What’s with all this bold talk from millennials? Don’t they know to keep hush about their outlandish opinions? In a recent article from Lisa Earle McLeod the author submits an open letter (closer to a manifesto) that explains why millennials have the opinions they have.
She has two key points. First, employers are tolerating poor performers, and those poor performers drag everyone else down, including highly-motivated millennials. It’s not so much that millennials are unreasonably ambitious and over-eager, it is that their enthusiasm is the correct attitude and lower-functioning colleagues should not be setting the pace. Fair ball.
Secondly, we must give our work purpose. Organizations that have “a purpose bigger than money” have better business results. This purpose-driven organization is reminiscent of Simon Sinek’s Power of Why although McLeod’s critique is closer to a sense of Noble Purpose amongst the sales team, a major concern of hers.
This focus on enthusiastic front-line staff is consistent with other critiques. Josh Bersin notes that many organizations are flipping their hierarchy to place priority on engaged employees first, who then attract and retain customers who, in turn, keep the profits alive. If it works, go for it.
Can big data reduce crime? Yes it can. This is a great TED Talk by Anne Milgram about using analytics to improve the criminal justice system. The talk from October 2013 describes how Milgram successfully attempted to “moneyball” policing and the work of judges in her role as attorney general of New Jersey. Hers is a great story, and has many features in common with the Moneyball book and movie.
The speaker describes how she built a team, created raw data, analyzed it, and produced simple and meaningful tools. Her most impressive outcome is a risk assessment tool that helps judges identify the likelihood a defendant will re-offend, not show up in court, or commit a violent act. She and her team have successfully reduced crime.
Baseball players and police officers alike have a culture of bravado and confidence which may be critical when handling conflict, intimidation, and credibility. Yet what police officers and baseball players often need is a safe space to question their assumptions, assess whether they could do better, and decide that they will do better. These types of vulnerable moments don’t play out well when a player is at bat, or when an officer is handling complaints from the perpetrators.
In Milgram’s talk, where others see cool math tricks, I see a change in mindset and demeanor. The speaker expresses curiosity about the information, enthusiasm for unexpected findings, modesty about baseline effectiveness, a lack of blame, and a can-do attitude about trying to do more and do better.
It’s a great metaphor for business. In those workplaces where managers fiercely claw their way to the top, there may be a reduced willingness to talk about shortcomings in a manner that requires trust and collaboration. Yet making exceptional decisions require that leaders choose an entirely different mood and posture while they explore an uncharted area, allow information to out-rank instinct, and aspire to a more subtle kind of greatness. Put posture aside, and just do good work. The way things are changing, those are the only kinds of people who will stay on top.
Apostrophe Absent. Photo courtesy of Michael Derr.
Are you compatible with your organizational culture? I sure hope not. You need the freedom to break from the pack in order to pass along new information and adapt to disruptive change.
In the 2011 book Connected by Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler, the authors describe the way opinions and behaviors spread through social networks. They describe a Three Degrees of Influence rule: we influence and are influenced by people three degrees removed from us, most of whom we do not even know.
You might know one hundred people, but those people may know another one hundred people (each), and so on. This could result in a million people crowd-sourcing shared opinions. You would pick up many opinions from this extended network. The reverse is true as well. You could spontaneously assert that we should have all better table manners, and a million people might change their behaviors. Or maybe they’ll just talk about having better manners.
The implication is that you do not entirely experience independent thought. You might control what time you arrive at work, what garments to wear to the office, and how you respond emotionally to what your manager just said. But the allocation of housework in your household, the social norms in appropriate dress, and the organizational culture of two-way conversation could all be things that have significant third-party influence. You’re not exactly an autonomous hero in the workplace; you are a team-player in an environment where culture runs deep.
This critique has been revisited in a recent book review in which Yuval Harari summarizes The Knowledge Illusion by Steven Sloman and Philip Fernbach. Sloman and Ferbach posit that individual thinking is a myth, and that we actually think in groups. With modern civilization we have come to rely increasingly on the expertise of others. This crowd-think has mostly been good for us, but it also has a downside. People “…lock themselves inside an echo chamber of like-minded friends and self-confirming newsfeeds, where their beliefs are constantly reinforced and seldom challenged.”
Group loyalty and pride in our presumed intelligence causes us to stick to the normal way of doing things. This is a challenge to those of us who produce or consume new information. New information and new ideas disrupt stable group environments. If we are trying to change the workplace so that things are done differently, we must exchange discomforting opinions. We must propose ideas that will be rejected. We must try things out that won’t work.
Wot You Lookin’ At. Photo courtesy of Kate Russel.
How do you really know if someone is trying to fool you? Sometimes it’s easy. You know the kid took the cookie. You know the employee wasn’t sick. You know corporate is just cutting costs. But big data makes it harder to know what to believe. The raw data takes hours to read and is in a specialization that is not your area. Everyone who works with the data is beholden to an interest. And what if that cool thing the data scientists have figured out his how to scam you as a target? Thankfully, there is help.
A recent article from the New Yorker advises on How to Call B.S. on Big Data. It’s a great summary of a course at the University of Washington which became available in January 2017. In the spirit of public education, you can access a large amount of the materials in the course’s web site with videos, tools, and case studies.
There are some simple protective measures that are known to those in the number-crunching fields. Watch out for unfair comparisons; remember that correlation doesn’t imply causation; and beware of the hubris of those making bold claims. On average you need to keep information in context and ask for a plausible theory about why a fact would be true. The plausible theory is your hypothesis, and the scientific method is to test the hypothesis. No plausible theory; no science.
Amongst the precautions is that data taken from the general public will often re-create prejudice. I see this all the time when looking at inequalities in women’s promotions and salaries. Superficially it does appear that many women are self-selecting into less onerous careers. Deeper into the analysis, you tend to find that women do more than their share of the caring (in all of its forms) and that it’s a pervasive imposition, a subtle stereotype, and just about everyone is causing this to happen.
I’m glad to know that there is a growing desire among non-quants to consume information in a more sophisticated manner. For my own work, this doesn’t worry me. I’m honest and my motives are transparent [about stuart] If anything, I’m intimidated by the volume of work ahead of me. I used to have a clear sense of the amount of work required to seek the truth in the data and share what I found with a sincere audience. Since the rise of fake news and the increasing complexities of social media, a Pandora’s Box has been opened people like me are obliged to investigate ten times as many topics. We may be asked to fact-check nonsensical statements, defend controversial findings that were created in a neutral setting, or spend excess hours establishing credibility.
The most unsettling concept raised in the article is the BS Asymmetry Principle coined by Alberto Brandolini: the amount of energy needed to refute BS is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it. And so begins the new hybrid skill set of doing good math, and then talking about it properly.
Human resources departments and those who handle their data are expected to guard the best secrets. But one of the biggest secrets is ironically an anti-secret. Did you know you’re allowed to talk openly about your own pay? Don’t tell HR. It’s embarrassing (for them).
This article in Atlantic.com by Jonathan Timm from July 2014 draws attention to the dubious practice of pay secrecy. I’m not talking about the employer’s obligation to keep your pay information confidential. Rather it’s an article about employees being obliged to keep their pay a secret from one another. These obligations are referred to as “gag rules.”
For the uninitiated, there is no meaningful moral obligation for employees to refrain to talking about their salary with each other. On the contrary, in the United States there are regulations that protect employees’ rights to discuss working conditions with one another. It’s on the edges of the legislation that allows employees to collectively discuss their lot in life, bargain for improvements, and possibly unionize.
In that context the moral judgement should be obvious. Those handling the file at human resources desks are not allowed to advance anti-union behavior, and as professionals they should always advise against such policies.
The article describes personal experiences of people struggling with these fake rules. What is notable is how people presume these gag rules are legitimate, employers and employees alike. Gag rules create a sense of guilt about whether we should put ourselves ahead of the employer. They make us self-consciousness about whether we’re being greedy. We’re embarrassed to talk about whether we’re losers for being the lowest paid person. Raising the topic with colleagues is “akin to asking about their sex life.”
These emotions are powerful stuff. But then, that’s how bullying is done, isn’t it?
Above and beyond beef-and-taters union issues, gag rules are also wrapped up in discriminatory pay practices. That is, it is easier to under-pay women and visible minorities or play favorites if employees don’t talk about their pay. A woman named Lilly Ledbetter complied with the gag rule at Goodyear for nearly three decades and ultimately found out she was under-paid. Ms. Ledbetter sued and lost because she did not complain about being under-paid within the first 180 days of her first paycheck.
Ironically, employers share pay information with each other all the time. They’re called compensation surveys. They happen on an annual basis (if not monthly), and they are delivered through specialized consulting services. The work is done under careful checks and balances that ensure data privacy and keep the whole process fair and legal. Those who have worked on such surveys are proud of their work. I used to do compensation surveys myself, and I was good at it.
One of the reasons why compensation professionals love doing this work is because it helps make pay fair and equitable. Looking down from the ivory tower, human resources people know that perceived unfairness in pay creates discord. So “good” employers put some work into getting it right, behind the scenes, in a kind of lab environment where social justice is organized by experts. But really we’re just trying to stay one step ahead of the riff-raff.
Let’s face it, employees and the social justice movements they created are the rightful owner of this dialogue. Gag rules and compensation surveys are just the cultural appropriation of working class politics.
Then he laughed into my eyes. Photo courtesy of Jose Pesavento.
Too much knowledge can turn you into an idiot. The curse of knowledge is that problem where experts in a field are unable to explain their great knowledge to a lay audience, because they can’t bring it down to earth. The speaker might have good information about the base knowledge of their audience, but they just don’t “get” that their audience hasn’t taken the introductory course in their subject area. It’s odd that someone can be highly esteemed for their knowledge, yet get short-tempered with the very people who hold them in high regard. I think this is why it’s so hard for experts in two different fields to communicate with one another. There is a special skill set in talking to intelligent people who don’t understand what it is that you do.
Stuart Murray Speaks 