In these days of extremisms on all sides, I’ve been thinking about the power of a committed few. In particular, what percentage of a population is required to change the perception of the majority? Alternatively, when does an idea shift from the minority to the majority? We tend to think of social progress and change…
Throughout the ages, dogs have been human’s closest companions. Research suggests one of the reasons might be that dogs understand human intention. Recent research tested whether dogs were able to distinguish intentional human actions from unintentional ones, even when the outcomes were the same. In the experiment, dogs were fed rewards (i.e. treats) through a…
While it’s natural to try to learn from success, it can provide a skewed outlook. We need to understand survivorship bias to make better decisions. Survivorship bias happens when we base our understanding only on the experiences of those who succeed or are highlighted in some way, and do not take into account others who…
We sensationalize innovation as moments of eureka leading to novel ideas but most innovation comes from exploring the adjacent possible. The concept of the adjacent possible originates from Stuart Kauffman’ work on biological evolution. Kauffman’s theory is biological systems morph into more complex systems by taking small, incremental steps rather than extreme jumps or more…
We innately know how to hear but we need to learn to listen. While that might seem counter-intuitive, it’s like the difference between seeing words versus reading books. Overly simplified, to read (and understand) a book, we need to recognize letters, put them together into words, understand the connotation of sentences, and organize them into…
According to the theory of risk compensation, people adjust their behavior in response to perceived levels of risk; they are careful when they sense heightened risk and less careful when they feel more protected. As a result, attempts to increase safety can have the opposite effect. For example, the much-cited paper “The Effects of Automobile…
Have you ever had a co-worker or a teacher try to explain something to you and use words that you didn’t really understand? If so, the confusion might be theirs, not yours. The Feynman Learning Technique suggests that, if you can’t adequately explain something to a twelve-year old, you probably don’t really understand it that…
“Specialists are people who know more and more about less and less, until they know everything about nothing. Generalists are people who know less and less about more and more, until they know nothing about everything.”Likely source: Robert E. Swain Yes, those sentences are intended to be humorous but we can’t help but recognize an…
Having been in the technology industry for the last 25 years, I’ve felt the need to be constantly learning just to stay current. When I was a developer, it was programming languages: FORTRAN, Pascal, C, Smalltalk, C++, Java, Perl, Python, Ruby – I could never quite keep up. Over the last few years, I’ve experienced…
One of my most popular blogs is “The No Asshole Rule” which was inspired by a class I took from Professor Robert Sutton. Sutton encourages companies to get rid of workplace assholes who deliberately make co-workers feel bad about themselves and who are openly aggressive to others with less power. While there’s a detailed on-line…