Proximity Matters

When work involves sharing information, the people involved should sit together. The reason why is captured in a passage I came across describing how currency brokers work in the London Review of Books:

Brokers in major money-market currencies don’t work as individuals, but in teams of up to a dozen or more, sitting close together in subsections of large, open-plan offices. Good eyesight is useful – trainees still sometimes called ‘board boys’ write unfilled bids to borrow and offers to lend on whiteboards surrounding clusters of brokers’ desks, and you can occasionally see a broker using binoculars to read a distant whiteboard or screen – but a more crucial skill is ‘broker’s ear’: the capacity to monitor what is being said by all the other brokers at nearby desks, despite the noise and while at the same time holding a voicebox conversation with a client. As one broker put it to me: ‘When you’re on the desk you’re expected to hear everyone else’s conversations as well, because they’re all relevant to you, and if you’re on the phone speaking to someone about what’s going on in the market there could be a hot piece of information coming in with one of your colleagues that you would want to tell your clients, so you’ve got to be able to hear it coming in as you’re speaking to the person.’

When you first encounter it, broker’s ear is disconcerting. You’ll be sitting beside a broker at his desk, thinking he’s fully engaged in his conversation with you, when suddenly he’ll respond to a question or comment, from several desks away, that you simply hadn’t registered.

I know this idea runs counter to tradition in a lot of places – usually seating is by seniority (all the executives in the corners and along the windows) and functions. In my industry (mortgages), loan officers are in one section, processors in another, underwriters somewhere else, and closers are over there). This is an organization-centric arrangement – good for the egos of managers who can look over their domain, and good for training people within their function. But, separating functions requires information handoffs, and inevitably there are fumbles and failures to communicate. For example, I’ve heard closers asking customers to resubmit information directly to them because it’s easier than finding out if it’s already been provided to someone else in the work flow.

Putting people in earshot of each other greatly reduces the effort needed to keep everyone in the loop, and results in better execution. It’s also much harder to maintain “us versus them” distinctions when everyone sits together.

Give Me a Reason

Everyone who has raised a child has gone through the “Why?” stage. Humans are wired to figure things out, and asking why is often the most direct route to understanding.

In his book Why? Charles Tilly outlines a framework for how this question is answered. There are four approaches: Conventions, stories, codes, and technical accounts.

1) Conventions are standard explanations of an event which don’t attempt to establish causality (e.g., you explain to a friend you have not responded to an email because you are swamped at work). You and your friend both know this is not literally the reason (after all, you’re not at work 24 hours a day), but your friend accepts the convention and does not make you account for every minute since you received the email.

2) Stories are more detailed narratives which provide more details and present a simplified causality model. If you are a 20 minutes late to work, a conventional comment about traffic being bad will probably suffice. If you keep your spouse waiting 20 minutes in a restaurant for an anniversary dinner, you will probably have a very detailed story establishing you left with plenty of time, the nature of the accident causing the traffic delay, etc.

3) Codes explain actions by referring to existing rules. For example, an employee is not reimbursed for five 40 mile business related trips but is reimbursed for one 60 mile trip because the policy is no reimbursements for trips less than 50 miles.

4) Technical Accounts are detailed explanations of events which attempt to prove causality (or at correlation) with evidence. An example is an engineering study explaining the failure of a dam.

Here is how the rejection of a loan might be explained:

• The borrower had bad credit (convention)
• I approved a loan to someone who had multiple late credit cards just like this applicant and the prior loan defaulted…(story)
• The investor will not buy the loan if the borrower’s FICO score is below 600 (code)
• Studies have shown that borrowers with FICO scores below 600 default 40% more frequently…(technical account).

Each approach has drawbacks. Conventions are by definition incomplete and don’t fully establish causality or educate. They’re fine as a kind of shorthand when nobody really cares much about the answer, but are usually inappropriate when someone really wants to know why.

Similarly, codes are a shorthand explanation which don’t educate (except about the code itself) or explain. Saying an investor won’t buy a loan if the FICO score is below 600 doesn’t explain why that’s the investor’s policy any more than “Because I said so!” explains to a child why they have to go to bed at 9:00 PM. Codes work best when everyone understands the reasons underlying the code already.

Stories are extremely effective at conveying values and information. Like asking “Why?”, narrative explanation and understanding seem to be hard wired into humans (picture cave dwellers huddled around the fire listening to stories of the day’s hunt). However, if you’re using a story to convey a truth, you need to make sure your story represents a truth, and not an isolated instance. For example, your story about how dangerous unleashed dogs are because you were once bitten by one will not resonate with someone who spends a lot of time around unleashed dogs at a dog park. Also. stories are seductive, and as discussed in in a previous post people are all too willing to accept them uncritically.

Technical accounts use evidence and establish causality to answer the question. They are the nuclear weapons of explanation – after a good technical account you really know why. The problem with technical accounts is they tend to be boring, and more information than the audience is looking for. They also tend to be limited in scope – it’s hard to establish the why of big events conclusively.

Given each has drawbacks, which is the best form to use? They can each be appropriate in certain contexts. Tilly introduces the concept of “superior stories”; stories which draw on the strengths of a narrative format, but which are underpinned with the evidence and causal links found in a technical account.

What to Do When You’re Dissatisfied: Part I

Although for the most part I’ve had a happy life, I’ve been in many situations I’ve been dissatisfied with (a bad experience at a restaurant a few weeks ago, several jobs I’ve had in the past, and the last 10 years of my first marriage all come to mind). What to do?

The first thing is to pause and give thanks for the gift you’ve received. If sounds too Buddhist/New Age for you pretend you didn’t read it and skip down a paragraph.  Dissatisfaction is a gift because it gives you an opportunity to handle a situation, learn from it, and become more adept at handling such situations in the future. Framing the situation that way moves you from the irritation and anger you’re probably feeling to a calm sense that this is a situation you can master and transform. If you want to explore this idea further I recommend Naikan, by Gregg Krech.

You have two paths to handling your dissatisfaction. They’re not mutually exclusive; you can often follow them both simultaneously. The first option is to challenge the external source of your stress, and the second option is to change your internal response to the stress. For example, as I’m writing this I’m in Wheeler, Oregon and it’s starting to snow really hard. Tomorrow I was planning to get up early and drive two hours over winding roads and a mountain pass to get to two meetings I’ve scheduled in Portland. One of my options is to challenge the storm; I could leave now before it gets worse, or I could go buy chains for my rental car. Or, I can accept the storm, change my plans, and spend another day or two where I am.

Changing your internal response works best in the following situations:

• The aggravation is trivial in the grand scheme of things.
• The aggravation isn’t trivial, but it’s not likely to be repeated (a stranger sneezes on you on the bus – irritating, but you’re not likely to ever see him again).
• There is nothing you can do to change the situation (you are snowed in, there is nothing you can do, you might as well enjoy it).

Even as children we are all familiar with the idea of riding it out, grinning and bearing it, going with the flow, etc. I never thought seriously about this approach until I read Albert Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus. In Greek mythology Sisyphus committed multiple offenses against the Gods, and in punishment was given the task of rolling a huge boulder to the top of a hill. The twist on the punishment is the task is impossible; before Sisyphus reaches the top of the hill the boulder always slips away and rolls back down. Pointless, repetitive tasks are referred to as Sisyphean tasks. Camus’ essay suggests Sisyphus can attribute his own meaning to the task and take pleasure in the struggle (instead of defining success as reaching the top of the hill).

But what if you don’t want to change – what if you want the situation to change? I’ll discuss that in Part II.

What Do Successful Personal, Reporting, and Client Relationships Have In Common?

John Gottman can watch a married couple interacting for 15 minutes and predict with 90% accuracy whether that couple will still be married 15 years later. Based on his system, I think he would probably be able to predict the success of manager-subordinate and salesperson-client relationships too.

Gottman looks at bids and bid responses between people to draw conclusions about their relationship. In Gottman’s terminology a bid is an attempt by one person to establish a connection, and a bid response is how the other person reacts to the bid. Responses fall into three categories: turning towards, turning against, and turning away. Some examples:

BID	RESPONSE
Husband (on the couch calling to his wife in the kitchen): “Honey, could you bring me a beer?”	Wife Turning Towards - “Sounds good, let me join you. How’s the game going?”
	Turning Against – “Get it yourself, you slob!”
	Turning Away - Silence
Employee sends an email with some requested information to a manager.	Manager Turning Towards - “Thanks for the quick response. Could you include some background on the Ragamuffin account?”
	Turning Against – “Incomplete as usual, where’s the background on the Ragamuffin account?”
	Turning Away – No response to the email
Salesperson following up with a call on some emailed information	Potential Client Turning Towards - “It was interesting but we’re not doing anything until the next budget cycle. I have your contact information and will let you know.”
	Turning Against - “Stop spamming me.”
	Turning Away – Doesn’t return the call

Gottman’s research shows contempt (on the part of either party) is the best signal a relationship is headed down the drain.

Here are some other takeaways from Gottman’s research:

• In a successful relationship, there are a lot of bids going on; a happily married couple may engage as many as 100 times in ten minutes while eating a meal. Not all of these bids get “turning towards” responses, but the ratio is high. Couples headed to divorce engage much less and have a much lower ratio of positive responses. Obviously, there are not going to be as many manager-employee or salesperson-client interactions, but an absence of interaction is bad, and a low ratio of positive responses makes infrequent interaction even worse.
• The overwhelming majority of interactions are trivial; even in the best relationships there is not a lot of sharing of deep feeling and soul searching going on. It’s the frequency and ratio of positive to negative responses that’s important, not the topic.

All this rings true to me in both my personal and professional relationships. What is truly amazing to me is how many managers and clients operate almost exclusively in the “Turn Away” mode, when a quick “Turn Toward” acknowledgment of an employee’s or salesperson’s effort is so easy.

I first read about Gottman’s work in Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink. If you want to dig deeper, I recommend Gottman’s book The Relationship Cure.

Focus on Others’ Minutiae

Yes, this is the opposite of the typical time management advice. The usual approach is to determine your goals, identify the tasks you need to complete to accomplish the most important ones, and give those tasks top priority. Suggestions include doing the big rocks first, and and identifying what's important as opposed to what's urgent. The conventional advice, then, is to focus on your goals, and do what’s important. My advice is to do the opposite – focus on others, and don’t prioritize what’s “important”.

Here’s an example. You get to work in the morning and are informed the deadline for an important report has been moved up and it must be done in time for a meeting first thing tomorrow morning. You estimate it will take 8 hours to complete. You also have emails from three coworkers requesting information, and each response will take 10 minutes to complete. Conventional wisdom would have you work on your report and push back the response to the coworkers (if you’re nice, you’ll let them know you can’t get to it today). My advice is to respond to the coworkers. Here’s why:

• You have four things to do. Your brain has a lot of trouble distinguishing between accomplishing something big and something small; all achievements register roughly the same in your brain regardless of their magnitude. If you do the three small items, your brain will feel like it’s accomplished 75% of what you needed to do today in the first half hour. You will be happier and more productive, offsetting the time you “lost” responding to your colleagues.
• If you do the report first, the fact that you have three more things to do will weigh on your mind at some level, making you less productive. Better to clear your mind and rid yourself of other tasks you can accomplish quickly so you can fully focus on the big one.
• Your coworkers may be waiting for your response to complete their own urgent projects. Everyone's productivity goes up when bottlenecks are eliminated, and the best way to do that is to give priority to other’s needs.
• The total 1/2 hour you need to respond to your coworkers represents a little over 6% of the time you need to complete the report. Work tends to expand to fill the time available, and it’s not hard to squeeze 6% out of the total time needed to complete the project.
• If you put your coworkers off, they will probably be thinking to themselves, “He only needs to spend 10 minutes on this, is everything he has to do today so important he can’t spend 10 minutes on my request?” This situation gets really ugly if your coworker catches you taking a break from your report (and you will, or should, take some breaks – no one can work productively on a single project 8 hours straight).

Of course, if you find yourself never getting to your own projects there’s an overload problem (to be discussed in another post). There are times when you shouldn’t follow this guideline (for example, see my post Do What You Dread). However, when I focus on responding to others I’m both happier and more productive, and so are the people around me.