Work Matters

Category: Evidence-based Management

  • Evidence-Based Study Tips: Nine Ways To Help You Learn

    All three of my children are students; my son and daughter are in college and my youngest daughter just started high school.  And I have been a professor for over 25 years, so I see lots of variation in how students — undergraduates, masters students, and doctoral students — go about trying to learn and be successful.  As such, I was struck with a list of 9 things over at BPS research that students can do to be more effective, gleaned from The Psychologist.  Check out the post at BPS research for details, but here they are:

    1. Adopt a growth mindset: This might be the most important of all; as Carol Dweck's wonderful research shows, when people believe that their intelligence and abilities are malleable rather than fixed, they try harder of learn more.  It is useless and downright destructive to view your abilities as fixed because, if they are, why should you bother try? And failure means your dumb.  That mindset is dangerous nonsense — and if your teachers start talking that way, ignore them –or send them some information about Dweck's research. 

    2. Sleep well.  There is tons of evidence that sleep deprivation makes people dumber and nastier. There are times when you've got to push it because of deadlines and such, but I think we all know that feeling a dulled mind from lack of sleep. 

    3. Forgive yourself for procrastinating.  A cool study shows that students who forgive themselves for past sins here procrastinate less and perform better in the future. 

    4. Test yourself.  As BPS reports:  "A powerful finding in laboratory studies of learning is the ‘testing effect’
    whereby time spent answering quiz questions (including feedback of
    correct answers) is more beneficial than the same time spent merely
    re-studying that same material."

    5. Pace yourself. People remember things better when they do a bit every day rather than cram for exams. I know this is against the instincts and habits of many students out there, but the evidence here is clear, so learning to plod along can help you a lot.

    6. Vivid examples may not always work best. This one is interesting because, as professor, I know that students love vivid examples.  But BPS reports some research suggesting that learning abstract concepts rather than the juicy stories that illustrate them enables students to more easily apply the concepts to diverse challenges.   (I have to learn more about this, as it actually seems inconsistent with stuff in Made to Stick — although perhaps the challenge is that juicy stories are so sticky that we don't focus on the underlying lesson). 

    7. Take naps.  I love this point. I talk about it a lot in Good Boss, Bad Boss because there is evidence that taking a nap not only makes you more effective, it helps keep your inner jerk from rearing its ugly head.  Napping is also a way to offset some of the negative effects of sleep deprivation when the pressure is on.  See the BPS summary of research on how to nap — lying down is better than leaning forward, but leaning forward is better than not napping at all. 

    8. Get handouts prior to the lecture.  I blogged about this research awhile back; many faculty now put handouts on line, so if you are a student, it sounds like looking at hem before the lecture and bringing them with you is a good idea.  Students who get handouts in advance take fewer notes, but still tend to better on tests, at least according to one recent study. 

    9. Believe in yourself.  As BPS tells us:  "Self-belief affects problem-solving abilities even when the influence of
    background knowledge is taken into account. Bobby Hoffman and Alexandru
    Spatariu     showed this in 2008
    in the context of 81 undergrad students solving mental multiplication
    problems. The students’ belief in their own ability, called
    ‘self-efficacy’, and their general ability both made unique
    contributions to their performance."

    I will send this post to my children; I hope they read it!  I would also add that if you look at this list, these tips aren't just for students.  Really, they are nice summary of the learning mindset, of how to manage yourself for learning over the long haul.  In particular, two overall themes jump out at me that are supported by piles of behavioral science research conducted under diverse banners (psychology, education, sociology) and labeled with diverse jargon:

    1. If you believe you can, you can; if you believe you can't, you can't (points 1 and 9)

    2. Treat your journey as a marathon, not a sprint or series of sprints (points 2,5, and 7; and perhaps some others)

    Let me know what you think of these tips; and also let me know your ideas about how to persuade others to do some of this stuff!  I am especially concerned about the challenge of teaching people (and myself too) to "pace yourself."  That is something that is easier said that done.


  • “I Have Already Told You More Than 125% Of What I Know”

    I first heard from a charming and honest statement years ago from a Stanford colleague who was being asked question after question about a case study he had done. He was providing us one compelling answer after another. But then he stopped himself in mid-sentence and said he refused to answer more questions because, as the headline says, "I have already told you more than 125% of what I know."

    I think that those of us who are alleged to have expertise in certain topics can easily fall into this trap as we try to be helpful to others, and rather than stopping and realizing that we are beyond our expertise, we just keep saying more and more about things we know less and less about.

    I was thinking of this comment this morning after I got yet another media inquiry to talk about swearing in the workplace, a topic I officially retired from talking about after my NPR interview on power players and profanity.  I did devote time to reading research on swearing and such and did learn some interesting lessons from The No Asshole Rule (especially from all the great comments and emails).  But after being pressed pretty hard by a reporter to do another interview, I realized it was time to turn back to topics I know more about, and I used the "125%" line to deliver the message.

    I don't think it is always bad, by the way, to tell more than you know so long as you make clear that you are speculating or hypothesizing beyond the information you have.  A lot of creativity happens that way, but when you do so, it is good to understand (and explain to others) that this the case.  This isn't an easy thing to do, however, because we human beings often have excessive confidence in our knowledge and expertise ESPECIALLY about areas we are must ignorant about. Comforting, isn't it?  The path to self-awareness is not easy for any of us humans.

  • The Strategic Use Of Anger During Negotiations: It Doesn’t Work With East Asians

    I was doing some reading on cultural differences in management styles and, once again, BPS Research has a cool study.  There is a stream of research on negotiation that shows the strategic expression of anger is effective, apparently because it is taken as a sign you are "tough" and thus leads your intimidated opponent to make concessions.  A new study by Hajo Adam and his colleagues suggests that this may be a culturally specific finding, which applies to people of Western descent but not necessarily others.  In a pair of studies that compared people of European descent to people of East Asian descent they found, in both a hypothetical and a more realistic negotiation, that people in the two groups had opposite reactions to negotiating with an angry opponent:

    "Western-ancestry students were more likely to make a concession to their
    negotiation partner whereas the East-Asian ancestry students were less
    likely to do so."

    This study is quite fascinating for at least three reasons.  The first is that these are pronounced cultural effects.  The second is they aren't simply pronounced in magnitude — rather they demonstrate a reversal depending on the cultural background. So although many of us may claim that people are the same no matter where they are from, this apparently isn't so (at least on some dimensions).  The third is more practical: if you are a Westerner and are accustomed to getting your way by browbeating negotiation opponents (and speaking in an angry tone), your usual approach may backfire if you try to use it on East Asians. And if you are from an Asian background, and have to negotiate with Westerners, it might help you to get pissed-off (or at least pretend to be) at times. 

    Cool study.  And instructive. It is only one study, but there are other experiments that show such cultural differences on other dimensions — for example that Westerners are more like to "free-ride" or engage in "social-loafing" then people raised in Asian cultures.  For example, this study found that Chinese school kids performed better when working in pairs than working alone on an "auditory tracking task"; but U.S. school kids performed better when working alone than in pairs.  Again, there is a reverse effect, and evidence that well, we aren't all the same. 

    What are your reactions to these cultural differences?  The usual explanation for such findings is that Asians are from "collectivistic" cultures and that Westerners are from "individualistic" cultures.  Is that why? Any other explanations or implications strike you? 

    P.S. The citation for the negotiation study is: Adam H, Shirako A, & Maddux WW (2010). Cultural variance in the interpersonal effects of anger in negotiations. Psychological science : a journal of the American Psychological Society / APS, 21 (6)

  • Being Busy Makes Us Happier, But Our Instinct Is To Do Nothing

    BPS Research does it again. Check-out this study.  The upshot:

    Forced to wait for fifteen minutes at the airport luggage carousel
    leaves many of us miserable and irritated. Yet if we'd spent the same
    waiting time walking to the carousel we'd be far happier. That's
    according to Christopher Hsee
    and colleagues, who say we're happier when busy but that unfortunately
    our instinct is for idleness. Unless we have a reason for being active
    we choose to do nothing – an evolutionary vestige that ensures we
    conserve energy.

    This research explains nearly 100% of my emotions, actions, and predilections!  And it is very consistent with what every parent knows: When the kids are complaining about being bored or are sitting around being grumpy, get them to do SOMETHING no matter how trivial or inane it may seem.  This may apply to bosses too, but I have to think about it.

    The citation is: Hsee CK, Yang AX, & Wang L (2010). Idleness aversion and the need for justifiable busyness. Psychological science : a journal of the American Psychological Society / APS, 21(7). 

  • Tom Davenport on Great Decisions at Pixar

    Check out Tom's new post at HBR on Five Ways Pixar Makes Better Decisions.   As often strikes me when I learn more about a great company like Pixar, their success is grounded in knowing and consistently doing obvious but powerful things.  While some management gurus are saying we have to reinvent management for the times, what they are doing at Pixar are approaches that I have been around for a long time.

    Indeed, when we interviewed Brad Bird (Academy Award winning director of Pixar blockbusters The Incredibles and Ratatouille) he emphasized that the most important lessons he learned — like persistent attention to quality, the power of pride in doing good work, constant feedback and constructive conflict, and on and on — came from his early interactions with the master animators ( known as Walt's Nine Old Men ) at Disney who produced classic films like Snow White, Dumbo, and so on.

    Here is just a little taste from Tom's great post:

    Even though directors have autonomy, they get feedback from
    others.     "Dailies," or movies in progress, are shown for
    feedback to the entire animation crew. In The Economist
    interview, Catmull also describes a more extensive periodic peer review
    process:

    We have a structure so they get their feedback from
    their peers. … Every two or three months they present the film to the
    other filmmakers…and they will go through, and they will tear the film
    apart. Directors aren't forced to respond to the feedback, but they
    generally do — and the films are generally better for it.

    This is a great example of striking a healthy balance between autonomy and control, which is always a balancing act.

    Also, I wonder, do people agree with my argument that there really isn't difference between what great bosses did 50 or 100 years ago and what they do now? Or, as some thought leaders argue, it is time to reinvent management?  My view, perhaps too cynical, is that claims that a brand new management paradigm and practices have been invented, that I as a thought leader or guru am selling them, and if you don't use my stuff or accept my given truth, you are doomed for trouble, smacks of snake oil.  

    P.S. If you want to read a great book on Pixar, I suggest The Pixar Touch, which I wrote about here. Their history will just amaze you.

  • New Study: Pass Out The PowerPoint Slides Before The Lecture, People Like It And May Learn More

    BPS research reports an interesting study that suggests, as usually seems to be the case, that students know what helps them learn better than their teachers.  I have heard quite a few professors argue that, when they do a PowerPoint presentation, they don't want to pass-out the slides before the talk because students flip ahead, don't pay close attention, don't take good notes and — in some cases — because they think the students ought to pay for the copies (although with the web, that argument goes away because you can just post them on a website).  Not all faculty are so down on passing out the PowerPoints before: The study reported at BPS found that 50% of lecturers preferred to give handouts before, while the other half was split between lecturers who distributed them afterward or not at all.  The students had more consistent opinions, with 74% preferring to get the handouts before the lecture.

    The interesting part is the follow-up, where, in the first experiment, there was no significant difference in test performance between students who got handouts before or after the lecture.  But, after tweaking the design a bit, they researchers did find that students who got handouts before performed better in a test given 12 minutes after the lecture.  Another interesting twist was that, in both sets of experiments, students who did not get handouts before took more notes.   As BPS reports:

    The findings provide preliminary evidence that lecturers should provide
    their students with handouts during the lecture. Regarding the more
    extensive note-taking that took place when handouts were held back until
    after a lecture, the researchers speculated that this was 'unlikely to
    be a deep encoding task', which would normally be expected to aid memory
    retention, and may instead have acted merely acted as a distraction.

    This is, as they say, preliminary research.  The first study did not reveal much, but the second is suggestive.  For anyone who teaches,  this study does suggest strong evidence that your students want the handouts first, some evidence that handing out the slides first will help them perform better, and no evidence that handing the slides out early harms their performance.

    This is not an earth-shaking problem or issue, but I have been amazed too see how vehemently some faculty feel about this issue, so I am glad to see a little evidence.  

    The citation is: Marsh,
    E., & Sink, H. (2009). Access to handouts of presentation slides
    during lecture: Consequences for learning. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 24 (5), 691-706

  • The Frequency of Eye-Blinking is Linked to Creativity

    Check out this research summary at BPS Research.  This study showed that the rate of eye-blinking was linked to performance on a creative task — bot not to IQ.  Those subjects who blinked at a moderate rate were most creative.  Apparently, eye-blinking frequency is linked to dopamine.  As BPS reports:

    The researchers pointed to evidence showing, for example, that patients
    diagnosed with schizophrenia, which is associated with excess dopamine,
    tend to have high eye blink rates. Patients with Parkinson's, by
    contrast, which is associated with reduced dopamine, show low eye blink
    rates. They also highlighted past research linking dopamine with
    creativity. For example, there's evidence that positive mood – which is
    related to dopamine levels – can enhance creativity, although the
    results in this area have been extremely inconsistent.

    Now, this is just one study, but the implications are intriguing, and a bit scary.  If you have ever seen Blade Runner, you may recall that the test they used to determine if a creature was a human or a "replicant" entailed asking various strange questions and watching for changes in the rate of blinking. I can imagine some employment test based on the same principle, where — much like Harrison Ford did in Blade Runner — job candidates are given some test to determine their blinking rate.  Perhaps in our strange future, employers will forget the job sample test and other tried and true predictors, or the portfolio of past work, or that training in design thinking, and just look at the blinking rate! 

    I hope this is just a strange fantasy, but it is a cool study. 

    The reference is: Chermahini,
    S., & Hommel, B. (2010). The (b)link between creativity and
    dopamine: Spontaneous eye blink rates predict and dissociate divergent
    and convergent thinking. Cognition,
    115     (3), 458-465

  • Winner Take All Incentives And Cheating

    Steve Levitt of Freakonomics fame has shown that, when teacher's pay is linked to the the performance of their students on standardized tests, they are prone to cheat — I mean the teacher's cheat.  Levitt's data from Chicago suggest that about 5% of teachers cheated to get bonuses and other goodies.  A recent New York Times article shows that this problem persists, and tells a rather discouraging story of a principal from Georgia who "erased bubbles on the multiple-choice answer sheets and
    filled in the right answers." And if you look check out the Freakonomics blog, there is evidence that Australian teachers cheat too.   

    The kind of pressures that educators face aren't just financial
    incentives (although that alone is plenty of pressure as many systems
    reward only the top performers no matter how well everyone else does),
    they also risk being fired, demoted, or their schools may lose
    accreditation, be put on probation, and in some cases, closed for poor
    performance

    The Times article offers an interesting quote that has implications beyond education:

    John Fremer, a specialist in data forensics
    who was hired by an independent panel to dig deeper into the Atlanta
    schools, and who investigated earlier scandals in Texas and elsewhere,
    said educator cheating was rising. “Every time you increase the stakes
    associated with any testing program, you get more cheating,” he said.  

    I found this quote to be interesting because a related implication is that, the more pressure that people face for performance, the more likely they are to cheat.  Perhaps the most extreme case are winner take all games.  Just watch how soccer players in the World Cup fake severe injuries to draw fouls again and again, even though they have barely been touched by opponents or not at all.

    To this point, BPS research reports a new study by Spanish researchers that shows the dangers of winner take all incentive systems.  The experiment entailed online completing mazes but divided subjects into two conditions.  In the first condition, students were paid based on how many mazes they completed.  So, there were incentives, but not competition or severe pressures to succeed.  In the second condition, subjects were only paid if they completed more mazes then the other five members of their group — so it was winner take all.  The subjects in the winner take all condition didn't perform any better, but they cheated more (the researchers figured out a clever way to catch them), especially if they were poor performers or women. 

    As the researchers conclude:

    'It turns out that individuals who are less able to fulfill the
    assigned task do not only have a higher probability to cheat, they also
    cheat in more different ways,' the researchers said. 'It appears that
    poor performers either feel entitled to cheat in a system that does not
    give them any legitimate opportunities to succeed, or they engage in
    "face saving" activity to avoid embarrassment for their poor
    performance.

    After years of reading research and working with organizations of all kinds, I have learned to become very wary of winner take all incentives.  Or as often happens in organizations, systems where the top performers get the lion's share of the money and their more ordinary peers get a few crumbs.  These systems not only encourage cheating, unless they are managed with extreme skill, they also undermine cooperation because, "If I help you, it means I am less likely to succeed."

    Well, whenever I write about these kinds of problems, people ask me what the alternatives should be, and I confess, that is a tough question.  But I do think that a few guidelines are useful:

    1.  When in doubt, anoint a higher percentage of your people as "winners" and a lower percentage as "losers"

    2. When in doubt, err on the side of smaller differences in pay between the top performers and everyone else.

    3.  Define superstars as people who help others succeed ,not who stomp on others on the way to the top.

    Those are my three. Do you have other guidelines to add? This is a tough problem and every organization that I know struggles with such issues. 

    P.S. The article summarized at BPS is: Schwieren,
    C., & Weichselbaumer, D. (2010). Does competition enhance
    performance or cheating? A laboratory experiment Journal of Economic Psychology, 31
    (3), 241-253

    P.P.S. Also see this great article by Chip and Dan Heath on "Why
    Incentives are Effective, Irresistible, and Almost Certain to
    Backfire."

  • Baseball Players With Big Smiles Live Longer

    I just visited my favorite psychology blog, BPS research, and found a really cool study of smiling.  The researchers rated the "smile intensity" of 230 baseball
    professional baseball players and "The
    researchers used a three-point smile scale: no smile, half smile (mouth
    only), and genuine 'Duchenne' smile (muscles contracted around the
    mouth and corners of the eyes)."  They found:


    Willie_Mays_cropped Focusing on the 150 players who'd
    died by the time of the study and controlling for extraneous factors
    such as BMI and marital status, the researchers found that those who
    were flashing a genuine 'Duchenne Smile' were half as likely to die in
    any given year compared with non-smilers. Indeed, the average life-span
    of the 63 deceased non-smilers was 72.9 years compared with 75 years for
    the 64 partial smilers and 79.9 years for the 23 Duchenne smilers.

    The question, of course, is does smiling make you healthier, being healthier make you smile more, or perhaps most likely, a smile is a sign of an unpbeat personality, which has been linked to longevity in numerous studies — check out this cool study of nuns in particular.  But there is also a fascinating set of studies that show smiling makes you feel happier and frowning make you feel grumpy.  I wrote about this in fairly gory detail in one of my early blog posts in 2006.  The "mechanism" through which this apparently happens is really cool.  Smiling leads to momentary cooling of blood the brain and frowning leads to momentary heating — and a large body of research shows that being "hot-headed" makes people grumpy and aggressive. 

    I love this weird emotion stuff.  It seems like a smile might be good for us — or perhaps more likely, is a sign of a good mental health.

    P.S. The picture is of baseball great Willie Mays, I think it is from 1952 and that looks like a real smile to me. Mays is still alive, by the way.

    P.P.S. The citation for the study is: Abel,
    E., & Kruger, M. (2010). Smile Intensity in Photographs Predicts
    Longevity. Psychological Science

  • Fear-Based Performance Management at Fox News?

    Regardless of what you may think about Fox News, it is hard to argue with their commercial success.  Nonetheless, at least based on a leaked memo published over at Gawker, it appears that senior management is concerned about a rash of mistakes.  They are apparently responding by instituting a fear-based system. 

    I say "apparently" because I have no idea if this is actually written by Fox executives. Real or fake, it provides a good illustration of the kind of thing that seems reasonable, but that — at least if you believe the basic underpinnings of the quality movement (quality guru W. Edwards Deming's mantra was "Drive Out Fear") and related research by Amy Edmondson and others on psychological safety, mistakes, and learning — these are practices that aren't likely to eliminate mistakes, but they will amplify CYA behavior, brainstorming, and tendency to make the same mistakes over and over again.  I would add that perhaps they may increase personnel costs as people are fired for their mistakes, blamed and shown the door, and then new people come in and keep making the same mistakes because the system stifles learning. 

    Here is the alleged memo from the Fox executives.  Let me know what you think about it — would this work in your organization?

    Subject: Quality
    Control     We had a mistake on Newsroom today when a wrong book cover
    went on screen during a guest segment, the kind of thing that can fall
    through the cracks on any day with any story given the large amount of
    elements and editorial we run through our broadcasts. Unfortunately, it
    is the latest in a series of mistakes on FNC in recent months. We have
    to all improve our performance in terms of ensuring error-free
    broadcasts. To that end, there was a meeting this afternoon between
    senior managers and the folks who run the daytime shows in which
    expectations were reviewed, and the following results were announced:
    Effective immediately, there is zero tolerance for on-screen errors.
    Mistakes by any member of the show team that end up on air may result in
    immediate disciplinary action against those who played significant
    roles in the "mistake chain," and those who supervise them. That may
    include warning letters to personnel files, suspensions, and other
    possible actions up to and including termination, and this will all
    obviously play a role in performance reviews.

    So we now face a great
    opportunity to review and improve on our workflow and quality control
    efforts. To make the most of that opportunity, effective immediately,
    Newsroom is going to "zero base" our newscast production. That means we
    will start by going to air with only the most essential, basic, and
    manageable elements. To share a key quote from today's meeting: "It is
    more important to get it right, than it is to get it on." We may then
    build up again slowly as deadlines and workloads allow so that we can be
    sure we can quality check everything before it makes air, and we never
    having to explain, retract, qualify or apologize again. Please know that
    jobs are on the line here. I can not stress that enough. I will review
    again during our Monday editorial meeting, and in the days and weeks
    ahead. This experience should make us stronger editorially, and I
    encourage everyone to invest themselves one hundred and ten percent in
    this effort.

    P.S. See this post on "The best diagnostic question" for a much different approach to learning from failure. Although I should note that there is another interesting element here: The memo implies that getting it right rather than getting done as quickly as possible will be rewarded more now –which is a step away from from fear and toward quality.