Without Comment: There’s a flip side to everything

For the next time you think there’s only one way to skin a cat:

TEDTalks : Derek Sivers: Weird, or just different? – Derek Sivers (2009): “‘There’s a flip side to everything,’ the saying goes, and in 2 minutes, Derek Sivers shows this is true in a few ways you might not expect.“

(Via TEDTalks (video).)

Keith and Rush are right for all the wrong reasons

If you listen too long to Keith Olbermann or Rush Limbaugh, you may come to believe politics are important only as a tool for beating the tar out of those you don’t like.

No wonder most people are turned off to politics all together.

That’s a shame, because politics – like coalitioning(?) – is really important as the art of the possible:  How do you  assemble the right groups of stakeholders to identify, implement and sustain effective solutions to important problems.?

And when it comes to achieving success on issues or projects that are complex, large-scale or heavily regulated or legislatively affected, likely nothing happens without engaging in – or at least understanding how – the politics of getting things done.

That’s why I recently counseled a new PR professional looking to be successful in public policy communications to familiar with – and hopefully comfortable at – working with governmental relations.

Even in outcome-neutral public involvement programs, success as defined by the client and the community will rest in part on how well goals and issues are communicated to elected and regulatory officials who have to implement any recommendations.

There are lots of ways to gain familiarity with politics and with the unique pressures and motivations that drive public servants.  But here are two great organizations and sources for becoming more adept at government affairs and using that skill appropriately:

• http://pac.org/

• http://www.prsa.org/Network/Communities/PAG/

Time spent with either of these two groups are likely to be more productive when it comes to politics than another minute spent with Keith and Rush.

How thin is your margin of error?

My wife and I consider The American Restaurant our go-to restaurant for special events; we have ever since our net worth became greater than a blank check and a three-day float.

But two off outings in a row – including a ruined New Year’s Eve dinner – has moved the Crown Center classic out of the “no brainer” category into “not now/maybe never?”

New Year’s Eve was the worst. High expectations.  Left a fun party for a highly anticipated late night of intimate dining and dancing.  Dressed to the nines (Linda beautiful as always and me, well, Cary had nothing to fear nor did innocent bystanders).  And ready for a great meal by Chef Gold.

What we got was “meh” food, incredibly slow service and no attention from our server (at one point he did the reverse “Walk like an Egyptian” to avoid eye contact towards the end of a 30-minute span during which no food was delivered to our table).  We eventually had to enlist the butter boy into being our emissary. And then all we got was an incredulous look when we balked at receiving two courses at the same time when the food finally arrived.

With Linda nauseated from no food (it’s now 11:15 pm), a dense cloud of forbidden cigarette smoke in the ladies lounge and the (mutually shared) bile of having a good night out, we left early and headed for home, two surprised dogs, shrimp marinara TV dinners and an irritable take on the AR.

And the thing is, it didn’t have to be that way.

IF … the restaurant had kept us informed about what was going on … acknowledged the problem and the difficulties it presented … sent an appropriate representative to confer with us … recognized our goal was getting something resembling food, not slices of bread falling like autumn leaves … and asked if there was anything that could be done to restore our confidence … things might have turned out differently.

And for us coalitionists, the key take-away may be that our margin of error on delivering the goods – and fixing problems when quality falls short – is slim. We had a two-decade investment of good times in the American, and quality issues have put a serious wobble in the relationship.  Most of the people we seek to engage don’t have a similar 20-year reservoir of confidence and good will in the institutions we may represent.

Good design makes you smarter

The bottom line of a recent post of mine is that bad design – of anything: process, materials, content – prevents us from winning the confidence and support of potential allies.

It probably also prevents us from fully tapping the creativity of stakeholders when we ask them to help us brainstorm solutions for knotty problems, according to Don Norman in the following video (see esp. the portion at around five minutes).

Norman’s a world-renowned usability expert who believes intellect and emotion are – and should be – brought together by good design in ways that increase creativity, productivity and satisfaction.

Without Comment: Seven ways to get what you want

7 Ways to Get What You Want: “Influence is the key to any leadership role. Some folks do not like talking about it, but power and influence are natural phenomena in organizations and in leadership roles. People who want power and influence often try not to appear as if they are seeking it, and some people who have power and influence are reticent about how they actually got it.

Research into the area of power and influence is fascinating. In one notable study, 165 managers were asked to write short descriptions of occasions when they influenced their bosses, co-workers, or employees. (See Kipnis, Schmidt, Swaffin-Smith, and Wilkinson, ‘Patterns of Managerial Influence,’ Organizational Dynamics.) The responses from these 165 managers were condensed and rewritten into a 58-item questionnaire that was then administered to over 750 managers. In this questionnaire, the managers were asked both how and why they influenced people in the workplace.

This research identified seven key influence tactics:

(1) Reason: Using facts and data to bolster your request.

(2) Assertiveness: Using a direct and forceful approach, such as demanding compliance, ordering others to do what is asked, and pointing out rules that must be followed.

(3) Friendliness: Creating goodwill by being affable and acting humble prior to making your request.

(4) Sanctions: Doling out punishments or distributing rewards.

(5) Coalition: Getting the support of others to back your idea, proposal, or request.

(6) Bargaining: Negotiating with others for the exchange of benefits or favors.

(7) Higher authority: Gaining the support of others at higher levels in the organization to back up your idea, proposal, or request.

The researchers discovered that the managers did not rely equally on the seven influence tactics. When the managers were interacting with their superiors, the most commonly used tactics (in order of frequency) were reason, coalition, friendliness, and bargaining. When the managers were interacting with their subordinates, the most commonly used tactics (in order of frequency) were reason, assertiveness, friendliness, and coalition. Interestingly, the use of sanctions was the least popular influence tactic by the managers. What’s more, the managers who controlled resources valued by others, or who were perceived to have more power than others, used a greater variety of influence tactics and employed assertiveness more often than did managers with less power.

To be an effective leader, you need to know which influence tactic to use in which situation. This leadership skill often separates the great leaders from the rest.

So, what influence tactics do you use?

Scott Derrick is the Director of Professional Development at the Senior Executives Association, a nonprofit professional association of career federal executives. Scott is also an executive coach and leadership consultant with the Federal Executive Development Group LLC, a consulting company specializing in leadership development in the federal sector. The views expressed here are his own.“

(Via GovLoop.)

Rdrs wnt lss sez AW

As king of the one-sentence paragraph, not surprisingly I agree with Ann Wylie. Shorter is better (usually) when it comes time to engage and inform stakeholders. As she noted recently:

“Size does matter. All things else being equal, your readers would rather read a short piece than a long piece.

In writing — as in eating, imbibing, reality TV viewing and so much else in life — it’s good to set limits. In other words, establish an appropriate length limit for each piece you write. Here are some ideas for inspiration:

• The recommended length of the average press release has dropped from 400 words B.I. (before Internet) to 250 words A.I. (after Internet), according toB.L. Ochman. What have you done to respond to the obstacles of screen reading in your PR and other communications?
• What’s the best length for a tweet? While Twitter cuts you off at 140 characters, the better limit is actually 129 characters, according usability expert Jakob Nielsen. That allows for the average 11-character attribution that gets added whenever anyone retweets your status update.
• Sandra Oliver, a researcher at Thames Valley University in London, found that employees would read about 400 words of their CEO’s message. How long is your CEO’s message? If it’s longer than 400 words, did you put the words you don’t want employees to read after the first 400?

The right length for each piece, of course, depends — on the topic, audience, medium, vehicle, budget and other matters of judgment. But using these ideas and observations, you can establish general copy length limits.”

And if you aren’t convinced, see this post from Ann:

“How long is too long?

When it comes to paragraphs, the shorter the paragraph, the better, according to The Poynter Institute’s Eyetrack III study.

“The bottom line is that stories with shorter paragraphs got more than twice as many overall eye fixations than those with longer paragraphs,” the Poynter researchers wrote. “These data suggest that the longer-paragraph format discourages reading and that short-paragraph format overwhelmingly encourages reading.”

That’s not really surprising to anyone who’s studied the effects of paragraph length in print or online: People tend to skip long paragraphs in either medium. What is surprising is what constitutes a “short” paragraph on the Web.

The Eyetrack researchers measured this way:

• Short paragraphs: one or two sentences long
• Medium paragraphs: up to six sentences long
• Long paragraphs: up to 18 sentences long

Bottom line: Online, hit return every paragraph or two.”

Nudging people to find the middle path

Since finding compromises is often the hallmark of a good coalitionist, I thought this from The Frontal Cortex might be of interest…

“I found this minor anecdote, from Peter Baker’s authoritative NY Times article on Obama’s decision-making process for Afghanistan, to be quite fascinating:

On Oct. 9, Mr. Obama and his team reviewed General McChrystal’s troop proposals for the first time. Some in the White House were surprised by the numbers, assuming there would be a middle ground between 10,000 and 40,000.

‘Why wasn’t there a 25 number?’ one senior administration official asked in an interview. He then answered his own question: ‘It would have been too tempting.’

General McChrystal, it turns out, is a shrewd student of decision-making. He realized that the introduction of a compromise option – say, a troop buildup of 25,000 soldiers – would have been irrationally attractive. This is known as the compromise effect, and it was first documented by Amos Tversky and Itamar Simonson.

Here’s an example of the compromise bias in action: A group of sixty undergraduates received descriptions and pictures of microwave ovens taken from an actual catalog. They were asked to choose between an Emerson oven priced at $110 and a Panasonic priced at $180, which had a few more features. Both items were on sale, a third off the regular price. In this scenario, 57 percent of subjects chose the Emerson and 43 percent chose the Panasonic.

Now let’s consider a second scenario, faced by another group of undergraduates. They were presented with the same two microwave options, but given a third choice as well: a $200 Panasonic oven at a 10 percent discount. Of course, this Panasonic oven is a clearly inferior choice, since it comes with a much smaller discount; it’s mere presence in the catalog shouldn’t influence our decision. Nevertheless, the introduction of this new alternative dramatically increased the attractiveness of the other Panasonic oven, so that 60 percent of subjects new chose it.

Retail stores have long manipulated this bias, as they constantly present consumers with deliberately mediocre and expensive options, just so other options seem more reasonable. (The easiest way to make a $50 T-shirt seem like a good deal is to surround it with $100 T-shirts.) When it comes to decision-making, context is everything.

The point is that most of us are natural compromisers, eager to find a middle-way. (There’s some suggestive evidence that the tendency to pursue the compromise option is mediated by culture, with East Asians more likely than Westerners to show the compromise effect.) Furthermore, our compromising tendencies can be skewed by the audience: when American subjects were told that they might have to defend their choice in front of a whole classroom, they shifted towards the safety of the middle option. Obama, of course, needed to justify his decision to an entire planet.

Read the comments on this post…“

(Via The Frontal Cortex.)

Do coalitionists lose the “big game” in high school gyms?

People believe cheap is bad – see the discussion buried below in the post from the Frontal Cortex as well as the previous one on wine expertise.

Bad quality, bad service, bad process; these are the attributes that you and I see when we know or suspect that we’re dealing with cheaper goods.

So what do public involvement and other coalition practitioners frequently do as they launch and manage initiatives that require public judgments of the quality and success of processes used and outcomes achieved.

Pick the cheapest engagement options.

We reduce communication frequency. Use the cheapest materials. Host meetings in high school gyms and other free or inexpensive locations.

We do it out of habit. Out of a desire to be good financial stewards. To cope with tight budgets. To fit in with our organizations’ cultures.

All good reasons. Likely there are many more.

But is it all a false economy when the trappings used prime our stakeholders to expect substandard experiences yielding inferior results?

And are we distorting the results in ways that harm the discussion – and the reputations and effectiveness of our organizations – with the basic engagement ethos of simpler, cheaper?

Dopamine and Future Forecasting:

Ed Yong has a typically excellent post on a new paper that looks at how manipulating dopamine levels in the brain can change our predictions of future pleasure:

Tali Sharot from University College London found that if volunteers had more dopamine in their brains as they thought about events in their future, they would imagine those events to be more gratifying. It’s the first direct evidence that dopamine influences how happy we expect ourselves to be.

Sharot recruited 61 volunteers and asked them to say how happy they’d feel if they visited one of 80 holiday destinations, from Greece to Thailand. All of the recruits were given a vitamin C supplement as a placebo and 40 minutes later, they had to imagine themselves on holiday at half of the possible locations. After this bout of fanciful daydreaming, they had to take another pill but this time, half of them were given L-DOPA instead of the placebo. Again, they had to imagine themselves in various holiday spots.

The next day, Sharot brought the volunteers back. By this time, they would have broken down all the L-DOPA in their system. She asked them to choose which of two destinations they’d like to go to, from the set that they had thought about the day before. Finally, they rated each destination again.

By the end of the experiments, they perceived their imaginary holidays to be more enjoyable if they had previously thought about the locations under the influence of L-DOPA (while vitamin C, as predicted, had no effect). The implication is clear: think about the future with more dopamine in the noggin and you’ll imagine that you have a better time.

As I’ve noted before, the popular caricature of dopamine – it’s the hedonistic molecule in the brain, activated by sex, drugs and rock and roll – is slightly misleading. Dopamine neurons, it turns out, don’t care about pleasure per se – they’re much more interested in predicting pleasure, and then comparing our predictions to the actual event. The transactions of dopamine are largely about learning – finding a way to maximize our rewards – and not about mere decadence.

What I find so interesting about this experiment is that it neatly confirmed this theory of computational neuroscience. After all, the subjects didn’t feel happier after popping a pill of L-DOPA – boosting dopamine levels didn’t lead to instant gratification, like Huxley’s soma. Instead, it merely altered their predictions of future happiness.

But here’s the funny thing about those predictions: they tend to correlate pretty accurately with our actual experience. If you think you’re going to have a good time on vacation, then you probably will, just as we tend to enjoy foods and beverages and products that we expect to enjoy. (This is the consumer version of the placebo effect.) Here’s how I described similar phenomena in How We Decide:

Baba Shiv, a neuroeconomist at Stanford, supplied a group of people with Sobe Adrenaline Rush, an ‘energy’ drink that was supposed to make them feel more alert and energetic. (The drink contained a potent brew of sugar and caffeine which, the bottle promised, would impart ’superior functionality’). Some participants paid full price for the drinks, while others were offered a discount. The participants were then asked to solve a series of word puzzles. Shiv found that people who paid discounted prices consistently solved about thirty percent fewer puzzles than the people who paid full price for the drinks. The subjects were convinced that the stuff on sale was much less potent, even though all the drinks were identical. ‘We ran the study again and again, not sure if what we got had happened by chance or fluke,’ Shiv says. ‘But every time we ran it we got the same results.’

Why did the cheaper energy drink prove less effective? According to Shiv, consumers typically suffer from a version of the placebo effect. Since we expect cheaper goods to be less effective, they generally are less effective, even if they are identical to more expensive products. This is why brand-name aspirin works better than generic aspirin, or why Coke tastes better than cheaper colas, even if most consumers can’t tell the difference in blind taste tests. ‘We have these general beliefs about the world⎯for example, that cheaper products are of lower quality⎯and they translate into specific expectations about specific products,’ said Shiv. ‘Then, once these expectations are activated, they start to really impact our behavior.

So the next time you buy something on sale, pop a pill of L-DOPA. It will increase your pleasure, if only because you expect it to.

Read the comments on this post…“

(Via The Frontal Cortex.)

Without Comment: The Unreliability of Expertise?

(Via The Frontal Cortex.)

The WSJ discovers the unreliability of wine critics, citing the fascinating statistical work of Robert Hodgson:

In his first study, each year, for four years, Mr. Hodgson served actual panels of California State Fair Wine Competition judges–some 70 judges each year–about 100 wines over a two-day period. He employed the same blind tasting process as the actual competition. In Mr. Hodgson’s study, however, every wine was presented to each judge three different times, each time drawn from the same bottle.

The results astonished Mr. Hodgson. The judges’ wine ratings typically varied by ±4 points on a standard ratings scale running from 80 to 100. A wine rated 91 on one tasting would often be rated an 87 or 95 on the next. Some of the judges did much worse, and only about one in 10 regularly rated the same wine within a range of ±2 points.

Mr. Hodgson also found that the judges whose ratings were most consistent in any given year landed in the middle of the pack in other years, suggesting that their consistent performance that year had simply been due to chance.

It’s easy to pick on wine critics, as I certainly have in the past. Wine is a complex and intoxicating substance, and the tongue is a crude sensory muscle. While I’ve argued that the consistent inconsistency of oenophiles teaches us something interesting about the mind – expectations warp reality – they are merely part of a larger category of experts vastly overselling their predictive powers.

Look, for instance, at mutual fund managers. They take absurdly huge fees from our retirement savings, but the vast majority of mutual funds in any given year will underperform the S&P 500 and other passive benchmarks. (Between 1982 and 2003, there have only been three years in which more than 50 percent of mutual funds beat the market.) Even those funds that do manage to outperform the market rarely do so for long. Their models work haphazardly; their success is inconsistent.

Or look at political experts. In the early 1980s, Philip Tetlock at UC Berkeley picked two hundred and eighty-four people who made their living ‘commenting or offering advice on political and economic trends’ and began asking them to make predictions about future events. He had a long list of pertinent questions. Would George Bush be re-elected? Would there be a peaceful end to apartheid in South Africa? Would Quebec secede from Canada? Would the dot-com bubble burst? In each case, the pundits were asked to rate the probability of several possible outcomes. Tetlock then interrogated the pundits about their thought process, so that he could better understand how they made up their minds. By the end of the study, Tetlock had quantified 82,361 different predictions.

After Tetlock tallied up the data, the predictive failures of the pundits became obvious. Although they were paid for their keen insights into world affairs, they tended to perform worse than random chance. Most of Tetlock’s questions had three possible answers; the pundits, on average, selected the right answer less than 33 percent of the time. In other words, a dart-throwing chimp would have beaten the vast majority of professionals. Tetlock also found that the most famous pundits in Tetlock’s study tended to be the least accurate, consistently churning out overblown and overconfident forecasts. Eminence was a handicap.

But here’s the worst part: even terrible expert advice can reliably tamp down activity in brain regions (like the anterior cingulate cortex) that are supposed to monitor mistakes and errors. It’s as if the brain is intimidated by credentials, bullied by bravado. The perverse result is that we fail to skeptically check the very people making mistakes with our money. I think one of the core challenges in fixing our economy is to make sure we design incentive systems to reward real expertise, and not faux-experts with no track record of success. We need to fund scientists, not mutual fund managers.

Read the comments on this post…“

Without Comment: Average Internet User Now Spends 68 Hours Per Month Online

(Via Mashable!.)

The Nielsen Company issued a report on the top U.S. web brands and Internet usage in the U.S. As expected, Google is the #1 web brand based on unique audience.

The statistic that really jumped out for us, however, was that in September 2009, the average U.S. Internet user spent an estimated 68 hours online (both at home and at work).

Although that still trails television usage by a significant margin, it’s clear that the Internet is carving out a greater and greater role in our lives each month.

In addition to spending an average of 68 hours online, the average user visits nearly 2700 websites and averages 57 seconds per site.

For the larger web brands, users spend an average of 1 hour 53 minutes a month on Google, 3 hours 8 minutes on Yahoo and 5 hours 24 minutes on Facebook. The usage study compliments another Nielsen report issued yesterday that reported a 25% increase in online video viewing year-over-year.