I saw an article on the Forbes website and thought it kind of summarizes some of the things we spoke about this semester. Here is the link: http://www.forbes.com/sites/danschawbel/2013/12/17/14-things-every-successful-person-has-in-common/
Category Archives: Move People
Personal Accountability for Team Performance
In a team environment like on a NBA basketball team, it is easy for personal laziness (especially on the defensive end) to be hidden underneath the overall team’s results. Some players focus only on offense, where stats are more easily seen on the box score. On the flip side, people who go all out and fight for every possession may not be properly recognized — these plays have a great effect on the team’s performance, but may not show up on in stats (which most people pay attention to). The Washington Wizards have a bulletin board tracking “hustle plays” per individual to try to track, recognize, and reward players who pay attention to the little details of every play on the court
The Pelicans have a similar board, and the player with the most “hustle points” is reportedly allowed to use the coach’s suite for the weekend to use however he likes.
Positive pressure
We talked a lot about peer pressure as a lever that managers can use to control their employees, but it’s also important to think about how peer pressure can be used in a more empowering context, where people voluntarily submit to peer evaluation to help themselves accomplish a desired goal when many demands are competing for their time.
I can give an example from personal experience. It wasn’t done within a work context, but the basic mechanism applies.
I worked as a newspaper journalist in New York for several years before coming to the I School, and the old cliche about every reporter having an unfinished novel stashed in his or her desk drawer is more or less true. It’s an information-intensive (and especially a writing-intensive) job and it’s hard to find the time and headspace for a personal project on the side. So over the years, a group of us all knew we had this mutual interest and eventually we decided to act on it by staring a writing group where we would all get together and share some personal writing once a month.
Getting feedback was definitely a benefit of this group, but the real value — one we explicitly talked about and sought out — was that the combination of peer encouragement and peer pressure (the fear of disappointing our respected peers by failing to produce) gave us the extra motivation to make room in our lives for something that we cared about but that could be difficult to prioritize when it conferred little tangible benefit (unlike working, cleaning your apartment, running errands, etc.).
If we can generalize a little bit from this case example, I think this can be an effective structure for keeping longer-term projects on track when you have good buy-in from your team but a lot of competing demands on your time.
Quitting Smoking, and the Ulysses Contract
This episode of Radiolab begins with a former civil rights activist, Zelda, who wants to quit smoking after 40+ years. She makes a deal with herself: the day she smokes another cigarette, she has to donate $5,000 to the KKK. She picks a friend to hold her to it. The episode frames this (somewhat extreme) example in the larger context: it’s a “Ulysses Contract.” In it, you make a decision that will design it so that it binds you in the future. Ulysses wants to hear the sirens, but men who hear them inevitably go mad and navigate their boat onto the rocks. He has his men stuff their ears with wax so they can’t hear, and then have them tie him to the mast. They’re not to change course no matter what he says and no matter how much he protests.
The key point here for Zelda is that she has a larger goal of quitting smoking. But when faced with cigarettes, the immediate desire overwhelmed her longer term goal. To make it stick and break the habit, she had to come up with something that was terrible and immediate enough to overwhelm her desire for the cigarette. An added point is that by telling her friend, there’s accountability for keeping her promise to stop smoking.
http://www.radiolab.org/story/117165-help/
Serious Behavior Change: End of Life Discussions
One of the most difficult situations to have is discussing end of life conversations. End of life discussions concern making an “advanced directive” outlining how people want to die.
Some 96 percent of people who die in La Crosse, Wisconsin, have an advance directive or similar documentation. Nationally, only about 30 percent of adults have a document like that.
La Crosse’s success at implementing such a difficult widespread behavior change is a great example of the principles of altering the situation with nudges. The La Crosse medical community proactively incorporates end-of-life discussions in every comprehensively across many patient interactions with hospital nurses in a multitude of situations. Essentially, members of La Crosse as patients are unable to escape the medical hospital being an open resource to be “trusted advisors” to start end of life discussions. By sprinkling “nudges” across numerous interactions with medical staff, La Crosse maximizes the chances that patients will say start the discussion instead of postponing it indefinitely.
Since 25% of medical costs is spent in the last year of life, La Crosse’s efforts have led it spend less on health care for patients at the end of life than any other place in the country, according to the Dartmouth Health Atlas.
Article Synopsis: http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2014/03/05/286126451/living-wills-are-the-talk-of-the-town-in-la-crosse-wis
Full Podcast:http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2014/02/28/283444163/episode-521-the-town-that-loves-death
Peer Pressure: Changing Electricity Consumption Habits
Opower is a company that uses old fashion subtle peer pressure techniques to get people to use less energy. It just recently went IPO this week and its success follows failed attempts by both Google and Microsoft to generate similar consumer outcomes.
Basically Opower has implemented many of Robert Cialdini behavior changing techniques. The key magic is a paper statement to each household 1) comparing the house’s energy consumption with the community’s average and 2) giving a simple grade assessing your energy consumption made of smiley faces.
http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/the_efficient_planet/2013/03/opower_using_smiley_faces_and_peer_pressure_to_save_the_planet.html
“How Great Leaders Inspire Action”
When I got the “Inspire Someone” task I didn’t exactly know any inspiration techniques so I researched a bit to find one. I came across a guy called Simon Sinek who did the third most watched TEDx talk of all time entitled “How Great Leaders Inspire Action”. It quickly caught my interest as he claimed to have the answer for the question we are continuously dealing with in class. Why is it that someone is able to achieve extraordinary performance, when others are not?
He explains how successful leaders and companies all think, act, and communicate in the same way, by focusing on why the company exists rather than what it does or how it does it. He applies his theory on the cases of Apple, Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Wright Brothers – an approach very similar to the one we use in class. He is convinced that companies and leaders who think, act, and communicate according to a strong belief are the ones who succeed.
Although Sinek’s theory doesn’t seem to be grounded in much research it gave me a good tool to accomplish the task. I decided to try it out on my Designing Mobile Experiences the next day. Our group work choosing one of three “it” screens for the app we’re designing. An “it” screen is the most important screen for demonstrating the user experience. Its purpose is to make people “get it”. This was initially proving to be difficult because different team members each had different ideas about what information it should contain and how it should look.
I chose to carry out the inspiration task implicitly because explaining my actions and preaching about inspirational techniques wouldn’t have felt natural in the situation. My inspirational tactic was instead to lead our discussion in the direction of discussing why our app exists instead of discussing how it works or what it does. This actually seemed to work well as it made us take a step back to focus on pursuing our overarching goal: “making it safer to bike.” We ended up agreeing on an “it” screen, essentially by answering the question: “Why should we choose this screen?” “Because it demonstrates how we can make it safer to bike!”
I even found Sinek’s approach applicable when analysing the “Queen of Versailles” speech in the “Pep Talk” task. Although the speaker seems to be a bit of a swindler he follows Sinek’s pattern for inspiring people which seems to be working. He begins with asking why: why do they work? To save lives! How do they save lives? They sell vacations. What kind of vacations do they sell? They sell time-shares. I definitely think Sinek’s TEDx talk is worth a watch when trying to uncover what makes some people able to achieve extraordinary results. Maybe we can discuss the relevancy and validity of his theory in class when we reach the “Behavioral Change” or “Move People” week.
How can you put “motivate and inspire” into your schedule?
Since I found the “Inspire Someone” App Task quite challenging, I started looking for tangible examples of how to inspire and motivate others. I stumbled upon this article where Val Demings, former chief of the Orlando Police Department, gives some practical suggestions for putting “motivate and inspire” into one’s schedule. You will see that she mainly focuses on invoking emotional aspects.
It is also worth mentioning that the year before Demings became Chief, Orlando saw the highest rise in violent crime in its history. When she led the force from 2007 to 2011, they experienced a 40% reduction in violent crime – “a stat that is at least partly attributable to smart policing by motivated and inspired officers.”
A forceful champion
Here’s someone who I think qualifies for this title:
http://m.bbc.com/news/magazine-26260978
Can I officially request that we get him on Hangouts for the class?
Rethinking Performance Reviews: How to Communicate Feedback
So far we have focused on how individuals who have dedicated themselves to being the best have voluntarily sought out critical feedback to improve themselves. This begs the question about what happens when people are involuntarily made to provide or receive feedback. Does this feedback actually lead to improvement? The most common example today is the tradition of the employee performance evaluations often used by companies.
The short article, “The Case against Performance Reviews” by Derek Thompson at The Atlantic is interesting because it focuses on the big question about whether the “evaluation process” itself is a flawed system.
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/01/the-case-against-performance-reviews/283402/
Theoretically, the performance review is supposed to convey information from the evaluator on how the receiving employee can improve. However, there are many potential pitfalls that could diminish the effectiveness of performance reviews.
- The evaluator is unable to provide objective feedback because of intrinsic biases. Thompson provides an example that most evaluators tend to favor other people who are similar to themselves and bias evaluations of employees who are different.
- Most criticism is received negatively by employees. Thompson cites research that the tendency of the average person to dislike receiving feedback/criticism perhaps can influence how that person acts upon the feedback information received