in Behavior, Psychology
Happiness, behavior change, autonomy, purpose…
These words have moved into the everyday business conversation and taken on a life of their own in the last few years. They’ve spawned books and conversations. Yet few offer a systematic way towards better outcomes. And not just that, but also helping us become aware of what might be holding us back.
I think I’ve found a book that adds to the conversation, and fills that void.…
in Creativity, Psychology
Expertise is the enemy of innovation right? Yes, but even experts can think differently. And, there’s much to learn from them on how they are able to overcome their ‘know-it-all’ tendencies.
Indeed, research into expertise and expert performance explains how great strategists use mental frames to break cognitive barriers that prevent others from seeing new options. It is not just that experts know more about the problem—in fact they often know less—but they think differently. They restructure, reorganize, and refine their representation of knowledge so as to more efficiently apply knowledge to solve problems.
Thinking differently is just a matter of shifting your frame. Of seeing things from a different point of view. But what inhibits us from being able to think differently?
More specifically, what happens inside our minds that limit our capacity to think differently?…
in Innovation, Psychology
We all think we know how most of the things we work with a on a daily basis work. Take for example your computer, how does it work? How does the screen display those icons? How does the mouse/keypad work? How does the computer know when you’ve written on the keyboard?
To answer these questions we could easily go to Wikipedia or HowStuffWorks and find out everything there is to know about computers, including how they work. But most of the explanations you’ll find are very simplistic, they’ll give you the basics. What they won’t tell you is ‘why’ they work this way. Why it is the way it is.
And that’s exactly the types of answers we should be looking for because we think we understand how most things work, but the truth is we don’t. We have an illusion of how things work. …
in Behavior, Marketing, Psychology
We have a client in the in the personal finance industry that helps people get out of debt providing good credit repair services and for the past two months we have been managing and executing their social media strategy.
Part of this strategy is defining the content, branding and overall message you want to convey. This is key because it helps people determine what you stand for. At the beginning we told the client that his business had the perception of being a fraud. With so many businesses that claim to help one get out of debt we weren’t surprised.
Anyways, in order to break that pattern we decided that we would post only useful ‘how to get out of debt’ (not the type that’s on ezines) content through Twitter and Facebook, which is generally browsed by in debt people looking for how to make 2000 fast. My client did not agree with this idea, they wanted to post financial news (obvious to everyone else) from reputable sources. News that keep confirming how the world is going to end because our economy is still in the rut.
They think this is what people will be interested in reading. Well bo-ho! I questioned this assumption and fired back that people are already aware of this since there isn’t a day that goes by that we’re not reminded of it. Should we create more noise?…
in Marketing, Psychology, Strategy
I have a few friends who are looking for a job and have been for a awhile. They use digital means such as Linkedin, Simply Hired, Monster to find jobs as well as network with people. This process takes a lot of time, but the biggest problem is they still live with their parents; and the parents are fed up with it.
They’ve even told me their parents want to take their computers away because they think finding a job through the internet is dumb. They say they should job hunt the old fashioned way by going door to door. Say what?
It’s ironic because recruiters are changing their employee-hunting tactics to focus more on online:
Rather than sift through mounds of online applications, they are going out to hunt for candidates themselves. Many plan to scale back their use of online job boards, which they say generate mostly unqualified leads, and hunt for candidates with a particular expertise on places like LinkedIn Corp.’s professional networking site before they post an opening. As the market gets more competitive again, they are hiring recruiters with expertise in headhunting and networking, rather than those with experience processing paperwork.
I’m not saying the old fashioned way of job hunting is wrong, it’s just that parents fail to understand how the internet is changing how we do most things; including job hunting. Why this disconnect?
Because of ignorance. They don’t take the time to step into our world and see what we see. This same principle applies to understanding the world of both our customers and employees.
Why is this important?
I recently argued that CEO’s should use social media because they need to get an intimate feel for the tools their customers and employees use to communicate instead of leaving it up to their lieutenants to figure it out. If they don’t experience these tools firsthand, they’ll never get the visceral experience of how these tools are really used in the front lines.
I don’t know about you but I like to experience things first hand and get an intuitive feel for them because it’s the only way I can understand how others might use, react, behave, etc.
Point: The only way to understand what customers (our children) are thinking is to put ourselves in their shoes and step into their world. Look at the world from their eyes. We have to close the gap between their world and ours if we are to understand and help solve their problems in a better way.
How do you do that?
Easy.
Observe, notice, ask, listen, repeat.
in Psychology
I got a PowerPoint preso in my email today about a speech given by Bill Gates to a high school of the 11 things kids won’t learn in school. The rules themselves are quite good and you should definitely check them out.
While I had never heard of such a speech from Bill Gates, I had a hunch he didn’t give this speech and was curious to see if there was a video on the web. I googled ‘bill gates speech to teenagers’ and ended up finding out that the 11 laws did not originate from him and that no one actually knows where they came from.
What’s interesting is most people would not have gone to Google to dig deeper, they’ll believe with certainty that Bill Gates gave this speech just as they’ll believe most everything that confirms their own beliefs. It’s very easy to get influenced by such a presentation because it comes from an authority figure, we humans will automatically take it as ‘must-do’ advice.
The main thing is to understand that…
It’s very easy to dress up ideas and align them with an influential figure to ‘provoke’ change. I have no doubt this presentation has been shared by parents throughout the world who then showed it to their kids and got a good result because of it. But, the opposite is also true. An idea can be manipulated with bad intentions in mind, and then we’ll have a very different result.
My point is that we often fall prey to the confirmation bias, our inherent tendency to confirm what we believe is true. I’m not arguing the value of the 11 laws on the presentation, they’re worth reading and taken into consideration. I’m just pointing out that by not ‘questioning’ our own beliefs we overlook the truth which most of the time lead to bad decisions.
The truth: Tell anyone what they want to hear and they’ll believe you. Especially if it’s common sense!
What to do instead?
As I’ve written before, in innovation activities there is a very strong emotional incentive to seek out opinions and information that confirms the value of our ideas:
Whenever we have an idea, instead of searching for ways to prove our ideas wrong, we usually attempt to prove them correct. Once we see a pattern we do not easily let go of it, we keep digging and digging to see that pattern more and more. Sometimes there isn’t even a pattern there but we somehow ‘want’ to believe there is. You know all too well how this plays out in any organization.
Again, instead of confirming our beliefs we should spend time searching for ‘evidence’ that we are wrong. The intention is not to be a skeptic, but to set ourselves free from assumptions and see with clarity. Some of us will dig deeper than others but the important thing is that you dig to challenge your own thinking. See the light!
P.S. Just to clear things up, It’s not that I don’t trust my friend. I just trust my instincts a lot more. But I do get his intent with sharing the preso with me, thanks 
Making people happy is such a radical idea that it’s a sad thing to see when people are seeking help on how to be more decent to humans. That’s why delivering happiness is not business as usual. I’ve previously written about how Zappos has designed their business model around the idea of ‘delivering happiness’. Yet there’s still a lot of doubt around this ‘radical’ concept, see this Forbes article that asks: is employee happiness a corporate responsibility?
When I see questions such as these I cringe. Well of course it is! Seriously, why would anybody want to work at a place that makes them unhappy? I understand answering this questions is a lot more complicated because it deals with human nature, but it really doesn’t have to be. Grab a pen and paper, an important idea is coming up…
A recent Fast Company article backs this up. According to a study by David Rand of Harvard: People who spend time with happy people are more likely to become happy themselves.
Think about that for a second. Is that something too complex to understand? Do we really need this type of research to understand something so human? No. We don’t really need this type of research to know that hanging out with happy people will makes us more happy. Or that making unhappy people happy makes us happier. It’s common sense!
And that’s not all. Even more telling is that sadness is twice as infectious as happiness. No surprise here either, as an unhappy customer is more likely to tell five people how much your product or services sucks as opposed to telling just one. And by the way, this also includes your employees. Their part of the equation too.
With so much at stake, why can’t we get our heads around that happiness is actually simple?
Here’s the problem: Organizations have a lot of ‘business sense’ but not a lot of ‘common sense’.
Simply understanding that happiness and sadness are contagious should be enough for any organization to treat their people and their customers with decency. Would you rather be know for spreading sadness than happiness? Didn’t think so!
The BIG idea is very simple then: make people happy. Why? Because if your employees are are happy then your customers will be happy. It’s a win-win scenario. Everyone is happy and it all originated from you. That’s what people will remember, trust me 
