Author: ken

The New Political Campaign

As we look back on November’s election, we hope to understand what produced the outcome: what issues persuaded most voters, what policies carried more weight, what candidates proved more trustworthy. But Sasha Issenberg, a reporter for Slate, has come out with a book that suggests none of those things mattered. As she said recently to Politico: “journalists are still stuck in a paradigm where they think of the campaign as primarily an effort to change minds.” (See, “10 Breakout Political Reporters of 2012.”)

The people who run campaigns, though, see it more as getting the people who favor your candidate to actually cast their ballots. Trying to change their minds is a waste of time.

The study of voter attitudes supports that conclusion. If a voter’s mind is not made up already simply because his or her identity is “republican” or “democrat,” then it is shaped by perceptions about the candidate that cannot easily be spun by advertising or by debates, as we used to think.

This is confirmed by the fact that the tens of millions of dollars squandered on last minute campaign advertisements by conservative billionaires had such little effect. The advertising agencies profited as did the media outlets, but voters did not budge.

Clearly voters are motivated by various factors in making up their minds, many of which are unconscious. But the point is that it is much harder to change such opinions once formed. As Issenberg shows, the important thing is to figure out who will vote for your candidate and, then, getting them to cast their ballots. This helps to explain the stress on early voting, as well as the stringent demands for IDs to block voters from actually voting.

What it shows most of all, though, is the importance of massive amounts of data, good experimental techniques, and relentless analysis of how to motivate the voters on your side. Some voters can be encouraged to vote by being praised as good citizens or seeing such praise doled out to others. But, not surprisingly, the most effective techniques are those that threaten the targeted citizens with mild feelings of guilt should they fail to cast their ballots. That can backfire, of course. If the message is too blatant or crude, the potential voter will feel resentment and anger. But deftly conveyed it has a significant impact.

All along, the news media were preoccupied by the “undecided” voters, those who might be persuaded by either side. The media are still focusing on that, though the conventional wisdom is coming around to the view that “undecided” voters may just be unwilling to speak their convictions or, even, acknowledge them to themselves. Increasingly the campaigns are using massive amounts of data to determine the probabilities and, then, going after their targets.

Each party spent over a billion dollars in the last campaign. Now it seems inevitable that more money will have to be raised to support these sophisticated, data-driven campaigns. There will still need to be ads and debates because they are expected. But the biggest budgets will be going to target voters more and more precisely.

Learning to be Vulnerable As a Species

A highly respected former sports reporter turned editorial commentator for The New York Times, Joe Nocera, just asked the question, “Should kids play football?” And the answer wasn’t clear.

The evidence is mounting for the number of routine concussions sustained in professional football, and their consequences of severe memory loss, confusion and, even, death among aging players. The issue is obviously relevant for college football as well. And there is just as much violence in professional hockey and other contact sports such as boxing. So maybe kids should not get started on this pathway to greater and greater risk. (See, “Should Kids Play Football?”)

The issue is getting attention now for legal and economic reasons. According to John Kircher, a law professor who specializes in the insurance industry: “The handwriting is on the wall, there’s no question . . . . Insurers will look at the dangers and might look at increasing premiums, and the insurers and the insured will ask whether the game is worth a candle.” (See, “Concussion Liability Costs May Rise, and Not Just for N.F.L.”)

This comes at a time when many forms of violence we used to routinely accept are being critically scrutinized. We know now that war produces high levels of PTSD among soldiers in combat. WWI brought attention to “shell shock,” but such traumatic injuries are far more widespread than previously thought, and they are not confined to soldiers in the direct line of battle. Echoing Joe Nocera, we might also ask: “Should people engage in battle?”

Workers in heavy industry and mining are also subject to high levels of injury. And then there is the damage that comes from exposure to toxic chemicals. Even office workers, sitting a their desks, can suffer damage to their spines.

And we are learning that the mind is fragile as well, not just the body and the brain. Psychological trauma stemming from abuse, neglect or repeated verbal threats don’t show up as scars and bruises, but they do considerable and often irremediable damage. And then there is the trauma of witnessing such shootings as just occurred in Newtown. No doubt those who were there will be affected for the rest of their lives. As a species we are turning out to be far more delicate and vulnerable than we had thought..

Are we getting weaker — or are we simply more aware? Earlier cultures tended to think that their “heroic” ancestors were stronger and more capable of great feats of endurance than they themselves. Those mythic memories were probably constructed. But why, then, did we not notice these limitations before?

Clearly, we did not want to know. Our self-image is constantly “improved” by unconscious tendencies to protect self-esteem. Moreover, we are members of a highly competitive society, and have taken pride in being the dominant species on the planet. But as we learn more about our limitations, we can no longer sustain the posturing of strength and invulnerability we have promoted up to now.

We have to adapt to a softer, weaker self-image, one that emphasizes the strength that comes from intelligence, thoughtfulness and cooperation. To be sure, there will still be heroes among us, but the price we have to pay for violence is mounting.

Can You Trust It? Can You Even Find It?

H.R. professionals used to work hard to maintain their usefulness and integrity. They understood that providing personal professional services is particularly complicated when the provider is a friend, a colleague or a boss. Nowadays, however, they increasingly are hard to find.

According to a recent story in The New York Times, “The outsourcing of H.R. has accelerated over the last decade and will continue to do so.” There are several reasons for this. Organizations don’t know how to do it themselves, and often they don’t even know how to evaluate those who do. And, then, it’s expensive. Most organizations would rather not hire extra employees, to begin with, and the fewer benefits they have to offer them the better.

According to Lisa Rowan, a research vice president at IDC, the market research firm. “While some companies may entrust their H.R. needs to a single outside firm, it’s more common to parcel out functions to a range of outside providers.” The prevailing wisdom – or rationale – for outsourcing such work is that is can “free up a client to focus on its strengths,” said Don Weinstein, senior vice president at a large H.R. outsourcing firm. But when did any organization ever have the luxury of concentrating on its core competency alone?

Many internal H.R. functions have been “cut to the bone,” said Peter Cappelli, a management professor and director of the Center for Human Resources at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. The idea that companies will be more strategic about human resources after they outsource “requires some heroic assumptions,” said Professor Cappelli. “Supervisors may be able to take over some important roles, but many of the people who were experts at recruiting, training and career development have been laid off,” he said. (See, “When the H.R. Office Leaves the Building.”)

In the past, it was a progressive step for management to regard employees as “resources,” on a par with the materials they needed to produce their goods. They couldn’t just be picked up and discarded as needed. Human resources required attention and care, and it made a difference to productivity and profit when they were thought about more carefully.

Today, we are moving on from that original insight, but in two contradictory directions, two directions that reflect what is happening in the workforce itself. On the one hand, as the term suggests, people with traditional jobs continue to have instrumental value. Not intrinsically important, they are still resources needed in production. On the other hand, in the knowledge industries that depend on engagement and creativity, workers need to feel valued and to have the experience of being effective. Without that they won’t produce the insights and new ideas that are needed.
Traditional H.R. is inadequate to deal with the needs of this second stream of “knowledge workers” with their symbolic capacities and sophisticated needs. On the other hand, businesses seem to feel that the majority of old fashioned workers are simply not worth the effort they had poured into H.R.

They can’t get rid of their needs, but they don’t want to do more than the minimum. For that group outsourcing H.R. is the solution — and making the resources hard to find.

How to Use the Full Power of Our Brains

A recent study revealed that two-thirds of the American public believe we only use 10% of our brains, and that is just one of our most widely held “neuromyths,” according to a recent account in The Wall Street Journal. Ironically, “the teachers who knew the most about neuroscience believed the most myths.” (See, “Using Just 10% of Your Brain? Think Again.”)

Other myths include the belief that rich environments stimulate the brain and that we each have our own styles of learning. Patently false, psychologists and neuroscientists refer to that first belief as the “10% myth.” But where did it come from? And why do people continue to believe it?

They must be thinking abut the unconscious, where an extraordinary amount of mental activity does go on out of awareness. To be sure, the full brain is actively employed, even if its activity is not available to consciousness. But it can easily seem to lay people that unknown or unconscious means inactive or dormant.

New information from the senses is constantly being taken in by he brain, though most of it is discarded. According to one psychologist, the brain is capable of processing only 40 of the 11,000,000 bits of information it receives from our senses each second. To be retained, the new bits of information need to be assimilated to memory, while responses are being automatically generated. Indeed, research has shown that the brain has usually initiated a response to a stimulus before we actually believe we are “deciding” to respond. In other words consciousness lags behind behavior.

According to George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, only 5% of our ideas reach consciousness. But that does not matter as much as we might think, since our brains are actively monitoring the world and adapting to it automatically and unconsciously all the time. The value of consciousness is largely thought to be that it provides a second opportunity to reconsider our responses, to reflect, to inhibit, and to plan.

So our brains are not being under-utilized as the “10% myth” implies. We are just unaware of what it is doing. Moreover, we are not in control of its responses, though we can often override the behaviors it sets in motion.

But there is an additional factor, I suspect, behind the popularity of the “10% myth.” It encourages us to think that we could be more powerful and effective as individuals if only we tried harder, strategized better, or could figure out a technological solution to overcoming our limitations. The fact is that there actually is a way we can be more thoughtful and effective, but that is through cooperation and collaboration, though interacting with others, rather than through enhancing our individual brains. If we deliberate among ourselves, reflect, discuss our thoughts and seek advice, our thinking is expanded, corrected and enlarged.

So the “10% myth” is a way of holding on to our faith in the power of the individual, our myth that other people are an impediment to achievement and success. The myth suggests that we all have all we need in ourselves, even if we never get to use it.

But Can We Make Ourselves Vulnerable?

Five years ago, Nassim Nicholas Taleb captured our attention with his account of “black swans,” unpredictable events of extraordinary consequence. Within the year, the financial crisis both illustrated and vindicated his concept, and “black swans” entered our lexicon.

World War I is another good example of a major crisis that took everyone by surprise, as is 9/11 and, more recently, superstorm “Sandy.” Black swans are not always catastrophes, and he offers the example of the internet. It is only in retrospect that one can only see how such overwhelming events are looming, and only in retrospect we can see how everything has been changed as a result. Is it possible to prepare for them?

Being unexpected and overwhelming, black swans challenge the very idea of risk assessment. You can’t prepare for events you can’t anticipate, nor assess the extent of risks that are unprecedented. But now he has come up with some ideas about how to cope with them.

If black swans cannot be predicted, the key to survival is becoming more adaptive and resilient when they occur. Discomfort, stress and volatility make us more adaptive and stronger. He notes, we have been “obsessed with comfort and cosmetic stability . . . . but by making ourselves too comfortable and eliminating all volatility from our lives, we do to our bodies and souls what Mr. Greenspan did to the U.S. economy: We make them fragile. We must instead learn to gain from disorder.”

He has five recommendations to make us more “antifragile,” including keeping our organizations smaller, emphasizing entrepreneurship, making sure that those who manage organizations are directly affected by their success or failure. The underlying principle is expecting to make mistakes and learning from them rather than trying never to fail. Building more instability into our system will make us more resilient when the inevitable great upheaval arrives. (See “Learning to Love Volatility.”)

These are thoughtful suggestions, but what are the incentives for implementing them?

Financially, our businesses usually benefit from economies of scale. Being bigger usually means being able not only to cut costs but also to compete more effectively. That’s why we have banks that are “too big to fail.” The only way to right-size them now appears to be through government regulation, and they are proving highly resistant to any effort that threatens their power.

But there are psychological obstacles as well. No one wants to fail, even when the lessons of failure are valuable. Nassim Nicholas Taleb wants us to be exposed to greater risk, more vulnerable and smaller, but who wants those things for himself? And who will resist the temptation for greater security or more profit?

The benefit, of course, is that if we can impose greater insecurity on ourselves, we will become more secure in the long run, when it really matters. But the whole point of black swans is that they are out of sight, and out of sight usually means out of mind.