Thoughts of The Week #62 (24 May 2020)

Thoughts of the Week is a review of the most interesting thoughts I encountered on Twitter and other mediums during the last week. It is free, but if you like it, you can support me on Patreon.

1/5: Iteration

“Some founders worry about launching products before they’re perfect. […] But that’s not the thing to fear. The really scary thing is if you spend another 6-12 months perfecting your product, launch, and then learn you were building the wrong thing.” – Leo Polovets

“Few things worse than building the wrong thing the right way.” – Zack Kanter (link)

Innovation has three components: inefficiency, imperfection, and redundancy.

You need to be ready to use your time inefficiently because, in large part, you cannot know in advance what is useful and what isn’t.

You need to be ready to ship something imperfect, because it’s the only way to ship quickly enough to iterate.

You need to have redundancy to absorb the inevitable first failures without having to rely on a first success (otherwise, you risk pushing too hard something which doesn’t fit what others could use).

2/5: Mimicry

“Behaviour is contagious because we catch it from other people. Much of what we do results from the unconscious mimicry of others around us. As in virology, people’s susceptibility varies. If you do not own a microwave now, it is unlikely that you will ever buy one — you are effectively immune.” – Rory Sutherland (link)

For a virus to jump from one person to the other, it needs social contact. The same applies to behaviors. For a behavior to jump from one person to another, the second one must have an opportunity to observe the first one (and, ideally, see that the former is benefitting from the behavior).

Books could be written on how to spread desired behaviors inside a company. One under-used practice is to maximize the opportunities in which desired behaviors are observed. 

A typical example is the CEO. He is the most visible person in the company. If his behavior embodies a core value, it can make it spread like wildfire in the company. If, instead, the behavior his employees see goes against the core value, well, that’s what’s going to spread.

A company can influence which behaviors will be under the eyes of their employees. What people see, they imitate.

(Also, I recently wrote a tweet on imitation, skin in the game, and mimetic societies: link.)

3/5: Common knowledge

“Purely as a practical matter, a police force without legitimacy can not enforce the law. Anyone who has taught high school […] knows a weak and analogical version of this. […] I’m sure we’ll see plenty of interesting criminology studies on the collapse of legitimacy in these riots. It has the feeling of a common-knowledge collapse: everyone knew X, but now everyone knows everyone knows X. [… The Police] can only function if they’re seen by 99% of the people 99% of the time as doing the right thing.” – Simon DeDeo (link)

Linking this to point #2 of today’s newsletter, behaviors need a critical mass to spread.

Reaching the critical mass should be the main objective of anyone trying to introduce behavioral change. (In my book “Best Practices for Operational Excellence”, I explain how).

4/5: Love as common knowledge

“A certain kind of tipping point emerges in common knowledge. I know X, but also I know you know X, and I know you know I know X, … That recursive ratchet is fast, and emotionally explosive—think about falling in love, a two-person case.” – Simon DeDeo (link)

This is a way to reformulate point #3 above. Reaching common knowledge is related to critical mass. In a company, for example, only after everyone knows that everyone knows what the operational standards are, sustainable changes in operational culture are achieved.

5/5: Statistics

“Part of understanding statistics is understanding when a single data point indicates more than just an anecdote, and also when a full analysis of a large dataset is nothing more than an anecdote.” – Harry Crane

If a medical study is performed on patients being treated by a single hospital, increasing the number of patients adds little to the significance of the study, for it cannot rule out that the hospital was a determinant factor leading to the results of the study. If the observations in a dataset are all correlated, they are an anecdote.

On the other hand, a single black swan can disprove the rule that “swans are white”, and who cares if it’s an anecdote.

Size matters, but it is not everything.

My own essays of the week

I didn’t write any essays recently, as I focused on editing the last pages of my upcoming book on irrational behaviors and behavioral change. You can pre-order it here.