Shaping the Path

April 27, 2021April 27, 2021 ~ Sasha ~ Leave a comment

In my first job out of business school, I was the most junior person in IBM’s Corporate Citizenship team. Stan Litow, the hard-charging ex-Deputy Chancellor of the NYC Schools, ran the group and was my boss’s boss.

Occasionally, I got to work directly with Stan, and “work” often meant doing the background research and preparing a draft document or an email for him to send out.

My barometer of success was simple. I tracked:

The speed with which things I produced went out the door.
The difference between what I produced and what finally got sent by Stan.

Naturally, the two were correlated: the closer I got to the target, the faster the end product was sent out.

I came to discover that it wasn’t just getting the content right that mattered. It also helped tremendously if I made it as easy as possible to turn my draft into the final product. This meant things like:

Drafting the outgoing email to accompany a file
Writing that email to make it sound the way Stan sounded
Succinctly explaining to Stan the context behind what I’d done and the recipient
Being completely clear what actions needed to be taken

While at the time I was enabling my boss’s boss, these behaviors continue to inform my actions to this day.

To be influential and drive action, part of our work is to make these actions as easy as possible – called “shaping the path” by behavioral economist Jonathan Haidt (Chip and Dan Heath also talk about this a lot in Switch). Shaping the path is the act of removing all friction between a person and the action you want them to take: giving students a printed map if you want them to go to a dorm and get a vaccine, for example, increases the number of students who get the shot.

Once you start paying attention to shaping the path, it’s addictive, especially in written communication (email/Slack).

You’re shaping the path every time you:

(email) Write a good self-contained forwardable email when you’re networking
(email) In an email, summarize your headlines in one sentence rather than assume that everyone will read the attachment
(email/Slack) Transform a paragraph into a numbered or bulleted list that is easy to digest
(Slack) Include a clickable link to a file to a colleague rather than a filepath
Encourage your team to take a specific action, and then model that action in verbal or written form
Use Docusign
Turn your Word Doc contract into an online Terms of Service
(email/Slack) Put all the information everyone needs in one place, more than once (as in, even after everyone has the calendar invite: “here are the materials for our meeting next Thursday from 10:00 to 11:00 am Eastern time and here’s the Zoom link”)
(email) Change the email subject line of an email to make it clearer what it’s about.
Are hyper-specific about what would be most helpful, or how you can help, and ask for just that (size of the action, amount of time) and nothing more.

Making everything a little easier for the people you interact with is a sign of both empathy and respect. It shows that you know how busy they are, and that you recognize how much time and energy it takes to task switch.

As a bonus, it’s more likely that people will do the things you’d like them to do and that they will feel great about it, because it was so easy for them.

Tap, Tap, Tap

June 3, 2010June 2, 2010 ~ Sasha ~ 1 Comment

Today I’m going to hear Dan Heath talk about his new book, Switch, which is about how to create changes in people’s behavior. I count myself an adamant fan of their first book Made to Stick, so I’m looking forward to the talk. Made to Stick is of the only actionable books on communications I’ve read, and I recommend it to anyone who wants to communicate, sell, interview, connect, or tell stories more effectively (yes this means you!).

Often when I’m asked to do a “how to fundraise” presentation to a small group I’ll start with the “tappers and listeners” experiment that Chip and Dan cite early on in Made to Stick. The finding was published in the Journal of Political Economy by Dr. Elizabeth Newton, and the experiment goes like this:

Have everyone in your group pair up. For each pair, elect one person as the “tapper” and one person as the “listener.” The goal is to have the “listener” guess the song that the “tapper” is tapping. All the tapper can do is tap her finger on the table in sync with the notes of the song she wants the listener to guess. So, if the song is “Happy Birthday,” the tapper would tap: “tap-tap-tap-tap-tap-taaaaaaaaaaaap.” (tap out “Happy Birthday” and you’ll see what I mean.) Have each person be the tapper once and the listener once

Before everyone gets started, ask them to estimate how often the listener will guess the song correctly. (You should do this too, right now. Just write it down or remember your guess. Will the listener guess right all the time? Half the time? A quarter of the time?)

Now run the experiment and see what happens.

I did this yesterday with a group and it played out like it does every time. People laugh out loud – it’s a combination of excitement, joy, frustration and embarrassment. And they do a terrible job guessing the songs and a terrible job guessing how good they will be at guessing the songs.

Yesterday, my group’s median guess for how often the tappers would get the song right was 25%. In Dr. Newton’s experiment, which was much bigger, people estimated 50%. And in fact, people in the experiment guessed right 1 in 40 times (2.5%). In my group yesterday the group guessed right 8% of the time.

Put another way, people estimate that “listeners” are engaged in a coin toss (1 in 2), when really it’s a shot in the dark (1 in 40).

What’s going on here?

Dr. Newton’s article is titled “The Curse of Knowledge in Economic Settings: An Experimental Analysis.” The Curse of Knowledge in this case is the song that the “tapper” has playing in her head. As she’s tapping, she literally hears each and every note, and she just cannot imagine what it feels like to be a listener who doesn’t have that tune, who just hears “tap-tap-tap-tap” and thinks “well that could be ANYTHING!!” The tapper and listener can’t help but get a little bit frustrated at each other. The tapper thinks “well c’mon, this shouldn’t be so hard,” because she hears the notes accompanying the taps; and the listener wants to please the tapper and wants to get it right but just isn’t getting enough information.

I love having people do this together because it is simple, fun and visceral. You can tell people a million times to explain things simply, to use narrative, to tell stories, to avoid jargon…and you won’t get half the effect you have after they’ve played this 5- minute game.

It’s easy to remember what it feels like to be both a tapper and a listener and from there you can begin to understand how your own knowledge, expertise and experience are hampering your ability to explain yourself, your story, what your organization does, the change you hope to see in the world.

The next time you’re telling your story and you see a blank, smiling face across the table, take a moment to think: what does this sound like without the accompanying music?

Tap-tap-tap-tap….

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Pattern (mis)recognition

April 22, 2010April 22, 2010 ~ Sasha ~ Leave a comment

I’m just finishing Chip and Dan Heath’s new book, Switch, which I bought right away because I thought Made to Stick was one of the most actionable books I’ve ever seen about effective communications. A few years after reading Made to Stick, I still recommend it far and wide.

Made to Stick is one of those books whose entire arc grabs you and informs your thinking from that day forward. I’m not sure Stick hits that bar, but it has a lot of good stuff in it, and I found at least one gem that I think may be the most important reminder I’ve gotten in a while about how to make sense of the world. It’s called fundamental attribution error, which describes our tendency consistently to reach incorrect conclusions about the meaning of the data / information we’re getting.

A story to explain the concept: a group of schoolkids that was struggling academically was divided into two groups for a few hours of once-a-week instruction over a six week period. One group received normal tutoring and traditional instruction in the subject areas in which they were struggling; another group was exposed to a curriculum that focused on the mind as a pliable “muscle” that could be strengthened through hard work and study, and on the concept that intelligence wasn’t fixed. Group 1 was taught stuff, group 2 was taught that they could be taught stuff.

Put another way: group 2 was taught that the data they’d received about their academic performance (that they didn’t do well in school) did not mean that they were irrevocably poor students. And guess what? Test scores from this second group – after just a few hours of these sessions spread out over a little more than a month – soon beat the pants off those of group 1.

I think of fundamental attribution error as the story we build around the data we are given. In the simple, obvious case: I push the elevator button a bunch of times, and the elevator comes. The attribution error is thinking that the more I push the button, the more quickly the elevator comes.

Elevator-pushing is a blunt example. But life is full of more subtle, trickier situations. Say I’m meeting someone for the first time and she seems distracted and disengaged. If I’m nervous about the conversation, my attitudes about the information I’m receiving (she’s not looking me in the eye, she seems distracted) informs the story I tell myself about her actions (which is by definition not the same thing as her actions). This story can be objective and positive (“I’m noticing that she’s distracted.”) or it can morph into a stream of fear-induced thoughts: “she doesn’t like me” or “she’s not interested in what I’m saying.” More often than not where you end up will be somewhere between these two extremes.

Chip and Dan Heath remind us in Switch that humans are typically awful at distinguishing real from imagined patterns; that we over-attribute actions to people’s personalities and attitudes rather than to situations; and that the biases we bring into situations play an overwhelming role in how we process the information we receive.

Our outlook – about ourselves, our own self-image, how we think people act and process information – is the superstructure upon which we hang the tidbits and facts that accumulate throughout our days. They allow us to make sense of the complexity of the world around us, but they also can reinforce patterns that are completely of our own making. This is why acting fearless, positive, open and present is just about the most powerful strategy for having positive interactions and learning appropriately from things you hear from others.

I’m beginning to believe that HOW we make sense of information – which more often than not is about us, our attitudes and biases and fears – is the most fundamental determinant of our experiences of and success in the world. Put another way, recognizing where we consistently reach wrong conclusions is the first, giant step towards breaking out of these patterns.

The data – how people act and react; what they think of us; what they hope to achieve themselves – is usually quite benign, and the signal (real information) to noise (our story about the data) ratio is often pretty low.

Separating out what we see from what we tell ourselves allows us a glimpse of real, honest truths.

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