Letters Remain

  • Personal Responsibility and Our Irresponsible Behaviours

    Even though we may be reluctant to pay a premium for our insurance because of others who engage in irresponsible behaviours (for example: smoking, overeating and health insurance), Sandeep Jauhar, M.D. reminds us of some pertinent results from the health care field.

    Jauhar provides evidence that “punitive measures to force healthy behavior” do not work; reminds us that we all undoubtedly engage in some form of comparable, irresponsible behaviours (e.g. using a phone while driving); and that the issue of personal responsibility in health care is a lot more complex that we imagine:

    Personal responsibility is a complex notion, especially when it comes to health. Individual choices always take place within a broader, messy context. When people advocate the need for personal accountability, they presuppose more control over health and sickness than really exists.

    Unhealthy habits are one factor in disease, but so are social status, income, family dynamics, education and genetics. Patient noncompliance with medical recommendations undoubtedly contributes to poor health, but it is as much a function of poor communication, medication costs and side effects, cultural barriers and inadequate resources as it is of willful disregard of a doctor’s advice. […]

    Healthy living should be encouraged, but punishing patients who make poor health choices clearly oversimplifies a very complex issue. […]

    ‘It’s the context of people’s lives that determines their health,” said a World Health Organization report on health disparities. “So blaming individuals for poor health or crediting them for good health is inappropriate.”

    No mention of moral hazard.

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • Scores and Comparisons: Most Persuasive Feedback Method

    Numeric and normative feedback (scores and comparative information) is more persuasive and effective than text feedback with only “self-relevant data”, regardless of the source. That’s according to a 2006 study looking at the best methods for providing feedback to ‘leaders’:

    This study investigated the influence of feedback format (text versus numeric/normative) on leaders’ reactions to 360 degree feedback received from bosses, direct reports, and peers. Leaders who received numeric/normative feedback reacted more favourably than those who received text feedback regardless of the source. […] These findings suggest that, contrary to predictions of feedback intervention theory (FIT), feedback that provided scores and comparative information was reacted to more positively than text feedback that provided only self-relevant data. In addition, negative reactions to feedback were detrimental to future changes.

    via @bakadesuyo

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • Underestimating Others’ Willingness to Help

    We vastly underestimate how likely people are to provide assistance when asked, in both social settings and when soliciting funds.

    That’s the verdict coming from research conducted by associate professor of organizational behavior at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, Frank Flynn. Flynn found that we underestimate how much others are willing to provide in financial assistance and the willingness of others to come to our assistance (by around 50%).

    “People’s underestimation of others’ willingness to comply is driven by their failure to diagnose these feelings of social obligation on the part of others.”

    One study found that those asking for help incorrectly believed it was more likely they would receive help if they were indirect about it—communicating their request with a look, rather than a direct question. In contrast, people in the position of offering assistance said they were much more likely to help if asked point blank. “That really puts the obligation on them, and makes it very awkward for them to refuse.” […]

    “Other studies we’ve conducted indicate that people overestimate how likely it is that others will come to them for help,” Flynn continues. “This means not only are people not asking for help when in fact they could get it, but they’re not encouraging others to come to them for help when in fact they’re willing to offer it. That tells us that the ‘open-door’ policy is basically ineffective unless people are actively encouraged to use it.”

    Remember, too: telling children not to talk to strangers isn’t the best advice.

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • Succeeding With Freemium (Case Studies)

    A look at how to succeed with freemium, through a number of case studies:

    • Experiment with different freemium models: When Pandora offered 10 hours of free radio before requiring users to pay an annual subscription, the vast majority of their users left once their allocation of free time expired. The company then experimented with a free, advertising-supported model with a premium option available (that also included a desktop application, higher quality streams and fewer usage limits), and the subscriber conversion rate grew to 1.7% of their 20 million users.
      Automattic doesn’t employ the conventional tiered premium model, but instead offers “a-la-carte freemium services”: premium ‘add-ons’ such as domain mapping. The problem with this, says CEO Toni Schneider, is that it can be difficult to market the distinct services effectively.
    • Discover where your marketing costs should go (where are you acquiring users?): Dropbox started attempting to acquire users through conventional search marketing, the acquisition costs of which were thousands of dollars per customer (for a $100 product). Noticing that user referrals were a big source of growth, the company then changed tactics and started offering an incentive (more storage space) to all existing users for referring friends. Dropbox CEO Drew Houston says that “the big lesson there is if you adopt a freemium business model your marketing cost is the free users” and “search is great for harvesting demand, not creating it”.
    • Focus on deriving maximum value from users: After figuring out the dynamics of their user base (that inactive users drop off over time and active users started paying–there was minimum freeloading), Evernote realised good growth and investment interest. The company’s CEO says freemium can work for any business if you have 1) a great long-term retention rate, 2) a product that increases in value over time and 3) variable costs.
    • Beware and identify/remove abusers: Not (necessarily) freeloaders, but those who use free versions for nefarious means. MailChimp‘s legal costs increased 245 percent after abuse-related issues (spamming, etc.) increased by 354 in the first seven months of moving to a freemium model. They had to develop ways to automate their detection (a waste of resources).

    I also like the introduction to this article:

    Don’t spend money on marketing, do offer flexibility and data exporting to eliminate buyers’ regret, make sure to capitalize on and value goodwill, and only charge for things that are hard to do. That’s what some startups say is the key to success in the freemium business. But the biggest reason […] Pandora, Dropbox, Evernote, Automattic and MailChimp are doing well is because they have great products that people want. They’ve been able to get those products to a broad audience by using the freemium model — that is, offering a free service with the option to upgrade.

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • Sleep for Creativity

    Dreams are not “meaningless narratives” but are “layered with significance and substance”, laments insomniac Jonah Lehrer as he considers the importance of dreaming for creativity:

    A group of students was given a tedious task that involved transforming a long list of number strings into a new set of number strings. This required the subjects to apply a painstaking set of algorithms. However, […] there was an elegant shortcut, which could only be uncovered if the subjects saw the subtle links between the different number sets. When left to their own devices, less than 25 percent of people found the shortcut, even when given several hours to mull over the task. However, when [the researcher, Jan Born,] allowed people to sleep between experimental trials, they suddenly became much more clever: 59 percent of all participants were able to find the shortcut. Born argues that deep sleep and dreaming “set the stage for the emergence of insight” by allowing us to mentally represent old ideas in new ways.

    So that’s another good reason to sleep well.

    Before looking at how sleep is “an essential component of creativity”, Lehrer also describes this fascinating study: a selection of rodents spent their day running around a circular track, having their brain activity monitored. Once the animals fell asleep, the researchers noted that the brain activity displayed was identical to that displayed while they were actually running around the track (i.e. they were dreaming about running). On further examination, the researchers then discovered that they could also predict precisely where on the track the rodents were at any given point in their dream.

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • Information Foraging and The Fold

    Even though users are now accustomed to scrolling down web pages, we know that the fold still exists and is important–and how we can design to take advantage of it.

    In light of this, Jakob Nielsen has conducted research to see what prompts users use to decide whether to scroll or not (the answer: the information scent).

    The implications are clear: the material that’s the most important for the users’ goals or your business goals should be above the fold. Users do look below the fold, but not nearly as much as they look above the fold.

    People will look very far down a page if (a) the layout encourages scanning, and (b) the initially viewable information makes them believe that it will be worth their time to scroll.

    Finally, while placing the most important stuff on top, don’t forget to put a nice morsel at the very bottom.

    via @zambonini

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • Negotiating Over ‘Sacred Values’

    When requested to give up a “sacred value”, the inclusion of a financial incentive incites moral outrage, decreases general support for a compromise, increases anger and increases a subject’s approval of “violent opposition”.

    Research looking at our reactions to such proposals offers same suggestions for negotiating over sacred values.

    A more successful tack for negotiating over sacred values, as it turns out, is to simply use the right words. Whether discussing nuclear disarmament or reluctance to sell one’s lucky mug at a garage sale, using specific rhetorical strategies can make trade-offs seem less taboo and can facilitate conflict resolution. […] One tactic is to describe tradeoffs in terms of “costs and benefits” and “analysis” rather than in terms of sacred values and money. This vague utilitarian language appears to mask the emotion-laden taboo nature of the exchange. Another strategy is to emphasize the dire, obligatory nature of the trade-off. For example, people are more willing to sell their body organs for medical transplants when told it is the only way to save lives because this framing posits the exchange as one sacred value for another. In an age where many of the most volatile conflicts stem from sacred causes, and politicians have questioned effectiveness of diplomacy, understanding how to best negotiate about these issues has never been more critical.

    via Schneier on Security

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • Summarising Joel on Software

    Now that Joel Spolsky has ‘retired’ from blogging at Joel on Software (in the format the site has been known for, at least), Jan Willem Boer is reading the entire back-catalogue of entries and condensing the knowledge within each essay into a single sentence (or two).

    The result is a stunning list of tips on running a small business, programming best practices, productivity tips, technical hiring practices and entrepreneurship.

    The series:

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • Technological Affluence and Happiness (Everything Except TV is Good)

    In a study probing the association between ‘technological affluence’ and general well-being it was found that computers, mobile phones and music players increased self-reported levels of happiness, while television ownership decreased it.

    That is: the ownership of most modern technological goods makes us happy, except for televisions, which make us sad.

    Using self-reported life satisfaction as a measure of subjective well-being we find that a fixed phone, a mobile phone, a compact disk player, a computer and an Internet connection are all associated with higher levels of well-being, whereas television sets are associated with lower levels. We further provide evidence suggesting that the level of mobile and broadband penetration matters for life satisfaction as well. Our estimates indicate that, at a minimum, an individual requires a 10% increase in GDP per capita as compensation to [cease] holding these products. Further implications suggest that increasing mobile penetration by 10% has limited effects on implied GDP per capita, contrary to a similar increase in broadband penetration.

    via Tim Harford

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • The Checklist Advantage

    To ensure that extremely complex tasks–tasks too complex even for “super-specialists”–are performed effectively, accurately and with minimal mistakes, checklists are an invaluable tool, suggested Atul Gawande in a 2007 article in The New Yorker (and everywhere else since, it seems).

    Gawande illustrates (in an inordinate amount of detail) how seemingly unnecessary checklists can make huge differences to our effectiveness in completing the most complex (and simple) of tasks by looking at how Peter Pronovost dramatically reduced infection rates (from 11% to 0% in some cases*) in hospitals throughout America.

    So how do you actually manage [immense] complexity? The solution that the medical profession has favored is specialization. […]

    We now live in the era of the super-specialist—of clinicians who have taken the time to practice at one narrow thing until they can do it better than anyone who hasn’t. Super-specialists have two advantages over ordinary specialists: greater knowledge of the details that matter and an ability to handle the complexities of the job. [But] what do you do when expertise is not enough? […]

    It’s far from obvious that something as simple as a checklist could be of much help in medical care. […] Mapping out the proper steps for each [patient] is not possible, and physicians have been skeptical that a piece of paper with a bunch of little boxes would improve matters much.

    In 2001, though, a critical-care specialist at Johns Hopkins Hospital named Peter Pronovost decided to give it a try. […]

    The checklists provided two main benefits, Pronovost observed. First, they helped with memory recall, especially with mundane matters that are easily overlooked in patients undergoing more drastic events. […] A second effect was to make explicit the minimum, expected steps in complex processes.

    Gawande notes how Pronovost enabled the widespread use of checklists by persuading hospital management to actively encourage and take the side of those lower down in the professional hierarchy (i.e. nurses) to challenge those above them (i.e. consultants) without recriminations.

    via @zambonini

    *The checklist used was extremely simple and contained only five steps. It was so simple that it was resisted by almost every employee. With the checklist actually being consulted readily, it turned out that at least one step was either missed or not implemented correctly in many cases.

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    Lloyd Morgan