What's Best Next

You are here: Home / Archives for 2 - Professional Skills / a Soft Skills

How Information Overload Affects Decision Making

by

A recent article from Newsweek. Here’s the summary:

The Twitterization of our culture has revolutionized our lives, but with an unintended consequence—our overloaded brains freeze when we have to make decisions.

And this is very interesting:

The booming science of decision making has shown that more information can lead to objectively poorer choices, and to choices that people come to regret. It has shown that an unconscious system guides many of our decisions, and that it can be sidelined by too much information. And it has shown that decisions requiring creativity benefit from letting the problem incubate below the level of awareness—something that becomes ever-more difficult when information never stops arriving.

Taking Initiative Means Taking Initiative, Not Waiting to be Told

by

One more Godin post today. A really good point from a short profile of Sasha Dichter, Director of Business Development at the Acumen Fund, which he is doing as part of a series profiling a dozen people who have made the decision to lead and initiate:

It’s so easy to get hung up on reacting to incoming, on working through a checklist and on imagining what the boss wants you to do next. It’s far more productive, I think, to decide where you want to go and then go there. And the power and low-price of online tools makes that easier than ever.

The key difference between initiators and everyone else is the simple idea of posture. What do you say to yourself in between assignments? What do you do when you see something that needs doing?

Sasha asks himself (not his boss), “what’s next?” And that’s the shift. You look at a world of opportunities and you pick one. Initiative is taken, it’s not given.

Seth Godin's New Book Now Available

by

Poke the Box — that is, take initiative — is Seth Godin’s newest book and it releases today. It’s his first book published non-traditionally, and here’s what he has to say about it:

Here’s a little-spoken truth learned via crowdsourcing:

Most people don’t believe they are capable of initiative.

Initiating a project, a blog, a wikipedia article, a family journey. Initiating something even when you’re not putatively in charge.

At the same time, almost all people believe they are capable of editing, giving feedback or merely criticizing.

So finding people to fix your typos is easy.

A few people are vandals, happy to anonymously attack or add graffiti or useless noise.

If your project depends on individuals to step up and say, “This is what I believe, here is my plan, here is my original thought, here is my tribe,” then you need to expect that most people will see that offer and decline to take it.

Most of the edits on Wikipedia are tiny. Most of the tweets among the billions that go by are reactions or possibly responses, not initiatives. Q&A sites flourish because everyone knows how to ask a question, and many feel empowered to answer it, if it’s specific enough. Little tiny steps, not intellectual leaps or risks.

I have a controversial belief about this: I don’t think the problem has much to do with the innate ability to initiate. I think it has to do with believing that it’s possible and acceptable for you to do it. We’ve only had these doors open wide for a decade or so, and most people have been brainwashed into believing that their job is to copyedit the world, not to design it.

There’s a huge shortage… a shortage of people who will say go.

Today we’re shipping my new book Poke the Box. Writing a book isn’t that difficult for me (I’ve done it before), and it would have been easy to keep publishing books the traditional way, the way it’s supposed to be done. Instead, I took the opportunity to start a new publishing company, to reinvent a lot of what we expect when we think of when we consider publishing a book. I took my own advice.

I hope you’ll check it out.

Go!

Asking Questions is the Key to Understanding

by

From John Piper, in his latest book Think: The Life of the Mind and the Love of God:

One of the best honors I received during my six years of teaching college Bible classes was a T-shirt. My teaching assistant made it. On the back it said, “Asking questions is the key to understanding.”

When I speak of becoming intentional about thinking harder, that’s mainly what I mean: asking questions and working hard with our minds to answer them. Therefore, learning to think fruitfully about biblical texts means forming the habit of asking questions.

The kinds of questions you can ask of a text are almost endless:

  • Why did he use that word?
  • Why did he put it here and not there?
  • How does he use that word in other places?
  • How is that word different from this other one he could have used?
  • How does the combination of these words affect the meaning of that word?
  • Why does that statement follow this one?
  • Why did he connect these statements with the word because or the word therefore or the word although or the words in order that? Is that logical?
  • How does it fit with what another author in the Bible says?
  • How does it fit with my experience?

For more on what Piper means by asking questions of the text, you can also see his article “Brothers, Let Us Query the Text.”

3 Basic Laws of Idea Generation and Human Nature, and Why It's Bad to Make Employees Sit at Their Desks for a Defined Period

by

Excellent, from Scott Belsky’s Making Ideas Happen: Overcoming the Obstacles Between Vision and Reality:

As you develop some norms and expectations for your team’s work flow, try to elevate true productivity over the appearance of hard work.

Managers instinctively measure work ethic with an eye on the clock. Measuring work by time spent working is seductive, because it’s easy and objective. But doing so defies the realities of the creative work flow and will ultimately damage morale.

In reality, ideas are made to happen in spurts.

The pressure of being required to sit at your desk until a certain time creates a factory-like culture that ignores a few basic laws of idea generation and human nature:

  1. When the brain is tired, it doesn’t work well.
  2. Idea generation happens on its own terms.
  3. When you feel forced to execute beyond your capacity, you begin to hate what you are doing.

Rather than focusing on face time, creative teams should embrace transparency and strive to build a fundamental trust between colleagues. As leaders, we must create rules and norms for the sake of efficiency rather than as a result of mistrust. We should measure tangible outputs like actions taken and quality of outcomes.

Which leads to the concept of a “results only work environment” — where “employees are compensated based on their achievement of specified goals rather than on the number of hours worked. The ultimate goal is to empower employees to make their own decisions about when and where they work as long as mutually agreed-upon goals are achieved. This means that bosses stop watching employee calendars and paying attention to when people arrive and leave the office.”

For more on the idea of a results only work environment, see the ROWE Blog and the book Why Work Sucks and How to Fix It (which I wish had a different title, but oh well), both of which are by the two former Best Buy employees who pioneered this approach at Best Buy (seeing productivity go up something like 35% in some departments) and are helping spread it to more and more companies.

Is Attending Conferences an Unnecessary Expense?

by

Keith Ferrazzi makes a good case that the answer is no, in Never Eat Alone.

The reason that conferences are not unnecessary expenses is because it is actually revenue generating to attend. But this is often overlooked because only the cost is tied to the conference in an organization’s budget, but the productive outcomes from the conference are not.

First, here’s how Ferrazzi decides whether to attend a conference:

“Conferences are good for mainly one thing. They provide a forum to meet the kind of like-minded people who can help you fulfill your mission and goals. Before deciding to attend a conference, I sometimes informally go so far as using a simple return-on-investment thought process. Is the likely return I’ll get from the relationships I establish and build equal to or greater than the price of the conference and the time I spend there? If so, I attend. If not, I don’t.”

Second, here is Ferrazzi’s very good case on why cutting out conferences is a bad way to cut costs:

“Right after we sold YaYa, the new owners instituted a set of cost-cutting policies relative to travel and conferences. I thought the policies were fundamentally off the mark. The owners saw conferences as boondoggles–pleasant affairs for indulgent executives rather than as revenue generators. To our new parent company, the costs of sending people to a few events each year seemed like an unnecessary expense on the start-up company’s balance sheet.

“I strongly disagreed and promised to convince them otherwise. I set about recording the actual number of revenue-generating projects that came directly from people I had met at conferences. The owners were stunned when I presented a spreadsheet showing successive deals and how a significant chunk of revenue could be traced back to one conference or another.”

Third, here’s a good summary from Fast Company on the value of conferences and conventions: They enable you to (1) make contacts and (2) share ideas.

Remember: Ask Questions

by

“Questions attract thoughts and new ideas. Asking questions creates a learning mindset.”

Plus, it’s the right thing to do. Being interested in others — reflected in asking questions — is part of treating people well.

Turn it into a Question

by

Here’s another approach to problem solving: When you have a problem, turn it into a question. Write it down on a document or sheet of paper, and then think through it on paper. Define the problem first, and probe it deeply. Ask “what is the problem?” and then “what else could be the problem?” Then do the same to identify causes, and then solutions.