Strategy. Innovation. Brand.
Effect and Cause
Is it clean yet?
I worry about cause and effect. If you get them backwards, you wind up chasing your tail. While you’re at it, you can create all kinds of havoc.
Take MS (please). We have long thought of multiple sclerosis as an autoimmune disease. The immune system interprets myelin – the fatty sheath around our nerves – as a threat and attacks it. As it eats away the myelin, it also impairs our ability to send signals from our brain to our limbs. The end result is often spasticity or even paralysis.
We don’t know the cause but the effect is clearly the malfunctioning immune system. Or maybe not. Some recent research suggests that a bacterium may be involved. It may be that the immune system is reacting appropriately to an infection. The myelin is simply an innocent bystander, collateral damage in the antibacterial attack.
The bacterium involved is a weird little thing. It’s difficult to spot. But it’s especially difficult to spot if you’re not looking for it. We may have gotten cause and effect reversed and been looking for a cure in all the wrong places. If so, it’s a failure of imagination as much as a failure of research. (Note that the bacterial findings are very preliminary, so let’s continue to keep our imaginations open).
Here’s another example: obsessive compulsive disorder. In a recent article, Claire Gillan argues that we may have gotten cause and effect reversed. She summarizes her thesis in two simple sentences: “Everybody knows that thoughts cause actions which cause habits. What if this is the wrong way round?”
As Gillan notes, we’ve always assumed that OCD behaviors were the effect. It seemed obvious that the cause was irrational thinking and, especially, fear. We’re afraid of germs and, therefore, we wash our hands obsessively. We’re afraid of breaking our mother’s back and, therefore, we avoid cracks in the sidewalk. Sometimes our fears are rooted in reality. At other times, they’re completely delusional. Whether real or delusional, however, we’ve always assumed that our fears caused our behavior, not the other way round.
In her research on OCD behavior, Gillan has made some surprising discoveries. When she induced new habits in volunteers, she found that people with OCD change their beliefs to explain the new habit. In other words, behavior is the cause and belief is the effect.
Traditional therapies for OCD have sought to address the fear. They aimed to change the way people with OCD think. But perhaps traditional therapists need to change their own thinking. Perhaps by changing the behaviors of people with OCD, their thinking would (fairly naturally) change on its own.
This is, of course, quite similar to the idea of confabulation. With confabulation, we make up stories to explain the world around us. It gives us a sense of control. With OCD – if Gillan is right – we make up stories to explain our own behavior. This, too, gives us a sense of control.
Now, if we could just get cause and effect straight, perhaps we really would have some control.
My iPod Is Conscious
Speak, wise one.
Apparently my iPod is a sentient being. It senses its surroundings, understands context, and makes intelligent decisions.
Here’s the latest example. Yesterday, we received this week’s edition of The New Yorker. The cover features a couple kissing on the 59th Street Bridge. This morning, at the gym, my iPod randomly selected (from more than 4,000 choices) the 59th Street Bridge Song, the goopy old standard by Simon & Garfunkel. Even more eerily, the lyrics told me to “Slow down, you’re moving too fast…” which was exactly what I needed to do on the exercise machine I was using.
Clearly, my iPod knew about the magazine (the print edition!) and also knew that I was over-exerting myself. It selected the perfectly appropriate song from thousands of possibilities. Thank you, Steve Jobs.
But wait … really? Clearly the magazine’s cover art primed me to think about the 59th Street Bridge. When I heard the song, I made the connection. That’s the effect of priming. As for the advice on slowing down … well, I wouldn’t have noticed it if I weren’t overdoing it. In other words, I was being primed (or conditioned) in two different ways. I noticed things that I wouldn’t otherwise have noticed. I assumed there was a connection, but it was really just a coincidence.
Coincidences can screw up our thinking in myriad ways. Let’s look at four ways to consider coincidences and causes:
A) It’s a coincidence and we recognize it as such – most people would conclude that my iPod is not conscious … Apple’s not that good. We correctly conclude that it’s not a cause-and-effect situation.
B) It’s a coincidence but we thinks it’s a cause – this is where we can get into big trouble and deep debates. This is a problem in any discipline — like economics, sociology or climate science — where it’s difficult to run experiments. It’s hard to pin down if X causes Y or if Y causes X or … well, maybe it’s just a coincidence. (Maybe it was the rats).
C) It’s a cause and we recognize it as such – we know that certain germs cause certain diseases. So we take appropriate precautions.
D) It’s a cause but we think it’s a coincidence – before the 19th century, we didn’t recognize that germs caused diseases. We thought it was just a coincidence that people died in filthy places.
I suspect that many conspiracy theories stem from Category B. We note a coincidence and assume mistakenly that it’s a cause. The dust bowl in the United States coincided with over farming and also with the rise of communism in Europe. A small but noisy group of people concluded that the dust bowl was not caused by farming techniques and drought but was actually a communist conspiracy.
We can also suffer from Category D problems. I read recently of a man who had a chronic infection in his right ear. Doctors couldn’t figure it out. Finally, the man took some earwax from his left (healthy) ear and stuck it in his right ear. The infection went away. It seemed coincidental that his left ear was healthy while his right ear was not but it actually pointed to a cause. His left ear had healthy bacteria (a healthy microbiome) while his right ear did not. The man suspected that the difference between his left and right ears was not coincidental. He was right and solved a Category D problem.
In a weird way, this all ties back to innovation. If we want to stimulate innovation, we can usefully ask questions like this: “I note that A and B vary coincidentally. Is that really a coincidence or does it point to some deeper cause that we can capitalize on?” While Category B can generate endless debates, Category D could generate novel solutions.
(How do you know if something is true? Click here.)
Rats, Lice, and Innovation
A fundamental driver of history
I took a lot of history courses in college. Most of them were focused on a particular geography at a particular time like, say, Latin America in the 19th century.
A few, however, sought to describe and explain the entire arc of history – the grand narrative of the really big picture. I especially remember reading Arnold Toynbee’s A Study of History, a 12-volume set that chronicled 26 different civilizations and offered a cohesive explanation of why they rose and fell. (Truth be told, I read the abridged version).
As I read Toynbee, I finally came to understand the entire ebb and flow of history – why things happened and how one thing led to another. Then I read another book that shook my confidence and taught me that I probably didn’t understand much at all.
The book was Rats, Lice and History by Hans Zinsser. It’s a much more modest book than Toynbee’s but perhaps more enlightening. Its basic thesis is simple: a lot of stuff happens by accident and stupidity. One army defeats another not because of the grand arc of history but because rats have eaten the losing army’s grain. A civilization falls not because of religion (or lack of it) but because lice have spread disease among the population.
I’ve always taken Zinsser’s book as a cautionary tale. Whenever I read a grand narrative that claims to explain it all, I wonder if the author didn’t miss something random and elemental. Was Karl Marx right about the rise of the working class or did he just miss the fact that plague destroyed prevailing social structures? Did America become a great power because of Manifest Destiny or because two great oceans protected us from pathogens?
Though I understand something about pathogens, I never connected them to innovation – until last week. That’s when I stumbled across an article by Damian Murray in The Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology. Murray connects pathogens to a culture’s ability to generate scientific and technical innovations.
The path from pathogen to innovation (or lack of it) is a bit circuitous. The basic argument is that the presence of pathogens causes cultures to adopt certain practices and behaviors that suppress disease. These practices include “xenophobia and prejudiced responses to foreign individuals”, the adoption of “conformist attitudes and behaviors”, traditionalism, collectivism, and authoritarianism.
Murray (and many others before him) argues that xenophobia, conformism, traditionalism, collectivism, and authoritarianism “serve to buffer against disease transmission.” In other words, they’re good for you and your culture. While these behaviors help ward off diseases, Murray argues that they also have a hidden cost: reduced ability to innovate.
These variables are linked in multiple ways. For instance, xenophobia, conformism, and traditionalism tend to produce collectivist as opposed to individualist cultures. Murray notes that a number of researchers (including Hofstede) have connected individualism to innovation. Similarly, conformism may lead to authoritarianism (or is it the other way round?) which may lead to a reduced rate of innovation.
Murray’s argument is ingenious and intriguing. But, for me, it’s not just about innovation. It illustrates a much bigger problem in understanding reality: we often don’t know what causes what. We look at the past and build arguments that A leads to B and B leads to C. Our stories are logical and comforting but probably wrong.
The French philosopher Henri Bergson warned us to beware of the “retrospective illusion”: that mechanistic forces predetermined every event in history. That history could not have happened any other way. (This feels similar to the illusion of explanatory depth). For me, Murray and Bergson are saying the same thing: don’t assume that A causes B just because it seems logical and intuitive. Maybe it was just the rats.
Success and Serendipity
Anything could happen.
Carl von Clausewitz, the renowned German military strategist, wrote that “No campaign plan survives first contact with the enemy.” It’s good to plan, organize, and coordinate but remember that the enemy will always do something unexpected. Resilience – the ability to react to new realities and change direction as needed – is probably the single most important variable in battlefield success.
Clausewitz, of course, was focused on war planning. At the risk of being presumptuous, I’d like to paraphrase the thought: No business plan survives first contact with reality. As in warfare, it’s good to plan ahead. But don’t stick to the plan blindly. Be observant and pragmatic. As you learn more about reality, adjust the plan accordingly and do it quickly.
We all like to make predictions, of course, but reality intervenes. Odd things happen. Weird coincidences occur. As we learned a few weeks ago, we all confabulate. We make up stories to explain what happened in the past. By understanding the past, we should be able to control the future.
Unfortunately, the stories we confabulate about the past are never completely true. Too many things happen serendipitously. We may think that X caused Y but reality is much more complicated and counter-intuitive. Another German, Georg W.F. Hegel probably said it best: “History teaches us nothing except that it teaches us nothing.”
If we can’t predict the future, why bother to write a business plan at all? Because it’s useful to lay out all the variables, understand how they inter-relate, and tell a story about the future. Once you have a story, you can adjust it. You can tell how closely your thinking relates to reality and change your plans accordingly. It’s like tailoring a new set of clothes. Following a pattern will get you close to a good fit. But you’ll need several fittings – a nip here, a tuck there – to make the ensemble fit perfectly.
This approach to planning also emphasizes the importance of serendipity. My favorite definition of serendipity is “…an aptitude for making desirable discoveries by accident.” If you could predict the future accurately, you wouldn’t need serendipity – you would simply follow the plan. Since you can’t predict the future, you need to promote serendipity as part of your plan.
How do you promote serendipity? The simple answer is that you do new things. Talk to different people. Take a different route to work. Study a new language. Travel to a new country. Take a course in a new discipline. Don’t ever assume that you know what you’re doing. Remember what Louis Pasteur said, “Chance favors the prepared mind.” Never let an accident go to waste.
Social Media and Empty Calories
I’m at my bliss point.
Can’t stop eating those potato chips? Blame it on the bliss point.
On a graph, the bliss point looks like an upside-down U. Think of it as a crave curve. At the top of the curve, the food you’re eating provides maximum bliss and minimum warning. You crave it and simply want more. If you move past the top of the curve, however, the food starts to alert your brain that you’ve eaten enough. You stop eating.
Being good marketers, food engineers want you to eat more. They aim to hit the top of the crave curve. As it happens, “…big, distinct flavors [tend] to overwhelm the brain, which responds by depressing your desire to have more.” So food engineers blend flavors to get just the right bliss balance that will keep you consuming.
As with food, so with slot machines. As the anthropologist Natasha Dow Schüll points out, slot machine designers aim for a mechanical version of the bliss point called the “machine zone”.
Once players enter the machine zone, their “…worries, social demands, and even bodily awareness fade away. … gambling addicts play not to win but simply to keep playing as long as possible….” Like food engineering, game engineering aims to keep you going … just one more nibble or one more pull on the slot machine’s arm.
I wonder if social media doesn’t work the same way. It’s simple, it’s repetitive, and it’s enjoyable. Just one more peek … it’s an innocent pastime, isn’t it? It can’t really hurt anything, can it?
I took a short break just a moment ago and checked my social media. What did I learn? Well, I found out what a former colleague had for lunch today in Minneapolis. Did I really want to know that? No … but think of what I might have learned. I might have found that several people “liked” my latest article. I might have learned that a professional association wants to hire me for a keynote speech. I might have discovered that Tilda Swinton wants to invite me to lunch. Oh, the possibilities.
There’s an old joke that second marriages are the triumph of hope over knowledge. The same is true for social media. The reality is that most of what we discover on social media is rather boring. But maybe … just maybe … something interesting has happened. We have to check. It’s like being in the machine zone. Our worries and social obligations just fade away.
And when something interesting does happen, we get a little reward, just like a slot machine. In reality, the reward never equals the investment. But, as we bask in the glow of the reward, we forget that. We’re in the zone. We can’t break away. In fact, we don’t even want to break away.
My Mom used to say that it’s easier to avoid temptation than to resist it. I’ve learned not to stock potato chips in the house. I’ve learned not to frequent gaming dens. Maybe it’s time to put the social media away, too.
My Social Media
