3BI: the importance of taking breaks, the benefits of forced change, and data-driven decision challenges
Welcome to my weekly 3BI newsletter sharing three insights from the worlds of psychology, decision-making, and behavioral change. Sign up here to have it delivered straight to your inbox.
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I’m back! Sorry for the long delay between newsletters. I’ve been busy with work, wedding planning, and a number of other things that have thrown off my writing habit.
I’m taking some of my own behavioral change medicine to get back to a weekly cadence, though. Let’s get to it:
Bias free decision-making is hard
Amazon may be the most data-driven organization in the world. It’s famous for experimentation and frameworks for everything from strategic decisions to meeting structure. That doesn’t mean they are immune from cognitive biases, though.
When the company was evaluating cities for its second headquarters, one executive’s football fandom may have been a major factor. From the Philadelphia Enquirer:
At the June 2018 meeting where Philadelphia was recommended for the office complex — alongside Chicago and Raleigh, N.C. — Jassy “opined that he disliked the city, which was the bitter rival of his favorite football team, the New York Giants,” Stone writes in his book about Amazon and Bezos, citing the recollections of an unidentified participant.
Although Jassy seemed to be joking, the remarks marked a turning point, where an earnestly conducted, data-driven vetting process gave way to what search team members saw as “the arbitrary personal preferences of senior executives.”
That turning point was ignoring the search team’s recommendations and developing a list based on personal preferences:
After Amazon’s search team culled its collection of 238 responses down to 20 finalists, including Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, in January 2018, members began visiting each of those locations, meeting with officials and business leaders and touring potential sites.
In June of that year, according to Stone, the search team prepared a six-page paper ranking the finalists into three groups: “not viable,” “hotly debated,” and “top tier.”
…
The “top-tier” list included Northern Virginia, New York, and Dallas, as well as Philadelphia, Chicago, and Raleigh. But search team leaders recommended that the company focus its efforts on the latter three cities so it could begin talking to elected officials and locking down real estate, Stone writes.
…
But when the paper was presented to Bezos, Jassy, and other senior company leaders, the recommendation to focus on the three cities was discarded.
Instead, the senior executives compiled their own list of final targets. It consisted of Dallas, Los Angeles, New York City, Northern Virginia, and Nashville.
I think this is an interesting case study because it demonstrates no one is immune to biases and that, often, we’re subconsciously looking for opportunities to ignore data and follow our emotions.
The company had a data-driven process in place, just as it does for everything, but personal opinions still waded into the conversation. Once they did, it opened up the floodgates for others to do the same, and the data-driven recommendations were tossed to the side.
Eliminating bias from strategic decisions and group dynamics is hard!
Read more at the Philadelphia Enquirer. '
Disappointing outcomes lead to surprising opportunities
It’s easy to be stuck in our ways, even though change can be good for us. We tend to resist change for a variety of psychological reasons, so often the only way we do so is when forced.
Katy Milkman’s behavioral science podcast Choiceology discussed the benefits of forced change in its latest episode, with some interesting examples, including this one from Adam Grant:
Three years ago, winter of 2018, I went to a bunch of the most influential CEOs in Silicon Valley. And I said, “Hey, I want to do a remote Friday experiment where you randomly assign people to work from home just one day a week. And I want to test the effects on productivity, creativity, collaboration—what does it do to your culture?” And they all declined. And they said, “Look, we don’t want to open Pandora’s box. People might never come back. We don’t know if they’ll get anything done.” And hilariously, at least three of those CEOs have now announced that they might never come back to an office.
Those CEOs missed an early opportunity to test remote work in a less dire situation, but the pandemic forced them to explore new ways of working together. For at least some of those CEOs, that exploration revealed that remote work could actually be better for business.
The pandemic has forced us all to make abrupt changes to our lives, and it’s worth reflecting on which are better for us in the long term, and why we may have resisted them before.
Listen to the episode here.
You need breaks
A schedule full of meetings has always been draining, but especially so when social distancing has moved all of those meetings to video calls.
A day of meetings can’t always be avoided, but according to research from Microsoft’s Human Factors Lab, adding short breaks in between them can have a significant impact.
Researchers from the lab, which examines how humans interact with technology, asked 14 people to take part in video meetings while wearing electroencephalogram (EEG) equipment—a cap to monitor the electrical activity in their brains.
The 14 volunteers each participated in two different sessions of meetings. On one day they attended stretches of four half-hour meetings back-to-back, with each call devoted to different tasks—designing an office layout, for example, or creating a marketing plan. On another day, the four half-hour meetings were interspersed with 10-minute breaks. Instead of hurriedly jumping from one meeting to the next, participants meditated with the Headspace app during the breaks.
They found that short breaks between meetings had a significant impact on stress levels.
Not only did the breaks relieve stress, but they also increased focused during meetings:
When participants had meditation breaks, brainwave patterns showed positive levels of frontal alpha asymmetry, which correlates to higher engagement during the meeting. Without breaks, the levels were negative, suggesting the participants were withdrawn, or less engaged in the meeting. This shows that when the brain is experiencing stress, it’s harder to stay focused and engaged.
As they succinctly summarize, “The antidote to meeting fatigue is simple: taking short breaks.”
Read more at Microsoft WorkLab.
Other stuff
Nudgestock, one of the best behavioral science events around, is virtual again for 2021 and happening on June 11. Last year’s was fantastic, so I recommend signing up here.
What Really Happened With that Weird Yankees COVID Outbreak: A really insightful interview on COVID, virus testing, and vaccines.
Meet the Four Kinds of People Holding Us Back From Full Vaccination: This is a great example of developing real understanding of different people’s underlying motivations and developing behavioral iniatives specific to their circumstances.
A cool visual demonstrating how a seemingly simple system can lead to chaotic outcomes:
Have a great weekend!