About a century ago two competing models for modern media emerged in the U.S. and Germany. Using what they were learning about psychology, the Nazis created state propaganda to sway the masses to serve the interests of the state and advertisers in the U.S. used those same insights to serve the interests of the corporation. (A fascinating documentary, the Century of the Self, makes this argument and can be found here.)
William James published what some argue was the first textbook on psychology - the Principles of Psychology - in 1890 and Freud published The Interpretation of Dreams in 1900 and Civilization and its Discontents in 1930. If you visit the apartment in Vienna where Freud pioneered psychotherapy you don't just see that the Freudian couch was actually a bed. (Freud thought that a bed was a safe and cozy place from which to free associate but perhaps the preponderance of sexual references would have given way to a preponderance of food references had he instead used a kitchen table.) What you get from the museum that once was his office is this very exciting sense of the mind as a new frontier. Rather than blame spirits or madness for weird thoughts and behavior, these early psychologists were taking a scientific approach to the mind, hoping to better understand the impulses that seemed to lay below the seemingly thin veneer of our civility. Jung's concept of the collective unconscious might be suspect but it gets to the reality that something binds us that is almost mystical and that these impulses could be tapped to sway large groups to do strange things - like drive to the mall on a sunny day or shout angry slogans at political rallies.
These insights were exploited with new and transformative technology of that time. The radio was the first technology to allow people across an entire nation to hear about the wonders of the Third Reich or nylons and electric razors and it was quickly followed by TV.
Obviously it made an enormous difference whether a community used these powerful new media technology to promote the interests of the state or the corporation. Someone once said that the book most likely to change minds in the Soviet Union would be the Sears Catalog. Magazines, newspapers, radio and TV shaped minds - and thus communities - as only churches and sacred texts had before. And it was no coincidence that the state and corporation undermined the dominance of the church last century.
This century's transformative media is the internet and the social media it has enabled. The shift in advertising revenue from newspapers to the internet has shattered old business models and forced a scramble to discover new audiences and sources of revenue for reporting and commentary.
And curiously, the choice about whether this model will be funded by the state or the corporation, by advertising for political interest and shared values or great values on products you'll love, is still in question. This week's senate hearings with the social media giants Facebook, Twitter, and Google gets to the question of how social media has been used to manipulate voters and thus American policy rather than merely focus on getting us to buy more goods.
It's worth noting that this is social media.
About the same time as the emergence of the radio and television, a third really powerful technology emerged: the telephone. This was intimate and personal and allowed two people to communicate and in the process strengthen relationships. I think it's telling that so much of the internet is experienced on a phone. Even though actual talking on the phone is not even in the top ten activities people do with their phones, what they're doing is closer to what was done on the phone last century than what was done with TV and radio. They're creating and feeling part of a community.
Community is a third goal, different from the goals of consumption and propaganda. I think one thing we're seeing in the success of Twitter and Facebook is the strong impulse to belong. You can dismiss this as tribalism but I think it speaks to communities of the mind and shared values, to what it means to be human and feel the part of something larger. It's worth noting that the strength and vulnerability of these brands is that they are platforms. Zuckerberg doesn't make editorial decisions about what posts your Aunt Leola or cousin Curt should make on Facebook. They do. Your friends are rarely selling goods or trying to win votes for the political party they are starting. (Although I admit I would be interested in seeing the posts of someone who was starting a new party; that sounds like an interesting person.) They are simply connecting, sharing what they are proud of, what impresses them, what they are worried about and what made them laugh. The third way beyond media as a tool for conspicuous consumption or political propaganda is media a tool for creating communities of the mind, of shared interests and simple friendships. It's not novel that people would do that; it is novel that people could do that across distances, with a tool more inclusive than the phone or the kitchen table.
Trump listens to his
gut. While he may not be self-made man, his facts are, and he shows a
disinterest in sustained thinking or nuanced thoughts.
His reliance on instinct
and disdain for theory has taken him past what we know of how economies work to
what he feels about how individuals feel about psychology of work. Freud could better explain Trump's economic policies than could Keynes.
Over the last couple of
centuries, the economy has obviously made us more prosperous. Our prosperity from our work has increased more obviously than our contentment, though. What has obviously worked economically has less obviously worked psychologically. This is partly because of division of
labor.
Adam Smith's Wealth of
Nations, the book that was arguably the first to define capitalism, opens with the
account of division of labor as a force that had multiplied productivity.
THE greatest improvement in the productive
powers of labour … seem to have been the effects of the division of labour.
,,,,
To take an example ... the trade of the pin-maker. One man draws out the wire,
another straights it, a third cuts it, a fourth points it, a fifth grinds it at
the top for receiving, the head; to make the head requires two or three
distinct operations; to put it on is a peculiar business, to whiten the pins is
another; it is even a trade by itself to put them into the paper; and the
important business of making a pin is, in this manner, divided into about
eighteen distinct operations, which, in some manufactories, are all performed
by distinct hands ... Each person... might be considered as making four
thousand eight hundred pins in a day. But if they had all wrought separately
and independently, and without any of them having been educated to this
peculiar business, they certainly could not each of them have made twenty,
perhaps not one pin in a day …
By Smith’s calculation,
division of labor bumped up productivity somewhere between 240 to 4,800 times. As
Smith’s Wealth of Nations was published in 1776, for the first time since the
ancient Greeks, productivity began to rise in the West.
If anything, this
process has accelerated and deepened. This month I'm working with a client's
product development team intent on rolling out a next generation computer chip
that can be used in self-driving cars. The team involved in planning includes a
couple of folks from Scotland, a couple from India, one from Malaysia, a couple
from China and one from Austin, TX. The team working on project tasks includes
an even larger swath of countries.
We don’t just divide
labor to focus on different tasks within a factory. We now divide labor across continents.
But this comes with a
price. What makes us more affluent makes it more difficult to be engaged.
Division of labor makes it harder for employees to see – or experience – how their
tasks feed into finished products. And when a product is dependent on the
efforts of so many people, it becomes harder to feel as though your own efforts
make a difference.
Obviously gales of
creative destruction that obsolete jobs, companies and even whole industries
are the most visible element fueling the support for Trump’s promise of a
national economy that won’t lose jobs to overseas competition. I suspect,
though, that this curious alienation that comes from the steady division of
labor that has started with pins and extended to transistors so small that
their state can be changed by subatomic particles (true story), is a big part
of why we don’t feel more certain of the gains that have come through this
process that has made us part of a global economy.
Trump's protectionist
policies will stymie this force for progress. His economic policies are awful.
To me, the fact that policies which reverse the increased specialization and
global trade take us backwards is hardly worth arguing. (Although I have argued
it here.) The bigger question is why Trump's
anti-trade policies won so many converts. I think the answer is, in part,
psychological. Progress has made us more affluent; it has also made it harder
for us to be engaged in our work.
Csizkzentmihalyi
reported on a studies of where people find flow. People doing more traditional
work like farming are more likely to find flow - or engagement - work. People
doing more modern work are more likely to find flow in leisure. Tasks that we
can see the whole of - building a cabinet or sheering sheep or cooking a meal -
are tasks that are easier to find flow in than tasks that are merely some small part of a larger process.
What does this mean?
Economic progress is at odds with psychological well being. As our work becomes
more specialized and we're more productive, we run the risk of becoming less
engaged in our work and less happy.
I do think there is a
fix for this and it goes back to Csikszentmihayli's work on flow. For the last
100 years - well, at least the last 50 years or so - we've focused on the
quality of the product, what we experience as consumers. At its current peak of
evolution, this focus on what customers experience with your product is called
UX, or user experience. It's a big deal and rightfully so. It's a big part of how
we've made the post-Adam Smith rise in productivity translate into more
happiness as a consumer. What's next? We focus on our work as producers. We can
create video games that engage and delight; we can also design work - just as we
design products - to engage and delight.
I won't pretend that the
only problem with globalization is that specialization can lead to stronger
feelings of alienation than more traditional work. I will say, though, that as
we become better at designing work to engage us when we are wearing our producer hat, jobs and
work will become less a matter of angst and anger than it has in recent decades
and will make it easier to sustain support for a process that has not only made
us more affluent than our ancestors but more affluent than they could even
imagine.
Deming
argued that there are four elements of profound knowledge that define a what managers should know.
1. Appreciation for a
system
2. Understanding of
variation
3. Psychology, and
4. A theory of
knowledge
To
effectively manage or understand an organization, you don't need a deep
understanding of any one of these but you need some understanding of all of these. Also, each of these elements makes more sense within the context of the other three; the four form a system.
"A bad system will beat a good person every time."
- Deming
1.
Appreciation for a system and 2. understanding of variation
Deming used things
like control charts that tracked data over time to determine what was common
cause and what was special cause. To understand variation is to understand the difference between what comes from the system and what does not. People in 2000 in the US were 6X more productive than people in 1900 in the US. It wasn't because they worked harder (in fact, average work weeks dropped from about 60 hours a week to about 38 hours a week in that time). It's because they had better systems. You'll never get as far trying to make people work harder in an old system as you will by improving that system.
Here
is a set of 100 data points representing rework (imagine an auto assembly line
that created 1,000 cars a day, say) that mostly varies from about 10 to 40 cars that need to be reworked each day That much variation yields a control chart
that suggests that normal variation falls within a range of 1 to 47 cars. (Normal variation is what we can expect from the
system.)
Only one data point in the above chart - the one on day 16 that
hits 57 - appears to come from special cause. All the rest of the variation is
just a normal part of the day to day variation.
Normal variation can still be explained as special by people who
don’t understand it. It often is. "Orlando was not paying attention and we
had 6 cars in a row assembled with the brake pads swapped. That's what happened." There is
always a story to go with the data. And there is often a person we can name in
that story. Normal variation can be explained but those explanations are themselves randomly associated with outcomes of a stable system. (This does not just happen on assembly lines. Each day, regardless of whether it goes up or down, moves a lot of moves a little, analysts say things like, "Investors were skittish today because of ..." What would actually be remarkable would be a day in which the major indices finished exactly where they started. Variation is normal. It is only over longer periods of time that you can spot a general direction.)
The only story for a data point that deserves explanation in the above graph is
what happened on day 16. That is unusual and the explanation for that day will
likely tell you something. It is special, meaning that what happened on that
day isn’t explained by the normal rise and fall of our system, is variation that lies outside the normal bounds of daily variation.
Meanwhile, if you don't like it when you have to rework more than, say, 25 cars in a day, you
need to look at the system. Is the process you're using dependent on guys like
Orlando performing four different assembly steps every 5 minutes for 2 hours in
a row before he gets a break? Is there any data suggesting that the average
person can sustain focus and accuracy for that long without attention wandering? It's
easy to say that Orlando should focus but do you have any data suggesting the
average person hired for this role does? If that part of the process is
consistently contributing to, say, 4 to 15 of the rework events each day, then
we know that changing that process has the potential to reduce rework by about
10 units a day. (Note that this goal of ten is not the product of some
arbitrary goal that came of the fact that we have ten fingers but instead comes
from examination of the data that suggests we get an average of 10 errors a day
from the process Orlando works.)
Once we know what is wrong with the system, rather than blame
Orlando for the errors, we can brainstorm solutions. What if we gave Orlando
breaks every 90 minutes instead of every 120? What if we rotated the person
responsible for this really demanding process step so that no one had to do
this task more than 2 hours a day? What if we changed the process so that
Orlando has to do just 3 steps every 5 minutes instead of 4 steps? And so on.
If we find a plausible theory for improvement, we can implement it for, say,
another 30 to 100 days to see if this brought down errors. If it did, we have
made progress and we can turn to some other issue within the system.
The behavior of the system is typically stable even as we change
who we hire. (And the hiring process is part of the system. If we make a real
change in what we screen for when we interview candidates, that too, might improve
our system.) Systems define most outcomes. Changing teachers or politicians, employees or bankers is often like changing the cast in your play in the hopes that Romeo & Juliet will end happily.
Also, systems can behave in unexpected ways. A system has
emergent properties that none of its part have. For instance, an engine cannot
get you across town, nor can a steering wheel nor tires nor an axle. But when
these parts are brought together in a system like a car, they can. Organizations
are made up of knowledge workers who have to coordinate in order to create
value. The person who designs a new product is worthless unless there is a
person who can make it. Even those two are worthless if someone can't sell what
they make, and so on. Just like the parts of the car cannot get you across
town, the parts of an organization can't create value; through coordination,
though, these people can create enormous value that emerges from their
interactions. As a manager, you need to understand their current output as
something that has lots of normal variation and you need to appreciate that the
efforts in one part of the process can create problems in another step. (For
instance, optimizing each part of the car could result in 87 different size
bolts. This complexity could make it more difficult to keep all your parts
stocked and even errors in assembly as you raise the risk of someone using the wrong bolt that is just fractionally off in size. Doing what is best for the system - changing the
design so that it relies on just 3 different size bolts for instance - might
mean doing what is less than optimal for a specific part.) The point is to
optimize the system and that depends on people within it cooperating rather
than competing.
Which brings us to psychology.
If you have people within a system compete for promotions and
raises rather than cooperate to create a fabulous product, you lay land mines
for issues. If you have people work towards local goals rather than
cooperate to create a success for the whole organization, you can easily encourage
sub-optimization. Worse, you can disengage people through the use of extrinsic
motivation.
The worst kind of motivation focuses people so much on the
rewards that they don’t pay much attention to the task itself. One study of four-year-old
children who tend to love a drum at that age broke the kids into three groups.
One group was told that the box in front of them had a special gift for them
for playing the drum. They stared at it distractedly the whole time they were
pounding. Another group was told, almost in passing, that they’d get a prize
for playing the drum. The third group was told nothing but was turned loose in
the same toy room that included a drum. The second group was most likely to
later identify the drum as their favorite toy, which gave rise to a notion of
minimal sufficiency principle, [Mark Lepper] “using rewards or threats that are
minimally sufficient to get kids to do the desired behaviors, but not so strong
that the kids view the threats or rewards as the reason they are acting that
way.”
As with systems or variation, psychology is rich with much more
than the simple considerations I’ve mentioned. Deming felt that so much of what
we do in school and work undermines the intrinsic motivation of people to
learn, engage, cooperate, and create. He often showed this chart (video to follow).
This psychological question of how the system you have designed engages or
disengages people might be the most important question of all.
"90% of what matters cannot be measured."
- Deming
Finally, the fourth element of profound knowledge is the theory
of knowledge. How do you know what you know? Your data and people’s behavior
might be stable but what if the environment changes? How do you know that
customers like your product? What about it do they like? The advances in UX
since the time of Deming (he died in the early 1990s) have taken this question
seriously. It’s worth remembering that he made his name as a management
consultant but first got to Japan as a person to help with the census (“How do
we know how many people live in Nara?” “How do we count people staying in a
hotel on the night of the census? Are they counted as residents of the city of the hotel or the city they claim as home?”). And he got into the position to help to
define this after getting a PhD in Physics. He studied phenomenon and tried to
understand how we knew what we knew, and carried that basic inquiry into the question of how to count the population of an entire nation and how to measure quality in a product or service.
Evidence for what you know comes from data but data comes after
you’ve formulated a theory. If you change what you are trying to measure or
what you believe about the phenomenon, the data may suddenly be made obsolete or
you’ll need to collect it differently. Your theory of knowledge is bound up in how you measure variation and how you define and understand the system you expect people to engage in.
Theory of knowledge, psychology, variation and systems. You can
start anywhere and go everywhere but the real goal is to understand what you
are dealing with in terms of a system and how that enables or disables people
from realizing their potential within that system. This means understanding the
difference between common cause and special cause variation and even a deeper
understanding of how you know anything at all. All of it is humbling but it
also leads to continuous learning and improvement as you continue to inquire on
all of those fronts. Systems evolve with the people within them and the
environment around them … or they become obsolete.
Ultimately, a successful social inventor or entrepreneur creates a system that outlasts them. The US didn’t collapse when Thomas
Jefferson and John Adams died hours apart on the country’s 50th
anniversary. Apple’s stock didn’t fall to zero when Steve Jobs died. The real
value is less about your efforts within a system than your ability to improve or create the system. It’s true that some people run much faster than others but no one
outruns a jet; what you want to do in improving or creating a system is to
create something that performs much better than the people within it could hope
to on their own. A great manager does
the same and I’m not sure how you’d do any of it without at least some
intuitive or learned understanding of Deming’s profound knowledge.
Some parts of a woman's brain change up to 25% through the course of a month. "When I started taking a woman's hormonal state into account as I evaluated her psychiatrically, I discovered the massive neurological effects her hormones have during different stages of life in shaping her desires, her values, and the very way she perceives reality," writes Dr. Louann Brizendine in The Female Brain.
I mention this because I want to make a bold claim. One that I think will be proven in the next decade or two but is not - to the best of my knowledge - yet proven or even claimed by any serious professionals.
It is not just that people in different cultures and points of developmental history have different opinions and beliefs: their brains are wired differently.
To take a simple example, in schools were children don't feel as safe and violence and bullying is common, test scores are lower to reflect, I believe, more time spent in the fight or flight portion of their brain and less time in the frontal lobes.
The brain of a villager living in a rural area of Afghanistan who suffers from hunger, is regularly coerced by threats of violence, and feels as though he has little control over his life will be bathed in a very different set of hormones and chemicals than the brain of a Greenwich villager living in New York who worries about overeating, is regularly persuaded by advertising, and feels like he has no purpose in his life. It is not just that these two people have different beliefs about the world. I would argue that these two have very different brains.
My personal opinion is that a sense of control is the biggest determinant of how the brain is wired and world view formed.
And this matters for policy. Imagine going into Mississippi to "help" the locals to give up on their curious religious beliefs and odd superstitions in order to become more developed and prosperous. It probably would not be long before they had taken up arms to chase you and your BMW-driving friends out of town. It is not as though you can simply offer some new information to change how they think. You would likely have to change the way their brain is wired, the way they make sense of the world. You cannot simply bring new policies into old brains, put new wine into old bottles.
It might just be that the answer is to change conditions for the next generation as much as possible. Alleviating hunger. Adding control and order to the point that people feel less intimidated in their daily lives. Offering choices to the young. These actions might plant the seeds for then introducing policies that will be welcomed rather than repulsed.
I love the idea of psychology, cognitive science, and therapy. I think that happiness and peace of mind is more important than we allow. But as I get older, I am more inclined to believe that social systems do as much to define psychology and cognition as anything we could do with an individual in a particular social milieu. To change the individual, you have to change the social system. Change the world he lives in and you change the individual. I predict that we'll even find that if you change the world he lives in, you change the very composition of his brain.
I ran across a batch of quotes from Freud and selected out of them this set. A century later, the man still knows how to make a person rub his chin and ponder.
Anatomy is destiny.
Children are completely egoistic; they feel their needs intensely and strive ruthlessly to satisfy them.
Dreams are often most profound when they seem the most crazy.
Love and work... work and love, that's all there is
One is very crazy when in love.
Religion is an illusion and it derives its strength from the fact that it falls in with our instinctual desires.
Sadism is all right in its place, but it should be directed to proper ends.
Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.
The great question that has never been answered, and which I have not yet been able to answer, despite my thirty years of research into the feminine soul, is "What does a woman want?"
The mind is like an iceberg, it floats with one-seventh of its bulk above water.
We are never so defenseless against suffering as when we love.
What a distressing contrast there is between the radiant intelligence of the child and the feeble mentality of the average adult.
What we call happiness in the strictest sense comes from the (preferably sudden) satisfaction of needs which have been dammed up to a high degree.
Whoever loves becomes humble. Those who love have, so to speak, pawned a part of their narcissism.
One reason that the liberal economies rose to prominence while Germany self destructed under the Nazis is that they used the powers of mass psychology to stimulate visions of consumption rather than world domination.
We really did learn a great deal about psychology early in the 20th century. Sadly, what we’ve learned has largely been mis-used. The Nazis may have been the first to use the power of psychology. Specifically, they applied these principles to propaganda and the manipulation of mass media as a tool to create the consensus trance, to define national opinion. Used as a tool for stimulating delusions of world domination, the Nazis caused Germany to self destruct, killing about 60+ million people before they were done.
The Allies – the UK and even more so, the US – used this newfound power of mass psychology for something better. Rather than focus the masses on world domination, they focused the masses on consumption. Advertising, branding, and admonitions to “go shopping” keep us all focused on the importance of making and spending more money. This way, the masses are still manipulated but rather benignly. I’m almost positive that’s better.
