Unjudging someone
I often work on organisations’ strategy where this question arises: “Andrew, should we define our values?”
My definition of values is this: “Values are beliefs that, when shared and visible as behaviours, predict your success”. So, the answer is an obvious ‘yes’, because who wouldn’t want to know what beliefs predict success, especially when multiplied over 100, or 1000 or 10,000 staff?
The problem is that values are often self-reinforcing. Take a common value, ‘respect’. It’s easy to respect people who have the same outlook and mindset and opinions as ourselves. But what about people who don’t? And, even more practically, how would we have access to people who hold vastly differing ideas to our own?
This is where a Danish social innovation comes in: the ‘human library’. It’s called a library because you or I can “borrow” a human being. Literally.
They turn up, and are literally ‘open books’ having honest conversations we would not normally have access to. Every human book from their bookshelf represents a perspective in society that is often subject to prejudice, stigmatization or discrimination because of their lifestyle, diagnosis, belief, disability, social status, ethnic origin etc. It’s now a global initiative, across 85 countries, and they proudly state that they are “a place where difficult questions are expected, appreciated and answered”.
Question: What diverse perspectives can you introduce that can enable you to ask — and answer — difficult questions?
The price of under-statement
Let’s stay in Denmark but go back 400 years. At this time, fully two-thirds of the country’s national income came from one source: taxing shipping in the Baltic Sea. This was enforced easily because every vessel was forced past the narrow neck where Helsingor is located.
Here, officials would board and value each item, which they would tax at 1 - 2%. But this was slow, and led to inevitable arguments, so they came up with a method that eliminated labour (and dispute) altogether: they simply asked ship captains to state the value of their cargo.
But, what prevented captains from understating the value, and hence underpaying tax?
Their brilliant tactic was this: the Danish state had the right to buy the cargo for whatever value the captain assigned. This meant that captains had to do a calculus as follows: “What’s the lowest value that’s high enough for them not to want to buy it?”
It’s just like we do for kids: one cuts the cake, the other one gets to choose.
This remarkably successful example of behavioural economics remained in place for over 400 years, and only was eliminated at the birth of the era of free trade routes negotiated internationally from the 1850s onwards.
Question: How can you provide an incentive for your customers to self-regulate and conform to your requirements?
The machines are thinking for us
When I was a kid, we weren’t allowed to take calculators into maths exams, in a belief that manual calculation was the point of the task. (I remember we even had printed books with logarithmic tables in the back — and I swear this was the 20th, not the 19th, century!). 40 years later, my 13yo son is not only allowed a calculator but also uses tools like Grammarly when he’s writing (or, more usually, typing).
If you don’t know it, Grammarly is an artificial intelligence engine that, in real-time, as you write, corrects your spelling (I’m using it as I write this and it told me that ‘real-time’ is hyphenated). That’s the minimal version; it also will identify incorrect grammar (quite well, I must add). And, something my son commented on: it even gives you feedback about your writing style.
Yesterday, Jasper wrote an email to one of his teachers, asking for an extension on a project owing to illness, and Grammarly rated it as ‘optimistic’ and ‘confident’. He was delighted, and came to show me. I’m optimistic and confident this little ‘nudge’ makes him more likely to pen a letter on his own initiative next time he has to ask for a favour or special dispensation of some sort.
Question: What AI innovations can you use in your business not only to reduce effort and improve quality, but to heighten motivation at the same time?
Do you have a colleague who would benefit from this? Please feel free to share.
And, if you like what you’ve read, please do me (and the algorithms) a favour and click the heart. It truly does make a difference to the number of people who read this.
As you travel through your world this coming week, notice the various incentives that have been designed to encourage your compliance.
I’ll be with you again next Friday,
Andrew
You may want to check out Braver Angels - a nonpartisan US group committed to teaching us how to engage in civil civic dialogue again. I’ve take the social media courses and participate in several debates (including one in a few hours on free speech on college campuses); the debates are designed to preclude personal attacks and force ‘meaningful’ conversation. They help us overcome our worst instincts and move toward our best intentions.
I always enjoy and get something out of your 5MSM, thanks Andrew. Fascinating vignette about the Human Library