“I’m sorry, but I just don’t trust you,” said Pat to Chris skeptically. Within this black cloud of a sentence—sure to drop plenty of rain on any relationship—there is a very faint silver lining: the fact that Pat is willing to say it out loud to Chris. More typically, a lack of trust [...]
“We have too many meetings!” It’s a common enough cry, but what lies underneath it is, “We have too many boring/ineffective/time-wasting meetings!” Whether or not you can make meetings less frequent, what can you do to make the meetings you have more meaningful? The practice of stable [...]
The composer Igor Stravinsky, when he got stuck in the middle of creating one his innovative modernist compositions, would take a break to stand on his head. (This story, along with many other accounts of the work routines of creative individuals, can be found in the book Daily Rituals by Mason [...]
Have you had the experience of being skeptical about something until someone you respect causes you to change your mind? I have been a little suspicious of the notion of “wearable tech” (c’mon, my phone isn’t enough of an intrusion on my peace of mind?). But my colleague Chris Cancialosi of [...]
You’re probably not any keener than I am to think of yourself as an overgrown rat in a lab, obsessively pushing buttons to get rewards and avoid punishments. Of course that’s not all we are (otherwise I couldn’t type this and you couldn’t read it), but there are substantial portions of our [...]
Seattle has grown nearly 20% since 2010. This change has all sorts of consequences, but the one that may affect me the most is a collective breakdown in the civility of driving behavior. When I moved here from San Francisco in 1989, the driving customs seemed almost quaint. Getting through a 4-way [...]
Change is hard. Hermits sitting alone on a mountaintop for decades, attempting to perfect their souls, know this. Sports teams trying to improve their records know this (believe me, I’ve been a Seattle Mariners fan for 20 years and this is definitely true). And of course you know it too, from [...]
Bonding with a group of like-minded people is a thrilling experience. Clubs and fraternities, communities of faith, and reunions often have this quality. We understand each other, we’ve had a lot of shared experiences, we can almost finish one another’s sentences. Our tribal impulse has deep [...]
A compelling piece of recent research about team effectiveness comes from Google’s Aristotle Project. It’s among the best and most thorough investigations of what makes corporate teams work well together. The key finding was that the number one predictor of team effectiveness is “psychological[...]
Daniel Kahneman’s book Thinking Fast and Slow is a compelling, deeply researched argument that human brains have two systems for engaging in thinking. What he calls "System 1" is fast, instinctive and emotional. "System 2" is slower, more deliberative, and more logical. System 1 is the source of[...]