, you may need to think about your choice of flavours. Research by Kendall Eskine at the City University of New York found that bitter flavours make us more judgemental. Eskine and colleagues asked 57 volunteers to rate how morally questionable a set of scenarios were on a scale of 1 to 100. Some of the scenarios included a man eating his already-dead dog, cousins engaging in consensual sex.

At the start and again midway through the scenarios, participants were given a bitter drink or water.

Participants given bitter drinks were much tougher in their judgements than those who drank water, giving scenarios a score that was on average 27 per cent higher. It seemed that taste perception significantly affected their moral judgments and the physical disgust (induced via a bitter taste) produced feelings of moral disgust

Participants were also asked if they were political conservatives or liberals. Interestingly, the politically conservative individuals were more strongly affected by bitter tastes than liberals

So if you are taking a client or the boss out for a drink or dinner, try and stay clear of the bitter drinks or food if you are looking to get the OK for some radical proposal. If you want them to judge a rivals proposal harshly, recommend the fish with extra lemon juice, washed down with a glass of Aperol.

Crazy Deadlines good for Creativity?

So does a deadline help deliver creative solutions? I once worked with a colleague who always felt he needed a deadline to get things done, that kicked off the ‘backs to the wall’, ‘consider anything’ type of thinking that worked for him.

I came to realise over the years however that this guy was a procrastinator and it was the deadline shaking him out of his procrastinating routine that delivered for him. It wasn’t that the deadline made him anymore creative, it just got him focused on the job. That guy probably thought that serious time pressure was the only way to get resourceful when it came to delivering, because he had never actually tried it any other way.

I recently read an article on the Harvard Business Review by Teresa M. Amabile, Constance N. Hadley, and Steven J. Kramer which directly addressed the question of whether a deadline helps creativity.

The paper uses a case study from a software developer who was set an impossible deadline to deliver a complex specification that required coming up with creative solutions under very tight deadlines. Anyone who was worked in software development will identify with this. The industry has a long history of the time needed to complete complex work being underestimated, with dire consequences for those involved (never mind the software produced).

The summary from their research is that on days of the most extreme time pressure, the people involved were 45 percent less likely to come up with a new idea or solve a complex problem. Even worse, there was a kind of “pressure hangover,” with lower creativity persisting for two days or more.

According to Amabile and colleagues, ‘working under the gun’ as they put it, is a bad idea when complex, creative thinking is needed. I agree and I know plenty other software developers who have been there and would concur.

Because you're worth it

If we have had a bad day, maybe lost an important deal or got singled out for criticism by someone, we can feel pretty bad. When this happens people often think about their family, their good health or some other positive aspect of their lives. Psychologists call this ‘Self-affirmation’. It involves reminding ourselves of our self-worth when things go wrong.

Rather than only do this after things have gone wrong, a little self affirmation could be a useful daily habit. One study from Carnegie Mellon University suggests that Self-Affirmation improves problem-solving under stress. Highly stressed individuals who took time out to remind themselves of their self worth performed under pressure at the same level as participants with low chronic stress levels. They solved more problems that their stressed peers who did not indulge in a little self affirmation.

Another study showed that people who affirmed their self-worth make less errors than those who do not. Better again, they seemed to be particularly aware of mistakes they did make and corrected more errors.

The tip here is to consider taking time to remind yourself of your value as a person, in a way that is not tied to your work life. It can help reduce the effects of stress and make you a better problem solver in high pressure situations. This can also make you less likely to make mistakes and if you do make a few, it can help you learn from them and correct your behaviour.

So don’t be afraid to tell yourself how great you are, because you’re worth it and its worth your while

Be Centre Stage

Have you wandered into a meeting room, made small talk with whoever is already there  and took a seat without thinking about it that much? Does it actually matter where we sit? Maybe it does.

Most people make the unconscious assumption that people in the centre are most important and therefore don’t tend to notice their mistakes as much or interrogate their contributions. This is known as the ‘Centre Stage Effect’.

It is covered in a 2005 paper from Berkeley which looks at a number of studies.  It tested the centre-stage effect using observational data from a real television show, The Weakest Link. Results show that players assigned at random to central positions are more likely to win the game than those in extreme positions.

There are a number of other similar lab based studies which come to the same conclusion, we fail to consciously look at and accurately assess the 'important' person in the centre. This leads to a biased (although favourable) assessment of whoever is in that central position.

Moral of the story? Want to get away with it? Get to the meeting early and grab the centre seat. The guys on either side will take brunt of any criticism flying about.

Sorry I've forgotten your name

We have all been in meetings or at social events where we got introduced to a bunch of people. Afterwards when we try to recall the encounter, the names can be hard to remember. Quite often someone will say, ‘That guy from sales, what was he called?’. It is easier to remember all types of information about someone, than their name. We are better at remembering what they do, where they come from, what they specialise in, what their hobbies are. This is backed up by a number of studies.

One such study gave people fake names and biographies to remember. In recall tests, only 30% could recall surnames, compared to 68% and 69% for hobbies and jobs respectively.

In another study, participants found it easier to remember that a person is a potter, i.e. maker of pots, than if their surname is actually Potter.

The bad news is that the jury is out on why this occurs. Some theories are that lots of similar names (lots of Johns, Marys, Smiths) interfere with each other and this inhibits our ability to form durable memories about someone’s specific name.

However others would suggest that familiar names are easier to recall and it should be easier to remember someone called John or Mary, rather than a name we have never heard of before.

The good news is that research has shown that the semantic meaning we attach to names, or the different levels at which we process them, helps our ability to recall.

For example, we meet John Smith, we use his initials JS, he happened to be a nice guy so we associate ‘Just Super’ with his name. If he wasn’t that nice, maybe ‘Just Stupid’ would have been more appropriate. We have now given his name greater semantic significance and done some additional processing to come up with ‘Just Super’.

It is now much more memorable and we have different cues and levels of processing to assist recall. Next time we meet ‘JS’ ‘Just Super’ nice John, we won’t be stuck for a name or get caught trying to read his name badge. This might be why nick names tend to stick and are easily remembered.

The moral of the story is not to get too frustrated or embarrassed if you can’t recall a name, it happens to most of us. If you want to remember names better, associate them with some other information about the meeting or characteristics of the person involved. Don’t get too upset either if someone you meet can’t remember your name, it’s not personal. Just point them in the direction of this blog. Hopefully they will think you are closer to the 'Super' than the 'Stupid' end of the scale.

Be careful what you visualize

We have all heard of visualizing our goals. There are examples of football place kickers visualizing getting the last minute winner. Many golfers have visualized sinking that winning putt.

Research by Pham and Taylor at the University of California, suggests however that visualizing needs to involve the process of achieving your goal, not just the outcome. In other words, you visualize your run up to the ball, feet position, momentum, the contact with the ball, the release of the strike on the ball. Just visualizing the ball going between the posts is not enough.

Thinking about the process, in detail and ‘experiencing’ it via visualization helps us to focus the mind on potential problems, what needs to be right, what can go wrong and how to overcome any problems.

Just visualizing the outcome lets us prone to the ‘Planning Fallacy’ This is a cognitive error which affects most of us, regardless of experience. We continually fail to anticipate just how much of any plan can and will go wrong. We are hardwired to think everything will be much easier than it really will be.

In the research cited, students were asked to either visualize their ultimate goal of doing well in an exam or the steps they would take to reach that goal, i.e. studying.

The results were clear-cut. Participants who visualized themselves reading and gaining the required skills and knowledge, spent longer actually studying and got better grades in the exam.

Just imagining reaching a goal may be worse than ineffective, it may reduce our performance. In the study by Pham and Taylor, participants who just envisioned a successful outcome studied less and actually had reduced motivation.

So for visualization, like the song goes, “it ain’t what you do it’s the way that you do it”.