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Just Flip a Coin Instead

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Sometimes decisions aren’t worth the cost of deciding

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This article is a reprint of an episode of my new podcast. You can visit the site of the original episode here.

Stever Robbins here. Welcome to the Get-It-Done Guy’s Quick and Dirty Tips to Work Less and Do More.

Today’s tip is about decisions. The bottom line? If it costs more to research and make a decision than the impact that decision will actually have, flip a coin instead.

In my first corporate job, we needed a laser printer for our programmers. The executives met to discuss it. After all, a $600 laser printer would only save twelve programmers hours worth of hassle. The marketing department had one, true, but then, they needed one. Otherwise, how could they print drafts of the billboard they erected, celebrating the company’s “Great Beginnings.”

In the end, they didn’t buy the printer. The programmers would just have to make do. And at night, I lay awake wondered: was this somehow my fault? In retrospect, perhaps I overestimated my own importance.

Decisions cost money

But I didn’t overestimate the decision’s importance. The decision not to buy the printer took four executives three one-hour meetings to make. The executives made about $100,000 a year, apiece, which is $50/hour. Multiply by four executives and three hours, and we’re talking $600 worth of management time to make that decision. They should have just spent the $600 on the darned printer.

This was the first time I saw that decisions cost money. And if it costs more to make a decision than the amount you’re deciding about, it’s more sensible to flip a coin or spend the money without further discussion. That’s why some businesses don’t even require receipts for small expenses when employees travel. It’s cheaper to reimburse $5 than handle the paperwork to document the expense.

Indirect costs can mount up

In my example, the cost was the executives’ salaries, but indirect costs can mount up, as well — costs of delays while the decision is being made, the cost of the distraction of having to make the decision, the cost of gathering information, and so on. And sometimes researching one decision leads you to expand the issue way, way too much.

For example (hypothetical, hah!), imagine the motor in your front- loading washing machine burns out for the sixth time, and you decide to buy a new washer. You call a saleswoman and she recommends an $800 model. But you want to be sure you’re making the right choice. So you demur and research begins.

You subscribe to ConsumerReports.org, you print descriptions of dozens of washers, and compare them feature by feature. You call the store and ask about delivery options and service plans. And you realize you can have your dryer venting cleaned as long as the workmen will be poking around. And, you know, since you’re moving the dryer to get at the duct, maybe you should just buy a new dryer to match the new washer.

Soon, your $800 purchase has become a major renovation. Your research gave you so many overspending opportunities that now you’re spending thousands on an extra appliance, delivery, and duct-cleaning. Oh, yeah–and during the project, you’ll be driving your laundry to the laundromat and spending two hours a week doing laundry in bad lighting.

You just spent hundreds of dollars, twelve hours of research time, six hours of laundromat duty, gas to drive there, and the self-esteem nightmare of laundromat lighting, all because you didn’t want to say “yes” to the saleswoman’s $800 suggestion. When you add it all up, you’d have been way better off just buying the dryer.

Non-monetary costs are important

Some decisions have a non-monetary cost. When you and your husband/ wife/transgendered partner or polyamorous family unit decide to go to dinner, you might want a sandwich whereas they want to try a new ethnic restaurant where the food still has eyeballs. Should you graciously say, “Yes,” firmly say “No,” or debate? If you debate, it could become an argument. If you smile brightly and say, “Yes, let’s be adventurous!”, you get major relationship brownie points. Maybe even extra snuggling. If you say, “No, let’s discuss it,” even if you settle on the food-with-a-face, you don’t get the points. With interpersonal decisions, sometimes saying “Yes, dear” and bypassing the decision can be worth way more than getting your way. And you can always order the rice as a safe backup dish.

If my first employers had just made decisions and spent money, instead of spending money to not-make decisions, they might have survived. You don’t need to make their mistake.

Today, put it to work. Review the major decisions you’re making about things to buy, places to go, people to see, and all that stuff. Notice how much work goes into each decision, and ask yourself how important each one really is. Then for the decisions that aren’t worth the cost of deciding, just flip a coin. You’ll free up your mind and you’ll move things forward, and all for less than it would take to make a decision.

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The Tragedy of the Commons explained

How rational choice makes some markets fail

The Tragedy of the Commons is a situation where players cooperate or everyone loses, yet each individual has incentive not to cooperate. Also known as the “Prisoner’s Dilemma,” here’s a sample Tragedy of the Commons: farmers graze their cows on a shared grassy area called the Commons. The Commons can support 100 cows. One hundred farmers each bring a cow, and the eatin’s good. But each farmer thinks, “If I bring one extra cow, it doubles my entire income and only puts a 1% drain on the Commons.” All 100 farmers think this, all bring one extra cow, and 200 cows quickly overgraze the Commons. It dies completely, and then, so do the cows, followed by the farmers.

Pollution fits this structure. The Commons is nature’s ability to absorb the pollution. The benefit of polluting to any one polluter is great–they save clean-up costs. But when every producer does this calculation, rivers and landscapes quickly become clogged with pollution.

Energy usage fits this structure. The Commons is energy. The benefit to living in a suburb and driving to work is huge–I get lots of land, a nice yard, and a big house, and pay relatively little for a car and gas. But when 350 million Americans all make this trade-off, we’re suddenly using 40% of the world’s oil driving prices up. We don’t know how this one plays out, yet, but it will be interesting, since our physical sprawl makes cars a survival necessity, not a choice, for almost everyone.

Advertising fits this structure. Any one advertiser can get great returns by sending you junk mail, putting ads on your favorite TV shows, and putting up billboards on your roads. When all advertisers do this, you get so overloaded with messages than now it takes 20 ad impressions for you to pick a product out of the crowd. So now all advertisers must advertise so much that they spend a fortune, and you get overloaded. I no longer even look at my paper mail, and I get around 6-10 pieces a day. A one-week trip brings me back to a stack of 60-100 items. It goes straight into the trash. So now, it’s not clear advertisers can reach me at all.

Littering fits this structure. Any one person finds it convenient to dump their trash on the ground, leaving it for someone else (mom?) to pick up. When everyone in a neighborhood does this, they end up living in a garbage heap. Eventually, no one even sees a point in using the trash can any more and the litter accelerates.

I also think social networking sites are a Tragedy of the Commons. I’m not yet completely sure, though. Time will tell.

The “Tragedy” Can Be Used for Good

The Tragedy works in reverse, too. There are times when no one person has incentive to do a good thing, yet a small contribution by every person adds up to a huge Good Thing. Consider building an interstate highway system. No one person could pay for it, and even if they could, they could never collect enough in revenue to maintain it and make it worthwhile. Yet building it brings great benefit to everyone. The neat thing is that if every person pays just a little bit, we collect enough in total to take on the project. That’s where taxes really shine as a financing device; they’re one of the few good ways to finance building shared resources. Everyone pays a relatively small amount, and we get services that give far more benefit.

Public schools are another example. It’s cheaper for us all to pay a little in taxes and end up with schools for everyone. (Yes, you can complain about the quality of our existing school system, but the quality problems have less to do with the funding and more to do with our model of education.)

Fire protection is another example. While typing this, I received a call from the Volunteer Fireman’s Committee asking for donations. It’s a scary request, as it implies I won’t get fire protection without paying. Yet I’m happy to pay for firemen through my taxes. That way, we all contribute, and we have a fire prevention infrastructure that benefits us all.

Managing the Tragedy is a Fundamental Role of Government

I believe Governments are the only players in our world who can manage the Tragedy of the Commons. Our markets are built on the assumption that each customer/supplier should be free to pursue their maximum self-interest. The Government introduces regulation, tariffs, etc. designed to spread the Commons risk among market players, so the market can function and produce what’s best for civilization overall.

Sadly, I don’t think politicians or voters consider this, so the mechanism fails. Regulation isn’t inherently good or bad; it’s simply the only way to avert certain Tragedies of the Commons. Taxes aren’t inherently good or bad (though many would like you to believe that for their own political agendas); they’re simply one way to raise funds for projects that would otherwise never happen due to Tragedies.

Is Counting the Root of all Evil?

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The love of money isn’t the root of all evil; arithmetic is the root of all evil. More specifically, counting.

Don’t get me wrong; counting was a wonderful invention. It has its uses. We can keep track of kids: “Are all 5 kids here? Let’s see, 1… 2… 3… 4… where’s Billy?” We can keep track of time. “He’s working overtime in the salt mines, honey. Instead of 12 hours, he’s working 14 hours today. He’ll be home at … 9, 10. Yes, 10 p.m.” And we can keep track of money: “He gets paid $1.49/hour working overtime, so our bank balance will be $11.37 … $12.37 … $13.37 … $13.86 after Billy gives us his share.” In fact, they remind us over and over in MBA school that “What gets measured, gets managed.”

So where’s the problem? This is evil? This gave us the industrial-friggin’-revolution. This sounds great!!

We measure the wrong stuff

Well, the problem starts when we choose what to measure. We often measure what doesn’t lead to our goal, and expect the measuring to magically create the managing.

Want profit? Let’s count expenses. Tell all managers to submit weekly reports of their team’s expenses. Let’s call it a TPS Report, and count how many TPS reports people send, to make sure they’re doing their job (which has silently morphed from “running a profitable business” to “submitting TPS reports”). Well, whoopie. We’ve added a whole layer of useless counting, and then another layer to count who is and isn’t counting. Since we don’t actually know what to do with the silly TPS report, we slide further from profitability. We’re counting the wrong thing.

Or how about sick days? There’s a hoot. “You only get six sick days.” Nice. Like that’s controllable. If you’re sick for seven days, come on in and give it to everyone else in your department, so everyone has to take six days off. You can measure sick days, but the measure is useless.

Seemingly meaningful measurements … aren’t

Then we make up measurements that mean nothing and try to manage those. “Let’s rank our employees. Then we can fire the bottom 10%.” Sounds easy; isn’t easy. (Sadly, however, it is a much-publicized Jack Welch policy.) How much time will managers spend on this ranking exercise? Do they apply consistent standards that are directly related to the company’s goals? Do we fire the 10% of managers whose ranking skill is in the bottom 10%? Who decides that?

Ranking is hard. Really hard. In fact, in 1963, psychologist George Miller’s famous paper “The Magic Number 7 +/- 2” presented results showing people can make ranking distinctions between 5 to 9 items, and then we pretty much lose track. If you think you can accurately rank a 250-person department, you’re deluded and thus in the bottom 10%; it’s time to pack your bags.

Even if you can rank, can you use the rankings for action? We want to punt the bottom 10% of the company. We can’t really compare an accountant against a design engineer, so our fresh new Harriford MBA, Darren, suggests we eliminate 10% of each department. That will add up to 10% of the company.

But what if our 30 design engineers rock, while our 30 accountants all suck eggs? As a company, we want to fire six accountants (10% of 60 employees) and no design engineers. But firing 10% of each department means we leave three mediocre accountants standing, and three rockin’ design engineers out of work. That’s clearly wrong. But we get one benefit: we know Darren didn’t understand the logic of firing, so we know he’s in the bottom 10% and should be fired. Success! We have at least one confirmed cost savings from this exercise.

Measurement turns us evil

I know you’re asking: what in heaven’s name does this have to do with spirituality, morality, and/or the rest of our lives? (If you weren’t asking that, don’t worry, just go with the flow.)

Here’s where the evil comes in. We only measure so we can make decisions about those measurements and change our behavior. But we do this by judging the measurements as “good” or “bad.” When we’re measuring a “bad” trend, we panic. We’re afraid. We’re angry. We get frustrated, anxious, mean, jealous, violent, and nasty.

How do people act when they feel anxious, mean, jealous, violent, and nasty? Fortunately, we live in a Highly Evolved Society, so we meditate for five minutes, do some yoga, and we’re fine. NOT! Most people want to get rid of the bad feelings. Some fudge the numbers and play financial games. Think Enron. Some people hit something. Some people treat everyone around like crap. And some people blame.

Yes, they blame. They blame colleagues. “Sales are down! Sally distracted me so I lost the big prospect.” They blame loved ones. “I went over my sick day quota since I had to take Billy to treatment for his Black Lung disease.” They blame the government.”If it weren’t for the (Republicans/Democrats), (the economy/the occupation/global warming/life/love/happiness) would be better.” And they blame themselves. “I’m just a failure.”

All because they counted, then got emotionally wedded to the counting.

What counts and what doesn’t?

I’ve been talking so far about business, only not really. We count the wrong things in business, we count the wrong things in life. We go to pieces when our business counts go off-track, we go to pieces when our real-life counts go off-track. And remember, real life counts more. Where do you get caught in the counting?

Some of us count who’s done more housework, us or our spouse. Some of us count the dollars in our savings account. Some of us count what someone does to prove they love us. Some of us count how pious our neighbors are. It all turns into judgment, and from there, into emotion. When the counting is going the way we want, we think life is good. When the counting goes the other way, we get upset.

The upset is extra, though! It’s our reaction to the counting. The counting doesn’t cause the problem; it’s our stories about the counting that cause the problem.

Let’s fix this. Let counting be counting. Let emotion be emotion. All this score-keeping, counting, and measuring is made up. It’s all fantasy. It’s a convenient tool for making decisions. But it’s not real. And it’s certainly not worth turning yourself into an ogre, feeling horrible, and abusing yourself and your loved ones.

What if you count and discover your bank account isn’t high enough to send your kids to college? Don’t get upset. Use it as information and change your savings plan. But don’t beat yourself up. You can’t do anything for your kids that way, except set a bad example. Use the information to stay centered and work with the people you love to fix the situation.

What if you count and discover your spouse overcharged on the credit card? You can fly into a rage, or you can sit down with your spouse, love each other tremendously, and decide from that place how you’ll deal with the situation. I used the “fly-into-a-rage” method several times. It didn’t pay the bill, nor did it make me an attractive snuggle partner, even to our stuffed animals. The counting-as-information plus love-then-problem-solving works way better.

What if you count pounds, and discover you have more than you want? You can get depressed and eat a chocolate cake to help yourself feel better (Stever’s diet advice: learn to distinguish “sugar rush” from “feel better”). Or realize the number’s just information you can use to change your diet. If you’re going to diet, doing it from a place of fun makes it … well … more fun. And if you’re not going to diet, then at least enjoy the chocolate cake. But don’t let counting trick you into not-dieting, and also not enjoying the cake. That’s plain foolishness!

And what if you count and discover you’re not as rich as Darren, despite your superior skills? Or you’re not as rich as the goal you set at age 23? You can call yourself a failure and jump out of a plane without a parachute. That’s one solution. But maybe you can notice that a number is just a number, while you’re an entire human being who has much more to offer than a number.

Counting is optional. If you stop counting and look around, you just might find you’re warm, dry, full, and reading the web. And that’s not such a bad place to be. So count only when it’s useful, don’t take it too seriously, and feel good either way. Move your attention from counting to living. Put your attention on the things that make you feel happy, joyous, and grateful. If you must count, count those, and every day, count a little higher. It’s your life, and only you can make your counting count.

Is "nice" good business or just wishful thinking?

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I’d like to share with you a LinkedIn exchange I had on the topic of whether Being Nice is a good business strategy.

Questioner Is there power in being nice, with people in general or as a management tool? … Do you agree, or is this just so much psychobabble?

Stever

I haven’t read “The Power of Nice,” though I’m amused that we’ve created a culture where we believe we have to make a case for treating each other nicely. It can certainly be better business to screw people. Prof. Howard Stevenson of Harvard Business School did a study about that years ago. He concluded that being unethical did, indeed, pay, but it produces a world we don’t want to live in, so we tell stories like, “Being ethical is good business.”

In my life, I find when I’m centered and calm and at my best, I naturally want to be nice to people, and it feels darned good. And yeah, there’s more and more research supporting that position.

Questioner Are you saying there are times when the best thing to do is “screw people”?

Stever

The “best thing to do” depends on your value system. In business, if you value profits over people, you can sometimes maximize profits by screwing people. Nicotine-enhanced cigarette, anyone? Unethical behavior is common in business. The Conference Board did a study showing 60% of all people interviewed over a wide range of companies and industries routinely were asked to do unethical or illegal things. That makes it the majority way of doing business. That says to me that unethical behavior is more normal in the workforce than being female. (Copy of the study is available in PDF form here. See page 22.)

Personally, I value people over profits. I would love to live in a world where, if a business can legally, but unethically, make a profit, it would go out of business regardless of profitability. I used to stand up in meetings and point out when we were doing something unethical. Now I’m self-employed; honest self-examination isn’t a survival trait in corporate America. What was a survival trait, however, was the willingness to help everyone convince themselves that the profit-maximizing choice was also the ethically and morally “right” choice.

My own life has been a continual effort to deepen my integrity and building a life that aligns with my values. It disturbs me to see people damage their own integrity through self-denial.

That’s why I quoted Prof. Stevenson’s research. There’s this very comforting, but empirically false story that we can somehow maximize our business fortunes and our ethical/moral fortunes in one happy bundle. When we adopt the story, we get to have it all. When we face tough choices with very real tradeoffs between being a “good businessperson” and being a “good human being,” we relieve ourselves of having to confront the real choice, since our little story lets us maximize people OR profits, and claim that in the long run, our decision was magically best for both.

So back to your original question… I’ve had a very happy, satisfying, successful life on many levels, and have forgone chances to get a lot richer, legally, in ways that would have compromised my personal sense of integrity.

You may be different. If you prefer profits to people, then yeah, the best thing for you may be to screw people. I suspect if you do that, you’ll find yourself at life’s end surrounded by people you don’t like very much, with fewer happy memories than you might like. But that could simply be MY wishful thinking. I’m sure there are people who’ve been total jerks their whole life, accumulated huge fortunes, and died quite happy and quite oblivious to any suffering or harm they cause to others.

The good news is that you get to choose who you’ll be.

Using recursion in NLP

NLP is said to be recursive. What does that mean?

From a conversation on NLP connections:

innovating new high-level models in NLP? … is expected to be out of reach for most.

Richard also encourages people to go out and invent their own stuff. I don’t really think NLP is a field, the way, say, optics is a field. NLP is a particular approach to psychology, but to become self-sustaining, it needs enough organizational, research, and development infrastructure to outlast its creators. That infrastructure just isn’t there.

Bizarrely, EMDR might end up lasting longer, more widely used and accepted, than NLP, even though Grinder claims EMDR’s Francine Shapiro basically took one tiny NLP concept, relabeled it, and went out and sold it (successfully) to the established psychological machine.

So as an open question, what specific parts of computer science … to build recursive and generative models

Well, for one, go study recursive functions in computer science. If you work your way through the book Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs by Sussman and Abelson, you’ll know recursion like the back of your hand. (You actually have to do the problem sets, though. Understanding it is very different from being able to do it. The book is now freely available on the web.)

Recursion is the programming equivalent of mathematical induction, by the way. It’s hard to understand without learning it deliberately. And it’s hard to use without a learning curve. Many people throw the word around with no understanding or concept of what it means. I used to TA a course in computer science taught using the programming language LISP. LISP is notable, among other reasons, because it’s designed to find recursive solutions to problems. Some people “got it,” but many people didn’t, even very, very smart people.

Recursion is defining a function in terms of itself. Consider the Fibonacci series: 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, … Each term is made by summing the previous two terms. If you were to try to write a normal math function that would generate the sequence, it would be very long and complicated.

But you can express it recursively very simple:

The Nth fibonacci number = The N-1th fibonacci number + the n-2th fibonacci number
or in math terms: Fib(N) = Fib(N-1) + Fib(N-2)

If you think about this, it works, except somewhere you need to specify two consecutive Fib numbers so all future ones can be computed. The final recursive definition looks like this:

Fib(N) = Fib(N-1) + Fib(N-2)
Fib(1) = 1
Fib(2) = 1

So now we know:
Fib(3) = Fib(2) + Fib (1) = 1 + 1 = 2
Fib(4) = Fib(3) + Fib(2) = 2 + 1 = 3
etc.

In some sense, the later Fib() functions are built up of earlier Fib() functions.

In LISP, recursion is sometimes used to build self-modifying programs. Since the program is essentially defined in terms of its earlier self, it’s recursive.

How does recursion apply in NLP?

One place recursion applies in NLP is in strategies. A non-recursive strategy is attached to a specific time and place. For example, “Go into a bar. See attractive person. Feel confident. Walk up and offer to buy a drink.” There’s no recursion in that.

A recursive strategy in some way refers to itself or builds a stronger version of itself. For example, “Go into a bar. Remember what you did last time and generate a dozen new possiblities for how to behave to meet someone. Go do that. Afterwards, future pace that behavior if applicable to a dozen new contexts.” That’s recursive because the behavior in any one time is built on past runnings of the strategy. The strategy is also self-modifying and self-improving.

In Richard’s trainer’s training, he teaches some specific skills. A big piece of the strategy he installs, however, is essentially, “When in a troublesome situation you’ve never been in before, enter a resourceful state and invent a new strategy on the fly.” That’s recursive because it’s a strategy-modifying strategy.

Make sense?

NLP: Model, modeling tool, or both?

When Bandler, Grinder, Dilts, etc. first formalized NLP, they certainly did it using the terminology of mathematical models, particularly calculus.(1).

The early NLP literature (Structure of Magic, NLP Vol I) talks about “4-tuples” (or 5-tuples, if you go back far enough), and “operations” that can be done to 4-tuples.

This was an early attempt to make NLP a calculus. Math-phobics, suspend that phobia. We aren’t talking mathematical calculus, but a general calculus. That just means they defined distinctions to pay attention to, operations on those distinctions, and rules telling how they all went together and what produced what results.

In Math, distinctions called “numbers” include 4, 5, and 9. Our operators include something called “addition.” The rules of math say when you combine 4 and 5 using addition, you get 9.

In NLP, we have distinctions called “4-tuples” with a specific set of internal/external sight, sound, small, taste, etc. We have an operators, “set anchor” and “fire archor.” Given two different 4-tuples, we can anchor both. When we combine them using the operator “fire off anchors,” we get a new 4-tuple with elements of the original two.

So NLP, itself, is a model. It has distinctions like 4-tuples, physiological state, internal images, auditory voices, submodalities, the unconscious mind, etc. It has operators like anchoring, shifting submodalities, etc. It also has rules for how those combine: if someone has Friends coded in one set of submodalities and Acquaintances in another, they can make an Acquaintance a friend by shifting the set of submodalities.

When they were developing NLP, existing therapies weren’t this rigorous. They didn’t have well-defined distinctions or operators, and had no real idea why or when their stuff worked. NLP was (and to some extent, still is) novel in that it attempted to be as rigorous as a mathematical model.

(To this day, the DSM-IV, the traditional therapeutic Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, has many descriptions that are too vague to be used as good, rigorous distinctions.)

Producing models with NLP

NLP can also be used to produce models. You can use the NLP distinctions to build a model of a skill. The famous spelling strategy, for example, uses the NLP distinctions to produce a model of how some good spellers spell: they create a mental image of a word properly spelled and anchor it to the sound of the word. That’s a super-simple model, but it reflects how the process operates.

B&G originally hoped people would go out and use NLP to produce models of how people did all sorts of skills. In practice, this hasn’t happened. I’m not sure why, but I suspect that successful modeling is a specialized skill that isn’t terribly useful in daily life, so few people get good at it.

Models by themselves aren’t very useful. Their usefulness comes from applying them. You can develop one model and then spend a lifetime applying it. The paradox is that those who love building models rarely enjoy applying them once the model seems to work. And those who like application are rarely good at building them.

Some professions are pure model-building professions. Linguistics, mathematics, physics, computer programming, academic research, and some forms of management consulting (e.g. business process re-engineering) are all model-building professions. Look closely at that list and you’ll find that those professions sort by task/system, not by people. They may be good at building models, but those practitioners rarely spend their time developing fine distinctions about people. Rather, they model things and systems.

So is NLP a model? Yes.
Can NLP be used to build models? Certainly.
Is NLP used to build models? By a few people, but rarely.
Is NLP necessarily model-building? Not at all. You can be highly skilled at using NLP for therapeutic interventions and not do any model-building.

Addendum from a conversation on 18 Aug 2007

A key piece of modeling is choosing the distinctions your model will have. Physics, for example, uses the distinctions “FORCE,” “MASS,” and “ACCELERATION.” Newton is very famous for finding and proving the relationship FORCE = MASS * ACCELERATION (F=MA).

What is often (always?) overlooked is that the very choice of Force, Mass, and Acceleration to measure is, itself, genius. If he had chosen WEIGHT, DENSITY, and SPEED, he likely would have found no relationship.

Bandler’s greatest genius, in my mind, is that he simply slices up reality a bit differently from the rest of us when watching people. He creates new models not because he has great skill in modeling (though that helps), but because he can slice up his observations in ways no one has ever done before. His ability to articulate what he does is relatively rare, and lets him teach portions of it.

For example, he noticed voice tone and tempo when talking to Erickson. Others simply hadn’t noticed it before. Is the genius in noticing that Milton would embed commands through his tone or tempo (relatively easy to hear, once you know you’re listening for tone and tempo changes)? Or is the genius noticing that tone/tempo might be relevant in the first place.

Maybe it’s both.

That’s why I find Bandler irreplaceable in many ways. He perceives differently, and that is a powerful piece of his modeling.

I came across this when modeling software engineers long ago. After many frustrating hours trying to figure out how one superb programmer broke down his solutions into code, he simply shouted (words translated to a metaphor for the non-programmers), “Stever, you just don’t get it. HAMMERS aren’t used to pound nails, they’re just a way to provide bracing while you use the door frame to pound the nail.”

His definition was radically different from how everyone I knew thought about hammers. But with his definition (his way of slicing up the world), many previously hard problems suddenly became simple. Ditto for the entire concept of recursion, by the way. Many extremely hard problems, when expressed recursively, can become absurdly simple.

Modeling = the distinctions you make AND the relationships you find between them.

The magic resides in both halves of the definition.

(1) For those of you who have taken group theory, think “Rings” and “fields.”back

What's the difference between unconscious assimilation and unconscious modeling?

What’s the difference between the two?

My impression is that unconscious assimilation is the natural ability we have to mirror others to the point where we adopt their cognitive skills. It’s the way we learn language as an infant, and it extends well into adult behavior (ever notice that people follow their leaders’ actions, not words?) For some fascinating reading on what might be the mechanism behind unconscious assimilation, Google “mirror neuron system.”

Assimilation isn’t installation, at least not as Bandler uses the word.

Installation, as Bandler uses the word, is very precise, and very different. Bandler leads audiences through sequences of unconscious representations and emotional states over and over and over until those sequences get learned through repetition. Then he anchors them to the desired context.

For instance, I once saw Bandler up on stage (ever seen his Orlando videos? Where he’s sitting there with a huge banner saying “NLP Seminars Group” above his head?) as he was doing an installation. He was talking about how he remembers a given person’s meta-programs and issues. He does it, he says, by visualizing a list of their criteria, etc. above their head. So looking at someone, he sees this little checklist above their head, telling what work needs to be done. Of course, journalists just use a little book and jot notes. It’s an archetypical American image: the 1950s journalist in dapper suit, gripping a notepad and scribbling with a pencil. Sometimes, they even have a pencil stuck behind their ear, right beneath a hat with a big sign in the hatband that says “PRESS.” Very film noir.

If you followed along that last paragraph, three times you likely made pictures of people with large, readable words over their heads. If we told those stories a dozen times, your unconscious mind would start to “get” the general strategy: make pictures of big, legible words over people’s heads.

If I anchored it correctly, later I can help you link it to the right context. I might ask, “If you’d like to learn a cool way of remembering people’s names, stop for a minute and imagine you just met someone on the street…” As I see you start to enter your name memory strategy, I fire the anchor and Bazoom! the strategy gets linked. I would reinforce it with some hypnotic language, test the work, of course, and probably tell your conscious mind some other story to distract you. The installation part is the rehearsing and anchoring of the strategy and associated feeling states.

So in my understanding:

  • Assimilation uses the mirror neuron system to “get it” unconsciously.
  • Installation is a deliberate leading of someone through representations below conscious awareness to help them develop a cognitive skill.

Are you as good at recruiting as you are at sales?

August 2007 Newsletter

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We say people are our greatest resource. And Dilbert’s boss points out, “resources are our greatest asset.” But most companies put huge effort into attracting and retaining customers, and much less into attracting and retaining people. Salespeople get trainings, off-sites, apprenticeships, workshops, and books on finding and romancing customers. But rarely does a company jump so fully into finding and romancing their people (“our greatest asset,” remember?)

If your business depends on innovation, judgment, or in-person contact, people are key. MIT says 40% (yes, 40%) of its grads enter into finance or consulting. They don’t go because they like the fields, nor do they go for the money; grads go because consulting firms and I-banks put as much effort into recruiting as they do into sales. They recruit better than other companies. You could have those kids working for you instead. It would be better for you, and frankly, better for the country.(1).

When you want a customer, you go where customers hang out. You learn what motivates them. Why do they buy what they do? What are their needs? What do they think of you and your products? With your insights as a guide, you begin the dance that ends, we hope, with a nice new business relationship.

So where do new recruits hang out? What are their needs? Why do they choose the jobs they do?

Last week, I blogged about the absurdity of punting a job candidate after reading their MySpace page. I said it’s us old fogies who don’t understand that the World has changed, and we need to get with the program. It turns out, I was righter than I thought.

My friends Ian Ybarra, recent grad, Chris Resto, founder of MIT’s largest intern program, and Ramit Sethi just published “Recruit or Die.” Interviewing over 1000 students, they give a tour through the minds of today’s best candidates and how they make decisions.

Today’s job candidates research companies as much as companies research them. And then candidates swap notes. A lot. MySpace, Twitter, you name it, they use it. Successful recruiting means managing your reputation as much as selecting the people you want. When you ding someone, act rudely, show up unprepared, or rescind an offer, the news flashes through the social networks back to the people you most want to hire. If you’re less than top-notch, you’ll never even know you’re chasing away your best candidates.

What are candidates discussing in their online forums? Top performers aren’t looking for a salary; they’re looking for a career. They don’t want a retirement plan, they want growth, opportunity, and positioning for their next jobs. They don’t want to feel like a cog in the machine, they want a chance to have real responsibility to rise as rapidly as their talents allow. Take a look at your current recruiting pitch. Is there any overlap with what your recruits want?

Once your message is right, you need a quality recruiting process to deliver it. Sales has a century of research and frameworks. Recruiting, not so much. But just as sales builds on itself, so does recruiting. You research and contact your potential recruits. You build brand awareness among them, complete with all the brand attributes you want your company to stand for as an employer. Then you develop ways to identify your prospects early on, and begin building relationships far in advance with the people you someday want. The pieces of good recruiting aren’t hard, you just need to do them and put them all together.

The second half of “Recruit or Die” lays out the recruiting process start to finish—including what to do once your offer is accepted to build a strong partnership with your new employee. They make recruiting as rigorous as sales. In fact, just replace “job candidate” with “customer” and the book becomes a sales management handbook!

If people are key for your business, pursue them as you’d pursue your hottest prospect. Get inside their minds, provide real value (and not just money), communicate respectfully, and you’ll find you’ll attracting recruits of the very top calibre.

You can find Recruit or Die via my website: https://www.steverrobbins.com/r/recruitordie.

(1) Stever’s over-the-top soapbox: This trend spells doom for America. Forty percent of MIT students go into consulting and i-banking? FORTY PERCENT? These are exactly the people we need innovating. We need them discovering clean, cheap energy, halting global warming, and helping us compete globally. If they get sidetracked into producing 500-page jargon-filled strategy documents, we’ll lose their potential forever.back

Overcoming your own change resistance

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Some change resistance is good. How about yours?

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Q: I am change-resistant. I know it, but it doesn’t help. Once I’ve decided to change something, I enjoy the challenge. But I often resist with “it won’t work because…” How do I know when I am simply resisting change or have a valid concern? You can always point out what can go wrong, and the change resistant-person (e.g. me) truly believes he or she is correct in their objection. – Suzanne

A: You’re in good company, Suzanne! Things change fast these days, yet success is built on resisting change. Yes, you heard right; results come from stability, dependability, focus, and persistence. In other words, the *change-resistance* that keeps us on-track day in and day out. Trust me, Fortune 500 companies rarely get there by embracing change. They innovate once (or get lucky), grow, then do everything they can to keep anyone from creating change that might topple them. Just watch ExxonMobile embracing change around global warming…

Change is hard, physically hard. Our brains grow neural pathways when we learn. Change means creating new paths, PLUS actively resisting our past learning. It’s way easier to invent reasons not to change, so we often do.

You know you’re knee-jerk resisting when you start with objections. Your points may be valid. Maybe. But starting with “No” shows resistance. If the objections come rapid-fire, that’s an even stronger signal. On your third “yes, but…” you’re driving from habit. Realize it. Pat yourself on the back for realizing it. Then stop.

(Try a rubber band around one wrist. When you hear yourself say “yes, but…” snap the rubber band lightly to remind yourself to shift gears.)

Next, just listen. Inside, think, “yes, AND…” Outside, say “Tell me more.” Listen, nod Yes, smile, and take notes. Agree to nothing. Just listen. Inside, object to your heart’s content; go wild. Outside, nod, smile, and write. Then say, “I’d like some time to think about this. Thank you.”

You listened, now think. Write down your objections. On paper, you’ll often find them less daunting than you thought. Once you’re done kvetching, list the possible benefits of the change.

Now, stretch your imagination; write down three or four possible futures that could come from the change. Explore positives and negatives about each one. For example, “If we move, we’ll have more Chinese restaurants that deliver. That means more romantic evenings at home. But then, we’ll bloat from the MSG, so we’ll need to buy a treadmill…” Be humorous. You’re not trying to predict the future; you’re just shaking up your thinking.

After this brainstorming, decide if you agree with the change. If not, you’ve thought enough to build a careful argument. Rather than a seeming nay-sayer, you’ll be a thoughtful contributor to the discussion. If you decide you like the change, psyche yourself up for the challenge and give it a go, full steam ahead!

Change-resistance is fine, if your reasons are good. By letting your knee-jerk response signal Time To Think, you can choose when to keep the status quo and when to act. Either way, you won’t respond willy-nilly; you’ll make a good decision from careful deliberation.

How to think strategically

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What is strategic thinking, anyway?

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It sounds easy: my client wanted to think more strategically. isn’t that the hot buzzword? “Strategic thinking.” Oooh! Sexy. There’s only one problem: what, exactly, does it mean?

You’d think we would know. But I’ve seen executive teams discuss in all seriousness what the lever does on a piece of machinery. That’s about as non-strategic as it gets. In fact, a general rule is that if you read it in a manual, it’s quite likely not strategic.

What is strategic is when you’re doing something that changes the structure of the business in some basic way. Paint a machine lever red? Not strategic. Decide to outsource manufacturing to China? Strategic, because it changes who you hire, how you manage them, and what they’re capable of achieving. You punt your machines and take on eager young managers who speak Mandarin.

This is the first kind of strategic impact: changing organization structure. This includes outsourcing, selecting vendors (since what you can do now becomes expanded and limited by what they can do), mergers and acquisitions, changing the org chart, going public, and hiring and firing people who will in turn make strategic decisions.

Or consider an entrepreneurial client who insists on answering the phones himself. He’s done it since founding the business 20 years ago and prides himself on knowing everything that’s going on. But now that the company gets a hundred phone calls a day, he decides to install an automated attendant, freeing himself to do other things. This is an example of “business process reengineering,” which is a fancy way of saying “doing things differently.” Changing how a business does something is strategic because different hows give the business different capabilities. If your product is produced on a machine that turns out 100 widgets a day, then you simply can’t bid on a job that wants 500 units by tomorrow. If you can rearrange your factory processes and produce 5,000 units a day, whole new markets open up.

Speaking of markets, choosing the markets to compete in, what to sell, and how to price are all strategic decisions. After all, those decisions determine who you’ll hire, how you set up your org structure, and how you’ll deliver your product or service.

The American Express web site lists 20+ cards. I called a friend in Amex’s strategy group to help me understand the difference between the “Platinum Business” and the “Business Platinum” cards. He said, “I work in strategy. I don’t really know our product lines.” A strategy group that doesn’t know the products? I don’t know what they do, but it seems awfully dangerous to be making organization structure and process decisions without even knowing what your customers are buying.

Everything we’ve discussed so far is cross-functional; they can involve changes that affect many parts of a business. Though it’s possible to make strategic decisions in one area of a company without involving other areas, that’s a dangerous game. If our marketing department starts competing in a new market that cares about delivery time, but doesn’t tell our shipping folks, they can set the company up for failure.

Don’t make the same mistake. Learn when your decisions are strategic. That means decisions about org structure, process–the HOW–, cross-functional decisions, and the marketing decisions of what to sell and who to sell them to.

If you want to learn more about strategy, my very favorite book is Co-opetition by Adam Brandenburger and Barry Nalebuff. I also liked Geoff Moore’s “Crossing the Chasm.” Both books are circa mid-90s. There are 83,416 other business books that will teach you some kind of strategic thinking. I’m not sure the specific strategic approach is very important (though consulting firms will make big bucks telling you otherwise); to me, the value comes from learning to think at a strategic level consistently and integrate strategic thinking into your daily running of the business.