Brain Rules for Researchers
“All right, brain. I don’t like you ad you don’t like me – so let’s just do this and I’ll get back to killing you with beer.” - Homer Simpson Read more »
Quality Thinking and Quantity Surveying
“Statistics are like bikinis. What they reveal is suggestive, but what they conceal is vital.” - Aaron Levenstein Read more »
Energizing Research
“Vision without execution is hallucination.” - Thomas Edison Read more »
Visualisation is the Solution to the Data Problem
“Data is not information, information is not knowledge, knowledge is not understanding, understanding is not wisdom.” - Cliff Stoll & Gary Schubert
Numbers are Slippy, Stories are Sticky
“The story – from Rumplestiltskin to War and Peace – is one of the basic tools invented by the human mind for the purpose of understanding. There have been great societies that did not use the wheel, but there have been no societies that did not tell stories.” - Ursula K. Le Guin
Keeping up Appearances
Several of our previous posts (eg Rules that Make the Inception,The Real Me) have outlined the importance of context in determining our behavior. The situation can bring out the devil even in the most normal of people. I wanted to explore context a bit more in this post, especially with respect to social roles and performances. As a change from our last rather serious post I have embedded a bit of comedy here, hope you enjoy!
Tropic Thunder
The Devil is in the System
I recall on holiday last year reading Elliot Aronson’s sociology course text book, “The Social Animal”. Heavy reading perhaps for the beach in Bali, but I devoured it faster than any Stephen King pulp fiction. What amazed me at the time was how clearly it demonstrates the malleability of human beings to social influence. It left me feeling that we were all, well rather daft creatures, and that our sense of autonomy was probably often an illusion.
Driving change
While the lessons of the two Dan’s (Pink and Ariely) are important for all our interpersonal relationships, they are arguably most important when we seek to change behaviour in an organisation. Change management often involves training programs and workshops which are used to influence and change behaviours (I have run many of these myself). The following lessons from behavioural economics are critical to success:
