Improving empathy means improving everything

By Duncan Anderson. To see all blogs click here.

One sentence summary: Empathy is built by practicing trying to understand others. You are not born good at empathizing. IMO building empathy is a core way to improve everything. 

Summary: 

Have you tried to understand what others think? 

• I don't know why but I didn't start practicing trying to understanding others until my mid 20s. It wasn't on the curriculum!!

  • I now systematically try to empathize with others (details of how I do this below)

  • I also systematically try to empathize with myself. 

    • The number of times I have had no idea of what is driving myself, I’ve reacted and not responded, is totally ridiculous!

• It’s the best fun. I’ve learned so so so much! 

Improving empathy means improving at everything?

• Everything = ultimately the outcome of human capital (eg the chair you are sitting on, the food you eat, computer you use, etc)

• Everything = outcome of decisions that have been made

• Human capital:

  • Trying to understand others => makes you better at empathising => better at helping others

  • Better at empathising with others => better at understanding yourself => better at empathising with yourself => live a better life 

• Decisions:

  • Decisions = logic + emotion

    • Practicing empathising with others and yourself => better at emotional awareness => better at accurately explaining emotions => better at emotion regulation

      • Therefore increased empathy => increased resolution of emotion => better decision making quality

  • Values are logic which resonate as emotions 

Want to help? 

• Want to help others? Practice trying to understand others and yourself. Aka cultivate empathy

• Want to help yourself? Practice trying to understand others and yourself. Aka cultivate empathy

• Want to make better decisions? Practice trying to understand others and yourself. Aka cultivate empathy

• Want to help improve your own and society’s values? Practice trying to understand others and yourself. Aka cultivate empathy

  • Want to help? Cultivate empathy

Cultivate cultivate cultivate: 

• Are you physically fit? You go to the gym to build physical health. 

• Are you knowledge / logic fit? You read books to build your knowledge. 

• Jingle: Are you emotionally fit? Practice understanding others and yourself to build your empathy / emotional health / emotional intelligence. 

  • Details for how I try to cultivate empathy are below. 

++++++++++++++++++++++

Details: 

Growth vs fixed mindset: 

• Fixed mindset = you are born good or bad at things. Eg good at maths. Eg bad at English

• Growth mindset = built not born = you can cultivate anything. 

• If your friend has played 100 hours of a video game and you have played zero hours who is going to be better? 

  • IMO everything is cultivated. You start off bad at everything. Bad at walking, bad at talking, bad at maths, bad at writing. 

  • So basically a growth mindset should be applied to all mental abilities. 

• I believe the most fixed mindset words are someone is 'smart' or someone is 'dumb'. 

  • Again, no one is born able to walk or talk, IMO skills are cultivated. 

  • Smart = have spent time cultivating a skill. 

  • Dumb = are yet to spend time cultivating a skill. 

• IMO don’t let anyone call you smart or dumb. 

• IMO don’t call anyone smart or dumb. 

  • You are really good at maths, you have done a good job cultivating that skill. 

  • Let me see if I can assist with this problem you are solving. One of the things I’ve been trying to cultivate is ‘thinking in models’, let me show you how I would try to represent this problem as a model. 

  • You try to write a blog for the first time, it’s not very good. That’s because you’ve never tried writing! 

  • Seinfeld is famous for pushing himself to write a joke a day. Want to get good at something, start practicing / cultivating! 

• Skill in this sense is often assumed to be a hard skill, such as the examples above (articulation, mathematics etc). Skills can also refer to soft skills. 

• IMO you are not born good at empathizing or bad at empathizing. You have either built empathy by trying to understand others or you are yet to cultivate this skill. 

• As with everything you’re practicing, you’ll likely not be correct the majority of the time early on as you develop your empathy muscle.

Ways to ‘cultivate’ empathy: 

• A: For yourself with yourself

  • Write down when you felt frustrated, when you felt excited, when you felt drained, etc in a doc. 

  • Then on the weekend try to explain why. 

  • Here is a model I use to try an unpack things which I called the ‘Storied Model’. 

    • 1. Stimulus

    • => 2. Story about Stimulus

    • => 3. Perception of Stimulus

    • => 4. Response / Reaction to Perception of Stimulus

    • => 5. Outcome (emotional outcome)

  • What I’m typically trying to do during the week is to note the ‘5. Outcome (emotional outcome)’ down with some context (eg this meeting) and then I try to investigate what happened and why through the other stories when I have the space. 

  • Example: in the meeting on Tuesday about [X] I became frustrated, why did this happen? 

  • Example: I was really excited on Wednesday when person [x] sent me this email, why did this happen? 

  • Seriously this is SO ENERGISING! 

• B: For yourself with others

  • A decent portion of my work one on one weekly meetings is doing “A: For yourself with yourself” but with another person. 

  • If you are anything like me you’ll miss many things about yourself and the situation. Speaking with others can really help you understand massively! 

  • Example: While I was trying to self regulate, I was experiencing frustration in [meeting x], I’m hoping you can help me unpack this. 

• C: For others with yourself

  • “One of the most famous cognitive biases is the Fundamental Attribution Error, that is, the tendency to blame the actions of others on their internal characteristics, while excusing the actions of oneself due to external factors. The classic example is driving in traffic: a driver that cuts you off is a jerk, but if you cut a driver off it is because you are rushing to the emergency room.” Ben Thompson. 

  • I try to assume positive intent and afford others the graces I give myself. 

  • I note when I see others exhibiting strong emotions and the context and then investigate eg using the Storied Model when I have space ‘trying as hard as possible to look at the world through their eyes’. 

  • THIS IS SO REVEALING, SO ENERGISING!

  • Example: in a meeting on Thursday it appears that Person A was being really equanimous. Why? 

• D: For others with others

  • “Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.” Carl Jung

  • This is ‘C: For others with yourself’ except with others, eg the person who you are analysing or someone who can help you get a better understanding. 

  • Discussing others without them in the room with the intent to help is a beautiful, caring, positive sum action. 

  • Discussing others without them in the room without the intent to help is character assination, it is politics, it is negative sum and it is totally not cool! 

  • Example: I was really impressed with the calmness with which Person B handled siguation Y, do you think that is a fair characterisation of what happened? And if so thoughts on how they were able to do this so well? 

“It’s good to learn from your own mistakes, it’s better to learn from others.”

• I do learning from my immediate surrounds, but also try to incorporate the wisdom of others. 

• If you have read many books on economics you have probably learned a bunch about economics. If you have read many books on empathy then you have probably learned a bunch about empathy. You can read books / podcasts etc that will ‘allow you to walk a mile in someone else’s shoes’. 

• Fav podcasts: 

  • Dear HBR - to learn empathy about different work circumstances such as ‘difficult people’, ‘overcoming negativity’, ‘ineffective leaders’, etc etc. It’s GOLD! 

  • Where Should We Begin? with Esther Perel - live couples (romantic) counselling sessions. Everyone should listen to these IMO. 

  • Reboot - effectively therapy sessions with entrepreneurs. 

• Quality books:

  • The Art of Empathy: A Complete Guide to Life's Most Essential Skill

  • Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis - about growing up poor and white in america. Super good! 

  • Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ

  • Down and Out in Paris and London: George Orwell - yes the 1984 Orwell. It’s about his time being homeless in the Great Depression. 

Improving empathy means improving at everything?

• Everything = ultimately the outcome of human capital (eg the chair you are sitting on, the food you eat, computer you use, etc)

• Everything = outcome of decisions that have been made

• Human capital:

  • Trying to understand others => makes you better at empathising => better at helping others

  • Better at empathising with others => better at understanding yourself => better at empathising with yourself => live a better life 

• Decisions:

  • Decisions = logic + emotion

    • Practicing empathising with others and yourself => better at emotional awareness => better at accurately explaining emotions => better at emotion regulation

      • Therefore increased empathy => increased resolution of emotion => better decision making quality

  • Values are logic which resonate as emotions 

Want to help? 

• Want to help others? Practice trying to understand others and yourself. Aka cultivate empathy

• Want to help yourself? Practice trying to understand others and yourself. Aka cultivate empathy

• Want to make better decisions? Practice trying to understand others and yourself. Aka cultivate empathy

• Want to help improve your and societies values? Practice trying to understand others and yourself. Aka cultivate empathy

  • Want to help? Cultivate empathy

Positive Sum Pushback Approaches - "Every interaction can be positive sum, it doesn't matter if you are disagreeing."

By Duncan Anderson. To see all blogs click here.

Two Sentence Summary: 

• The goal is to put forward a different view to someone, have them change their mind and enjoy the process! 

• The goal is to put forward a different view to someone, be open and flexible to other views, change your view and enjoy the process!

"I don't like that man, I must get to know them better." Abraham Lincoln. 

You learn nothing from people who agree with you. 

Someone who has a different view to me, yay, an opportunity to learn, an opportunity for a mutually positive sum interaction. I must go speak to that person BUT endeavour to have both parties be energised at the end.

Mutually positive sum = 1. where after the discussion both parties are energised + 2. both parties would redo the discussion again if they had their time again + 3. both parties look forward to discussing with each other in the future. 

Jingle: "Yay, someone with a different view to me, I must go have a mutually positive sum interaction with them."

“Every interaction can be positive sum” 

• "Every interaction can be positive sum, it doesn't matter if you are disagreeing with someone or agreeing with someone, providing constructive feedback or complimenting a strength"

• "Every interaction can be negative sum, it doesn't matter if you are disagreeing with someone or agreeing with someone, providing constructive feedback or complimenting a strength"

Positive sum pushback approaches:

• When should you push back? 

  • If you have a medium+ disagreement then should bring it up. 

  • You don't always get onto the same page by the end of the discussion (eg you might need to disagree but commit) but you should always bring up a medium+ point where you don't agree. 

  • As they say 'don't sweat the small things'. 

• Model for bringing up point where you don't agree = 1. approach + 2. words + 3. tone

• Possible Pushback Approaches:

  • Option 1: disagree without providing a reason. 

    • Obviously this isn't good. IMO this is never ok. 

  • Option 2: disagree then provide reason but with combative negative sum words and tone  

    • eg I don't agree, I think you missed a crucial point that renders your conclusion invalid. The point is [insert point]

  • Option 3: disagree then provide invalid reason

    • Invalid reason = doesn’t have evidence but needs it. Not all reasons need evidence. However not everything needs evidence, some things are self evident. "You do not require evidence if it's self evident."

    • The two main categories I look at for where problems can come from: 

      • 1. The idea is bad

      • 2. Time. 

        • 2.1 You need to spend 100 hour to save 10 hours. Clearly not worth it! 

        • 2.2 You have a deadline, and the amount of time needed to implement an idea will not be recouped before the deadline.

    • Example of invalid = I don’t know if we have time 

    • vs example of valid = this is a good idea but believe it will take 30 hours meaning that we’ll miss our deadline if we do this. Is it ok if we delay? 

  • Option 4: don’t agree but can’t articulate the reason in the moment => ask for time to consider

    • Sometimes there is something that doesn't sit right with you but you can't articulate what ‘it’ is at the current time. Ask to have time to think about it and say is it ok if I get back to your by [insert date].

    • Don’t agree if you don’t agree, ask for time! 

  • Option 5: disagree then provide valid reason but with positive sum interthinking words and tone 

    • eg I'm not sure I agree. A point I think is worth considering is [insert point]. What are your thoughts on this?

  • Option 6: provide reason then explain what your conclusion is (ie reason first, not second)

    • Eg here is what I think is an interesting [insert point]. I think this points to a conclusion different to what you put forward. Do you have any thoughts on the point I put forward? (ie inviting constructive feedback on your point)

    • I find that often starting with reason before conclusion can be less ‘confrontational’ / more positive sum. 

  • Option 7: asking the other party to help you understand their point of view. 

    • Background: 

      • Let's say there is proposal 1 and proposal 2. you like proposal 1 but the other party like proposal 2. you have already tried 'option 3' but it has fallen flat.

    • What to do now? 

      • Are you able to help me understand your reasons for preferring proposal 2 over proposal 1? 

      • ie you are turning to tables, instead of you trying to explain your point of view, you get the other party to explain their point of view and then you can see if their is a hole in either your or their logic to talk to. 

Emotional energy exchange enitiative - interacting with yourself and others better!

By Duncan Anderson. To see all blogs click here.

One Minute Summary:

• The best relationships are mutually positive sum; this is where:

  • 1. you give others energy AND the act of giving others energy gives you energy. 

  • 2. Others give you energy AND the active of others giving you energy gives them energy. 

• I believe there is no upper limit on much value you can give someone… And no upper limit to what someone can give to you, so let's give each other lots :)!! 

• One key way to add value is to help each other manifest and propagate good energy, remove bad energy and support each other emotionally at the right times. 

• In short:

  • What emotions do you feed yourself? 

  • What emotions do you feed to others? 

  • What emotions do others feed to you? 

Jingle: let’s set up an ‘Emotional energy exchange enitiative’... a mutually positive sum one! I’ll try and make your life good, I’d appreciate it if you tried to help make mine good too!

++++++++++

Overview

Model and elaboration time: 

• Foundation layer = L1: Emotional Energy

• Middle layer = L2: Verbal Communication

• Top Layer = L3: Output

• Comment: 

  • IMO your Emotional Energy will affect your Verbal Communications, and how you Verbally Communicate in turn affects your Output (eg a project you are working on). 

• You are always communicating to yourself and others on an emotional level whether you are conscious about it or not. 

• I believe the goal should be: 

  • To yourself: overall you are 1. Emotionally self sufficient and 2. Have sufficient emotional regulation abilities. 

  • With others: overall you have emotionally mutually positive sum interactions with others (at more than the positive sentiment override level)

    • Emotionally mutually positive sum interactions with others = 1. You add emotional energy to their emotional tank * 2. You help regulate others * 3. The process of doing this ‘support / growth’ adds energy to your tank. 

    • Please note that sometimes this will mean showing someone how to grow emotionally. Other times it will be supporting them. See ‘Helping Humans Handbook’ on ‘Push vs Support vs Intervene vs Leave alone’. 

• If you can do this well I think you’ll have a much better relationship with yourself, with others and others with you. One way to look at this is that you are effectively caring more and better, yay! Caring is cool! 

We can help each other with our emotional energy: 

• Doing this makes a better emotional environment for everyone. 

• Do you want to get better at problem solving? Do you want others to help you get better at problem solving? Well I think you want to focus on improving your emotional energy and having others help you as well. Honestly I feel that 33% of time should be spent on improving ‘L3: Output’ (eg problem solving), 33% on ‘L2: Verbal Communications’ and 33% on ‘L1: Emotional Energy’. 

• This means that: 

  • 1. We let each other know what emotional energy we think the other is exhibiting

  • 2. We help others with their emotional energy (eg 2.1 Tell them to lift: you are being draining, quit it! Or 2.2 Support them: you are being draining, wanna talk about what’s on your mind? Or can i take something off your plate?)

  • 3. We try and figure out what emotional energy we want to create and then how to manifest this (eg inspiring, supportive, playful purpose, thoughtful disagreement, fruitful frustration, etc)

  • 4. We figure out how to propagate this energy. 

• If we can do this well it will mean: 

  • 1. We are better

  • 2. Others are better

  • 3. We enjoy interacting with each other better

  • 4. We care about each other more… and better 

• Riddle: 

  • Question: What does 4x betters + 1x more give you? 

  • Answer: good. Haha. this made me laugh. 

• “To improve is to change; to be perfect is to change often.” Winston Churchill. Please help me change! 

Questions to ask:

• What energy do you want to manifest internally? 

• Do you know what energy you exhibit to others?

• Have you confirmed that your perception of what you emotionally exhibit to others reality?

• What energy do others exhibit? Is this the type of energy you think that we want at Edrolo? 

• In the last week, have you tried to grow someone from an emotional energy point of view?

• In the last month, have you offered emotional support to someone?

+++++++++++++

Details

The impetus / background:  

• I’ve been at a health retreat and one of the things I did was ‘equine therapy’. 

  • This is therapy with horses. 

  • Now i’ve spent basically no time with horses in my life. If you know horses this isn’t new news: horses are freaky emotionally perceptive. 

  • The only way you can communicate with them is through your emotions. You can’t talk to them, you can’t give them a project you have done. 

  • It got me thinking about the world from an emotional energy specific lens :). 

• Then I thought about this TED Talk. Emotional contagion is a real thing!

• Then I made this model :) 

• Foundation layer = L1: Emotional Energy

• Middle layer = L2: Verbal Communication

• Top Layer = L3: Output

• Comment: 

• IMO we are all communicating on the emotional energy level at all times. 

  • For me, at Secondary School and University I was basically only getting feedback on ‘L3: Output.” How did I go on that test, did I get a good grade for that project, etc 

  • I wasn’t getting feedback about ‘L2: Verbal Communication’ in Secondary School… except being told to be quiet. I talked a LOT. 

  • When I started work post University I realised that ‘L2: Verbal Communication’ was very important and started to actively work on improving my comms. 

    • Secondary School and University were basically single player games for me, work has been a multiplayer game. IMO to do well at a multiplayer game you need to ‘L2: Verbal Communicate’ well. 

    • So I’ve been proactively thinking about ‘L2: Verbal Communications” in one form or another for 12+ years. 

  • I’ve thought about ‘L1: Emotional Energy’ but honestly not to the extent of ‘L1: Output’ or ‘L2: Verbal Comms’... 

  • I honestly think that emotional energy / state is the foundational layer. Ie emotional energy massively affects the other two! So if energy is not good then everything else isn’t good. 

    • IMO this is the summary of this HBR article, that ‘emotional energy / mood’ is the most important thing. 

• Cool I thought. Let’s go blog about this and develop some thoughts :). 

Indulge me in a bit of a jaunt - I like this model: 

• This is one lens to look at the world through and it’s one that I’ve heard psychologists talk about a lot.

• There are many versions of this model, the above attributes are not exhaustive. 

• Basically get biological, social and psychological areas right = have a good life. 

• I think what we and others say emotionally (ie your emotional energy) can make a massive positive or negative difference in social and psychological areas. Ie if we get better at ‘Emotional Energy’ we get better at life.

I would like to hopefully be great on all levels of this model “L1: Emotional Energy => L2: Verbal Communication => L3: Output”

• This blog is to explore the “L1: Emotional Energy” level and see how I can hopefully ‘level up’. 

With yourself: 

• Goal: overall you are ‘1. Emotionally self sufficient’ and ‘2. Have sufficient emotional regulation abilities’

  • Model 1:

Model 2:

• Emotional Outcome = 

  • 1. emotional self awareness (what am I feeling) 

  • * 2. why am I feeling this (see Helping Humans Hard Fun and Storied Model blogs) 

  • * 3. ability to change stimulus / story about stimulus / response to stimulus 

  • * 4. ability to regulate emotion (eg to get good at experiencing the good emotion, eg to not have the bad emotion take a wrecking ball to everything)

• IMO you need a good outcome in all 4 variables above to be in a good place internally! 

• What is truly truly crucial is that IMO a lot of the time you are only partially aware of your Emotional Energy. And sometimes the Emotional Energy you think you are exhibiting isn’t what someone else is receiving. 

• Details: 

  • Sufficiency typically means “positive sentiment override” or better. Ie emotional self sufficiency = 75%+ of the time you are energised with less than 25% of the time being drained. If you work for 4 hours where 3 are energising and 1 is draining you don’t care about the draining hour because of the 3 energising hours, you have “positive sentiment override” for the 1 draining hour because of the energising 3. 

  • I think everyone has good and bad days, if I have one draining day a week then I’m a happy boy, ie i’m not down about having 1 bad day a week.  

  • Also bad = draining. Good = energising. bad != negative emotions like sadness, frustration, etc. 

    • I think emotional health is feeling all emotions in a healthy way. Not ‘only feeling “good” emotions.’ 

    • “The loss of sadness. How psychology transformed normal sorrow into a depressive disorder.” is a very interesting book. 

    • Sadness done well is energising. If you have lost something you have cared about you should feel sad. It’s reminiscing about the good times and how you won’t have more of them, it can teach you to treasure things :)! So done well :( = :). Hahahahah! 

      • Sadness done well = sumptuous sadness

      • Sadness done poorly = sucky sadness

    • Frustration done well is energising. It is a signal that something isn’t good enough and you need to fix it. So it gives you the motivation to do something to fix the source of frustration. 

      • Frustration done well = fruitful frustration

      • Frustration done poorly = f@#$ing frustration

    • You can do good emotions badly as well. Let’s say something good happens at work but you don’t take a second to ‘celebrate’. You just charge on by and you then don’t let yourself experience the goodness that could have been. 

      • Good done well = glad goodness

      • Good done poorly = gone goodness

• Examples: 

  • Read ‘Designed vs Default expectations’ and see the ‘Storied Model’. 

  • Good life = 1. Doing the right things * 2. Doing things right. 

    • I personally find that ‘2. Doing things right’ is harder than thing the right things to do. 

With others:

• This is the part I’m most excited about. Yay! 

  • This is you with others

  • And others with you

• Model time: 

• How you affect others = 1. what do they do to your energy + 2. What energy do you put out

• 1. what do they do to your energy = 1.1 remove downside + 1.2 support + 1.3 add upside. 

  • Sometimes need to amp someone up

  • Sometimes calm down as too jacked

  • Sometimes tell them to stop being negative

  • Sometimes offer support. 

  • Sometimes tell them they are walking past something they shouldn't. They need to get annoyed about this and fix it. 

• 2. What energy do you put out

  • It shouldn't be one thing. It should be what it needs to be. 

  • Sometimes inspiring, hurting, frustrated, calming, caring, put in primary emotions

• Comments

  • Most of the time at work I want to be conscious about the energy I'm putting out. 

  • If you get this energy thing right you have this beautiful mutually positive sum dance with everyone! 

    • Sometimes the other pulls in the opposite direction to you, sometimes they ameliorate, sometimes amplify further where you are heading, other times they teach you something totally new that you weren't aware of. 

    • It's ballet, it's poetry. 

  • What is crucial is that we are actively helping shape ourselves AND others. “Hope is not a strategy.” I expect you to help me learn where to improve More than that, please try and actually change me! 

  • Good people add value. Bad people take value. It's not about necessarily saying everyone should be energetic, constantly have one mood. It's being exactly what is needed for that moment, sometimes affecting others and other times others affecting you! Yay!

  • Basically if we get this right we’ll all: 

    • 1. Become more aware of our emotional energy

    • 2. Figure out what emotional energy we should be manifesting for different situations

    • 3. Be able to manifest and propagate the energy we want for that specific situation

    • 4. Improve our emotional sufficiency and regulation

    • 5. Improve others  emotional sufficiency and regulation

  • In short:

    • I’ll try and make your life good, I’d appreciate it if you tried to make my life good too.

    • I’ll try and improve your emotional energy (which means exhibiting all types of energy in a positive sum fashion, not just being eg positive), I’d appreciate it if you tried to improve my emotional energy. 

Helping Humans Handbook - don’t just support, also push, intervene and leave alone!

By Duncan Anderson. To see all blogs click here.

One sentence summary: helping != supporting. Helping = Push OR Support OR Intervene OR Leave alone. Which one and when? Well that’s the fun! 

Summary: 

• When wanting to help humans you can: 

  • A: push them to lift

  • B: support them

  • C: intervene and take something off their plate

  • D: leave alone

  • Comment: helping humans means figuring out which of the above to do and when. 

• I’ve found that early managers often only ever ‘B: support’ when they are working with direct reports. “Having a default is a fault.”

  • Overusing support at best stunts the growth of someone (sometimes the optimal amount of support for growing someone is zero support, see Energising Expectations blog)

  • Overusing support at worst makes someone become dependent

• Learning when to “Push vs Support vs Intervene vs Leave alone” is a challenge but it is fun… and challenging fun is the best type of fun! 

• A framework (aka a handbook) for how to think about helping humans:

  • 1. Empathise don’t apologize

  • 2. Root cause analysis (no proximate cause analysis)

  • 3. Push vs Support vs Intervene vs Leave alone

• Jingle: support sufficiently, push pertinently, intervene intermittently and leave alone limitedly :)!

++++++++++++++++++

Details:

Theory: 

• Helping Humans Handbook: 

  • If someone comes to you asking for help, what do you do?

    • (optional) 1. Empathise don’t apologize

    • 2. Root cause analysis (no proximate cause analysis)

    • 3. Push vs Support vs Intervene vs Leave alone

  • If you are trying to help someone, what do you do? 

    • (optional) 1. Empathise don’t apologize

    • 2. Root cause analysis (no proximate cause analysis)

    • 3. Push vs Support vs Intervene vs Leave alone

  • Comment: 

    • Yes the exact same framework can apply for both proactively and reactively helping. 

    • Clearly this ‘handbook’ isn’t comprehensive, however hopefully it’s helpful! 

• 1. Empathise don’t apologize (honestly, this could be it’s own blog all together):

  • When someone is unhappy they will have a reason (narrative) for why unhappiness happened. 

  • It is important to empathise (ie recognise unhappiness and say we want to not have unhappiness) BUT to get to the bottom of whether the narrative someone has for the unhappiness is fair and reasonable. 

  • Empathising = recognising unhappiness and that you are here to help BUT not endorsing the narrative someone has until you can get to the bottom of whether you agree with the narrative. 

  • Apologizing = recognising unhappiness and that you are here to help AND endorsing the narrative someone has for being unhappy without consciously agreeing / disagreeing with the narrative. 

    • A typical pitfall I see some first time managers make is that if a direct report is unhappy, the manager takes this as their failing and immediately apologized saying it’s ‘the manager’s fault’ and ‘they’ll fix this’. 

  • “Problems come from when you have an incorrect understanding of the world.” 

    • If one apologizes (ie endorses the narrative) when the narrative a person has for being unhappy is unfair then the unhappy person will feel justified for their narrative and hence feeling the way they do. 

    • This typically means they have cemented an incorrect interpretation of the world and this incorrect interpretation I’ve found will have second order negative consequences for both the person who is unhappy and person who endorsed the unfair narrative. Ie short term gain, long term pain. 

  • ‘Empathise don’t apologize’ process =

    • 1. Someone comes to you unhappy. 

    • 2. Empathise about how being unhappy isn’t good and you are here to help 

    • 3. Ascertain what the narrative is behind someone being unhappy

    • 4. Form your own view on if the narrative is a fair one and why. 

      • 5A. If you agree with the narrative then work together on what to do

      • 5B. If you don’t agree with the narrative then explain how you got to your view of the ‘narrative’ and mutually work to get to ‘truth’. 

  • A 2x2 for y’all

• 2. Root cause analysis (no proximate cause analysis)

• A proximate cause is not the ultimate ‘real’ reason an event occurred, the root cause is the ultimately reason an event occurred (link to read more). 

• Treating a proximate cause is like taking a panadol for a headache, it numbs the pain for a short while then it wears off and the headache comes back. Always attempt to find the root cause! 

• Environment vs Others vs Individual

  • When looking for root causes I try to always look from these three lenses. 

  • Let’s say someone is stressed, what could the root cause be? 

    • Environment = there is a lot of time pressure because of a looming deadline so this is ‘environmental’. 

    • Others = there is someone who is being particularly difficult to work with and this is causing stress.

    • Individual = is this person not cut out for the role they are currently in

• 3. Push vs Support vs Intervene vs Leave alone

  • With the synopsis of ‘2. Root cause analysis’ you need to then figure out what to do and how to do it! 

  • Comment: 

    • What I see first time managers doing? The default is ‘always support’. 

    • Support to a fault = dependency. 

    • “Having default answers is a fault.” “To the person with a hammer every problem looks like a nail.” “Good managers manage people how they need to be managed.” Custom pick you response to each situation. 

  • Interactions with others fall into three buckets: 

    • 1. Negative sum

    • 2. Zero sum

    • 3. Positive sum

    • Aim: only have positive sum interactions with others. 

      • Eg it doesn’t matter if you are needing to say someone has had sub-sufficient work quality, you can do it in a positive sum way where they: 1. Know how to improve, 2. Want to improve, 3. Liked the interaction and look forward to interacting with you again

      • Eg it doesn’t matter if someone is overreacting to a circumstance, done well you can: 1. Help them see this, 2. Help them understand the root drivers (eg see Default vs Designed Expectations), 3. Push vs Support vs Intervene appropriate, 4. Help the person move from ‘overreacting’ to an ‘appropriate reaction’. 5. They liked the interaction and look forward to interacting with you again

  • Leaving alone

    • Sometimes someone is in a stressful place and the best strategy is just to get out of their way. They have this and just need to crack on with getting things done. 

    • However other times you check in with someone and see things are fraying at the edges. They say they have got it and would like ‘get on with it’ aka ‘be left alone’. However you can see a better path to the finish line. 

• Sometimes despite being asked to be left alone the best course of action is not to leave people alone. 

Examples: 

Example - push & proactive

• What has happened?

  • You review output and believe that work is below sufficiency. 

• What to do:

  • 1. Empathise don’t apologize. 

    • Analysis: nil

    • What to say / do: Hi [person name], thanks for the work you have done here. I think I’ve found a way for you to level up. 

  • 2. Root cause analysis (no proximate cause analysis)

    • Analysis: the cause is that they do not know better. Ie this isn’t laziness. 

    • What to say / do: nil

  • 3. Push vs Support vs Intervene vs Leave alone

    • Analysis: done in stage 2

    • What to say / do: 

      • Are you please able to look at your work and then look at my changes to it and let me know what you think is better and why? 

      • If they agree with your changes are an improvement then say something like ‘wonderful, let’s make sure we incorporate this going forward’. 

  • Notes:

    • The person was not intentionally doing sub-optimal work

    • The goal is to provide feedback in a positive sum fashion, that will allow the person to realise 1. What sufficiency is and 2. Give them a push to be at or above sufficiency in the future. 

Example - push & reactive

• What has happened?

  • Someone comes to you stressed about delivery of a project on time. 

• What to do:

  • 1. Empathise don’t apologize. 

    • Analysis: nil

    • What to say / do: Hi [person name], thanks for coming to me. It’s not good that you are stressing, let’s see what we can do about this. Are you able to please let me know the details...

  • 2. Root cause analysis (no proximate cause analysis)

    • Analysis: 

      • Let’s say that in this case the person can’t see the ‘picture’ and that a GANNT chart needs to be made so one can see all the moving pieces and when they need to be done. 

      • From this it is clear the person doesn’t have actual time pressure. 

    • What to say / do: nil

  • 3. Push vs Support vs Intervene vs Leave alone

    • Analysis: done in stage 2

    • What to say / do: 

      • Please have a look at the GANNT chart I’ve made, please let me know if you feel the assumptions are reasonable or not. 

      • If they agree they are then they should not stress.

      • (push) Then you say, in the future, if you are worried about deadlines please make sure you make a GANNT chart. 

  • Notes:

    • When someone is stressed, it’s not fun for anyone involved. Whilst it’s important to try to help dampen the situation, we also do not have enough detail to know whether the narrative is correct / warranted

    • Once the root cause has been understood and we see the stress is unwarranted, the expectations are reset 

    • It is also an opportunity to give positive sum feedback for the future as well

Example - support & push (yeah I’m muddying things, I don’t care) 

• What has happened?

  • Someone comes to you saying they are struggling to work with another team member asking your advice. 

• What to do:

  • 1. Empathise don’t apologize. 

    • Analysis: nil

    • What to say / do: Hi [person name], thanks for coming to me. It’s not good that you are finding it difficult to communicate clearly with person x, let’s see what we can do about this. Are you able to please let me know the details...

  • 2. Root cause analysis (no proximate cause analysis)

    • Analysis: 

      • “Don’t attribute to malice that which can be attributed to miscommunication.” 

      • It turns out that form a meeting at the end both parties thought they were on the same page but actually had different understandings. 

      • To try and ward off against this I specifically try to rearticulate what has been agreed in a different way to what has been put forward and ask the other party to confirm if my rearticulation is accurate. 

      • You suggest that going forward both parties rearticulate the next steps to each other in an effort to minimise misunderstanding. 

      • The root cause is: others AND the individual (and not the environment) 

    • What to say / do: nil

  • 3. Push vs Support vs Intervene vs Leave alone

    • Analysis: done in stage 2

    • What to say / do: 

      • So you push the person who came to you to rearticulate. 

      • And you support the person by suggesting to the other party that they also rearticulate the proposed next steps. 

Example - intervene

• What has happened?

  • “When the going gets tough, the tough get going.” But no one is superman and everyone needs help at different points. 

  • The ultimately strength is being able to be vulnerable and asking for help. 

    • Strength != always having it and never asking for help. If you need help and don’t ask for help and you crack, or a key deadline is missed etc, then this helps no one. Not you, not your team, not the company. 

    • Strength = being able to shoulder responsibility but also being able to be vulnerable and know when to ask for help. 

  • Someone needs help but doesn’t see it and is refusing to be offered support. 

• What to do:

  • 1. Empathise don’t apologize. 

    • Analysis: nil

    • What to say / do: Hi [person name], I’m just wanting to double check we have an appropriate amount of buffer for delivering this project. 

  • 2. Root cause analysis (no proximate cause analysis)

    • Analysis: 

      • After looking it is clear we are not going to get the project done on time. 

      • The problem here is the ‘individual’ and not asking for help. 

    • What to say / do: nil

  • 3. Push vs Support vs Intervene vs Leave alone

    • Analysis: done in stage 2

    • What to say / do: 

      • Show your analysis of how there isn’t enough buffer. 

      • Say we are going to be helping out to make sure we don’t miss the deadline (ie intervene). 

++++++++++++++++++++++++

For fun: i wrote this as part of this blog but decided to remove. But I think it’s interesting all the same so have kept it here for people to read if they are keen! 

• “The meta goal of all businesses as being to help humanity.”

  • All businesses are ultimately the outcome of human capital. 

    • The chair you are sitting on is the outcome of humans. 

    • The internet is the outcome of humans. 

    • The food you eat is the outcome of humans, etc etc. 

  • So, if you upgrade human capital you are increase the capability of business. As long as the business has nobel mission, increase human capital => improve humanity

  • Business outcome = 1. Capability of a business’s human capital * 2. How motivated the human capital is

    • Put another way: Business outcome = 1. Capacity for output (capability of a business’s human capital) * 2. Output utilisation percentage (how motivated the human capital is)

• “We are all players, we are all coaches.”

  • We are here to help each other and to be helped by each other in a mutually positive sum fashion (see Partnership Economics blog). 

  • It is everyone's job to upgrade themselves (or grow themselves). Is it everyone's job to help upgrade those around them. 

  • It is everyone's job to look after their motivation. It is everyone's job to help with the motivation of those around them. It is not just eg a manager's job to grow a direct report. Ideally everyone should be helping everyone (ie direct report growing manager as much as manager growing direct report). Again, we are all coaches, we are all players. 

• Goals: 

  • Goal 1 = you can grow other people

  • Goal 2 = you become able to self direct personal growth (ie grow even with zero input from others… but obviously it’s best to be able to 1. Self direct growth AND 2. Get growth from others)

  • Goal 3 = you help others get to motivation self sufficiency (ie they don’t need external help to be motivated)

  • Goal 4 = you become motivation self sufficient (ie you don’t need motivation support from others except in extreme circumstances. There are always times we will need help from others, and we should 100% ask for help. But ideally only when circumstances call for it). 

Emotional health is experiencing the full spectrum of emotions in a healthy way, not only feeling ‘positive emotions’

By Duncan Anderson. To see all blogs click here.

Summary:

*note: “!=” means “not equal to”

Healthy emotions != positive emotions

Unhealthy emotions != negative emotions

IMO emotional health is feeling the full spectrum of emotions in a healthy way, not only feeling ‘positive emotions’

What does this blog contain?

• 1. A few different models for the spectrum of emotions

• 2. How to experience ‘negative’ emotions in a healthy way?

• 3. How to experience ‘negative’ emotions in an unhealthy way?

• 4. How to experience ‘positive’ emotions in a healthy way?

• 5. How to experience ‘positive’ emotions in an unhealthy way?

+++++++++++++++++++

Details:

What is the ‘spectrum’ of emotion? A couple of models for you:

How to feel ‘negative’ emotions in a healthy way? How to feel ‘negative’ emotions in an unhealthy way?

• Healthy frustration vs unhealthy frustration:

  • “The reasonable person adapts themselves to the world, the unreasonable person adapts the world to them. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable person.”

  • If you think something about the world can be improved then it could well frustrate you!

  • Frustration done healthy way = motivation to improve something.

    • You see that secondary school textbooks often don’t have answers for questions in them.

    • You have a ‘small’ frustration response.

    • This causes you to talk to people about how you feel having answers in textbooks will massively improve education.

    • Result: You form a team / company and build a new textbook with answers.

  • Frustration done unhealthy way = get pissed off and have people dislike you

    • You see that secondary school textbooks often don’t have answers for questions in them.

    • You have a ‘large’ frustration response.

    • This causes you to angrily talk to people about how you feel not having answers in textbooks is stupid, and that this NEEDS to be done.

    • Instead of coalescing a team to solve this problem you have people think you are unreasonable and think ‘I don’t want to work with that person.’

    • Result: You do NOT form a team / company and build a new textbook.

• Healthy grief vs unhealthy grief:

  • “The opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference.”

  • If you care about someone and you lose them then I would argue you should grieve. If you don’t grieve did you really care about them?

  • I don’t want to go through life not caring about things, I want to care deeply about MANY things!

    • Something good happens to someone / something you care about = happy

    • Something bad happens to someone / something you care about = sad

  • Healthy grief:

    • Grief can be you remembering what was so special about someone you have lost. Reminiscing about the good times you have had and that unfortunately you won’t have more time with them.

    • Grief done well helps you value good moments (as you have a deeper appreciation of the ephemerality of life).

    • Result: Grief (aka knowing bad, aka where south is) can help you know where north is (aka good). There is no north without south. Feeling strongly about someone or something in both a positive and negative sense to me can be one of the most beautiful things in life. I don’t want only one colour, I want all colours under the rainbow… in a healthy fashion!

      • But more than this. I find the more ‘colours’ you have the more interesting each individual colour is. Ie adding a new ‘colour’ to your life makes all the existing ‘colours’ more vivid.

  • Unhealthy grief:

    • You lose someone or something you care about but you block it out and try to shut out any ‘negative’ emotions stemming from the loss.

    • Result: You miss the opportunity to learn about what was important and good (ie calibrate where south is and hence where north is, ie to add new colours to your palate).

      • You may also need to process your grief and locking it away could well mean it surfaces later is counter productive ways.

How to feel ‘positive’ emotions in a healthy way? How to feel ‘positive emotions in an unhealthy way?

• A ‘win’ in a health way vs a ‘win’ in an unhealthy way:

  • Unhealthy ‘win’

    • You are working on a project at work and you have a breakthrough solving a key ‘technical problem’.

    • You don’t stop to ‘smell the roses’ / ‘pop the champagne’ for yourself or with your team.

    • You are so busy that you immediately charge on with the next item.

    • This doesn’t allow you to be grateful. This doesn’t allow you to build camaraderie with your coworkers. This doesn’t allow you to thank someone.

    • Effectively there is all this positivity that you are stealing from yourself and the people in your team.

  • Healthy ‘win’

    • After a ‘win’ you stop and celebrate sufficiently.

    • This can be just a ‘this is so cool!’ with a couple of people. It can be a high five. It can be ‘great job, I really like how you did X here.’

    • It might be a more formal celebratory dinner with the team.

    • For myself, when something good happens, I like to take a quiet minute at my desk, close my eyes and just let the feeling wash over me. THE BEST! Then I’ll try and say something to someone else (eg ‘this is so cool’).

    • Joy = feeling good unadulterated by thought. Just a pure feeling of good I find so therapeutic. Don’t rob yourself of these little happy hits!

That’s it people.

The importance of importance - “There is always a most important thing. If you don't know what the most important thing is you will not be important for very long.”

By Duncan Anderson. To see all blogs click here.

One sentence summary:To maximise your success you need to understand what is the most important thing and construct your first principle view on what should be done for it

If you are running a team it is likely not possible to know everything that is going on, even if the team is 3 people… let alone 30 or 300.

• IMO the manager of a team must always know what the most important thing is, and have a personally derived first party first principles view on what to do for the most important thing.

  • IMO it is not ok for the manager of a team to not know what the most important thing is.

  • IMO it is not ok for the manager of a team not to have their own first party first principles view of what to do for the most important thing.

  • The manager likely cannot know everything, but IMO the manager must know these things.

  • Also, even if you are not a manager, I think you should know what the most important thing for yourself is and how to improve it if you have been in your role for 6 months or longer.

• Jingle: “There is always a most important thing. If you don't know what the most important thing is, you will not be important for very long.” TM DA

• “If you want to become important then get good at figuring out what is important!” TM DA

• Importance doesn’t lead to impotence, it leads to importance, ah hahah!

Personal Story:

• Modus operandi - 5 years ago: I used to just try as hard as possible.

  • Doing a good job = trying as hard as possible.

  • Let’s call this working hard but not necessarily smart.

• Modus operandi - now:  

  • Work to figure out what the most important thing is and then what I think should be done for the most important thing.

  • Please note: the most important thing isn’t necessarily the biggest thing.

  • Let’s call this ‘trying to work smart!’

• Modus operandi - future:

  • I don’t know yet but i change my mind about basically everything so assuming I’ll change my mind about this.

Why do you need to understand what is important

• You should always be trying to improve at work

• Understanding where to improve requires understanding what is the most important place for your time

• As a manager you need to understand what is the most important area for your team

  • But more than that you need to understand what is most important for you, your projects and anything you are doing at work

• By understanding the importance you will understand priorities

  • This will lead to you being much more effective and successful in the work you complete

How to know if you understand what is important?

I like the analogy that what you are doing at work is ‘building a machine’. It might be just the work you are personally doing, or it might be for a team, or an entire company, or an economy! Basically you can approximate anything as a machine.

Here are some problems I have seen with corresponding questions to help you understand whether they are problems for you :

• People don’t know what the machine that they are operating looks like => can I make a flowchart of the machine schematic at sufficient detail?

• People have an idea of what the machine looks like but no idea of how well each node in the machine is functioning => do I know what the key metric that matters for each node in the machine is?

• People don’t have a view on what is the target level of performance for each node => do I have a target for each metric based on first principles of what is possible? (no ‘the metric should improve year on year’, sufficiency vs perfectionism, etc)

• People don’t know what the most important thing for themselves / their team is => if you have the above pieces you should be able to determine the most important part of the machine.

• People don’t have their own first party first principles view on what a good solution is for the most important node (no outsourcing this one) => you don’t have to have a view on how to do everything well in every part of your organisation but for the most important thing I believe you should.

+++++++++++++++

Delectable details:

Theory:

Why do you need to know what is important?

• At  work you should always be working on improving. Be you a brand new recruit straight out of university / school or the CEO of a large corporation.

• If you are going to improve, you need to understand what should be your top priority to improve

  • “If everything is a priority, nothing is a priority.” Typically once your workout what is important  focus on this until it is at sufficiency and then move onto the next thing to improve!

  • Almost everything can be improved indefinitely, so at some point you stop and reallocate your time because it is not the most important thing to work on anymore.

    • Another lens to look that this through is where can you get the most ROI with your time

Improving sufficiently… or improving sufficiency… or sufficiently improving? How about all three!

How to figure out  what is important?

• I put on my special counsel hat and do an ‘important investigation’.  

• I like the analogy that what you are doing at work is ‘building a machine’. It might be just the work you are personally doing, or there might be for a team, or an entire company, or an economy! Basically you can approximate anything as a machine IMO.

• The process below might seem a bit confusing at first but hopefully it will make of sense once you read the examples

• The “important investigation” process… AKA the machine that improves machines, ha:

  • 1. Map your your problem space end game.

    • I.e What does the optimal solution look like

  • 2. Map out the theoretical maximum path to your problem space end game.

    • I.e what is the best case scenario for getting to your optimal solution

      • This could be adoption rates, time to get there etc

  • 3. If you are already achieving close to your theoretical maximum don’t dive deeper, everything is all good and therefore this is not an important issue to understand! If you are not close to theoretical maximum go a layer deeper and try understand what is important.

    • 4. Map out your existing machine in a flow chart. (you are effectively building a model of your problem space)

      • “All models are wrong but some are useful.”

        • Don’t make mangey models, make magnificent models!

    • 5. At each node (A node can be any discrete part of the flowchart for your machine that can be analyzed) of your machine, determine if it is:

      • 5.1 A place in the machine where a theoretical maximum exists or not.

      • 5.2 if it doesn’t have a theoretical maximum determine the minimum sufficiency needed for the node.

    • 6. Determine existing performance at each node vs theoretical max or sufficiency.

    • 7. Determine which node is the most important to work on in the existing machine design taking into account the consequential nature of nodes

      • ie there might be a node down the stream that can improve more in absolute terms but it’s actually more important to work on the upstream node because of flow on effects

    • 8. Now that you have a high level understanding the existing machine you need to decide what to do next. My typical options:

      • 8.1 do I need to go deeper on a specific node, as currently I only have a low resolution understanding that is insufficient to make a decision about prioritising what to do

      • 8.2 is it better to look at changing the machine design (ie the way the flow chart flows ;) )

      • 8.3 and if neither of 8.1 or 8.2 make sense then get into trying to improve the node deemed most important!

How do you improve a node once it is identified as being important?

Say I’ve identified a node that I’d like to try to understand and / or improve, how do I normally look to break down the node? This is one model I sequentially run through (but normally I custom make up a model / taxonomy that tries to fit the problem I’m solving)

• The model:

  • Recipe - the detail of how to do whatever problem at high quality

  • Process - how to do the problem at high quantity (if your recipe is sh1t, don’t try and scale it (process). No one wants lots of sh1t.)

    • Can you do it straight up faster

    • Can you do a small, medium or large version of what we are currently doing

    • Should we remove a piece of the process

    • Should we add a piece to the process

    • Is there an out of the box solution to making things that is a big win.

  • Resourcing - is there enough time/money to get a sufficient outcome?

  • Culture - are the people doing the work aligned with each other and the business?

  • Team structure - Does the team have the right people, the right roles and the right people in the right roles?

• Comment:

  • There is no point working on process if the recipe is poor IMO.

  • It doesn’t matter if you have great resourcing if they are making a bad reference design (recipe) in an inefficient and / or error prone way (process).

  • Because you have a great recipe, process and underlying human resourcing doesn’t mean you won’t have a counter productive culture… but you can’t have good culture if people are crap, they don’t like the recipe or the process does everyone’s head in.

  • Don’t get me wrong, any of the pieces above being wrong will wreck something, but I normally find it best to go sequentially through pieces in the manner I’ve just said.

Edifying Examples:

Example - Simple Enterprise Sales Organisation:

• Background:

  • I’m going to over simplify this example to try and make the model work easily.

  • Product: You make timetabling software for secondary schools (ie what student should be in which class with which teacher)

  • Currently schools do this by pen and paper and your solution is both faster and cheaper

  • You also don’t have any competitors in the software space.

• 1. Map your your problem space end game.

  • What is the theoretical maximum market share of your product? 100% as it’s faster and cheaper than the existing pen and paper solution.

• 2. Map out the theoretical maximum path to your problem space end game.

  • What is the theoretical maximum adoption curve of your product?

    • Map out all the valid reasons a school could say no (eg need to see other schools using the product, eg can only deal with so much change at a given time, etc etc).

    • This might mean that in the first year you can get a maximum of 20% of the market, 40% in the second year, 60% in the third year, 80% fourth year and 100% in the fifth year.

• 3. If you are operating close to theoretical maximum don’t dive deeper, everything is all good! If you are not close to theoretical maximum go a layer deeper.

  • How is the machine performing currently?

    • You are about to enter the 3rd year of selling your product

    • In the first year you took 10% market share, and in the second year you took another 10% market share for 20% market share in total.

    • So vs your theoretical maximum you are underperforming by 50% (ie should be at 40% market share by your estimates but are only at 20% market share).

    • So we go a layer deeper.

• 4. Map out your existing machine in a flow chart. Ie you are effectively building a model.

  • So you build a ‘flow chart map’ for the machine to see where you can improve things

    • Existing machine map:

      • 1. Figure out who the right person at a school to speak to is

      • => 2. Phone call to set up meeting with person

      • => 3. In person meeting

      • => 4. School makes / doesn’t make purchase of the product

• 5. At each node of your machine, determine if it is:

  • Ok, annoyingly I’m going to jumble the next steps together and just synthesise.

  • Sample machine map 1:

• Synthesis:

• IMO the clear step to look at here is that only 20% of meetings are going to purchase.

• There isn’t much point in closing more than 50% of phone calls unless we are confident that 20% is the maximum you can get out of meeting people.

• So you make a map of the meeting step to see what you can do?

  • 1. Product is much worse than we think

  • 2. We are pitching the product with poor sales materials (ie recipe)

  • 3. The sales people have good materials but aren’t using them well

  • 4. The school isn’t ready to make a decision at this point, ie after 1x meeting.

• You do the work and find out that it’s ‘reason 4’ and you then change the sales process to include a trial.

• Proposed sales machine after this round of work:

• You then run the machine to gather enough data to re-examine the machine and see if things are near theoretical maximums.

• Sample machine map 2:

• Synthesis:

• Annoyingly you have only moved from 9% overall close rate to 10% despite the new steps.

• However you’ve gone from ‘in person meeting’ of 20% close to 50% onto the next step. So this looks like it is a good win.

• To me the glaring problem to me here is that after a trial there is ‘only’ a 50% close rate after a school has tried the product.

• There are two major possible problems I see here :

  • 1. The product isn’t anywhere near as good as you believe it to be

  • Or 2. The trial is run poorly and the appropriate experience isn’t had.

• You investigate for the possible areas here and find out that while the product is faster and cheaper it is only if schools know how to use it. You need to make a bunch of User Experience improvements for the product, it’s not how the training is being run, it’s that they are being trained to use a product that is unnecessarily hard to use.

• You make improvements then run the machine to gather enough data to re-examine the machine and see if things are near theoretical maximums.

• Sample machine map 3:

• Yay, you have moved to 18%, an 80% jump.

• This is close to what you had thought was the maximum amount of customers you could close, 20%. Should you stop here as this from a low resolution point of view is where you felt conversion rates might cap out?

• You have learned a lot about your sales machine, and you look at the ‘in person meeting’ conversion rate of meeting => trail of 50%. If the product is really good this should be higher right? What are the reasons why this number is so low:

  • 1. The product is no good => you shouldn’t have 90% close rate after the trail if the product is no good.

  • 2. The sales message in the meeting isn’t doing a good job of explaining the actual product

  • 3. The people in the meeting have a quality sales message to convey but are not doing it well.

• You investigate and find out that the sales message isn’t at all capturing and resonating with the appropriate school personnel. You do the work to upgrade the sales message and then run the machine to gather enough data to re-examine the machine and see if things are near theoretical maximums.

• Sample machine map 4:

• You get the in person meeting => trial of software number to go from 50 => 80%. Fark yeah!

• Overall close rate is now at 29%.

  • This is more than 3x where you started at with your sales machine!

  • This also means your thoughts on theoretical maximum adoption rate was wrong.

• You might decide that these numbers can’t be improved upon and then go about scaling your sales team, eg you had a team of 5, there wasn’t point in scaling a team that wasn’t working well, but now it’s time to go to 20 and you then have the problem of how to scale the team as the key thing to focus on!

Example - Running a restaurant:

• Background:

  • I’m going to over simplify this example to try and make the model work easily.

  • One of the key things I’m going to try and flex in this example vs the previous sales example is there were ‘theoretical maximums’ in many places, here there won’t  be.

  • You have a restaurant running and you have the meals that you make. Let’s see what is going on.

  • Why is a restaurant a good example to you?

    • To me, in some respects making product is like designing a meal (ie making recipe)

    • Do you have a good meal (recipe) that people will like?

    • You can do a minimum viable product (MVP) and test out a new recipe on people before you scale it to your entire menu?

    • Once you have a recipe right can you get the right ingredients for it?

    • Can only one person make the dish or can you get many people to make the dish?

• 1. Map your your problem space end game.

  • The goal is to have a thriving restaurant with 80%+ occupancy each week.

• 2. Map out the theoretical maximum path to your problem space end game.

  • Unlike selling timetabling software to schools, a restaurant can actually start with high occupancy and stay there.

    • Eg you start out at 80%+ occupancy and stay there.

    • Eg you start out at 80% occupancy and then it starts to drop

    • Eg you start out below 80% occupancy and occupancy rises from there.

  • For this restaurant occupancy started at 50% and has been steadily dropping to now being at 30% occupancy.

• 3. If you are operating close to theoretical maximum don’t dive deeper, everything is all good! If you are not close to theoretical maximum go a layer deeper.

  • This is obviously not close to theoretical maximum. We need to figure out what to do.

• 4. Map out your existing machine in a flow chart. Ie you are effectively building a model.

  • Flowchart:

    • 1. The recipe

    • 2. The ingredients for the recipe

    • 3. The cooking of the recipe (process)

• 5. At each node of your machine determine if it is:

  • 5.1 A place where a theoretical maximum exists or not.

  • 5.2 if it doesn’t have a theoretical maximum determine the minimum sufficiency needed for the node.

  • Analysis

    • 1. The recipe => there is no such thing as ‘theoretical max’ for a recipe. ie you can always do something better. This is like saying a book is as good as a book can be.

    • 2. The ingredients for the recipe => while i’m sure there can always be better ingredients, this an area where a theortical max is more possible than a recipe having theoretical max IMO. It’s like half way between ‘has a theoretical max and doesn’t have one’, ha!

    • 3. The cooking of the recipe => this one I feel there is a theoretical max.

• 6. Determine existing performance at each node vs theoretical max or sufficiency.

  • You are the owner of the restaurant, and you determine that when you cook the meals you have very happy customers.

  • However not so for your other chefs.

  • So the problem is “3. The cooking of the recipe” (process, scale)

• 7. Determine which node is the most important to work on in the existing machine design taking into account the consequential nature of nodes (ie there might be a node down the stream that can improve more in absolute terms but it’s actually more important to work on the upstream node because of flow on effects)

  • As above, “3. The cooking of the recipe” is the area to focus on.

• 8. Now that you have a high level understanding the existing machine you need to decide what to do next. My typical options:

  • 8.1 do i need to go deeper on a specific node as currently I only have a low resolution understanding that is insufficient to make a decision about prioritising what to do

  • 8.2 is it better to look at changing the machine design (ie the way the flow chart flows ;) )

  • 8.3 and if neither of 8.1 or 8.2 make sense then get into trying to improve the node deemed most important!

  • Possible solutions for “3. The cooking of the recipe”:

    • Is it because you have chefs who aren’t trained properly?

    • Is it because you have bad chefs who aren’t trying properly?

    • Is it because the recipe is so complicated that only a master chef can do it?

  • Synthesis

    • You know any decent chef could make this dish as you are personally cooking.

    • The way to find out if ‘you have bad chefs who aren’t trying properly’ vs ‘you have chefs who aren’t trained properly’ is to try and train the chefs and see how this goes. This is how you figure out what the root cause problem is

    • You conduct this project to get your data and then synthesize!

Ok, enough examples! What have I seen?

• People don’t know what the machine that they are operating looks like => can I make a flowchart of the machine schematic at sufficient detail?

• People have an idea of what the machine looks like but no idea of how well each node in the machine is functioning => do I know what the key metric that matters for each node in the machine is?

• People don’t have a view on what is the target level of performance for each node => do I have a target for each metric based on first principles of what is possible? (no ‘the metric should improve year on year’, sufficiency vs perfectionism, etc)

• People don’t know what the most important thing for themselves / their team is => if you have the above pieces you should be able to determine the most important part of the machine.

• People don’t have their own first party first principles view on what a good solution is for the most important node (no outsourcing this one) => you don’t have to have a view on how to do everything well in every part of your organisation but for the most important thing I believe you should.

Levelling up problem solving ability through the 'Treasure Taxonomy'

By Duncan Anderson. To see all blogs click here.

One Sentence Summary: you get good at things you practice; here is a framework for how to level up problem solving ability.

IMO we are all basically problem solving all the time. The better you are at problem solving the more value you should add, the more you can improve the world, the more you can earn, etc!

In short, levelling up at problem solving = good :)!

I should add that, god, I find problem solving fun.

Problem solving * good for the world = purpose!

Jingle: IMO getting good at problem solving is a key way to have a lot of fun in life!

Here is a taxonomy I created for how to think about levels of problem solving. I'm calling this the 'Treasure Taxonomy' because the further you go up the taxonomy the more treasure you find!

What I find funny is that I believe one gets better at higher levels of synthesis (problem solving) if one simply: 1. knows about the higher levels, and then 2. tries doing the higher levels!

• Introductory: knowing about the ‘Treasure Taxonomy’ allows you to use elements of it which is better than ‘just trying hard to problem solve good’.

• Intermediate: asking yourself if you have done different levels from the ‘Treasure Taxonomy’

  • Eg I’ll ask myself ‘have I done “Level 6 - create a model”?’ … and then get better from just repeatedly trying!

  • Or I’ll ask someone ‘can you please 1. Tell me “Level 3: synthesis - push back” which parts of this solution you don’t agree with and then please “Level 6: create a model”?’ After asking they’ll come back with something cool!

  • Ie the ability to be able to point people (yourself and others) to where to focus on problem solving makes their problem solving MUCH better!

• Advanced: systematically using the ‘Treasure Taxonomy’ real time as you problem solve

  • Example at the bottom. This is my fav part so please read on through :)

In short, I don’t think you should finish your problem solving unless you have referenced the ‘Treasure Taxonomy’ and tried to problem solve at all the levels. It’s such an easy hack.

The Treasure Taxonomy:

• Level 1: summary - verbatim = just writing down what happened

  • This is not useful. When you are problem solving / in a conversation / reading article please only try to do Level 2+

  • IMO, during work time you should never be eg reading an article and not trying to do Level 2+

  • Once people know about the higher levels of the ‘Treasure Taxonomy’ I find they are typically much better at doing them. That’s right, simply knowing about higher levels makes people much better problem solvers!

• Level 2: summary - key points = being able to extract the key points and articulate them in a significantly shorter manner.

  • eg you get 80% of the value of a 1 hour conversation in 3 mins AND then can take the components and use elsewhere.

  • this is extracting the key ingredients of a problem space / a conversation and packaging them nicely

• Level 3: synthesis - key point push back = you will disagree with part of an problem space solution / article / conversation AND have a reason why. No reason no disagreement!

  • saying how one of the ingredients from the problem space / article / conversation doesn't make sense.

  • "Opinions are like arseholes, everyone has one. But unlike arseholes, opinions should be examined very closely!" Tim Minchin.

  • Also see Devil (Un)disqualified Decision.

• Level 4: synthesis - internal joining = you can take two components of the problem space / article / conversation and join them together to create something new.

  • you able to join two ingredients together to make a new ingredient. This is not saying these two ingredients belong next to each other, it’s creating a new ingredient from the combination of two ingredients found in “Level 2: summary - key points”

• Level 5: synthesis - external ingredient = join an ingredient from the problem space / article with an external component to create new knowledge

  • you are able to join an ingredient form the article with an external ingredient and make a new ingredient

• Level 6: create a model - internal joining = join pieces together into a new meta story

  • you are able to take the ingredients from the problem space / article / conversation and join them together into a recipe that makes sense. This adds a meaning layer above all the ingredients

  • put another way you get pieces of a picture (ingredients) and you join them together into a cohesive picture.

  • this might involve pushing back on different individual ingredients as in “Level 3: synthesis - push back”. “Level 3: synthesis - push back” is more 'I don't like this ingredient and here is why' vs Level 6 is 'I don't think this ingredient fits into this recipe and here is why'.

• Level 7:  create a model - external ingredients = joining what is in the problem space / article with external ingredients into a cohesive structure/ recipe

  • As at the top, god I find this is fun.

  • Problem solving * good for the world = purpose.

  • Group * problem solving * good for the world = purpose + joy.

    • Group problem solving I find even better than individual problem solving!

  • IMO getting good at problem solving is a key way to have a lot of fun in life!

  • Making a taxonomy is problem solving, so this is problem solving about problem solving! Or fun about fun :)

• Level 8: Heston Blumenthal - joining multiple recipes (models) together into epic scrumptiousness!

  • This is taking 2 existing recipes (ie collections of cohesive ingredients) and then combining them together into a way a better super recipe.

Another way of looking at this is Solo Taxonomy:

• I'd argue that putting forward SOLO taxonomy is a synthesis of the model I created above showing it from a different point of view.

Example - what to do during a user feedback interview for your product:

• Level 1: summary - verbatim

  • Do not just write down all the words someone is saying.

• Level 2: summary - key points = being able to extract the key points and articulate them in a significantly shorter manner.

  • During the interview, try to write down the key points (ingredients) that someone is expressing.

  • If you think you find a key point you might ask a clarification question about it. Eg “I’d like to check my understanding, are you saying ‘rearticulation of key point’?” Don’t repeat back verbatim what someone said.

• Level 3: synthesis - key point push back = you will disagree with part of an problem space solution / article / conversation AND have a reason why. No reason no disagreement!

  • Try to do this in a nice positive sum way, eg you might question whether a key point fits with the product.

  • “I think you are saying that X is a substitute for Y, but I see that X is a compliment to Y for reasons A,B & C. Do you think this has merit?”

• Level 4: synthesis - internal joining = you can take two components of the problem space / article / conversation and join them together to create something new.

  • So you are halfway through your user feedback interview and you have 5x ingredients / key points which you have written down on in front of you as you have been taking notes.

  • “Do you think you can combine ingredients 1 and ingredient 3 and make new ingredient Z?” Then you see what the person says and maybe you have created something new :)!

• Level 5: synthesis - external ingredient = join an ingredient from the problem space / article with an external component to create new knowledge

  • The same as Level 4 but you bring an ingredient that hasn’t been discussed in the conversation and ask about joining.

• Level 6: create a model - internal joining = join pieces together into a new meta story

  • This is where the real fun happens!!!!

  • “Ok, can I see what you think about this. We have ingredients 1, 2, 3, Z & 5, do you think we can join them together to make this recipe “52Z312”? Ie there a meta way to make structure out of everything? Eg this could be the narrative about how this segment of user will find value from the product but how a different segment of user might not.

  • “All models are wrong. Some are useful.” Ultimately the world is too complex to understand everything so we use models to be able to be able to approximate the world to make decisions. Occam’s Razor: the simplest model that gives you the ability to make a high quality decision is the best!

  • Getting good at making models = getting good at problem solving = getting good at life :)

• Level 7:  create a model - external ingredients = joining what is in the problem space / article with external ingredients into a cohesive structure/ recipe

  • Same as Level 6 but adding external ingredients.

• Level 8: Heston Blumenthal - joining multiple recipes (models) together into epic scrumptiousness!

  • Eg “ok, I think there are two segments of users, I see you fitting into segment 1 and that you don’t like this part of the product for reason M, but that segment 2 does like this part of the product for reason N. However overall I do think that even despite not liking this part of the product you will find more value in buying the product than not buying the product. Do you feel this is a fair characterisation?”

• Comment:

  • What you are doing is real time building ingredients and models by asking questions of a person in the user testing interview. At the end you hopefully have epic new learnings!

Partnership Economics - “the best things are selfless and selfish”

By Duncan Anderson. To see all blogs click here.

One Sentence Summary: a good partnership produces excess value (ie more value from partnering than not), good partners share the excess value fairly, and the best partners give more than their fair share (selfless); this in turn means they get more and better partnership opportunities over their life (selfish).

Summary:

One lens I believe you can view life through: life as a series of partnerships

• Partnership = any interaction you have with another party

  • Partnerships can be small or large. eg a single meeting is a partnership, eg a friendship might last a lifetime and be a 'partnership', starting a business, being a citizen of a country, etc

• Partnerships can be:

  • Negative sum

  • Zero sum

  • Positive sum

    • Mutually positive sum - Unfair = this is where both parties in the partnership are better of because of having done the partnership that if they hadn't done it  but one side takes an unfair amount of the economic surplus

    • Mutually positive sum - Fair = where the excess value created from the partnership is split fairly

    • Mutually positive sum - Selflessly Selfishly = where you give ~10% more than is “fair” to the other party

• Jingle: The best things are selfless AND selfish.

• Through some math I’ll attempt to show you that IMO the goal is ‘Mutually positive sum - Selflessly Selfishly’. To maximise the amount of ‘excess value’ you accumulate over your life you give aware more than is fair in any individual partnership.

• Being a good partner isn’t just the right moral thing to do, it’s the right financial thing to do! Yay!

+++++++++++++++++

Food for thought:

• Have you ever worked with someone and thought “I really enjoyed that.”

• And have you ever worked with someone and thought “Nope, never want to do that again.”

  • Why? What was the difference?

• Furthermore, have you ever wondered how others have found working with you?

• What is the ‘optimal partner’?

  • Partnerships can be small or large.

Delicious details:

Some examples of good versus bad partnerships:

• Schools

  • A good school is a community

  • A bad school is a ‘prison’ (it’s not actually a prison, but ‘kids are fighting against the system’)

• Sports team - “a champion team will always beat a team of champions”

  • In a good sports team, the players work well together

  • In a bad sports team, the players don’t work well together

• Company

  • A good company is a community

  • A bad company is a place workers resent (people are only there for money and can actively work against each other)

The Model: Partnership outcomes = 1. Partnership is good + 2. Know what is good for different parties + 3. Is a good partner

• 1. Partnership is good (size of the pie)

  • Taxonomy:

    • Negative sum

    • Zero sum

    • Positive sum

  • Commnet:

    • Good partnerships create more value from the partnering than from not partnering.

    • Let’s say there is Party 1 who makes 1 unit of output and Party 2 who makes 1 unit of output.

    • They partner together:

      • Negative sum = Party 1 + Party 2 = 1 + 1 = 1.5 (shrinks the pie)

      • Zero sum = Party 1 + Party 2 = 1 + 1 = 2 (pie is the same size)

      • Positive sum = Party 1 + Party 2 = 1 + 1 = 3 (grows the pie)

• 2. Know what is good (can see the whole pie)

  • Taxonomy

    • L1: Doesn't know what is good for self

    • L2: Knows what is good for self BUT not the party you are in a partnership with

    • L3: Knows what is good for self AND the part you are in direct partnership

    • L4: L3 + knows what is good for parties not directly in the partnership

    • L5: L4 + helps other parties know what is and isn't good for them (ie move up L1=>L5)

  • Model (if you can’t make something into a model you don’t understand it ;P)

• Why do I like this model I made? Because it is shaped like a pie!!!!! This… is no pie in the sky idea!

• Do you know only about yourself, or can you expand the circle of care :)  

• … Also, many people use the example of a pie for an economy. Good partnerships grow the size of the pie… good partners split the pie in a fair fashion. Yes, so many many many metaphors here, me happy… and now also hungry ;P

• 3. is a good partner (splits the pie up fairly)

  • Taxonomy (yeah i know this is joining variables 1 & 2 but I think it’s the right thing to do, technically negative sum shouldn’t be here)

    • L1: Negative sum - one party enters a partnership where they win however other side would be better off without doing partnership

    • L2: Zero sum - one side wins, the other side loses

    • L3: Mutually positive sum - Unfair = this is where both parties in the partnership are better off because of having done the partnership than if they hadn't done it but one side takes an unfair amount of the economic surplus

    • L4: Mutually positive sum - Fair = where the excess value created from the partnership is split fairly

    • L5: Mutually positive sum - Selflessly selfishly = where you give 10% more than is fair to the other party

  • Instead of a model for this one I’m making names, yay, names!

The model from another lens:

• Partnership outcomes = 1. Partnership value is good (how is the overall environment?)  + 2. Know what is good for different parties (how is the partnership for others?) + 3. Is a good partner (what is your contribution to the partnership?)

Rearticulating examples of good versus bad partnerships:

• Schools

  • A good school is a community

  • A bad school is a ‘prison’ (it’s not actually a prison, but ‘kids are fighting against the system’)

    • A good school is mutually positive sum, where some people will be adding more value than others (assumably the teachers!), whereas a bad school is negative sum

• Sports team - “a champion team will always beat a team of champions”

  • In a good sports team, the players work well together

  • In a bad sports team, the players don’t work well together

    • A good sports team is mutually positive sum, whereas a bad sports team is negative sum.

• Company

  • A good company is a community

  • A bad company is a place workers resent (people are only there for money and can actively work against each other)

    • A good company is mutually positive sum, whereas a bad company is negative sum.

    • Ie a good company is greater than the sum of it’s parts.

• I sense a pattern!

Detailed examples:

Example 1 - Partners have equal value they are bringing to the partnership (demonstrating things with numbers can make things far more Stark :)... even though it's the Lannisters who are always on about money)

• The conditions of the partnership

• Possible set of outcomes:

• Possible set of outcomes with commentary

• Outtakes

• Yes, empirical proof that being selfless = being selfish. God i love this :).

  • This is important to understand IMO. Basically you want to collect as much excess value as you can in life.

  • The way for this is to be the best partner possible as then you’ll get more quantity and quality partnership opportunities brought to you.

  • You be the best partner by 1. Doing positive sum partnerships and 2. Giving more than is fair to the other party.

  • So while you get less from this one partnership it means you get way more partnerships! Yay!

• try only to do positive sum partnerships and try to split the excess value created from the partnership selflessly in a way the other party understands this :)

• side note: if you can properly explain this then the other party will be 'no, i don't want more than is fair, selfishly I want to be the selfless party. then you smile and split this fairly'.

Example 2 - Partners have equal value they are bringing to the partnership (equal is not necessarily fair)

• The conditions of the partnership.

• Possible set of outcomes

• Possible set of outcomes with commentary

Outtakes

• It's unlikely that in a partnership both parties will be bringing the exact same value, as such splitting the excess value is fairly doesn't mean 50:50.

• However still try to give more than is fair IMO, likely you’ll need to explain what you think is fair and why.

• The exact details are too hard normally to predict, so just try to make sure there is excess value created with a significant margin for error built in and try to then see how much value each side brings, then give more than is fair!

Example 3 - giving feedback to coworkers

• One key type of partnership is 'giving another person feedback', AKA helping them grow.

• Quotes

  • “a wise person can learn from the mistakes of others, a fool not even from their own.” Will Durant

  • "it's good to learn from your own mistakes, it's better to learn from others." Buffett

  • “Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.” Carl Jung

• Possible outcomes from feedback interaction

• The goal:

• How do you know if this is working? That each time you catch up with someone you grow more AND you look forward to seeing them again more after each meeting. aka a proper positive feedback loop is setup

• How do you know it isn't working? You look forward to catching up with them less and less

• You will grow far more if you have others helping grow than if you are just trying to grow yourself.

• For more details on this see: “it’s not about strengths and weaknesses, it’s about trajectory and levelling up”

10x work goals: human beings, not human doings - thoughts on how epic work can be a reason for being

By Duncan Anderson. To see all blogs click here.

One sentence summary: done well I think you can get mind blowing levels of happiness from work, that work can be the best thing you ever experience!

Summary:

• Right now, for myself, work done well is easily the best thing I know of. If you had told 18 year old Duncan that work would be better than anything else in life (yes, including sex… and even chocolate! What? No, not chocolate! 18 year old Duncan could never have believed anything could be better than chocolate. In case you are wondering, yes 18 year old Duncan was very very mature ;P).

• What’s more, for myself work has been consistently getting better :)!

• I plan to make work 10x better than it currently is, this I call ‘maslatonic eudication’. Yes I’ve made up some more words.

• My process for making work better = 1. Stretch your imagination to it’s absolute limits to come up with loftiest goal you can possibly conceive * 2. Attempt to articulate this goal at the highest resolution you can * 3. Bring this goal into being.

  • Hopefully you’ll make progress towards your goal, and as you do it’ll then expand requisitely the limits of your imagination so you can then think up new goals that weren’t possible before :). Ie achieving the next level unlocks new levels you didn’t know about before. Say what? Life getting better means that life can get even better? I believe it to be so.

• For a long while I was a human doing.

  • I didn’t choose to go to primary and secondary school.

  • I didn’t choose what I studied at primary or most of secondary school.

  • I didn’t choose to go to University, I may have chosen what degree but not that I would go to University

  • Etc etc

• Well, I don’t want to be a human doing, i want to be a human being :)!

++++++++++

Background:

• If you work full time you are likely going to spend the majority of your waking hours working. So ideally work should be farking awesome!

• The world we live in today is basically totally unrecognisable to what life was like 200 years ago, let alone when humans were in their hunter gatherer days.

• Warren Buffett is fond of saying that the average person in the US now lives better than the richest person in the world (John D Rockerfella Senior) did when Buffett was born (1930).  

• Now you have a fridge (no fridge before), air conditioning (no air con), regulated heating (before it was put on a fire), microwave, the internet, reliable transport, ubereats, supermarkets, smartphones, etc etc.

• Some life MECEs for ya (mutually exclusive collectively exhaustive breakdowns):

• Obviously, hopefully other parts of your life are awesome as well. Here is one quick MECE for how I split my life:

  • Fun * consequence = meaning (this is what I try and have work be and is 5 days a week)

  • Fun * no consequence = play (1 day a week)

  • Relaxing (1 day a week)

  • Comment: however this blog is focusing just on ‘work’.

• One more MECE for you:

• Explicit plan (5 days a week)

• The plan is ‘don’t have a plan’ AKA serendipity AKA see which way the wind blows (1 day a week)

• The plan is do nothing AKA relaxing (1 day a week)

• Please note that I think you can get meaning in many places of life, it doesn’t have to be ‘work’. No one can tell you what you like, you get to decide :). I really like working at Edrolo if that isn’t clear, but others might

  • eg have a personal project they work on for 100 hours that they plan to never show anyone and get meaning from that

  • eg I think done well raising children can be deeply meaningful

  • eg you might work for money so you can provide your family, and that gives work meaning

  • IMO there isn’t one answer, there is what works for you :).

• This blog is about thoughts I’ve made for myself, hopefully there is something thought provoking in here for you.

++++++++++

Detail baby:

1. Work time = 1.1 the work you do * 1.2 the relationships you have at work

• Done well, work is the best thing I know of. SERIOUSLY. Yes better than anything else (I’m including things like ‘being in love’, ‘sex’ and even chocolate!!!!).

• If you had told this to 20 year old duncan I would have scoffed in your face. Seriously it’s like the world is upside down!

• The eskimos have 50 words for ice. The words ‘work’ and ‘good relationship’ are not even remotely close to encapsulating what I’m aiming for. This blog is my attempt to articulate the highest possible conception I can imagine that ‘work’ could be, and the highest possible thing I can conceive that ‘work relationships’ can be. Ie I’m attempting to try and create a goal for the highest plane of existence I can imagine at ‘work’ and ‘work relationships’. As far as I’m aware there aren’t words to describe what I’m trying to articulate… so I’ve made my own :).

• There are taxonomies for the detail of what these words mean below, you only get the abbreviation now:

  • ‘1.1 the work you do’ highest level I can currently conceive = eudication

    • eudaimonia * vocation = eudication

      • Eudaimonia is an ancient greek philosophical word that means ‘the good of all goods’.

      • Vocation = one’s calling, life’s work, etc.

    • Also eudication sounds like education so that makes me happy.

  • ‘1.2 the relationships you have at work’ highest level I can currently conceive = maslatonic

    • Maslow's hierarchy of needs * platonic love = maslatonic

      • Maslow's hierarchy of needs = a framework for what is needed to have a good life that I really like. I think if you have all of Maslow’s needs met from a relationship you are likely to have a pretty good outcome.

      • Platonic love = love of the mind, not of the flesh. Honestly I feel that it’s possible for someone’s mind to be 1000x more beautiful than the most physically beautiful person on earth! Also, I’m a big fan of Plato, after which the word platonic is partially derived!

      • Yes there is etymology from greek philosophy in both ‘euidcation’ and ‘maslatonic’. This symmetry makes me smiley.

    • I like the joining of these two words as you are getting all of your needs met (maslow’s hierarchy) through interacting with an epic beautiful mind (platonic love).

• The best thing I know of, easily better than anything else I’ve ever encountered, is maslatonic eudicaiton.

  • Read on to see my attempt to articulate this!

1.1 the work you do:

• Work Taxonomy

  • First of all, it is wonderful to be able to worry about what job to have.

    • For a long time we were all hunter gathers and then subsistence farmers tilling the soil with our hands.

    • “In Western Europe in 1700 the were ~ 400 different jobs. Today there are approximately 500,000.” The school of Life.

    • There are unfortunately still a lot of people who don’t have the same opportunities as we do in say Australia, let’s try and help everyone have the same opportunities.

  • “The eskimos have 50 words for ice.”

    • As I’m trying to articulate new planes of being, I think they need a name.

    • To me the word ‘work’ comes embedded with meaning from today’s society. Honestly I feel it comes with a lot of ‘embedded negative meaning’.

      • According to studies done in the developed world 90% of people report not liking their job.

      • Obviously this is not great! I think if most people had the money to retire now they would.

      • This was certainly 18 year old Duncan’s plan, retire as soon as possible. Now I like ‘work’ so much that I never want to retire.

    • Also, I believe that once you know there is something to strive for you are far more likely to get there. “Hope is not a strategy.”

  • My goal here is to articulate the highest possible conception I can imagine currently of what work could be.

    • Then once I’ve tried to articulate this I can try and bring it into being. COOL!

  • Work equation = 1. Interesting * 2. Challenging in a good way (aka flow) * 3. Good for the world * 4. Likes company strategy * 5. Feels like the company is making progress

• I feel like I need to add in some more levels here, haha. Honestly work is 100x levelled up for me vs 10 years ago… but I’ve only managed to put in 4 levels so I feel like I’m underselling what I’ve personally found… profound!  

• Seriously, work done well (work + work relationships) is massively better than the high water mark 18 year old Duncan had experienced. It’s messed up.

• What is the best level of work called?

  • Honestly there is not a word I’m aware of that comes close to describing what I think ‘epic mind bending work that can give you 10x as much happiness as eating chocolate happiness can give you’.

  • So I’m inventing a new word for it (PS if you know a good existing word please let me know).

  • eudaimonia * vocation = eudication

    • Eudaimonia = an ancient greek philosophical word that means ‘the good of all goods’.

    • Vocation = one’s calling, life’s work, etc.

    • FYI I think words are solutions to problems. They are inherited wisdom from past generations. If you can describe something new with ~1-5 words existing words, then don’t create a new word. However if it takes you say 20 words to describe something then creating a new word is often lower cognitive load. Also, creating new words is fun :)

  • I don’t mind ‘eudication’ really quite close to ‘education’. And this is what I think I do at both Edrolo and OwlTail (the two companies I have cofounded).

++++++++++++++

Background on Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs:

• The theory is that you need to look after each need in order. ie you can’t do ‘beloning’ if you don’t have ‘safety’ looked after first.

• And that if you have all levels looked after you have a good life.

• Maslow also modified the hierarchy to have another category at the top called ‘transcendence’ which is basically helping others move up the hierarchy.

+++++++++++

1.2 the relationships you have at work

• “Life is too short for shallow relationships.”

  • Why wouldn't you went epic relationships in all areas of your life.

  • I'm going to argue that is possible for work relationships to provide you with more happiness than any other relationships in your life because 1. You spend more time working than anything else * 2. You have more levels to interact in at work than in non work.

    • However of course this doesn’t mean you can’t have epic relationships in all areas of life.

  • The best friendships provide mutual growth.

• Taxonomy of ‘relationships’:

  • L1: someone you know and you catch up and have surface level conversation.

    • ‘surface friendship’

  • L2: someone who gives you passive ‘L3: Belonging’, ‘L4: Esteem’ and you do the same (ie passive L3 & L4)

    • what good friendships were for DA for the first 20 years of my life

  • L3: L2 + you do active ‘L6: transcendence (aka helping them with levels of Maslow’s hierarchy)’.

    • Socrates “the purpose of a friend to help you be better than you otherwise would have been”

    • So you are proactively helping someone else with ‘L3: belonging’, ‘L4: Esteem’, ‘L5: self actualisation’ (ie helping them grow).

  • L4: L3 + someone who is actively doing ‘L6: transcendence’ for you

    • IMO without building something (eg a business, raising a child) it’s not possible to get past L4. IMO part of how deep a relationship can be is the ‘canvass you have to paint upon’, if you add building something to the mix you have a massively expanded canvass and as such increased opportunities to have relationship rewards.

    • Haha. It’s kinda like your relationship at L5 has a rewards program, every minute you spend can give you extra rewards :).

  • L5: L4 + you are working on building something (environment) that makes a big difference.

    • Most people spend the majority of their waking hours working. At work you can be building something, this gives you a huge new area for which you can interact with others.

    • It means you can monstrously help eachother grow etc.

    • This is an epic work colleague. Basically a work colleague has all the canvas a friend has to operate with + entirely new areas!!! As such happiness can be much bigger!

• With a model:

  • You want to be friendly, you want to have emotional support, problem solving support, grow others, others grow you, etc etc.

  • This model is far from perfect, an example of an issue is: for me work and the relationships you have at work are inextricably intertwined. Eg a lot of the activities I have for relationships here are ONLY possible with an epic job. However I think it helps to separate them to try and explain.

Alright, so in summary:

• If you work full time you’ll do more awake hours working than anything else.

• The right work is meaningful, it give you purpose and happiness. Eudication.

• “People are the best of times, people are the worst of times.”

  • For me, great work done with great people in a great way is much better than ‘great work by yourself’.

• I don’t think you can expect a good life to be handed to you, but I do think you can try and design one for yourself. If you reach for the stars and fail, only to land on the moon, you’ll still ‘fail’ far past everyone else!

• Honestly, to me life is a journey, not a destination. It has the opportunity to be the most beautiful epic thing ever :). I’ve very glad to be alive!

Decision frameworks: “How to approach solving problems is itself a problem to solve.”

By Duncan Anderson. To see all blogs click here.

“For the person with a hammer every problem looks like a nail.’

One sentence summary: each problem is likely different, therefore the approach to solving each problem should be different.

Jingle: How to approach solving problems is itself a problem to solve.

Here are some ‘small’ frameworks for y’all! One day I’ll get around to making blogs about medium and large frameworks :)

Problems I see:

• Problem 1: no problem solving done at all

• Problem 2: treat all decisions as irreversible

• Problem 3: do not balance solution confidence vs decision sufficiency threshold to make a decision

• Problem 4: do not take into account how much change a decision is and / or how controversial it is

• Problem 5: make decision only in ‘theoretical land’. IMO most decisions about whether to go ahead with something should have data gathered from ‘practical land’.

++++++++++++++

Delicious Details:

Problem 1: no problem solving done at all

Context:

• Often one’s inclination is to go with the first thing that comes to mind. This is not problem solving.

• I often try to class problems into three sizes: small, medium or large. For a medium or large problem I think you need to put forward multiple options for what to do.

• A small decision size is often for something that is very similar to what you have done before, so you have high confidence in your proposed solution will work.

Solution: for medium or large problems put forward multiple options for your solution.

Problem 2: treat all decisions as irreversible

Context

• From Bezos 2016 letter:

• “One common pitfall for large organizations – one that hurts speed and inventiveness – is “one-size-fits-all” decision making. Some decisions are consequential and irreversible or nearly irreversible – one-way doors – and these decisions must be made methodically, carefully, slowly, with great deliberation and consultation. If you walk through and don’t like what you see on the other side, you can’t get back to where you were before. We can call these Type 1 decisions. But most decisions aren’t like that – they are changeable, reversible – they’re two-way doors. If you’ve made a suboptimal Type 2 decision, you don’t have to live with the consequences for that long. You can reopen the door and go back through. Type 2 decisions can and should be made quickly by high judgment individuals or small groups. As organizations get larger, there seems to be a tendency to use the heavy-weight Type 1 decision-making process on most decisions, including many Type 2 decisions. The end result of this is slowness, unthoughtful risk aversion, failure to experiment sufficiently, and consequently diminished invention. We’ll have to figure out how to fight that tendency. And one-size-fits-all thinking will turn out to be only one of the pitfalls. We’ll work hard to avoid it… and any other large organization maladies we can identify.”

• This I thought was cool, thanks Mr Bezos.

Solution: before you make a decision, figure out if it’s reversible and as such adjust the level of confidence you need to move ahead with the decision.

Problem 3: do not balance solution confidence vs decision sufficiency threshold to make a decision

Context:

• Decision making confidence needed = 1. Reversibility of decision * 2. Confidence of solution being correct.

Solution: A nice 2 x 2 for y’all!

Problem 4: do not take into account how much change a decision is and / or how controversial it is

Context:

• Decision making confidence needed = 1. Amount of change proposed new proposal is * 2. How controversial new proposal is

Solution: (aside: this is sometimes referred to as the ‘Overton Window’)

Problem 5: make decision only in ‘theoretical land’. IMO most decisions about whether to go ahead with something should have data gathered from ‘practical land’.

“In theory 100% of my proposed solutions make sense, in practice 50% actually work out.”

AKA “In theory I’m a genius, in practice I’m profoundly fallible :).” DA

Sub Problem 1

• Problem: people can spend an excessive amount of time in theoretical problem solving land when the only way to know if something is going to work is to actually try the solution.

• Solution: I’ve found that it’s possible to try basically 100% of things in a ‘soft’ way. And that you can only really know if something is a good solution when there is actual hard data it is working.

  • Sprint: How to Solve Big Problems and Test New Ideas in Just Five Days is a wonderful book that shows you how to prototype and get meaningful feedback on many things like ‘hardware’ in 5 days.

Sub Problem 2:

• Problem: people often don’t kill solutions after they go live (ie in practical land, ie after leaving theoretical land) because of ‘the sunk cost fallacy’.

• Solution: you only decide on if you are actually going ahead with a solution after a requisite amount of real world ‘practical’ data has been collected for the solution. You don’t commit to an ongoing solution in the theoretical problem solving phase.

Examples:

• Hiring people

  • What I think is the way to approach things:

    • Have ~2x interviews - theoretical data collection

    • Have 1x audition - practical data collection

      • This is typically half a day of actual work that the person would be doing

    • Have a review after 3 and 6 months where the actual decision about if you keep someone is made - practical data collection

      • Netflix decision variable = if you wouldn’t fight to keep someone then you should push them out

      • Edrolo decision variable = knowing all that you know now would you rehire the person.

    • So the actual decision point about keeping someone is at 6 months of practical data collection. It is not assumed they are going to be around after the interview stage (ie zero practical data collection has been done). This is one reason why businesses have probation periods .

  • A way to do things suboptimally.

    • You only hire based on interviews. Ie theoretical information.

    • Sometimes you might have an excessive amount of interviews like 6x interviews.

    • The decision point about keeping someone is done at interview stage. You only get rid of people after this if they are in bottom quartile of performance. Ie the decision point is after zero theoretical information.

  • While this may sound ‘harsh’ I actually think it is the most ‘humane’ way to go about things.

    • Continuum: “Ruinous empathy” ⇔ “fair” ⇔ “harsh”

    • IMO you want to try and be as ‘fair’ as possible, ‘ruinous empathy’ is no good for anyone.

    • I doubt there is a job that is a good fit for every single person in the world. Having a person in a job that isn’t good for them is: 1. Bad for that person, 2. Bad for the team, 3. Bad for the company and 4. Bad for management.

    • I’ve found that having the standard of ‘knowing all that you know now would you rehire the person’ is a much better way to get a ‘fair’ outcome.

• Making product

  • At Edrolo one product we are now making is ‘textbooks’.

    • We are trying to move the game forward and as such do things that have not been done before with our textbooks. If you do something that has not been done before there is a risk that it will not work.

    • What we do is make a small sample of say 5x lessons of our new ‘recipe’ and then trial this with 5-10 schools who we believe are representative of the broader school body.

  • How to do this wrong:

    • No matter how many people you speak to in theoretical land (eg teachers and students) we always always find there are things you only find out when people are actually using tangible product.

    • So you wouldn’t make an entire textbook before you get real feedback on a sample of the product.

• Internal processes

  • What not to do

    • You have decided to run monthly ‘all hands meeting’ for your company and come up with a format for what they should be.

    • Before you have run one all hands you have decided on the format should be and stick with this going forward.

  • What to do

    • You decide to run monthly ‘all hands meetings’ for your company. You come up with a proposed format for the 1st all hands.

    • However you are only going to commit to a format after gathering feedback after the first three all hands. Ie there is a non-trivial amount of ‘real world practical data’ taken into account for your decision.

• Comment

  • This is basically lean product methodology.

  • For some reason I find that people can be ‘lean’ when looking at product, but they aren’t ‘lean’ when they think about other areas like hiring, internal processes etc.

  • How much can you learn in theory vs in practice? For many decisions you can only know if it’s right after practical data. So, don’t overcook time on theoretical problem solving and don’t make a decision before you have sufficient practical data :).

It's not about strengths & weaknesses, it’s about trajectory & levelling-up! you can improve at everything always :)

By Duncan Anderson. To see all blogs click here.

One sentence summary: I believe that all skills are cultivated; be it playing video games, problem solving or empathy; as such there is no thing a strengths and weaknesses, but instead areas where you have levelled up and areas where you are yet to level up :)

Summary:

• I think it’s better to view the world as ‘levelling-up’ vs ‘strengths and weaknesses’.

  • It doesn’t matter if it’s a relative strength or relative weakness you still want to level up (the weakness or strength).

  • This is growth mindset stuff :).

  • For reference this is a development of a previous blog called ‘ho ho ho, merry feedback-mas’.

• You can level up indefinitely :).

• 0. Quality Feedback = 1. Feedback is accurate * 2. Feedback is understood by other person * 3. Person receiving feedback wants action it

  • When giving feedback if you talk about levelling up instead of ‘weaknesses/strengths’ then it’s far more likely ‘3. Person receiving feedback wants action it’

• Researchers say personal growth (aka levelling up) is one of the top three things that gives you happiness. So do it with the right language :).

• Easy vs hard levelling up:

  • Levelling up the hard way = trying ambiguously to improve

  • Levelling up the easy way = 1. Clear area of focus on where to level up * 2. Clear understanding of what the next level looks like * 3. Clear plan on how to get to the next level

• Ideall you have:

  • ‘1. Clear area of focus on where to level up’ for 1x EQ area and 1x IQ area at all times

    • EQ = emotional intelligence

  • ‘2. Clear understanding of what the next level looks like’ for each area.

  • ‘3. Clear plan on how to get to the next level’

  • If you don’t have this I suggest working on it with your manager

• Sometimes there minimum levels of sufficiency needed. If you are below the minimum sufficient level then focus the majority of your energy on getting to ‘the sufficient level’ ASAP.

• Jingle: let’s not be fearful of feedback, let’s love levelling up!

+++++++++++++++++++

Details: ‘strengths & weaknesses’ vs ‘trajectory & levelling-up’ OR ‘feedback gifts’ vs ‘level-up cheat codes’!

• Old view:

  • One has strengths and weaknesses.

• New view:

  • Everything is on a continuum and can never not be improved. You should be looking to Level-Up on everything.

    • This doesn’t mean you should try to level everything up at once, often best to have a few key focus areas.

    • The areas you are looking to level up might be ‘relative strengths’ or ‘relative weaknesses’, it depends on what you are trying to do.

  • What matters is someone’s trajectory. Current skill levels are of much less importance.

  • What is good / bad for someone who is a Novice (eg new to a role) is likely totally different for someone is a Master (eg 10 years in the game)

    • It’s a continuum, levelling-up is limitless :).

• If you are Novice ‘relative strength / weakness’ might look like this:

• But if you are a Master ‘relative strength / weakness’ might look like this:

• So basically the Weakness of a Master might we wildly higher than the Strength of Novice.

• What DA sees as core cultural values:

  • Trying: at school you might be weak at something because you don’t try. It is not optional to try at Edrolo.

  • Growth mindset: you also need to believe in yourself, you can improve at things if you apply yourself. (See Esteem Team blog for more detail)

• If someone has these cultural values, what are possible reasons for someone being ‘relatively weak’ / ‘not improving’ at something?

  • 1. Relative weakness because someone has never done the task before.

  • 2. They have an incorrect view of what 'good is'. Ie what the next level looks like.

  • 3. They don’t know how to ‘level up’ (ie get to the next level).

  • 4. They need to be reminded that their 'automatic' response might not be optimal. Rewiring automatic responses takes time and effort.

  • Again, I don’t see trying and not believing in yourself as optional. See ‘esteem team’ email.

• Outcomes of looking at the world this way:

  • When you are giving someone feedback (everyone should be doing this at least once a week IMO) then couch it in ‘levelling-up’ language; not in ‘strengths & weaknesses’ language. It’s not feedback, it’s a way to help someone level-up.

    • OR not feedback gifts but level-up cheat codes :)!

  • When thinking of yourself, think, ‘where do I need to level up and how can I level up there?’ Strengths and weaknesses is fixed mindset talk ;).

  • Just to nail this point once again:

    • No one is able to talk or walk when they are born. Einstein wasn’t born epic at physics, he levelled up from a baby to relativity. Wholly sh1t!

    • If you started playing a video game and you’d never played video games you are going to be crap. But if you play for ages you’ll slowly level up again and again… and again.

  • So help yourself and others level up constantly!

0. Quality Feedback = 1. Feedback is accurate * 2. Feedback is understood by other person * 3. Person receiving feedback wants action it

• 1. Feedback is accurate = 1.1 make sure you understand what happened * 1.2 confidence in the feedback (ie way to help someone level-up).

  • 1.1 make sure you understand what happened

    • Almost always the first questions I ask are clarification / confirmation questions.

      • *aside: this wasn’t what I did enough ~2 years ago :(.

    • Examples: ‘Can you please take me through how you go to this conclusion?’ / ‘Just so I understand, is this what you meant?’ / etc etc.

    • As per ‘upside down happiness’ email I think the most ‘right’ you’ll be in ‘90% right’, so before you try and give someone a ‘level up cheat code’ make sure you aren’t wide of the mark.

  • 1.2 confidence in the feedback

    • Taxonomy: 1.2.1 Low Confidence / 1.2.1 Medium Confidence / 1.2.3 High Confidence

    • 1.2.1 Low Confidence

      • If you have low confidence then I’ll basically do an investigation.

        • These are largely the same questions as ‘clarification questions’.

      • You can move from seeing possible sign of something to being:

        • 1. Nothing to see here. Or,

        • 2. Holly crap, we are pointed in total opposite directions. Feedback needed!

      • Basically just ask questions until you get to sufficient confidence of ‘what is going on’.

        • Cultural value: having your heart in the right place.

        • If you have your heart in the right place then this process is an opportunity to grow / level-up someone. We do not want someone to feel like a fool!

        • Cultural values: be vulnerable and humble.

    • 1.2.3 high confidence

      • Almost always do feedback 1:1. Not in front of others.

      • ‘Hey [person] I think I have a way for you to ‘level up’, wanna hear about this sweet level up cheat code?’

• 2. Feedback is understood by other person = 2.1 what the next level looks like * 2.2 how to get to the next level

• 3. Person receiving feedback wants action it

  • Taxonomy: 3.1 wants to action / 3.2 indifferent / 3.3 doesn't want to action

  • Example of feedback someone ‘3.3 doesn't want to action’

    • Duncan you are weak at X, don’t do it again.

  • Example of feedback someone ‘3.1 wants to action’. Feedback giver = FG. Duncan Anderson = DA.

    • FG: Hey Duncan, did you enjoy the problem solving we did last week.

    • DA: Yeah I really liked it, so much fun!

    • FG: I was thinking about ways you might be able to level up at problem solving.

    • DA: Hell yes, I love levelling up.

    • FG: Alright, I think it’s really useful to write down clearly the ‘Job To Be Done’ of the problem before you start to try and solve it. I’ve found that clearly specifying the ‘Job To Be Done’ means solutions are much more on point.

    • DA: Oh yeah, I’ve heard one of the founders crap on about ‘Jobs To Be Done’, I’ll give it a try next time.

    • FG: Sweet. Loop me in when you problem solve next so we can check in on this.

  • Comment:

    • When done well this seems like you are helping someone, not pulling them up on a weakness. Or painful ego hurting feedback vs ‘level-up cheat code’.

• *aside: Firstly, at the start of the year I thought it would be fun to try and give feedback in every 1:1 that I did. Initially it was tough but now I think ~80% of them I can find a ‘level up cheat code gift' to give someone. It's so much fun. I enjoy 1:1s more than ever and this is one of the key reasons.

  • "People are the best of times, people are the worst of times." I find one of the ways to have people be the best of times is 'mutual level-up cheat code giving'.

Onwards and level-up-wards :)!

Bulletproofing Your Business - “the person who does not have time to help has no advantage over the person who cannot help.”

By Duncan Anderson. To see all blogs click here.

“Hope for the best, plan for the worst.”

• I believe there are always going to be times when fires start that need urgent attention in any business. So it’s best to make sure you have resources that can respond urgently to these fires (problems).

• Do this by building in time for critical people to be able to instantly drop what they are doing and help.

One way I try to bulletproof a business?

• 1. Figure out any mission critical areas of the business

• 2. For each mission critical area have:

  • 2.1 A person who is Autonomous for this mission critical area

    • Autonomous = 1. can see if a problem arises (many people can’t do this, they are blissfully unaware there is a fire raging) + 2. Can put the fire out (just because you know there is a problem doesn’t mean you know how to solve the problem)

    • Obviously try to prevent as many fires as you can… but you won’t be able to prevent all fires. So you need to prepare to put out spontaneous fires.

  • 2.2 A second person who is Autonomous for each mission critical area

    • If you only have 1x Autonomous person and you lose them suddenly you have a mission critical part of the business unattended! Panic stations!

  • 2.3 An Autonomous person has ~50% of their week free of ‘mission critical tasks’.

    • Non mIssion critical task = if the task is not done this week it will not matter.

    • Mission critical task = has to be done this week.

    • I’ve found this is hard to do. Basically, anyone who is a manager or owns a mission critical part of the business should have significant portions of time on ‘non mission critical tasks’. Often these people are ‘strong performers’ and have more on their plate. Ie often the people who can best help are the people who have the least time to help.

    • Not having enough time for the right people on ‘non mission critical tasks’ I’ve found is a great way to make work unenjoyable for them. This is because if there is a fire that must be dealt with and the person who can help has to go past 100% utilisation then they often don’t enjoy helping. Don’t have the strongest performers be unhappy!

“The person who does not have time to help has no advantage over the person who cannot help.”

• Done well this means that if a fire starts off in a mission critical part of the business you can have enough resourcing to immediately act to put the fire out.

• However, you also need to be able to let some fires burn, AKA not all fires require urgent attention. I’ve found that it can be possible to spend all of your time putting out fires, and thereby not have time to build anything new.

Expectations vs Recommendations vs Suggestions - “Never ascribe to malice that which can be ascribed to miscommunication.”

By Duncan Anderson. To see all blogs click here.

One Sentence Summary: communication is hard, avoid some miscommunications by classifying input as an Expectation, Recommendation, Suggestion!

Definitions:

• Suggestion = take it or leave it AND no need to let the person providing the suggestion know what you decide to do

• Recommendation = take it or leave it BUT you need to let the person providing the recommendation know what you decide to do

• Expectation = cannot take it or leave it HOWEVER if you don’t agree with the expectation please say to so

+++++++++++++++

Details:

For the purpose of this blog let’s assume the following:

• 1. Parties: ‘1.1 Input Provider’ and ‘1.2 Input Receiver’

• 2. Input components = 2.1 Classification of Input * 2.2 Contents of Input

“Never ascribe to malice that which can be ascribed to miscommunication.”

• If someone doesn't do something agreed upon, it's probably not incompetence or worse, insubordination. It's likely there was a difference of understanding in what each party thought they should do. Ie miscommunication!

I find that miscommunication causes ~90% of problems. Here is one way I try to avoid miscommunication:

• If you are the ‘1.1 Input Provider’ clearly ‘2.1 Classify Input’ as an Expectation, Recommendation or Suggestion.  

• Have the all parties confirm their understanding of the ‘2.2 Contents of Input’.

2.1 Classification of Input = Expectation or Suggestion or Recommendation. Definitions:

• Suggestion =

  • A. The ‘1.2 Input Receiver’ can take it or leave it, final owner of what to do is the ‘1.2 Input Receiver’

  • B. There is no need for the ‘1.2 Input Receiver’ to notify the ‘1.1 Input Provider’ what their final decision was.

• Recommendation =

  • A. The ‘1.2 Input Receiver’ can take it or leave it, final owner of what to do is the ‘1.2 Input Receiver’

  • B. However for the ‘1.2 Input Receiver’ to needs notify the ‘1.1 Input Provider’ what their final decision was.

• Expectation =

  • A. The ‘1.2 Input Receiver’ cannot take it or leave it, final owner of what to do is the ‘1.1 Input Provider’

  • B. However if the ‘1.2 Input Receiver’ doesn’t agree with the Expectation they  should push back. No one wants ‘yes people’. Please always ‘thoughtfully disagree’.

Clear communications is not the responsibility of one party, it is the responsibility of all parties always! Leverage the -ations: Expectations, Suggestions & Recommendations

Jingle: -ations make actions accurate!

After input is provided have both parties confirm their understanding of the ‘2.2 Contents of Input’

• This is separate to ‘2.1 Classification of Input’ (aka Expectation, Recommendation or Suggestion). With a blog like this the definitions of Expectation, Recommendation and Suggestion should be clear.

• How to confirm their understanding of the ‘2.2 Contents of Input’:

  • The ‘1.1 Input Provider’ asks the ‘1.2 Input Receiver’ to confirm their understanding of the ‘2.2 Contents of Input’ by restating the ‘2.2 Contents of Input’ orthogonally.

    • Orthogonally = not in the same words that the ‘1.1 Input Provider’ used. Ie the ‘1.2 Input Receiver’ rearticulates the  ‘2.2 Contents of Input’ in their own words. To be clear the ‘1.2 Input Receiver’ is NOT allowed to repeat using the same language what was said in ‘2.2 Contents of Input’.

    • Rearticulation is remarkable. The number of times I’ve thought both parties are on the same page only to find out they aren’t through this technique is terffique ;).

  • After this the ‘1.1 Input Provider’ asks that ‘1.2 Input Receiver’ an orthogonal question (aka a Hinge Question) to double check their understanding a second time.

    • Orthogonal question = a question that can only be answered correctly IF the ‘1.2 Input Receiver’ understands the ‘2.2 Contents of Input’. Ie cannot be answered correct by repeating back what was said by the ‘1.1 Input Provider’.

    • Orthogonal is phenomenal ;)!

  • *aside: the above two actions are to check that the ‘1.2 Input Receiver’ understands the ‘2.2 Contents of Input’ from a ‘first principles’ perspective. A ‘rote learning’ perspective can be done with repeating what was said in ‘2.2 Contents of Input’.

Example time:

• Input: It is an expectation that you come back with a proposal of whether we should go on a holiday to either the north pole or the south pole.

• ‘1.2 Input Receiver’ orthogonally rearticulating input:

  • Rearticulation done well: So you do not want me to go and book a holiday to one of the two, you want to know which one I would recommend?

  • Rearticulation done poorly: I will come back with a proposal for going on a holiday to the north or south pole.

• ‘1.1 Input Provider’ asking an orthogonal question of the ‘1.2 Input Receiver’ to check understanding

  • Orthogonal question done well: why are we suggesting to do a proposal here vs skipping a proposal and jumping straight to booking the holiday?

  • Orthogonal question done poorly: what are the two destinations for the proposed holiday we should be considering?

… if you want to know what the answer to where you should go on holiday is… it’s to the North Pole as that is where Santa is silly ;)!

Default vs designed expectations: write your own stories!

By Duncan Anderson. To see all blogs click here.

One sentence summary:

• happiness = reality - expectations

  • where expectations = the stories we tell ourselves

• the stories we tell ourselves are all powerful

  • the right story can make an event energising

  • the wrong story can make the exact same event draining

• no one can tell you want you like, you get to decide :); so I recommend being wary of accepting the default stories society tells, instead try making your own stories, ones that work for you!  

Key terms and definitions:

• Interchangeable words: stories / narrative / values / culture / expectations

• Scrumptious = delicious + nutritious

‘Storied Model’:

• 1. Stimulus

• => 2. Story about Stimulus

• => 3. Perception of Stimulus

• => 4. Response / Reaction to Perception of Stimulus

• => 5. Outcome

Without realising it, “bad outcomes” in our lives may be due to counterproductive stories we are telling ourselves. Our responses are often ingrained, so it may be easier to change the story itself, rather than the reaction to the story. 2000s Duncan had no idea that I was even telling myself certain stories. Finding that it was possible to change the stories I told myself and that this could change bad outcome to good outcomes was revelatory for me! One of the best ways I’ve found to help myself is to be great at finding the stories that are attached to events, people, work, etc. You want to be great at navigating your way to the story. Or a great Narrative Navigator :)!

One of the best ways I’ve found to help others is to be narrative navigate with them too! All aboard the narrative navigator :)!

“Changing how you respond with the world is often as good as changing the world.” Sam Harris

“Everything begins and ends in the mind.” Andrew Moffat.

• IMO stories fundamentally affect how we perceive and interact with the world. Don’t labour under an inherited ‘nightmare’ story, build a beautiful story ‘eutopia’ for yourself.

• Default vs designed stories / values. We are all unique in our own way, so default stories / values might not be right for you! A good life is unlikely to be handed to you, but I think you can design one :)!

Jingle: don’t let negative narratives nail you, build scrumptious stories to succeed by!

++++++++++++

Theory:

I have made this model as a lens to understand where good and bad outcomes come from. I’m calling it the ‘Storied Model’. Storied = celebrated. Honestly, the number of times that examining the stories that underlie outcomes has helped improve my life needs to be celebrated… and turned into a story though this blog :)!

==================

Storied Model:

• 1. Stimulus

• => 2. Story about Stimulus

• => 3. Perception of Stimulus

• => 4. Response / Reaction to Perception of Stimulus

• => 5. Outcome

==================

Comment:

• One key lever to change ‘5. Outcomes’ in my life I wasn’t aware of 5 years ago is to change the ‘2. Stories about Stimuli’ we tell ourselves.

• I’ve personally found it is much easier to change the ‘2. Story about Stimulus’ than it is to change my ‘4. Response to Perception of Stimulus’.

Let’s say there is a bad outcome in your life, here is a decision tree to for how to use the ‘Storied Model’:

• If a bad outcome is occurring where the stimulus is another person’s actions what can you do?

  • Strategy 1: you can note the bad outcome and do nothing.

  • Strategy 2: if the outcome is bad enough then remove it from your life by not seeing that person anymore.

    • Strategy 1 & 2 were basically how I operated for the first 20 years of my life.

  • Strategy 3: give feedback to the person about their actions to change the stimulus

    • When I first started trying this I normally ended up in a worse place than where I started. Eg I bought things up in a counter productive way so that maybe the person I was bringing things up to wasn’t part of my life after :(. 20 Year Old Duncan was not the greatest communicator (honestly I find comms hard, I think I’m much better than I used to be… but I also hope to be able to get massively better at communicating indefinitely)

  • Strategy 4: change my ‘4. Response to the Stimulus’.

    • Be mindful, just accept it!

    • “God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.”

    • While there are definitely things one should accept, I don’t think you should accept everything! Somethings are crap and should be changed.

    • “The reasonable person adapts themself to the world: the unreasonable person persists in trying to adapt the world to them. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable person.”

    • Not only do I think it’s ok to not accept everything, I think you should actively not accept some things! I don’t plan to ever rest trying to make education better. I don’t plan to ever stop trying to make myself better (although not all day every day, one must have some downtime :) ).

  • Strategy 5: change my ‘3. Story about the Stimulus’

    • When I figured this out is was REVELATORY! Seriously, things became 10x easier!

    • “Don’t treat the symptom, treat the cause.” It all of a sudden felt like I had been totally misconceiving the problem, Strategies 3 & 4 were often ‘treating the symptom’ in hindsight IMO. I was like ‘ Duncan you silly billy, you’ve been doing it all wrong!’

    • Now I find trying to articulate the story behind an outcome, work, others, politics, so so so much fun. I’ve found that it’s really hard to do and that I should try to constantly update the story that I’m saying. I don’t believe this will ever be done.

    • Basically I don’t believe I’ll ever be able to 100% articulate the story behind anything, it’s just a process of constantly updating the story over time (hopefully with the help of others). Fun fun fun.

  • Strategy 6: helping others understand the ‘3. Story they have about the Stimulus’ and understanding if it is serving them well or not.

    • You need to bring things up in a very amenable fashion obviously, but if people believe you are trying to help them AND you use tone that is ‘provoking thought’ (see ‘talking taxonomies’) then I’ve found you can do this.

    • It’s giving a present to them and to yourself.

    • “Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.” Carl Jung

    • “You need to give someone enough rope to look good changing their mind.” AOC

The ‘Storied Model’ from a different lens:

• Let’s say there is a person exhibiting behaviour (stimulus for you) that is causing you to be sad. What can you do?

  • A. You could remove the ‘1. Stimulus’ (person) from your life

  • B. You could ‘respond not react’, changing how you ‘4. Response / Reaction to Perception of Stimulus’.

  • C. You could change your ‘3. Perception of Stimulus’ of the ‘1. Stimulus’ by changing your ‘2. Story about Stimulus’.

  • D. You could try to have the person originating the stimulus to stop creating it through either ‘B’ or ‘C’ above.

• Comment:

  • My interactions are almost never 100% positive. Be it with myself, my work, my friends, my family etc. ie I have some percentage positive and some negative with basically everything in my life.

  • I’m typically aiming for 75%+ of interactions to be positive : negative (ie the level of ‘positive sentiment override’). However each area of my life carries a different sufficient positive sentiment override point. That is the level of ‘positive sentiment override’ is not necessarily 75%, some areas it’s 60%, others 90%. The point I’m trying to make is that, for me, the acceptable level is not ‘100%’ basically anywhere.

  • Let’s say that a certain relationship is 70% good and 30% not good and you want to get to 80% good : 20% not good. Now every problem is different, but typically the easiest way I’ve found to turn a negative interaction into a positive one is to either:

    • ‘C’ change my ‘2. Story about Stimulus’ or

    • ‘D’ change the other person’s ‘2. Story about Stimulus’.

    • Ie update my or the other person's values / expectations / narrative / story.

  • THIS WAS REVELATORY!!!! I’ve typically found that changing how I ‘4. Responded to Perception of Stimulus’ is like swimming against the tide (ie very hard to do); but that changing my ‘3. Perception’ of the ‘1. Stimulus’ through changing my ‘2. Story about Stimulus’ is like ‘changing the direction of the tide’. Ie typically it’s WAY WAY easier for me to have a different ‘5. Outcome’ from a ‘1. Stimulus’ through changing ‘the story’ vs through ‘changing response’.

  • Over my time, I’ve found that I had a lot of counterproductive stories / values / cultural narratives / ect rattling around my head. I’ve slowly been trying to examine them and have them work for me, not against me.

  • Also, I’ve found that it’s possible to speak to others about the stories in their heads and if they agree that the story doesn’t make sense, they can change the stories they tell themselves which then hopefully changes their outcomes to stimuli.

  • Woot woot OMG OMG. I basically realised that for a very long time I had not been seeing that often the root cause of an issue was the story in someone’s head!

Where do our stories come from? And how can we help write our own stories?

• “Culture (expectations) happens by default or by design”

• Happiness = reality - expectations

• Expectations = 1. Either you take expectations from society (socio-cultural indoctrination) or 2. You make your own expectations

  • Expectations = values / rules / principles / etc etc.

• I think the two of the key questions one should try and answer are:

  • 1. What does it mean for me to live a good life?

  • 2. What is the common good and how can I help with this?

• One definition of a ‘good life’ that I like is ‘to make your own values and live by them’. I think I made up that definition :).

  • I think basically all parts of life come wrapped in stories from society AKA socio-cultural indoctrination.

    • What does it mean to be a good person?

    • What is family?

    • What a romantic relationship should be?

    • Is it cool to try hard at school?

    • Should we have capital punishment?

    • Is same sex marriage a good idea?

    • Etc etc.

  • Examples:

    • 1. In many parts of the middle east drinking alcohol is illegal. So often westerners think ‘why aren’t people in the Middle East going and having drinks every friday?’ And people in the Middle East think, ‘why do these westerners go and drink every friday? It can’t be fun being hungover every saturday?’

    • 2. Let’s say you are born in Salt Lake City, there is very high chance you are going to be a Mormon and think polygamy is the way to go. If you are born in Australia you likely don’t think polygamy is the done thing.

    • 3. You are born 300 years ago in England and think that public hangings for ~200 crimes is totally fine… but born today and you likely think there is no reason the state should have capital punishment.

    • These examples have some relatively stark contrasts, more nuanced narratives below. The point is ‘sociocultural indoctrination’ is a real thing, ie you are fed stories from the minute you are born. These stories permeate basically all parts of your life.

• A taxonomy of values creation:

  • L1: I'm not aware of the rules & principles of the stories that permeate the society I live in

  • L2: I am aware of the prevalent socio cultural story and passively or actively live by the principles

  • L3: I have pushed back on some parts of the standard story. Ie I am starting to decide what works for me

  • L4: I am aware of multiple stories (ie multiple different doctrines, not just the main prevalent one of the society I live in today) and I pick and choose the parts from multiple doctrines that work for me

  • L5: I create my own values. Ie I am not just taking from existing doctrines, I’m creating my own values to augment existing values I have actively chosen

  • L6: I help others move up L1-L5.

• “No one can tell you what you like, you get to decide :)!!!”

  • Honestly, for me, this is one of the things that makes life so much fun.

  • I get to learn about myself and the world and change my view of the narrative / story that I think makes the most sense for me and others.

  • “Be the change you want to see.” Gandhi.

  • I don’t think you should be forcing your views onto others, but hopefully provoking thought! I hope this is how these blogs come across. They are thought experiments for me (I hope to continually evolve and change my views on everything) and hopefully thought provoking for others.

Jingle: don’t let negative narratives nail you, build scrumptious stories to succeed by!

++++++++++++

Examples:

Exemplar expectations (stories)

• ‘Doing well at work is getting 100% and being seen to get 100%’ vs ‘doing well at work is maximising trajectory and having people have an accurate view of your strengths and weaknesses so they can trust you and help you improve your trajectory’

• ‘Sales is a dirty thing’ vs ‘Sales is helping someone do something they didn't yet know they wanted to do’

• Work: how I moved this from draining to energising

• A good manager is the best at growing a direct report, not the best at helping a direct report

• ‘Any time not working / reading is wasted time’ vs ‘for machines downtime is a bug, for human’s it’s a feature’.

• Exercise: how I moved this from draining to energising

• Conversation story: trying to move from draining debates to energising discourse

  • Bad story:

    • Pick a side and debate:

      • You don’t learn, you end up trying to strawman each other and have negative sum emotional tank outcome

  • Good story

    • You aren’t out to prove your view right, you are out to learn

      • You both know more at the end of the discussion and have emotional tank more full. Positive sum interaction.

• Child vs romantic partner: how the same ‘stimulus’ can have totally different outcomes

• What grade on the assessment did I expect?

‘Doing well at work is getting 100% and being seen to get 100%’ vs ‘doing well at work is maximising trajectory and having people have an accurate view of your strengths and weaknesses so they can trust you and help you improve your trajectory’

• In much of the existing High School systems doing well means getting 100% on a test.

• However in many white collar jobs you need to learn on the job so the key thing is that you can do more in a year vs today.

• To do more in year means that your trajectory of growth is as high as possible.

• Zone of proximal development:

  • “You learn nothing if you get 100% right or 0% right”

  • “Getting something wrong once is not a problem, getting the same thing wrong multiple times is a problem.”

  • To maximise growth it’s often right to have people getting 50% right.

  • And then for people to be able to recognise ‘if I did this again, how would I be able to do this to get 100%’.

• If you want to help people (done well helping others is helping ourselves and the company you work for) then people need to know where to help.

  • So if you are not able to be vulnerable and show where you don’t understand others can’t figure out how to help.

  • “Vulnerability is not a sign of weakness, it’s a sign of self awareness.”

• Ok, so IMO the main story of doing well in High School (ie getting 100%) is not the story of how to do well in most white collar jobs. Getting 100% on a test doesn’t necessarily mean learning has happened. So we need to change the story in people’s heads!

‘Sales is a dirty thing’ vs ‘Sales is helping someone do something they didn't yet know they wanted to do’

• For some reason I think sales has quite negative embedded connotations.

• However I think in some respects everything is sales! Eg

  • If you are teaching Year 7 Science and you have student who doesn’t want to try, helping that student find the motivation to try is ‘sales’. Ie it’s ‘helping them do something they didn’t yet know they wanted to do’.

  • You are applying for a job at a company and have an interview, you want the company to hire you. So you are selling them on why to give you the job.

  • You talk to a friend about a great book you have read, you are selling them on the idea of reading the book.

  • Convincing your child to eat their greens.

• So sales done well = helping someone do something they didn't yet know they wanted to do

• Sales done poorly = convincing someone to do something they shouldn’t do

  • Edrolo only:

    • IMO at Edrolo we don’t want to have a school buy if the product doesn’t work for them. This might be because the product has issues and we need to change something OR it might be because they are not ready or any other myriad of reasons.

    • IMO getting someone to do something they shouldn’t do is in the long term not good for them or the person person doing the sales!

• However, IMO sales done well is a gift, it is not dirty!

DA’s stories around work: how I moved this from draining to energising

• Past:

  • I found what I learned at school and uni very boring, I only did it as I wanted to get a higher paying job because ‘higher paying job > lower paying job’.

  • I thought work would be the same, an imposition on my time that I wouldn’t do if I had the money to retire.

  • The story: work < hanging out with friends and / or relaxing = work is draining and therefore the best job was the highest paid job.  

• Now

  • I didn’t realise this at 22 but work can make the world better. I strongly believe I do this for my work.

  • Work can be interesting. I love learning about management, about education, about communicating with people, and on and on. I basically find the vast majority of things I do at work interesting now! This is a big change from before where learning was only done to get paid more, now learning is so I can help improve the world more. Ie the story has changed.

  • The story = 1. Work that makes the world better * 2. Work where I get to learn about how to make the world better and put it into action > more energising than hanging with friends and relaxing for 5-6 days a week (still need some relax time :) ) = I never want to retire vs before I wanted to retire as soon as possible.

A good manager helps a direct vs grows a direct

• Past:

  • I used to think that being a good manager meant being great at supporting and helping directs’.

• Now:

  • I feel that too much support and help can actually hinder the growth trajectory of a direct.

  • If you help too much you ‘give people fish, you don’t teach them to fish’.

  • I now think the main thing a manager should be focused on is the long term trajectory of a direct (ie growth), not helping. And that at times this means the optimum amount of support to maximise trajectory is zero support (see ‘energising expectations blog)

Exercise: how I moved this from draining to energising

• Past:

  • I used to find exercising really draining.

  • I did it because you should to ‘be healthy’.

  • But I would be at the gym after work on the treadmill hating it and it would really drain me. It was such a mental effort to do the exercise.
    The story = 1. I have to exercise as it’s healthy but I’m tired and I just want to slump on the couch = exercise is draining.

• Now:

  • I exercise before work when I’m not pooped.

  • I also listen to podcasts / audiobooks (didn’t use to do this believe it or not) and it’s a joyous time to learn about the world. God I love learning.

  • I get total peace without anyone slacking me, talking to me, no meetings etc.

  • So now the story now is: 1. It’s healthy and it actually gives me energy at the start of the day (vs end of the day) * 2. I get to learn all this cool stuff * 3. It’s a time of peacefulness = I look forward to the gym and it’s energising!

• Comment:

  • I changed the story and made it work for me (ie making energising), not me working for the story of ‘you have to exercise to be healthy’ and it being draining.

Child vs romantic partner: how the same ‘stimulus’ can have totally different outcomes

• Your child needs emotional support and help growing emotionally => opportunity to help => love the child => energising outcome from stimulus (yay)

• Your romantic partner needs emotional support and help growing emotionally (frankly I feel we can all use a bit of this) => the partner is not the perfect snowflake to complete me, if they were the right person I wouldn’t need to do anything => I think we should breakup => draining outcome from the same stimulus.

• Comment:

  • I’ve found I could have had unrealistic and counterproductive stories in my head about romantic relationships in the past that have led to bad outcomes.

  • I enjoy helping people at work grow, is there any reason I can’t enjoy helping people outside of work grow?

  • “The purpose of a friend is to make you better than you otherwise would have been.” Socrates.

  • The story I used to have re romantic partners was that any kind of active growth needed by me for the other person was a sign they weren’t right. (At times) I’ve been able to change this story to one where finding a place to help someone grow is seen as me giving a gift to them and a gift to myself.

Conversation story: trying to move from draining debates to energising discourse

• Counterproductive story:

  • When having a discussion with someone you ‘pick a side which often by design is different to the other party and then try to show demonstrate why your view is right’ AKA draining debate.

    • You don’t learn, you end up trying to strawman each other and have negative sum emotional tank outcome

• Good story

  • You aren’t out to prove your view right, you are out to learn.

    • You both know more at the end and have emotional tank more full. Positive sum.

    • You don’t need to know a lot about a topic to have a conversation and learn about it, you don’t have to have a point of view to have a discussion about something.

• Comment:

  • Unfortunately I think things like politics, debating at school, high school having a right / wrong answer, etc often has the default story about conversing on a topic as it needing to ‘pick a side and then try to show why your view is correct’.

  • I’ve found this story to be typically counter productive!

One to mull over:

• Expectations of a romantic partner:

  • Ultimate lover, love that lasts a lifetime (ie a ‘love affair’), best friend, intellectual companion, counsellor, etc.

  • You are looking for the perfect snowflake to complete you… and if they don’t then they are not the right snowflake, find another one!

• Let’s contrast this with expectations of work:

  • Work: you are not expected to know what to do at work vs Romantic Relationship: it should all just work magically)

  • Work: you are expected to have training on your job vs Romantic Relationship: again, it should work else they are the wrong person

  • Work: You expect feedback at work vs Romantic Relationship: a romantic partner should just know what you feel, if you have to explain it, they are not the right person

  • Work: you have a plan for your career  vs Romantic Relationship: having a plan for your romantic relationship is… unromantic

• I think that life without quality relationships would be unfun. I try to actively foster and build quality, rewarding, mutually positive sum relationships at work and outside of work.

  • If you work full time then you likely spend more of your waking hours working than doing anything else. Why wouldn’t you want to have epic work relationships?

  • I also think the set of expectations at work are very conducive to great working relationships.

What grade on the assessment did I expect?

• Let’s say you were expecting an ‘A’ and you got a ‘B’, you are unhappy.

• But if you were expecting a ‘C’ and you got and ‘B’, you are happy.

• This is just a microcosm of how stories everywhere all the time are running us!

+++++++++

Rules and regulations: indulge me in one adjunct.

• Rules = expectations / values / stories (i just put rules as it has the alliteration)

  • I don’t think most people have clearly articulated to themselves let alone others what they think the story / expectations that work for them are.

• Regulation = it’s not enough to have clearly defined values / stories / expectations, you need to implement them well AND update them as and when required.

• Taxonomy time:

  • L1: There are not clearly communicated expectations / principles / values

    • At times two parties will have different expectations and don’t know they do, this is not a recipe for happiness IMO.

  • L2: Have clearly communicated principles but they are not regulated well.

    • Culture downside definition: “Culture is what you are willing to walk past.”

    • Eg it doesn’t matter if you have a story that discussions are for both parties to learn, not to try and have one crowned victor, if when you have discussions you end up in draining debates. If it is ‘principle’ then you need to say so and try to live by the story you think makes sense.

  • L3: good expectations regulated well.

    • This is hard… but I think without this it’s a recipe for unhappiness… so I don’t think it’s optional!

Esteem team - how resilience can lead to brilliance

By Duncan Anderson. To see all blogs click here.

One sentence summary: No one is born with any real skills, let alone the ability to even walk or talk, however from this starting point some people through immense effort are able to cultivate their mind to be 1000x more capable than the average human.  In order to do achieve this level of brilliance, I posit the most important attribute for building one’s mind is resilience in the belief you can build and improve your mind… so resilience leads to brilliance… we are built not born.

Summary:

• In important areas like empathy, problem solving and communication I believe human minds can be cultivated to be 1000x better than the current ‘average’.

• Jobs are moving to be mental based so cultivating our minds is important… to say nothing that, IMO it’s just fun :).

• IMO the key to improving mental capability is believing you can ‘build your mind’. This is self belief / esteem / resilience AKA Growth Mindset.

  • “Smart is not something you are, smart is something you get.”

  • Mental growth = 1. Belief you can improve * 2. Time spent improving * 3. How you spend the time improving.

  • If you don’t ‘1. Belief you can improve’ you don’t spend time improving and therefore you don’t improve.

• Unfortunately I believe much of the current socio-cultural indoctrination does a really bad job letting people know ‘they can cultivate their mind’. It says ‘you are not good at maths, that is ok’. To me this is NOT OK!

• To me there is no such thing as smart or dumb, there are just people who have cultivated their mind and people who are yet to cultivate their mind. That society tells us there are smart people and dumb people I think is doing a massive amount of harm to the human race. I think we need to get rid of this story of smart / dumb entirely!

• I think the most important thing you need for yourself (and to build in others) is belief you can grow your mind, ie have reslliance to the belief you can grow their mind.

  • In the modern world it’s not ‘might is right’, it’s ‘minds matter most’.

• If believing you can improve is the key to growing mental capacity then… BELIEVING IN YOURSELF IS NOT OPTIONAL.

• JINGLE: Believing in yourself is not optional, built not born!

Details (this is a shorter blog, and the details are where all the meaty fun is, I think this is one of the most important blogs I’ve written so please PLEASE read on):

How to think about your ability to improve and upgrade your self

• Fixed vs Growth Mindset recap

  • Fixed mindset

    • The fixed mindset is where you have an innate belief that your abilities are hardwired and unable to be changed

      • I.e

        • “I’m naturally good at the humanities but I’m just not good at maths, it is something I just have to deal with, I wish I was born with better skills in Maths”

        • “I would never be able to complete a triathlon, the training would be too intense and I’m just not made for it”

  • Growth mindset

    • The growth mindset is where you believe you can nurture your abilities in anything given enough time and effort

      • I.e

        • “While I’m not currently great at Maths, I will be able to get a mark I’m happy with on the test as long as I study two hours a night, use Edrolo videos and ask for help from my peers”

        • “I haven’t done any exercise for a long time, but I will be able to do a triathlon in two years from now as long as I stick to my exercise routine, my body is designed to adapt I just need to give it the right inputs”

  • This blog is focused on ways of thinking about and implementing the growth mindset, it is important to be aware of your mindset and the fact you may have a growth mindset about somethings and a fixed mindset about others

    • Breaking out of the fixed mindset is the first step to exponential personal growth

• “Built not born.”

  • All skills are cultivated, from walking to talking to playing sport to playing the violin to driving to empathy to problem solving to communication to creativity.

  • Hopefully you intuitively know this is true. You can learn things. And if you practice you get better (eg you practice at sport you get better). Not all types of practice are equal, good practice (often referred to as ‘deliberate practice’) is better than poor practice.

  • What is important here is that you believe you can treat your mind like a blank canvass and learn any skill you wish with enough time and effort, as opposed to having the scope of skills you will be good at predetermined in your genetics at birth

• “Smart is not something you are, smart is something you get.”

  • The stories we tell ourselves (growth vs fixed mindset)

    • If you ask 12 year olds if they are going to be able to get their driver's licence 100% say yes… even if some will fail the test 5x+ times. [growth mindset]

    • If you ask 12 years olds if they are going to be able to do the maths in class today a non trivial percentage will say ‘no I won’t be able to do this because I’m not good at maths’. [fixed mindset]

    • IMO they have a growth mindset for driving but not maths in large part because of the stories society tells them since birth :(.

  • To me, this is a travesty.

    • Jobs are moving to be mental based (ie physical based ones are being replaced by machines) and some humans don’t belief in their mental ability. What could be worse for a mental based job than if you don’t believe in your mental capacity!!!! So SAD!

    • Overall, I think society has significant elements of ‘fixed mindset’ when it comes to mental attributes. Ie the story is not a reflection of truth (that human minds can be massively cultivated) and is doing humanity a massive disservice.

      • Watch this video if you want an example of this, warning is very very very sad :(.

    • I hope that with Edrolo we can change this story at a global scale to where everyone ‘is 100% confident they’ll be able to get their driver's licence’ AKA growth mindset for all mental endeavours. Imagine giving self belief to every human on earth… sounds like a worthy use of time :).

Growth of your mind vs physical endeavours

• Get ready for a massive oversimplification, let’s say there are two types of growth: 1. Growth with an upper limit and 2. Growth without an upper limit.

• 1. Growth with an upper limit

  • (Almost all) physical endeavours will have a limit which can’t be surpassed due to biological constraints

    • Example:

      • how high someone can jump

        • it’s impossible someone can jump 1000x higher than average

        • If your vertical jump was 1000x the average person, you would be able to jump 457.2 metres straight up unassisted

  • (Some) Mental endeavours.

    • Example

      • the number of maths problems one can do in a minute.

      • remembering esoteric facts.

    • The good thing is that this is where computers are good. So we humans can augment our brains with computers for where we are weak. Yay!

• 2. Things without an upper limit.

  • (Many) Mental endeavours.

    • Communication: the best book isn’t twice as good an average book. It’s likely 1000x better. JK Rowling and Shakespeare aren’t twice as good as average, they are more like 1000x IMO.

    • Problem Solving: the best people aren’t twice as good at problem solving as average. Ada Lovelace (wrote the first computer program in the 1800s) and Elon Musk aren’t twice as good at problem solving as average, they are more like 1000x IMO.

    • Any many more areas.

Believe in yourself!

• As mentioned above jobs are moving to be mental based. So it’s very important we help people build the belief that they can cultivate their own minds

• Ok, so if your mind is what matters and you aren’t born with any real skills, then how do you learn skills and grow them in the first place?

  • What matters is not where you are now, but your trajectory ( this can be defined as your rate of improvement  in what your current capabilities and the new capabilities you cultivate Ie that you have a growth mindset (and not a fixed mindset)

  • An equation to explain what the inputs to growing skills are

    • Growing skills = 1. Belief you can improve * 2. Time spent improving * 3. How you spend the time improving.

• I’m positing that the most important variable is ‘1. Belief you can improve’ as without this you won’t do ‘2. Time spent improving’ because it’s a ‘waste of time’ (fixed mindset perspective).

  • I see it as my job to believe in myself… and to help others build belief in themselves.

  • I think you want to get to bullet proof belief in yourself. Taxonomy time (for self belief):

    • L1. 0% self belief: I’m not good at ‘eg maths’. I’m not going to try at all and give up basically immediately.

    • L2. 50% self belief: I’ll try but i’ll give up after some time OR I need a lot of hand holding to get through this.

    • L3. 100% self belief AKA resilience. No matter what I can do this. Eg get licence, do this maths, improve my ability to empathise, problem solve, etc.

      • This article is wonderful on ‘post traumatic growth and resilience’ from Martin Seligman.

        • DA one sentence summary: if you tell yourself the right story (ie that you can grow) then the outcome of a negative event can be totally different than if you tell yourself the wrong story (ie that you cannot grow and there is nothing to learn from the event about how you can improve).  

      • If you can build your mind (which I think is an undeniable fact) then there is no reason not to have 100% self belief.

      • Einstein was born not able to walk or talk, he wasn’t able to do sh1t… well except sh1t himself :). Then he did something ‘relatively’ good through systemic cultivation.

  • I think everyone should have ‘Resilience (AKA 100% self belief)’ that they can cultivate their mind.

    • It took me a long long LONG time to realise this. FAR TOO LONG :(.

    • Now if I’m starting to doubt myself (if you can tell me how to turn this off please let me know), I try to remember to say to myself ‘built not born’.

    • With the people I work with I try to make sure they have bullet proof self belief (aka resilience) through a combination of telling them what is in this blog and encouragement.

    • So I’m trying to build esteem (self belief) in others… and when I need a reminder to believe in myself they help me out too. Some would say… we are an ‘esteem team’ :). (PS I like that one)

• Alright, so I think human brains in all the ways that matter are basically unconstrained (ie no upper limit). That you can build your brain through deliberate practice.

  • IMO humans with exceptional mental capacity (brilliance) are no different to you or I, they have just done serious mental cultivation (through resilience)… so in other words resilience leads to brilliance :).

  • Don’t be a shit human, be a two shits human.

    • 1. Give a shit about what you do.

    • And 2. Get shit done.

  • Being a 2 shit human will give you the motivation to build yourself (resilience)… because building yourself when you give a sh1t is beautiful fun (brilliance)!

… Ok on addendum:

• Believe it or not I’m trying really hard not to extend blogs (there are so many threads I want to pull on inside this blog!). I’m actually quite proud of how ‘short’ this blog is… but I have broken. One addendum!

• IMO believing in yourself != (does not equal) thinking you are awesome at everything.

• Believing in yourself = you can improve at basically anything if you try hard and try in the right way

• I think trouble comes when you think you are either better or worse than you actually are.

• Having an accurate reflection of your abilities is key to learning where you need to grow (ie use your resilience).

• So:

  • Good esteem => grow your mental capabilities

  • Good esteem => not allowing you to undermine yourself => correct identification of areas for which you can grow

  • Good esteem => not allowing your ego to protect itself and delude you into thinking you are good at something when in fact you are not => correct identification of areas for which you can grow

• Let’s be an esteem team AND help each other know what we actually look like as then we can spend our time improving as wisely as possible :)!

Helping humans, hard fun? But the best kind of fun :)! - Generations of models for how to help humans

By Duncan Anderson. To see all blogs click here.

One sentence summary: understanding humans is hard - when trying to help: 1. look for the root not proximate cause, 2. take into account others and the environment as well as the individual and 3. think about how your and the individuals emotional state will affect things... Oh, and have fun :)

The human brain is the most complex thing in the known universe. A human brain has more connections than there are stars in the universe!

Helping people is hard. However, done well I find helping people is fun :)!!

Five generations of how to identify the root cause of a problem:

• G1: person is a good / bad employee

• G2: person has strengths and weaknesses

• G3: strengths and weaknesses have strengths and weaknesses :) (eg someone is good at managing a certain type of person but bad with another type of person)

• G4: G3 + when looking for the root cause, did it originate from the individual (I used to assume far too often things originated with the individual), others (eg someone has poor tone because someone provoked them vs the individual originated the tone) or the environment (eg looming deadline is causing stress leading to poor tone)

• G5: G4 + including how ‘emotional tank levels’ for all parties at G4 can affect things (eg if someone is in a really bad spot their comms tone might be far worse because of this, eg if you are really drained today you are probably looking at the world more negatively than is fair)

When looking to help people (others and/or myself), I ask a set of questions that I hope sets me on the correct ROUTE:

• 1. Is the problem I have identifying the root cause or a proximate cause (symptom)? (Try to always go a couple of layers deeper to check if you are at the root cause or not)

  • What is the Root cause?

• 2. Have I considered not just the individual, but also the environment and others? (This is to try and break me out of just looking at the individual… which I find I can easily do. Often I find the root cause is not the individual, but someone else or the environment)

  • Are there Other things that may be factors?

• 3. Is the person sometimes good at this and other times not good at this? (This allows me to try and get at the nuance of strengths and weaknesses thereby not having an overly simple articulation of the root cause. Eg is someone good at managing this person, but not that person? Hmmm, why!)

  • Is this an Unusual circumstance?

• 4. How full is my emotional tank? (If I’m depleted have I taken into account how this will be affecting myself and my view of the world? Eg if my tank is empty I’m typically far more negative.)

  • How is my Tank?

  • "Hack 1: if your emotional tank is low TELL PEOPLE IT IS AND WHY!" I don’t know about you, but I find understanding people hard. So if you know if your tank is low please let others know! …however I’ve found the emptier my tank is the less emotionally self-aware I am. Annoyingly, when it matters most to be self aware I find I’m the least self aware!!!

  • "Hack 2: if I don’t know where I am in my emotional tank (ie I have to ask the question of where am I) then typically I’m pretty depleted!"

  • "Hack 3: get external input on where your emotional tank is by... asking others if you seem tense… and then listening to what they say :)!"

  • "Hack 4: mental health days are a thing! If you need a day off for inside or outside of work things then TAKE ONE!"
    
    

• 5. How full is the individual’s emotional tank? (If the individual’s emotional tank is depleted should I be treating them differently? Eg cut slack or offer support instead of provide feedback.)

• How is the Emotional tank of the individual?

• "Hack 5: to try and determine if someone’s tank is low, if their tone is significantly worse than usual I ask ‘how are you?’ vs responding to them." This can allow them the space to open up.

• "Hack 6: If you can see someone needs it encourage them to take the rest of the day off or tomorrow off."
  
  

Is someone bad at their job... Or are you bad at understanding how to help them :)!

• “Built not born.”

  • We are all born not able to talk or walk... let alone do a 21st century job!

  • We need to build and cultivate ourselves and others.

  • Finding how to help others is one of the most fun games I know of.

  • Don’t get annoyed if someone didn’t do good, get happy because you found a way to help someone!

• “Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.” Carl Jung

  • I find that everytime I find a way to help someone… I also find how to help myself! Yay!

  • For some reason it's easy for me to see the twig in someone else's eye but not the log in mine :(.

• When I find something that didn’t go well it makes me happy, not annoyed.

  • It is an opportunity to help someone AND to help myself.

  • “Be the change you want to see.”

  • Don’t be annoyed at something and not try to help. Helping = happiness :)!

  • “You have no right to be annoyed at someone if you haven't told them about what is annoying you.”

• Jingle: “Don’t be sad about bad, help yourself to some happiness”. TM DA :). (i’ve decided i’m going to try and make a jingle for each blog as well as a one sentence summary! )

  • Helping others = helping yourself.

  • Helping humans might be hard, but done well it’s fun!!

+++++++++++++++++

Delicious Details (please read, I like this bit far more than the summary)

All models are wrong… but some are useful :). The world is extremely complex, while models are an approximation of the world (and as such wrong as they do not capture everything), good models help you understand the world better than having nothing as a guide to navigate.

• Ultimately everything is human capital.

  • Eg the chair I’m sitting on to type this is ultimately the product of human capital.

  • Eg the computer I’m using to type this was made by humans.

  • Eg the internet that I’m going to send this to you over was made by humans.

  • Eg the coffee I drank this morning is made by humans.

  • “People are the best of times, people are the worst of times.”

  • Honestly the number of times I’ve tried to help others and / or myself and actually hindered is annoyingly high.

  • But as they say “life doesn’t get easier, you get better at it”.

  • Below are some thoughts on how I try to help!

Do you know what I also find complex? People. Very very very very very complex! Over time I try to develop and improve models, thereby hopefully increasing my understanding of the world and hopefully being able to help more :)!!! Here is one model lens I currently use to better understand how to help people at work:

• G1: a person is a good / bad at their job

  • This is a very one-dimensional view

• G2: a person has strengths and weaknesses

  • someone is not good at everything or bad at everything, but good in some areas and bad in others.

  • Eg someone is good at people management but perhaps weak at problem solving

• G3: a person has strengths and weaknesses even within a certain area

  • someone might be a good manager of a specific type of person but not others (please note that I think one key aspect of management strength is the ability to manage a wide variety of people)

  • Someone might be poor at problem solving at figuring out how to significantly improve a product (eg making a new deal maker) but be great at problem solving how to get our customers to see why we a new deal maker. So they are not ‘good’ or ‘bad’ at problem solving, but have relative strengths and weaknesses within problem solving itself!

• G4: G3 + environment / others / individual.

  • G1-3 are looking at the individual only.

  • Proximate vs root cause. When you are trying to ‘problem solve’ try to always get to the root cause. Unfortunately in the past I’ve many times treated a symptom (proximate cause) and not the root cause. I try to always ask myself this: ‘is this to proximate or root cause?’ / AKA can i go deeper.

    • I often rephrase this as ‘root cause vs symptom’. Eg if you have a headache and you take a panadol the headache will go away for a bit but then return once the panadol has worn off. Best to find the reason causing the headache (root cause) and treat this, not address the symptom with a panadol.

  • Example:

    • Let’s say that in a meeting someone spoke with a tone that was not great. Was this:

      • 1. The individual / yourself. Eg does the person need to think more deeply about their tone and eg find a way to ‘provoke thought’ vs ‘tell people how it is’? If the person is the root cause then try to help them level up through energising feedback :).

      • 2. Others. Eg did someone else say something incendiary and this caused the individual to respond with poor tone. Of course we try to ‘respond not react’, but it’s quite possible here that if you are looking to try and help, the person to speak to is ‘the other’ here (root cause), not ‘the individual’ (symptom).

      • 3. The environment. Eg does someone have poor tone in the meeting but if you zoom out they are in a mega crunch time, and this behaviour is uncharacteristic of them. So it’s the environment causing the tone (root cause), not a systemic area to address with the person (symptom).

• G5: G4 + including how ‘emotional tank levels’ (see below for more detail) for all parties at G4 can affect things.

• What come after ‘Generation 6’? I don’t know yet, please let me know any ideas you have!

Emotional Tank Talk:

• I’m a big fan of the concept of one having ‘an emotional tank’.

• On my best days I like to think I’m alright… on my worst days I’m really really bad at life :( !

• Honestly, I think you can be a totally different person when your emotional tank is full vs when it is empty.

• I think you should treat yourself and others differently depending on where they / you are in their / your emotional tank! Here are my rules of thumb:

  • I’m a big fan of the concept of positive sentiment override. This is from Nobel Prize winning economist Danny Kahneman and says ‘if 75%+ of your time is positive then you have positive sentiment override’. Eg if you work for 4 hours and 3 of the hours are good but 1 is bad, then you don’t care about the 1 bad hour because of the 3 positive hours, ie you have positive sentiment override for the 1 negative hour. However if the ratio is 2 hours positive to 2 hours negative you don’t have positive sentiment override for the 2 negative. I think it’s basically impossible to have every minute of anything be positive!

  • I’m going to invert this ratio here :):

    • ‘Treat normally’ if emotional tank is 25%+ full.

      • Eg if someone has exhibited poor tone in a meeting

      • AND they are the root cause of the tone (ie not others, not the environment)

      • AND their emotional tank is 25%+ full

      • THEN give them constructive feedback.

    • ‘Cut slack’ if emotional tank is 10-15% full.

      • Eg if someone has exhibited poor tone in a meeting

      • AND they are the root cause of the tone (ie not others, not the environment)

      • AND their emotional tank is 10-25%+ full

      • THEN cut them some slack. Eg say ‘hey, how are you today?’

    • ‘Provide support’ if emotional tank is less than 10% full.

      • Eg if someone has exhibited poor tone in a meeting

      • AND they are the root cause of the tone (ie not others, not the environment)

      • AND their emotional tank is less than 10%+ full

      • THEN give them support. Eg say ‘hey, how are you today? Do you want to talk about it? Is there something I can take off your plate?’

• I have a tank, you have a tank, we all have tanks! Thanks for our tanks!

  • I don’t want to be a robot, I like having emotions, I like feeling things.

  • “For machines downtime is a bug, for humans it’s a feature.” Arianna Huffington.

  • I think that, as above, you should treat others differently depending on how full their emotional tank is… and also you should treat yourself differently depending on how full your emotional tank is!

  • For some reason my default is to treat myself the same. It can be that exactly when I need to be kind to myself I’m the hardest on myself because I’m not thinking about my emotional tank levels! What a silly billy!

  • “The golden rule: treat others the way you would like to be treated.” I use the same levels above for when I should cut myself some slack or ask for support!

• Post traumatic growth and building resilience.

  • This is a topic for another day but I think you want to get better at managing your emotional tank so you become depleted as little as possible.

  • This is basically around how often your emotional tank gets to 25% or lower.

Alright, let’s try and wrap all these thoughts into a nice checklist :). Dis is delightful, checklist-ising = energ-izing :)!

• 1. For this problem  have I identified the root cause or a proximate cause (symptom)?

  • Try to always go a couple of layers deeper to check if you are at the root cause or not.

  • This is meant to be covering off G1-5.

• 2. Have I considered not just the individual, but also the environment and others?

  • Addressing G4

• 3. Is the person sometimes good at this and other times not good at this?

  • This is meant to specifically address G3: aka hopefully allows me get at the nuance of strengths and weaknesses.

• 4. How full is my emotional tank?

  • Eg if I’m depleted have I taken this into account for how it will be affecting myself and my view of the world? Eg if my tank is empty I’m typically far more negative.

  • Addressing part of G5.

• 5. How full is the individual’s emotional tank?

  • Eg if the individual’s emotional tank is depleted should I be treating them differently?

  • Addressing the other part of G5.

The end :)

Devil (un)disqualified decisions: only move ahead with decisions that the devil cannot disqualify (aka the work needed to build an opinion)

By Duncan Anderson. To see all blogs click here.

One sentence summary:  To build confidence in a decision you first need to get to a point where you believe the decision is makes sense for what you are trying to solve through standardard problem solving methods, then you need to systematically work through all the reasons why the decision does not make sense, every time you disqualify a reason why the decision does not make sense will gain more confidence in your decision.

Blog summary:

The work needed to build an opinion:

• 1. Try to find all the reasons why a decision will work and subsequently validate / invalidate the reasons. Each reason to move ahead with a decision you can validate increases the probability to go ahead.

  • “Why something makes sense”

• 2. 10x thinking. eg How can we make 10x the revenue next year, how can we take 10% the time to build a Mustang for next year, etc.

  • I find that massively moving the goalposts prompts serious creativity, it’s so easy to get stuck with incremental thinking :(.

• 3. Try to find all the reasons why a decision won’t work and subsequently validate / invalidate the reasons. Each reason to not move ahead with a decision you can invalidate increases the probability to go ahead with the idea.

  • “Why something doesn’t not make sense”. aka playing Devil's Advocate.

  • Jingle time: “before you can move ahead with a decision you need to be able to tell the devil to f$%^ off!” AKA devil (un)disqualified decisions :).

  • Want to end up in heaven? First make sure you are not headed to hell!

• 4. Run through any second and third order consequences (link for details) from your decision

Things to note:

• Not all reasons are born equal. It doesn’t matter how many reasons you have to go ahead with a decision, one deal breaker means you shouldn’t do it.

• Not all decisions are born equal. Some have more consequence than others (eg small / medium / large). For medium+ decisions I don’t believe you should move ahead unless you have been able to tell the devil to f$@# off.

Graphical representation:

• You start at no confidence in a decision.

• Then you try to improve confidence by finding reasons why the decision makes sense.

• At some point it the best way to further improve confidence in a decision is to try to ‘disqualify’ the decision by playing Devil’s Advocate. If you have tried your hardest to disqualify a decision but it still makes sense to go ahead then let’s do it :).

Should each blog have a poster? Why not?

• Something about giving the finger to the devil seems about appropriate to me.

• Please someone come up with a concept, let me know and we’ll make a poster out of it.

++++++++++++++++++++++

Primer info:

• What are strawmen and steelmen arguments?

  • Strawman:

    • A strawman is a version of an argument that no one actually believes, but is very easy to dispute.

  • Steeleman

    • In contrast, a steelman argument is the strongest version of an argument, sometimes called the principle of charity. The goal of steelmanning is to avoid attributing irrationality, logical fallacies or falsehoods to others' statements, when a coherent, rational interpretation of the statements is available.

• Using a strawman vs steelman argument

  • If you just wanted to win the debate (and annoy the person you’re speaking to), pick a strawman of their argument and burn it to the ground. If, however, you want to actually try to get to the truth, you should consider the strongest possible argument that your opponent could have meant and reply to that.

• Giving the devil his due (aka playing devil's advocate)

  • Trying to look at the other side of an argument and seeing all the reasons why something might not work (or might work).

• Confirmation bias

• • Confirmation bias is the tendency to search for, interpret, favor, and recall information in a way that confirms one's preexisting beliefs or hypotheses. It is a type of cognitive bias and a systematic error of inductive reasoning.

  • Confirmation bias is also the tendency to disregard information that denys one's preexisting beliefs or hypotheses.

• Charlie Munger on the work needed to have an opinion (Charlie Munger is one of my heros).

  • “I never allow myself to have an opinion on anything that I don’t know the other side’s argument better than they do.” — Charlie Munger

  • “We all are learning, modifying, or destroying ideas all the time. Rapid destruction of your ideas when the time is right is one of the most valuable qualities you can acquire. You must force yourself to consider arguments on the other side.” — Charlie Munger

  • “The ability to destroy your ideas rapidly instead of slowly when the occasion is right is one of the most valuable things. You have to work hard on it. Ask yourself what are the arguments on the other side. It’s bad to have an opinion you’re proud of if you can’t state the arguments for the other side better than your opponents. This is a great mental discipline.” — Charlie Munger

• Other quotes

  • “The ability to change your mind is a superpower.” Ray Dalio.

  • "To be absolutely certain about something, one must know everything or nothing about it." — Henry Kissinger

  • “Self-belief must be balanced with self-awareness. I used to hate criticism of any sort and actively avoided it. Now I try to always listen to it with the assumption that it’s true, and then decide if I want to act on it or not. Truth-seeking is hard and often painful, but it is what separates self-belief from self-delusion.” Sam Altman

Details baby :)  

For the purpose of this blog I’m going to simplify the world into two types of decisions:

• 1. Where you know what the answer to a decision should be

• 2. Where you don’t know what the answer to a decision should be

I’m just going to talk about decisions where you don’t know what the answer should be today.

What have I got for ya?

• Decision making = 1. Determining the level of confidence needed to move ahead with a decision + 2. Theoretical exploration of a decision + 3. Practical exploration of a decision

• Decision Journal Framework

• An example

1. Determining the level of confidence needed to move ahead with a decision

When you are trying to make a decision where you don’t know what the answer is you need to figure out what the appropriate confidence threshold (confidence sufficiency) is before you can go ahead with the decision.

• Where you do not know the answer you cannot be 100% certain so you need to determine your confidence sufficiency threshold (aka uncertainty threshold) where you are comfortable move ahead with the decision. However, the level of sufficiency should differ depending on the circumstances of the decision.

  • Eg, do I need to be 50% certain, 75% certain, 90% certain to go ahead.

• Here is the main framework I use to figure out what the confidence threshold is:

  • Confidence threshold = 1. How easy is it to reverse the decisions + 2. How much work is involved in a decision

    • Reversibility: some decisions are easy to reverse, some are very very difficult. As such you should be more careful before going ahead (ie higher confidence threshold)

    • Work involved: some decision have heaps of work involved, some very little. All else equal the more work involved the higher the confidence threshold should be.

• Guidelines for low, medium and high confidence thresholds:

  • Low = 50% confidence it is the right thing to do:

    • I typically don’t move ahead with anything I don’t have at least 50% confidence in.

    • You’ll see below that sometimes the best way to increase confidence is through ‘practical exploration’ of the idea.

      • Ie i have 50% confidence from ‘theortically investigating’ the idea and as it’s low risk the best way to get more confidence is to ‘practically investigate’.

  • Medium = 75% confidence

    • You have investigated the decision theortically and have been able to do some practical investigation but due to the scope of what needs to be done you aren’t able to exhaustively investigate all avenues

  • High = 90% confidence

    • If I don’t know the answer I don’t think it is really possible to have more than 90% confidence until we have actually tried something (ie max confidence at ‘theoretical’ stage is 90% confidence, can only get to 100% confidence once you have ‘practically’ tried something).

2. Theoretical exploration of a decision

Theoretical exploration of a decision (idea) is seriously something, I think, I could write a book on.

• I only wanted to talk about one part of this today which is ‘the job of playing devil's advocate’. However as usual I’ve managed to massively blow out this friggin blog :(.

• What I would normally do?

  • Write a proposal centered around ‘universal problem solving framework’. What is the ‘universal problem solving framework’?

    • 1. JTBD = write down the job to be done

    • 2. MECE the JTBD = Mutually Exclusive and Collectively Exhaustive break down the JTBD from at least one lens

    • 3. Make a model of ‘2’ = turn 2 into an equation and model the variables out through eg a taxonomy

    • 4. Crunch the model from ‘3’ = run a few scenarios through your model to see where it help, hinders and breaks and adapt the model accordingly.

    • 5. Synthesize learnings from ‘4’ into a report.

  • After this I’d send the report from ‘5’ to an appropriate group of people for them to read, digest and come up with questions before we have a meeting to discuss it.

  • What happens in the meeting where we discuss the report?

    • 1. We decide on the ‘confidence threshold’ to move forward. Let’s say that it’s 75% for this decision.

    • 2. We then put forward reasons in turn why we think the recommendation will work and debate them as a group to see if they are valid. Each point we think is valid should increase our confidence to move ahead with this decision.

    • 3. Practice 10x thinking. Eg how do we make 10x the revenue of this year? Eg how do we take 10% of the time to build a mustang vs last year. I find that forcing yourself to think big like this typically generates ideas you otherwise wouldn’t have gotten!

    • 4. Once we get halfway to the confidence threshold (eg ~40% confidence we should move ahead with this decision) we then switch from putting forward ideas of why this will work to putting forward idea of why the proposal won’t work (ie giving the devil his due). Here we try to put forward all ideas for why the decision is bad and then we debate. Ultimately any idea we can put forward that we can’t see stopping the decision is a way to ‘increase’ confidence we should move ahead.

      • However it is important to remember: “It doesn’t matter how many how many dealmakers you have for a decision, just one dealbreaker means you shouldn’t move ahead.”

    • 5. Try to look for any second and third order consequences from the decision. I find it’s often easy to look narrowly at the outcomes of your proposal and not consider who else it might affect.

    • 5. If we get the confidence threshold them we move ahead!

Graphical representation of the discussion in the meeting:

• It makes no sense to look at why you should not do something until you have some confidence it makes sense

  • Afterwhich, any reason we can find that not move ahead that we can disqualify is a way to increase confidence.

• It’s really important to try and look at a problem from both sides and not ‘get caught up with confirmation bias’ etc.  

• Aside: I find that most people have a pessimistic ⇔ optimistic set point.

  • Ie they are typically up one end more of the continuum more than they should be. Systemically going through why to do something and then why not to (playing devils advocate) with a group I find is a great way to overcome your innate biases and also everyone knows they will get the chance to put forward reasons why something won’t work.

  • This I’ve found makes for much more energising meetings :)!

I find that problems come when you have an incorrect view of reality, ie you neither want to think your idea is better or worse than it actually is (overconfident / underconfident).

• One key way I try to get around this is by systemically with a group trying to see why an idea will work and then group trying to break an idea (playing devils advocate) and then asking each person what they think the confidence level this is a good idea is.

3. Practical exploration of an decision
Finding through doing

• You can only gain so much confidence through talking through an idea theoretically, at some point you have to put rubber to the road.

• You almost never have full information about making a decision… and sometimes the easiest way to get more information is to make the decision and see how things go.

• If a decision is easy to reverse than try out the proposal and see where you are wrong (eg didn’t have full information or had errors in your synthesis). I find ‘practical’ knowledge is often the fastest way to learn vs sitting around trying to gather more information ‘theoretically’.

  • Aside: I think in the past I’ve spent too long discussing an idea vs just trying it out to see what is what.

• Even if a decision is hard to reverse one hack I like is just to ‘run a pilot’.

  • Eg you don’t need to build an entire Mustang and ship it to schools to get a unit of learning. You can just make 1x lesson and then show it to 5x students and 5x teachers to get feedback. If the feedback is good then you build the idea for the entire Mustang, if it’s not good then you learn why and adjust the idea and then run another pilot.

• Usually we get these learnings by implementing a batch size of 1 (BS1) to investigate the proposed solution

  • The reason to do a BS1 are to

    • Test whether a solution will work

    • Find issues before scaling the solution

    • Both reasons are centred around exploring a decision and finding learnings so you can be confident in what you are proposing to do

• Aside: this is also called ‘lean methodology’. Build the MVP (minimum viable product), then test it (measure) and then learn. Then update what you want to build. Build => measure => learning =>  build etc etc.

Decision Journal Framework

Want to level up decision making even further? Then try having a decision journal! FYI I have one of these.

• What is a Decision Journal?

  • A place where you note down your decisions and then come back in the future and review your decisions to systematically learn.

• DA’s suggestion of what to include in a Decision Journal:

  • What is your confidence sufficiency threshold to move ahead and why?

    • Is this decision easily reversible or not?

    • How much work is needed to actually get a unit of learning? Can I get a unit of learning with 10% of the work (eg a pilot)?

  • What percentage certain am I that this proposal is right?

    • What are the key reasons I think the proposal will work?

    • What are the key reasons I think the proposal won’t work?

    • Have I carefully looked for any dealbreakers to make sure there are none? (it doesn’t matter how many dealmakers there are, just one dealbreaker will cause this to fall over).

    • Have I stress tested this decision with an appropriate number of other people?

  • What is my headspace when making this decision (eg confidence, not confidence, relaxed, stressed, etc)?

  • Date I made this decision?

  • Date I should review this decision?