There's an all you can eat buffet with all the flavours of the world, you can have whatever you want. This is going to be amazing! You love lasagna, but look at those fajitas. You go for the fajitas, but then your friend arrives with sushi which looks even better. Why didn't you get that?? You always screw up...

Barry Schwartz studied how more choice not only doesn't always help us choose better, but can also make us feel worse about what we got even if it was great. Reduced satisfaction arises from:

The opportunity cost of what we could have had and what was good about other options

Regret and anticipated regret of the choice we made

Self-blame when we think we are responsible for not doing as well as we could have

For an entertaining and educational 20 mins watch Barry Schwartz' TED talk on the paradox of choice.

The paradox of choice

In Manager Time a day is neatly sliced up into hourly chunks according to the calendar. Meeting someone is as easy as finding a free slot that coincides. You don’t have to worry too much about what you’ll be doing next as your calendar will tell you.

In Maker Time a day is an open book to get something hard and meaningful done. Even thinking when a meeting might be and remembering to go can distract from getting on with making. Long, uninterrupted chunks of time, not sliced and diced by meetings on the hour are ideal to make progress on hard problems and tackle something new. Even a single meeting in the middle of an afternoon can disrupt that long meaningful chunk into two that make it harder to tackle something big as you have to context switch and pick up where you left off.

Most modern offices operate on Manager Time. It’s great for meetings but comes at a cost for getting meaningful work done. If you’re a maker you may associate with the feeling that to get some real work done you feel you need to do it at the weekend, or in an evening after everyone’s gone home, when you’ll be free of interruptions.

If you’re a manager, consider your makers when you schedule your next meeting.

If you haven’t already, you should read the original article Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule, by Paul Graham from whom this excellent observation is from.

Manager time, maker time

This acronym acts as a handy checklist to consider and clarify roles and responsibilities for projects. You could even build a table — a Responsibility Assignment Matrix —  with what needs to happen and the people who are involved identifying what relationship each person has for each task. In particular, sometimes making it clear who doesn’t have a say can be the most helpful thing to do. It breaks down somewhat like this:

Responsible
Who will actually be responsible for doing the task.

Accountable
Who is accountable for it being completed and achieving its goals.

Consulted
Whose opinion will be sought for the task, though they won’t be doing it themselves.

Informed
Who doesn’t get a say in the task, but will be kept informed of how it’s going.

RACI

This is what you get when someone is able to launch something that is not only cheaper, but also better. It’s kind of an irresistible	proposition. Most new things that are better don’t tend to also be cheaper. Often this is only possible with a whole new technology or approach. It’s like when the first taxi apps started appearing. To me it was like hang on, this is way better — no trying to catch a taxi in the rain, simple, non-awkward, no swinging by the ATM payments — and also cheaper. It’s also similar to Target’s Cheap Chic.

It is of course, not the only way to compete. If you make something better, people will pay what it’s worth to them. But if you can do it cheaper too you’re on to a winner. 

Sexy value is a name, I believe, from Ogilvy and Mather.

You might also like another model of theirs: The Big Ideal.

Sexy value

There are lots of questions you can ask of data. I like this model as it gives a framework for the different types of questions you might ask. It was introduced to me as the data science pyramid with descriptive analytics — measuring what’s happening — being the foundation on which others are built. You don’t have to go in order, but it’s a nice approach to consider how the questions you’re asking of your data might evolve.

To take our school Summer fête as an example, for a long time takings were all in cash and put into one bucket at the end for counting. You end up with one number for how much you raised. But you might move to collecting more descriptive data on the takings for each stall — whether the bar earns more than the tombola, for example. You then might be able to ask diagnostic questions like figuring out why one fête earned more than another with a different mix of stalls. If you know how many people came you might be able to make some predictions on the takings of a future fête based on number of people and stall types. And if you get fancy you might start to use your data to figure out how you could raise more money for the school in future.

There are many ways to slice and dice data and the questions you ask, but I like the clarifying simplicity of this one.

As far as I know, the framework is the Analytics Ascendancy model, or Analytics Value Escalator, or other such business sounding name from Gartner.

Analytics maturity

Pitched as the one number you need to grow your business the Net Promoter Score (NPS) gives you a way to measure across your customer-base how many people love what you’re doing enough to tell their friends vs how many people are ambivalent or negative about your business. The resulting number, your NPS, from +100 to -100 has been shown to give a reliable indicator of companies’ future success.

To calculate your NPS ask your customers how likely they would be to recommend your business to a friend — or variations thereof — and give them a scale of 0 (not likely) to 10 (very likely) to answer on. Those who answer 9 or 10 are your biggest fans or Promoters. Those who answer 7 or 8 are passively satisfied — they like your business but are unlikely to shout about it. And anyone 6 or below are your detractors. If they talk about your business it could well be negative. Your NPS is your % of promoters minus the % of your detractors. For example, if you got 100 responses, 35 9s or 10s, 37 7s and 8s, and 28 0–6s then your NPS would be 35 minus 28 = 7.

Keep track over time and you’ll get a good sense of how your business is doing. Follow up with qualitative feedback, for instance “why did you give this rating?”, and get a recipe for improving your business. Simples.

Learn more in the original Harvard Business Review article, “The One Number You Need to Grow” by Frederick F. Reichheld.

Net Promoter Score

The more transparent your workplace the less transparent your employees. In an age of trackers, wearables, online monitoring, workplace chat and always-on devices it turns out that not only does a more transparent workplace actually drive people to more secretive behaviours, but that adding a little more privacy actually may improve productivity also.

Very simply, the transparency paradox is the idea that increasingly transparent, open, observable workplaces can create less transparent employees.

See Harvard prof Ethan Bernstein’s The Transparency Paradox study (pdf) or I learned about it from the Freakonomics podcast: Yes, the Open Office Is Terrible — But It Doesn’t Have to Be.

The transparency paradox

Originally an observation meant as satire, the Peter Principle (book) states that “every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence.” Someone who is good at their job is likely to get promoted. But the promoted position will likely require different skills. If they’re good they may get promoted again, but if not, there they will stay. Then at some point each employee in an organisation will be incompetent at their position. I like this short take on the Peter Principle by Tim Harford.

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The Peter Principle

It’s easy to think “it’s just a few minutes.” But as the number of people that you hold up increases, the true cost of being late scales rapidly. Being 10 mins late to a meeting with 10 others is 100 minutes. Holding the door for 20s on a train of 600 people is over 3 hours of time collectively. Unless your time is worth a lot more than everyone else’s it’s worth thinking twice before holding the door to a train or not taking the start of a meeting seriously. I think, at the end of the day, it’s really about respect.

The cost of being late

You might think that adding more of a good thing would make things better? And, yes, that’s often true, up to a point. Beyond it, however, you may see the law of diminishing returns where adding progressively more of a single factor yields progressively lower benefits.

And we should also never forget that “more is different”.

The sketchplanation is a homage to perhaps my favourite comedy sketch with an early-career Simon Pegg in the series Big Train: the cake factory (video). Well worth two and a half minutes.

PS. If you follow by email, rather than Instagram or Twitter, I apologise for the last few weeks’ irregularity. Had a little mix-up with Mailchimp, but hopefully all good now.

Law of diminishing returns

Named after the brilliant Clay Shirky his principle broadly states that:

Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution.

Sometimes this may manifest itself as blindness towards new or different ways of doing things, other times it’s the challenge of and innate resistance to making oneself obsolete. Examples include there being more money in life-long illnesses than cures, traditional newspapers’ resistance to alternative online news forms, planned obsolescence of products, committees requiring the presence of committees, or resistance to self-checkouts at a supermarket.

Some exceptions include Vitality health insurance in the UK that  rewards a healthy lifestyle, and the lightbulb industry, in its move towards ultra long-lasting and efficient LED lights, boldly eliminating the need to replace most of its products for a lifetime. I’m still waiting for a breakdown service to reward people for taking care of their cars rather than focusing on fixing the breakdowns.

The Shirky Principle

Perhaps, like me, you’re used to thinking about bringing customers onboard as a funnel. It’s a very natural metaphor for thinking about customer acquisition. For example, you market to 10,000 people, 500 people visit your website, 50 of them put something in the basket and 10 of them buy. If you draw it out it looks like a funnel. And the next time you market you start fresh with a new 10,000. But the real world isn’t like that. Delivering a good service to your customers helps the next customers come in. Hence the flywheel model.

A flywheel is typically a big heavy wheel that stores and releases energy from an engine or vehicle. The flywheel metaphor is about happy customers driving your growth. And when you think about your business this way it can cause you to make different decisions. Having more customers is like a bigger, heavier flywheel containing more energy. Happy customers speed you up, unhappy customers slow you down. Making it easier for customers to try your product reduces friction, as does making it easier for for customers to talk about and share your product. Get your flywheel big, heavy and spinning like crazy and your business is doing well.

The flywheel model is from Brian Halligan at Hubspot. I’ve thought about customer funnels for literally years and I wish I’d known about the flywheel long ago. Check out Hubspot’s flywheel intro for more.

The business flywheel

In Dan Pink’s book Drive, he looks at scientific studies showing that the all too common approach to motivating people involving rewards and punishments, or the carrot and stick approach, ultimately doesn’t help motivate people for the tasks and work we have to do today.

Instead, we do our best work when driven by intrinsic motivation — motivation from inside us, rather than imposed externally like rewards or punishments. And the 3 facets he highlights that help intrinsic motivation are:

Autonomy: being in control and able to guide both what we do and how we do it

Mastery: our desire to continually be improving and learning and bettering ourselves

Purpose: working towards something we think is worthwhile. Having a North star to aim for and a reason it’s worth doing what we’re doing.

I find it a useful framework to think through whenever I’m not feeling motivated, or when I want to help make sure the people I’m working with are motivated.

Also see: flow at work, Goldilocks tasks, the zone of proximal development, on parenting.

What drives us: autonomy, mastery, purpose

Conway was mostly observing software development, but I would think it has some application to any large project: cruise ship design, car design, space shuttle design, heck maybe even governments and law.

Law is kind of a strong word for an observation, but in any case, here are some other ‘laws’: Fitt’s law, Metcalfe’s law, Goodhart’s Law, Muphry’s law, Moore’s law, Koomey’s law, the law of diminishing brownies, the law of lockers and, my favourite, Hofstadter’s Law.

PS: As you read this I may be cycling mid-lake and trying not to sink to raise money for charity: www.cycleorsink.com

Conway’s Law

Networks effects can lead to massive, rapid growth. Amazon has leveraged this little sketch by Jeff Bezos in 2001 for mega growth — Amazon calls it a virtuous cycle — and, more recently, the Uber variation, by David Sacks explains much of Uber’s wild ride.

When you build a platform that leverages network effects right it can enable growth way beyond what has historically been possible. Also, see Metcalfe’s Law.

The ‘Virtuous Cycles’ of Amazon and Uber

This is military strategist John Boyd’s framework for combat operations that also turns out to apply quite well to businesses and learning in general. It’s really not that far from the ol’ test-learn cycle or a good design process.

There’s lots of nuance to his framework, but some of the application of it that I like includes:

The faster you can do this loop — at your startup or in a fight — the more stuff you will get to try and the faster you will learn

If you’re in competition with another entity then completing your OODA loop fast, and acting to change the environment for them, disrupts their loop and forces them back to observe before they can act. It slows them down and creates confusion

I learned about it from Reid Hoffman’s excellent Masters of Scale podcast.

OODA Loop

In other words, if you pick a measure to assess people’s performance, then we find a way to game it. I like the illustration of a nail factory that sets number of nails produced as their measure of productivity and the workers figure out they can get tons of tiny nails. And, if they switch it to the weight of nails made, they get a few giant heavy nails. Or perhaps the story of measuring fitness by steps from a pedometer only to find they get put on the dog.

Some strategies for helping this are to try and find better, harder to game measures, assess with multiple measures, or to allow a little discretion. More detail in this nice little article.

I also liked an idea I read in Measure What Matters of pairing a quantity measure with a quality measure, for example, assessing both number of nails and customer satisfaction of the nails.

Goodhart’s Law: when a measure becomes a target, it cease to be a good measure.

I’ve found this model useful in my thinking so many times. Also known as the Buying Hierarchy, it’s a model that illustrates a common evolution — though not perfect nor universal — in products and markets where an original innovation provides a performance or functionality benefit over what others can provide. As a result they can charge more as no one else does it.

When others come to deliver that too, then the focus for the customer can move to which delivers the most reliable quality. When the reliability is the same from different providers then we’ll choose the one that is more convenient.

Only once all else is equal does the lowest price option become the winning one. At this stage you’re selling a commodity where people could choose to get the same thing, just as easily, for the same quality in several places.

There’s a business to be made at each stage, but it’s sensible to know where you’re competing.

The original model is from Windermere Associates and widely shared by Clayton Christensen in The Innovator’s Dilemma.

The customer value chain

A model from Ogilvy and Mather that’s a really interesting way to get to the heart of what could make your brand thrive. The intersection between what people care about (a cultural tension) and what you could be famous as a business (your brand’s best self) is a recipe for doing something good that matters.

Try starting from a question: “The world would be a better place if…” and see where you get to.

Check out The Big IdeaL on Ogilvy and Mather for more.

The Big Ideal ™

Well, the barnacles we see don’t move. But when they’re little, they do swim, and once they’ve found their spot they basically cement themselves in place. They’re what’s known as sessile animals — ones that don’t move once settled, along with mussels and coral. Now that would be a different way of life.

Watch out for barnacles

Cheat sheet for Crossing the Chasm by Geoffrey Moore

Understanding the Chasm

The Peter Principle, identified as a pattern within organisations can be applied more generally such that anything that works will be used in progressively more challenging situations until it fails.

The Generalised Peter Principle

Breadth of experience, knowledge and sectors and world-class skills in one discipline. As you can imagine, this would set you up pretty well. IDEO famously seek out t-shaped people

T-shaped people need breadth and depth

From The Design of Business. With a little reflection the funnel is pretty trivial. But I do think it’s a useful way to think about things. At what stage is your business? Still tackling a mystery like Xerox Parc, or getting it down to heuristics like Zynga, or refining out an algorithm like McDonalds.

Roger Martin’s knowledge funnel

I love this quote from PW Anderson. More often seems like it should be more of the same, but more is different. It would be good if more people considered this.

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