"How many licks does it take to get to the Tootsie Roll center of a Tootsie Pop?"

Today, October 31st, is Halloween, a day that children celebrate by dressing up in costumes and going door-to-door in search of candy, usually asking the question, "Trick or Treat?"  They almost always get a "treat" so there is rarely, if ever, a "trick"!  If I do happen to write a blog post on October 31st, I usually try to make it at least a little fun - for some of my past Halloween posts, see "Don't go anywhere with scary, spooky, or haunted in the title" or "Are Trick-or-Treaters honest?"  I'll keep with the tradition today.  

There's a really good chance that most children who go Trick-or-Treating tonight will find a Tootsie Pop in their bag at the end of the night.  Tootsie Pops were basically lollipops that had a Tootsie Roll at the center.  There was a famous commercial from my childhood, "How many licks does it take to get to the Tootsie Roll center of a Tootsie Pop?"  A boy goes asking around to see if the smartest animals (Mr. Fox, Mr. Turtle, and finally Mr. Owl) know how many licks it takes to get to the center of the Tootsie Pop.   All I can say is that "If there's anything I can't stand, it's a smart owl" (just watch the commercial). 

Raise your hand if you ever tried to find out as a child!  I never made it - just like Mr. Turtle (and as it turns out, Mr. Owl), I always gave up after so many licks and just bit down into the candy to get to the Tootsie Pop.  Well, apparently several independent groups of scientists have actually tried to find out the answer.  It's a legitimate scientific question!

A group of Purdue University engineering students (Boiler Up!) designed and built a licking machine modeled after the human tongue and determined that it took an average (over a number of trials) of 364 licks to get to the Tootsie Roll center of a Tootsie Pop.  As a comparison, a group of twenty human volunteers also performed the test (without the machine) and found that it took only 252 licks.  Not to be outdone by their Big Ten rivals (at least in academics, though certainly not in football - but if they weren't stealing signs, who knows?), a chemical engineering student at the University of Michigan created his own customized licking machine and found that it took 411 licks to get to the center.  

There was a larger clinical study involving 130 human subjects from Bellarmine University.  They actually published their findings (check out their study results here), and it seems that there can be variation in the number of licks required based on the color of the Tootsie Pop!  Regardless, on average, they found that it took 175 licks in just over 14 minutes to get to the Tootsie Roll center. (oh, and Orange Tootsie Pops are the quickest).  Finally, a group of middle school science students at Swarthmore Junior High School found that it took an average of 144 licks.

Wow - based on the best available scientific data, it can take anywhere from 144 licks to 411 licks to get to the center.  It's clear to me that the world may never know how many licks it really does take to get to the Tootsie Roll center of a Tootsie Pop.  Trick or Treat!

Drunkard's Walk

I finished reading a great book a few months ago by the theoretical physicist, Leonard Mlodinow entitled The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives.  I highly recommend it!  Mlodinow talks about the role of randomness in our everyday lives and the cognitive biases that lead us to misinterpret them.  The laws of probability may seem simple on their surface (and I say that while fully admitting that some of these so-called "simple laws" are beyond my understanding), but in a world that is characterized by volatility, uncertainty, complexity, ambiguity, and turbulence (VUCAT), it's often difficult and at times impossible to distinguish between random and non-random events.  He writes, "If events are random, we are not in control, and if we are in control of events, they are not random. There is therefore a fundamental clash between our need to feel we are in control and our ability to recognize randomness. That clash is one of the principal reasons we misinterpret random events."

Mlodinow is one of the few theoretical physicists that I have encountered (I've been reading a lot of books on chaos and complexity lately - trust me) who can explain specialized topics in ways that even non-physicists can understand.  He writes about concepts such as "regression toward the mean" and "the law of large numbers" and discusses how such things as wine ratings and political polls are surprisingly random.  He spends most of one chapter on the famous "Monty Hall problem" and how it applies to our everyday lives.  He even writes a little on complex systems and chaos - "In complex systems (among which I count our lives) we should expect that minor factors we can usually ignore will by chance sometimes cause major incidents" (sounds a lot like the "butterfly effect" right?).  

Mlodinow writes, "The human mind is built to identify for each event a definite cause and therefore have a hard time accepting the influence of unrelated or random factors."  The truth is, we live in a random, non-linear world.  He ends the book with what I thought was a very powerful point, "What I've learned, above all, is to keep marching forward because the best news is that since chance does play a role, one important factor in success is under our control: the number of at-bats, the number of chances taken, the number of opportunities seized.  For even a coin weighted toward failure will sometimes land on success.  Or as the IBM pioneer Thomas Watson said, If you want to succeed, double your failure rate."

Failure

After the 8th seed Miami Heat defeated the number one seed Milwaukee Bucks last year in the first round of the playoffs (4-1 in the best-of-seven series), Bucks superstar Giannis Antetokounmpo was asked by sports journalist Eric Nehm whether the season was a failure (see the video clip here).  Antetokounmpo was a little defensive at first, but then he responded with what I think is a Master Class on success versus failure:

Oh my god. You asked me the same question last year, Eric ... okay? Do you get a promotion every year? In your job? No, right? So every year you work is a failure? Yes or no? No. Every year you work, you work towards something, towards a goal — which is to get a promotion, to be able to take care of your family, provide a house for them, or take care of your parents. You work towards a goal — it’s not a failure. It’s steps to success. I don’t want to make it personal. There’s always steps to it. Michael Jordan played 15 years, won six championships. The other nine years was a failure? That’s what you’re telling me. I’m asking you a question, yes or no? Exactly. So why you ask me that question? It’s the wrong question.

Antetokounmpo was clearly frustrated.  And who wouldn't be?  His team was just eliminated in the first round of the play-offs by the lowest seeded team.  It was a crushing loss, and Antetokounmpo effectively missed the first three games of the series due to injuries.  The team had won the NBA World Championship two seasons earlier, and everyone had expected them to compete for another championship that year.  Instead, they were sent home by a Miami Heat team that wasn't as talented and wasn't supposed to win.  Antetokounmpo continued:

There’s no failure in sports. There’s good days, bad days, so days you are able to be successful — some days you’re not. Some days it’s your turn, some days it’s not your turn. That’s what sports is about. You don’t always win — so other people are going to win, simple as that. We’re going to come back next year, try to be better, try to build good habits , try to play better. Not having 10 days straight of playing bad basketball, and hopefully we can win a championship. So 50 years from 1970-2021 that we didn’t win a championship, it was 50 years of failure? No, it was not. It was steps to it. We were able to win one, hopefully we’re able to win another one.

I am reminded of another great basketball player, Michael Jordan and a famous Nike commercial that perfectly encapsulates what it means to fail:

I’ve missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. Twenty-six times I’ve been trusted to take the game-winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.

The take-home message here is that no matter what you do for a living (sports, business, medicine, etc) and no matter how good you are at it, you will experience failure at some point.  The true champions and experts are the individuals who learn from their experience at failure, change their approach, and do better the next time.  As someone once told me, the word "Fail" is an acronym for "First attempt in learning."  The more we fail, the more we learn.  And the more we learn, the better we become.

Necessary companions, but often strangers

Several months ago, I wrote a post about something that I called the Accountability-Authority Matrix, which I based, at least in part, on the well-known RACI model.  I recently came across another article ("Leadership Strangers: Authority and Accountability") with a similar 2x2 matrix based upon authority and accountability, and I thought it was worth sharing.  Jon Mertz introduces the topic with, "A project or initiative begins.  Do we have the authority to lead?  An initiative deviates.  Do we have accountability in results?"  He continues, "Authority and accountability are necessary companions, yet they are often strangers."  

I could not agree more.  Authority has to come with accountability, and the reverse is also true.  If you are going to hold someone accountable for performance, you better make sure that they are provided with the requisite authority to make the necessary decisions to assure successful completion of a project or initiative.

Mertz created a 2x2 matrix with "Accountability" on the vertical axis and "Authority" on the horizontal axis.  

Four situations can develop, depending upon how much clarity there is around a leader's authority and accountability.

1. Vague Authority and Vague Accountability: When a leader's decisionmaking authority is vague and no one is sure who is being held accountable for decisions, the project or initiative is perfectly set-up for failure.  No one is making decisions, and no one is being held accountable for poor performance in this situation.  

2. Vague Authority and Clear Accountability: When a leader is being held accountable for decisions that he or she does not have the authority to make, there is usually an impasse.  Stalemate. Finger-pointing. Passing the blame.  Organizations stagnate in this situation, because nothing gets done and nothing moves forward.

3. Clear Authority and Vague Accountability: Without the necessary level of of accountability, leaders often become self-serving (I labeled leaders who fall into this quadrant, "Dictators" in my matrix).  

4. Clear Authority and Clear Accountability: Mertz writes, "Vibrant authority is our fuel, strong accountability is our mile marker."  Here we have the ideal situation.  Here is where organizations thrive.  "Authority provides power, while accountability keeps power centered."

A drop of honey...

Hovhannes Tumanyan was a prolific writer who created fables, epics, novels, poems, and even translations of classic works by Byron, Goethe, and Pushkin into his native language, Armenian.  Today he is widely considered to be the national poet of Armenia.  He wrote a poem called "A Drop of Honey" in 1909, which I haven't been able to find on the Internet.  However, the poem has been paraphrased by a number of authors, and I will do so again here:

There once lived a king who ruled over a country far away in a time long ago.  On a warm, sunny, summer afternoon, the king sat with one of his ministers in his luxurious palace that overlooked the market place of the city.  The king was eating a dessert of puffed rice with honey, and he looked over his land with great pride and satisfaction.  It was a magnificent palace in an even more magnificent city in an even more magnificent country.  Life was great.

As he was thinking about his great fortune and success, a small drop of honey dripped from his puffed rice onto the window ledge.  The minister was about to call a servant to come and wipe up the drop of honey, but the king waved a hand to stop him, saying, "Don't bother.  It's only a little drop of honey.  It's not our problem."

The minister shrugged his shoulders and looked back down at the drop of honey.  The drop of honey trickled slowly over the window ledge and dropped down on the street below.  Shortly thereafter, a fly came buzzing by and landed on the sweet drop of honey that had fallen onto the street.  A nearby lizard saw the fly and shot out its tongue to catch it.  But this alerted a nearby cat, who suddenly pounced on top of the lizard, trapping it under its paw.  

As it so happened, a dog was lying at one of the market stalls close by, and when the dog saw the cat jump into the middle of the street, he ran to chase his worst enemy, the cat.  The dog and cat started fighting with each other in the middle of the street.  The king and his minister heard the commotion below.

The minister was about to call a servant to go and deal with the two animals, when the king again waved his hand and said, "Relax.  It's only a cat and a dog.  And they belong to someone in the market place, not me.  We should not interfere.  It's not our problem."

The cat's owner was absolutely horrified to see his cat being attacked by the dog.  He started whacking the dog with a broom.  Of course, the dog's owner was horrified to see her dog being attacked by the cat, so she started whacking the cat with her broom.  

Soon, more people started coming out from their stalls and houses to see what all the screaming and shouting was about.  Some of these people were friends with the cat's owner, and others were friends of the dog's owners.  They all started arguing with each other, supporting their friends.  A fight broke out in the middle of the street.  The worried minister turned once more to the king, whose only comment was "Not our problem.  We should not interfere.  Have some puffed rice with honey and do not trouble yourself any further."

As the king and his minister continued to watch, the police arrived to break up the fight.  Unfortunately, the people had become so angry, that they started fighting the police.  It was a full-scale riot.  The king turned to his minister and said, "I know what you are thinking, but it's not our problem.  Besides, the army can handle this."

But the army couldn't stop it.  The riot swiftly escalated with looting and destruction all over the city.  Buildings were set on fire, and by the next morning the once magnificent city had been reduced to a smoldering pile of ashes.  The king and his minister looked down with horror.  The king sighed and said, "Oh, maybe the little drop of honey was our problem."

Sounds a lot like the "butterfly effect", doesn't it?

"So are the ants..."

I finished my last post ("The longer you stay...the longer you stay") with a great quote by Henry David Thoreau: "It is not enough to be busy; so are the ants. The question is: What are we busy about?"  It seems that many, if not most, of organizations today are operating with the management mindset that "more is better" :  If you want maximum results, you should put forth maximum effort.  But is that really true?  Is there evidence to support that statement?

As it turns out, maybe "maximum effort" doesn't always turn into the "maximum results".  Greg McKeown wrote a nice article for the online Harvard Business Review, "To build a top performing team, ask for 85% effort" and suggests a better formula, "optimal effort = maximum results".  Counterintuitively, less effort can actually lead to greater success!  He talks about something known as the "85% rule".  The "85% rule" is about "consistency, pacing, and finishing" and is well known in the field of sports performance.  Carl Lewis, one of the greatest Track and Field athletes of all-time was known as a "slow starter" and "great finisher" - he would push himself hard, but only to 85%.  Just look at how effortlessly the Jamaican sprinter Usain Bolt blows away the rest of the competition.  Look out how relaxed he really is - is he putting forth 100% effort?  Not really.  He's putting forth optimal effort.  

The same is true when it comes to performance outside of athletics.  We do better when we engage with our optimal effort, not our maximal effort.  If we push ourselves too hard and for too long, we paradoxically end up performing worse.  And if we continue to push ourselves in that manner, we will burn ourselves out.

McKeown provides a number of suggestions for leaders to build high-performing teams without burning them out (by following the "85% rule"):

1.  Create a "done for the day" time:  I love this recommendation!  When possible, leaders should establish a "done for the day" time that their teams should follow, unless there is an emergency.  McKeown writes, "When managers are ambiguous about the length of workdays, they risk introducing decision fatigue, diminishing returns, or even getting negative returns from their employees."  Remember, "the longer you stay...the longer you stay."  McKeown tells a story of a a new employee at a private equity firm who was eager to make a good impression by staying late.  His manager saw him working past the "done for the day" time and asked, "Why are you still here?  We don't stay late here unless there is an absolute emergency.  We want you to be fresh tomorrow morning. Please go home."

2.  Ask for a little less than maximum capacity: In other words, apply the "85% rule" in your organization.  There is a very well-known concept in exercise and rehabilitation called "perceived exertion".  Essentially, "perceived exertion" is how hard you think your body is working, which as it turns out, is fairly accurate.  For example, if the "perceived exertion" is on a scale of 1 (lowest level of exertion) and 10 (maximum level of exertion), individuals should be targeting a score of between 8 to 9 most of the time.  

3.  Ask "how am I making your work more stressful than it needs to be?": Sometimes, just asking the members of your team what you, as their leader, are doing to cause more stress and anxiety can be very enlightening.  For example, I've always been one to check and respond to emails at the end of the day or on weekends.  What kind of message does that send to my team?  Even if I tell them that I don't expect for them to follow my lead, they usually do, because they think that I expect them to respond to me.  McKeown mentions a study by investigators at the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence, which found that 1 in 5 workers is highly engaged but having high burnout too.  In other words, these highly motivated, enthusiastic workers who were passionate about their work were also experiencing significant burnout - higher even than unengaged workers.  More importantly, these workers were the most likely to leave the organization!  Again, "optimal effort=maximum results".

4.  Encourage 85% right decisions: We don't need to make a perfect decision all the time.  Most leaders, myself included, tend to be perfectionists.  We are all afraid of making mistakes.  McKeown again mentions a study about adaptive and maladaptive perfectionists.  Research by Brian Swider, Dana Harari, Amy Breidenthal, and Laurens Bujold Steel (see "The Pros and cons of perfectionism, according to research" in Harvard Business Review) distinguish between excellence-seeking perfectionism and failure-avoiding perfectionism.  The former describes individuals who hold high standards for themselves and others, while the latter describes individuals who continually worry that their work is not sufficient or adequate.  Swider and colleagues also recognize that there are positive aspects to perfectionism, as well as negative ones.  The positive effects are stronger for those excellence-seeking perfectionists, while the negative effects are stronger in the failure-avoiding perfectionists.  Perhaps the best way to take advantage of the positive effects and mitigate the negative ones is to encourage "85% right" decisions.

5.  Watch-out for high-pressure language: Avoid the use of high-pressure terms such as "Urgent", "ASAP", or "Need" in email or text communications.  I would also add "Gentle Reminder" to this list.  McKeown suggests fostering open communication about genuine deadlines, the rationale behind these deadlines, and the potential trade-offs that can or should be made.  

6.  End meetings 10 minutes early: See my previous post ("Has technology really improved our lives?") about the intriguing results of the Microsoft Human Factors Lab's study on the use of breaks between virtual meetings.  

7.  Set your own intensity to 85%: Building upon the point made above about email and text communication after hours or on the weekends, leaders need to model the right behaviors when it comes to the 85% effort and work-life integration.  Surprisingly, as I mentioned in a previous post that mentions the book, Chimpanzee Politics by Frans de Waal, we can learn a lot about group politics and behavior by observing primate groups.  Researchers in a classic study found that baboons look to their alpha male (the "boss" of the group, if you will) every 20-30 seconds to see what he is doing.  In other words, the rest of the baboons in the group model the behavior of the alpha male.  Leaders in all organizations are always "on display" - what they say and do matters.

McKeown writes, "Despite some companies' attempts, we can't fix today's burnout culture with a wellness app.  What it takes, is a mindset and culture shift among managers and organizations everywhere."  Applying the "85% rule" would be a great step in the right direction.

"The longer you stay...the longer you stay."

There's an old saying (there's even a post about it on the blog KevinMD) that I learned from one of my chief residents all the WAY back when I was a third-year medical student on my 2nd month of Internal Medicine.  I was finishing up some charts and it was getting late.  My chief looked at me and said, "Why don't you get out of here?"  I replied that I was trying to finish up a few last minute things so that I would be better prepared for tomorrow.  He shook his head, took one look at me, and said, "Derek, the longer you stay...the longer you stay.  Go home."  So I went home.

His point is that there is always one more thing that you could do before leaving work at the end of the day.  Just "one more thing" always leads to one more thing.  The latest research suggests that our days are becoming more and more packed with things to do.  There never seems like we have enough time to do all of the things that we are supposed to do.  Just ask anyone at work, "How are you doing?"  There's a really good chance that their reply will be, "Busy" or some variation thereof.  Ashley Whillans, a researcher at Harvard Business School analyzed data from Gallup and noted that the percentage of employed Americans reporting that they "never have enough time" increased to 80% in 2018.  It's called "time poverty" and it's getting worse.

Our family took a trip to Guam, and we stopped for about a week in Tokyo on the way home (technically, we had to travel even farther from home in order to get to Tokyo, but the direct flight from Tokyo to home was significantly shorter than the return flight from Guam).  It was a great trip, but two things really stuck with me.  First, the Japanese work very, very hard.  I heard that it's not good for workers to leave before their bosses.  Most bosses have figured this out and stay long hours after the normal work day just to keep everyone working hard.  Notably, despite the long work hours, Japanese workers have consistently ranked last among G7 countries in terms of worker productivity since the 1970's.  Second, the suicide rate in Japan is apparently very high.  Overall mortality rates from suicide in Japan are almost twice as high for males and almost three times higher for females compared with the United States.  I suspect these two statistics are related.

Adam Waytz wrote an article for the March-April 2023 issue of Harvard Business Review, "Beware a culture of busyness".  Waytz writes that "Busyness has become a status symbol.  People consider those who exert high effort to be morally admirable, regardless of their output."  Legendary UCLA basketball coach John Wooden (see my posts "Believe" and "Bill Walton's Haircut" for more on one of the all-time great leaders) once said, "Never mistake activity for achievement."  And that is perhaps the point that Adam Waytz is trying to make.  The prevailing corporate culture continues to reward busyness, but just because someone is busy doesn't mean they are productive.  All it's really doing is increasing mental fatigue, stress, and burnout, all of which actually decrease productivity!

Waytz goes on to suggest ways that we can "reverse busyness."  First, we should be rewarding productivity, not just activity.  Shift to performance-based pay rather than time-based pay.  As an example, Waytz cites a study by the economist Edward Lazear that found that when the automobile-glass-repair company Safetlite switched from hourly pay to pay based on the number of windshields installed, productivity increased by 44%!  Second, eliminate low-value work, i.e. waste (there's a lot of waste that methods such as Lean/Six Sigma can help remove - more on that in a future post).  Third, force people off the clock.  A number of companies have shifted to open leave policies (i.e. no caps on the number of vacation days).  They've found that these policies encourage their workers to actually take vacation without adversely impacting their productivity in the long-run.  Fourth, leaders need to model the correct behaviors - leaders and managers should go home at a decent hour and take time off too.

The American philosopher and writer, Henry David Thoreau, once said, "It is not enough to be busy; so are the ants. The question is: What are we busy about?"  And most importantly, "the longer you stay...the longer you stay."

"Has technology really improved our lives?"

I am old enough to remember a time before we had desktop computers, handheld telephones, the Internet, and even cable television (or at least I can remember when our family didn't have cable television)!  There's no question in my mind that technology has, in a lot of ways, made our lives easier.  But has technology really made our lives better?  With all of this talk about ChatGPT, artificial intelligence, and the Internet of Things (IoT), it's easy to see and appreciate that technology will continue to have a major impact of our lives going forward.  Now, whether there will be something in our future similar to the fictional Skynet or Matrix (see also my post from 2018 "Weird Science") is a different question entirely.  We've been wrestling with these largely, at least until recently, philosophical and existential discussions for years.  The brilliant physicist Albert Einstein once said, "It has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity" (he may have been talking about the atomic bomb), and the architect Frank Lloyd Wright said, "If it keeps up, man will atrophy all his limbs but the push-button finger."

Today, I wanted to focus on three fairly recent and rather interesting studies about the kinds of technology that we deal with in our everyday lives.  The first two studies involved the smartphones that we carry with us everywhere we go.  The third study involves something else that has become a lot more common in our professional lives - the virtual meeting (something that we probably would have never considered until the COVID-19 pandemic).  Virtual meetings have dramatically changed how we work, but again I think the jury is still out on whether or not virtual meetings have made our professional and personal lives better.

Adrian War and colleagues published the first study in 2017 entitled "Brain drain: The mere presence of one's own smartphone reduces available cognitive capacity".  These investigators conducted two experiments.  In experiment #1, they randomly assigned 548 undergraduate students and then asked them to perform a series of cognitive tests.  Study participants were asked to place their smartphones in their desk, pocket/bag, or another room.  They were all told to place their phones completely on silent mode.  The cognitive tests were designed to measure cognitive capacity and fluid intelligence.  The study participants randomized to the "desk" condition performed significantly worse, while those randomized to the "other room" condition performed significantly better.  In other words, the mere thought of having their smartphone immediately out of reach was enough to shorten their working memory capacity.  In experiment #2, they randomly assigned 296 undergraduate students to the same three conditions above, but they added two additional conditions in a 3x2 randomization matrix ("smartphone off" or "smartphone on") - thus, students could be assigned to one of six possible groups.  Again, participants in the "desk" condition performed significantly worse (regardless of whether it was turned on or off).  In other words, the decrease in performance on the cognitive tests was likely not related to incoming notifications.  The investigators concluded that the mere presence of a smartphone in our midst can shorten our attention span and distract us from the task at hand.

The next study is just as disturbing (I recognize that I am perhaps being overly dramatic here).  Julia Brailovskaia and colleagues published a study entitled "Finding the 'sweet spot' of smartphone use: Reduction or abstinence to increase well-being and health lifestyle?! An experimental intervention study".  These investigators randomized 619 smartphone users in Germany to either complete abstinence from their smartphone for an entire week, reducing daily smartphone use by 1 hour (for just one week), or control (use the smartphone as normal).  The study last for four months, and the investigators monitored actual smartphone use and measured life satisfaction, depressive symptoms, anxiety symptoms, physical activity, and smoking behavior at 1 and 4 months into the study.  Both interventions reduced smartphone use (as designed), but more importantly life satisfaction and physical activity improved in both groups as well.  These effects were sustained at up to 4 months, and of interest, the effect was stronger in the daily reduction group compared to the abstinence group!  Both interventions also reduced symptoms of depression and anxiety, as well as reducing tobacco use.  The investigators concluded that reducing smartphone use leads to more well-being and a healthier lifestyle, though importantly complete abstinence is not required (and is probably not realistic anyway).

The final study involved something that the investigators call, "Zoom Fatigue" ("Nonverbal overload: A theoretical argument for the causes of Zoom Fatigue").  Jeremy Bailenson proposed four reasons (all of which are backed by some evidence) on how virtual meetings (occurring in this case on the Zoom platform) likely lead to adverse psychological consequences:

1. Excessive amounts of close-up eye contact is highly intense.  Bailenson claims (correctly, in my opinion) that the amount of eye contact as well as the size of faces on the screens is unnatural.  Everyone is looking at everyone, all the time.  All listeners are treated nonverbally like a speaker, so even if you are not speaking during a virtual meeting, everyone is still staring at you.  Given that the fear of speaking in public is one of the most common phobias today, the excessive amounts of close-up eye contact can cause significant stress.

2.  Seeing yourself during video chats constantly in real-time is fatiguing.  The "Hollywood Squares" view on Zoom (and other virtual meeting platforms too) includes you, as the user (although you can hide self-view, I believe).  It's like having someone follow you around with a mirror constantly, and it can be incredibly taxing and stressful.

3.  Video chats dramatically reduce our usual mobility.  Even if we are talking to someone at work over the telephone or participating in an audio conference, we can get up and move around.  That's generally not possible with virtual meetings, particularly when organizations require that the webcam is always turned on (as many do).  While travel time for in-person meetings is no longer necessary for virtual meetings, at least we were able to get the blood moving and stretch our legs throughout the day.  Bailenson suggests that there is evidence to suggest that when people are moving, they're actually performing better cognitively.

4.  The cognitive load is much higher in video chats.  Again, nonverbal communication is an important part of communication.  And it's a lot easier to pick up cues, gestures, and signals in-person versus during a virtual meeting.  As a result, as Bailenson suggest, you simply have to work harder on nonverbal communication during virtual meetings.

One final point that I think is relevant to this discussion.  In my own anecdotal experience (shared by a number of my colleagues and reported elsewhere in the lay press), the number of back-to-back meetings that I am required to attend has significantly increased since we have started using virtual meetings with greater frequency.  Again, my comment around travel time between meetings above is an important one.  Researchers at Microsoft;s Human Factors Lab measured brain wave activity (using EEG) in fourteen employees while they took part in virtual meetings over the course of two different sessions.  In the first session, they attended stretches of four half-hour meetings back-to-back, while in the next session these meetings were separated by 10-minute breaks.  You can see the results below (this figure has made its way around social media):

As you can certainly appreciate, attending back-to-back meetings without a break significantly increased stress levels!  The investigators at Microsoft concluded that taking a break between meetings allows your brain to "reset", which will reduce the cumulative build-up of stress across meetings.  Additional results suggested that back-to-back meetings decrease our ability to focus and engage, and that by taking breaks between meetings, even if short ones, we are beter able to perform.

So, what should we conclude from these studies in aggregate?  I would say that we should:

1. Take a break from our smartphones every once in a while (remember, taking a break for as little as one hour per day over the course of one week had significant benefits on health and wellbeing up to four months later)

2. Schedule 10-minute breaks between virtual meetings

3. Continue to provide virtual meeting options, but definitely consider how we can decrease the stressful nature of large virtual meetings in particular

Technology is here to stay.  And it will continue to have significant benefits on our quality of life.  However, we need to pay close attention on how we implement technology so that we can minimize the adverse effects of technology in our lives, which have been shown to exist as well.

Robin Hood and the state of Texas

Last time I mentioned a book called, Flirting with Disaster: Why Accidents are Rarely Accidental by Marc Gerstein and Michael Ellsberg and specifically the chapter entitled "Butterfly wings and stone heads: How complexity influences catastrophe in policy decisions."  Gerstein and Ellsberg discussed two really nice examples of the well-known "Butterfly Effect" which teach us that even the most insignificant choices can sometimes have profound consequences.  The first example involved the mysterious Easter Island (Rapa Nui) and its large statues called moai.  The second example of the "Butterfly Effect" involves a public school financing plan in the state of Texas, commonly known as the "Robin Hood plan", which cost Texas taxpayers an estimated $81 billion in depreciated real estate values.

Public education in the United States is the responsibility of each state and is mostly (95%) funded by local property taxes.  Individuals and families living in wealthier neighborhoods have more expensive homes and therefore pay more in property taxes.  As a result, the public schools in these districts can spend more on their schools compared to schools in less affluent neighborhoods.  Many states try to balance the amount of funds available to all public schools by shifting money from the rich to the poor through grants and subsidies.  

The Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund filed a lawsuit against Texas Commissioner of Education William Kirby on behalf of the Edgewood Independent School District in San Antonio in 1984, citing discrimination against students living in poor school districts.  The case eventually made it to the Texas Supreme Court, who ruled in favor of Edgewood, which prompted the Texas legislature to pass a new public school financing plan in 1993.  The new plan was commonly known as the "Robin Hood plan", for reasons that will become clear shortly.  

Here's how the new plan was supposed to work.  The state divided the total assessed property value in each school district by the number of pupils, making certain allowances for children with limited English proficiency, learning disabilities, etc.  Each school district would keep all property taxes below a certain confiscation threshold (originally $340,000), and any revenue above that amount would be collected by the state for redistribution to poorer school districts (i.e., taking from the rich to give to the poor).  Seems fairly straightforward, right?

Importantly, since property taxes collected above the threshold limit didn't benefit the local school district, over time the property values in these districts fell (property values are significantly influenced by factors such as crime rates and the quality of local schools).  Some experts estimated that the property value of homes decreased by $11,000 for each $1,000 per year in taxes paid to another school district (assuming a twenty-year mortgage at 7 percent interest).  

Of course, as property values in these wealthier school districts fell, there was less property tax revenue available to redistribute to poorer school districts.  As a result, the state government lowered the previous confiscation threshold in order to increase the amount of money available to the poor districts, which had the unintended effect of lowering property taxes in the wealthier districts even further!  As housing prices fell in the wealthy districts, local governments had to increase property taxes even further to make up the shortfall to fund their own local schools, which only worsened the spiral downward.

As of just a few days ago (September 23, 2023), there was a local television news story on this issue, and apparently the Texas legislature is actively trying to change the law.  The program has not been as straightforward or successful as originally envisioned.  Here again, we have a case of both complex and unintended consequences resulting from a relatively straightforward (at least on the surface) decision.  The "Butterfly Effect" strikes again!

Butterfly Wings and Stone Heads

As you might have guessed from several of my recent posts, I have been digging a lot into the literature on complexity science and chaos theory lately.  You've probably heard of the so-called "Butterfly Effect" (see also the famous poem, whose author is unknown, "For want of a nail"), which I have posted about in the past (see "Butterflies").  In short, the MIT meteorologist Edward Lorenz stumbled on what has come to be called the "Butterfly Effect" while conducting a weather simulation in 1961.  Lorenz had programmed an early computer (called a Royal McBee) using 12 mathematical equations to try to see if he could develop a model that would predict the weather.  He surreptitiously stopped one of the trials of the simulation in the middle, replacing some of the normal six-digit variables with three-digit variables (he basically rounded) instead.  To his surprise, this very small change in starting conditions produced dramatically different results.  He metaphorically compared his discovery to a butterfly flapping its wings in Brazil and causing a tornado in Texas.

If you are interested in science fiction, I highly recommend a 1952 short story by Ray Bradbury called "A Sound of Thunder", which also involves a butterfly that ends up changing the course of history.  With the "Butterfly Effect" in mind, I recently came across a book called, Flirting with Disaster: Why Accidents are Rarely Accidental by Marc Gerstein and Michael Ellsberg.  There's a great chapter early in the book with a catchy title, "Butterfly wings and stone heads: How complexity influences catastrophe in policy decisions."  The chapter's key take-home message is that in the world we live in today, i.e. a VUCAT world (one that is characterized by volatility, uncertainty, complexity, ambiguity, and turbulence), small changes in practice or seemingly minor decisions can sometimes have dramatic and often unintended consequences.  The authors talk about a very well-known model in sociology called the Schelling Segregation Model developed by the economist Thomas Schelling (see the article, "The Math of Segregation" in the journal American Scientist for a great overview).  While I may talk more about this model in the future, in today's post I want to cover one of the cases discussed in the second half of the chapter (I will talk about the second case in another post).

The first case (actually it was the second case mentioned in the chapter, but I want to cover this one first) involves Easter Island (also known as Rapa Nui - Dutch explorers gave the island its common name because it was "discovered" on Easter Sunday in 1722), an island in the southeastern Pacific that is a special territory of Chile.  The island is most famous for its nearly 1,000 monumental stone statues, called moai, which were created by the early Rapa Nui people (one of the moai played a prominent role in the storyline of the 2006 film Night at the Museum).

The story behind the moai is absolutely fascinating!  These monolithic human figurines were carved out of volcanic rock more than 500 years ago.  While the tallest moai known is almost 10 meters high and weighs just over 80 tons, the average height and weight is about 4 meters and 14 tons, respectively.  More than 900 of these stone statues exist, though statues are still being discovered even today.  What is amazing is that the statues were carved in a quarry near the center of the island and then moved into position around the island's perimeter.  These statues are often referred to as "Easter Island Heads" because of the disproportionate size of their heads and the fact that most of them were found buried up to the shoulders.  Archaeologists today feel that the moai were a representation of the Rapa Nui's ancestors and deities.  The heads actually face away from the ocean and "look" to the center of the island, keeping watch over the Rapa Nui villages and people.

Easter Island is one of the world's most remote inhabited islands (Chile is just over 2,100 miles to the East), and the nearest inhabited island is Pitcairn Island, with just about 50 residents in 2023 located 1,300 miles away (Pitcairn Island is most famous as the landing site for Fletcher Christian and the rest of the mutineers made famous in the Mutiny on the Bounty).  Approximately 8,000 people live on the island as of 2023.  Today, the island is mostly barren with few native species of birds, but that wasn't always the case.  Easter Island was once home to lush and diverse forests, specifically a now extinct species of palm tree, and it was home to several large colonies of sea- and land-birds.  The birds are long gone as well.  

While scientists today can surmise how (and perhaps why) the moai were built, they still don't know for sure about what happened to the Rapa Nui people.  Here is where things get a little interesting (and a little controversial).  The American scientist and writer Jared Diamond claims in his book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Failor Succeed that the Rapa Nui society on Easter Island collapsed due to environmental damage caused by humans (he also blames environmental causes to the collapse of society on Pitcairn Island, but that may be a greater stretch).  Some scientists blame the moai on the collapse of the Rapa Nui society.  Building these large statues became somewhat of an obsession, with tribal chiefs competing with each other over who could build the largest and most complex moai.  The Rapa Nui islanders used the palm trees that covered the island to create the logs, ropes, and sleds used to move these large statues from the quarries in the center of the island to their final positions.  The palm trees took up to 100 years to reach adult height, and unfortunately the trees were cut down faster than they could be replaced.  Without trees, the ecology collapsed.  The loss of the trees led to the collapse of the bird population.  No trees meant less rain (apparently tree growth and rainfall are mutually interdependent) and more soil erosion and greater water runoff.  Crop yields tumbled.  Without trees, the Rapa Nui no longer had wood for their cooking fires, canoes, and shelters.  As food and water became more scarce, the different tribes of Rapa Nui started to fight.  Soon, the entire society on Rapa Nui collapsed as well.

As Marc Gerstein and Michael Ellsberg write, "It would have been impossible to conceive that one day an islander would cut down the very last tree and, with that act, one thousand years of civilization would collapse soon thereafter."  Diamond's theory (he calls it "ecocide") sounds a lot like the poem mentioned above, "For want of a nail".  I have to point out that many scientists do not agree with his theory, claiming that the population of people on Rapa Nui slowly decreased over many years (see Terry Hunt's article, "Rethinking the Fall of Easter Island" that appeared in the journal American Scientist).  The truth, as it usually does, likely falls somewhere in the middle of the two opposing theories.  

Regardless of who is correct here, I really think that this story is yet another good example of the concepts I've been discussing in several of my recent posts on complexity theory and complex adaptive systems.  The "Butterfly Effect" reminds us that every decision we make counts, regardless of its scale.  Even the most insignificant choices can sometimes have profound consequences.

“Copy the how…”

The late Kobe Bryant was arguably one of the greatest basketball players to ever play the game.  It's rare these days to see (at least) a male player of his caliber play for the same team during his entire career.  Bryant played his entire 20 year career for the Los Angeles Lakers - rather than changing teams, he simply changed his jersey number (he wore #8 for the first half of his career and #24 for the second half).  He was the 1996-1997 NBA Rookie of the Year, 2007-2008 League MVP, 18x NBA All-Star (including winnning the All-Star Game MVP four times), 5x NBA Champ (including NBA Finals MVP twice), and 2x NBA Scoring Champ.  He also was one of those rare players who played both offense and defense equally well, being named to the NBA's All-Defensive Team 12x in his career.  He was named to the 75th NBA Anniversary Team, and he was a two-time Olympic Gold medalist in basketball for Team USA.  If all of that wasn't enough, he even won an Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film in 2018 for his film, Dear Basketball.  

Bryant wasn't perfect.  He was charged in 2003 for sexual assault, though the charges were later dropped by the prosecutors after his accuser decided not to testify at trial.  His accuser did file a civil lawsuit against Bryant, which was settled out of court.

Bryant retired after the 2015-2016 NBA season.  In the season finale on April 13th, he scored an NBA season-high 60 points, outscoring the opposing team's entire team (Utah Jazz) in the fourth and final period of the game, 23-21.  Bryant and his 13 year-old daughter Gianna were tragically killed in a helicopter accident on January 26, 2020.  He was post-humously inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame in 2021.

Bryant was nicknamed "Black Mamba" after the deadly snake.  He was known for his relentless work ethic, which was the subject of a 2018 book The Mamba Mentality.  Bryant said, "Don’t copy the what. Copy the how."  He would study the greats in all domains, not just basketball and not just sports.  Music, business, politics, art.  It didn't matter.  Bryant explained, "No matter what discipline you are in, there’s a common denominator in how we approach our craft.  The attention to detail. The level of commitment.  Those things are the same across the board.  That is my message: Don’t look at what I did but *how* I did it.  The how.  And then you can transfer that over to any profession and any discipline."

It's amazing to me how much you can learn from and apply some of the lessons other leaders learned, regardless of their industry.  As I've mentioned several times, I am learning a lot about leadership by reading some of the biographies from the U.S. Presidents, in succession (I'm still working on a book about Warren G. Harding, by the way).  Military leaders, industrial magnates, business tycoons, political leaders, and athletes.  I guarantee that there are lessons to be learned from all of them (even if the lesson is "what not to do").  "Don't copy the what, copy the how..."

Please don't interrupt!

I was recently interviewed at one of our hospital fundraising events by a local television news reporter.  I was taught several years ago to always try to limit yourself to three key points during an interview, and I think I was able to do that this time.  However, as I reflected on how well the interview went afterwards, I thought to myself, "Wow, I must have been nervous, because I kept interrupting the reporter and answering her questions before she was even finished asking them."  I even started to worry if she had noticed that I was interrupting her.  

Unfortunately, it is a well-known fact that men interrupt women all of the time!  It happens so frequently, that there is a label for it - "manterrupting" (see the Nextions Yellow Paper Series article, "Mansplaining, Manterrupting & Bropropriating: Gender Bias and the Pervasive Interruption of Women" by lead researcher and President Dr. Arin N. Reeves for an excellent overview of this literature).  And as it turns out, "manterrupting" has been around for a really long time.  As early as 1985, Catherine Krupnick reported that, "Numerous studies have demonstrated that in mixed-sex conversations, women are interrupted far more frequently than men."  More concerning, once women are interrupted, they are more likely to stay out of the discussion!

The American writer Rebecca Solnit wrote an essay in 2008 entitled, "Men Explain Things to Me" in which she introduced the term mansplaining into our lexicon.  Solnit defined it as "a man interrupting a woman to explain to her something that she actually knows more about than he does."  Of interest, but maybe not a surprise, Solnit was apparently in a discussion when a man first interrupted her and then began to talk about a very important book that had recently come out in her field.  He quickly realized that Solnit was the author of the book!

Dr. Reeves observed 15 live meetings, 11 conference calls, and 3 panel discussions, which collectively amounted to 2,460 minutes of conversation.  Each conversation had at least 5 people, of which at least 2 were women.  All of the participants were leaders within organizations at the level of Partner/Managing Director or Vice President and above.  She next interviewed 14 of the women and 13 of the men who had participated in these conversations.  There were a total of 859 interruptions for an average of 29.6 interruptions per meeting/call/panel discussion.  Of the 859 interruptions, 582 (67.8%) were by men and 277 (32.2%) were by women.  More revealing, of the 582 interruptions by men, 418 of them (71.8%) were interruptions of women who were speaking!  Surprisingly however, women were more likely to interrupt women speakers too (179 of the 277 interruptions involved women interrupting other women).

Whereas most of the interruptions by men were to state disagreement (usually) or agreement (at times), accelerate the conversation, or add a personal anecdote or perspective, the interruptions by women were usually to ask questions or for points to be repeated or clarified.  The majority, by far, of interruptions of women by men were what is called intrusive interruptions, defined as "intentionally or unintentionally usurping the speaker's turn at talk with the intent of ceasing the speaker's ability to finish organically."  

In the follow-up interviews, Dr. Evans found that most of the men were not aware of either interrupting anyone or having been interrupted.  In contrast, the women were almost always conscious of the fact that they were being interrupted and expressed feelings of "disrespect", "feeling invisible", "being stuck" and unable to respond, and "frustrated".  Unfortunately, women commonly feel this way because they are often subject to intrusive interruptions, as shown by Dr. Evans in her study and supported by a vast literature of similar studies (see, for example, a recent study on the frequency of interruptions during resident physician's morning report).

I was recently asked what am I personally doing to support our hospital's Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion initiatives.  As I reflect on my recent interview, clearly I need to be more cognizant of the times that I interrupt someone and simply back-up and let the speaker finish.  I've already started catching myself addressing female physicians as "Doctor" rather than using their first name (unless they request that I call them by their first name).  And I can certainly continue to be a sponsor, an ally, and a mentor.  Dr. Evans offer some even better advice and recommendations:

1.  Create, use, and follow agendas for meetings ("An increase in structure leads to a decrease in interruptions.")

2.  Remember what we all learned in kindergarten - Take turns!  ("In meetings where the meeting leaders asked people to go around the table and give their perspectives, the clarity around who should be speaking was sharpened, and if someone interrupted, the interruptions were neutralized much faster...")

3.  Call out interruptions, both before they happen and when they occur ("Remind people at the beginning of the meeting that interruptions prevent an effective exchange of ideas and make meetings longer than necessary" and "There is nothing that stops an interrupting man more than another man pointing out the interruptions."

It's clear we all need to do better, and as my recent experience shows, that starts with me.

"Have a Nekton Mentality"

It's been a while since I have written about P.J. Fleck, the current head coach at the University of Minnesota.  As of today's post, the Minnesota Golden Gophers are 3-2 with a very tough game coming up this weekend against the #2 ranked University of Michigan Wolverines.  He's not done a bad job with an overall record of 44-27 in his 7th year there (including a 4-0 record in the post-season), but for some reason fans on social media aren't happy with the team's performance.  Oh well, I still like reading about his coaching and leadership philosophy (see my posts from a few years ago, "Row the Boat", "Golden Gopher Leadership 101", and "What makes a champion?"). I've always liked one of his quips, "Have a Nekton Mentality".

For those of you who didn't major in marine biology, there are two categories of aquatic animals.  "Plankton" (not the character from Sponge Bob) are marine drifters and literally "just go with the flow" (they are carried along by the tides and currents).  "Nektons", on the other hand, are able to move or swim independently of the currents.  In Fleck-speak, Nektons are "always hungry, always attacking, and never satisfied."  

As a leadership metaphor, Nektons are the individuals who don't let the situation dictate what happens next, but rather they themselves dictate what happens next.  Nektons are always progressing forward and are never satisfied with the status quo.  Nektons don't react, they proact!  The word proact is a verb that means to take action in advance of an expected event.  Nekton leaders are in a state of constant readiness and seek to continuously improve. “Have a Nekron mentality!”

Experts

It doesn't feel like October here in Chicago, but who's complaining?  Unfortunately, as the saying goes, "If you don't like the weather in Chicago, just wait a few minutes."  I've lived here long enough to know that the reverse is true - "If you like the weather in Chicago, just wait a few minutes."  Truthfully, the weather doesn't change quite that fast here, but we've certainly been enjoying what will undoubtedly be some of the last remaining days by our swimming pool.  Even if the weather hasn't changed very much, Autumn is here according to the calendar.  And with the transition from September to October, I wanted to take a very brief break away from the themes I've been posting about over the last couple of weeks (network science, complexity, and chaos theory). 

My interest of late in the fields of network science, complexity, and chaos theory have forced me to pick up some articles and books that I probably would have avoided in the past.  As I've admitted a number of times in previous posts, if our children ever had questions about their math homework growing up, they were smart enough to go talk to their mother!  However, these topics of late have forced me to go back and brush up on some of my mathematics skills, as well as learning some new ones (graph theory, topology, and algorithms in the field of computer science).  I've learned new words such as cybernetics and cellular automata, and I have even learned some very basic (if there is such a thing) theoretical physics.  

During my reading, I've come across several quotes pertaining to the nature of expertise.  Realize that most of these quotes have been attributed to scientists who were not only considered experts in their respective fields, but they were also considered to be some of the most brilliant minds in the history of science.  The first quote is by the Danish physicist Niels Bohr, who won the 1922 Nobel Prize in Physics for his foundational contributions in atomic theory and quantum physics.  Bohr said:

An expert is a person who has made all the mistakes that can be made in  very narrow field.

Werner Heisenberg was a German theoretical physicist who won the 1932 Nobel Prize in Physics for creating the field of quantum mechanis.  Heisenberg published his famous "uncertainty principle" in 1927 (a topic for another day, trust me).  Heisenberg and Bohr certainly agreed on the nature of expertise, and perhaps Heisenberg was thinking of Bohrs when he wrote:

Many people will tell you that an expert is someone who knows a great deal about his subject.  To this I would object that no one can ever know very much about any subject.  I would much prefer the following definition: an expert is someone who knows some of the worst mistakes that can be made in his subject, and how to avoid them.

Of course, as I started to look up both of these quotes to verify that Bohrs and Heisenberg actually said them, I found a quote by a pediatrician named W.P. Northrup of New York University who wrote in 1904 (before the two quotes above, by the way):

My one admirer kindly spoke of me, he being in an amiable mood, as an expert in this diagnosis [referring to Northrup's expertise at diagnosing pneumonia in children].  "Yes," I agreed, which took him aback.  "I've made all the mistakes that are possible."  The net result of that should be expert.

I am reminded of the ancient Greek philosopher Socrates, who said, The only true wisdom is knowing you know nothing.  My point is that all of us, even the intellectual greats, started out as beginners.  Rather than looking at our mistakes as failures, we need to consider that our mistakes are what make us better in the long run.    

Ancora Imparo!