Data and sources don't guarantee accuracy – that's your job

Time have changed with regard to email hoaxes. In the old days, people would forward the most outrageous stories to you (and one hundred of their other friends) in an attempt to keep everyone out of harm's way.

Typically, after carefully reading the email and applying some common sense, I could tell that most likely it was untrue. However, to check my thinking I'd often search on Snopes.com to check out the story. In the last five years, I've only found one story to be true. The rest are hoaxes.

Recently, I've noticed something new with these emails. Many now start out with a sentence saying, "This has been confirmed on snopes.com" and often provide a link to the story on Snopes.

Yet surprisingly, when I click on the link, often Snopes says that the rumor is false! Sometimes the link itself isn't even a real Snopes link in the first place. It seems that just citing Snopes is enough for most people to believe the story.

Unfortunately, this doesn't just happen with urban legends and emails. I see business leaders make the similar mistakes.

Once during a presentation, I made a point that customer satisfaction scores were dropping. Several people were skeptical and asked to see the data. I put up a line chart showing scores decreasing over the course of six months. I asked if they were satisfied. They were. I then told them that I had showed them a graph from the prior year (I later showed them the current year's graph which supported my statement). I asked why my original statement was suspect but the graph was taken at face value. Most of them didn't have an answer.

It seems that we don't trust people as much as we trust graphs and tables. If something doesn't make sense when it is said, why would it suddenly make sense when you see the data?

Several years ago, I was asked to confirm the validity of a model that was being used in a proposal. The model suggested certain causal relationships between how people learned something and how well they retained it. The model didn't make sense to me intuitively. Luckily it had a source attributed to it. I contacted the organization that created the model. In my first attempt, no one in the organization had ever heard of it. After two or three months of trying, I finally found one person who recognized it. She sent me an email saying that the "model" was created during a brainstorming session and was loosely adapted from some research that was done in the 1960's in a totally different field of study. She said that she would never use it as a definitive source. I contacted the people who asked me to verify the model. I told them what the woman said. I also explained why the model didn't really make sense. They said that as long as they had the correct citation, they felt the model was ok. They never took the model out of the presentation. Several years later, I still saw the model being used and quoted as fact.

Finally, a 2008 study by Greg Miller titled “Neuroimaging: Don't Be Seduced by the Brain,” (Science 13 June 2008 320: 1413) found that the presence of MRI images in a report led undergraduates to more readily accept far-fetched conclusions. One of the reports in the experiment erroneously asserted that the same areas of the brain that are activated by doing math are active when we are watching television. It then stated the conclusion that watching TV improves math skills. Readers were more likely to accept this conclusion as true when a photo of the brain accompanied the article.

Data should not replace common-sense or experience. We need to learn to use the two as checks and balances against one another.

Perhaps this blind acceptance of "data" (or the illusion of data) is due to the current, relentless focus on evidence-based and data-driven management. Both of those are important practices for a leader. However, they are meant to supplement good thinking, not replace it.

It's not enough to confirm that a statement or conclusion is backed by data and sources. The data and sources themselves must be scrutinized for their own accuracy and bias.
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PS: Did you Google the Greg Miller study to see if it actually existed? It does. But if you didn't check for yourself, you left yourself open to poor thinking.


Brad Kolar is the President of Kolar Associates, a leadership consulting and workforce productivity consulting firm. He can be reached at brad.kolar@kolarassociates.com.

Another new blog - what state of "being" are you?

I'd like to recommend a great new blog - State of Being by Joe Pulichene.

In his profile, Joe describes himself as, "Just another average Joe."  But his insights are nothing of the sort.  By reflecting on his own personal and professional experiences, Joe has stumbled on to a powerful model that can help us shape our our lives as well as those that we lead.

Joe's "State of Being Model" provides a simple, pragmatic model of the journey from:

• Wanna be - that point where we decide to pursue something new
• Could be - when we've begun to show some promise
• Be - when we've arrived
• Used to be - when we've lost some of our game but still retain some of that promise
• Has been - when our success is a just a memory rather than a reality

Joe also talks about the dreaded "should have been" state which occurs when something knocks us off our journey.

Joe's ideas are profound while his writing is simple and enjoyable.  He has a lot to offer.  If you are trying to navigate your own journey to excellence, I'd encourage you to check out The State of Being at http://stateobeing.blogspot.com/.  Be sure to read from the bottom up (earliest entries to most recent).

Thinking outside the (blue) tooth

I have a very simple definition of innovation. Innovation is overcoming constraints. That's it. It doesn't matter how fancy or how simple a solution is. If it is the first to overcome a constraint, it's innovative.

I discovered a wonderful, yet simple example of this recently. I downloaded an app called VQ Mileage Tracker for my Blackberry.

Of course, mileage tracking on a cell phone, in and of itself, is no longer innovative. However, VQ has added something simple to the mix. Mileage trackers only work if they know when they should start and stop tracking your mileage. This is where VQ has overcome a constraint. They've figured out how to let the program figure out when you are traveling.

Mileage tracker uses your car's Bluetooth as a trigger. When you start your car and your cell phone connects to the Bluetooth, Mileage tracker starts. When you turn off the car and break the connection, it stops. It's that simple.

Of course, it's not perfect but it doesn't have to be. 90% of the time it's going to get it right. For the other 10%, mileage tracker has some customizable settings that allow you to further "tune" its tracking rules. It also has a manual mode so you can track without Bluetooth.

This idea required them to look at things from the outside-in. This is a key to innovation that many people miss. Often we do the opposite, we think about things from inside out. For example, write down as many uses as you can think of for a brick. (Seriously - go do this!)

Look at your list. If you are like most people, your list probably contains uses that are consistent with attributes of a brick. That is, things that need something hard, strong, bulky, etc. That is thinking from the inside-out. It provides solutions but they aren't always that exciting.

Now think about this from the outside-in. Think about a problem that you are having. For example suppose that you are having trouble getting people to navigate in your store. Now think about the different processes they go through to navigate. They look for signs, they ask for help, the read maps, they look for other visual cues. Now, starting with each of those, consider how you could use a brick. You might be surprised at the results. Most won't involve the primary attributes of the brick. Rather, you might find that you can write things on the brick, you can create a path with the brick, etc. This is thinking from the outside in. When you do that, you discover ways of using things that you would have never previously considered. It's what made MacGyver so much fun to watch!

Now, back to the VQ. Thinking inside-out from Bluetooth as a possible solution might have taken us down the wrong path. When we think of Bluetooth, we get stuck in the rut of thinking about the transmission of data to a wireless device. We might have been sidetracked trying to think of how to get the Bluetooth to send or receive the actual tracking data.

But, thinking from the outside-in yielded a simple result. They started with a question about the problem rather than the solution - "How can we figure out when someone is about to drive?" The simple answer, the Bluetooth is connected. That's it. It's simple yet it overcomes a major constraint. Innovation at its finest.

Brad Kolar is the President of Kolar Associates, a leadership consulting and workforce productivity consulting firm. He can be reached at brad.kolar@kolarassociates.com.

Think beyond best practices

"Have you implemented this somewhere else already?"

I hear this question a lot. As my friend Mark McDowell of Accenture once told me, "Most people want to be first to be second. Few want to be first." It's no wonder that most companies find themselves in a constant state of "catch up".

In the April, 2010 Harvard Business Review, C.K. Prahalad makes a similar point in his excellent article, Best Practices Get You Only So Far. With regard to the adoption of best practices, Prahalad says:

Such benchmarking has a role to play in business, but I'm not exactly a big fan of the process. It may allow enterprises to catch up with competitors, but it won't turn them into market leaders.

So why do so few many leaders want to be first to be second? I think it is due to three issues. Each one represents a major issue of leadership.

Taking risks

Clearly doing something proven is safer than doing something new. Even if it doesn't work out, who can blame you? The data and experience were on your side. But leadership isn't about minimizing risk, it's about taking calculated risks to get ahead. In today's environment, maintaining the status quo, while safe in the short term, is actually the biggest risk you can take. Why implement a new practice that only brings you up to par with your competition? How are you going to win that way? As Prahalad says "Organizations become winners by spotting big opportunities and inventing next practices…"

Understanding the business

"Business Acumen" is a hot topic for training in many organizations. It seems that too many leaders reached their positions without ever having to understand how their business worked. Now they are paying the price. Coming up with the next big idea is hard when you don't understand the current and future dynamics of your business. As a result, it is easier to adopt someone else's idea and manage its implementation. Managing an implementation project doesn't require knowledge of the business, leadership does.

Executing without thinking

The final barrier is the false belief that things are moving too fast to allow time for thought. It's easier to pull a best practice "off the shelf" than to take time to dive into the problems of your organization. However, as Jeffery Pfeffer and Robert Sutton routinely point out in their book, Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths & Total Nonsense, pulling ideas off the shelf doesn't always work. Unless your organization's strategy, customer-base, workforce, and operating model are the same as those of the company that has the best practice, you probably aren't going to see the same result. Pfeffer and Sutton's book is filled with examples of best practices that worked incredibly well for one company but never really delivered anywhere else. Pace has always been important for a business. However, taking time to understand the dynamics of your organization, customers, industry, and economy will ultimately drive better and faster success.

Implementing best practices is easy. You don't need to be a leader to copy what others do. Leadership is about having the vision and understanding to see what's next and the strength and determination to bring it to fruition.

Brad Kolar is the President of Kolar Associates, a leadership consulting and workforce productivity consulting firm. He can be reached at brad.kolar@kolarassociates.com.

Miscommunication – it might just be different memories

Don't you hate it when you painstakingly lay out your vision and expectations for a project only to have your team fall way short of your expectations? It happens to many of us and it's frustrating. It's frustrating for you and for your team.  Often we chalk these situations up to miscommunication. However, recent research into how our memory works paints a different picture.


In their book, The Invisible Gorilla, Daniel Simon and Chris Chabris discuss what they call "the illusion of memory". Their point is that we often act as though our memories are like computers – carefully recording and storing information. But, that's not the case. Simon and Chabris make an argument that our memories tend to be quite fluid and malleable. Often they wind up being as much of a reflection of what we expected to happen or what happened to someone else as they are a reflection of reality.


So what does this have to do with your meetings and your memories? And, why can two (or more) people have completely different recollections of the same event? Any memory that you have of an event is based upon three sets of information:


1) the memory of the actual event.
2) your thinking and planning prior to the event
3) your reflection on that event.


Only the memory of the actual event is based upon shared experience between you and the other person. That means that there are four other influences for which there is no common basis. No wonder our shared recollections can be so far off. Even the memory of the actual experience is suspect. Research and our daily experience tell us that two people can look at or listen to the exact same thing and yet come away with a very different interpretation of what occurred. Peter Senge's "Ladder of Inference" and "Left Side Conversation" illustrated this principle quite well.


So we start off with a "suspect" recollection and then just add to it. The other two influences, your pre and post meeting thoughts, play a bigger role in shaping your memory than you might anticipate. Often we will fill-in details based on our expectations. For example, if a certain person usually pushes back on ideas, there is a good chance that you will "remember" that person pushing back – whether they did or not.


Once you've combined your unique interpretation of the event with your thoughts prior to and after the event, you most likely have a memory that bears very little resemblance to what transpired. Worse yet, it bears even less resemblance to what the other person remembers transpiring.


So, given that we can't rely on our shared memories, we need a better way to create and ensure shared understanding. Here are a few tips:


1) Rapid prototyping –Within a day of the meeting, have the team provide a model of their solution. This will give you the most concrete view of how they are interpreting your request.

2) Provide examples – provide examples of both what you are and are not looking for. Sometimes the non-examples are more important. If there is a risk that people will confuse your ideas with prior ideas, it is important to get those prior ideas out in the open and explain how the new ideas is different.

3) Have a follow up meeting – after a day or two, conduct a follow up meeting to see if people's memories of the meeting are the same.

Multitasking – playing the odds

Why is it that despite volumes of research to the contrary, we generally think that we can multitask? Some of us even believe that we are good at it.

The problem seems to be that the research contradicts our experience. We've all multitasked in meetings without problems. Perhaps we've driven a car while texting without driving off the road. These experiences gives us a false sense of confidence in our ability to focus on more than one thing at a time.

Daniel Simon and Christopher Chabris have finally provided an explanation that seems to reconcile the science with our experience.

Simon and Chabris are most famous among business people for a popular video used in training workshops and meetings. The video involves people passing basketballs to one another. If you haven't seen this yet, I'd strongly recommend that you take a look here before reading any further.

The video provides a stunning example of selective attention. In their new book, The Invisible Gorilla: And Other Ways Our Intuitions Deceive Us Chabris and Simon explain what is happening.

The reason that many people don't see the gorilla is that it is unexpected given the task being performed.  Our brain is constantly receiving visual, tactile, and auditory stimuli. In order for us to function, our brain has to make a decision as to which of those stimuli should be made conscious. It turns out somewhat paradoxically that our brain tends to filter out things that we don't expect to see or hear. You would think the opposite would be true but it's actually more efficient to ignore the exceptions. This is an important point when it comes to multitasking.

The reason that many of us are "successful" at multitasking is that most of the time we are in rote situations - nothing unexpected is occurring. We don't get into accidents when driving and texting because accidents and the things that cause them to happen are pretty rare. Similarly, the reason that we don't miss much in meetings is because unfortunately, most meetings these days don't have a lot of content or discussion that is particularly new or unusual. It's usually the same old stuff. Our multitasking success is less about skill and more about luck and probability. Unfortunately, when the odds go against us and the unexpected occurs, we often find out that our skills weren't as good as we thought.

So, perhaps we are good at multitasking in situations that actually don't require our attention in the first place. But, that's not when problems are going to occur. We aren't so good when we find ourselves in unexpected territory. Unfortunately, we don't know when those unexpected things are going to happen so we can't proactively decide when it's time to pay attention.  Don't confuse probability with skill.  The odds of you missing something might be small since there usually isn't something to miss.  However, as the research shows, the odds of you missing something important or unexpected when it does happen are huge.  Do you really want to take that risk?

If you find that you can multitask at work, you might not be doing things that really are stretching yourself or your business. It might be time to put down the Blackberry and pick up some new, more aggressive goals.

If you have to make a case for change, you've already lost

Think about the most recent change in which you've been involved. Was the change itself a surprise? Was the problem that precipitated the change a surprise?

Most changes occur in response to a growing problem or issue. Rarely do those changes come out of the blue.

So why would we need to create a case for change? Shouldn't people already be aware of the issues and problems being faced by the organization?

Unfortunately, the answer is 'no'. In many organizations leaders don't provide context on a regular basis. Instead communication between leaders and their people is focused on tactical instructions and discussions. As a result, when a change comes, people are caught off guard. When that happens, discussions about "the case for change" begin. It's also too late. If your people don't understand what's happening in your business, they aren't going to be ready to understand and accept a change.

Instead, leaders would be much better served by taking time to provide organizational context on a regular basis. This doesn't have to take away from the day-to-day discussions they are having. In fact, they can enhance them. Sharing organizational challenges, performance issues, or concerns on a regular basis doesn't just prepare people for future changes. It also builds awareness and gives people an opportunity to look for opportunities to address those problems in the course of their work.

Many leaders believe that providing such context takes valuable time that is better served discussing tactical issues. However, the opposite is true. Adding a bit of context in each conversation only adds a few minutes. The time sink is when that context has to presented all at once, from start to finish.

If you find yourself pressed to make a case for change it's a clear sign that you are not providing enough day-to-day context to your people. It might be time to change the nature of your discussions.