Archive for category leadership
Diabolical werewolves test trust in team
Posted by mark in Communication, leadership on August 1, 2023
Tonight, there’s a full moon. Then on August 30 comes the second full one of the month—a rare blue moon. Thus, it’s especially appropriate to consider werewolves and, in particular, an online game where these lycanthropes (secretly designated) undermine trust and security within a group.
I played Werewolf a few times but never got very far due to the cutthroat “kill the newbie” strategy deployed by more experienced (and vicious!) players. My interest in the Werewolf game stems from it providing a good laboratory for studying social dynamics and teamwork. See, for example, this blog by a relationship expert about What Werewolf teaches us about Trust & Security. For scientists studying such interactions, the Idiap Wolf Corpus (sounds creepy!) offers a wealth of data in the form of audio-visual recordings of 15 games played by 4 groups of people.
A newly published study by a trio of industrial engineers* delves into the impact of playing Werewolf at a distance and what this revealed about teamwork when members participate only on a virtual basis. The researchers divided 30 students into 3 teams of ten comprised of two werewolves, seven villagers, and one seer. Their experiment varied the groups by leadership experience.
The sample size of this study was far too small to support any conclusions, in my opinion. I just thought it would be fun to put teams, such as a group of researchers tasked with developing a new product, to the test of Werewolf.
Devious!
Cue the howls as the full moon rises…
PS I do wonder how well teams do at a distance versus in person. My feeling based on a lot of experience as a chemical engineer leading plant-process-improvement projects is that it pays to get together in one room every several meetings. It would be interesting to see well-designed research on all virtual, all in-person or a mix of the two.
*Vera Setyanitami, Hilya Mudrika Arini and Nurul Lathifah, People’s Trust in a Virtual Project Team: Results of a Game Experiment, Jurnal Teknik Industri, Vol. 25, No. 1, June 2023.
Over half of all children have below-average reading skills
Posted by mark in Education, leadership, pop, Uncategorized on June 24, 2019
Yes, you read that right—this statistic was cited by Eugenia Cheng last weekend in her column for the Wall Street Journal on why Averages Aren’t Always What They Seem. In this case, a small number of excellent readers skews the distribution to the right.
But none of this applies to my offspring, them being in the Lake Wobegon region where all the children are above average.
I would never admit it, but deep down I realize that I’ve succumbed to the superiority illusion, aka the Dunning-Kruger effect. As advised in this June 3rd post by Forbes you’d best be careful not to be taken in by individuals who consistently overestimate their competence due to this cognitive bias.
Steve Carell took the superiority illusion to an absurd extreme as the manager Michael Scott in the “The Office” television series. It’s funny unless you are subject to someone like this.
“The knowledge and intelligence that are required to be good at a task are often the same qualities needed to recognize that one is not good at that task—and if one lacks such knowledge and intelligence, one remains ignorant that one is not good at that task.”
— David Dunning, professor of psychology at the University of Michigan
“Stupid people are so stupid they’re unable to grasp the fact that they’re stupid.”
— Letter to Editor of Oroville Mercury Register, 6/23/19
Favorite posts from three rings in the 2011 Management Improvement Blog Carnival (3 of 3)
Posted by hank in leadership on January 9, 2012
For the final blog review of the 2011 Management Improvement Blog Carnival I have chosen to review NOOP.NL, a blog about Agile software development and management by Dutch author (among other things) Jurgen Appelo. Being a software developer myself, this blog caught my eye. For those unfamiliar with Agile development, it is a method of software development that focuses on small, short iterations (called Sprints).
The first post that I want to share is actually not about Agile specifically – The Feedback Door is a clever method of getting feedback after a presentation or course. You put sticky notes on or near the door and ask people to stick their feedback directly on the door. Since the attendees need to pass through the door to leave, it’s difficult to ignore! Jorgen combines the feedback door idea with a “Happiness Index” (expanded on in this post) as a simple way to get quantitative feedback as well. It’s called, naturally, the Happiness Door.
Many of the posts in the blog are of a more philosophical bent (such as The Purpose of a Business is NOT Customer Value, and It takes Complexity to Handle Complexity). However, 21 Concrete Practices for Agile Managers stands out as a great collection of practical suggestions for Agile practitioners.
Finally, I liked this short and to the point post about the necessity of measures. It’s true that you can’t improve something without measuring some aspect of it. However as a commenter pointed out, you have to be careful what you measure. If you emphasize the wrong metric as a manager you may be encouraging the wrong behavior. A classic example in software is using lines of code (LOC) as a metric. This rewards sloppy and verbose coding and penalizes concise and elegant solutions to problems.
Favorite posts from three rings in the 2011 Management Improvement Blog Carnival (2 of 3)
Posted by mark in leadership, Wellness on December 19, 2011
For the 2011 Annual Management Improvement Blog Carnival,* I reviewed the Unfolding Leadership blog (the second of three looked over by me and my son Hank). In his meme** inspired SMALL WORLD entry Dan Oestreich explains how he began blogging in 2004 as an outlet for creative expression, not only in words, but also photography. The pictures are what caught my eye and made Unfolding Leadership stand out from the pack. This blog of October 7 provides an example of Oestreich’s eloquence in words and visuals.
I found the mid-year blog ON HYPOCRISY AND SELF-PROTECTION very thought-provoking because of its forgiving dissection of why so many leaders say one thing but do the other. Oestreich provides an inside look at just such a fellow who happens to be in charge of a technical group. From my experience, competence in science and engineering correlates inversely with people skills. However, if one is willing to put himself under a microscope and be open to change, improvement is possible. I urge anyone in a leadership position, especially those with technical backgrounds, to read this blog.
Going back to the first Unfolding Leadership blog of 2011 titled SCAR one finds a very poignant story of a woman who had the courage to speak up at work, but, unfortunately, it created a very bad outcome. I really like the accompanying photograph and found it very apropos. Read the comments for further insights on this issue of trust.
* For all the 2011 blogs see this list http://curiouscat.com/management/carnival_2011.cfm. Background on the carnival itself can be found here http://management.curiouscatblog.net/about/.
**(An idea that is spread from blog to blog – see this page http://thedailymeme.com/what-is-a-meme/ for the provenance)