How to Deal With Loneliness

I like this post by Om Swami on loneliness. “It’s a blessing if you can harness it and be inspired while reveling in it. If not, it is the root cause of persistent restlessness and emptiness.” In this post he quotes Matt Haig and some of this quote resonates.

Loneliness happens to most of us, at times. And it happens even though in our world we may have the feeling that it should happen less often thanks to the connections and constant opportunities for connection and entertainment. “In theory, it has never been easier to not be lonely. There is always someone we can talk to online. If we are away from loved ones then we can Skype them. But loneliness is a feeling as much as anything.”

How can we deal with loneliness? “I think the American writer Edith Wharton was the wisest person ever on loneliness. She believed the cure for it wasn’t always to have company, but to find a way to be happy with your own company. Not to be antisocial, but not be scared of your own unaccompanied presence.”

So, find a way to be happy with your own company!

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How Virtual Creatures Invade Our Connections and our World

Virtual creatures start to be everywhere in our environment: major instagram influencers are hired by leading brands that are in fact virtual, virtual news anchor presenters appear. Maybe your next connection on your preferred social network will be virtual? Tough times for starlets, like exposed in this post ‘Brands Are Creating Virtual Influencers, Which Could Make the Kardashians a Thing of the Past‘.

Lilmiquela, a famous virtual Instagram influencer

Virtual creatures may look safer and more docile: no risk of personal crisis and unprofessional behaviors outside the screen, and full control of the behavior on screen. They can be made as attractive as needed, and may be fully adapted to the audience – many of those virtual influencers are colored.

At the same time of course we’re losing a certain dose of humanity, making interactions with those influencers and brands even more… virtual and distant from our day-to-day life. Those won’t have the same day-to-day issues and challenges we face as humans. Also, their perfection will look even more unapproachable for us poor imperfect humans.

I believe this trend is here to stay and will even be enhanced further with AI bots coupled with virtual creatures. It will also be harder to distinguish those virtual connections. Another reason to stay grounded in our humanity and being less influenced by the perfect pictures we find of others on social networks!

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How Levels of Authority Should Specify the Right Debate Forum on Decisions

Following up on our post about ‘How To Find the Right Balance for Bureaucracy‘, the issue of decision approval in organizations is always a critical one. The issue of Levels of Authority granted to individuals always revolves around pre- or post- control. What is important is that the smaller decisions are not impeded by delays and are in fact controlled post-decision; but that for important decisions, sufficient debate occurs prior to the decision.

In fast growing organizations, levels of authority are always too low. It is often the same in organizations that are not used to running large projects when it comes to the level of authority of the project manager. Levels of Authority often need to be increased to minimise delays, and improve reactivity. However, for major decisions that can have a substantial impact on the organization’s performance, it remain legitimate to ensure that a proper debate occurs. And sometimes those decisions may look small but will have a high leverage on performance.

The way approvals happen in most companies however is that despite a proper system of levels of authority, debate do not happen prior to the decision. Decisions are limited to clicking on an approval button and often there is no context to the decision. The issue may also lie in improper levels of authority, and the important decision may be hidden in the midst of many less important ones.

Levels of authority should not only specify authority levels: they should also specify those decisions that require debate, and how this debate should be conducted.

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How To Find the Right Balance for Bureaucracy

I am always astonished as how fast bureaucracy can develop in any organisation, i.e. activities being created that keep people busy with limited value created for the client. In this HBR article (in French) ‘Le coût de la bureaucratie‘ some measures of bureaucracy and of its costs are developed. At the same time, some bureaucracy, systems and standards is needed to keep large organizations going and remain effective as they scale. How can the right balance be found?

Bureaucracy is measured by looking for example at the time it takes to get a given decision, and the HBR paper shows that it increases significantly with the size of the organization. This is obviously a problem. At the same time, some kind of control is required on decisions being taken, in particular when they can have a large leverage on the organization’s performance. Similarly, a minimum of internal coordination and systems are required when an organisation grows, to make work more effective; but they should not be too inflexible and unable to adapt to new circumstances.

There is a fine balance between not enough and too much bureaucracy. Those organisations that find the right balance are the most effective. The main issue, I find, is that principles of operation often become obsolete but remain in force in bureaucratic organizations. I believe that every few years, a hard look should be taken at how the organisation works, and an objective of replacing 30 to 40% of its operating principles should be sought.

Do you practice this periodic health check?

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How the Collaborative Age Seems to Create Increasing Rural Abandonment

Rural abandonment is an increasing reality. It is also a key driver of politics in many countries, with votes being increasingly differentiated between city and countryside; and votes in the countryside being increasingly extremist. One of the latest examples is the cancellation of rural bus lines over the entirety of west Canada: ‘Decline of Greyhound service mirrors rural Canada’s plight‘.

Abandoned basic services in rural France

A few years ago, with the the rise of internet, visionaries were considering rather the contrary, with city people moving back to rural places, creating life again there, and working remotely from home. There are still regularly a few stories about such experiences, but more often, people are just moving from larger to smaller cities for an improved lifestyle.

As of now, rural abandonment seems in general to increase, and additional forces tend to reinforce the trend:

  • agricultural work seems increasingly ripe to robotisation, as work is performed in a relatively simple environment, and GPS based optimisation can increase yield significantly,
  • weaker government resources reduce subsidization of rural public services
  • the mix of ideas is much better in cities, creating additional value and an increasing value gap
  • in a negative cycle, the loss of basic businesses and services in rural areas makes life harder and increases the migration to local towns

The rural territory is an asset and should not be seen as a burden or just as a playground for city folks. Some isolated initiatives give new economic life to certain territories but they are still far apart.

This issue of rural abandonment needs to be addressed proactively by governments: otherwise the burden of maintenance will increase dramatically. I am looking forward to hear about possible initiatives.

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How the Science Behind Popular Psychological Effects is Often Wrong

Surprise, the science behind our previous blog post ‘How To Play With the Psychological Lunch Effect‘ was wrong! An excellent post ‘Impossibly Hungry Judges‘ explains in detail why and gives all the necessary links to papers that show why. Still, many people use this study as a reference (and we did too as it is entrenched in popular knowledge!)

This is just another example that we need to take with a pinch of salt all those popular psychological studies. In this case, as shown in this paper ‘Overlooked factors in the analysis of parole decisions‘, there were many other factors that explain very well the order of cases during the morning and afternoon and explain better the timing: easier cases that are supported by lawyers are considered first, etc.

We know intuitively that timing and lunch may play a role, but the correlation was just too strong to be true. It is probably much weaker. This is just a reminder of how much we need to be careful between correlation and causation, and when we read about a surprising psychological study!

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How To Play With the Psychological Lunch Effect

A famous and often quoted study ‘Extraneous factors in judicial decisions‘ shows that judges’ decision-making is greatly influenced by timing, and particularly whether they are hungry: the proportion of parole granted goes down to a flat zero just before lunch.

Percentage of positive decisions based on time in the day

This tends to be an excellent illustration of the effect of timing of our decision-making abilities.

Using the lunch effect is one of the dirty secrets of facilitating: I often make sure that the hardest decision-making topics are tackled at the end of the morning just before lunch time, just to be able to use the fact that I can postpone lunch until a decision is taken. When participants become hungry they suddenly tend to agree on some decision, letting their fights on the side.

The lunch effect can thus be positive or negative, just know how to use it to your advantage.

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How Emotions Drive Organisational or Social Change

I love this Gapingvoid post ‘Why change management is emotional‘. It just hits the nail that every organization leader should avoid. Contrary to general belief, change can’t just be created by an executive decision and a powerpoint deck.

“The only thing that drives real change are emotions.

A major change is emotional brain chemistry and can be ignited just by a simple thing you do or say. Once you’ve flicked the switch, amazing things can happen. It should be supported by reason or argument”

It follows that it is essential at the start of a change management process to identify which are those emotions which you expect to change and address.

It may look hard, but actually when taken from the emotional side, change can be quite easy. What’s difficult is to figure out the hot button that will make the organization respond.

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How Increasingly Difficult It Can Be To Prove Causation vs Correlation

Following up from the post ‘How the Van der Waerden Theorem Shows the Limits of Big Data‘, since Big Data will produce an increasing number of spurious correlations, the issue of identifying causation versus correlation will become increasingly important.

This Medium article ‘Understanding Causality and Big Data: Complexities, Challenges, and Tradeoffs‘ does a good work to explain the issues at stake. It also explains in a clear manner when causation is really needed, and when correlation is sufficient.

The most important in my view is that with the increasing complexity of our world (directly inherited by our increasing linkage), proving causation will become increasingly difficult. It does not help that we are trying to increasingly derive causation from smaller effects, which are on the border of being statistically significant. The causation chain can have some very indirect links that will make it difficult to determine what is causing what. I believe the current debates about the effect of certain chemicals used in natural environment (such as pesticides) exactly demonstrates this issue: in a complex ecosystem, proving a causation link is very difficult even if there is correlation.

Substantial theoretical and practical progress in the methods to determine causation is an important issue for the world today. I hope that enough focus and effort is dedicated to this problem.

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How AI is Being Used to Spot Lies and False Declarations

Following up on our review of the changes brought by AI in the field of justice (see for example the post ‘How Predictive Justice Software Starts Being Used‘), this interesting Quartz post ‘Police are using artificial intelligence to spot written lies‘ addresses how AI can detect fake statements for insurance or police.

Certain patterns can certainly be identified to assess the probability for a statement to be untrue, but the immediate question if of course up to what level this may be used. Is this only to prioritize those declarations that would warrant further investigation, or would that lead to a straight rejection?

One can also expect in the near future to see a whole new industry of AI statement coaches to emerge, with coaches and counter-AI programs being made available to check the veracity level and modify the initial statement to make them appear more credible… The interesting part here is that we are increasingly moving into a world of conformity, because AI will instantaneously detect anything that comes out of the ordinary.

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How the Japanese Concept of Ikigai Increases Life Satisfaction

The concept of Ikigai has been floating around the web lately, like in this Medium article ‘Ikigai: The Japanese Secret to a Long and Happy Life Might Just Help You Live a More Fulfilling Life‘. It seems to be a japanese concept aimed at locating the area at the intersection of what you love doing, what you are good at, what you can be compensated against, and what the world needs. Compared to other models, it is this last addition which makes the approach special.

The addition of values and seeking activities that the world needs is an interesting change to the more classical model of finding the soft spot between passion, career and capability. It definitely gives an interesting spin to the exercise of finding out where to locate what we are currently doing as our main activity.

As to whether finding one’s Ikigai is the best way to prolong life, that’s a stretched conclusion which we’ll not investigate further, although this claim obviously creates interesting reflections.

How close are you to your Ikigai?

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How Memos Are More Powerful Than Powerpoints to Structure Thoughts

I am always amazed at how Powerpoint presentations have become the standard support to structure thinking in organizations. I sometimes feel old-fashioned because I prefer to work on memos to get my thoughts in order. Luckily I am not alone: Jeff Bezos at Amazon has banned powerpoints in favor of structured memos, as explained here or here. And I truly believe that memos have substantial benefits.

Powerpoint presentations are everywhere in organizations. I even know some that use this support for their commercial proposals! This tool has great benefits in terms of sharing, but it also structures the thought process in a certain way: bullet points, overall structures that are fit for presenting.

Memos are of course less sexy when it comes to sharing ideas but I find that they allow a more structure thought build-up. That is possibly because a certain logic needs to be developed throughout the document, which is not so much the case in a powerpoint presentation. Also, there are much less possibilities to be distracted by some graphical representations.

My personal process when developing detailed thoughts about an issue is to write a memo and work around structuring it in a satisfying manner. If needed I may produce an additional powerpoint presentation, but I find the memo format much more amenable to the development of a structured approach.

If you find you are producing too much powerpoint thoughts, try to structure your thinking using memos. It is worth it!

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