Problem Solving blog

Well some things go your way and some things don’t.  My forum idea sounded alright but then reality set in… I have no time!  One thing lead to another and two months later I just didn’t have time.  I have considered what I can do with it and I am planning to develop another towards the end of the year… I hope.   One of the cool things I made for the forum was a flash video about creativity.  You can watch and enjoy by clicking the link below.

Luke’s amazing Creativity Video

Let me know if you like it!

courtesy of razee81

Yesterday I was rambling about decision making.  Well… today I am going to talk a bit more about surfacing hidden bias.

The devils advocate

In religious literature the devil is a being who opposes God and argues against the ’saints’ of God in order that he may bring them down.  Being a Christian I don’t particulary like the devil there is however something we can learn from him.  How to surface hidden bias!   If you notice that you keep making the same mistakes you are probably operating under a bias of some sort.  Let’s take the example of the Gambler’s Fallacy.

“If I pull the lever this time I am more likely to win because I have pulled the lever more times”.  BIAS!

So the devil would say (if he was against gambling)…

“How do you know if you pull the lever this time … it will work”.

A seed of doubt gets sown into the mind of the participant and voila!  You have them doubting what they think they know!  If there is a bias here it will become obvious.  The relative strength of any idea, is only as good as the flaws that are in it.  Here is another example of the devil’s advocate.

“I have to buy those shoes.”  But… the devil might say:

“What would happen if you didn’t buy those shoes.”

The opposite point of view is used as a frame of reference to tease out the flaws in the thinking of the person with said bias. Okay one more:

“If I buy this item off ebay it will save me money later.”   The devil would say:

“How do you know that you will save money later… you might not even want to have it later.”

This technique makes use of the opposite point of view and forces people to confront their bias.  This does not guarantee that they will necessarily follow your advice but it’s a meaningful way to surface hidden assumptions!  Here is another technique I have seen people like Gordon Ramsey use.

Direct Confrontation

Say for a moment somebody you know is in dire need of a change of scenery.  They may be stuck in a rut and their thinking may not be helping them at all.  So what can you do?  Well, you can confront them!  There is an art to this as the following story indicates.

A while ago somebody very close to me was in an abusive relationship.  In the beginning I made myself available to talk to this person just about their relationship and the problems they had.  Overtime I noticed that I was not helping the problem… so I took a different approach.  I would confront them and deliberately raise the issue making a point out the bias in a non-accusing manner.

A word of warning: When you do this be prepared for fireworks.  People don’t like being told they are wrong or their ideas don’t work.  Yet, for the sake of helping them you sometimes have to hurt them.  Just today I did this to a person I have a great deal of respect for.  They basically got angry and said something to me which was uncalled for.  This is where things like learning to see through the biases of others is important.  They are not really angry at you (though they are temporarily!) they are angry because you have exposed them.  When you do this it takes extreme care.  Sometimes the best way is Gordon’s way though I wouldn’t recommend reaching for that one first!  The point is: we don’t know we have a bias until it surfaces and even then we are not sure how to get rid of it.   I have had this happen to me and it hurts!  Be careful.

Using positive ‘confession’ or self-talk

One of the better ways to rid yourself of a bias is to replace it with positive self-talk. Management research suggests that one of the ways we find answers is by talking to ourselves.  I have found that we solve our problems this way too.  That is, we can talk ourselves into and out of things on a regular basis.  Once we are aware of the bias, we can routinely begin to speak through the issue by replacing it with a positive belief.  Example:

“If I had of only looked when I crossed the street I would not have been hit by that car.”

This can easily become:

“I did what I did and at the time I thought it was the best course of action.  I cannot change it so therefore I accept it.”

What’s the difference?  Well the hindsight bias stops us from making better decisions in the future.  By accepting failure and alas being human, we can move forward.  We can make better decisions. Here’s a management example:

“Bob keeps calling in sick.  I have given him two warnings and this will be his third.  However, if I fire him now I won’t know whether or not he will turn out good as an employee.”

In this bias you are deferring action to a future date because you are fearful of confronting Bob.  Firing Bob is the future event you are avoiding so you make up a story to convince yourself that doing it later is the better option.  What to do?   Direct confrontation?  Hold up.  The problem isn’t Bob … it’s you.  It’s what you think the problem is.  If you have around here long enough you will learn my golden rule:

The problem is exactly what you think the problem is.

You think that Bob won’t be happy, you think there will be an issue of having to fire him and you think the outcome will be bad.  One thought produces another which in turn, produces another and that produces another and so on.  Until you have a mess that is purely made up of a system of related biases in your mind.   You need to first look at the situation and begin to restructure your thoughts.

“Bob keeps calling in sick.  I wonder what the problem is with Bob that he would do that?”

Now you have detached the future event from the payoff so you can leave it open as to what needs to be done.  Secondly, getting more information instead of building a scenario where Bob gets fired might actually create a win-win situation for you and Bob.  Bob may just be in the wrong job or he may have genuine problems.  Either way don’t predict events before they happen… you aren’t Nostradamus!

I find in situations like this that my imagination is helpful.  I can imagine a better outcome than Bob getting fired and it clears my mind to help me focus better.  I can use the devil’s advocate to challenge myself and more often than not it settles my emotions.  In closing I would like to relate a story of something that happened to me a few years ago.

After being offered a scholarship to finish my doctorate I had two catastrophic events happen to me.  1. I got struck down with pneumonia and asthma and 2. my primary supervisor pulled out of my PhD.  It meant that I wouldn’t finish my PhD on time and I might be out of a job.   During the coming months my boss continually reminded me to finish my PhD on time and hounded me.  I heard about how I was going to be found ‘unsatisfactory’ in my performance.  In my mind I began to build all kinds of horrible pictures, mental imagery of the worst sort!  My performance review came and went and to my suprise I was found ’satisfactory’.  I had spent so much time preparing for the worse that when the best happened… I was totally surprised!  I learned something extremely valuable from this experience (other than prayer works I might add!): don’t create a worst case scenario without considering the best case scenario.  Have both on hand because you have no idea what’s going to happen.  Be prepared and whatever you do don’t settle on one over the other.  Think it through and make good judgements!

Courtesy of tijmen

I want to talk to you about biases and how they effect your judgement.

Identifying Bias

A bias is a way of thinking that you are accustomed to that sits in your head.  It’s main features are that it forces you to make decisions through it.  Hence:

1. When you make decisions that contain bias you get the same result… again and again.
2. When you are not aware of a bias you have no idea it’s affecting your outcomes
3. The reality of what you are doing is obscured by your biases
4. A bias is built into your decision making processes

The classic example is that of the football team.  If you follow a certain team, no matter how biased you think you are or aren’t… you will always side against the decisions made to that team… even though they may be right.  I have a friend who follows the ‘Collingwood’ football team in Australian rules.  No matter what I say during a game he is ready to kill me if I suggest that the umpire was right.  Do you know people like this?

How do Biases effect me?

The main way a bias effects you is that it makes you have impared judgement.  Once I was sitting in a meeting where I had to work out who to ‘let go’ as they say.  When the conversation came up about the person I suggested, everybody agreed.  I suggested the ‘least’ qualified to be removed.  At the time I justified my decision by saying that the person should have gone because they didn’t meet the criteria of the organisation.  Can I say it was a big mistake?  That person was the best person I have ever had working for me and I have not settled on another person since.  ‘Qualified’ people have come and gone but most of them have given me headaches.  I learned through this experience that my judgement was affected by ‘qualification’ bias!

In your case you have different biases that live in your mind that act as a template for how you make decisions… this is part of what the late Geoffrey Vickers called ‘the art of judgement’.  How do you know when you are operating under a bias?  Let’s have a look.

Types of Biases

It is impossible to label all of the biases as I know them.   But here is one I encounter more often than any others… hindsight bias.  Let’s look at this story:

I recently moved out of a house in another suburb because it had asbestos roofing… I didn’t want my children to get sick.  After I moved they changed the roof and fixed the asbestos problem.  I should have stayed.

Note: This is hindsight bias.  You have identified a problem, noted the solution but failed to take into account the moderating variable you weren’t aware of.  What is this moderating variable?  It’s the fact thay you didn’t realise the roof would fix the problem.  If you knew that… and were certain of it… you probably wouldn’t have moved.   How then can you justify a choice you weren’t aware of… it wasn’t a choice at all! Here is another example.

I have played the poker machines 200 times in a row.  The chances of me winning are much higher next time I pull this lever… after all you have to be in it to win it!

This is the Gambler’s Fallacy. I have met entreprenuers with this condition, sales people and many, many others.  It’s the idea that previously random events decrease in their probability which each new cycle of the event.  People stuck in this fallacy are likely to believe in things like ‘lucky’ streaks or use some item of clothing that brings them luck.  Former Australian Cricket Captain used a red rag in his pocket for good luck when he was batting.  Now for one more example:

I met a woman once who bought a loaf of gold bread.  When I asked her why she told me that she was collecting them and would one day sell them on ebay.

Quite often we make purchase choices without realising that afterwards that we actually have no need of the item we just bought.  The ultimate goal of the purchase is justified through the bias.   This is post-purchase rationalisation or post-hoc (meaning after the event) rationalisation. We do this when we are facing a messy problem.  We create stories to justify our actions. A final example of biases in action:

I was worried about having burn-out.  So I looked up burnout on the web and it was confirmed… I have burn-out.

What’s so bad about this?  The person in question has only looked for confirming evidence of their bias.  They have not really looked up evidence that suggests the contrary.  What if they have something else?  They call this one: Confirmation Bias. You are seeking information that only confirms your position… not denies it.  When you do this you can become narrow minded.  It can develop into all kinds of mental problems and make you frame your problems in such a way that you will not be able to see around them.

Other types of bias

The ever helpful Wikipedia resource lists a bunch of other biases which you can read about here.  The main type of biases I have mentioned here are probably the most common ones I have seen.  The main point of what I have said here is that these things live with us.  In a later post I will talk about surfacing hidden biases and learning to develp yourself from them.

*Image Credit: Namida-k

Scholar Robert Chua says that we have spoken so much about decision making that we have gotten it to the point where we can no longer talk about it in a meaningful way.  However, we need to say something because we are of those that must make decisions.  I think decision making is the act of making choices in certain situations where there are knowns and unknowns.

Your boss comes to you and says can we afford to do this?  Should I do that?  You job is to reason between the two points of view and reach a conclusion.   You reason between that which we know about and that which know about.  Here is a story from my own life:

Recently I was asked what I thought about an assignment from a student… was it good enough?  When I looked at her assignment it looked to me as if it was fine so I sent back an email saying that I thought it was fine.  When marking time comes I have to apply a set of criteria.  That criteria returned an above average grade but wasn’t a ‘perfect’ grade.The student then contacted me and said, ‘You told me that I would get a better grade, you said it was fine.’  My very unpopular response was: yes the assessment was fine and that’s the grade I gave it.  To me it was good enough.  It was fine.  But it wasn’t great.
On the surface it looks like I am being nasty.  However, that student demonstrated a decision to trust me to tell her what I thought.  She gave me the criteria for making that decision.  She asked me if it was good enough.  To me it was.  But I can’t tell you what a great assignment is until I see one.  Why?  Simply because I don’t set out to make perfect assignments… as a student that’s your job.  I can give you the parameters.  I can tell you this is what I think greatness looks like, but unless you show me greatness… how will I know what it looks like?

The decision for me was based on a set of knowns in my mind.  What is good enough?  I have a set of ideas locked away in my mind that says, ‘here this is what is good enough’.  Therefore my response was framed that way.

In my way of thinking we make decisions to solve problems.  Note:
1.    A decision is made under constraints
2.    It’s based on what we think the problem is
3.    Under the constraints of 1 and 2 we make certain choices
4.    We act
For this reason when you make decisions you need to be aware that you are acting under constraints.  What kind of constraints?  What kind of process are you involved in?  What kind of pressure has your boss or employees or YOU put yourself under?  All of these things affect the way you make decisions.  A decision is something you make based on a certain criteria.

What kind of decisions do you make?

What is your role?  What are the expectations of your role?  Here is an example from my own life:

Role: I am a lecturer

Expectations: To undertake research, teaching and service to the university under given constraints.

Decisions I make and am responsible for: When to do research, how to manage students and deliver courses, when and where to help the in the university decision making process.
These are the decisions I am paid for.  Note the constraints.  These are the things I can’t control.  I can’t just make my own decisions when I find a cheat for example.  I can use judgement.  The question is am I aware of those constraints?  Do I know what I am responsible for?

Decisions are those things we have to come to a conclusion about in which we must choose a course of action.  They are based on what we know about something and unfortunately, what we don’t know.  In my life I have often made decisions on what people have known and how they have come to know it, without realising I am operating under different constraints.  That is, when I make decisions, I have thought I could copy what someone else had done and expect much the same results.  It just won’t work.  Hence, this is why we haven’t yet invented a business system that can actually do the job it was assigned to do.  Every organisation is different… every person is different.  We have different stories we tell ourselves. And on we go.

To conclude this post I want you to begin to think about the decisions you make and under what constraints you make them.  What are the rules you use to make decisions?  What pressure do you put yourself under?  Think about it… the answer may just surprise you.

I have just finished reading a book in which the author quoted Mother Theresa:

“We are not here to be successful we are here to be faithful.”

Mother Theresa was perhaps referring to her “calling” to help the poor.   When I read this quote I felt that there is a divide being suggested by Mother Theresa that is worth considering on a Sunday morning.  The question I have is this: To be successful often requires sacrifice of personal values yet most successful people are highly actualised individuals living a fairly successful life!  Take the Richard Bransons of the world.  These people are highly effective as people and quite successful.  They appear to be living in the their values and actualising their destiny.

However, I don’t really think Mother Theresa meant this saying as ROI.  I think she meant to say that, in order to follow purpose and be faithful you must learn to change the way you assess your life.  The measuring stick you use to say, “I am successful” should become “I am faithful”.  Faithfulness is an entirely different quality than success orientation.  Yet, inherent in the concepts of personal success are the exact qualities of faithfulness to personal desire we see Mother Theresa talking about.   This brings me to my point (at last): Most people I have me trade off their ‘faithfulness’ for a sense of ‘personal security’… myself included.  Here are two recent examples of people I happen to know:

Person A said to me the other day that they like to invent things and showed me a very clever device that they had built that was about tracking trajectory of bullets and recording speed etc.  I must admit I had no idea of what it could do but the concept fascinated me.   This person then went on to say something that struck me.  It would be what they would do if life didn’t get in the way.   The personal security they got from their job meant they traded off the need to be faithful to themselves.

Person B I met at a conference I was part of organising.  This individual was highly successful and very enthusiastic.  I got to talking to this person and realised when I was talking to them that they had never traded anything for faithfulness and wound up being successful anyway.  Was this some kind of accident.  No.  As I got to talking to this person I learned that he had learned at a very young age that if you want to make it, you have to take risks and follow your heart… even if it means trading off personal security for a little while.  That is, to find your life’s purpose you must never trade off your values to find personal security.

Between these two examples is an important truth.  There are some people who find success in what they do on both the level of personal security and faithfulness.  These are a rare breed.  My wife happens to be one of these people.  God bless her, you can’t make her do anything she doesn’t think she shouldn’t be doing.  Her personal conviction (shared with me) is that somebody should be home to take care of the children.  Now, I respect people who don’t share my convictions and this way of life isn’t for everyone. However, my wife has chosen in her case to live from her heart and invest time in our children instead of working.  There is a huge cost involved here and I am paying for it!  Yet, living from the heart and not trading off personal security is what Mother Theresa I think is hinting at.

I could cite others who I believe have found the nexus between personal security and faithfulness but I will leave it up to you to seek them out.  I want to finish this post today with a thought that struck me when I read that quote.  Purpose doesn’t necessarity mean riches but it does mean a level of success that goes beyond the idea of materialism and into a deeper more satisfying spiritual level.  There is no guarantee that if we quit our jobs and begin to do the things we love that we will make money.  Nevertheless, if we continue (myself included) living a life that reflects more “personal security” than “heart value” we will find a level of misery than transcends our desire for personal security.  What we must do, is find a way to express our hearts desire on a daily basis anyway while we have personal security… but that is another post for another day.

*Image Credit: jurvetson

You don’t have to look far to find a meme these days.  One at hand example is the growing popularity of things as seemingly random as the graph jam blog.  The question that strikes me is the randomness of these ideas.  They emerge and are passed around the internet and seem to make no sense.  But as Malcolm Gladwell asked in the Tipping Point… what makes these ideas stick?

Stickiness can’t be planned… but if you don’t plan you fail?

The rate at which something becomes popular on the internet is alarming.  I have seen one (yes it’s sad) of my posts be stumbled and hit 2000 unique visitors in less than an hour.  That’s small fish compared to some people I know who do that by lunch everyday.  The thing that always gets me about these peaks and valleys is the collective consciousness that drives it.  To have this kind of short term stickiness you need something that makes enough people happy… at once… for a short period of time.  The randomness of stickiness makes you wonder what it is that people love so much about things as bizarre as this poor bastard at the University of Florida.

Shared consciousness creates stickiness

What makes these things stick is the shared consciousness around the singular element of meaning… or the thing that makes us laugh at the poor tase me bro man. What sticks relates to people and how they think about that one thing.  That doesn’t mean everybody loves it… it means that equally as many people hate it.  Then when we come to see it… it divides us into a love/hate paradox.  Very few people I have ever met I have learned to think in a way that helps to see multiple intersecting dimensions (Alan is good at this).   Most people learn to enjoy a false positive narrative when it comes to life because it’s easier than admitting that stuff happens so randomly.  Yet, in the disorganisation of things, especially consciousness there is an equilibrium.  It’s there … otherwise we wouldn’t ever be able to detect the patterns that appear to us in the everyday flow of life.  We also actively create these patterns… which makes it all the more confusing.

Randomness Stickiness

Ralph Stacey used a concept called: complex adaptive systems to explain how in social networks people learn and grow through disequilibrium.  As new problems arise there is an emergent response to the crisis which we in turn find ourselves trying to manage.  We try different concepts until one sticks for no other reason that the fact that we tried it.  In affiliate marketing circles and in general most of the successful people will tell you that they make so much money because they keep on trying and until they find the random stickiness they are after.  Once the ‘hit the vien’ it’s low cost-high profit.  In between it’s trial, error and misery.

The most recent example in my life of random stickiness came when I wrote a paper for the Australasian Journal of Information Systems.  At first the editors said no but might accept it if we revised it.  We changed the title and indeed the focus of the paper and they accepted it immediately without contacting us.  Something we wrote stuck with the editors of the journal or they needed papers!

Right place at the right time is random stickiness

So is being at the wrong place at the wrong time.  The guy who started Facebook and the other one who did myspace were probably reading social trends.  I strongly doubt however they mapped out the random stickiness that happened to their sites.  That said, intuition might have had something to do with it. What about the LOLCATS people?  These are those things that for some reason large groups love and hate at the same time.  About all I can work out is four things that I have noticed that these ’sticky’ things have in common.

Four essential properties of stickiness

1. Engagement: People engaging with the core concept - interacting consciousness that engages to create a platform that people use or something that is liked as a basic concept.

2. Talkability: Something people are willing to remark on and spread the word for to whoever and whomever they please.  Reasons for this vary but I have noticed that people like sharing something that adds a certain amount of humour to the lives of others.  Most people share things because it gives them a sense of worth and creates value for the audience.

3. Passability: Something which is passable or easy to share creates the possibility of stickiness but does not absolutely guarantee it.  If it’s easy to tell people about something then it’s easy to spread.

4. Lastability: The final point about stickiness that I have noticed is the life cycle of a concept.  To me most (not all) high volume concepts, on the web at least, last a lot less longer that others.  I have seen posts on other people’s blog have an immediate hit then nothing whereas others will last a lot longer because of the inherent value of the post.   The same goes for anything.  There is a natural limit to how long something can last.  There is short term lastability (i.e. get a first life) and long term lasting(ness) which continually uses the same engagement factor to create more value from the same essential concept (i.e. problogger or digg). A short term lasting concept creates value for a shorter cycle (but might have higher initial volume) as opposed to a long term lasting concept which creates value over an extended period.  Either way the level of engagement with a concept and it’s lasting quality are important levels of stickiness.

A contrast to what I am saying here is found in the one hit wonder.  They come and then they go.  Why?  Random stickiness.  I have had no end of trying concepts that failed (especially in business) and I have to say I had never really considered the level of stickiness involved.  It’s incredibly important to do market research and find these streams… but you must remember it’s random.  If it could be continually predicted to 100% reliability (or 95% for the statisticians out there ) then we would all be rich.  We aren’t all rich.  Some of us are pretty far from rich… actually.  That aside, how something sticks and why it does is random.

Recently I have noticed a growing trend on my wife’s blog. The last group of posts have been about me and my misadventures.  The last one was about comments I made when I was marking recently.  Before that was how some old lady confused me for a dog thus giving the impression that I was cute… of course they were talking about my dog.  Before that I was buying bargain bread and destroying a possum with my awesome flatulence.

I like the one where I ended up working a long week and worked out that I was making $10.50 an hour. The other one is where I am eating snacks and leaving my rubbish in the car… priceless.   I could go on for hours… and I will.  No, I won’t.  Suffice to say that reading several posts (probably in the order of 100) of the dumb things I do.   Given that this is the problem solving blog and not my life story there is a lesson.  It’s this: it’s good to be reminded of how human you are.  You often don’t realise the silly things you do and how other people think about them. Having someone else write about you is also very surreal.

On the other hand some of those posts have left me shaking my head.  Still, it’s been interesting to read about my life from my wife’s point of view.  I am still waiting for the next suprise. Off the top of my head I can name five things that I have done that are what we call “blog worthy”!