Why do we think that crime is worse?  Because we remember the crime on the news last night easily, but have a hard time remembering the news from a year ago. What we see is all there is.  This is how Daniel Kahneman describes many cognitive biases in Thinking Fast and Slow. When we analyze situations, we only consider the relevant facts that come to memory.  We don’t consider information we can’t remember or that doesn’t come to mind.  What we see or what we remember, is all there is.

This is at the heart of our errors in analyzing the world around us. We want to think rationally about the situations that happen to us, but we can’t bring all of the right facts that we need to mind; so we make mistakes.  When we are trying to answer very hard questions and recognize that we probably don’t have all of the data we need or can’t remember all the data we need, that is the time to remember the errors caused by WYSIATI thinking.

Related Posts:

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• The Fear of the Remembered - It’s amazing to me how many people worriedly ask me about the safety of our living in Mexico.  Yes, Mexico has lots of news of drug wars, kidnapping and murders. Each of these events is tragic as well as memorable.  This is why it casts a shadow on the entire country. In Guadalajara, where we live, it…
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The best way to learn something is to try teaching it to someone else.  We may think we fully understand the subject but trying to explain it to someone else requires a deeper understanding and actually proves that you do understand.  This is the same thing that happens from being responsible for something.  It changes our reference point.

In my post about Positive and Negative Goals, I mentioned how groups should gather around positive goals as they are energizing. When we are building groups of accountability, the best way to do this is to be responsible for someone else’s success. This helps all of us be proactive toward helping others.

Moreover, consider the effect of responsibility on parents.  They suddenly start attending church or stop smoking or get a good job.  They do this because they know that they are now providing a model and responsible for their children. Being responsible for something makes even difficult habits easier to kick. And the cycle continues, as children get older, it’s important for them to also be given responsibility both to build trust and because it changes the way we see our situation.

Of course, giving responsibility requires trust and trust requires a belief in both the competency and character of the other person. Many times we need development in both. Delaney House builds on this by first making people responsible for very small things, and as they become more accomplished, giving them responsibility for more. They’ve even seen that elderly people who are put in charge of a plant in their room live longer than those who are not responsible for anything. Ultimately, we all are more satisfied with life when we are responsible for something that is in our power to control.

 Photo Credit: marcokalmann via Compfight

“I know a lawyer that charges $750/hr. At that price, I would only pay for the 3 minutes it took for him to give him the advice I needed and I would expect that he would already have the answer to the question I asked.  If he had to look it up, that would be on his time.”  - a friend

In the industrial era, time was an easy way to measure productivity. A person working on the assembly line produced some number of widgets in a certain amount of time. If we were to compare the most talented widget maker and  the least talent widget maker, we would certainly find a difference but the distribution of all workers could be plotted ona bell curve. Everyone could make at least 1 and noone made more than 1,000,000.

But information work is not limited by physical constraints. The variance between one information worker and another can be several orders of magnitude, possibly even infinitely different.  Within information work, a typical hour may yield zero useful results, and the next hour may invent the cure to cancer.  How does one put on a scale the measure of value on an hourly basis?

Perhaps this is why so many companies use salaries instead. It accounts for the lumpiness of value provided by a typical information worker. One hour is incredible, the next is filled with the frustrating sound of rebooting their computer. Hourly wages don’t make much sense when we pay someone to think for a living, but it doesn’t stop us from using this measure of evaluation.

We hired a UX designer to help us out with our last project. It bothered me that we paid him by the hour but this is what he preferred – it was easier to account for his own time.  He delivered way more value than we ever paid him, but when we got the invoice, others who reviewed it asked me why it took so long to do some particular part of work. Because that’s the nature of information work! It took him half an hour to come up with some ideas that we would never have come up with, but doing some of the more manual work to show the implementation took more time.  It still was highly valuable and he delivered big.

At the same time, those who do this kind of work can delude themselves into thinking a few minutes of their time is worth the world. A friend had a business partner who was working on 4 different ventures at the same time, while my friend was really focusing only on the one between the two of them. When confronted with the lack of focus on this project, the business partner explained that his ideas and insights were not measurable by the hour.  This is just lazy. It’s true that a specialized worker can provide valuable ideas but usually this only happens through dedicated focus.

Information workers are specialized. No one pays a talented architect $350/hr to break ground, but neither should one be astounded that he makes $350/hr doing architecture. Nevertheless, sometimes an architect must spend some of his time doing work that is below his ability so that he can also deliver the ideas that make him worth his rate. The key is to deliver good ideas and execute on them. This is what every information worker should strive for and it’s why salary works better than hourly pay.

So is $750/hr a ridiculous pay for a lawyer? Well, how much is it worth for the idea no one else could find that causes you to win the case?

Meetings, the practical alternative to work

This quote was on my boss’ mug that he made sure to bring to every meeting he attended. These kinds of silent protests worked well when we all sat in the same conference room to have a meeting, but as we’ve become more global, we call into all conference calls from our desk. At one point in my career, I had 30 hours of meetings a week! Meetings are often work theater, but what looks like work is not really work.

There are many adages on this theme: Don’t confuse effort with results.  He generated lots of smoke but no fire, or lots of heat but no light. When work consisted of making widgets, it was easy to measure both the effort and the results because they were correlated.  Unfortunately, we’ve never really left this correlation behind and it leads to a lot of work theater.

Many offices are the stage for work theater — a place where we put on a show about working.  It sure feels like work when we’re at the office even if we are talking about other things. Perhaps this leads to the rather simple reasoning about outsourcing information work.  It’s cheaper, so we can have 4 people “working” for the cost of 1.  But four people doing the wrong thing does not equal 1 person doing the right thing.  Outsourcing only works when a company rethinks how to make sure the outsourced group is responsible for results. Not all “work” is created equal.

In the process of selling our software to many large organizations, I experience a lot of work theater.  There is so much ambiguity for everyone at large companies that many isolate themselves into very limited boxes and only focus on one thing.  Without a doubt, these people do lots of “work”, but it’s not the same as getting results. This is why small motivated companies that are able to work toward targeted results, will win everyday.

Related Reading:
Steven Blank: “The Difference between Motion and Action”
Fred Wilson: Action Oriented Entrepreneurs

• To Be Goals – These are self-improvement.  The involve developing skillz. Examples include learning a new language, getting more sleep, being more punctual. You might think of these as goals that answer how you want to be characterized.
• To Do Goals - These are experiential. They involve desirable adventures.  Examples include traveling to china, enjoying a meal at Alinea ($210 pp), or going to an olympic games.  These are the things people typically put on their “bucket list”.
• To Have Goals – These are typically material, but sometimes situational (e.g. have a success business).  They involve possessing something we perceive as enjoyable. These are probably the most common type of goals people fantasize about but are likely to be the least satisfying when realized.

This list is in order from most difficult to least difficult to achieve as well as from most satisfying to least satisfying.  In addition, “To Be” goals will often enable the “To Do” and “To Have” goals.

I like this framework for considering goals that are worthy of pursuit. I hope that it is helpful for you as well.

[Credit: I came across this framework originally in Tim Ferris' The 4-hour Workweek which I don't recommend, but there were a couple of useful ideas as there are in most books]

Photo Credit: Joe Penniston via Compfight

 It wasn’t that we were unprepared.  The previous week my parents flew out to help us pack and we spent an intense week getting ready. We sold our second car, we packed all the closets, the drawers, the random things hanging out on our desks (where do we get all of that stuff?).  We purged things that we really didn’t need — like my original laptop from 1998.  I did try to boot it but it gave out one last long beep and then died. So the house was ready, but the question remained: would it all fit.

On Wednesday evening, we had over 19 people show up from Esperanza Viva, the Spanish-speaking church that we had been attending.  They managed to get all of our belongings out of our apartment, but packing the truck was taking more time.  Furniture and boxes lay strewn about the truck like a pack of dogs all clamoring to on board. But we resisted the temptation to just throw them in there and another engineer and I worked hard to try to fill ever cubic inch of space. There were not a few doubters that it would all fit, but just like leftovers going into Tupperware, it’s amazing how much can fit in a small space.

It turned out there was even more stuff that was still left in the house to pack, but after a little repacking as well as shedding some laundry baskets and that old Ficus that decorated our porch, we managed to get everything in the truck and were ready to go — almost.

My wife followed me over to get the tow dolly for our car and on the way, I took a turn just a little to tight for our truck and caught one of the rear tires on the median.  There was a large sound but it wasn’t the first time I had caught the median before.  Ann though, who was following behind, watched the tire explode with a huge white puff and envisioned all of our belongings going with it. Needless to say, this did not inspire confidence for driving not only the truck but also towing a car behind.

Fortunately, the truck made it to the UHaul but indeed we had a blow out.  One of the employees stuck their finger in the tire just to show how bad it was.  After waiting an hour for the tire repair man, we launched our 1200 mile journey right at rush hour traffic.

Now even though Tetris may have helped me pack the truck, Mario Cart proved less useful with a 27ft rig.  It took 2 more days, but we have finally arrived back in Colorado.  The furniture and boxes are in their kennel (storage) for now and the truck made it back to UHaul in one piece.

Thank you so much to all of you who helped us with our move.  We couldn’t have done it without you. We will miss all of our friends and family in California and look forward to getting to hang out again with our friends and family here in Colorado.

If you want to see some pictures from the trip, you can check out my twitter feed (@brinkofchaos) located on the front page of this blog.

Why did Paul send Tychicus to Ephesis?

This was one of the questions that we were supposed to answer before meting together in a small group (after reading Ephesians 6 in the Bible). The passage discusses Paul wanting to send Tychicus to give news of their work.  When we got together as a small group though people seemed to be answering a completely different question:

Because Tychicus was Paul’s best friend

Because Paul trusted Tychicus.

I read the question as: “For what purpose did Paul send someone to the Ephesians”, but many others read the question as: “For what reason did Paul send Tychicus instead of himself”. Of course, the person asking the question had one answer in mind, but the answers vary greatly depending on how you read the question.

This happens all the time.  We ask a question, and receive an answer that seems to be a complete non sequitur to what we asked.  This is not an example of the other person providing a koan (e.g.  ”What is Buddha?” Dongshan said, “Three pounds of flax.”) but rather stems from ambiguity in the question. The problem is that neither communicator even sees the ambiguity because for both it was perfectly clear in their mind. This is the root of miscommunication.

Next time you find yourself miscommunicating with someone, see if you can find the ambiguity and identify ways to eliminate it.

Photo Credit: エン バルドマン via Compfight

Those from the West are typically drawn to focus on the Shark then search for other objects of significance. Those from the East still see the shark, but also pay attention to the overall context (like the school of fish on the right hand side, or the light rays coming from the sky). From the time we were very young, we were taught by our parents how to perceive the world.

In the excellent book, “The Geography Of Thought”, the author describes in broad strokes how the eastern mindset differs from the western mindset. For example, in East Asia it is more common to learn verbs before one learns nouns. Western thinkers learn nouns first (“Ball”, “Car”, “Balloon” – just listen to a mother and her young child). Eastern thinking is more aware of connections — they had a much easier time conceptualizing radio waves than the Western world. Western thought focuses on Platonic categories and objects. Even our language creates nouns from adjectives. In English, we describe the quality of white for a particular object we describe its “whiteness”. In Chinese would use a simile — as white as a snow leopard.

These are all broad generalities. They certainly don’t describe every person from either culture, but I lent the book to a Chinese friend and he said it helped him better understand working with some of his western colleagues. In meetings, people would talk about problems in the system and see the problem either with Part A or with Part B where he saw the problem as being in the connection between the parts.

All of us carry a framework through which we perceive and understand that world around us. It’s what we notice, it’s how we talk to ourselves about it, it’s how we make connections. Our framework helps us make sense of the world around us, but it can also cause us to miss important things. Because we live and reason through this framework, it is not possible for us to even fully understand it until we expose ourselves to others with a different framework. This is one of the reasons I love to both read and travel.

Understanding the stories of others is something we wrestle with even from the time we are very young. Apparently one of the causes for the rebelliousness of a two-year old is that he suddenly realizes that others’ desires differ from his own. He ponders, “How different are they? Well, let’s find out!”. Much to the consternation of his parents, this exploring is an important first step to understanding how others perceive things differently than we do.

But this doesn’t seem to be a lesson we ever stop learning. We want to believe that everyone is like us because it makes it easier for us to model the world around us. And indeed, there are many people we run into that are a lot like us, but then there is a whole world of people whose lives we can hardly imagine.

* Note: I edited the dialog in the middle panel to make the panel stand on its own. The original read “Half of the passengers on this flight are bound for birthright, just like us”. The full book is about a number of American Jews traveling to Israel on a Birthright trip, which is a trip paid for by the Israeli government to show Jews from around the world what Israel is like. The author is very skeptical of the process, especially in trying to untangle the story behind the Palestinian and Israeli perspective which is what makes it an interesting read.]

I knew that I both wanted to get to the island to feel the immediate sense of accomplishment, but more, I wanted the memory of having made it out that far. It turns out the height of the island above the sea was closer to 4 or 5 feet. When I got there, I walked around the island which was mostly made of coral with bare feet (ouch), but again, I had swum all the way out there, I wanted to see the whole thing.

It was probably the highlight of my day, not because the experience itself was particularly enjoyable, but rather because the memory of it is very enjoyable. Daniel Kahneman described this difference between the enjoyment we get from experiencing something in the moment compared to the enjoyment we get from revisiting the memory of what we had done in his TED speech.* This difference is a helpful framework for thinking through life’s event

Consider all the memories you have of eating ice cream a couple of years ago. If you have any, they are probably not very clear. We eat ice cream because we enjoy it in the moment not the future memories we will have.  But we don’t only chose experiences we enjoy now, but also chose to “make memories” that we will enjoy in the future.

My swimming was exactly this type of experience. Swallowing sea water that kept splashing me in the face coupled with the constant reminder of not being a great swimmer and then walking on rough coral was not about the enjoyment of the moment – but it is a great memory.

* One of his examples is a colonoscopy study that shows people are more likely to come back for another scope if they leave the scope in longer – though I think they now totally sedate you so maybe they just decided not remembering it at all is better. His TED speech is a worthwhile watch. The ice cream example came from a great book on cognitive biases called You Are Not So Smart from the author of a blog by the same name.

My friend who runs a brain training business uses this illustration. Stand at an intersection and watch traffic go by for half an hour. After, try to remember as many of the cars as you can. None of us can report back details of every car we saw. We can report the cars that looked exactly like ours, or the ones with that strange bumper sticker, or the one that looked like the van from Scooby Doo. Each of these cars evoked an emotional reaction which is why we remember them. Our memory does not work like a video recorder.

And our thinking does not work like a computer. When we are sensing fear we make ourselves believe that our fear is even more rational. When we are feeling sick or depressed, we think like we will feel this way forever (even though it won’t). When we fast, there are times that you feel very hungry so hungry that we can’t imagine that we can endure it, and then a half hour later we don’t feel hungry at all.  Our emotions significantly influence how we think.

But we are not slaves to our emotions. Knowing how our emotions affect us gives us the power to influence them.  We can choose what we want to dwell on.  Our emotions will try to interject and we can’t completely prevent that. But we can remind ourselves that our emotions are not always based on truth and remind ourselves about what is true.  Also, as any parent knows, distraction is our friend.  Instead of trying to tell ourselves we shouldn’t feel that way, we should try to direct our attention elsewhere. 

Our emotions are continually changing. They help us remember or they prevent us from remembering. They are truly what help us make decisions. But we would do well to remember, especially when we are feeling emotions strongly, that allowing ourselves some time will benefit us greatly.

Recently, I watched a rerun of The West Wing that showed the president right after his daughter had been kidnapped and safely returned. Shaken by the uncertainty of life, the President faces a number of ambiguous challenges, balancing complex relationships between a number of nations. In the midst of this, a series of tornadoes strikes the midwest and he travels out to provide support. When he gets there, he starts out simply trying to encourage those there but slowly finds that he is enjoying talking to the individuals and listening to their plight. Later, he offers to help out with the dishes and try to work on the reconstruction. There is nothing like the temptation working on things with immediate results.

Any leader can relate to this temptation — the desire to seek out something that is easily measurable, where you can see the work of your hands. As you become more senior in a company, the more abstract the position becomes – defining culture, setting vision, cultivating relationships. This is what defines leadership — initiating, creating, directing action in the midst of uncertainty. But this can be incredibly draining, especially during difficult times.

At one point in my career I made the transition from being a manager to being an individual contributor. I looked forward to a bit of a reprieve having someone else define the problem that I needed to solve rather than having to figure it out on my own. My boss though didn’t do this. At one point I pulled him aside and said, I deal more with your boss than I do with you. He turned to me and said, Matthew, you’re a senior engineer, you should define the problems that must be fixed. You should work with my boss and other leaders in the organization to solve the bigger problems. Alas, it’s much easier when someone else is defining the objectives. But that is what it means to lead.

Several CEOs that I know struggle with this. They are very competent people at whose hand comes prosperity and success. They are capable to handle both large and small problems, but they are so tempted to grab for the concrete tasks at hand rather than figuring out how they can spend more time facing the abstraction. It’s totally scary to be out doing and executing outside of what we know. Faced with a million options, choosing the path means the possibility of failing. But this is exactly what’s needed.

The West Wing President finally has his press secretary turn to him and challenge him about what in the world they are doing out there. Reiterating that the world needs him to be working on the big issues, not washing dishes. We as leaders are called to that war, beware the seduction of the simple concrete tasks.

Fear is one of the most powerful emotions we feel. It’s not only anxiety about our loved ones but the future as well. When we are assessing risk and uncertainty, we believe that scenarios we can remember are more likely to occur than ones we haven’t heard of.  This is called the availability bias.  Unfortunately, fear abuses this bias to makes us even more convinced that our most scary scenario is highly likely.

Not only is fear powerful, but it is also contagious. When we hang out with others who feel very afraid, we become more afraid. Think about the power of ghost stories with groups of people.  When we feel uncertain, we look to others to see how we should respond.  When they are afraid too, it fuels our own fear — mass panic.

Many marketing messages are all about stimulating fear because of its potency. They conspire against us to make us worry about what someone will think if we are wearing the wrong jeans.  They usually give us a nice picture to go along with this. The world wants us to be afraid because it’s easier to manipulate us when we are in this state.

The root of fear is uncertainty, so when that uncertainty is addressed, the fear dissipates just as quickly as it came. We look back and can’t even remember why we felt so convinced that our loved one was lying dead in a ditch. The things we worry most about are not usually the things that come to pass — this fights the tendency to make fear more real. Knowing this can keep us sane when we are afraid either for our loved one or for what will take place tomorrow.

Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own. – Matthew 6:34 [NIV]

Some businesses chose to make money their primary goal. Profit is a great goal for a company, but when your customers sense that they are simply being squeezed for cash, they flee. This sometimes creates a death spiral where each lost customer means more must be squeezed out of the ones remaining, only to have them cancel their orders even more quickly. No one wants to just be a source of cash for someone else. Money in business is a by-product of servicing your customers extremely well. As one of my friends puts it, “You should deliver far more value than your customer pays for”.

It’s not just businesses that suffer from this problem. When we make striving for contentment or happiness a goal, it becomes ever more elusive. Happiness and contentment come from doing things that matter. They are by-products of focusing on things which are important and that are typically outside of ourselves. I’ve heard that one of the best ways to get out of depression is to go do something for others – belly watching doesn’t help anyone, including the person looking at their belly. Contentment in life is not found by searching for contentment, it is a by-product of living life well.

In many ways, the journey is more important than the goal and doing the journey right just might be the only way to achieve the goal that you are striving for. Okay, you can stop shaking your head now.

Nothing has been scientifically proven to be more effective for headaches.
- TV commercial

Sure sounds better than reality: No scientific studies have ever compared this product to any other product. Modern marketing and politics play fancy free and foot loose with the truth. Spin is king. Harry G. Frankfurt wrote a small treatise on this subject called On Bullshit. He defines bullsh*t (BS) as neither lying nor telling the truth. It is instead a complete indifference to whether the truth even matters.

Our culture has a growing disregard for truth – both knowing what makes something true as well as confronting our own reality. It’s interesting that the original American culture held truth in high regard. For example, the 5th Amendment sure stands in stark contradiction to this trend. Politicians are taught to not even answer reporters questions, or if they have to answer, quibble with the definition of “is”.  Criminals tell half-truths (BS) for fear they might be caught.

I wonder if the founding fathers would have found it necessary for the accused not to be forced to incriminate themselves. This really only matters if one still holds that truth as important.  If truth is not important, than the expectation is simply that the accused will lie if confronted with their crime.  This idea has taken hold so strongly that even someone who “pleads the 5th” seems both guilty and a bad liar.

Everywhere we look, we are confronted with BS. Even when we get in the “No Spin Zone”, we are just asking they apply a particular spin, but we feel more comfortable if they label it as without BS.  The world is so complicated that none of us is able to keep up with all the new information created every day. Epistemology is important.

Having worked in Marketing, there is a fine line between positioning and authenticity. Authenticity is important, or as a good friend of mine says, being WYSIWYG (What you See is What You Get). So I’m working to eliminate BS in my own words, so that if questioned, I don’t need to plead the 5th.