Data Tastes Better With Ice Cream

Posted on by Stuart Murray
staunton-cherry-pie-attributed-to-tom-feary-no-mods-permitted
Staunton Cherry Pie.  Photo courtesy of Tom Feary.

One day, years ago, I was picking up my children from school. My son, who was in Kindergarten, said “it’s pie week.” I thought about it, and yes, we were approaching March 14th, which numerically is 3.14, also known as Pi Day. I knew about this event, but I didn’t know they were celebrating it in schools. Presumably, my son’s teacher had mentioned it in class. I asked my kids if we should buy pies and share with the class on March 14th? Yes! The children were all in favour of this. How could they say no?

The night before Pi Day I brought home four pies, two for each class of kids. I had forgotten to tell my wife, and she asked “What are these for?” I told her. She said Pi Day was not a thing, and besides, she added, the teachers won’t take time away from teaching to serve pie. I put one pie in the fridge for ourselves, and I took the other three pies to work the next day.

Although Pi Day had been celebrated before, it didn’t elicit excitement. To change this, I put the pie in the coffee room and sent out a pithy email at 1:59 pm. You know, 3.14159, get it? It has well received.

That night I asked the kids what they did at school for Pi Day. Nothing, it turned out. I asked my son, why did he say it was Pie Week? “I just wanted to eat some pie.” My wife gave me that look again, and shook her head. “Pi Day is not a thing” she repeated.  Her disbelief sent me online. Yes, there was such a thing as Pi Day. But my jaw dropped when I saw the photograph on the Wikipedia page, showing the founder of Pi Day at an event. I experienced a startling déjà vu.

When I was in my twenties, I took a trip to San Francisco. At the end of each day I would meet a family friend at his workplace, and he would drive us home. One day I stopped in, and he offered a slice of pie. Their office celebrated Pi Day on March 14. “It’s just a little thing I started up around the Exploratorium,” he said. The man who handed me that pie was Larry Shaw. He was the founder of Pi Day, he was on the photo on Wikipedia, and he had handed one of the earliest slices of Pi Day pie. I had completely forgotten this random moment, until my son reminded me by accident. I never knew that Larry started this tradition until I saw it online.

I have been organizing Pi Day events at my workplace ever since. It’s a time to pause and reflect on how math that has improved our lives in the past year. As we stand there eating pie, my math-y colleagues talk about the great work we have done around the office. We seal the deal with food which, research shows, improves the likelihood that people will agree.

Good Information, Not for Snacking

Posted on by Stuart Murray

The Pringles Effect is when someone asks for one piece of workforce data.  Then they come back and ask for two more things.  Then they ask for four.  Before too long, they are taking advantage of every opportunity for more information.  It is largely identical to the behavior when you have one Pringles chip, and before long your hand is stuck in the canister.  In general the phenomenon is “information addiction” which feeds the reward centre of your brain with dopamine.  Unlike other addictions, information addiction does not appear to have a major downside, aside from hours lost, and resources spent on research which has no outcome (this time).  On average, curiosity and the desire to advance society’s knowledge is laudable.  But the superficial behavior, particularly in the early stages, resembles compulsive snacking.

New-Hire Enthusiasm Makes Liars of Us All

Posted on by Stuart Murray
game-time-by-michael-neel-v3
Game Time, courtesy of Michael Neel.

This interesting blog post by Mike West from One Model describes a data anomaly in “Best Employer” awards.  Many of these awards are based on employee engagement surveys, which are consistent and scientific, but susceptible to a subtle sampling bias.

The issue is that engagement is highest for new employees.  I have seen this phenomenon in other surveys, and I have pondered why this would be true.  It will make sense when you consider your personal experience.  When you are first employed, you have recently chosen to work for that employer, you have just been chosen by the manager, and you get the greatest concentration of training and personal attention.

By contrast, years later you might wish you could work elsewhere, even if you have not made an effort to move.  You may have changed managers, breaking the personal sense of loyalty and trust.  Even under a favorable scenario you will be deemed “fully-performing” …and be neglected as a result.  Negative career events occur over the years, and with greater length of service you will have more opportunity for annoyances, defeats, and betrayals.  You might leave, and lo and behold the cycle starts all over again!

Mike West notes that growing companies hire more staff into brand new positions.  This means a larger fraction of their workforce have less than one year of job tenure, which means a larger fraction of the survey sample will have high engagement.  Yes, it is nice to work for a growing company, but growth itself is not what makes people happy.

If you were the only new hire in a company that is stable in size and has low turnover, you might be just as excited as a peer who joined a growing company.  But the growing company would get a better score.  The article references the constantly-growing Google, often rated the very best employer.  Google tends to lose the top spot when they hire fewer people.

So, how do you game the awards?  Make email addresses for new staff more readily available.  How to correct this anomaly?  Companies conducting surveys should report the data on a stratified basis, adjusting for length of service.  Or, run a multivariate model which isolates employee culture and adjusts for the length-of-service effect.

But hey, it’s math.  It’s all fun and games until someone loses an award.

Disrupt an MBA Class by Inventing Spreadsheets

Posted on by Stuart Murray
idea-cropped-by-katie-tegtmeyer
Idea.  By Katie Tegtmeyer.  Cropped.

This is a great TED talk by Dan Bricklin, the inventor of the electronic spreadsheet.  The application he created – VisiCalc – is the original precursor to Excel, one of the easiest to use number-crunching tools when doing workforce analysis and just about everything else.  He tells a great story of the disruption that his new tool caused its first audience, the MBA class he attended at Harvard, and the first conference where he revealed it.

This is a story of invention, so watch for key words like error, daydream, magic, imagine, prototype, feedback, find solutions, new capabilities, and marketing.  This is a story of iterative design, where they figured out what they were creating part-way through the exploration.

Become the Boss of Your Data

Posted on by Stuart Murray
close-up-courtesy-of-photosteve-101
Close Up.  Courtesy of photosteve101.

May I let you in on a secret?  There’s a memo going around the “in” crowd, and I think you might be in.  It’s about highlighters.  Highlighters are magical weapons.  But it’s not the highlighter itself that is magical.  It’s just a couple of plastic tubes, a felt tip, and some see-through ink.  What’s special is the way it is used.

At some point you will enter a meeting to discuss human resource metrics.  You will be handed a printed page full of numbers.  For those just getting started with this skill, there may be a flood of emotion.  These pages may look like a blur, like scrambled eggs, or a junkyard, or an ancient text in Linear B.  You recall vivid memories of that schoolteacher who didn’t tell you that you could become good at math.  Maybe you made a big mistake with math one time (don’t worry, everyone did).

But you have a secret weapon.  You have a highlighter.  Take a deep breath, maybe two.  Now, un-sheath your highlighter, and put the cap on the opposite end, to keep it all together.  Make clean, swift movements, like you do this every day.

You are hereby granted permission to mark the page with highlighter.  It’s funny, right?  You weren’t sure if that was okay.  So just go for it.  Maybe test the pen in the corner or something.  There, now you’re ready.  You are the boss of this piece of paper in your hand.

Now look in the bottom right-hand corner of the page.  It’s usually some kind of total.  Highlight the total.  Say the number out loud.  Look at the title in the upper-left of the page.  Does the number you highlighted reflect the title of the page?  It should.  If it doesn’t, then someone other than you is confused.

“This number, what does it mean?”  Just keep it simple.  Don’t apologize.  You see, you are the client.  You are allowed to ask questions.  And this pristine piece of paper with the fancy characters… has just been marked up by you, deciding for yourself what is clear, what is interesting.  Listen to the answer you get.  Make the math people use their words.  Don’t worry, they’re happy you are engaging.

Now, you should have a dry feeling in your mouth.  You’re not nervous.  You’re hungry.   Spend the next few minutes in silence, marking the page.  Find the biggest number on the page.  Then the smallest.  Find things that don’t make sense.  Find things that aren’t what you expected.  Just briefly, consider a new way of thinking.  Catch a typo, and be nice about it.

Now talk about what you found.  Compare notes with others.  You’ll probably get it half-right.

And that’s it.  You’re done with first steps.  But just remember, you can’t do it if you aren’t using your highlighter.  Because a highlighter is a magical weapon that defeats intimidation.

Mercer’s 2015 Survey, “Inside Employees Minds”

Posted on by Stuart Murray
brains-by-annabellaphoto
“Brains.”  Attributed to Annabellaphoto.

In September 2015, Graham Dodd from the Canadian offices of Mercer released the results of a large survey of employees across Canada.  Amongst their findings, was that plenty of employees with high job satisfaction are still considering leaving their current employer.  It makes sense; those who are driven and talented will be both engaged and also looking for their next adventure.  Why would we presume that employees who strive are those that are easily satisfied?