Work in Progress, a weekly psychological deep dive into business current events. Ranging from Elon Musk’s pivot of Twitter to a local town’s task of disposing of 500 pounds of pasta, we’ll touch on what is happening, explore the organizational forces at play using psychological frameworks, and talk about what we all can learn in order to be more effective and successful in our own careers.
Whether you’re an individual looking for additional mentorship, or a team leader looking to more intentionally support their team, I think you’ll find useful tactics here.
Bill C-18 & The "Will" and The "Way" to Behavior Change
In Canada, Meta is no longer showing news on its platform. The hardline move is a defensive play to try and prevent further legislation around how social media companies deliver and monetize publisher content that is shared on their platforms. Granted, most everyone is favor of NOT seeing news when they log-in to their social accounts. But that does not make people's existing viewing and reading behavior any easier to unseat. Here, we will look at behavior change and review Berkman's framework for the "will" and the "way" problems that make behavior change difficult.
14 Aug 2023
LK-99 & Lessons in Product Delivery
LK-99 drew the excitement of the scientific community and then drew its ire. Promoted as the highly improbable and equally sought-after room-temperature superconductor, replication studies quickly found blatant errors in the study design and data collection of the initial research team. Beyond the immediately obvious lessons, the story of LK-99 can teach us a thing or two about proper product delivery.
24 Jul 2023
What Barbenheimer Teaches About Our Strengths and Opportunities
Barbenheimer has become an internet meme sensation for the stark differences of its two titular characters. In truth, the movies and its protagonists share striking similarities as they respectively explore their theme of internal conflict. For us and our teams, the movies highlight a universal struggle that we all face - how can our strengths also present us with problems and opportunities for development. In this post, we will explore that idea to better understand how a single behavior can be both a strength and a weakness and we will look at tactics that can help us minimize those downsides without sacrificing our max potential.
17 Jul 2023
Record Heat & Our Short-Term Thinking Demise
Across the globe, billions of people are experiencing a heat wave. June was the hottest month on record and July looks like it will warm up even further, with day-after-day of record high global temperatures. Climate scientists are consistently highlighting the cause - weak effects from an emerging moderate El Nino and strong effects from human-influenced climate change. Despite nearly universal alignment on the problem, a myriad of potential solutions, and high degree of support for implementing those solutions progress is slow. In part, the hesitant pace of change is caused by short-term thinking that preferences immediate and known value over longer-term benefits of more ambiguous proportion. Here, we will dive into some of the cognitive biases at play and discuss tactics to implement in our teams that help overcome these pitfalls.
10 Jul 2023
Threads vs Twitter - How & Why to be a Good Copycat
Last week, amidst more troubles at Twitter, Meta released its twitter-killer alternative. Threads, like other apps that have already hit the market, mirrors many of the key features and the app interface of Twitter. As we look through history, we see plenty of stories of competitors copying from each other to win market share. But we also see that copying is only half of the battle. In this post, we will look at how the timing of the Threads launch has helped to separate it from the pack and discuss why imitation can often be a superior strategy to innovation.
8 Jul 2023
Lionel Messi - Productive vs Busy
How can you not talk about the greatest player of all time after the greatest World Cup final of all time? Sharing a few lessons from Messi that we can all learn from, even if we're not (yet) performing on the world stage. Data references from this article: https://lnkd.in/eMwxuiam
3 Jul 2023
The U.S. Supreme Court - How Structures Can Reduce Bias
The Supreme Court wrapped up hearings on its latest session with another round of blockbuster decisions, rolling back affirmative action and reducing civil rights protections for members of the LGBTQ+ community. While acting conservatively to try and reduce the impact of bias on our society, the high court is simultaneously and ironically failing to account for the bias in its own organization. Recent reports of lavish trips gifted to justices and aggressive decisions from the shadow docket have helped to drive the judicial branch into a legitimacy crisis. Structures, akin to the affirmative action programs it recently struck down, may provide an answer.
Reddit found itself on the front page of the news this week as more than 2,000 community moderators continued their protest against the platform and co-founder CEO Steve Huffman. Focused around a change to the company's API pricing and the resulting loss of features from 3rd-party developers, the protest seems one-part anger about the policy change and one-part grief for how the corporate side of Reddit is evolving the platform as it heads towards its upcoming IPO. Huffman, for his part, could not seem to care less. As Huffman pushes forward with his plans while moderators attempt to slow him down, we can all learn about some common pitfalls that occur in organizational change management and the tactics we can use to avoid them.
24 Jun 2023
Leadership Starts Where Layoffs End - Building Resilience in Teams
Leadership is defined when times are at their worst. For companies, there might be no worse time than the days after a layoff. After layoffs, employee motivation is at or near all time lows, momentum that had been building is very likely stopped, and team leads throughout the organization are assigned the difficult task of accelerating the organization back to full operating speed. In this post, we explore Suzanne Kobasa's three traits of psychological hardiness and how to build up resilience in your team.
23 Jun 2023
500 Pounds of Pasta & Handling the Unexpected
In business, things usually do not go according to plan. Even those surprises are not quite so unexpected as seeing hundreds of pounds of pasta suddenly appear in the woods of small town America. Officials of Old Bridge, New Jersey encountered just this problem. Their response has a lot to teach us about how to approach edge cases, recurring alignment with stakeholders, and the can-do attitude needed to fix issues fast.
23 Jun 2023
Theranos & The Curse of High Expectations
Without a doubt, Elizabeth Holmes and the Theranos executive team are criminals. After defrauding investors of hundreds of millions of dollars, Holmes's fate was sealed this week as the date for her prison sentence to begin was set. Still, it is important for us to recognize that we are also prone to the biases and situational factors that accelerated the misbehavior of these individuals. Incentives inherent to our jobs and whether leaders highlight inputs or outputs of teams can have undesirable influence on the way that team approaches its work. These problems can be accentuated when we value people for the work they deliver rather than for who they are. Here, we will explore these influences and how we can minimize their damaging potential.
19 Jun 2023
Relationship Advice - How to Work Most Effectively with your Boss
Every year the world celebrates Valentine’s Day, a holiday for our nearest and dearest relationships. But when we think about important relationships, there is one connection that gets consistently overlooked and under-analyzed - the one with our manager. They are one of the most influential people on our career. However, most of the advice on developing effective managerial relationships is woefully incomplete when compared to the amount of advice on building healthy personal relationships. Still, a lot of the same principles can apply in each case because a strong relationship only needs mutual respect, shared goals, and open communication - something we should strive for in our professional work as in our personal lives. In that spirit, let's take top advice on building quality personal relationships from certified experts and spin it to look at how we can work more effectively with our manager.
19 Jun 2023
Mass Layoffs & Bad Leadership - A Rant
This episode is just a rant. Nearly a quarter of a million people have been laid off in the tech sector over the past 13 months. That is a large amount of social disruption that has largely been explained away as a result of macroeconomic factors and the reversing digital trends post-pandemic. There are a myriad of nuanced reasons that each company who used layoffs chose to do so. However, in my opinion, there is really only one underlying factor - bad leadership.
19 Jun 2023
Elon Musk Buys Twitter - How NOT to Start a New Job
Elon Musk's first month as Chief Twit has been the opposite of a smooth start - dropping ~75% of his workforce, losing advertisers in droves, and a mess of new product feature rollouts. Personally, I have never started a new job as CEO of a company and maybe you have not either. But here is my advice to Elon (and you) for setting yourself for success in any new company - Focus on the people, Don't do anything, Solve stakeholder needs, and Trust yourself.
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