If you want to know something, don't bother asking

DISCLAIMER: I am at the HR Technology Conference this week, and that combined with the lingering hangover-but-in-a-good-way effects from the HRevolution event held yesterday, (if you ever see Mike Carden again, ask him about how many times you should rub your eyes to make them feel better, he will know what you mean), the posts this week may be even shallower and offbeat than usual.  Or they might simply uphold the blog's tradition of shallowness, we will see.Cy Twombly - Untitled

While waiting for a morning session to kick off, I read this piece, 'Catchy Headlines, Bogus Data' on the Neuromarketing blog. Why I am reading a blog on neuromarketing in the first place is another question entirely.  But in the piece, the author points out the fallacies in the findings of a recent study about online content consumption habits conducted by Harris Interactive. In the study, researchers concluded that readers were attracted to online content the most by 'catchy headlines', 54%, and 'interesting picturers', 44%, the obvious conclusion for marketers and others interested in increasing the attractiveness of their online content would be to write catchier headlines and include more pictures.

But the problem with these conclusions, at least according to Neuromarketing, is that the Harris survey only asked people what they feel would be more likely to influence their decision to read a piece of content, not what actual actions they take with respect to online content.

From the Neuromarketing piece:

I have no doubt that the above data, gathered from over 2,300 survey participants, was collected and analyzed using the best practices for such research.

There’s only one problem. This lovely, detailed data is bogus, despite the large sample size and low calculated margin of error.

What’s wrong with this data? It’s simple. Asking people why they do things is terribly unreliable. Our behavior as humans is influenced by many, many factors, most of which aren’t conscious or rational.

Asking people why they do things is terribly unreliable.

Let's have that sink in for a second. For me, it at least has direct relevance to why it seems like I can't get a straight answer out of my 11-year old sometimes.

Still not convinced that asking is often not the best way to determine why people behave the way they do? How about this then, also from the Neuromarketing piece:

Split-brain research as shown that people have a remarkable ability to fabricate explanations for their actions that seem logical but have no basis in reality.

Net-net?

Asking people what they would be likely to do given a set of parameters is often an inherently flawed way to conduct research or to make decisions about what options to present the people you are trying to reach. And then, after they have taken an action, asking them to report why they did indeed take that action is also subject to humans' pesky tendency to rationalize and misremember.

What to do about this as a HR/Talent pro that needs to better understand people and their actions and motivations?

Trust what people do, less about why they say they did it, and discount significantly what people say they might do in the future.

Also prepare with even more earnestness for the day when the robots take over all our jobs.

Stop Making Decisions

Stop making decisions. Or rather, stop making so many decisions.

Here's the thing - you're smart, you have an important job, maybe you have a family, kids, a bunch of people in your personal and professional life that rely on you to be the leader and to take charge. You have to make a ridiculous number of decisions each day - for yourself, for your teams, your kids, maybe even your friends.Kandinsky - Ville Arabe

And it's exhausting.

So I'd like to offer a couple of simple recommendations to reduce the amount and volume of decisions you have to deal with in any given day, taken not from me, but from a couple of folks you might be familiar with - President Obama, and the President of the Internet, Mark Zuckerberg.

Here they are, more or less:

1. From Barack - Eat and wear the same thing every day (or at least get someone to make all your meals and place them in front of you at meal time).

From the Vanity Fair piece linked to above:

(Obama) I don’t want to make decisions about what I’m eating or wearing. Because I have too many other decisions to make.” He mentioned research that shows the simple act of making decisions degrades one’s ability to make further decisions

2. From Zuck - Wear the same thing every day (or at least get someone to lay out your clothes for you each day).

From the Business Insider piece:

I mean, I wear the same thing every day, right? I mean, it's literally, if you could see my closet," Zuckerberg starts to explain, as Lauer asks if he owns 12 of the same gray t-shirt. "Maybe about 20,"

Remove from your daily decision making the mundane, wearying, and non-productive process of deciding what to eat and what to wear and you will free up time, energy, and mental capacity to focus on things that really matter.

Now, you might not be in a position to order around your minions to organize for you your food and clothing choices each day, but chances are you are spending time contemplating, deliberating, and ruminating on things that at the end of the day that at best don't really matter that much, and at worst, are materially detracting from your ability to do amazing things.

You don't need to be consulted about everything.

You don't need to weigh 38 options before you decide where to have dinner tonight.

You can let go of at least one thing that doesn't really matter to spend 10 more minutes on something that does.

It is ok not to be in charge all the time.

Have a Great Weekend!

#HRevolution 2012 Preview

The 5th installment of the HRevolution (Un)Conference for Human Resources, Recruiting, and Talent Professionals is set for this coming Sunday, October 7, 2012 in Chicago, Illinois. Since 2009, HRevolution has been creating unique opportunities for HR professionals, recruiters, consultants, and vendors to come together to discuss and debate the future of HR.

Once again, the HRevolution has partnered with the HR Technology Conference, to be held October 8-10, also in Chicago, to offer HRevolution attendees a fantastic discount for the big HR Tech event of the year, for folks attending both events.

If you have not yet purchased your ticket to HRevolution, there is still time to get in, visit the registration page here to get started.

I have had the great pleasure and honor to be a member of the HRevolution organizining team since the beginning, and I can say with great confidence that this year's event is shaping up to be our best yet. 

Have a look at the agenda here - littered with some of the sharpest thinkers and most innovative HR and Talent people in the space, the kinds of smart, interesting, and connected people that you simply have to get to know. Folks like Bret Starr, Gerry Crispin, Alexandra Levit, Laurie Ruettimann, the Talent Anarchy team, and your hero Tim Sackett just to name a few.

But beyond the 'formal but not really formal' sessions, consistently the best aspect of HRevolution is the connections that are made within and across the community of people that while having many different roles and positions in the industry, are united in their common desire to make business, HR, and workplaces, and themselves better.

The HRevolution is an entirely bootstrapped, volunteer event made possible by the incredible commitment and generosity of a few important and fantastic organizations - our sponsors and partners.

We are so thankful for the tremendous support of the following HRevolution 2012 sponsors:

Aquire - The leading solution provider for workforce planning and analytics solutions, and importantly a long time supporter of the HR community via HRevolution and the HR Happy Hour Show

Ceridian - A Human Resources and Payroll solutions provider and a past sponsor of HRevolution that we are honored to have with us again in 2012

Pinstripe - A global RPO provider that has shown amazing support in the past not only for HRevolution, but for the HR and Recruiting industry as a whole - fantastic people that really believe in what they do.

SilkRoad - A leading provider of social, cloud-based talent management solutions for functions like Recruiting and Onboarding. We are really happy to welcome them to the HRevolution family.

We on the HRevolution team are truly grateful for your support!

Tonight on the HR Happy Hour Show, (streaming live starting at 8:00PM ET here), we will spend the hour talking about a revolution, the HRevolution that is. We will be joined by members of the organizing team, session leaders, sponsors, and attendees to preview and collectively begin the countdown to what is for many of us, our favorite event of the year.

If you are planning to attend HRevolution, either as a veteran, or as a first-timer, I encourage you to tune-in to the HR Happy Hour Show tonight, and even better, to call in on 646-378-1086 and share with us why you make time in your busy lives to attend HRevolution.

Listen to internet radio with Steve Boese on Blog Talk Radio

Lastly, I have to thank and recognize the other members of the HRevolution team, a wonderful group that I am proud to be associated with - Trish McFarlane, Ben Eubanks, and Matt 'akaBruno' Stollak. Once again, an amazing team to work with.

Hopefully I will see lots of you in Chicago on Sunday and on the Happy Hour Show tonight!

These might be the next HR roles you need to fill (or perform)

It has become kind of edgy or possibly trendy, (my guess the first three times a new idea is pitched it is edgy, after that it becomes something else, and trendy was the only term I could think of in less than five seconds), to talk about Human Resources in the future in diametrically different contexts that the traditional ones most of us are familiar with. Think about how many times you've read about 'HR is the new PR' or 'HR (and more likely recruiting), is really Sales and Marketing', and even takes that advocate HR as the organization's owners of social media and internal collaboration and productivity initiatives. While sometimes these kinds of analyses and predictions about the evolution of HR are optimistic, (if occasionally sounding a little bit like wishful thinking from veteran HR pros just a little weary of FMLA claims and 401(k) migrations), if they are going to prove true, or at least directionally correct, then there are some implications for the roles that will be required in HR, and naturally, the kinds of skills the HR professional of the (near) future will need to possess.Mark Rothko - Untitled

What might some of those roles and skill sets entail?

Well, that sounds like a hard question, and rather than try to figure it out for myself, I will take the lazy route, and co-opt some examples from a neat piece on the Simply Zesty blog, titled 'The Job Roles You Should Be Hiring For', an examination of the roles, skills, and titles that are sought after in the Digital and Social Marketing space.

Think you know how to staff the HR department of the future? Or perhaps a more important question for you personally - Do you think you have the right skills for the potential evolution of HR?

Well, take a look at some of the roles and skill sets that the Simply Zesty piece thinks the modern digital marketing team needs and then think about your answers: (NOTE: roles and descriptions lifted entirely from this piece, please don't sue me)

Data Analyst - With a large amount of data being collected by brands across social profiles as well as more traditional data-gathering channels such as email marketing or phone lists, there is a pressing need for smart analysis of this data to ensure you reach your customers (employees) in the best way.

Futurologist - This is a slightly more adventurous hire and likely only really feasible for those companies with larger staffing budgets, but it’s an important one. With communications technology developing at the rate it is, there is a demand on companies to stay relevant and also impress their customers with the future-thinking stuff that gets talked about and shared, (by employees, perhaps?)

Designer - Most brands will have a designer or graphic design team already, but it is an important hire even for smaller businesses to bring an element of this in-house. The need for beautiful design for your website (or company career site), or product to live online is more important than ever. Where once it might have been enough to just have a website, then a mobile site, then a Facebook Page and then an app, now there is a need for these to be beautiful and responsive.

Creative Thinker - So not exactly a descriptive job title, but that’s sort of the point. While we get bogged down with the technological aspect of social media, it’s tempting to subject the creative process to the same process as you would approach a technological solution. This is an important role if you want to develop the kind of content that you see dream brands such as Innocent, Nike or Red Bull executing. Creativity should be as high on the agenda as marketing or sales, with proper investment made to get the best ideas you can

A Good Copywriter - One of the highest demands on a social media manager is the expectation that they will suddenly be an able copywriter, able to write just as effectively for email marketing, Twitter updates, Facebook Page copy, websites, online ads, etc. And while many social media managers will of course be more than adequate at this, given the amount of time they will spend across these different formats anyway, there is a huge difference between copy that just does what’s required of it, and copy that makes people stop in their tracks and think. Unless you’re making this a key role in itself, you will always get sub-standard copy that just does the former

There are a couple of other roles listed on the piece, but you get the idea I think.

If the conception, practice, and profession of HR is really going to morph to look more like marketing, PR, and digital advertising, then it seems logical the HR department of the future will at least partially be populated with the kinds of folks in the roles listed above. Whether or not people with those particular sets of skills want to actually reside in HR I suppose is a question for another day.

Today, I will leave you with these, simpler questions: 

So, do you have some or all of those skills on your HR team?

Do you have some or any of those skills yourself?

The Photographic Truthiness Effect

Check this recent finding reported in a fascinating piece from the British Psychological Society blog on the effects of combining images, even ones that offer the reader no specific information, with statements, and the resulting effect on people's perception of the 'truthiness' of said statements:Everything in this blog is true. Trust me. Here's an unrelated picture.

When we're making a snap judgement about a fact, the mere presence of an accompanying photograph makes us more likely to think it's true, even when the photo doesn't provide any evidence one way or the other. In the words of (researcher) Eryn Newman and her colleagues, uninformative photographs "inflate truthiness".

It is pretty much a given these days about the importance of imagery on the web, (witness the incredible growth and emerging impact of Pinterest and Instagram, both primarily visual platforms), and the need for communicators and marketers of every kind to figure out how to use a combination of visual imagery, video, audio, text, etc. to help their messages stand out in a crowded market for attention. But this research takes the idea a step further, and possibly makes the communicator's job a little simpler, i.e., that it really doesn't matter too much what images are included with the message, just that some kind of image is present.

More from the BPS piece:

Ninety-two students in New Zealand and a further 48 in Canada looked at dozens of "true or alive statements" about celebrities, some of whom they'd heard of and some they hadn't, such as "John Key is alive". As fast as they could, without compromising their accuracy, the students had to say whether each statement was true or not. Crucially, half the statements were accompanied by a photo of the relevant celebrity and half weren't. The take-home finding: the participants were more likely to say a statement was true if it was accompanied by a photo.

Fantastic stuff - slap a semi-related image up along with whatever statement you are trying to pass off as the 'truth', and bam - all of a sudden the 'truthiness' of whatever you are trying to sell is increased. 

Admittedly this is kind of a goofy story, but one I think raises an interesting question, that is, how often are we truly being manipulated, even if subtly, by the mere existence of that well-placed image, or that perfectly Instagrammed and filtered shot that accompanies every other tweet, status update, or web page that we see?

How often are we being tricked into believing something that seems at first read to be wrong, or at least to be a little off, but we get distracted by a fancy image just long enough to lose focus and go along with whatever the savvy communicator wants us to think?

How many blog posts have you read and thought, 'That is a clever picture. That writer really knows their stuff?'