Tag Archives: Reality checks

November 6, 2017 · 3:11 pm

Are We In An Information Death Spiral?

Sometimes I wonder if we’re in an informational death spiral. That’s when an aircraft is out of control, loses lift, and heads in a corkscrew motion toward the ground. My pilot friends say they usually begin with a random, increasing roll and airspeed. That’s where I think we all just might be with respect to information. We’ve had a random, increasing rolling of what “real” information is and the speed at which it is generated is increasing.

Photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash

Why this matters to you, both in business and in life, is that it’s becoming increasingly impossible to tell fact from fiction. The revelation that the Russian government created thousands of fake accounts across the social sphere to generate and amplify “news” items that were made up out of whole cloth is devastating to anyone who tries to figure out fact from fiction. That devastation is multiplied by the findings of this year’s Pew study which found:

Two-thirds of Americans (66%) use Facebook, and a majority of those users get news on the site, similar to 2016. Looked at as a portion of all U.S. adults, this translates into just under half (45%) of Americans getting news on Facebook. While a large share of its users get news on [Twitter} (74% say they do), its audience is significantly smaller overall. This means that overall, fewer Americans get news on Twitter (11% of U.S. adults).

In other words, we’re increasingly relying on the least reliable sources for news and information. Imagine if you were doing this in your business. Rather than looking at actual revenues, you based your appraisal of how things were going on how full your warehouse seemed or how busy your staff was. Sure, a warehouse that’s becoming empty can signal great sales but it can also signal an issue with your supply chain or with your accounting department who hasn’t been paying suppliers. Maybe it’s a collections issue. You don’t know until you get the real facts.

Being able to separate fact from fiction is the basis of being an educated, competent person. When others are out there trying as hard as they can to mask facts or to impose fiction, that job is thrown into a death spiral. When Facebook changed from being a place when you could focus on friends and family to a platform for news and information, the spiral began. When their algorithm began to reward the click bait that was able to deceive enough people by being outrageous, our collective noses headed toward the ground.

Don’t be fooled by fake news, either in the office or out of it. Find the facts, level off your wings, and fly on.

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October 25, 2017 · 11:25 am

Business Tourists

When I worked in Manhattan a long time ago, one thing that regularly made me crazy was tourists. They weren’t hard to spot. They weren’t moving along with the general flow of pedestrian traffic. In fact, they often weren’t moving at all as they stopped to gawk at the big buildings or waited until the light turned green before crossing a street that had no traffic.

At holiday time, it was worse. Not only did they stare at the decorations but there were LOTS more of them. They had to have the photo of the Rockefeller Center tree while the rest of us had to BE SOMEWHERE.

It’s become worse with the advent of smartphones. Now, it’s not just the tourists that walk around without purpose. One is constantly bumping into people. We used to have an expression at the NHL: don’t skate with your head down. It meant one should pay attention to the surroundings to avoid nasty collisions. Smartphone users inevitably walk with their heads’ down.

I see that Honolulu, another tourist mecca, has passed a law that will fine you up to $35 if you’re caught staring at your phone when crossing the street. Get caught a second time and it’ll cost you up to $75. Nailed a third time and the fine is $99. Of course, by then you’re probably in a hospital, having been hit by a car. Still, there is a business lesson in this.

It’s way too easy to conduct business with your head down, fixated on what you’re doing while ignoring your surroundings. Heck, many places encourage it, as employees sit in front of computers wearing headphones. That’s a worry (how are people to interact?) but the big concern is ignoring the changing market or new opportunities that emerge. No, we can’t go chasing every shiny new object, but we do need to be aware that they’re out there so we can evaluate if they present a new opportunity or just a distraction. When we’re locked in – whether to a computer screen or a smartphone or to our own internal goings-on – we’re business tourists, out of sync with the pace of business and unaware of our surroundings. Head’s up!

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October 11, 2017 · 9:57 am

Truthiness Wins

If you’re not familiar with the term “truthiness,” you should be. Coined way back in 2005 by Stephen Colbert, it’s a term that refers to

"I created this cartoon illustration in c...

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

the belief or assertion that a particular statement is true based on the intuition or perceptions of some individual or individuals, without regard to evidence, logic, intellectual examination, or facts. Truthiness can range from ignorant assertions of falsehoods to deliberate duplicity or propaganda intended to sway opinions.

It was meant to be a term of satire, generally describing a politician departing from an obvious set of facts to espouse something that seems like the truth but isn’t. A dozen years ago, that was a circumstance that was relatively unusual. Today, it’s the norm, both in business and out. If you’re reading today’s screed thinking that I have an answer, you can stop here: I don’t. There are way too many vested interests that have come to rely on truthiness as a way of doing business, and that’s a shame.

Facebook recently admitted that Russian agents used its network to distribute disinformation to roughly 10 million U.S. users in order to influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election. They and other social platforms are trying to figure out how to readily identify “fake news“, all of which fits the definition of truthiness to a tee. To paraphrase Cassius in Julius Caesar, the fault, dear reader, is not in our stars or our social platforms, but in ourselves. We believe what we want to believe thanks to confirmation bias, and the explosion of content sources has made it possible for us never to hear a point of view to the contrary.

This is bad in real life and could be fatal in business. If we only pay close attention to evidence and arguments that support our own thinking on various business issues, and to toss out or ignore contradictory evidence, the odds are good that we’ll fall for something that’s truthy rather than true.

It’s 2017 and truthiness has won, or at least it’s holding the high ground and doing an excellent job of fighting off reality. Our job as business people is to win the battle and put truthiness back into the hands of the satirist from whence it came, both in business and in real life. Are you with me?

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