Conversation Agent - Valeria Maltoni

Authenticity, it's Your Call.

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We may not know what's real today, but we surely know how to spot a fake – the result of a mediated, manipulated, and focus-group-tested effort. 

Take for example customer conversations. So much work goes into cramming all sorts of meaning into scripts, that at the time of delivery they sounds hollow and insincere, if not a little robotic. If you watched Bicentennial Man#, you may be inclined to believe that robots want to have more heart.

You pick up the phone to call a company's customer service line, already regretting having done so and steeling yourself for the obligatory phone system purgatory. Then you get to a live person and fast forward through the litany of salutes. It is not the customer rep's fault, really. And it's not the script's fault, either. It was an attempt at presenting a uniform brand experience.

After being subjected to this treatment indiscriminately from many companies that implement “best practices” or work hard at benchmarking their services, we literally cannot hear the words anymore. Thus, we cannot distinguish one company from the other.

There are a few problems with this kind of script

• It's not infused with the specific company's personality.

The 404 messages of many younger brands are good example of a personality – remember the error message on Technorati? At least they were entertaining. How about the Twitter whale?

The most on-brand 404 page I found online is Pixar's. The use sadness from their hit movie ‘Inside Out’ to explain the error message. 

Emailcenter has since added a redirect to save their jobs, but their 404 page used to ask you to choose which one of their developers should be fired for the mistake. Whoever you picked, you’d see a funny group picture and relevant copy. 

• There's no subtext.

No room behind the actual words for the “actor,” the person using it, to interpret the script. How you say “we're sorry about that,” or “let me pull up your record,” even how you ask for someone's zip code, could be less stilted, warmer. It's about timing and how you say something.

• It's been watered down in an effort to make sure that three separate departments, and legal, are all satisfied with the exact words.

No punch line anymore.

Am I saying you should improvise? Well, let's see what that means. Improvisation, in the performing arts is a very spontaneous performance without specific or scripted preparation. In engineering this means to solve a problem with the tools and materials immediately at hand – think Apollo 13.

Improvisation may be a stop gap, but it does have rules

Tina Fey's Bossypants  outlines four principles: 

1. The first rule of improvisation is AGREE. Always agree and SAY YES. When you’re improvising, this means you are required to agree with whatever your partner has created.

Acknowledge the person. We're programming chat bots to do it because it's important.

2. The second rule of improvisation is not only to say yes, but YES, AND. You are supposed to agree and then add something of your own.

We go a step further with the person calling, taking the initiative.

3. The next rule is MAKE STATEMENTS. This is a positive way of saying “Don’t ask questions all the time.” [...] In other words: Whatever the problem, be part of the solution. Don’t just sit around raising questions and pointing out obstacles.

It's ok to say we don't know, then to follow up.

4. THERE ARE NO MISTAKES, only opportunities. If I start a scene as what I think is very clearly a cop riding a bicycle, but you think I am a hamster in a hamster wheel, guess what? Now I’m a hamster in a hamster wheel. I’m not going to stop everything to explain that it was really supposed to be a bike.

Now that would be engaging. We're not perfect, but we're more likely to connect with someone and be forgiven when our response is sincere. A non-apology apology feels like the person calling doesn't matter.

To be authentic doesn't mean we're always shooting form the hip. In fact, we're the most spontaneous when we know what we're talking about.

A company that takes the time to communicate its history, culture, practices, and go-to-market strategies simply, is a business that learns to know itself. A business that learns what happy customers like, studies the verbatims on complaints and issues, can learn to spot how to fill the gap. 

Many organizations feel that scale holds them to pre-packaged marketing.

• It makes no room for the customer. It's all been arranged in the script.
• It leaves no room for the company or call center representative.

Authenticity starts with clarity about who you are, what you stand for, and how you are different. Know thyself said the inscription on the Temple of Apollo at Delphi.

When we become intimately familiar with who we are, what we're about, what we do and for whom (we don't go wrong in thinking we're addressing people just like us at a minimum) we don't need a script anymore. Principles, guidelines, and the right tools to pull up information suffice.

But all the tools won't make up for listening. We cannot fake listening – we either do, or we don't. Listening goes to the heart of realness, it's very much part of the conversation. The part that moves individuals towards connection.

[image courtesy of Immanuel Giel: Greek γνῶθι σεαυτόν or gnothi seauton]

“What is it that Makes X Reasonable Behavior?”

This post is part of a new series on conversations worthy of attention. New email subscribers will receive it as part of the weekly digest.

Human behavior is a fascinating and never-ending source of learning.

If you work in marketing, communications, brand strategy, public relations, advertising, and in general in trying to persuade people to do something — a fairly accurate definition of business in search of results — this is where you keep coming back. 

Economists have figured it out as well. There is no such thing as rational behavior — we rationalize after the fact.  

But we forget human nature in our haste to fit in with the spreadsheet crowd. Adman Rory Sutherland# says:

“The most dangerous technology of recent years has spread without a voice raised against it. I am talking about the spreadsheet.

What the spreadsheet has done is to create in organisations and governments an over-reliance on numbers (by no means always meaningful or even accurate) with the result that often spurious numerical targets, metrics or values invariably override any conflicting human judgment. 

This has given rise to what a colleague of mine, Anthony Tasgal, calls “The Arithmocracy”: a powerful left-brained administrative caste which attaches importance only to things which can be expressed in numerical terms or on a chart.

I object to the spreadsheet precisely because of the pseudo-science involved, and the way numbers create a semblance of mathematical rigour which lends some measures or extrapolations an influence they don’t deserve.

Einstein posted a sign in his office at Princeton which read, “Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts.” In spreadsheet-land everyone knows educational standards are falling — but “that’s fine because the pass rate is going up.” 

Bankers have instinctively known for years that something was wrong — but 1,000 screens twinkling with reassuring numbers have vetoed anyone from acting on their instincts.

We worry endlessly about how technology might give rein to our baser urges but give no thought at all to the dangers of excessive logic. Yet the Holocaust and the Soviet famine were both the product of meticulous government officials in dutiful pursuit of numerical targets.

Italians, by and large, don’t go in for atrocities. It’s not mass hysteria that really frightens me, it’s mass rationality.”

Italians, by and large, embrace human nature — this might explain a global rise in our collective love for the “Bel Paese,” where we can put life back into lifestyle. How can a country that has a crippling bureaucracy and has chronic problems with diversity be so diverse and enjoyable?

Some ideas don't make sense. We do well when we accept that and work our way to understanding “what is it that makes X reasonable behavior?” in the words of Ole Peters#, Fellow and PI, Engodicity Economics. The question asked this way leads to insights about the decision-maker’s situation.

People place higher value on things they already own, and that includes ideas. 

But we can predict behavior (to a certain extent). Thaler was awarded the Nobel Prize for his work based on this insight. He coined the term “nudging” to describe the small interventions we can create to lead people in the direction we want them to go.

The entire field of advertising and brand messaging owes its success to this simple fact — that pure efficiency is over-rated. We're not driven by perfect rationality, perfect trust, and perfect information. What makes us unique and interesting is our edge.

Nudging works at scale as well. One only has to look at algorithms. They're reprogramming us precisely because they're able to engineer small nudges frequently enough to create habits. Machines exploit our biased human nature, not our ability to think rationally.

It's the observation of what makes a behavior reasonable that leads to insights, not the precise measurement of what people do. 

Vitalik Buterin and economist Tyler Cohen talked# about travel literally, but this thinking applies to the type of research we do as strategists:

I think the kind of traveling that is valuable is the kind where it’s not even set up as explicit travel for the sake of travel. You’re traveling there in order to do something, and in the course of doing that, you end up interacting with people.

You end up seeing what the different aspects of the culture look like. You end up seeing how people think, how people interact with each other.

Buterin works at the intersection of programming, economics, cryptography, distributed systems, information theory, and math to synthesize insights across those fields into successful, real-world applications like Ethereum, which aims to decentralize the Internet.

If you just want to find out what something looks like or where it is, then by all means open up a search box and look at the photos and description. You can put all of it in a spreadsheet, including how tall it is how much it weighs, and how many people go there.

But if you want to understand what attracts them, how something affects people, then you've got to be there, watch them interact with it, and listen to their stories. Online we have the illusion of knowing why people do what they do just because we can track it (and prompt it). Good prompting starts with a good understanding of human behavior, not the other way around.

We worship spreadsheets and data and under-rate the importance and value of connecting with the right people. Human connection is a strong signal. I would have never learned of the best place to eat in Genova, Italy, had I not stopped for artisanal gelato and met Martina.

What we worship ends up occupying our mind, until we see nothing else.

In a recent conversation with a family physician I learned that we fall because we break the femur#, we don't break the femur because we fall (when femur is involved in older age). The two are correlated, but get causation wrong, and you miss* important clues. World-changing ideas live there.

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* We do love explaining how something went after the fact. Why would we admit to be old and frail? It was the fall that did it! Maybe.

Mistakes Happen. It's What we do With them that Makes a Difference.

This post is part of a new series on conversations worthy of attention. New email subscribers will receive it as part of the weekly digest.

When we say “done is better than perfect,” we're not saying forget testing. Steve Woods, CTO of Nudge.ai, put the philosophy to the test# recently. He got into a sales meeting, and when he came out the phones were ringing off the hook—hundreds of people had received repeated invite/cancellation/invites messages to a webinar.

Nick Haughton, growth engineering at Nudge says, “I moved into this role 2 weeks ago, and we already had this webinar in flight. I had never done a webinar before, but we needed to get things live ASAP as our partner was depending on us.”

Sometimes trying to do things fast means we cut corners. He was saving the registrants to Salesforce, and not sending them a registration confirmation email. Nick says in a panic moment he realized no one would have the time of the webinar blocked off in their calendar.

So he made an event in a public Nudge calendar, and invited everyone to it, using Zapier to automate inviting the already registered webinar attendees. Somehow some people were getting over 10 invite-and-decline emails for the event.

One person wrote back,“Dude, what's going on with my inbox,” he panicked and deleted the event, making sure not to send a notification that the event was deleted. But then he got an email from someone asking why the event was deleted.

Soon after Nick got a note from Paul, Nudge CEO, saying to call him. “I am so thankful both Steve and Paul have kids, they are very patient leaders, and walked me through next steps. I'm not sure how I managed to do that, but I am not going to mess with google calendar like that again.”

(Note to self, don't mess with Google calendar.)

After failing to isolate who received the notifications, Nick decided to send an apology email to everyone, and to clarify that the event was still happening. Here's his honest and heartfelt apology:

Hi Kirsty,

 

I made a really stupid mistake this afternoon. Some of you saw your inbox flooded with meeting invites and cancellations for the Revenue Operations webinar we're hosting in May.  Some of you might have seen something like this:

 

 

This was a human error on my part, and tomorrow we're putting processes in place to make sure it doesn't happen again.

 

To clarify, the Revenue Operations is definitely happening May 9th at 1pm EST, and I'm (clearly) excited to see you there.

 

Apologies,

 

Nick Haughton

Nudge.ai

Do you think people appreciated the sentiment? Yes, they did. Nick received 15 responses to the apology. Everyone was very positive, and a lot of people shared anecdotes about being in a similar situation. “It made me feel a lot better knowing that nearly everyone has made a careless mistake like this throughout their career.”

What happened the next day was not suprising—people started sharing their own stories and encouraging the company to move onwards. Because we can all identify with the situation. I've just met Nick through an email exchange, and I like him already.

We're attracted to shared experiences, and when something is less than perfect, we feel better about ourselves as we empathize with the people and situation. This happens when it's a genuine mistake, so let's not rush to contrive a disaster (nobody likes that, and we can tell.)

Mistakes do happen. It's what we do with them that makes a difference.

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For a little bit of background, I met Steve Woods when he was with Eloqua. The expression “digital body language,” which I've used for years to talk about how people and networks move online, is originally from his book.

See for example, marketing as a profit center, and ideas for writing compelling content.

Get out of "Idea Debt." Get it Done.

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When we study the work of great inventors and innovators, we find that there are plenty people who got things egregiously wrong in their first try. If you put an idea out there, others can contribute to fixing it — or you can fix it if you try new approaches.

Many ideas get better as people use them, over time. Yet so many of us spend more time trying to find the perfect idea.

Hit those slopes, avoid “Idea Debt”

Artist Kazu Kibuishi# says we create “Idea Debt” when we spend years dreaming about an awesome thing we'll do—when we have enough time (or money, or of the right people, etc.) “The truth is, no matter what you do, it will never be as great as it is in your mind, and so you’re really setting yourself up for failure.”

That's because it's much easier to develop good taste than it is to create great products from it. Kibuishi enjoys snowboarding. He noticed that some people took a long time to decide whether to hit the slopes. As they waited they got cold... and their skill didn't get any better.

The first draft of anything is far from perfect. It's the doing that gets it better. 

To stand out, stand up

Anyone who's ever accomplished something remarkable has spent less time wrestling with the idea, and more trying to make something with it. “You'll hit gold more often if you simply try out a lot of things,” says Ira Glass, host and producer of This American Life.

To do something that stands out we should build a tremendous body of work.

Making something that is interesting comes with a hard process. The problem, says Glass, is that nobody tells us when we're getting started — there is a gap between our taste and our creations.

It's far easier to see in our mind's eye what something should look like, than it is building the skill to make it. How we think about ideas drives what we do with them.

Ideas are networks

Darwin discovered there was something peculiar in the crowded waters of a reef set in a desolate habitat in the Indian Ocean. He noted the observation he made about the coral reef, “so many different life forms, occupying such a vast array of ecological niches, inhabiting waters that were otherwise nutrient poor.”

That was the hint that would shape his larger theory about the innovative persistence of life years later. Great ideas fade into view over long periods of time.

Darwin had the full theory of natural selection brewing in his mind for many months before he had his alleged epiphany while reading Malthus in October of 1838. Stephen Johnson says an idea is thus not a single thing, it's “a network.” 

We combine it with other observations we made, add insights from the people who came before us... and find collaborators to expand and extend our own experience.

Be a patient teacher and an aggressive learner

Enrico Fermi was an Italian physicist at a time when physics wasn't held in high esteem in Italy. The 1938 Nobel Prize winner earned his leadership status through work.

Fermi was versed in both theory and an experimental physics — publishing the results of his thinking, learning new languages to access and join the European scientific community, and supporting the discipline at home got him noticed. 

His consistent displays of competence, his support of peer scientists across Europe, his sharp intelligence and passion for physics, and some sheer luck, catapulted him from fairly humble origins to the world's stage.

The shortest path to getting noticed is to notice first. Building trust with opinion leaders in any community is a critical stepping stone in getting people to adopt an idea. We need to be patient teachers... and aggressive learners, at the same time.

Perfect is the enemy of done

Author Richard Bach says, “Everything you see and touch was once an invisible idea until someone chose to bring it into being. Any powerful ideas is absolutely fascinating and absolutely useless until we choose to use it.” 

To get an idea done, we often need to get past our sense of self.

What it takes to make an idea happen doesn't challenge only existing limiting frames in general—it challenges us in the process. Which is why we become conflicted about our sanity and rife with self-doubt. Learning how to share an idea is an important step.

We all think our ideas are good. Many of them are. Adoption is the validation that the idea was good. If we get past the need to be perfect—both in mindset and personal culture (or self-imposed peer pressure)—we can get to done.

Our actions change our reality. 

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I was that creative who loved all her ideas. My mother still smiles to this day when we reminisce. “Which drawing (or poem) do you like best?” I would ask. She'd pause what she was doing and take time to consider, then pick one.

“What's wrong with the other?” I'd say quickly.

A better question would have been, “What makes it your favorite?” (market research!) because I would have learned much more.

With time, we learn the right actions.

The Anatomy of A Forever Brand

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In 1938, the son of the founder of a famous global organization that traded in raw materials met with a young man, a former schoolteacher.

Harry Oppenheimer, the son of the founder of De Beers Consolidated Mines, Ltd. asked the young man, Francis Wayland Ayer, to come up with a way to change people's perspective on diamonds and make Americans fall in love with engagement rings.

Ayer had founded an agency with his father and a $250 investment in 1869. He persuaded Oppenheimer to underwrite the cost to research people's attitudes in the U.S. market.

This was to be the last hope for realizing enormous profits out of an otherwise fairly common and plentiful stone that had been available by the bucketful since 1870, when huge diamond mines were discovered near the Orange River, in South Africa. 

Creating demand was the answer. It meant building a new norm in culture, then making it pervasive. N.W. Ayer found that the most critical ways to influence the purchase of diamonds was to first create emotional and romantic feelings tied to diamonds. 

Brand building is a long-term game. Its aim is to create a mental and physical availability among a large number of potential customers. It seeks to build emotional salience and recall of a few memorable, distinctive characteristics. 

Building forever brands

It starts with a deep understanding of business. Ayer understood both the business De Beers intended to build and the business of advertising.

N.W. Ayer & Son had made a name for itself first as the compiler and publisher of the widely used American Newspaper Annual. The agency then revolutionized the advertising industry by pioneering the open contract. This allowed advertisers to pay a fixed commission for the volume of placements. Ayer introduced copywriting in 1888 and creative in 1898#.

The British businessmen behind the operations in South Africa started the De Beers Consolidated Mines Ltd cartel, now known as De Beers. They had realized that for people to consider diamonds valuable, they needed to maintain an aura of mystery. Diamonds needed to be rare. De Beers moved to control both supply and demand. If you've ever tried to sell a diamond, you'll know (or suspect) there's much more to their commercial success#.

Marketing is about figuring out the commercial potential of an idea. Who benefits? Why does it matter? What's the appeal?

The building blocks are designed to answer those questions simply to prime people emotionally so that a number of them will act on the impulse. To have a small impact on a large number of people we also need an item to be available and easy to buy.

What does a powerful slogan do?

“Slogan” is a Scottish term that means “battle cry.” Businesses often consider the promotional part of marketing as the true conflict with competitors, where to win share of mind. Slogans are recognizable statements we associate with a brand in our minds.

If I say, “got milk?”, “just do it.”, “think different,” “where's the beef?”, “does she... or doesn't she?”  “the pause that refreshes,” “have it your way,” many will visualize the respective brands. “Reach out and touch someone” was also quite popular at the time. It was AT&T's slogan, the work of N.W. Ayer & Son.

“A diamond is forever” is America’s most famous advertising slogan and today over 90 percent of American’s recognize it. Frances Gerety, one of Ayer’s young copywriters, was working late one night. The story goes that she put her head down on the table from exhaustion and pleaded for help. Just before she left work that night she scribbled the words “a diamond is forever” on a piece of paper. It was 1947.

Gerety colleagues in the copy department (all men) argued that the slogan didn’t really mean anything. Using “forever” wasn’t even grammatically correct, they said. But between 1948 and 2010, the slogan has appeared in every De Beers engagement ad.

The genius is in what the slogan sells—it was:

“the conception of a new form of advertising, which has been widely imitated ever since. There was no direct sale to be made. There was no brand name to be impressed on the public mind. There was simply an idea — the eternal emotional value surrounding the diamond.”

According to internal Ayer documents, the emphasis on both eternity and sentiment made the statement powerful. The slogan sold an ideal, it made an impression and created a new culture. 

Selling the invisible

Ayer's marching orders where to sell a product for Oppenheimer and De Beers to mainstream Americans who (most likely) did not want it nor need.

How do you take something extravagant that only wealthy can afford, with declining sales for more than two decades, plummeting during the Great Depression, and make it a winner? You not only sell the emotional value of the idea, you also build a marketing campaign around it to sway opinion.

Marketing, advertising and public relations campaigns kept communicating the notion that diamonds are forever associated with love, luxury, strength, and emotion. Ayer enlisted jewelers, celebrities, magazines, lecturers, and entertainment to that end. In the nascent days of motion pictures, he had movie scripts and scenes changed to show the stars wearing, shopping, and yearning for diamonds.

In just three years, he reversed the trend of declining diamond sales—and sales were up over 50 percent. Brand building works on motivation and ability and gets measured in months, rather than weeks. Results accrue over longer periods of time—how many people did we attract over 18 months? (vs. this month)

The slogan didn't sell a specific make or ring, it sold the idea of commitment between two individuals. Communications conveyed the invisible—strength, durability, and achievement—appealing to men and women in slightly different ways.

Diamonds are the gift of love was the main message to young men, who bought 90 percent of engagement rings. The first campaign in 1939 emphasized the male's business savvy. No courtship is complete without a sparkling diamond was the main message to women. 

Turning norms into culture

Only 5 percent of future brides had a diamond engagement ring in 1947. By 1981, about 60 percent had received one from their fiancé. A 55 percent market penetration made the De Beers marketing campaign a legend in marketing circles.

Edward Jay Epstein explains how the heavy marketing worked in a 1982 article for the Atlantic#:

Movie idols, the paragons of romance for the mass audience, would be given diamonds to use as their symbols of indestructible love. In addition, the agency suggested offering stories and society photographs to selected magazines and newspapers which would reinforce the link between diamonds and romance. Stories would stress the size of diamonds that celebrities presented to their loved ones, and photographs would conspicuously show the glittering stone on the hand of a well-known woman. Fashion designers would talk on radio programs about the “trend towards diamonds” that Ayer planned to start.

[...]

In its 1947 strategy plan, the advertising agency [...] outlined a subtle program that included arranging for lecturers to visit high schools across the country. “All of these lectures revolve around the diamond engagement ring, and are reaching thousands of girls in their assemblies, classes and informal meetings in our leading educational institutions,” the agency explained in a memorandum to De Beers.

The agency had organized, in 1946, a weekly service called “Hollywood Personalities,” which provided 125 leading newspapers with descriptions of the diamonds worn by movie stars.

[...]

In 1947, the agency commissioned a series of portraits of “engaged socialites.” The idea was to create prestigious “role models” for the poorer middle-class wage-earners. The advertising agency explained, in its 1948 strategy paper, “We spread the word of diamonds worn by stars of screen and stage, by wives and daughters of political leaders, by any woman who can make the grocer's wife and the mechanic's sweetheart say 'I wish I had what she has.'”

From creating a new norm, De Beers’ famous slogan entered pop culture. It inspired books, songs, and even movies, like the James Bond spy movie “Diamonds Are Forever” (1971). The genius in the slogan is that it promotes the gesture and commitment to the relationship—and the object. Diamonds are to keep, not to re-sell.

Even today, it's impossible to reverse the trend. Articles, celebrity images, and mainstream stories continue to celebrate diamonds as a status symbol, and example of achievement. Welding the individual personal aim to the business goal of the company creates intrinsic value for an item that is otherwise difficult to re-sell at a profit, if not impossible.

Between 1939 and 1979, De Beers's wholesale diamond sales in the United States increased from $23 million to $2.1 billion. The company's ad budget went from $200,000 to $10 million a year in the same period. The investment allowed N.W. Ayer to turn an idea into cultural norm. 

Building a brand in 2019

In a world increasingly run by technology and digital media, brands are still an asset that converts. Perception, recall, and attraction have become table stakes, the price of entry for consideration. Brands with a clear core value create a shortcut to reputation.

People’s value has now shifted more fully into relationship building and intelligence. You need reputation, the stuff of good brands, AND relationships, the stuff of good people, to generate revenue.

You can still build a valuable brand with shorter time frames and attention spans, even when the number of choices keeps growing. In this article I'm making the case of why it's important, especially when what you sell is not tangible—like a service—because we do buy experiences.

This is the topic of a new talk I'm developing based on the questions I've been answering over the last couple of years, including from enterprise brands, technology companies, and professional services organizations.

It's a Multibillion Dollar Business. Here's What You Need to Know About Belief.

This post is part of a new series on conversations worthy of attention. New email subscribers will receive it as part of the weekly digest.

Stories of online scams often give us pause, didn't they know that it sounded too good to be true? But it's not that easy to tell sometimes. Take for example the home improvement letter:

We were doing some work down the street, and I noticed it looks like you could use a new roof. We have some supplies left over from the other job, and we'll have to return them to the supplier either way, so I can use the leftovers to give you a new roof for a really low price. 

You get something like this in the mail and might think, why not? How Stuff Works says# proceed with care. The very fact that we might want and need something done without an appreciation of how it should be done, including fair market price, makes us vulnerable. 

Why we believe

Tarot card reading, astrology, cons and psychics use what psychologists call “Barnum statements,” things that are generally applicable to most human beings. That's how they get us to pay attention.

John Oliver had a special segement on HBO's Last Week Tonight about psychics#. He says while they're are not “real” we shouldn't ignore their influence. Four in 10 Americans believe in psychics, According to the Pew Research Center. “Statistically, that means that out of all the people who saw John Travolta’s Gotti movie, four of them are psychics,” said Oliver.

Belief is a rudimentary need of the human mind. Neuroscientists Abhijit Naskar says#:

“Belief is the brain's natural self-maintenance mechanism. It enables a person function properly in daily life, without worrying about the true nature of reality, as the brain is incapable of comprehending the actual Reality. Belief is exclusively a matter of personal domain. It has nothing to do with reality.”

Our beliefs help us get through life's daily struggles. The purpose of belief is self-preservation. What would happen if we carried opinions only in things for which we had strong facts?

The business of belief

We use hunches to pursue an idea, but we need proof to follow through. This is the part where we do our due diligence. Yet, when we want something badly or need a solution to a problem that seems unsolvable or face incredible odds, we're ready to believe anything.

Morgan Hausel says “high stakes and limited options” are the triggers#, and they're common in business. We read click bait articles because even if there is a tiny chance that something might work for us, we don't want to miss out. But our mental math is poor.

The higher the likelihood of a payout, the more we want something to be true. Which means the first place we want to examine are incentives. 

Belief is a multibillion dollar business. It leverages our desire to make what we read, hear, and see applicable to our problem. Nature has given us the ability to imagine, and we use our imagination to dream, to envision a better reality. 

How belief shapes our lives

We need a belief system to function. “Beliefs are crucial cognitive mechanism of the brain,” says Abhijit Naskar. Beliefs do have power, they just work a little differently than we read in sensational headlines and stories. 

What we believe influences what we do. If you're confident, you're more likely to seek opportunities, and to find them. After we pursue something and make progress, success creates success.

If you believe in your ability to create healthy eating habits, you're more likely to explore foods that are better for you and exercise. Beliefs about character shape our decisions and our development#. 

Our beliefs also influence other people's behaviors, not just their thinking. They create an expectation that our brain is finely tuned to fulfil. When we choose to believe someone is great, we're likely influencing them to rise up to the occasion. The opposite is also true—someone who doesn't believe in us drags us down.

Belief is tightly connected to health. Research has found that positive beliefs about aging leads to people living 7.6 years longer#. If it helps with self-perception, it also helps with perception by others. 

Chip Conley believes there's no perfect age to be a most effective leader. The Founder of Joie de Vivre Hospitality at 26 worked with Airbnb founders as mentor in his 50s. He helped them trasnform the company into the largest hospitality brand today. 

He says it's time for business to start to value wisdom as much it does disruption. Elders have tremendous process knowledge, like the ability to get things done by understanding other people's motivations. Emotional intelligence is part of it, but also a large repertoir of experience.

We believe older generations have purchasing power, backed by data. But fail to believe they have wisdom, and we could use some. It was 43-year old Steve Jobs who rescued Apple and created the iMac. Warren Buffet and Charlie Munger dispense plenty of wisdom, and keep creating success.

Conley defines wisdom as “the ability to arrive at good judgement with just the right alchemy of confidence and doubt. [...] 'Good judgement', at its core, is about pattern recognition.”

What we believe about belief creates our reality. We then get to live in it.

"Brave New Work" is a Love Letter to Organizations and the People who Make Them Possible

Mini book read. New email subscribers will receive it as part of the weekly digest.

Reinvention has deep roots in American culture. It's the land of pioneers, the place of the possible. If the current conversation has turned on itself, when we pan out with our lens, we can see the undercurrent clearly—“can do” is in the fabric of the many who made this the land of opportunity.

Undercurrent is the name of Aaron Dignan's former charge—a company that evolved to help businesses develop innovation capabilities and pipelines. Aaron took his own advice and reinvented the work. Now CEO of The Ready, he and his team collaborate with businesses on their transformation journey.

The next phase of work is about being ready for change. It's relatively esy to do when companies are small—agility is a form of survival—but when companies grow, their own structures and processes get in the way. What makes them strong becomes a liability as context changes rapidly.

We need to be “brave,” says Aaron, and re-learn to adapt to ever changing circumstances. Autonomy is once again a hard-earned skill to navigate the hardened controls that make business efficient, if inflexible. These are the themes of Brave New Work, a long love letter to organizations and the people who want to breathe life into them.

The book itself is brave—rather than offering the usual prescription, it sets the stage to open our minds to a different way of thinking. Work isn't working, but we don't have to keep sabotaging ourselves.

We can reinvent work, and we should.

Three layers of value

When I read a book, I examine the ideas in three ways—as a learner, as an author, and as a practitioner. Here's my take on Brave New Work.

First as a learner—the book is very accessible. The book starts with a conversation about the future, an introduction of the big idea follows, then a discussion about the change and its impact. Aaron has chosen an interesting metaphor to help us understand how we need to cross to the other side and embrace transformation. Any European is very familiar with the roundabout designed to help keep cars moving at intersections, rather than stopping them. Results may vary, but they depend on the driver's choices, and not on the driver's compliance with a traffic light. 

Then as an author—structurally, I look at the information and references, do stories, examples and diagrams / charts help lighten the cognitive load? The questions and framework are useful tools to explain the vision and bring readers along at the same time. Work, evolution, complexity, power and change are principally energetic concepts. The book examines some of these concepts, rather than assuming them, as so many authors do, to jump to solutions.  How we get to where we're going is as important as the destination. 

Third as a practitioner—the grounding of concepts and the examples are useful to make sense of what's happening. It's simple to see how we got here, but it's important to figure out what we can do to improve our course. Permission is the most valuable application of the information. If we want to put this into practice, we want to know “it's within our control”. The two foundational mindsets, “people positive” and “complexity conscious,” are the unifying thread to keep us oriented as we examine each of 12 domains where we need to question and reinvent our approach most. Aaron describes the 12 domains as blocks in the Operating System (OS) Canvas, a framework that is the proving ground for the future of work.

Overall, the book is an easy read. But this doesn't mean it's easy to do. Part I is the homework, Part II is the practice.

Part III is the caution, which is super important to get. We often head into change as if it were easy, yet it's the most difficult thing we can tackle.

Everyone loves to talk about change, but nobody like to be the person to whom it happens, and even less so, the person who changes. It reminds me of a cartoon (above).

My highlights

“There's no word for accountability in Finnish. Accountability is something that is left when responsibility is subtracted,” says educator, researcher, and policy advisor Pasl Sahlberg. It's not a word in Italian, either. The problem is that we do know better, yet we keep behaving as if we could control and predict the world.

In the introduction you will learn that we describe our current frustration about organized work with the same words William J. Donovan, director of the U.S. office of Strategic Services (OSS) used at the end of the Simple Sabotage Field Manual in 1944. He was teaching agents how to disrupt day-to-day business operations.

We succeeded. It seems that since as far back as 1910, everything has changed, except management. In a world that is always changing, where we're called to learn continuously, the organization's chart survives defeat. 

Every person in an organization fits in a box, we're spare parts with written rules about our duties and tasks. Yet, “the genius of the firm” happens “not inside people but between people,” says Aaron. The Ready's way of work reflects this insight.

Our way of working—our operating system—is built on distributed authority, consent, and agreements, so we don't have to rely on positional leaders.

Ecosystems evolve naturally to take care of the problems. Agility is a mindset, not a tool-set, says Aaron. We need to make our way back to it. Fredrick Taylor, who engineered the mother of industrial efficiency, figured out a way to make workers trade autonomy for efficiency.

Once he found out how much it cost, he dictated his terms—a modest percentage wage premium in exchange for doing exactly as I say. Since then, thinking and doing bacame two independent work functions—managers think, workers do. We're still operating under this assumption.

But bureaucracy ruined it for efficiency and has created its own brand of organizational debt. We're now optimizing our way into a cliff. Our way of working has tremendous inertia. The twelve domains contain each some thought starters, in action examples, and key questions for change:

Purpose—can be socially positive or socially destructive. After all, the key difference between a charity and a terrorist organization is intent.

Authority—the default assumption is that you don't have the right to do anything unless you are given permission.

Structure—to accomplish anything, projects often require a marathon of communication and coordination.

Strategy—is about where to play and how to win. But do we do things because they're the right thing to do?

Resources—perhaps no other process is so respected and reviled as the annual planning and budgeting process. Budgets can actually work against performance.

Innovation—every activity in the organization is a black box of potential energy. If every team isn't constantly learning in ways big and small, we're missing our chance to pursue our purpose with everything we've got.

Workflow—is how we divide and do the work, the path and process we use to create value.

Meetings—to meet or not to meet? Maybe we change the question to, how do we meet?

Information—until very recently in human history, all information was trapped in someone's head, or on a piece of paper. This has led to a scarcity mindset.

Membership—isn't binary, it's a social status, an identity, a living agreement. Not every employee feels the same level of loyalty, or inclusion, or participation. 

Mastery—think back on the time in your career when you grew the fastest. What were the conditions that drove that rapid development?

Compensation—lacking purpose and meaning in their work, many professionals view their career as nothing more than a series of stepping stones from one job title and pay package to another.

You can use the Canvas as a way to describe what happens in your organization, as a diagnostic tool, and as a path to imagine how things could be different.

How behavior spreads

In organizations, “culture eats strategy for breakfast.” Behavior spreads through culture. We imitate what others do.

Culture is not something we can control or design, it emerges from our behaviors. As much as we'd like to believe it, we can't change people. Anyone who's ever tried to manage their spouse or kids knows it all too well. 

Management consultant Margaret Wheatley studies organizational behavior. In 1996, she said (emphasis mine) :

“These days, a different ideal for organizations is surfacing. We want organizations to be adaptive, flexible, self-renewing, resilient, learning, intelligent-attributes found only in living systems.

The tension of our times is that we want our organizations to behave as living systems, but we only know how to treat them as machines.”

Only 26 percent of transformation efforts succeed, says McKinsey in a recent report. Front line employees actually think that number is more like 6 percent.

If we can't change people, what can we change? We can change how we change, starting with what we do every day. The power to make a difference is in the present, not in some future outcome we can hardly predict. We can start small, learn by doing, then spread what works.

On creating the future of work

It seems that all of a sudden, we've realized that humans, and not technology, are the point. Look at business titles, and you'll find the word “human” everywhere—human companies, even human marketing! But execution looks more like an excuse to learn more about my private affairs.

I think it started when Fast Company declared: work is personal circa 1997. Twelve years on and the current climate feels like a dystopian novel—recruiting is broken, the mighty shareholder rules, and “at will” has become “at whim”. The policies, daily actions, and organizational structures remain attached to what used to work.

Oxford economist Kate Raworth questions# whether growth is the solution to all our problems. “We need economies that make us thrive, whether they grow or not,” she says. Companies and economies expect demand and never ending growth.

We've morgaged our future in the constant effort to just keep up. But we're not thriving.

Can we get the future of work right? 

I hope you find Brave New Work as useful as I did.

Small Groups United by a Shared Purpose are Changing Big Tech Companies. Here's How.

This post is part of a new series on conversations worthy of attention. New email subscribers will receive it as part of the weekly digest.

There's a new form of communication that flies in the face of the story that companies lack internal engagement—the open letter from employees to the CEO. Recent examples of grassroots leadership at big tech companies demonstrate that people understand how to lead change.

Dear Sundar:

“We believe that Google should not be in the business of war,” says an open letter to CEO Sundar Pichai signed by more than 3,100 Google employees. 

Like many organizations, Google has encouraged employees to share information and communicate with each other. Intranets, message boards, and internal communities are all useful methods to stay up to date on what's going on in an organizaiton, to collaborate, and learn organically from colleagues. 

When companies talk about engagement, they often focus on top down communication flows and overlook peer networks and internal word of mouth. Coordination is an important aspect of modern workflows where teams of specialists form to solve business problems.

Increasingly, they also compare notes about the internal obstacles employees and teams face as part of this spirit of cooperation. As the NYT reports#: 

Google employees have circulated protest petitions on a range of issues, including Google Plus, the company’s lagging competitor to Facebook, and Google’s sponsorship of the Conservative Political Action Conference.

Employees raised questions about Google’s involvement in Project Maven at a recent companywide meeting. At the time, Diane Greene, who leads Google’s cloud infrastructure business, defended the deal and sought to reassure concerned employees. A company spokesman said most of the signatures on the protest letter had been collected before the company had an opportunity to explain the situation.

This form of activism based on insider knowledge gets results. “We’re actively engaged across the company in a comprehensive discussion of this important topic,” said Google in a statement about the issue. The employees’ open letter to Pichai argued that being associagted with this kind of military work could alienate customers and potential recruits:

“This plan will irreparably damage Google’s brand and its ability to compete for talent. Amid growing fears of biased and weaponized AI, Google is already struggling to keep the public’s trust.” 

[...]

“The argument that other firms, like Microsoft and Amazon, are also participating doesn’t make this any less risky for Google. Google’s unique history, its motto Don’t Be Evil, and its direct reach into the lives of billions of users set it apart.”

The lines have blurred between work and life—employees are also owners, investors, customers, and citizens. As people, they want to make a more enduring difference with their work.

Jeff Bezos and Board of Directors:

“Amazon has the resources and scale to spark the world’s imagination and redefine what is possible and necessary to address the climate crisis,” say 4,520 Amazon employees. They used the same Medium# the company's CEO used recently to communicate directly with the public about his private affairs.

The structure of the letter is familiar to the many who study the yearly letter Jeff Bezons writers to shareholders#—what happened with data to support it, why it happened, and what needs to happen next. It's the same memo format employees use to present ideas in meetings.

Company identity is a big part of how it does business:

We’re a company that understands the importance of thinking big, taking ownership of hard problems, and earning trust. These traits have made Amazon a top global innovator but have been missing from the company’s approach to climate change.

5 specific examples follow the statement. The same logic we've seen in the Google letters applies here—employees are people, too. “Our customer obsession requires climate obsession.” Six prinsiples spell out the proposal of what Amazon should do.

The business' strategic direction and its mission to be “Earth’s most customer-centric company” should align. A call to action precedes numbered references and list of signatures to date. The signatures creates transparency, they make the document real.

Communication is two-way

When both parties engage, communication becomes a conversation. That's were we get things done. These are two examples of how after years of pushing communication from the top down, they're now starting to work their way from the bottom to the top.

It's more efficient than going through channels#, and more effective.

To make a difference in business we need to move the needle. This means:

1. finding something concrete and tangible we want to achieve
2. aligning different stakeholders—in this case employees are also investors, customers, and citizens
3. proposing one change that everyone can agree on—in both of these examples, the change is “on brand,” it reflects what each company set out to do, and likely how everyone measures results in their day-to-day

In the past, these kinds of negotiations were happening across the table between a few representatives, or not happening at all. Public is the nature of today's conversations. And it's not a spectator's sport.

 

"Cascades" is an Important Manual on How to Start and Sustain Large-Scale Change

Mini book read. New email subscribers will receive it as part of the weekly digest.

I love mystery books, am a voracious reader of them. Greg Satell's book reads like one in many ways. One cannot wait to find out what happens next and why it happened. People, situations, and events build up from chapter to chapter and sometimes leap off the page.

Cascades kept my attention from introduction to summary, and I dug through the notes with relish. When I asked Greg Satell about the mystery thing, he smiled. “Unlocking true insight is very, very hard. I think you need to show the struggle that leads to the insight.” 

It's probably the secret to Greg's writing—he presents the idea, then works on it with you, adding sometimes counter intuitive references along the way. If this is your cup of espesso, go get the book today. I would lend you my galley copy, but it's got notes all over.

The big idea is that there's been a shift from hierarchies to networks. This has been a little while in the making. Then Greg will take yoy through what a cascade looks like. It's a term Duncan Watts defined as part of his research—you'll see his seminal book at the bottom of the pile in the image above. In publisbing date order, these books belong together in your mental toolkit.

Once you're clear on the anatomy of a cascade, you'll learn how change movements succeed and fail. Greg has several first person stories and connections to events as they unfolded. This part was refreshingly new. The afterward ties it all together.

Three layers of value

When I read a book, I examine the ideas in three ways—as a learner, as an author, and as a practitioner. Here's my take on Cascades.

First as a learner—the density of information doesn’t detract from the enjoyment. The book is packed with references. Writers are also readers, and it's clear Greg has done his homework. This kind of in depth reading comes after years of focus on a topic.

Then as an author—structurally, I look at the symmetry of information and references, unedited and new stories, diagrams and charts to make the case, and science to prove it. I LOVE the take on Gladwell’s “theory of the few,” it’s so much more complete than just using Watt’s ideas (which is what I did in my talk on influence at SxSWi). How we get the ideas to use for the resources (Iowa corn anyone?) is as imporant as how we decide whom to read and reach out to.

Third as a practitioner—the examples are useful, especially as they unfold as they would in real life. It's easy to wonder what’s going on in my environments while reading. Intervention is the most valuable application of the information. If I'm going to put this into practice, I want to know “what’s within my control”. The responsiveness of thresholds within a cascades has fascinating applications. Some of it might be a surprise to you.

Overall, the book feels like a quick read and the stories will stay with you. Part I moves very fast through concepts and ideas, pulling you forward into Part II, which is more practical and organized with one concept or idea per chapter.

My highlights

Imagine going to dinner with a legend in your professional circles right after you land in a new country. You're there to check on the business of a satellite office for a company, and you know your contact is about to launch something new.

The preface sets up as the beginning of a quest. Its true nature will show up years later. 

In the introduction, you will read about companies that have succeeded and companies that failed. Greg weaves stories of success and failure with a quick tempo. There are many details all pointing to two key aspects of successful movements, which is what leads to sustainble change.

Network cascades is the first, and the simple formula that is network theory foundation of “small groups, loosely connected, but united by a shared purpose” set the tone for the rest of the book. What does a revolution look like from the inside? What's the role of leaders? How do we create change that lasts?

Some favorite soundbites useful for organizations:

Inertia can be a powerful force, even more powerful than hope or fear.

Our existing mental model is that strong governance drives change.

A generation ago, we would expect a dominant model in an industry to last an entire career, whereas today, we can't depend on a business model lasting even a decade.

What we miss when we look at nascent trends is the early stages is that diverse groups tend to intersperse and connect. These connections don't form in an organized, gradual manner, but exponentially.

When groups first connect, there is always a period of awkward distance. Much like a dance at summer camp, where the boys and girls start on opposite sides of the room, the first connections are slow to happen.

Newtorks really are “small worlds,” clustered into tiny communities, but also connected through links over long distances.

What we see determines how we will act.

How behavior spreads

If you've spent the last 18+ years online, you've likely formed impressions. Based on digital body language, speed of response, the words people use, and so on. We observe what is happening, but it's only afterward that we draw the lessons, sometimes.

Who knew that sending a public message on something unremarkable could get someone fired? Because social media cannot be in your head. People just read what is online. That's how we learn about context the hard way.

Well, there's context to moving people to action. Greg calls it the threshold model. We all have different things that motivate us. Part of it is influenced by our identity, part of it by our view of the world.

We react or respond to situations based on how things are going—are we stressed, or is it a good day? But we also watch what the people in our circles are doing. Which is why we have community managers to moderate valuable network. They're people experienced in group behavior and dynamics.

Thresholds are a concept introduced by Mark Granovetter in a 1978 paper about collective behavior#. You may remember the name from the seminal paper he wrote five years earlier, The Strength of Weak Ties, where he set out to demonstrate what happens beyond the connections within small, well-defined groups.

Another powerful concept in the book is that of the keystone change. It goes counter to the laundry list of things that need tackling and therefore we choose do do nothing or incremental changes in all of them mindset. 

On leading toward common ground

The current climate doesn't feel warm and fuzzy on community. But if we want to be here in the next decades, we need to set out to rebuild and repair our infrastructure of connections. We'll probably work with robots, and artificial intelligence (AI) is already here. 

“No change affects everyone equally,” says Greg in the afterward. To end this cycle, we need to forge a new agenda on shared values. 

And one last thing: if you want to create a successful movement, start making a difference. Successful movements attract.

I hope you enjoy Cascades as much as I did.

"Savvy" is a Practical Handbook to Navigate the Post-Truth World

Mini book read. New email subscribers will receive it as part of the weekly digest.

Social media was supposed to change the world—it did, but likely not in the direction we imagined. Every day we're wading through fake news, lying leaders, and ghosting. Who to believe? What is real? How can we tell?

    Shiv Singh and Rohini Luthra, Ph.D. have taken a deep look at why we don't trust anymore and we fall for alternative facts. Human nature makes us desperate to belong, we want to be right. But then social pressure means we bow to authority.

    Because technology has made us mighty, giving us the ability to spread information and seemingly become more persuasive overnight, we have a blind trust in Artificial Intelligence (AI).

        We face these challenges as customers, citizens, parents, and community members.

    Savvy is a practical handbook for individuals who want to navigate this post-trust world. If you're looking for ways to get savvier about alternative facts, to become more judicious about whom and what to trust, this book is for you.

Three layers of value

    When I read a book, I examine the ideas in three ways—as a learner, as an author, and as a practitioner. Here's my take on Savvy.

    First as a learner—the examples and studies make information you might have read elsewhere useful in a specific context. The references are contemporary, literally pulled from the headlines. Which is remarkable, given the publishing life cycle.

    Then as an author—structurally, I look at the symmetry of information and references to make the case, use of stories, visuals, and science to prove it. The book has a simple structure that is easy to follow and remember when you pick it up again. The length, at 172 pages, is appropriate to deliver substance with brevity.

    Third as a practitioner—the examples help me see how I would put some of the information into practice; most importantly, they help me analyze what’s going on in my environment. The most valuable part is the application to get savvy. It answers the question of “what’s within my control.”

    Overall, the book is interesting. It won't give you the magic wand, you'll have to work for that. But it will give you a set of tools to counter the psychological biases that lead us away from the truth.

My highlights

    The rise and fall of Theranos is a story many of you might have come across. John Carreyrou revealed the deception in a Wall Street Journal article, and then in a book. It was surprising how many existing employees and investors denied the evidence in an attempt to remain consistent with their earlier decisions to work with the company.

    Social psychologist Solomon Asch says, “we have found a tendency to conformity in our society so strong that reasonably intelligent and well-meaning people are willing to call white black.” They're unable to come to terms with the truth. The nature of the Theranos board membership contributed to groupthink.

    Once a reputable person attests to the validity of something because they want to believe, they're able to convince others to join in. It did not occur to any of the members to conduct an independent due diligence. It's also easy to fall for the “us vs. them” mindset.

    Preserving the cohesiveness of the group is often more important than introducing doubts or questions that might jeopardize a goal. It's worth asking if your group at work overestimates its ability to achieve this goal. Or if it has a sense of superiority about its commitment to the goal.

    We have a similar mechanism online. Human biases blind us to errors in logic, lack of evidence, and the interests at play. Each of us is called to respond to fake information, it's a new survival skill we need to develop to keep sane.

    On the definition of trust by social psychologist Morton Deutsch is based on reading intention:

He defined trust as the “confidence that [one] will find what is desired [from another] rather than is feared.”

    Shared values and mutual incentives are critical to establishing trust. When we have the right conditions these two ingredients are sufficient. However, to tell truth from opinion, we need to pay attention to what we're ready to believe and why that may be so.

    On why we go along with lies. Psychologists Gordon Pennycook and David Rand conducted studies that demonstrated how more exposure to a message made us vulnerable to believing it, without vetting it first.

    On why we love bad news. Ohio state University psychologist John Cacioppo found that the human brain “reacts more strongly to stimuli it perceives as negative.” Negativity influences our attitudes. Psychologist Daniel Kahneman found that we react more strongly at the prospect of losing than we do at that of winning.

    On why we see what we want to see. Psychologists Albert Hastorf and Hadley Cantril conducted studies that demonstrated we have selective perception. Their finding was that “out of all the occurrences going on in an environment, a person selects those that have some significance for him from his own egocentric position in the total matrix.” Our motives color judgment.

    On why we bow to authority. Psychologists Stanley Milgram and Philip Zimbardo conducted research that revealed how ordinary people can become evil, victimizing and torturing others, based on nothing more than peer pressure and the environment they’re placed in. Milgram said, “It is not so much the kind of person a man is as the kind of situation in which he finds himself that determines how he will act.”

How behavior spreads

    It's surprising to discover how so many people go along with reprehensible behavior. Often this happens in situations of power imbalances. But sometimes people have the courage to speak up. When they do, others come forward as well. This was the case with Howard Weinstein's actions.

    The story of Duke Tran at Wells Fargo also created ripple effects at the company. Tran had been fired in retaliation for having discovered a customer in Lexington, North Carolina owed the bank the entire amount of a balloon mortgage for which no paperwork existed. Tran received a settlement for damages and the bank is now engaged in rebuilding trust.

    But behavior also spreads based on fake news and with negative consequences. Dr. Deb Roy and his team at the MIT Media Lab “studied true and false news stories distributed on Twitter over the eleven-year period between 2006 and 2017.” “The study found that false news was 70 percent more likely to be retweeted than true news.” False information spread faster than the truth. This should give us pause.

On the future

    The last chapter on artificial intelligence introduces several concepts worth thinking about.

    On the social credit score. China has created the fullest application of it. But in the Western world we already have many elements in place—credit scores, Yelp, TripAdvisor and Glassdoor reviews, ranking and rating systems, activity on Facebook and Google. Imagine if all this data were linked together.

    On automated actions. From driver-less cars to systems that fire people, our future many look pretty grim, if we're not careful. Imagine a hospital system shut down suddenly, or a power grid turning off without warning.

    There is much more. The book is a call to understanding our triggers and to be vigilant about our decisions and responses. We should seek first to understand and analyze like the skeptic, because fakery, as Shiv and Rohini call it, has become “a pervasive fact of life in the post-trust era.”

    For those who are curious, Savvy is a practical handbook for individuals who want to navigate this post-trust world.