Conversation Agent - Valeria Maltoni

What's the New Narrative? Habit-Forming Approaches to Resilience

Last year I created a website to encourage people to put life back into lifestyle. I was hearing a general disenchantment with the polished image of lifestyle influencers. Many colleagues and friends loved to hear my stories about the Made in Italy, and couldn't find anything resembling that genuine spirit of Italian style. So I took the plunge and added the publication to my writing rotation. I was channeling a general sense of malaise with the perfect portrayals that left no room for real persons with family life and budgets to juggle to see themselves in the picture. Then my... Read more →

Find Signal in Noise to Draw Meaning and Make Better Decisions

Cognitive biases, we're not leaving home without them. Well, right now we're not leaving home, period. It's just so interesting that there's an obsession over productivity and time spent on tasks, and yet, so little proportional attention to how what occupies brain waves impacts it. I don't know if you've ever wondered why are there are so many cognitive biases. There must be some reason they survived through the centuries to modern day. And yes, I'm aware this is a rhetorical question, because cognitive biases help us address key needs in our lives: filter and sort information organize data draw... Read more →

Changing Habits, Behaviors, and Attitudes: What will Stick?

I've been thinking about the question of change that sticks more in the past two months than I have in the past twenty years. Because pandemics have a way of focusing attention on the few things that matter to people. The impossibility of predicting something in the early days of a fluid and complex environment is not preventing many from trying. Much of the current research I've read suffers from availability heuristic, confirmation bias and small sample size, for starters. Feel free to add the biases you've observed from this list.# That's mostly because what people say and what they... Read more →

Write Like you Mean it. Three Ways to Frame Communications to Show You Care

In the last three weeks, you've likely received messages from many companies you've done business with at some point in the past. Each message read basically the same way, something about “the CoViD-19 pandemic” making things harder and more uncertain. For some companies, that was the one chance to show empathic imagination and say something that mattered. For example, things like “we're keeping your points to this level for one extra year” like Hilton Honors and Air New Zealand did; or “we proactively froze your membership on your behalf with no charge” like Planet Fitness did. Instead, many chose to... Read more →

A Quarantine from Reality: Italian Goes to America, Son Opens a Bank, Helps Rebuild a Community, a City, a State, and a Country

It seems that what's dictating the human agenda right now is fear. Each day we get our rationing of counts—who lived, who died, who told a story. Right out of Hamilton, the show. The avalanche of articles and news alerts seem to indicate that anything goes. In a business setting, which is what I'm used to, when a new situation like the one we're facing creates a change, the first line of defense from letting it overtake you is what you say to others and your internal conversation. Because those words are birthing the emotional wake you'll need to live... Read more →