Figuring out Feelings

Understanding well-being and how we feel is very much in our consciousness. Organisations now see staff well-being and personal happiness as key components of a sustainable way of working and a big influence on staff retention. At a societal level we are concerned about how stressed and unhappy our youth are, how lonely our elderly might be and the increasing suicide rates in many developed countries. If we had a way of measuring and trending how people feel, that may go a long way in designing early intervention programs and reviewing the efficacy of the various initiatives deployed by organisations and society itself.     

I read something which got me thinking a little more about this. Researchers at the University of Manchester and Indiana University have put some science behind this idea of  ‘sentiment tracking’.

They looked at how global emotion and mood, as measured via something like Twitter, could predict stock market activity. They investigated whether measurements of collective mood states derived from large scale Twitter feeds, correlated to the value of the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) over time. They analyzed the text content of daily Twitter feeds by two mood tracking tools, OpinionFinder that measures positive vs. negative mood and Google-Profile of Mood States (GPOMS)

Their results indicated that the accuracy of DJIA predictions can be significantly improved by the inclusion of specific public mood dimensions. If you want to predict closing prices on the Dow Jones, have an eye on the Twitter feed.

This raises some interesting questions about how we look at social media data or activity. It may justify a more qualitative approach. When it comes to social media marketing, we may need to look at how our followers feel, rather than just counting them.

While causation and correlation could be difficult to nail down, there is perhaps something in this for the Data Scientists among us. There is a plethora of online content generated by users across all forms of social media, text, images, video. 

Parsing online content and cross referencing this with behavior may create some predictive tools or highlight some change in public mood. Looking at which emoticons are used and how frequently may be one place to start. Too many ASAPs in emails might signal someone under a little stress, lots of work emails sent at night or weekends could be from someone on the road to burnout. 

The take away is that with a focus on the Internet of Things, we could be relying on devices to tell us more about the world and how we live our lives. However a lot of this information could already be out there, we just have to look for it.  

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. 

The Future is more valuable than the Past

We care more about the future than about the past. Several studies have shown that we value events in the future more than we value equivalent events in the past.

The nineteenth century American author Herman Melville (he of Moby Dick fame) is often quoted on this – “The Past is dead, and has no resurrection; but the Future is endowed with such a life, that it lives to us even in anticipation.”

As one study puts it, the person who buys a cookie and eats it right away may get X units of pleasure from it, but the person who saves the cookie until later gets X units of pleasure when it is eventually eaten plus all the additional pleasure of looking forward to the event. Looking forward to stuff increases the enjoyment we get from it and hence we value it more.

In research by Caruso and colleagues they found that students wanted more money for a mundane job they would do in the future than for one they had already done in the past, and mock-jurors awarded more money to an accident victim who was going to suffer for a year than who had already suffered for a year.

The results consistently show that once something has happened, we value it less than we did in the lead up to an event. This has a few practical implications for how we pay for services and compensate clients or employees.

If you work in the legal profession, it may be wise to get compensation agreed for your client before they recover from their injuries. If you are drafting a service level agreement with a supplier you would be better off having any punitive reimbursement amounts agreed in advance rather than calculated afterwards. If you are trying to get a bonus organised, get it agreed before you achieve your targets rather than after, don’t go into your boss looking for a rise because you have had a good year. Once it’s in the past your boss won’t value it as much as he might have done six months earlier.

There is also another point to note here. If we plan stuff in the future and take the time to think about it or actively anticipate it, we will feel better. A supporting study by Bryant has found that people who devote time to anticipating enjoyable experiences report being happier in general. Bonuses and compensation aside, it pays to savour. 

We come up with more creative solutions for others

In work, some managers have a tendency to assign a problem or issue to a specific subordinate. It literally becomes ‘their problem’ and it’s up to them to solve it. Some would see this approach as one that encourages responsibility and ownership of the task in hand. In other words, if you make someone directly accountable, they will be more motivated and perhaps more effective in coming up with a solution.

Some research however casts doubt on this approach. Being too close to a problem or being personally involved in it can affect our ability to come up with creative solutions. This is based on an idea called the "Construal Level Theory" - the notion that distance from a problem provokes a more abstract thinking style.

Evan Polman and Kyle Emich at New York University examined how we are more capable of mental novelty when thinking on behalf of strangers than for ourselves. They conducted four studies involving hundreds of undergrads.

In one study they found that participants drew more original aliens for a story to be written by someone else than for a story they were to write themselves. In another study, participants thought of more original gift ideas for an unknown student completely unrelated to themselves, as opposed to one who they were told shared their same birth month.

When it came to problem solving the trend continued. Participants were given a tower puzzle. They were asked to explain how one could escape a tower by cutting a rope that was only half as long as the tower was high. (The solution is to divide the rope lengthwise into two thinner strips and then tied them together). Participants were more likely to solve the problem if they imagined someone else trapped in the tower, rather than themselves.

This could explain why we sometimes surprise ourselves when giving advice or solutions to others. We are more likely to be creative and think in an abstract way when sorting out someone else’s problem rather than our own. This could impact on how we assign problems (like the tower puzzle) to co-workers. Perhaps we could construct the task so that they see it as someone else’s problem but one they are asked to help solve.

Next time you have a problem to delegate, try and create some healthy distance between the conundrum and the person coming up with the solution. You might see improved results.

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.

A little acknowledgement goes a long way

I have known a few mangers in the past who paid lip-service to the idea of ‘valuing peoples contribution’. You don’t need to be a genius to know this is a motivational killer.

In his book “The Upside of Irrationality“, Dan Ariely describes an experiment where he puts some science behind this all too familiar situation.

The researchers paid participants to identify and circle instances where the same letter appeared side-by-side on a page of text. They were paid on a descending scale, the highest amount for the first page they completed and less for each page after that until they figured the money wasn't worth it and they quit. People were randomly assigned to groups that would have one of three variations on this basic idea.

The first group wrote their name on page and the examiner looked over the page and verbally acknowledged the work before placing the page on the pile of worksheets.

The second group did not write their name on page. The examiner just placed the finished page on a pile without looking at it or acknowledging receiving it.

The third group did not write name on page. The examiner immediately placed their finished worksheet in a shredder.

If it was just a matter of money, each group should quit working at approximately the same pay rate (remember the descending pay rate). The results showed that the group that had its work shredded when handed up, stopped working at almost twice the pay rate than the group that had its work fleetingly acknowledged. The group that had its unnamed work placed on a pile without acknowledgement stopped working at very nearly the same pay rate as the group that had their work shredded.

The similarity between the last two groups is interesting. “Ignoring the performance of people is almost as bad as shredding their effort before their eyes,” Ariely says. “The good news is that adding motivation doesn't seem to be so difficult. The bad news is that eliminating motivation seems to be incredibly easy, and if we don’t think about it carefully, we might overdo it.”

It is striking how little acknowledgement it takes to motivate people. Just taking a little time to acknowledge and thank employees is critical to maintaining a happy and productive staff. This can be more effective than payment incentives and expensive corporate culture projects. A little acknowledgement really does go a long way.

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. 

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. 

Memory and open doors

After a meeting or sales demo do you sometimes gather people for a review and get them to recall what happened? If you are trying to get people to recall events or key points you might be better off doing this in the room where the meeting or demo happened.

Research by Gabriel Radvansky at Notre Dame University suggests that memories are stored as a series of successive events. You could almost think of them as chapters in a book. It is easier for us to recall events (or chapters) which just happened. This is fair enough.

However what is interesting in Radvanskys research is that walking through doorways seems to create a new memory episode (or chapter) and therefore making it more difficult to recall details that we literally have left behind in the room (previous chapters).

His research used a virtual reality environment with several rooms containing various objects. When participants entered a room they saw a table and picked up an object, once an object was picked up, they could no longer see it. At the next table (sometimes in the same room) they put down the object and picked up another one. Memory tests were carried out (on what people were carrying) when they entered, left or had been in a room for a while

The research found that memory performance was poorer after travelling through an open doorway, compared with covering the same distance within the same room. The authors said "Walking through doorways serves as an event boundary, thereby initiating the updating of one's event model [i.e. the creation of a new episode in memory]".

So if you have ever walked into a room and forgot something, this may explain it. There is another aspect which suggests that we recall information better in the context in which we experienced it. There is a long list or research in this area including the famous Godden and Baddeley study on divers superior recall under water, if they were trained under water.

This could have implications for how we train staff. You may be better for example, training staff at a desk or in the room where they will actually be working. When we study we may be better studying at a desk with the pens and instruments we will have on our desk when we do an exam. If you are rehearsing a demo, do it in the boardroom where you will be presenting, you may recall your lines a bit better.

To get back to where we started, if you have just had an important meeting, interview or conference call, no one leaves the room until they write down the key points and better still have the review there and then in the room. Keep the door closed. If you have another review later, use the same room. 

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.

If something happens, then you need a plan

We all do a bit of project planning every now and again. This can be for a formal large project with multiple goals and participants or a plan just to get an email put together and sent off.

Research by Gollwitzer etc al, 2006 suggests that we need to anticipate problems and set a series of ‘if then’ actions. This would be if the new piece of software is not live by an agreed date, then, we have a paper based system to use in the short term. In other words we look at what can go wrong, what can be outside of our control and develop contingency plans that are worked out in detail and ready to go.

When the inevitable does occur and some original deadline or action does not materialise, we are not left floundering, wondering what we can do about it or who do we call. Your ‘if then’ is ready to swing into action, you continue to feel in control. You stay in business.

This sounds like really basic advice and a really obvious thing to do. You would however be surprised by the number of people out there who are happy to wing it and not do this extra level of planning.

Once they come up with a plan they let it at that and treat the ‘if thens’ with a touch of ‘we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it’. That type of head in the sand thinking can be a serious threat to your business.

While you can't have an 'if then' for every project milestone, you could have them for the milestones that are an operational threat. I have seen clients unable to issue monthly invoices with devastating implications for cash flow because a data load into a new billing system hit a technical snag. This is particularly important for projects with several suppliers. When something does go wrong, each will point the finger at the other and cooperation to resolve the issue could be in short supply.

So review your project plan. Identify the junctures where failure will seriously jeopardise your organisation and put in your 'if then' plans for these. You will keep a degree of control and not be left at the mercy of suppliers and project managers. Always have an option open, if the worst then happens, you will be ok.

What motivates the office flirt?

Know any flirty guys in your office? It turns out they may not be that happy in their job. A 2011 study from the University of Surrey suggests that men who flirt at work tend to be less satisfied with their job.

The BPS reports that Chadi Moussa and Adrian Banks from the University of Surrey asked 201 participants to complete a questionnaire measuring flirting behaviours at work, job satisfaction, self-reported job performance and personality. The participants (men and women) were aged 21-68 and came from a variety of employment sectors.

The researchers' strongest finding was that flirting at work was negatively related to job satisfaction for men. There was no significant relationship between flirting and job satisfaction for women.

Chadi Moussa says: “These findings contradict popular notions that flirting at work can make employees mores satisfied or perform better. If men are feeling unsatisfied in their roles, then they may resort to flirting to keep them entertained and this would partially explain the negative relationship. While flirting can have benefits, excessive flirting at work may be a sign that you’re unsatisfied with your job or simple bored."

If you are doing a review with a member of staff who is known as an office flirt, dig a little to see if they are really happy at work. If you are worried about employee retention, keep a really close eye on the flirts. Just make sure you don't fall for their one liners.

Tomorrow is closer than Yesterday

Heading back to work after the bank holiday. Does last weekend seem like ages ago, and work deadlines this week scarily close?

The Past feels psychologically further away than the Future. Recent research by Caruso et al (2013) showed that Valentine's Day will feel closer in time one week beforehand than one week after. This has been dubbed the ‘temporal Doppler effect’.

Caruso had a scale from 1 to 7 (1 is close in time, 7 being distant in time). Participants rated an upcoming Valentine's Day an average of 3.9 when it was one week in the future, but an average of 4.8 when it was one week in the past.

This could be a good thing. We appear to be future orientated. This may even be adaptive as it is useful in helping us plan, we are more concerned about (perceptively closer) future events. It may help us move on from past mistakes (‘that was ages ago’ type of feeling). It allows us to focus on and meet deadlines we think are imminent.

There could also be a downside however, as we tend to forget the past, repeat mistakes and focus on ‘getting it right next time’. Either way, as long as we know that we are prone to this way of thinking we can factor it in.

Assumptions at Work

Much of our recent national and economic history can be traced back to not challenging assumptions. The assumption that house prices would keep on rising, endless access to cheap credit, that we would always earn more and more, that our banks and planners were well regulated. However don’t feel too bad about that, clinging to assumptions is part of human nature. The following is based on an article by Michael Michalko where he explains how assumptions work.

To understand how powerful and subtle assumptions can be, try doing this exercise in your head. Add up the following numbers as quickly as you can. Take 1000 and add 40 to it. Now add another 1000. Now add 30. Add another 1000. Now add 20. Now add another 1000. Now add 10. What is the total?

Our confidence in our ability to add according to the way we were taught in base ten at school encourages us to process the information in a certain way and assume an answer. If your total is 5,000, then you are wrong. 96% of people who add these simple numbers get the wrong answer. The numbers are arranged in such a way to set people up to get the wrong answer when adding using base ten. The correct answer is 4,100.Human nature is such that when we assume we know how to do something, we perform the act without much thought about the assumptions we make.

You have probably seen it in work or at home in household chores where people have particular ways of doing things. Once we think we know how something should be done, we keep doing it, then we teach others to do it the same way, and they in turn teach others until eventually you reach a point where no one remembers why something is done a certain way but we keep doing it anyway. We tend to accept whatever explanation someone with experience tells us. They have done it for years and so know best.

If you work in a job where mentoring is part of induction or continuous training ask yourself ‘why’ every now and again and see if you know the answer. Unfortunately we don’t ask that all important ‘why’ often enough and slip into the habit of not challenging assumptions.

This is well demonstrated in an experiment psychologists performed some years ago. It began with a cage containing five monkeys. Inside the cage, they hung a banana on a string with a set of stairs placed under it. Before long, a monkey went to the stairs and started to climb towards the banana. As soon as he started up the stairs, the psychologists sprayed all of the other monkeys with ice cold water. After a while, another monkey made an attempt to obtain the banana.  As soon as his foot touched the stairs, all of the other monkeys were sprayed with ice cold water. Bit of conditioned learning kicked in here. It's wasn't long before all of the other monkeys would physically prevent any monkey from climbing the stairs.

Now, the psychologists shut off the cold water, removed one monkey from the cage and replaced it with a new one. The new monkey saw the banana and started to climb the stairs. To his surprise and horror, all of the other monkeys attacked him.  After another attempt and attack, he discovered that if he tried to climb the stairs, he would be assaulted. Next they removed another of the original five monkeys and replaced it with a new one. The newcomer went to the stairs and was attacked. The previous newcomer took part in the punishment with great gusto. In turn, they replaced a third original monkey with a new one, then a fourth, then the fifth. Every time the newest monkey tried to climb the stairs, he was attacked.

The monkeys had no idea why they were not permitted to climb the stairs or why they were beating any monkey that tried. After replacing all the original monkeys, none of the remaining monkeys had ever been sprayed with cold water. Nevertheless, no monkey ever again approached the stairs to try for the banana. Why not? Because as far as they know that's the way it's always been around here. 

We do the same in the workplace. How many times have you heard "It has always been done this way” or “Don't mess with what works." Instead of challenging these assumptions, many of us, like the monkeys, simply keep reproducing what has been done before. It's the easiest thing to do. Just like adding using base ten.

This also sheds some light on why change is sometimes very difficult, we are making assumptions even when we don’t realise it and breaking that cycle of behavior is difficult both personally and at a social / corporate level. It may even explain why for years we assumed the church, politicians were to be trusted, ‘sure we’ve always trusted them’. Next time you notice yourself making an assumption, do yourself a favor and challenge it. Don’t be a monkey, your reward could be that dangling banana everyone else said you couldn’t have.

What if you don't want to Manage?

Are you good at your job? Have you worked hard to get the expertise and experience that makes you an effective professional?

What's next? For many of us, just as we spend years building a career skills set, hopefully doing something we like, we end up getting that promotion to manager or team leader. We get separated from our peers, the job we like and put into a management environment we may not enjoy or really want.

I've seen this several times in software development where once you get 10 years experience, you are in danger of being drafted into management, there is no career path or pay scale other than that.

Many programmers don't ever want to be managers, they want to keep learning new technologies, languages, devices and professionally develop. Its why they do the job, not to be the boss. Ironically if you work your way up in one organisation, you may have to leave to avoid the management/team lead promotion net. You go to another company, start a few steps back (in effect applying for a demotion), but still doing the job you like.

This is not unusual or limited to any one job type, in an interesting article Anne Kreamer, former Executive Vice President, Worldwide Creative Director, for Nickelodeon discusses this phenomenon and her own experiences.

She cites research conducted by Office Team which found that 76% of employees did not want their boss's job. If employees are no longer driven by the old incentives (work hard and you could be the boss), it's time for companies to figure out new ways of rewarding and keeping talented workers.

Perhaps you can flag in your reviews that you want a career path that does not involve leaving your skills behind and becoming a manager. Maybe there is a halfway house where you could mentor junior staff  or projects, be responsible for their development, using that experience but still developing your own skills and doing a job you like. This type of innovative structure may tempt skilled staff to stay.

This is not all about protecting reluctant employees from being defaulted into management. Organisations that promote people into roles they really don't want but got landed with anyway, are probably not getting the best motivated people in key positions. We then get the worst of both worlds, we lose skilled happy people and also get weak management.

That is not any good for anyone.

Do you Learn from Your Mistakes?

I have recently read a Harvard Business School paper,  called "Learning From My Success and From Others' Failure: Evidence from Minimally-Invasive Cardiac Surgery." An important feature of the paper is that self-attribution bias results in individuals failing to improve as much as we may think from their own mistakes. We learn better from the mistakes of others rather than our own.

Daniel Kahneman would not be surprised by this, he has long held that we put our success down to our abilities and skill, while we maintain that our failures result from external factors, the actions of others or just plain bad luck.

How can you beat this well established bias and learn more? One way may be to document your mistakes as they occur. The act of writing them down takes out some of the emotion and allows you to think. Revisit the mistakes in a few weeks and you may spot a pattern or develop an awareness of why your mistakes happen.

Most people out there won't do this, they will continue to make mistakes and worse still not learn a lot from them. If you can learn just a few lessons from all the mistakes that enviably occur, then you will be at a considerable advantage in your professional development. It would be a mistake not to.

Plead Guilty Everytime

If you are looking to hire a leader, a hard worker who will be looked up to, what personal traits would you short list?

How high up that short list would 'Guilt' be? Probably not very. However some research conducted in 2011 by Francis J. Flynn at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business has put forward the idea that Guilt should be near the top of the list.

In the Harvard Business Review, Flynn describes how he gave 150 workers in the Finance Dept. of a Fortune 500 Company a standard psychological test. The test (TOSCA - Test of Self-Conscious Affect) measured the workers tendency to feel guilt. The results were then compared with actual performance reviews. The results were clear, the more an employee was prone to guilt, the higher the rating they got from their boss in reviews.

Flynn found this very interesting as the TOSCA and the performance ratings were completely independent but the link between performance and guilt was well established. Flynn and his colleagues conducted some follow up research which showed that the guilt prone were also more committed to their organizations and were seen as stronger leaders by their peers.

The research also suggested that guilt-ridden people were more likely to accept layoffs and carry them out. Flynn explained that it was not that they don’t feel guilty about laying people off, "it’s that they feel obligated to support their employer, so they accept layoffs as a way to reduce costs".

So next time you are hiring someone whom you want to be a hard worker, be leadership material, can be counted on to be fully committed to the organisation and if necessary conduct the unattractive business of redundancies, select the guilty.

You could give a TOSCA test, or have a chat about their previous experience, or have candidates involved in some role play scenario, where they will have to confront a potentially guilt laden situation and comment on how guilty they feel.

You probably know your own staff pretty well, especially if you work in a small or medium size company. Think of the people you know that would be the type to feel guilty. Are they also committed and hard-working, are they people the company can count on? If so then perhaps add 'Guilt' to the attributes for your next hires.

Just to note: The article in the Harvard Business Review was well contested and the comments section has several points taking issue with the research.

Uncover Hidden Bias and Attitudes

Implicit Association Test - Screen for bias or attitudes?

We are all a little or more than a little biased. Don’t feel bad about this. The ability to quickly tell a friend from foe helped early humans survive, being able to quickly catergorise people is a good thing in that respect. The downside is that this is also the foundation of stereotypes, prejudice and, ultimately, discrimination.It can affect how we treat and work with people.

We can be consciously committed to social equality, and deliberately work to behave without prejudgment, yet still possess hidden negative biases or stereotypes. What relevance has this to the workplace? If you have a company that has customers from a particular group, for example, elderly or mainly female, then these groups could be treated differently by staff members carrying this latent but present prejudice to that social group

Why it’s important

Many studies show a link between hidden biases and actual behavior. Hidden biases reveal themselves in how we interact with the world at large and the work place is no exception.
Studies have shown that school teachers inadvertently or otherwise show prejudices in the classroom. Some researchers believe children of color and white children in the same classroom effectively receive different educations. The same could be true in internal meetings, customer service or when forming project teams.

A now classic experiment showed that white interviewers sat farther away from black applicants than from white applicants, made more speech errors and ended the interviews 25% sooner. Such discrimination has been shown to diminish the performance of anyone treated that way, whether black or white.

"Implicit Association Tests" (IATs) can shine a light on these hidden, or automatic, stereotypes. They go way beyond race and gender, indeed Project Implicit — a collaborative research effort between researchers at Harvard University, the University of Virginia, and University of Washington shows many examples of tests for different associations and biases.

How it works

The implicit association test is often associated with Greenwald (Greenwald, McGhee & Schwartz, 1998), and is used to measure personality or prejudices while ensuring that participants are oblivious to the purpose of this procedure.

Say you are testing for diligence. You would ask a person to hit a key on a keyboard when a word comes up that relates to them e.g, their gender, age, star sign etc and the same key when a word relating to diligence comes up e.g. meticulous. You would also ask them to hit a different key when a word comes up that is not about them and when a word that does not relate to diligence comes up e.g. lazy. Diligent people complete this task quickly with few errors

You could swap the keys and have the same key relating to the self and negative behaviour. People who are not very diligent would perform well on this test. The difference between the two tests would rate the persons level of diligence (Steffens, 2004).

How you can use it  You could use this to build a test for diligence as part of induction training or recruitment. You could also create a test to investigate attitudes to, for example, older people if you ran a residential care facility, attitudes to race if your employees or customers would belong to that particular group. These tests are more difficult to counter and may be more reliable than asking new recruits to say what their thoughts on old people, racial groups are.

You could rate peoples attitude to particular project (have a key to press for project terms and positive thoughts, a key for non-project terms and negative thoughts, then swap). This could be ran over the life span of a project to get some ones attitude to the project, feelings it will succeed or fail. Getting back to diligence, you could periodically test staff to see if scores are dipping and intervene with work place changes or motivational improvements.

If your company was bought out, before and after the buy out have a test with a key to press for company terms and positive words, a key to press for non company terms and negative words, then swap. You would get an indication of workers change in attitude to their new conditions and owners. Get the picture?

It could be cross validated with some other tests, performance results, interview questions or observations of performance but is a good starting point.

This is a Test Post