Your Daily Tao

There are always good reasons for choosing behaviors that undermine psychological safety. It is often more efficient to cut off debate, to make a quick decision, to listen to whoever knows the most and ask others to hold their tongues. But a team will become an amplification of its internal culture, for better or worse. Study after study shows that while psychological safety might be less efficient in the short run, it’s more productive over time. If motivation comes from giving individuals a greater sense of control, then psychological safety is the caveat we must remember when individuals come together in a group. Establishing control requires more than just seizing self-determination. Being a subversive works, unless you’re leading a team. When people come together in a group, sometimes we need to give control to others. That’s ultimately what team norms are: individuals willingly giving a measure of control to their teammates. But that works only when people feel like they can trust one another. It only succeeds when we feel psychologically safe.

Long-term productivity over short-term gains. We all might have experienced times where we wanted to cut a team member off, end discussion early or felt irritated at having to explain yourself repeatedly. Yet, while we could have been more efficient with time by cutting your team member off, it is unproductive in the long run as team members will no longer feel safe to report issues and share new suggestions.

In this book, Duhigg talks about how Google learned to identify that it is not about the individuals that make a team “strong” and high-performing, but the team dynamics. Teams that were able to consistently achieve psychological safety for team members were the most high-performing ones.

We spend so much time thinking about putting the best individuals together. But achieving the best results comes from the dynamics of teams.

From these insights, a theory of motivation has emerged: The first step in creating drive is giving people opportunities to make choices that provide them with a sense of autonomy and self-determination. In experiments, people are more motivated to complete difficult tasks when those chores are presented as decisions rather than commands. That’s one of the reasons why your cable company asks all those questions when you sign up for service. If they ask if you prefer a paperless bill to an itemized statement, or the ultra package versus the platinum lineup, or HBO to Showtime, you’re more likely to be motivated to pay the bill each month. As long as we feel a sense of control, we’re more willing to play along. This is a useful lesson for anyone hoping to motivate themselves or others, because it suggests an easy method for triggering the will to act: Find a choice, almost any choice, that allows you to exert control. If you are struggling to answer a tedious stream of emails, decide to reply to one from the middle of your inbox. If you’re trying to start an assignment, write the conclusion first, or start by making the graphics, or do whatever’s most interesting to you. To find the motivation to confront an unpleasant employee, choose where the meeting is going to occur. To start the next sales call, decide what question you’ll ask first.

On motivating ourselves. In one of my previous posts, I wrote about how we could motivate employees by providing them autonomy over their workplace environments and decisions. Now, what happens when we have to motivate ourselves?

Its about framing things such that we have a choice, and doing something that allows us to have control. When we’re stuck with a big assignment in hand, we can always frame a simple choice we can take (maybe what word processing software to use) to get the ball rolling.

Never ever let ourselves get into a position where we feel a distinct lack of freedom over our choices. That is when the downward spiral begins.

What Sheila and the other experimenters wanted to know was: Would there be a difference between how many times and how hard the actor was zapped, depending on which reason he had given for his depression? It turns out that you were more likely to hurt somebody if you believed their mental illness was the result of their biochemistry than if you believed it was the result of what had happened to them in life. Believing depression was a disease didn’t reduce hostility. In fact, it increased it. This experiment—like so much of what I had learned—hints at something. For a long time, we have been told there are only two ways of thinking about depression. Either it’s a moral failing—a sign of weakness—or it’s a brain disease. Neither has worked well in ending depression, or in ending its stigma. But everything I had learned suggests that there’s a third option—to regard depression as largely a reaction to the way we are living. This way is better, Marc said, because if it’s an innate biological disease, the most you can hope for from other people is sympathy—a sense that you, with your difference, deserve their big-hearted kindness. But if it’s a response to how we live, you can get something richer: empathy—because it could happen to any of us. It’s not some alien thing. It’s a universal human source of vulnerability. The evidence suggests Marc is right—looking at it this way makes people less cruel, to themselves and to other people.

The final passage I’ll be posting from this book. One thing that stood out to me about this passage was how easily our attitude towards others could change based on our beliefs.

In this case, believing that someone’s mental health issues could be caused by internal biochemistry issues innate to them would result in us treating them more harshly. Whereas when we think that its due to environmental factors, we tend to be less hostile.

Logically, we shouldn’t be treating people better or worse in either situations. However, the fact that we do so is when believing depression results from environmental factors is that such “misfortunes” could have easily happened to ourselves. And while the truth lie somewhere in between, believing that mental health issues results from things that happen to us will enable us to empathise more deeply and be kinder.

Vincent began to wonder if the anti-obesity programs—including his own—had been doing it all wrong, by (for example) giving out nutritional advice. Obese people didn’t need to be told what to eat; they knew the nutritional advice better than he did. They needed someone to understand why they ate. After meeting a person who had been raped, he told me, “I thought with a tremendously clear insight that sending this woman to see a dietitian to learn how to eat right would be grotesque.” Far from teaching the obese people, he realized they were the people who could teach him what was really going on. So he gathered the patients in groups of around fifteen, and asked them: “Why do you think people get fat? Not how. How is obvious. I’m asking why … What are the benefits?” Encouraged to think about it for the first time, they told him. The answers came in three different categories. The first was that it is sexually protective: men are less interested in you, so you are safer. The second was that it is physically protective: for example, in the program there were two prison guards, who lost between 100 and 150 pounds each. Suddenly, as they shed their bulk, they felt much more vulnerable among the prisoners—they could be more easily beaten up. To walk through those cell blocks with confidence, they explained, they needed to be the size of a refrigerator. And the third category was that it reduced people’s expectations of them. “You apply for a job weighing four hundred pounds, people assume you’re stupid, lazy,” Vincent said.If you’ve been badly hurt by the world—and sexual abuse is not the only way this can happen—you often want to retreat. Putting on a lot of weight is—paradoxically—a way of becoming invisible to a lot of humanity.

The need for perspective and empathy. We tend to only focus on the drawbacks of a person’s decisions, but not the benefits. It is easy to assume that we know better than someone when we zone in on the negative consequences of their choices.

Understanding the true reasons why one make the choices they have made (and we are usually not so different after all), based on their upbringing and situation allows us to gain a better understanding of how to change, if there is even a need to change.

While this passage focuses on obesity, I find that this resonates with plenty of other situations I’ve seen. So many of us have tried, or encountered, situations where you or people have tried to change your decision by telling you consequences that you’ve already known. We know the sitaution where we have considerations for a decision and it feels right,  even if we were not able to express it well to the other party.

To attempt to convince someone without even understanding their internal dilemma is at best, slightly annoying and at worst condescending and might instead induce rebellious feelings.

Ask questions and listen first, and try to not assume you know better, even though as humans, we are bound to fall into this habit.

Tim’s first tentative piece of research was to give this survey to 316 students. When the results came back and were all calculated out, Tim was struck by the results: materialistic people, who think happiness comes from accumulating stuff and a superior status, had much higher levels of depression and anxiety. This was, he knew, just a primitive first shot in the dark. So Tim’s next step was—as part of a larger study—to get a clinical psychologist to assess 140 eighteen-year-olds in depth, calculating where they were on the Aspiration Index and if they were depressed or anxious. When the results were added up, they were the same: the more the kids valued getting things and being seen to have things, the more likely they were to be suffering from depression and anxiety.

As we move on to the next part of Johann Hari’s book, it begins to speak about what are the factors that cause us anxiety and stress and may eventually lead to depression.

One of the passages that caught my attention was this, where being plugged into a consumeristic and materialistic aspect of society tends to lead to higher levels of depression.

Does having a materialistic mindset lead to depression? Or is it the other way round? That anxiety causes you to focus on external items such as material purchases rather than dealing with your internal issue. The answer is definitely more nuanced than a simple “just be less materialistic”.

Just like how we engage in addictive and negative behaviours (drinking, gaming, binging on food) whenever we have some form of emotional discontent, it could just be that these 2 things (materialistic mindset x depression) perpertuate each other in some sort of negative feedback loop. What we can learn to do, is to recognise when we’re in a negative spiral and deal with things, especially with the help of loved ones.

What he wanted to know was—would the isolated people get sicker than the connected people? It turned out that they were three times more likely to catch the cold than people who had lots of close connections to other people. Another scientist, Lisa Berkman, had followed both isolated and highly connected people over nine years, to see whether one group was more likely to die than the other. She discovered that isolated people were two to three times more likely to die during that period. Almost everything became more fatal when you were alone: cancer, heart disease, respiratory problems. Loneliness itself, John was slowly discovering as he pieced together the evidence, seemed to be deadly. When they added up the figures, John and other scientists found that being disconnected from the people around you had the same effect on your health as being obese—which was, until then, considered the biggest health crisis the developed world faced.

The greatest insight I had over the past few years, and reinforced by this passage, is that our physical and mental health are all closely tied together. We might tend to see our various aspects (physical vs mental) as disparate things on their own, but the truth is that everything is interconnected and will have an impact.

While doctors and health professionals  have to isolate symptons or problems in order to treat them, we have to take a holistic view of our own health. In this case, feeling isolated and lonely within our society will not only impact your mental health, but also lead to problems physically.

It also makes me think about how we could indirectly deal with  with rising healthcare costs. Investing a lot more in the mental health of people, reducing financial stress through policies and improving the state of workplace environments could possibly help people get less sick, and hence, reduce the overalll cost of healthcare.

The numbers showed that 25 percent of the effects of antidepressants were due to natural recovery, 50 percent were due to the story you had been told about them, and only 25 percent to the actual chemicals. “That surprised the hell out of me,” Irving told me in the front room of his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts. They assumed they had gotten their numbers wrong—that there was some mistake in their calculations. Guy was sure, he told me later, “there’s got to be something wrong with this data,” and so they kept going over it, again and again, for months. “I got so sick of looking at spreadsheets and data and analyzing it every which way possible,” he said, but they knew there must be a mistake somewhere. They couldn’t find any errors—so they published their data, to see what other scientists made of it. When Irving published these figures in a scientific journal, he expected a big fightback from the scientists who had produced all this data. But in fact, in the months that followed, he found there was—if anything—a feeling of shamefaced relief from many of them. One group of researchers wrote that it had been a “dirty little secret” in the field for a long time that the effects of these drugs on depression itself were in reality tiny. Irving thought, before he published, that he had a scoop, a previously unknown shocker. In fact, he had only discovered what many people in the field had privately known all along.

On mental health. The main thesis of this book is that our current approach towards depression, an approach that works based on the efficacy of drugs, does not really work that well after all. Rather, the placebo effect, the idea that just believing that a treatment works even if it might just be a sugar pill, seems to have a larger impact on recovery than the actual chemicals in the drugs.

What this means is that any approach that focuses mainly on dispensing drugs, like how we might do so for a flu, would not yield the most effective results.

Economic incentives and the tendency to focus on simple solutions might have compelled us to focus on constantly developing new antidepressants. However, it seems that issuing pills to a patient simply glosses over the problem, and does not deal with the fundamental cause of depression.

Depression can be a result of many factors. Chemical imbalances in the brain is only just one of them. Circumstances in life, family and many other factors and the amalgamation of these factors all contribute to this extremely complex issue. Focusing on chemicals and drugs, distracts us from really making progress on solving depression. I’ll be sharing more passages over the next few days as Hari goes into more details about his research on how we become depressed and what can we do to prevent this.

Let me explain a big problem in seven simple sentences. As countries grow rich, their birthrates fall and the average age of the population climbs. In order to keep up a lofty standard of living, citizens need workers to serve them, whether as neurosurgeons in hospitals, waiters in restaurants, or manicurists in nail salons. This requires an influx of new workers, which means opening up the gates to more immigrants. Unless a country has strong cultural and civic institutions, new immigrants can splinter the dominant culture. Thus countries face either (1) declining relative wealth or (2) fraying cultural fabric. Prosperous nations cannot enjoy their prosperity without becoming multicultural. But if they become multicultural, they struggle to pursue unified, national goals.

The inevitable issue that happens to almost any developed nation. Birth rates drop and immigration is needed to maintain the country’s economic development. Social integration then becomes the biggest challenges for these countries.

The rise of nationalistic and insular politics is definitely one reaction towards this trend. Yet, as nations move to be more inter-connected with each other than ever, taking an insular approach to the nation’s future might not be a good thing.

I’ll be posting a few more excerpts in the book’s chronological order over the next few days to share Buchholz’s perspectives and how he thinks these issues can be alleviated.

And so Monderman tried something revolutionary. He suggested that the road through Oudehaske be made to look more like what it already was: a road through a village. First, the existing traffic signs were removed. (Signs always irritated Monderman: driving through his home country of the Netherlands with the writer Tom Vanderbilt, Monderman railed against their patronizing redundancy. “Do you really think that no one would perceive there is a bridge over there?” he would ask, waving at a sign that stood next to a bridge, notifying people of the bridge.23) The signs might ostensibly be asking drivers to slow down. However, argued Monderman, because signs are the universal language of roads everywhere, on a deeper level the effect of their presence is simply to reassure drivers that they were on a road—a road like any other, where cars rule. Monderman wanted to remind them that they were also in a village, where kids might play. So, next, he replaced the tarmac with red-brick paving, and the raised curb with a flush sidewalk and gently curved guttering. Cars could stray off the road and onto the verge if they wished. They tended not to. Where once drivers had, figuratively speaking, sped through the village on autopilot—not really attending to what they were doing—now they were faced with a messy situation and had to engage their brains. It was hard to know quite what to do, or where to drive—or which space belonged to the cars and which to the village children. As Tom Vanderbilt describes Monderman’s strategy, “Rather than clarity and segregation, he had created confusion and ambiguity.”
A confusing situation always grabs the attention, as Brian Eno has argued. Perplexed, drivers took the cautious way forward: they drove so slowly through Oudehaske that Monderman could no longer capture their speed on his radar gun. Earl Wiener would have recognized the logic: by forcing drivers to confront the possibility of small errors, the chance of their making larger ones was greatly reduced.

When processes become too smooth, we’ll take our attention off and function on autopilot. This prevents us from doing things carefully and might lead to catastrophic errors. In this anecdote, the roads were too smooth and reminded drivers too much of a highway. They were speeding in a village where kids might walk onto the road. This led to a higher rate of accidents.

By creating mini obstacles and forcing drivers to be in an environment which they have to actively engage in, the drivers had to slow down and put attention towards their driving and there were way less accidents.

Such situations can also find its parallels in the workplace. Important processes that have the potential for significant consequences should provide feedback for users to actively engage in. Being the lazy humans we are, we tend to leave things on autopilot and assume everything’s all right. Feedback or redesigning process which compels us to think can help prevent major errors.

Is there any evidence that neat environments really help? The longer T George Harris chased credible research into the impact of “good design” on employee productivity, the more elusive that research seemed. “People suddenly put into ‘good design’ did not seem to wake up and love it,” he wrote. What they loved instead was control over the space in which they had to live or work. And that control typically leads to mess. The psychologist Craig Knight admits that a space that workers design for themselves will almost always look rather ugly. “It doesn’t look as good as something a designer would have chosen, and it never will.” The management theorist A. K. Korman vividly recalls visiting one factory where the mess had been embraced: I was assaulted with a kaleidoscope of orange, blue, pink, yellow, red and multi-colored machines. My host laughed at the expression on my face and then went on to tell me that the management of the company had told the workers they could paint the machines any color they wanted and the company would furnish the paint if they furnished the manpower. The result was a very unusual looking factory to me, although it was a pleasing work environment to those who worked there every day.

I’ve always been awed by the minimalist and super aesthetic offices whenever I’ve used to interview for jobs at various companies and places. However, the places that really made me comfortable was the messiness of my own desk, where everything I needed was right where it needed to be.

We humans like our autonomy, even over seemingly trivial shit that don’t matter. The freedom to decide how to decorate your desk, select your own chair or choose your own seating position are all seemingly pointless in the larger scheme of things but can have a huge impact on our morale.

In some sense, that might also explain why some people feel much happier and more fulfilled when moving out of their family home into their own place. It might not be about escaping anything negative per se, but simply about our enjoyment of freedom and the autonomy we have in deciding trivial things.

One way to make employees happy: Learn to curb your own inner compulsions and let them have the autonomy to decide on as many things as they can.