This is a quick productivity tip for anyone who feels overwhelmed by the over-abundance of information and obligations. Fold the towels first. I first developed this metaphor when I figured out how to “get around to” folding the laundry for my family of four. There was a big intimidating pile of laundry that I didn’t want to start working on. So, I just walked up to the pile and pulled out all of the towels, folded them all, and put them away in about five minutes. I came back to the pile two hours later, and it was about half as big as the last time I looked at it. There, not so intimidating. Let’s finish the rest of this work.
Similarly, I was able to apply this metaphor to large volumes of errors in spreadsheets full of workforce data. You see, there is a high likelihood that if you look at all of the problems you need to solve, there is typically one big problem that can be solved really quickly. Think of this as a strike-attack against the intimidation factor. Just wrap up one big problem then step away from your desk for an hour or for the day. Come back to your list of woes, and the remaining work should seem far easier. It works with laundry. It works with big data. And, it could work for you.
Unsubscribe to your biggest spam provider, request a deadline extension on your most unreasonable task, ask for help with that thing that is beyond your ability, or send a courtesy note to that one person you’re worried that you might have offended. It doesn’t always work out this way, but when it does work, it’s incredibly empowering.
2012 Marine Corps Trials Day 2. Photo courtesy of DVIDSHUB.
We hear lots about excellence these days. So what are the opportunities for persons with disabilities and disadvantages to drive excellence? It may be that those who are in the throes of disadvantage might not have a fair shot at success. But there are opportunities for everyone to aspire to excellence, through the cultivation of empathy for those who are disadvantaged.
This is a touching article about a doctor who was concerned about his own mother during her disabling illness. The illness was Parkinson’s disease, a degenerative disorder that affects movement. In the Times article, Dr. Sandeep Jauhar is rigged with a device that allows him to personally experience the sensation of his muscles turning to jelly, like those who have Parkinson’s, like his mother.
Why would he do such a thing? Because he always wanted to understand his mother’s perspective during the illness. Devices are also available that replicate the effects of emphysema, psychiatric illness, and nerve disease related to diabetes.
While I haven’t experienced it yet, I have also heard rave reviews about a similar effort called Dark Table. Dark Table is a restaurant in Vancouver where food is served and eaten in a room which is completely dark. The servers are blind or visually impaired, and the guests commit to keeping their gadgets off and eating their meals in the dark. The dark dining experience increases the awareness of other senses such as hearing, touch, and taste. It creates jobs for persons with disabilities. And it also helps people empathize with the perspective of the visually impaired.
Emotional Intelligence in Workplace Conflict
On the human resources side of the fence, it’s possible to develop greater empathy for those we are in conflict with. The nurturing of empathy is important for industrial relations, the professional development of managers, performance conversations, and the general growth of all staff. How do you teach workplace empathy? I have been involved in complex roleplay scenarios called Conflict Theatre. The theatre scenes are designed so that each scenario is integrated into well-developed back stories and emotional perspectives of the actors.
The theatre is presented so as to invite audience members to step into the shoes of an individual actor and attempt to change the course of the conflict. It’s one thing to sit back and observe from and armchair, and develop an opinion about how things should be done. But the real expertise is to understand the full emotional context of each player in a conflict, an understanding which is far more vivid when experienced directly.
Empathizing with diverse perspectives turns out to be a key attribute of those who face conflict with dignity and grace. It takes you beyond the negotiations that resembles bartering for trinkets, and even beyond the interest-based bargaining of those vying for a win-win solution. You have to learn how to understand people as individuals based on their perspective and story, not their category or “type.” This includes understanding their perspective when they struggle with ability, whether it’s professional ability or impairments.
Using Emotional Intelligence to Improve Workplace Culture
The thing I find fascinating about these initiatives is their scientific and cultural back-story. The Parkinson’s device was built in response to well-documented complaints that patients perceive their nurses and doctors lack empathy for their hardships. Blind dining is traced back to Switzerland by a man named Jorge Spielmann, whose concept was imitated in restaurants in London, Paris, and New York. Conflict Theatre in Vancouver comes out David Diamond’s Theatre for Living, which itself comes out of Theatre for the Oppressed, created by Augusto Boal in Brazil in the 1970’s. Theatre for the Oppressed, as you might guess from the name, arises from social critiques and movements to overcome repression, with an intellectual legacy dating well back into the 50’s.
To affect society on the larger scale we need to reach into the emerging science, the social experiments in many countries, and the lessons learned many decades into the past. The knowledge and confidence of those with power and privilege can pale in comparison to the universe of individual experiences. In order to take full advantage of the best information when advancing ourselves in this world, we need humility about how right we truly are, curiosity for knowledge that is new, and sensitivity to the lessons from other cultures and other moments in time. Only then can each of us aspire to excellence.
The wall of plexiglass. Photo courtesy of ebt47563.
Exactly how do you change organizational culture? This is a good HBR article from June 2017 about attempts to change corporate culture from the bottom-up. It’s a story about Dr. Reddy’s, a global pharmaceutical company based in India and led by G.V. Prasad. The authors are Bryan Walker from IDEO and Sarah A. Soule from Stanford Business School.
Dr. Reddy’s process of culture change began with significant ground research to find out what their staff, providers, and investors needed when dealing with customers. They brought their goals down to four simple words that brought it all together: good health can’t wait. Instead of selling the slogan through posters and speeches they chose to demonstrate their purpose through actions. The initiative named projects in packaging, sales, and internal data to advance the new vision. There were some immediate impacts. One scientist broke a number of company rules and produced a new product in 15 days, having prioritized new efforts to match the vision.
The comparison to social movements is important, because movements start with an emotion rather than a call to action. Movements start small, “with a group of passionate enthusiasts who deliver modest wins.” Momentum builds through networks, penetrating power structures and leadership.
There are also “safe havens,” places where activists can behave differently from the dominant culture and discuss their goals. In innovative organizations, research labs are often built as separate mico-organizations that cultivate change as prep-work for the larger organization. This story resonates with me, because disruptive workforce analytics will occasionally fall of deaf ears. The analysis needs to be created in a manner which partially ignores pre-existing agendas or presumptions of how things would normally be done. The decision of whether to apply new ideas might belong within a more formal process, but when experimenting with messy new ideas, to be sequestered is ideal.
Beyond the HBR article two additional models are appropriate to discuss the nature of change.
Innovating Technology and Trends Through Social Networks
The first model is the diffusion of innovations as described by Everett Rogers. In this model, there is a small avant-garde of weirdos who just get into stuff that is new and interesting. That crowd of innovators will not have the full opportunity to make money or make it big. But their new findings diffuse through social networks, based on peoples’ network connections and their readiness to consider new ideas.
There are several hold-outs, such as the laggard crowd who resists change until it is impossible to do so. The biggest difficulty is the early-stage challenge of “Crossing the Chasm” where the new idea has won-over a small crowd of early-adopters who are about 13.5% of the population. The challenge is that sometimes there’s something about the new idea that doesn’t mesh with the next crowd, the early majority. Some examples might be that the new technology has a difficult user interface, or the social trend is incompatible with the conventional lifestyle of those in the burbs.
In my opinion, the classic example of this challenge is the hands-free bluetooth headset that you see people wearing when they’re talking on the phone while walking down the street. The technology has been in public for more than fifteen years and our first instinct is still that we want the caller to get professional help. And that’s even when you’re not also angry at them about a misunderstanding.
Using Social Disobedience Tools to Change Workplace Culture From Within
Another compelling cultural change model is the Spectrum of Allies model from George Lakey of Training for Change. Lakey is highly experienced in training social justice activists in civil disobedience. I attended a couple of workshops with Lakey when I was part of the labour movement, and his spectrum model is eye-opening.
The key diagram is a semi-circle, kind of like a half-order of a large pizza with six or eight slices. The idea is that everyone can be categorized according to their level of enthusiasm for, or resistance to, an agenda or new idea. Then you lay these wedges out in order, with the most supportive categories on the left and the most resistant on the right. Your goal is to shift all of society one wedge to the left. That is, the biggest hold-outs still get your attention, you’re just trying to convince them to become only moderately opposed to your goals. Those in the middle, you can tip towards you slightly. Those who are with you from the start, those are your strongest advocates and you can start giving them more work.
What really holds the model together is that you are shifting the entire social culture towards your way of thinking, resulting in culture change. Everyone is a big deal, everyone receives the attention they deserve. It’s very different from that us-against-them stuff that we’re accustomed to seeing during elections. And it is very different from the notion that the main difference in the key players is their place on the org chart.
What this means for workforce analytics, is that you will require several different vehicles to bring meaningful information into human resource decision-making. While there will be those who are hungry for the information, there will be others who need to simply be sold on the notion that it is not a threat. While innovative findings might be compelling amongst an in-crowd, getting the information through cliques and interests will require bridging links and data translation. You can build new ideas in self-imposed isolation, but at some point you step into public and advance it your ideas through the audience.
But before you step out, please put away your Bluetooth headset.
There is increased speculation that artificial intelligence (AI) will increasingly replace the work of humans over the medium to long term. Already, AI is performing well at the world-class tournament levels in such games as Chess and Go, the latter of which was a major breakthrough. What about actual jobs?
At University of Oxford, a survey from the Future of Humanity Institute asked several leading experts how long it will take for machines to outperform humans. Here is the average forecast for a couple of skill sets:
2023 – Folding laundry
2027 – Truck driving
2031 – Retail sales
2049 – The writing of best-selling books
2053 – Surgery
In the long game, they think all human tasks will be out-performed by machines in 45 years. All human jobs would be replaced in about 125 years. So we’re kind of safe for a decade or so. However, there are major concerns about what this change will mean for humanity, as this change may increase economic inequality.
In my opinion, as this relates to workforce planning, the challenge seems most interesting in the transition period. That is, people will get new jobs designing new technologies, and people will make themselves more productive by using technology in the workplace. But there will be more frequent changes, more dramatic changes, and things will happen more quickly.
These changes mean that human resources will be the key party delivering change management, knowledge management, hiring, learning and development, and employee communications. The pace at which people adapt to change will determine success in investment decisions and the retention of engaged customers. But only if you get the metrics right. Anything else, and your organization is sunk.
Within human resources, truth is the first victim of industrial warfare. Does your working day involve manipulation of facts and truth? I bet it does.
Parties to negotiations proffer bargaining positions that are a precise distance from where things are really going. You support the management rights of managers who are clearly wrong. You conduct investigations into discipline cases where the facts are unclear or contradictory. You guard secrets on the tip of your tongue when people blather on at cocktail parties. As you empathize with diverse perspectives, there are multiple truths, things that may be true to one person but not the other.
The game of human resources brings an impish delight that you are at the crossroads between diplomacy, politics, espionage, and psychiatric nursing. If you can suspend your disbelief and stay in the adventure then truth be damned.
Workforce Analytics and the Re-Definition of Truth
But wait… here comes the human resource metrics team. We’re going to screw it up for you.
In order to love spending long hours getting the numbers right, analysts must develop a hatred for incorrect statements of fact. I feel a special kind of disgust when I discover that I have accidentally made a wrong statement. With large amounts of data, there are always errors inside the data I have received. And the more elaborate my calculations, the greater the risk that I have made a mistake, even when I apply good skills.
Between analysts there is a lot of blunt talk about whether formulas, numbers, and facts are correct. If something is wrong, the not-so-secret language of quants includes phrases like “that is false” and “I made a mistake” and “fix that now.” Analysts know how to talk with each other. Then we step into a meeting with non-quantitative colleagues who use very little math and lots of words. Dirty, filthy words, making statements that are incorrect. You know where this is going. Things must be corrected.
These two crowds – the generalists and the analysts – need a common language, an ability to translate words between two cultures. You might have experienced strange conversations involving phrases such as: How important is this fact? Is this really a fact? Is it true or false? Is it important if this fact is incorrect? Oh, look, someone made a mistake! Shall we discuss it with them? How can we talk about this mistake without embarrassing them? Oh goodness, the person who is wrong has the most power; who will talk with them about it? I’ll do it! No, not you. Wait, yes… you can tell them, you’re not a threat.
This dynamic give the human resource generalist an opportunity for an extremely complex skill set. Who in your office is the data translator between truth and context? As a generalist, how good are you at maintaining two mental states, one in which the facts are crystal clear in your mind, and another in which story and posture prevail? Can you pull together a discreet meeting to correct-course on a disputed fact? Can you prevent ill-informed decisions from being advanced, and also keep it quiet about it afterward?
It’s tough work to grapple with poker-faced stares between analysts, subordinates, and superiors while you navigate the rich world of debated facts. If the spreadsheet tells you only one thing that is certain, it is that this time you must do what feels right in your gut. You have been nourished with facts, and now your gut feels right. So put on your game face, and go! Now that’s employee engagement.
Discomfort of Innocence. Photo by Mohammed Alalawi
Why do you hang out with people like you? Because you have to be friends with your friends’ friends. Society does not give you permission to dislike (or not know) your friends-of-friends. It’s called the forbidden triad. There is a complex quantitative puzzle involving triangles with plus and minus signs, all coded and ready for an elaborate statistical analysis. You can peek at the math in this October 2016 overview of the research by Dustin Stoltz, a PhD candidate at University of Notre Dame.
But back to people. The main problem is cognitive dissonance, that feeling you get when you are obliged to maintain two contradictory opinions at the same time. An example may be that you both love and hate a particular family member, politician, or manager in your workplace. Cognitive dissonance makes you uncomfortable, and you aspire to greater comfort. Therefore, you will choose between contradictory opinions and let one prevail over the other. So, you decide that you like that complex person. If you then meet a third-party who dislikes that person, you have to even-out the triangle. You will be motivated to change the third person’s mind, change your own mind, or just stop hanging out with the third party. If everyone does this, friendships and world views will evolve within cliques that are internally consistent, comfortable, and smug. But that’s not so clever.
That is because social networks are held together by people who choose to maintain contradictory opinions. They foster civil dialogue, cultivate plurality, and agree to disagree. It’s not so much that they are smarter, although that may still be the case. It’s that the exploration of the best information and the most diverse opinions guarantees contradiction. You will find attributes that seem contradictory but not mutually exclusive, such as sensitivity and courage. You will find rival facts, such as the prevailing research on global warming and colder winters in your own locale. And there will be facts that change quickly, such the price of oil or a change of government.
Workforce Analytics and the Workplace Culture of Curiosity and Discomfort
If you place comfort ahead of maximum information, then you have to insulate yourself from contradiction. Yet this can be a big mistake in the modern world. How could you possibly choose a stable mindset when the amount of information is exploding, technology is disrupting everything, and ideas and opinions go round the world in a heartbeat. It’s a wild and crazy world we live in. You must choose discomfort, and reject the allure of smug.
In workforce analytics, there is a great divide between colleagues and clients who are curious about new information and those who are not. It often feels like I exclusively support those hungry for the new, who like the challenge, who want to pick up a few tricks. Yet those who are more settled in their views or slower to change need to be brought along for the ride. That is because at the center of the social network people are obliged to commit to, and support, prevailing views. They tend to agree with one another just like you might do with your own friends. Looking outward to the fringes of the network, you might see a wider variety of irregular opinions, trends, and opportunities. The fringe is full of people who are removed from the network in some way, be it marginal legal status, geographic isolation, exclusion, or just looking different. To bring diverse views from the fringe to the center (and vice-versa) obliges us to maintain contradictory opinions.
The prescription that we must become uncomfortable applies equally to social trends, new technology, and disruptive workforce analytics. In your workplace, you may have had one opinion for a very long time. When you are presented with change or new evidence, it is one thing to simply obey orders or comply with the data. But if you really want to be clever, it is far better to hold onto that moment of discomfort for a while to get a sense of what everyone else is going through. Only then can you talk to diverse people who think and live in different worlds. And only then can you fine-tune new evidence to make it presentable to a broader audience.
If we are to disrupt normal ways of doing things through emerging information, we must stand at the bridge between two worlds, be prepared to disrupt ourselves, and get used to discomfort.
Stuart Murray Speaks 