Archive for January, 2020
Actively Disengaged?
Posted by Bill Storage in Innovation management on January 28, 2020
Over half of employees in America are disengaged from their jobs – 85%, according to a recent Gallup poll. About 15% are actively disengaged – so miserable that they seek to undermine the productivity of everyone else. Gallup, ADP and Towers Watson have been reporting similar numbers for two decades now. It’s an astounding claim that signals a crisis in management and the employee experience. Astounding. And it simply cannot be true.
Think about it. When you shop, eat out, sit in a classroom, meet with an accountant, hire an electrician, negotiate contracts, and talk to tech support, do you get a sense that they truly hate their jobs? They might begrudge their boss. They might be peeved about their pay. But those problems clearly haven’t lead to enough employment angst and career choice regret that they are truly disengaged. If they were, they couldn’t hide it. Most workers I encounter at all levels reveal some level of pride in their performance.
According to Bersin and Associates, we spend about a billion dollars per year to cure employee disengagement. And apparently to little effect given the persistence of disengagement reported in these surveys. The disengagement numbers don’t reconcile with our experience in the world. We’ve all seen organizational dysfunction and toxic cultures, but they are easy to recognize; i.e., they stand out from the norm. From a Bayesian logic perspective, we have rich priors about employee sentiments and attitudes, because we see them everywhere every day.
How do research firms reach such wrong conclusions about the state of engagement? That’s not entirely clear, but it probably goes beyond the fact that most of those firms offer consulting services to cure the disengagement problem. Survey researchers have long known that small variations in question wording and order profoundly affect responses (e.g. Hadley Cantril, 1944). In engagement surveys, context and priming likely play a large part.
I’m not saying that companies do a good job of promoting the right people into management; and I’m not denying that Dilbert is alive and well. I’m saying that the evidence suggests that despite these issues, most employees seek mastery of vocation; and they somehow find some degree of purpose in their work.
Successful firms realize that people will achieve mastery on their own if you get out of their way. They’re organized for learning and sensible risk-taking, not for process compliance. They’ve also found ways to align employees’ goals with corporate mission, fostering employees’ sense of purpose in their work.
Mastery seems to emerge naturally, perhaps from intrinsic motivation, when people have a role in setting their goals. In contrast, purpose, most researchers find, requires some level of top-down communications and careful trust building. Management must walk the talk to bring a mission to life.
Long ago I worked on a top secret aircraft project. After waiting a year or so on an SBI clearance, I was surprised to find that despite the standard need-to-know conditions being stipulated, the agency provided a large amount of information about the operational profile and mission of the vehicle that didn’t seem relevant to my work. Sensing that I was baffled by this, the agency’s rep explained that they had found that people were better at keeping secrets when they knew they were trusted and knew that they were a serious part of a serious mission. Never before or since have I felt such a sense of professional purpose.
Being able to see what part you play in the big picture provides purpose. A small investment in the top-down communication of a sincere message regarding purpose and risk-taking can prevent a large investment in rehiring, retraining and searching for the sources of lost productivity.
A short introduction to small data
Posted by Bill Storage in Probability and Risk on January 13, 2020
How many children are abducted each year? Did you know anyone who died in Vietnam?
Wikipedia explains that big data is about correlations, and that small data is either about the causes of effects, or is an inference from big data. None of that captures what I mean by small data.
Most people in my circles instead think small data deals with inferences about populations made from the sparse data from within those populations. For Bayesians, this means making best use of an intuitive informative prior distribution for a model. For wise non-Bayesians, it can mean bullshit detection.
In the early 90’s I taught a course on probabilistic risk analysis in aviation. In class we were discussing how to deal with estimating equipment failure rates where few previous failures were known when Todd, a friend who was attending the class, asked how many kids were abducted each year. I didn’t know. Nor did anyone else. But we all understood where Todd was going with the question.
Todd produced a newspaper clipping citing an evangelist – Billy Graham as I recall – who claimed that 50,000 children a year were abducted in the US. Todd asked if we thought that yielded a a reasonable prior distribution.
Seeing this as a sort of Fermi problem, the class kicked it around a bit. How many kids’ pictures are on milk cartons right now, someone asked (Milk Carton Kids – remember, this was pre-internet). We remembered seeing the same few pictures of missing kids on milk cartons for months. None of us knew of anyone in our social circles who had a child abducted. How does that affect your assessment of Billy Graham’s claim?
What other groups of people have 50,000 members I asked. Americans dead in Vietnam, someone said. True, about 50,000 American service men died in Vietnam (including 9000 accidents and 400 suicides, incidentally). Those deaths spanned 20 years. I asked the class if anyone had known someone, at least indirectly, who died in Vietnam (remember, this was the early 90s and most of us had once owned draft cards). Almost every hand went up. Assuming that dead soldiers and our class were roughly randomly selected implied each of our social spheres had about 4000 members (200 million Americans in 1970, divided by 50,000 deaths). That seemed reasonable, given that news of Vietnam deaths propagated through friends-of-friends channels.
Now given that most of us had been one or two degrees’ separation from someone who died in Vietnam, could Graham’s claim possibly be true? No, we reasoned, especially since news of abductions should travel through social circles as freely as Vietnam deaths. And those Vietnam deaths had spanned decades. Graham was claiming 50,000 abductions per year.
Automobile deaths, someone added. Those are certainly randomly distributed across income, class and ethnicity. Yes, and, oddly, they occur at a rate of about 50,000 per year in the US. Anyone know someone who died in a car accident? Every single person in the class did. Yet none of us had been close to an abduction. Abductions would have to be very skewed against aerospace engineers for our car death and abduction experience to be so vastly different given their supposedly equal occurrence rates in the larger population. But the Copernican position that we resided nowhere special in the landscapes of either abductions or automobile deaths had to be mostly valid, given the diversity of age, ethnicity and geography in the class (we spanned 30 years in age, with students from Washington, California and Missouri).
One way to check the veracity of Graham’s claim would have been to do a bunch of research. That would have been library slow and would have likely still required extrapolation and assumptions about distributions and the representativeness of whatever data we could dig up. Instead we drew a sound inference from very small data, our own sampling of world events.
We were able to make good judgments about the rate of abduction, which we were now confident was very, very much lower than one per thousand (50,000 abductions per year divide by 50 million kids). Our good judgments stemmed from our having rich priors (prior distributions) because we had sampled a lot of life and a lot of people. We had rich data about deaths from car wrecks and Vietnam, and about how many kids were not abducted in each of our admittedly small circles. Big data gets the headlines, causing many of us to forget just how good small data can be.
The Multidisciplinarian 