Author Archives: Greg Satell

About Greg Satell

Greg Satell is a popular speaker and consultant. His latest book, Cascades: How to Create a Movement That Drives Transformational Change, is available now. Follow his blog at Digital Tonto or on Twitter @Digital Tonto.

Your Feelings Are Often Triggers That Mislead You

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Your Feelings Are Often Triggers That Mislead You

GUEST POST from Greg Satell

The social psychologist Jonathan Haidt developed the metaphor of the Elephant and the Rider to describe the relationship between our emotional and cognitive brains. While the rider (representing our cognitive brain) may feel in control, it is the elephant (our emotions) that is more likely to determine which direction we will go.

That’s why it feels so good to act on our emotions. Rather than struggling with the reins to get the elephant to go where we want it to, we can just give in and race with abandon towards our destination. It’s usually not until we’ve run off a cliff that we realize that we should have exercised more restraint. By that time, it’s often too late to undo the damage.

The truth is that our brains are wired for survival, not to make rational decisions for a modern, industrialized economy. That’s why we shouldn’t blindly trust our feelings. We should see them as warning signs to proceed with caution because, while they can alert us to unseen dangers, they can also be triggers that others use to manipulate us.

The Thrill Of The Shift & Pivot

As Eric Ries explained in The Startup Way, when General Electric CEO Jeffrey Immelt wanted to implement a more entrepreneurial approach he asked Ries to help him implement “Lean Startup” methods at the company. The resulting program, called Fastworks, trained 80 coaches and launched a hundred projects in its first year. Pretty soon, Immelt was calling his company a 124 year-old startup.

A key ambition was the development of Predix, an industrial software platform. No longer would GE be a boring old manufacturing company, but would make a “pivot” to the digital age. It did not go well. During Immelt’s tenure, the company’s value would fall by 30%, while the broader maker more than doubled. Eventually the firm would collapse altogether.

Pundits love to tout the change gospel, but there’s little evidence that “pivots” are necessarily a good idea. Look at the world’s most valuable companies, Apple still makes most of its money on iPhones, Microsoft’s success is still rooted in business software, Alphabet’s profits come from search and so on. There are exceptions, of course, but most organizations become and stay successful by deepening their capabilities in a few key areas.

But that’s boring. Journalists rarely write cover stories about it. Business school professors don’t get tenure for writing case studies about how Procter & Gamble stuck with soap for more than a century or how Coke continues to make money off of sugary water. “Pivots,” on the other hand, are thrilling and fun. They get people talking. They feel good. That’s why they’re so popular.

The Eden Myth

Watch pundits on cable news or on stage at conferences and you may begin to notice a familiar pattern. They tell us that once there was a period when everything was pure and good, but then we—or the organization we work for—were corrupted in some way and cast out. So to return to the good times, we need to eliminate that corrupting influence.

This Eden myth is as old as history itself and it continues to thrive because it works so well.. We’re constantly inundated with scapegoats— the government, big business, tech giants, the “billionaire” class, immigrants, “woke” society—to blame for our fall from grace. The story feeds our anger and, much like the “thrill of the pivot,” makes us want to act.

Perhaps most importantly, the Eden myth makes us feel good. The outrage it triggers stimulates the release of the neurotransmitter dopamine which affects the pleasure centers in our brain. Our adrenal glands then begin to produce cortisol, which initiates a “fight or flight” response. Our senses get heightened. We feel motivated and alive.

Who wouldn’t want to feel like that? That’s why we can become addicted to the outrage-dopamine response machine and continually look for new opportunities to get our fix. We begin to need it and tune in every night, doom scroll on social media and seek out social connections that promote it. Ultimately, we’re going to want to act on it.

People who seek to manipulate us know all about this and design their approach to trigger an emotional response.

Creating An Echo Chamber

Once our neurons are primed and our senses are tuned to respond to specific stimuli, we will begin to frame what we experience in terms that reinforce those biases. Psychologists have found that we tend to overweight information that is most easily accessible and then look for information to confirm those early impressions and ignore evidence to the contrary.

These effects are multiplied by tribal tendencies. We form group identities easily, and groups tend to develop into echo chambers, which amplify common beliefs and minimize contrary information. We also tend to share more actively with people who agree with us and, without fear of questioning or rebuke, we are less likely to check that information for accuracy.

We are highly affected by what those around us think. In fact, a series of famous experiments first performed in the 1950’s, and confirmed many times since then, showed that we will conform to the opinions of those around us even if they are obviously wrong. More recent research has found that the effect extends to three degrees of social distance.

It’s likely that some version of this is what doomed Jeffrey Immelt at General Electric. When he took over as CEO in 2001, Silicon Valley was in a process of renewal after the dotcom crash. As the startup boom gathered steam, it captured the imagination of business journalists. He brought in Ries to “cast out” the old ways of plodding, industrial firms and surrounded himself with people who believed similar things. Everything must have felt right.

The elephant was in full control and the rider just went along—all the way off the cliff.

Don’t Believe Everything You Feel

The neuroscientist Antonio Damasio believes we encode experiences in our bodies as somatic markers and that our emotions often alert us to things that our brains aren’t aware of. Another researcher, Joseph Ledoux, had similar findings. He pointed out that our body reacts much faster than our mind, such as when we jump out of the way of an oncoming object and only seconds later realize what happened.

Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman suggests that we have two modes of thinking. The first is emotive, intuitive and fast. The second is rational, deliberative and slow. Our bodies evolved to make decisions quickly in life or death situations. Our rational minds came much later and don’t automatically engage. It takes effort to bring in the second system.

There are some contexts in which we should favor system one over system two. Certain professions, such as surgeons and pilots, train for years to hone their instincts so that they will be able to react quickly and appropriately in an emergency. When we have a bad feeling about a situation, we should take it seriously and proceed with caution.

However, our feelings need to be interrogated, especially in areas for which we do not have specific training or relevant expertise. We need to gain insight into what exactly our feelings are alerting us to and that requires us to engage our rational brain.

Yes, feelings should be taken seriously. They are often telling us that something is amiss. But they are much more reliable when they are alerting us to danger than when they are pushing us to overlook pertinent facts and proceed with a course of action. When we go with our gut, we need to make sure it’s not just because we had a bad lunch.

— Article courtesy of the Digital Tonto blog
— Image credit: Pixabay

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5 Simple Keys to Becoming a Powerful Communicator

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5 Simple Keys to Becoming a Powerful Communicator

GUEST POST from Greg Satell

Sometimes the hardest thing is merely to make yourself understood. Things that change the world, or even a small part of it, always arrive out of context because, by definition, the world hasn’t changed yet. That’s why innovators need to be great communicators, because an idea that doesn’t gain traction is an idea that fails.

That’s easier said than done. As Fareed Zakaria has put it, “Thinking and writing are inextricably intertwined. When I begin to write, I realize that my ‘thoughts’ are usually a jumble of half-baked, incoherent impulses strung together with gaping logical holes between them.” Clearly, if he struggles, we all do.

Yet the good news is that most people can immensely improve their communication skills by following a few simple rules. While, like any skill, they take a lifetime of practice to hone and perfect, you can start seeing progress within a few hours. It doesn’t matter if you’re an entrepreneur, a senior executive or just starting out, you need to communicate effectively.

1. Clarity Before Creativity, Always

Most people want their writing and speaking to be impressive. They have an idea in their heads of what a “professional” sounds like and they try to emulate those traits. They use big words, infuse acronyms and technical language or try to pluck a choice term or two out of the zeitgeist.

Yet trying to conform to some abstract notion of “professional” or “impressive” is a sure way to garble your message. Instead of trying to impress, just try to be clear. Different people have different conceptions of what they consider to be professional or impressive, but everyone knows what is clear.

The truth is that nobody cares how clever you are if they can’t understand what you’re trying to tell them and few will take the time and effort to figure it out. Most probably, they will assume you haven’t really thought things through and move on to other things.

So as you formulate your message, whether it’s an email, a pitch, a keynote or whatever, continually ask yourself, “how can I make it more clear?”

2. When In Doubt, Take It Out

Born in the late 13th century, William of Ockham was a giant of his age. As one of the few intellectual lights of medieval times, his commentaries on reason, logic and political theory are studied even today. His ideas about the separation of church and state were literally centuries ahead of their time and formed the basis for our own constitutional principle.

Yet he’s best known for Ockham’s Razor, sometimes known as the “principle of parsimony.” Often, the principle is interpreted as “Keep It Simple Stupid,” but that’s not quite right. A much more accurate translation would be, “entities should not be multiplied beyond necessity.” In other words, if something doesn’t need to be there, it shouldn’t be.

A useful device I use for applying Ockham’s razor is to imagine my audience, whether that is a reader or a listener, as having an internal “cognitive budget” they are willing to devote to whatever I’m trying to tell them. Then I judge everything I include by the standard of, “is this worth using up my cognitive budget?”

So be cautious and respectful with your audience’s attention. If you have any doubts whether it needs to be there, it probably doesn’t. Take it out and see if anything meaningful is lost. If not, keep it out and don’t look back.

3. If It Sounds Like Writing, It’s Probably Not Good

When we’re taught to write in school, we’re usually urged to follow a certain form. This often involves an academic, detached tone of voice. For many of the same reasons, when we speak to an audience, our tone takes on a “speaker’s voice. In both cases, the result is that we come off as performative and inauthentic.

Your communication, whether you’re speaking or writing, should sound like you, not someone you’re trying to be at a particular moment. Your vocabulary shouldn’t be significantly different when you write than when you speak. Your grammar and turns of phrase shouldn’t vary too much either. There’s absolutely no reason for you to come off as someone else.

Style should be invisible. If your audience is focusing on how you’re writing or speaking, then that steals cognitive energy away from concentrating on the message you’re trying to communicate. Don’t fall into the trap of trying to sound a certain way, just focus your energy on being as clear as possible.

4. Default To One Point

If you’re going to rob a bank, as a general rule anything you say after “put the money in the bag or I’ll blow your head off,” will be somewhat superfluous. That one simple point is perfectly sufficient for the job at hand. In fact, the uncomfortable pause that follows will probably accentuate the impact of your message.

Now, clearly there are exceptions to the “default to one point” rule. For example, if you kidnapped the teller’s family, that kind of time and effort might warrant adding a second point. Even then though, you might want to let your first point sink in and keep your second point in reserve in case you need to overcome an objection.

Obviously, I’m being facetious and not suggesting anyone actually rob a bank, but the point stands. In most contexts, but especially if you’re on a panel or doing a Q&A session, you’re usually, although not always, better off sticking to one point and making it well than trying to jam in a too much information

And, of course, if they like your one point they’ll be likely to ask for more. That’s how you build a conversation.

5. Dare to be Crap

The hardest thing about starting a project of any sort is that we always compare initial efforts to finished products and, not surprisingly, those efforts always seem to come up short. As Pixar President Ed Catmull wrote in his book, Creativity, Inc., “early on, all of our movies suck.” If it’s true of Pixar movies, it’s probably true of our work.

That makes it really hard to begin writing or scripting, because whatever you first put down is bound to be a disappointment. Your wording will be clumsy, your points will be unclear and you’ll begin to realize that your great idea is actually, as Fareed Zakaria put it, “a jumble of half-baked, incoherent impulses strung together with gaping logical holes between them.”

Your first efforts are always crap. Yet that shouldn’t blind you to the fact that all great works start out that way. As Vladimir Nabokov put it, “writing is rewriting.” The greatness comes not from the initial spark of inspiration, but from the long hours spent honing it down to reveal its core. But before you do that, you need to dare to be crap and produce a first draft.

The truth is that communicating even fairly simple ideas can be very hard work. As in most things, talent is overrated. You produce good work not from having a knack for a clever turn of phrase, but by putting in the effort to express your ideas clearly.

— Article courtesy of the Digital Tonto blog
— Image credit: Unsplash

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Three Myths That Kill Change and Transformation

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Three Myths That Kill Change and Transformation

GUEST POST from Greg Satell

In 1975, more than 80% of US corporate assets were tangible assets, things like factories, equipment and real estate. When leaders in an organization made decisions about change, they tended to involve tangible, strategic assets, such as building a new factory, entering a new market or launching a new line of products.

So when the modern practice of change management arose in the 1980s, that’s what it was designed to address. Managers began to recognize the need to communicate changes to the rank and file, so that they could better understand it and contribute to its success. An entire cottage industry of consultants arose to fill that need.

But now that situation has flipped and more than 80% of corporate assets are intangible. When we talk about change today we are usually talking about changes in people themselves, in how they think and how they act. Clearly, that’s a very different type of thing and we need to approach change differently. Unfortunately, too many people are mired in the past.

Myth #1: If People Understand Change, They Will Embrace It

Leaders like to be seen at the cutting edge and, to be effective, they need to believe in themselves. That’s what makes transformational initiatives so attractive. They’re much more fun than the more mundane aspects of managing an enterprise, like improving operations or cutting costs. Change gives leaders a chance to dream.

That’s what the practice of change management was designed to support. Someone high up in an organization would get an idea to, say, launch a new product line for a new market and the consultants would be brought in to help communicate the idea so that everyone could understand just how brilliant the idea was.

Of course, even if employees thought the idea was stupid there wasn’t much they could do about it. If a CEO wants to launch a new product line, invest in new factories and equipment and hire new people, there’s nothing the rank and file can do about it. Leadership has full control over tangible, strategic assets.

But today, when the vast majority of corporate assets are intangible, transformation initiatives involve changes in how people think and what they do, which leadership does not control. People have the power to resist and you can be sure they will. That’s why change fails, not because people don’t understand it, but because they don’t like it and actively sabotage it.

The truth is that humans form attachments to other people, ideas and things. When they feel those attachments are threatened, they will often lash out. That’s why when you ask people to change how they think or what they do, you will invariably offend some people’s identity, dignity and sense of self and they will act out in ways that are dishonest, underhanded and deceptive. That doesn’t make them bad people—we all do it—it just makes them human.

Myth #2: You Have To Convince The Skeptics

There is something baffling about human nature. Whenever we have an idea we are passionately about we feel intense desire to convince skeptics. Our inner marketers want to identify specific objections and then devise airtight arguments to counter them. We envision ourselves being dazzlingly persuasive and making our case.

Change management consultants encourage this type of thinking. They advise us to “provide simple, clear choices and consequences” and “show the benefits in a real and tangible way.” They also suggest that we have “open and honest conversations” and “even make a personal appeal” in order to “convert the strongest dissenters.”

This may make sense if the objections are rational, but often they are not. In fact, the most visceral dissent almost invariably has more to do with how people see themselves. That’s why change so often offends people’s dignity, because their identity is so often wrapped up in what they think and what they do. You can’t ask people to stop being who they think they are.

The good news is that you don’t have to. Consider the scientific evidence:

Sociologist Everett Rogers‘ “S-curve” research estimated that it takes only 10%-20% of a system to adopt an innovation for rapid acceptance by the majority to follow.
Professor Erica Chenoweth’s analysis of over 300 political revolutions in the past century finds that it only took 3.5% of active participation in a society to succeed, and many campaigns prevailed with less.
Recent research by sociologist Damon Centola at the University of Pennsylvania suggests that the tipping point for change is getting 25% of people in an organization on board.

There’s no need to waste time trying to convince people who hate your idea and want to undermine it in any way they can. Any engagement is very unlikely to be successful and very likely to frustrate and exhaust you. You are much better off focusing your energies on empowering those who are enthusiastic about change to succeed, so that they can bring in others who can bring in others still. That’s how you build traction.

Myth #3: Things Will Get Easier After A “Quick & Easy” Win

Change management pioneer John Kotter, who first started writing books about organizational transformation in the 1970s, has long advised to establish short-term wins. He stressed that these must be unambiguously successful, visible throughout the organization and clearly related to the change effort.

The concept is problematic for a number of reasons. First, and this isn’t really Kotter’s fault, but the idea of a “short-term win” is often understood to be a “quick and easy win,” which can backfire. If a change isn’t meaningful and relevant, then touting it can make a leader seem out of touch, discrediting the transformation effort.

More problematic is the idea that we should be shooting for projects that are unambiguously successful. That level of success is exceedingly rare. If we are going to wait for perfect projects, we may be waiting a long time. What we want to do is start with a Keystone Change and then learn from whatever successes and failures we encounter on the way.

Perhaps most dangerous of all is the notion that early projects should be visible to large numbers of people. Remember, if a change is significant and has the potential for impact, there will always be people who want to undermine it in ways that are dishonest, underhanded and deceptive. Why would we want to broadcast early efforts so they can knock them down?

The truth is that things don’t get easier after initial successes. They often get harder because those who oppose change now see it is really possible. That’s why you need to build a plan to anticipate resistance and Survive Victory from the start.

Change for the World We Live In

In the early 20th century, the great sociologist Max Weber noted that the sweeping industrialization taking place would lead to a change in organization. As cottage industries were replaced by large enterprises, leadership would have to become less traditional and charismatic and more organized and rational.

He also foresaw that jobs would need to be broken down into small, specific tasks and be governed by a system of hierarchy, authority and responsibility. This would require a more formal mode of organization—a bureaucracy—in which roles and responsibilities were clearly defined. Weber’s model reigned for a full century.

Over the past few decades we’ve undergone a similar shift from bureaucratic hierarchies to connected ecosystems and that affects how we need to approach transformation. The changes we need to implement today have less to do with decisions made about strategic, tangible assets and more to do with how people think and act. That presents a very different set of challenges and we need to adapt.

What we can’t do is pretend that the world is the same as it was 30 or 40 years ago and continue with practices that are so obviously failing. Just as Weber dispelled myths about infallible leaders a century ago, we need to break free of outdated concepts that have led to unacceptably poor results.

It’s time to leave myths behind and take a more clear-eyed approach to leading change.

— Article courtesy of the Digital Tonto blog
— Image credit: Pixabay

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We Must Stop Fooling Ourselves and Get Our Facts Straight

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GUEST POST from Greg Satell

Mehdi Hasan’s brutal takedown of Matt Taibbi was almost painful to watch. Taibbi, a longtime muckraking journalist of some renown, was invited by Elon Musk to review internal communications that came to be known as the Twitter Files and made big headlines with accusations regarding government censorship of social media.

Yet as Hasan quickly revealed, Taibbi got basic facts wrong, either not understanding what he was looking at, doing sloppy work or just plainly being disingenuous. What Taibbi was reporting as censorship was, in fact, a normal, deliberative process for flagging problematic content, most of which was not taken down.

He looked foolish, but I could feel his pain. In both of my books, I had similarly foolish errors. The difference was that I sent out sections to be fact-checked by experts and people with first-hand knowledge of events before I published. The truth is that it’s not easy to get facts straight. It takes hard work and humility to get things right. We need to be careful.

A Stupid Mistake

Some of the most famous business stories we hear are simply not accurate. Gurus and pundits love to tell you that after inventing digital photography Kodak ignored the market. Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, its EasyShare line of cameras were top sellers. It also made big investments in quality printing for digital photos. The problem was that it made most of its money on developing film, a business that completely disappeared.

Another popular fable is that Xerox failed to commercialize the technology developed at its Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), when in fact the laser printer developed there saved the company. What also conveniently gets left out is that Steve Jobs was able to get access to the company’s technology to build the Macintosh because Xerox had invested in Apple and then profited handsomely from that investment.

But my favorite mistold myth is that of Blockbuster, which supposedly ignored Netflix until it was too late. As Gina Keating, who covered the story for years at Reuters, explains in her book Netflixed, the video giant moved relatively quickly and came up with a successful strategy, but the CEO, John Antioco, left after a fight with investor Carl Icahn and the strategy was reversed.

Yet that’s not exactly how I told the story. For years I reported that Antioco was fired. I even wrote it up that way in my book Cascades until I contacted the former CEO to fact-check it. He was incredibly generous with his time, corrected me and then gave me additional insights that improved the book.

To this day, I don’t know exactly why I made the mistake. In fact, as soon as he pointed it out I knew I was wrong. Somehow the notion that he was fired got stuck in my head and, with no one to correct me, it just stayed there. We like to think that we remember things as they happened, but unfortunately our brains don’t work that way.

Why We Get Fooled

We tend to imagine that our minds are some sort of machines, recording what we see and hear, then storing those experiences away to be retrieved at a later time, but that’s not how our brains work at all. Humans have a need to build narratives. We like things to fit into neat patterns and fill in the gaps in our knowledge so that everything makes sense.

Psychologists often point to a halo effect, the tendency for an impression created in one area to influence opinion in another. For example, when someone is physically attractive, we tend to infer other good qualities and when a company is successful, we tend to think other good things about it.

The truth is that our thinking is riddled with subtle yet predictable biases. We are apt to be influenced not by the most rigorous information, but what we can most readily access. We make confounding errors that confuse correlation with causality and then look for information that confirms our judgments while discounting evidence to the contrary.

I’m sure that both Matt Taibbi and I fell into a number of these pitfalls. We observed a set of facts, perceived a pattern, built a narrative and then began filling in gaps with things that we thought we knew. As we looked for more evidence, we seized on what bolstered the stories we were telling ourselves, while ignoring contrary facts.

The difference, of course, is that I went and checked with a primary source, who immediately pointed out my error and, as soon as he did, it broke the spell. I immediately remembered reading in Keating’s book that he resigned and agreed to stay on for six months while a new CEO was being hired. Our brains do weird things.

How Our Errors Perpetuate

In addition to our own cognitive biases, there are a number of external factors that conspire to perpetuate our beliefs. The first is that we tend to embed ourselves in networks that have similar experiences and perspectives that we do. Scientific evidence shows that we conform to the views around us and that effect extends out to three degrees of relationships.

Once we find our tribe, we tend to view outsiders suspiciously and are less likely to scrutinize allies. In a study of adults that were randomly assigned to “leopards” and “tigers,” fMRI studies noted hostility to out-group members. Research from MIT suggests that when we are around people we expect to agree with us, we don’t check facts closely and are more likely to share false information.

In David McRraney’s new book, How to Change a Mind, he points out that people who are able to leave cults or reject long-held conspiracy theories first build alternative social networks. Our associations form an important part of our identity, so we are loath to change our opinions that signal inclusion into our tribe. There are deep evolutionary forces that drive us to be stalwart citizens of the communities we join.

Taibbi was, for years, a respected investigative journalist at Rolling Stone magazine. There, he had editors and fact checkers to answer to. Now, as an independent journalist, he has only the networks that he chooses to give him feedback and, being human like all of us, he subtly conforms to a set of dispositions and perspectives.

I probably fell prey to similar influences. As someone who researches innovation, I spend a lot of time with people who regard Netflix as a hero and Blockbuster as something of a bumbler. That probably affected how I perceived Antioco’s departure from the company. We all have blind spots and fall prey to the operational glitches in our brains. No one is immune.

Learning How To Not Fool Ourselves

In one of my favorite essays the physicist Richard Feynman wrote, “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself — and you are the easiest person to fool. So you have to be very careful about that,” He goes on further to say that simply being honest isn’t enough, you also need to “bend over backwards” to provide information so that others may prove you wrong.

So the first step is to be hyper-vigilant and aware that your brain has a tendency to fool you. It will quickly grasp on the most readily available data and detect patterns that may or may not be there. Then it will seek out other evidence that confirms those initial hunches while disregarding contrary evidence.

This is especially true of smart, accomplished people. Those who have been right in the past, who have proved the doubters wrong, are going to be less likely to see the warning signs. In many cases, they will even see opposition to their views as evidence they are on the right track. There’s a sucker born every minute and they’re usually the ones who think that they’re playing it smart.

Checking ourselves isn’t nearly enough, we need to actively seek out other views and perspectives. Some of this can be done with formal processes such as pre-mortems and red teams, but a lot of it is just acknowledging that we have blind spots, building the habit of reaching out to others and improving our listening skills.

Perhaps most of all, we need to have a sense of humility. It’s far too easy to be impressed with ourselves and far too difficult to see how we’re being led astray. There is often a negative correlation between our level of certainty and the likelihood of us being wrong. We all need to make an effort to believe less of what we think.

— Article courtesy of the Digital Tonto blog
— Image credit: 1 of 1,050+ FREE quotes for your meetings & presentations at http://misterinnovation.com

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We Must Hold AI Accountable

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We Must Hold AI Accountable

GUEST POST from Greg Satell

About ten years ago, IBM invited me to talk with some key members on the Watson team, when the triumph of creating a machine that could beat the best human players at the game show Jeopardy! was still fresh. I wrote in Forbes at the time that we were entering a new era of cognitive collaboration between humans, computers and other humans.

One thing that struck me was how similar the moment seemed to how aviation legend Chuck Yeager described the advent of flying-by-wire, four decades earlier, in which pilots no longer would operate aircraft, but interface with a computer that flew the plane. Many of the macho “flyboys” weren’t able to trust the machines and couldn’t adapt.

Now, with the launch of ChatGPT, Bill Gates has announced that the age of AI has begun and, much like those old flyboys, we’re all going to struggle to adapt. Our success will not only rely on our ability to learn new skills and work in new ways, but the extent to which we are able to trust our machine collaborators. To reach its potential, AI will need to become accountable.

Recognizing Data Bias

With humans, we work diligently to construct safe and constructive learning environments. We design curriculums, carefully selecting materials, instructors and students to try and get the right mix of information and social dynamics. We go to all this trouble because we understand that the environment we create greatly influences the learning experience.

Machines also have a learning environment called a “corpus.” If, for example, you want to teach an algorithm to recognize cats, you expose it to thousands of pictures of cats. In time, it figures out how to tell the difference between, say, a cat and a dog. Much like with human beings, it is through learning from these experiences that algorithms become useful.

However, the process can go horribly awry. A famous case is Microsoft’s Tay, a Twitter bot that the company unleashed on the microblogging platform in 2016. In under a day, Tay went from being friendly and casual (“humans are super cool”) to downright scary, (“Hitler was right and I hate Jews”). It was profoundly disturbing.

Bias in the learning corpus is far more common than we often realize. Do an image search for the word “professional haircut” and you will get almost exclusively pictures of white men. Do the same for “unprofessional haircut” and you will see much more racial and gender diversity.

It’s not hard to figure out why this happens. Editors writing articles about haircuts portray white men in one way and other genders and races in another. When we query machines, we inevitably find our own biases baked in.

Accounting For Algorithmic Bias

A second major source of bias results from how decision-making models are designed. Consider the case of Sarah Wysocki, a fifth grade teacher who — despite being lauded by parents, students, and administrators alike — was fired from the D.C. school district because an algorithm judged her performance to be sub-par. Why? It’s not exactly clear, because the system was too complex to be understood by those who fired her.

Yet it’s not hard to imagine how it could happen. If a teacher’s ability is evaluated based on test scores, then other aspects of performance, such as taking on children with learning differences or emotional problems, would fail to register, or even unfairly penalize them. Good human managers recognize outliers, algorithms generally aren’t designed that way.

In other cases, models are constructed according to what data is easiest to acquire or the model is overfit to a specific set of cases and is then applied too broadly. In 2013, Google Flu Trends predicted almost double as many cases there actually were. What appears to have happened is that increased media coverage about Google Flu Trends led to more searches by people who weren’t sick. The algorithm was never designed to take itself into account.

The simple fact is that an algorithm must be designed in one way or another. Every possible contingency cannot be pursued. Choices have to be made and bias will inevitably creep in. Mistakes happen. The key is not to eliminate error, but to make our systems accountable through, explainability, auditability and transparency.

To Build An Era Of Cognitive Collaboration We First Need To Build Trust

In 2020, Ofqual, the authority that administers A-Level college entrance exams in the UK, found itself mired in scandal. Unable to hold live exams because of Covid-19, it designed and employed an algorithm that based scores partly on the historical performance of the schools students attended with the unintended consequence that already disadvantaged students found themselves further penalized by artificially deflated scores.

The outcry was immediate, but in a sense the Ofqual case is a happy story. Because the agency was transparent about how the algorithm was constructed, the source of the bias was quickly revealed, corrective action was taken in a timely manner, and much of the damage was likely mitigated. As Linus’s Law advises, “given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.”

The age of artificial intelligence requires us to collaborate with machines, leveraging their capabilities to better serve other humans. To make that collaboration successful, however, it needs to take place in an atmosphere of trust. Machines, just like humans, need to be held accountable, their decisions and insights can’t be a “black box.” We need to be able to understand where their judgments come from and how they’re decisions are being made.

Senator Schumer worked on legislation to promote more transparency in 2024, but that is only a start and the new administration has pushed the pause button on AI regulation. The real change has to come from within ourselves and how we see our relationships with the machines we create. Marshall McLuhan wrote that media are extensions of man and the same can be said for technology. Our machines inherit our human weaknesses and frailties. We need to make allowances for that.

— Article courtesy of the Digital Tonto blog
— Image credit: Flickr

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The Keys to Changing Someone’s Mind

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The Keys to Changing Someone's Mind

GUEST POST from Greg Satell

When is the last time you changed your mind about anything substantial? Was it another person that convinced you or an unexpected experience that changed your perspective? What led you to stop seeing something one way and start seeing it in another? I will bet it does not happen often. We rarely change our minds.

Now think about how much time we spend trying to change other people’s minds. From sales pitches and political discussions, to what we are going to have for dinner and when the kids should go to bed, we put a lot of time and effort into shaping the opinions of others. Most of that is probably wasted.

The truth is that we cannot really change anyone’s mind. Only they can do that. Yet as David McRaney explains in his new book, How Minds Change, there are new techniques that can help us be more persuasive, but they don’t require brilliant sophistry or snappy rhetoric. They involve more listening than speaking, and understanding the context in which beliefs arise.

Why We Fail To Adapt

We don’t experience the world as it is, but through the context of earlier experiences. What we think of as knowledge is really connections in our brains called synapses which develop over time. These pathways strengthen as we use them and degrade when we do not. Or, as scientists who study these things like to put it, the neurons that fire together, wire together.

It’s not just our own experiences that shape us either. In fact, a series of famous experiments done at Swarthmore College in the 1950’s showed that we will conform to the opinions of those around us even if they are obviously wrong. More recent research suggests that this effect extends out to three degrees of influence, so it’s not just people we know personally, but the friends of our friends’ friends that shape how we see things.

Finally, there are often switching costs to changing our minds. Our opinions are rarely isolated thoughts, but form a basis for decisions. Once we change our minds, we need to change our actions and that can have consequences. We may need to change how we do our jobs, what we choose to buy, how we act towards others and, sometimes, who we choose to associate ourselves with.

In The Righteous Mind, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt makes the point that our beliefs become closely intertwined with our identity. They signal our inclusion in a particular “team.” That’s why contrary views can often feel like an attack. Rather than taking in new information we often feel the urge to lash out and silence the opposing voice.

Meeting The Mind Changing Threshold

As closely as we cling to our beliefs, sometimes we do change our minds. In one study that analyzed voting behavior, it was found that when up to 20% of the information that people were exposed to contradicted their beliefs, they dug in their heels and grew more certain. Beyond that, however, their resolve tended to weaken. The informational environment can deeply influence what people believe.

Their relationship to the subject matter is also important. The elaboration likelihood model (ELM) and the heuristic-systematic model (HSM) developed in the 1980s both suggest that we treat different topics in different ways. Some topics, such as those that are important to us professionally, we’re willing to invest time in exploring systematically. Others are more marginal to us and we will tend to look for shortcuts.

For example, if we are researching a business investment, we’ll want to gather facts from a variety of different sources and study them closely. On the other hand, if we’re trying to decide which craft beer to select from a large selection at a bar, we’ll rely on subtle cues such as packaging, how the beer is described or what we see others drinking.

If we want to change someone’s mind about something we need to understand their relationship to the subject matter. If they are heavily invested in it, they are unlikely to be swayed by superficial arguments. In fact, weak or purely emotive arguments may suggest to them that the opposite is true. At the same time, if someone is not very knowledgeable or motivated to learn about a topic, bogging them down with a lot of facts is likely to bore them.

Two Strategies For Persuasion

If you want to change somebody’s mind, you can follow two different kinds of approaches. The first, which can be called “topic denial”, argues the facts. The second, called “technique denial,” exposes flaws in reasoning. For example, if you want to convince a vaccine skeptic you can either cite scientific evidence or refute the form of the argument, such as pointing out that while there may be a minimal risk to taking a vaccine, the same could be said of aspirin.

While research shows that both approaches can be effective, we need to keep context in mind. If you are in a trustful environment, such as a professional or scientific setting, a fact-based topic rebuttal can often be effective. However, if you’re trying to talk your crazy uncle out of a conspiracy theory at Thanksgiving dinner, you may want to try a technique rebuttal.

In recent years a variety of methods, such as Deep Canvassing, Street Epistemology and the Change Conversation Pyramid have emerged as effective technique rebuttal methods. Interestingly, they don’t rely on any elaborate rhetorical flourishes, but rather listening empathetically, restating the opposing position in a way that shows we understand it, identifying common ground and exploring how they came to their conclusion.

The truth is that we can never truly change somebody’s mind. Only they can do that. All too often, we treat opinions as if they were artillery in a battle. Yet attacking someone’s beliefs is more likely to raise their defenses than to convince them that they are in error. Before we can convince anyone of anything, we need to first build an environment of safety and trust.

Let Empathy Be You Secret Weapon

When we want to change somebody’s minds, our first instinct is to confront their beliefs. We want to be warriors and fight for our position. Yet because people’s opinions are often a result of their experiences and social networks, countering their beliefs won’t feel to them like merely offering a different perspective, but as an attack on their identity and dignity.

That’s why we’re much better off listening and building rapport. That’s not always easy to do, because staying silent while somebody is voicing an opinion we don’t agree with can feel like a surrender. But it doesn’t have to be. In fact, if we can identify a shared value and a shared language in an opposing viewpoint, we have a powerful tool to argue our position.

The truth is that empathy isn’t absolution. In fact, it can be our secret weapon. We don’t have to agree with someone’s belief to internalize it. We all have a need to be recognized and when we take the time to hear someone out, we honor their dignity. That makes them much more willing to hear us out. Lasting change is always built on common ground.

At some point, we all need to decide if we want to make a point or make a difference. If we really care about change, we need to hold ourselves accountable to be effective messengers and express ourselves in terms that others are willing to accept. That doesn’t in any way mean we have to compromise. It simply means that we need to advocate effectively.

To do that, we need to care more about building shared purpose than we do about winning points.

— Article courtesy of the Digital Tonto blog
— Image credit: Flickr

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Making Empathy Your Secret Weapon

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GUEST POST from Greg Satell

When I first moved to Kyiv about 20 years ago, I met my friend Pavlo, who is from Belarus. Eventually our talk turned to that country’s leader, Alexander Lukashenko, and an incident in which he turned off the utilities at the US Ambassador’s residence, as well as those of other diplomats. It seemed totally outlandish and crazy to me.

“But he won,” Pavlo countered. I was incredulous, until he explained. “Lukashenko knows he’s a bastard and that the world will never accept him. In that situation all you can win is your freedom and that’s what he won.” It was a mode of thinking so outrageous and foreign to me that I could scarcely believe it.

Yet it opened my eyes and made me a more effective operator. We tend to think of empathy as an act of generosity, but it’s far more than that. Learning how to internalize diverse viewpoints is a skill we should learn not only because it helps make others more comfortable, but because it empowers us to successfully navigate an often complex and difficult world.

Identifying Shared Values

We all have ideas we feel passionately about and, naturally, we want others to adopt them. The ideas we believe in make up an important facet of our identity, dignity and sense of self. For me, as an American living in post-communist countries, the ideas embedded in democratic institutions were important and it was difficult for me to see things another way.

My conversation with Pavlo opened my eyes. Where I saw America and “the west” as a more just society, people in other parts of the world saw it as a dominant force that restricted their freedom. My big insight was that I didn’t need to agree with a perspective to understand, internalize, and leverage it as a shared value.

For example, once I was able to understand that some people saw Americans as powerful—something akin to an invading force—I was able to shed the feelings of vulnerability that arose from being in a strange and foreign land and focus on the shared value of safety in my dealings with others.

A great strategy for identifying shared values is to listen closely to what your opposition is saying. People say and do things because they believe they will be effective. Once I was able to stop dismissing Lukashenko as a corrupt thug, I was able to identify the issues surrounding safety and dominance that could be useful to me.

Building Shared Purpose

Using empathy to identify shared values is a crucial first step, but doesn’t achieve anything by itself. To move things forward, we need to build a shared purpose. Consider a famous study called the Robbers Cave Experiment, which involved 22 boys of similar religious, racial and economic backgrounds invited to spend a few weeks at a summer camp.

In the first phase, they were separated into two groups of “Rattlers” and “Eagles” that had little contact with each other. As each group formed its own identity, they began to display hostility on the rare occasions when they were together. During the second phase, the two groups were given competitive tasks and tensions boiled over, with each group name calling, sabotaging each other’s efforts and violently attacking one another.

In the third phase, the researchers attempted to reduce tensions. At first, they merely brought them into friendly contact, with little effect. The boys just sneered at each other. However, when they were tricked into challenging tasks where they were forced to work together in order to be successful, the tenor changed quickly. By the end of the camp the two groups had fallen into a friendly camaraderie.

As Francis Fukuyama writes in his recent book, “Identity can be used to divide, but it can also be used to integrate,” which is exactly what I found in my years working is foreign cultures. Once I was able to leverage shared values to create a shared purpose and began engaging in shared actions, that purpose and those actions became part of a shared identity. Yes, I was still an American, with American values and perspectives, but I became their American.

Overcoming Conflict By Designing A Dilemma

Unfortunately, building a shared purpose isn’t always possible. A simple truth is that humans build attachments to people, ideas and things. When those attachments are threatened, they will lash out. That’s why whenever we set out to make a significant impact, there will always be those who will work to undermine what we are trying to achieve in ways that are dishonest, underhanded and deceptive.

When that happens—and it always does eventually—we can get sucked into a conflict, which will likely take us off course and discredit what we’re trying to achieve. Yet, here too, developing empathy skills to identify shared values can be extremely helpful once we learn how to design a dilemma action, which puts the opponents into an impossible position.

Dilemma actions have been used for at least a century—famous examples include Gandhi’s Salt March, King’s Birmingham Campaign and Alice Paul’s Silent Sentinels—but more recently codified by the global activist, Srdja Popović. They are just as effective in an organizational context, using an opponent’s resistance against them.

One of the great things about dilemma actions is that you approach them exactly the same way you approach building allies—by identifying a shared purpose. Once you do that, you can design a constructive act rooted in that shared purpose that advances your agenda. Your opponent then has a choice: they can disrupt the act and violate the shared value or they can let it go forward and let change progress.

For example, I was once running a transformation project that was being impeded by a Sales Director hogging accounts. Although it was agreed that she would distribute her clients, she never got around to it, so I set up a meeting with a key account and one of our salespeople. When she tried to disrupt the meeting, she violated the shared value we had established, was dismissed from her position and everything fell into place after that.

Empathy Is Not Absolution

Empathy, as powerful as it can potentially be, is widely misunderstood. It is often paired with compassion in the context of creating a more beneficial workplace. That is, of course, a reasonable and worthy objective, but the one-dimensional use of the term is misleading and limits its value.

When seen only through the lens of making others more comfortable, empathy can seem like a “nice to have,” trait rather than a valuable competency and an important source of competitive advantage. It’s much easier to see the advantage of imposing your will, rather than internalizing the perspectives of others.

One thing I learned over many years living in foreign cultures is that it’s important to understand how people around you think, especially if you don’t agree with them and, as is sometimes the case, find their point of view morally reprehensible. In fact, learning more about how others think can make you a more effective leader, negotiator and manager.

Empathy is not absolution. You can internalize the ideas of others and still vehemently disagree. There is a reason that Special Forces are trained to understand the cultures in which they will operate and it isn’t because it makes them nicer people. It’s because it makes them more lethal operators.

It is only through empathy that we can understand motivations—for good or ill—and design effective strategies to build shared purpose or, if need be, design a dilemma for an opponent. To operate in an often difficult world, you need to understand your environment. That’s why building empathy skills can be like a secret weapon.

— Article courtesy of the Digital Tonto blog
— Image credit: Pexels

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The Technology of Tomorrow Requires Ecosystems Today

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The Technology Of Tomorrow Requires Ecosystems Today

GUEST POST from Greg Satell

There are a number of stories about what led Hans Lipperhey to submit a patent for the telescope in 1608. Some say that he saw two children playing with lenses in his shop who discovered that when they put one lens in front of each other they could see a weather vane across the street. Others say it was an apprentice that noticed the telescopic effect.

Yet the more interesting question is how such an important discovery could have such prosaic origins. Why was it that it was at that time that somebody noticed that looking through two lenses would magnify objects and not before? How could it have been that the discovery was made in a humble workshop and not by some great personage?

The truth is that history tends to converge and cascade around certain places and times, such as Cambridge before World War I, Vienna in the 1920s or, more recently, in Silicon Valley. In each case, we find that there were ecosystems that led to the inventions that changed the world. If we are going to build a more innovative economy, that’s where we need to focus.

How The Printing Press Led To A New Era Of Science

The mystery surrounding the invention of the telescope in the early 1600s begins to make more sense when you consider that the printing press was invented a little over a century before. By the mid-1500s books were transformed from priceless artifacts rarely seen outside monasteries, to something common enough that people could keep in their homes.

As literacy flourished, the need for spectacles grew exponentially and lens making became a much more common trade. With so many lenses around, it was only a matter of time before someone figured out that combining two lenses would create a compound effect and result in magnification (the microscope was invented around the same time).

From there, things began to move quickly. In 1609, Galileo Galilei first used the telescope to explore the heavens and changed our conception of the universe. He was able to see stars that were invisible to the naked eye, mountains and valleys on the moon and noticed that, similar to the moon, Venus had phases suggesting that it revolved around the sun.

A half century later, Antonie van Leeuwenhoek built himself a microscope and discovered an entirely new world made up of cells and fibers far too small for the human eye to detect. For the first time we became aware of bacteria and protozoa, creating the new field of microbiology. The world began to move away from ancient superstition and into one of observation and deduction.

It’s hard to see how any of this could have been foreseen when Gutenberg printed his first bible. Galileo and van Leeuwenhoek were products of their age as much as they were creators of the future.

How The Light Bulb Helped To Reshape Life, Work And Diets

In 1882, just three years after he had almost literally shocked the world with his revolutionary lighting system, Thomas Edison opened his Pearl Street Station, the first commercial electrical distribution plant in the United States. By 1884 it was already servicing over 500 homes.Yet for the next few decades, electric light remained mostly a curiosity.

As the economist Paul David explains in The Dynamo and the Computer, electricity didn’t have a measurable impact on the economy until the early 1920’s — 40 years after Edison’s plant. The problem wasn’t with electricity itself, Edison quickly expanded his distribution network as did his rival George Westinghouse, but a lack of complementary technologies.

To truly impact productivity, factories had to be redesigned to function not around a single steam turbine, but with smaller electric motors powering each machine. That created the opportunity to reimagine work itself, which led to the study of management. Greater productivity raised living standards and a new consumer culture.

Much like with the printing press, the ecosystem created by electric light led to secondary and tertiary inventions. Radios changed the way people received information and were entertained. Refrigeration meant not only that food could be kept fresh, but sent over large distances, reshaping agriculture and greatly improving diets.

The Automobile And The Category Killer

The internal combustion engine was developed in the late 1870’s and early 1880’s. Two of its primary inventors, Gottlieb Daimler and Karl Benz, began developing cars in the mid-1880’s. Henry Ford came two decades later. By pioneering the assembly line, he transformed cars from an expensive curiosity into a true “product for the masses” and it was this transformation that led to its major impact.

When just a few people have a car, it is merely a mode of transportation. But when everyone has a car, it becomes a force that reshapes society. People move from crowded cities into bedroom communities in the suburbs. Social relationships change, especially for farmers who previously lived their entire lives within a single day’s horse ride of 10 or 12 square miles. Lives opened up. Worlds broadened.

New infrastructure, like roads and gas stations were built. Improved logistics began to reshape supply chains and factories moved from cities in the north—close to customers—to small towns in the south, where labor and land were cheaper. That improved the economics of manufacturing, improved incomes and enriched lives.

With the means to easily carry a week’s worth of groceries, corner stores were replaced by supermarkets. Eventually suburbs formed and shopping malls sprang up. In the US, Little League baseball became popular. With mobility combined with the productivity effects of electricity, almost every facet of life—where we lived, worked and shopped—was reshaped.

Embarking On A New Era Of Innovation

These days, it seems that every time you turn around you see some breakthrough technology that will change our lives. We see media reports about computing breakthroughs, miracle cures, new sources of energy and more. Unfortunately, very few will ever see the outside of a lab and even fewer will prove commercially viable enough to impact our lives.

Don’t get me wrong. Many of these are real discoveries produced by serious scientists and reported by reputable sources. The problem is with how science works. At any given time there are a myriad of exciting possibilities, but very few pan out and even the ones that do usually take decades to make an impact.

Digital technology is a great example of how this happens. As AnnaLee Saxenian explained in Regional Advantage, back in the 1970s and 80s, when Boston was the center of the technology universe, Silicon Valley invested in an ecosystem, which included not just corporations, but scientific labs, universities and community colleges. New England rejected that approach. The results speak for themselves.

If you want to understand the technology of tomorrow, don’t try to imagine an idea no one has ever thought of, but look at the problems people are working on today. You’ll find a vast network working on quantum computing, a significant synthetic biology economy, a large-scale effort in materials science and billions of dollars invested into energy storage startups.

That’s why, if we are to win the future, we need to invest in ecosystems. It’s the nodes that grab attention, but the networks that make things happen.

— Article courtesy of the Digital Tonto blog
— Image credit: Pixabay

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Change is Never Simple or Linear

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Change is Never Simple or Linear

GUEST POST from Greg Satell

I still remember the excitement I felt seeing Kyiv, Ukraine for the first time in 2002. I had been living in Eastern Europe for five years by that time and had the privilege of witnessing first-hand how formerly communist countries moved boldly into a new future of peace and prosperity. Still, Kyiv was different somehow, bigger, more raw and bursting with potential.

An often repeated quip at the time was, “Ukraine is like Poland in 1993… and always will be.” Unlike the Visegrad countries of Poland, Czech, Slovakia and Hungary, Ukraine had been an actual Soviet Republic and the degree of institutional and societal rot created greater challenges. Kyiv in 2002 was, in many ways, a cynical place.

Today, no one can deny that a paradigm shift has occurred. No longer seen as a corrupt backwater, Ukraine has inspired the world with its ingenuity, humanity and courage. Its president, Volodomyr Zelensky, is an international hero. Yet the transformation, while still incomplete, didn’t come easily and it has important lessons that we can learn from.

A Material Desire

In the early 2000s, Ukraine felt like a place in limbo. Ravaged by the 1998 ruble crisis and often considered to be a sub-market of Russia, most multinational companies were running their Ukrainian operations from Moscow. The highly publicized murder of journalist Georgiy Gongadze in 2000 just added to the feeling that the country was stuck in a hopeless limbo.

When I first arrived, there was a palpable sense of political apathy. Many Ukrainians traveled to Europe and, with its neighbor Poland ascending to the EU, were more than aware that they were being left behind. Still, it didn’t seem like anything could be done about the corrupt powers that ruled the country, so why worry about things that didn’t concern you?

That began to change in 2004, when a relatively boring technocratic reformer named Viktor Yushchenko, who was credited with taming hyperinflation as a central banker and helping to improve the economy as Prime Minister, emerged as the opposition candidate for President. Powerful interests opposed his reforms. He was poisoned, leaving his face disfigured. Many expected his candidacy to end there, but it transformed him into an inspirational leader.

The forces backing his opponent, an almost cartoonish thug named Viktor Yanukovych, tried to falsify the election, which led to the Orange Revolution. I remember that, at first, the effort often seemed futile. But we persevered and the Supreme Court of Ukraine nullified the falsified election results. Against seemingly all odds, Yushchenko rose to the presidency.

A Failure To Survive Victory

We had won, or so we thought. The rightful candidate was elected, justice was done and it seemed like a new era had dawned. Yet soon it became clear that things were not going well. The unity of Yushchenko’s coalition broke down and infighting ensued. Planned reforms stalled in a morass of corruption and incompetence. The financial crisis at the end of 2008 put the last nail in the coffin.

In 2010, Victor Yanukovych, the same man we marched against, rose to the presidency. He was even worse than we had feared. He changed the Constitution to grab more power and threw his opponent, Yulia Tymoshenko, in jail to cripple the opposition. Corruption reached new heights (experts estimate that the regime looted as much as $100 billion—an amount almost equal to the entire GDP of Ukraine).

Things came to a head when Yanukovych backed out of a trade agreement with the EU. It was the final straw. It is one thing to steal, to make a mockery of the rule of law and to run the country far below any reasonable standard of governance. But the prospect of EU integration had come to symbolize inclusion into Europe and a chance to, someday, live a normal life. People once again took to the streets in what came to be called the Euromaidan protests.

The regime fought back, but to little avail. Riot police attacked, yet more people came to Kyiv’s central square, known as the “Maidan.” Yanukovych passed a law outlawing the protests and even more came. Things escalated and the regime started shooting the protestors. Soon there were Molotov cocktails, helmets, and improvised shields. In the end more than 100 people were dead in the streets.

The world took notice and the diplomats came. Meanwhile, away from the cameras, other meetings were held in Parliament. The oligarchs, facing sanctions against their western assets, and even Yanukovych’s allies in his own party, had enough. Suddenly bereft of any support, the corrupt strongman fled from the country. An interim government was announced and Petro Poroshenko was elected president later that Spring.

The Rise Of A Consciousness Based On Shared Values

The Orange Revolution got its name because Orange was the campaign color of Yushchenko’s party, Our Ukraine. It was about changing who was in power in the hopes that he could change things. That was our mistake. You can never base a transformation in any one person, policy or program. It always needs to be rooted in shared values.

“In 2015 we were fighting for an idea. That’s why 2015 was different,” Mustafa Nayem, who initiated the protests, would later tell me. They were called “Euromaidan,” because they were about values, specifically European Values. It was a realization that the material aspirations could not be met without a fundamental change in beliefs and how the country saw itself.

“Immediately after Maidan [in 2005], all the people went home and they calmed down,” Nayem told me. “We lost the chance to push the government towards some changes. In 2013, and after Maidan in 2014, many people are still angry, they’re still active, they’re still pushing. And the inner process of these protests is still proceeding. We have this conversion of civil society.”

These events came to be known as the Revolution of Dignity, because it was the moment that the Ukrainian people demanded to have their sovereignty as an independent country recognized, no matter what the cost. That’s what led Putin to annex Crimea, invade Donbas in 2014 and then the entire country in 2022.

To Shift Opinions You Need To Shift Networks

From the outside, Ukraine’s story can seem like a real life version of the hero’s journey, in which an ordinary person is called to greatness and tested in some profound way which leads to a transformation. Yet Volodymyr Zelensky is not Luke Skywalker, Vladimir Putin is not Darth Vader and Russia does not dominate the universe.

While it is true that Zelensky has a particular set of talents that earlier leaders, such as Viktor Yushchenko, lacked, he has been shaped by context at least as much as he has shaped events. Not only is he a member of the first Ukrainian generation to have little memory or nostalgia for the Soviet Union, he is operating in an ecosystem prepared by two revolutions.

To truly shape events, you must shape networks. That is why Russia is failing and Ukraine is succeeding. One thing I noticed living in both countries is that Ukrainians had a deep desire to connect to the world, while Russians were much more suspicious, fearing that taking in elements of other cultures would corrupt their own.

It is networks of unseen connections that lead to transformation and change. You can’t overpower, you need to attract small groups, loosely connected and united by shared purpose to achieve great things. That never happens in a straightforward manner. We live in a world not of linear cause and effect, but of complex ecosystems, which we need to grow and nurture if they are to achieve their full potential.

— Article courtesy of the Digital Tonto blog
— Image credit: Pixabay

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Focus on Shaping Networks Not Opinions

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Focus on Shaping Networks Not Opinions

GUEST POST from Greg Satell

Anybody who has ever been married or had kids knows how difficult it can be to convince even a single person. To persuade dozens or hundreds — much less thousands or millions — to change their mind about something important seems like a pipe dream. Yet that doesn’t stop people from spending significant time and energy to do just that.

In fact, there is a massive industry dedicated to shaping opinions. Professionals research attitudes, identify “value propositions,” craft messages and leverage “influencers” in the hopes that they can get people to change their minds. Yet despite the billions of dollars invested each year, evidence of consistent success remains elusive.

The truth is that the best indicator of what people do and think is what the people around them do and think. Instead of trying to shape opinions, we need to shape networks. That’s why we need to focus our efforts on working to craft cultures rather than wordsmithing slogans. To do that, we need to understand the subtle ways we influence each other.

The Influencer Myth

Malcolm Gladwell, blockbuster book, The Tipping Point, popularized his “Law of the Few,” which he stated as: “The success of any kind of social epidemic is heavily dependent on the involvement of people with a particular and rare set of social gifts.” This reenergized earlier ideas about opinion leaders, the supposedly secret people who somehow have outsize influence on others.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the communications industry quickly jumped to promote the idea of secret “influentials” living among us. Clearly, if you’re looking to shape opinions, being able to identify such people would be incredibly valuable and, it goes without saying, firms who could claim an expertise in leveraging those powers could earn outsized fees.

Yet the actual evidence that these people actually exist is incredibly thin. Even the original opinion leader research found that influence was highly contextual. In a more recent study of e-mails, it was found that highly connected people weren’t necessary to produce a viral cascade. In another, based on Twitter, it was found that they aren’t even sufficient. So called “Influentials” are only slightly more likely to produce viral chains.

Duncan Watts, co- author of both studies and a pioneer in the science of networks told me, “The Influentials hypothesis, is a theory that can be made to fit the facts once they are known, but it has little predictive power. It is at best a convenient fiction; at worst a misleading model. The real world is much more complicated.”

The Framingham Heart Study

While there is little evidence to suggest that there are special people secretly influencing our attitudes and decisions, there is abundant evidence that completely normal people exert influence all the time. We may ask our nephew about what app to download, or a co-worker about where to go for dinner. We all have people in our lives that we go to for advice about particular things.

Decades of scientific research suggests that the best indicator of what we think and do is what the people around us think and do. A famous series of studies performed in the 1950s—replicated countless times since then—found that when confronted with a overwhelming opinion, people will conform to the majority even if it is obviously wrong.

More recent research indicates that the effect applies not only to people we know well, but that extends even to second and third-degree relationships. So not only our friends, but the friends of their friends as well—many of whom we may have never met—influence us. This effect not only applies to our opinions, but also things like smoking and obesity and behaviors related to cooperation and trust.

The evidence is, in fact, overwhelming. Working to shape opinions is bound to be a fruitless exercise unless we are able to shape the networks in which ideas, attitudes and behaviors form. Fortunately, there are some fairly straightforward ways to do that.

Starting With A Majority

When we’re passionate about an idea, we want it to spread. We want to tell everyone, especially, for psychological reasons which are not quite clear to me, the opposition. There is some strange quirk embedded in human nature that makes us want to try to convince those who are most hostile to the proposition. We want to convince skeptics.

As should be clear by now, that’s a very bad idea. An idea in its early stages is, almost by definition, not fully formed. It hasn’t been tested and doesn’t have a track record. You also lack experience in countering objections. Taking an idea in its infancy into hostile territory almost guarantees failure.

The simple alternative is to start with a majority, even if that majority is only three people in a room of five. You can always expand a majority out, but once you’re in the minority you’re going to get immediate pushback. Go out and find people who are as enthusiastic as you are, who are willing to support your idea, to strengthen it and help troubleshoot.

That’s how you can begin to gain traction and build a sense for shared purpose and mission. As you begin to work out the kinks, you can embark on a keystone project, show some success, build a track record and accumulate social proof. As you gain momentum, you will find that there is no need to chase skeptics. They will start coming to you.

Small Groups, Loosely Connected, But United By A Shared Purpose

The biggest misconception about change is that once people understand it, they will embrace it and so the best way to drive change forward is to explain the need for change in a convincing and persuasive way. Change, in this view, is essentially a communication exercise and the right combination of words and images is all that is required.

Even assuming that it is practical to convince people that way, by the same logic they can just as easily have their mind changed right back by counter-arguments. So even successful shaping opinions is, at best, a temporary solution. Clearly, if we are going to bring about sustainable change, we need to shape not just opinions, but networks as well.

In my book Cascades, I explained how small groups, loosely connected but united by a shared purpose drive transformational change. It happens gradually, almost imperceptibly, at first. Connections accumulate under the surface, barely noticed, as small groups slowly begin to link together and congeal into a network. Eventually things hit a tipping point.

The good news is that decades of research suggest that tipping point is much smaller than most people think. Everett Rogers’ “S-curve” research estimated it at 10%-20% of a system. Erica Chenoweth’s research calculated the tipping point to be at 3.5% of a society. Damon Centola at the University of Pennsylvania suggests the tipping point to be at 25% of an organization.

I would take each of these numbers with a grain of salt. The salient point here is that nowhere does the evidence suggest we need anything close to 51% support for change to take hold. Our job as leaders is to cultivate networks, help them connect and inspire them with a sense of shared values and shared purpose.

— Article courtesy of the Digital Tonto blog
— Image credit: Pixabay

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