Everlearn - Latest blog posts from Everlearn

No, I'm not telling

Sun, 14 Apr 2013 00:00:00 GMT

There is a popular myth that gets trotted out on training courses quite often. It starts with a study, usually at Yale or Harvard with MBA students. The researchers asked the students to write down specific goals after they completed the course, some of them were asked to tell some close friends and family what they had written and some were asked not to. When the researchers interviewed them ten years later the ones who had told someone were much more successful than the ones who hadn't.

I've known it was a myth for a long time now, (thanks Richard Wiseman!) but like many of these urban legends it seemed pretty plausible. It seems however that for certain goals at least, sharing can mean we put less effort into achieving them.

Researchers refer to identity goals. These goals are usually preceded by the phrase " I want to become"(insert: a better manager, a team player, etc) or "I'm going to be a" director in 5 years (for instance). And it seems from the research described at the psych your mind blog, telling people about these goals can backfire on you.

One study used law students as subjects and asked them to rate their career goals on a scale of 1 to 9. Some students dropped their answers into a box, others were asked to show the experimenter their answer before they dropped it in the box. The subjects were then given the opportunity to spend 45 minutes looking at legal cases, an activity that moves them closer to their goal. Participants who had their answers observed spent far less time working on the subsequent task than those who had not been observed.

Other studies have revealed what seems to be the cause of this particular phenomenon. Telling people about your identity goal makes you feel like you are closer to achieving it subsequently making you slack off from putting in the effort. So next time your business coach asks you what your goal is, or a trainer asks you to work with a partner to identify what you want to take away from this course, the correct answer may well be "no thanks, I actually want to achieve something".

image: lululemon athletica 2009

source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/lululemonathletica/4207563765/

What every charity should know about hurricanes

Fri, 12 Apr 2013 00:00:00 GMT

I'm looking at a flyer from a charity containing a large picture of a single African child staring plaintively back at me. So far so good, research has demonstrated that if you want me to open my wallet, then a single child is better than a family, a byproduct of the well known bystander effect.

Glancing further I notice that the child's name is Charles and he is from Zambia. Charles is a good name and there's no reason a child shouldn't be called that, unless a child with a different name could persuade me to donate more?

The answer is probably yes as NYU psychologist Adam Alter explains over at the Monkey Cage. Belgian psychologist Jozef Nuttin discovered a curious social effect which raises donations for hurricane relief, if you share the first initial with the name of the hurricane then you are likely to donate more money. For example women donators called Kerry or Karen donated 100 times more to the Hurricane Katrina relief fund than people who didn't share an initial.

So the question is, would the Nuttin effect, as I have decided to call it, work for other kinds of donations? I see no reason why not, names and it seems initials have a powerful hold over us. So if this list of the most popular names in then UK is right then you are much better off with a name which starts with J as four of the top 20 boys names start with this initial, and only one starts with C. There is also plenty of scope for examining naming conventions by region, sex or wealth as well to see what impact this might have on donations.

Incidentally Adam Alter is currently appearing in an advertisment for Prudential in the US as is Dan Gilbert. Psychologists really are the new rock stars.

Love and evaluation

Tue, 26 Mar 2013 00:00:00 GMT

Behavioural economist Dan Ariely is running a free 6 week course over at Coursera, the first set of lectures are excellent, providing a great introduction to some of the key studies in the field. One minor amusing takeaway was about lecturer evaluations. I think its fair to say I'm not a fan of this style of appraisal, and he points to some interesting research about their ineffectiveness.

If you ask people to write three things they love about their partner, they will rate their love higher than those who were asked to write 10 reasons why they love their partner. The reason for this difference doesn't have anything to do with their actual love, but more to do with how difficult it is to think of these 10 things.

Just before you ask delegates to complete their evaluation form, get them to spend five minutes listing ten ways to improve the course they were on. When they struggle to get to 10, they will asssume they enjoyed the course and rate you higher. Perhaps better yet, ask them to write three things they like about the course and 10 ways it could be improved?

Release valve

Thu, 7 Mar 2013 00:00:00 GMT

It isn't unusual for some people to spend a week obsessively playing a particular computer game. I'm not much of a gamer but I have spent the last week obsessing over a computer game company. I imagine this is less ordinary.

Psychologists and sociologists widely routimnely tell us that, whether or not we are acting out of altruism, people are basically cooperative. However, I have never seen this reflected in a model for organisational governance until a week ago when I came across Valve, the company behind the online gaming platform, Steam. Their basic philosophy is of anarcho syndicalist and built around and non-governance. Listening to this podcast from Econtalk with Yanis Varoufakis, the resident economist at Valve, offers an introduction to the uniquely deliberate collaborative nature of Valve.

Alternatively, you can watch founder, Gabe Newell talking about Valve's corporate culture, or you can read their employee handbook. The highlights include the absolutely flat organisational structure and the total autonomy of Valve employees who are all free to choose which teams and projects they join. New staff are chosen by consensus across the organisation, as are bonuses for each team member. All desks are on wheels and individuals can move between project teams depending on their particular interests at the time, or if a conflict can't be resolved within a particular team.

I can't think of any company I have worked with or for that could implement a structure like this and nor would I advise it, yet I think there are some simple lessons any organisation no matter how hierarchical can learn from them:

Recruitment - how often do we engage the team in the recruitment of members, or recruit by consensus? I've seen plenty of team managers on interview panels but never the other team members candidates can expect to work with. They're the ones who will set the group norms and improve productivity shouldn't we involve them as well?

Communication - one of the key factors in making this structure work is that all members of the organisation (about 350) know what other members of Valve are doing through inter-team meetings and the company intranet. A structure like this couldn't work unless information is shared and viewed actively and rapidly. Through technology and a lack of centralisation information about team projects filters throughout the organisation constantly.

Cultural change - Gabe Newell thinks it takes around 6 months before someone feels comfortable in the Valve culture. However, there are brilliant and creative people who never get comfortable because they are so used to more recognisable social and organisational norms. When you run a cultural change programme, you're not just wrestling with your own organisation norms, but cultural ones as well, yet we give no thought to wider cultural impacts on employees.

Customer engagement - there are minimal barriers between Valve and its customers as well as between customers themselves. The results are instantaneous feedback, positive reinforcement loops, symmetrical information and almost no need for marketing. A question to the lean readers of this blog -Is this the leanest company in the world right now?

I am not crazy enough to suggest to any of the organisations I work with should adapt to this business model. They have inbuilt structural advantages that are hard to replicate in other parts of the economy. I am however crazy enough to predict that we will soon see an increasingly wide adoption of non-hierarchical, autonomous models in organisations because of trends in generational shifts, global competition, and an increasingly online economy.

Finally to maintain a successful organisational system like this requires some very strong cultural and social norms, particularly around decision making, performance management, and motivation. If by any chance someone from Valve is reading this, and you're looking for a psychologist in residence, I am sure I can find some time in my busy schedule.

Gorillas in our midst

Fri, 22 Feb 2013 00:00:00 GMT

Good news for cancer sufferers this week as it turns out radiologists can usually spot the signs of cancer on a brain scan. Bad news however if you have gorillas on the brain, because 83% of the same radiologists didn't spot a hairy ape on the same slide.

This is further confirmation of a phenomena we've covered here before, inattentional blindness, our tendency to miss obvious things when we are concentrating on a task. So if you've ever wondered how you missed that crucial point at a meeting, or in a report it could be because you were concentrating too hard.

This seems like a pretty solid effect now and has been identified in lots of different situations. What I would like to see now is some research on when and why it happens, and how we can avoid, if possible, making some of the obvious errors that accompany it.

Reciprocity and robot cats

Tue, 12 Feb 2013 00:00:00 GMT

A couple of really interesting studies have been doing the rounds this week which demonstrate the profound depth of our social instincts. I am sure that when Robert Cialdini was writing his seminal work on influence it never occurred to him that his techniques would explain our relationship with computers. But that's exactly what a Princeton psychologist has demonstrated in a series of experiments on the rule of reciprocity. Simply put if you do something nice for me, I feel obligated to do something nice in return.

Clifford Nass set up a room with two computers and asked subjects to work at one of the terminals. For some subjects the computer would be helpful and for others the computer would be unhelpful. After 20 minutes the computer asked the subject to reciprocate and help them learn by completing a very dull task. Sometimes the computer they were working on asked for this help, sometimes it was the other computer in the room.

The results were quite striking, if the computer had been helpful then the subject helped it much more than they helped the unused computer. However if the computer they were working on had been unhelpful they completed far more of the task on the other computer when it asked for help, essentially punishing the unhelpful computer by working harder on the neutral machine. This pattern of helpfulness and retaliation is exactly what the rule of reciprocity predicts for human interactions.

The second experiment was loose replication of the Milgram obedience experiments. The experimenter, Christoph Bartneck, created a robotic cat which some of the time helped the subject in a game against a computer and other times wasn't helpful. The experimenter, clad in standard issue authoritarian white coat would then tell the subject they needed to switch off the robot, this would mean erasing their entire personality and behaviours. The robot cat would plead with the subject not to turn it off. Although all the participants eventually turned off the cat, they took on average 35 seconds longer to turn off the helpful cat.

So as the era of robot trainers approaches, I just want our future robotic overlords to know that unlike all those other subjects I would never, ever switch them off.

Image: Christoph Bartneck

Animate

Fri, 21 Dec 2012 00:00:00 GMT

We've discussed the work of Robert Cialdini before on this site, but now you can hear it from the man himself. Influence at Work have put together a great little primer on Cialdini's seminal research.

So if you're looking for a great opener for a sales course, or to encourage more people to do your elearning or you just want your husband to do the dishes more, then check out the presentation here. Actually, not the dishes one - it's psychology not magic.

And in case you're wondering I have it on good authority that the artist is one of Britain's greatest animators, responsible for this cartoon amongst others.

Not finishing what you start

Sun, 4 Nov 2012 00:00:00 GMT

One of my favourite time management tips, especially useful if you work from home, is to start a task the minute you wake up. Feel free to nip in the shower and have breakfast after that but there is something deeply motivating about the power of an unfinished task.

This concept has been understood for years and is known as the Zeigarnik effect. Named after the Russian psychologist who observed that a waitress in a cafe could remember all the items on a large order right up until it was delivered to the table, and then she immediately forgot it. Incomplete tasks seem to stick in the memory and exert a gentle pull to complete them.

Tom Stafford's article on Tetris over at Mindhacks includes a brief overview of the Zeigarnik effect. The article is a fascinating reminder of the power of games in our lives and the motivation derived from the desire to complete. I think the training industry and HR in general could learn a great deal from games designers on making work and training courses more intrinsically motivating and meaningful, rather than tedious and dull.

It also provides the quote of the week, on why people find Tetris so compelling, "My conclusion, it's to do with a deep - seated psychological drive to tidy up"

Are we nearly there yet?

Thu, 1 Nov 2012 00:00:00 GMT

I am typing this post with a game of rugby in the background. One of the players has just received a yellow card which means he has been sent to the sin bin for 10 minutes while the rest of his team struggle on manfully without him.

Imagine you're the coach of the team, you're a man down and getting battered, the captain comes over and asks you how much time is left for your team to hang on. To motivate your team, should you tell him that there are 3 minutes gone or that there is 7 minutes remaining?

The answer is: it depends, as this article on the Influence at Work website demonstrates. It seems that telling someone you have completed 20% of a task is a more powerful motivator than telling someone they have 80% to go. It also seems that telling them they only have 20% left to go is a more powerful motivator than telling people the task is 80% complete. So you should tell the captain that the 3 minutes has elapsed, but if he asks you after 7 minutes, you should tell him there are only 3 minutes remaining.

The researchers refer to this as the Small Areas hypothesis. If you're trying to motivate your staff to do a task remember the smaller number is always better. Now we just need to convince Microsoft to include a percentage remaining function to tasks in a project to keep our project managers on their toes!

Video Games and Cooperation

Sun, 30 Sep 2012 00:00:00 GMT

Some new research out of Ohio University indicating that playing computer games in cooperative mode is more likely to increase cooperative behaviour in other settings.

Experimenters had subjects play the video game Halo 2 for 20 minutes, some of them played together against the computer and in others played against each other. After playing the game players then completed a cooperation task, involving dividing coins between the players. Those who had played the video game cooperatively also played the task cooperatively and those who hadn't played cooperatively, did not cooperate during the task.

Much of the comment on this study has been focused around the effect of video games on subsequent violence concluding, wisely, that it depends on the type of game and how it is being played. Just because Mark Chapman was inspired to murder John Lennon after reading Catcher in the Rye doesn't mean all fiction should be vilified.

But I think this research also has some other interesting applications for online learning. Most organisations seem to believe team building needs to take place in a field somewhere behind the back of hotel. But it seems that the same impact can be standardised through a gaming solution and have measurable benefits back in the workplace.

And of course if we hire elderly people and get them to play World of Warcraft in cooperatively they may well be unstoppable.

Science vs Economics

Sun, 30 Sep 2012 00:00:00 GMT

This blog is dedicated to trying to explain and draw conclusions from evidence based research in the social sciences to HR and training. There is so much misinformation, pseudoscience, junk theory and popular but incorrect folk wisdom. There are enormous gains organisations can make from analysing and applying this research.

However it is also important to remember social science research is by its nature incomplete and liable to change over time. There are issues with replicability, the subjects used and cultural and researcher bias amongst other issues. Which brings us to this terrific Econtalk with Jim Manzi exploring the limits of knowledge.

At the heart of the conversation is to me a really interesting thought experiment which bears thinking about carefully. It goes like this:

You are the president of the United States and you were contemplating attacking Iran to stop them developing a nuclear weapon. Your first advisor is a physicist and they tell you all about what Iran needs to make a nuclear weapon, the steps involved and what equipment would be necessary to make the bomb. your second advisor is an eminent historian who explains to you the history and culture of Iran, it's religion and politics and how it came to be in the position it is and whether you should intervene or not.

You could get almost any physicist in the world to come to the White House and recieve exactly the same advice. But that is not true about the advice of the historian, you could get an equally eminent historian who could give you a completely different version and advice.

The question he then poses is if the advisor was an economist would his advice be more like the physicist or more like the historian? Now swap economist for psychologist or sociologist or behavioural economist and ask yourself the same question?

There are always management decisions which need to be made and they should always be made using the best available evidence and data, but all of these decisions are inevitably based on opinion and an understanding of the limits of knowledge and a willingness to seek out diverse opinions is crucial.

This also gets to the heart of one of my greatest bugbears, that economics is seen as a discipline more like science than social science and I don't see any good reason why this should be the case.

Magical thinking

Tue, 25 Sep 2012 00:00:00 GMT

An interesting article in Discover magazine from professional magician Alex Stone on how we our decisions can be manipulated. He starts with the concept of forcing, a technique used by magicians to give the illusion of choice when in fact the magician is controlling your choices.

He moves from magic tricks to some real life examples of how our decisions are forced. For example if you ask someone if they are happy they will rate themselves as happier than if you ask them if they are unhappy.

There are some other great examples in the piece, including a brief look at some jury research that we have used on interviewing skills courses. More evidence that our decision making is much less rational than we would like to think, and that some people have known this for a long time.

How do you solve a problem like Kevin

Tue, 21 Aug 2012 00:00:00 GMT

I don't think you need to be a cricket fan to be fascinated by the current imbroglio involving Kevin Pietersen and his spectacular falling out with the England and Wales Cricket board. His offences include texting disparaging comments about the captain to an opposing player, being difficult to manage, being full of himself and frankly, not very British. He is also outrageously gifted, a world class and innovative batsman and probably the most talented England player of the last decade.

The problem is exacerbated by what seems to be a clique developing in the England dressing room, with three bowlers apparently undermining Pietersen at every opportunity. This seems to me to represent a classic management dilemma:

Is the team more productive without it's most productive individual?
How do you deal with egos in your teams?
How do you stop cliques developing in your teams and how do you deal with them if they do?
How do you deal with personal criticism as a manager?
How do you keep doing your job effectively in such a poisonous environment?
What kind of systems could you put in place to prevent this happening in the first place?

I mention all of this mostly because I would be surprised if you read a better management article this year than this one by the Old Batsman.

Genius in a bottle

Fri, 17 Aug 2012 00:00:00 GMT

News of an enormous breakthrough in creativity research which has the potential to revolutionise the world of creativity training, and finally overthrow the ridiculous left brain/ right brain dichotomy. I'll let the Economist explain:

"This - removing alcohol - may be short-sighted. Another recent paper from the journal Consciousness and Cognition by psychologists at the University of Illinois confirms what many have long suspected: a couple of drinks makes workers more creative. Tipsy employees, they say, find it hard to focus on a task, but this makes them more likely to come up with innovative ideas. This may help to explain the success of Silicon Valley, one of the last workplaces in America where hard and soft drinks still jostle for space in the company fridge."

That's right, psychologists have decided that the boozy lunch enhances creativity. Our resident Everlearn designer is now working on a branded hip flask.

Eye don't spy

Fri, 17 Aug 2012 00:00:00 GMT

Many years ago, I attended an NLP course - Bandler and McKenna, for those who know about these things - and we were taught about eye access cues. The idea is that when people are talking about something, where they are looking will tell you whether they are lying or not. You can see one of the charts here. I remember thinking at the time that if this was true we would always know who the guilty party was, no need for interrogations, alibis, etc. Critical thinking isn't really encouraged on NLP courses so I didn't mention it, but I'm very pleased that some researchers have had similar thoughts and conducted a study to test these claims.

The researchers conducted three relatively simple studies to test the validity of these claims. In the first one they tested the eye movement of participants who were lying to see if they matched NLP coding. In the second study they trained half the participants to understand eye accessing cues and then made all the participants do a lie detector test. And finally they mapped the eye movements of liars and truth tellers in famous press conferences (think Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky).

They found no evidence for eye accessing cues. So that as they say is that. On a final note one of the experimenters was Richard Wiseman, magician, psychologist and professional debunker. If you work in "soft skills" training and you haven't read 59 seconds you're probably in dereliction of your duty.

The training troubador

Thu, 2 Aug 2012 00:00:00 GMT

I have often thought, though rarely expressed, the idea that trainers are business bards. Like a modern Alan a Dale weaving stories and fables for corporate types. I realise this idea may not chime with the studied rationalist pitch of this blog, but telling stories is one of the most important and overlooked facets of our profession. I recently stumbled across an article summarising research on the importance of narrative persuasion in a legal setting, which has some excellent ideas for trainers about the importance of story telling. So settle back in your chairs and let me tell you more.

It starts with a discussion of two types of persuasion, rhetorical where the speaker makes a series of logical arguments in order to persuade their listeners and narrative which is driven by antagonists, protagonists and plot. It seems that narrative forms of persuasion are much better at changing opinions particularly if they are emotional in nature than logical argumentation. To achieve this the persuader needs to transport the listener into the story so they feel like a part of the narrative. There are six factors a trainer needs to consider when building transporting narratives:

Good storytellers - ever get frustrated that you are clearly far cleverer, understand the topic better and in every way superior to your colleague, but they get better feedback than you? OK just me then. But it's probably because they're a better storyteller, with a mastery of pitch, pace, pause, and ability to build suspense. Who is telling the story is an important component of building persuasive narratives.
Immersive Images - "It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen" is the opening line from 1984 by a man who implicitly understood the power of imagery. You need to build vivid mental images which are easy to remember and difficult to counter.
Realism - worlds of pure fantasy are less persuasive than those that have a grounding in reality. The actors within the story must be realistic and behave in believable ways.
Structure - make sure the story has a beginning, middle and end, or the classic three acts. Start with a question then let the answer slowly unfold over the course of the narrative.
Context and surroundings - the reason you turn down the lights when you're telling a ghost story is because the environment is important. So make sure there are no distractions, use props, or mood music to make the story more effective.
The audience - Different people will have different levels of engagement with a narrative driven training course. The researchers look at a 19 point scale which can assess a participants ability to be transported, but which can be boiled down to the fundamental question: "Do I become absorbed in stories?".

Using these six factors the research team designed a series of studies examining some controversial issues like participants views on homosexuality and affirmative action, and assessed the power of stories to change people's minds. Their findings identified three main ways of making your training more effective:

The audience - Is your audience easily persuadable by stories or by rational arguments, you could use the scale mentioned in the article, you can make assumptions based on observation or the profession of your audience and pitch your material accordingly.

The material - If you think you will have a hostile audience, especially if the hostility is based on rational arguments. You should also use a story based approach when, heaven forbid, you have weak or missing material or you can switch styles, in weaker parts of your course.

The trainer - Have they been trained as a storyteller? Do they read and enjoy stories? Can they elicit narratives from their audience in order to make their training more memorable? And perhaps most importantly can they switch between rational explication and narrative.

There is a fantastic example of the power of stories from the wonderful art organisation, the significant object project, which examines the impact of stories in a sales environment. Their project involves selling ordinary objects on ebay, but with a story written by a professional author. The idea is that people will pay more for an everyday object if it has a story attached, and you should definitely go over there now to see how they're getting on.

The point of powerpoint

Thu, 26 Jul 2012 00:00:00 GMT

A really good, open access study about the uses and abuses of powerpoint has just been published demonstrating that presentations which don't respect the cognitive principles of learning tend to fail in predictable ways, and that while people are aware of the failure, most people aren't aware of why they fail.

They begin with a literature review of the research on learning in three main areas, encoding information, working memory and long term memory, from which they derive eight key principles of cognitive communication. Apart from giving us a framework to assess learning interventions- in this case Powerpoint- these principles form an excellent guide to designing training interventions that really work. Below is a quick overview but I would encourage you to look at the paper as there is is more depth and some excellent pointers listed for each.

Discriminability - the information presented must be clearly distinguished from the background and any other patterns in the presentation
Perceptual organisation - information needs to grouped together to make it easier to process
Salience - our attention is drawn to differences e.g. we tend to code and remember the large part of pie chart which sticks out from the rest
Limited capacity - our brain can only usually process 4 packages of information at one time
Informative change - we expect changes to bring us important information so we pay more attention to visual and auditory changes
Appropriate knowledge - use information which the audience are already aware of rather than novel symbols or concepts
Compatability - make sure your audio and visual messages are congruent otherwise it will be harder to process
Relevance - don't overdo it, and avoid ambiguity

The researchers then set up a series of experiments utilising presentations that violated these core rules in multiple ways. They conducted surveys questioning people about which errors annoyed them the most (it's relevance unsurprisingly) and in a follow up study they tested how aware participants were of the things they instinctively thought were wrong.

The results were fairly clear. A random selection of slides they collected from various sources violated the cognitive principles of learning usually in multiple ways meaning that most users of Powerpoint make these mistakes often. These flaws are obvious to their audience but they often can't articulate what the flaw is, which probably explains why these flaws persist.

The applications for corporate training are pretty clear: when you are designing learning interventions make sure you understand the theory and application of the 8 cognitive design principles, otherwise you risk alienating your audience and defeating the purpose of your training.

Finally I think the researchers missed a great opportunity: surely they should have published the research in a powerpoint presentation?

Return of Kong

Mon, 16 Jul 2012 00:00:00 GMT

We've talked before about inattentional blindness, the idea that if we're concentrating on one task we can tend to miss very obvious information in the background. Thus if we worry too much about the detail we can miss obvious opportunities.

Now, fresh from the pages of the Research Digest comes a twist in the form of innatentional deafness. Experimenters at the University of London asked participants to listen to a recording of two pairs talking, one between two men and one between two women. Half the participants were asked to listen to the women talking and the other half were asked to listen to the men talking. Halfway through the conversation a male voice can be heard saying "I am a gorilla, I am a gorilla" for 18 seconds.

Participants listening to the male voices heard the gorilla 90% of the time but those listening to the women only heard the gorilla 30% of the time. It seems that listening to the women meant screening out male voices, even unusual ones. I foresee a nice little active listening exercise on future Everlearn courses.

The recording they used in the experiment can be found here.

Fishing for compliments

Thu, 5 Jul 2012 00:00:00 GMT

When I first started training, every management course had a section on how to praise to your team. They included some fairly simple homilies, like make sure the praise is specific, make sure it is deserved etc. Then sometime in the early naughts when I looked away for a second we started calling it affirmations. These days I don't really see much management training about either.

This brings me in a slightly long winded fashion to a fantastic series of articles over at The New Inquiry, delving into some fascinating research on how we give compliments, who gives them, to whom, how frequently and what do we say.

For instance, compliments are quite gender bound, a compliment given to a man by another man is more likely to be accepted than compliments given to a woman by another woman. In fact women are more likely to accept a compliment from a man than from another woman. Women are more likely to recieve compliments based on their appearance while men tend to receive more compliments based on their skills.

Complimenting people with positive sterotypes is not particularly well recieved: telling a Chinese associate they must be really good at maths or complimenting an African American man on his sporting prowess tends not to be effective. Finally knowing how to respond to compliments can be very difficult, it can leave us embarrased that we didn't say something first or it looks like we don't value the relationship.

Obviously most of these studies were done in social settings rather than in organisational settings but workplaces are still bound by general social conventions. There is certainly a huge opportunity to do research on giving and recieving compliments in team environments. In the meantime I'm off to develop some new activities where delegates work in the same and different gender dyads to see if I can spot any differences.

Broken windows

Sun, 24 Jun 2012 00:00:00 GMT

Dan Ariely reports on an interesting amateur experiment where a bicycle left chained to a rail is gradually stripped over the course of a year. Once the water bottle dissapears on Day 160 the rest of the bike is pretty quickly gone.

This reminds me of an older study conducted by blog hero Philip Zimbardo in 1979. He left two cars unattended, one in an affluent area and one in a more deprived area. The car in the deprived area was quickly stripped, wheras the one in the affluent area was not touched at all. Which might win a prize for the most obvious social science research of all time except for one curious fact, when Zimbardo went and broke the lights on the car in the affluent area, it was pretty quickly stripped as well.

This simple experiment came to prominence via an extremely influential article in the Atlantic Monthly which elucidated the now famous broken windows theory. Basically crime can, at least partly, be attributed to cues in the environment. If you see a broken window, you're more likely to throw a stone at the window. I think there are a couple of conclusions for the corporate world.

Dan Ariely highlights the social proof factor, that if we see someone doing something dishonest we will tend to take that as justification, and this will escalate over time. Also if you stick staff in a shabby office then you will probably get shabby outputs.

But I also think there is a deeper point to be made. Many problems we see in organisations started as small issues further down the chain- it might be a badly worded letter to customers or an incomprehensible website. When it is obvious that errors or poor work are not being challenged, people further up the chain unconsicously relax their own standards, leading to further frustration, lack of motivation and poor service.

Myths of behavioural change

Fri, 1 Jun 2012 00:00:00 GMT

A really good applied psychology roundup of the ten most common behavioural change myths on this video. The speaker Brock Macdonald works for Metro Vancouver devising strategies to increase recycling in the City.

While his top ten are related to recycling, they are pretty pervasive regardless of context.

People are lazy
People don't care
It's all about education
People won't change until you hit them in the wallet
It's all about carrots and sticks
The system is fine, people are the problem
Immigrants are the problem
It's all about convenience
Regulation is the only way to change things
For businesses it's about the bottom line

There are some great ancedotes and a tour of some of the research, and its applications. There is also a curiously behaviourist finish, arguing that social media does not necessarily reinforce the correct organisational behaviours. Which given the current organisational excitement for online and social learning is a question well worth discussing.

The cost of a free plane ride

Wed, 9 May 2012 00:00:00 GMT

In 1982 American Airlines - then, as now in financial difficulty - made a decision to offer customers the opportunity to pay $250 000 for free lifetime first class tickets on their airline. Even at the time it should have been perfectly obvious the kinds of people who could afford to take this opportunity were probably going to fly a lot in their lifetime and lose the airline money over the long term. Which is precisely what happened, one passenger for instance flew the equivalent of $5.4 million worth of flights in a five year period. The problem has become so bad American Airlines are trying to renege on the deal.

So why did AA make such an obviously terrible business decision?

American Airlines suffered from a decision making bias called temporal discounting, the tendency to prefer short term gratification to long term gain. They were so influenced by the amount of money they could make now they didn't consider how much this would cost later. This short term thinking is very hard to avoid and is often the root cause of why business planning is so difficult.

For more information on the American Airlines attempts to take their customers to court see here.

For examples of temporal discounting you can use to demonstrate this phenomenon with your teams check out our resources section.

The I's have it

Mon, 7 May 2012 00:00:00 GMT

One would think in an heirarchical organisation - and most organisations are - power would flow from the top down. In reality however this is rarely true. Workers can wield enormous power over managers, the difficult team member who consumes a disproportionate amount of a managers time has more power than the manager, and is the PA who controls access to senior managers more powerful than her boss?

If you want to know who really has the power in a relationship just count the pronouns. In this short NPR podcast Alix Spiegel interviews psychologist James Pennebaker. His research indicates that the person in a relationship who uses the most I's has the least power in that relationship.

So if you're not sure about who is in really in charge in your organisations, dig out your emails and count the I's.

UPDATE - you can see more of James Pennebaker's work and do some of the exercises yourself here

The language of decision making

Sun, 6 May 2012 00:00:00 GMT

Learning a new language is advantageous for many reasons, brain plasticity, cultural awareness and improving your holiday experience. It can also help you make better business decisions.

Of all the cognitive biases that riddle decision making, the one that corporate types understand the best is risk aversion- the tendency for percieved risks to outweigh potential gains. Some new research from the University of Chicago indicates that foreign language speakers may actually be less risk averse than their native speaking peers.

The simple experimental paradigm asked dual language speakers to look at a series of situations, similar to the ones developed by psychologist Daniel Kahneman, which we have also adapted and are available in our Resource s section.

The subjects were asked to evaluate the situation, and make a decision. In the native language condition, subjects, as expected, took the safe option 80% of the time. However when subjects examined the scenario in their second language, those taking the safe option plummeted to 40%.

The researchers hypothesise the increased cognitive load of thinking in a second language means people avoid sloppy automatic processes which improves their decision making. So if you want your management teams to make better decisions then your money might be better spent on a language course than a decision making course.

For more background on the research check out this Wired article.

Does it work the second time?

Sat, 21 Apr 2012 00:00:00 GMT

At Everlearn we pay for content from a variety of academics and students to ensure our content stays fresh and relevant and that we stay at the forefront of applied social science research. Mostly this consists of activities, based on classic and new experiments. But there is a longer term plan to this approach, a plan which aims to try and give back to the psychology community at large.

Social science experiments suffer from several major failings which I think the work we do at Everlearn can partially alleviate. The first of these is to do with the subject composition. Most experiments are conducted with American college graduates. This means it can be difficult to discern how generalisable the results are to the wider population or other nationalities. By replicating these experiments with organisations in diverse fields, with different types of employees, we can certainly add some results from different subjects to the overall literature.

The second major problem, ably captured in this post from Mindhacks is about the replication of experiments. It can be difficult to tell how robust an experiment is because they are not often replicated. This problem has been highlighted recently with several high profile experiments failing the replication test. Again at Everlearn we can provide at the least, anecdotal evidence from the replications we run on our training courses.

There are several barriers to doing this at the moment. Firstly, we are and will remain a business- we only do things we think are in the best interests of our clients and their customers. Secondly, informed consent would be needed, and delegates don't come on a training course expecting to have to sign a waiver for their consent in the process. Finally it can be very difficult to set up a training courses under experimental conditions.

I don't believe any of these issues are insurmountable, but it will probably take some time to develop more enterprising and creative ways of doing it.

The 50 greatest learning theorists

Tue, 20 Mar 2012 00:00:00 GMT

Donald Clark is embarking on a series of the 50 greatest learning theorists from Socrates through to the present day. I have no doubt he will be as controversial as ever, well worth reading.

I have nothing to add except that I wish I'd thought of doing it.

What organisational psychology should do next

Sat, 17 Mar 2012 00:00:00 GMT

There is a depressingly familiar tale on the Providentia website about the public understanding of psychology. This seems pretty accurate to me in term of the general public, but I would also add that most people see psychologists and therapists as being in the same profession. For example whenever I mention that I am a psychologist someone always asks if I am going to psychoanalyse them.

I am often surprised by how influential the language of therapy is in the public imagination. Even in casual conversations with clients, they will talk about ego, self esteem, the unconscious, intoversion / extraversion etc. I suspect this is a product of the mass media, you rarely see or hear conversations about psychology, whereas a visit to the therapist is an often used trope. I also belive this conflation of psychology and therapy is one of the major barriers when dealing with organisations.

The general understanding of psychology in the organisations we work with is decidedly mixed. There does seem to be a belief even at the highest levels that we need to do something for "the staff", but nobody really knows what. Senior managers are extraordinarily resistant to interventions based on systemic or group principles, and when confronted with the evidence they shrug their shoulders and mutter something about just common sense. Training and HR managers who often commission this kind of work are more receptive but still have a very 1960's Humanistic view of what their people strategy might be.

So what should organisational psychology do next? I would endorse all of the solutions in the Providentia article. On the popular writing front, Malcolm Gladwell really has opened the doors for a more sociological approach to business. Despite his flaws I think political blogger Ezra Klein's comment that he's like "Aesop for the corprorate classes" is spot on, and HR and training writers and bloggers need to take advantage of this groundwork. We need to start to get the language of psychology understood within organisations. Managers need to understand things like confirmation bias, price anchoring, and social and group effects.

On an institutional level I've written previously that training managers need to demand a higher level of evidence from their suppliers and their staff. When we are challenged by senior managers they can rarely fault our data and I think that represents the other way forward. Organisations live on data, and psychologists can bring a level of data analysis about staff and customers unrivalled by other training disciplines.

Orcs and the elderly

Wed, 7 Mar 2012 00:00:00 GMT

Next time you're in B&Q and you see a member of staff looking at a computer screen, just peer over and see what they're doing. If they're playing World of Warcraft (WoW), that's who you want to help you with your enquiry. Because surely a company with such an enlightened recruitment policy can't possibly have failed to notice the new research that playing World of Warcraft improves cognitive functioning in the elderly.

Apart from giving me a few ideas on how to spend my twighlight years there are a couple of other points to make. More and more studies are finding that Massive Mulitplayer Online Roleplaying Games (MMPORG) are an excellent way to hone management, leadership and social skills, and organisations ignore these skills at their peril. Secondly experiential learning environments whether online or in the classroom is clearly the most effective way to demonstrate and practice new skills.

And finally perhaps this is the answer to all our management recruitment needs, just find the top WoW players in your area and hire them.

The kind of training strategy I'd like to see

Tue, 6 Mar 2012 00:00:00 GMT

The sure to be riveting journal of negative results in biomedicine hits the news stands this week as a necessary corollary to some of the publication biases in standard academic journals. It got me thinking, again about what should constitute evidence in training practice. If only training departments were so worried about their knowledge base they thought they needed a journal for negative results.

You would never believe it to look at a training bid or strategy but there is no course in any management and leadership programme that will not have several decades of peer reviewed articles to draw on. Whether it's team building, creativity, or influence and persuasion, there is plenty of excellent, readily available research literature that clever trainers could adapt for their organisations.

Yet in my decades of reading and writing corporate training bids, proposals and strategy documents, only one organisation has ever given me something more than anecdotal evidence of the effectiveness of their training interventions. No prizes for guessing who that is.

So if you're a Training or HR manager, here is my suggestion to you. If you are looking at a bid or training strategy document and every course proposal does not have at least one citation to a peer reviewed journal it gets binned, instantly and irrevocably.

Thus clearing the way for Everlearn to sweep the board.

Forget interviews, flip a coin

Thu, 1 Mar 2012 00:00:00 GMT

Of all the businesses in all the world I can't imagine any that take recruitment more seriously than major sports teams. The amount of money the average premiership football team spends on scouting, player assessment, transfer fees and wages is enormous. And probably useless. In American sports, where the draft system makes it easy to rank performance, you would expect this spending would be much better targeted. However, as this paper from Cade Massey and Richard Thaler which has been doing the rounds on the internet makes clear, NFL teams may as well choose their rookies at random.

I suspect that sports teams spend a far greater perecentage of their turnover on recruitment than any other organisation so if they can't get it right, how bad must other recruitment processes be? For instance we know from the research of Allen Huffcutt and others that interviews are a very poor predictor of future performance. We know interviews are riddled with interpersonal bias, yet I've never seen a HR department that recommends you don't interview candidates, have you?

The triumph of soft skills training?

Mon, 13 Feb 2012 00:00:00 GMT

I think the publication of the governments Behavioural Insights Team (BIT?) paper "Applying behavioural insights to reduce fraud, error and debt" should represent a watershed in organisational training. I won't hold my breath. After years of being ignored, this represents- to the best of my knowledge- the first systematic attempt to apply decades of psychology and behavioural research to non military government programs.

One of the key contributors to the report were Influence at Work UK, the consultancy set up by psychologist Robert Cialdini. They have cropped up on this blog before in relation to their NHS work. We recently had the good fortune to meet with them and talk through some of the work they have done in Revenues and Customs, and the figures are pretty stark.

The new HMRC campaign (using behavioural techniques) cleared £560 million out of a portfolio of £650 million (86%). This compares to clearing £290 million out of £510 million (57%) the year before.
When the redesigned letters are introduced prior to passing cases to collections then the campaign cleared rises to £598 million (92%)
The wider pilot studies using four different letter types has resulted in over £1 billion in extra revenue.

Not too shabby for "soft skills" training. Now if only we can get the private sector to follow the excellent lead of the public sector.

Body of lies

Sun, 12 Feb 2012 00:00:00 GMT

While learning style theory is probably the most damaging piece of pseudo-psychology inflicted on their clients by corporate trainers, possibly the most egregious fraud is body language training. For years we told people to look for tells, note how people shake hands, preening behaviour and the like, while completely ignoring context, culture and the field work of anthropologist Paul Ekman, or Tim Roth if you prefer.

So imagine my amusement that the same moment corporate trainers finally woke up to the world of micro expressions psychologists are overturning Ekman's research findings.

Learning to learn

Tue, 7 Feb 2012 00:00:00 GMT

There is a great article at Wired magazine explaining why everything you thought you knew about learning is wrong. Robert Bjork a psychologist at UCLA outlines his 3 key learning strategies.

Interleaving - don't try and learn in chunks. Do different but related things at the same time.
Change locations - studying in different locations will help you recall information better later.
Spacing - cramming is bad. Make sure you wait between study sessions as this will strengthen the retrieval mechanisms

However instead of following the research I suggest we divide our content into bite size chunks, cram people into a classroom, and try to get it all done in a day.

The death of the lecture?

Tue, 17 Jan 2012 00:00:00 GMT

January is usually a pretty dull month for psychology on the web. It mostly consists of rehashed posts on willpower, sticking to your new years resolutions, best of the year posts, and thoughts for 2012. Having said that I'm surprised I missed this post from the BPS and grateful for their best of the year roundup for drawing my attention to it. The post in question concerns a study of the much maligned lecture as a learning format.

A group of psychologists, including a physics Nobel Prize winner staged an intervention in an undergraduate science class. The team used deliberative practice techniques including participant led discussion, quizzes and instructor feedback with students over a twelve week period. A control group received traditional lecture style instruction.

The results were startling with the intervention group doubling their test results compared to the control group. Additionally over 90% of students said they had enjoyed the experience. I suspect most people who work in learning and training would find this result fairly intuitive. We all work very hard to make our courses as engaging and participant led as we can.

Before the self congratulation begins however, there are some serious methodological flaws in this study neatly summarised in this New York Times article. These include fears the experimental group was too homogenous, a large percentage of students did not turn up to the final exams and the bias of the experimenters.

It is probably far too soon to write off the lecture as a learning tool, particularly as it moves into online mediums, like the TED conference (yes they are lectures). But if I have one thought for 2012 it is probably to echo the final sentiment from the NYT article by Dr James Stigler:

"I think that the authors are pioneers in exploring and testing ways we can improve undergraduate teaching and learning", he said. "As a psychologist, I'm ashamed that it is physicists who are leading this effort, and not learning scientists."

And as a learning professional I am ashamed by the lack of rigour and testing in corporate training. We shouldn't leave everything to the academics.

Patriarchy or preference?

Mon, 2 Jan 2012 00:00:00 GMT

A fascinating and controversial podcast from Econtalk around the psychology of gender, which I think is a must for diversity trainers. The social psychologist Roy Baumeister argues that the reason there aren't more women in senior positions in organisations is due to preference rather than patriarchy. He believes the real reason is that women make smaller and deeper social networks rather than larger and shallower ones. This explains why men build much larger organisations as they expand their social networks, and women who are less interested in large networks build smaller businesses.

He also points out that in almost any data set comparing men and women, men tend to be at both extremes, while women cluster in the middle. So for example if you look at academic achievement men will tend to be at the top and bottom of achievement and women more bunched in the middle. He points out that as most homeless people are men, if they were included in surveys of corporate pay then you may find a similar effect, the very top are men, the very bottom are men, and the middle are women meaning differences in average pay are really quite small.

The podcast finishes with an indictment of the research currently being done in gender studies, and it's application. I am certainly not a gender studies expert, and some of the conversation and examples strike me as very old fashioned. But with so much time and money in organisations spent on diversity policy which assumes the problem is a patriarchal culture in the boardroom it is important to sift the evidence carefully before deciding on our diversity policies.

On our larger projects, Everlearn give each delegate an ipod touch preloaded with free and creative commons material to reinforce key learning points before and after workshop sessions.

Warfare at Work

Tue, 13 Dec 2011 00:00:00 GMT

The BPS Occupational Digest has a fascinating article on a popular Learning in Mind topic, incentives at work. It looks at a new study comparing group and individual incentives. It used a competitive computer battle simulation to examine the behaviour of subjects under group, mixed group and individual incentive schemes, which came to the same conclusion as most of the other studies.

It seems that when the group is incentivised more co-operative strategies emerge than when the subjects had a mix of individual and group strategies. Both the blog and the researchers do however sound a note of caution that the dip in cooperative behaviour may be a result of the urgency of the task rather than the nature of the incentives.

Aliens and organisations

Fri, 2 Dec 2011 00:00:00 GMT

A well titled article over at the Mother Jones magazine, The science of why we don't believe science. The principle villain of the piece appears to be motivated reasoning. This is the idea that we are motivated to protect our existing beliefs and biases rather than examine the evidence.

Throughout the article the author gives a good roundup of some of the research on decision making including one of my favourite pieces of field research. Leon Festinger, who famously formulated the theory of cognitive dissonance, infiltrated a UFO cult to examine what would happen when their prophecy of world destruction failed to materialise.

The answer: their own belief in the prophecy meant that god had saved the world from destruction. You can clearly see the power of motivated reasoning stepping in here to protect them from the obvious truth that their prophecy was wrong. More concerning perhaps, is the shameful drop in the number of psychologists infiltrating cults which I think reflects poorly on the profession.

The article frames this conversation in political terms using the examples of birthers, and vaccine and global warming denialists to explore our tendency to avoid contradictory information. You could just as easily write an article looking at examples within business, like evidence that smaller teams are better or incentivising people does not improve performance. The article finishes by saying if you want to convince someone, don't lead with facts, lead with values. I would add, if you want to lessen the effects of cognitive bias always ask yourself, what evidence would it take to overturn my cherished belief, and look for that evidence.

Please remember to wash your hands

Fri, 2 Dec 2011 00:00:00 GMT

The more we wash our hands the less likely we are to prejudiced, seems to be the findings of a startling new study. The research starts with the evolutionary psychology idea that prejudice happens because groups fear disease being brought in by members of the outgroup, and that by fighting the idea of disease we can also fight the prejudice.

One experiment was done with a mixed group of subjects some of whom had been vaccinated and some who hadn't. The group were asked to read an article about the effects of flu, and complete a survey assessing their level of prejudice. Those who had been vaccinated showed less prejudice than those who had not.

In a variation of the original the subjects were all people who had been vaccinated. They were all given an article on the dangers of flu, but some were reminded of the efficacy of their vaccinations while others were not. The survey results showed that those who were reminded of the efficacy of their vaccination were more tolerant than those who were not reminded.

In the final variation some participants were asked to use a hand wipe on themselves and their computer and others were not, they also read a statement about the effectiveness of hand wiping. Again those who had wiped their hands were less prejudiced than those who did not.

I for one look forward to the day when I can walk into a diversity course with a bottle of antibacterial spray, douse each person in the room and tell them they have passed the course. Can't wait for the follow up on the effects of moisturiser on prejudice.

Carousels and customers

Sun, 27 Nov 2011 00:00:00 GMT

Every time we run a customer service course some humourist will usually comment, "everything would work fine if it wasn't for those pesky kids, sorry customers." Customers are without doubt an annoying bunch, unfortunately they are also the ones who pay our wages. This thought came to mind while reading this little parable from Dan Ariely:

"There once was a clever engineer who noticed that the carousels for luggage are spaced at different distances from different gates - some farther and some closer to where the passengers were deplaning. And this engineer redesigned the allocation of carousels such that they minimized the distance to their gate, and therefore minimized the amount of walking that passengers would have to do to pick up their luggage. A few airports implemented this highly efficient system and patted themselves on the back. They were very pleased with their improvement - that is, until people started complaining."

The Engineer created a perfectly optimised process, getting people to their luggage carousel in the most efficient way possible. Unfortunately for him while customers hate walking a long way to collect their luggage, they hate waiting for their luggage even more. This kind of thing is pretty common in most of the organisations I've worked in. Everything is organised by what looks efficient to the managers. That new telephony system which prioritises calls or those new hand held devices that makes tracking things easier, or that expensive new CRM system. But like the Engineer learned to his cost, it's not management who needs to be pleased.

Deliberative practice

Sat, 26 Nov 2011 00:00:00 GMT

An interesting article on the Freakonomics site by Sanjoy Mahajan, arguing that while motivation is necessary for learning, it is not sufficient. His argument is that without deliberative practice, motivation in and of itself will not allow you to master something difficult.

Deliberative practice is reflecting on how something was learned, what worked and what didn't. The concept is nicely summarised in the post by the phsysicist John Wheeler, "once we have solved a problem, think of one sentence we could have told our earlier selves to crack that problem." He goes on to cite some of the research on expertise, and deliberative practice and to give some further examples.

I think this is an important point for corporate learning as well. We are very good at deploying content, mostly the wrong content but that's a different story. We are also very good at getting people to reflect on the content we have given them, through quizzes, tests, conversation and feedback. What we don't do at all is get people to reflect on the process of how they learnt and how they can improve that process next time.

Expectations and experiments

Sat, 26 Nov 2011 00:00:00 GMT

I listen to a lot of podcasts- around 10 - 20 a week. They are mostly psychology or science based, I listen on trains, on walks and in hotels. Oddly, however, I have never really enjoyed audiobooks. I don't understand how I can love Jonah Leherer's books, his blog, enjoy his contributions on podcasts and his lectures, but really dislike the experience of listening to his audio book.

Apparently I'm not alone as this post from Real World Psychology seems to indicate. Based on the research she cites, listening to audiobooks is the clear winner in terms of retention, image formation, and not being distracted. Yet like me she would prefer just to read the book.

There are also some obvious implications for learning practitioners as well. If you want people just to learn instructions reading is probably best, but if you want people to think more creatively then verbal stimuli seems to be better. Also no matter what the research suggests, no matter how much they may have actually learnt, it's expectations that count on the feedback form.

Psychopedia

Wed, 23 Nov 2011 00:00:00 GMT

We have lamented the loss of the really excellent cognitive daily blog before, but Greta Munger has been keeping the flame burning by setting her psychology students the task of updating articles and references on Wikipedia.

Pay attention educators this is how it's done.

Pink on performance

Wed, 23 Nov 2011 00:00:00 GMT

Step into any management development course and you would think that motivation theory ended in the 1960's and was done by only three people, Frederick Taylor, Abraham Maslow and Douglas McGregor. Readers will be amazed to learn that not only did their contemporaries do better research, but that motivation studies continue right through to present day.

One of those contemporaries Sam Glucksberg, designed an ingenious experiment to examine the effect of incentives on motivation. Using a classic creativity task, Dunckers candle problem glucksberg set about examining different motivational techniques. Two teams are set the task of fixing a candle to a wall, however one group has been told they will get a cash reward if they can attach the candle, the other does not. In the original experiment, and when Everlearn have replicated it the incentivised group rarely finished the task first.

In this TED presentation Dan Pink uses this experiment as the starting point for a tour of the research on motivation. He examines how motivation has traditionally been viewed in organisations and highlights the two primary motivators for workers,purpose, control and mastery. In the final section he examines some of the ways business are using this research to more effectively manage the performance of their staff with initiatives like Google 20% time and ROWE.

This is the seventh post in a series about the psychology of performance management

The first post is here

The second post is here

The third post is here

The fourth post is here

The fifth post is here

the sixth post is here

The Kids are OK

Wed, 16 Nov 2011 00:00:00 GMT

As youth unemployment tops a million, it seems everyone has taken to the airwaves to vilify the young for their laziness, lack of respect and the absence of work ethic. I find it strange that everyone blames the kids and nobody blames the businesses. I can understand why a kid who has grown up with google, facebook, the internet, and has more processing power in their pocket than in your computers might not want to take the job in your call centre.

I spoke with a client last week who wanted thousands of pages of training documents for several different IT systems turned into elearning. I suggested that we make a searchable wiki and set the delegates some scenarios to work through in groups. The client was deeply suspicious of this cheap, learner centric solution and insisted on the usual expensive point and click elearning solution. I can easily imagine which course the average 18 year old would rather attend.

If you want to attract and keep the best and brightest of this generation you can't keep trying to force them to adapt to systems and processes which have been around since your generation. Alternatively, if you do want to sit them down, shut them up and lock down any way of finding useful information, don't call them lazy and don't be surprised by your 60% turnover rate.

A Jew, a Muslim and a minister walked into a church

Tue, 15 Nov 2011 00:00:00 GMT

A nice example of the power of group influence from Rick Warren, pastor at the Saddleback megachurch. Noticing his congregation were reaching mega proportions themeselves, Warren devised the "Daniel Plan" to help them shift a few extra pounds. First of all he committed to losing weight, using his implicit authority to incentivise his congregation. He then utilised the power of the small prayer groups to spread the message. This tactic is known as social proof, we tend to do things we see our peers do. The proof of the pudding, so to speak is in the results, in this case 72% of people lost weight and those in the small groups lost on average 6.8 pounds more than those who dieted individually.

My favourite quote from the article however concerns the two medical advisors Warren brought in Mark Hyman and Mehmet Oz (pictured with Warren):

"Saddleback had to assure its members that Hyman, who is Jewish, and Oz, a Muslim, were providing health advice, not spiritual counsel."

Yet again proving the enduring power of the ingroup / outgroup dynamic.

It's just cricket

Sun, 13 Nov 2011 00:00:00 GMT

Business gurus are very fond of trotting out Einsteins adage, "Insanity is doing the same thing, over and over, and expecting a different result." They never stop to explain why we keep doing it.

One of the main reasons is the availability heuristic. This mental quirk means we tend to assume the immediately available evidence is correct, even if it is a statistical anomaly, or there are better explanations. For instance I was talking to someone who had lost a particular funding stream for her department and subsequently would have to make people redundant. When I suggested some other options for making cost savings, she rather breezily replied that her husband had been made redundant, that's what happens. She reached for the nearest available option rather than necessarily the best option, and she will keep making that decision expecting a different result.

This came to mind when perusing this post from the Old Batsman blog. John Hotten does his best impression of Jonah Lehrer with a post about the availability heuristic, anchoring and the recent Australia vs South Africa test match which is well worth reading.

You get what you pay for

Fri, 11 Nov 2011 00:00:00 GMT

Let's conduct a little experiment, take out your phone scroll through the contacts list and make a mental note of how many of them you met through work. Most people are surprised to discover they have met more than 50% of their friends through work. We use this simple demonstration to show another of the major flaws in performance management -transactional and social thinking.

We tend to think of our jobs as transactional: we work to get money when, in fact, our jobs are also very social experiences. Apart from the perfunctory Christmas party, we tend to ignore the social aspects of work and concentrate on the transactional side. The trouble is that transactional incentives create very different behaviours from social incentives.

This effect was demonstrated in a 2004 study by the nauseatingly prolific Dan Ariely which proved the old adage "you get what you pay for". The experimenters paid subjects to do a simple computer task and discovered that the more they paid the more work subjects completed. So far so obvious, what was more surprising was that subjects asked to do the the work as a favour completed more tasks than those who were paid. The clear implication is that we are more motivated by social considerations than by financial ones.

A curious example of this effect was provided by a University of Zurich study in the 1990's. The Swiss government identified a town where they wanted to build a recycling centre for nuclear waste. Despite some obvious reticence, the residents supported building the waste disposal unit by a narrow margin. The researchers then told the residents the government would pay each citizen a substantial amount of money to put up with the waste facility. Amazingly, support for the proposal plummeted. When residents were motivated by civic duty they were much more likely to support the proposal, introduce money and suddenly the incentives change dramatically.

The final example of this transactional versus social effect comes from Israel. Psychologists asked subjects to complete a standardised test. Half the students were given a cash payment for each question they got right, the others were not. By now you can guess what happened: those who were offered the cash did worse on the test.

You might think, "Well OK, I'll do both, give people cash incentives and social incentives". Unfortunately research suggests the two kinds of thinking work independently. More transactional incentives make us less social. In studies where people are primed to think about money subjects tend to be less social, more self reliant and less generous.

The evidence from hundreds of different studies is clear. For all the effort, time and money we put into our performance management processes, financial incentives actually make anti-social behaviour more likely to happen. To motivate your staff effectively you need to maximise the social bonds within teams, and incentivise team and organisational behaviour.

This is the fifth post in a series about the psychology of performance management

The first post is here

The second post is here

The third post is here

The fourth post is here

The fifth post is here

The veil of ignorance

Fri, 4 Nov 2011 00:00:00 GMT

Imagine for a moment you needed to organise a major multinational corporation. You have no preconcieved ideas, you do not know at what level in the organisation you will end up, who your boss would be, what skills you would have, or anything about your customers. How do you think this organisation would look? What would the structure be like? What would the pay grade look like, and how would the organisation interact with customers?

This is a thought experiment made famous by the philosoper John Rawls, called the veil of ignorance. It is usually applied to social contract theory and social justice. For instance would anyone under the veil of ignorance set up a society based on slavery, or feudalism? Dan Ariely (yes him again) used this as the basis for a recent survey, which concluded that most Americans don't realise how unequal their society is, and would drastically reduce this inequity if given the chance.

I sometimes use this thought experiment with organisations or departments undergoing major restructuring to try and get them to understand the impact their changes will have on their staff and customers. I mention all of this this mainly because most organisations forget about equitable distribution when they design their performance management systems.

We are a suprisingly equitable species, with strong built in ideas about fairness. This is demonstrated in the classic economics activity, the ultimatum game. One individual is asked to divide a cash sum with another individual, and if both are happy with the split then they keep the money. So for example I have 1000 pounds to share and I might offer you 10 pounds. Surprisingly most people turn down the offer of a free tenner, and don't accept the ultimatum until the offer is more like 50/50.

I suspect something like the ultimatum game happens all the time when we attempt to motivate and incentivise staff, when we percieve injustice, we withdraw our labour creating a lack of motivation, intra group conflict and poor performance.

So before you design a performance management system don't copy what other organisations are doing try donning the veil of ignorance. What would a performance management system look like if you didn't know what business you were in, who the workers were, what the customers were like and where you are working. Chances are you'll design a much more equitable system.

UPDATE - I am obviously accidentally riding the psychology zeitgeist as Jonah Lehrer has a post up about inequality and neuroscience, and he's got monkeys.

This is the fifth post in a series about the psychology of performance management

The first post is here

The second post is here

The third post is here

The fourth post is here

I'll give you $3000 to f*ck off

Thu, 3 Nov 2011 00:00:00 GMT

Perhaps my favourite example of organisational goal setting is from the American online shoe company, Zappos. Their devotion to customer service, and enormous profits for doing it are legendary. A few examples of the brilliance of Zappos.

Halfway through training their customer service representatives they offer them $3000 to leave the company, rightly suspecting that if you take the money you weren't really commited and would have cost them more down the line. They suspended their successful operations in Canada because they didn't believe they were giving the customer the WOW factor and it would affect their brand loyalty and hard won reputation. They realised that well written reviews increase sales so they fix spelling mistakes and grammatical errors on their products to make it easier for customers to make decisions. The fact they have two way free returns seems almost prosaic. For a more personal take on Zappos, here is Steve Dubner from the very popular Freakonomics site on the extraordinary lengths they went to help his wife buy shoes.

This excellence stems from the simple goal of creating WOW through customer service. I haven't found any data but I suspect they have a tiny HR department which has so little to do it spends its time inspiring other HR practitioners to new levels of comedic irony. Make sure you scroll down to the first comment in that last link as well.

I also noticed an interesting phenomena when collecting the links about Zappos. The critics of Zappos often refer to their working conditions and practice as "cult-like." I find this criticism quite often when looking at organisations which have strong positive working cultures. We know from research that we are deeply pro-social creatures, but we also have a deep cultural suspicion of not expressing our individuality which creates enormous tensions in organisations and which I think is evident in the criticisms.

Anyway I hope the unique Zappos culture has survived its acquisition by Amazon.

This is the fourth post in a series about the psychology of performance management

The first post is here

The second post is here

The third post is here

What is it for?

Wed, 2 Nov 2011 00:00:00 GMT

Goal setting is the first main task of a performance management system. We have already covered the high level problems with goal setting in organisations, the proliferation of different goals in teams pull the organisation in different directions. Like the boys in the Robbers Cave Experiment the lack of an over arching purpose creates an antagonistic culture which is then codified by the performance management process.

This dysfunction is pretty easy to spot, go and talk to your front line workers and get them to list what they think the organisational objectives are (or should be) and then go to senior managers and ask the same question. I have rarely found the answers to be similar. For a performance management system to work it needs a unifying purpose or philosophy.

This podcast from the founder of American supermarket chain Whole Foods, John Mackey provides a fantastic example of how to do this properly. He talks about the founding philosophy of Whole Foods, its origins and the moment he realised that his workers understood his business better than he did.

We have suggested before this unifying purpose should be customer value, a philosophy we share with lean thinking. But we have worked for charities where the overriding purpose was different, like religion, or eradicating a certain disease which have served them equally well. Mackey adds another the idea of "conscious business."

Any organisation who wants to maximise staff performance needs to know what they are for, because the wrong purpose leads to the wrong outcomes, and larger and larger HR departments to control the chaos.

This is the third in a series of posts about the psychology of performance management

First post is here

Second post is here

Make corporate training more effective, the easy way

Mon, 24 Oct 2011 00:00:00 GMT

I guess I shouldn't be that amazed at how similar corporate learning is to the education system. If you make people do something for 12 of their most formative years it's going to be pretty ingrained later in life. So it shouldn't come as much surprise that all the points raised in this lengthy Mindhacks post by Tom Stafford, hold true for learning design as well. The dangerous idea that delegates are empty receptacles to pour information into, check; the one size fits all approach; check, making delegates regurgitate information and calling it assessment; check. He points to a 1973 study about how we code and remember information, and offers a timely reminder that like higher education, L&D departments would also be wise to heed:

"instead we should be thinking hard, always, about how to create teaching experiences in which students are more active, and about creating courses in which students are permitted and encouraged to come up with their own organisation of material, rather than be forced to regurgitate ours."

Also, in an age where higher education desperately looks to the private sector for ways to justify charging higher fees, perhaps they would be better off looking within their own institutions and applying some of the research they have been doing for decades now?

Better perks, bigger problems

Sat, 15 Oct 2011 00:00:00 GMT

Before turning to the research on creating a performance management system, I want to quickly look at the reluctance of HR departments to change their counter productive appraisal systems. To do this I would like to enlist the help of Dan Gilbert, social psychologist and prize winning author of Stumbling on Happiness.

In this TED presentation he outlines why we don't do the things that make us happy because we don't understand what makes us happy. We think a big bonus, or a better company car will motivate us to perform. We believe if only we were millionaires everything would be OK. He calls this process affective forecasting, or our ability to predict our future feelings. As he explains, we are really bad at this predictive game.

None of the things we think will make us happy in our job actually do, once we have achieved the big bonus, or company car our levels of happiness revert to where they were before. HR departments think they need to offer bigger bonuses and more choice in order to attract candidates. What they are actually doing is creating morale problems and disciplinary problems further down the line.

On our larger projects, Everlearn give each delegate an ipod touch preloaded with free and creative commons materials to reinforce the key learning points before and after workshop sessions.

The future of higher education?

Thu, 13 Oct 2011 00:00:00 GMT

I don't usually have a lot to say about higher education, I tend to leave that to Donald Clark. However this week for some reason I have had a couple of thoughts about universities. The first came while listening to Philip Pulman outlining his opposition to the closing of public libraries. It occurs to me that in many towns in Britain there are actually several large publically funded libraries it's just that some are in universities. Surely it wouldn't be that logistically difficult to open university libraries to the public? For several months a year they are not even in use. Is this really the best use of public funds?

The second thought was prompted by a visit to teaching hospital. It occured to me that if we think it is a useful idea for nurses and teachers to be trained on the job, why not other academic disciplines? Surely an MBA course could be immeasurably improved if the business department ran say an outsourced call centre? Students could see a working business, sit in on senior meetings, and look at how teams are organised in a real world setting. I don't really want the added competition so if I'm missing something important please do say so in the comments.

Perform!

Thu, 13 Oct 2011 00:00:00 GMT

Regular readers will probably know I've never met a performance management system I liked. Even before I started looking at the research I always suspected they didn't work, and I knew they didn't work for me. Although performance management can become complicated there are usually three core components:

goal setting - where are you going?
motivation - why you need to get there?
incentivisation - what do you get for getting there?

When there is a broad consensus among economists, behavioural economists, psychologists, and Al Gore's former speechwriter, then we can probably agree the way we do performance management needs to change. Fundamentally, the trouble with goals, targets and KPIs is our tremendous unconsicous capacity to cut corners or "game the system" to achieve them. KPIs narrow our focus, lead to infighting, blame cultures and performance problems. This issue is not new, thirty years ago the psychologist Donald T. Campbell coined the term, "the law of performance measurement", to define this problem:

"The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor."

Unfortunately, no amount of evidence seems to be able to persuade clients to abandon their appraisal and reward process, so after yet another futile argument I have decided to change tack and instead examine the research and try and offer some guidance on what a successful performance management system might look like.

Neuroscience in the news

Wed, 12 Oct 2011 00:00:00 GMT

The neuroscience community has been under the cosh lately, for this article in the New York Times, by Martin Lindstrom claiming that we love our iphones. Neuromarketing has a handy roundup of the academic pushback to the article. Also Ben Goldacre used his Bad Science column in the Guardian to highlight some pretty egregious simple statistical errors in the neurosicence research.

I don't tend to use, or cover neurosicence studies on my courses. This is mostly because I am not a neuropsychologist - the field is too new, has little business application, and can be sensationalist and hard to replicate in a classroom. But I fully expect this to change over the next few years as neuroscience overturns a lot of cherished psychological theories.

But it seems to me the neuroscience community have piled onto the wrong controversy. While I think their debunking of Lindstroms iphone pronouncements is a fine public service, their relative silence on the more serious statistical error is perhaps more worrying. If Lindstrom is indeed selling snake oil, then the businesses he works for can join the long list of those conned out of their shareholders hard earned money. The wider issue of slapdash research, a rush to publish and obvious statistical errors seems to me to require the most urgent attention.

Beware the underdog

Thu, 6 Oct 2011 00:00:00 GMT

Mention bullying on a training course and around half the delegates will have a story about being bullied or seeing some bullying. Despite all the training courses attended, legislation passed, HR policy enacted, it still seems fairly common in the workplace.

We tend to think of bullies as powerful people enacting their power on subordinates but new research suggests this might not be the case. Apparently, status is just as important as power in explaining bullying. Experimenters divided subjects into high status groups and low status groups- let's call them managers and staff. They then gave each group the power to assign tasks to the other group. The staff were much more likely to assign degrading tasks than the managers. It seems that when given the power, individuals with low status are much more likely to bully staff than high status individuals with the same power.

If we really want to stop a culture of bullying, we should pay less attention to bullying policies and more attention to how we structure teams and departments. The traditional hierarchical structure of staff teams visualise power relationships in an organisation without showing the value people bring. We need to develop better ways of demonstrating to staff the value and importance of their contribution.

Thanks to the Situationist blog for the link to this as yet unpublished research.

Which way around?

Thu, 6 Oct 2011 00:00:00 GMT

You would think that of all the things police do to catch criminals, fingerprinting was one the most scientific, foolproof ways of identifying whodunnit. However you would be wrong. Those pesky cognitive biases get in the way of even the most experienced analysts.

This All in the Mind podcast (10/3/11) demonstrates that the problem is in the process. If the analyst has seen a picture of the alleged perpetrator then they are more likely to say the fingerprints belong to that person than if they had done the fingerprint analysis first. This is an extraordinary finding. Fingerprint analysis has been considered scientific and reliable for over a century now. If it can be influenced by cognitive bias then so can almost anything. There is also an interesting section on the police response to the researchers: couldn't happen to us, we're much cleverer than that, our analysts are better trained. Sounds familiar.

I have worked with plenty of business analysts over the years who analyse processes based on time to complete a task, IT constraints, call volume etc, but I've never met one who optimises processes to take account of unconscious implicit bias. The question is, which processes do you have which are influenced by flawed decision making, and what are you going to do?

On our larger projects, Everlearn give each delegate an ipod touch preloaded with free and creative commons materials to reinforce the key learning points before during and after workshop sessions.

I have to do everything around here

Tue, 20 Sep 2011 00:00:00 GMT

The Psychfiles is an informative introduction to psychological research and practice, very much pitched at a lay audience. Host Michael Britt sets out and regularly succeeds in highlighting how psychological research can be used in everyday life, whether it's raising children, losing weight or workplace issues, there's something here for everyone.

This particular episode highlights the fascinating group effect of social loafing. Social loafing is the term used to describe the fact that adding extra members to a team does not always produce more output from the team. The effect is very well documented, and this podcast takes you through the main experimental evidence, the conditions under which it occurs and some of the main explanatory theories.

Fans of lean, software development and process improvement have an added bonus of a discussion about the benefits of the AGILE methodology in avoiding social loafing. This is the podcast where software development meets social sciences.

On our larger projects, Everlearn give each delegate an ipod touch preloaded with free and creative commons materials to reinforce the key learning points before and after workshop sessions.

It's not my fault

Fri, 9 Sep 2011 00:00:00 GMT

You are the camp supervisor at Robbers Cave National Park, responsible for the welfare of 22 adolescent boys, and you have an exciting range of activities organised for them over the next two weeks. Unfortunately because of another booking (the finance department of a large multi national on a "team building" course), you have to split the children into 2 separate groups for the first week. You send your assistant to look after the first group, the Rattlers, while you take the other group, the Eagles.

Separately, the two groups have a great first week canoeing, putting up tents, archery and playing competitive team games. After the first week when it's time to bring all the kids together, something strange has happened. The boys don't get along. It starts with name calling and blaming the other group for problems. Then the competitive sports get a bit physical and it degenerates even further when the Rattlers win the competition.

Congratulations, you've just created your own version of Lord of the Flies with only two days left to fix it before the parents come to collect their little darlings.

This is the setup for one of the most famous experiments of all time, Muzafer Sherif's Robber Cave experiment, which Psyblog rates as one of the 10 most brilliant social psychology experiments. This experiment demonstrated the powerful effects, of in group and out group behaviours - my group is better than yours so i will give them priority, hoard resources for my group and portray the out group as inferior or bad. In organisations we have a name for it: the blame culture. The question of course is how do we fix it.

Sherif actually conducted a series of three experiments and each discovered a different way to reunite the two groups: uniting against a common enemy, uniting against the most powerful group (the experimenters) and uniting behind a common goal. While all are equally interesting, the last one provides the best way for organisations to counter the blame culture.

What organisations need to do is find is the one goal which can unite disparate teams, something that trascends all of the individual team goals. This goal should be customer service and it needs to be the central objective around which your organisations are constructed.

Companies are people too

Tue, 6 Sep 2011 00:00:00 GMT

I am somewhat surprised nobody has done research like this before. I recall a documentary many years ago which made the polemical claim that if organisations were people they would be psycopaths, but nothing apart from that. With the huge success of personality profiling in business it makes sense to try and identify what particular company traits people find valuable.

The BPS Digest has a good writeup so i'll just add that apart from the obvious marketing implications I can see interesting uses in recruitment, retention and cultural change. It's also nice to see some love for the repertory grid, I am amazed how overlooked this is as a tool in psychology therapy and business. I have used it fairly frequently over the years, but usually only to elicit constructs around change, individual values and products, it would be nice to see it used to its full potential more often.

Customer Services: The Odyssey

Mon, 5 Sep 2011 00:00:00 GMT

As I am getting the run around from my energy provider yet again because I want to pay monthly rather than quarterly, I am struck by their effort to avoid their customers. I am convinced service organisations in this country hate their customers judging by the lengths they go to avoid them. Dealing with your average customer services department feels like an epic, even Odysseus would struggle with.

So, with apologies to Homer, let's trace our journey. First we encounter the IT system, the impersonal guardian rigorously defending the service from you and the money you want to pay them. A few quick finger thrusts is sometimes enough to slay this guardian but further terrors await as you enter Hades On Hold. All you can do is wait and have patience, possibly strapping yourself to your chair lest you are driven mad by a desire to hang up. At last, to the customer service operative. However, like Penelope's suitors, they have no idea what the answer to the riddle might be. Finally, wearied, you reach the radiant Penelope herself, The Team Leader who can take card payment over the phone and bend the rules for you just this once.

My point is not just to prove I have far to much time on my hands, or that I should steer clear of fiction. I have delivered my fair share of customer service training over the years, but there is only a certain amount you can do before hitting the structural problems within a business. You can train a person to listen, to engage with the customer, to deal with difficult calls and handle aggression. You can train teams to be more cohesive, to help each other out, to share knowledge and skills, but eventually you come up against the simple fact that the people on the front line don't have the knowledge their customers want. You would think the solution was fairly simple, give the answers to the people at the front end and allow them to fix problems. Instead we take more knowledge away, put knowledge into second line support team, and more complex telephony systems, until our customers become used to dissapointment.

Time to choose

Wed, 31 Aug 2011 00:00:00 GMT

It is probably a bit strange to have an all time favourite podcast, it's not like I listen to them, and then carefully rate them against a 10 point checklist. But over the years I have found this is the one I relisten to most, recommend often and include in almost all of our training programmes. From the excellent team at Radiolab the topic of this podcast was choice.

Amongst its many delights it features the influential psychologist John Bargh, talking about his research on priming. The sociologist Barry Schwartz also takes a tour through the research on consumer decision making and customer choice, and science writers Jonah Lehrer and Malcolm Gladwell look at decision making and the illusion of free will respectively.

With examples as diverse as how casino's are organised to take advantage of unconscious biases to why the structure of George Bush's tax cuts take advantage of loss aversion, this really is an important resource for trainers and delegates alike. It was also the moment I realised why business planning is so difficult, because most people will always take twenty pounds now rather than two hundred pounds in two years time. A fascinating journey through some of the best research psychology in the field, you really should download it now.

On our larger projects, Everlearn give each delegate an ipod touch preloaded with free and creative commons materials to reinforce the key learning points before and after workshop sessions.

If it quacks it's probably quackery

Sat, 20 Aug 2011 00:00:00 GMT

The main reason we founded Everlearn was the appalling quality and standard of organisational, leadership and management training in the UK. I was tired of reading great research, books, articles and blogs on how organisations teams, and individuals actually work, and then having to pass off discredited theory and application to clients. I would sit in meetings as HR directors, Training directors and well paid consultants bemoaned that HR and training is not taken seriously, and think that's what we deserve.

When our own standards as a profession are so low, why would we expect other professions to treat us as equals? A profession which accepts the strangely cult like NLP as a legitimate qualification doesn't deserve a place on the board. While we bemoan this state of affairs our consultants are passing off snake oil solutions like the change curve, rational decision making, learning styles, and reading body language to increasingly credulous customers.

This is probably the best time in history to be working in HR and training, we now have huge amounts of fantastic research, committed and charismatic researchers, and the technology to widely distribute and debate the best way to enthuse our customers and staff. And over the next few years I fully expect neuroscience to enrich the learning community even further. There is no need for us to keep wading in the shallows desperately hoping the MD will take us seriously.

It is time for a great debate in the HR and training community, one that acknowledges that a lot of what we do doesn't work, that the people in organisations are just as important as any other factors, and that with careful application of evidence based training we can increase efficiency and profits.

On a related but lighter note, this made me laugh a lot.

Corporate learning is like a ?

Wed, 17 Aug 2011 00:00:00 GMT

The problem with both experiments and statistics is they can take so long to do properly. Even the best experiments are constrained by ethics, current technology, the complexity of human interaction and unconscious biases, to name but a few. So in a fast paced business and learning environment it can be necessary to rely on other techniques.

This is where using metaphorical information can be useful. By metaphors we mean psychological or business models which can be used to explain complex problems or interactions in the workplace. These only reflect business problems rather than explaining them. For example let's go back to Transactional Analysis.

Even its most ardent fans don't believe we have a literal parent, adult and child in our heads, but it helps as a metaphor for how our mind works and allows us to examine current behaviour and anticipate future events. As long as the audience agrees this is the correct metaphor - I find nurses, social workers and other caring professions enjoy this model immensely - then we will include it on our courses. Choosing the right metaphor is obviously extremely important, for instance I suspect that Prince 2 is more useful as a metaphor for discussing projects with project managers than it is as a methodology for making projects successful.

The trouble with the metaphor models approach is when people claim their metaphors are actually true. The other issue is when the metaphorical content is used when better, more evidence based models exist, for instance the much used Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, a model so banal as to be practically useless.

While metaphorical content can fill important gaps in corporate learning, it is also a sign of poor training. I can't begin to catalogue the amount of corporate training I have seen which consists entirely of metaphorical learning. If your management and leadership training is built entirely metaphor with no statistical or experimental evidence, you're probably employing the training equivalent of snake oil salesmen.

Didn't they do well?

Wed, 10 Aug 2011 00:00:00 GMT

In 1973 a group of doctors, psychiatrists and social workers shifted quietly in their seats as they waited for Dr Myron Fox to begin his presentation, "Mathematical game theory as applied to physician education". For over an hour, the tall, lean, distinguished Dr Fox gave a warm, charming and humorous presentation followed by 30 minutes of questions. The audience was delighted, and the ecstatic feedback forms reflected this. Unfortunately Doctor Fox was an actor, and the presentation he delivered was literally unintelligible. Like much of the corporate training delegates are forced to endure.

This study illustrates one of the two main reasons why evaluation forms are ineffective, group effects. Despite the audience being knowledgeable about what was being said they ignored the content and judged the entire speech on the performance of Dr Fox. Another example is the pervasive confirmation bias, most experienced trainers will be aware that delegates will give you better feedback if you give them information that confirms their biases rather than challenges them.

The other main reason evaluation forms are so ineffective are due to statistical issues. For example the low numbers on courses means it is not really a valid sample, the question design is usually too vague to be of any real use, or they ask leading questions. The scales are insufficiently weighted with no real context provided. Statistical issues are very well known and studied, Donald Clark has a nice roundup of some of the research, and a lively comments section.

The continued use of feedback forms to assess training shows both the poverty of knowledge about assessment and a distinct lack of imagination in the learning community. Evaluation forms are another example of getting what you measure. The stated aim is to measure the effectiveness of training in the workplace, but evaluation forms really measure individual satisfaction with trainer.

A final point, not often discussed, is about the medium of delivery. I am usually fairly ambivalent about how learning is communicated, whether electronically, or in person, I am more interested in making sure the content is accurate and relevant. But if the purpose of your course is for individuals to remember what is said, Wikipedia probably beats the nice person in the suit.

What you measure is what you get

Mon, 1 Aug 2011 00:00:00 GMT

Experiments are the best kind of organisational evidence because they tell us things about our customers and our staff they don't know about themselves. Statistics on the other hand tell us how prevalent the things we do know about are. For the purposes of this post I am going to make the arbitrary division of statistical data into metrics, which organisations study too much, and social statistics which they study too little. As the memorable opening line from Kaplan and Norton's famous Balanced Scorecard article puts it, "what you measure is what you get."

There are several kinds of social statistics, but the most used type in business is the survey or opinion poll. The survey has some obvious problems, memorably explained in this Yes Prime Minister clip (Youtube). But survey data still provides very helpful ways of understanding how we think and behave within organisations, and our customer's view of our business.

For example when we do motivation in organisations we introduce the concept of Flow. The data from this model comes from a survey, where participants were stopped at random points in their day and asked to write down what they were doing and how it made them feel. The large sample size, questionnaire design and replications make us think it is a robust model of motivation. It is of course possible, though unlikely, that the thousands of subjects were lying, or otherwise telling the researchers what they wanted to hear.

Interestingly surveys are the only way most training is evaluated, via the infamous evaluation form. The issues with using evaluation forms are so many and varied the topic deserves a post in its own right.

Keeping appointments

Sun, 31 Jul 2011 00:00:00 GMT

On the subject of experimental evidence and Robert Cialdini, here is a great example from Bedfordshire NHS. Their experiment aimed at cutting no shows, and their behavioural interventions led to a decrease in patients cancelling by 30%. The study involved three interventions, getting patients to repeat their appointment time, getting them to write it down, and putting encouraging posters around the surgery.

These interventions correspond to two of Cialidini's 6 tools of influence:

Consistency - by repeating the instructions and making appointees write them down, people feel more obliged and committed to attend.
Social Proof - the posters reinforced the principle that keeping your appointments is the norm and if everyone else is doing it creates the urge to fall in line.

It seems the study was conducted by Mindspace, a collaboration between the government and Cialdini's consultancy, Influence at Work. It is in the beta stage now but well worth subscribing to if they are going to be doing more quality work like this.

Listen

Sun, 31 Jul 2011 00:00:00 GMT

The wonderfully named Julian Treasure gives an important talk about how to listen. He starts off by explaining how listening works, with some examples of pattern recognition, differencing and filters. He then talks about how and why we are losing our ability to listen and the importance of conscious listening. He concludes with five ways to improve our conscious listening:

Enjoying silence
The mixer - listening for distinct sounds
Savouring - enjoying mundane sound
Listening positions - move to a different listening position e.g. passive /active, reductive / expansive
RASA - Receive, Appreciate, Summarise, Ask

So much of business is about forming relationships, and listening is a critical component of doing this. There are surprisingly few studies about the most effective ways of listening so this presentation is timely. Really listening to our customers and staff, instead of just implementing what we think they want is a crucial way of making business successful.

On our larger projects, Everlearn give each delegate an ipod touch preloaded with free and creative commons materials to reinforce the key learning points before and after workshop sessions.

The structure of creativity

Thu, 28 Jul 2011 00:00:00 GMT

Jonah Lehrer uses a post comparing Apple to auteur directors to pivot to a conversation about how creativity works. I think he is right to point out the lone genius rarely exists outside of romantic stereotypes. I remember being surprised to discover Thomas Edison employed a small army of researchers at Menlo Park.

The psychologist most linked with creativity is probably Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, who sketches out a collaborative approach to creativity comprising three interrelated parts, the domain, the field and the individual.

The domain is a set of symbolic rules and procedures, these can exist at more and more granular levels for example biology is a domain, with genetics, molecular biology as domains within the broader domain. In business functional departments can be seen as domains, HR, Finance, Projects, with their own language and symbols.

The field are the gatekeepers of the domain, these are the "experts" who allow new information, ideas and products into the domain. In organisations the field/s could be senior managers, experts in a particular discipline, or cohesive teams.

Finally individuals can be considered creative when they use the symbols, rules and procedures of the domain to invent some new idea or product which is accepted by the field and incorporated into the domain. As new ideas become part of the domain, others use these innovations to make new creative discoveries and so the system moves on, continually improving itself.

All of which is a fancy way of saying that creativity rests not just with the individual but with the organisational structures around them. Organisations need to work just as hard at simplifying the language and symbols within departments to make them more accessible, and staffing them with people who can accept change and use it to drive innovation forward.

Using experiments

Wed, 27 Jul 2011 00:00:00 GMT

It only takes 7 billion euros to design an experiment to find the Higgs Boson particle, if only that was all it took in psychology. Human thought and behaviour are slippery things and annoyingly hard to quantify. Actually you could say the same thing about organisations, customers, and teams. However with a few practical considerations, see here for an example, we can figure out what most of the people will do most of the time, and the way we can do that is through experiments.

Experiments can tell us things we couldn't find out in other ways. When we design training we for look for experimental data which provides answers for problems identified by our clients.A lot of the time we have a large store of existing materials that we use. Other times we can find studies conducted within the clients sector, like this piece of research about the efficacy of drugs and pricing which we used with a pharmaceutical client. Where possible we also replicate the experimental design as activities to encourage participation and for delegates to experience the phenomena we are discussing.

The other useful thing about experiments is that we can use them to assess the efficacy of training. I have never understood why a profession desperate for credibility, has not put more thought into how to utilise experiments as part of their feedback process.

A few years ago I delivered a course on influence and persuasion for a car manufacturer. We covered the six key ways to influence people, as developed by Robert Cialdini, and had sales staff rewrite some of their current publicity materials. I spent an hour arguing with the sales director that he should do a small experiment, comparing these rewritten campaign materials alongside his current campaign to see which one was more effective, ironically I couldn't persuade him.

Ideally the last session of any training course would be designing experiments to test the content we have delivered back in the workplace.

Tools for the job

Mon, 25 Jul 2011 00:00:00 GMT

A client recently asked me if I had a problem with covering transactional analysis on a course. I guess when every second sentence spoken starts with 'I read a study about that recently', she was probably worried I would find TA a little bit woolly. I actually quite like Transactional Analysis but it made me think about how we decide what to include in our training and why we do it that way.

At Everlearn we have a four step framework for deciding what to include in our service offerings, listed below in descending order of usefulness:

Experimental evidence- preferably randomised, double blind, and replicable.
Statistical data- with a large sample size, well constructed questions, and not culturally specific.
Metaphorical- things that can't or haven't been studied, but everyone can agree is useful in terms of examining a particular behavioural, or organisational problem.
Quackery- discredited theory and practice proven to be ineffective.

The acronym clearly needs a bit of work, but I think it gives a good idea of our approach. Over the next few posts I will sketch out these categories in a little more depth, and show how they relate to developing and evaluating training.

Barrel not apple

Wed, 20 Jul 2011 00:00:00 GMT

If anyone could be considered the godfather of Everlearn it is probably social psychologist Philip Zimbardo. With the 40th anniversary of the Stanford experiments it's probably time we acknowledged that debt and explained why his research is so important.

In the 15 or so years I have been a consultant and trainer I have almost never come across individuals or teams whose sole purpose was to come to work and do a bad job. I have seen plenty of people accused of this, plenty of policies designed to stop it, plenty of people who are being "performance managed", and plenty of people who were just going through the motions. But the idea that people need to be coerced and managed into working is very wide of the mark.

This the where Zimbardo's experiment was so important, he took graduate students, applied a battery of psychological tests to ensure they were not psycopaths, and then put them into a realistic prison environment where, within days, half of them were literally torturing the other half. What Zimbardo had unwittingly discovered was that you can place perfectly normal individuals in bad situations and much of the time bad behaviour will ensue. As Zimbardo succinctly puts it, it's not a few rotten apples in the barrel, it's a rotten barrel.

The implications for all kinds of organisations is clear, much of the behaviour in organisations can be attributed to bad systems and processes, for example vertical integration, HR and financial policies, IT systems and bad management. If managers started focusing on these unintended consequences of bad systems, we can create promote better working environments. An understanding of the psychology of how systems and situations affect behaviour, which Zimbardo pioneered, is crucial in doing this.

You can read more about the Zimbardo Prison experiment in 30 Second Psychology.

What do you remember?

Wed, 20 Jul 2011 00:00:00 GMT

You're talking to a colleague, she's telling you about that meeting you all attended a couple of months ago where the directors made that big decision about the direction of the company. You have trouble remembering at first, but she tells you who else was there, that great speech the MD made, and the conversation you all had about the strategy. As your memory starts to return, you remember what you said, how you felt about the new strategy and you can't believe you forgot about it.

You return to your desk and look at your Outlook calendar. You were on holiday that week.

We had the pleasure of seeing Elizabeth Loftus speak in London last week where she demonstrated how easy it is to distort memory, and spoke about the applications of her work. During the 1980's psychiatry, counselling, and therapy were in the midst of what came to be known as the "memory wars". Therapists all over the world were helping their clients recover lost memories, including child abuse, Satanism and other horrific acts. Into the fray stepped Elizabeth Loftus, who through a series of clever experiments definitively showed memories weren't being recovered, they were being implanted.

At the best of times our memories are easily distorted and false memories are surprisingly easy to plant. If our memory can be compromised simply by the order of the words we use to describe them, then our decision making can be equally compromised. There has been debate this week in the psychology blogosphere about whether the internet has become an extension of memory, if true it may actually lead to enormous improvements in how organisations make decisions.

The other thing I went away contemplating is how important experiments are. Managers tend to go by their gut feeling, or the limited data they collect and have access to. To really know what our customers or staff want, we need to design robust experiments to test our assumptions even if that is controversial, difficult or expensive.

You can read more about the work of Elizabeth Loftus in 30 Second Psychology.

Still the trouble with targets

Wed, 20 Jul 2011 00:00:00 GMT

Dan Ariely nails the problem:

To think about the effects of these measurements, let's first think about corporate America, where measurement of performance has a much longer history. Recently I met with one of the CEOs I most respect, and he told me a story about when he himself messed up the incentives for his employees, by over-measurement. A few years earlier he had tried to create a specific performance evaluation matrix for each of his top employees, and he asked them to focus on optimizing that particular measure; for some it was selection of algorithms, for others it was return on investment for advertising, and so on. He also changed their compensation structure so that 10 percent of their bonus depended on their performance relative to that measure.

What he quickly found was that his top employees did not focus 10 percent of their time and efforts on maximizing that measure, they gave almost all of their attention to it. This was not such good news, because they began to do anything that would improve their performance on that measure even by a tiny bit, even if they messed up other employees in the process. Ultimately they were consumed with maximizing what they knew they would be measured on, regardless of the fact that this was only part of their overall responsibility. This kind of behavior falls in line with the phrase 'you are what you measure', which is the idea that once we measure something we make it salient and motivational, and people start over-focusing on it and neglecting other aspects of their job or life.

Couldn't agree more, and we have the evidence, so why do businesses keep doing it?

Adapt AND Fail

Thu, 14 Jul 2011 00:00:00 GMT

Econtalk is probably my favourite podcast at the moment, the genial though slightly grumpy Russ Roberts spends an hour talking to an economist or author about a particular economic theory or topic. Though an ardent free marketer, he is usually quite sceptical of his own positions and those of his guests, making for an enjoyable duel.

This one features Tim Harford, Financial Times Columnist and presenter of BBC4 statistics show More or Less. He is talking about his book Adapt which claims the increasingly complexity of the world means organisations need to learn to understand failure and adapt quicker in order to survive. The programme discusses perennial Everlearn favourite groupthink, business experiments and the irrational taint of failure in public life. There is also a brief discussion of the work of Erik Brynjolfsson whose research supports a hunch I have had about ITprojects for some time and will get a post of its own in due course.

On our larger projects, Everlearn give each delegate an ipod touch preloaded with free and creative commons materials to reinforce the key learning points before and after workshop sessions.

What Bruno's brother did

Tue, 12 Jul 2011 00:00:00 GMT

This could prove very popular with contract managers. I want to be at the first sales meeting where a client pulls out their lie detection glasses.

An interesting side note in this story, and indeed the history of psychology is the involvement of Ali G and Bruno star Sacha Baron Cohen's brother. He is a well repected psychologist, famous for his view that most men are systemisers, autism is caused by too much testosterone in the womb, and that most men fall somehwere on the autistic spectrum. And he has a carefully compiled list of bullet points to prove it.

You can learn more about Simon Baron Cohen's work in 30 Second Psychology

Going Native

Mon, 11 Jul 2011 00:00:00 GMT

A few years ago I ran a team building course for a mixed group of consultants. They had been brought together to work on a multi million pound, shared services bid for a local council. The event covered topics like game theory, Belbin's team roles, mutual objective setting, and customer service. The training was well received and I moved onto other projects.

A few months later I was working on a different project staying in a hotel as two of the directors leading the project. These directors really disliked their own organisation, particularly the new managing director and were under huge pressure to secure the bid. So they gathered their loyalist team members, and moved their office closer to the client.

Over the course of several months, I watched as they consistently defied direct orders from the operational side of their own business, ignored helpful steers from the client, fell out with their service partners, and isolated dissenting members of their team who eventually resigned. When I suggested perhaps they were "going native" they looked surprised and shocked.

Right until the moment the decision was announced they were convinced they had won the bid.

In hindsight we should have covered groupthink on the team building course. Groupthink is a psychological effect which happens when teams are to collusive, and this is one of the best examples I have seen. The strong external threat (their own MD, and securing the bid), the refusal to take helpful advice, punishment of dissent, and collective rationalisation of decisions, are all classic symptoms.

Groupthink is a common phenomena and arises partly from the way we structure our organisations, all the accountants together, all the HR people together, all the sales staff together etc. As soon as a strong external threat arises there is not enough diversity of opinion within the group, and they make bad decisions. If you are working in a public sector organisation, take note of how different departments are dealing with the present changes to service agreements.

You can read more about Groupthink in 30 Second Psychology.

30 Second Psychology

Fri, 8 Jul 2011 00:00:00 GMT

If I was to gather some of my favourite psychology bloggers in a room I would probably put them in a giant maze and see if they managed to get out in the order of my preference for them. Fortunately Christian Jarrett from the terrific BPS Research blog had a better idea, get them to write 30 second introductions to some of the key concepts in psychology.

So contributors like Vaughan Bell and Tom Stafford of Mind Hacks and Dave Munger from the sadly defunct Cognitive Daily have written a fantastic guide to 50 thought provoking psychology theories. Many of the topics Everlearn cover on our courses, like groupthink, loss aversion and stereotype threat are in there, alongside a few I haven't heard of before.

When I can get my copy back from the Everlearn design director - apparently it is a beautiful book, and the illustrations are marvellous - I will do a few blog posts on some of the theories covered and their business applications. In the meantime go and buy a copy for yourself, you won't regret it.

The trouble with targets

Fri, 1 Jul 2011 00:00:00 GMT

I was interested to discover via the Bad Science blog that the national waiting times in Accident and Emergency targets had been dropped by the government. Long before Everlearn, I was involved in the rollout of this programme across the UK for the Modernisation Agency. This programme was my first experience of demand analysis, statistical control charts and some of the other evaluation tools I now use, and still believe are incredibly effective.

However over the subsequent years I have come to see that the overall aim of the programme, imposing a maximum four hour waiting time target was deeply flawed, for similar reasons to those outlined in this Psyblog post about the dark side of goal setting, and in the documentary The Trap. I remember the shock on Tony Blair's face when confronted by a nurse on Question Time, who informed him of some of the methods they used to manipulate this target, including putting patients on trolleys, getting them to leave and sign back in again, etc.

I have no doubt the previous government acted in good faith, as I know I did when working on this programme, but well done to the current government for recognising the damage these centralised targets were causing and abolishing them. I hope this is the beginning of an understanding of how issues in organisations arise from structural and group effects, and that centralised targets actually create perverse incentives for individuals where reaching the target is more important than helping the customer.

Educating cheats

Mon, 27 Jun 2011 00:00:00 GMT

A fascinating conversation between a philosophy instructor (T), and someone who writes student essays for money(C). The conversation is much more nuanced than you might expect, and both sides agree that the educational system creates powerful incentives for students to cheat. For example the teacher - institution relationship, making students do courses which have no practical value for their further education, and the devaluation of what a degree means in today's marketplace.

It is easy to just blame the students for their moral failings, the educators who enable them, and the people who offer essay writing services. A quick peek in the comments on this article shows this is the overwhelmingly popular response.

I am not arguing that the students should be cheating or that somehow they are not culpable for their cheating, or that they shouldn't be punished. I simply think that the current system of punishment is not working, and by analysing and removing the systemic problems the plagiarism goes away.

For instance if you remove the necessity for budding computer scientists, nurses, doctors and lawyers to study ancient philosophy you free up resources which can be used to make better, more relevant philosophy courses. This means people like me who do like ancient philosophy get the benefits of an excellent education.

Also, dialogues rock!

The change curve and the trouble with experts

Sun, 26 Jun 2011 00:00:00 GMT

A great myth busting All in the Mind podcast (14.06.11) taking apart the infamous stages of grief, and challenging the idea that experts have better predictive abilities than generalists.

Many of you will have encountered the change curve, based on Elisabeth Kubler Ross' now debunked stages of grief, and peddled by many change managers and consultants. This podcast looks at research showing that we do not respond to grief and by extension change, in the predictable ways anticipated.

It also examines the work of psychologist Philip Tetlock. Tetlock studied over 82 000 predictions by professional economists, political analysts, journalists and the like. He found experts were no more likely to correctly predict events than a random guess would. It also examines practical ways you can make your predictions more accurate.

On our larger projects, Everlearn give each delegate an ipod touch preloaded with free and creative commons materials to reinforce the key learning points before and after workshop sessions.

Stereotype threat in the public sector?

Fri, 24 Jun 2011 00:00:00 GMT

I have recently finished the excellent Whistling Vivaldi by Claude Steel. The book outlines the research on stereotype threat, the tendency for people to perform poorly when they are operating under a negative stereotype. For example female mathematicians usually perform worse on maths test than their male counterparts, but when you tell them the test has been designed to eliminate gender bias, this effect disappears.

Reading the book made me wonder what other groups might be affected apart from the obvious gender and race. In the past I have done a lot of work with local and central government and I wonder if the popular idea of the public sector being inefficient and wasteful has an effect on the workers performance?

It shouldn't be too difficult to devise an experiment to test this effect in the public sector, any social scientists up for the challenge?

Now you see it ...

Fri, 24 Jun 2011 00:00:00 GMT

Fantastic experiment applying the principle of inattentional blindness to a real life event, you can check out a good summary over at the Mindhacks blog.

We use this concept on a few of our courses, mostly to demonstrate how easy it is to miss crucial information and potential opportunities by being too task focused.

On one recent change management course, we were streaming the classic video when it froze for several seconds just as the gorilla walked onto the screen. At the end of the video the trainer assumed the jig was up and started to explain the purpose of the activity, only to realise that half the group had still not spotted the gorilla.

Women, business needs you!

Fri, 24 Jun 2011 00:00:00 GMT

Mindhacks brings the good news, and the terrifying implications!

We'll all be up all night as well.

But is it Crowdsourcing?

Mon, 13 Jun 2011 00:00:00 GMT

A fantastic demonstration of open government in Iceland, but I don't think it counts as crowdsourcing. For the wisdom of crowds effect to work people need to make their decisions independently of others. You also need some way to aggregate the information, for example the way the stock market aggregates the value of companies.

None of us are immune to the influence of charisma, conformity and the other tricks our mind can play on us. Having the debate on facebook rather than in a meeting doesn't mitigate these effects.

Taking Management Seriously

Fri, 10 Jun 2011 00:00:00 GMT

I am a little sad to see the end of the football season, not because I am particularly a football fan, it just seems to be the only industry in Britain where leadership and management are taken seriously, often hysterically so.

Tune in to any fan forum or listen to any football debate and you'll hear a bunch of passionate people asking exactly the right questions, Do we have the right person in charge? Do we have the right people on the job? Are they organised in the right way? Do we have the correct tactics? Are we building a long term sustainable club?

I imagine most football fans go back to work after a weekend and never think to ask themselves the same questions about their job: Do we have the right managers? Does our organisation have the right people? Are they working the right way? Do we have the right strategy? Is our strategy sustainable?

Looking to sport for inspiration is fairly common in business, coaching for instance, so why soes it always seem the wrong lessons are learned. If Barcelona are the best football team in the world perhaps it is instructive to look at how they achieved it. A unique culture, a long term strategy, players who are commited to a certain style and coached in a world class manner.

Google vs Apple

Fri, 10 Jun 2011 00:00:00 GMT

Excellent article on how the different management cultures at Apple and Google have profound impact on their product lines and creative processes, over at Ars Technica .

It's nice to see an article which doesn't analyse these companies through the lens of their respective founders, and instead looks at more of the team and systems factors at play in the organisation. It probably comes as no surprise that here at Everlearn we suspect that the decentralised, power sharing model at Google, combined with their passion for open source technology will probably win out over Apple's more centralised approach in the long term. However it is instructive to remember that organisational structure needs to be carefully aligned with what customers want, and Apple's design led, command and control approach certainly does that.

The Right Kind of Career Treadmill

Mon, 23 May 2011 00:00:00 GMT

Over the years, I have worried about which angle to sit at. I've wondered whether I will get back problems and thought about using a stability ball. Now, it seems like the answer may literally be walking away. Research into the health problems of sitting have been doing the rounds on psychology and work related blogs for the last year or two. This infographic neatly summarises the issues involved:

Via: Medical Billing And Coding

So while your HR and Health and Safety departments scurry off to make offices look more like the gym, they should also pause to consider the mental benefits of movement, outlined by biochemist John Medina. Two excellent reasons to consider a different kind of career treadmill.

Welcome to Everlearn

Fri, 20 May 2011 00:00:00 GMT

Welcome to the Learning in Mind blog - your first stop for business related psychology posts. This blog will explore new thinking in psychology, sociology and education, and their application for current and future business practices. This may involve commenting on new studies, sharing insights from our clients, or longer explorations of topics like creativity, group dynamics and systems thinking. All of this can help organisations take the lead in developing new and better ways of working. We hope you enjoy the blog and the associated resources section, and take the time to consider how Everlearn can help your business.