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Psychologist Richard Wiseman created a study using waiters to identify what was the more effective method of creating a connection with strangers: mirroring or positive reinforcement. One group of waiters, using positive reinforcement, lavished praise and encouragement on patrons using words such as “great,” “no problem,” and “sure” in response to each order. The other group of waiters mirrored their customers simply by repeating their orders back to them. The results were stunning: the average tip of the waiters who mirrored was 70 percent more than of those who used positive reinforcement.
Never Split the Difference
Chris Voss and Tahl Raz
Perspectives on Organizational Strategy & Coordination: Optimizing for Few Coherent Goals v.s. Many Incoherent Goals
Transcript:
Speaker 1
I think one of the things where the corporate world is actually much better at this than the academic world or the educational world, because their goal is profit. So it's very clear. It's much harder to say what the goal of an educational institution is. It feels like it should be obvious, but within the general goal of like we want to produce successful, well-rounded people, there's a lot of disagreement about what the goals are. And so shaping the institutional incentives around those goals becomes extremely difficult, because not only do we have to worry about perverse incentives, but we have to worry about Vigorous disagreement about the kinds of things that are valued in the first place. And I think exactly what you're talking about, T, is something that if you went to a bunch of university administrators, let's say, or medical school administrators or doctors, and You said, what is the point to what you're doing? Is it to produce wise, well-rounded people? Is it to minimize costs to insurance companies? Is it to increase donor contributions? What is it? And there are all these competing goals. And so there's this constant infighting about among different people who have different versions of what the best version of their institution is, and it's so difficult to articulate What that is.
Speaker 2
I wonder if we're in different sides of this, because are you like worried about the hardness of it? It sounds like you think it's a problem that it's hard to come to agreement and articulate a goal, where I actually prefer the university that disagrees, has many incuit and plural goals, And worry that when it articulates an outcome clearly and starts orienting around that outcome, that's when it starts shedding a lot of what was good about the kind of pluralistic more. So let me just give you this is like from my life, right? So a university I've been employed at has started moving toward orienting everything around student success, where student success is defined as graduation rate, graduation speed, Salary after graduation. When you define that outcome, it becomes really easy to target, and the people that are targeting it, as you say, the people that target it well tend to rise, people that are willing to Go all in on targeting that stuff instead of caring about all the other weird shit that education might be for, tend to have better recordable outcomes and tend to rise in the university Structure. So I actually am happier for something as complicated with education, in which different groups have different conceptions of values about what they're doing, and we don't actually Try to settle it, and we don't hold them all to a high articulability constraint, because I think the business school and the CS department have more easily articulable outcomes than The creative writing department, art history department. A lot of the stuff that I'm writing right now is about like this defense of the inarticulable.
Speaker 1
It's a hard question to answer because I think that there are multiple levels of organization going on here. There's like a top administrator level, because these institutions tend to be pretty hierarchical. I think at the top of the hierarchy, there has to be some sort of reasonably well-defined goal, even if it doesn't specify what every individual component of the organization or institution Would do it. And I think that that trickles down to those levels though, and creates incentives. Regardless of whether or not it's a good thing, I think there has to be some sort of coherence at the very top level, even if it doesn't dictate what each individual component is doing.
Paul Smaldino & C. Thi Nguyen on Problems With Value Metrics & Governance at Scale
COMPLEXITY: Physics of Life
DEEP Framework: Documenting Decisions, Events, Explanations, and Proposals in Your Org
Summary:
The DEEP framework emphasizes the documentation of decisions, urging the recording of the rationale behind business and general decisions.
It also stresses the importance of documenting events such as meetings and town halls, highlighting the need for summarization. Furthermore, the framework encourages documenting explanations, especially in the context of onboarding, as they often involve repeated material.
Lastly, it emphasizes documenting proposals or ideas, allowing individuals to present their rationale to others and providing time for considered reactions.
The acronym 'DEEP' serves as a reminder for teams to consider the documentation created within their workflow.
Transcript:
Speaker 1
So I came up with an acronym as well, and I call that acronym deep. I think you'll identify with some of these. So deep for decisions, if there's ever a decision, then you should record the rationale for it. And we've talked about it endlessly on our tech radar's decision record systems. But I extend that to business decisions as well and general decisions as well. So similar format. Then there's events. So you have a town hall, you have a meeting, all of those are events, right? And you better document them for the benefit of other people. And when I say document, I mean, summarize, sure, you can have a recording or snippets of recordings if they are useful for people, but the summary is the more important thing. Then there's explanations, and I found these very useful in the context of onboarding, because there's a lot of explainer material that gets repeated in onboarding. And those are definitely great candidates for documentation. And the last one is proposals. And I called that proposals, but really I'm trying to talk about things like ideas. So let's take an example. I want to use this new library on my project. I have a certain rationale for it. Let me write down the thought process. What value is it going to bring? Let me present it to everyone. Everyone has the time to consume it. Oftentimes we go into decision making with a lot of cognitive load, where, you know, Ken explains in rapid fire things that he's been thinking about for the last 15 days. And now I have to consume it in the next 30 minutes and give Ken a year or nay. It's really difficult because Ken's done all the deep thinking, I need the time to process it and writing gives me the time to process it, right? And I can also not give knee jerk reactions, but considered reactions. So proposals, and that starts to include design documentation, idea papers, any kinds of proposals that you make on the team. So that acronym deep is a good trigger for teams to kind of hold on to and think about what is the documentation we're creating in the flow of work.
Asynchronous Collaboration — Getting It Right
Thoughtworks Technology Podcast
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