The Law is King

Thomas Paine | 3.5% Rule | Nudge Me Not | Elsewhere: Convergence and Divergence, Re-Employment, Eldercare

Photo by Crystal Berdion on Unsplash

In absolute governments the king is law, so in free countries the law ought to be king; and there ought to be no other.

| Thomas Paine, Common Sense

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I marched in the No Kings protests this weekend, along with five million others.

Hey, Hey, Ho, Ho!

Donald Trump has got to go!

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3.5% Rule

Erica Chenoweth laid out the “3.5% rule” as described by David Robson of the BBC:

“Numbers really matter for building power in ways that can really pose a serious challenge or threat to entrenched authorities or occupations,” Chenoweth says – and nonviolent protest seems to be the best way to get that widespread support.

Once around 3.5% of the whole population has begun to participate actively, success appears to be inevitable.

“There weren’t any campaigns that had failed after they had achieved 3.5% participation during a peak event,” says Chenoweth – a phenomenon she has called the “3.5% rule”. Besides the People Power movement [in the Philipines], that included the Singing Revolution in Estonia in the late 1980s and the Rose Revolution in Georgia in the early 2003.

With a population of 340 million, we’d need 12 million to join the movement, 7 million more than the 5 million who came out Saturday.

That’s doable.

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Nudge Me Not

Sharon O’Dea explores the need for digital quiet, or at least digital abstention. The rise of wellness and productivity pings — ‘Time to take a break!’, ‘Meeting with HR in two minutes.’ — has led to a corresponding fragmentation of our workday.

O’Dea cites Cass Sustein and Richard Thaler as the original proponents of Nudge Theory,

originally about helping people make better decisions without taking away their freedom. Think: putting fruit at eye level in the cafeteria so people are more likely to choose it over cake. Subtle. Smart. Respectful.

But in the workplace, any subtlety has been steamrolled by the Slackbot and the AI scheduler. Nudges have become a flood of digital interruptions: “Take a moment to journal your day.” “You’ve been in back-to-back meetings — want to schedule focus time?” “It’s 3pm. Time to hydrate!”

She also enumerates the psychological impacts:

Let’s start with Cognitive Load Theory. Every time you get a prompt, you’re being asked to make a decision. Dismiss it? Act on it? Snooze it? That’s one more mental pothole in a day already full of them. And those tiny decisions add up. They chip away at your mental bandwidth, leaving less room for the actual work you’re supposed to be doing.

Then there’s Reactance Theory: the human tendency to resist anything that feels like a threat to autonomy. Personally, nothing turns me into a sulky teenager faster than a bot telling me what to do, especially one that doesn’t know if I’m five minutes from a deadline or just finally, blessedly, on a roll.

And then there’s the Paradox of Choice. Retailers wrestle with the reality that an abundance of options actually requires more effort to choose while leaving us feeling unsatisfied with our selection. But in the workplace it looks more like a parade of “helpful” suggestions leaving us with a vague sense of having made potentially bad decisions: Do you want to block focus time now? Later? Reschedule that meeting? Do some mindfulness? Hydrate? All of the above?

We’re being hectored into burn-out. Turn off the niddling reminders, if you can, to retain your sanity and keep your blocks of focus unfragmented by our digital ‘helpers’.

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Elsewhere

Balancing convergence and divergence

[Originally from 2018, this snippet refers to Dissent, Not Consensus, Is the Shorter but Steeper Path from 2015 that I republished last week. Worth noting that the original piece is ten years old, but the lessons are timeless, and still not in broad use.]

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Once again, I see a call for lockstep groupthink as an unexamined necessity. In this case, a call for alignment from Hannah Price at the Jostle blog:

Keeping employees aligned is essential. Everyone should be marching to the beat of the same drum so your company can move forward in a unified, consistent, and efficient way. This week's Five for Friday delves into how you can achieve this and why it's so important.

Actually, dissent is a critical quality of creative, innovative workplaces where high degrees of autonomy are demanded by high performing individuals and teams.

I explored some aspects of the need to balance divergence and convergence in Dissent, Not Consensus, Is the Shorter but Steeper Path, where I discuss the research of Ulrich Klocke, who wrote about groupthink and dissent. It turns out that the impacts of dissent are positive both at the group and individual level (emphasis mine):

[…] early field studies analyzed the effects of groupthink, a tendency for concurrence seeking that effectively suppresses the expression of dissent. They found evidence that groupthink can have detrimental effects on group decisions. […] These experiments showed that dissent (compared to consent) enhances decision-making quality, even when no group member favors the correct solution before the discussion. This effect was mediated predominantly by more systematic processing of information but also by less biased processing of information. Specifically, dissent led to the introduction and repetition of more information and to a more balanced discussion of shared and unshared and preference-consistent and inconsistent information.

With regard to individual behavior in the context of dissent:

There is evidence for more systematic processing by individuals after being exposed to divergent opinions. One factor that mobilizes systematic processing is surprise or a deviation from expectancy. Usually, divergent opinions are unexpected and therefore cause surprise and mobilize cognitive resources to explain the unexpected event. In addition, it has been demonstrated that dissent, especially when articulated by a consistent minority, promotes divergent thinking, a variable related to unbiased processing.

So, I continue to warn people against cultural norms that extol or seek ‘alignment’ and implicitly or explicitly attempt to choke off or eliminate dissent. I recommend reading the entire Dissent, Not Consensus, Is the Shorter but Steeper Path for more insights from other thinkers on the topic.

Note that divergent perspectives — which are a fertile source of dissent — are exactly what companies gain from increased diversity. And therefore, the conventional wisdom about the need for alignment in teams and corporate culture is likely an indication of a company’s deep resistance to diversity, and biases against divergent thinking and dissent.

Klocke points out that unless these approaches are taken to apply more systematic and less biased processing of information,
decision-making is poor:

frequently, group discussions are superfluous, and groups would be better off using a decision shortcut like an immediate vote or an averaging procedure.

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Re-Employment

Buried in an article about older women playing a kid’s version of water polo, we gain a small insight into how Singapore is dealing with an aging population:

As Singapore has prospered, life expectancy here has soared to 84 and now nearly a fifth of the population is over 65. In recent decades, the government has raised not only the retirement age but also what it calls the re-employment age, or how long employers are required to extend jobs for people after they reach retirement age.

This is exactly the sort of anti-ageism policies we need to see in the U.S., but I have heard of nothing like this being discussed or enacted.

Basically, after reaching retirement age at 63, Singapore’s older workers can continue working an additional 5 years if they are physically able to.

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Eldercare

Along similar lines, Ken Dychtwald, Terry Fulmer, Robert Morison and Katy Terveer make the case for companies instituting eldercare policies, writing [emphasis mine]:

For the first time in U.S. history, the number of working adults providing care to an older adult (nearly 23 million) has surpassed the number providing care to preschool children (21 million). To help employees rise to this challenge, the authors argue, employers need to step up, just as the majority have done for childcare, by providing more support in the form of new and expanded business policies, programs, and benefits. The business case for doing so is straightforward: Supporting elder caregivers improves productivity, retention, recruitment, and diversity. In this article the authors discuss who the providers of eldercare are, what demands they face, and what kinds of support they need most. The authors also provide examples of organizations that are leading the way in offering eldercare support to their employees. They conclude by providing some practical guidance to leaders who want their organizations to meet the challenges and opportunities of this demographic shift.

We have more older adults than preschool kids.

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